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Part 5-2: Laughter
Prone, probably dying, Fergus howled.
“It hurts, oh god, it hurts!”
“Just. Hold on,” I said, or at least tried to say. I couldn’t look at him, I’d fall apart if I did, so I returned to the problem of the door.
“Hurts, hurts, hurts!” reminded Fergus.
There was no solving it. I got my own dose of hurt when a spray of disintegrating rock blasted my entire left side. Pain, worse than the wifi burn, pocked its way into my concentration.
“Minder, any fucking help?” I shouted, getting desperate.
“Alena, it hurts!”
“I god damn know, okay!” I didn’t mean to scream it, but frustration, panic and primal fear make me mean and self-centered sometimes.
“No, you don’t get it!” cried a muffled Fergus, voice contending with the rising roar of the room’s funeral, “Hurts! It. Hurts. Hurts!”
I had limited options. Curl into a ball and wait for imminent and tortuous death was the leading contender, but my will to live needed something to do in the meantime. I knew he hurt, I hurt too, but apparently I wasn’t understanding. Either Fergus was growing delirious in his death throes, or the Minder’s promise of using him as a sort of fucked up compass was trying to give me a hint.
It hurts, what hurts? The missing piece of the puzzle hurts? The door hurts? The way out hurts? The lesson hurts?
Destruction hurts.
“Do you hurt?” I yelled at the door, and punched it.
A wave of blue radiated out of it, like a ripple on a vertical pond.
Gasping, half from the pain of it and half from the christing fact that it worked, I hit it again. And again. It rippled, but with no solid colour. No, the pain needed to be constant.
Luckily, pain was in high supply. A fresh wave of debris drilled into me, and finally a dangerously heavy piece of the room caught my leg and pinned me against the door. Mortal pain, I then discovered, runs way deeper than standard issue ouchies. There’s a halo of crushing numbness that borders a deep well of slow agony, peppered with all the regular sting and hurt of say, a really bad cut. I figured efficient torture was all about the art of keeping one on the cusp of excruciating nerve damage and irreversible damage—here I was getting the full spectrum.
I did my best to share it with the door, making sure the Queen’s Band was touching the surface with the last of my physical strength, focusing on the tapestry of hurt.
The blue rippled out past the door, into the shaking walls, became solid.
Then it all flashed white as the object on me shifted and my bone ground. It somehow hurt to hear it too.
Vision starry, copper in my mouth, I couldn’t tell if the growing black blotches were from the spell or simply my eyes telling me goodbye.
The agony followed me through a grey night, I floated for a short while, maybe only seconds. Hard to tell in this warped reality, hard to tell amid the wretched lava coursing through all fibers of my being. Every nerve teemed with manic sensitivity, waves of sharp bites, oceans of dull ache. The wind cut. The grass bit.
Grass? This again?
I turned my head, and saw things that weren’t crumbling rooms or impossible doors. Indeed: I was on grass. There was a wall in the distance. And the pain, the hurt, it was still there, but only in blazing memory. What I really felt was a riot of pins and needles.
All this new input caused me to hyperventilate and gasp. Also, dizziness.
“Oh, oh, ah, whadafugginsha-eeet,” wheezed a familiar voice.
“Fer—?” I choked, wheeling around like a drunken starfish in the grass. I felt a warmth, a person, my friend. He was there, not dead, no blood, choking and shaking right there with me.
Our arms found one another and we became a single trauma unit, heaving and weeping for a time until the shock of it all waned enough to try and get a sense of things. I likened it to waking up out of an intoxicated brownout—disorienting and nauseating along with a edging notion that you might need to panic soon.
The Minder stood a short distance away, and for once, his mouth was set in a line, dancing mischief absent from his eyes.
“Now you know what The Collector endures, whenever he must use a rendering force in a world unfamiliar to him,” he said. “He built up to it, graduating through unthinkable tiers of torment, for unimaginable lengths of time, simply to find a rudimentary way to collect his locks and keys. The first forty or so, I believe, were obtained through various executions of the technique. He is of the opinion that he is owed a great debt of pain for these troubles. Though, if you were to debate the degree of moral culpability of such a viewpoint, I’d reckon you’d find me sympathetically aligned in your favour.”
He took a deep breath, as I sprawled and listened, far too drained to do anything else but cling to Fergus.
“But more importantly, Alena Bisk, is the understanding that The Collector willingly and regularly submits to this exercise in order to escape. What horror, what weight, what elementary drive pushes a soul to persevere through a trial so harrowing, so often?”
“You. Tell. Me,” I managed, each word sputtering out of me like I was a grandma with a heavy nicotine habit.
“That answer is the subject of a future lesson, and indeed the crux of my entire syllabus. For now, I’ve taken the liberty of repairing your bodily injuries, as the next test comes fast on the heels of this leg of the journey towards enlightenment. For what it’s worth, if you succeed, I do guarantee that my counterpart will need some time to prepare for the next. We can take the forthcoming lesson at a considerably more temperate pace.”
“Can’t, wait,” I said, failing to inject a sneer into my voice.
“I realize that is sarcasm, my dear, so excuse my literal response: you can wait, should you need the reprieve, but the sooner we reach a mutual covenant, the better for all parties.”
He reached into his coat and pulled out the red-bound book, and walked over. The Minder knelt before us, and held it open to the back page, wherein I saw myself lying in bed at home.
“I did not enjoy teaching the lesson,” he said. “You mightn’t believe I’d balk at a chance to see you suffer. No fault in such judgment, as I did intend such outcomes prior to revising my opinion of you. My only request is that you consider revising your opinion of me—after I’ve earned it.”
He moved the book closer to my face, and the instinct to escape overwhelmed before I could respond in any way to what he said.
The bedroom clicked back, and I de-ghosted immediately as a long, mournful sigh rose out of my chest. There was a thud, then gasps from the other girls as Fergus half-sat, half-collapsed against my dresser.
“…Status?” ventured Deluxe, clutching her tablet to her chest.
I held up a hand to stall the debrief for a few precious seconds, skimming my arm out through my modesty blanket as I did so. The pain from my wifi-rash was laughably pedestrian.
“Alena?” Fergus called out weakly.
“Uh huh?” I said.
“If I pass in my paper late do I still get partial credit?”
“Um, okay?” I didn’t know what he was on about, but my heart did a little backflip upon hearing the signature pep in his voice.
“Sweet. Okay, the secret is to,” he started to chuckle, “the secret is to channel pain into the target, that’s the puzzle, that’s the mechanism to get out.”
Our laughter scared Lobsters into flight, as Persi and Deluxe watched us with a mix of what looked like worry and guarded amusement. Didn’t matter. It felt fine as hell to give into the hilarity, stress-born as it was. It reminded me that I was still alive. And—in spite of the deep, dark depths of horror that I’d so unwillingly traversed—it reminded me that there could still be good feelings in the world.
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