Fire Angels

Chapter 24 Part 2 A wounded man and a little girl

Once a big stone dog opened its mouth and a gray tongue as long and sinuous as a snake came sliding out and ran along her arm. She was mesmerized by the wondrousness of the moving stone. The tongue was cold and gritty, but it felt strangely delightful and she felt something else where it touched her, the feeling of something slipping away.

Then red eyes of a huge stone saint beside the dog jerked open with such violence, the whole statue shuddered.

"Stop that!," it shouted in a thunderous voice, and brought its stone fist down on the dog's head with a mighty blow, smashing the head to bits and cracking the body in half so that the life, not unnaturally, went out of it.

"Now off you go," said the stone saint, sternly flapping its hands at her. "Do not be so foolish as to let that happen again."

As she scuttled away she saw that all the statues in the chamber were alive, watching her with their avid red eyes.

She began to be fearful when she wandered the chambers, even though the incident with the stone dog melted away like all her other conscious memories. Yet at the same time her feet seemed driven to wander. The statues, the writhing carvings, the dark tapestries which sometimes swayed for no apparent reason over the huge cold mirrors; all these things filled her with a disturbing sense of beauty, of wonder, of magic. The chambers seemed to go on forever and yet she had a confused suspicion that she was in some enclosed space.

In much the same way she could not remember why she did not like the horrible man, but whenever she saw him in those shadowy rooms, she ran away quickly making sure he did not see her. It was a pity for sometimes she longed for flesh and blood company - someone who might tell her why she was here and what she was supposed to be doing.

She saw the man often. He seemed to be at one with the stone beasts who were always alive around him. Sometimes the tongues of those beasts flickered quickly out and licked him as he walked past, or their hands rubbed his bare flesh. Often she saw him embracing one of them. The red glow of the stone beast's eyes turned his pale skin ruby.

Once she came upon him having sex with one of them, huffing and puffing away with his hand upon its spread buttocks, while it squatted before him, with a beatific look on its face. She slipped away quickly lest she be forced to join in.

There was someone else among those endless chambers too. Sometimes she was sure she saw a flash of blue or a human face made of flesh not stone peering at her from behind a pillar. Once she saw a young girl in a blue dress standing in a doorway and she chased after her, calling on her to come and walk with her for she was tired of all these stones. The girl vanished without a trace, but in chasing this phantom she came to a place she had never seen before, a place where a wide stone staircase led up toward grey light.

Cautiously she climbed the stairs. At the top was an enormous space filled with cold grayish light. She looked up and gasped and clutched the stair rail for the walls soared dizzyingly up and up until they ended huge arches. Great arched windows filled the walls so that she could see the sky.

The chamber stretched away before her in a forest of pillars. She could not see the other end. She could not see any statues either and the pillars were free of carving. It was better up here she decided and for a long time she wandered among the pillars, watching the sky through the windows or rather the clouds, dragging themselves across the sky like engorged grey slugs.

As she came progressed down the chamber, it became lighter and she saw that at this end, the chamber was open to the sky. The arches stuck up like broken ribs, like spikes trying to catch those slowly dragging clouds.

Then she heard a voice calling "Dion, Dion." She turned in wonder to see who was calling. She was at the opposite end of the great chamber by then. Near the wall was a huge raised area and upon it a kind of long stone flat stone table. The stone table was carved round its sides, she saw with displeasure, but the voice seemed to be coming from there.