The Price of Revenge

Prince, a name given to all of Hop’s boys. Prince, because it was a name that cut easily through the occasionally raucous din of the patrons of the bar and through the thick smoke of the den. A name that carried to all corners of the building, up into the draughty attic, down into the stocked cellar, and outside into the stables when necessary. A name recognized and respected by any who frequented The Horse You Came In On saloon, desired and envied by all of the boys not lucky enough to be dubbed such.

Every two years, Hop came to the boy’s orphanage for a new Prince. Despite his insistence that there be no pomp and circumstance surrounding what he considered such a trivial matter, as to Hop it was merely a meager, humble attempt to help elevate a single soul to greatness, all eyes would watch. All manner of person would nonchalantly vie for a discrete view of the selection while pretending an air of casual insouciance.

The boys, of course, would suffer no such pretense amongst themselves and proceeded to primp and preen. And, while the mood was generally congenial, none of them would go so far as to ruin their own chance by helping the others. Small pranks, never anything unforgivable as they knew only one boy would be chosen and friendships were expected to persist between those that remained, left an assortment of cowlicks, missing shoelaces, turned collars, knotted ties, and once, a rather humorous limerick scrawled in kohl upon the face of a boy that had slept in.

Despite their efforts, whether at success or sabotage, it never seemed to matter to Hop. His requirements changed each selection, the current boy could have nothing in common at all with the previous selection or he could be so similar as to be mistaken for a twin. There was no sense to it, and so the boys did their best to present themselves as who they wanted to be. In that discovery of self, regardless of who was ultimately chosen, all felt the benefit of a clarity of ambition.

“Prince,” Hop would say, overdramatic in his booming rich baritone, “I name thee,” as he took in the newest boy. “Prince,” Hop would say, genuine tears of joy dappling his eyes, “because a new life begets a new name,” as he embraced his latest charge. “Prince,” Hop would whisper, genuflecting as much as his bulk would allow, “because all of Hop’s Princes become Kings.”

The speech was always the same, filled with the same emotion, met with the same rapturous applause. Hop always gave the newest Prince time to say his goodbyes, to be tousled and hugged and slapped on the back in congratulations. He would listen to the unabashed adoration through the doors of the Headmaster’s office as he signed the paperwork that legally bound him as Prince’s guardian.

And Hop would wait by the street for the boy to join him. He never waited long. An unassuming carriage brought them to the saloon, to their home. On that first day, Prince’s new life began. In two years’ time, with Hop’s promise fulfilled, Prince would be a proper gentlemen. Trained in the ways of society and trade, strengthened and humbled by manual labor, a small fortune to his name as he was allowed to keep the gathered tips given by customers, a vast network of Princes and Kings to call an apprenticeship upon when he finally struck out on his own.

Prince reflected on all of this as he wiped the brown poppy residue from the windows. Cold winter light poured in through the streaks of clean glass his rags revealed. Morning shone in, bright and cloudless. A bitter wind blew outside, but the fire he built before beginning his daily chores suffused the whole of the saloon in a comforting warmth. A full year had passed since his life began, and a year from now he would begin again.

Nervous excitement crept in at the thought. Prince was happy and could hardly imagine being done with all of this. His future was laid out before him, he knew, which was its own kind of contentment, but a year away did not seem away enough at all. Here, Prince was well seen after. Hot meals he was taught to cook by generous chefs. Lively patrons that tipped his service and sometimes purchased his drink, though Hop only encouraged drinking to the extent that he was still able to work. A warm bed. Writing and reading lessons given by men whose life work was just that. Even mucking the stables had adorned him with not only a respect for those that carried the job, but a musculature he never expected to have seen on his body.

Prince was happy, and his happiness was bought as such a small price. Hop asked for so little in return. A smile, a touch. A warm body to hold at night while he slept. Sometimes, when the sickly-sweet smoke of the den crept into every inch of the saloon and made Prince’s head slightly fuzzy and his pupils dilate, he would seek out Hop.

Hop, his jolly face entertaining customers at the bar, laughing at his own silly jokes. Hop, the force of his personality drawing people in droves to pack the saloon. Prince would swim through the treacle of his opium induced fugue to find Hop and kiss the man. Prince was ashamed the first time this happened but Hop met his affection with a soupcon of expectation. As the year slowly progressed, it became a normal thing.

Prince was loved and loved freely in return. He did not want to leave, though he knew it must happen. Was a condition of the contract between them. In the preparation for their separation, to become a Gentlemen, discipline was also a condition. Strength of character as much as body and mind a prerequisite for success. Prince understood that a broken glass, or spilled ale meant brutal retaliation after the saloon emptied. As money drove society, a loss because of carelessness or drunkenness must be dealt with lest standing be lost as well. A harsh, painful lesson to learn and relearn, but an imperative lesson to impart.

Those lessons could last anywhere from several minutes to several hours. Those lessons always ended with Hop’s tender ministrations to whatever injuries he may have inflicted. The pain was always temporary, and the attention Prince received after made the anticipation of its end agonizing in its pleasure. Even the pain held a measured amount of enjoyment.

Possibly due to the change of season from late fall to deepening winter, Hop had become melancholy of late. Prince knew, though, that sessions of discipline inflamed his passions. Perhaps, he thought, tonight may bring a purposefully dropped plate. Perhaps Prince could pull him out of his somber mood.

The clatter of iron shod on cold cobblestone setts interrupted that thought. Peering through the now clean window, Prince looked down at the street, watching as a drawn carriage pulled to a stop before the saloon entrance. Simple black wood, its only adornments being wrought iron greyed with age, it was pulled by two unhealthy looking Clydesdales.

It was far too early in the morning for hansoms to be operating, much less customers to be calling upon a saloon for drink. Prince stared in wonder as four figures of indeterminate sex exited. All were suitably businesslike, clad in flowing black greatcoats, impressive top hats, steel tipped canes, and faces covered by expensive looking scarves.

They were not here for Prince, that much was obvious, so he bade for Hop to wake and dress.

~~

Through mists of agony, she awoke to the sound of seawater gently lapping against creaking wooden planks. They had been worn smooth by the passage of time and were comfortable in their way. A minute more of blessed sleep was all she needed for the pain to recede.

A minute passed, then another, then another. There was no respite. No subtle dulling of the torture she had endured for… months? Years, perhaps? Time quickly became a meaningless standard of measurement under such duress.

An unforgiving stone slab. The sotto voce whispers of voyeurs enlivened by her torment. After every cut, every piece of her removed, he was there.

His voice, an adagio so soothing, so cloying, so terribly ostinato.

That horrible, beautiful scythe swinging andante, ever closer, promising an end.

Promising an escape from all his tender ministrations.

No, the pain remained a hammer striking the taught strings of her being. The sweet release of death proved neither sweet nor release.

Through mists of agony, she stood. Her own body creaking, unfamiliar. Confused, surprised, she saw herself unbound, whole, a person once again.

Mayhap she was not dead after all! Had she been rescued? Had she been, at some point in her brief but welcome moments of unconsciousness, whisked away to a ship to be delivered home? Hope flared.

Looking around she noticed other passengers staring at her hungrily. Well, she was no stranger to the lusts of men. What woman was? She ran to the railings to see a wine dark sea stretching off to the horizon in all directions, broken only by small rocky islands. An uncharted topography so ripe for exploration that her enthusiasm for the unknown almost blinded her to the fact that the sky was…

The sky was…

Hope died.

Unnatural. No cloud, no sun, no moon, no star decorated the space above her. A bruised sky of dim purple and wan red suggesting sunrise or sunset but promising neither. No, she watched, gripping the railing until her hands went numb, until her fingernails cracked and broke and became just another voice in the chorus of fire running along her nerves. Nothing changed. Nothing moved.

Her chest ached at the realization. Frantically, as a memory surfaced, she opened her shirt.

A hole.

Blood seeped and pumped and churned, but no heart was there. It had been cut from her, leaving a ragged, gaping wound. Something like despair wound its way into her soul. Why, then, if she were truly dead, why was she still suffering?

Through mists of agony, she heard. The beating of her heart. Somewhere distant. Somewhere kept alive by an obsession so strong, it kept her from death as well.

It was not lust the other passengers on this voyage had in their eyes. They were jealous. They detested and desired her in equal measure for her living. They would turn on her, eventually.

But even as she watched, they became something different. Something less. The further from port they sailed, the more they unwound from their earthly selves until they were more akin to shadows and specters than people. Casting off their humanity only seemed to invigorate them, and suddenly shadows had become as threatening as people generally were in life.

It was not lost on her that she remained herself. Or, as much herself as she could remember. So much had already been taken, stolen from her. Not least of which had been her name.

Circumstances forgotten in lieu of current peril, she weighed her options. Stay and endure the same as she had in life. Jump overboard, face the unknown, and rely on her ability to swim and will to persist. The former offered certainty, while the latter offered a chance for anything else.

If she listened, she could follow the beat of her heart all the way back. Claim it. Find peace in true death.

She jumped.

The collar of her mortality dragged her under. She fought, kicking hard, dragging herself upward to the surface. For such a talented swimmer, even in undeath, to drown upon first touching water? The ignominy of the thing!

The sea swallowed her. Infiltrated her nostrils, flowed mercilessly into her lungs. She thrashed and gagged and spat, desperate, fighting upwards, struggling for air. As her vision swam, greyed, as her panic wormed deep into her brain rendering her insensate, the water pulled her ever deeper.

Deeper.

Through mists of agony, she woke to darkness. She coughed, emptying lungs full of icy water that froze her guts. Relief met bowel clenching terror as she took a deep breath of the same water. Begging and pleading, desperate, fighting upwards, struggling for air.

Deeper.

Over and over again, she woke only to drown. Only to freeze. Only to be crushed by the incessant pressure of the miles of ocean above. Over and over she fought to survive, to breathe, to feel anything but the unrelenting despair and unceasing pain.

Deeper.

A lifetime passed. Two, ten, uncounted, unknown. An eternity of suffering in the depths, sinking deeper and deeper, suffered two minutes at a time.

Until...

Madness had consumed her mind. Lights flickered in the distance. She had seen them before, in her limited moments of lucidity. Shoals of the lost and damned. Schools of those who had given up the fight to be drawn to those that still were. They came closer, predatory intent easily seen as they arrowed towards her.

Anger overwhelmed despair. She knew she was there because of someone, this was happening because someone meant for it to happen, though so many of details eluded her. And those… those ghosts slowly ate away at her very being. Devouring her memories, gnawing away at her self, eroding everything she was. Had been gorging themselves as she sank.

Raising her hand to stave them off, she saw her own pale skeleton. Finger bones protruding from bloated, chewed skin. Her mind gone, taken by as many as could take, and her body with it.

In a flash of unadulterated hatred, of pure madness induced rage, she remembered her name.

And used the sharpened end of her finger to carve into her forearm.

The ghosts scattered, denied their meal. Embracing the inexorable descent, she no longer fought for the safety of the surface. Numb now to the icy water, revenge would be her breath as she sank. No more struggling, no more drowning, no more pain, only the torment of the slow crawl of time.

An eternity passed.

Full of hate.

Full of madness.

By the time she saw the necrotic light glowing up from beneath, she understood where she was. This seabed was where forgotten Gods came to slumber and die. Billions of years and trillions of Gods forming nightmarish strata of tentacles and metallic limbs and unidentifiable anatomies.

Even dead Gods dream, and in their dream states they birthed innumerable horrors that lived brief, flaring existences only to be snuffed out and unmade by the pressures of reality. They fought each other and scavenged the deadfall of souls just like hers.

No. Not like hers.

~~

Had Prince bothered to pay closer to attention to the horses, events might have transpired differently. As it stood, he failed to notice that these horses, unlike so many others, did not paw at the ground, or stamp, nor did they whinny or neigh impatiently. Steam did not rise from their flanks after a long journey. He did not see that behind their blinders lay empty sockets.

The coachman was in no better state. His eyes slitted, unmoving. His lips parted, a thin stream of water pouring endlessly to drip onto his tattered, soaked collar. He made no effort to attend to the passengers. He was a willing, if slightly unable, companion.

She would never have forced help, only taken if offered.

As her four companions exited, she thought upon them. Yes, companions. For friends was far too generous a word and acquaintances far too distant. Each was a Prince in their own time, each a pauper before that. Each learned, before the end, the cost of their service to their soul, and like her kept themselves animated through sheer force of will. Each found her in turn, having long been pursuing their own paths of revenge. Each promised help, for services rendered. Thus, a companionship was born.

Now, as her path neared an end, as the beating of her heart grew louder and louder in her ears, she wondered, without caring overmuch, what mission they would undertake next.

Her crow? Raven? Rook? Corbie? She never understood the difference, and it mattered little as it was all of these things and none. A demon with feathers so dark they reflected the perpetual burning coal of its eyes, perched atop her shoulder. This was a friend. This was a part of her. An extension of her.

Her Ego.

In a gilded cage by her feet, draped in crushed velvet, dwelled her Id. She lifted the cage and stepped outside and made her way into the basement of the bar.

In each corner stood one of her companions.

Two wooden chairs occupied the center of the room. On the right sat the barman. Corpulent, greasy. The foul gleam behind rheumy blue eyes betrayed his jolly façade. His arms hung at his sides, overdeveloped to compensate for spindly legs, ending in thick ham-hock hands and long strangler’s fingers. Even now, he feigned jovial innocence.

On the left sat the Prince. Beautiful in his youth, simple, in love. A new talent, she could see the warp and weft beneath the world, and here she saw the spiderweb skeins that connected them. Love, devotion, passion streamed from the boy and was captured, tangled and abused, corrupted by the cruelty and manipulation of the monster sitting beside him.

Subversion of the pure had doomed this boy long before she stepped into the room. Left alive, Hop would claim another victim. Dead, Hop’s victory would be in turning Prince into another monster to take his place. Prince was marked for death the moment this toad decided to latch onto him. She could see it, the perversion of his devotion, twisting into hate, reaching out for its willing supplicant. A cycle of murder yet to resolve.

Sadness, unfamiliar to her after so long, blanketed her. The crow pecked at her head. Pity, doubt, these things offended the Ego. Not pity, she thought at the bird. Sympathy.

It cackled at her.

She sat the cage down just past the doorframe and made her way to Hop. “May I help you? It seems I’ve fallen out of favor with you, though never a complaint have I had! Allow me to make good whatever miscommunication there has been,” there was genuine merriment in his voice. Hop was a charismatic showman at the best of times.

Slowly, she pulled the scarf down, revealing a face split and broken by abuse. Slowly, she unbuttoned her blouse, much to the chagrin of Prince whose eyes were nearly bulging out of his head. Her torso completely exposed, Hop was greeted with the sight of a living cadaver. A gaping hole in the chest of someone he could not define as man or woman. A body so broken and destroyed as to be hardly recognizable as a person at all.

His lips flapped and spluttered as he struggled to form words.

She lifted her forearm to his eyes. There, in a mass of scar tissue fish belly white, read

Lenore.

The veneer of amicable fat man dropped immediately. “No!” he roared. “You foul, foul thing. No! You are dead. I watched him cut the heart from your chest!” One of her companions stepped forward and forced him back into his seat. Hop looked around, trying to read the situation. He retreated into his cowardice, “I know where he is. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

A voice like a body being dragged through cold dirt answered, “Yes.” And she moved back to the cage, flipping open the lock.

The Id spilled out, clumsily rolling around, gathering its bearings. Growing. Unfolding. Stretching until it brushed the ceiling above. It bobbed softly up and down on bamboo thick legs. Nightmare black, with thick rose thorns that oozed golden venom, covered in weeping horizontal slits. The Id was nothing more than a mass of those legs, connected at the center by impossible biology to a mobius strip of itself. To stare at it, to try to understand it, was to go mad.

Prince was trying to make sense of the thing until he seized and began foaming at the mouth.

Hop squeezed his eyes shut and tried to hide under his chair. “Open them,” she commanded. And he did. “Sit,” she commanded. And he did.

Every slit opened simultaneously. Each contained an eye, a human eye. They whirled around madly, no one looking or spinning in the same direction as the other. Hop was fixated on the thing. Her Id. Her pet.

She pointed at Hop.

All of the eyes focused on Hop. He squealed. It walked across the basement without ever occupying the space between. Still frames of movement as it simply existed in one place, then another, then another, until it was next to him. Gently, it lifted a thorned leg and brushed it against his cheek.

There was a whisper of parting flesh. Then screams as the venom did work. He gouged chunks of flesh from his throat with bloody fingernails as he rolled on the ground. He beat his fists into pulp against the wooden floor. Hop’s arms twitched and twisted until bones broke, throwing him into further frenzy.

Then silence fell as quickly as it had begun. Hop was unharmed, his wounds healed, but the pain was not forgotten.

“So many more things worse than death,” croaked Lenore.

Prince came out of his fit just in time to see the Id’s un-body split into a nest of champing human mouths and devour a screaming, squirming Hop. Two new slits appeared on one of its stalks. Fresh venom dripped from its thorns.

Lenore dabbed her finger into the honey liquid and pressed it to her lips. She knew everything Hop knew, everything he was.

“You… you killed him,” cried Prince.

“I give you this choice,” offered Lenore. “You can know what he was, or you can die in ignorance to prevent you from becoming like him.”

He thought it over, at war with himself. Only when the fresh slits opened to expose rheumy blue eyes that stared loathing at him did he finally concede. “Tell me.”

“I will show you,” and she leaned down to kiss him gently on the mouth, earning another squawk of condescension from the Ego. It was a kindness for the boy, the last act of mercy he would ever know.

He expired with a sigh.

As the Id folded back in on itself to enter its cage, fed and satisfied, Lenore spoke to the Raven. “Find my cousin. Torment him. Send him a message. Tell him…

…Nevermore.”