And still it grew.
He decided, then, to look away from it. In his mind he recalled in distinctness, with labored, painstaking concentration, the THL soldier; he noted the direction, in relation to the enormous, world-filling tree-thing, along which the soldier could be found. He made his head turn, his eyes focus that way.
A small circle, like some far end of a declining tube, opened up and unveiled for him a minute portion of reality-as-it-usually-was. Within that circle he made out the face of the THL soldier, unchanged; it stabilized in normal luminosity and shape. And, meanwhile, throughout the endless area which was not the distant circle of world, a multitude of noiseless, sparklike configurations flicked on and achieved form with such magnitude of brightness that even without focussing on them he experienced pain; they appalled the optic portion of his percept-system, and yet did not halt the transfer of their impressions: despite the unendurable brilliance the configurations continued to flow into him, and he knew that they had come to stay. Never, he knew. They would never leave.
For an almost unmeasurable fraction of an instant he ventured to look directly at one unusually compelling light-configuration; its furious activity attracted his gaze.
Below it, the circle which contained unaltered reality changed. At once he forced his attention back. Too late?
The THL soldier’s face. Swollen eyes. Pale. The man returned Rachmael’s gaze; their eyes met and each perceived the other, and then the physiognomic properties of the reality-landscape swiftly underwent a crumbling new alteration; the eyes became rocks that immediately were engulfed by a freezing wind which obliterated them with dense snow. The jaw, the cheeks and mouth and chin, even the nose disappeared as they became lesser mountains of barren, uninhabited rock that also succumbed to the snow. Only the tip of the nose projected, a peak presiding alone above a ten-thousand-mile waste that supported no life nor anything that moved. Rachmael watched, and years lapsed by, recorded by the internal clock of his perceiving mind; he knew the duration and knew the meaning of the landscape’s perpetual refusal to live: he knew where he was and he recognized this which he saw. It was beyond his ability not to recognize it.
This was the hellscape.
No, he thought. It has to stop. Because now he saw tiny distant figures sprouting everywhere to populate the hellscape, and as they formed they continued the dancing, frenzied activities familiar to them—and familiar to him, as if he were back once more and again witnessing this, and knowing with certitude what he would, within the next thousand years, be forced to scrutinize.
His fear, concentrated and directed in this one field, superimposed like a dissolving beam over the hellscape, rolled back the snow, made its thousand-year-old depth fade into thinness; the rocks once more appeared and then retreated backward into time to resume their function as features of a face. The hellscape reverted with awful obedience to what it had been, as if almost no force were needed to push it out of existence, away from the stronghold of reality in which it had a moment before entrenched itself. And this appalled him the most of all: this told him dreadful news. The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known. And this meant that not long ago, when the hellscape first formed, he had been without any life, any at all. Not an enormous force from outside breaking in—that was not what confronted him. There was no adversary. These, the terrible transmutations of world in every direction, had spontaneously entered as his own life had dwindled, faded, and at last—for a moment, anyhow—entirely shut down.
He had died.
But he was now again alive.
Where, then? Not where he had lived before.
The THL soldier’s face, customary and natural, hung within the diminished, constricted aperture through which reality showed, a face relieved of the intrusion of hell-attributes. As long, Rachmael realized, as I keep that face in front of me, I’m okay. And if he talks. That would do it; that would get me through.
But he won’t, he realized. He tried to kill me; he wants me dead. He did kill me. This man—this sole link with outside—is my murderer.
He stared at the face; in return, the eyes glared unwinkingly back, the owl eyes of cruelty that loathed him and wanted him dead, wanted him to suffer. And the THL soldier said nothing; Rachmael waited and heard no sound, even after years—a decade passed and another began and still no word was spoken. Or if it was he failed to hear it.
“Goddam you,” Rachmael said. His own voice did not reach him; he felt his throat tremble with the sound, but his ears detected no change, nothing. “Do something,” Rachmael said. “Please.”
The soldier smiled.
“Then you can hear me,” Rachmael said. “Even after this long.” It was amazing that this man still lived, after so many centuries. But he did not bother to reflect on that; all that mattered was the uninterrupted realness of the face before him. “Say something,” Rachmael said, “or I’ll break you.” His words weren’t right, he realized. Meaningful, familiar, but somehow not correct; he was bewildered. “Like a rod of iron,” he said. “I will dash you in pieces. Like a potter’s vessel. For I am like a refiner’s fire.” Horrified, he tried to comprehend the warpage of his language; where had the conventional, everyday—
Within him all his language disappeared; all words were gone. Some scanning agency of his brain, some organic searching device, swept out mile after mile of emptiness, finding no stored words, nothing to draw on: he felt it sweeping wider and wider, extending its oscillations into every dark reach, overlooking nothing; it wanted, would accept, anything, now; it was desperate. And still, year after year, the empty bins where words, many of them, had once been but were not now.
He said, then, “Tremens factus sum ego et timeo.” Because out of the periphery of his vision he had obtained a clear glimpse of the progress of the brilliant light-based drama unfolding silently. “Libere me,” he said, and repeated it, once, twice, then on and on, without cease. “Libere me Domini,” he said, and for a hundred years he listened, watched the events projected soundlessly before him, witnessed forever.
“Let go of me, you bastard,” the THL soldier said. His hands grasped Rachmael’s neck and the pain was vast beyond compare; Rachmael let go and the face mocked him in leering hate. “And enjoy your expanded consciousness,” the soldier said with malice so overwhelming that Rachmael felt throughout him unendurable somatic torment which came and then stayed.
“Mors scribitum,” Rachmael said, appealing to the THL soldier. He repeated it, but there was no response. “Misere me,” he said, then; he had nothing else available, nothing more to draw on. “Dies Irae,” he said, trying to explain what was happening inside him. “Dies Illa.” He waited hopefully; he waited years, but no help, no sound, came. I won’t make it, he realized then. Time has stopped. There is no answer.
“Lots of luck,” the face said, then. And began to recede, to move away. The soldier was leaving.
Rachmael hit him. Crushed the mouth. Teeth flew; bits of broken white escaped and vanished, and blood that shone with dazzling flame, like a flow of new, clear fire, exposed itself and filled his vision; the power of illumination emanating from the blood overwhelmed everything, and he saw only that—its intensity stifled everything else and for the first time since the dart had approached him he felt wonder, not fear; this was good.
This captivated and pleased him, and he contemplated it with joy.
In five centuries the blood by degrees faded. The flame lessened. Once more, drifting dimly behind the breathing color, the lusterless face of the THL soldier could be made out, uninteresting and unimportant, of no value because it had no light. It was a dreary and tiresome specter, long known, infinitely boring; he experienced excruciating disappointment to see the fire decrease and the THL soldier’s features re-gather. How long, he asked himself, do I have to keep seeing this same unlit scene?
The face, however, was not the same. He had broken it. Split it open with his fist. Opened it up, let out the precious, blinding blood; the face, a ruined husk, gaped disrobed of its shell: he saw, not the mere outside, but into its genuine works.
Another face, concealed before, wriggled and squeezed out, as if wishing to escape. As if, Rachmael thought, it knows I can see it, and it can’t stand that. That’s the one thing it can’t endure.
The inner face, emerging from the cracked-open gray-chitin mask, now tried to fold up within itself, attempted vigorously to wrap itself in its own semi-fluid tissue. A wet, limp face, made of the sea, dripping, and at the same time stinking; he smelled its salty, acrid scent and felt sick.