Or
(Les Chroniques infernales)
(Les Chroniques infernales)
Esther Rochon
(Chapter 6, p. 61-69)
The Captive Queen
Lame found herself alone at the portal between worlds. It was the first time there was no one else with her to activate the mechanism. But she had seen it done many times. Even though she had no gift for technology, she read the controls, pushed buttons and was happy to see the portal in front of her open under Arxann's basement. She slowly climbed the stairway and found herself in the room that she knew well, since she had lived there recently. She came out smiling, glad to return to the fold. Adjusting the backpack on her shoulders, she started forward, feeling strangely tired.
The ruins were deserted, as usual. As she went around the pile of gravel that had fallen through the opening at the top of the dome, she wondered how the repair work was going. She did not see any scaffolding, which annoyed her. She was in a hurry to leave this vicinity, where she did not feel safe.
There was really nothing to worry about, she told herself. She had not been gone for long, especially considered on an infernal time scale. And she also knew how efficient infernal workers were on large-scale projects. Long before, she had seen that landscape occupied by machine, when the former hells were abandoned in favour of the eight new hells. The traces of what had been there had been almost completely erased; lighting had been installed, irrigation canals dug, enough arable soil brought in so a few fields could be planted, which would feed the population of reformed tormentors. Compared to this major work, what was required to fix the cracks in the dome was barely worth mentioning. Once begun, it would go quickly.
However, everything was so dark here, in comparison with the illuminated world from which she was coming. Her body felt numb to her, no doubt because of the unusual lifestyle, richer in emotions, that she had had there. She decided to allow herself a period of readjustment to the former hells before she joined her farmer or seawater desalinator friends.
Since no one knew yet that she had come back, she could easily find a quiet corner in the big desert that once had been the hells. Wouldn't Rel's words provide a clue to help her choose a place to spend a few days? What she had to do was fully accept what she had gone through in order to be able to open herself up to something else.
Why not go there where, once, the soft hells had been located, where she had been an autonomous damned, who kept the entry logs? She felt ready now to recall those memories: They no longer haunted her. She would perhaps discover paths that would help her in the future.
The idea of this excursion definitely appealed to her. She had already made a kind of pilgrimage there; everything had gone very well. It was just after the hells were moved. Centuries had passed since. Why not repeat the experience? She started walking, with difficulty, through the dust her feet kept sinking into. Nothing like a little exercise, after the inaction of recent weeks.
All the long way, the more she advanced, the more convinced Lame was that she had been right to go to the site of the former soft hells. This was not far from the base of the dome. Here, if rapid deterioration of the celestial concrete occurred, she was in less danger of being crushed. Rel had wanted to protect her; he had given her... a little gold button and a series of numbers to recite by heart! Nothing prevented Lame from taking more tangible measures! She could not imagine places safer than the soft hills very close to the thick walls. Even though she was sure she had nothing to fear, the condition of the tunnel towards the ludicrous worlds worried her. She was anxious for everything to be properly repaired. In the meantime, her survival instinct made her search for a sheltered place that could provide a refuge in case of catastrophe.
Finally, she reached the goal of her journey.
She descended a few soft hills and stopped. She was there. Nothing more remained of the infernal marshes in which she had splashed, nothing but gloomy knolls.
Her mood suddenly changed. Why had she ventured this far alone? The whole region of the former hells was without danger; why was she not reassured? Were there too many horrible, repressed memories suddenly trying to take hold of her? She stood still among the abandoned ashes under the concrete sky. No sound, except her own breathing.
Without warning, the unimaginable happened.
Suddenly, she saw the ground moving in front of her. An underground crawling movement, coming towards her. She turned to run. Too late: a similar movement blocked the way forward. There were still the two sides. She leaped to the left, taking great strides. But the sand was deep. She could not move fast. Throwing her bag to the ground to lessen her burden, she tried to run. As if in a nightmare, the ground was crumbling beneath her feet. She had no idea what was chasing her. Had these places been thoroughly examined?
She understood. Her mind was gripped with horror as her body sank into a hole. What awaited her was a fate worse than death.
Barely able to breathe because of the sand, incapable of opening her eyes or struggling, she could feel herself being touched all over the surface of her body by thousands of feet and antennae, being bitten by thousands of mouths. She could not even cry out, not that it would have done any good. Buried in the sand, no one would find her. The venom that had been injected into her was beginning to take effect. Her body was losing sensitivity and mobility. Everything was getting heavy.
She might remain there until the end of time, paralyzed but conscious, her swollen body used for food by the ancient ants of the soft hells, which had populated the region since time immemorial, making their enormous prey last.
Strange visions appeared to her. It seemed to her she could make out cold comments on the floods of recollections emerging from her memory. The ants were no doubt tampering with her brain, beginning to play with her internal chemistry to recalibrate it to their standards. The horror of her situation shook her mentally, but with no reaction from her body. Tactile feelings were coming back to her a little. Ants had entered every orifice. They were moving through her mouth and her digestive system, through her vagina, her anus, her nostrils and her ears, venturing into the deepest recesses of her like scouts holding their breath. They were methodically doing inventory before instigating the changes that would render Lame unrecognizable, incapable of using her body normally, assuming she were ever found, ever freed.
During her time in the soft hells, long ago, Lame had done everything to avoid falling prey to the ants. She had succeeded. But now today she had herself walked towards the fate that terrified her the most. She had just left the outside worlds because they seemed dull to her, and now she had fallen into a situation that was anything but humdrum!
Her body was paralyzed; she could no longer hear nor see; the references of her senses were no longer available, except for touch. Above all, it would now be impossible for her to have any idea of the passage of time. Had she been here for an hour, two days or three years? Already, she no longer knew; she would know less and less. A larva, which could live for millennia, in infernal time of course. What good would it do her to hope for rescue?
Impossible to resist. Her life as Lame had ceased. She had been the wife of the powerful and mysterious Rel, she had known years that were beyond compare and lived a passion more magnificent than her wildest dreams. There was no point in clinging to the past. She had never imagined that everything could end so quickly. But she knew the ants were unforgiving.
She sank into unconsciousness. Then, in a kind of dream, she found herself nose to nose with an ant as big as she was, and she understood its gestures and language. In her drugged state, Lame again had the feeling she had a functional body and was able to speak, and that the other creature could answer her.
"I have already paid my debts," Lame declared, "I'm a former damned, I have finished atoning, by what right are you holding me?"
"You still have your personal debt to us, the ants."
"They weren't discharged with the others?"
"Usually they are left for later, for the time when you meet us. In the past, you spent time in the soft hells, without doing a session with us. With certain exceptions, the soft damned always end up falling into our clutches. Then we make them atone for their wrongs against us. You, however, did not come to see us; your wrongs towards us remain unpunished. Do you at least remember what you did to us?"
"No."
"Look then."
All of a sudden, Lame sees herself again as a little girl, in her previous life, crushing ants, with her shoes, on a sidewalk, because she had nothing better to do. No one around her told her not to. She was pitiless, watching them writhe in pain for an instant, then lying still, dead on the cement.
"I see," she answered. "If this debt has not been paid, the best thing, then, is to do it as soon as possible."
The ants continued settling into Lame's body. She had already seen larvae, she had heard of them; the horror of their punishment had been the basis for many of her nightmares. From time to time, she imagined her beauty leaving her. Her hair would fall out, if it hadn't already; her belly and her breasts had already started to swell - they would be the storehouse. She was being stuffed day and night. Her limbs, now useless, would become spindly; one day they might fall off like dead branches. She was sinking into the sand, being transformed little by little into a blind, conscious nest.
Since she was no longer in shock, she could consider her situation with a clear head. The ants, which she met sometimes in visions, did not want to tell her how much time had passed since her arrival, nor inform her, for the time being, of the condition of her body. She therefore had not been here for a very long time. So what? No point in struggling.
The ants were surprised by her attitude. Manipulating her inner chemistry with millennia of infernal experience, they observed that there was nothing feigned about her acceptance.
"That's because I was the wife of Rel," she explained to them. "The king of the hells made me his queen. I conduct myself in accordance with what he taught me. Have I wronged your kind? I am atoning for that. However..."
She took a long time to complete her thought: everything passed so slowly in this suspended world.
"However," she continued, days later perhaps, "I'm not the only one concerned. My parents, as well as the society in which I lived when I did you harm, could easily have taught me not to kill you."
"You want to take revenge on your parents and society, Lame?" asked the big ant, her usual imaginary interlocutor.
With time, they were getting to be on rather friendly terms.
"They have their responsibilities in my behaviour towards you."
"Certainly, but that's no reason to resent them."
"I would like to ask them to explain themselves."
"That's the business of the judges, not the damned."
"Indeed. Let's say that I would like to imagine I could do it."
"We, the ants, we feel grateful to our ancestors."
"You have a simple mind, not I. I killed your kind in the world that my parents and society had given me; I even committed suicide. I think I have finished paying for the suicide. Now I am with the ants. In a sense, it's no longer serious."
"You surprise me. None of you see the murder of ants as a sin. It is ordinary sadism, passed down heedlessly from generation to generation. A suicide, though, is surprising. Your opinion is the opposite of what we usually hear."
"If my mother had taught me not to crush ants, that could have indicated that I belonged to a world a little less unbalanced than the one where I was in! I would have wanted less to leave it through suicide!"
"Is that all?"
"I'm being punished because I was not educated properly!"
"The past is unreachable. No one hears your demands. All that is finished. You should have addressed yourself to the living, even if it meant being ridiculed and only making you more unhappy. Once people are dead, it's too late."
"I know. Everyone atones for their own sins. In addition, who can know if those who, in their view, have done them wrong atone for anything?"
"So why not change your attitude? Follow our example, venerate your parents and those who raised you. That will not alter their fate, and they will have no way of knowing what you think of them, but, at least, it will put you in a better mood."
"No," answered Lame. "I want to make them appear before me. I am capable of it, since in any case it is in my mind that this is happening and there is nothing else for me to do."
She did as she had said, but it took time...© 1999 Éditions Alire & Esther Rochon
To find out what happens next...
