The ceiling was a flesh-quilt of flattened human faces, stilled by death in varied states of final agony, eyeless but staring with distorted, empty sockets, black as depth, as the whole, bound by sinewed stitches, had been distended by the gravity of the what-was above—
for the ceiling of one chamber is floor of another—
and above us, above the queer silence of the Visagereum, broken only—
broken only: sporadically:
by their fat, swollen lips repeating death words
(a name,
a gutteration, an
accusation
or a curse)
—ABOVE US:
was the Abattoir, where the killing had been done, where the mass of headless bodies lay heavy; heavy, on the leather floor,
Blood…
d-drip–dripped, soaked through their pores, and fell (“Suzanna,” one said. I swear that’s what he said.) like rain from an accumulus of hate.
Red like raspberries. Sweet as the future.
“For when I pass, I must precipitate their pain,” the Beast had said.
In the Abattoir:
“Suzanna,” and I pulled her by the hand,
further–and further—and further
into the underworld gloom, in which we, by some malignancy of luck, had found ourselves, drenched in blood, but in the blood of others; not our own
Blood,
wiped away and
Falling
Down her cheeks like tears
I did not care then (slipping on the blood on the bloody-puddled floor, as blood itself, it ran toward some infernal drain, and down, down toward oblivion) about myself:
only about Suzanna.
And in the distance I heard the beating of HIS GODFORSAKEN HOOVES.
And in the distance, she heard the beating of
HER-HEART
IS-MY
HEART-HER
HEART-IS
MY-HEART .
I had taken her, saved her from the clutches of the Beast. Did this she not, in her nearly-doomsday, see, even as her teeth’d finally—bit through the ragged gag. She spat: “Leave me!”
“Suzanna,” I said,
under this foul subterranean sky of tortured faces.
And His hoof-falls neared.
“Leave me,” she cried. “You shouldn’t’ave taken me.” (Her mouth, of sharpened teeth, was filled with blood.) “For Him—
“Do not!” I said.
—she said, “For Him I wish to die!”
And He appeared, Man-bodied, Bull-headed and Raven-beaked, with pair of Dread-horns from hideous Skull erupted, above the yellowed tips of which floated twin burning, long-fallen cherubim, which did in harmony, with pale-flamed lips, blow into: playing them as instruments, playing on them the very Music of Inferno!
Her hand slipped from bloodless mine.
To Him, whose presence as-if had flooded the Visagereum with shadows, she stepped.
Bull-headed, and I—
I as-if lost my head .
Ascended until
Dead,
“Suzanna,” I intoned,
or gutterated, accused or cursed, or moaned, out of an agonized face stretched and stitched—to all the others.
For I had tried to save who did not desire to be saved.
To become forever trapped within
The Labyrinth.
Timeless now He walks upon the inverse of my face, as my eyeless eyes stare down into the chamber, where the dripping blood does run (down, down toward oblivion,) from whose endless depths are wrung, my tears.