Nicholas to Jack: The First Trial

Jack,

Well, fuck all. So like you to wish and make command without knowing it, where yes, there are terrible ghoulies in the Whiteland but you forget to go an mention you’re its Black Queen. The swelter of these icy planes’ll give way to the crackling apart of them, I know it well. You speak to the ground and it shatters under me. This is no longer a bed, but the place the rats go.

I remember all their names, as little as their noses, the creatures that together swarm up the world and dust the air to black at the want of your switching fingers. I might’ve known you’d come and ask for this. A warning, my darling, we mustn’t be coy. I know it’s a necessary terror.

You burnt into the flesh of me these patterns in your strange language so I know it best here: first fed me is my imprisonment. You pick it off the vines like rotted grapes, drop them so loving down to me, around me, all around my steely cage descends, the vines and bars and twisting cobwebs tangles all of your hair.

How you tell me to be brave is with a quick smirk, as we know there is no use for bravery in your white world. Secret is there might not be no use for it anywhere, yeah? It comes to us doin what needs be done. That’s the word of my boots, anyhow, trampled down these hills to the valley down to find a cave to claim. Be here a bit, I may. The long road is before us now, innit? The vermin following along me now are Gerard and Stanley. They won’t cross over the river when it come, but sweet they are to see me out.

The happy news is I’ve plenty to think on and keep the cold hand at bay. This is not my first turn in a cage, and won’t be my last, for I’m many thousands years old as now. The wind will keep me awake, I know, and my memories.

I once took another man’s place in these bars. A man who dint deserve the time I did for him, not in the least. But that’s love, pet. Can still hear the smacking of his woman on her chewing gum hard with hairspray behind the barber’s chair she lived.

Now, Pig, you must say why it’s hard and how it hurts. For your God is listening again.

Shhhh Maggot, the dark won’t come here. The day will long.

It’s the touch and the sound of damp earth beating a coffin lid. Without Adam, I will not keep sane. Without the lick of Ev’s knees about my back in the night. But you’ll see, yes? Course, you’ve come to see.

In the dark times before I found them, I begun to write myself letters to mark the passing of the days. I left them all in books and left the books in cities which have fallen and stood alike. I buried them like an animal. I ate them. I shat them and I reassembled them. I brought them to the church and they were made books in your bibles.

Alone in a cell, I do not belong to anyone, not even myself, not my family. The sshhhilllll sound of a metal plate of the same sabulous muck for supper is all what music I know. I don’t mind as much if I can think of the taste of blood, but it don’t feed. I am not nourished. The ring-ring of my violin, the trembling, holographic noise. Oh, when that is silenced, it is prison. The thrush taking over my tongue is the closest to lager I may taste till my undoing. I am held under purgatory but just above my hell.

When I was once a boy, I took the pins from the rat’s cages in the science room and while there were only three, perchance this is why they’re friend to me. I was whipped hard for it until the master’s lip collected sweat and I achieved my first erection. I wrote it down somewhere and it may as well be here. I shall dig for it.

The what to get me past the chains coiling about my heart is only the make believing I’m waiting on the postmaster.

-Nicholas