Weekly Drabble #200: Heart of Darkness (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'tea with Cthulu' from Sam C. Originally, this was going to be an addition to the Shadow over Illinois series, but I couldn't quite get the right angle for it, so I had to scrap that plan and go with an entry into Jason Clarke's ongoing encounters with The Blind One and the lost temple of the Golden King. Enjoy!

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Heart of Darkness

Why do you come here?

“You always ask me that,” Jason Clarke told The Blind One.

Yes.

“I’ve told you why.”

Yes, you have.The demon was in her human form again, looking out at him with milky, unseeing eyes from the open flaps of the pup tent he’d gotten for her. There was a sleeping bag inside to go with it. For the past God-only-knew thousands of years, she’d had to make her nest upon the mountains of treasure or in the empty stone chambers and hallways that filled this ancient, impossible labyrinth. That had a certain aesthetic, but Jason didn’t know how comfortable it could be. The tent wasn’t nearly large enough for some of the forms she took, but when she was human – or one of the smaller horrors she could become – it fit her nicely.

I could twist your head off, she pointed out. Even in this form, I could pull you apart like a doll. I’ve done worse, simply to see it happen.

“That’s true,” he replied. “But if you did that, who would bring you pizza?” He opened the box. Supreme Meat Lover’s, extra cheese. The Blind One didn’t need to eat – centuries of starvation had proven that – but when she did, it was with a carnivore’s appetite.

Her sightless eyes widened and she crawled out of the tent, naked and pale. You have a point.

“It’s been known to happen.” He pulled a slice out of the pie, long strings of melted mozzarella cheese dangling from it. She grabbed it out of his hands and scarfed it down. “You’re welcome,” he said with a smile.

Thank you, she replied after the last of the slice had disappeared. She picked up another one, eating this one marginally slower. Why do you come here?

“You know why,” he answered. “I’m an archaeologist. This place... this is something from the past. It’s from a people that no one has ever even known existed and in a region that we’ve never known this kind of civilization to exist! No one in the world has ever found anything like this... or like you,” he continued, looking away from the demon.

She tilted her head. Very few humans have ever wanted to meet my kind. Those that do seek more than mundane knowledge and tales of the forgotten.They bartered for power – temporal, spiritual, physical and offered more than mere cuisine in trade for it. Jason Clarke had yet to make any requests of that nature, making him an anomaly. The first human in countless centuries not to touch any of the Golden King’s horde and one who didn’t attempt to barter, bind or beg of her.

“I can understand why.” Jason took a slice for himself, draping it across a paper plate and popping open a can of soda. “Every moment I spend with you, some deep primeval part of me is screaming. The more I learn about you, the less I know.”

So I’m just a... ‘scientific’ curiosituriousity, then? A puzzle to be solved so that I can fit into your nice, neat boxes of what is and is not?

“Yes,” he answered honestly. There was both teasing and threat in The Blind One’s comment, whether or not she intended the latter. “That’s part of it. To borrow a phrase, to learn about you is, frankly, provocative. You are something that all of our knowledge and understanding says cannot exist, something that our instincts and emotions say should not.” He shook his head. “I don’t think you’ll ever fit into one of those ‘neat boxes’, though.  You can’t.”

The Blind One seemed amused by that. Jason took a bite from his own pizza slice. Though she looked human – small, blind... even vulnerable, that was only an illusion. Even like this, there was much about her that was deeply disturbing. The way her lips never matched her words – or didn’t move at all – when she spoke, the different ways her blindness manifested, the strange scent of her. The way she tugged at his senses, like he was standing on a crumbling cliff over some endless void. She was an abomination; a thing of unending hunger and the need to slaughter. He had no idea how many people she had killed. Those who’d found these catacombs were probably only the tip of that particular iceberg.

Every time he left this tomb of a treasure vault, everything in him told him to never come back. To destroy all his notes and files and leave the lost temple of the Golden King to be forgotten consigning its sole inhabitant back to legend and hearsay forevermore. To leave its existence for looters who would never survive spreading word of it back to the rest of humanity. Every fiber inside him told him that was the only sane course of action. Instead, he came back. A human willingly seeking court with a demon. Insane, but he kept coming back. He brought her gifts. He looked forward to seeing her.

As she pointed out, even when she took this human form, she could tear a grown man limb from limb if the whim struck her. So far, she hadn’t. He’d like to think that that meant something... but it was impossible to say. It might only be the demonic version of ‘cupboard love’ and when she grew bored...

He didn’t like those thoughts, but he couldn’t ignore them. He couldn’t pretend that The Blind One was something that she wasn’t. She was a demon, with an ocean of blood on her hands. But I keep coming back, he admitted to himself. And it wasn’t all for the knowledge of lost civilizations.

You said that curiosity was only part of it, The Blind One pointed out. And the rest?

Jason took a sip of pop to gather his thoughts. “I’ve told you,” he replied.

You know I can always tell when you’re lying, she reminded him.

“What am I lying about?”

She stared at him for a very long time, so long that Jason felt his skin crawl and icicles dribble through his guts. I’m not sure yet, she admitted. She could see the flavour of human sins, taste the colours of them, but she couldn’t always tell the particulars of them. Some pulsed red, bright and dripping with passion and rage. Others coiled and chittered in purple, secretive and deceitful. There was a lie, pale and thin, in the human’s words. She felt it every time he spoke. But I’ll find out.

Jason couldn’t help it and felt a small smile twitch onto his lips. “You probably will,” he admitted as he sat in the darkness, eating pizza and drinking pop with a demon that should have remained buried in the past, and knowing that he was going to come to see her again. And the time after that. And most likely the time after that, too.