Weekly Drabble #248: Down (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'one last descent' from Pethrai D'Arkos and with that foreboding phrase in mind, we return to Jason and The Blind One. Enjoy!

~

Down:

He was going to tell her.

Jason had agonized over that decision for weeks, but the more it ate at him, the more apparent that he was hiding something became. Even if The Blind One couldn’t, as the saying went ‘see into the hearts of men’, she was attentive enough to notice that something about him had changed and she’d been pressing him more to know what secret he was keeping. He’d made excuses to come down less often, but even that only made his discomfort more apparent. And, he believed, on some level that his behaviour hurt her. If she’d been human, that wouldn’t ever have been in question, but he still knew nothing about what demons were truly like. Did she actually feel the same emotions in the same way as a human or was it a pantomime, like how a high-functioning sociopath might act?

All the books he’d read, chat rooms and forums he’d visited and research dives he’d done barely scratched the surface of what he needed to know. Mythology and legends that might have had some basis in truth were interwoven with deliberate falsehoods, misconceptions, fiction being mistaken for truth, New Age bullshit and a host of other issues that muddied the water. Making matters worse, the Golden King’s empire predated all other written languages. Coupled with its geographic isolation from the ‘cradle of civilization’ in the Middle East, the Blind One had been imprisoned millennia before anyone whose writings still existed to this day would have heard about her, let alone written anything down.

The only direct records were the cuneiform and hieroglyphics engraved into the treasury-tomb’s walls and aside from the cursed warning at the labyrinth’s entrance, there was no translation available. The Blind One could read them easily enough, but it amused her to watch him make the attempt, only occasionally helping when he was irrevocably stuck – or he bribed her with her favourite takeout. Even still, it was slow going.

He’d also been delving into Native American myths, hoping that the survivors of the Golden King’s reign had passed some of their stories down through the ages but even that was proving fruitless. The closest he’d come to anything like The Blind One were the myths of the wendigo, but that carried only superficial similarities. She had no heart of ice, no reek of decay or unearthly chill preceding her presence.

Likewise, the Navajo tales of skinwalkers had some association with the bound demon – the ability to change shape from human to animal (or something resembling animals), two feet to four – but again, that was only tangential. Were these stories about The Blind One or something like her, shifting from their original telling over the centuries until they had nearly nothing in common with the actual origin of the tales? Were they just ordinary legends like every culture possessed? Or, perhaps were they true and spoke of other dangers that modern society turned up their noses at? The Blind One’s mere existence opened that Pandora's box and Jason found himself wondering just how many other creatures like her had lived alongside humanity and never been noticed, or they had been and then dismissed as impossible, primitive stories.

What else lurked in the cracks and corners of the world humanity thought they knew?

He didn’t know. He didn’t even know what would happen when he told The Blind One that the descendant of the man who’d imprisoned her to guard his labyrinth was standing before her. But these last few months had been terrifying and exciting in equal parts (okay, more terrifying than exciting), but it had taken a simple young Masters students doing urban archaeology and introduced him to a world unlike any he’d ever imagined.

A world of unimaginable horrors, with an ever-growing labyrinth infested by nameless, shadowy terrors... and at the center of it all, a creature of endless hunger and complete malevolence that not even the earliest seers, shamans, scribes and madman had been able to codify. A creature who could not be photographed or recorded without that information warping into incomprehensible drivel, painful script or nightmarish apparitions.

Or perhaps... just perhaps, that malevolence wasn’t as complete as if might appear at first glance. The Blind One had never tried to kill him. He wasn’t a thief as the Golden King had described, but there was nothing holding her in check from murdering visitors on a whim, or to satiate her centuries-long starvation. Knowing what he knew now, he was certain that she would be unable to go through it but that wasn’t the point; the demon didn’t know he was her captor’s heir (or at least one of them, Jason still had no idea how far the Golden King’s bloodlines might have spread over the millennia) and she’d still never tried to harm him.

She was fundamentally, inescapably inhuman. Her nature was to kill, consume and corrupt, but there were parts that were not like that. The eagerness to learn about how the world had changed, the loneliness he was sure he hadn’t imagined, the way her voiceless tone changed when they conversed. There was more there than destruction and death, he was sure of it. That was why he’d carried out some... preparations. Maybe he was being too optimistic. Maybe he was doing exactly what The Blind One wanted – if the insane didn’t know they were insane, did someone corrupted by a demon know that they had been? - or maybe...

...maybe the world was ready to have the curtain pulled back.

He didn’t know, but today, though... he did know that today would be the day he told a caged demon that he was the heir of the man who’d imprisoned her. After that... then he’d have to see what happened and if he was just a fool, or if The Blind One no longer needed to be caged.

After all, some small part of him thought wryly. How could the world get any worse?

~

“Why the fuck we bothering with this stupid bullshit, Jay-Jay?” the young woman complained as she shuffled along the city streets, hands in her pockets, two larger young men in gang colours on either side of her. “Seems like a waste of time, you ask me.”

“Ain’t nobody did ask you. I fukken tol’ you, Keisha,” Jackson James, Jay-Jay to the 9thStreet Reds, snapped. “We gots a fukken job, now shut that bitch mouth. You don’t see T-Bone mouthin’ off every five fukken minutes do you?”

“Thas’ cuz I ain’t riding yo dick like Keisha is,” the other man grunted. “So I know sayin’ anythin’ ain’t gone get any response. Leastwise she gets somethin’ outta ya, Jay-jay.”

“Everyone’s a fukken whiner these days,” Jay-Jay growled with a shake of his head, dreads swooshing across his face.“I tol’ you, this came straight from the top crib. Billy says this motherfucker been coming through our territory on the regular. Clean upstanding kind of citizen, you know what I’m saying? Kind ain’t caught dead in our neck of the woods without a camera, po-po escort and his fukken pronouns, you know? So Billy’s curious and wants to know what this cracker’s up to.”

“Fuck do we care about some white-ass dipshit does?” T-Bone grumbled. “Prolly recycling his sandals or some shit.”

“We care, cuz the boss cares and we don’ need to fukken ask why the boss cares. Or do you wanna go back to Billy’s crib and get all up in his business? I’m sure he’ll love to have a little pow-wow with every banger what comes through his door. Maybe offer you some tea and crumpets as he gets your opinion on how he runs the Reds? That what you think’ll happen, T-Bone?”

“Yeah, fine. I’m jus’ sayin’ this ain’t our usual bizness, you know? Like who cares what this motherfucker’s doing? We could be doing real work, not gettin’ shoved into some fukken snipe hunt, you know?”

“T-bone, you are one dumb-ass banger. Use yo’ fukken eyes and that meaty slop ‘tween yo ears that yo momma gave you. You ever seen a more twitchy fuck that ain’t have some shit on the side? Keisha, you feel me, right?”

“He’s as skittish as a boy who’s got a side piece and tryin’ to hide it,” the woman confirmed. “And he’s pretty shit at it.”

“Right. So maybe homey just has a little honey on the down-low that he skips out to see away from his upper-crust fiancee an’ shit and this is a fat ol’ nothingburger. Or maybe Billy’s senses are tinglin’ that somethin’ else is happening and that somethin’ is goin’ down in Red territory. So whatever it is, we get a cut of it. That gettin’ through all that mary jane in yo head, T-Bone? You think the Reds got nothing better to do than send a couple bangers after some fuck-ass cracker, or maybe you think there’s somethin’ happenin’ in our motherfuckin’ backyard and the only way we find out is to follow this fuck. You got that, or do I need to bust out some fukken crayons and coloured paper?”

“Yeah I got it.”

“What about you, Keisha?”

“I got it, Jay-Jay.”

“Good. Looks like he’s heading into the subway.Keisha, you follow him into his car and text us which station he gets off at. T-Bone, you take the carin front, I’ll take the one behind, so’s he doesn’t notice three bangers on his ass and if he moves up or down a car, we still got eyes on ‘im without spookin’ him.”

“You’re going to a lot of trouble for this. Might be nothin’.”

“Yeah, it might be nothin’. Or it might be somethin’ and if it is, I ain’t the one that’s gonna blow it and have to explain that shit to Billy. Now both of you, keep yo’ fukken voices down. We’re supposed to be incognito an’ shit, not broadcastin’ that we’re here.”

“What all this clever spy shit don’t work? Got a plan for that, smartass?”

“Then we might have to tune white boy up a little, but we’ll save that for last. This is supposed to go down all quiet-like, but Billy’s counting on us. We’re gonna get to the bottom of whatever’s goin’ on in our territory one way or the other, y’all got that? Good. Now let’s do this thing – and no more fukken complaints.”