Once a Monster by Robert Dinsdale

Author:Robert Dinsdale [Dinsdale, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2023-08-22T17:00:00+00:00

18

The Eighth Great Trade

From the Mind of a Monster, Across All Time

Dreams, dreams, dreams – but what else is there, down here in the dark?

He opens his eyes.

No church any longer. No St George in the East. He lifts himself, only to discover no girl in the crook of his arm; indeed, hardly an arm at all, just a rippling appendage of muscle and hair. No nave in front of him, no chancel in which he’s made a nest. Only a sanctum of dark stone, the dais in its centre both altar and bedstead, and in the walls the same carving over and again. He doesn’t know much, but he knows what this is: the labrys, the two-headed axe; they came for him with weapons like these, when they drove him into the dark. Of all the things he remembers: this most of all.

The only light here comes from the embers of the fires he stokes. Little cauldrons, where one dark archway opens to another; enough to see by, enough to blacken the walls, enough to fill his Palace with soot and smoke. He’ll have to do his rounds, rousing each one back to life. His hands can hold nothing so delicate as a flint, so there is never a hope of reviving a fire once its ashes are cold. Great tracts of his Palace are in forever darkness now. He knows his way through those sightless tracts by touch and scent, but any Guest who comes upon his Palace would turn to madness if they strayed too far. His Palace is wide and his Palace is deep and his Palace is the world for ever and ever. His Guests will need light, if they are to have any hope of finding him at all.

Underneath his hoofed feet, a carpet of bone fractures and shifts. Sometimes, a herd of goats, a braying ass, a sounder of boars, are driven down the Long Stair, which rises from the uttermost end of his Palace to a great Door above. This is the bounty his Palace provides, frequent enough to sustain him, rare enough that the aching emptiness within him has never truly been satisfied. This feeling is beyond hunger. It is the permanent state of being. Aching and empty, empty and in need.

A sound echoes through the Palace. That is the way of things here; the archways amplify sound. He stops feeding the fire, cocks his head, heavy with two curled horns. It is the tiniest of sounds, like the scampering of the rats he sometimes hears: the turning of a key in a lock, at the top of the Long Stair.

Now his heart is aflame.

His Guests have arrived.

Why do they scream already? Why is the scent that floods his Palace so ripe with sweat and shit? He turns towards the sound, following the spiral of passageways as the scents fill him up. Oh yes, this is hunger now.

Onward he goes. Left he turns, then right. Forward he ploughs; then back. It

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