Immobile on the breakfast room window-seat, I feel my eyes narrow once again, for I know the next place I need to look … and there you are, my Angel, in the dark verandah’d house, in the middle of your thousandth violent combat with Lucan.
[…]
Your throat becomes tight and your eyes burn with tears that you try to keep inside you and the tears bend the light from the ceiling in your eyes and your voice goes squeaky and tense and he grabs you.
[…]
My sight zooms in below your smudged amber eye-shadow, enters your unconscious eyes and sees you are dreaming that your hurt spirit crouches with dripping wings, naked in an alleyway. But Lucan discovers you, of course, and he points down a downward-moving escalator, telling you to ride it, and you do. Your feet can feel the gears trundling underneath the step. Smoke swirls around you, growing redder as you travel down. Sweat trickles down your spine. The escalator steps are now hot beneath your bare feet. You see that yet again you are naked in public, as you so very often are, despite your always hating this. Also, as always when you’re naked and scared, your erection stands hungry and hard in full view, while your body runs with sweat. The forty-five-degree descent ahead is dead-straight, for miles. Either side, banks of pipes, valves, tubes and wires tower up to clear sky and drop to depths of gloom, clad in complex walkways, balconies and stairs. Panic floods through you. The rumbling of the escalator gears is augmented by a booming so deep that it might be the engines of a planet, overlaid with a bank of sound as dense as the machinery—clanks, hisses, whistles, grating screeches and explosions. Sparks leap from point to point around you, as you watch in fright. A huge grinding blast from far below shakes the steps and a red flicker rises. You lean beyond the hand-rail and peer down: five miles beneath you a ball of orange fire rages, tiny and intricately floral at this distance.
[…]
One of these days he will kill you while you’re with him, or he’ll kill you for escaping, or you’ll kill yourself because you can’t escape him any other way.
Always, you have to hide your face behind your hands, hardly daring to peek between the bars of your fingers to see what new invasion or privation is in store, what knife is being whetted through the doorway, just for you—swaying on your feet, without the freedom of perspective to show you what is upward, while the walls of this tomb-dark house tilt and bend and leer and totter inward, always…
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