Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
In the city, there are places the sun never shines on. Sometimes, surrounded by twenty-story buildings, streets find themselves continually bathed in shadow, no matter the time of day, no matter what season it is. The one side of the hotel that wasn’t shadowed by other buildings happened to be the front of it, and also facing north, which meant no sun either way.
I wasn’t entirely sure what this boded for the hotel, if anything at all. Aren’t there places in the world where the sun doesn’t shine for six months out of the year? But then again, those places also have the opposite, where the midnight sun never set, for half a year…
The city was kind of like that. Never wholly dark, not even in winter on nights without any moon. There was always something glowing, be it buildings and rooms within them, or streetlamps, or…
I had been afraid of the dark, back when I lived with my family. It was something that flared up into intolerable, joint-freezing, mind-bashing, all-encompassing true fear that didn’t so much attack you as it did squirm into you, under your skin and into your veins, somehow. The kind of fear that made you unable to save yourself.
I couldn’t find the switch to the lamp. I knew it was there, I knew I only had to throw my arm out and I’d find it. The lamp was the only thing I kept on my bedside table, there were no obstacles. Not even a glass of water. I never got thirsty at night, rarely woke up at all.
Where was the switch?
My arm wouldn’t move. I tried to move. My throat was closing over. All the while, the darkness got thicker, crept over my face. It turned from mist to fog to water to some gelatinous substance, crawling and crawling. Forcing my jaw open, into my mouth. Twisting up my nostrils — I couldn’t breathe. Sliming into my ears without pause, all through my hair, slicker than oil. Down down down into my throat.
Maybe that’s what set the screams free, maybe it touched something that unfroze my vocal cords. I screamed and screamed and screamed and scream, until my throat was a blossoming rose of red hot pain, until my ears were chiming with the frequencies. I could have broken glass, crystal, maybe even diamond. I screamed until my bedroom door was thrown open, the light switched on, and my sister Krystl rushed to my side, shaking me.
“Elouise! Elouise! Wake up! It’s all right…Elouise!”
I had stopped screaming, and was staring up at her, my entire body moving like an earthquake against my pillows. Krystl later said that she’d never seen anything as frightening as my eyes, in that moment — all pupil, no colour, as wide as the moon I couldn’t see. I believed her. Out of my sisters, Ruby was always the one who tended to exaggerate; Krystl simply told the truth. (Something which tended to get her into a fair bit of trouble, as a matter of fact.)
After that, I slept with my lamp on, without fail. We had moved to one of the more “urban rural” areas when Mum remarried, the house was a good twenty or thirty metres back from the road, so the whining amber glow of the streetlights didn’t reach any bedroom windows, anymore. For a while, Mum thought that was was started the madness growing in my brain — the move in general, I mean. But it wasn’t. It just…started. Nothing triggered it. It began of its own volition, like something alive in and of itself. Much like the darkness, it crawled. Unlike the darkness, there was no light that could frighten it off.
The city was never wholly dark. But I didn’t know that at first. At first, I began closing the curtains over my window as soon as the sky began to edge closer to purple than orange — I wouldn’t let the dark in, and I didn’t turn the light off. I couldn’t let it get the better of me. God knows if it would have given me a heart attack this time.
Not long after I had moved into my apartment, the light bulb above my bed blew. Naturally. Wender hadn’t changed the damn things in months and months, according to Jeremy. There was a vindictive little pop, and suddenly, darkness.
Except there wasn’t.
I remained where I had been sitting on my bed, my heart gearing up to start pounding…and the momentary darkness after the initial piking out of the bulb suddenly retracted, and became…I wasn’t sure how to describe it. It was still dark, it was still black…but I could see. The outline of my shelves along the wall. The unused television, my sad old couch. The kitchen, the kettle next to the sink. The fridge, making enough noise to awaken the dead. My little kitchen table and the chair which I’d thrown my denim jacket over, too lazy to hang it up.
It wasn’t dark. It was shades of black. I could see.
I’d leapt to my feet, a tour jete off my bed that would have surely made a ballerina jealous. Would-be fear had given way to a strange exhilaration, which leant me a modicum of grace, extremely temporary. I leaped again to the window, and hauled back the curtains. The inside of my apartment turned a very particular shade of blue, argentine grey, soft rich yellows, amber-rose, some earthy greens. Not dark. Not blind. Deeply shadowed.
I could see.
The city itself had taken darkness and if not banished it — the sky was still the colour of sin — but defied it, at the very least. Darkness could visit the city. Darkness could cover the city. But the city lights shone as silver and gold despite it.
I had raised my hands to my face. I could see them clearly. It was too hard to see the lines on my palms or the silvery scars that marched down towards my inner elbow, but I could see them. I could see myself. And I realised, then — I didn’t have to stop out the darkness, because the city would do it for me.
So perhaps, before, I lied when I said I didn’t love or hate the hotel. I loved the hotel because it was here in this city, and this city was determined to become mine, or perhaps was determined to make me belong to it. Maybe it was both. Who knew? Who can read the heart of a city? It’s far beyond our ken, I think…
Mephisto sat in the old sofa, bathed in the light of the (my) city. The not-quite darkness made him look even paler than he actually was, his features sharper. His eyes remained that unearthly blue, same as Killian’s. He was watching me as I was watching him, hands folded beneath his chin, thoughtful.
We had spent the most of the day explaining the loss of my memory to Nutmeg. She had frowned as if someone had custom-delivered a headache for her, and the emotions that went through her made very little sense to me. Mephisto had been on the receiving end of her black looks more than once, which he bore with obnoxious amusement. He ruffled Nutmeg simply by being here (with me? I wasn’t sure…), but Nutmeg couldn’t agitate him in the slightest. The more biting her insults, the better the demon took them…I think he might have actually enjoyed it, each time she spat poison at him. I couldn’t tell, Mephisto was so utterly alien to me.
That’s not to say it wasn’t pretty funny, watching them go at it. But I would never say that to Nutmeg. She could probably take a liking to exterior decoration with my guts, as well — I wasn’t that special to her, after all.
She had glanced at her wristwatch at about five o’clock, give or take ten or so minutes, and grimaced.
“I have an appointment,” she said to me, apologetically. Again, she touched my face with her beautiful fingers. Her eyes were filled with a curious mixture of sadness and frustration. “Elouise…whatever caused this…I’ll fix it for you, all right?”
“Will you, now?” Mephisto asked, treading a very fine line between playful and insulting, as only he could.
“Vaffanculo a Lei, demone vecchio,” she spat over her shoulder with a low growl. Mephisto chuckled at that, and inclined his head, pressing his hand to his heart, mockingly. Nutmeg hissed through her teeth and turned back to me.
“There will be a reason, and we’ll get that time back. All right? Sweet pea?” I nodded, and she pressed a light kiss to my forehead. “Take care. And as for you, demon — if you screw up, I will remind you that the popular consensus regarding me in this hotel is that I am a sociopath.”
Mephisto simply chuckled. “I’ll consider myself told.”
“So you should,” she muttered as she closed the door behind her. Mephisto regarded the place where she was no longer standing with a cheeky smile, as if he could still see her, then turned to me.
“What a fascinating young lady!”
“What did…she say to you?” I asked, tentatively curious. “Before. Was that Italian or Spanish?”
Mephisto’s smile got wider, if at all possible. He sank elegantly into the sofa.
“That was indeed Italian, and what she said is generally unrepeatable. Nothing you haven’t heard before, I’m sure, but I…am a man of taste.”
“Wealth and taste,” I muttered beneath my breath. He heard, of course.
“Perhaps, perhaps.”
“I didn’t know Nutmeg was Italian,” I mused. “She doesn’t have an accent…so I never twigged on. How strange.”
“Your Nutmeg has had a long time to work the accent from her voice,” Mephisto replied, steepling his fingers in front of his face. He looked thoughtful, but I frowned.
“How does that work? She’s not that old…”
“Hmm? I suppose not. She’s older than you think she is, though.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “How old is she, then? I think she’s maybe twenty-nine at the utter maximum.”
Mephisto’s smile was bizarrely secretive, and he wore it like a veil. “It’s best that you keep thinking that.”
“Tell me!” I insisted.
“Even if I did, you wouldn’t believe me, child.” If anyone else had called me child, it would have sounded hokey and affected, put-on. But the way the demon said it turned it into something rollingly sensual, very nearly sexual, cutting a thin line between something playful and something sacreligious. I wanted to blush, but I wasn’t sure why. Everything about Mephisto was completely confusing. I think he knew it, too.
“We didn’t tell her about Killian,” I said quietly, wandering over to my bed and sitting upon it cross-legged. Just thinking about the young man with a demon’s face and summer in his back pocket created a strange sort of hurt in me, somewhere between my ribcage and my shoulderblades, a real dull ache that clawed like a lonely animal.
“We didn’t,” Mephisto agreed, furrowing his brow. “And I think we had best keep quiet about that, for now.”
“That’s hardly possible,” I protested. The purple of sunset was giving way to the dark of night, and it seemed to be settling around his shoulders, it made him seem…less real. Like the hallucination I thought he was. “She saw you, she knows what Killian looks like. So.”
Mephisto shook his head. “Nutmeg saw what she expected to see, in my face. She won’t have noticed.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, for what had to be the millionth time. Troubled clouds gathered in Mephisto’s startling eyes.
“People only see me when they expect to see me — or are exceptionally talented, like Miss Nutmeg. And when they do see me, what they see…tends to differ.”
“So…what I’m seeing…isn’t your real face?” I shook my head. “How does that–”
“They’re all ‘real’ faces,” Mephisto corrected. “All of them are mine. You…” he trailed off, looking somewhat puzzled, slightly perturbed. “You just see one that’s echoed in Killian’s face. And…I am not sure why.”
Something told me that wasn’t the truth. He had a fair idea why. But it was hidden there in the depths of shocking blue, and I wasn’t going to go searching for it. Not if he was…
“Are you the Devil?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I am a devil, yes.”
“No,” I shook my head impatiently. “Not a devil. The Devil. The…lightbringer.”
He lowered his eyelids and looked at me from beneath his thick eyelashes.
“What would you say or do if I said yes? Or no?”
“I’m not…I’m not sure…” I whispered. Why was I whispering? It was as if I was being told a secret that I couldn’t keep in my mind, that would spill out from me if I raised my voice. It was strange…
“Then why ask?” Mephisto’s voice was low, warm, and heady, as heady and rich as liquer, warmer than a tired afternoon’s sunbeam, slicing through motes of dust in the air and sending them spinning. It was too much, too heavy for me to take in — I shuddered, wrapping my arms around myself. For protection? Comfort? I was startled out of my skull to discover that I wanted neither — I wanted Mephisto to come over to me and hold me close again, the way he had that morning, when I awoke screaming. The way he had when I was incoherent, unhere, curled in his lap. None of it was…
“Because it doesn’t make sense, you helping me, if you are,” I croaked hoarsely.
“Ah? I see you were studying classical theology before you left university?” He was smirking.
“Actually, I got kicked out,” I corrected, even though my head was whirling. Mephisto looked at me for the space of a heartbeat and a sigh before starting to laugh.
“Oh, Elouise, Elouise, Elouise. What am I to do with you?”
“I…don’t know?”
“Nor do I,” he smiled, a genuine, affectionate, amused smile.
“Why,” I insisted. “Why do you want to…why help me…why…?”
Mephisto was silent, as if contemplating this. Darkness fell into the apartment, and seemed to swirl around his shoulders. I was aware I should get up and switch the light on, but there was something as delicate as spidersilk spinning through the air, between us — this demon and I. If I moved, I would break it. I surely would.
“Elouise,” he said. “Have you ever read The Screwtape Letters? By C.S. Lewis?”
“N…no,” I replied.
His smile was completely inscrutable.
“Neither have I.”