Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
Something was shaking me.
“Elouise. Elouise, it’s all right, calm down, it’s–”
I sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, clawing at thin air, hands flailing, connecting with…something. A muttered curse. The shaking intensified.
“Shut up, calm down, will you stop thrashing about!”
“Me…Me…Mephisto…?”
The demon’s face blurred into vision in front of me. He was scowling, a trickle of blood escaping from the corner of his mouth. It looked so dark, darker than the reddest satiny rose, as it slid down his white white ivory white skin.
I blinked at him. “You’re bleeding.”
He gave me a withering look. “You don’t say.”
I shook my head, scaring away the last few phantoms of sleep, surfacing quickly. Air bubbles of reality popped around me, bringing my attention into the moment. I looked around myself – apartment. Demon. Bed. Me. Fell asleep in my clothes. It was morning?
“Morning…”
“I surmised you were having another nightmare.” Mephisto was dabbing at his lip with a tissue, probably conjured from nowhere and from my tissue box at the same time, as usual. “You were thrashing about…as is evident.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said, slowly. I shook my head again, harder.
“Hm?” Mephisto had gotten rid of all the blood, and scrunched the tissue into a ball. He threw it across the room into my wastepaper basket, somehow forcing it to disobey the laws of gravity, velocity, and resistance – it flew like a stone skimmed lightly across the surface of a weir. Watching it didn’t help with the clouds gathering in the front of my mind.
“The person in my dream…wasn’t me…”
“It’s common in dreams to think we’re someone else,” Mephisto said. “Gives us all a break from this nightmare called ‘real life’, and well it–”
“No! No, I didn’t think I was someone else! I was someone else!” I was sitting upright in the bed like someone had electrocuted me, ramrod straight and covered in raised hairs. I could feel how wide my eyes were, wide and staring, but I couldn’t relax, couldn’t close them. “That…that wasn’t me!”
“Elouise, what in the name of nine levels of hell are you going on about?” Mephisto frowned.
“That wasn’t me, in that dream. The person in my body. I could never…I don’t…it’s not so much the things she did, because it’s a dream, right? It’s more…the way she thought, and there was no fear, just anger, furious anger and enjoyment…I mean, she was beating down the no-faces – the things that tried to eat me again, I mean, they had no faces…she beat them down like there was no tomorrow! I wouldn’t be able to do that!”
Mephisto stared at me blankly, then the ever-familiar line appeared between his brows.
“You’re sure of this?” he asked, voice low.
“Yes,” I insisted. “That wasn’t me. That was someone else. I could never…I never…that’s…”
Heartbeat. Backbeat. Downbeat.
“I know who I am and who I’m not,” I whispered.
And then, of course – because poetry has its time, its cues – the music began again.
How was it that I heard an orchestra in only six strings? But how was it that I heard suns exploding into being from steel? Visions leapt before my eyes, shimmering into being like heat haze. I wasn’t so much possessed by the giddy, vertigolike feeling as I was thrown into the tsunami of it, a sweet venom that sunk into my veins like lead, and yet flowed through me like ichor, sweeter than the purest honey, and burning like someone set heaven on fire. I was standing on the edge of a cliff, buffeted by winds warmer than an embrace, staring out at a desert, every atom within me crying – screaming, howling – to abandon myself to the feeling, to fall, fall, freefall, let go, now, now, NOW!
I gasped for breath, my eyes rolled back in my head, and I let go.
People search for years and years, looking for their purpose on earth, the meaning of life. Maybe we all were, without knowing it. Maybe the meaning of life was to search for meaning. Who really knew? There have been no definite answers, as long as humanity’s been around…and we’ve been around a while. (When I was younger, I used to worry that if I suddenly did understand what the meaning of life was, I’d wink out of existence, quick as a falling star.)
My purpose was there, in that song, in that godsbedamned guitar.
I let go, I stopped looking, even on an unconscious level. I stopped, and I just flew. There was no changing things now, no denial, nothing, just light and music and exploding stars and endless skies and I became one with the music because I was that song. My own purpose and my own reason was being played back to me, note by note, and I was being played. I had no body, there was no need for it, not now. This was all I was, the moon pulling on the ocean solely to see the waves, the nighttime existing so we could see stars. I made no sense and I made perfect sense. I was a song. I was a song…
Who sung me into being?
As if in reponse to my flyaway whirling thought, there was another sound, over the steel strings, falling, climbing, diving, and weaving with the same speed as my soul was moving, not a perfect sound by human standards, but glass-edged, argentine perfection in the eyes of all else.
Killian’s voice.
And there, I was there, in the center of it all was me, myself, my very soul, exploding into being like a firework, bleeding throughout reality like the sunset’s watercoloured skies, and I–
“For the love of all you hold sacred, Elouise! Wake up! Wake up!”
The music had stopped. I plummeted back down to tangibility. My heart was beating, my blood flowing. My head hurt.
“Mephisto…?” I whispered.
I was lying in his arms, too weak to move; he was gazing down at me with something very much approaching fear upon his face. But what on Earth could he be afraid of? He was a demon. Maybe I was going mad…oh, wait…
Mephisto drew in a breath, as if he wanted to say something, but whatever it was must have died on his tongue. He shook his head in frustration, and, after leaning me back against the pillows I had almost fallen into before he caught me (gently, almost tenderly), got up, and stalked out of the apartment.
I threw my left arm across my eyes; I felt boneless, liquid, overheated.
I heard a sharp series of knocks on another apartment door, then – much to my surprise – the sound of my own voice.
“Hey!” My voice said, sounding annoyed and thick with sleep. “Would you mind keeping it down? It’s too bloody early for that racket! Some of us had late nights!”
“What the hell…” I mumbled.
The voice that came from behind the door was sheepish, and despite being hard to hear, instantly recognisable.
“Sorry, Elouise! I’ll shut up now!”
Stomping, and my own apartment door closing. I removed my arm from across my eyes. Mephisto had come back, looked distinctly perturbed, and extremely out of character.
“How’d you do that?” I croaked at him.
“Diabolic magic, so on so forth,” he snapped. I tried to sit up, I couldn’t. It was too exhausting. The demon once again sat upon the edge of my bed, taking my limp hands in his own.
“You’re warm,” I mumbled nonsensically. I felt like I’d just spent a decade underwater with my eyes open. “Though you’d be…lizardy. Cold-blooded. I thought…you’re warm.”
“And you,” he said, slowly, the storm that had been thundering across his face now confined solely to his unnervingly blue eyes. “Are completely and utterly mad. Did you know that?”
I blinked at him, but somehow the question helped me regain my footing in reality. This was a familiar subject, after all.
“Yes,” I replied, honestly.
Mephisto stared at me for a few moments, then sighed wearily, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“May I ask what the hell you were trying to do?”
“Trying…to do?” I frowned, shook my head (a decidedly bad move – suddenly my ears were hissing and the room was waving about nauseously). I sat up slowly and cautiously, inch by inch. “Just then? I…I passed out. Didn’t I? I fell backwards…”
“You mean, you don’t know?” Mephisto looked flabbergasted. “That’s impossible…how can you not know…”
“Know what?”
Mephisto sighed again. “And they say that modern music is my territory, oh really, yes…”
“What are you muttering about?” I snapped, irritation beginning to settle in. “I just fainted! Aren’t you going to go and get me a glass of water? Or call the…well, no, don’t call the ambulance, that would be a waste of time…oh.” A glass of water was shoved unceremoniously under my nose. I accepted it sheepishly and sipped. “Thank you?”
“You’ll find there’s nothing wrong with your body,” Mephisto said. “Apart from some minor signs of hypertension. Which, I believe, are fading as we speak.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I can feel your life and your blood. You’ll be happy to know that you are not ‘lizardy’, either.” He gave me a wry look.
“You know what happened to me,” I said. It wasn’t a question. Mephisto nodded slowly, regarding me with a heavy sapphire look – far too overwhelming to handle, right now. I avoided his gaze, for my own sanity’s sake. (Or lack thereof.)
“It was nothing I instigated,” he said. I wanted to protest, to complain that I actually didn’t think he did, that time. I took another sip of water instead.
“Answer me honestly, Elouise.” He put his fingers beneath my chin, tilting my face up to his own. I couldn’t avoid his eyes, now. “You honestly have no idea what you just did, then? When you passed out?”
“No,” I whispered. “No…no idea…I just…I just…”
“You just?”
“Le-let go…fell.”
Mephisto’s face was carefully blank. He let my chin go, very carefully and gently. He got to his feet and began to pace the length of the apartment, that neutral mask held meticulously in place, his eyes unfocused.
Fear was beginning to rise in me again, twining its way up my spine and grasping my neck in its thick and clumsy grip.
“Mephisto?” I croaked. “Wh…what did…what did I do? You know, don’t you. Tell me. What I did.”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” he replied distractedly, almost offhandedly. He continued to pace.
“Don’t care. Just tell me. Please. Mephisto.” My heart was thudding like someone had coralled a thousand furious rabbits in it and then mixed amphetamines in their carrots. “I want to know. Tell me!”
Mephisto stopped pacing, and turned on his heel to face me. (Cuban heels, I thought giddily, nonsensically. He’s wearing boots with Cuban heels.) To think I had thought that his eyes were dark when talking to Nutmeg yesterday. They were all but a shade away from black, now.
“In very simple terms,” he said, his voice too even for comfort, “You turned yourself into a song, Elouise.”