Page 115 of Envious Of Fire
Only hair. Red. Leather from the seat, shredded into flakes, cushion mixed with hair mixed with red.
And bone.
Brock hears a noise, looks up. The back door of the car is open, his son, gone.
“Ash?” chokes Brock through a mouthful of flesh, of blood. He spits. “Ash? Is something wrong? Did something happen?”
He claws his way out through the driver’s seat, staggers out onto the hot sand and cracked earth. The front of the car is folded against a thick, bent-over cactus, the vehicle partly lifted, front wheels spinning.
Brock stumbles away from the car, still blinking wildly, his eyes searching the blinding white-yellow fire of the desert for his son. “Ash?” he calls out. “Did something happen? Where’d you go? Why are you—??”
He collapses to his knees, stares ahead.
A phone on the ground, screen cracked.
Two earbuds, one near the phone, one farther away.
Like two breadcrumbs, the only breadcrumbs, the shape of his son already far away, running for his life, out of reach, the shape of Asher painted against the blurry mountainous horizon.
“I died,” chokes Brock. “And I came back. It was all …” He swallows, tastes nothing but blood, picks a hair from his mouth, spits. “It was all like a dream. Just forget it ever happened.” He stares into the distance for his son. He can no longer see him. “Things are okay now.”
25.
It’s Time.
—·—
The shifting sands of hourglasses.
The sound is like the ticking of clocks, only the ticks are so much closer together, as if there are countless secret increments of time between seconds of a clock, immeasurable increments, as close together as atoms. It’s the sound that plays all the days and nights long in the private quarters of George, which Tristan has just entered. The doors spread to reveal shelves and shelves and yet more shelves full of hourglasses in every size, style, and color. George once claimed to have just over two hundred, but the first impression one gets upon entering the room is that there are two thousand. All of them seem to be running nonstop somehow, the sounds of shifting sands everywhere, like a soothing white noise.
Tonight, it feels anything but soothing.
Tristan is certain that box was not empty. The box meant for Markadian. Mance’s sick little gift.
George seems to sense Tristan before he’s even entered the room. “I do not have to be an assistant,” states George with an oddly grand flair, like making a profound proclamation. “I do not have to be George. I do not have to be anything at all. Not a human being. Not a Feral. Not even a … a vampire.”
The shelves are also in the middle of the room, open-back bookcases lined with hourglasses from one end to the other, like an alien candy store with nothing edible in sight, all of it on display for casual browsing. The only source of light isaround the perimeter of the room, as if the walls glow, sliced by the shelves—a yellowish-green light shining through the hourglasses, pulsing, creating an eerie, otherworldly aura.
“Have you ever considered, Tristan … ever truly considered how … how meaningless everything is …?”
Tristan moves slowly through the maze of shelves and glass and sand. Through the narrow spaces between the shelves, he sees that George is standing atop his desk, so tall he nearly touches the ceiling, eyes closed as if meditating.
“But then you find the one thing you love most … such as a pouring of sand through two bulbs of united glass … a tool we use to portray the very passage of time … and your entire … no,myentire existence … becomes devoted to that one thing …”
Are you blood-drunk?Tristan comes around another shelf, drawing closer to the middle of the room, closer to George, the sands around him hissing, whispering …I think you need a real meal.Perhaps the chefs can prepare a plate of sashimi over rice.
“A trivial pursuit,” George goes on, “to collect time in the form of sand within glass, but it is my entire being. Some would say even world domination is a trivial endeavor. Or making ten million dollars. Or having a child.”
Butternut squash risotto…Lobster thermidor…A rack of lamb with herb crust…
“What does any of it truly mean in the end, when we are all simply returned to dust no matter what we do …?”
Tristan comes to a stop at the end of a shelf, in perfect view of George.It means that perhaps we should enjoy whatever we please however we please during our short time on this planet.
“And what if our pleasure is hurting others?” George lifts his arms high in the air, seeming positively euphoric. “You have awakened so many memories in me, Tristan, with just a taste, so many memories of my freedom. Did you know I was the one inmy dear family who carried out the torturing of humans?”
Tristan moves in front of the shelf, a mere three paces from the desk George stands upon.Through ghastly long monologues?
