Songs From Spider Street Read Online Free Page B

dress my incarceration in white.
    I have spent
most of my life in one cage or another and now I am in the most elaborate one
of all; one designed by a genius.
     
    Sleep comes in sharp slices, empty of any real rest. And the dreams it
contains are windswept and bleak. But one held the faint forgotten scent of
hope; an escape. I kneel and my hands and knees melt through the gonads of the
horse. I exit through the raining ruins of its penis, falling but not falling
towards the ice below. The air is sharp and cutting but at the same time it
holds me, letting me safely down to the ground. At last I am there and I begin
to stand. But the heat that was my saviour now holds me in a trap of ice that
melts beneath me, only to freeze at once in the extreme cold. By the time I am
up to my thighs in the frozen mantrap I am awake, shaking from cold and fear.
    The wind
sighs and murmurs through the great device. Occasionally there are voices mixed
in with the random aeolian tones. They may be human but their message is not.
     
    CeKaracal comes here each year, they say, to ‘revisit’ and ‘redefine’ the
gargantuan piece; they do say that art is a process and not a thing. Are the
bones embedded deep inside the ice a vital part of the work or just his idea of
a joke? If so, perhaps great artists don’t have much of a sense of humour.
     
    My family are all I can think of. When will I be free of this place, to
go to them again? Sometimes I see my youngest son’s face deep in the ice,
frozen and dead, under a mask of blood. Sometimes I feel that this place is
carved out of my own fear and guilt, not ice at all.
     
    My sketchy knowledge of equine anatomy has aided my progress. I assume
that CeKaracal has created an anatomically accurate animal; it is certainly
very intricate. Gods alone know how he did it.
    Progress up
the horse’s throat has been agonising. Someone has cut some rudimentary steps,
as smooth as glass. Another of the artist’s small sadisms? Purchase is nearly
impossible and I have had to flail for handholds to steady myself; I fear that
a fall will break my bones and I will be stuck in here for good.
     
    My wife screams at me through the swirling flakes. I cannot hear her
accusations but I know it has something to do with pride; it always has. Suvi
has always said the same thing about me. But without pride, what is there?
Survival is not enough. Is it?
     
    The horse’s enormous teeth are clamped shut in a silent, frozen
whinnying. No way out there. And, once outside, what then? A drop of some
hundred feet to the white surface below; a dozen or more shattered bones and a
long agony before the cold claims me finally. There is no escape. I must simply
be patient.
    My sense of
time has become a nonsense now. But my stomach tells me it must be at least
three days. Despite the small amount of food I found, hunger has caught up with
me. Only the cruellest of jailers would treat their prisoner like this.
    My fingers
have begun to lose sensation. They are becoming a bruised blue beneath the
skin.
     
    I have struggled up into the cranial cavity of the beast. The brain pan
is empty. Of course. The great artist is making some sort of statement, no
doubt. What was I expecting? A great artistic revelation; an undeserved
epiphany; the key to my own freedom. No.
    As I sit
here, my own brain burns as if it could sear its way free of its fleshly
moorings and soar away of its own accord, leaving my body behind as the useless
lump of meat it has always been. My mind has always been my betrayer, my body
always suffering on its behalf.
     
    My heartbeat feels slower. Pictures form in my breath as it streams out
in white clouds from my mouth, like small swirls of soul escaping from within.
My oldest son condemning me and then pleading with me; my wife running from
something unseen.
    Only now, as
my body begins to fail, does my mind begin to work properly. I dig my fingers
through the thick layer of frost inside the rim of the giant