The Scream Page 3

a few feet was Jesse, naked, who also had a small black box hovering above him, and when I looked I noticed that I was also standing there, in the middle of weirdness, butt-naked.

  Jesse stared at me. I stared back. And then I heard the voice of the Dragon.

  "And so, since you both have passed your tests, the contest will begin. And so the contest has begun."

  I began to wonder then, fleetingly, if the Dragon knew what my true wish was -- of all the times to think of that! -- for it was said that it was true wishes only that the Steel Dragon granted. So what if I lost a few million coins. I had given the speech they'd asked for, after all. What I would gain. Oh, what I would gain, if my true wish were to be. . .

  A blue, semi-transparent barrier sprung between me and Jesse. Upon his body appeared a pale-blue armor that conformed to his flesh, and in his hand appeared a midnight blue longsword. I went to touch the barrier. It was, as I suspected, as impassable as a wall. A thick, steel wall.

  I thought of how nice it would be to hold a massive twin-bladed battle-axe in my hands, and of how it would help to hold it with my arms and body stronger and faster than the flesh I was already equipped with. It was something I almost always wished for when I stood before a potential foe, weaponless. Somehow, it always helped me to win.

  Suddenly, to my mild astonishment, what I imagined had become real. I was beginning to suspect the nature of the coming battle, and of the realm in which it would be fought, and I knew what the stakes were. I knew so much, and nothing, a dream.

  I imagined myself to be in armor and helm that would be impenetrable, and the color of deathly black. A loud buzzing sounded in my head, and when the armor did not appear, I imagined armor with a little more vulnerability. It appeared upon me -- the helm with exaggerated black horns twisting outward, looking as if my head could not support the weight of them.

  Jesse was now surrounding himself with a moving, multi-layered, steel-ringed grid, and his sword glowed brightly. I wished it away, and Jesse shrugged.

  I swung my mighty battle-axe at the barrier between us, seeing it shatter in my mind's eye, and so it did, into pieces, and disappeared.

  I imagined hard, liquid-looking chrome spikes to form from the floor beneath Jesse, with all of them stabbing for various parts of his body, but they all disappeared before they could strike. I then turned the spikes into black snakes with round spinning razors in their mouths, whose heads Jesse dismembered. He stood there calmly, unmoving as he did so, the snakes and their heads falling to the floor and vanishing. Thousands of daggers were flung at me from all directions, and I thought them away. . .and away they went.

  The steel lips upon Jesse's greathelm twisted into an amused smile, in a macabre caricature of his own face.

  I called into existence the presence of a hundred grey skeletal warriors, with red lights glowing softly from their eye sockets, all carrying black lances and wearing small steel helmets with tiny, pearl colored horns. They were mounted upon the backs of giant, wildly animated demonic Chihuahua, their curled, razor-tipped tails wagging with dizzying speed.

  Jesse fought them, with skeleton heads and dog tails flying about with trails of blood through the air, and within minutes he'd defeated and killed them all. Again his helmet smiled at me, this time sadistically, with all traces of his former amusement vanished.

  Suddenly dozens of lion-things sprang upon me, attempting, and desperately failing, to pierce their elongated teeth through my armor. I imagined their number to double and to turn and attack Jesse, but I imagined their teeth to pierce his armor and soft flesh. I heard his scream, and I frightened myself with a scream of my own, a scream full of evil, sadistic delight. I sounded like a man possessed, and I must have been, for I imagined flame like that of the Steel Dragon's falling down from the white sky to engulf Jesse, and I barely stopped it from being reversed upon myself. It had no effect at all on him, reminding me of the battle between the Steel Dragon and Blood.

  At that same instant, whether we'd decided together as a subconscious act, or the Dragon had imposed the thought upon us, I believe we both knew that it was time to end the foreplay and get down to the nitty gritty. Jesse stood before me, his blue helmet smiling from ear to metal ear, and at last we traded serious, genuine blows, axe against longsword, his apparent good nature against my. . .whatever the hell it is you call the belief in nothing but random chance without mercy. Chaos? Evil? Digression.

  Many blows were struck, and it soon became apparent that Jesse was the better warrior. I guess those who trained me and called me a low-ranking swordmaster were filling my head with lies akin to shit. Perhaps it because I wasn't really so good with a battle-axe, I'd only imagined that I was. Jesse swung a blow that sent my axe clattering against the floor out of my reach. He took the tip of his glowing blade and pried my helmet from my head, letting the sword's tip rest coldly against my jugular.

  I'm sure I could have imagined myself away from him, but instead I did something to him that I now wish I hadn't. It was a truly horrible thing that I did to him.

  Jesse asked me, "Do you willingly yield your life to me for the sake of me being granted my wish?" he asked, again using his natural, deeper voice. The tone of his words was almost pleading, as if he wouldn't be able to kill me any other way. After all, we had been friends for some months, so it could have been a bit of that, ill-mixed with his strong desire to have his wish fulfilled, that kept me from being dead.

  I imagined my hand reaching into the most secret and tortured place in Jesse's mind. I drifted through clouds of memories and beliefs and things he'd half forgotten or remembered no longer, and in it all I saw a memory so vivid I could feel my distant body jerk, and I could feel a trickle of blood at my neck.

  The memory I saw was of Jesse in an embrace with a woman who must have been his true love, a woman of a beauty surpassing perhaps even that of a goddess, if such creatures as goddesses truly existed. She was a warm, loving woman, always happy, always smiling. I stared at his memory of them together with gluttonous envy, and I then saw his memory's end and put it as a vision before his very eyes; I made his memory stand physically before him.

  Jesse witnessed the very act that I'm sure he must have relived in horror ever since it had occurred. He saw himself killing his love with his hands clasped about her neck, choking her life from her as her writhing and kicking slowed, and then ceased.

  She then died in his hands by his hands, the woman he loved more than anything in all the cosmos, all that is and ever was, murdered by his own jealous rage. And what made the matter even worse, if there could have even been such a thing, was when he'd discovered that his rage of jealousy was as unjust as it was unfounded. She had loved none other than he in all the world, and had been happy. He had seen that clearly in her eyes as she passed away -- just as crisp and clear as he relived that moment under the white sky.

  Jesse's sword fell to my feet, and he clasped his head between his hands and screamed, in a way that has made me feel a deep, horrible guilt for all my days since, but at least I'm able to live with it, now.

  Jesse exploded into fine ashy dust, but his dreadful, sorrow-filled, miserable, mind-screwing scream continued, echoing in my head relentlessly and full of contempt, giving all other thoughts no quarter. I cried out in horror, my eyes closed, my mind on fire.

  When I opened my eyes, I was again in the warm, damp-smelling cavern of the Steel Dragon, and I could hear poor Jesse's ghastly scream smashing through the walls of my consciousness with unending perseverance.

  The Steel Dragon then asked me calmly, in a voice not nearly so thunderous as it had spoken with before, "What you wished before does now no longer matter. Yes, I know your little speech from the noblemen wasn't truly yours." It paused a bit to move its giant head towards me. From all the screaming in my head, I could barely stand. "Tell me what it is you wish. Tell me what you yearn for from the deepest cavity of your eternal soul, for the words you utter will be final, and only they will matter in making your wis
h come to be."

  Now within me I had a conflict, even though I had already discarded the wish I had been hired to ask the Steel Dragon.

  It didn't take long for the one, older desire, to begin to lose its meaning. A new passion was alive within me, to be rid of something that nothing, I knew, in the outside world would ever be able to rid me of. In his dying act Jesse had grafted that damnable scream of his into my mind, and I would be doomed to hear it, feel it, breathe-smell-sweat-burn with it for eternity, if something wasn't done. This meant that my other wish, which I probably desired as much as Jesse did his, was now insignificant, and would cost me my sanity and my everlasting soul, if it was that which I wished for. Perhaps it would become my hell eternal, and I would end up like Thorin, in life as well as death -- and of such matters there was absolutely nothing I could do for myself. Somehow I knew that to be the absolute truth.

  "Let me forget this scream," I asked the Dragon feebly, "and all that it means. But," I added as an afterthought, wiping the sweat from my eyes, "don't let me forget what I did."

  "And so it will be done, and so it has been," said the Dragon, and blackness engulfed me.

  When I awoke, I lay in front of the dead campfire near what had been the entrance to the