THE IMAGINATION THIEF (mini-chapters 99-120)

101 Desire as disease in Angel Deon

101   Desire as disease in Angel Deon

Immobile on the breakfast room window-seat, I feel my eyes narrow once again, for I know the next place I need to look ... and there you are, my Angel, in the dark verandah'd house, in the middle of your thousandth violent combat with Lucan. He twists your arm until you wince, and stares like a gun at your bewitching eyes, to find out if you're lying. Are you lying, Angel? Angel, are you lying? Answer Lucan. Your adrenaline is pumping—your nipples stand hard against your black polo-neck (no bra today) and you are breathing fast. Angel, are you lying? For you know you won't escape him: you'll tell him what he's seeking and you'll give him what he wants, as you always end up doing, every single time you fight.

Your throat becomes tight and your eyes burn with tears that you try to keep inside you and the tears bend the light from the ceiling in your eyes and your voice goes squeaky and tense and he grabs you. Dragging your beautiful face around the dusty cellar floor, he reaches down and with the power of a single hand he holds your jaws open. Tenderly then, with his other hand, he touches the end of your tongue with the Capri cigarette that you left in the ashtray a minute and a half ago. The cigarette burns—you yelp and whine. Tongue revenge. You picture your face, through its crying, as the face of a boy whom you once found dead upon the sand by the Casino, half-in half-out of the water that trickles out of Wesley Lake: he'd tried to screw Lucan on a drug deal, was shot dead by Damian on orders from Lucan, and then had a leather face nailed to his dead skull, obscuring his own face, just as a deterrent to others.

And here in the cellar, out of sight or sound of help, Lucan douses you with kerosene by candle-light, and clamps himself around you, a muscled insect incubus positioning its sting among the folds of inflammable, delirium-inducing, evaporated kerosene... He kisses you and whispers, "You're just a pair of fuck-holes to me, you little freak..." and you black out from zero food and excess hormones.

My sight zooms in below your smudged amber eye-shadow, enters your unconscious eyes and sees you are dreaming that your hurt spirit crouches with dripping wings, naked in an alleyway. But Lucan discovers you, of course, and he points down a downward-moving escalator, telling you to ride it, and you do. Your feet can feel the gears trundling underneath the step. Smoke swirls around you, growing redder as you travel down. Sweat trickles down your spine. The escalator steps are now hot beneath your bare feet. You see that yet again you are naked in public, as you so very often are, despite your always hating this. Also, as always when you're naked and scared, your erection stands hungry and hard in full view, while your body runs with sweat. The forty-five-degree descent ahead is dead-straight, for miles. Either side, banks of pipes, valves, tubes and wires tower up to clear sky and drop to depths of gloom, clad in complex walkways, balconies and stairs. Panic floods through you. The rumbling of the escalator gears is augmented by a booming so deep that it might be the engines of a planet, overlaid with a bank of sound as dense as the machinery—clanks, hisses, whistles, grating screeches and explosions. Sparks leap from point to point around you, as you watch in fright. A huge grinding blast from far below shakes the steps and a red flicker rises. You lean beyond the hand-rail and peer down: five miles beneath you a ball of orange fire rages, tiny and intricately floral at this distance.

You jolt back to real life, but it's out of the frying pan and into the fire, as Lucan's powerful arms are whirling you around through the air of the bedroom and thwacking you down upon your back onto the bed. He must have been carrying you up the staircase from the cellar, while you were descending your escalator. As he stalks around the shadowy room, you lie there apprehensively with wet staring eyes, rubbing your hand in the softest way across your necklace of bites. Your eyes hold aloft an early memory: where and how he bit your body, long ago, and wouldn't stop although you asked him to, and so you lay there as he bit, still and staring as you were (like your staring eyes now), while the back of your hand rubbed your neck and softly rubbed it more and more...

And how fast the years with him have run, since that nadir of weakness then, whose memory now hardens your erection to the feeling of a metal strut. You wish you shared this latter with that Siamese twin, you know the one, and had a tail like a snake's too—but now he flips you over, prone, and grabs your throat with both big hands until you choke with a pre-orgasmic tightness and constriction. He leans near your ear and whispers, "Wait until I hang you—you'll ejaculate for sure, my little love-slave..." Your anus grabs his giant penis, sucks it up and pulls it in deep, and deeper still until you feel it pushing far up inside you. "We'll both shoot together, while you die—won't that be sexy?" And as Lucan gives his laugh, deep and wicked, you moan and quiver cat-like and shoot like a small pistol, all around the bedroom.

You want mercy, little Angel? Dream on, baby. He's only just begun with you tonight, like every night, and you're hard again already. Your ears are always ringing and your eyes want to cry and you never can keep him out; he's always there, pushing, forcing, punching through your freedom and your body and your space. Except for your mind, you have no privacy at all, but are naked to him all the time. You glimpse yourself there in the shadows of the mirror, like a sexy little weasel, wiping off the blood from your mouth where he's hit you. Your desire for him is so extreme, it must be a disease—one you'll die of, as you realise now. One of these days he will kill you while you're with him, or he'll kill you for escaping, or you'll kill yourself because you can't escape him any other way.

Always, you have to hide your face behind your hands, hardly daring to peek between the bars of your fingers to see what new invasion or privation is in store, what knife is being whetted through the doorway, just for you—swaying on your feet, without the freedom of perspective to show you what is upward, while the walls of this tomb-dark house tilt and bend and leer and totter inward, always...

  

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Imagination Thief, in The Guardian and elsewhere, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/synopsis-and-characters-list-the-imagination-thief/

For the 12 Films in The Imagination Thief, see http://www.rohanquine.com/video-books-films/12-films/

For the Audio-book version and the Video-book version of each of its 120 mini-chapters, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/audiobook-tumblr-wattpad/

For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/ and http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/

And for its Amazon pages, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909 and http://www.amazon.com/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909

The Imagination Thief is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories. It's about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. It celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.