The marigold round of human souls, red, blue, yellow, green. The little bobbles of marionette heads are singing, “Row, row, row your boat!” They are of a nasal noise of pinch, little puppets singing in choir, machines with guns to the back of their smiling heads, putting their dead-lives into it, “Gently down the stream…” Their smiles hurting, their faces shining in darkness, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily… Life is but a dream.”
Their faces lower from the strings, and their necks momentarily rest. Their heads roll a little more down, and down more. Their eyelids forced open, their pupils and irises of their pupil eyes reflecting the bright yellow and the brown walls of a room vast, the marigold round’s spinning stopped. Everything locked, unmoving, and rigid. Their little bows of cotton spiffy, their shirts neat in cuffs with every wrinkle ironed. The smell of a carnival.
Spinning tape, spinning cassette, and it’s rewinding now. The song rewinding, everything still. Lights are all on. The little ones sit, their eyes still reflecting, eyes still painfully held. Abruptly, the rewind is finished, the sound of the button, and the tape starts spinning again. They pop their heads at once in uniform jump, the marigold round of them impaled on little sticks like toys. They all sing together, bouncing up and down for song’s sake. Their arms and heads swing with the words, as strings pull at them.
Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
The heads drop, their grins still fixed. Unwillingly willing; unwilling wills. Mockery of a mockery. Nowhere for them to go; this is it.
These sounds play in the outer darkness, among many others, where the black heat echoes the nightmare, echoing in the walls of Satan’s heart. Leviathan has found him, and he is taught true torment by the tethers of his strings. Ten years, ten hundred, ten thousand, ten hundred-thousand, ten million, ten hundred-million, ten hundred billion. Will they be dying to return to sleep?
The pain, fed. Chewing on the pain between gum-rot, chewing on teeth that fall out. Cold scratching the throat. Time endless. Feeding ignorance.
The eyes of Satan’s… They mistakenly blink once, and the marionettes turn their heads, all winding their necks together at the same time, to look at Satan. They watch Satan. These dolls are blinkless, smiling jesters, yet scrutinizing with dead eyes. Souls conformed by the pressure, the pressure birthing deformity in this exile worse than hell.
Where all these puppets and marionettes watch, they expect Satan to do one thing:
E A T - I T !
Satan’s teeth chatter, his eyes now forcing themselves open from dread, eyes wandering with waters held at the bottom eyelid cup. He is miming gestures in the forced grin and eyes, tears rolling down now.
“Good!” the mimics say in their analog machine noise, their fake voices.
The little puppets go back to their workshop, like elves busy with nothing. Their hair fake and solid, painted onto their fake polished heads. Their eyes beaming from the heart by force, beating away with toy hammers without choice, meaningless works.
Satan weeps more, with teeth falling out more, his teeth being chewed by teeth, cutting the gums, before teeth turn into fleshly bloods-gums. Satan spits out the fleshy blood-gums. Out into the brown carpet fibers.
The heads crank back, the noises stop, the act of their faces stuck still, eyes all reflecting the nothingness in their porcelain eyes, staring back at Satan. Staring deeper. Their pupils hypnotizing the demon by force. They do not move, but only expect.
Satan looks around, his cries paused in a gut scalding hot with stirnament, saying in the plea of a child, “No. No. I can’t…”
The dolls still stare, staring with shiny eyes in the dark so bright.
“I can’t! No!” Satan cries out loud, on his knees in the carpet, where his mushy tooth is fleshy now, stuck and mixed with carpet hairs and fibers. The lights warm even more in yellow and orange sickliness.
The dolls all spring up one foot with the next, marching closer. Their joy in the ignorance, toying with death in depravity of jestered joys. They encircle Satan, their eyes beaming down at his body on the floor, the light and yellow shining off and across their fake faces and hair, showing the rigidity of their lessons strained into them, until they obey as they do now, seeming older than time.
“Stop! Stop!” Satan screams in thrashes, biting, clawing, kicking, and punching. Nothing, like a nightmare-logic, nothing stops them. This is Leviathan’s providence.
The hand of one stretches over the Satan’s mouth, its plastic tasting like the human salt of a hand that snacked for hours, reaching constantly with hedonism into a bag of candy. The smell of sour candy becomes more clear as the wet of Satan’s mouth smears into the puppet’s hands. His scream is not escaping, but the smell of candy grows from the moisture of wet muffles into fingers and palm.
Satan’s eyes roll back and forth in a teary terror tantrum, tearing more than any child or soldier, where the little ones pile with their treadless dress shoes and small hands onto Satan’s limbs and chest; they are unmoving. Joy cackles distant, as the head grows far away from what’s happening, from the trauma beyond trauma. This isn’t wrestling with Satan; this is wrestling with the blackened rot bondage of the outer darkness. Sanity is always approaching nothing here.
The doll behind now puts the grip of one hand at one side of the cheek, and another hand at the other side of the mouth, ripping his lips apart by force. Another stands in front, with stubby but skinny toy proportions, and this dark-haired porcelain boy in overalls, with rosy cheeks, smiles in a joy likened unto a child-predator, where he has found a scared little one alone, that being this frowny small Satan… He forces Satan’s teeth, prying them apart by tiny fake fingers, as Satan’s tears and cries continue. Satan is dehumanized, without consideration of his suffering, and his movement speaks of a “No, don’t.”
The toy boy grabs the gums and fleshy gum-tooth, which there are many of. He takes them off the floor in scoops, forcing them into Satan’s mouth, past the forced-open teeth and mouth. Satan’s face recoils backwards, but another small one is holding his head now, so he cannot take his head away from this. What they want him to eat is now mixed with hairs and carpet fibers from the floor. The boy’s eyes grow darker in soul as the grin stretches harder, his eyes and cheeks shining with a sickly yellow reflected. Satan tastes the flesh, and it is of a sickly sweetness, of a flesh ridden with some disease unknown.
The little doll boy of black hair and rosy cheeks tells the Satan, “Eat the can—can—candy!” He glitches in his little tape-recorder sound of analog tenor.
Satan feels sharp in needles that prickle up and down in hot and cold flashes, a fever dream made of sweat shakes, and his gut feels like it is taking off into a trauma accelerating. He recognizes the voice… It is childlike and playful in evil empty now. This is the mockery of his murderer, Antony.
Satan chews on the fleshy sweet rot of gummy thick flesh that was once his teeth, now convulsing in shivers of disgust at the face, like a child who can’t stand the taste of vegetables. Satan is sad and frowning, still crying. The mouth is still held open, as little toys caress and pat his hair. The black-haired, rosy-cheeked boy is in a wide-open gaze from eyelids peeled back from excitement’s ease, staring without break from Satan’s weeping sorrow. This black-haired boy is grinning so hard that it hurts to look at.
Satan feels the room big and small at the same time, while they all smile over him. It is all big and small in growing fakeness, becoming more unreal.
The boy doll in the center reflects the Satan in his pupils, reflecting the bright yellow of the light, and a lampshade-yellow with brown carpet is found there, and Satan sees himself from above in the eyes, his body held down, but how is it so? Satan watches as the dolls get up off his limbs and walk away like humans, their grins gone, like that, as if they were never toys… His body gets up and walks out of the room with them, casually, but it’s not real. It can’t be. Humans don’t just walk like that… “They do!” the demon thinks, just not like that, not after something like that…
Satan watches his body from afar now, seeing the eyes of all, their black pupils each showing the same thing, them all leaving in different ways, all leaving. They are still smiling, but their pupils show something else. How can he see himself from above?
Eventually, all of them get up and leave, even in the vision where he is above them, and they are gone. Walking away like little tiny humans in puppet and doll forms, it is too disturbing in its uncanniness every time.
Something makes sense in Satan’s head; he realizes something. “Oh…” he tells himself out loud, after they all leave.
The head and skull burning, burning. Scalding skull. Pins and needles in the hands and feet. Ringing louder now. Distant. The heart beating louder. The heart is drumming fast. Pins and needles still stabbing him. Stabbing at the ears precisely. It is faster now, all faster. The pupils his own grow large with a drooling taking on. The weight of Leviathan sits on his chest. The teeth fall out of his mouth. Cold and dry throat. The floor under his head is stabbing at the ear more so now, big and small in sharpness. Nerves known by location in their fear, and a detached surgical ringing loud alongside growing distance over the body. The heart is firing like a machine gun now. The guts twist up into knots. Satan pisses himself. A flatline sound screaming far away.
“Oh…” Satan realizes nothing, and just like that, a revelation filled with nothing now understood, all at once.
He sees this all as he feels it, nothing. Satan sees himself lay his head out limp, dead. The lights in his unblinking corpse still reflecting colors, colors bright with empty, in the darkened corner of this too-much exile. When the head falls limp, Satan sees that it was a pupil of the boy in front again. All of what he thought was his death was felt as himself, but just seen through the eyes of a puppet torturing him. He cannot get out of this prison; that is the greatest feeling then. It is all a game to them.
“You will know nothing.” The Leviathan speaks like waves of an ocean storm, all in a flash, into the blackened heart of Satan. Another tooth rolls out of his mouth, turned into mushy flesh again. Ignorance fed, poisoned. Those invisible warnings, ignored. Never-ending now.
Satan is nothing to the Leviathan and his providence. The dry heat of Satan himself is nothing in the vast blackness.
Satan is a part of a larger cycle within cycles, where new souls are birthed in the demiurge’s creation, before being fed into Leviathan from a lostness path away, not meant to be found within the Kenoma. The darkest corner. Where Satan lies is just one little room of this infinitude hotel of puppet machines. Stairs all leading into each other, always making new stairs, where steps hold rooms inside of rooms, mocking the dreams of ouroboros with structures of further outer-confinements. The housing all being a dead home of a different kind, apart from the material dredge.
This is the feeling of nothing, the sound of nothing, the sight of nothing. In nothingness is anything but fullness; its structure without material, but its logic is the same in the vacancy thereof, if need be.
Deeper the Satan sinks, not through twelve of twelve eternities, but through this: a one followed not by one hundred zeros as eternities, but by ten billion zeros as the number of eternities. That number is then raised to the power of itself, and the result raised to the power of itself again, ten more times in all, until the process reaches an exhaustion of comprehension. Call it the Number. Twelve of twelve eternities, multiplied by the Number: that is how long Satan has already been held in Leviathan’s abyss, and it is only a point in his time there, one over the Number of his whole stay. The whole is longer than that span by the Number again, so the full length of it is twelve of twelve eternities, multiplied by the Number, and multiplied by the Number once more. This stay mentioned is never ending, that limit only being used for reference as a yardstick, so even its total can be multiplied further by the Number.
Leviathan forces this unto every soul trapped within their toys, and even onto the Satan. Turn the Number into a fraction of itself, for example, one over the Number, and that is the share of the whole that Satan holds: a point shrinking toward zero, while the whole grows away from it. Even that is beyond comprehension, in the size of how many times Satan has lived here at one point, and that will grow. The infinity is a vast nothingness in this darkest corner, always stretching further from itself, like a trauma-induced dissociation growing closer to zero in sanity, as its length experienced is in the opposite direction of the countlessness of positive notation.
The denial of Satan is his dread. Conformless in denial of his tormented fate.
Satan cannot leave. The sickening disturbance is everywhere.
But as it is written, The things which eye hath not seen, neither
ear hath heard, neither came into man’s heart, are, which God hath
prepared for them that love him.
— 1 Corinthians 2:9 Geneva Bible (1599)
Stares vacant in the eyes, rims of pupils reflecting with crescents of the room he cannot leave. They tell him in their fake voices, “Don’t pretend…” Grins… Everywhere over him. The absolute vacancy.