The Jaysome Heart

“Excuse me?”

There are places that are not places as much as ideas. Concepts made into other things. There are words that are too limited for the telling. It is an Else, and not as far from the world as people think it is.

The creature in the room turns slowly. Other things turn. There are pins through his body. Sometimes he has teeth. The walls have chains that know him. A wind blows through the room fit to chill shadows to their bones.

The boy standing in the room is eleven. And very cross, even for eleven. “You took my box. I got that as a gift for Charlie,” he says firmly.

“You know not where you are.” The man-thing’s voice is a whisper containing screams. Pain is a glee that burns in too-human eyes. “This is not for you,” he hisses.

The chains move. Drawn by words as much as tone. There is a lashing out.

The boy stands, unharmed. He blinks. “Tickling? I get tickled a lot by Charlie and Honcho you know!”

The man-thing smiles, and the smile is a twisting of the world. There are smiles that were never smiles at all. His is close to the root of them all. “You are foolish. That is not the same as brave.” The creature moves slowly. It is never fast. It never needs to be fast.

“Uhm! You have pins in your body all over and you’re calling me foolish?” The boy stares, mouth agape in shock. “Those are some really bad bindings you know, and –.”

“Bindings. Heh.” The laugh is just the word, flat. “We explore the edges beyond the known; we are beyond bindings.”

The boy scratches his head. “But you’re bound to the box.” It is a statement with no question contained within it; the boy knows bindings.

“There are rules,” the creature whispers, something kin to fury in his face.

“A rule is a binding,” the boy says patiently. “I know you think you’re a monster because you’re all confusled, but you’re not.”

The man with pins for heads laughs, then, and the laughter causes every chain to tremble into chimes that ache the spirit. “You think I am not a monster?” he asks finally.

“Nope. Cuz you’re not sure where pain ends and pleasure begins and you’ve made them into this? And you’re kinda cute pretending bindings aren’t bindings, but I’m a Jay and I’m really good at those!”

“You are known” The creature gestures. The way into this place breaks the world. The ways deeper from this place terrify even it. “And waited. And claimed.”

Jay waves into the other place. “Hi!”

The way shivers, and sunders apart. Every chain in the room rusts between moments.

“Man.” The boy lets out huge sigh. “I’m really big you know, even for a Jay. But there’s parts of me I don’t let get big, and you had to try and open one and now I’m going to probably forget this cuz it’s not jaysome to remember? And sometimes I don’t like having to forget. Sometimes –.”

The man-thing does not move, but every pin in his body vibrates to some unseen note. He makes a noise he’s never made before.

“Sometimes it’s hard to keep forgetting, but it’s really important too. To be jaysome. And not a monster. That is important.”

“Eh. Eh. Eh,” the man-thing breathes, gulping air. Shaking. “What are you?”

“I’m Jay, but you knew that. Only you didn’t know it.” The boy holds out a hand, and the box is in it. “And I’m giving this to Charlie as a gift because sometimes oopses work like that. And I might even open it, but you won’t come.”

“We must.”

“But then you’d meet me. I’d have to be a monster to stop you. And I don’t want to do that,” Jay says, and the creature shutters at the calm words. “You took the box from me, and that was almost smart. But you couldn’t hide it and I’m sorry but you won’t come,” and the words are still calm, but there is an emptiness beyond truth to them, a certainty deeper than the place the man-thing calls its dwelling.

The boy vanishes a moment later. Moves somewhere else, with the same unconscious ease with which he came here.

The man with pins in his body stands in the place of power, in the oldest temple his kind know of, and tastes nothing in the air but the half-alien stench of his own fear.

The box opens. Some days later.

He does not go. Even for his kind, it has a cost. And he pays. And he pays. And he pays.

Because he knows all there is of pain and pleasure, but the boy called Jay will some day know all of sadness, and that runs deeper than anything a Cenobite can reach.