And then …
While he worked, while he worked fascinated, while he worked fascinated to the point of obliviousness, she began creating walls. Not bricks this time, because unlike the initial sealing-off of the horrors that she might one day wish to experience again, this was to be an enclosure from which no escape was possible.
And she bound him there with her fantasy body. No vagina dentata, no castratory pleasure of his secret self-hatred. She bound him with a muscular lock that no amount of struggling could ease. She spasmed once, a vise-grip wrench that locked together with a crushing pressure that would not permit withdrawal.
And she raised the steel walls around him, leaving him in there in a darkness with that now-discarded fantasy female who could never be used again, not even by herself.
And the only light would come from the horrors that would escape from behind the brick enclosure, for time without end, and which would eventually present themselves so bent and diseased and horrible that not even he, alien Visigoth marauder, not even he could derive joy from them.
And she left her fantasy grotto.
When the bus pulled into Philadelphia, she was the first one off. She hurried away from the station, knowing that she had lost the only secret place anyone ever really has to hide in. She had lost the ability to dream those private dreams; and what that would mean to her she could not say. Worse, she now knew what horrors she had kept entombed, knew that she was one with the rest of the human race, each member of which had grotesqueries beyond belief merely waiting to claw their way out from behind insufficient brickwork.
She was not sure she could bear to be Dana, knowing what had always lived, breathing deeply, behind those walls.
But she also knew that this animal would never walk the streets again.
When the bus was emptied, one passenger would still be sitting there, hollow-eyed and with a recognizable expression of demented agony on his face. And no matter where they took him, from that bus and from that station, no matter where they took things that had once been human and were now vegetables … no matter where that final passenger came to rest, he would spend the number of his days locked away from the real world where he could do harm.
He, like Dana, would spend his days and nights alone.
The difference was only broken glass.
Harlan Ellison, Broken Glass
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