XLVIII
The Young Cripple got off the table and ran. She ran so incredibly fast and with such precision, it was hard to believe that this was her first time. She ran as if it were her hobby, as if it were something that she excelled at. She ran as if she had run her whole life, as if she weren’t new to the experience.
As she ran, her level of frightened exhilaration swelled; and as if orchestrated by it, so too did the music blasting from the radio, and with it, the surge of manic anxiety in Heaven. Souls ran about frantically, screaming at the tops of their lungs, in both agony and ecstasy. When they weren’t sucking on nipples and sticking their fingers in sockets, they were fighting, dancing, making love, folding paper airplanes, and making hand puppets - and acting out the most fantastic kind of theatre. They were brutal, kind, bullish, and considerate. They were attentive, disconnected, egotistical, and at the same time, they were one important, beautiful and all purposeful part of the whole group; of all of Heaven. They screeched and squealed, and they laughed and sang. They picked and they pulled, and they whispered sweet tidings whilst embroiled in a gentle and clement caress. They tore off paint and chewed through the nipples that stuck out the walls. And they wrote resignations and love letters; and drew pictures of the sun and the sky, and of elephants with alligator shoes.
The Father gripped The Young Cripple’s hand and dragged her along the corridor. With his other free hand, he struck with his forearm at the chins and chests of any soul that didn’t alight from their path.
“Where to?” shouted The Father.
The Young Cripple was stricken with panic. Below her, under her feet, scores of souls wriggled about like spineless slugs. It was near on impossible to tell one from the other, just as much as it was to gauge whether they were enjoying the closeness, or whether they were protesting beneath a reviling tapestry of claustrophobia.
The Father tugged on the girl’s hand, and it tugged on her senses.
“Where to?” he shouted once more.
“The radio,” she said, shouting over the taunting. “We have to find the radio.”
“What radio?”
“It’s the only way out. It’s where your son is. It’s where heard I him last. We have to find the radio.”
“Where is it?”
Behind them, a swarm of souls was gathering. They clustered together and the more that aggregated, the more unstable was their manner, and the more sober their mal and horrific intentions. They were driven by an energy that was brewing in the mindset of The Young Cripple and now serenading from the radio, inspiring one and all into the same revelry - their senses acute by the thought of escape. The further The Young Cripple and The Father got along the corridor, the larger the cluster appeared. And as the sound of the radio blasted and deafened their ears, just an inch away from salvation, the cluster swarmed upon them.
The Young Cripple screamed.
And she let go of The Father’s hand.