Anton held Eric’s hand as he lay bleeding after he was wounded by Belshazzar. It was not the creature’s name, but Anton had to give it a name, and it was the name that came to him, bubbling up from his deep fount of Bible verses and shame. He who was weighed and was found wanting.
Belshazzar was eight feet tall, smelling like pus and clad in black, claws as sharp as knives, and it lived in that impossible, sprawling space behind the red door, in the house Anton’s family had just moved into. As Anton applied more pressure on Eric’s wound, he imagined an alternate timeline where he did not open the red door, where he just took the dusty turbo broiler his mother wanted him to keep in that room, and just left it in a corner and went back to his comic book. But the red door opened on a feast—gleaming oak table covered with flowers, wine bottles, fruits, thick cuts of meat—and, entranced, he walked in. Anton did not see the writing on the wall: the dried blood filling the cracks on the marble floor like grout, the dark doorway on the other side of the table that led to many rooms. Eight hundred and thirteen rooms, as Eric had noted.
“A hundred more than the Palace of Versailles,” Anton had said.
“It’s amazing that you know that,” Eric said, which Anton treasured as he would a flicker of light in a dark room.
(When Anton shared this piece of trivia years before in the all-boys Catholic school he attended, someone at the back shouted “Gay!” And Anton replied, in effect, that he was gay, but surely people of various sexual orientations have interest in the fucking Palace of fucking Versailles. Then the boy beat him up. Same old same old.)
Eric got lost in the house two days before Anton, through another red door. Between the time he entered the door and the time he lay bleeding stretched two hundred and three days. Two hundred and one days for Anton, then.
All those days of hiding and running and crying, of trying to find the exit and hoping and giving up and trying again. All those days of swiping food from the “Feast Room” that for some reason never ran out of food. The food there tasted like ash, but boys lost in an impossible place can’t be choosers, can they.
It was Anton’s mother who found them outside the red door. How did they get out? It must have been Eric’s blood, which covered them like floodwater. Was that it? Was that all it took, a blood sacrifice? If Anton had known, he would have gladly opened up a vein to set them free.
From his mother’s perspective, he was only gone ten minutes. Ten minutes later he had lost twenty pounds and had gained a friend bleeding from a deep gash in his stomach. They were both rushed to the hospital. The last time Anton saw Eric was when he was being wheeled out of surgery to the ICU.
Anton recovered, at least physically. Everyone recovers physically, eventually, from even the worst things. The boy in class who decided he was gay for knowing too much about French palaces punched him so hard he lost a tooth, but he recovered from that. Eric’s father, who decided they had both been bewitched—maybe they stepped on a dwarf mound, maybe Anton’s mother forgot to sacrifice a chicken before buying the house, who knows?—handed him a note in his hospital room which said, simply, that Eric wished not to see him again.
And he’d like to believe he recovered from that, too.
Anton graduated from college and now worked in an ad agency, drafting communication plans for various companies, earning good money. Sometimes, a distraught co-worker would rant to him about a difficult client who kept changing their minds about the color motif for an upcoming event, or a supplier who couldn’t seem to follow directions, and he would very nearly say, At least you’re alive. At least you’re not stuck in an eight-hundred-room palace with a monster. At least you’re not alone.
One night, while trying to decide what meat to buy at the grocery, someone sidled up to him and said, “Anton?”
Who else would say his name with such hesitation, such fear? Eric’s wounds had healed, but he was Eric’s walking wound, a reminder.
“Where the hell have you been?” Eric demanded. He looked well, was dressed well. Sneakers with corporate clothing. Maybe he worked in an agency, too. Graphic artist. Anton remembered Eric drawing on the floors of Belshazzar’s house with powdered drywall, chipping paint off the walls to reveal a face. It’s you, he would say. I’m painting you.
“Why did you leave the hospital without saying goodbye?” Eric looking as if he were bleeding right there, in the grocery aisle. “I’ve looked all over for you. You’re not even on Facebook.”
Why did you leave the hospital without saying goodbye?
Anton said nothing, not trusting himself to speak without letting the anger and regret overcome his voice.
Eric sighed. “Do you need to finish your shopping now, or can we get out of here and get a drink?”
My God, Anton thought. Must we now unpack the past twenty years, the lies our parents have told us? Maybe Eric’s father saw the way Anton looked at his son, saw the tender way he held his hand. He was weighed and was found wanting.
Perhaps for twenty years he had unknowingly longed for it, the room with Eric in it. Anton stood now in his own impossible place, with its many rooms, and watched it all collapse until he was sure there was only one room he could enter.
—
Eliza Victoria is the author of several books including the Philippine National Book Award-winning Dwellers (2014), the novel Wounded Little Gods (2016), and the graphic novel After Lambana (2016, a collaboration with Mervin Malonzo). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications, including Daily Science Fiction, The Dark Magazine, Room Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, and the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthologies. Visit her at elizavictoria.com.
A very interesting and original concept and an excellent ending. Nicely done.