Pathways - Jeri Taylor [161]
He burst into tears. He didn’t see how he could bear even another minute of this pain, much less—what had Wix said?—days. Days! He’d never make it, he’d die, he’d rather die than go through this. Tears coursed down his face, and he was sure (well, not sure, not sure of anything anymore, but hopeful) that Wix in seeing his misery would relent and free him. He’d find some crystals, not many, just enough to ease the pain, and then he’d do this his way. He’d break the habit, he just had to do it slowly, gradually, not in this sudden violent way that was such a shock to his body.
But Wix made no move to help him, just sat there on his stool and stared at him with limpid orange eyes.
It was a three-day descent into hell. Looking back, something he tried not to do but couldn’t always avoid, he didn’t know how he survived. He hadn’t wanted to survive. Again and again he’d begged Wix to kill him, to put a weapon against his head and put him out of his misery, but that plea met with no more success than any other.
Every minute was hours long, and the hours lasted for days, nightmares of pain and hallucination, a kaleidoscopic fantasy of demon images shot with blood, punctuated with the sounds of his own screams. He saw ghastly tableaux of wretched souls undergoing every dreadful form of torture imaginable. He saw the poor man he’d found in his hut, an eternity ago, feet being burned with hot coals, shrieking in agony. He saw his family at the moment of vaporization, bodies rent apart at the molecular level, then held there at that moment, in eternal anguish, piteous cries of suffering unheard.
Time did not pass. There was nothing, no reality, no ship, no universe, nothing except pain, which consumed him but would not kill him. He wanted death, wanted oblivion, wanted a nothingness that would spare him this unbearable affliction, but only the pain was constant, ageless and eternal.
He thrashed in his bonds like a fish flopping on dry land, drowning in oxygen. His throat was hoarse from screaming. He was wet from perspiration and urine, alternately trembling with cold and then raging with fever. If he could go mad perhaps the brain would find a way to deal with his horror, but a psychotic snap did not occur. He was Neelix, he was pain.
Occasionally he was aware that Wix was still nearby, sometimes wiping his face with a damp towel, sometimes spooning a bit of cold liquid between his parched lips. At one point he tasted something acrid, burning, which revolted when it hit his stomach and came churning back up his throat in a stream of bile. Blood dripped from his palms, where he’d dug his nails into the flesh as deeply as he could, an instinctual effort to shift the focus of pain, but nothing could get in the way of the burning of his body from the inside out.
All of these moments were fleeting, fragmentary, grace notes to the symphony of pain he was enduring. The agony was a totality, an inevitability, a blinding, searing colossus that obliterated everything else. He knew no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue. He was spitted on a skewer of fire, burning, burning.
He had no memory of lapsing into unconsciousness.
He became aware, gradually, that Wix was speaking to him, calling his name. “Neelix . . . Neelix . . . open your eyes . . . Neelix . . .”
Neelix didn’t want to open his eyes. They felt welded shut, crusted with dried matter. He ached miserably, and smelled the stench of his own body. He tried to go back to sleep.
“Neelix! Listen to me—open your eyes.” Neelix felt a warm, moist cloth sponging his eyelids, loosening the crusts, soothing his skin. His lids quivered for a moment, then opened, closed almost immediately as light flooded into widened pupils.
“I think you’ve done it. How are you feeling?”
What an odd question. And an odd statement—what had he done? He remembered nothing . . . but wait, wait . . . that was Wix speaking to him, Wix, his newfound friend, his partner in a salvage business . . .
He opened his eyes again