Going Under Read Free Page B

your skull ..." She let go.
    The imp remained motionless for a moment, then very carefully rubbed its hideous little face against her vest. "You have the tender mercies of a goddess. I shall say no more." And it didn't, although it vibrated with anxiety so violently she started to feel that his talking had been a better option.
    Madame Des Loupes was the greatest clairvoyant of the age. Lila had met her before, and taken tea. Nothing bad had happened. She had been given no dire prophecies or information, and the tea was good. Madame had been infallibly correct and polite about Lila's descent into hell, Lila thought. A pity for Lila that she had imagined fiery morasses and roasting spits instead of intense emotional and mental anguish, but either way, forewarned was not forearmed.

    She had not understood her personal situation until much too late. Too late she realised that when a demon talked about living in hell, it meant you were living inside the worlds of your own illusions. Demons considered this a form of victimhood-you were a victim of an inaccurate reality. This made you easy meat for anyone who could push your buttons, whatever they were. And for those who were without illusion, seeing the hotspots of other people's lies, selfdeceptions, motivations, and fears was simple.
    Lila still wasn't sure it was human to live without some illusions and to see what was there as clearly as the demons claimed to see it although seeing of reality for what it was ... that had a power she couldn't deny. But again, it wasn't a power you could wield like a sword. It was a power you could follow, like a current, or you might fight and swim against it and drown. Either way you might drown in fact. Just knowing what things were like wouldn't save you from them any more than knowing how a volcano works would save you from a fiery death if you got close to one that was going up.
    Lila had once thought that all great powers of that kind, such as seeing The Truth and suchlike, were the powers of champions which would grant a kind of immunity from harm. They seemed legendary and otherworldly, supernatural abilities for the rare people who were spiritually developed enough to have gained them. But no. They were not like that at all. The only thing you had to do to acquire them was to stop fooling yourself (though that was not easy when you had spent a lifetime being bamboozled into your illusions by other bamboozled people who came from great long heritages of similarly bamboozled people who all had very good and proud reasons for wanting to believe bamboozling things).

    However, the visionary gifts of the champions who saw trulywhich she had thought of as so grandly elevated and conferring great privilege-showed instead the limits of one's power; what one might do, or might not, and when. She got that now. Compared to the dreams she used to cultivate about knowing everything, dreams in which everything was so obvious that it was only a matter of doing the right thing at the right moment to ensure the whole world turned in a more favourable direction-why, the realisations of her own mistakes in so believing were like repeated slaps in the face with a wet, weekold dead fish. Look at Mom and Dad, who had finally seen through their self-destructiveness in the moments of their death, but never bothered to do so in life when it could have been of use. And look at Lila, who had shored them up in their folly with her protective lies and deceptions, while despising them secretly and pretending the entire thing was loving care. The horrific and pointless waste of it made her eyes prick with tears and her throat close with pain. And to think she had been going to show them, with her nice job and her superior sense of how to organise life, exactly how to be better people when she was busy blaming her sister for leaving home and bailing out and saying rude, nasty things about Mom and Dad ...
    Yes, the vision of the demons was hard to take. Because she