Damnation

My innards quivered at the chime, at everything beautiful, as though my bones would there melt and I would bow on my breast. Against this urge seethed an incendiary black tar, the culmination of ‘pitchforks and brimstone’ I had laid to ferment on the backburner, now forged robust as compacted spars that jabbed each limb upright.

It was an odd divide, of wilting hopeful desire, towards comfortable slavery and refurbished chastity in the house of the Bishop, that, upon daring to reach outwards, struck against smouldering iron rods in my flesh that caged it to recoil and burrow away. Hope curled to a mere blip, overwhelmed in the smog, and easily crushed. ‘I’m dying again,’ I lamented woe to the murk. And my own warden, that is, also me, laughed, with a grin like a crescent moon, and teeth like palisades.

I inclined my gaze to the left, down the road that neared the iniquitous quarry.

The Bishop relented. With a long blink, his whole body groaned, and weight fell on his shoulders as he embarked up the road like that upon an unwashed serf.

It amused me, his grief. It tickled for a little chuckle. But principally my purpose was not to humiliate or to denigrate him, no, predominantly when I considered that silhouette: jaw tight, gaze focused, immersed in silent prayer, I submitted my own wish to our Superior by a spirit of cool professionalism, and indeed, detached care for a colleague, that he not worry so much.

I may be a desolating golem constructed of whirling guillotines, but a hand on a shoulder is a hand on a shoulder, if you quite understand my gist.

And as we rose the streets my hatred thickened. I see you in my reticle, you fat scabie, Hejat Vanderheir! He needed to die! Kill him, kill him, strip him sinew by sinew, on holy mandate, choke him and burst him to bits. No satisfaction would come to me until that parasite’s blood painted the room and spattered the scandalised witnesses. Maybe by their disgust, to be speckled with fluids so sanitary, they would understand a little, of what it was, when a 160 pound man, laid his weight upon a child!

ABOMINATION.

HOLY OF HOLIES, I’LL PURIFY THIS CADAVER! GIVE IT TO ME; I WILL CAUTERIZE THE BACTERIA STRAIGHT THROUGH MY TEETH. LET’S MAKE HIM BEG, ON HIS KNEES, TO YOU, TO BE CINDERS.

My breath smouldered and my viscera burbled hot as a stirring volcano. Straight into there! Yup, deliver him straight into the mantle of the earth, and through to the incandescent core to be murdered.

We ascended steps and stairways. At an upper tier, our destination bared itself: a large hospital edificed like a cathedral, upon a slight outcropping that elevated it above the rest of the street. The belly of Hejat’s blistering soul scraped the tile on which we trod, and in crossing through its invisible membrane, his plasma cocooned me such that it blanked all signals of people and even of Hejat himself, like a fish blind to the doings above water.

My back shivered as the range of my traversal zone tightened further. Unless the Bishop had some impressive trick, I would not be leaving the grounds of this hospital. And honestly, I hoped he didn’t.

We entered the building to reception. The Bishop instructed me to wait there, on a chair.

Fine—same as always.

“Supernatural damages,” he advised the receptionist. “Give this one food if he requests it.” (Her bow of the head: ‘My will is yours Primarch.’) Then he departed into the halls, but before that, he blessed her.

So we were there in an otherwise vacant reception room. Her body blazed in my sight as if aflame, from the blessing, so bright I couldn’t stand to look her way or risk a headache. But also all the air was alight. Currents of bright thread wafted everywhere. That was from immersion in Hejat.

On every breath, honeyed flavours proliferated into my throat and succour congealed on my tongue. Tears of pleasure pricked my eyes. To even open my mouth guaranteed a tendril of Heaven would slide into it and bring rapture. Everything was blinding, but nothing dizzied; this was a pleasant migraine.

Funny, though: the currents didn’t seem to point in a fixed direction, as the ‘magnetic’ pull between myself and a target did. So for even such a massive debtor, what, at the end, I would have to hunt? Perhaps that’s a stimulation-exercise. Keepers of caged tigers will sometimes throw food inside tough packages for the beast to rip through, and perhaps... my mind was drifting as it incessantly did, into odd places, away from the fuming indignation I needed to preserve to not lose my nerve or go manic.

I huffed, crossed my arms tighter, and sank deeper into the chair.

Resentment crackled like burning briers.

The Bishop shortly returned. He escorted me to a small room lit by a skylight, furnished only with a few chairs, a table, and Hejat, in a wheelchair.

“Oh, welcome back Primarch,” he chirped, with hands cutely curled like a gerbil’s. “Again I must say, it’s a blessing of blessings, that Your Ardour would vis—oh! Oh!” He pointed as I assembled beside the Bishop. “That—that is the beast! Your Ardour, be watchful, that is not truly a man!”

Smoke rolled up my throat—too my eyes rolled. I bit my lip and crossed my arms even tighter.

“I am aware, saer Vanderheir.”

“It is this who assault me, who put me to the bed-ward,” he insisted. A smirk tugged my lip.

“Yes, it is known. Calm, calm,” urged the Bishop with an open palm.

Hejat indeed quieted, not calmed, for his palms flapped and head boggled scarlet with disputations against me, but intelligent with a snakelike intelligence about kowtowing to authority figures as effective means to prevail.

Such calculating filth.

“We are here to discern the matter of your custody,” the Bishop began. He sighed roughly. “Saer Vanderheir, by many witnesses you are seen guilty of a great trespass, to speak, you have made lustful acts upon children.”

“Oh—no, no, I—” he stammered.

“Quiet!” The Bishop snapped. An inferno of fire shot from his eyes. Even I flinched in astonishment.

The lukewarm manner he presented to me, I realised, had not been lukewarm at all—the gust of the tornado died beside me into silence, which presided over the speechless room.

“Quiet, now,” the Bishop said in renewed calm. For each word he spoke, comfort reentered the air like a sigh. “From this allegation, a claimant has arisen. Your acts have attracted upon you a Devil of the Church. This creature will ravage you, consume you, and consign you to Hell. Presently, I am preventing that.”

Face red and cheeks puffed, Hejat bit his tongue.

“My puzzle is whether I ought to cede you. My preference is that I do not,” the Bishop advised. “But if I am to deny this one’s claim, you must submit under my charge. Do you understand this?”

“Of course so but—my Bishop, my Bishop, you are my Primarch; I am always under your charge,” Hejat said. “As I live in Rajj, not as exile. Yes?”

“You are under my charge if you do what I will of you. You are quite near the grounds of exile,” the Bishop warned. “What I present to you then is a choice—you may step away from my aegis, and this one will catch you, and eat you, or you may do my will, and admit yourself to the penitentiary.”

Hejat’s hands shivered. His neck dribbled sweat. His face puckered.

“My Bishop, quite, how long in the penitentiary?”

“You would not be released.”

And the rat guffawed in affronted astonishment, and slapped the arm of his wheelchair and rolled his fat head as if seeking commiseration from the stars: can you believe this!?

“Atrocious!” he roared. “That is—a ridiculous demand, I cannot do that, not for something I have not even done!”

“You have done it,” the Bishop said.

“No! No no, ridiculous, I have not at all! This is a charge put against me to unwind my life, Bishop—a grievous thing I could never—I would never, ever, how could you be sure?”

“I know you have done it.”

“No you don’t,” Hejat’s voice cracked. “All you know of this—allegation—must come from stories, and vile whispers, by evil hearts that must wish me debased. You have not been in any room where such happened—you cannot say that it did.”

“You are playing dangerously, saer Vanderheir.”

“I am not, I am not, please listen, my Bishop!” He pleaded. “Let no injustice come from your rule and no falsity come from your mouth! Let Your Ardour be never remembered as one who judged for the heinous; and let me say to you who I am, that you may hear from my soul, and the truth.”

The Bishop fell unreadably silent.

“Among the staff of the institution, I am quite valued. I teach grammar and mathematics, both very well, for my students perform each very highly. You would see my rigour to the Church, yes? And each year I do pass my inspections. Then it is senseless to say, I have done this thing, on mere word, when I am the reverse of one who would harm. I adore those children,” he blurted as though he would cry.

“Saer Vanderheir, you understand, you also use only your word, and you are contesting a testimony of above fifty witnesses.”

“Those fifty are lying,” he sobbed. “In strange confederacy against me—and what ill have I done to bring such? And why is my mercy among my accusers? Please my Bishop, if you ask, five hundred more will say I am true. You are the one I most need to defend me.”

“Further, in accord with this testimony, male emissions were found in the girls’ bathroom. The one very near to your class.”

“Ahh... I know then, Bishop, I think I may know. A pervert is on campus, but in faith you cannot call it me,” he insisted. “Listen, please, my Primarch, there is a boy... in the senior classes, Ureczeyl Medchem. I have seen him sneak suspiciously near to those privies.”

The Bishop frowned.

“He is, yes, I have always thought, a boy of a questionable sort... but as he is only a youth, I gave the benefit of the doubt, that he would in time smooth to virtue. I suspected he may be an onanist.”

“The senior classes are quite far from that bathroom.”

“Yes—it is quite secluded.” His face scrunched in disgust. “You see, the heinous commute for misdeeds? That is how I noticed his presence as odd.”

“And though you suspected, you never confronted him?”

“Oh—yes, of course, I urged him to decency. But for dignity pressed him no further; I thought he had stopped.”

The Bishop's frown deepened.

“I hear my own negligence, Bishop,” he said. “I am sorry, I truly am. I thought he truly had stopped at the first rebuke. But now I fear, it could be...”

“Yes, saer Vanderheir?”

“...it could be...”

Loudly I snorted. My presence to that point had been implicitly set as that of a shadow on the wall, to be addressed later, but at such audacious slithering that laugh sprung out despite me.

The Bishop and Hejat both tensed, but as much as the fading of a gong into silence, my interruption and presence also receded. Permission to proceed this farcical dialogue: granted.

(Ridiculous how much power I had and yet did not have at all.)

The Bishop levelled his gaze back upon Hejat.

“You were speaking?” asked the Bishop.

“Ah, it is, yes...” his tongue curled ready to talk, but his gaze wafted to me—then back to the Bishop. “To be in a room with an attacker as this, does addle me somewhat offput.”

“Would you like him to leave?”

“Oh—” Hejat’s brows popped up. The offer actually surprised him. “Aeum, n-no, I will persevere, Ah, what was I speaking of?”

“The student Ureczeyl, who you implicate of onanism in the girls’ bathrooms.” The Bishop paused. “Onanism, however, cannot be the end of the ills done around these pupils. For we found stains, also, on the clothes of your students.”

“Ohhhh!” Hejat howled on perfect cue, craning his head back like a cackling jackal. “No, no, no, no, that is—horrendous, no, that is—grisly, the beast!” He thumped his fist on his handrest. “Ureczeyl? Then it is Ureczeyl!? That—that, he was touching not only himself, but my precious poppets, my little girls?”

“Someone has,” the Bishop said breezily.

“Then it is him!” Hejat pointed forward as if firing arrows. His wheelchair under him squeaked. “And he dared—and I—oh, no...”

He buried his face in his palm and heaved in production of weeping.

“Hejat,” the Bishop said gently. “Is this the statement you wish to make on entry to the penitentiary?”

“—I am not going!” he shrieked.

A light impact struck my chest. The head of the Bishop’s staff rested sternly upon my breast—and Hejat since last second sat much nearer to me, no, I had swooped much nearer to him, and stood midway across the small room.

Had Madjea not caught me Hejat would be dead—as he ought to be, with that sloppy tongue! Expansions of my chest from heavy breaths pressed against the staff, and my teeth cracked together, and my glare at the priest seethed as brimstone.

He received me with his own quiet, reprimanding look and pushed me back into line.

Why!?

This sacrosanct cheater! You already lost! Against a judge of his eminence I couldn’t scream to dispute—as he knew, and exploited, to scramble any scrap he could towards a victorious salvation. That desperation wasn’t kosher. He was breaking principles. If I calmed myself at that moment, rationally I could laugh and just wait for the algorithm to drop him between its gaps, but fury trembled in me as a shrieking boiler, and my brain roiled with pillows of smog. Other than indignation, a part of me must have feared that a miracle might sit on his shoulder.

With teeth grit so fiercely in a predator’s snarl, I did not mute my face very promptly.

Hejat licked his lips and began to sweat.

The Bishop looked coolly upon him. “Surrender.”

“No—that is still nonsense,” he snapped. “I cannot go to such a place, if I am not guilty, for all of my life, it miscarries justice.”

“If you do not surrender you will not have a life,” the Bishop advised, and his staff (I may have pushed against it) dug deeper against my chest. His voice softened. “Please listen to what I say, and let it be truly considered inside your heart. You do not need to confess to anything. At this stage, what is crucial is simply accession to the institution, that I may say you did in fact accept my treatment, and that failures of result may instead be put upon me as the physician.” (By those words he invoked an intense arcanum.)

Hejat quieted into contemplation and leaned back in his seat.

(And because of that intensity, he thought he had won.)

“Hear me in the practical terms,” the Bishop said as he relaxed his staff, to sheathe it. “Of at least frustrating your fate, for a moment. Then we may think of improving it.”

Madjea had offered an incredible deal. Even Hejat knew it too. Equations whizzed in the air around his cupped forehead wherein every logical ‘pro’ fit, ‘listen to Madjea’. ‘If I accept this, there’s also opportunity for this and a claim towards this...’ his ‘thises’, to clarify, all involved finding footing to escape his dilemma with minimal consequence, so he could resume raping children. Mercy to heretics is just tactical ground. The Bishop’s not stupid; he’s just fighting me.

But he had overlooked something.

Hejat’s jaw trembled and sweat drooled down his neck. Inside his torso, his guts squelched and knotted, with acid leaking out an anxious stink.

Like a curtain falls over the smiling cast of a play, his face then fell blank.

He hobbled up to his feet and gripped a cane, which was leaned against his wheelchair.

Wobbling a step forward, he said, “I would just like to speak to—” and he was reaching for me.

Yes! Yes! Behind a motionless patina, my spirit cheered him closer as a child urges a puppy into a hug. Just one more step, two more, and...

Swift as the whip of a cockroach’s antennae, the Bishop’s staff interceded between us. My spirit clicked its tongue and rolled its eyes, with a dramatic groan of, come on!

“Stop,” the Bishop said, ducked forward with palm up at Hejat.

“Tkah—Shien’s black night, what is this? The beast has hit me and battered me. What debt has balmed me on that? I wish to step out and speak with it, that is all, why am I interrupted?”

“No. You cannot,” the Bishop insisted, “he will kill you on the first syllable.”

Hejat sneered, not as though the Bishop were wrong, but as a tyrant who receives a poor war report.

“You will have no dialogue. You cannot have one, because that one hasn’t an ear to petition—”

“Pah!” Hejat interrupted. “And you have much of one, Bishop? All you do is blockade and blockade me, what petition can I ask of you?” Grunting, he shoved the staff’s head aside. “But to treat me a fool and lock me away, scald me with accusations,” he muttered, as the Bishop bodily shoved himself between us, palm still outstretched, and accidentally pushed me a step back.

I’m the easier pillar to move; and he’s a cop on the job, it’s whatever.

Hejat’s juddering lip returned for one instant, as the flash of a tree amid fire and smoke, but disappeared as quickly as the blinding sweep of a billowing plume into hatred. His hands folded upon the cane.

Though silent, he glowered like a wolf.

And he winced, too hurt to stay completely defiant, as the pain of his hips asserted itself, and he sat back in the wheelchair furiously. The cane settled over his lap and he gripped its length as if strangling it.

The Bishop relaxed minutely.

“What is that beast here for if it can do nothing,” Hejat spat, pointing at me.

He’s not really wrong. I can only shrug.

“You see that is a witch’s spirit? A—monster you have let march through the city, to return reports and pain. Why accost me? You do not know what that thing has done. Or what danger, I fear, presses on the city in these hours.”

Was he trying to goad me?

Honestly, it was kind of working.

“I am no sorcerer, and I am no corpse. You heard from the creature the foul whispers, yes? Then how can you say it was not witchcraft that... created thoughts against me? Can ghouls not do so? Yet you would believe... the most wicked slander of me, before the thought of an evil in motion? Are even you deceived?”

“Saer Vanderheir. Even if I am deceived, what bargain could you make by speaking to an agent of the one who, purportedly, aligns forces against you?”

“I do not know! That is why I must talk,” he insisted.

“And if I am deceived, am I not working by the will of the one who opposes you, and if there is parley, you may achieve such by subjecting to me, else there is simply no desire of your enemy to talk?”

“I—auh,” Hejat stumbled.

“We can talk,” I interjected lightly. “I’d, love that, actually...”

The Bishop closed his eyes; Hejat edged deeper into his chair. A dreadful stillness settled over the room, as though age had ripped the wallpaper from the walls, and revealed beneath it cement.

In that stillness, my guts graunched as if kneaded by a hag. Anxiety shuddered under my skin that I may have spoken too much—because I had just shuffled the situation towards my win, and now I, bafflingly, wasn’t sure if I desired it.

Hejat understood that like him I was evil. There was an odd link of confederacy, as among two thieves plotting a heist, that neither would affront the other by claiming not to be thieves—rather, that it glorified the evil to boast of it openly, but only among the equally compromised. He yearned to proliferate malice and to pride in what he was; as such, he desired collaboration with me so as to more effectively ruin Rajj.

Of course, he would be ceding his ‘territory’ in some level to me, but that did not bother him if my presence overall made the city a worse place to live. The more corrupt a city, the more the ticks on it may gorge. He did not understand yet that my humiliation involved eating ticks.

But the Bishop’s presence complicated the freeness of tongue he needed to speak with me, without affronting himself or becoming awkward, as he could not stand any concession of truth in the light. It burned the slimy film around his ego like buttered turkey in an oven.

Despite an arrogance that told him he could control me, also, he was terrified of me.

He shuddered to prop right his cane, stamped its foot to the floor. He heaved himself up like someone possessed, magnetised on a death march, yet shuddering.

The Bishop opened his eyes and dropped his shoulders in a dim, hopeless concession.

“I will bless you,” he said.

Hejat hoisted his belly up onto the cane. “I don’t want blessings.”

“Even so, accept it. For my own peace, that you may return, I pray, with a clearer perspective.” The Bishop then glanced to me, not for permission, but curious of my thoughts.

I shrugged.

As though thralled by my permissiveness, and the blessing now a prerequisite to us exiting the room, Hejat froze and waited to receive it. His thumbs itched the head of the cane nervously.

Toward him the Bishop drew the sign of Czjeir. A muttered prayer accompanied the broad, slow swish of each finger, along which trailed incandescent fire too bright for me to observe—and had the character of a mirage, present, but only questionably so. I blinked against the light; the Bishop withdrew his hand, and the traced shape hung in the air as a blazing afterimage, a ghost lingering after the substance had gone.

And then I heard crackling.

“aaa.... aaa,” Hejat begun to moan.

The cane clattered against porcelain tile and the wheelchair squeaked backwards; an urgent bell sounded, alarms shrieked in Hell; I swooped down.

“Aaa—AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” he screamed. The image of the blazing Czjeirphet smeared away behind me. The Bishop flinched back in alarm. On hands and knees, I was arched over Hejat, my body a whip, the action automatic, as I wrestled his wrists down to the floor.

Hejat had collapsed. “AAAAAAA—” onto the ground, screaming, and my impulse to act was not that of a hunter. This man was screaming—and writhing on the ground, screaming, with drool splashing out, whipping head all directions a shake of ‘no! NO!!’. His eyes bulged—massively—mummylike, massively, more white than iris, popped near fully out of their sockets, with pinprick pupils jittering everywhere yet unavoidable fixed on—something invisible, some vision apparent only to him.

And there were slices on his cheeks—tear-tracks, from fingernails tearing him. They were self-inflicted; he had in the instant before I stopped him almost ripped out his eyes, maybe his whole face, not to destroy the vision but to put out the fire—of the blessing, which had now seeped through his skin, through his muscle, and settled upon his core, into his core, his soul, a beautiful vanilla-smooth coating applied—no, adhered, to a grease clot.

It was burning him. Two incompatible substances had been forced to mix; a bison’s great frame ended in dainty chicken legs that snapped beneath the body’s weight; a seal in the arctic with blubber stripped for a dazzling coating of peacock feathers. Hejat could not digest this blessing. Thus, it would never end.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—” his jaw hinged wider than a snake’s. His quivering eyes settled finally—on me. They settled on me.

Whatever he wished to say, he had to say through his eyes, since the screams had overrun his throat and his tongue completely, these screams of horror, of grief, of guilt, of shame and pain, death and contrition. I think he had been given a mind that could see—with true recognition—what he had done.

Tears welled up and poured down his face. His neck bobbed as if sobbing and his mouth flapped without words, but even these suggestions of crying did not interrupt the screams. They came out of him like their own creatures. He looked at me like I was a god, like I was salvation.

Those eyes with one final hope they begged: KILL ME.

With all his hope to me alone he begged: GET ME OUT OF THIS PLACE.

Because I was the only one who could balm him he begged: PUT ME IN THE DARK, WHERE THERE’S A DIFFERENT TORMENT.

I leaned back to assess. His struggling beneath me had weakened, so my grip upon his wrists had weakened. He hugged me to punctuate his desperation, the absolute sincerity of his plea for Hell to give him mercy from Heaven, utterly backwards but genuine, and as I withdrew, and he slipped away, he wricked in a spasm of simultaneous misery and total acceptance. He curled fetal on his side, pressing his palms to his forehead, and screaming.

Paging doctor Mephi. That’s how it felt.

“What’s happened?” Madjea said breathless, stepping a step near but too scared to cross the line of ‘becoming involved’.

He really doesn’t know his own potency.

The spiteful thought did flash to simply leave the wretch.

But it dimmed, very fast, into surgical sensibility. My body moved before me; I watched, with hands folded behind my back, as I grabbed him by his throat and wrest him once, in a terrible and purposeful motion. A crack of bone sounded. His whole body below his neck fell limp.

Then I leapt onto the table and spread him upon it, as though smoothing a sheet of paper, like a patient, to receive surgery.

“Madjea,” I said. The words proceeded without thought. “A tongue accustomed to thistle vomits at the taste of good herbs.”

Wide-eyed and paralysed, the horror of what was proceeding humbled the boy to only watch, but plainly in his puffed mouth, and in his soul, the young Bishop had objections.

Hejat’s head yet thrashed and screamed on the table. I drew a nail up his breast to unzip his thorax.

“Where best should lodge a reprobate whose adorations are not found in Heaven? Where is the dwelling of a leech or a slug, except in the swamp or in the muck, yet where else to enthrone a proud whore but her brothel?” My palms pressed down. Hejat’s ribs cracked outward. “There is no hope in some cases.”

It puzzled me how surely I was saying these things.

Yet for all the abuse I was inflicting on his body, Hejat’s screams had not flickered an inch from their original tenor. The pain went simply unregistered. Compared to the scalding light of the blessing, it was perhaps even comfortable.

“There’s no blame for your trying, and not for Czjeir’s trying. The craving is simply so entrenched that nothing you present is favourable to the rush of the lust. He’s very far down, and never stepped away. Now he’s an offence to even bring up,” my voice continued. “Czjeir so gives these ones their lust—and only their lust. They’ll burn in the ravenousness of their own desires. Look, Madjea, do you understand?”

I was shoulder-deep in Hejat’s torso when I asked this.

Madjea only winced. But for the brutality of the sermon, he was listening.

“Hm.” I twisted my hand, grasped around his heart. The organ came loose like a plucked grape, and with a final airy breath of, “aaah...” Hejat fell silent.

The soul like dew dripped out of the flesh, it ran and congealed under the heart. I rolled the meat away to palm only the spirit, which clotted into the form of a glowing white orb. As I held it aloft, like a diamond to catch the sun, the magnetic field of Hejat’s soul that had encompassed the hospital condensed down into the material vessel, squeezed fully into the size of an apple in my hand. Yet the pull remained at perfect intensity. Less than an armspan between it and my mouth—oh god, yes. I could not put this thing down if I tried.

And yet it was flawed. A disappointment struck. A clear coating like resin had mingled into the sin, offputting as bleach poured into cake batter, and the ultimate product, though still radiant with a delectable savour, was not half as enticing as it shoulder have been.

Granted, ‘half as enticing’ still meant, ‘fifty times more than anything else in this city’, but that I could even think to observe it attested to its sad dilution.

Within the cask of the soul, the psyche whirled, screaming within itself. The core clawed at the resin walls; its form barely flickered from a ball; the strange stability felt to me like a prison. Its hue was also not silver but a subtle white-gold. I say this all for academic archival.

The first prickles of rot stung its pith.

Between anguish, reprobation, agony, and chagrin, a gasp of hope for mercy arose. Yet, let him die—let Shien’s curse crush his mind, that he could no longer think, and so no longer suffer, the fire wrought of recognizing the heinousness of one’s own misdeeds.

I frowned.

A nail traced a track down his surface.

Whose hand are you in?

I’ll tell you, rat, nobody generous.

I lifted him up, and I swigged him down like an oyster.