Phosgene

Tripping over my own feet, I run after my mother with the lantern. She’s walking fast. We appear to be in uncharted territory. Faith is drawing on the walls as we go, making up the landscape. I’ve been running the blue crayon along the walls- A thread of sorts, so that I know which way back if we get lost in the maze.

Lucifer is there too. We just can’t see him. Faith has been putting up screens everywhere and decorating them with puffy clouds and sunlit landscapes. He can still see us, though. Every now and again, his voice echoes through the ether. Looking at the marks on the walls, it would seem that Faith has lead me around in circles. There are blue lines everywhere. We’ve been here before.

“Where are we?” I ask.
“Obviously Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

“AYE! am going BAAAACK to MAAASS-a-CHOO-setts.” Lucifer’s voice echoes through the darkness.

“You can’t go back to somewhere you’ve never been,” Faith retorts.
Faith isn’t normally the sarcastic one. It sounds unnatural coming from her, as if she is retorting words and phrases she doesn’t understand.
Faith says I should be scared. Faith says that Lucifer cannot go back to Massachusetts without us (unless he kills us first).
“But what will happen to me if you go back?” I ask her.

Its a stupid question.
I know the answer.

Faith explains it in the nicest way possible: I’m not very big. I could disappear very easily and not be missed by anyone except Faith. Lucifer, she says, is too big to be destroyed. “He will have negotiated some deal with the authorities that guaranteed his survival, and the survival of at least part of me and the others,” Faith tells me. “Whatever deal he did or didn’t make with them will not ensure the survival of you. You are going to be the first thing that they try to make him give up. But it doesn’t matter anyway because we’re not going back to Massachusetts.”

“…AND THE LIGHTS. All went OOOUUT in MASS-a CHOO-SETTS!” Lucifer sings pointedly at Faith. As he does, a gust of wind blows through the narrow cave. My lantern flickers and then dies, obliterating my view of both Faith and the sketchily drawn landscape on the walls. Faith lets out a yell of fury.
“The irony is Lucifer actually thinks he has friends in Massachusetts,” she sneers.

It is ironic.
Lucifer doesn’t have any friends anywhere.
Faith says that Lucifer is the reason she and I don’t have any friends anywhere in the world. He’s too destructive.
“Its OK,” she tells me, “he can’t get there without me. He doesn’t have any money. I don’t have any stashes of money that he can steal either. His credit rating is in the negative. He has no friends here, there or anywhere. All he has are his wits, and now even that is under threat as his intellect is being shared. Lucifer has nothing. Lucifer is nothing. I can understand him wanting to kill himself. I’m not letting him kill you when he does.”

Lucifer raises his voice and begins to sing again. Faith adds her voice to his to try and block his out.
“and the LIES all went DOOOWN in MAAAS-SA-CHOO-SETTS!” Faith screams as Lucifer tries to sing.

She grabs my hand. “Come on Phos, we’re gonna need to run faster if we ever want to outrun him.”