Page 39 - The Grotesque Children's Book

“Please, please, Helios, turn the chariot round. Let us go back to the
eastern sky. To the West is blackness. To the West is oblivion.”

For what you may not realize is that the horses who drive Helios’ chariot
today are not the same ones who drive it tomorrow. Helios’ horses don’t
survive the setting of the sun. They die as they fall off the edge of the earth
and Helios heads back east to find a fresh set for the morning. You can see the
horses die: great brilliant bursts of red, orange and pink. Yes, it is the death of
the chariot horses which gives you so much pleasure at day’s end. I hope I
haven’t ruined the experience for you. Sometimes the truth can spoil things
so. Just remember the joy of the horses waiting next to pull the chariot in the
morning. Weigh their joy against the terror and sorrow of the horses of the
evening, and you have yourself a classic solipsistic equilibrium; you cannot
have the one without the other. So you may as well enjoy the one and,
and...and do what you can to muffle the piteous sounds of the other.

“And Helios’s horses --?” you ask. Where do they come from every
morning?” Oh you inquisitive equinophile, you. Well may your curiosity be
rewarded with knowledge which prevents you from making foolish mistakes.
Though your curiosity has such a head start on your laggardly knowledge, the
gap may be, for you and indeed all your fellow mankind, too wide, too wide.
Blessed are the ignorant, for they shan’t recognize sorrow when it spits in their
faces.

Helios’s horses are not horses at all. They are stolen children. There’s a
terrible terrible demigod who makes his living finding mothers and fathers so
desperate for the lives of their children that they are willing to sell the weakest
and most misshapen of their children for money to feed the others. The
demigod’s name is Signore Puermutanto. That means “children-changer.”
Puermutanto has made a bargain with Helios: immortality in exchange for a
constant supply of children who are happier as winged horses than they would
ever be if they remained weak, misshapen and grotesque as they were destined.

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