Chapter 27 #4
“We found the animals, and maybe the alchemists, too,” says Dodger, top lip curling back from her teeth as she looks around.
“I have no idea what could have done this to them. Something they probably thought was really clever right up until they felt themselves being absorbed into the greater whole.”
“This is … wrong,” says Roger, hollow horror in his voice. “We need to go.”
“Yes, we do,” says Dodger. She turns back toward the door, and stops dead. The torn skin is already sealing over, becoming just another flat section of the wall; it’s happening so fast that she can virtually see it, see the muscle below the skin knitting itself back together.
(And what does a cavern of flesh need with muscle? The question is small, nagging, and terrible. If this is just skin and tissue made of liquified alchemists and their research subjects, it shouldn’t need any muscle. It has no reason to move.)
“Roger…”
“Shit,” says Roger. He freezes for a moment, clearly overwhelmed by the situation, then says, in a voice that leaves no room for argument, “You need to open for me.”
The flesh over the door continues to heal.
Roger takes a deep breath. When he tries again, his voice has subharmonics the human voice shouldn’t be able to convey, shadows and impossible distortions. “I command you to open, laboratory door. I am ready to leave.”
The door keeps healing.
“I … That always works,” says Roger. It doesn’t matter that the door doesn’t have any ears (or maybe it does, and that would be so much worse, somehow, than the alternative); the universe can hear him, and that means the universe should listen when he speaks.
It always has before. People have come apart under his command, breaking down into their component pieces.
Walls have fallen. Bullets have stopped, robbed of their kinetic energy.
“Maybe the rules are different here for some reason,” says Judy. “Like when we’re inside the everything.”
“Or maybe this is where we need to run,” says Dodger. She grabs hold of Roger’s arm and whirls, running deeper into the cavernous depths of the fleshy horror.
Roger grabs Judy’s hand in his own, dragging her along as Dodger pulls him in her wake, rapidly leaving the room where they initially arrived behind.
The door to the menagerie level is locked when Lilianne first tries the knob.
She frowns before she tries again, wiggling it against the strange resistance she’s feeling.
It’s not the feeling of a latch being thrown; there’s too much torque for that.
It’s just like something is stopping it from turning, even when it naturally should.
“What’s wrong?” asks Smita.
“I don’t know,” says Lilianne, and twists harder. This time the knob obliges, rotating until there’s a strange popping sound, like a chicken bone being twisted out of its socket and finally ripping loose. The knob turns fully, and the door swings a few inches inward.
The smell that follows is bloody and carnal, carried by a gust of unusually warm, moist air.
When it hits Lilianne’s skin she recoils, briefly convinced that the next time she looks at her hands, she’ll find them covered in a fine spray of bloody spots.
Smita doesn’t seem to notice. She pushes on into the darkened entryway, walking toward the door at the far end.
It doesn’t resist her. When she shoves against the crash bar, the door pushes easily open, accompanied by a horrifying ripping, like someone has sliced halfway through a raw pork chop and is now tearing it in half.
The room on the other side is bathed in white light, mingled equally with the warning red.
“Come on,” says Smita. She steps through.
Lilianne follows.
The room beyond—the menagerie level proper—is wrong.
Everything is clean and polished, the floor made of metal grating that opens onto a vast drop down into deeper darkness below them, the walls studded with chrome and metallic plates, all of which are perfectly spotless.
It feels like something out of a science fiction movie, or—
“What is this, a Resident Evil remake?” asks Lilianne, voice low and bewildered. “If anything moans, I’m leaving.”
“Noted,” says Smita.
There are cages set into the walls, all of them empty, holding not even bones. Lilianne starts toward them, then pauses. She can see the metal grating underfoot. So why can’t she feel it?
Every step she takes is elevated, just a little, just enough that she can feel the difference.
It doesn’t help that whatever she’s actually walking on is softer than metal would be, yielding, like walking on the rubber matting that sometimes gets put down on convention center floors during trade shows or academic conferences.
She stops and bends, reaching for the floor.
She needs to feel whatever it is she’s walking on top of. She needs to understand.
“Stop!” says Smita.
Lilianne looks sharply up, focusing on her companion. “What is it?”
“I don’t … I don’t think you should be touching that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
Lilianne glances down again. The floor is glossy and unobstructed, no rugs or plastic sheeting to obscure the plain metal. “I’m standing on it,” she says, trying to sound reasonable. “I’m already touching it, if you really think about it.”
“Your shoes are touching it,” says Smita. “Please … please don’t.”
Lilianne glances up again. Something about Smita’s face isn’t right. There’s a lurking horror in her expression that doesn’t match the situation in the slightest. “Smita, what’s going on?”
“Can you really not see?”
Lilianne looks down for a third time. “I don’t think so, no. Whatever it is you’re seeing, it’s not here for me.”
“The floor is covered by what looks like a layer of skin. Not just skin: it’s too plump and rounded to be just skin.
There’s tissue underneath it. It has pores, Lily.
No hairs or freckles or anything like that, but it’s alive.
It’s soft and squishy and alive. It’s on the walls, too.
And when you reach for it, it reaches back. ”
“How do you mean?”
“These little threads come up out of the pores and they stretch toward your fingers, like they’re going to grab hold. I’m afraid if you touch it, you won’t be able to pull your hand away.”
Lilianne blinks then, and for just a moment, it seems like she can see what Smita’s describing, a layer of pinkish flesh, the skin closer in shade to her own than to Smita’s, skin that’s never seen the sun before. She pulls her hand back as she straightens. “All right. Let’s say you’re right.”
“So easy?”
“If I’m right and the floor is plain metal, I touch it and no one gets hurt. If you’re right, anyone who touches skin that puts out feelers so it can touch them back could be in a lot of trouble. Do we turn back or keep going?”
“Roger and Dodger went this way.”
The statement isn’t the same as an answer, and it is at the same time, because out of all of them, Smita is the one who doesn’t have to be here.
She could have walked away as soon as the twins finished spinning the timeline into something that would let her stay away; she could have chosen freedom from the tangled web of the alchemical world.
The fact that she didn’t says more about her capacity for love and loyalty than anything else could possibly communicate.
If her people are here, Smita isn’t leaving.
That much is easy to see. Lilianne takes a deep breath.
Logic says they should go and find Artemis and Kelpie, should get themselves some backup before they go any deeper into a space that is apparently trying to actively disguise itself from her.
This isn’t safe. And that doesn’t matter.
“Alchemy has a lot of focus on transformation and healing,” she says, haltingly. “Filling a room with flesh that lives despite not having a visible body is absolutely within the capabilities of a master. It would, however, require a lot of raw materials to set up.”
“This was the menagerie, according to Kelpie,” says Smita.
“I don’t see any animals, and there weren’t any alchemists in here when we arrived.
Not even dead ones. Maybe this was set up as a failsafe, in case the place was being evacuated?
You can’t spill anyone’s secrets if you’ve been absorbed into a giant skin blob. ”
That isn’t entirely true, but Lilianne doesn’t think hearing that will make Smita feel any better. It wouldn’t make her feel any better, and she doesn’t have people lost somewhere inside this collection of horrors. She takes a longer look around.
In addition to the door they entered through, there are two halls leading deeper into the lab, one open, the other blocked by a door with a crash bar like the one they’ve already opened. Taking a guess, she points at the closed door: “What do you see over there?”
“Just wall, which means, just skin,” says Smita.
Lilianne nods. She doesn’t know why they’re seeing two different versions of this space, but none of the explanations she can come up with are good ones.
They range from the bad—everyone who comes here sees something different, chosen at random from a list of horrors—to the truly terrible—the lab doesn’t want one of them, and is doing its best to get rid of the unnecessary body, whether by blocking out all the dangers so that they’ll stumble into disaster, or by showing them everything to whet their curiosity.
That option is worse in part because she can’t decide whether it’s trying to attract her or Smita.
She doesn’t want to get hurt defending someone she barely knows. Her crush, while strong, is nowhere near that powerful. But she also doesn’t want to stand idly by as Smita walks open-eyed into danger. She moves her finger, pointing to the second door.
“And there?” she asks.
“An opening. That’s the way deeper into the lab.”