Chapter Eighteen
Three Sides to Every Story
The Catacombs
The darkness swallows me whole the moment I step through.
I stumble forward, my hands reaching out instinctively to catch myself against stone walls that feel too close, too real, too much like—
No. Don’t think about it.
The portal seals behind me with that vacuum sound, final as a coffin lid closing. The pixelated fog dissipates, leaving only solid stone and absolute dark.
For a moment, I just stand there, letting my eyes adjust. But they do not. Darkness does not give way to light. Shapes do not begin to emerge. Outlines do not start to form.
I cannot see. I cannot fucking see. My eyes are open, but dread grips me tighter. I blink and blink again, desperate for images to appear. But they do not. Panic claws at my chest, nausea assaults my stomach, and a crippling weight presses down on my chest.
My other senses sharpen in the void where sight fails me.
I can hear the distant plinking of water droplets as they splash against unseen surfaces.
The temperature of the air is cold and prickles against my face, neck, and hands.
I note how strongly I can feel the air here.
Is that a byproduct of The Catacombs or just my mind playing tricks on me?
Can I feel here in ways that I cannot in the OW?
Or are my shifting senses doing barrel rolls with my perceptions?
The only thing I can tell for certain is that I am standing on solid ground. And I only know this because I’m not currently plummeting through the ground. I can feel the dirt and stone beneath my feet. But I cannot see it.
Nothing replaces the darkness. Physical touch is my only useful relationship to the world around me right now. I have not taken a single step deeper into the abyss and already feel like I’ve been swallowed whole. I do not know what to do. I am paralyzed by fear and anxiety, and I fucking hate it.
How far ahead of me I can move in any given direction, I have no idea.
It is pure black. This is not the darkness of night with slivers of light from the stars or the moon.
Nor is it the thick, inky color of my former chamber after the candle gets snuffed out.
This is complete and total darkness. It is disorienting and terrifying, and panic overwhelms me.
I am trapped but uncaged. I cannot escape.
I turn around to try to retreat to the Piazza, but behind me is just as dark and empty as the part before me.
Once I turn around, I immediately lose my sense of direction.
Now all ways are no ways, and I cannot even grasp in what direction I’m facing.
Up and down have lost all meaning, and I am racked with a growing and festering sense of suffocation.
My body trembles, paralysis creeping in.
I may be moments away from a catatonic stroke overtaking me.
A flash of Maddy cuts into my mind’s eye, momentarily replacing the darkness around me.
It is enough to motivate a single step forward.
Then another. I thrust my hands in front of me, feeling nothing, so I take yet another step.
Then I run my hands along my sides and can feel the cave walls on either side of me.
What are those smooth ridges and cutting edges that I feel in the lumpy earth?
I stop my feet and continue to explore with my fingers, creating images from the sensations at the tips of my hands.
Are those … bones?
I shuffle my feet forward slowly as my hands take in the structure hemming me in.
The walls are most definitely lined with bones.
They feel as though they’ve been embedded in the stone itself, like layers of sediment have captured ages of agony.
Ribs curve into archways. Femurs support the ceiling mere inches above my head.
I can feel the rounded surfaces and telltale eye sockets of skulls.
I force myself to take another step forward.
The passage narrows.
My shoulders brush against the walls, rough stone that catches on my cloak, pulls at the fabric like grasping hands. The ceiling lowers with each step, forcing me to duck my head, to curl my spine, to make myself smaller.
I do not know where I’m going. I cannot see anything in any direction. But I know if I remain still, the fear will consume me, and I will end before I’ve even had a chance to begin this journey. Even if I don’t know the way forward, I know nothing can change if I stand still.
The air grows thicker. Heavier. Pressing down on my chest like a physical weight.
Stone walls. Confined space. No escape.
No.
No, this is different. This is The Catacombs. This is the path to Maddy. This is—
But my body doesn’t care about logic. My body remembers.
Stone walls. The smell of decay and desperation. The feeling of being trapped, caged, buried alive while still breathing.
The prison.
The memory crashes through me before I can stop it, vivid and immediate and wrong.
England, 1869
The air in the yard stinks of piss and sweat. It’s a mix of hard labor and even harder indignities. Toil and hopelessness have a scent. In here, I can smell despair.
Madeleine stands just beyond the bars.
Her shawl’s too thin for the cold, but she won’t admit it. She never does. She holds herself like a soldier, chin high, spine straighter than mine’s ever been. But I see it anyway—the tremor in her lip, the red at the edges of her eyes. She hasn’t slept.
“You won’t write to me,” she says.
Not a question. Just the truth. Soft and sure, like all the other truths she’s ever handed me, whether I asked for them or not.
I rest my fingers around the bars—don’t grip them, not really. I don’t look at her either. My eyes fix on her boots, scuffed and damp. There’s a bit of mud on the right one. I want to kneel and clean it off with my sleeve. I want to fix it. I want to fix everything.
But I don’t move.
“I will.” It’s a lie.
Madeleine scoffs, the sound barely a breath.
She steps forward anyway, bold, as always.
She’s close enough now that I can see the wind’s gotten to her skin.
Pink patches flare across her cheeks, raw and angry.
I reach my hand through the bars without thinking, wanting to touch her face, wanting to remember what warmth feels like.
But I stop short—too much of me is poison now.
“You won’t,” she says again.
She lifts her hand instead and tucks the collar of my coat where it’s gone crooked. Like I’m something that can be tidied. Like they won’t ship me off tomorrow.
“You’ll burn the letter before it’s finished. Or they’ll take it from you. Or you’ll say something cruel, some clever little barb to make me stop waiting.” Her voice is low, and I swear the firewood crackling in the courtyard furnace listens better than I do.
She brushes her fingers along the edge of my coat. There’s a hole there. She doesn’t mention it.
“That’s what you do, Asher. You break things before they’re taken from you.”
“I didn’t kill that man,” I whisper, my voice hoarse.
“I know,” she says.
I lift my eyes then, and, fuck, I wish I hadn’t. Because hers are full of love and fury, the kind of sacred devotion that doesn’t survive in men like me. I want to reach through the bars and pull her to me, bury my face in her neck, beg her to run. But the words won’t come. They never do.
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” I mutter.
“It matters to me.” Her voice cracks, and it shatters something in my ribs.
That’s the last thing she says to me.
They come for me at dawn. Two guards. Boots echoing on stone like war drums. I don’t fight it. What would be the point?
They march me to the gallows. But the fire gets there first.
Someone’s cigar, possibly.
The building goes up like a kindling. Screams echo off the stone. The guards vanish. I hear bones snap. I see flames curl up the wood rafters like they’ve got purpose. I watch the rope burn before it can claim me.
But it doesn’t matter. Not really.
Because I’m still in prison.
And she’s already gone.
The Catacombs
The memory holds me in the narrow passage. My feet have stopped moving, my hands resting by my sides. I welcome the images in a reality devoid of any.
Maddy’s voice echoes in my skull. Her face, pink-cheeked from the cold. Her hands tucking my collar. Her eyes full of love and fury and—
No. Wait. Something’s wrong.
The image wavers. Distorts. Like looking at a reflection in disturbed water.
No, that’s not how it was.
The certainty hits me like a fist to the gut.
I remembered it wrong. I’ve been carrying a lie in my heart just to have the courage to press on.
Did I convince myself that Maddy came to see me in that prison?
Or was that a trick of the corporate conglomerate of Death’s Door, LLC to make me a more efficient soul-snatching machine?
In the total darkness around me, I begin to see my past more clearly than ever before. And I do not like what I see.
The memory shifts. Reforms. Corrects itself with brutal, unforgiving clarity. The reality of those final moments crystalizes in my mind.
The stink of coal fuel.
His sinister laugh.
The glow of the ember on the tip of his cigar.
No, wait. That light is not a memory. That spark flickers before me now.
In the distance, a single source of illumination shines. Surrounded by a sea of darkness, light creeps in. And by that tiny speck of flame, a path begins to emerge.