Chapter 28 #3
There is no one here. But the bulky shapes of dissection tables loom out of the floor like fleshy mushrooms, their tops smoothed over with tightly drawn skin, their structures obscured.
Kelpie moves to the middle of the room and looks up, at the dangling light structures likewise swallowed by the skin.
It’s the belly of the beast, and the final bruised sphincter illustrates that: all of them have looked like orifices inside some terrible, unthinkable creature, but this one is clamped tight, moist and unknowable, and it does not look inclined to yield.
“We have to keep going,” says Kelpie, and it’s half statement, half plea. She’s begging to be told that she’s wrong, and there’s another way. She closes her eyes for a moment, then continues: “It wants us to keep going.”
Artemis jerks in alarm. She hasn’t seen or heard anything to indicate that this place is capable of wanting anything. “Kelpie … what do you mean?”
“I mean that whatever this place used to construct itself is still here, and it hurts, and it can tell it’s almost done being forced to be whatever it is right now.
In the stories, the travelers pick up the improbable road on the other side of the mosasaur, once they’re on the shore again.
They don’t see another mosasaur until Past the Pluvial Peaks, and even then, it’s not the same one.
Once we’re on the road, whatever that means, this whole thing can die. ”
“I don’t like the idea that we’re walking through something that can think,” says Artemis.
Kelpie shrugs. “I don’t like the idea that we’re walking through an amalgamation of all my friends and the remains of every animal in this lab, but I’m here anyway,” she says.
She turns and walks for the final sphincter, and Artemis follows, because there is nothing else to do.
In the final chamber, the animal nature of their surroundings is undeniable, painted in the wet moisture of the walls and floor, in the blood vessels as big around as adult human arms that spin their traceries across the ceiling.
If they walked through skin and flesh before, now they stand in viscera, in the chambered space within the chest. They stand, no matter how they look at their situation, inside a nightmare.
A nightmare that has already claimed six people, all of them unconscious and seemingly unaware of their surroundings.
Roger, Dodger, and Erin are webbed to the far wall by bonds of near-translucent skin, tied tight and held firm.
Smita, Lilianne, and Judy are connected to the floor, red muscle tissue grown up around their feet and calves like terrible boots, holding them locked where they are.
There is a half-grown peach tree about a foot away from Judy, close enough that she has collapsed halfway onto it, rather than to the ground.
It holds her up, immature branches bending beneath the weight of her. Her eyes are closed; she does not move.
There is another figure here, wrought out of the same red, raw material as the walls, damp with mucus and internal fluids, almost invisible until it moves, turning toward the pair of them.
It has a human face, flensed raw and bare of skin; when it smiles at Artemis and Kelpie, they can see every muscle and tendon pulling into place.
“My dears,” it says, and it has a woman’s voice, not only in timbre, but in pitch and intonation; it speaks like a kindly schoolteacher, like someone no one wants to disappoint.
If Roger sounds like the platonic ideal of a college professor and Dodger sounds like a children’s science educator, this figure sounds like a kindly woman in a patterned dress, the sort who exists mostly in memory and nostalgia-tinted stories for parents to recount around the dinner table.
It speaks for a time that never was, an ideal that could never have been.
Artemis swings her bow around, taking aim at the center of the figure’s chest. It continues smiling, lipless and terrible.
“We’re all together now,” it says. “A few of my children are missing, but enough of us are here. We can finally begin.”
Dodger’s eyes remain closed, but they move frantically behind her lids, the motion only obvious because the rest of her is so uncannily still.
It’s the first sign Artemis and Kelpie have had that their friends are in any way still aware of their surroundings.
A muscle in her jaw twitches under the skin, sharp and staccato.
“Who are you?” asks Artemis, voice cold.
“I am the alkahest and the void,” says the figure. “The alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end. I am the improbable road, and I am your doorway to the graveyard path.”
“How did you take our friends?”
“As easily as a flower takes the petal,” says the figure.
“They were always mine. I only needed to remind them. The little Lunar isn’t my property, but she comes close enough, and I pulled on the threads Avery had tangled inside of her to convince her to obey.
The rest were simple things. Their sympathies have always been mine to have and to hold. ”
Artemis is a hunter, but Kelpie, at her core, is a prey animal.
When Artemis glances to her to see how she’s taking this particular intro to a villain speech, she’s standing so still that it barely looks like she’s breathing.
If not for the contrast between the vivid orange of her skin and the glistening red of the walls, she might well disappear, blending into the background through sheer force of will.
The flensed figure steps forward, and Artemis’s stomach clenches, confronted with such an obvious sign of how wrong everything is here in this lab below the world, where the natural laws have somehow been warped and replaced with the outlines of the Up-and-Under, Asphodel Baker’s wild reimagining of reality becoming manifest.
“You’re not mine either, little Lunar, but you could be, if you stopped fighting and gave in to what I require,” it says.
“My son remade you in his own image. There are barriers in your flesh that have never been there for the others of your kind. I didn’t tell him to take you.
If it had been down to me, I would have set him stalking among the Hyades, to square this circle smoothly.
But I was already gone by the time he came to court and claim you, and I had no way of telling him what to do. ”
“What do you mean, ‘already gone’?”
“I’ve been traveling the graveyard path since my departure, and it’s shown me so many things I didn’t think I would ever have the luxury of knowing,” says the figure.
“It’s taught me what I did right, and what I did wrong, and now that I understand it all, I can finally continue.
Great sages have always died for wisdom.
I have nothing of the god on the tree to claim as my own, but my father knew him once, and he was able to show me the path to descend and then return.
They used to call it a katabasis, before they knew the name of the graveyard path.
So many things are redefined when you name them, even if they remain otherwise entirely the same. ”
There’s no more denying what—or who—this figure has to be, and still Artemis swallows the name, refusing to give voice to what she now fears more deeply than ever before.
It’s Kelpie, prey animal that she is, who overcomes her terror and steps forward, hooves muted against the flesh-covered floor, to look up at the skinless, raw-meat figure of their apotheosis come at long, terrible last.
“Hello, Asphodel,” she says, and the word is spoken, the story is told: there is no longer any changing what comes next.