Chapter 20 Resurrection
RESURRECTION
Outside the chamber, the basement feels darker, malevolent now that I know what’s seething at its heart, but the light trickling down the stairs is enough to split my head.
I clap a hand over my eyes to shield them.
The power sealed behind these walls of clay and tar and old magic is muted but not gone.
I sense it within, patiently biding its time, storing its energy like an alligator before a death roll.
The fissures in the brick, so fine they’re barely visible, are suddenly gaping to me, screaming proof that this man-made cell won’t hold, can’t hold forever.
What then? What happens when Arla’s pet manages to free itself and goes rampaging through the city set on vengeance? What becomes of her, us, this place?
There will be hell to pay, the voice whispers to me, and it seems to come from within the room and within myself at the same time. It is the only thing I am certain of anymore.
I wait for Arla to seal the door, watching as the key simply evaporates from her hand when done, and I wonder if she feels it, too, the slow, inevitable unraveling, the creature pressing from inside to break free.
“The walls, everything written on them … that’s what’s holding her in?” We stand side by side, staring into the darkness, feeling what sleeps there.
“It’s written in Aramaic,” she says. “An utterly complex working. Painted in cremation ash and slaked lime, bat guano, and goodness knows what else. I’m still trying to work out the exact composition of the material.
The most important parts of Rudzitin’s journal have been a painfully slow translation process—I’m hardly fluent in Aramaic.
I’ve spent the last couple of years working on them and still only understand a fraction.
But I’ve figured out where to focus my efforts, and I’m proud to say I’ve made real progress in the last few months.
It binds her, the spell you might call it, but it does so much more than that.
Unfortunately, I don’t have Rudzitin’s genius, but I have determination and a few things he didn’t have. ”
“What’s that?” I can’t help asking.
“Time, for one,” she says with a grin, moving toward the stairs. “Money, for two. And you.”
“Me?” Her hubris is unmistakable, a bitter spice salting the air that I can practically taste. My mind goes to Cadence, what she senses that the rest of us can’t. I wonder what she knows that she isn’t sharing.
“Yes, kitten. You. The final piece on the board. Now I only need to make the plays and checkmate.”
I was right: It’s been a game to her all along. “I don’t understand. What do I have to do with any of this?”
“You’re the fire, Jude,” she tells me, her sultry eyes sparkling. “And that’s where things are forged. Things that last.”
“You’re not making sense.” But I remember Twig’s eerie explanation to Cadence— You are the tool … You are the ingredient … We are the spell.
“I make perfect sense,” she assures me. “The Fathom gives many gifts. Water, dreams, darkness. Power, magic, energy.” She saunters toward me. “Fire … and death.” Her stare is unrelenting, even in the faint light, and a shudder runs through me at her piercing gaze. “You’re a twofer.”
She’s seen me strip Seattle’s icon of its electricity, knows I’ve been setting fires since I was a child. But she’s referring to something else. I back up a step.
“You’ve felt the heat and the grave.” Her gaze hovers. “That means we have a full circle now. With your help, we can finish what Rudzitin started, keep her here in perpetuity.”
The full set Brennan mentioned. Is that all this is about? Continuing to hold the Fathom hostage?
“You saw the slime mold,” she continues. “It’s contained, but it’s growing. I don’t know what it means exactly, but it can’t be good. For anyone.”
I grab her arm. “Arla, what’s down there, it’s not natural. Don’t you see? It’s beyond you, me, any of us.” My mother’s words are a ghost at my back: Don’t toy with things you don’t understand.
She jerks her arm away. “Nothing is beyond me, Jude. Not anymore. Not if we stick together.” Her face slips from snarl to smile.
“And you’re wrong. The Fathom is the most natural thing in the world.
More natural even than you or I. You know, I have to say, I expected something far less puritanical from you. ”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Frustrated, I follow her up the stairs into the storage room and immediately collapse against a wall, blinded by the lighting raining acid on my retinas.
Arla loops an arm in mine and steers me toward the club and elevator. I don’t really understand what’s happening, only that staring into that well has given me hyper-photosensitivity. The light unbearable.
“It takes time to process it,” she says in a soothing whisper. “You’re discombobulated, is all, your senses in upheaval. I told you this would happen. You’ve had your whole world turned upside down. Fear is normal at first.”
But it’s not the fear that feels out of place to me, it’s the lack of it. That Arla seems perfectly at ease living over the mythical equivalent of an active volcano is delusional. “How deep does that well go?”
“Wells are anywhere from ten to hundreds of feet deep,” she answers.
“But that one … We’re not even twenty feet above sea level in Pioneer Square.
He dug deep enough to hit the saltwater-freshwater interface—the journal indicates that much.
And it’s grated at the bottom. But how far beyond that, I haven’t been able to deduce.
The deepest well in the world goes more than twelve hundred feet down,” she says.
“And it’s not holding an ancient elemental entity. ”
I shiver imagining the potential scope.
“But it’s not like I’m going to call groundwater services to have it surveyed,” she tells me. “Even with a complete translation of the journal, I’m not sure I’ll ever truly understand how he did it.”
Back in her loft, she deposits me on a barstool and starts making a tall glass of ice water. “You need to hydrate,” she says, passing it to me. My head is beginning to throb with the impending drum of a killer headache. “And you need rest. The first time is difficult.”
“Why?” Though I don’t know if I can trust her answer.
“Because everything inside you is revolting against what you’ve learned. All those carefully ordered neural pathways are rerouting themselves, gouging new trenches into your brain. Even your organs can feel the change. They’ll resist at first, but with time it gets easier.”
Anneli’s blindness from her encounter comes back to me. Is that what happened? Did her eyes revolt against the vision in Svalbard?
But I can see, if painfully. And Arla seems to think my reaction will be short-lived. “How many times have you been down there?”
“As many as it takes.” Her eyes are flat, a wall I cannot scale. “It’s different for me.”
“Why?”
“We belong to each other,” she says simply. “The Fathom and me.”
It’s clear that she believes it, but I don’t.
That creature I witnessed—she doesn’t belong to anyone.
I’ve known creatures like that before. My grandfather.
My grandmother. Some things simply don’t fit in cages.
It’s a drug to Arla, the power she’s sitting over.
I can understand the pull. I’ve felt it myself, that insatiable craving for limitlessness.
But I can’t understand the ignorance. It’s willful and reckless.
“You said that she called you.” I watch her for any reaction that will explain. Does Arla hear a voice like I do? “What did you mean?”
She nods. “It was nearly three years ago. I was looking for a new place to land. My relationship with my father was strained beyond repair.”
I keep quiet, the headline Brennan showed me glaring behind my eyes. Drowning will do that, I think.
“I started to feel a tug westward, away from Colorado and everything I’d known, a pull to the coast and the water.
” Her eyes meet mine and cut away, as if she doesn’t want me to read too much in them.
“I’ve always loved the water. I was barely walking when my mother found me in the neighbor’s pond, swimming as if I were born to it.
It made sense, at that point in my life, that I would find my way to the water again.
But in the end, it wasn’t the ocean I found. It was her.
“I wanted to invest in real estate, build something for myself for a change. I was drawn to this listing, to its dilapidated basement. The second I saw the door, I knew. I made an offer on the spot. It took time to figure out how to get inside. The key—”
“It appears and disappears,” I note.
“Yes, it’s part of the spell. In the beginning, I slept down there on a mattress on the floor.
My dreams were a vivid, repetitive, thrashing sequence of events—the stacking of bricks, the painting of words, the call to the deep and her arrival, the man before her, short but proud, the magic barely holding, the fire eating a path through the city.
Until I saw him stand before the door one night and hold out his palm.
He spoke a word—Aramaic for gift—and a key appeared.
The next morning, I tried it, and that was the first time I stepped inside.
Now, I have only to think it and the key appears. ”
“And after? When it goes away?”
She shrugs one shoulder. “I simply think it gone again once the door is locked, and poof.”
The story Brennan told me about Arla’s water-dowsing days makes more sense.
If the Fathom called her, it must have sensed her affinity for water, a magic that would enable her to find it when no one else could.
But why does the Fathom need Arla? There can only be one reason—it’s looking for someone to free it.
“What about the rest of us?” I press. “Why drag us into this?”
Arla schools her gaze just left of mine. “I told you. We need a full circle to complete the spell.”