Q hefts Aiden back to his feet. “Faster!”
The hallways become a blur as we run through them. El Cid seems to know which way she’s going. Or maybe she doesn’t, maybe we have to keep going forward because the devils are right behind us.
As if to match my previous fear, ruby veins are now running through these rooms, bathing us in their blood-colored light.
“Can you feel it?” Nebuchadnezzar asks Aiden. “Can you feel your soul?”
Aiden stops and closes his eyes for a moment.
“Move!” El Cid shouts back at us.
Aiden shakes his head. “No,” his voice is faint.
I grab his hand, tugging him along.
“Stay near the back, Q.” Cid orders.
“You’re lost,” Q accuses, “you need my help.”
“They need you,” she shouts back.
Why are they shouting?
Because the hellsong is so loud. Because all I can hear is Myla’s sick, low, and sultry voice humming the saddest song I’ve ever heard.
Q drops behind us as I drag Aiden after El Cid. None of these rooms have any natural stone at all. They are opening up though, each one sporting many more exits and hallways—a hundred new ways for the dyitzu to come at us. The ceilings are rising too. I’m hoping this gives El Cid enough options to lead us to where we need to go.
I’m guessing we’re headed toward the second peak. The deeper in we travel, the more subjective reality becomes. The more subjective it is, the more likely Aiden is to be able to find his soul.
“I’ve seen this room before!” Nebuchadnezzar yells. “I was just thinking about it.”
“We haven’t gone in a circle,” El Cid insists.
“Keep moving!” I shout.
The dyitzu must be close because I can hear them over the hellsong. Damn. I wonder how many followed us in here. A thousand?
“No,” Nebuchadnezzar answers, his crazy blue eyes looking all around. “I mean I saw this room before, back near the Pole.”
Oh shit. And the azure lighting, and the red lighting . . . I had thought of those before they happened too.
“The rooms, Cid!” Q yells from behind me. “They’re taking on the nature of our thoughts.”
El Cid shakes her head. “But there are no Furies! We can’t be that far in yet.”
“It’s happening, Cid!” Q shouts.
She leads us deeper in. I can practically hear the dyitzu breathing behind us.
El Cid seems more confident now, leading us quickly from room to room with a purpose.
“The shape of the rooms are the same!” she shouts. “It’s just the features we’re adding.”
She must have taken us in a circle, maybe to test her theory, because we come upon a pair of surprised dyitzu from behind. They turn at the sound of her voice and hurl fire. She cuts them down with wide, quick strokes.
“That may not keep happening as we go deeper in,” Nebuchadnezzar says. “The stone of the rooms themselves might change.”
Aiden stops, putting his hands on his knees. I’d pick him up if I could, but the most I can do is grab his hand and drag him with us.
“Pay attention to the rooms,” Cid says. “We’ll have to remember them to get back.”
Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m barely awake enough to think, let alone memorize the rooms we’re running through. I do my best to remember them by their shape and by the color of the crystals or the vein of lightrock, but when I try to recall them, they’ve fled from my mind. Maybe I can just remember a little, and someone else can remember a different part. Together we might find our way back.
The rooms become hypnotic, as if each one is a single note in a vile lullaby, tricking my mind into relaxing. And it needs to relax so badly. My body is dying, my lungs are aching, and the muscles in my arms are so full of blood I can barely move them. Aiden stumbles on behind me, my reason for existence.
I see a shadow of a man down a side corridor. He darts away.
No one else seems to have seen him.
“There are people down here!” I warn.
“You’re seeing things,” Q yells back.
“I saw someone.” Unless I’m insane. Unless that was a figment of my mad mind impressing itself upon the world around us.
“You must have seen a dyitzu,” El Cid shouts.
“I know what I saw!”
They don’t believe me. Cid’s leading us up a series of long corridors now, but I think we’re still heading in a straight line away from where we entered. I think. There’s no way to know.
“Shit!” Q yells.
Aiden is trying to stop again. I grab his wrist more forcefully. He turns his head and vomits. My heart dies in my chest. His body is half dead, his organs half turned, and we’re taking him at a full run through this hell.
“What?” El Cid calls back.
“Cris is right, we are not alone.”
“Your minds are making it up,” she says.
“I don’t think so, Cid.”
“But this place has been abandoned since . . . I mean, it hasn’t been safe to come here for two thousand years.”
But I feel what Q is feeling. There’s something below us, far below us maybe, but I sense its evil, its dark intentions, radiating up through Soulfall, this world which is changing to match its malice.
Myla’s voice is joyous. It rises from the lowest depths of despair to the highest notes of ecstasy. But joy isn’t the right word. I can feel the music in my bones. It overpowers all that I can hear.
Aiden must feel better after his vomiting because the hellsong is coming from his mind—or at least, that’s what I think. We’ve all heard her voice, now.
We run down a long hallway. Just as we leave it, I see dyitzu pouring in.
“Behind!” Q warns.
El Cid takes us along a quick series of turns and then down a set of stairs. The dyitzu might have been able to keep up, but with the hellsong so loud, I doubt they can hear our footsteps.
Christ, I’m lost. We’re not going to be able to find our way out of here again. This labyrinth will be our tomb.
Apparently satisfied that we lost them, El Cid slows and leads us into the next room.
There is a man there, dressed in dyitzu skin leathers, barefoot and unarmed.
“Salvete,” he says, his voice hollow.
“Salve,” El Cid answers, walking by him.
We follow her, and the man starts to follow us. Hell. Is he an enemy? Will he attack? What language was he speaking?
He shouts some more words.
“What’s he saying?” Q asks.
“Babbling,” El Cid says. “I think he’s insane.”
And the rooms seem to match his state of mind. They have become twisted and odd. Stairways lead up into walls. Doors jut out from ceilings. El Cid takes us through a hallway that dead ends. She turns around.
“I’m lost!” Q shouts.
“Me too,” El Cid answers.
My blood runs cold, but she keeps us moving. She’s got to. Lost or no, the dyitzu are still behind us.
The next room has stone ribs coming out of the walls. The top half of a human is trapped there. The ribs press across his body, keeping him still against the grey stone. The ruby red light covers him over, and his guts, strung out from his torso, form a small pile on the ground where they glisten in the light. This man speaks as well, perhaps in that same language. Cid ignores him.
“We’re going down!” Q yells. “We need to go up.”
El Cid turns, the red light masking the green of her eyes. “There’s no way up.”
So we go down.
I hear something over the hellsong. A raven calling perhaps? Or several of them. We come into the next room. It too has the rib cage walls, but its floor is covered with tiny grey-skinned babies. There are toddlers in the back, eating some of the younger ones. Then I realize the babies are trying to eat each other as well, gnawing their siblings’ limbs with their toothless gums. In the back
of the room, held down by the stone ribs in the wall, is a pregnant woman. She’s screaming, though I can barely hear her over the hellsong. Even as she shouts an infant comes head first out of her distended vagina. It drops to the ground, its placenta following. The smell of fetid and perverse afterbirth assaults me.
One of the older children picks up the gooey organic mass and starts to eat it. Another chews at the umbilical cord, slurping it up into its mouth like it was some giant piece of spaghetti. The freshly born infant reaches out with one of his skinny arms and grabs hold of one of its brothers. It tries to eat the ankle with a strength and dexterity which should be beyond a newborn—only without teeth, not much happens. The real damage is done on the right side of the room where the children are older.
They are fighting and wrestling, rolling amidst the younger infants, crushing them, sometimes devouring them. They get older as I follow them around the circle of this room until I make it back to the woman. There, one of those grey skinned children has grown old enough to become an adolescent. He’s aroused.
He enters his mother, but pulls away quickly as another child comes out.
The mother screeches.
I feel something pressing against the shoes Jessica gave me. One of the babies is trying to eat through the leather.
“We have to go forward!” Q yells over the hellsong and the sound of a thousand crying, dying and feeding children.
“We’ll hurt them!” El Cid yells.
A toddler has made it over to Nebuchadnezzar. “You killed us!” Its tiny voice holds a strange and special hatred. “You killed our mothers. You killed our fathers.”
Not good.
The mass of children starts moving toward us. Even the infants, who should be too young to understand or even crawl. Hell, maybe none of them should even speak English.
Q grabs Cid by the shoulder. “Now, Cid!”
El Cid’s sword flicks back and forth, tearing a way through the room. The children shout in pain. The toddlers clutch at their wounds and cower. The adolescents slink away, teeth bared. The infants cry as she crushes them beneath her boots. Q falls in behind her, his purple sword widening the path. Aiden follows that path of blood and death. I hear the sorrowful crying of the mother. She must be in so much pain, and she must be insane, but for some reason her tears sound fresh, as if the wound was new.
Maybe it would be worth it to cut our way to her and kill her—to save her from this Hell.
But El Cid doesn’t take us that way. We come toward the back of the chamber. The woman’s crying doesn’t stop, it keeps with us. It is so soulful I want to cry myself. I cover my ears and yell. It’s like before, when El Cid insulted me, and the part of my mind that was supposed to defend me from insults had failed. Only now the pain is so much worse. How long has that woman been here . . .
El Cid turns, and I realize it isn’t the mother who’s crying.
Tears are rolling down her face, washing away the blood of the children she’d just murdered. Snot pours freely from her nose. She’s shaking violently with her grief.
I wonder what it must have been like for her to cut through those grey children. I wonder, had she been anything other than an infidel, if she would have even been able to do it.
I fall to my knees in front of her and wrap her up in a hug. From behind us, the sounds of dyitzu fire and shouting babies echo in. El Cid sobs in my arms like Aiden might. I’d forgotten how small she is. The tears and snot soak into my shirt.
She shakes and shakes and shakes.
The children, she must have somehow managed to love every single one of them.
Q grabs her shoulder with one hand. “Come on!” I hear him shout. “Come on! They’re coming.”
But El Cid can’t move. She’s stayed strong this whole time, while the rest of us broke down. We acted on our hearts and made her do the hard work. We made her override us when we were too irrational. We made her come up with the solutions when we had none.
“Now!” Q screams.
He pulls us both to our feet and pushes us along. Aiden is ahead of us and Neb is trying to catch up.
“Do you know where we are?” Q is yelling at El Cid.
She’s still crying, and she’s not even focused on him. A dyitzu rounds the corner. I hit it in the face with the Old Lady.
It drops to the ground, its clawed fingers clutching at its eyes. I ram the butt of my shotgun into its skull again and again.
I turn back to Q and Cid.
“Do you know?” Q is shouting at her. “Which direction to the upper mountain?”
El Cid is focusing on him now, but her eyes are still full of sorrow. “I don’t know.”
For the first time in my life, I see what Q’s face looks like when he’s afraid.
El Cid falls back against a stone wall. Q’s nervous eyes are glancing all around us. Neb’s mask is long gone. He’s brushing his hands over his grey trenchcoat, again and again and again and again. Aiden sits down and looks back toward the room with the children. Some were his own age. Some of the ones we killed, even.
Myla’s voice is as clear as a bell. It rings softly through the halls, reminding me of futures we could have had. Of the things we missed in the Old World. Of what it might have been like to grow old with each other. It was Hell that tore us apart. On Earth, things would have been different. I can see her now, standing at my grave. She’s old. Sad. Crying.
She lays orchids on the ground where my body would have rested.
It’s like that, you know, for a person who spent fifty years loving another. Fucking and kissing and hating and fighting and holding and singing. I can’t think of such things, I have to think of the shape of the rooms. El Cid said that the rock didn’t change, only what was imprinted on the rock did. But how could she know? If, in such a place, believing a thing made it true, how could she know whether the underlying rock really was the same, or if it was her expectation that made it seem so?
The brained dyitzu’s blood is creeping across the floor. One thing is certain, we can’t stay here.
“Follow me!” I shout.
El Cid struggles back to her feet. Q moves to pick up Aiden, but my boy waves him off.
“I can run,” Aiden says. “The pain, it isn’t bad here.”
“Can you feel it yet?” Neb’s voice is thick with a German accent. “Can you feel the ether?”
Aiden shakes his head.
I plow forward into the dark.
I hear their footsteps behind me. There must be some way to figure this maze out. There has to be a way we can get across to the far mountain. But how can I begin to find out where I’m going if I don’t know if El Cid was right when she said the stone can’t move?
There is a way to know. We could have other people, who didn’t know or believe that stricture, walk into those rooms and measure them. Then we could compare their measurements with hers.
Damn, now I get it.
I realize why there’s no magic. Because even when magic is real, the only way to understand it is to understand its nature. The entire idea of the supernatural is bullshit. Even here, surrounded by a supernatural reality, surrounded by relativism, the only way to make any progress in understanding is to think analytically about it. The stuff of the Erebus, the ether of the world Nebuchadnezzar just mentioned, it exists—and anything that exists must do so under a set of circumstances. It must have nature.
That’s what Q meant about Earth’s lightning being magic. It was pretty awesome, an unmeasurable energy that strikes backward, whose parts, electrons, could be in two places at once, and could ignore causality. What could be more supernatural than that? But lightning is completely natural. Humans had missed the boat! We kept looking around us for magic and magicians, but we had missed the fact that we had already learned the magic and become the magicians ourselves.
So it doesn’t really matter if I know the way up to the second mountain. What matters is that the most powerful subconscious around us believes I know the way—an
d if the hellsong is any indication—that subconscious is Aiden’s.
“Where are we?” Nebuchadnezzar shouts.
“Getting close!” I yell back.
Q’s face is blank.
El Cid is right behind him. She’s got a crooked little grin behind her tears.
Nebuchadnezzar is just behind Aiden, his pole swinging back and forth as he runs. “The hell do you think you’re taking us?”
I stop, turn and grab him by the shoulders. “I know the way! I figured it out.”
For a moment he doesn’t believe me, but then his skepticism breaks. Maybe he can see the grin I feel on my face. Maybe it doesn’t look as mad as I think it must. Maybe his wish-thinking is getting the better of him again. Hell, it could even be that he figured out how believing in me might be self-fulfilling—but whatever the case—the key is that Aiden saw him believe in me. And as long as Aiden buys this, we’re home free.
Myla’s music sounds a little less sad.
My friends and son, they eagerly follow me now as I race onward, downward, into the depths. When I round the next corner, I see a bundle of orchids. They’re the ones I imagined just moment’s ago. I hear Myla’s singing, but it’s different now. She’s singing a song I know. A song that was my lullaby when I was dying of cancer.
In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine,
Lived a miner, forty-niner
And his daughter Clementine.
The dyitzu come at us while Myla sings us the chorus. One of their clawed feet crushes the heads of some of the orchids. El Cid’s white blade snakes out into the darkness as Neb and I rush forward. I duck below a fireball and end up tripping to the ground, but Neb keeps going. He’s swinging away at them as I regain my feet. They’re not all dead, but we keep running.
I can see the other people, now, the hopeless souls down here. They’ve been lost so long, their minds feeding into the environment, the environment feeding into their minds. They must be mad.
Light she was and like a fairy, Myla sings on.
And her shoes were number nine
Soulfall (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 2) Page 11
