Black Bottle

by Anthony Huso

  She was sturdy and powerful but he knew that she shouldn’t be doing this. None of them should be doing this.

  * * *

  THE walls of Bablemum’s sewer system sloughed like diseased flesh. Pale leprous hunks of masonry buckled and spluttered into residual pools. Everywhere, it seemed, vesical-pipes dropped into the vault. Hydriform.

  But the inlets were quiet. Barely dribbling. They moaned with air currents, purposeless in the vacuum of the abandoned cityscape.

  Squelchy walls led in every direction but Caliph stuck to one, following the Veydens sack of netting, which cradled three glass balls—analogous to the city’s lamppost globes. As with the streetlamps, these too were filled with an oily liquid that emitted a cadaverous luminosity.

  They had been stored in separate niches at the bottom of the access point. The man had taken them out and slid each, clanking against the other, into the sack of netting. As he eased the last one in, some kind of proximal reaction had taken place and all three orbs began to bubble and glow.

  Without the language barrier Caliph would have asked what they were and how they worked. Instead, he said nothing.

  The sewer did not smell as bad anymore. The initial blast of fumes must have been lurking, trapped against the hatch. Down here, there was a breeze, cool and almost refreshing and Caliph realized that with such regular rain and no fresh waste being introduced, much of the sewage had already been flushed from Bablemum’s system.

  “I don’t believe they’re taking us to dinner,” said Baufent.

  “Me neither.”

  The man had given Taelin to one of the other Veydens, leaving one hand for the sack of lights and the other for his spear. It was bizarre. This man in fine clothes, carrying a spear through the tunnel.

  They passed beneath occasional grates that sluiced in streetlight and sound. Caliph heard trees shush-shushing. Then the narrow slits to the upper world disappeared and he felt himself sucked into another sagging archway.

  Finally, after tramping some way, the man’s oily light burst out over an uncertain precipice. The man held the netting high, revealing a dam of sorts that dropped off on the left into churlish reeking darkness. The air here was stirred by a never-ending gray waterfall, which poured from higher up on the right, over a series of smaller flumes that stepped through a vast angled tunnel. Caliph smelled minerals here and thought of Bablemum’s infamous mines. Maybe this was part of them, carrying out the dregs and sediment from what had once been constant digging.

  The man was crossing the dam, dragging the light with him. Caliph let Baufent go first, watching over her not only from the darkness that quickly converged behind them but from the possibility of a fall.

  Their path was furnished by a questionable catwalk that straddled a narrow viaduct. The viaduct was in turn supported by a series of pillars through which jetted the great cataract from the mines. Unlike the textured metal of the Bulotecus, the floor panels of this catwalk were poorly designed. Though they were grilled and therefore porous, they were also smooth and extremely slippery. Caliph kept a ready hand in the event Baufent lost her footing.

  Unintentionally, he tasted the mist before clamping his lips shut.

  The man with the lights used his single word again in an effort to coax Baufent along.

  “I’m coming, you oversized toad!” She said.

  “Take your time,” said Caliph. “They’ll wait.”

  “Of course they’ll wait! Do you think I’m a damned fool?” Her voice was angry but her arms shook a bit at the slender and overly rusted rail.

  “Take my hand.”

  “So you can drag me down too?”

  “Take it.”

  Baufent snapped her fingers around Caliph’s wrist. She looked at him meaningfully and said, “All right, hero. Get me out of here.”

  Caliph pivoted around her and took the lead. He adjusted her grip, reciprocating her wrist-lock, then, slowly, he began guiding her toward the Veydens.

  They reached the end with only one close call and stepped from the catwalk back onto solid stone.

  “Thank you,” said Baufent.

  “Wouldn’t have to thank me if I hadn’t dragged you fourteen hundred miles,” said Caliph. He turned his hands upside down and pushed at the cushion of air between him and the Veydens, ushering them impatiently to get on with this ridiculous and dangerous excursion.

  They did, guiding him through a pointed archway into a nondescript and sloppy cellar that echoed with some dolorous mechanism laboring far above.

  A series of low, flat steps offered access to a strangely domestic-looking but dingy hallway. The floor had been tiled in tasteless ocher and lavender squares—many of which were broken or missing. The glass spheres in the net illuminated a rusted iron door.

  Caliph felt the fumes of the waterfall pull past him and thought he could now interpret the sound as a chugging ventilation fan, though its location remained a mystery.

  The Veyden guide rattled at the door. He did not seem to have a key or any other means of opening it but there was a chain attached to a strip of rusted metal that he could have slid within a frame. A peep slot, Caliph realized. It was the chain that the man had rattled.

  Instantly, beyond the portal a faint sound of frenzied movement reverberated softly. More the ghost of sound than real sound, the clamor splashed and roiled only a moment before settling into ominous silence. For several long moments Caliph listened to the distant splish of the falls and the ghostly sound of glugging pipes. He waited for the peep slot to slide back, for someone to demand a password.

  The Veydens waited too, frightened looks on their faces. Why were they frightened? Caliph had a bad feeling about whatever was going to happen. He didn’t have a weapon. Baufent would be useless in a fight. And the three Veydens would make short work of him.

  The peep slot did not slide back. It never slid back.

  Rather, a harsh squeak followed by a rusted clank bounced through the tiled hall. On the other side of the door Caliph heard a metal bolt retract and the portal creaked open. A tantalizing fissure peered into the darkness. An audible gasp rose out of the black, as though lungs full of liquefied sickness had breathed too deeply.

  Then the door swung wide and Caliph nearly screamed.

  CHAPTER

  49

  What Caliph had taken for negative space beyond the door, was in fact a hunched but enormous bulwark-like body, draped in inky cloth.

  The Veydens seemed to melt before it, trembling.

  When this daemon-shape spoke, a kind of “Hlnugh’dugh!” sound, the solid metal door vibrated. Caliph could assign no recognizable language to the voice and considered that it might have been a feral croak.

  Whatever was underneath the shimmering blackness was only vaguely man-shaped. Caliph had the impression that the longer he looked, the less man-like it became, as if in that first glance his mind had tried to bend what his eyes took in.

  It reached out, which elicited a yelp from Baufent, because this thing belonged in a wax museum of static nightmares, not here, not shifting and sentient, not groaning in the dark.

  When its hand or paw extended to the edge of the door, Caliph felt his sanity slip. The paw rose from what was not precisely an arm, anchored to a hump of evil muscle. It was the only part of the actual entity exposed beyond the cloth and when it took hold of the scabrous door frame it made the metal groan.

  The room beyond the door was sunken so that Caliph realized he was viewing the monster only from the waist up. As it leaned hunchback, gripping the door frame, Caliph got the impression of a giant crone peering through her window at him. Its enormous pink hand, pale as pork fat, held the casement with the wrong number of fingers, each only two knuckles long.

  Caliph could feel hidden eyes examining him while the huge filthy brown talons flexed and gouged the metal as if it had been clay.

  He had nothing to focus on besides the paw. Black silk in a black sewer swung in the black doorway so that only this thing,
this paw, a gift of raw fish, glistened in the Veyden’s light.

  The hand’s corpulence was so swollen that it looked as if touching it might cause it to tear open. Caliph decided he was not looking at skin but at raw exposed tissue—that was alive with wriggling, threshing forms. He realized that they were not parasitic worms but pulsing veins, squirming as if the creature’s circulatory system had a mind of its own.

  When he heard the dreadful inhuman voice again—slurred inarticulate, and soft, semi-consonants melting into one another, he felt the blood leave his head. What kept him conscious was the shrieking sound of the paw coming away from the door frame, swinging back down into the pure black folds, disappearing and taking great hunks of metal with it.

  The claw’s absence made room for the Veyden to use the doorway but Caliph’s guide was rooted in place. If the Veydens had betrayed him, they seemed just as terrified as he was. Caliph assumed that this strange reality was based on facts he had no access to. He wasn’t trying to piece it together. He was looking for escape.

  Back in the direction of the dam there was no light, just the distant roar of water. Baufent was still staring through the doorway, lips parted, cheeks trembling.

  Caliph glared at the man who had led him here but then, the situation that had been impossible for him to understand became more so as, for no apparent reason, the monster behind the door reached out and grabbed Caliph’s Veyden guide. The pink paw came through the doorway and enfolded the Veyden, large enough to engulf the seven-foot man.

  In response, the man dropped his net full of glowing spheres.

  Caliph scrambled for them but they were already beyond his reach. They tumbled over the threshold, down a set of steep stone steps and into the sunken room. Caliph watched them go. One cracked and intense liquid sprayed through the fissure, losing its luminosity as it wet the wall.

  The Veyden screamed as he disappeared under the black canopy of silk. A mortifying crunch put an abrupt end to his wailing.

  What were the other Veydens doing? Caliph couldn’t see. Darkness had swallowed everything. He heard a second man scream. It too was cut short and followed by gruesome crunching. Caliph remembered his guide’s spear. It must have fallen somewhere. He dropped to his hands and knees, desperately searching.

  That was the moment he heard her voice.

  It spoke in a language he didn’t understand.

  A prickle at the base of his hairline crawled up the back of his skull as Caliph’s eyes adjusted to the new level of gloom. Past the hideous black-draped shape that still swayed guardian, he detected a strange halo of light whose origin seemed remote.

  It bled from behind a familiar, slender, diminutive silhouette.

  Sena stood at least thirty feet away, perhaps at the center of the space beyond the door.

  * * *

  THE other Veyden wasn’t making noise. He might have crawled back toward the roaring cataract, feeling his way through the dark. Caliph didn’t know.

  Baufent stood over Taelin’s senseless form, staring into the only light left: a pallid radiance that streamed—or so it seemed—from between Sena’s shoulder blades.

  “The flawless won’t touch you,” said Sena.

  Caliph didn’t know about that. The sounds of chewing, of breaking and grinding had only recently stopped. They had been terrible, and like the aftermath of a devastating quake, the silence that followed was both profound and uncertain.

  He looked over his shoulder one more time at Baufent. Her eyes darted to him. She seemed to know what he was going to do. Without a word, she communicated her demands. Get back here! Don’t you dare leave me!

  He motioned her to stay put, then looked down the stairs, past the hulking thing toward Sena’s halo.

  Crossing the threshold was like entering a crypt. The room smelled of things long settled.

  “What are you doing down here?” His voice was unsteady. “What happened at Sandren? What is all of this?”

  He put the huge silk-covered thing behind him as he crossed the room but it was still there. It creaked against reality’s floorboards, almost insupportable.

  He refused to look at it, keeping his eyes on Sena.

  The steps had been uneven and slick with the fluid burst from the glass spheres, but the floor of the room was equally treacherous. It was relatively dry but each step sank in, an inch or more, into a peat-like sediment. It was like walking on cake.

  “Why are you here?” He tried to keep his voice level but detected the sound of pleading in it. He was unprepared for the truth.

  “I’m not with Them, Caliph.” His heart swelled momentarily. “But I wanted you to open that door.” The metaphor she had used on the airship came back to him. “I wanted you to see these things behind it because you never believed me. You never listened to me about your uncle’s book. I just needed you to understand.”

  From behind, Baufent called out to him, desperate, pleading. Her voice prompted a vague sense of responsibility that he ignored.

  The room was some kind of empty septic tank and as he crossed it, it sank its cold moldy teeth into his chest. He detected a slope. Some cement structure meant to control the flow of sediment. Sena stood on top of it. She was only a few steps away now. She said something in the language Caliph couldn’t understand and the thing at the doorway moved away. Caliph heard other movements in the tank. Other vast shapes, which he had not even noticed, began to disperse, hauling their giant forms into equally sized culverts.

  “You have to understand something,” she said as he approached. “It’s you and me. Just you and…” Her voice trailed off for several seconds, hinting at deeper meanings. “… me.”

  “Is it?” A tatting of mold on one of the room’s pillars seemed to absorb the phosphorescent light coming from her back. “I don’t think it’s been you and me for a long time now.”

  Little was clear to Caliph except that Sena was standing in this horrid tank, surrounded by miscreations.

  The long chase had worn him down. He had made up his mind, finally. But the realization made him miserable and desolate. He felt sick. Sick and weak and exhausted. He reached out and grabbed her by her fashionable jacket, hands knotting into fists.

  He shook her violently. He took her by the throat. She was light and her body jerked limply under the force, as if she was helpless. She winced. He threw her on the ground.

  “What did you do!” he screamed at her. “What did you do!”

  All the dead people poured out through his scream. He could feel them as if they were there. His responsibility. As if they were staring at him right now. Alani and Sig and all the rest.

  Sena did not look up from where he had thrown her. Light trickled between her leather collar and the back of her neck. It lit her hair. He could see flecks of sewer mud. Glops of black gunk from a puddle near her arm had splashed up and spattered her shoulder.

  Chest heaving with shame and anger and uncertainty he stood over her with one bizarre thought in his head: what now?

  He certainly wasn’t going to sink down on his knees and touch her, help her up, clean her off. What he was thinking of doing was unspeakable.

  “Drink it, Caliph.”

  He couldn’t see her face. He swung his chin to one side and cocked his head. Incredulous. He wasn’t listening to her. He would never listen to her again.

  But already he had reached inside his pocket and found the tiny metal flask. It was leaden in his hand.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t. This is over. This madness. It stops here. You’re going to fix it.” He was embarrassed at how childish his words sounded. “Get up,” he told her.

  A few huge shapes shifted in the black wings of the chamber. Apparently not all of her immense underlings had left. He sensed some of them might be drawing closer but he didn’t dare to look. Were they her bodyguards? Would one of them now reach out and break him in its mouth?

  Baufent’s voice called again, thousands of miles away.

  Sena’s whisper
drowned the doctor out. She whispered to the flawless first, passing them some instruction. Then she whispered to him. “You know everything you need, do you? To make your decision? Is that it, Caliph? You know so much?”

  “You’ve been dosing me with these tinctures. Who knows what—”

  “Your third dose isn’t going to kill you. Drink it.” She rolled onto her side and looked up at him. There was an ugly smear of mud on her face.

  “Fix it,” he said. “Fix what you did!”

  “I will. You drink it and I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.”

  “Fix it now!” He wanted to call her a murderer, but felt the hypocrisy of the thing. He wanted to blame all his frustrations on her, starting with her inattentiveness over the past year to everything from the plague and his dead friends right down to this moment standing in this deplorable room. But he couldn’t. No matter what holomorphy she had used, he had chosen this. He had arrived here under his own power.

  “If you don’t drink it, I won’t stop you. You can strangle me if you want. It’s what you’re thinking. And I’ll let you do it. But what will happen next, Caliph? Think about that. What will happen next?”

  Caliph did think about that. She was crazy. She had always been crazy. And that was why he was here. Because he had always gone along with it. But not anymore. This was it. This was the last time.

  “I drink it and you fix everything? Can you can really do that?”

  “I can really do that, Caliph.”

  He hated her. He hated her more in that moment than he had ever hated anyone, because even now with her lying in the shit of civilization, at his feet, she was still somehow more powerful than he could understand.

  “Gods-fucking-dammit!” He could smell the drug before he unscrewed the cap. The memory of it. Its taste and aroma were already burned into his brain. What was he going to do instead? Go back to Baufent and help her drag Taelin up to street level? And then what? Find food? Barricade against the creatures?

  So maybe this was the easy way out. And he was a gutless shit-heel. He had always suspected himself a coward. And maybe this was the worst moment of his life. He hated the sense of inevitability. With the flask open, the sweet tea-and-mint smell sickening the air, he tipped it into his mouth.