The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  Breezes commingling through various tunnels brought her the smell of foods cooking. Not all of the odors appealed, but she started salivating. She said nothing of the tight hungry knot in her belly. Mad as he was, Glimet probably would have insisted they join some group for a meal, shot himself in the head with that lousy bulb of his, and been sucked right out, the last of him, into the stratosphere, leaving her lost and without her medicine.

  Staked-out territories grew fewer and fewer. They came to a blue tile station stop, labeled “22nd Street” where they went around a narrow bend, then descended a stairwell into a smoky cavern.

  The single point of illumination was a grated vent to the surface. Debris from numerous cave-ins blocked the walkway ahead. Elsewhere lay mounds of dirt and concrete, and bent iron rods sticking out of the walls like the broken feelers of giant insects. Farther back lay the yawning mouths of multiple lightless tunnels. A diesel smell hung in the air.

  Glimet turned away from the debris, journeying across the cavern. She followed him to where the floor ended abruptly. Below lay a greasy pit, and in it, the rails. Despite the fact that subways hadn’t run for more than a decade, the railheads still shone in the gray light. Maybe, she thought, all the oil kept them from rusting. “All the oil” was something she had never seen, something which had existed a couple of generations ago. Old people still sometimes talked about “all the oil.”

  Glimet eased his invisible body into the rail pit. “You gotta c-come down here, too,” he wheezed, once he’d gained his footing. “The platform is blocked off where the roof fell over there. You can’t use it anymore.” She glanced nervously back along the track and Glimet laughed. “There’s no Septas. They all stopped. Ya got to get down, sweetie. I’ll help you.”

  Once in the pit, they strode down the center of the track. The rails were attached by large blocks to a relatively flat bed. Between the rails she found all sorts of things—the crooked handle from an old umbrella, plastic silverware, even a few old aluminum cans that she gathered up, knowing that she could trade them. Glimet seemed to take no notice, although it was difficult to see him now.

  They bypassed the collapsed area and entered the tunnels. The track did not appear to curve, but soon the lighter point of entry vanished behind them and the rails became all but invisible. “We have to go this way,” Glimet insisted. His voice smothered her. The air had become still, oppressive. The odor of diesel enshrouded her. She splashed through a pool of water, cursing it. After the third or fourth one, she stopped worrying.

  Blindly, she scuffled behind him.

  Things moved about in the darkness, skittering away at their approach. Rats, probably. Rats didn’t scare her.

  For what seemed like hours they pushed through the blackness, at first toward nothing. When a small spot of light appeared before her, Amerind thought it was an illusion, a false image in the retina. To her right, she discovered that she could see pale lines appearing as if in the air and she had time to be afraid before she realized that it was real, not magic at all—white-painted graffiti on the black tunnel walls.

  Ahead, the light source grew, and she found that she saw it more clearly when she didn’t look directly at it. Shadows lay inside it, lines and planes that soon solidified into a concrete wall with a broad recessed niche above a rough dirt floor.

  The light came from another street level vent. A faint buzz, as of insects, came to them as they neared the vent. Not surprisingly, the area stank violently of human waste; someone had been using the vent as a makeshift outhouse.

  Shikker held her nose and cautiously squinted up through the rough circle of dripping metal gridwork through which the light spilled like milk. She could make out the edge of a building in the background, but it might have been any one in the Overcity. She guessed that they’d crossed to the far side of the river. What buildings might remain there, she had no idea. The west gate had a reputation for being the one where more people got waylaid, beaten, or went missing. Here, however, was a sneaky way in, if they could find a ladder, and the vent up there wasn’t welded. Given its other use, no one was likely to investigate it too closely.

  She turned aside, intending to share this with Glimet, but found a monster standing before her. She cried out and jumped up into the putrid vent shaft. Glimet lay on the ground. The monster ignored her. It was closing on him.

  It was squat, and broad around the middle. Wild hair stood out like oily weeds over its mushroom head. Layers of loose clothing covered up most of the body—just the hands and face showed in the gray light, but that was enough.

  Huge, purplish knots jutted from its dark skin, protruding randomly across the surfaces of both face and hands. The entire body was probably covered with grotesque, seeping nodes. Shikker couldn’t even see any eyes because of the knots. The eyes were pits into which no light fell.

  The monster paused and considered her briefly before addressing Glimet. When it spoke, the voice was so compassionate, so feminine, that Glimet looked around at Shikker. “You’re nearly lost,” it said.

  ***

  The name suited her—Horrible Woman. Chemosh and Tecato had done justice to her ugliness in their stories, but they’d said nothing of the accompanying aura of unimaginable pain held in check by sheer force of will. The woman must have been in agony every moment. Shikker could sense it, smell it, like a ripe perfume coming off her, and she responded instinctively. She jumped down out of the vent.

  Horrible Woman glanced toward her, sizing her up. After a moment, she asked, “What are you doing so deep in here?”

  “Looking for you,” Shikker replied.

  Glimet raised the canvas bag. “You have supplies we need. I have some for you, to trade.” His head bobbed, then rose, with considerable effort, into the air. All the while he babbled about Amerind, about her wounds, her need.

  Horrible Woman considered what he said. Shikker noticed that each time they spoke to the woman she hesitated briefly before replying, as if each question and answer had to journey past her pain.

  She said, “So much disharmony. And you, doomed even now. Even now.”

  “Do-doomed?” He floated fearfully back.

  “Irreversibly. How did you let so much of yourself go? How could you watch yourself be devoured? How could you choose it?”

  Her questions were not dismissive; she seemed genuinely to want his explanation.

  Glimet faltered. He looked to Shikker for guidance but she shook her head. Already she had begun to doubt that she knew anything true about Orbiters.

  He tilted his head back. “‘How’ is because of the Other Place,” he said. “When I look at it, when I’m there, it’s the sweetest, the best thing. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’d—I’d put the bulb to my head and fire and fire and fire if it would get me there quicker, if that wouldn’t kill me. I don’t want to die, I want to go to the Other Place. It’s so good there.”

  Horrible Woman considered him for a long moment before turning to Amerind. “You’ll want your medicine. Come.” She swung heavily about and headed out of the light, into a different realm of darkness than the one they had just traversed.

  “I brought potatoes and beans both,” said the Orbiter. The bag floated forward in his invisible grip.

  “Reliable nutrients,” she said after a moment. Glimet floated like a buoy in her wake. Amerind tagged behind.

  As Glimet had related of his first encounter, they followed Horrible Woman by listening. Shikker caught hold of his cloak and let herself be pulled blindly along. In places where another vent or a hole flooded an area with light, the woman burst into view like a nightmare.

  They came upon another group of rails, two sets of tracks divided by a wall of vertical girders. Glimet stumbled in crossing them. Shikker helped him to his feet. In the pitch dark, he had substance, a spongy reality.

  By the time they were ready to move, they had lost their guide. Shikker cried out, her voice echoing.

  From off to the right, the gentle voice
replied, “Here! This way.” Horrible Woman had sensed their mishap and had lingered.

  Now Shikker led the way. Glimet held onto her shirttail. She reached out, patting at the darkness, then running her hand along the edge of the raised platform, using it as a guide, until her fingers closed around a cold metal handrail. She stubbed her toe against the first step up. She ascended. Something crunched underfoot.

  Soft fingers brushed her arm.

  “Jesus!” she shouted, and stumbled back against Glimet.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she snapped. “I just wasn’t ready.” She closed her eyes, summoning her will against the phobic dark. Trembling, she made herself reach forward again. She felt the knobs, soft as marshmallows, covering the hand. Against her blind terror, she let herself be touched, pulled, guided along a narrow ledge, and through a door, which, when it opened, revealed a dim light the color of brass. The woman let go of her.

  Beyond the door, the light defined a narrow landscape of broken concrete and sewer pipes. Where the walls had crumbled, the black bars of iron appeared as ribs. They followed the squat figure through all the debris, and finally around a high mound of sand, concrete, and brick.

  On the other side was the small makeshift camp that Glimet had earlier described. Cables had been strung across the room and wide sheets hung across them to make the walls of a deep tent. The glow came from inside the tent. The sheets were alive with the silhouettes of other people propped up within.

  The monster lingered at the edge of the tent, motioning for them to enter. Glimet lurched to a stop, and Amerind saw from his look that his nerves were frayed to the limit. He probably would have run if she hadn’t held onto him.

  “The supplies that you want are here,” Horrible Woman said. “What is it you’re afraid of?”

  He stared at the shifting shadows of the others behind the sheet. “Come on,” Amerind urged.

  “I see,” said the other. “Then you don’t trust. I’ll take you back if you wish.”

  “No,” he shouted, jumping at the loudness of his own voice. “I mean, I—we—need the medicine.” He closed his eye, shook his head. “What is this?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

  Amerind pulled him along. His terror had made her forget her own. She told him when to duck beneath the cable, and, walking backward now, towed him inside the long, low tent.

  What happened next seemed to her to occur in a waking dream.

  The smell choked her, the air was gangrenous, as if the tent itself were a rotting skin. They didn’t get up, the dozen or so bodies lying to either side. Only a couple of them made the effort even to look up. At once she dismissed Glimet’s story about these people pouring out to stare at him. They couldn’t have climbed to their feet much less made a mass effort to spook a wayward Orbiter. They suffered from the same disfigurement as Horrible Woman. A few had degenerated to the point that Amerind could no longer identify individual facial features. They had become purplish lumps of tissue. She walked through their midst, and remembered pictures she’d seen of Japanese people who’d been atom-bombed. This was like that. The skin of their distorted faces hung slackly as if all the meat underneath had been sucked away. Some were bloated, the way dead bodies got after awhile. She’d seen some who had died in their boxes and not been found right away. What were these people doing down here?

  The tent seemed to draw a breath. The sides flapped in like the sides of a giant lung. Amerind Shikker turned around.

  Glimet’s head swayed from side to side. He edged back, stepping on a man, who cried out shrilly. Glimet leapt away, but swung around to see the man’s leg jetting blood where Glimet’s invisible foot had squished it. His one eye rolled like the eye of a horse, and he turned in a circle, whining throatily, seeking a point of escape but trapped in every direction.

  Amerind ran over and touched him, trying to calm him. He swung the bag at her, knocking her aside.

  One of the disfigured invalids said, “Easy, Glimet.” He whipped around to confront a wet, pulpy horror. “Long time, no see,” the dark-haired horror said with grim humor.

  Glimet knew the voice, and enough of the face. It was impossible. The man was gone. Orbitol decay. He was in the Other Place. Dead, he admitted, and recognition of that fact tore it.

  Glimet bolted. His invisible body knocked Amerind aside. His cloak slapped her face. He hurtled down the aisle between dying, supine figures; the end of the tent—like an open, shrieking mouth—swelled before him. Amerind and Horrible Woman both called for him to stop, but he didn’t hear them above the shrill siren of terror in his head as he sprang through the opening.

  Had he been able to hover in the air in this world as he did in the other, it would not have mattered that the ground dropped away outside, he simply would have sailed to the far side. Instead, the bag of cans he carried snatched him, like an anchor, to the bottom.

  Shikker watched his cloak flutter from sight. She heard the scrape and crash of his descent, followed by a final splash; and she ran through the tent and out. It took her a moment to spot him among the dark debris. He lay in the wet groove of an open drainage pipe. The smell rising was sulfurous and vaguely excretory, but as fresh as spring air after the confines of the tent.

  She climbed down to get him, careful not to fall and tear up her already broken body. The water defined his naked form as if he were a figurine of glass. His forehead had been scraped raw, and blood trickled over his eyelid and down his face, disguising the line between what was left and what had been erased.

  Shadows from above shifted across them, and Amerind looked up, her mouth open with amazement, to see Horrible Woman joined by four others at the top, backlit by the glow from the tent. She thought of mourners gathered around a Christ Church Cemetery grave. She’d attended a few funerals.

  But how had they gotten up? she wondered. How had those seeping, rotting, dying people gotten to their feet?

  Glimet groaned, drawing her attention away. She crouched beside him. He was barely conscious; his eyelid fluttered. Light glinted on his eyeball as the shadows retreated.

  She looked around, and the five figures were gone. She stood on her tiptoes, climbed onto a mound of dirt, and searched in vain for them.

  That was the moment she saw the faintly glittering shape hanging in the deeper darkness far beyond the tent—an enormous, petaled circle, as if the shadows themselves had taken seed and closed together, and sprouted from a concrete wall, folding back, layer upon layer—a bloom, a blossom, a black and shimmering rosette of ice.

  Glimet spoke up thickly from where he lay. “Sweetie,” he called. “Got your medicine. But I forget, was it the p-potatoes or the beans that did the trick?” He tried to sit up, but toppled back into the stream.

  Chapter Eight: Glimet’s Passing

  “What’s happening to you?” Amerind Shikker asked Glimet.

  He opened his eye and stared at her, kneeling beside him. He had been humming—not a song, more of a half-conscious utterance of discomfort.

  He yawned, and she could see the tent through his mouth as if he were a ghost. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered.

  One of the others limped up behind her. “It’s his time. It’s coming now.”

  “I—I know you,” said Glimet. “You’re Alcevar, aren’t you? D-damn, I heard your voice and knew it.” He became puzzled, adding, “I thought you’d gone over, way last year.”

  The afflicted man nodded. His skin was splitting like a sausage sheath in places on his hands and face. The tissue underneath looked red as lava. “No longer,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Glimet.

  The sound of the syllable was odd. When Amerind looked back, Glimet’s mouth had disappeared entirely.

  The final stage would be a race to the last bit of him, the corpus callosum. He began to thrash inside his cloak. She tried to grab onto him with her one hand, but her fingers plunged straight through to the pad beneath him.

  The man called Alcevar brushed her back
. “Let him go,” he insisted weakly. “You have to.”

  Horrible Woman was sitting down, exhausted. She called to Shikker, “You can’t interfere. No one can this late. The chrysalis unfurls.”

  Amerind allowed herself to be walked back a few paces, but pulled loose then. “It ain’t right,” she argued. Her voice tightened. “We came here to help me, not to lose him.”

  “He came here to die,” one of them said.

  This wasn’t fair. How would she survive among all the nests in the underground? She hadn’t even found out where Glimet hid his secret cache of food tins. She forced a sidelong stare his way.

  A swipe of pink cranium remained now, hovering, shrinking. His huge blue eye faded away as she watched. The others sat rigid in anticipation. “Wait,” she pleaded, and no one paid attention.

  Then Glimet began to yowl. The sound emerged from far away, from some other tunnel, from some other level, from inside the pith of the black rose on the wall. She heard her first name shaped within the cry—the first time ever he had said it—and she tore loose from Alcevar. She ran back to the heap of bedding. The cloak lay rumpled and empty. “Glimet!” she wailed, and dropped down. She plunged her hand into the space he had occupied, grasping at anything. Her knee struck something hard beneath the cloak and she fumbled for the buried piece of him—any part with which to draw him back into this world.

  She pulled out the atomizer bulb.