by Allison Hurd
“Sorry!” she apologizes to me as the handcuff stops her jump short, yanking my arm again torturously. She tries to catch herself with muscles that are slow to react to her commands. She just manages to balance on one foot, and only steps on me briefly with the other. The new wave of pain shakes the drowsiness from my system and I half crawl, half get dragged through the door. We slam it shut behind us. I fall to the ground while Lia locks the heavy, wooden barricade and settles down beside me.
“So far, so good,” I joke feebly.
“Ha, yes. This is going swimmingly. You holding up, Kline?” Lia turns to the dazed man.
“I…I don’t understand. I was with my wife and son, and he was alive and playing and…where are they now? Is he still here somewhere?”
It seems like the Tree of Somnia knew just where to hit our dear pain in the ass for the most impact.
“No,” Lia says kindly. “You saw a dream. It is not reality. Try to put it behind you.”
He nods vacantly, his vision clearly still haunting him.
“We’re…really not on Earth, are we?” he asks slowly as Lia helps me stand back up.
“Nope. ‘Bout as far from earth as we can get, until we start dealing with a pantheon that believes in extraterrestrial gods,” I say absently, investigating our surroundings through my mounting headache.
I look at him, and I can tell he’s really crushed. I sigh. This is bad enough for Ophelia and me, and we’re what you could call familiar with the danger and psychic toll of our lifestyle. It would be truly traumatizing to be going through this nightmare without any preparation.
“What you’re feeling is normal,” I tell him softly. “No one wants to believe in this stuff—which is why no one does. You should take a breath…the Erinyes are legion. We’ve been lucky so far that we’ve only met up with age, illusion and sleep. So I need you to build a wall, detective. We’re about to go see an awful crime scene. Pretend something truly horrific just happened, and the bad guy is still on the loose, and knows everything in your file. Steel yourself against it, and be prepared to fight it the whole, long way home. Your family is waiting for you back in the sunlight, and this is the only way to get to them.”
“Her,” he corrects me.
“What’s that?”
“My family. It’s just her. My wife.”
I don’t know what to say to this. I’ve never lost a family member, though it’s been pretty freakin’ close a few times. Lia awkwardly pats his shoulder.
He expels his breath quickly and dashes his hand over his eyes. He walks purposefully over to us and I flinch back, expecting something else to start hurting. Instead, he unlocks our handcuffs.
“That wasn’t right of me. I apologize,” he says tersely. Ophelia and I rub our raw wrists.
“Thanks,” Lia says warmly. “We know this can’t be easy. You’re doin’ good, though.”
I can’t quite bring myself to thank someone for fixing a problem they caused, about an hour after it became a problem, but I nod along with what Lia says.
“Right, let’s get the fuck outta here, who’s with me?” I say as I head carefully towards the stairs.
I look up from the foot of them. The stairs go around the outer walls of this tower, and from here, I can’t see the top.
“Lia? How we doing on time?” I ask.
She consults her diamond sun, which really goes a long way to cheering this place up, if you ask me. She does a double take at the warm glow it casts.
“It…looks like it’s approaching high noon,” she says breathlessly.
“Impossible,” I tell her. “We’ve been here an hour, tops.”
“Not according to our sun.”
“But…we only went maybe a hundred yards! How long were we dreaming?”
“Not very long…” Lia says nervously.
“So, we just lost two hours?”
“I think we’ve found out why Hades was so ‘generous’ with the timeframe,” my sister replies grimly.
“Well…shit!” I mutter to no one in particular. This suddenly feels even less possible. If the courtyard took almost three hours to cross, how can we possibly make it up ninety floors in seven hours? “Okay. Well, best get hoofin’, double time, kids.”
Every step awakens some new bruise on my person. I don’t know how many steps we climb—I stop counting after the first hundred or so. Even thinking the numbers makes me thirsty, and as we don’t have any water, I give it up. I can hear Lia and Kline panting behind me; so it’s not just my legs burning, then. That’s comforting. The steps go on and on. Lia keeps her miniature star out as both a light source and a reminder of the time that passes. We climb for what feels like eons, but the stone slowly illuminates and begins to dim. By the second hour, I begin crawling. It’s awkward with just the one hand, but it feels better on my screaming legs. I crawl, looking only as far as the next step. The only thing keeping me going now is the realization that if I give up, I’ll get in the way of the two people behind me, and then it will be my fault that we all failed.
I see movement in the corner of my eye—the first sign of life apart from the three of us for the past couple of hours.
“Holy fuck!” I scream, clambering unthinkingly away from an enormous spider. It jumps as I do, and I begin falling down the stairs, so overwhelming is my desire to distance myself from it.
“Kill it!” I cry to Lia. Another spider begins crawling by my ear, and I can feel the soft tickle of its many legs against my neck.
“Summer, there’s nothing there!” Lia yells back.
I’m going to have a heart attack right here. I look up, and above me are just layers and layers of webs with multi-hued arachnids skittering spastically around them, descending menacingly on fine silk. I scream wordlessly as I try to run from them, tumbling over Lia and Detective Kline in my headlong pursuit to escape it. As I run, I rip at my flesh, trying to remove the pincers and cobwebs I can feel moving just out of the reach of my hand. I begin crying, desperately trying to make it stop. My greatest fear is coming true, and it is worse even than my nightmares. I vaguely hear my sister’s voice as an echo in the background, but it is growing fainter and fainter as I plunge down the stairway.
Then I hear her scream.
Hearing her distress stops me cold in my tracks. I look around, shuddering and sobbing quietly, my blood rising slowly through the scratches I’ve dug into my own skin as I ran. There are no spiders now. I spasm slightly as the adrenaline flowing through me throws up the emergency brakes.
“No!” my sister cries.
“Phobos,” I mutter to myself. Phobos is the incarnation of fear; to be in his presence is to taste pure horror. Which means that Lia is now trapped in her own worst fear, or worse, by The Worst Fear—the daimon himself.
There are two kinds of terror, I think. One is that of my arachnophobia; unthinking, irrational. Then there is a deeper kind, the one that even your most logical mind finds too upsetting to endure, and so your thoughts skate away from them. I hate spiders. They send me careening off a cliff of reasonable thought. But I can’t abide the thought of my sister being taken from me. Worse than the thought of all eternity watching malformed legs crawl over me, is the thought of Lia in a similar position.
“I’m coming, Lia!” I yell as I begin mounting the stairs again in a sprint. I seem to have run for quite some time. I keep thinking that she’ll be around the next bend, but she’s not. I will my legs to pump harder. I start running up the steps with my hands as well, careless of my ribs and shoulder.
And then I almost run headlong into Detective Kline’s rear where he cowers on the stairs. The spiders are back, and I can feel coherent thought slipping from me as the enormous jumping arachnids spring towards me. I start hyperventilating again, but just then I hear Ophelia, which resolves me to push onward. She’s fetal at the foot of a being that is unnaturally still. His skin and robes are purest white, his eyes the only thing that show he is not a statue. They are unadulterated blackness, mois
t globes of terrific nothingness.
“Let her go!” I scream, driving forward with my knife. The spiders are closing in on us, crawling over the hand that holds my blade, peeking over his shoulder.
“It’s not real!” I yell as he blocks, and I can feel something land on my head.
“It’s not real, it’s just a demon!” This time I aim my knife for the arachnid clinging to his robe. An inhuman screech reverberates from the daimon’s mouth as the knife slides into him and I drop the blade, my adrenaline finally giving way to the jibbering panic I’ve been holding back. Phobos looks as if he’s being sucked into the point where I’ve stabbed him, collapsing in on himself. He screams as he dies and I fall back in terror, watching wide-eyed as he implodes. With a pop he is gone, and so are all of his pets. I convulse uncontrollably, my muscles all releasing in one, agonizing shudder.
I sit up, whimpering to myself, and look over to the fallen form of my sister.
“Lia? Can you hear me?” She’s unresponsive. I check her pulse, and send a prayer of thanks to Persephone when it’s still there. I grab my vial of smelling salts and wave it under her nose. She sits up, breathing in sharply, her eyes wild as she surveys the area around her, waiting for the attack. Finally they find me and focus. Her face crumples into tears and she throws her hands around my neck.
“Oh, my God, Summer!” she cries.
“I know,” I tell her, stroking her hair.
“It was awful! I saw…I saw…”
“Don’t think about it. It wasn’t real. It’s over now. Nothing can get you.” She cries harder at this, pulling away from me to bury her head in her hands, giving over to the racking sobs that consume her. I always find that when my sister falters, that’s when I become strongest. Even now, as crippled as I am physically, my mind is busily shoving aside its own trauma to be there as she recovers from hers.
When her tears begin to subside, I get up and go to Detective Kline, who is still mutely staring at some distant spot.
“How we doing, detective?” I ask him.
He slowly brings his gaze back to the immediate locality and drags it up to my face, tear marks tracing the grooves in his skin.
“I hate it here.”
“Eloquently said, officer,” I say with a ghost of a smile. “Wanna see what other terrible things we can find?”
“I’m beginning to enjoy the thought of dying here, in all truth,” he says with a slight chuckle. “I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“And I’ll be damned if you ever see anything worse,” I tell him lightly. “Come on. I’d like to see sky again one last time before I become Hades’ altar girl.”
“Yeah, might as well finish it. Can’t get worse, right?”
I wince. “Man…why would you say that?”
“Say what?”
“Why would you dare the universe like that? I don’t even have any salt to throw. Here.” I knock on the wooden practice knife. “That will have to do.”
That makes him laugh a little. I go back to Lia, who is wiping her eyes and taking deep breaths.
“How you doin’, chica?” I ask her.
She smiles weakly. “I think I wish I’d taken your advice and picked an irrational fear.”
“It’s a bear, always being right,” I joke, shaking her gently by the shoulder. “About ready to get the hell out of dodge?”
She fishes the diamond sun out of her pocket where she had stored it. It’s really dimmed significantly. “We better shake a leg, if we want to,” she says. “I guesstimate we’ve got about three hours left.”
I nervously look up, expecting to see spiders again. Instead, I see the endlessly spiraling stairs.
“Good, I feel like a nice jog, don’t you?” I tease.
“I feel like a nice drink,” she responds dryly, cracking her neck. “Onward and upward.”
We begin climbing again. I let Lia take point this time—I want to be able to watch her. I don’t know what her big fear is, but it apparently rocked her pretty hard.
The salt from my tears dries on my skin and stings my parched lips. I keep my right hand on the wall to keep from trying to rub the dryness off my face—it would only irritate all of the scratches and bruises more. I focus on the rough stone against my fingers, and the way I can feel the constant bend of the staircase rising up slowly but invariably towards freedom.
It’s not long before our heavy breathing and the scrape of our shoes on stone are the only sounds in our world once more. It feels like the tower’s stories are growing a little shorter, which I take as a good sign that we’re getting higher, if chthonic architecture functions at all like its terrestrial counterpart.
“What’s that?” Lia asks into the silence.
“I didn’t say anything, chica.”
“It’s not funny!” she yells.
I furrow my brow. “You okay?” I look around carefully as I approach her, looking for the source of her discomfort. I won’t be surprised by another daimon again. I don’t see anything, so I keep walking up to her.
“No! Stay back!” She begins running up the stairs.
“Lia! It’s me!” I chase after her, and then I feel it. I can hear whispers in my parents’ voices. “It’s for the best,” they say. “It’s not forever.” I look around, but my parents are not here, of course. The floor is roiling around me, like I’m walking on an earthquake. I look behind me at the detective whose face is now morphing as I watch, becoming Gregor’s asymmetric mug.
“I’m sorry, Gregor,” I say to him remorsefully.
The figure opens his mouth, but no words come out. Then it reaches for me. I try to run, but it grabs my hand and pulls me back down the stairs.
“What the hell!” Detective Kline says to me when the world stops writhing.
“Must be another daimon,” I mutter, thinking hard.
A second later, Lia comes back down the stairs at the same pace she had ascended them. She lets out a soft “oof” as she runs into my elbow and blinks at us.
“How did I get here?” she asks. “I was almost at the top! I could see sunlight.”
Then it dawns on me.
“Mania,” I mutter.
“No way,” Lia moans. “This can’t be happening. So we’re not almost there?”
“Who’s Mania?” Kline asks.
I start laughing. “Sorry. It’s not funny. It just sort of is. Mania is the demon of madness.”
“How’s that funny, exactly?” he inquires.
“Oh come on,” I say to the cop. “You don’t see the irony in having to overcome madness in order to get out of this place? We’re clearly already in the pit of insanity as it is.”
“If you think that’s funny, I believe that you’re insane, at least,” Lia retorts. “How do we kill it?”
I double over laughing. “You don’t!” I crow. “You can’t kill madness. You just push through it.”
“Is it affecting you right now?” she asks me dubiously. “Because that’s pretty far from humorous.”
“Detective, could you please handcuff me and Lia again?” I request, still grinning foolishly.
“How’s that now?”
“Mania will get us all twisted around. It’ll be better if we can’t run away from each other. You could end up going in circles like Lia did, and we’re very much out of time.”
“So…how do we get through, then?” Detective Kline asks.
“You follow me. I’m pretty experienced in delaying going crazy,” I say with another light chuckle.
Lia catches the words I’m not saying. “You sure that’s wise, Summer? I would understand if this was sort of a lot for you, given…everything,” she says uncomfortably.
“Hell yeah it’s wise! This is so much better than before. I know there’s an end this time. Totally different animal from last time,” I reassure her.
She looks like she’s not buying it. I don’t blame her. We’ve had some rough patches over the years—it’s sort of inevi
table in our line of work. Tell enough people you made friends with a gnome and have to save your sister from a purple faerie, and someone’s bound to raise a few concerns to the people with couches and small, white pills.
“Think of it this way,” I suggest. “Out of all of us, I have the best track record of not going crazy.”
She looks at me suspiciously for a minute and then holds out her hand. “Detective, cuff us.”
He hesitates, looking at us both like he thinks we don’t need any help from Mania to go mad. He shakes his head as he gets out both pairs of cuffs. “If you’re doing it, I am, too.”
“There you go, Kline! Join the parade,” I say cheerfully.
“You’re a little bit too ‘up’ to be comforting,” Lia rebukes me.
“Sorry. This is just hilarious to me. Every time I have to drag you from some torment or other, someone tries to convince me I’m losing my mind. It’s pretty poetic.”
“I guess…” Lia snaps a little. “I just don’t think it’s very funny.”
“Fair enough,” I respond. “So let me get real for a second. From what we’ve seen so far, Mania will mess with our perceptions. You’ll see things, hear things and probably feel things that aren’t real. Up will be down. It will feel like we’re out.” I drag on their handcuffs. “This is real. That is all that is real. Okay? Feel that. Make ‘em a little too tight. Feel that? That will be what grounds you. Focus on it, and keep going where it pulls. Do that, and I can get us out.”
“How do you know?” Kline asks. “How will you be able to know which way is up with no one pulling you, then?”
I smile grimly. “Not my first rodeo, piggy. I already know what my ‘real’ is.” I grab the wall that I’d been tracing for the past couple hours.
He looks at me, uncomprehending. “You’re truly crazy, aren’t you? God dang it, y’all are escaped from somewhere and dragged me into something, didn’t you? What did you give me? Acid? Shrooms?”
“Sorry, Kline,” I say. “You don’t get to call me crazy. I’ve seen and done things far outside of the bell curve for human normalcy, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean you get to write me off. You’re not living in the bell curve right now. So instead of giving me conditions, how about you just call me an expert? You gonna trust the local expert? Or wait for the actual manifestation of madness to eat you?”
