Bottled Abyss (38 page)

She was nude with a dark gray complexion, glassy river rocks pebbling each shoulder, agate eyes and leafy green-black algae for hair. She took a step toward Janet and hisses came from her bouncing breasts, the nipples flickering with serpent tongues.

“Are you another Fury?”

“I am Nyx,” she said, raising one water logged twig of an eyebrow. Her eyes had long been crying and there was madness in their sorrow.

Janet thought of running but instead fixated on the being. “You are from the bottle?”

The bottle glided out of the bedroom, leaning on the waters as it went, coming to rest near the carpeted shore near Nyx’s gray toes. “The bottle is from me, little one, not the other way around. Now tell me, where is the man I’ve helped you find?”

“You helped me?”

“In the hospital, here tonight—I’ve tracked this man since I first smelled him on your hound in the desert.”

“What does that mean?”

“He left his mark on your pet, on your husband, on you. The smell goes bone-deep. I risked much to conjure new waters for him to ride. Now that the Fury is gone, I must take my chances and begin again. Where is Vincent Baker?”

“Dead.”

A flare of anger went through Nyx’s inhuman face. “He knew the Fury’s song. I heard it singing in his mind. That song can be recalled by few living mortals in this time. I again ask you where he is. Lying to me will bring you much pain, little one.”

“Vincent Baker is dead. I saw it happen just minutes ago.”

Nyx’s bottom lip quivered, as though she was on the verge of bawling. “The Fury could not take him!”

Janet laughed. “Well, it turns out Ford could.”

Tears flooded Nyx’s angry eyes. “You are telling the truth, it seems.”

“Happily so.”

Nyx’s nipples trilled with their snake tongues, equally disturbed. “Things have changed, little one. Vincent was perfect. With no time or effort he would have been the new Broker of Souls, the man to sail my waters… he understood
value
.

“Now I am left with you, Janet Erikson. You showed cunning in the hospital, but you narrowly understand value. A dead child and its father, that’s all you can grasp. That is a single dimension inside a billion prisms of life.

“I’ve waited this long and I have no choice but to retain my patience. You will have to learn, little one, and grow. Even if you survive my waters, it may take thousands of years of anguish, it may take until the dawning of a new intelligence in the world of mortals, but one day I can hope for you to retain the song, to hear my lessons, to become the solitary sailor of my new river, Hythia. You will navigate the ferry and relish the passing of all souls.”

“All of them? So if I do this…is it possible I will see Herman and Melody?”

Nyx shook her head. “I could lie and tell you this is so, but that is no way to begin. Those mortals, your husband, your daughter, they are lost to this universe, part of the last scheme. Now only paying souls can wander the lands of the dead. It is a restored era.”

Janet stood up straighter. “You’re telling me they died at the wrong time?”

“You mock me.”

“No,” Janet said carefully, “I’m just turning down your job.”

“You’re turning down immortality.”

Janet turned to run.

“It wasn’t an offer,” said Nyx.

A hand grabbed Janet’s ankle and she hit the floor hard. She kicked and pulled to free herself but the arm stretching from the black surface brought her into the water, down to her hip. She clutched the carpet, thrashing her legs. In the murky regions below, Nyx’s face creased with bladed teeth, unfathomable heartbreak around the pits of her eyes. Another tug on her leg and Janet’s entire body went below the waterline, and there she lost her grip on this world.

Evan crept up the stairs, baseball bat quivering in his hand. Nobody was inside the apartment. From the looks of things, a fire had been started earlier and ultimately squelched. He’d wondered if he took too long making up his mind. The opportunity had presented itself. He’d seen a bald man crashing out the front door, saw Janet’s purse of death coins spill over the balcony, but Evan could only hunker alongside the building and watch. When the Fury came out, he just couldn’t hang any longer and ran for his car.

But he was here now. Only, everybody had left. The apartment was empty.

He spotted the bottle sitting on the floor nearby. Evan picked it up, surprised at how full it felt.

Voices played in the street on the other side of the complex. Something was amiss over there. Maybe the police were on their way. Quickly, he hightailed it out of the apartment, bottle in one hand, bat in the other.

He got back to the Jeep and felt queasy. Janet’s truck was still where she parked it earlier. It was crazy. He’d seen her go back up to the room and he’d only returned to get his bat. That hadn’t taken long. So what had happened?

Where had Janet gone?

CHAPTER III

The Baby

Janet never enjoyed being under water. As a child she could remember being the only kid at the pool party who didn’t fight over the snorkel. She couldn’t bear it. She had to wear earplugs, pinch her nose shut and never stayed under for long. The whole experience rang as unnatural to her.

In the place Nyx had taken her, Janet learned that her fears only began there and extended far beyond.

After blacking out, she slowly regained consciousness, sensing motion but not seeing much of anything to suggest that was the case. Water pressed into her sinus, filled her lungs to the point of bursting. There was no need for breathing in this place, however. Janet understood that the River was not life or death; it was movement between the two, not purgatory, but a realm of evolution, constant transmogrification and transformation and mutation, as it were, a birth canal with life at one side and death at the other. And, she realized, she was pointed towards neither.

Murky images of rocks and hanging seaweed gradually filled her vision. Bubbles of all size and wobbling shapes traveled around her—they filtered through the rocks below and escaped to the ceiling a couple feet above. This place was a tomb of some sort. A moving tomb. She still had that sense of traveling, quickly, to some place or to no place.

A long wooden stick was wedged in the opposite rock wall where millions of angry vermillion things swirled around in an endless fit. They looked fishlike, but had no stable structure; even when her eyes locked onto one that moved slower than the rest, it was a stop-frame capture picture of a fish in spinning motion.

She attempted to lay still but the rock beneath her had heated to blistering. Her clothing was gone and her naked body had not handled the trip well; folds of torn skin hung from her body and tiny clouds of blood plumed from the lacerations as she moved. Trying to escape the heat below her, she reached for the rocky canopy overhead.

At once, the rocks closed around her fingers. At first she considered this a strike of good luck—she would be held in place while the rocks below had time to cool down, or if not, she at least wouldn’t be boiled. But the once helpful rocks above continued to clamp down. Janet tried to pull free but with every effort they constricted harder around her hand. She let out a wail, but no bubbles came from her throat. The silence of it all alarmed her more than the creaking and shattering of finger bones.

Blood emitted from the rocks in gentle puffs. Her fingers dislodged as they became a formless pulp. She felt her body dropping down to the hotter water beneath. She beat her palms against the rocks and attempted to swim forward. Her fingers were slowly recapturing some semblance of form, but every stroke through the water, she soon learned, was a wasted effort.

She couldn’t move.

Janet was powerless, subject to the outside world like a dead branch drifting on a stream that bumps into an occasional obstacle and changes direction but is wholly without mastery of its course.

Branch…

She looked at the stick jutting from the wall. Maybe she could grab hold of that and kick her feet to lift her body between these walls. That seemed unlikely, but no alternative offered itself otherwise.

Janet stretched out her arm. Her warped middle finger tapped the end of the stick. A red streak of shadow dove into her finger and locked on. One of the fish-things gnawed at her finger with spiny teeth, tearing at the throbbing nerves. She yanked her hand back and thrashed it all around her. The fish would not unlock its jaw and she felt a slimy sensation spreading through her veins.

Clabbery chunks of skin sloughed off her forearm. Janet’s body went into a type of stasis. Her mind perceived that if the fish’s venom travelled through her entire body, she would become, not dead, but finally as inanimate as these rocks around her. She continued to thrash, though her strength faded. The fish-thing squirmed gleefully on her mutilated finger.

Janet’s body fell towards the volcanic heat below and the approaching warmth awakened a new thought. She dropped her hand beneath her back and pressed the fish into the heat. The fish released her finger at once. She let go another silent scream as red-gold scales drifted up around her.

With new determination, Janet reached for the stick. Countless more fish darted around the area for chunks of flesh floating in space. At the movement of her hand, they all turned their energy on her. In the next second, she was covered from head to toe with the little bastards. Venom surged through her. She stopped thrashing and let her entire body touch down on the red-hot rocks below.

A turbulent rush of bubbles and scales littered through the water. She couldn’t see through them, and her body was shutting down from the assault and the burning it had just received, but she reached forward anyway, reached out to find that stick so she could pull herself out of this riverbed hell.

And she got hold of it. As soon as her fingers closed around the stick, she brought over her other hand and caught it. The stick came loose and all the surrounding rocks rolled back into the aquatic darkness and vanished. The effects of the venom seemed to go with them.

Janet treaded in the depths alone. She moved her arms, which moved the stick.

Not a stick.

An oar.

It felt like any other wooden oar, she imagined, but the biggest difference was that this oar had given back her freedom. She started pushing through the water’s density with ease, her body generating astonishing velocity forward.

Darkness was above, and below, but she kept going.

The teeth she mistook for mountains at first.

Janet continued striking the oar through the water, which had turned from pitch black to dark gray. She took that as a sign of progress but then began to wonder if the water had always been gray and her mind had played tricks on her.

Then the teeth gradually rose in the distance and she accepted that her eyes could distinguish more in the new brackish environment.

Below her, as always, darkness reigned forever, and above her the gray field lightened.

She made for the underwater mountains and discerned the white speckled gum line the teeth extruded from, thinking it was sand. Then the teeth, still miles from her, came more into focus and she perceived they had her surrounded from every side. She wasn’t inside the mouth of a giant sea creature, but that would soon change as the mouth snapped closed.

Desperately, she stabbed the water with her oar. Large boulders floated in space above. They were covered in toxic looking purple barnacles and hanging with venous, olive colored algae. Janet grappled the sides of these boulders and propelled up faster.

The teeth were well above her now, but she didn’t stop. She had to keep going. If she could make it topside, what would happen? Was it possible? Would she break through the surface of the water in Vincent Baker’s apartment? Or was this all futile?

Her strength waned. She grasped onto a boulder for a moment, then used her oar to push off and kicked her legs fiercely up. An awful theory settled on her mind. While she may be moving upward, for all she knew, she was going downward…

She didn’t want those teeth to close over her, she didn’t want to live in this place for thousands of years like Nyx had said, and she didn’t want to do this alone, without Herman, without Faye or Evan. Having them here might have been worth more than this oar.

For you
, said a voice in her consciousness.
These are the fallacies of mortal life. Like a good bottle of mead, it holds such promise when its seal is first broken and cork pulled free, but as the mead runs out, everything good quickly goes and the entire contents of the bottle mean less and less, quicker and quicker, and soon the mead is only a memory to be forgotten. The real story has been told and drips slowly to a terminus.

Mortals value life out of fear, not love. Take that fear away and death is the only valuable thing in the universe.

Janet’s mouth moved without words to say, “Go fuck yourself.”

She beat the oar madly.

The teeth soared above, great demonic icebergs crashing together at the top of the universe. They met in a perfect overlapping union and any light through the gray collapsed into penetrating blackness. Still, Janet fought on, thoughts of escaping through the teeth, somehow, some way, in the back of her mind. She may not have Herman or Melody, but she’d always have their memories and one day, yes, she too would die and rest all of this anger and sadness, once and for all. She would not be everlasting. She would fight for death. Not life after death. Just death. Peace.

The end of her oar smacked one of the floating boulders. Her shoulder buckled at the impact and her sore hands reacted fruitlessly. Her fingers unfurled and she let the oar go. She tried to swim back for it, but without the oar her body froze again. It was stuck in the space, just like the boulders.

Janet closed her eyes and felt the words of a song powerfully drill into her soul.

The River has no surface, has no bottom.

     
An Abyss is never bound,

     
Not by up and down.