“Um. I was actually doing fine. We just had a nice dinner. We were starting a long car ride. I was about to nod off when something just came and took me.” I gave Luther a suspicious glance.
“Who? Me?” Luther rolled his eyes. “I wish. If only I had the power, I would have dragged you back hours ago. Never would have let you leave. A waste of precious time, this is, though not if you manage to find my friend Olivier, I must say. And I have to admit, this is a nice respite from all the hubbub up in the village.”
He swung his legs off the day bed. “But enough is enough. We should get moving.” He tossed his book into the hearth, where it went up in a blaze of purple flames as it were doused in fuel oil
“Unless!” said Bern, holding up a finger. “James wishes to reconsider. He’s had time to think about the folly of his decision.”
“What folly?” said Luther. “I think it’s splendid. If only more of us could be so bold.”
“But there’s no guarantee he ever make it back here, or to life.”
“There are never guarantees, Bernard. Not even for us. Who’s to say we ever see the sky again?”
“I’d say it’s a pretty good bet, traveling with a snake charmer like you,” said Bern. “And listen, James. The Deeps is not just another corner of the Liminality. It’s a distinct place, with less porous borders, to say the least. And worse, Luther tells me there is some kind of roaming portal there with the potential to pack you away into an even more unpleasant and permanent existence.”
“The Horus.” Luther dismissed this concern with a wave of his hand. “From what Yaqob tells me, it is easily avoided. It’s the deluded fools who worship the thing who suffer the consequences.”
“So what do you say? You ready to pack it in?”
“No,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I guess I … I’m willing to chance it.” But my own words rang hollow in my ears. The patter of my heart didn’t lie. I was scared. Only the power of Karla’s dying words kept me determined to at least go through the motions.
Luther pulled on a cloak that he hadn’t brought with him, along with a floppy rain hat better suited for the surface where it was actually raining.
“Do you suggest we bundle up as well?” said Bern.
“Strictly optional,” said Luther. “You gentlemen should be fine. I just prefer to keep myself covered.” He wrapped a scarf around his neck. Bern looked at me and shrugged.
“It must be spring time by now on the living side. “Green leaves a-popping. Tulips blooming. Are they?”
“Actually, it’s almost May. Practically summer,” I said. “So when was the last time you made it back?”
“Oh, I still get hauled back regularly. Too often for my tastes. But it’s hard keep track of the seasons. There are no windows in my prison cell. And I don’t always partake of the fresh air and exercise opportunities, even when they offer a wheel chair. As much as a wreck as I am over here, over there I’m practically a vegetable on the other side. The human equivalent of a turnip.”
“Maybe you should have gone free when you had the chance,” I said. “Found yourself an assassin, like Lille.” I instantly regretted mentioning her name.
“Do you really think she—?”
“I don’t know. But you know what? I met one … on the other side.”
“Met one what?”
“An assassin from Frelsi. And he’s trying to recruit me. If I don’t join, he’s gonna pick off my friends … one by one.”
Luther sat down on a chair and laced up a pair of calf-length boots with hobnailed soles.
“Which ... friends?” said Bern.
“All of them. And their grandmothers too. Starting with Urszula, and this other girl named Ellen.”
Bern smirked. “Wow. Urszula’s grandmother must be ancient. Is she a vampire?”
“I mean, Ellen’s grandma, only … we don’t know that for sure.”
Boot laces tied, Luther rose from the chair and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that any more, young man. That won’t be a problem much longer.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you can’t do any facilitating from the Deeps. Once this Frelsian realizes you’ve gone, he has no reason to go after your friends.”
“So I can protect them all? By going to the Deeps?”
“Two birds with one stone. Or is it three? Four? However many.”
“So the Deeps are that permanent?”
“There’s a reason they call it the Deeps,” said Luther. “Souls don’t oscillate the way they do here. What goes in does not come out. At least that is how it is designed. The Dusters certainly made a lie of that.”
“You really think he’d leave them alone if I was gone?”
“If he’s a Facilitator, he’s no dummy. There is no logical reason for him to go after your friends once you are no longer a viable candidate for his profession.” Luther surged towards the door. “But enough dilly-dallying. Let’s get you on your way.”
Luther touched his fingers to the wall of the bubble. A hole appeared and grew, its edges rolling up, revealing a gaping cavity in the roots. The warm of their temporary shelter dissipated in the surrounding chill. Mist formed with each breath.
“Now, come.”
Bern touched my arm. “James. Don’t go,” he whispered. “Just don’t go. You don’t have to do this. There are times in life you just need to move on from things. There’s no guarantee you will ever find Karla. Let’s just turn around and back up top. Don’t worry about Luther. I think he enjoyed this little excursion.”
“No. I’m going.” Now that I knew that every person I cared about on Earth would likely benefit from my absence, I was more determined than ever to enter the Deeps. There was more at stake now than a futile promise to Karla. But that didn’t mean I was happy about it. That didn’t mean I wasn’t scared.
***
Luther ensured that the path ahead stayed illuminated with a pleasant shade of whitish-blue. Again, we had to deal with the topsy-turvy gravity of the passages continued, but it no longer bothered me to see our bodies aligned at all different angles. I guess I was getting used to it.
It did make me feel a little intoxicated and clumsy. My feet refused to land quite where I expected them to, and it occasionally threw me off balance and caused me to stumble.
We soon reached a crazily jumbled confluence of tunnels that looked like they had been torn apart and reassembled many times. The passages leading downward pulsed with peristalsis and their walls were coarse and knobby, in places wide enough to drive a bus, in other places barely large enough to squeeze through single file.
“We’re getting close, my friends,” he said. “Keep your thoughts simple. It will ease our progress.”
His words puzzled me until the walls ahead began to anticipate and respond to our approach. They shifted like wafting smoke, taking on shapes suggestive of tangible objects but never solidifying long enough to identify them.
“What’s … going on?” I said.
“We are approaching the Core,” said Luther. “The matrix down here responds more eagerly to every whim and worry. Too eagerly, I must say. Blank your mind if you can. Think only of tunnels. Plain, bright, smooth-walled tunnels. We’ll see what happens.”
I took his advice and thought of the concrete culverts full of spiders and bats I used to mess around in back in Ft. Pierce. I tried to minimize the wildlife aspect, but instead of a culvert, the tunnel wall took on the appearance of a hallway, hung with picture frames. One of the pictures resolved into a black and white photo of my mother’s grandparents. A rectangular digital thermostat with a liquid crystal display appeared beside the sketchy outlines of a bathroom door. This was the hall leading to my old bedroom.
On the opposite wall, half-formed faces and torsos followed with every step Bern took, each one dissipating as he moved along and a new one taking its place. When he paused to un-kink his leg, one of the shapes evolved into a full-length re
plica of Lille down to the scolding expression she sported when they argued. Apart from a few quick and nervous glances, Bern was unable to bring himself to face her directly.
Luther laughed. “You look pained, Bernard. Here, let me take care of that for you. He swiped his wand like a conductor and the images of Lille vanished under a rippling wave, replaced by a smoky replica of an old-fashioned cigar shop with a rack of newspapers and a candy display.
“What can I say?” said Luther. “I crave a good cigar.”
I tried again, keeping my mind blank this time, and my eyes straight ahead. Looking at the objects as they formed seemed only to strengthen them. But I could tell there was some wild stuff happening at the periphery of my vision. Drug dealers. Relatives. Kids I knew as a teenager. Some of the specters even had voices, though I couldn’t be sure that the mocking I heard didn’t come from my own brain.
The tunnel widened, gradually at first, but then the walls flared open like the bell of a trumpet. The glow lighting our way abruptly vanished.
“Hold it up there, boy,” said Luther. “This is it. The end of the road.”
A chasm circled the entire circumference. There was no distinction between ceiling and floor. It didn’t matter where you stood. Every edge dropped off into a deep, dark void.
“What’s down there?”
“What do you think is down there, fool? This is the place you asked me to take you. This is it. The brink of the Deeps.”
Chapter 21: Orb
I swooned at the depth-less darkness that lay beyond the brink, unable to discern up from down, down from up. We had descended to reach the end of this tunnel and yet it felt like we had climbed to the rim of a bowl.
The stale and dusty air moved, but scarcely enough to deserve being called a breeze. A nearly sub-audible drone hummed across the emptiness, threaded with the distant and muffled moans of a thousand Reapers.
“So what am I supposed to do? Climb down?”
“Climb?” said Luther. “Climbing will get you nowhere. You need to cross the void. A good running leap should do it.”
“You want me to jump?”
“Preposterous,” said Bern. “You can’t expect him to just leap into the darkness … just on faith.”
Luther frowned. “Then let us show him what is there.”
He took his wand and sliced a clump of roots free from the tunnel wall, balled them up, touched his wand again and they ignited, flaring as bright as magnesium. He tossed it over the rim into the emptiness.
The glow illuminated part of a perfectly round orb, smooth as polished obsidian, easily several miles in diameter. A void of about fifty meters separated it from a massive curving wall of roots pocked with the flared openings of hundreds of tunnels just like the one in which we stood. Water gushed from many, cascades spiraling down like threads looping into a loom, shaped by the bizarre gravity of this underworld.
“Bloody hell!” said Bern.
The orb seemed to hover in this socket, rotating ever so slowly. I stared, eyes pinned wide, jaw slack, bowels rippling; as the flare followed a spiral trajectory as it plummeted, snuffing out the instant it touched the glassy surface, plunging the void back into absolute darkness.
“What the fuck is that?”
“That … is your destination,” said Luther. “The destination of most souls in the Liminality ... apart from the lucky ones.”
“Bloody hell,” said Bern, his voice this time more subdued.
“Don’t forget this.” Luther reached into his cloak and removed the scroll he had written for his friend, Olivier. “I would be grateful for anything you can learn about his fate, however you manage to get word back to me. Remember, the Singularity spans existences. If you can access it, it might prove quite useful to you.”
“It’s not too late, James,” said Bern. “We can turn around and walk right back out of here.”
My brain wanted to listen to Bern. And my heart concurred, from the way it thudded against my ribs. But another part of me, a hidden corner of my soul, less accessible to the living and almost an organ in its own right, insisted on proceeding.
If I had learned anything about this universe, it was that no barrier was impenetrable. No transition irreversible. No law unbreakable. There were exceptions for everything, and so far, my experiences in two existences had both proven exceptional. Why should the third be any different? This gave me the hope and confidence I needed to proceed, despite the protests of my physical being.
I leaned over the edge and peered into the darkness. How bad could it be down there, anyhow?
“Cross your fingers, Bern. Keep that tea kettle ready. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
“Yeah, right,” said Luther, in a mocking tone. “In a jiff.”
“And if all goes well ... we’ll need an extra seat or two at the table.”
Bern’s eyes flickered, moist. He could hardly bear to watch.
I took a deep breath and inched my feet closer to the rim, struggling to stay braced and balanced between my vertigo and the weirdly changeable gravity. An unseen force alternately tugged me forward and nudged me back, like magnets sparring between repulsion and attraction, like the push of a wave and the suck of an undertow.
I leaned forward and tilted back. Leaned forward and....
“Good God! Enough already!” Luther lunged and shoved me with both hands. I hurtled into the blackness.
Chapter 22: Wasteland
Luther shoved me so hard, I went cartwheeling into the darkness, tumbling fast and far and out of control. I braced myself for a nasty impact, but before I could slam into that hard looking obsidian orb, a soft but powerful force seized me. I passed through something thick and soft like an invisible gel that sapped away all my momentum. I passed from utter darkness to blinding light, decelerating and floating gently down into a patch of powdery grit so cold I mistook it for snow.
A tingle shivered through me. Something shifted and left my body. I could tell that I had become something less than what I had been.
I wiped the grit from my eyes to find a landscape as bleak and desolate as the moons of Jupiter. All was bright, yet there was no sun. A diffuse glow spread across the sky, dimming gradually towards the horizon—a weirdly ubiquitous and source-less light that cast no shadows.
A fine haze hung in the air, blending earth and sky, smudging the distant horizon and rendering it barely discernible. Pink and gray dominated the landscape, mottled and mixed into diverse patterns and intermediate tones. A strong and constant wind sucked every last bit of residual heat from my body.
The sheer biting intensity of the cold shocked me, but no more so than my ability to endure it. The cold sank deep into my flesh, but my perception of it was in the abstract. The chill registered to my senses but I felt no threat from it, no biological imperative to get warm. It had no bearing on my ability to live, because I wasn’t exactly alive anymore.
Dry ice would have shed no fog in a place like this. A puddle of liquid nitrogen wouldn’t have even bubbled. The phrase ‘cold as hell’ suddenly had a new meaning. And to think I was drawing this frigid atmosphere into my lungs, if the twin cavities in my chest could still be described as such. But I felt no compulsion to breathe or blink and only did so out of habit.
Even more disconcerting was my lack of a heartbeat. The inside of my chest was as still as a crypt. Clearly, I was no longer a living thing, but something between a spirit and a human. I had entered another, more alien plane of existence.
I got up and looked around, trying to understand the layout of this place. The indistinct horizon rose all around me like the wall of some impossibly massive crater. The intervening landscape was all rumples and wrinkles. The terrain looked squashed, as if the mountains and hills that used to be here had been ground down to nubs.
I turned to face the wind and started walking. I had no destination, but I didn’t know what else I could do. I glanced back after a few dozen paces at the shallow prints my feet had pressed i
nto the dust. Those more than a few steps back had already been erased by the constant wind. There would be no chance of retracing my steps.
That realization made me panic. If the place I had landed was an entrance to this world, it might also be an exit. The problem was, there was nothing distinctive about it whatsoever; no landmark that would allow me to navigate back, not even any stray rocks with which I could build a cairn. I dropped to my knees and tried digging down through the dust, but only a few inches down I encountered seamless bedrock with the consistency of fire-hardened clay.
I got back on my feet, sucked it up and resumed my walkabout. Staying put was out of the question. I had come here to find souls, and there weren’t any to be found out here in these wastes, and I couldn’t very well expect anyone to come looking for me.
I told myself there was nothing special about the spot I came in; that it wasn’t so necessary that I return to that exact place. But with every step, I could feel my anxiety ramping up.
***
Hours, I must have walked. Half a day, maybe, though it was hard to tell without a clock. The unchanging sky told me nothing. Its brightness never wavered, and it never revealed a source. It was perpetually sunless and twelve o’clock noon.
I kept on walking and walking. What else could I do?
A grim possibility began to plague my mind. What if Luther had led me to the wrong place?
My experience so far didn’t square at all with what little Urszula had shared with me about her time in the Deeps. She gave the impression that it was a crowded place full of tumult, conflict and rebellion. Maybe this wasn’t the Deeps after all.
And if so, what if these empty wastes were all I would ever know till the end of time? With no Karla, nobody to talk to, ever again. An eternity alone in my own personal Death Valley.
In another world, the leaden shroud that settled over my soul would have stirred suicidal thoughts and sent a legion of roots squirming after reach me. But this time there was no possibility of transport to an alternative existence. This was the end of the road.
How long would it be before I went completely mad; before I collapsed into a fetal position and retreated into my mind like those Old Ones? Unlike them, my soul was unfinished. I would never enjoy the luxury of communion with the entity they called the Singularity.