The Mere Tide P47

The labyrinth-Objects of study-Put to bed-Conjurations of the dark-The pilot’s comfort.

Twenty minutes later the the pilot was carrying her through a puzzle of umbrageous corridors broadspread with a thousand suggestions of monsters across its grim candle lit gothicity. Some hell the pilot had found it advantageous to home in. What seasoned tramps would avoid if they could help it and where no bindlestiff would dare night twice. Smeared gutters of tallow or wax kept this place alight, the wicks installed haphazardly so that their sick lucent congresses clustered or slurred. They descended a zigzag of stairs. Down a different flight far away. To a level where bamboo broke through the stones slabs. Thick clustered shoots of a mutation grown by means other than photosynthesis. It became humid. Vines crawled up the walls. Roots groped from the ceiling. And still further down. The floor no longer stone but dirt. The tunnel smelled of earth and ozone and in places the walls were set so close together the pilot had to advance sideways and elsewhere she must crawl. A dungeon infinite, any aughting know where lied hell’s locality. Deep down they came upon a catacombs. Pillars of skulls in a carousel. Sarcophagi filled with newly embalmed kings and prime ministers. A cyborg. And through a tomb into a cellar’s casket blackness to the pilot’s bedchamber.

A bed occupied the main of the chamber and its noir baldachin was like fine skeins of ash fented by a master so that it resembled a cage of suspended ink. There were bookshelves, no free space upon them, columns of books on the floor, plinths of books. So many it might have been the storage closet of a library save that it smelled of a soapy pine for it was laos she boated in the cloisonne enamel bowls. A jingoistic chaos of wicker charms hung pendant from the ceiling. Others iron, meandered into ursigils and coated in blackblood. A motley scrawl of hexes diseased the walls and between them hung oil portraits, trawlers of sea, fishers of land. Who fished for fish and men but men as unlike any had seen before. Who pyred their losses for the perpetuation of reality. A human skull on a pedestal. A table for alchemy and the concoction of poultices. A ristra of studded diadems and a lifesize christ purpureal crowned, who knows what heads theyd graced, how heavily they had laid. There were x-rays of dwarf knees. Open data slates slow scrolling the deployments of the MVD, reports detailing the feeding habits of certain species of locusts. In the corner a jhaggik, a malignant polylobed junk flora like a fat half digested pineapple. Long thin feelers sprouted out of its squash body that pulsed the color of brick and drooled a pink goop. Several had ensnared a toad and holding it over its porous membrane of a face slowly wrung it of its juices.

Is this hell?

I think were a little nigh of hell.

The pilot navigated with preternatural grace to the bed and parted the curtains and pulled back the cashmere duvet and bent to lay the child on the good pillowtop. Dachni clung to her. Come on, said the pilot unclasping her hands from her neck a finger at a time. Youre supposed to hate me right now. She got free of the child and composed her hands on her breast. She tucked the child in, keeping a corner of the duvet folded back so her foot was exposed.

Lift up a little.

Dachni lifted her leg and the pilot positioned a pillow lengthwise under it.

Ill bring some beer.

Aint huntry.

Well, said the pilot smiling and patting her knee. Ill bring some. She pointed at the jhaggik. Dont go near that. Its dangerous.

Dachni glared at it. It was shoving the flaccid frogskin into a orifice belching digestive fluids through the gape.

Aint getting near that fuckin thing.

Smart girl.

Get it the fuck outta here.

The pilot laughed. Aye a good idea.

She went and twirled a talon over it and spoke a word and it twisted up tight in a protective case and inflated to size and she picked it up and put it in an urn and clamped a lid upon it. Then she came back to the bed and bent to bestow a goodnight kiss upon the child and the child snarled and battered at her with her tiny fists but she pushed through and planted the soft kiss upon her forehead and made to leave.

Wheres yer go?

The pilot turned at the door.

I needs hold congress with a lout unknown to you. But whistle and Ill come.

Dachni pulled the duvet over her head. Git on then ye sunuvabitch.

I can stay if you want.

She peeked out.

The pilot relaxed into a stance vixenish fey, a mouth corner turned seductively up, a hip bowed out. If you want.

Go way.

She shrugged. Khasta.

The lantern illuminating the room drained away.

Hey!

I thought you liked the dark.

Pet em back on! Fuckin light! Hassent light? Is fored ta see ye idijit.

There was a long pause. Something clicked against the stone threshold of the door.

Ill get a flashlight.

The door closed and the talonic scratching faded down the hall. She hadnt turned on the light.

If it has been noted of the wicked that they are affined more to the sun skirted regions than the balmy coast it is because they fear more the judgments of the day then the predacity of night. For while the wicked may meet the noose of the town or the tooth of the lion yet the lion will not pronounce his devourment nor will other lions travel from afar to spectate. In the end it is judgment the wicked flee and private the death they prefer. This preference however is latent in children and the fear of shame is easily overcome by other fears and in unfamiliar darks evil has neither leniency nor clemency and may awake even in dolts a genius for the conjuring of dangers and make every hope a jacklight.

Thus in creep cirrhosis of the rake hour. Contours slaverous of maw or sweaty yoni oozing forth to suckle her hag dry with carneous labia. A sick squelching echoed, maudlin fellation of the dismembered organs of centaurs ejaculating shrill priapic and soteriological pleas through the principal flues and harlequin infamy exhibiting symptoms of the yaws. Ferrety elves are come to thief her satchels. A distaff damnata emulging out of grout to debut her in the bordellos of Tophet. Hapless Morrigu with her murders floundering at curb whilst passes a parade of the nullifidians in lab coats. But who fears judgment carries in themselves judgment formed and it is the validation of that judgment that so inspires terror. For Cain slewed also Adam, Adam residing in Abel, and god in Adam, and Adam in Cain. And so every man who slays the seed of his father slays also his father and his father in himself, and if it is so the American and the Mandarin, the Nippon, the Indian, the European, mayhaps even the Slav all descend from common ancestries then they from Mercury’s Guinness Station to the nitrogen miners of Pluto’s plantum to the hibernating colonists of Themisto dashing for the next star over, not least in Eden nor East of it, have slaughtered unfortunate Adam many trillion times over.

Anayaaaaaaaa!

A furious scraping closed upon the door and threw it open

Are you alright?

Es not!

Anaya slid to her bedside. Calm down what happened?

Fuck ded ye go?

A beam illuminated the pilot’s face. Dachni scrabbled the torch away and held it on top her head like an antenna and flipped onto her belly and buried her face in the pillow.

Somethins en here.

Youre in here.

Geht rid it, she sobbed. Dont wan it here.

Do you want to go back to your room?

Dachni hacked her winded breaths. Caught in a place she did not want to be and miles of place she did not want to go to reach a place she did not want to be. The pilot gripped the canopy rail and turned in a swing and sat on the bed. A heavy hand dropped onto her back.

Did you want to talk?

She shook her head vigorously, the friction warming the wetted pillowcase.

The pilot rose in an audible ease of springs and undid her wrappings and rolled them neatly and put them aside and lifted the duvet and slid in. Dachni rolled back in yelp of fear and sudden jolting pain.

Theres nothing to be afraid of.

Git away!

An ophic arm cupped her hip and shored her up to a newborn nakedness freezing. That cold Dachni could feel frost on the pilot’s belly. As though she were exuding the cryogenic sleep out which she had prematurely arisen. It made Dachni writhed. She shielded her face with the flashlight and the pilot drew it from her fists and placed it on the nightstand. Then she licked in her affectionate manner the scar that formed the taper of the child’s brow. Her tongue was slick, no roughness to it, a frigid moisture. Cold needling points traced up her shirt to her panting heart and blossomed out over it. The child’s arms floundered above her head and her elbows bowed out. She tried to push the coldness back down gasping shrill whimpers in the effort but obsidian rictuses of bone with lean grading leathery lips at their bases arched over her shoulders and latched to her scapulae. Two more on her either side hooked to her shortribs and a last pair perched in her omphalos. She struggled to deperch the talons from her ossature but they were fastened tight.

Hello heartbeat.

She squealed her little girl squeals of fear and struggled on. She managed a single talon off and then it bore down harder than before and a writhing wave rolled up from her toes and she arched her back and her head shook side to side.

The pilot whispered a cool salve into her ear. Her mint breath was breath from some arctic clime and the plume of it rolled tenderly over her face. She made a final feeble essay to break free of her imprisonment and failed and collapsed spent in breathless defeat.

Tis not thy blooded casement wherein is seated life but the lungs. For each breath is the last breath but blood dries in the chambers of the veins. Cults of blood are thralled to the hypostasis, below them are the materialists, below them the hedonists. Its like old times isnt it?

Let go.

Why?

Let gooooo, she cried and began to slap at her again like a vicious petting.

The talons detached. Withdrew to her breast and massaged there. Geyshla child. Geyshla.

Her heaving sobs slowed in their deepening and the furious pace of her hearted chambers slacked.

Youll be alright.

Saided was a monster, she cried.

I know.

She shrank, her eyes creased tight, a brittle kindermonstrum sprawled. Isnt a monster. Isnt.

I know, said the pilot.