Rebus, the fifth of four.
Neith sways on the edge of the well and almost falls in, light-headed. How long has it been since she slept? Since she was safe? Well. Hunter survived longer, so she can do it too. It’s not a competition between them, just a measurement of possibility, a benchmark. Hunter was old, Neith is not. What matters is the will.
She splashes water on her face, looking down into the dark circle. Brick gives way to stone, and then to darkness. Black water, down and down under the house. Sub-er and sub-er, indeed. Under the basement, under the water.
And therefore: submarine.
Basement, base, basis, bathus: down and down under and deep and everything’s groovy.
What lies beneath the lower ocean?
What if there is another basement below this one? A sub-basement, marked by a submarine? What if down there, in the well, is where all Hunter’s secrets are hidden, and this is the catabasis demanded of her heir? It is suitably Greek, suitably perilous, after all: an anti-birth to prepare her for a new beginning.
Hunter is urging her on, surely, on and down the well. And, yes, of course: she will take the core rope memory with her. In fact, it will take her, for she will have to use it as a diving weight, throw it in and grab on. Whatever is down there, the CRM is part of it. Waterproof, as well as nuclear-proof, this old thread of storage – Little Old Lady memory, they called it once: nigh on indestructible, and carrying the weight of the world.
Abruptly, she is shaking. This is the act of a madwoman. Perhaps she really has suffered some sort of break; not hallucinations but reason all topsy-turvy. She pictures Keene on the screens around Piccadilly Circus: Mielikki, please. Come in. We can help. You don’t have to be alone.
She should go upstairs and call Jones, face the music, trust in the System. Perhaps it’s not too late, even now.
She laughs. Or perhaps it is. They made such a point of showing her the Firespine terminal. They think they can weather what comes. Perhaps they have cut the connection to the house already, in one of Lönnrot’s tunnels under the world, and all she can do here is give them what they want. She imagines Jones, manful with a chainsaw, shaking his head at her. All for nothing, Mielikki, I’m afraid.
You should be afraid. You’ve underestimated Hunter all along, and you’re doing it again.
And me, too. You underestimated me. All of you, except Lönnrot.
Have you found her diaries?
No. But I am about to.
Or die, of course. That is also a possibility.
*
She lowers the copper rope, hand over hand, like a plumb fishing line. The edges are quite sharp, so she has co-opted a pair of gardening gloves, marked with grooves along the palms and finger-edges. This same operation would make such marks.
Copper runs down into the well. It is one of the benefits of this storage medium: you can get it wet and not worry. You can expose it to vacuum and radiation. It is placid, inert. It is rope, not volatile celluloid or vulnerable magnetic tape. Twenty foot. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. She feels a slackening. Fifty foot to the bottom. If this turns out to be a wild goose chase, she will have to go fifty foot back up, exhaling all the way, and not get tangled in the line. She could run a garden hose down as a breathing tube. A hose like this one, in a plywood box behind the ladder. It might help somewhat, if she remembers to exhale into the water and not the hose.
Head first? Or feet? Good sense dictates feet.
She lays a stepladder over the edge of the well, tapes the hose to it, and strips. How much to take off? Modesty is not relevant. Warmth is a possible problem, but mobility is moreso. Underwear, then.
The last of the CRM is bundled into a ball, a short handle fixed to its top so that it will dangle below her as she dives.
She sits on the edge and lowers her feet into the cold water, relaxing into the shock. Breathing out. The water laps at her knees, tickling. There is no way to do this softly from now on. She must commit. She will have limited time in this water, limited breath, limited energy and body heat. It is the most dangerous thing she has ever done, to do this alone, in her physical condition. Do it or not, but do not hedge.
Feet or head first?
Feet, surely. Feet first. She will not be able to turn at the bottom if there is nothing there.
What if there is a bend, a low doorway she must slip through? Will she come back up for it?
She knows there is something there, knows it as a priest knows God is watching – and with all the same occasional waverings of faith.
She lifts her feet out of the water and stands at the wellhead. Grips the bundle of copper and the hose.
Head first, and down.
*
Cold like a new colour, stark and blinding. She gasps, blowing exhalate into the hose. The copper drags her down. She breathes quickly, pushing the bad air out through her nose. Should have brought a clothes peg – no, then she’d have to exhale through her mouth, she might lose the hose. No clothes peg. She’s fine.
How long has she been going down?
Can’t see anything. Blackness.
Head first down a well. She must be insane. Her body thrashes as if she’s fitting, and she is: it’s panic, pure and black in the ice water. One foot bangs hard against stone, and it hurts like hell. Broken toe, perhaps. Brings her to her senses, sort of. Her hands are numb, but she can still feel the weight of the copper, the drag of the hose. (Don’t let go of the hose. Not head first. Don’t.)
She can hear something, above her heartbeat: a slow metallic clinking, the sound of the copper making landfall. Close now. Tink tonk tonk. Crackle, and then a clunk, a medley of scratches and pitter-patters: the bundle touching down.
She has arrived.
She can feel the blood in her head, the too-full vessels pushing it around her brain, her heart not at all keen, her legs getting too little. Numb in the toes.
Don’t let go of the hose. That’s it. Breathe in, exhale into the water. She feels the bubbles ripple along her body to the surface. Don’t let go of the hose.
She reaches out, finds the stone of the well behind her, gropes in the darkness. Should have brought a light. What kind of light? Fishing light, chemical glow stick. Oh, yes, I’m sure there’s one of those upstairs.
Actually, there might be. If Hunter wants this found, she would have put one by.
Wants what found? There’s nothing here. She pulls herself on around the wall, fingers chilled and touching slick stone, slick and sharp. Feels something grate: spiked finger. A nail? A jagged edge? Blood in the water, she can taste it, has a momentary panic that now the sharks will come, but not here, in fresh water, in a well beneath the world.
Why not, if one came in a tunnel?
Though that one had no need of a blood trail to follow. If that particular shark is coming for you, it will surely find you.
Her hand swishes through emptiness. Must have drifted away from the wall. Must have.
No.
No, not drifted. There is a hole. She grasps the edge: brick, brick, brick, lots of bricks in an arch. An archway. Is this the source of the water? One of London’s lost rivers? If so, it would be madness to go through. If not, it is why she came. No way to know.
What if Hunter is merely a vindictive old cow who thought she could take me with her?
She thinks it’s too dark to see, then realises that at some point she has closed her eyes. When she opens them everything is a blur, but through the archway comes something, some faint glimmer, and without giving herself time to debate she lunges through.
Don’t let go of the hose. Except that it won’t reach.
She lets go of the hose.
Through the arch, and up, trailing the spindle of string that will allow her to pull up the copper rope behind.
She feels a familiar unwillingness to exhale. This is the last of her air. Once it is gone, there will be nothing left.
She opens her mouth, and rides the bubbles up into a circle of light.
When her head breaks the surface, she is almost too weak to climb out.
*
Mielikki Neith had expectations of this room. She believed she would find answers here, and she will: there is no doubt of that now. What she had not done, she realises now, is imagined it. She had not considered what it would look like, what shape her answers might take – but if she had, it would not have been this. She might have imagined a magician’s laboratory, all hung with stuffed bats and with rows of strange organs in glass jars; or she might have thought of a study full of notes and coloured strings of consequence and causation. She might have populated the room in so many different ways. But never like this.
The chair is in the middle, in the approved style of the Witness, and the screens are arrayed all around just as they were in the one where Diana Hunter died. The machines are dormant, but not switched off. They whisper gently, and – more important to her right now – they give off heat. There are only two things out of place. The first is a free-standing clothes rail with a dressing gown on a hanger. Without thinking she puts it on, then wonders if it was left for her, or if the last shoulders it wrapped were Hunter’s.
The second thing out of place is on a trestle table by the far wall. There’s the curious gaping mouth, green metallic paint – Cold War chic – and underneath that the stencil lettering, like a prop: FIRESPINE.
Her hands are still curled clubs of flesh, useless fingers thick and bloodless with cold. One of them is bleeding, and she can’t remember why.
She feeds the rope key into the terminal, abruptly remembering the cover art of Hunter’s non-existent book: a quipu. It is an Andean string recording system, another hint. She could have been here days ago. Smith would still be alive so she could arrest him. Emmett would still be alive, too. She’d never have kissed Jones.
The terminal makes an alarming scissoring noise, tiny teeth drawing the key inward like a locust with a blade of grass. After a few mouthfuls it seems content to reel in the rest unaided. Chackachack.
She sits down in the chair, listening to someone’s breathing go wrong, go high and quick. Panic attack. Heart attack. Oxygen depletion. Hypothermia. Shock. Fight/flight. High altitude. She wonders if there’s any air in this room at all, to speak of, or whether she was supposed to bring her own.
Practically a bloody holiday.
No. Just tired. So tired.
Did she inhale water? She’s coughing now, coughing and choking in the chair. White foam spatters, white with flecks of red. Maybe they’ve already killed her: something nasty and fast-acting, something that eats lung tissue. She thinks of orchids, and touches her ears, looking for shoots. No.
She blinks, staring up at the white ceiling. The screens are coming on all around her, showing her herself in the chair, the machine gently embracing her head. It is the new model, only just cleared for human trials and fully automated. She feels cold around her head, then the scraping of an infinitesimally delicate depilation, then pressure as the drills go in. Nothing to worry about. A perfectly ordinary medical procedure.
Oblivion comes quickly, like zipping up a coat.
i expect you’re wondering
THIS IS HOW it is when you get eaten by a shark:
First, you feel a tugging, like being the bobber on a fishing line. You go down under the water – wham! If you’re me, and I am because who the fuck else would I be, your mind immediately connects this with reports you have read of being eaten by a shark, so you know what’s happening to you and you’re aware of knowing, how irritatingly fucking postmodern. You think of that amazing professor from the Vienna School of Literature who gave a lecture at some desolate paid-for event you attended in Hong Kong, who wore a dress that was cut to the hip and whispered in your ear that she’d put herself through college by writhing, nude and glistening, in a nightclub cage. She would have told you to concentrate on the fucking blowjob.
For blowjob read getting eaten by a shark. Even so: Don’t be bullshit, Constantine, she would have said, experience your own death as yours, not as something on someone else’s website. It is the last thing you will ever own.
I don’t. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be eaten by a shark.
Fuck.
Fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck.
I feel no pain, but each beat of my heart must be putting my blood into the black water.
FUCK-FUCK! FUCK-FUCK! FUCK-FUCK!
This is how it is when you get eaten by a shark. I should take a photo. My last Instagram. I wish I’d written a full confession – it would have taken years.
I wish Stella wasn’t being eaten too.
I wish she was Stella, and she wasn’t being eaten too.
Fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck … Oh, fuck it.
That first strike is a tester, to make sure you’re not inedible. Surfers often survive shark attacks because wetsuits don’t taste like seal meat. Sadly, my clothes are not made of neoprene. The second strike usually comes a few heartbeats later: the shark returns, and it really goes to town.
Yes. Now.
This shark, my personal shark, is so enormous that it doesn’t bite me in half. Getting eaten by this shark is frictionless, even harmless. It’s an eclipse in fast motion, darkness and water engulfed by vastness and silence. It’s not a shark at all, it’s the apocalypse. I see the sky and the waves, and Megalos looking down, and then I see a blurred line like the edge of one of those cheap wipe effects in consumer video software, coming down across the world.
My shark has swallowed me whole.
At last.
*
Choking wet flesh, salt and stink; foam, and clenching internal muscles; I am being smothered by peristalsis. I reach out and grasp, cling on to something pliant, something abrasive. A scar? A lesion? A ligament? I have no idea. There’s a sound like anger, or maybe heartburn. Am I uncomfortable in your gullet, you demon sprat? Too spiky, too fat, too Greek?
I am Constantine Kyriakos! I was puked out by Leviathan because my divine, godlike testicles were too much even for the greatest of sharks. That’s right! That’s right! YOU WANT SOME? COME GET SOME!
Except that I don’t know if sharks can vomit, and even if they can, this one isn’t. Down I go. Down, down, down. If I had a pocket knife, I could do some damage here, at least, maybe cut my way out. Escape from the belly of the beast. I don’t have a pocket knife. I buy them regularly at airports and then leave them behind next time I fly because you can’t take them in your luggage any more. But there’s a really fantastic one I got in Thun that time which had a USB stick and a welding torch. I mean, real actual tools. I could—
I could basically nothing.
Sure. Cut my way out into the bottom of the sea. But why not? What’s the worst that could happen?
But then I’d be leaving Stella. So, okay, new plan: find Stella, cut a way out. Has she done a diving course? Should I explain about decompression?
Yes, Constantine, these things are a major fucking concern right now.
I should be dead. How am I still even conscious? Why isn’t my vision strange and speckled and brown, then black, then—I will not die; the world will end.
Yes, my dear friends: here, in this last place, your noble, sexually overdriven, lonely correspondent chooses to reveal himself literate and thoughtful, after all. I die quoting Wilde, not shouting at clouds.
Oh, wait. Shit. That’s Ayn fucking Rand, isn’t it?
Well, to hell with that, then. I better get out of this. I have to get out of this.
I’m not getting out of this.
FUCK-FUCK! FUCK-FUCK! FUCK—
Wait. Wait. I’m breathing.
*
I’m breathing in the absolute night-time of the fish’s gut. I can’t smell anything. Maybe the stink is so intense that my nose has just switched off, or maybe the shark bit off the back half of my brain on the way down.
I reach up and back, seeking the crater, the raw edges of bone. I wonder if it will itch, if I will feel the urge to dig my nails in—
No. I’m all there.
If I had a phone, I could use the screen for a light.
Hell, maybe I’d have a signal here.
I call out Stella’s name. I know it’s not her name, but we’re really past that point. It’s not as if there’s likely to be anyone else in here, anyway.
She doesn’t answer. I get to all fours and crawl, reaching for her, for anything. Perhaps this is hell, after all. My hands slither on the pliant floor, but I carry on. Stella. Stella. Stella.
I bang my head on a box. It’s huge, like a coffin.
I think I’m crying now, but there’s nothing else here. Just me and the box. How would I know?
I feel lips on my forehead: an unexpected blessing in the dark.
Lips, but not hers.
I wake to sunlight in murdered Scipio’s house, to bright sun and the smell of legion coffee. The good Tesserarius Gnaeus is jostling my shoulder, a look of alarm upon his face. Good grief, the man never stops waking me for crises and catastrophes. Could he not, just once, wake me in some more convivial way?
‘Learnèd,’ Gnaeus murmurs, low and intense, ‘the Bishop Augustine is here to see you.’
Oh.
Of all the crises and catastrophes, I think I would prefer: not this one.
Well, I will not receive him in my bed.
I mean, I shall not receive him in my underclothes.
Oh, damn and drat. Drat it all.
What I mean is that there will be no meeting between myself and my former lover in any context which might be construed as intimate. I shall not be the woman he banished. I am myself now, owned and entire, and I shall be myself. My name is Athenais Karthagonensis, and I may once have been a forger and a jilted lover, but now I am a prophet and a holy magus, the mother of a dead son and a speaker to angels and demons. He shall meet me as an equal. That will infuriate him, of course, but it will also intrigue and impress him, and we shall have a better time of our discussions thereby.
There, that is what I meant.
I rise, and dress, and we meet in the hall.
Gnomon Page 68