by Jared Ravens
He had just a moment to catch his breath. He knew he was suspended quite high in the air. Look down in the cool, blue light he saw he was several stories above the cave's floor, dangling gently on ratted pieced of rope. There was no sound but the hushed call of distant wind elsewhere in the cave. He made his way down carefully, mindful that every spare moment made the rope ladder sway. He made his way to the bottom of the ladder and dropped to the ground in relief.
Around him was a vast room with broken furniture and small piles of rubbish. It seemed as if someone was using the room as a trash heap. The walls were bathed in blue light from a single lamp on one of the walls. Frosted glass covered whatever the elegant light source was.
He heard a sound, like a distant rock falling. There were several doors and passages out of the room so he chose the one with the sound. He walked down a set of narrow stone stairs and through several hallways. It wasn’t long before he was lost.
He took several more turns, listening but only occasionally hearing a sound that wasn't his own echo. He followed them through fork after fork, door after door, and empty room after empty room. The path was generally lit by torch, meaning someone was lighting them, but all he could find no one.
He was unaware of what time it was, but when he finally felt exhausted he lay down on a bench in the corner of a room and lay his head on his sack to sleep.
When he woke if felt like it was much later. It could have been centuries. He had been in a deep, strange sleep with echoey voices and creatures in robes that paced around him. Yet the dream was still around him. There were five tall robed figures, walking past him, through the room, carrying torches and dragging their feet. They were not quite human but they were humanoid, with long pale faces and chins that stretched abnormally down to the neck of their brown robes. Bern stood up quietly, watching the unreal procession from the corner. He had heard stories of the underground but knew nothing of these things.
He hid behind a broken dresser, his heart pounding, and watched as the last of them walked through. He followed at a distance through the corridors, careful that he was always far enough back that they couldn't see him. It was needless caution; they moved as if in a trance, looking forward and never back. The soon came to a wide set of stairs carved out of the rock. They curved upwards and to the right in a gentle ascent. The wall on the right opened up into a giant panorama of a spectacular cave. Stalagmites and stalagmites rose and dropped in an enormous, multicolored mouth. The back end of the cave, far in the distance, had a dark lake covered in mist. He could make out small figures moving in the distance.
Something squeaked. Behind him was a small animal, a lizard-like creature that stood up on its hind legs. It squeaked again and bared its teeth. The imp moved towards Bern and he moved back into a wall. It approached him, sniffing at the air. It rose to its full height, about knee level, and chomped at him. He kicked it in its chin, knocking it back. It stood up, stunned, and jumped to bite him again. He kicked it until it flew back into the wall with a pop. It fell to floor, lifeless.
Looking carefully at the thing he examined its features, its thin body and light green skin. A mist emerged from it, forming into a a translucent being that mirrored its old shape. The white, cloudy creature snapped at him silently and then scurried forward, towards the multicolored cave. He watched it disappear down one of the many ridges as it made its way to the dark lake.
While the path the ghost had taken was too treacherous for Bern, he could make out paths on the edges of the cave. He walked back down the stairs and turned to the right, following the trail as it edged past red holes filled with water and light blue waterfalls. It felt like he was entering another world, another time someplace dark and magical. A musty feeling filled him, as if something old and ruminating was spilling it energy into him.
He moved carefully as he approached the lake. The long faced men were walking along its shores, mumbling something among themselves. He took a left and moved towards a doorway cut into the cave wall. As soon as he turned into it ran face first into something fleshy and solid, falling to the ground. He looked up, horrified that his face had hit the chest of one of the long faced men. The being stood over him, nearly a third higher than he was, and peered at him with black, beady eyes. He opened his mouth extremely slowly, revealing small, blunt teeth in a wide jaw stretching almost as long as Bern’s forearm.
"Who..." he said in a tone that was nearly musical, with a rhythm so slow that it felt like dust was blowing form his mouth.
"Bern," he said, quietly as he stood up. "I... need to speak to Waring. For Martel. From her, I mean."
"Ohhh..." it said, then turned very slowly. It walked through the doorway, which Bern believed meant he was supposed to follow. The being turned into a room where Bern was surprised to find six others of the same kind milling about. They moved wood pen plates and bowls form side tables to a dinning table at the center fo the room. They mad noises that sounded like conversation and but seemed senseless.
"What... do you do..." they would say slowly. "Moving.. here.... " another would respond. "Good.."
Bern’s guide looked at him with an unreadable blank expression for the longest time. Eventually he went to the others and sat down. They passed the empty bowls around as they made meaningless talk to each other. When they ate, they chewed the air and drank brown water that flowed form a pitcher. It fell out of their mouthes and onto the floor. They stared emotionless around the room, some seeing bern and others looking right through him. At one point they began to eat the plates themselves, chewing splinters with their small teeth.
It was a bizarre and macabre scene. They were lost in their own world, barely even noticing the person in the room. Bern felt alone in the insanity. The rules of the world around him were entirely unknown.
He backed out of the room and into the hallway, following it back towards the lake. The group he had seen earlier were further down the shore, and when he looked at them he saw something he hadn't noticed before. The wall at the far end of the cave had holes in it where movement could be seen. As he moved closer he saw there were people moving past the windows. At the base of the wall people were exiting and filing in a line down he shore.
Now standing next to the shore he could see it all more clearly. The people were wandering aimlessly, a distracted look in their eyes. The long faced men corralled them, gently guiding them into the lake. He looked a the black lake, a motionless mirror with a haze of fog floating above it. Over at the far end, where the people and long faced men were gathering, the new arrivals walked quietly into the lake. The wandered for some distance, spreading out across the lake as they walked further into it, the water never coming more than chest high. When they were far enough out they disappeared into the deep mist.
He walked over to where the people were gathered, then picked up speed. The long faced men looked at him as he rushed past them but didn't try to stop him. He saw what he suspected: the people were coming from above and down a long spiral, exiting were he was standing. A crowd of newly dead people were coming down the spiral making it tight. He pushed his way up through their blank stares, looking at each face. Soon the crowd became too thick to move through. The people continued to push towards him in mass and Bern stumbled back, unable to be resist the force. They pushed him back with a tidal force as continued to try to see who was in the next group of arrivals.
He saw through one of the windows in the wall that the long faced men were grouped around some person and guiding them away on the banks of the lake. He pushed his way back down the spiral, forcing his way through the people to get to the bottom. He ran towards them, losing his breath several times with the exertion. I pushed two of the men out of the way and gripped the woman by the shoulders, pulling her around to face him.
Bern caressed his wife, holding her as he had never held a person before. He felt weak and his legs buckled. He fell to the ground, bowing to her and holding her ankles as he cried.
"I cannot believe it i
s you," he told her when he looked up at her. Of course, it was not her. It was her, but a facsimile of her. She was pale, smiling gently with eyes much darker than normal. They were empty. He pulled himself up to meet her, still overcome with emotion. It was her, but it wasn't her. It was her.
"You... should not be here," said one of the long face men. Bern excused himself and told the man he needed a minute. When he interrupted him again, Bern snapped at him.
"Give me a moment," he said. He was surrounded by five of the men but their personalities were so benign that he felt no fear of them.
“Bern," the woman said to me. His heart jumped at the sound of his name. She smiled and he embraced her. She responded with a weaker version of the same motion.
"Thank you," Bern told her. She repeated the same words, but softer.
"Bern," said one of the long faced men. Bern turned to look at the man. He repeated his name, as if he knew Bern.
"What do you want?" Bern asked him.
"No," the man said, in the same plain voice.
Bern had a sense of his foolishness, that his desperation had taken over the sensible parts of his mind. He also knew he wanted to protect what was left of his wife. He couldn't part with her again. He felt no threat from the long faced men and was prepared to defend himself if they tried to take her away. He turned, putting himself in between them and her. He waited for one of them to move or pull some decadent weapon from their brown robes.
“Bern,” came a voice from behind him in a tone that sounded like charred coals. "No."
He turned around to see a figure so large that he couldn't comprehend how he hadn't seen him earlier. He was four times Bern’s size, so large that he bend his neck to fit under the ceiling of the cave. Bern wondered why the being did not shrink to improve it’s posture, but then realized he was craning his neck forward in a slump. This was just how he preferred to stand. He was wearing a long brown robe and his face was thin, boney and pale with deep set eyes with bags under them. Bern had seen paintings of Waring before and all of them showed him as some dark terror. There was sadness that flowed from him, but there was also calmness and wisdom. It felt to Bern like he was waking from a deep rest. There was no fear in him until he realized that Waring was trying to take his wife from him.
"No," he sputtered. "You can't have her."
"You don't have her either."
"I'm here to… to deliver a message and then I’ll take her with me. That's my price."
"No," he said, extending his hand. His fingers were boney, his nails evenly cut. Bern’s body could fit in his hand and use it like a large, hard chair with room to spare. "You'll give it to me now."
Bern saw into the dark intensity of his eyes. He felt he was scanning the entirety of his life and situation, seemingly swallowing his soul with a look. He dropped his bag and fished through it, finding the letter at the bottom. Waring plucked it with his finger nails without effort. He let it sit on his finger, absorbing it without opening the envelope. In a moment he opened his eyes again and said:
"Hmmm."
"Bern," said Shayne. "Where are we?"
Bern told her quickly they were on their way home.
"Lying helps little," said the low voice. "Especially when you do so to yourself."
"What are you talking about?" Bern said, angrily. "You can't be so cruel to take her away from me again."
Waring had turned away from Bern and was shrinking. When he was to to Bern’s height he waved for him to follow his hunched footsteps. Bern looked Shayne.
“Leave her," he said.
Bern caught up to Waring as he trudged along the side of the lake. As Bern came close to him he felt the sensation that he had heard about, the immense sense of loss that Waring carried with him. It was overpowering, a feeling he could not entirely place.
"I'm not saving Fairfax," Waring said bluntly. "Martel is admired by me, but I will not save that which killed my friend."
He struggled to find words. Bern didn't what his mission was until now, and it didn't seem important in the aftermath of seeing Shayne.
"That's something you and Martel need to discuss," Bern told him.
"Then why are you here?" Waring demanded, suddenly angry. He glared at Bern with black marble eyes.
"I know what it feels like to lose someone," Bern replied. "I just did. But I'm sure Fairfax only did what he did because he felt threatened. Why should someone else lose his life?"
"I don't just feel Bautomet's loss," he explained, turning away from Bern. "I feel all the loss. It all comes down here, and I absorb it all, willingly. I do all of this, willingly. They come down here, the spirits, and they chose their clothes as they had them up top, and they appear to me because they sense who I am and what I can give them."
“They senses release," Bern replied, remembering my school lessons.
“Yes," Waring replied.
Bern looked back at his wife, who stood among the long faced men with her hand gently crossed. The lot of them looked to have the same expression across all of their faces: blank and bewildered.
"You said clothes," Bern asked him. "They put on clothes."
"What they wearing on them, yes."
"But where do they get their bodies? Aren't they dead?"
"Their clothes," Waring said, looking at Bern as if he was ignorant. "They wear them on the outside. Of themselves."
Bern looked again at his wife, then at the line of people trudging into the water some distance from me.
"You're saying their clothes are their bodies."
"Just like yours."
"Yes, but I"m alive."
He looked Bern up and down.
"You're down here," he said, then turned away and continued walking. Just when Bern’s confusion was at its peak, he had said something that confused him even more. Waring walked further along the lake, turning at one point behind a large stalagmite. On the other side was a set of old, rusted manacles, each loop easily the size of my body. He put his hands on the iron chain that attached them to the rock. As Bern turned he saw that on the other side of a rock wall were the pieces of an enormous skeleton laying on the ground. Pieces of multiple arms lay from on the ground and a spine as thick as Berns body rested against a wall. There was no skull.
“They wouldn’t let me take the skull,” Waring explained.
As Bern looked closer at the skeleton he could see something vague and shimmery. He took a step back, seeing the image of The Beast aside its old bones. But the faded image moved very little, and seemed almost static.
"They think I am so sad," Waring said, in a voice that reflected ages of depression. "I am not at all. It comes through me and then off me. Inside I am happy."
Watching him, the way his hands petted the chain, Bern saw there was much tenderness in him. Bautomet was not the horrible creature that everyone saw; Waring had immense love for it. It had come from the anger and bitterness that was harvested from the emotions that he absorbed. Bautomet was his child.
"You must not have noticed how angry and mean Bautomet could be," Bern said, his eyes on the image of the beast.
"He was playful,” Waring said, looking at Bern. "Very rough."
"Maybe he was misunderstood," Bern added, diplomatically. "By all of us."
"Very much so."
"There was not a lot of explanation he offered us when he came to eat us.”
Waring’s expression struck him. He smiled a little, moving his hands off the chain.
"Everyone dies," he said. "But not really. You don't see the larger picture. No one does. They just want to stay up there. So. You don't see. You still don't see.”
“But you kept him him here,” Bern replied, looking at the glowing image move slightly. “You know how I feel.”
“Yes,” Waring said, walking out of the alcove. “I couldn’t let him go. Yet. But I know how all this works. There will be another. It’s just timing.”
Bern thought about his response as they walked along the banks of the ri
ver.
"You think Martel is mistaken."
"She doesn't see how things work either, in this case."
"Its a very contentious situation, and I imagine she is looking for your help."
"No," he said, bluntly. He smiled again, the strangest smile Bern could imagine. It felt very inappropriate, as if Waring had no idea how facial expressions were meant to work.
"I have to say, I am very ignorant,” Bern said. “What, exactly, did Martel want you to do?"
"She knows Fairfax is going to die. So do I. So does everyone. She wants me to throw up another soul like I would into a baby, and rescue him."
"My..." Bern replied, lost for words.
"No. That’s the answer. I told Theo to get a group together just to kill Fairfax. I don't want to save him.”
“Would you even let him down here if he died?”
Waring grimaced.
“I have a duty,” he said. “If he found his way here, I would consider it. Not everyone comes down here…”
“Where do they go?”
“Other paths,” he shrugged, his face tight at the thought of Fairfax. “So, Fairfax can wander with them. He can die painfully and wander aimlessly for eternity.”
"Wait," Bern said. "Why did you pull Shayne to the side out of all of the people coming down the spiral?"
"She had something interesting in her," he replied. "Martel had marked her in a way. She does that sometimes with interesting people."
Bern blinked several times.
"Martel wanted you to put my wife into Fairfax's body after he died?"