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.
The River is not deep, is not shallow,
An Abyss is never bound,
Not by up and down.
She sang the song for an eternity. She could sense her organs rearrange, tiny fishes seep into her veins in place of blood, and above, in the lands of the living, she started to appreciate how full Nyx’s coffers would get, how roaring this grim economy would come to be. This thrilled her, but one idea didn’t sit as well. Perhaps in time it would, but right now, it still riled the remainder of human emotion she possessed. It was the idea that her baby, her Melody, had been a voided check, that her husband, Herman, was the same. They were worthless…of all the souls waiting on the shore with coins in their hand, Melody and Herman would not be among them.
But millions of strangers already were, and Vincent Baker was among them.
His soul had value.
And without prejudice she would board him and the others, to give them passage to the Underworld.
Tears wanted to form in Janet’s eyes, but even if they had, this place would not let them exit the husk that used to be her body.
You’ve learned much quickly.
Janet trembled. Then, with tenderness, slippery cold arms slid under her legs and behind her head.
Cradled her.
2
“You wanted to go on…I would have never suspected you wanted to live so badly.”
Janet heard what Nyx whispered in her ear, but it hardly made sense. She would have debated the God had she not been drunk on ambrosia.
Nyx suspected her disagreement and added, “I was prepared to have a long arduous search—because in the past you have embraced death, unlike most mortals who shun it. I shouldn’t be surprised you’ve ended up like the rest…tired of pain, but wanting to breathe all the same. You should have come by your torment honestly, but you’re a fake, Janet Erikson.”
Janet grinded her teeth into the nipple. It was thick and tasted like seaweed and saltwater, and at times, blood, but not by any of the damage she was doing. Another draught of clean ambrosia spilled in her mouth, casting its golden path down her esophagus and into her stomach. Her body had been unbelievably unnourished on the mere dribbles before that, as though she’d grown different muscle groups and couldn’t operate them without more food.
Nyx roughly pushed on her breast to let down more milk.
More ambrosia did come and Janet eagerly sucked at it. Nyx had to readjust her breast for a moment, the nipple came free of Janet’s mouth, and the agony of the mere separation drew Janet into a sorrowful rage of wailing and thrashing. Her face filled with hot blood and tears came out of the sides of her eyes in bubbles. She was lost, so small, a disaster of creation, hideous, absolutely hideous without her sustenance. The violence of her fit made her regurgitate some of the golden fluid and it spread throughout the dark waters in thinly brilliant threads and snakes.
Such a loss! How much had that vomit been worth? All of this milk had made her stronger and her mind clearer…to waste it because of a weak stomach was catastrophic and unforgivable. How much had it been? A teaspoon? Tablespoon? Cup? If someone could sell a cup of this beautiful drink, how much would it go for? A million dollars to start, and maybe a few hundred slaves to add? No, more. It must be more.
Since being drawn down into the God’s seaweed palace, Janet’s mind had been preoccupied on the value of everything great and small. She couldn’t help it; Nyx was teaching silent lessons without saying much of anything, but those lessons were heard and appreciated. Most of Janet’s past life had been shoved to the farthest point of her selfish mind, much in the way her need for alcohol or suicide had been. She could still access them and recall what they meant at one time, but it was all so…worthless now. All of that stuff was elemental, transient, and should just vanish by way of the ever-flowing waters around her.
“Gently,” Nyx warned, as Janet tore excitedly at the nipple. The God would say these things more for a display of humanness and less for a reaction to any pain, if such a thing existed for the being.
Janet’s new eyes could see underwater with more clarity, though there wasn’t much to see except swaying seaweed and swirling currents carrying particulates and pebbles in dynamic helixes. It was a lonely place, the River, but Janet was beginning to understand its purpose; this was the only stepping stone into the Underworld, a place where a soul would retain its consciousness even after the death of its host body. As a mortal, such a place would mean offering a payment for safe passage. The coin became part of the River itself and made Nyx vital.
The ultimate joke played on the mortals was never truly appreciated, for it was a secret only Nyx and now Janet could know.
All of a mortal’s life memories were extinguished upon reaching the Underworld. Their love, their pain, their beginning, their middle, their ending. Gone from them and cast into the brew that was the River. The consciousness of a mortal did continue on though, as promised, but in the form of a dull-witted ghost that wandered through a godless, lifeless place, which Nyx gladly thought of as a waste dump.
There is no Hades? No Lord of the Underworld? Janet thought while feeding.
“Once, there were five Gods of the Underworld. This Hades was not one of them, nor was he a real entity, but even if he had been, he would have gone extinct with the rest. Mortals were given too many privileges in life and in death, and it all came to a head.”
How did you survive?
“I was wise enough to employ someone like you who valued the River and couldn’t bear to see it dry up forever.”
What is the River really made of?
“Tragedy.” Nyx’s black smile opened in the waters above. “It is the only potent memory mortals leave behind in their lives. It has the greatest worth. Every other memory is laid to waste.”
But not everybody has tragedies.
“You are greatly wrong. There is no other common memory shared among mortal kind. It is inevitable mortals find something dark to dwell upon in their last moments. Death is not a process for them like with animals. It is an abomination they have no use for… even older mortals, full of pain and rot, may wish for release, but no longer desire death when it comes.”
What about the fly? I used the River’s waters on a fly. It yielded a coin.
“All life, even plants—even microbes, experience tragedy in their way. It isn’t human tragedy of course and it is never as nourishing, but I welcome it all.”
How can that be?
“That fly experienced something you couldn’t appreciate and it has nothing to do with grieving over its death or the death of the eggs it would never have a chance to lay. That fly had one note of discord ringing through its heart as its systems shut down: How will I ever be a fly now? That is a common premise with lower life forms. Humans are the only who feel sorry for themselves and think nothing about their value as living things. They place value on things outside themselves and generate more pain and tragedy in one soul than a whole world of flies could.”
I was like that. I feared I’d live down in these waters, suffering all this pain and misery, and being alone the whole time. I wanted to live again so I could find somebody to spend time with. That is why you found me, wasn’t it?
“Yes, if you had embraced misery, I would not have found you. That need to live brought you to me. Now that you’ve shed those deplorable traits, you can hel
p bring me back. Soon, you’ll ascend to the living world and finish this.”
No! I want to drink more.
“Then do so, but remember that I’m not whole yet. This can’t go on for much longer. My milk will not last another feeding.”
Janet wanted to bawl her eyes out for the news, but she knew that doing so would detach her from the ambrosia supply and that was something that positively could not be suffered.
Faye sat at the table, staring at the full glass of water. She wasn’t thirsty, but had poured the glass and wanted to finish what she started. Evan pensively studied her, waiting for her to respond to his heart-pouring-out. She didn’t want him back in the house. It had taken her a while but she had come to grips with the woman from the orange groves. That wasn’t an alternate self, it was who Faye really was, and the doppelganger had been the woman once called Evan Ledbetter’s wife.
He could never process this, but Faye had a feeling Janet could. Faye didn’t hate herself for walking out on Janet that day at the pond, but she didn’t much care for how long it had taken her to finally forgive her friend.
Now Janet was missing when Faye could really use her help, especially after the doctor’s bad news.
“You’re not going to say anything?” Evan prodded. “I’m telling you I was wrong. I’m saying I made a mistake and I want you and our child back. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
Faye picked a couple errant bread crumbs off the table cloth and flicked them on the floor. The act was a little unnerving and it didn’t suit her. She supposed her new-self and her old-self still would be walking every crumb over to the trash can, but they shared in that happiness.
“Faye?”
“I heard you.”
“Which part?”
“Everything,” she said with a sigh. “But there is something you don’t know and I’m not sure how you’re going to take this.”
“After all we’ve been through, it’s safe to say I can handle whatever it is.”
Bottled Abyss Page 20