by Laura Bickle
“Oh. Yeah. Maybe not.”
“You’re stuck in an alchemical process. Dissolution. What happened to you?” He took her hand in his and squinted, poking at the ooze. “Are you following in your old man’s footsteps and fucking around with the wrong alchemy texts? Which ones? Not Melchoir. Tell me you’re not reading Melchoir. He was full of so much shit . . .”
“No. No, I am not fucking around with any alchemy texts!” Petra rubbed the bridge of her nose with her free hand, only to feel her fingertips pushing into the cartilage. She pulled her fingers away, and they come back with a string of tar. She tried to flip it off, but it wouldn’t detach from her middle finger. “I was chasing a snake and inhaled some of its breath. Which, apparently, is pretty toxic.”
“A snake?” Her father sat upright, bones rattling. “What kind of snake?”
“A huge snake. About thirty feet long. Green, with a yellow crest . . .”
“And yellow eyes! Yes, yes!” Her father became excited. He picked up a pebble and began to draw on the brick. He drew a fair likeness of the snake in white, with its feathered crest and slitted eyes. “You met the basilisk.”
“Don’t look so enthused.”
“The basilisk is amazing. Well . . .” He looked her over again. “Well, she’s amazing from a distance. At least a quarter-mile upwind. With binoculars.”
She lifted her gooey hands in surrender. “Lesson learned.”
“The basilisk represents transformation and dissolution. She’s poison, but she’s also the key to eternal life. Blood from the right side of the basilisk yields eternal life, and the left side is Medusa’s blood, certain death.”
“Mmmkay. So is it—she—is one of Lascaris’s leftovers?”
“Probably. I did a fair amount of looking for her back in the day. But I suspected she was buried too deep for me to reach her, sleeping.”
“She’s a subterranean creature?”
“That’s my guess.”
“I wonder if the earthquakes woke her up. We’ve had some weird seismic activity lately.”
“Could be. Or she might have woken up on her own to lay eggs.”
She stared at her father. “Are you shitting me? There’s more than one?”
He shrugged, a motion that made his humerus clatter against his scapula. “Why not?”
“Awesome.” She rested her head in her hands, forgetting that she was apparently made of goo in this spiritual plane. She made a face and pulled her sticky hands away. Sig made no move to wash her face again. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands, and they dripped on the symbols of the brick.
“What is this stuff?” she asked.
“The bricks tell the story of the Emerald Tablet, the first alchemical text. It was rumored to have been a gift to humanity from Thoth himself. In painstaking detail, it goes through all seven alchemical processes: calcination, dissolution, separation, conjugation, fermentation, distillation, and coagulation. I’ve been working on translating them from the source material, trying to learn the processes firsthand.” His fingers brushed the brick with a bit of possessiveness.
“But that’s really the least of your worries.” Her father pointed to her. “You’ve got to solve that problem before you chase down any more snakes or further your alchemical education.”
“No kidding.” She let her hands dangle in her lap. “What do I do?”
“Not sure,” her dad admitted.
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
“I don’t know everything.” He crossed his arm bones across his ribs with a grating sound. Sig had sneaked up beside him and took a test bite of his fibula.
“Sig, that’s rude,” Petra said. Not that Miss Manners had written a newspaper column on it, but she was quite sure that was rude, on any plane of existence.
“Listen to me.” Her father took her gluey hands in his. “All I can do is share what I know about alchemy, and you’ll have to make your own decisions. I screwed up, not too far from where you are now. I don’t want you to get stuck here. Like me.”
“What do you mean, you screwed up?”
“I got stuck in my own phase. The separation stage, the third stage of alchemy. I was trying to isolate the Alzheimer’s, to get it out of my brain. Things went wrong, and . . . this is the only way that I can keep my wits. Here.” His hand sketched the underworld.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I know. And I’m sorry, too . . . for everything that happened when I left. But listen . . . we don’t have time for that now. You have to use what I did as knowledge to help you move on. You’ve got to get through dissolution and into separation. That’s the next stage.”
“So.” She took a deep breath and looked around her, at the bricks and the roads into darkness. “I can’t stay here.”
“No. You’ve got to pick a road. Find a symbol that speaks to you. Bring it back here. That’s your best hope.”
“Is that what you did? In this place?”
He nodded. His smile was wan. “And I picked wrong.”
She climbed to her feet. “Are you coming with me?”
“I can’t. I can’t influence your decision. Just . . .” He shook his head. “I took bad advice, and I got stuck.”
“Stroud. He gave you the bad advice.”
“Yes. And I’m ashamed of that. Just . . . just follow your heart, kiddo.” His hazel eyes shone.
Petra kissed him on the receding hairline above his forehead, the way she had so many times before in the nursing home. This time, she left behind a tar-like smudge. He handed her his lantern.
Squaring her shoulders, she faced the paths.
Sig stood beside her, wagging his tail, nose working at the dank smells in the darkness.
She peered at each path. She didn’t have an intuitive bone in her body. She had no idea how to follow her heart. The darkness was impenetrable, and no path looked any better than any other.
She dug into her pocket for the Venificus Locus.
“That’s cheating,” her dad said. “The underworld is about weighing your heart, not the logical stuff.”
“I don’t care if it’s cheating, Dad. I want out.”
She found the Locus and held it up to the bluish light. The goo on her hands slipped into the channel around the grooves, clogging it.
“Damn.”
“Told you.”
She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him.
The right-hand path was closest. That was as good as any. She struck off down the tunnel.
Behind her, her father made a harrumphing sound.
The lantern cast a golden light along the walls of the tunnel. It reminded her a bit of the tunnels beneath the Lunaria in the Hanged Men’s subterranean domain. The floor of the tunnel was smooth underfoot, as if it had been trod by many feet before her. Maybe that was a good sign.
Or not.
The tunnel opened into a round chamber. She lifted her lantern high as she spotted a glimmer of something in the center of the floor.
It was a cluster of rock quartz about as big as her skull. A lovely specimen. She knelt and lifted the lantern high over it. Shadows shifted in the flickering light within the facets of the quartz. It had surprising clarity for a cluster, with well-formed symmetrical facets and beautiful ghost inclusions within.
This must be it. She was a geologist—surely there must be a metaphorical rock in the center of her chest.
She reached down for it, but a voice stopped her.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
She glanced up, as a figure detached from the shadows gathered around the ceiling. It fluttered down by her feet.
She blinked. It was a great blue heron. But it was talking to her in a familiar voice: Frankie’s voice.
“Frankie?”
“Don’t look
so shocked.” The heron cocked his head and looked at her. Sig sidled around to take an experimental nip, and the heron slapped him with a massive grey-blue wing.
“Is this how you get around in the spirit world?”
The heron ruffled his feathers. “Sometimes. It gets me where I need to go. At least, it gets me around a lot faster than the toad suit does.”
Petra rubbed her sticky fingers against her temple. The spirit world was giving her one helluva headache. Her brain did not process symbolism well. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to tell you that things aren’t always as they seem.”
“Oh. So quoth the talking heron. Are you sober in the spirit world?”
The heron shook his feathers. His wingspan was impressive, nearly five feet across, and he wasn’t even really stretching. “I’m always sober in the spirit world,” he sneered.
“My dad says that I need to take this rock and bring it to the center of the underworld, the umbilicus.”
The heron snaked his head down and stared at the quartz. “Look carefully.” His dark eyes were reflected hundreds of times in the backlit quartz.
Petra got down on hands and knees and squinted at it. She looked deeply within, saw the normal ghosts and reflections moving in it. It seemed stable. Real. She reached for it . . .
“Look underneath,” the heron insisted.
She peered at the base of the cluster, where it sat on the floor. Something was moving around it, not just a trick of the light.
She scuttled back. A snake had curled around the base of the rock and was regarding her with luminous eyes. It hissed, opening a hood.
Oh, fuck. It wasn’t just a snake, a cute one, like a garter snake or a DeKay’s snake. It was a cobra. She slowly backed away on her hands and feet, crablike. If she’d snatched that rock up, the snake would surely have struck her.
The heron walked up to the stone, looking right and left at the reflections of the asp in the quartz. The giant bird ducked right, snatched up the snake in its beak, and swallowed it. It was a bizarre process . . . the snake’s tail flipped and lashed at the edge of the heron’s mouth, and the heron struggled to swallow it. It was visible, undulating and alive, as it descended down the heron’s thin throat. Petra watched in fascination until the swallow was complete, and the snake had disappeared somewhere deep within the heron’s gullet.
“Tasty.” The heron nodded at himself, then at the quartz. “Are you sure you still want that?”
“Mmmm yeah . . . maybe not.”
“Good choice. Gotta get back topside. Maria’s making spaghetti for dinner. Which will be weird, after snake, but . . .” The heron burped and took wing into the shadows above.
“Thanks, Frankie!” she called.
She looked at the quartz cluster at her feet, then traded glances with Sig.
“I think I’ll pass.”
Sig was the first to turn and leave.
The second tunnel she picked was much the same as the first, except she could hear air moving through it—there had to be an opening to the surface world here, somewhere. She lifted the lantern as high as she could, but couldn’t discern exactly where the sound was coming from. It sounded like an exhalation over a bottle, and she could feel the change in barometric pressure. She popped her ears three times before she reached a cylindrical chamber at the end. It was empty, except for a peacock feather lying on the stone floor.
That looked like something suitably magical that the Umbilicus would approve of.
She reached for the feather, but a breeze pushed it away.
She held her lantern aloft. She couldn’t see the ceiling of this chamber, but the sound of the exhalation had increased above her.
No matter. She set the lantern down and went to pick up the feather.
The feather scuttled up, away, as the wind rose.
“Damn it.” Petra tried to catch it by cupping her hands, but the air pushed it away. It was like trying to catch a plastic bag in a rainstorm. She lunged over her head to try to snag it, leaping like a circus performer. If she could just get one sticky finger on it, she’d have it caught.
But the soughing wind sucked it up, out of reach, over her head and into the darkness above. Petra waited, thinking: What comes up must come down.
But it didn’t. It had been carried away, likely sucked to the surface or jammed into a crevice somewhere.
She put her hands on her hips. “Well, fuck.” She was reminded of a myth she’d read about in school about the Egyptian goddess of justice, Ma’at, who weighed the hearts of the dead against a feather. If the heart was lighter than the feather, the soul would ascend to the sky and not get gobbled by the crocodile-headed god, Sobek.
She had apparently failed this test.
She squinted upward. There was air there. Maybe a way out. Who said she had to play by the stupid rules, anyway? Her dad. But clearly, he didn’t have a handle on the underworld, anyway.
She found a bit of a ledge and put her foot on it. That seemed easy enough. She found a handhold and started to haul herself up the wall, hand over hand.
Sig barked at her.
“Yes, I know that this is cheating. But nobody asked me if I wanted to play.”
She jammed her hand into a fissure in the rock, hauled herself up, and planted her feet in footholds. She was doing a good job, she thought—ten feet from the ground, now. Maybe . . .
A gust of wind hit her, and she pressed herself to the wall. She thought it would pass, but it didn’t. It just got stronger, pushing her from her footholds. Surely she was sticky enough to cling to the wall, to wait it out?
But, no. The wind intensified, and she was forced to back down. She slid the last three feet to the floor, leaving an oily smear on the wall.
The wind dropped back, and she made a face at it.
Damn. She guessed she’d have to play by the rules and find something else to bring back to the umbilicus. Three more tries.
The third path felt warmer, as if there might be an inviting fire at the end of the path. This path was lined with coal and soot. It reminded her of the one time she’d been in a crematorium, the way the heat shimmered in the air. She sure hoped her new sticky form wasn’t flammable.
A red glow emanated at the end of the tunnel. On a slab of stone lay a sword, just pulled from a blacksmith’s forge glowing in the wall. The sword was bright orange, not yet thrust into a bucket to cool it.
A sword. Perhaps that was the tool she needed to separate herself from the spirit world, to move forward. That would be the most tangible way to do it. But how to grasp it without getting burned?
A figure in black, wearing a blacksmith’s apron, turned.
Her breath snagged in her throat, and Sig growled.
It was Stroud, the Alchemist of Temperance.
“Shit,” she hissed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE UNDERWORLD
The Sisters of Serpens were going to kill him. Cal was convinced of it. Or worse. They could come up with much worse things to do to him. They seemed to have no issues with killing, and they liked to be creative about it. That was a bad combination, in Cal’s experience.
Cal clung to the back of Bel’s motorcycle like a flea on a wolf. Wind tore through his hair, and he buried his face against her back. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see the trees zinging past at crazy speeds and close angles—this off-roading was worse than the land speeder chases in The Return of the Jedi. Cal had had a dirt bike once upon a time, and he thought that he was kind of cool because of it. Now, he realized that he’d been riding like someone who actually treasured his existence. A June bug hit him in the throat, and it felt like he’d been shot. Branches and leaves whipped past his face and slashed through his clothes.
Well, they weren’t the clothes that he’d ripped off from
the uniform truck. They’d re-dressed him in one of the dead guy’s clothes. He was wearing the dead dude’s boots and his leather jacket that smelled like bad aftershave, and Cal wanted to vomit. He was acutely aware that the clothes’ original owner and his friends were currently crumpled up like broken dolls in the Sisters’ luggage.
If that didn’t make him want to barf, the ride sure did. But Cal wasn’t sure what would happen if he hurled the entirety of his four-course chuck wagon meal down Bel’s neck. If he did that, he was pretty darn sure that the hour of his demise would hasten to . . . immediately.
Not that any of this shit mattered. Bel had made it clear that he was on her magical leash. If he was beyond the reach of her pacifying power, this hypnosis, whatever the fuck she did to him, he was as good as dead.
Bel seemed to be guiding them by her own woo-woo internal compass. She would stop without warning, sit on the ground and meditate for what felt like hours, then get back up again to lead. She sure acted like she knew where they were going, and where they were going had run out of road. She led them into the wilderness, across dry creek gullies, through valleys, and among the pine trees of the deep forest of the backcountry. The park was crawling with rangers; more than once, she’d double back and take a different route to avoid the law. When they stopped to rest or eat, she’d be watching the horizon with a thousand-yard stare. Wherever they were going to meet the snake, only she knew.
Bel finally stopped at the edges of a forest, dismounting, and seeming as if she were listening to some supersonic sound that only bats and certain comic book heroes could hear. Probably just her and Aquaman. Cal was relieved to stop; the inside of his thighs and his ass ached from being on the bike, and he was grateful to have the chance to stop and stretch and settle his stomach.
“She’s close,” she murmured, her gaze distant.
Fuck. Cal squinched his eyes shut. “Is it like . . . a big snake? Like the anacondas on the Nature Channel?”
“Yes, Cal,” she said with infinite patience, as if he were in kindergarten. “She’s a very big snake.”