“What? What am I—”
“You go back down and search the body. His hands. The floor around him. There’s no way of telling where he hid his brother’s ring, but he rarely took his own off.”
“She hasn’t got it, then,” Sander told the Muscovite, no doubt straining his voice to ensure Jo heard him. The shitbird. “We’ll land this fish ’fore she brings it up!”
Jo ignored him, trying to hook Jan’s eyes on hers. “It’s not him. The kitchen, it’s a woman.”
“And how do you know that?” said Jan, finally meeting her gaze and spooking hers in the process. “No, it doesn’t matter. Search him, her, it, just go. And if it isn’t him, search every other room to see if he’s down there.”
“It’s too dark,” she said. “How am I to see?”
“You saw the one in the kitchen well enough.” He smiled coldly, not attempting to blunt the sharpness of his tone. “And you found the hearth, so if he’s here, I trust you’ll find him. Now, go.”
So go she went, goddamn his eyes, diving right off the roof without a care for whether the fish was still down there or if Sander speared her or she drowned for real this time. The plunge carried her past the second-story window, deeper into the meer, and then she curled through an open kitchen window and almost rammed into the seated corpse. She kicked backward, stirring up the muck that covered the old stone floor. Her toes cut through the thick sludge as she righted herself, floating in front of the woman, for woman she had to be—she was all black and bone, and her clothes had dissolved to mist-thin shreds, but what man had ever sat so hunched and miserable, had found himself so busy with work he could not quit it even to avoid his death? It was strange and terrible to see her thus frozen, as if the house had filled in an instant but the weight of her responsibility had kept her stuck to the floor down these many cold days and colder nights.
How had this come to pass, she wondered, what sort of flood took this poor bitch so unawares that she didn’t even drop her peeling knife, and yet hadn’t cast her about in its torrent? She should have been dashed against the walls, blown out the window, tangled in the banister, not left to sit quietly in her corner. It was a queer thing, and made Jo icy and ill to think of it.
Quickly then, woman or no, Jo went for the hands, squinting for a gleam of color, and when that failed, extending her own fingers to stroke the blurry digits that lay arrested before her, bones woven together around the rusty knife like a sparrow’s nest upon a blackthorn branch. Nothing but pale twigs that felt softer than they should have, and with a sandiness to them that made Jo recoil as if her hand had been stung by a switch.
That was that, then, but as she turned back to the window she had swum through, something shiny snared her attention. It was a golden bar above her, where the hazy wall opposite the stair met the distant ceiling, and though her chest was beginning to tighten, she swam quickly to it. Another door, she realized, but there was light on the other side of it, not the dismal gloom of this sunken place but real, blazing light, and she let her fingers pass through the crack of brilliance shining through. The light seemed to skip over her fingertips and she smiled in the dimness. She must be drowning again, but before she fled for the surface she wedged her fingernails into the spongy seam, hooking the top of the door and kicking backward off the wall.
The door didn’t budge, but a splinter drove up into the bed of her pinky nail, and her gasp turned into a painful choking as a dark ribbon began to unspool from her fingertip, winding around her in the water. Shit, she really was fucking drowning. Fighting the jagged ache in her stomach and chest and the stinging in her finger and the ever-thickening water, she made for the window. A familiar, bulky silhouette passed before it, but she kicked ever harder, having more important things to worry about than some goddamn mud-munching fish.
Just as she passed through the portal, however, there was a burst of light from behind her, and even as she was planting her foot against the sill and launching herself up, up, up, she clearly saw her shadow cast out upon the muddy floor of the meer. The door had opened, she knew, and as soon as she had another breath she would see what lay beyond it, in the light.
V.
Jolanda had been down too long, and Jan sighed with frustration. He had as good as held her under himself, letting her dive again after she had surfaced with a bloody finger and a wild, dangerous smile that looked far too much like those Sander wore. Jan had initially protested her going back in so soon, before she had even caught her breath, but she had told him she was sure that the ring was at hand, and so he had let her go.
Now she was bobbing against a ceiling, mouth frozen open, bulging eyes staring at nothing. Or maybe she had tried to force her way through a new window and become stuck in a gap between slats, fingernails peeled back from clawing at the wood, knees black from banging at the frame. What a horrible way to die.
Only now did it occur to Jan that he hadn’t reminded her to retrieve the rope and play it out as she had before, and he gave another long sigh as he took off the shirt he had only recently put back on after hewing open the roof. First would be to find the window she used to enter and exit the bedchamber, which would take him to the rope, and then he would use it as she should have as he went from room to room and—
She gasped, the splash of her surfacing somehow waiting for her to take in the air she must so desperately have needed before crashing all about her. She was close enough that he could have jumped out and landed on her, had he been of a mind. Her back was to him, and her whirling arms immediately began to carry her away from the roof, toward the graveyard. The boat was right there beside her, but she seemed blind to it, deaf to Sander’s laughter as she passed the vessel, and then the big man’s cackling lurched into a shout as the boat pitched to the side. Sander fell into the bed of the violently rocking craft, and the Muscovite, who deftly kept his feet, gave a cry as he launched a spear. Jan realized what must be happening even as he backed up enough to get a good leap. That goddamn fish wasn’t such a bottom dweller after all, and as Jan jumped for the boat, he saw its black shadow in front of the vessel, cutting along after the girl. The behemoth was longer than Sander was tall.
Jan fell short of the boat and plunged into the water, but as soon as he broke the surface, Sander snatched the bare-chested man by the wrist and hoisted him up. It was like riding a pendulum, the boat nearly tipping every few seconds as it dipped from side to side, and then Jan was dropped into the bed of the boat and Sander fell atop him. Jan lay perfectly still lest they capsize, and Sander loomed above him, a look that was somewhere between pleasure and fury on his bearded face. As they pitched from side to side without sign of slowing, Jan felt with sudden, dreadful certainty that something was very wrong with Sander, that this was not the man he had shared so much with over the years—it was as if Sander were smoother, cleaner, clearer of eye even here in the midst of justifiable panic, and Jan’s heart jumped in his chest. This wasn’t Sander—this was a stranger.
“They fuckin sent it!” Sander hissed. “Some kind of hell fish, sent up to thwart us!”
Jan relaxed at this. Same old Sander. “Off me, but careful about it! Get us after it, man!”
Sander slithered backward and was on one of the benches before Jan had even sat up, the Muscovite so excited he had lapsed into his native tongue, babbling and pointing as he dropped onto the other rowing bench. The boat had been facing the roof, but together they brought it around fast, and then the vessel leapt forward like an otter after a bream. There was Jo, halfway to the rush-guarded border of the cemetery shallows, but where—
—The fish was following her but was closer to the boat than the girl, and Jan supposed his own fall into the water must have caused it to double back and investigate before resuming the chase.
“You said it ate mud and worms and shit!” Jan snarled, squinting to get a better look at the fish. It was a true monster, all right. “What’s it doing after her, then?”
“Sometimes the big ones have rat
s in the belly,” Andrei said, panting. It was hard to tell from his tone if he was gleeful or horrified. Jan dared not take his eyes off the fish and the girl. “Da, they push the mud for dinner, but big ones also have rats. Ducks, even.”
“She look like a ball-washing bird to you!?” Sander shouted. He was decidedly gleeful.
“Pushing mud for dinner in, in… graven yard? Da, pushing mud for dinner in graven yard, he finds more than worms. He finds dead men! Maybe he has grown a taste for us after this dinner, da?”
The fish was right on top of her—she was an instant away from being bit. Shaking the water from his hair and eyes, Jan looked behind him for a pike but saw something better—the Muscovite’s cat was just behind him, taking advantage of the chaos to creep forward and steal from the small net Andrei had been casting before the Leviathan arose. The net had trapped a few bream that now flopped about, the tabby cautiously slapping at one as though the fish were hot and might burn her paw. Jan had her by the scruff in an instant and, ignoring the claws kicking at his forearm, he spun around and hurled her.
The cat tumbled through the air, a horrible mewling instantly drowned out by the Muscovite’s frantic cry, and then she slapped into the water. The fish had gotten too far ahead for Jan to see whether it took the bait or continued after the girl, but Jolanda was still above water, which—
—Jan was on the floor of the boat, blood burning his eyes. If he hadn’t been squatting when he’d thrown the cat, he would have gone in, maybe drowned, but instead he’d simply slumped down. He had pissed himself, he realized, his legs wetter and warmer and—
—Christ’s wounds. Sander had nearly decapitated Andrei, the fallen Muscovite’s twitching body taking up the bulk of the craft between Jan and the rowers’ bench, where the mad bastard had resumed his seat. Sander worked his oars furiously, his face nearly as red as the blood soaking Jan and everything else in the bottom of the boat as he braced himself and strained his arms. They had slowed, reeling drunkenly over the meer instead of sliding neatly across it, but they were still moving forward. Only a few dark cables and a palm’s worth of skin connected Andrei’s shoulders to the head that lay heavily on Jan’s foot. He kicked it off, trying to sit up straighter, but then the boat careened to the side, burning wet garbage forcing its way up and out of his throat, the hot sick bringing with it the worst headache of his life. Still, he was better off than the man he was puking on.
“Get the fuck up,” Sander groaned, his tone the same as when he was being speared on Jan’s cock. “Couldn’t’ve done much. Weak cunt.”
“Ugh,” said Jan. He spit, only to have the slimy rope swing back under his jaw and stick in his chest hair.
“Fuckin rublehead. Lost it. Oar. Dropped you with it. I dropped him.”
“Jolanda,” Jan managed, bracing an arm on the side of the boat and pulling himself farther upright. “She—”
—Screamed, somewhere close. It might have been his name. Jan squinted into the returned mist, the tombstones and rushes waiting just ahead to greet them. Sander grimaced as the oars dragged through the water as though it was honey, pudding, old blood, his breath wheezing, his hands bloody, and Jan picked up the sticky red sword Sander had dropped beside the dead Muscovite. Fucking bottom dwellers.
VI.
The rushes cut her arms, but Jo didn’t feel them as she squirmed through the muck of the graveyard, trying with all her might to keep from retching. Breathing was like drinking boiling dye, the heat of each inhalation striking her like a father’s fist to the belly, but to give in now, to let it all spill out here, that would be worse than never having found it, worse than never making it to dry land, to safety. Except it wasn’t dry, and as something whipped her calf hard enough to draw her notice along with a stripe of blood, she realized she wasn’t safe.
What she had hoped was an island in the cemetery was nothing more than a small patch of mud and reeds that barely broke the surface, and that fucking fish had followed her up onto it, beaching itself in the mire and wriggling forward in monstrous parody of how she had gained the marshy prominence. The meaty whisker that had struck her leg protruded just above its yawning, fat-lipped mouth, and seeing it in the light of day, she wondered how she had evaded it as long as she did, the size of the thing unbelievable. She kicked its lip, pushing herself forward in the mud as it eagerly squirmed after her, cutting itself a channel in the muck as Jo slid back into deeper water, the bar of sediment crossed as quickly as it had been gained.
The mud she’d acquired bled off her, clouding the water as she swam, but before the swirling brown sludge obscured the bottom, she saw there were stones beneath her, and then more of them were rising up beside her. These were just little markers, smaller than she was. Nothing to afford sanctuary, nothing to buy her even a moment to catch her breath. A great splashing came from behind and she knew it had freed itself from the mudflat, that it was back in the water proper, that it was moments away from having her in its belly. She swam harder, too hard, blind from tears and mud and exhaustion, not even trying to breathe anymore as she hauled herself through sludge and water with equal ferocity.
Then her forearm smashed into stone, the pain of it forcing a gasp, and she floundered as the fire in her lungs was smothered out by the splinters of ice shivering their way through her arm. She would have gone under if there had been anywhere to go, but she had nearly beached herself again, the water barely up to her waist. Filth running down her cheeks, she looked back toward the monster and there it was, barreling down a canal between the stones and rushes, its whipping barbels churning the surface before it. The crypt, she realized, her numb mind finally absorbing where she was; she had swum into the side of the crypt. Its roof was right there, close enough to touch, but as she deliriously reached up to grasp it, the bog seemed to pull her back down—as soon as she had set her feet on the bottom, the mud had begun to swallow her.
The fish hit her, and hard, water splashing, those sharp whiskers scraping her raised arm, her bare breast, her side; it fucking had her, the weight of it knocking her back. She gave up, falling against the crypt with a final desperate cry. It had her.
Except it didn’t. Jan had jumped between them, she saw, jumped into the water to save her. It had been him half-landing on her, not the fish, but even as she saw him, the monster struck. Jan’s body was suddenly thrashing between her and the fish, the brown water flaring red all around them, and she sank farther into the mud, gibbering at the sight of her beloved taken by a seabeast out of legend or nightmare.
And take him it did, the catfish suddenly twisting away and shoving itself back into deeper water, a broken arm ending in a limp-wristed hand cutting the surface like a pennant before the fish dove and vanished, taking him down into the dark.
Jo let the swamp pull her down after him, the water lapping at her throat, and she sobbed, choking on the air as if it were smoke, as if it were brine. Then something else was on her, something crawling through her hair and over her shoulder, and she retreated deeper into the muck, unwilling to let it have her, not ready to—
“—fuck’s wrong with you, get up ’fore it comes back,” said Sander, his fingers like hooks digging into her armpit. It was not the sight of him hanging his upper body off the crypt to pull her up that brought her around, however—it was the figure holding Sander’s belt to keep the bigger man from falling in. Jo’s cries turned into ragged laughter to see Jan standing above her, his legs bloodied from his encounter with the fish but seemingly intact, whole, safe. Alive. She gave herself to Sander then—much as she wanted to use him as a scaffolding and scramble up to Jan, she was too fucking tuckered.
Jan helped Sander squirm back onto the roof with Jo in his arms, and there they lay for a time, Sander and Jo panting side by side as Jan stood over them, grinning. Sander was soaked in blood as well, and she wondered how they had conquered the fish after it dove with Jan, but she was still having trouble breathing, so the questions would wait. Besides, she had something to say first.
>
“Got it,” she finally managed, and as she did, Jan sank down beside her, settling on his knees and drawing her up, holding her against his stomach. Sander scrambled away from them, his satisfied expression shriveling and darkening like old sea grass tossed onto coals. Jan’s bare belly was warm against Jo’s cheek, and she let the tears come faster as he took her hands in his. “Got it.”
He was feeling her fingers, she realized, which was a disappointment, albeit an understandable one. She smiled to herself, nuzzling the nest of hair on his stomach. He would be so proud of her. His voice broke as he said, “You dropped it, Jo.”
“No,” she said, unable to keep the smirk off her face as she raised her head to meet his gaze. “I haven’t. Just have to wait a day or two.”
“What?” He almost looked angry. “What are you—”
Jo swallowed loudly, and pulling a hand away from him, touched it to her stomach as she curled up tighter against him, the stone beneath her no longer so sharp, no longer so cold. Her other arm began to sing its agony again, but she ignored it, closing her eyes and pressing herself harder and harder against him, trying to sink into his very guts as he murmured, “Clever. So clever. You swallowed it when you saw the fish?”
“Aye. It came in a window…” she said, refusing to remember what came before it, refusing to see what had so transfixed her down there. She had thought she was drowning, and dreaming as she went, but here she was, and so the long yellow table, the dead people sitting at it, the eels, all that—
—She bit down as something pushed into her mouth, trying to wriggle into her belly, a fucking eel, it—
—Jan slapped her across the cheek and she relaxed her jaw, easing her teeth off his fingers as she looked up at him, confused, afraid. He smiled, working the digits farther back, making her gag. “We can’t wait, Jo. We can’t. Now, don’t you bite, you be a good girl and—”
The Folly of the World Page 15