Like waves pounding lazily down on her, she feels herself losing balance, a bloated desire to topple over backwards and sleep, would sense the mold first only as a momentary itch, followed by cool relief as it spreads and anesthetizes, neatly choking off the nerves like a gardener pulling weeds. In a matter of moments she would be sheathed in a safe, cool, fleshy envelope of lurid orange, blue, and purple patches further ornamenting her with fat leathery flowers and mushroom heads on long stalks like dangling lotus blossoms. Meandering in and out of one room after another, each with its own distinct color and texture now, where all was identical before, stumbling and drooping more and more as strings of spore feed into her nostrils and corkscrew into her ears, powdering her face and hands pale blue, and she totters to the Golem’s metronomic tread. He’s there in the doorway, but the spores don’t bother him—the moment they land on his tainted flesh they shrivel and steam with formaldehyde poisoning. Even his shoes leave blackened scorch marks on the springy floor.
Christine collects herself for an instant and thinks to drop one blue hand into her purse, from which she pulls a perfume bottle. She splatters it liberally on her face and hands, pulling off sheets of powdery blue lint melting in the perfume. Then she drops the bottle to the floor, shattering it on a fortuitously exposed bit of tile, and the coils of alcohol and perfume slither up in a cloud around her body, melting the spores and tangling the floating filaments up in impenetrable knots that drop to the ground twisting. The shock of the smell knifes through the buzzing in her head and she is able to reorient herself. She wipes her feet in the spreading stain, soaking her shoes thoroughly, meanwhile clearing blue tears from her golden eyes with her handkerchief, and then trips quickly down the hall and out into the stairwell, walking in a golden flame of perfume. The Golem is only a few yards behind.
#4.) Ghosts: The moment her foot crosses the threshold, everything goes pitch-black. Silence. No motion. No odor in the air. No temperature. No sense of the stairs behind her or the floorboards stretching out before her. The walls are invisible, and the rooms beyond visible only as patches of denser darkness against the dark. Without realizing it, she’s taken several steps out into the middle. The sensation of her feet touching the floor becomes more and remote, as if she were elongating up through the ceiling. But everywhere the darkness is humming, as though permeated by tingling nerves. It engulfs her without absorbing her, so that while the borders between all other things become blurred and intermixed, she and the dark stay discrete.
Nothing is preventing her from stealing down to the other stairs, but she’s wary to move, suspecting that she will begin to dissolve into the dark if she tries. But of course she’s moving already, walking up and down in front of the doors first on one side, then on the other. But from high atop her shoulders, looking down at where her feet must be, far below, she feels she’s only sailing along without effort. One by one she picks out the luminous figures that honestly were there all along. They shine with such diffused radiance that at least at first they’re barely perceptible, but each appears to be brightening slowly, with each new pass, emerging at increments out of the dark.
As they come out, Christine recognizes who they are. It would be wrong to distinguish between them, they’re all the same. Each is doing something in its own room, illuminating the few sticks of furniture collapsed in corners and casting dimly discernible shadows with their own light. They’re pantomiming old routines, fixed in time to such an extent that their every motion has already become a circular preparation for the next repetition. As Christine recognizes them, she begins to hear them, baffled voices both reminiscent of her own and completely strange speaking fragments, coming to the door of the room and throwing up both hands, fingers drooping onto the palms, “ . . . It can’t . . . ” a voice from the corner, saying, “ . . . famine . . . ” and other rooms, “ . . . find me . . . ” and, becoming aware of her, “ . . . but, I . . . ” and, coming up behind her, “ . . . not for any . . . ” muffled as if they were speaking through coffin lids. Sailing past the doors, she picks up every scrap and feels her court assembling around her on all sides. She stops in the middle again.
One of them draws very near. She floats silently forward, hesitates, then glides up, superimposing her immaterial skirt over Christine’s. An indolent, numb feeling soaks into her right leg, and then she’s barely conscious of it anymore. Her eyelids droop, but then a moment later she jerks them open and looks—circular powdery blue-black holes in a blue-white face smiling idiotically with its powdery smudge of a mouth only inches from her face, and her leg dislocated, numb and immobile, that this one is wearing like a stocking on her own ghost leg. Around her, on all sides, there are others like this one, straining eagerly forward to ease in through the other leg, or an arm, to seize on her and dress themselves in her body. Feverishly, to fend them off, she thinks to bang herself hard against the floor, but she can’t collapse—her right leg won’t bend or tip. So instead she stomps on the floor with her left leg, jarring her up to her teeth, and flails out her arms, trying to smack them against the walls. She suffers to stay awake, and all the while a crude copy of her face grins oblivious at her, freezing her right leg to the ground. Finally, in a fit of desperation, she seizes the icy throat and squeezes it shut. The expression on the other face does not change, but for a moment it seems to be turning a darker shade of blue. The mouth opens a little and emits a mewling, gurgling sound in a reedy caricature of her voice. Christine shakes it violently by the throat. The shade appears to elongate a little, as if her head were trying to float off her neck, snapping back and forth. She’s not sure what happens next—perhaps it slips? Suddenly pins and needles shatter up and down her leg and she’s free.
Turning away a moment she can see the hallway stretching off into the distance, but now it blurs, turning into a bridge. The walls vanish, and a narrow lake appears, flanking her on both sides. The stairwell has become a flight of steps where the bridge becomes an elevated walkway over the opposite bank. The ceiling is now a concrete dome, large enough to span an entire city, lit with colorless light evenly shining across its surface. The air is sharp and cold.
More of them straggle in front of her, closing around her, a knot sliding closed. They reach for her with coy, timid gestures, pressing in to touch her. Behind her, there is nothing but an opaque wall of shadow, where the bridge trails off hanging in nothingness, no way out. She glances down at the water—it looks deathly cold and blue, poisoned. Finally, she simply throws up her arms and dashes between them, twisting sideways to avoid their hands.
In the middle of the bridge, she turns to see if they are following her—they’re not. They’re waiting. Christine stops, breathing hard, and watches them, straining her ears—what holds them back? One by one they come apart in fragments like silver dandelion heads, pulverizing into beads of white down that drift away to either side. Candles in squat blue bells of frosted glass float across the water, set in motion by long, graceful hands that retreat into gem-encrusted portholes in the bank, just above the waterline, their fingers weighted with heavy rings, wrists by pendulous bracelets, all set with big precious stones. Some of the candles drift lazily toward her, others race in straight lines raising tiny wakes behind them, only to halt perfectly still a few yards away from her. In their blue light that turns everything blue, she can see that the lake isn’t water at all, but raw mercury, heaving and shuddering like a living thing, throwing azure flashes back up at her.
A sound draws her attention back to the bridge. Standing where the shades had been, there is a black coach and team. The horses are black, and their skeletons have been painted on their bodies in thick streaks of white phosphorus. They have black plumes sprouting from their heads, but no bit nor bridle, no reins, because no coachman. She hesitates a moment longer, and then the horses and the front of the coach fade to transparency a moment, as if a jagged hole had been cut through them both, revealing the interior of the carriage. The Golem is in there, staring straight at her from
his seat. His spectacles glint like a pair of dusty lamps as he leans almost imperceptibly forward. Then the vision fades, the horses and carriage reappear as before—the horses snort and start forward, rattling across the bridge toward her. She loses no time, but bolts up the stairs at the other end.
Here the bridge spans a pair of tracks in a narrow gorge. As she runs across, a train rushes past not more than five feet below, and she glances down, still running, the windows flashing by. Inside they all are staring back, their eyes wide open, their mouths open and toothless in a sort of senile, fumbling expression, with their hands in their laps, strobing past all in the same posture as the train roars by behind her. As its noise dies down, she can hear the coach battering up the stairs to the causeway.
A path corkscrews among the trees, and after only a few steps she’s lost. Overhead, densely interlaced branches scribble out the cavern-roof sky, and as she runs the trunks crowd in close on all sides, until she’s practically moving through a tunnel—and then again, in moments a vista will open to one side or the other, revealing trees the size of cathedrals, with a span of branches big enough to shadow a small town—an underground forest. Spiders the size of barns rattle by on legs like oil derricks, monkeys swing from tree to tree in barking shoals. Malachite branches and scored trunks of granite and basalt, limestone and porphyry, sheathed in coats of pumice moss and ivy vines of soft lead, and wide beds of zinc grass. Minute flakes of plagioclase feldspar sprinkle down from the boughs like dew and collect on the path in a thick layer of fine dust that billows in moon-colored transparent clouds behind her footsteps. Strange piping and chirping noises come shouting out of the darkness like birds being throttled, and others like the voices of parrots, ravens, or mynahs trained to speak by raving psychotics. They seem to be hunting her down, circling closer like bloodhounds. She gets a good look at one as it hops onto a branch hanging over the path ahead—it’s actually a sort of clockwork, assembled around a small plastic figurine of a saint, with porcelain bird’s legs emerging from its knees, tin tailfeathers from the base jutting behind, wings on either side of the gears and cogs that protrude from its spine, and a painted metal beak affixed to its face, which opens and closes to utter shrill, distorted cries and queerly accented nonsense in the voice of a pull-string doll. More of them cluster all around her as she runs down the path, babbling incomprehensible words and groaning. The coach is still following her, ignoring the path, cutting toward her in a straight line. She watches as it vanishes behind a root the size of a train car, and then appears again, mounting over the top and driving straight down the side perpendicular to the ground, the horses walking downward and clinging to the root like flies, then bending backwards parallel to the ground once more to continue pursuing her. Around her she can see the Golem’s skeleton reproduced in different sizes, the bones of the largest thrusting up among the trees in pallid and cracked columns, the ground littered with his bones, and leaping, yawping corpses flashing in the heather under swinging lightbulbs that hang from long cords from the trees, kicking up clouds of fireflies and glowing worms.
Angrily, she batters some of “birds” from a nearby branch and turns a corner and confronts another “bird” standing beside the path, identical to the rest but fifty feet high, a colossal St Roc, with his rigid loincloth and crutches sweeping back and forth, his yacking beak expelling thunderous fragments of words down at her. The next moment an impenetrable screen of trees interposes itself between them.
#5.) Putrefaction: Behind her the grisly coach is still coursing effortlessly after. A burning sensation is seething in her lungs, forcing her to stop running. The burning spreads to her face and across her chest and back, down her abdomen, but her arms and legs are cold. She can feel her skin turning red, then going green, her hands begin to shake, a violent throbbing surges up behind her temples, she feels as if she’s been flushed through with mercury, a viscous green-black membrane intermittently blocking her throat, and with it a rancid putrefying taste in her mouth, bitter and sour, stinking vapors rustling up into her sinuses, her eyes are hot and red, wanting to water but too dry, curdling in their sockets and leeching color, becoming cheesy, crumbling, something rifling through her, fingers and toes blackening, first sooting then blanching her face to bruise purple and green, like a steady winding clockwork ticking out threads of burning bile down into her muscles and bones, and parching her skin until it’s straining all over to split. Inside she can feel her heart collapsing and her organs shriveling and quaking uncontrollably.
#6.) Disfigurement: Suddenly her right leg twists erupting gouts of sweet toothache pain as the brittle bone ruptures in three places. She clenches her teeth tightly down against it and staggers along the path, from tree to tree emitting little screams, and grinning as well—he’s really laying it on, or if not him, something, something like the story forcing her toward the end. A rustling from off the path—nearby she can see gleaming metal braces slithering in the bracken like predatory animals, waiting to spring, hoping to solder themselves around her shattered leg. Clinging to the trunk of her tree as if it were a liferaft, she inadvertently scrabbles at the bark—green crust crinkles under her fingernails and copper red beams underneath. With failing eyes she scans the border of the path and then, her mouth bubbling with horrible mirthless laughter as her leg yaws beneath her, she hobbles to another tree, hugging it to her chest as her knees buckle in splinters of exhausting pain. She presses one eye right to its knobby trunk—the “bark” is a thick layer of tarnish, but from the smell she knows it’s silver beneath. Again her eyes twitch across the trees lining the path, and with her last ounce of strength she flings herself toward one that stands out even through a blanket of pumice moss and heavy shadows from the trees that seem to huddle conspiratorially about it. She embraces the trunk, slumping forward, mashing her face against the uncorrupted gold, a fissure draining amber. As surely as silver follows copper, gold follows silver, and she knows this. A chemical mist steams off the tree from its roots, and she breaths it in, feeling the gold pouring coolly into her eyes, spreading cool and calm vapor from her lungs and rippling across her skin, through her hair, reddening her blood from green-black, driving the green from her face, breathing the corruption from her, since gold is hers. It plays numbing fingers along the ruins of her leg, aligning and knitting the bones back as they were, rotating her foot back into its proper aspect, easing wrenched joints back into their beds.
She hangs there until she feels well again, her feet sound beneath her again, striding along peeling the “moss” from the bark, exposing the rosy, reflective surface dripping amber here and there. She takes a single drop of it on her tongue to refresh her, and steps back onto the path, crushing zinc blades of grass beneath her feet. But the coach is still approaching, almost on top of her, and she is forced to flee, though she wants to fight.
#7.) Vertigo: There, beyond the trees, the path follows the line of the shore, running along white chalk cliffs and heaps of black rock down below. Stretching off to her left are low, dismal hills covered with clover, and sulfurous figures moving alone or in pairs dot the peaks and dip into the shallow valleys between. The ocean is purple like new wine, with roving patches of luminous emerald; the sky is still the same blank, glowing gray. The chalk path traces the contours of the cliffs. Glancing behind her, she can see the coach racing after her out of the middle distance. Her foot slips and she turns around again, staggering only a foot or so away from the edge. The path is creeping steadily over toward the sea, until the brink of the drop becomes its right margin—but she doesn’t dare leave the path.
The path is getting narrower still, and slippery. She’s treading its left margin like a tightrope trying not to fall, but the ground is beginning to crumble. She looks below, and she can see the Golem, keeping pace with her down on the rocks, with a white sheet in his hands. The horses are each holding a corner of the sheet in their teeth, stretching it to form a crude equilateral triangle, ready to catch her when she falls. At every mome
nt she feels as though she’s tipping over toward them, and having a target only makes it worse. The Golem’s face is impassive, unreadable, staring up at her if anything with a plaintive expression, but the horses are nodding their skull-painted heads mockingly, lifting their hooves high and prancing jauntily over the stones. A chunk of wet earth crumbles beneath her feet and she swings round slamming into the slope, digging her fingers into the soft clay and fumbling for a firmer purchase. Her feet are waving in the air, but her fingers latch on to something like a buried pipe or a heavy tree root (although there are no trees anywhere), and she seizes it with white knuckles. She can hear them flapping the sheet invitingly below. She holds on.
A sickening lurch and she can feel her feet beginning to angle upwards, away from the cliff face. The cliff is falling forward. A moment later it stops, having tilted ninety degrees—small stones and clods of earth come skipping across the ground and ricochet past her into open air. The waves crash straight up just a little beyond her. Looking back, she can still see them, standing sideways in midair with their sheet at the same distance beneath her feet as before. With no cliff to lean on her arms are weakening, and she tries to worm her fingers deeper into the mud around the pipe, working her palms around it to support herself.
Another jerk and the cliff is plummeting forward again. She is hanging straight “up” from the ground, as if she were standing on her head, and the Golem and his horses are hovering immediately above, upside down. If she lets go and misses them, she’ll fall right up to the top of the dome, or perhaps straight through and out into the sky, into space. Now the fatigue in her aching hands and arms is becoming hot pain, her shoulders are straining to pop from their sockets, a hideous squeamish feeling ripples across the soles of her feet and in her knees at the thought of falling, and her palms begin to sweat. She wants to pull forward and curl up against the pipe and wait for things to right themselves. She closes her eyes, her mind racing.
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