The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  She opens her eyes.

  Her first thought is that she’s inside the belly of a whale. She is somewhere dark and red and vast and vaulted, a space bounded by curving riblike columns that yawn upward, presumably joining somewhere far above her. Between every set of ribs is the entryway to another vault. She tilts her head and suddenly she feels like she’s in a chamber in a cathedral; the space seems slightly more sane if she can understand it as a kind of impossible architecture, replicating itself uncontrollably. Except no: it’s not architectural because it’s so clearly animal. Except it’s not animal because it’s so clearly architectural. It’s all of the above. It’s none of the above. It seems to breathe even though it doesn’t move. It seems wet even though it isn’t moist. It’s a building that houses a beast that’s swallowed the building. It’s leviathan.

  It smells like sweat: her own sweat.

  She keeps her eyes open. She takes a step forward, just to see if she can move in here. The galleries of infinite space around her reel vertiginously. It is as though she is trying to make her way down the corridor that opens up when two mirrors face one another. She reaches out, clutching for a support that is not there, and she can feel the gesture echoed, reflected, amplified through the spaces around her. She understands this, distantly, as a form of power, but has no clear idea on how to utilize it.

  She looks down, hoping that she’ll stabilize if she keeps her eyes on her feet, on the floor. Except what’s beneath her isn’t really a floor: it’s a kind of shifting tissue, a design that seems to squirm, like an intricate carpet that, when seen out of the corner of your eye, reveals itself to be a seething field of insects. Just beneath its surface she can feel larger beings forming and reforming themselves—tendrilous things, massive starfish, faceless gnarls of unearthly tissue—she can feel them gathering beneath her feet, threatening to rise, the risk becoming greater with each additional moment of hesitation.

  She lurches forward, or what feels like forward, although it somehow also produces the sensation that a reflected version of herself, a twin, is moving backward. She tries to focus on what she’s after, why she came in here in the first place.

  The pig-faced man, she thinks. You have to find him. You can’t let him get away with the sword.

  As she articulates this desire, the chambers around her seem to revolve. She advances through one vast arch—feeling refracted versions of herself advancing and retreating in the spaces around her—and she finds herself in a new vault. And there’s the man.

  She’s face-to-face with him. She thought she’d be afraid but he doesn’t look fearsome anymore. He looks tired. He’s holding the sword at his side in one hand; his other hand is wrapped around the shaft of the arrow embedded in his chest. He heaves every time he tries to take a breath. His shirt is dark with blood. He’s not moving. He turns his head slowly from side to side, seemingly unsure of where to go next. His mask is pushed back on his forehead. Finally his small eyes fix on her, an uncomprehending rage burning in them.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” he croaks, crumbs of dried blood flaking from his lips. “You don’t belong here. You’re not even supposed to be here.”

  “Tough shit,” she says, and she tackles him. Her body puts pressure on the arrow in his chest as he falls, and he moans. The sword falls from his hand, clatters away. She wants it, but she also wants to make sure this shitbag stays down. Straddling him, she punches him in the face once, twice, breaking open the skin across her knuckles as she strikes the teeth in his mouth. She knocks the mask from his head. With her other hand she grabs the shaft of the arrow and yanks on it, twists it, hoping it’ll fuck something up inside him. He howls, and, momentarily satisfied, she leaps free, hurries over to where the sword has fallen, and she lifts it up.

  She tests the sword’s balance and heft in her grip. It’s lighter than she expected. It feels good. It feels natural. And more than that: she can feel that it offers her some measure of protection in this space, some degree of control.

  She turns back, holds the sword out before her and watches as the man slowly clambers back to his feet, maybe readying himself for another round. Come on, she thinks, come at me. I’ve killed pigs before.

  But he doesn’t come at her. He just stands there, glaring at her, hate and confusion in his face.

  Finally she can see something resolve in him, as though he has settled upon something to say, as though he has prepared some curse to direct at her, one final weapon to wield. He gets as far as opening his mouth, but at that moment the ground opens up beneath his feet. A massive worm rises, a segmented tube, thick and twisting, as wide around as a rain barrel. The man’s legs disappear into the wide funnel of the worm’s fang-ringed maw; he’s in the beast now, all the way up to his waist, and his face, for the first time, turns to fear. He looks imploringly at her, a terrified entreaty to which she does not respond.

  And then the worm contracts, just once, and Ollie’s ears fill with the terrible wet splintering sound of the man’s legs being chewed, pulped. And the worm expands outward again and the man drops further into its mouth. Only his shoulders, his head, and one arm remain outside.

  Ollie steps closer. She looks down into the fading light of the man’s eyes. Even now he seems to be attempting to muster a look of contempt. But then the worm crunches down on him with another hideous contraction and it’s over; all the human expression and animal appetites in his face drain away forever, and he slides down into the throat of the thing and is gone.

  She tightens her grip on the hilt of the sword, intuiting, correctly, what is going to happen next.

  The worm rises up. It twists and aims its mouth at her and lunges. She sidesteps it, and she draws the sword back, and she looks at the alien meat of the worm’s body as it begins to loop around for a return lunge, and she summons up all of her knowledge of butchery, she makes her assessment, she calculates, she finds the right vector, the right moment, and she strikes.

  It’s perfect. The cut is perfect. The sword passes perfectly through. The two halves of the worm thrash wildly for a moment, splashing her with gallons of black ichor, and then they fall, and are still.

  She scrubs her eyes clear with one hand. The air around her has begun to throb, as though by wounding the worm she has wounded the space itself. Maybe she has. She can feel it beginning to gather its energies against her, as though she were an invading pathogen within the system of an enormous body. And she knows then that the sword won’t protect her indefinitely. She knows she has to hurry. It’s time to go.

  But go where?

  She looks ahead, examining the corridor that stretches off before her. There’s something lying there, something she recognizes. It’s a serving platter, her own serving platter, the very one that she and Victor threw into the Inside two nights ago, bearing a payload of monstrous eggs. The eggs are nowhere to be seen now, but that’s definitely her platter. She stoops down, picks it up, just to confirm that it’s real.

  When she stands up again she can see into her kitchen. She’s looking out at it from the other side of a portal, the one that Victor warned her was reopening, the one he was going to try to close on his own. It looks like he hasn’t been successful. In fact she can see him, there on the far side, pacing around the room, reading some incantation out of an ancient-looking tome, casting nervous glances seemingly right at her.

  “Victor,” she calls out. “Hi.” It doesn’t seem that he can hear her. But she knows that she could take one step forward and she’d be back in the Bronx.

  So—she’s beginning to get it. You can use the Inside as a way to take shortcuts across space. You could go wherever you wanted. All you’d need is something that made it easy to carve your way in, and something that made it easy to carve your way back out again, somewhere else. And something that could help you to banish the holes you’d made, once you were through. Oh yeah, and ideally something that could protect you against the horrible monsters encroaching on you from every angle. And the sword i
n her hand does all of those things. The sword can cut through space better than anything else because it makes all of those things possible.

  But it wasn’t just that the sword could cut through space, she remembers. It was also that the sword could cut through time. That was what everyone kept saying. And so—you should be able to go not just wherever you wanted, but also whenever—?

  She looks to her left. Another series of ribbed chambers, but as she peers into the murky reaches of this corridor she understands that she’s looking back in time. That if she went down there, she would go back into the past. How far back, she doesn’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any end to it.

  You could go back, she suddenly thinks. You could go back and fix the mistakes you’ve made. She would have wanted to do this, once. But now she’s not so sure. Maybe she shouldn’t grasp at the chance to undo the errors of the past. Maybe it’s nobler to stay in the present, return to the shattered, broken farm, do the work of picking up the pieces, sweeping up the glass, making a future that might work.

  She turns around, just to double-check that there’s still a path back to the farm, that the portal the pig-faced man cut remains open. And then she jolts: for standing there behind her, just a few feet away, staring at her with a face tautened by rage, is the pale woman, the dark-haired woman. The observer, the finder. The witch.

  “Fuck,” Ollie blurts, and she hurriedly gets the sword up. She holds its quivering length between them. She glares down the blade at the woman.

  But the woman doesn’t advance upon her. Instead, her eyes flick to the mess on the floor; Ollie watches her reconstruct a narrative from the segments of the worm, the spilled pile of smashed parts that once was the pig-faced man, and the hundred little maggoty things that have risen to devour it. And then the woman looks back at Ollie—assessing for one long, searching moment—and whatever fight was in her seems to go out. The expression on her face passes from anger to resignation: It’s over.

  Kill her, Ollie thinks. She brought all this grief to your door; as long as she walks this earth you’ll never be safe. She tightens her grip on the hilt of the sword. But she doesn’t move.

  It’s the woman who moves first. She takes a few steps, moving around the edge of a wide circle, of which Ollie is the center. She is careful to stay out of range of a lunge. She seems to possess an eerie familiarity with the disorienting space; she moves through it with something like confidence even though she doesn’t have the protection of the sword. She positions herself at the mouth of the corridor that leads back to the past. She peers down it, turning away from Ollie.

  Don’t let her get away, some cautionary part of Ollie thinks. If you do, she’ll never stop coming after you, never stop coming after you and your family. She’ll never stop until she has the sword.

  But then the woman looks over her shoulder, looks Ollie in the face one final time, and Ollie knows that she’s wrong. The look in the woman’s expression is pleading, desperate. I need to go back, it seems to be saying. Please just let me go.

  Ollie recognizes the yearning in this woman’s expression. It matches something in herself. And she understands, then, that what the woman wants is different from what the man wanted: it has nothing to do with getting the sword or coming after Ollie or ruling the world or whatever. What the woman wants is to fix some mistake, to heal some long-ago wound, something small, something personal. She can read it, plain as anything, right there on the woman’s face. And even though there is a part of Ollie that wants vengeance, that wants to take this sword and run the woman through, in an attempt to extract a terrible justice for the violence that this woman brought into her life, there is another part that speaks calmly, and gently, and Ollie listens to what this part is saying. It says, You could just let her go.

  She gives one tiny nod.

  And, seeing this, the woman goes. She turns away from Ollie, and takes a step forward, and then another, and then she begins to hurry, breaking into a sprint toward whatever the past holds for her. Ollie blinks once and the woman is gone.

  It’s time, also, for Ollie herself to go. She can feel the space gathering up for an assault on her. She has to move. She turns away from the past and looks back out at the farm, the present, the ruined dining room, right there, one step away.

  To be frank, the present looks like a mess. There’s broken glass all over everything, but the mess is not confined to that one room. Its boundaries extend: they reach out to encompass the entire farm, in its fallen state; they reach out to encompass the people she loves, the people who are the closest thing she has to a family: Jesse, cowering somewhere, terrorized by the day’s events, damaged in who knows what fashion by her long absence, broken, a sad sick clown on the inside; Ulysses, angry at her, his accusations of her selfishness still stinging; Donald, the long year of silence between her and him, the gulf that she wants to bridge with no clear knowledge of how, all the disappointments and betrayals and miscommunications, not a single thing among all that shit that she could reliably call a foundation, a thing on which she could build. She looks away, back over her shoulder, back to her kitchen in New York, but of course the mess reaches there as well, encompassing the people who she couldn’t help, Guychardson, Angel, the dead. The mess is the exact shape of her entire life. There’s no escape from it.

  But maybe, she thinks, maybe she doesn’t need to escape from it, not any more. Maybe she’s ready to face it. To work. To build a world that she can inhabit happily, a future.

  She thinks the word a second time: Future. And, slowly, she turns, just one half step, and looks down the fourth and final corridor, the last path leading away from the crossroads where she has found herself. The path that leads into the future.

  Just give me a hint, she thinks at the path. Just a glimpse. Show me how it all turns out. She aims the sword in its direction as though something monstrous might come charging out at her, some horrific fate given form.

  But what trembles into view before her are not terrible fates. They’re just images of a life, her life. She sees herself working hard in the kitchen at Carnage, using her knives to carve out cuts that the chefs will see as artful. She sees herself in the apartment with Victor, the two of them laughing together, concocting schemes. She sees herself in a car, making the drive between the city and the farm; she sees this happening many times, trying to make peace with Donald, trying to close the gap between her and her son. Eating meals together. Trying to fix the mistakes she’s made, to be a better person. She sees herself held by Ulysses; she sees herself held by Donald. Beyond that, more hazily, she sees Jesse getting older; she sees his face changing from the face of a boy into that of a teenager into that of a man. Even further out she sees another child, another son, a beautiful black child, with Ulysses as the father—

  And then the visions snap away, and the path is back to showing her nothing, just room after room in endless sequence. Ollie feels a pang as they’re all swept away: she wants to know more. Are these all the same future? Or are they a gallery of possible futures? Can she somehow realize them all, or will she have to choose between them? She doesn’t know. But the pang passes, and what it leaves behind, like a gift, is hope. A sense of hope. For the first time in a long time she believes, really believes, that the future could turn out well. All she has to do is do the work.

  And then it’s time. The chamber begins to quiver, threatening to collapse in on itself, and a thousand nubs rise from the floor; it turns from carpet into tongue. Her impression that she’s in a room suddenly slides away, replaced by the impression that she’s in a mouth, and she stands there at this junction, in this place that lives inside space and time, and she grits her teeth and closes her eyes and readies her body and takes a step. Stepping back outside. Committing to the mess. Ready to begin.

  28

  HOMES

  Maja wakes up in the bed of her childhood home. She blinks.

  A map of the constellations hangs above her bed. She pinned it there when she was ten. She
lies there for a minute, looking at the familiar shapes, persistent through time, exactly as she remembered them.

  She is eighteen years old.

  She is forty years old.

  She raises her hands in front of her face, flexes her young fingers, forms them into fists.

  She sits up in the bed, looks over at her small white desk, the neat pile of school books, the row of six candles she’s placed at the desk’s edge, arranged in order of color. Everything in its right place.

  She rolls up one sleeve of her nightshirt and then the other, checking for the thin black bands of her tattoos. They’re gone.

  It worked, she thinks.

  Relief wells up within her, so abrupt and so overwhelming that her body physically jerks. There’s a layer of sadness down within her: a layer that she’s operated on top of for so many years that she has forgotten that it wasn’t always there. And now that strata is breaking up, coming apart, flowing up and out of her face, which is suddenly wet with tears.

  What time is it? she thinks, with sudden panic. Please don’t let me be too late. But she knows it’s early. She can tell just from the position of the square of morning sunlight above her desk, surrounded by dappled bits of color thrown by the crystal pendant that hangs in her window.

  She gets up. She goes out into the hall, and crosses into Eivind’s room. He’s in his bed, asleep.

  The Archive speaks to her. It has a new voice now, garbled and damaged and partial from the day’s events. But it’s still there, in her head. Hey, it says. I recognize that guy.

  It’s good to see him, Maja thinks.

  Why don’t you say hi, says the Archive.

  In a minute, Maja thinks. And for a minute she just looks at him. Just until she stops crying.

  Then she speaks. “Eivind,” she says.

  He stirs.

  “Eivind,” she says again.