Clutching the bottom sheet in one clenched fist, I swung my legs off of the bed. For one terrifying moment, my tiny feet found nothing, and I worried my plan was all for naught —that too much of the floor had torn away, and the flashlight had long since been swallowed by the abyss. But then my toes touched something solid, and my confidence returned.
I said a prayer and let go of the bed. The insane yawing cast me to my hands and knees. Around me, the voices of the creature’s victims redoubled their efforts, shouting screaming begging threatening pleading until my only thought was make it stop make it stop make it stop.
But it didn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop, unless I made it stop.
Fingers splayed, I dragged my palms across the floor, groping wildly left and right in a desperate attempt to find the flashlight. All around me, the darkness was alive with the voices of the damned, and the creature’s wretched slithering.
My right hand bumped hard round plastic. My left ankle was ensnared by something cold and wet —tongue or tentacle I wasn’t sure —and I yelped, my fear redoubling. My fingers closed around the flashlight as whatever grasped my ankle yanked me backward, an obscene mockery of my father’s playful act.
I rolled onto my back, wielding the flashlight before me like an unignited lightsaber. Then the floor under me ended, and I was falling.
No —not falling. Swinging at the end of this appendage. Dangling over the gaping maw of this blasphemous creature —this beast that would consume me, that would make me part of it forever.
I thumbed the flashlight’s switch.
The darkness shattered.
It was as though I’d switched on a bank of floodlights —as though I’d turned on the sun.
For a moment, I saw a tangle of mottled gray flesh, a gaping rust-colored beak —a wet, pulsing black gullet. Then the creature shrieked —my whole world shaking —and, in a wisp of oily gray-green vapor that put me in mind of rot, of sickness, of death, it simply ceased to be.
Just like that, all was silent.
Silent, but not still.
When the creature vanished, I was released from its grasp, and felt a sudden strange sensation —like falling, only upward. Despite myself, I dropped the flashlight, so disoriented was I by what was happening. It fell not upward with me, but down, and I soon left its blinding glow behind. But I did not fall in darkness. Phantom images swirled around me, a zoetrope of paths taken and not taken, of experiences long forgotten and lives never lived. For a time, the little girl and I were one, our experiences intertwined —every possible iteration of both our lives projected all around us as though in mockery of the path toward damnation we both chose. But slowly, that little girl and her experiences bled away, and with her, her sense of hope, of faith, of happiness.
Above me, something glimmered, like the surface of the ocean seen from below. Consciousness, I thought. I rose toward it without control, without volition, at once aching for the reality I’d abandoned, and for the fantasy from which I’d been so violently torn. All around me swam the demons of my past, the horrors of my present, the false promise of fu tures never realized. They reflected off the shimmering membrane above, funhouse images that seemed to mock the man I’d become.
Right before I broke the surface, I heard someone call my name, in a voice as beautiful as love, as sad as heartbreak. That one “Sam?” carried with it years of bitterness and sorrow, now long behind. That one “Sam?” somehow suggested eventual acceptance of who I was and what I’d done that fell somewhere short of forgiveness, and yet still seemed a kindness of which I was not worthy. That one “Sam?” conveyed an eternity of peace and happiness forever marred by my absence —an absence for which I, now made aware of it, would never forgive myself.
When I heard that solitary “Sam?” I wept like a child.
For the voice that spoke it was Elizabeth’s.
27.
“Sam?”
I couldn’t breathe.
My lungs burned in my chest. My limbs prickled from lack of oxygen. Blind panic gripped me, and I thrashed about like a man drowning.
“Sam!”
I heard her call my name. My Elizabeth, I thought for a moment, but it wasn’t —not this time. Was it Ana? I wondered, feeling a pang of guilt at the notion —or rather, at the thrill that coursed unbidden through me, so soon after being in the presence of my life’s true love. But it wasn’t Ana, either. The voice was unaccented.
I opened my eyes, a monumental force of will, but everything was blurry and blue-black. I suppose that should have worried me, but it seemed secondary to the fact I couldn’t breathe.
“For fuck’s sake, Sam, would you hold still?”
A hand on my chest. Small. Dainty. Strong as a goddamn ox. It pinned me to the ground with such force, my panicked thrashing all but ceased. Then another hand cupped my jaw and, with forefinger and thumb, squeezed, forcing open my mouth. Only then did I realize why it was I couldn’t breathe.
Two fingers in my mouth. Instinctively, I fought, but the fingers’ owner paid me no mind. Instead, she carefully tweezed out the dry, scratchy bolus that blocked my airway, and tossed it to the dirt beside me.
I gulped air into my lungs, and the world around me steadied. My vision cleared, and I realized I’d seen vague blue-black because vague blue-black was all there was to see. I was lying in a small clearing on the canyon floor, the first faint tinge of morning light just bright enough to blot out the stars above, but not enough to allow me to make out the details of my surroundings.
I rolled over to one side, a dry cough rasping against the tender flesh of my throat. It felt like it’d been stuffed full of twigs. I poked at the ball that lay beside me, and realized I wasn’t far off —it appeared to be made of feathers, bone, and sinew, bound together with coarse twine.
Then I realized the arm I was propped up on was the one I’d dislocated —and yet it held my weight. I sat up —my kidneys not protesting, despite the beating they’d just taken —and rolled my shoulder joint a couple times to test it. It felt fine.
“Feeling better, Collector?”
Lilith. I should have known. Who else could have found me way the hell out here?
I spat, or tried. My mouth was dry as dust, and tasted like death. Believe me, I wish that were a colorful exaggeration, but it isn’t —and sadly, on this count, I’m in a position to know.
“Actually, yeah,” I said. “Though I could do with a mint. How long was I out?”
“A day, I’d say, give or take a couple hours.”
The news hit me like a fucking mallet. An entire day gone. Which meant I only had one left.
Lilith caught my wide-eyed panic, mistook it for anger. “Don’t look at me like that —had I not come along to rescue your sorry undead ass, it would have been a week. Quite a mess you’ve landed yourself in. Two dozen of the Fallen slaughtered at the hands of their Chosen kin —the first overt offensive since the Great War. And the rumor in the Depths is you’re to blame.”
“How’s that, exactly?”
“They say you led the Chosen here, though there’s some debate as to whether that was by incompetence or by design.”