A Lower Deep

Chapter Eleven

Cathy and Janice slept fitfully, with their hands snatching out to each other across the space between their beds. The bloody sheets had been hung aside to dry for later use, along with the stored afterbirth, which would add potency to any spell. Janice's scars took on another hue. All the ghosts of herself sat on the mattress, cuddling and patting her thighs and listening to the deep regular breathing and frequent angry snorts.

The empty robes of Fane pressed a wet cloth to Cathy's forehead. The floating cowl turned to me. Slowly his face reconciled and filled in angle by angle. He stroked and washed her brow and neck, and spoke quietly in her ear. She smiled warmly in her sleep.

Just as his features had been scribbled in, so was the truth that Fane was the father of her child.

Eddie's bed was empty, though the pins remained stuck through the blankets. His organs were still intact in the clay jars, but the jars had been rearranged. His lungs worked their steady rhythm like a bellows.

"Is my daughter safe?" Fane asked.

"Yes."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know."

He nodded, and oddly enough added, "I trust you."

"Apparently you do. Why?"

"You're the only man I've ever met who truly has nothing left to lose, and absolutely nothing to ever gain." He pulled no parlor tricks, but his voice still sounded as if it came from everywhere around me. "I pity you."

"Knock off that crap. Where did they take Eddie?"

"He vanished right before Catherine went into labor."

"When this is over you should take her and go back to selling shoes."

"Perhaps I will. As soon as Elijah is expunged and I get my daughter back." He kissed Cathy's lips, and for a moment my jealousy grew as bright as Elijah's. Fane wiped her face again and said, "I used to think being a shoe salesman was hell. No wonder God killed me."

The smell of curdled milk made me want to sneeze. I left Fane pressing his mouth to Cathy's chin while Janice's ghosts glanced down at her. They saw her one poor seedy life being led despite their potential and expectations, and it revolted them. Her ghosts looked angry enough to kill her.

They pleaded and followed me down the passages, plaintive and clutching. I tried to get them to show me where Eddie had gone, or been taken, but the tragedies of their unlived lives suddenly became too much. Their teeth fell out and their gray roots kept showing through, and their husbands pre-ejaculated and their hysterectomies left them vacant and bitter, and the welfare checks kept getting stolen out of their jimmied mailboxes.

The torchlight dispersed them. I tried more and more doors. Penitents kept their flagellation down to a minimum tonight. They chewed leather and their attempts at atonement were halfhearted at best. When the storm broke I knew that at least half of them would go back to the common world. Out there they'd be normal again. They'd screw around on their spouses and lie in confession. They'd get creative on their 1040s and forget to rewind their tape rents, and they'd cut each other off in traffic and buy shoes from Fane that didn't fit.

Where are you? I called when I came to the chapel.

Self carried the jar with Eddie's heart in it. He and Eddie stood holding hands before the door.

What are you doing here? I asked.

Self remained silent, panting. The flaps of Eddie's chest had been shut, and he wore a soggy shirt. He said, "I want to go to the place."

"Which place, Eddie?"

"The one of forgetting."

I worked my arm into Self's mouth and slashed myself against his fangs. I fed him blood hoping to sever the link between him and whatever else haunted Armon. His Adam's apple bopped as he sucked, and he soon began to burn and flood with our rage again.

Oh, my head.

You've been in contact with it.

Me? With what?

You tell me.

No, you tell me.

Where's the baby?

Safe.

Where are the others? Where's Aaron? And John?

There are no others. None who count.

He sniffed the jar and his mouth watered. I'd given him a taste, and his appetite grew as he watched the beating heart, thinking of the juice and raw flavor. The force of his own desire seemed to startle him, and he wavered a step and held the jar away from his face. It surprised the hell out of me. He handed Eddie's heart back to the boy, who held the pottery close. I felt something in my second self that I'd never felt before, and the icy sweat prickled my hair.

He'd almost felt guilty.

I asked, What's the place of forgetting?

Where did you hear that?

You think you can stop answering me with questions?

Can you?

Yes, I said.

L'oubliette, Mon Capitaine.

An oubliette was a miniature dungeon reached through a trapdoor that was so small only one person could be in it at a time, hunched over.

Do they even have one here?

A room of torture. Of course they do. For purging if not for adversaries. They have everything else.

It was also called a murder hole.

I said, Show me.

We entered the chapel. Gawain and my father were already inside. As we passed the metal stoup that held the holy water I nearly dabbed and crossed myself with it. Some habits died hard and others didn't die at all. We continued into the vaulted aisles, the arches of ashlar, and the sheltered arcade, knowing that beneath us were the cloister tombs.

The single cell of the dungeon sat nestled behind the altar, as if at any moment the priest might call someone up front and send him to that prison. The trapdoor screeched open like a terrified man. My father said, "Woo woo."

Eddie walked forward and started to climb down into the hole. Gawain put out his hand and gently stopped him, and for a second I thought he might hug the boy.

I could barely squeeze myself down into the hole.

The depth of darkness cut through me as easily and quickly as I moved through it. Self shut the trapdoor. A whole ocean of antiquity existed in every white-capped second. There are moments of distinction when the soul stands to one side and takes full measure. The substance of the forgotten place thickened into a veil sliding over me, encompassing my corpse, a pall over my coffin.

I walked and kept walking, the levels of shadow before me, inside of me, and the endless reams behind my eyes. My father's breath seemed to heat the back of my neck. I tried to grasp my mother's songs but she was too far away, even here and now. My lost love Danielle shifted in my arms, just as she had in the pew when she'd died whispering her devotion. I could deal with the dead but only when I raised them and they didn't raise themselves. All the flaming words of my past didn't light an inch of the way. The gloom went beyond remoteness, another manifestation of doubt and regret. Like all my remorse it was never-ending, as deep and limitless as the dark where all my own failures lurked. I could go no farther.

Get me out of here.

I hadn't moved an inch. There was no place to move. The trapdoor opened.

My second self said, Well, that was a stupid-ass waste of time. What did you forget in that place?

Not a thing.

I was stiff and sore, but I finally knew why Gawain was here.

My father put his whole head into the stoup and blew bubbles in the holy water. It reminded me of when he taught me to swim in our backyard pool, and our dogs paddled beside him and his skin was bronzed by the sun. No amount of blessed water could wash the harlequin stains from his face.

Self thought it looked kind of fun. He clambered up the stoup and tried to do it too, but my father hogged the bowl. They giggled and splashed each other. The tiny bells tinkled until my brain rang with them.

I said, Are you sure the baby's safe?

Pop's a pretty fun guy! Not like he used to be.

Sometimes the despair came in too low and fast. It slid under my guard to skewer me so deeply that I didn't know if I was dead or alive anymore. A moan started to ease up my throat but I managed to swallow it in time. My body bucked as if making a stab for a life that no longer-and might never have-existed. My legs went wobbly and then the surge of grief crested and passed.

The girl?

As safe as she can be, he said.

Gawain, as ever, stood patient and relaxed, free from the turmoil of dull sentience. His parents had prepared him from birth for excursions like these. They'd trained him by driving him out of his mind. They'd punctured his eardrums, put out his eyes, and sliced his tongue apart. By detaching him from himself they'd loosed him from the sensual world and left him to explore that enormity beyond the common touch. He lived in that darkness, disassociated from the rest of us.

A part of me had always been intensely envious of him. He remained the paragon in repose. He was blessed because no blessing would ever matter to him.

He gazed at me with those blank eyes, awaiting my resolve.

"All right, Gawain. You lead, I'll follow."

I pried the jar with Eddie's heart in it from the boy's arms and hid it in the vestibule. I set seven charms with seven locks and seven wards around the pottery. I wasn't going to make it easy for the mount to take this particular pound of flesh.

I opened the oubliette. Gawain stepped inside it easily, without bending or ducking. He slipped into the blackness of the dungeon box and faded until I couldn't see the back of his white hair anymore. I pulled my father's dripping face from the stoup and urged him toward the murder hole. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his head into the trap. He made funny noises and did something he could never have done in life-he laughed at himself. Self snickered and prodded my Dad in the ass with a claw, and my father shot forward and fell inside. Self held his nose and jumped into the hole as if he were snorkeling in the Bahamas. I heard one of them go "Wheeeeeeeeeee!"

I took Eddie's hand and led him down into the forgotten place.

We were instantly consumed, as if the earth had heaved on top of us. This time I could feel his assent. It was like slipping through regions draped with cobwebs. I could feel the return of my own oath's affirmations. Maybe John wasn't that far off. Gawain's robes flapped against my belly exactly as they had when we'd stood around the covene tree. Even then he had no self-doubt or fractures of fear or buried half-stifled desires. Before the wedge of his purity the black curtain flinched aside, parted for him, and let us pass.

Dad chortled in the shadows. In a space not large enough for even one broken man we walked for miles. Self said, Damn, my feet hurt! I could hear him and my father tickling each other and tittering in turns. I kept a firm grip on Eddie's wrist and prayed that when this was all over they could make him whole once more.

He whispered, "I forget. I keep forgetting."

Let it be true, I thought. Forget everything, even in your dreams and your most awful nightmares, cleave yourself from your visit here. Do what the rest of us can't.