Chapter 29 Between Two Points
Reason’s silvery heat suit was not so heavy as to make her go slowly, and yet she did, and so did Dignity beside her, as they shuffled along a passage beneath the City. The bright lights installed in their helmets showed them only dirty and bare floor, walls, and roof, with occasional empty doorways opening to right or left. Dignity bore on his back an inflatable raft, the significance of which had been explained to her: their route would take them through deep water.
At her belt she carried a container of special food, a medicine provided by Patience and to be given to Prayer. Over her shoulder was slung a Heavenite-made Accelerator sub-machine gun. This had been forced on her over her protestations that she had proved herself worse than incompetent with firearms, that she hated them, and that she would not possibly use one. One of them must carry a gun, Chief Doohickey had countered, and would she rather it would be Dignity?
Both carried compasses and Heaven-made Lumina hand grenades; and Dignity had a long-handled and powerful flashlight as a backup light. Their reflective suits featured air supply and battery powered cooling units, neither as yet necessary. It was hot and humid but they were managing. Neither had brought a phone, for phones were useless down here, as were GPS devices.
So was any attempt at cheer or confidence, as they well knew from previous experience. A walk in the Hadean regions was inescapably frightening. Already they had heard sounds behind them, as of stealthy pursuit. They were trying not to look through the doorways as they passed them, but whenever they did, they saw alarming things, identifiable or unidentifiable. The only thing Reason had seen clearly had been the shed skin of a huge reptile, probably one of the scalies—maybe even Bits Bitterly. She hoped that the things she was seeing and hearing were reflections of her own fears and not real, but regardless, they were too vivid to be ignored. What could not be seen could be smelled: brimstone and assorted nasty things.
They came now to where their passage was intersected by another and paused while Reason took out the map. They were supposed to turn right here in order to avoid passing directly under other houses and, just possibly, encountering neighbors. They would go a short distance to the east and then proceed north toward Goner House again, along a passage that ran underneath and parallel to Sandhill Street. The distances involved were matters of yards and not miles, yet she saw that they had thus far barely moved out from under Grace House. Why did it seem like they had been journeying for an hour?
“Grace House is less than a block from Goner House,” Dignity muttered, echoing her thought. “Shouldn’t we be there already?”
She nodded. “Sure we should, nothing makes sense down here. Come on, let’s push on.”
It only made sense that they should be in Goner House in mere minutes. She had said so to Doohickey, and the chief had agreed. But Grace had suggested otherwise, that somehow this mission was not going to be what the HIA supposed.
When they had cautiously turned the corner into the east-west passage, they found that it descended and that a few inches of still and murky water filled the floor from wall to wall. They looked at each other and said nothing. As they began to wade, their feet stirred the water and it slopped against the walls, the moving liquid making rippling reflection on the walls and roof. It deepened as they descended.
“This is a tributary of an underground river that fills the next passage,” she whispered. “On the map it’s called the River Breakfaith.”
“Yeah, Grace told me it’s not always so deep,” Dignity said. “Bad luck that it rained yesterday.”
She paused and gripped his arm. “Look, I know all passages seem to get smaller in the distance, because of perspective, but I swear this really does get smaller. I mean it gets really narrow. And look how deep the water is ahead. What is that at the end?”
To augment their helmet lights, Dignity took the flashlight from his belt and aimed it at the end of the passage. The opening into the north-south way did indeed seem to have contracted to a mere four or five feet across. Furthermore, the water was so deep there that only a two-foot space remained between its surface and the roof. Across this rectangular opening and all but filling it was an orange-yellow form so desiccated that it did not entirely stop the light beam. It had the look of a creature, something reptilian or insect-like, and mostly translucent: a half-rotted thing with a blob of dead face.
Dignity turned away from it, his eyes squinched shut.
“What is it?” he said weakly.
“It’s a yellow turnback,” Reason answered. (She was the well-read one of the two and had browsed bestiaries in the Heavenly Embassy library.) “But it’s dead.”
“I know! But you know what that means? It means we can’t scare it away. So we’ll have to go right through its carcass. Do you want to touch it?”
“No way! You do it.”
“Maybe—maybe when we get close to it the water motion will make it sink. Huh?”
When she did not answer, he slowly took the life raft off his back and pulled the cord to inflate it. Using the little paddles that came with the boat, they approached the turnback until they had to bend down to avoid the roof, and then a little farther until Dignity gripped the roof to keep the raft from bumping into the creature. Up close it was even more horrifying, a massive monster, its head protruding from its chest and its great shoulders standing far out and high. Why, Reason wondered, had it died here, filling this opening? Why was it still standing up? Had someone put it here to scare them?
When Dignity used his long, heavy flashlight to push at it hesitantly, the whole frame of the thing shuddered and one eyelid flipped up, though there was no eye behind it. The cousins screamed as one and reached for their paddles, Dignity dropping his flashlight overboard in the process. They did not stop frantically paddling until they were back in shallow water at the far end of the passage. There they sat shuddering and gradually getting their breath back. Dignity was the first to speak.
“I give up,” he said weakly. “The only thing is, how can we go back to Grace and tell him we got stopped by something dead?”
“We could lie,” Reason said dismally. “Say it was alive. Oh, but then he’d ask why I didn’t shoot it.”
“Grace always knows when I’m lying anyway,” he said bitterly.
Half an hour later, after much fruitless discussion and complaint and considerable needless rest, they paddled up to it again. Both were almost faint with fear and revulsion. Dignity closed his eyes and struck at it with his paddle. Reason saw that this time the mouth fell open. A slight sound came out, a sighing sort of sound that seemed to come from the departed spirit of the thing. The cousins again screamed as one. Dignity opened his eyes and flailed away with his paddle, striking at it over and over again, and each time pushing it back and down, little by little creating an opening in the passage. When there was sufficient room, he gripped the roof and pulled the raft through with such excessive effort that it rammed the far wall of the passage they had entered and bounced off. Without consultation they took their paddles and splashed away from the corpse, some of which was still above water.
Now they were in a much larger passage, the one that ran far under Sandhill Street. Though the water remained deep, the roof was now several feet above them. No end of this River Breakfaith was in sight before or behind them, but in theory they need only paddle a short distance in order to reach a shorter passage on the left leading to Goner House, one of many passages opening on both sides. This, however, proved impossible because the tunnel floor ascended abruptly, leaving the deep water behind, and soon the raft bumped against bottom. They were obliged to get out and wade, pulling the raft behind them and expecting to soon reach dry floor.
Dignity suddenly reached out and gripped Reason’s shoulder. “What are those things?” he said, pointing.
Swimming toward them in the few inches of water remaining were hundreds of white creatures. “Palliaters!?
?? Reason shouted in fear. “Quick, turn off your helmet light!”
She turned off hers while getting back in the raft, but Dignity, though he joined her in the raft, kept his light on. She reached out to turn it off for him, but he pushed her hand away.
“Are you crazy?” he said. “Then we won’t be able to see them!”
“They’re mostly blind but they’re drawn to the light!” she said. “Turn it off and they can’t see us!”
With a shaking hand, Dignity turned off his light. They sat in total darkness.
“What are palliaters?” he whispered.
“A kind of sucking fish,” she answered in the same tone. “They attach themselves to you and suck your strength away. I hope they’ll just go back where they came from.”
“And we go on in the dark?”
“Well, no, we can hardly do that. We’d only blunder into one of the side passages and be lost.”
“So we wait a while and turn our lights back on?”
“How do I know!” she said angrily. “Dig, we’ve never been in a situation like this, and to tell you the truth, I think we’ve got plenty of reasons to go back. If we turn on a light and try to continue to Goner House, those greedy little bloodsuckers will be all over us.”
“You think they can do that through our boots?”
Reason had not thought of this but answered immediately. “Of course! Why not? We don’t know that they can’t. Look, I give up. Let’s go back.”
“I think you’re forgetting something.”
Reason considered and then lifted her hands to her face in misery. “Right, the water’s too shallow to ride the raft, and we can’t walk back for the same reason we can’t go forward.”
And for a very long time they sat in the raft and did not speak.
“Reas’?”
“What?”
“I’ve been sitting here thinking that one of those yellow turnbacks, a live one, might come sneaking along any time and eat us. I guess we would hear it though, coming through the water.”
“Me, I’ve been thinking about how, if we were up above on the street, we could trot to Goner House in probably less than a minute.”
More silence.
“Look, I’m going to turn a light on,” he said. “Maybe the fish have gone away and won’t see it. Shield your eyes.”
When their eyes had adjusted, they looked into the water and for some time had hope that the fish would not come. However, they did come, and once again in their hundreds. As an experiment, Dignity took off a silver boot and lowered the shoe end into the water. The palliaters crowded their noses against it. He waited, then lifted the boot out and examined it.
“No marks on the boot,” he reported. “I think we can go on.”
“Or back,” she added.
“Oh, heck, we still don’t have a real excuse to go back.”
They stepped out of the raft and waded out of the water in the direction of Goner House. A little walking, passing a doorway on the left and another on the right, brought them to a place where the floor of the passage had collapsed. A large pit about twenty feet deep lay before them, its floor a mass of tumbled, broken pieces of concrete. They must either climb steeply down and then up again, or use the map to find some way around. Reason felt sure that this further extension of their ‘short walk’ to Goner House was too much for coincidence.
“Do you get the feeling someone knew we were coming?” she said.
“I don’t know about that, Reas’, but this could be the break we’ve been waiting for. We can take a look around, and if there’s no way through to right or left, we’ve finally got a real excuse.”
She did not argue with this. They retraced their steps and tried the first opening to the east. That passage soon led them to a wall of dirt and rubble which, after some consideration, they realized must be fill that had been poured in from above. This would be the area below Sluggard’s Lot, which had been hastily filled in by the City after the night of the shelling three years earlier.
The door to the west led them to a barrier of rubble and stones piled all the way to the roof, crudely done but showing signs of intelligent construction. This added weight to their suspicion that their mission had somehow been anticipated. Fine then. They swiftly agreed to give up the attempt and report back to Grace.