Chapter 43: The Inevitable

Even from twenty meters Violet could see the depersonalized blankness made manifest in how the animals carried themselves. The ambient noise of the day, insects and far off birds, had entirely ceased. But for the gentle rush of the river and the steadily quickening beat of her own heart, Violet could hear nothing at all.

She could not tell for sure if these animals were the same ones she’d watched trudge past during her night in the control booth (how distant that time suddenly seemed, and yet how impossibly near all the same), but they might have been. The false animals were thin and stooped with neglect, their fur thin and ribs protruding. The nearest of them, a limping fox with a charcoal pelt, hung its mouth limply open and from the lower jaw hung several dark and dripping growths that Violet only slowly realized were threads of blood and saliva gummed together.

She took a step back.

The false animals matched her movement with a jittery attempt at automaton precision, yet the effect was ruined by how broken they’d become.

“I’ve remembered something.” The cat said suddenly.

Violet stared down at her companion, unable to speak.

“I may have left the stove on at home.” The cat finished, and Violet, despite the whole horrible turn the situation had taken, let out a half hysterical yip of laughter.

Through this, however, she could not erase the dark press of an ever growing certainty that this position she was in had now become inescapable.

Turning, she looked to the other end of the bridge, still horribly distant. Yet upon that far off stretch of dead concrete Violet saw no mirroring line of false animals, no completion to the trap that had just been sprung.

She hesitated, gripped by fearful confusion. The bridge was really the perfect place for an ambush, and Violet couldn’t help but feel foolish for not catching onto that sooner. Still, the influence was not rushing its pawns in to run her down, there was no sea of bared teeth and empty eyes rising to claim her once and for all.

Violet took another step away from the false animals and they lurched concordantly in like water filling a vacuum.

The cat seemed to be over its forced attempt at levity. The fur between its shoulders had risen straight up.

“I think we could probably outrun them,” it decided. “They’re tottery.”

That last word, spoken so seriously, made Violet want to laugh again, to shriek. She wasn’t at all sure how to feel, the proper disposition of emotion hung in ruins. As she continued to back away the beast came close, fabric rippling uncertainly.

i -- c o u l d -- c l e a r -- a -- p a t h ---- It said, nodding to the false animals.

Violet blinked, glancing between her two companions. The cat wanted to race forward, towards the refinery and beyond, while the beast proposed going back the way they’d come. Her eyes traced a jagged path down the river to one side, then the other.

Even if they made it past the false animals and back onto open ground….

“I don’t think there’s any other way across,” she said, aware that her voice was shaky nearly to the point of incoherence. Still her mind raced along. “And they’d follow us even if we ran. They wouldn’t let us stop to make a raft.”

The beast shivered as though it had been physically struck, jaws clattering. Across the length of her brief time knowing the beast Violet had seen her new companion sad and uncertain and alone. This was the first time she’d ever seen it scared.

When the beast next spoke its voice was small and hesitant.

i f -- i .. . . . k i l l e d -- t h e m

This was not a nice thought, and contemplating even the vaguest edges of it deepened the ugly swirl of sickness that curled within her.

Violet shook her head.

“Th…there’d always be more.” She mumbled, feeling weak and small even amidst what she knew was a correct decision. Striking the false animals down wouldn’t solve anything. Not when the influence could simply call more out from where they lurked in the dark, lonely places of the world.

The cat turned the beginnings of a jagged circle and made a low, frustrated growling sound in the back of its throat. For a moment it looked disconcertingly feline, quite unlike itself…or at least that presentation Violet held to be most familiar.

“They…it isn’t blocking the other side of the bridge.” Violet said hurriedly, hoping to snap the cat from its uneasy ambulations.

Her companion did stop, then took a deep breath.

“That worries me,” it said, then was silent for a long moment. “It’s a real pity you can’t swim. I should have taught you.”

Violet blinked, caught off guard. Of all the things to think about….

“I would’ve,” the cat said, eyes flashing up to catch her in a strangely earnest gaze. “Just, we didn’t come across any ponds or creeks with swimming holes….” It was silent for another small eternity. “There are all kinds of words I want to say right now.”

“…Words?”

“Terrible ones.” The cat confirmed.

Violet’s gaze shot inexorably back to the false animals, a surreal, sickly numbness falling to dull the brighter, more devastating edges of her fear. Again the urge to laugh, to yelp and scream, came tugging at the front of her mind.

“Why don’t you?” She asked instead.

“Because you’re going to survive this,” said the cat matter of factly, and seemed to have recovered itself a little bit. “And I don’t want that sort of bad influence hanging over your head.”

This had to be at least somewhat facetious, but Violet nodded soberly anyway. The beast said nothing. It had begun to grind its teeth and Violet placed what she hoped was a calming hand on her new companion’s side.

w h a t -- s h o u l d -- w e -- d o

            o n c e -- w e ’ r e -- a c r o s s -- t h e -- b r i d g e ? ---- It asked.

Violet found that she could not answer.

“I’m still in favor of running.” The cat said, filling in her silence.

Taking a deep breath, Violet looked past the opposite end of the bridge (still empty), beyond the looming hulk of the refinery and up the barren slope of the hill that bordered it. The sky above that distant point was crystalline with Glow, like vision in the moments after staring at something bright. The sight lifted Violet’s spirits and again, almost desperately, she reached out towards it with all her heart and soul.

Just as it had all the previous times, her grasp dissolved into open space. The light was merely a projection, a beacon. Though the Glow itself was close, it had to be, the space that remained seemed to expand infinitely.

Violet suddenly felt very aware of how tired and sore and weak she was. Beyond that, curling into the corners of her perception, the influence had begun to make itself known.

It lurked, advancing only far enough that it could be felt, but behind the velvety subtleness of that pressure loomed a void, a depthless absence in the space that lurked behind what she could see. And in that lightless, colorless place there coiled and shifted an unspeakable and shapeless enormity.

Again a sensation of pull, of being drawn by some slow and irresistible force. It felt like descent, or at least the manifestation of such. Down and down and—

“Violet!” The cat said sharply and Violet jolted, a strange, vowelless cry caught behind her teeth.

Before her, the cat’s fur was puffed and it stared, newly frightened. Some distance of the bridge’s length had vanished before her, as though time itself had been swallowed (and perhaps it had), and the false animals bringing up her rear had shifted rather closer, ten meters now rather than twenty. Upon the fox’s cataclysmically nulled face Violet could see a cluster of similar stunned flies and they turned helpless circles upon whorls of matted fur. From the bottom of her lungs rose a low, despairing groan.

The cat spoke again, tail swishing behind it like a conductor’s baton. It was walking backwards now, teeth halfway bared out of some unavoidable sense of instinctive terror.

“You need to keep talking to me,” it said, not bothering to disguise the urgency that heightened each word. “It can be anything, I don’t care if it makes no sense, just keep that thing out of your head.”

“Cat.” Violet said, and it was a troublingly long time before other words began to make sense. She recited half forgotten pieces of poems and then her mother’s name. She listed her neighbors in order of where they lived on her street and then did it backwards. There came fragmentary thoughts about the bees nesting in the church and Violet wished aloud that they might come and buzz loudly enough to somehow shock the false animals awake and disintegrate the influence wherever it was nested.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The cat offered encouragement every time she paused for breath, and so did the beast, though its voice frayed within Violet’s mind. She held tightly to a corner of its fabric, as though this would make its words clearer, and the beast did its best to remain upright and strong, though Violet could feel the smallest of shivers disrupting its form.

Beneath everything, around and between and within, the influence sat like a poison. Waiting.

They were nearly to the other end of the bridge now and Violet could see the full layout of the refinery, its main building offset from the road. Half collapsed rows of chain link fence attempted to shield a tangle of raised oil tanks and freight cars sitting upon warped whorls of railway track, cut off from all possible purpose.

The air smelled sour, acrid with spilt fuel and some deeper, more sinister scent that baked up from out of the ground.

Rot, Violet realized. Instinct froze her legs and she faltered. The cat had hesitated too. Together, in near perfect unison, they glanced uneasily back to their empty eyed escorts, the false animals still following patiently along, a little closer than they’d been before.

A wrongness pervaded the refinery, to that which lay beyond its decaying outer shell. Violet couldn’t help but think back upon what the raven had told her, its description of the past and current evils that infected the place. She’d assumed they were one and the same, memories of ancient pollution and human malfeasance arcing forward to stain even the present, but….

Down and down and—

Violet shook her head and felt slightly as though a part of her was coming unmoored, her thoughts askew, alternate to what might be considered normal.

“Deep evil.” She said, and felt ill for having let the words escape.

“Once we get off the bridge we’re going to run,” said the cat, pretending it hadn’t heard her. “The ground is pretty open so you should be able to outmaneuver anything that pursues. Then we’ll be home free.”

“I can’t run….” Violet mumbled. Her voice registered at a slight distance, for the slowly swooping sensation of descent was back; like the shock of missing a step in the dark, but seamlessly perpetuated and stretched out unto eternity. A sudden fear came: she would never hit the bottom. This would last forever.

But of course there was always a bottom. And at that eldritch terminus lay the influence.

“You have to.” The cat said urgently, but Violet could only halfway recall what her companion’s words were in reference to, and when further speech came its structure abdicated sense and then her thoughts were fragmentary.

    Down and

She could remember this from other places. The mice in the signal-box and that unseen shift that had come with the influence’s cold attention focusing upon her for the very first time.

        down and down

Her night in the control booth and the annihilating, possessing press of that which had claimed the endless procession of animals.

            and down and

And she had wanted to scream but the ability for panic to register had been sapped, yet the influence had not broken her for there had been something in the way, some unaccountable thing it could not understand.

                down and

Its intentions had spilled free from practice, an inevitability, an invitation near as it was able to understand the concept. No matter where she went and which way she traveled, her destination would always be the same.

                    down down down down

The inevitability had arrived.

Violet shivered free from the splintered embrace of her realization and for a moment felt like she did in the aftermath of speaking to animals, her own perspective restored but so strange as to be rendered alien in a space where it rightfully should have fit.

Her legs went strange beneath her and for a panicked half second Violet was sure that the seams of reality had split, that the skin of all things was surrendering function. Instead, she merely puddled to her knees and was sick instead, a liquidy lurch rising from out of her center. Out came the willow tea and the honeycomb and everything else in a great sour tide.

Tears welled and her vision blurred. At the back of her mind Violet knew that if the false animals wished to rush forward then there would be nothing she could do to stop them, yet they remained statuesque and unsympathetic as she retched helplessly onto the concrete.

When she straightened up there was a wet and nearly velvety warmth collecting upon her upper lip, little crimson droplets falling to dot the front of her blouse like stars.

Her nose had begun to bleed.

Silently, the beast offered a white cotton handkerchief it had produced from somewhere. The fabric was stiff with age and smelled musty in the same way the very back of her closet at home did, but the Violet pressed her face into it and was unable to suppress the barest edges of a miserable whimper.

“Thank you.” She tried to say, but her throat stung and her chest was hitching. All that escaped was a hoarse little choke and then a whole body shiver.

“Are you okay? Can you get up?” The cat asked.

Violet did and felt swimmy on her feet, still trembling. Her companions kept glancing to the false animals, but they still had not moved. The charcoal furred fox had begun to make a faint choking sound but still remained upright.

“You remember what you said about it?” Violet asked, words blurry and strange. A faint mist of blood glimmered in the air before her.

“About what?” The cat asked, very calmly. Each point of jaggedly puffed fur had begun to tremble.

“The influence,” Violet said, and could not help but wonder if she was making any sense. To assign focus elsewhere might let it in yet further, so out came the words in a disorganized torrent. “You said you couldn’t feel a center, only processes all connected, but there is one, a center, all of it, and it’s here. It wants….”

“Violet.” The cat said, and sounded firm again, trying to snap her back to normalcy. But there was no stability to be found, no solid ground but for the nearly magnetic pull of the influence, and each time she tried to yank away there was some part of her that could not react in synch and it was as though she were being pulled apart.

She was still moving, her legs making shuffling little strides, and Violet managed to stop herself exactly at the end of the bridge, where concrete melted into a tarry, oil soaked slurry that reeked of fuel and death. Amongst it seethed half rotten strands of fungus only slightly red, for they were just as poisoned as everything else. Here and there they had attempted flowers but the results held no concept of symmetry or rational shape, and gazing upon their eldritch curlings tugged a whimper from the very center of Violet’s being, that small part of her that still recognized fully what was sane and rational in the world.

From amidst the half collapsed fuel tanks and choked off culverts, those hidden places dark and quiet, false animals came shambling forth. Some moved on their knees, upon limbs too splintered and worn to remain functional, and others were blind and possessed only wet fungal pits where their eyes had been, yet those simple organs were not necessary for they still saw. Upon the ground, half buried in caustic filth, the slow pulsations of flesh no longer traditionally formed showed her where animals lay connected and deteriorating, still sensical but not in any way that could be sanely recognized.

They did not surge forward to trap her on the bridge, as Violet somehow knew they wouldn’t. Instead each animal took a carefully determined position and from the cat came a nearly agonized groan of fright. It was too distant to fully qualify as sense and so Violet chose to pretend that she had not heard it. She could only observe the animals and how their slowly developing line performed an arc towards the refinery itself, highlighting a door that sagged upon itself, jagged with rust.

She was not surprised by this, indeed it seemed inevitable, how could she have not seen it coming? The shock of this sudden revelation was nearly electric, like the time she’d touched the bare end of a wire back home and been knocked onto her back with her hair standing straight up and fiery jitters of pain rolling up and down the length of her arm. It felt like that but entirely internal, and though the force of it hurt, Violet found connections reopened and nuance of thought freshly possible.

The influence was still there, of course it was, like a sea, a hole, a pressure, but she could think around it at least for now. The beast had pressed itself next to her and was trying to say something, but that curious bandwidth on which its communications ran was splintering ever further and Violet could only hear fragments and the crackling hiss of a connection nearly severed.

She thought about saying something, only to be frozen by a thought: could it even hear her? The beast had no ears, no traditional senses at all. What if the pressure of the influence was cutting it off from her? From everyone.

“We need to go.” The cat said urgently. “Right now. Before they come for us.”

Violet shook her head, the motion slow and ponderous. There was a grimacing half smile on her face but she could not understand why. An image came, the cat’s teeth glinting with blood. That was her now, but not entirely.

An unraveling was coming again, like a loose thread at the center of her mind, opening a hole, something that could never be closed. Violet blinked hard and shocked that sensation away, then took a deep breath and forced the world into as clear a focus as it would go.

“They…it. It isn’t going to do that. It’s herding me. Wants me to go down to where the center is.”

Down down—

She blinked again, halting the deadly rhythm before it could become newly infectious.

“Good for it,” the cat said, voice sharp with unease. “Here’s the plan. I’ll take your friend and go knock a hole in that line of false animals, then we’ll play rear guard while you run for it.”

“Cat….” Violet sighed. “Do you really think I can outrun all of them?”

“You won’t have to. We’ll be right there, protecting you all the way.” But though there was an undeniable stubborn determination in the cat’s voice, Violet could see her companion eyeing the beast, silently gauging its capabilities. It would be doing the heavy lifting, the cat knew that already.

“I’ll have to stop eventually,” Violet said. “They won’t. They’ll just keep coming until there’s too many of them for you to stop.”

“Then what?” The cat demanded, voice harsh with fear and frustration.

Violet’s eyes had gone to the refinery, following the guiding line of blank animals. Vessels.

“I can’t get away from this,” she said, and felt coldly numb putting the sum total of her revelation to words. “It’ll get me if I try to run. It’ll pull me to pieces.”

“No.” Said the cat.

Violet continued as though her companion hadn’t spoken.

“If I don’t do this then it’ll be done to me. I have to face it. See if I can beat it.”

The cat rose briefly onto its hind legs, possessed by a seething froth of anger and fright.

“Beat it how?” Her companion demanded. “You will die if you go in there. Every single one of us will die.”

It took Violet a long moment to gather her words. She was trembling, head filled with a chaos of terror and numbness and, deeper still, a cold determination.

At last she spoke.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Violet said, then looked to the beast. “Either of you.”

The beast only stared, though Violet thought she could see a certain realization of her intentions brewing in the back of its hollow eyes. From its place before her the cat reeled as though under the force of a blow. It stared up, shocked and genuinely insulted.

“You stupid girl,” it chastised, then let out a sharp huff. “What kind of person would I be if I let you do something like this on your own?”

Violet said nothing. The cat examined the false animals and the hill and the faraway Glow, all with a curious arithmetic playing out behind the silver of its eyes.

“Is this really the only way?” It asked.

“Yes.” Violet said, though she knew the cat had arrived at exactly the same conclusion.

Her companion drew itself straight.

“If you think this can be done, then I’ll be with you until the very end. No matter what that end might be.”

Violet managed a smile, a real one this time, relieved and terrified and a hundred other things all at once. Then she stepped off the end of the bridge and towards the foreboding darkness of the refinery.