Chapter 44: Down Down Down

Though the beast and the cat stayed determinedly close as the refinery’s shadow consigned the world to shadow, Violet could not help but feel incredibly, intensely alone.

Portions of the refinery’s outer wall had sheared away, and within were places where the upper floors had crumpled together like the folds of an accordion, rusted and frothing with excited bursts of fungus. The walls and great doorway ahead seemed to be in the process of melting, shedding the sharpness of their original angles.

Where texture ought to have been hard and definite, a greasy haze had supplanted solidity. It was as though all the world had been set askew, not at all proper to how things should have been, wrong in a nameless way that Violet could not begin to describe.

“What will we do when we’re down there?” The cat asked suddenly, then seemed to feel immediately bad for asking the question. It knew that she had no solid answer, no idea beyond the vaguest edges of a certainty that this was the only thing left to do.

It was desperate, but was this a victorious scramble in an unexpected direction, or the last mad writhings of a trapped animal?

They were nearly at the doorway and through the oily filth that coated the ground came the dull gleam of rails. Once upon a time the freight cars stranded outside might have been rolled into the building itself, loaded or unloaded depending on cargo. Indeed, Violet could see the frame of one car halfway buckled into the center of the refinery floor as though it were in the process of being swallowed, for the floor had flowered inwards like the maw of some carnivorous plant and even the sharp angles of bent metal had become unnatural and soft.

Beyond there, down down down, all that remained visible was a hard pane of lightless space that nonetheless was possessed with depth beyond comprehension. At the center of Violet’s mind flickered some pale realization of size, just how far down the refinery went.

“You’re named after a flower.” Said the cat, and Violet realized that it had been speaking to her for some time, but on these words it pitched its volume up and startled her into listening.

She blinked. The cat had said this to her before and it only slowly trickled into her mind what had come next.

“Violets are edible.” She managed to reply, and could not contain a shrill, terrified yelp of something that might have been laughter. Was her companion trying to make a joke? Distract her from everything?

At the sound of her words the cat turned half a shivery circle, then flickered straight again. It was not zipping as smoothly now, there was something bothering it, or something wrong with the space past space. The points of her companion’s teeth were showing in a hysterical grimace and Violet did not like the frightened brightness in her friend’s eyes.

“They’re also very pretty, and durable, and perennial; which means they always come back no matter what.” The cat said.

Violet knew what perennials were but made herself smile anyway, for it was a sweet thing the cat had said. Her mother’s roses back home were perennials, but they had dried up and died, and suddenly Violet found herself wondering how her own flower was doing, the one the cat had given her on the night she’d trapped the drainpipe demon.

How had she ever truly been afraid of demons when things like this existed?

No.

Just because one fear might be eclipsed by something greater did not mean it ceased to exist.

She nodded and smiled so wide it hurt her face and felt like weeping all the while. To her immediate rear the beast was rigid with unease and looked at her as though it would be the last time they’d ever see one another.

Violet touched her companion, realizing too late that she was printing crimson streaks upon its shoulder, but the beast pretended not to notice. Though Violet knew the beast could not hear her she imagined that her touch was transmitting every word and nuance perfectly.

“Once upon a time there was a girl and a cat and a beast made of fabric.” She said and told herself that she did not see the cordon of false animals collapsing in around her, only a few meters distant now, forming a tight semicircle that pinned her into the doorway of the refinery.

The only way to proceed was forward, but that was fine. She’d known that.

“The three of them went on many adventures. Adventures. And no matter how dark things got they were always very brave. They were always brave.”

Some of the sentences she had to say twice, for the words did not feel real and Violet could not be sure what came out of her mouth. The fog was descending.

To her right, up against the furthest sagging wall of the refinery’s main room, the ceiling curved down like an inverted archway, as if executing a bow to introduce the decline of a stairwell. There had once been lights upon the wall, utilitarian glass fixtures done in squares and rectangles, strong shapes bracketed in wire, but now overgrown with crimson threads that were swollen and drooling something not unlike pus. They seemed broken in some way, even amongst the decay of the surrounding building and almost everywhere were stretched great spangles and streaks of grayness interrupting the fungal flow where fuel had dripped and run and killed everything it touched.

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For a moment Violet felt a horror at the absoluteness of that, but the fuel had no presence to it, no life or semblance of such, and the way the influence attempted to bridge over top of the death anyway, as though it had no comprehension of hurt or setback, made her feel further unraveled, small and hopeless next to….

She ended the thought before it could become embedded and fetched her lantern instead, tugging it free from the top of her pack. Her fingers drew smeary crimson streaks across the glass and when she wound it up to full brightness the lantern blared spots of red like a secret message. Violet half expected the false animals, the influence, to cringe away, for all evil things flinched from the light in her stories.

Nothing happened. Blank eyes glittered. Teeth and spots of bone left white and exposed grew brighter and in that illumination detail stood sickly exposed. Upon the walls and those parts of the floor that bowed or stood incongruously ridged where metal plates had buckled like mountain ranges undergoing tectonic convergence, sickly streamers of moisture gleamed with a light that held its own colorless illumination. It had a pull of its own, that light, and Violet could not bear to look at it.

She shuffled slowly back in the vague direction of the stairs, for the only way to go was down and Violet had a sense that the false animals would be upon her if she went in a direction the influence did not want. It was some time before she reached the top of the stairs, long enough that her lantern had begun to dim, the filaments flickering as they lost energy.

The cat brushed roughly against her legs and nearly made her stumble, but Violet’s eyes were upon her companion and she felt a bit of peace, and in the rustling flutter of the beast’s fabric too, for it was making itself large and imposing in a vain attempt to ward back the false animals. She was not certain but there seemed to be more of them now.

When Violet turned to look down the length of the stairway the whole dark expanse seemed to twist before her and the sense of wrongness that pervaded the whole refinery grew immeasurably stronger as though concentrated by the confinement of this new space. The cat had stopped as well and stood just short of the first step with its fur raised and paws bunched together beneath it, as though it could not bear to expose itself to more ground than it absolutely needed to.

Her lantern flickered, on the edge of losing light entirely, and she stepped close to the cat for solidarity. For a moment the thought came, incongruously, that she was sinking, that her foot had just traveled a great deal further than it needed to for a single step. The material was flexing beneath her, Violet thought, and for a second she was certain that her leg would be swallowed up to her knee. She swayed, the whole composition of the world gone foreign.

Violet touched the nearest wall before she could stop herself and felt a slick and greasy softness register beneath her fingers that seemed at first like wet silk and then the skin of an apple just before it rotted through. An indication of firmness, an unpleasantly warm, organic fragility. Then the sensation settled and Violet realized the cat was making a low groan in the back of its throat, eyes still fixed upon the blackness ahead.

“This is a bad place.” It said and seemed almost incomprehensibly feline for a second, disposition caught in a halfway place that did not seem controlled.

Was there anything she could say? The question spun helplessly out before her, so intense it was nearly visible. Violet found the crank to her lantern, some stability restored, and then quickly wound it back up, a hard white light filling the stairwell, shadows like shards of obsidian cast downwards as though pointing out the limits of her visibility.

The cat flinched back and Violet nearly did the same, but the sight before her was so arrestingly bizarre that she simply froze. The stairway seemed twisted somehow, its layout only made worse by the revealing glare of her lantern’s light. The stairs were level and the walls were straight, but the color was wrong and she could not convince herself that it was because of her lantern. It felt almost as though she were looking at two stairways at once, laid nearly but not perfectly over top of each other. Angles did not make total sense and in places she could not tell where some steps ended and others began. The sharper edges of the stairs had bent and melted into each other, though Violet thought she could see where the original layout still was. She stared down to the nearest step, only a few inches away from her feet, and suddenly it all became clear.

The stairway was moving, twitching, shifting in a hundred thousand directions at once, sluggishly respondent to ghostly impulses and those instincts that remained. Through the shock of this realization Violet could only feel a deeper sense of grotesque familiarity, for she’d seen this same thing before. Were she to look closer, to flatten out upon the scape before her, she knew distantly that she would see the tiny branching blueness of veins and nerves like twisting clusters of translucent roots. There would be muscles that had not atrophied yet and perhaps the palest echoes of bones; spinal cords and brains gone dark and dead but for the basest of impulses.

It stretched out endlessly around her, upon the floors and walls and out of sight, a thousand types of flesh melted seamlessly together; gone bloodlessly translucent and numb but for the occasional directionless twitch.

Yes, she had seen this before, in the signal-box and the nature of the false animals, but trying to envision the scale made her feel as though a great silent hole had opened in the center of her mind and was swallowing the sharper edges of her horror.

Perhaps that was a good thing, for the keenest desire that arose now was one to shriek, so loudly that everything might be shattered, herself included.

Then the cat shivered into being atop her rucksack, its entrance jittery and strange. Violet could feel her companion trembling, but strangely that was almost reassuring. Had the cat been calm in the face of this she might have felt alone, small and useless.

“If you want to take a moment….” Said the cat.

Violet touched its tail and took as deep a breath as she could manage. There was still the horror screaming through her, the absolute otherworldly awfulness of the situation; but it hardly felt real anymore.

Perhaps that was simply some instinctive trick of her mind, a desperate ploy to keep her sanity from snapping like an elastic band.

“I’m alright.” Violet said, and took her first step into the influence’s lair.

Down and down and down.