Chapter 46: Seams Past the Air

With the dark came a yawning sense of absence, a stunned empty horror huge beyond comprehension. Her mind was spinning, thoughts splintered. Once again, from all around her, the influence in its omnipresence seemed impossibly total.

There was still the beast, close enough to touch, but though Violet knew her eyes were open, all she could see were directionless shocks of phantom light, fading irrevocably as though devoured. As if she were staring into the center of a demon, once more reduced to a low, numb creature, made pitiful by the grand impossibility of something ancient and awful beyond understanding.

All of it made Violet think of her very first nighttime trip into the woods back home. The dark had closed in around her, and more than anything she had felt alone, the world entirely gone. That had been an illusion, and had been proved so in the instant that her eyes adjusted, but that could not be done here, the darkness was not empty but rather packed full of an encroaching force that desired nothing more than—

Her lantern made a high stuttering noise and then there was a burst of white hot glare from where she’d clutched it against her chest. Violet took a startled, hopping step backwards and nearly fell over her own feet, a razor sharp realness restored to the world. It hurt. Everything hurt to think about, but the numbness at the edges of the world had been chased back and so she welcomed the pain and knew that for all that had happened, she would not be taken. Not yet.

With the new clarity came realizations, and those hurt even worse. The cat was gone, the cat was gone, her friend had been taken. She stared back to where the beast had reared up amidst flickery shards of shadow, but it was no longer straining to push back against the tide of false animals…for they had gone slack.

There were no longer any sharp movements from amongst the horde, no deadly purpose leaking unevenly out from behind a clumsy, mangled facade. The animals seemed to be running on auto-pilot again, pressed slowly forward by the brute surge of inertia. Those smaller and slower were being trampled, Violet could see creatures sagging silently down, blank eyed even as they crumpled out of sight. The floor ran with blood.

Her lantern’s light shivered and bent in a strange way, for the glass was fractured and no longer allowed a clear transference of illumination. The filament had begun to sing. Soon enough it would burn through and she would be plunged back into darkness, but Violet made herself bury that unwelcome truth somewhere she could not acknowledge it. Otherwise she thought that she would start keening helplessly into the void and never be able to stop.

She had to focus. The cat was gone, the cat was gone, the cat was—

A staticky shiver of fabric brushed across the back of her shoulders and there was the beast, backing slowly away from the slumping animals, preferring to envelope her instead. It settled like a cloak across her shoulders and again Violet felt a peculiar coldness that was not quite real but still registered as a phantom sensation, singing across all available nerves.

It helped cut through some of the influence, gave her mind something to do, even if that something was still vaguely disturbing. The beast’s words crackled on the edge of coherence but still could not be pulled together, there was no room for it to speak.

The influence had done all of this on purpose, Violet knew. It had not snatched the cat out of simple convenience. It was separating her away from her companions.

How could she face it? The cat was gone.

The animals in front of her had mostly picked themselves back up, but a few, where the bear had plowed through, were bent and broken in ways that not even their unwanted host could overcome. A dog wheezed upon the ground and tried to stand, but there was a curious jagged division in its body, the whole space below its shoulders slack and gone but for a distinct pulsation of newly aware fungi. Around the whole circumference of the dying dog the cordon had been reassembled and they took a ragged step back as though coaxing her forward into the vacuum thus created.

She longed to race forward, to slip through the animals before they could maneuver to block her. The hallway stretched ahead, a twisted chasm that invited further descent, and amongst the dread intentions of the influence, its endless seething presence, she thought that she could feel an internal distinction, some sort of impossible tension frothing out of its activities, for it was having to work in order to herd her along. Below as well, a tremor of intention like a throat tensing to swallow. It was like listening to a demon, but in reverse, for the influence was nothingness for the most part, except those bits where its attention…faded.

Violet looked to the animals, and those ones trampled underfoot. And she looked to the film of maladjusted flesh that held the form of walls and floor. There were flickers running through it, like the dying glare of her own lantern, and for the very first time Violet saw that the influence was not an omnipresence.

It had edges. And if those edges could be made wide enough, then maybe, just maybe…she could slide through and get at its heart. The infernal presence beyond the air had begun to stutter. Yet still it pressed onward. If she did nothing, if she simply cowered and waited for some impossible salvation, the influence would crack her mind like an egg.

Especially once her lantern went out.

It was a little bit like crossing the river, the moment she’d realized her boat was sinking. Her path now was similarly inalterable, her trajectory long ago decided. In the boat her options had narrowed to a single unified point of potential success surrounded on all sides by those choices—panic, retreat, a numb collapse into despair—that would drag her into the depths.

Violet thought of what the cat might say, its reaction to her tremblings, and she knew almost instantly. It was alright to be afraid, but not so scared that reason and function ceased entirely.

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No useless fear.

She looked up to where the beast was grinding its teeth, the noise sharp and hollow, then touched smooth bone and felt the slick, fading warmth of spilt blood upon her fingertips. Even though she was physically touching her companion, Violet could only hear static coming in helpless bursts from that icy indefinable place that was the beast’s center.

But of course she was still resting upon the surface of things, and so Violet forced herself away and into the observational halfway space that lay beyond the solidity of the world. She could do nothing by speaking words, it was only by meeting the beast halfway that she could hope to restore communication…if that was still possible. Physical proximity evaporated, then she was in amongst the annihilating press of the influence.

It felt like sickness, like being locked into the depths of a fever with thought splintered and sense not properly assigned, normality so distant it might as well never have never existed. And this was all the world now, for though Violet knew there were limits to the power she felt, none seemed to be present anymore. She called out and felt her voice swallowed without acknowledgment or echo. Not the slightest bit of comprehension rose to face her, the influence did not care.

A coldness settled within her and Violet knew what she was feeling, the pull and dissolution of everything, the final collapse of the world into a stateless, numb fog.

The cat had told her about this, but even it had not recognized the harbinger.

Entropy.

When everything had been consumed and all the world lay silent beneath a skin of repurposed flesh then the influence would not sorrow at its aloneness or yearn for further conquests, for there would be nothing left but itself and within that eternal singularity thought and feeling would cease, the stars would dim, and the tides would fall flat upon alien shores. And then everything would die.

Violet knew that in this place at the end of all things she would not know any of that, nor would the cat, or the beast, her mother, Maud, the bees in their swirling multitudes….

In the blank, glassy eyes of the false animals, held at the very back of her most distant perception, Violet saw a promise of inevitability. It had always been there, whether she’d recognized it or not, and there was no malice contained within, for she did not think the influence knew what it was to hate or fear or dislike. In its proliferation she saw water rushing to fill an empty space, she saw the silent pull of lightless space in the wake of a collapsing star.

All around her the tiny particles and interlocking pieces that made up the world, that hinged her thoughts to sense and allowed her eyes to see, every single one of them was pulling apart.

But even in the midst of this she knew—knew—that there was more to the world, for the sky still hung bright and luminous and full of Glow, and there were tadpoles and flowers, trees and cats and foxes and even demons, the whole bright arc of her life cutting through it all, made incandescent by useful fear and a great defiant rejection of what the influence stood in representation of.

The world was not over yet.

Violet forced herself to look further, straining into the nothingness, and there within she caught a vague trace of a different noise, an interruption within the influence’s space.

The beast!

Reaching it felt like hugging vapor, but Violet clung to the slippery shred of connection she’d established and spoke as clearly as she could, marshaling every thought and every bit of courage she could muster, all to deliver a message, what she knew needed to be done.

F I N D - T H E - C A T --- She said, and realized with a trace of shock that she was speaking almost like the beast now, a scattered diffusion to her unpracticed voice.

--- F I N D - T H E - C A T , - F O L L O W - T H E - B E A R

The beast shivered with shock from across infinite space.

w h a t -- a b o u t -- y o u ? ? ? ---- It asked, voice badly corroded by distance and fear.

There were explanations that could be given, descriptions of how they needed to divide the influence’s attentions, to distract it if that was even possible…but they were too many words, and there wasn’t enough time.

I ‘ L L - F O L L O W --- Violet promised. --- T R U S T - M E

It didn’t seem to have occurred to the beast that the danger of what she’d asked it do was almost immeasurably huge, all Violet could feel was a profound sense of worry and protective concern.

y o u -- s h o u l d n ’ t -- h a v e -- t o -- d o -- t h i s

P L E A S E .. --- Violet said, and slowly the intensity of her companion’s worry began to disperse, though she could still feel it burning away, like the pilot light beneath an oil heater.

i .. — w e -- w i l l -- w a i t -- f o r -- y o u ---- The beast said at last, then the sureness of its touch slipped beyond comprehension and the connection bravely stretching through the influence’s fog melted away.

But though the balance of her presence shifted and a new sense of profound aloneness shivered the edges of her being, Violet maintained focus.

Then the influence trembled and Violet knew somehow that the beast had just plowed through the cordon of false animals, racing down the hallway, tracing the path of the bear.

Had she made a mistake, sending her friend into the very heart of the refinery?

No.

No time for doubt, this was it, if the influence was going to try and stop her companion then its attention would be shifting away from her at least a little bit. She tried not to think of what the false animals might be doing. Were they pressing closer? Would she even notice if one of them was, at this very moment, sliding its jaws around her ankle or wrist?

But she could not think about that; the pressure felt uneven now, there were conflicting attentions, a radiating sequence of oddnesses rippling ever outward. The beast was on the move, and even in the numb press of unspace Violet thought that she could feel an interminable sensation of descent attributed to each new reaction, for they were getting stronger, approaching a place that felt sickeningly familiar.

And suddenly Violet knew that what she was perceiving, even in this limited, sidelong way, was a place where the influence was even stronger than everywhere else, a sunless plateau where everything had already come to an end.

Yet…again she could feel the edges, seams that centered upon this space and though it scared her so badly that she could feel sickness welling up even within this bodiless place, Violet made herself reach out towards it, for there was in implication even beyond the terror.

The influence had a center, and it was not looking at her anymore.

Again there rose a feeling of separation, a stasis of thought and motion, a termination of all things different and strange. In a moment it was as though she were staring into the drainpipe again, all knowledge and ability strangled before the rising numb collapse of the world and everything in it.

But she had not been bested by the demon in the drainpipe, for she had friends, and she had ability, and nothing would change that, no matter how invincible the influence thought itself to be.

Violet reached into the heart of the fog until she thought that the very core of herself was about to be tugged to static, then gathered every shred of strength she could muster and grabbed the influence as hard as she could.