I strain to see where the sound came from overhead, my sight miraculously managing to grasp at the faintest trace of a bird resting on what must be an obsolete pipe. A chalky sheen reflects off of its feathers as if it brought a touch of light with it, and I am able to make out the graceful head and delicate beak, the prayerfully folded wings of a dove. How I can see these traces of form in such unnatural dark is beyond comprehension, but I’m too grateful to question it for long. The sense of orientation is profound. I can’t imagine what it’s doing down here or how it got in, but it thrashes on its perch, fanning the dark, lustrous underside of white glowing. And then it is gone, sailing away from me into the black, until I hear it land and call with a ghostly wail several feet down.
Shuffling blindly, I follow the dove’s flight path and reach the soft dig of rotting wood and a drift of air beyond. I can feel it’s an old window, broken out, the frame hanging vacant like a cavity pecked into a tree. On the other side, I realize, must be the areaway, as the windows down here face out to what would have once been street level. Though it’s likely not the same one I was in with Arla.
This is how we travel, the dove and I, through the next plodding hundred feet of below-street tunnel that feels endless. With my labored breathing, the thud of my toe bumping the concrete rim of a discarded cinder block or a what I guess is an old sign, silken whistles of flight before me. I’m slow because I can’t see, because my fear is like drag in the water, because my shins are bruised and my toes aching, my knuckles scraped raw from brick. It’s taking much longer to get out than it did to get in.
I tell myself I cannot continue to play these games. That when I make it out of here,ifI make it out of here, I’m done with Arla and the lot of them. I don’t care if they’re the only others like me I’ve known since my mother died. I don’t care if they’re a “family” and I’m an orphan. I don’t care if Arla is the first person to trulyseeme since I was a child on the steps of Solidago. They’ve gone too far.
Fear constricts my throat to a straw, my breath so shallow I can barely draw oxygen. Or maybe it’s the dust and the mold. The inhales come wheezy and sharp, windpipe contracting more with every negative thought. I never had asthma as a kid, but I recognize it now, my body revolting against this place, these people. Every minute down here feels like a day. Before me, the faint smudge of the dove blurs. I’m close to blacking out. Though I’d hardly know the difference if I did, already trapped in a sea of naught.
And then I hear the voice—Remember.
For a second, I forget where I am and see goldenrod flowing around me, the lick of flames behind us flickering a sienna radiance. That moment when the world exploded, when the ground dropped away from my feet, and I lifted into the sky. The freedom in flying. The slippery nature of reality when shock set in. The release when contact was made with such force the soul ejected from the body. And then the peace. Long undulating waves of it coursing over me. A thick carpet of calm creeping like moss as I was weighted beneath the blanket of death. And somewhere in the deep, whispering all around, the power—raw and feral and alive, freewheeling and atomic, an undoing and a promise.
I breathe that power into myself now and feel it flood my lungs with lustrous molecules. I’ve been here before, in the gloom of the grave. I know the hush of death. I know the brooding seed buried within the black earth. I know the clash of stars against the night sky. I know the stillness. And I know what beats at the heart of it. There is power in surrender. I know because I have died once already.
When I open my eyes again, I do not see the inky black of the underground but a constellation of light sparking off every surface, illuminating every downy barb of the dove, every spot marking its wings in the shape of little skulls. It ignites a way forward that was always there for me to find, like the sky has descended into the belly of the earth, and I have swallowed the stars.
My mind races ahead, pitching me toward an end. I clamber past the boarded-up front of an old store and through the left-behindtraces of an illegal bar, now ironically buried beneath a pub just behind Arla’s building. In the corner, past the overturned chairs and empty kegs, I see the rickety makings of a staircase leading to a drab if sturdy door. I start toward it, but the dove dives for my head, drawing me back to the old sidewalk, on toward a looming corner.
It’s only as I round it to the other side that I begin to understand. The dove is not leading me away from something, buttowardsomething. Something that must be near Arla’s basement because surely we’re getting close. But what?
Her.
The word is as startling as a sudden spotlight. It stops me in my tracks, bringing another wave of fear, icy in my veins. I’m not sure it was even mine. Did the voice whisper it to me? Or someone else?
A renewed need to get out pushes up, green as fescue in the summer. I worry about what has been captured in the Pandora’s box of Arla’s basement, what fresh pestilence waits down here in the underground.
Another corner looms and I realize I am close. Around it is the gate I first came through, Arla’s strange basement with its stranger room, sealed off from all of this. The bricks rising beside me must belong to Medusa, or to what’s below it.
I pick up my pace when the dove dives for me again, mussing my hair and battering its wings against the wall next to me before clumsily alighting on a rafter. A broken bit of old sign drops, painted block letters that spell outU-N-D-R-Y—LAUNDRY?SUNDRY?—catching and bruising my ankle as it hits the ground. I curse and glance up to give the dove the finger when I see it’s exposed something on the wall beneath the sign, something that’s hung here for the last century at least.
The thin paper of a lithograph is glued crookedly to the wall, faded in places, tattered at the edges, but remarkably intact. It has the camp of a circus poster, but not the innocence. At its center, a woman sits among waves, her lower half scaled like a mermaid’s,the tail split many times over, coiling around the image at impossible lengths. Her head is crowned with curling ram horns, wreathed by fire. Her teeth sharp and red with blood. Her eyes burn into mine.
The letters are blocked in around her, offset, and printed in a handful of catchy fonts, unmistakable.
RUDZITIN’S EXTRAORDINARY PIT SHOW
PRESENTS:
THE FATHOM
Oracle of the Pacific
The face of aWOMAN, the body of aMONSTER, the power of aDEMON.
WANT TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE?
COME AND SEE FOR YOURSELF!
IF YOU DARE
The breath dies in my throat.Her.
A single downy feather drifts down before the poster, resting at my feet. But the dove has disappeared when I search, its soft sighs a memory in my ears. Eerie stillness descends, the image on the poster and I alone in this urban hell.THE FATHOM—the words stare out at me, bold, undeniable.Body of a monster… power of a demon.
But the face… The face of a woman.
Who is Arla? I wonder not for the first time. What is this game she’s playing at?
