A woman in a bull mask riding gleefully astride a golden-skinned man, her pale skin glistening, the neckline of her gown half-clawed down to expose her breasts. Up and down she went, wild with violent desire. Up and down…
The steamboat was calling to her, revealing itself in layers.
…men and womendrinking and drinking from a spewing red fountain with their hands, sloshing thick wine between their fingers until red slopped down their fronts. And still they had not had their fill…
A song started, the silence broken. Marie recognized it—it was the song the musicians had played on the steamboat’s upper deck. Except it wasn’t quite the same. The melody was mangled and twisted, the notes whirling on a carousel that spun backward. It was mocking her.
…men and women inside the room dancing. Faster. And faster. Their bodies crashing into one another with violent force as the song swelled, swallowing their cries of pleasure and laughter. They began to move in such tight formation that they seemed to Marie’s frazzled mind to have fused together into one pulsing mass. The thing raised its arms, too many all at once, clawing out together for her to join them…
Marie screamed, wrenching herself away from whatever darkness pulled her in. This wasn’t real. She knew that. By the saints and all that was holy, she knew that. This was alchemy. And here in this strange place, alchemy reigned supreme. It transfigured bodies into monsters, molded space and time into malleable clay. Had she thought that she had truly understood the limits their alchemy might reach?
Marie kept running even when the unbearable smell of something ashen and long decayed—sulfur?—stung her nose. There was no path, only more twisting shapes and shadows and screaming. The rasping red glow flickered in and out as if someone were lighting a candle, then promptly snuffing it out. Was this hell?
A silken whisper at her ear:This is you. You’ve done this to yourself, Marie.
She had been abandoned. Twice now by her own mother. By the loa. But no, she wasn’t being abandoned—it was far worse than that. She was beingspatout. Same as Jon had openly done before Gailon, no different from Father Antoine’s words ringing down at her from his pulpit, more warning than sermon:So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of Mymouth.
Both Jacques and Jon had warned her. As had God. And now the Baron of Death himself. In her selfishness, she had not chosen a side, only her own. And she supposed it was divine judgment that she should be left here now, utterly alone. Marie staggered through the darkness, desperate to be free of this hellish cage.
The boiler room. The air swollen with steam, tinged with the glowing red embers of burning coal. Dark-robed figures crouched before an open furnace, its insides red like a belly split open down the middle. They fed it strange offerings…dark limbs…and stones…teeth.
Behind the furnace, the dark, shadowed shape of a long-horned thing, growing larger with each sacrifice, fat and grossly protruding from its offerings. The thing stood, and it kept on rising, stretching, looming larger than any natural room could contain, than the entire steamboat could hold, until the shape of it seemed to swallow the darkness whole…
Marie stumbled back with a cry.
This was not the work of some distant Greek deity, not at all the work of the horned god Dionysus conjured from myth. Marie understood at last the blatant truth of the whole of the steamboat: Every decadent arrangement, every act and drop of wine had been a performance meant to mask something much more malevolent that lived within its dark heart.
This place was an altar to something truly evil. Demonic.
She could feel it. Something infernal breathed within that room, something alive, powerful and ancient, and so very wrong.
The robed figures snapped their heads up to her, turning as one. They stood. And slowly started toward her—
Marie turned and ran. Her mouth open and soundless, weighed with a silent scream that wouldn’t come. Thundering footfalls behind her. The dark thing was close. It would soon have her.
“Legba!” Marie called. “Papa!” she cried, hot tears blinding her as she stumbled forward.
Then she felt it. The subtle curve of the air, the cool breath of the loa of the crossroads as he passed over the threshold into the land of the living.There,Papa Legba whispered.Turn there.Crying with relief, Marie did as she was told. She turned, the hallway twisting into—
A dead end.
There was no door this time. Only an empty wall. No exit. No way out. The footfalls grew closer.
Marie screamed. Why would Legba lead her here? Was this amusement for him? Was she nothing more than a puppet that could be worked on a string like those poor men on the stage? Was this simply a game for the gods to see how far her mind could bend before it broke? Marie clutched at the walls, but her handscame back wet, slippery with something dark and warm like blood.
“Goddamn you! You left me!You all fucking left me!” She gasped, desperately frantic. “There’s no way out,” she whispered, half sobbing. Blind panic seized her. Her hands dug into her hair, grasping at her scalp, dragging down the sides of her face, smearing the blood. “There’s no fucking way out!”
Marie screamed. For the men who had been enslaved and mutilated and killed for sport. For the loa. For her saints, for God. Jon. Her mother. The echo of her terror circled the dark until she felt the entire presence of the steamboat screaming back at her.
Behind her, a presence.
Marie whirled to face a figure stepping out from the coiling mist. Black-robed, a pointed hood concealing its face. The flickering red lights stuttered in and out overhead, a mad heartbeat hammering in the dark. It approached her slowly, as if floating.
Marie shrank back against the wall. Her first, frenzied thought was that it was a demon, something infernal conjured from the boiler room that had found her at last. But it was not.
Silas.
The alchemist neared her, and she could see as he grew closer the way the snow-white ends of his hair made a determined climb toward the ruddy-gold roots, eating away at what was left of his natural color bit by bit. A dark, inky ring spread out from the center of his irises, slowly overtaking what was left of the blue. A sickness slowly spreading.
