Because itwasa creature. There was no sign of Harker there anymore. His deep brown eyes were blank and black, almost sightless seeming. Like all he needed was instinct, and instinct said his prey was close by. Just on the other side of a thin membrane, barely visible. The only thing he had to do was find a place to slip into.
But god, the way he went about it.
He didn’t search. He scrabbled, feverishly. He went over and over the edges of her door with clawed, hungry fingers, looking for holes. Looking for some crack that might let him in. Horrible to see—but something else that she didn’t expect, too.
Sad. It was desperately sad. Even though she hated him, even though he was awful, her heart swelled to see someone so robbed of all their senses. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, just to make the idea go away.
Yet still, remnants of it remained.
They followed her as she finally stood, and closed the door on him. They made her do it slow, too slow, as if hoping he mightswitch back at any moment. And even after he was sealed on the other side, she couldn’t quite tear herself away. She stood with her forehead pressed to what was now stone surrounded by nothingness, for a long time.You are starting to think he means his help, her mind whispered.To see it as something a begrudgingly made friend might do, instead of a forced enemy.
Even though that was ridiculous.
In fact,allher focus right now was. Calabaraia lay spread out behind her, and all she could do was think about him. Like nothing had changed from her first moments at Harrowhall, to where she was now. Truth be told, she had gottenworse. Then, she had gladly pushed him from her mind.
Now it took time.
It felt like pulling a tooth out, from the root.
She was sure she bled, as she finally put her back to the door. And this time, somehow, what she saw couldn’t quite wash that feeling away. It lingered, as she let her gaze wander over a landscape that the historian Hornbeck had once calledfeatureless and dull, and the explorer Alvin Broadbeam had declaredsingularly barren without a bit of civilization about it.
But it was, in truth, a wonder beyond all imagining.
Because it wasn’t really the gray desert they had described at all. It was a shimmering series of dunes, dotted with silver. Each one of those rises so soft seeming, so subtle, it was like seeing something that wasn’t all there. It appeared nebulous almost, like you could sink into the ground with one step.
And that thought finally made her understand: It was not the ground at all
It was thesky. It was the upside-down sky. She was standingamid stars, amid the velvet darkness of the night, amid the furrows made by something like clouds. And somehow, it all took her weight.
She could walk on these things, with her human feet.
She did right then and there.
She took a step, heart in her throat, and it all held her as softly as sand.
And they hadn’t appreciated a single thing about it. They had looked at it and found it lacking, simply because it wasn’t covered in roads and buildings and things that didn’t even matter here. Nobody lived in a house. They didn’t even need to choose between the ground and the sky.
There was none of that to them.
It was all just everything, all at once.
She looked up, and there were staircases suspended in nothingness. Twisting things like trees, weaving sideways through the spaces in between. Somewhere in the distance she could hear music, sweet music—like nothing on earth and yet so familiar at the same time. It made her think of that Sunday school song:
I danced with the devil when the sky turned black.
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.
She even found herself humming it, as she stepped toward the sound. And she felt absolutely no fear when she did. Because of the favor she had been granted, she thought. Because of the safe passage that was now hers.
But the farther she walked, the more she wondered if that was the truth.
Or if ringing the bell was more about something else. Not about claiming safety, but about showing thatyouwere safe. That you would not hurt anything here. That you didn’t have terribleintentions and would not do anything deeply unfair. Like their way of granting permission to come, she thought, in places where humans had decided for them what permission they gave.
We say that we grant it to them, and they grant it to us, Hargreaves had said the other day.But that is not entirely the case. The beings of the Underneath do not, in truth, seem to understand such a concept. They only know what we enforce and impress upon them. They only know to abide by our wishes.
And that had seemed like a strange thing for her to say, at the time.
This very feeling she was getting seemed strange, truth be told.
