29
The Deepest Dark is loud with the creaking of the limbs of the One Tree, but the sounds are carried to me through an air more viscous than air has any right to be. The vibrations of the One Tree judder through me. I am in the underbelly of the Underworld.
I'm crouching on ground knotted and ridged with questing root tips. Dripping from them like a luminous fluid are the souls of the dead, their time in Hell done. They slide into the air, first just as balls of light, but soon they take a roughly human shape-a life's habit, a life's form, is hard to undo.
Here, down is up and up is down. Above my head is the great abyss that all souls rise/fall into. What happens after, I'm not sure. Souls coruscate across the dark like stars, heading to places our words cannot encompass, because no stories come back from there. Nothing comes back from there.
For a while, despite my urgency, I am held by that sight. Captivated. The time will come when I'll know it intimately-maybe soon-but not now.
The air crackles with the whispers of those long dead, coming down through the roots of the tree.
'It was only a cold. A passing that became passing.'
'Miss her.'
'Miss her.'
'Sorry, never finished before I finished.'
'And… And… And…'
'Sometimes it rains, and all I am is the rain. Can you feel me?'
'Here… Here…'
It is a tumbling cacophony of bad poetry. Maybe that's what people are, ultimately. These chattering final thoughts, crowded and messy.
I lower my gaze and try and shut out the sound.
Here in the dark, I reach out, and my questing fingers find the bicycle that Death has somehow left me. 'Yes.'
Yes, yes, the bicycle echoes. Ride. Ride.
I clamber onto the seat. I haven't ridden a bike since I was twelve, but you never forget. OK, maybe you do. The bike shakes beneath me and I wrestle with the handlebars.
Care. Care, it whispers.
Once I start pedaling, I'm in the groove. Easy. Sort of.
I ride in the darkness, the bicycle wobbling between my legs. The dark is a deep cold liquid pressure around me. My ribs complain, everything feels like it's going to implode. My breath grows stale in my lungs. Suffocation looms.
I make the mistake of looking up into the dark again and see the souls there, drifting slowly, spinning and orbiting one another. Some are twitching but most are still, and they extend into the weightless abyss above.
I get the sense that, if I look too long, my flesh, or whatever this is that inhabits this space, will hollow and lighten, and I will lift and rise into that dark. It's already starting to happen, and it's not altogether unpleasant. I've stopped riding. The bike tips, and I fall on my side. It doesn't hurt. I get to my feet, and I realize that my grip is tenuous. I've also noticed that the urge to breathe has disappeared. I'm starting to get awfully casual about the whole thing.
A crack has opened up before me, and I peer down. Light spills from it and I'm gazing into my own stupid mug. It's a bemused face, a little sleepy, an I-just-had-sex face. Then I remember why I'm doing this: Lissa. I don't know what future we have together, but I want to create the possibility of one.
I wink at myself, clamber back on my bike and keep riding. There's a long way to go.
I follow my instincts, taking one narrow road, then another, rising up one hillock then down the next. I pick up speed as my confidence returns, and I start to accept my surroundings rather than gawking at them. This isn't so hard.
Slowly the darkness becomes something else. A green glow reveals the streets of some under-under city. And it's the first time I start to have any serious doubts. There's a familiar wrongness about the place. It shouldn't be here. The root tips that extend over this part of the Deepest Dark are dying-curling up and blackening. The air is foul and choking. But it's where I need to ride.
There's a hall in the middle of the city and a door is open. Something vaguely humanoid slips through it. Its eyes are huge, its face narrow, and its long mouth opens to reveal teeth. There are rather a lot of them, and they look sharp.
Then I realize where I am.
I've never seen one in its natural form, but I know what it is immediately. The hate-filled eyes glare at me. If looks could kill… I'm staring at a Stirrer. And this is the city Devour. I'm in the heartland of Stirrers. I'm a dead man.
The Stirrer sniffs at the air, and takes a step toward me. How the hell do you stall a Stirrer in the Deepest Dark?
It takes another step toward me.
The bicycle shudders between my legs. Flight, it whispers. Haste.
Good idea.
The Stirrer howls. It's a shrill and horrible sound that tightens my skin, and I pedal faster.
Not much time, the bicycle says.
I know what it means. The world closes in as I pedal through the streets, clumsily jumping gutters when I need to. The whole place is lit like the radium dial on an old watch. The sky above here is absent of souls, it's a patch of utter darkness. A wind crashes down from the dark, and it's frigid. I'm really not meant to be here. This place is telling me that in no uncertain terms.
A quick glance over my shoulder reveals a dozen Stirrers loping after me. They're making ground. The under-under world increases its pressure against my flesh. I start pedaling as hard as I can. And then the bike stops, just jolts to a halt. Unfortunately I don't, and I'm flying over the handlebars. I flip in the air, then land on my back. I open my eyes, all my breath gone now.
The Stirrers race toward me, their great mouths widening. I look at all those teeth. They grab my bike first. It lets out a shrill scream. The air closes about me like a vice. The fastest Stirrer grabs my leg and I–I can breathe again.
The Deepest Dark is gone, and I'm… well… I'm in the Underworld again. The familiar smells of rosewater, rot and doughnuts fill my nostrils, the odor overpowering everything else, but for the dim hint of Stirrers. Here I am as deep in the Underworld as I have ever been and it is shockingly familiar.
I'm standing and shivering at the top of Mount Coot-tha-well, the Underworld equivalent. It's actually quite crowded here. But whether these people are dead or, like me, just visiting, I'm not sure. I think about what it takes to reach this place if you're not dead, and I doubt they're like me. But then there are tourists to every realm. Even Everest can be crowded at this time of year. People are gathered at Mount Coot-tha's lookout, built in the gap between two mighty root buttresses, gazing idly down on the city.
A baroque, brass curlicue-covered CityCat-looking like something a cartoonist might draw after a couple of tabs of acid, all flourishes and shadows, everything either sharp-edged or ridged with flowers-piloted no doubt by one of Charon's many employees, is cruising the black coils of the river below. Shadows clamber over it. The Brisbane River is one of the many tributaries of the Styx, and if you blink you can see, momentarily, the multitude of other rivers intersecting it so that the river below looks less like a cogent single stream and more like the vascular and shifting fingers of a delta or the veins of a lung.
The suburbs below, stretching out to the city and south to the Gold Coast (well, their Underworld equivalents) are, for the same reason as the river, a difficult thing to look upon. Buildings are fused together, different histories fold over each other. If you blink, sometimes the city isn't there at all, just a great forest. Only the sky is a relative constant, and the constellations that mark it are those that I know, though the dark is a little more crowded. Shapes stream through the spaces between the stars-spiraling ropes of birds and bats, or things that look like birds and bats, their cries distant and shrill, and meaningless.
