Into the Nest and Out

A gasp, as if surfacing from an eternity spent underwater, was how Alisabeth came into the waking world once more. She looked around herself, at the rocks, the still grey-black sky that cut against the spires in a panic. How long had she been trapped with the spectre—the Moonman? How long had it been since her rabbit…

It could have been said that the hideous words of the dream came back to Alice then, but the truth was that he had not ever forgotten. Not even the sudden dismissal of his unconscious reality could have banished such a thing. It had spoken with the remnants of his own voice, stealing his own breath and beating it into an inescapable paralysis. Even when it laid within his own mouth, upon his own tongue, it had been curled into speech not his own.

He clambered to his feet, slow against the stone and the shovel that was becoming so trusty. The cavities behind his eyes felt sore, sorer even than his still-tired legs. “Christ,” he hissed as he rose. Christ was his curse of choice, though he was far from religious—but religion had always worked upon him, wrought his body like the aches and pains coursing through it now. Protestant, Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, even Witnesses: faith had borne into him, weathered his flesh like rain against soft but stalwart marble, chipped away at his life in so many crosses poised just outside, in the cemetery that was his everyday. His calluses were worn by religion’s command. Christ. But he didn’t believe in Christ—couldn’t believe in a captive sort of choice. He couldn’t believe in unconditionally conditional love. He couldn’t believe in providence.

Yet, providentially and just past his left shoulder, was a small cavern in the rock: a channel past the husk of marble that was the mountains. For a moment, it felt again as if his entire body was moving around his fixed eyeballs. Then his gaze fell to his feet, fell behind a harsh blink of his eyes. When he opened them again, though, the tunnel was still there.

Alice drew a shaking breath into her throat and let it out again with the same measure of trepidation. Had that been there before? She had no earthly idea. But then again, this was clearly not quite Earth. An earthly idea may be worth nothing against whatever sort of providence ruled here. Still, she couldn’t believe. Almost couldn’t.

Carefully, as if she walked upon ice, she took a step, then another, then another, until she was consumed by the shadow of the passage. But then—perhaps indeed and truly set on ice, she was—her footing slid out from under her. There was scarcely even time to scream as she fell down the chilled and polished chute, the darkness she plunged into becoming all consuming at last. Air whipped all around her, howling so relentlessly against the narrow channel that it became a sort of silence itself. She couldn’t tell if she was going face first or not, or if her eyes were open at all. Her body grew numb against all the sensations of movement, of the rush of smooth cold against it, of the fall; her ears were made deaf; her vision was so utterly removed from her by the unyielding blackness—but then, it wasn’t. Then, cracks of maroon, of crimson, of red glinted through the walls beside her, as if glaring through lidded and blinking eyes—hundreds of them. Alice didn’t know what she was seeing, or if she was even truly seeing it. Blood? Hell? Or was this what death, death at the very last, truly looked like—not an abyss, but a streak of red?

A monstrous cavern opened up then, spiralling just beside her track of descent. The place squirmed with movement: thousands of things roiled along the walls, living and pulsing like a maggot colony, like an open wound. It took a moment before Alisabeth realized she could hear them chittering—and breathing. They were indistinguishable from each other—a feathery swarm crawling over and under and into each other, seemingly without end, in a mass of revolting and absolute red. As suddenly as it was finally, Alice knew what they were: “you will go past the husk of these mountains into the caverns, the channels fraught with reddened underwocks.” Underwocks: these things were underwocks.

The nest was whirling up and up away from Alisabeth as she slid further down still. The feathers and beaks collided into each other here and there as the blackness returned slowly but surely. And then Alice saw it: a glimpse past the shadow and the writhing things and the spinning repulsion settling definitely upon her diaphragm, around her lungs and beating heart. A figure, looking giant and statuesque directly in the midst of the cavern. A figure, feathered and red like the rest, but tipped and crowned in metal. A figure who, beneath it all, Alice could have sworn had a chin, a mouth with lips, a flared nose—a living face.

Then it was gone. Then it was all blackness again until suddenly it wasn’t, and Alisabeth fell at last, and was staring up at the grey-black sky again, but from a strange checkered grass now. She was out of the mountains. And, as she rolled to look across the plains she had fallen to, she was right where her rabbit had just finished the same journey.