I held the poker in front of me like a rapier as I crept forward into the tunnel, since it was going to be a lot easier in that low, narrow passage for me to stab than to swing. The brick walkway curved then curved again, always sloping down, so that within just a few moments I knew I must be lower than the house itself. Soon I could hear voices, or perhaps one voice thickened and complicated by echoes. I took a few more steps, then saw there was more light ahead of me, so I made my way as quietly as I could down the passage, staying close to the wall and stopping at every bend to peer ahead, until suddenly the corridor widened dramatically.
I was in a subbasement, I guess, but that doesn’t do it justice. It was a cave, was what it was, a cave underneath Vera’s house, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, all pointing in the proper directions. As I moved out of the light of one torch and through a darker area toward the next torch, I suddenly heard Vera’s voice clearly. I couldn’t make out all the words—something about “disappointed,” and “you certainly know”—but it was obvious she was talking to someone. That worried me. I had no urge to fight with Vera, who was quite a package by herself, and if she had allies I definitely wanted to avoid a confrontation. I thought about just turning and heading back, but by now either Belle or, more likely, Smyler had finished up with the other and would come looking for me.
I did my best silent slink. It was more than a cave, I could now see, it was some kind of warehouse or distillery or both. On all sides of me, barely visible in the dim light, stood dozens upon dozens of thick glass vessels, each about the size of a restaurant soup kettle, stacked in rows on shelves that reached to the low ceiling. It looked like Vera was running some kind of medical supply warehouse down there.
“I do not blame you, of course,” I heard her say. “I don’t blame you at all. Every one of you has earned his place here. Every one . . .”
As I tiptoed forward, trying to find a vantage point through the crowded shelves so I could see who Vera was talking to, I caught an odd flash in one of the jars and let my gaze drift back to it.
Something looked back at me. A head. A bodiless head.
No, I realized as I bent down, it wasn’t completely bodiless, because it looked like many of the pieces that would constitute a body were bobbing in the jar with it, only none of them were connected to each other. I looked at the other jars and saw forearms with hands attached, the fingers splayed against the glass like gray-green starfish. I saw feet, and faces that had been removed from the skull and now looked more like masks, and of course penises—quite a few of those, too (although no more than one per container). And in every jar, as if it were the sun around which those nasty pale planets revolved, floated a head.
Revolted, I let my eyes slide back down the row, then up to the rows above, and then ahead to those that still lay before me, shelved on either side of the central passage. I knew I must be looking at Vera’s Immortals, all the lovers she had honored, the men who had treated her as she expected to be treated.
Fat lot of good it did them, I thought.
Then the nearest bodiless head winked at me and grinned.
Generally I try not to squawk like a frightened child when in surveillance situations, but it was too late to take it back now. Not only had I alerted Vera but I had probably been loud enough to let Smyler know where I was, too. In fact, I had probably let the people down in the Abaddon levels know where I was. Even the heads around me were beginning to wake up, rolling their eyes to see who had sent little-girl-scream waves through their formaldehyde.
No use pretending or skulking now. I stepped out into the center of the walkway and went forward. Vera stood at the center of the cavern room in the midst of rows of sturdy, ugly shelves, each nearly full of glass jars, each glass jar with its own set of hands and hearts and balls and staring eyes.
I underestimated Vera. I had expected her to be surprised to see me, or at least to weep and shriek at me before she attacked. Instead she came after me immediately and without a word, arms spread wide. She swung her hands toward me as if trying to claw my eyes; I wondered why, because she was too far away for that to make any sense. Then about three thousandths of a second later those horrible little fingernail-filaments of hers snapped past me like taser wires, just missing my face.
Her toxin-tubes obviously weren’t just for close-up work.
So, I had a fireplace poker; she had, whipping from the fingers of either hand, six-foot jellyfish tendrils that could poison me. Vera lashed out again. I threw myself down as her stingers swept a jar off the shelf behind me. It crashed to the floor, belching broken glass and foul liquids, ejecting body parts in all directions. I had to jump over the corpse-hands, which immediately began crawling toward Vera. She snapped out both her arms at once. I dove under the nearly invisible strands and rolled, then jabbed with the poker when I was close enough, ramming it into her gut as hard as I could. It doubled her over but that seemed to be alclass="underline" I was still staring at her when she yanked her hands back and tried to catch me in the trailing strands again. One of them got me, wrapping around my neck like a thread of burning napalm. As it tightened on my throat I could feel the ability to think running out of me like sand, the pain getting stronger, darker, like a powerful electric charge, no, like an entire eel, wrapped around my neck and squeezing the life out of me.
The surge of agony lessened. From the corner of my eye I saw Vera kicking at something. One of the hands from the broken jar was clinging to her ankle. She finally managed to shake it loose and turned her attention back to me, but by then I had my idea.
I grabbed the stinger around my neck with my hand. It was like holding a white hot wire, but as I said, by this point I could do pain. I yanked at it hard, then braced myself and kept pulling, even though it felt like I was cutting my own head off with a power saw, until the tendril finally snapped. Vera let out a screech of rage, but she sure didn’t sound injured. Those translucent folds snapped over her eyes as she hissed in fury and heaved her filaments at me again. I ducked, then smashed the closest jar with the iron poker, then smashed another. As she pulled back her tendrils I struck out around me as widely as I could, knocking one jar into another, sweeping the unbroken ones as well as the shards off the shelves. Glass was everywhere, and the stinking clouds of the preserving liquid all but blinded me.
But there were body parts all over too, and like a school of slow, slow fish they were making their way through the glass and spilled liquids toward Vera.
Now I pushed over whole rows of jars, trying to fill the floor with broken glass and free as many of Vera’s immortals as possible. As they piled around her, different parts from dozens of different bodies built bridges with each other, clinging, climbing. Hands worked together to lift a head up to other hands. Many-headed, many limbed piles of dripping meat built themselves up from the sloshing floor like volcanoes being born. The composite creatures quickly surrounded Vera, and despite the love she had lavished on them and the kindnesses she had shown them, none of her immortals seemed willing to miss out on this reunion.
She had forgotten about me and was trying to fight her way free, but the coral reef of fingers and feet and kidneys and faces had already risen to her waist. Hands climbed her body like crabs—many already clung to her dark, loosened hair. She shrieked and tried to knock them away, but more flung themselves onto her and then made chains so that other hands could cross, until Vera swayed at the center of a crowd of these teetering, squirming piles, white-faced and astounded, still screaming but almost without sound now because she had shrieked herself hoarse. Hands scuttled closer and pulled themselves to her so that the heads could kiss her. As the body-meat piles grew higher, the heads ran their tongues over her, tongues that sometimes came loose and dropped to the floor like overfilled leeches.