Chapter 45: Abdication of Form

“I dreamt of flying last night,” said the cat after they had descended a few more steps. “Perhaps it’s because of the beast, seeing it fly has made me want to imitate….”

There were sharp scratching sounds coming from the top of her rucksack, the cat punching its claws in and out of the fabric. Violet wanted to tell it to stop, but there was a certain realness to the noise and though she did not like it, it was better than the pressure of the influence. Her mother had once told her about pressure and how things at the bottom of a body of water were hemmed in on all sides by an ever growing denseness.

She had not known what that meant at the time, but now it made perfect sense, even if the effect was not being accomplished with liquid of any kind. It was as though she were being squeezed out of herself. Was this what happened with all of the animals the influence trapped? Was this the sensation they felt just before they were turned irrevocably false?

Violet tried to speak but there only came a whimper for she had chosen the wrong time to look at what the stairway was turning into ahead of her. No sharp angles now, no representation of form, only the ghostly echo of its past self, metal gone and concrete eaten away by semi-liquid runs of translucent material that pulsed with poisonous potential.

There was a smell rising off of it that was not entirely rot but rather held a sweetness that made Violet want to be sick again. But the idea of leaning over, putting any part of herself even an inch closer to the material was sickening enough that she remained upright. She’d touched it with her fingers. They burned as though caught alight.

Was that all the influence needed to burrow into her? Was it over now?

Violet squeezed her eyes shut for a long moment and made herself reflect upon the cat’s words, though they had gone distantly surreal, their meaning under siege.

Flying.

“W-Where….” She managed, but though it wasn’t quite a question her companion seized gratefully upon it.

“In a forest, or over it, I think,” the cat’s words tumbled forth in a babble, a torrent. “There was green, and I was very far up, but there was no danger of falling, even though I was definitely present, not doing my typical travels. When I travel I can’t see much of anything, even if I always know where I am. Isn’t it funny how flying is often the opposite?”

There was a desperate invitation to laugh at this small irony, to find humor in some aspect of the situation, but the context glanced right off of Violet’s mind and she could only stare. She looked back at the beast and saw that it was keeping itself entirely off the ground. Even if its senses were a haze it could still feel the wrongness pervading all things.

Soon they reached a landing with an open doorway to the right and a continuation of their descent ahead. Violet looked and found that the stairs fell off before her, crookedly impassable and growing ever more shapeless as they went. Teeth grew jaggedly from the walls and there was a gulping ripple to the flesh, shadows flickering further on, where the light of her lantern curved in strange ways and could not assign meaning to the shapes that lurked there. From depths unseen there carried a liquidy echo of active noise, stretched by distance.

Violet turned, so that the stairway was relegated to darkness. Still there came a dead glitter of bare enamel, curved and chipped and grown through with veins and curls of bare nerves that sang in the open air.

“I didn’t see that.” She said aloud, and though it was obviously a lie her mind seized upon it so readily that she could not entirely recall the actuality of what lay before her beyond an aching dread and a knowledge that she would most certainly die if she took another step forward.

The floor flattened past the doorway and Violet knew this was where she was meant to go, for the false animals filled the stairway behind her and she could see tiny cascades of dark liquid falling down the stairs where splintered hooves and cracked claws had split the material covering the original steps. If they wished then they could let gravity work and fall upon her in a dead eyed avalanche, but the false animals simply inched forward ever so subtly, a stasis imposed that hummed like an overloaded electrical wire.

Violet went and held her lantern up to light the hallway ahead. The smell was worse here, carried by a curious hot breeze that put a fit of moisture upon her. She shivered even in the sudden heat and heard a faint noise of distress come from the cat, which seemed to have picked up on additional troubling details. But whatever they were it kept them locked mercifully away.

Though the integrity of the architecture was melting and Violet could not dispel that same dizziness that had nearly crippled her upon the stairs (knowing the truth of why it was there did not erase its effects), she made herself identify old familiarities. There was the darkness of a doorway and along the lefthand side of the wall she could see the honeycomb pattern of what had once been a shelf or perhaps a stand of cubbyholes for workers to leave their belongings in. The wood or metal or whatever it had been made of was long gone but the calcified flesh which had covered it held the old shape.

Then there was a shambling movement from the nearest doorway and Violet saw the glint of eyes, a cluster closely packed, though they moved singularly. For a moment her thought was that she was about to see an enormous spider, for nothing else she knew of had that many eyes, but when the head of the creature poked free into the hallway and exposed itself to the light of her lantern she could see that it was quadrupedal and sat upon legs that looked like that of a deer, though the head was indescribable and held angles that she could not parse.

“There were tall buildings in my dream,” the cat said hurriedly, and Violet clung to her companion’s words even as a whimpering mewl of horror slid past her gritted teeth. “So it had to be the city, but maybe the city a very long time from now, for there were only a few buildings left. I was going between them, making these long flying leaps, and out from the tallest one I aimed for the forest….”

There were more movements, tangles of them in the rooms that bordered the hallway. Some of the creatures had legs and others did not but for atrophied stumps that could not support them. Others had been melded to the walls and everywhere was an acidy undercurrent of rot and waste and a high, nearly imperceptible whine of some underlying presence that lived within them all and was not the influence but was not the animals either. Violet did not want to know what true form it held and cringed away, but it recoiled from her too and shrieked all the louder.

The many eyed thing’s head was not right and she could see the seams where flesh had rejected itself and was sliding slowly from the bone, eyes flickering on the verge of uselessness. It did not move past the doorway to the room it was in and Violet shuffled past without looking too closely, for the numbness at her center was growing worse and she could feel the influence throbbing ever closer, like she was approaching the center of some awful self designed engine.

The deer thing did not move, perhaps it could not have, but others did and they shambled into the hallway ahead of her, so pale as to be nearly transparent, like clusters of insect eggs. Within them Violet could see the shivery pulse of shriveled organs and veins cloudy with pollution, streaks and slabs of skin gone gray where they had lain in puddles of dripping fuel, but none of that could be felt by them, nor cared about by the influence, for what was pain to a thing that had no soul.

They did not hem her in but rather shivered backwards, and those that could not walk while still facing her crumpled to the ground and wheezed impotently there. A tangled cluster of them oozed upon the ground and twitched their broken limbs. She could hear movement from other rooms as well, animals running themselves into the walls or doorways, but there was no care for their plight.

The beast slipped past her and dragged one of the fallen animals off to the side, opening a passage for her, and Violet wanted badly to hug the beast but it was already shooting back around her side, to where the false animals guarding her rear had begun to edge forwards with open jaws.

It pushed hard against the face of a skinny dog and Violet heard bones splinter, for the animal was still pushing forward just as hard as ever and it shattered its own neck with a crunch rather than take a step back.

And still, rather than writhe amidst a final agony of misfiring nerves, Violet saw the false animal’s jaws snap at her and its crooked, blood rimed eyes never leave her even as it ran out of air and then blood and then…..

She turned her lantern away and heard another fatal crunch, for the beast was killing things now, any of the false animals which came too close. Were they trying to get her?

But if so, why were the animals in front of her not lunging as well? They kept backing away, matching her forward movements, and every so often one would stumble and fall and then be abandoned, shivering impotently on the ground. Violet though that certainly they would try to bite her, but none did more than stare blankly at the wall or the floor, no sensation left to them at all.

“It was a very large forest,” the cat continued, sensing her mounting distress. “And I could see birds every so often, but most of them kept their distance. Only a pair of ravens flew with me.”

Violet glanced over her shoulder, to where the cat sat hunched and small atop her rucksack. It was still perforating the top with its claws but she felt even less like she wanted it to stop. The noise had become a steady background, something to seize upon.

“Did they say anything?” She asked, and managed to keep her words somewhat steady. In a regular hallway there might have been an echo, but here it was swallowed so thoroughly that Violet wasn’t sure she’d even spoken until the cat nodded.

“Ravens are very chatty,” it said. “…As you’ve recently learned. Very…very….”

“Cat?”

Her companion blinked hard.

“This is awful. You are much braver than I am.” The cat said at last.

Violet thought for a moment about offering her companions another chance to leave, but that impulse was strangled before it could form. She’d been considering drawing a gateway symbol upon the nearest wall with a piece of chalk, an easy escape for the cat…but the wall was covered with awfulness, and in any case she knew it would not go.

“You came in here with me, even though you didn’t have to,” Violet said. “That’s very brave.”

“Will you just take the compliment, girl?” The cat asked, voice shrill with fear, then laughed to itself. That noise was discordant as well.

Violet made herself nod.

“Thank you.” She said.

The beast produced a low, anguished crackling sound and Violet turned to see that her new companion was shivering. The front of its fabric had gone dark with blood and there was a clot of something caught between its front teeth. She reached and tugged it out before she could think not to.

Whatever it was felt wet and fibrous, like a chunk of hair. Violet let it fall and the beast formed itself rigid again, blocking the ponderous advance of a fox. It was shifting its possessions within itself, Violet realized, forming a solid front to baffle any malicious advances that came. It helped that the false animals were slow, the influence’s singular determination the only thing moving them forward.

Violet inched past another fallen animal, this one smaller and so pale that she could see the shadows of its bones past bands of fading muscle. Its jaws were wrong, there were too many teeth, and she looked away before the sight could settle someplace it would be able to linger.

There were eyes upon the wall in unordered clumps and clusters, small and black like glass beads. This was where they were grown, Violet thought to herself, and then felt such an urge to be sick that she clutched her stomach and retched. There was nothing left and all she succeeded in doing was shaking the breath out of herself.

She shuffled along, shivery and weak, glancing uneasily to where the hallway behind her was increasingly filled with animals, or those things which had once been them. The lantern light threw hard shadows over half open jaws and furless, fungus spattered skin, muscles left bare and exposed, paws and hooves and faces eaten away.

Perhaps it was simply that she could not become any more frightened, but the terror that she had expected did not manifest. There was simply an acknowledgment of danger, low and quiet, like the tone of a church bell coming from a long way off.

“Violet.” Said the cat, and there was a sudden watchful sharpness in its voice that made her turn fully back around, lantern aimed. Ahead of her, where the hallway began to curve, she could see the faintly outlined presence of a very large thing manifesting just behind the line of false animals that guarded her forward motion.

It held no easily recognizable shape and for a second Violet thought about the many eyed deer, but this new presence was dark but for a flat scape of translucent flesh that split and fell away in shreds over top of an angular stretch of half broken jaws. They had once been grand and menacing, but Violet could see where the bone had grown honeycombed with rot and where the muscles that held the jaws shut were beginning to disintegrate, teeth but a memory. It moved at a shuffling lope, filling the whole hallway, and she could not understand its form.

“A bear.” The cat said faintly, and Violet could only think of illustrations she had seen in her books at home. There, the bears had been dark and foreboding creatures, huge and banded with muscle, their hides thick as armor. The creature before her still held that largeness, but it was illusory and she could see no fur or skin but that which hung in ragged, bloodless loops around its sides. The face was gone but for a suggestion of former brutality and over that space where the eyes had been was skin webbed shut like curls of spider silk.

For a moment she thought it might be coming to bolster the line of animals, but when it moved there was a deceptive speed and it smashed its companions aside, grinding them into the walls and crunching them underfoot with claws and paws that were cracked and shivering with fungus.

Violet halted and knew now that she had been wrong earlier, complacent in her estimation. There was always room for extra fear and she felt very small now, numb and yet possessed by a grand surge of dread. She had her lantern and her notebook, she had her fire poker and her hatchet…and none of them would be able to do a thing.

The bear swayed and groaned low in its throat, influence borne and blankly deadly. Violet thought that surely the beast would be right there to throw itself against the coming threat but of course it was already straining to destroy the tide of animals at her rear.

This had been the influence’s plan, Violet realized, and felt cold for having witnessed a clear intelligence manifesting through the cruelty, and for not having seen it coming.

The bear swung its head low, a rattling wheeze of breath sounding from within its desiccated form. It could not tell exactly where she was and had no senses of its own to determine further detail. That space which might have held a nose was bone, and its ears were packed with red curls of pestilence singing the deeper wishes of the influence.

Out came the rotten protrusion of its jaws and they snapped shut upon the air perhaps a foot in front of Violet’s face. Then the bear sagged against one wall and was choking deep in its throat, the skin around its eye sockets twitching as though some deeper, realer part of the creature were attempting to blink.

Violet froze, an image seared in the front of her mind, for when the false bear had opened its mouth she’d seen the slow migration of its teeth down the sides of its throat, borne by liquid strands of fungus. Caught along them had been shreds and tangles of material not unlike that which she had extricated from the beast’s own mouth.

The bear was shaking its head now and when it coughed there came a clot of something enamel streaked and broken. The cat stepped forward onto Violet’s shoulder, fur stiff and crackly against the side of her face.

There must have been something new about its presence, for the bear, the influence, stared suddenly up and again the jaws fell open. Again the ugly sight of that horrible mouth and before she could think, Violet swung out and cracked the bear across the side of its broken face with her lantern. Bone crumpled like papier-mâché, glass fractured and the filament made a zing noise as it was knocked off center, light gone suddenly discordant.

The bear did not notice, even as Violet stumbled back, though she could see that one of its eye sockets was suddenly drooping downward, the skin there pulled grotesquely taut.

But it was still coming, jaws held wide, and the cat leapt forward with a wild, feral cry. Violet shouted, the noise rising to a horrified shriek, but it was far too late to stop her companion and she could only watch as it ripped at the bear’s face with desperate claws, scoring bone and shredding the spaces where there had once been eyes.

Had the bear been normal then Violet though that it certainly would have fled, the cat’s defense was that ferocious, but the creature before her had been removed from normalcy long before, and it simply snapped its head sharply up and, with a practiced ease, caught the cat in its jaws.

Violet went stiff, a numb and total terror blanking her mind. The cat, eyes wide and flashing silver, flickered uselessly in place, unable to move, unable to escape.

Then the bear’s jaws snapped shut and the cat shrieked, writhing in the influence’s grip. Violet’s lantern fizzed low for a long moment and in that buzzing half light she saw the bear turn and lope back up the hallway with the cat in tow.

Before Violet could say anything, or break free from the shock that paralyzed her, the light went out and she was encased in total blackness.