Fathom (36 page)

J
osé could feel his insides weakening, bubbling, and dissolving wherever the arsenic mixture spilled, poured, and oozed. His eyes were watering with runny rust and stinking phosphorus. His sphincter failed, and fiery yellow excrement spilled into the back of the ambulance.

Ceaselessly he manufactured orange bile that smelled like eggs and lava, and he cast it out from both ends. Everything the mixture touched began to sizzle and simmer, as if it were pure acid leaking from his body.

“What have you done?” he asked between heaving gags.

“You’ll be all right,” Bernice told him. Her calm was infuriating. She had killed the two men in the ambulance and kicked
them out into the ditch, and then she took the wheel and directed the boxy vehicle along the roads. She left the siren on because she liked it, with its screeching red light and tinny wail.

José hadn’t known Bernice could drive such a thing, but she had assumed the wheel and taken the controls with assurance that was—if not masterly—perfectly instinctive.

He watched her wrestle the pedals and jerk on the gears, and the ambulance stalled only once. But as the seconds swept by and the poison coursed through his system, he was losing the ability to notice much of anything except for his own grueling struggle to keep himself from falling apart. How many internal organs could he lose to the gnawing combustion of the poison? How much of his stomach could he live without . . . and how much of his intestines? For over a hundred years, he’d barely thought of himself as a man at all; he was Mother’s child and construct.

But there on the floor of the ambulance, writhing and retching, he remembered that once upon a time he’d been a man with a torso that ticked with life. He recalled the need for food, the constant desire for alcohol or water or nourishment. There was forever some gastronomic distress or fluctuation brought on by the staleness of the ship’s cupboards or strange molds that worked into the breads, onto the meats.

Deep in the back of his memory he recalled a night on an island where the locals had given him cooked fish and a broth that they drank like coffee, though it was thicker and had more texture. He remembered the subsequent pain in his bowels, so intense that it brought on hallucinations and bloody diarrhea. It had been some treachery, then. It had been an attempt at mutiny that had failed and failed catastrophically.

“The captain was supposed to die,” he gurgled around the mouthful of saliva and vomit.

“What, baby?” Bernice called from the cab.

“They mean to kill me,” he recalled, and tried to say it out loud, but the words came out scrambled and damp. The acid from his stomach, from his throat, from his intestines . . . it was eating his teeth. They were crumbling in his mouth when he clacked them together.

His lover caught the general idea, and she responded with that same maddening calm. “You’ll be fine. I’ll get you right to Mother. We’re almost there. She’ll fix you. She
has
to fix you.”

“Mother,” he mumbled, his head lolling back and forth, coating his face and hair with his own bile.

He couldn’t remember, he couldn’t recall, he couldn’t focus. What was that noise? That awful, jangling, rattling mechanical sound, coupled with the piercing whine that spun around in circles over his head—where was it coming from, and what did it mean? He couldn’t concentrate.

There was an island, and his first mate had wanted his ship and his crew, so he’d paid the natives to . . . And there was a meal on the beach, while drums were . . .

No. There was a small, dark shop, and it was empty when he and Bernice had let themselves inside. He’d watched her from the second room as she entered the third chamber and through the curtain that wafted and waved, parting around her and behind her; he’d watched her rifle through the jars and canisters. She’d grabbed what she wanted, then returned to him in the middle room.

She’d mixed the powders and shavings in a crucible, because there was no jar that would hold it. She’d held up the grayish reddish powder and had poured something on top of it. When the two combined, the concoction had begun to sizzle and spit.

“Where did you learn it?” he’d asked her then, and he tried to ask her now from pure delirium.

“In church,” she’d told him then, but she did not answer him
now because she could not understand him anymore. His tongue was coming apart, dropping into strips of saggy flesh that flopped around in his mouth or fell out in chunks.

“In church?”

“There was a church, back on the island. I did some digging around in there. I told you, I haven’t liked this idea for a while. I don’t want the world to end, not yet. I’ve been trying to think of ways to put it off, and I thought . . .” She hadn’t bothered to finish her sentence, instead handing him the crucible with the foaming, disgusting mixture.

He took it, held it under his face so he could better see and sniff it.

“It’ll only hurt for a little bit, and it won’t be that bad,” she’d promised. “I read all about it. Mother can fix you up, but it’ll cost her plenty of energy to do it. Drink it, and you’ll get a little sick. But you’ll make me so happy. And you want to make me happy, don’t you? I thought you did. Maybe I’m just stupid.”

“You aren’t stupid,” he’d said, even though he’d long and privately assumed as much. It was only polite to argue.

Lying on his side in the back of the van, lying with a mouth filled with pieces of his own tongue swimming in acidic pus, José felt something cold against his cheek and he realized with only the dullest jab of horror that it was the van’s floor against his gums. The acid had burned through his face, and now it dripped down onto the floor. Where it touched the painted metal, the finish peeled and ran.

“Hang in there, baby,” Bernice said from the front seat. “I’m sorry it’s taking so long, but it’s not far now. I can feel it, you know? The way the water pulls at me, I know it’s right over there—but I can’t find a road. If I don’t find something soon—” She cut herself off. “There’s a road!”

She made a hard left and the ambulance teetered briefly on two wheels.

José gagged on the motion, and on the corrosive vomit. The vehicle bounced and bobbed on a barely paved strip. He could feel it, even through all the misery and disorientation and pain. He could also feel the water somewhere close, beckoning. He reached out with what was left of his determination, and he begged for Mother to hear him. Out in the distance, from the depths of the water, she heard him, and said she was coming to meet them.

What has happened?
she asked, but José was too far gone to answer. He’d spent all his energy to summon her attention, and it was merely a weak cry—a hand waving in the darkness. But she heard him and she was coming. That was all he needed to know or believe.

So he tumbled into unconsciousness, convinced at last that it was safe to do so. Mother would be there when he awakened.

Dimly, as if it were happening centuries or miles away, in the darkness of his blessedly quiet mind he felt the jostlings of the rushing, crashing ambulance as it moved him closer to the shore—and yes, he felt the shore, even asleep and lost—he could feel the water up against his awareness, washing up and down like the comforting lull of a tide.

Crash, jerk, jolt, and shudder. The ambulance had stopped.

The back doors yanked open and a blaze of light penetrated his mental fog. “Bernice.” He said her name in his sleep, or he thought he did. He hadn’t spoken a clear word since leaving Ybor. She was looking at him, trying to decide how to remove him. She was strong, though. He trusted that she could carry him.

Bernice pulled him out by his chest, hoisted him by the crooks of his arms, and dragged him to the water’s edge. Her hands squeezed and stretched the skin there, and it pinched—but the pinch was such a tiny discomfort compared with all the rest. It was a wonder that he felt it so sharply.

And then there was grass. It tickled the underside of his legs. It
brushed with an itching determination along his feet and against his legs, and he understood that his clothes were gone in giant patches where the acid vomit had eroded them into nothing. It left his burning skin open to the air, and he wanted to scream about it. But he was beyond screaming. He had no tongue, no cheeks. His jaw was hanging agape, and the walls of his stomach were collapsing upon themselves. The poison was eating him from the inside out, turning his blood into jelly and his bones into fragile things, leeched of all their strength.

When Bernice dragged him over a driftwood log, he heard his hip snap, and it sounded like a slice of apple being broken between a child’s fingers.

He didn’t feel it at all. He could barely feel anything, even pain.

He could hear Mother’s voice, though, and it was outraged and—if he dared to flatter himself—afraid. He tried to cry out for her, but the motion was gruesome; there was not enough muscle left to hold his face in its correct shape, and his effort merely shifted the festering gore.

She picked him up, pulled him into the water. He would have smiled if he’d had enough mouth left. The coolness of it soothed him, where there were nerves left to be soothed. The salt of it was tart against his body, but it was a familiar tartness that felt correct and friendly despite his open wounds.

She cradled him in her arms, not caring how little was left or how terrible it looked. Arahab hummed to him and held him. She drew his quivering, oozing form inside herself, shutting him away from the air, from the sky, and from the pain.

Even the pain.

Even . . . yes. It was gone, there in the swirling, beautiful blueness of her body—created with the ocean, reflecting the heavens. There was pleasant chill, and there was a pretty gleam of white
that covered everything, blanketing the universe with calm. He heard a song humming from the water around him, and he realized that his Mother was singing to him, something old and quiet, something soothing and loving. She was singing him a lullaby.

Blanketing him with . . .

Covering him with . . .

And all of it was.

White.

Arahab held José’s mangled body, even though it leaked poisonous fluids from every orifice, pore, and wound. She washed him with her hands and then she absorbed him, pulling him deeply into her own torso and closing her blank-white eyes.

“Mother?” Bernice asked. She was holding the small bronze shell between her hands. She fondled it nervously. “Mother?”

The elemental had not chosen a towering shape for this encounter, at the water’s edge where the sand clumped itself around sea oats and water weeds. The lumpy dunes hid them from view, or at least gave them a touch of shelter and the illusion of privacy. Beyond the dunes, beyond the farthest reaches of high tide, a ring of trees grew in a crescent. They clung to the mainland, fearing to reach too far onto the sand. The whole earth cowered away from Arahab.

She was only a little larger than a regular human, and only a little stranger in shape. With José inside her, the image was doubled and dreadful.

Arahab, an outline—a woman-shaped sack of water with hands held apart and outstretched. José, a shamble—a man-shaped tangle of gristle, meat, and bones that floated within the translucent skin of his Mother. She was holding him more snugly and warmly than a womb.

And she was concentrating, training her pupil-free eyes inward so she could examine her patient with all his torturous injuries. Whatever he’d consumed was consuming him in turn, and it sickened her, too.

She writhed, just a bit. She buckled a bit under the atrocious weight of his suffering, then stood straight again, with only her pelvis and legs concealed by the surf.

What happened to him?
she asked. The question was addressed to Bernice, who was still running her fingers around the ridges and ruffles of the shell.

“Poisoned,” she said. “The Greek, at the shop where we went for the call. He did it. He poisoned José; he tricked him. He almost tricked me, too, but José got sick real fast.”

Why?
she asked, not bothering to pursue the how. She knew how. She could
feel
how. It was something more than a spell and more than simple chemistry. There are powders and fumes that react poorly with water, even striking smoke and sparking peculiar flames. But there was magic here, a bad old kind that was meant to eat gods.

“He said . . . he said he had to make you the call, because he was keeping the peace or something. But he wouldn’t let you rouse Leviathan,” she said. The word “rouse” felt funny between her teeth. It wasn’t one she’d ever used. She wondered where she’d heard it, and why it sprang so easily into the story. “He said he’d kill us both to stop you.”

Did he?

José was squirming. No, he was twitching. He was dying there, held suspended and falling apart. The water around him was turning a cloudy yellow, a venomous placenta too sick to nourish anything.

Bernice nodded hard, trying to answer without speaking. She didn’t trust the sound of her own voice. She didn’t trust the grasping
flicks of her fingertips as they held and hid the bronze shell. For the first time in her life, she didn’t trust her own ability to talk her way through a falsehood.