Page 42 of Hellbound

The traveler let slip a small, exasperated whine. She waved at the wall. “But it’s got hinges. I thought divers could manipulate stuff here. Y’know, manifest things. Like door handles.”

Marian exhaled the desire to scream. “I can’t create anything down here; I can only touch and take.”

Golden creases formed between Tori’s eyes. “Then how do you—”

Two things happened in quick succession: Marian lost her patience, then snapped her right knee up and kicked the wall-slash-door in front of her. Instead of a smarting knee, Marian was rewarded with a sound like shattering glass. The wall crumbled like cheap plaster as Tori’s strangled shriek filled the fetid air.

Then there was a doorway where a wall once was, and the emptiness Marian had sensed before was replaced by a gentle vacuum. Space itself seemed to constrict around them. Marian stared into the open archway leading into murky darkness. She swallowed hard as she fixated on that ominous feeling.

Time dilation. Across the threshold, it moved at a crawl. Why, though?

Tori flapped her glowing arms in front of Marian. “Do you want the Remnant to jump us or something? That was so loud, I bet Lloyd heard it.”

Marian’s upper lip curled as she backed away from the traveler. “Calm the fuck down. Noise alone doesn’t draw the Remnant.”

“How would you know?” Tori said as she took a tentative step toward the new opening in the wall.

“Research. Experience,” Marian said gruffly, eyeing the tendrils of gray mist being drawn through the doorway with great suspicion. “The Falk incident.”

“Why do I know that name?” Tori crept toward the beckoning doorway.

Because Arthur Falk and Greg Bjernsen are the only reason anyone knows what happens to divers who lose a race with the Remnant.

“This is not the time for a history lesson.”

“Hey, you brought it up,” the traveler said as she slipped through the doorway.

Marian had barely lifted a foot off the ground when a single word thundered in her mind.

“Leave.”

It sounded nothing like familiar chorus of her own conflicted selves. It was too comprehensible, too … commanding.

And it had her too out of sorts to notice Tori had proceeded inside. The traveler shimmered in the darkness, her ghostly gold light hardly bright enough to illuminate the solid, ashy ground beneath her feet.

Marian approached slowly, her nerves buzzing as she went against that disembodied command. Every step forward felt like a mistake, yet there was nothing here. Tori’s flickering light illuminated curved walls of more gray stone all around them. Dark shadows filled deep recesses in uneven rows like catacombs.

“It’s like an empty tomb,” Marian muttered disliking very much how full it felt despite what she saw.

“It’s not empty,” Tori replied in a strained whisper. She shuffled backward slowly as every hair on Marian’s body stood on end.

The traveler slowly pointed a finger at the dismal darkness. All Marian saw were the vacant chambers surrounding them.

“It comes and goes,” the traveler muttered. “But I see it.”

Why Marian walked forward to see for herself was beyond her. Everything in her told her to stop, to turn around and leave. But something else dragged her forward. A force she couldn’t describe.

There was something here.

As she reached toward the empty space that had Tori so mesmerized, she felt it.

The lie burned away slowly at first, the way a lit match met paper. Then it accelerated rapidly. The gray stone and empty alcoves vanished, revealing a crimson cavern. Her fingers grazed the bars of a tiny cage made of twisted metal and sinews suspended by a construct she could barely comprehend.

A mind-bending fusion of decaying skin and stone appeared where there was once nothing. Chains of mixed matter dangled from the ceiling—flesh and bone, onyx and iron. Myriad smells mingled together to create a stench uniquely disgusting; ozone and char, rot and burning plastic. The urge to vomit struck Marian without warning. She yanked her hand away and doubled over with a loud gag.

Her stomach was empty, but her body still went through the motions. She heaved twice before the feeling passed. Panting, she straightened to find Tori transfixed on the grotesqueries hanging over them.

At the center of the horrors hung a smooth black chain interwoven with organic matter. Desiccated appendages that could have been fingers, legs, had they not all had teeth. Pointed, flat, broken. All of it seemed vaguely human, and yet fundamentally wrong.