At the Seams

Chapter 22: The Subconscious

Chapter 22: The Subconscious

Mary falls infinitely, her cries ballooning behind her, magnifying the sensation of the drop. The wind, hot and tangy like greenhouse air, rushes into her lungs. Her surroundings are entirely devoid of light, the blackness making the fall faster, longer, more disorienting. Finally, after her voice croaks from screaming and her mouth shrivels from the rushing wind, Mary lands roughly in a loose, brittle pile.

The mound’s girth is such that Mary plunges through and stops before her feet actually meet the ground. A cask of small, crunchy tidbits encases her. She shifts, sinking deeper into the queer hill. She continues to shimmy until her feet settle onto solid ground. She wiggles some more, loosening the debris until it starts to tumble around her. She moves her arms as if trying to catch her balance. Once they are free, she pushes the crackly stuff away from her chest and neck. Before long, Mary can trudge forward and out of the remainder of the pile. After a few blind steps, Mary collides with a wall, bloodying her nose. "Shit!" she cries. "Where's the hell’s the exit?"

Remembering Karn's words back in her cave, "You only had to look for it," Mary turns a slow circle, looking for an opening; and there, subtle enough to miss, Mary spies a patch of wall less dark than the blackness around it. No barrier lines the opening, but the light coming through is odd. Not silver and hazy, like the dawn in the meadow above, this light is more akin to shadow. It repels, and Mary wonders briefly if she could possibly avoid meeting it.

Mary turns to regard the mound that saved her legs, but can't distinguish anything in the almost perfect blackness. As her eyes adjust, the mound begins to resemble a destroyed haystack or haphazard pile of sticks. Mary plucks a slender twig from the floor and holds it an inch from her nose, examining it. The surface is pale and pitted beneath her fingers; the piece tapers in the middle, with one end bulbous, and the other splintered. Mary's confusion gives way to revulsion as recognition dawns on her. She holds a small, broken bone.

Mary drops the bone on the floor—as a general rule, the morbid never dismays Mary, but discovering a pile of bone makes her wonder whose abode upon which she might be intruding. "Karn," she calls, unable to keep the alarm from her voice. "Where are you? We gotta go!"

"Calm down, Mary," Karn says, the waver in its voice emphasized by the darkness and emphasizing the infuriating placation with which it speaks.

"Easy for you to say, you didn't land in a mountain of bone. Shouldn't we vacate?"

"If you so desire, but there is nothing to fear."

"I suppose some pacifist vegan left this mess behind?"

"Actually, you left them behind, Mary. These bones resulted from your appetites."

Mary stares at the pile of old corpses in the middle of the small cavern, wondering how it could all be hers. Her instincts tend toward kindness. Would she really leave such destruction in her path?

Karn interrupts her horrible reverie. "Mary, haven't we been over this? Maybe you do rescue spiders from sink drains and feed the finches (never coincidentally, of course), but you’re also a carnivore. In fact, if it came down to you or an animal, I’d bet you would kill it with your bare hands. Does this really make you horrible by your own definition? And, again, you destroyed nothing. These unfortunate critters simply deteriorated, as a lion's lunch simply deteriorates. The things on this level create angst, anger, violence; you have to put all that somewhere. However, did you intend to slaughter—it looks like hundreds, judging by the amount of bones—of tiny animals? Did you even know?"

"Of course not!"

"Then you destroyed nothing. You have no control down here, Mary. Stop pretending you do. Your heightened sense of personal responsibility, on which you have always prided yourself, is but a foolish face of fear. You invent responsibility and guilt for things with which you have nothing to do. Stop it. It's stupid and cumbersome and will trip you up down here."