Wickerman Cove

Part 41: Communion

It was a fall into darkness, but this time it wasn't a metaphor for passing out.

She hit the Singer's flesh and, for a second, Steph experienced the slime covered, brine stinking, semi-liquid matter in all its corporeal glory. Limbs rose out of the mass and dragged her under the surface. She tried not to breathe as it encompassed her, the stuff forcing its way into her ears and nose.

It was the lightless nothing of drowning in water so deep the sun couldn't reach, but it was something else, too.

She was dissolved and processed from the physical world into the Wyrd. Into the endless city under the sea where the Singer sat, guarding a stone gate carved with symbols that looked a hell of a lot like the language Penny called Arctic-4. They weren't arbitrary symbols, now that Steph had seen the mollusc things – they were pictograms. Figures from whatever dead civilisation the Singer and its friends had been part of.

If they really were dead: the city was alive this time. Movement here, a shape there. Semi-transparent, gelatinous things sliding along what she'd assumed were decorative columns. She realised what she had previously thought were doors were just features which allowed the current to pass through without damaging the city. Open spaces filled with life which ranged from plant, to animal, to fungal, communicating in voices that sang through the Wyrd.

That SANG.

Steph tried to take a deep breath, not that she exactly had lungs at the moment. If she still had a physical body, it was somewhere else. If she didn't... well, it was possible this was going to be a one-way trip. Hopefully she wouldn't get burned to a cinder when Penny and Mak set the nuke off.

Like before, the Singer loomed up as the current drew her in closer. She watched the city below – the eyeless, eel-like tentacles wrapped around towers that rose out of the depths. Endless precincts stretched out in every direction, peopled by untold numbers of things that she wouldn't have even identified as intelligent if she couldn't hear them talking.

The heartbeat of the Envious set up a distorted backbeat, the sound of the infinite hearts almost beating in time set her teeth on edge. It threatened to derail the chorus of voices, almost tipping the harmony into chaos.

The Singer itself was the loudest voice of them all. She watched its slack, fleshy lips move. It had an almost-human tongue the width of a city street, and teeth the size of buildings. Every pore and ridge on its glistening body vibrated in time with its voice, shimmering with a rainbow of colours that Steph just couldn't make sense of.

The current brought her astral body to a stop at the point where looking into the Singer's throat was like standing at the mouth of the Eisenhower Tunnel.

Steph could feel its attention on her. It didn't have eyes, but in this place that bordered on the Wyrd, she could feel the weight of its huge, alien mind standing over her. It reminded her of being a pretty sheltered, nineteen year old, E-1 and meeting her first old-money General.

"Okay," she said, "so I should probably have left myself more time to do this, but I really hope we can figure out a way to communicate before my Russian coworker triggers his nu—"

An image seared into her mind. It was less painful than it simply obliterated everything she was. One second, she was Stephanie Zoubareya, floating in some kind of bullshit spirit world full of sea creatures; the next, she was an eye – a camera angle – observing a set of scenes:

The sun went out. For a horrible second, the only light came from a thousand lambent green eyes, looking down like new stars. The heartbeat of the Envious was louder than she could have imagined. It burst her eardrums and shattered her bones. Buildings collapsed at the force of the vibration. Steam, without heat, filled the air as the sound atomised the oceans.