Spiral and Salt

I had not slept for four days. Or perhaps I had slept all that time, and what I took for wakefulness was merely a dream within a dream, dreamed by one who was no longer me. My apartment had become alien — the walls had shifted two inches to the left, the corners had ceased to be right angles, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw not my eyelids but a stratified rock descending into blackness, where a light pulsed like the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures.

I returned to Ricardo at dawn. He sat on the staircase, his head clasped in his hands, his fingers contorted as though he were trying to tear from his skull something that had taken root there. When I approached, he raised his face — and I recoiled. His eyes had grown dull, like those of a dead fish, and from the corners of his lips trickled a thin stream of saline fluid that smelled of iodine.

"She went down," he whispered. "Tonight. I heard the hatch open. I did not open it. It opened by itself, Doctor. A wind blew up from below — warm, damp, and it smelled... it smelled of me. Of my childhood. Of my mother, who died in childbirth. I heard her voice. She was calling me down."

I rushed into the flat. Inside, everything was bathed in that greenish light, which now streamed not from beneath the bed but from every crack — from the sockets, from the ventilation grilles, even from the fissures in the electrical wiring. The air had grown viscous as gelatin, and each step required effort, as though I were wading through water. In Lorna's bedroom, there was no one. The bed was empty, but the sheets were pressed as though not one body had lain on them, but dozens, entwined into a single knot.

The hatch in the basement stood wide open. The old concrete slab lay beside it, shattered into three pieces, and from that square blackness rose not a smell but a sound — low, vibrating, like the song of a whale, but a thousand times deeper, at such a frequency that my gums began to bleed. I peered inside. A staircase descended, but its steps were coated in something slimy, translucent, which breathed in time with my heartbeat. And on every step lay a shell. Not an ordinary one, but perfectly round, with a spiral that coiled not clockwise but inward, into infinity.

I should have left. Every fibre of my body screamed for flight. But my feet stepped onto the first stair, and I heard the slimy covering beneath my sole emit a sound like a whisper: "Found you."

I descended. The steps went far deeper than the foundation of the house could possibly allow — after ten steps, I realized I was already below the level of the basement; after twenty, that I had sunk into the earth to a depth that bore no relation to the building's height. The walls around me were not of concrete but of some porous material like pumice, and in every pore I saw eyes. They did not look at me — they looked through me, toward what I sensed was the centre of this construct.

At the thirtieth step, the staircase ended. I found myself in a circular cavern whose vaulted ceiling vanished into darkness, but light emanated from the centre — from a source I first took for a stalagmite, but then realized was an organ. Not a musical instrument, but a living one, composed of interwoven bones and sinews that pulsed in time with that singing. And at the foot of this organ, crouching, sat Lorna.

She was entirely naked, and her skin was now covered in scales from crown to heel, each one reflecting the greenish light, creating a kaleidoscope that made the head ache. But the most horrifying thing was not the scales. She had no face. That is — she had one, but it flowed like molten wax, constantly shifting features: for an instant I saw my mother, then my sister, then the face of a patient who had died in my arms a year ago. Each face looked at me and whispered the same words: "We are the echo. Lorna is the throat. And you — you are the tongue."

She — or it — turned toward me. From the pulsing mass of its face, a mouth emerged — human, far too small for that body — and spoke in a voice I had heard from the walls:

"You came, Doctor. I knew you would. You are the one who will close the circle. The priests I called came running with crosses and prayers. But their god knows nothing of what is here. Their god is merely a name for emptiness. But here — here is fullness. She wants to be born. She wants to come out through me. You will help her."

"Who?" I breathed, and my voice came out shrill, like a child's.

Lorna raised her hand and pointed at the bone-organ. At its apex, where the sinews converged, I saw an embryo — not human, not animal, but composed of pure light and darkness interwoven so tightly they appeared as one. It moved. And each time it moved, the walls of the cavern sighed.

"It is not a god," Lorna whispered, and for the first time, I heard a note of fear in her voice. "It is a daughter. A daughter of the abyss. I carried her not in my womb — I carried her in my very essence. And now she wants out. But for that, I need... a translator. One who will record her birth. That is you, Doctor. You will be my hands. Open the portal in my chest. Make the incision. Here." She drew her finger across her scaly breast, where a second, smaller mouth pulsed between her ribs. "Do this, and you will see the world as it was before creation. Before the sky came to be."

I stood paralysed. I could not move, could not breathe. And then from the organ came a sound — piercing as the cry of a newborn, but a thousand times more ancient. And I understood that if I did not do it now, she would do it herself. And then the birth would begin without a witness, and all we know as reality would become mere shell, cast into the abyss.

I raised my hands. There was no scalpel in them. But I knew: if I willed it, they would become sharp. This place gave me what I desired, turning wish into flesh.

And I wished to see the truth.