The Descent

SIXTEEN

Somewhere along the twisty path that Dona led me on, we stopped being in a place that looked like Adair’s fortress. Without my quite noticing how or when it happened, I suddenly realized that our surroundings had changed. The walls were gone. The ceiling overhead had disappeared. The world around us had shifted, broken apart and fallen away, and we were now in a place that was like the underworlds of folklore, the ones depicted by Dante and Milton, a dark, foreboding world that reeked of sorrow and regret.

We trudged through what appeared to be a cavern, though it was hard to tell as we walked through darkness with only the path in front of us lit, as though we were being followed by a spotlight. It could have been moonlight, I suppose, only there was no moon visible overhead. I heard rustlings and what sounded like whispers in the shadows to either side of the trail, but could see nothing. The tidy packed-earth floor of the passage had given way to a dirt path set on a deceptively gradual decline. I had the rather morbid sense that damned souls were hovering in the darkness just beyond sight or hearing. I could feel their gazes, desperately hungry, following us as though they wanted something we had.

“Tell me, Dona, where are we? What is this place?” I asked, growing uneasy at the changes to our surroundings. All of a sudden, I was unsure whether I could trust him.

He didn’t so much as look over his shoulder to address me, but kept loping along. “Have no fears; you are safe with me,” he said rather rotely.

“I feel as though we’re being watched.”

“We are,” he acknowledged. “The souls are curious about you. They’ve never seen a live soul in the underworld before. They’re drawn to your living energy.”

I thought of the place we’d just left, with its hall of doors that led to pieces of my past. Fez and St. Andrew had been filled with souls and yet they hadn’t paid me the slightest attention. This place was different. Walking through this open space with souls hovering just out of reach, I finally felt that I was in the underworld, the place of our terrors and nightmares, and I felt vulnerable.

“What is this place, Dona? Are we in hell?”

He grimaced. “Hell—what kind of question is that? There is neither heaven nor hell. There is only the underworld.”

“But it must be a different part of the underworld. This is so unlike the parts I’ve seen already,” I protested.

“Tell me what have you seen, then,” he replied. So I told him all of it, how the entirety of old Fez had unfurled before me as I’d walked down the boulevard on Savva’s arm, how I’d been taken back to St. Andrew of 1823 or thereabouts, exactly as I’d known it as a child, how I’d been transported to Luke’s hospital room—all of these scenes set just beyond the doors inside Adair’s fortress, or so it had seemed. How I’d seen old acquaintances but seemed to be invisible to everyone else.

Dona dismissed my account with a toss of his head. “It sounds as though you were brought back to a specific place in time to see those acquaintances. You were given a nice visit; don’t be ungrateful.”

I wasn’t about to give up, though. “But how is that possible?” I asked, dogged. “That time has passed. How can we step back into it as though nothing has happened?”

“How should I know?” he snapped suddenly. “Does it look as though I have any authority here? No one tells me anything. I can’t explain how it works; I only know that such things happen. That’s the way things work around here, and you’ll soon find out as much for yourself.” Then he glanced slyly over his shoulder at me; he had his own questions he wanted answered. “So, you knew Savva in life. Is that so?”

I flushed. “Yes. It was a miracle that we met that day. It was in Fez—”

But Dona cut me off, snorting with disgust through his broad, wet snout. His horns gleamed wickedly in the wan light from overhead. “Then you know what a selfish, spoiled whelp he was. I abhorred him. He was nothing but trouble, and an impossible liar. He would say or do anything for attention. I don’t know what Adair saw in him, to make him one of us . . .”

One of us? That was hardly a designation one could be proud of. We were all flawed, as was Savva. He was the same as the rest of us. Not that Dona was wrong in his estimate of Savva, not exactly. Savva was difficult at the best of times, and no one knew that better than I, but I couldn’t stand to hear him spoken of that way. “You’re not being fair to him. It’s not his fault. He has problems, Dona, real problems.”

“Don’t make excuses for him. That’s your problem, Lanny, you have a weakness for weak men.” He seemed pleased with himself.

“You can spare me your psychoanalysis,” I told him.

Dona continued, undeterred. “So, Savva is here in the underworld, is he? How does he like being a demon?”

“He’s not a demon—yet,” I said. “Though he told me that he is growing a tail.”

“He’s still in human form! He’s been here how long, and he’s still a human? Some people—the least deserving ones, have you ever noticed?—get all the breaks. I was put in demon form practically from the moment I arrived here. The queen took one look at me and said, ‘Oh yes, you’ll do nicely,’ and snapped her fingers, and that was that.” Dona practically shook with rage. His tail switched hotly from side to side. “I think she chose me because I was so handsome.”

Though immodest, Dona had been handsome: tall and regal, with that famous Northern Italian beauty. A former street urchin who had been taken in by an artist, made his model and his muse—only for Dona to repay the artist by turning him in to the papal authorities for being a sodomite, in order to save his own worthless neck.

He lifted one shoulder in an insouciant half shrug. “And now it’s all gone, taken away from me. I suppose that is my punishment in the hereafter, because in life I was so proud of my looks. Now I am a hideous beast, so ugly that the spirits run away from me in fear. Let’s see how Savva likes it when people run from him, when those boyish looks are gone. When those golden curls fall away and horns burst out of his skull. It hurts like hell, you know: the horns, the tail, the feet turning into hooves. Savva’s good fortune is not going to last much longer.”

“Do all of Adair’s former companions turn into demons?” I tried not to betray my worry that this, too, would be my fate.

“The queen is punishing us for having been with Adair in life—as though we had anything to say about that decision. She’s very jealous, you know,” he said, lost in his own bitter thoughts, failing to explain what she was jealous of. . . . But before I could ask him, the terrain changed suddenly before us and the path simply disappeared. Dona and I both tumbled down the long slope toward the black gully below. Once I’d started tumbling, gravity took over. I rolled faster and faster; I couldn’t stop myself. The bruising and bumping descent seemed to go on forever. Finally, my body rolled to a halt. I tilted my head back and looked up, but could see nothing; the top of the slope was shrouded in blackness.

And then I realized—the vial was gone. It had slipped from my hand when I’d fallen, probably when I’d instinctively tried to stop myself. In the dim light, I searched the dirt at my feet but found nothing. The tiny vial could be anywhere—hidden under a tussock or rock, buried in the dirt. It was lost, but it didn’t matter anyway. If our signal scheme had worked, Adair would have seen it by now and I would’ve been pulled from this reality and sent spinning back to the earth, to the fortress, to Adair. I would’ve felt the swirl and tug that I’d felt at the beginning. But there was no change, nothing. I was still in the underworld.

I located Dona by the groan coming from the darkness to my left. My intuition told me that I needed to get away from him, that something was wrong. Dona didn’t want to help me; he’d never helped anyone in his life. I’d wanted to believe him because I needed him, but I could pretend no longer. I scrambled to my feet. Dona was groggily lurching upright, like a horse trying to push up from the ground. He was uninjured. Run, every nerve in my body screamed at me. Leave him and run for your life.

But I had dithered too long. I had just decided to make a break from Dona while I had a chance when four demons stepped out of the shadows. A great brightness flickered overhead like a searchlight, and I saw the side of a great stone building behind them, a turret tower, a banner flying high overhead. We’d fallen into a dry moat.

Someone grabbed my elbow. It was Dona, jerking me to my feet and holding me up like a trophy he’d won. “It’s the woman the queen has been looking for. I found her—she’s my prisoner, and I demand to be allowed to present her personally to the queen,” he said proudly.

Surrounded by a quartet of demon guards, I was marched through the castle and down a series of halls to a set of heavy oak doors. Dona, who had led our party, did not confer with the two demons that stood at the entry with spears, but went up to one of the doors and knocked on it boldly. The rapping echoed down the great empty halls. No reply. He cleared his throat, ignoring the vague restless stirring of the guards, and knocked again, even more sharply and heavily this time.

You could hear a muffled moan of irritation from within, followed by a woman’s voice saying, “Oh, what is it? Must you interrupt me now? This had better be important.” Dona threw both doors open at once, radiating with pride over my capture, and gestured to the guards to usher me in. “I have caught her, Your Majesty. I found her and caught her and brought her here for you. Just as you desired.”

I was marched into a bedchamber. It was huge, a cross between the sort of royal apartment you’d see at Versailles and a neglected sepulcher. The room was vast but the furniture was clustered in the center of it, leaving the walls and corners hidden in woolly darkness. The silk wall coverings were mildewed and rotting; cobwebs hung from a giant unlit chandelier overhead. By far, the grandest thing in the room was the bed, a massive structure with posters that thrust heavenward like spires on a church. The bed curtains were great waterfalls of fabric, red velvet lined with gold satin and trimmed with braided swag. It was then, with a jolt of horror, that I realized this was the bed I’d seen in my nightmare. The coverlets were thrown back, as they’d been in my dream, revealing a woman astride a man like a succubus, their flesh tones stark against blindingly white sheets.

The queen. She was tall, almost painfully slender, and luminously white, as though lit from within. Her face was fiercely and coldly beautiful. From where I stood, all I could see of the man were his legs, protruding from under her. She rode him not with wild abandon but with prim control, her eyes closed and her face serene in concentration, pleasuring herself on him as though he were a toy, nothing more.

Dona made a low bow, his snout almost brushing the floor. “Your Majesty, I am proud to present to you the woman you have been looking for—Lanore.”

At this, the queen’s eyes opened and she turned her head, casting a quick gaze over her shoulder in our direction. She stopped rocking and took a deep breath, as though thinking about what she’d do next.

Finally, the man pinned underneath her acknowledged our presence by rising to his elbows. It was Jonathan, tousle-headed and slightly damp with sweat. He squinted at me and then his eyes widened in surprise. I think he would’ve tried to rush up to see me if it had been anyone but the queen sitting on his lap.

“Lanny!” he blurted out. “Good God, what are you doing here—”

“Silence,” the queen interrupted, looking down at him imperiously.

He held her gaze. “But that’s Lanny, that’s my friend. And if she’s here, that means she’s—”

“She’s not dead,” the queen interrupted him again, coldly.

Jonathan didn’t appear to be listening to her. He was upset and continued on. “If she’s here but not dead, as you say, then how could she have gotten here except through you? It’s impossible otherwise. You must’ve brought her here.” Then a look of shock and recognition dawned across his face. “You used me, used what I told you about the tattoo, and Adair. You shouldn’t have brought her here. This has nothing to do with her, she’s innocent—” He spoke faster and more hotly as he got madder, and the queen’s face began to curdle.

“Be careful how you speak to me,” she said, seething, but remaining cool to outward appearances. “There are limits to what I will allow, even from my favorites.” She swung off Jonathan as neatly as though she were dismounting a horse and snapped her fingers at the guards flanking me. “Take him away. I want to speak to this woman alone.”

Jonathan rose as the guard approached him. In the instant he stood naked, I saw that he didn’t look at all like the prisoner in my dreams. Jonathan was unblemished. He had no bruises, no barely healed wounds, no scars of any kind. He didn’t look at all ill treated. To the contrary, he seemed perfectly fine, and it occurred to me that I might’ve been tricked into coming here. Not only was he not abused; if anything, he looked better than the last time I’d seen him—that disconcerting mix of the familiar with a beauty so exquisite and extraordinary that it was nearly painful to behold. I’d forgotten that he was perfection, so perfectly sublime that he seemed almost to shine, as brilliant and luminescent as the sun breaking through the clouds after a storm.

The demon guard, seemingly resentful of Jonathan’s beauty or his favored position, grabbed Jonathan by the arm roughly to lead him away. Jonathan threw me a look over his shoulder—don’t despair, I’ll see you again, he seemed to say—and was hauled unceremoniously from the room.

Now there was only me, Dona, one guard, and the queen left in the room. She stepped down from the bed and reached for a sheer red robe as she passed by it, though it did almost nothing to hide her nakedness. She cast a sly eye downward at Dona, who bowed lowly a second time.

“What are you still doing here?” she demanded.

“A word, Your Majesty, if I may,” he said, twitching nervously. He knew he was taking an awful chance speaking up at this moment, but he might not have the opportunity to address the queen again, and certainly not when she was freshly indebted to him. “It is about the value of my service to you. I wish to raise the small matter of, um, a reward, your most gracious and generous Highness. While I, your loyal and humble servant, am most happy to have been able to bring Lanore to you, I would be most gratefully, most genuinely grateful . . .” Dona was starting to falter, the queen’s haughty silence beginning to unnerve him.

“A reward!” the queen squawked. She sounded insulted.

He lifted his shaggy head and looked the queen squarely in the eye. “I wish to be returned to my former body, Your Majesty. I wish to be made into the man I once was. This is what I desire. And if you do this for me, I pledge you my everlasting and undying gratitude. I shall be your faithful servant to the end of time . . .”

“Silence!” she bellowed, driving her fists to her sides as though the very sound of his voice shattered her nerves. He stopped speaking and cowered like a mouse in front of her, and the queen’s cool calm returned. A wickedly false smile surfaced on her face. “So you wish to return to your human form, do you, demon?” There was something in her tone that made my hair stand on end, an undertone that reminded me of the dry, ominous shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. Dona cringed before the queen in a hopeful and expectant bow, so blinded by his own desires that he could see nothing else, not even the tragedy that was about to descend on him like an eagle screaming down from the sky.

“Very well—your reward, demon,” the queen said, and with that a spasm passed over Dona. A look of surprise crossed his bullish face as a ripple warped the space around him, a distortion of light and air, and then, in the next instant he was gone. And in his place was a squat, fat bullfrog—olive with black speckles, his skin glistening with slime, his bulbous eyes rolling independently of each other in his head.

The queen leaned over and glared imperiously at the frog—and there seemed to be no question but that it was Dona. For a moment, I was afraid that she was going to step on him, crushing him underfoot. Instead, she gave a voluptuously triumphant smile at what she’d done and waved him toward the door. “Impertinent demon! You dare to expect gratitude for you to do what is, after all, your duty? You expect to be rewarded for merely doing your job? Well, there is your reward! Now, off with you! And if you are wise, you will not trouble me with your presence again, or next time I will turn you into a flea or a worm,” she warned. Dona did not even chirp in resignation, but hopped toward the door as he’d been commanded.

The queen then turned to me. Her icy stare sent a shiver down my back. She circled me slowly, looking me over. As she passed close by, I could make out her figure quite easily under the thin veil of her red robe. She may have been slender but she was muscular as well, and crackled with frightening energy—an energy similar to Adair’s, I couldn’t help but notice.

She plucked one of my curls, held it up as though she was examining it, and then let it fall. “So you’re the one he favors. For the life of me, I don’t see why—there’s nothing special about you.”

My blood began to race. I didn’t mind her insult, for it was true—there was nothing special about me. Even though she hadn’t said who “he” was, I knew of course: she was talking about Adair. It was then I noticed that, for all her coolness, she was seething. She was hurt.

The queen placed one bare white foot in front of the other as she circled me a second time. “Yes, you’re really rather plain, nothing extraordinary about you in the least. You’re like a little brown wren.”

I decided to put on a brave front. “It was you behind the dreams, wasn’t it? You tricked me into coming to the underworld.”

She laughed, bringing a hand to her sternum. “You accuse me of tricking you into coming here? It was no trick—you came for Jonathan, didn’t you? And he’s here.”

“So, let me speak to him,” I implored.

“In due time,” she said with an airily dismissive wave. She resumed pacing around me, studying me. She even ran a hand across my shoulders, along my back, like a child taunting me. Her touch was strong and electric and made me imagine, involuntarily, what it must be like for Jonathan when they were together, what it was like to couple with her, to be inside her.

I broke away from those thoughts. “It’s Adair—he’s the reason you’ve brought me here. I know that’s it, but I don’t understand. . . . Why do you need me? If you want him, why don’t you bring him here yourself?” I asked impudently. Desperation and exhaustion made me bold. After all, what more could she do to me? I assumed she needed me alive or else she would’ve killed me already.

She frowned, and I could swear the room dropped ten degrees instantaneously, a chill descending over it. “Indeed, the man you call Adair is the reason I’ve brought you here. Don’t worry, it will all be made clear to you eventually. A little patience, my brown wren. That’s all that’s required of you, a little patience.” She snapped her fingers at the remaining guard. “Take her away.”