Page 7 of Spelunking Through Hell

You have to stay careful if you want to stay alive. That’s not even up for negotiation.

I emerged from the woods feeling better than I had when I stepped into them, and relaxed at the hideous, familiar, beloved shape of the old Parrish place, the house that started as a punishment and became a palace because it was where we’d been happy. At this point, I’d lived there longer than I’d lived anywhere else. The house loomed over the field around it, teetering and shabby and painted an unpleasant gray-green, like rotting flesh. It didn’t matter how often I hired people to repaint it; the color always faded to swamp muck within a season, like the house remembered what had been done there.

I loped across the field, whistling as I drew close to the house and warning the tailypo that it was me. A chittering greeted me from the porch as I reached the steps, and by the time I got to the top, all five members of the current resident troop were clustered on the porch swing, tails draped possessively across one another, creepy little hands folded at quiet attention in front of them. Nothing looks attentive like a tailypo that thinks you might have food.

“Well, hello, darlings,” I said. “Sorry, no treats today. I’m just passing through.”

They’re about as smart as any other breed of lemur, but they knew the word “no” well enough to give me disappointed looks before they chittered and vanished into the brush around the house. I smiled as I watched them go. The tailypo is virtually extinct everywhere in North America except for the woods around Buckley, and I get to feel at least partially responsible for that. I took care of them when I was ateenager, and I managed to trick Thomas into doing the same, and the old Parrish place has served as a sanctuary for generations of the long-tailed little monsters. Given food and shelter and a safe place to raise their kits, the population has stayed pretty stable, and the woods have stayed a little weirder than they’d be otherwise.

They definitely keep the local kids from poking around the place looking for spare keys. I leaned up onto my toes and felt the top of the porch swing, running my fingertips along the high rail that was meant to be a support for hanging flowers until I found the little hook where the door key was kept and took it down. Thomas didn’t hide any keys while he was here. Thomas also didn’t spend the bulk of his time wandering around parallel dimensions looking for me; I think I can be forgiven for loosening the outer ring of security a little.

The living room was cool and smelled slightly musty, as it almost always did these days. Only being used by a human occasionally, while being occupied by relatively clean wild animals almost full time, will do that for a place. Tailypo are even more notorious for their denning hygiene than racoons, sometimes traveling as much as a mile to urinate and marking their territory with scent glands that are almost undetectable by humans. They make for pleasant roommates, even more so since the development of the oral rabies vaccine in the 1980s. We haven’t had an outbreak near Buckley in over forty years. No Stephen King novels for us.

Just a few monster movies, and those are more than enough.

I walked across the living room to the stairs, shedding clothes as I went. The ones I’d been wearing were torn and bloodstained, and while that might feed into the aesthetic I’d been crafting for the last fifty years, it wasn’t comfortable against the skin. I like cloth that bends when I do, doesn’t snap and crackle and shove flakes of my own dried bodily fluids into every crevasse it can find. Besides, one of the best parts of a stop off in my home dimension is being able to take a hot shower.

The water at the old Parrish place has never been turned off. Neither has the electricity. The bills are paid on a regular basis, and Kevin comes out every two or three years to replace the water heater, whether or not it’s needed. Between that and Mary making sure the pipes don’t freeze, the place stays pretty functional.

I left a trail from the front door to the master bathroom like the teenager I’d been the first time I stepped into this house, only pausing to grab a towel before I turned on the water and stepped under the stinging spray. I had no cuts or bruises left for it to aggravate, but myskin still knew it had been abraded recently, and the body remembers injury, even after it’s been erased. I may not have any scars, but I know where every single one of them should be.

The first time I saw myself in a mirror after this journey began, I didn’t know who I was looking at. I don’t think I can ever be said to have been innocent, not really; I’m the daughter of people who dedicated their lives to saving monsters, raised as much by the dead as by the living, gun in my hand before I could do long division. My future was set from the day I was born. But I used to at least be able to act the part.

Now, though... Thomas was heavily tattooed because the tattoos helped him to keep and amplify his magic, and because he liked the way they looked, enjoyed the aesthetic of carrying a record with him everywhere he went, something the Covenant couldn’t overwrite or take away. I got the idea from him. With no magic of my own and no way to guarantee anything I carried with me would survive the trip, I had to embed any charms I needed access to into my own flesh. It had been a quick enough process when all this started. A few protection and passage runes etched into my arm, a healing charm or two down the outside of my thigh. Now...

Every inch of skin below the neck on my right side was covered with a dense, ever-changing tapestry of images, drawn and redrawn after every use. Only a few stayed consistent between trips, the ones I’d learned I would always need, no matter what situation I was throwing myself into this time. I filled my hand with shower gel and began scrubbing it across myself, removing the sticky remains of a fight my body only half-remembered.

There was so much I couldn’t wash away. Best to handle what pieces I still could.

Rinsing away red-tinted suds, I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, toweling myself roughly dry. The urge to linger here, in the place that still felt like home, was as strong as it had ever been, coupled with the need to run and keep running, to never stop or slow until I found the man I was looking for and brought him back where he belonged.

The questions Cynthia asked me were nothing new, and nothing I hadn’t asked myself a hundred times. What was I going to do if I found a ninety-year-old man who barely remembered the wife he’d only known for a fragment of his life or, worse, a grave? Some featureless patch of earth with a tombstone and a pretty widow weeping over it like she had a right to swoop in and replace me just because I was a dozen dimensions away and not there when he needed me?

The answer was always easy, and always the same. I yanked open the top drawer of the dresser, pulling out clean clothes and dressing as quickly as I could. I wouldknow.I’ve never been happy not knowing things, and getting the answer, even if it hurt, would be better than not having it. So if I found him and he wasn’t mine anymore, for whatever reason, I’d be able to come home and finally figure out who I was and how I fit into the family I had left, how I could live with a son who treated me like a dangerous animal and a daughter who hated me.

Laura used to tell me, after she’d had a few too many glasses of sherry, that we learn how to love from our parents. They teach us what a healthy—or unhealthy—relationship looks like, and I guess she was right, because I love the same way my father did, and his way of loving nearly killed us both. He never got over losing my mom. She died, and he turned into a hard, brittle man who was ready to fight the world to keep me safe, even if he killed me in the process.

Maybe that’s what I learned from Thomas, or maybe the crossroads did me a favor when they made sure I wouldn’t know if he was alive or dead. I’d been able to shove my children at my best friend and beg her to keep them safe until I was finished finding their father and could come home. If the search had lasted for their entire childhoods, well, at least I’d stayed away, and not tried to mold them into people who would never have anything to lose, the way my father had with me. And maybe that was unfair to him, but I didn’t think so. Jonathan Healy had been a broken man who raised a breakable woman, and the only good thing I ever did for my family was let them go, whether or not they could see it that way.

If Thomas was dead, or had already let go of me, I could stop holding on. But until I knew for sure, as long as there was something that tasted like hope hanging in the air, I had to keep going. I stepped into my shorts and opened the bottom drawer, beginning to pull out boxes of ammunition and knives. Always knives.

Guns are great. Guns let you kill people before they get close enough to do the same to you, unless they also have guns, and then guns just make the fight shorter. Knives, though; knives don’t jam or run out of ammunition. Six bullets to each of my mother’s revolvers. Twelve chances to make the kill before I get gunned down in some backwater dimension where my body will never be found. Infinite cuts in a knife, if you treat it well and respect the weaknesses of the metal. I like knives.

I like guns better, but I like knives more than I like many other things. A life like mine doesn’t encourage a lot of affections.

By the time I finished gearing myself up, it was a wonder I didn’t rattle when I walked. That’s sometimes the only thing I miss about having long hair; poisoned hairpins really are a miracle that more people should pray for. Still, the loss of a handle people could easily use to grab me was worth the small reduction in my personal armory, and I felt prepared for just about anything as I walked back down the stairs.

A few things of mine had been lost in the attack. I wanted them back. Time to go and get them.

Dimensional keys are often surprisingly generic. You can’t tie them specifically to places you’ve never been before, so you lock them onto attributes and assumed directions. Not that “north” or “west” or “deeper” or whatever actually matter on a cosmic level. The human mind always starts from “here,” and anywhere else you want to be is in relation to that point. So the keys I use are tied to one of two things: a relative direction, or a place I’ve been before. You can also tie them to an idea—if there’s a world near you with a great beach, focusing on “a beach would be nice” can potentially pull you toward it. That only works if your available options include one that fits the bill, and since every crossing drops you in the dimensional point closest to where you started at the moment of transition, there could be a world justfilledwith gorgeous beaches, but none of them are close enough to make the list, and so you wind up in the extraplanar equivalent of Coney Island, broken bottles and tourists everywhere, not tropical vistas and silence.

Oh, and just to make things even more confusing, every dimension contains dozens of worlds. Start with the wrong assumed direction in mind, and the crossing you thought would put you in New Jersey could leave you on Olympus Mons, on Mars. No Jersey hot dogs there. No air either. Good luck!

I try not to navigate by ideas when I can help it. My primary idea is always either home or Thomas, depending on which way I’m headed, and that can throw things off no matter what I’m trying to do if neither one is directly in range.

The workbench in the basement was exactly as I’d left it the last time I’d been here: clean and organized, maybe the only thing in the house the tailypo never put their tiny hands on. Magic again, and again, not mine; Laura was an umbramancer before she disappeared,and for all I know, she still is one. Her magic was mostly about warding and seeing possible futures, and she’d set up a complicated ward over my workspace that apparently worked by shuffling through every possible future on a constant basis, always choosing the one where the spiders spun their webs someplace else and the dust fell in a different direction. Seemed like the sort of thing that could have been used to keep a house cleaner than I’d ever managed, but I didn’t mind. It was nice to know that everything was as pristine as I’d left it.

I sat down and placed my right arm on the bench, turned so the back of my hand was resting on the wood. Then I picked up a bottle of ink, and a needle.

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