Sublime Awakenings

Sublime Awakenings: Chapter 37

“Todd, look out!” Letta's voice rang out in a shrill scream inside the simulation chamber as her eyes snapped open to take in the green, foreign boy's black, gloved hand as it struck her sharply across the face.

“SILENCE! Keep it together soldier! The mission's not over yet!” Humans were such frail creatures. Defeated by zombies. Pff. When ZIM had gone up against Mall Security and that stoopid, little stink-man's creations, they had been a disgusting, but minor inconvenience at worst!

Letta looked up into his lavender eyes in a daze. “What? Soldier? Am I really awake?” The confusion suddenly left her voice to be replaced with urgency when she remembered why she had woken up screaming. “What happened to Squee?”

“Unfortunately, yes, you are awake. The Squeaky-child seems to be shifting nightmare worlds again. We're going to need to plug you back in, in order to maintain contact.”

“What? Again! But this doesn't even seem to be helping! Isn't there something else you can do to get that...thing out of him?”

“Yes, actually. I could remove the aniphasic life-form with a strong electromagnetic barrier, but since you-we humans have a bioelectric nervous system, it would probably extinguish his pitiful life.” Which was what he would end up doing if this matter wasn't resolved in due course. Bitters had said that she would prefer the Castil kid in addition to the Veelob, right? Or maybe he could just turn them both in like this?

“There's nothing else?”

“The life-form's behavior is...erratic. I do not understand it's motivation, much less how to coax it out.”

“But-”

“No more questions! Just sit back and relax, dirt-child. We will reinsert you momentarily.” Once the worm-baby had calmed down enough, the Invader turned on the heels of his boots, which made little squeaky noises as he marched from the projection chamber.

Dib's head turned away from the darkened screen at the sound of his nemesis entering the control room. “Zim, are you sure we're doing the right thing? What happens if she dies in there?”

Contact-covered eyes narrowed at the paranormalist in irritation as Zim joined the others at the controls. “Stop questioning ZIM! I don't know, okay? Exactly how many humans do you think I have run through the simulator, Dib?”

“Oh, great! More untested equipment! Why am I not surprised?”

“It is NOT untested!” A three-clawed hand fisted in Dib's blue shirt so that the Invader could pull the boy down all those precious inches to his level before whispering hotly into his ear. “This technology is used on Irkens in training as a matter of course! But if a fatal error occurs, the Pak will save the individual's data up until the error and apply any needed treatment for shock. Without the Pak, who knows what would happen to an Earthinoid? Now stop asking stupid questions that Zim cannot answer in front of other humans!” Stoopid, questiony Dib-thing and his Earthy judgments! If Zim had said, “Why, yes, stink-beast, it has been tested thoroughly with your kind,” the response would have been just as bad. Sometimes there was just no winning with the Dib. His illogical hyumaness prevented it.

Pepito exchanged an exacerbated look with Gaz at Zim's loud whispering, half of which they could actually make out. Did he really still think that they didn't know? So idiocy apparently wasn't limited to the Earth. At least Todd couldn't die with the key around his neck. He looked back to the screen as the darkness turned to fuzz, which was slowly finding shape. If this wasn't resolved soon, he was taking the boy back to his house to see if the powers of Hell could do anything about it.

“Fine, Zim!” Dib grabbed the alien's hand, jerking it free from his shirt so that he could stand up straight, though not letting it go just yet. “Just keep right on pretending while people's lives are in danger! Pretend that you're human, pretend that no one else knows, just like they pretend they don't know. Pretend that I'm not the only one who even cares! It is what you're good at!”

“Oh, dear Tallest, not this again! Keep it up, Dib-stink, and I'm getting you a muzzle. A muzzle of DOOM!”

Arms crossed over his chest, Pepito shook his head in dismay. Personally, he thought they both needed a muzzle. Maybe after this was all over he would curse them with laryngitis. That would be fun. “Could you please stop saying the word 'doom' so much? It's kind of tried.” But maybe that was just him. It was, after all, his father's favorite word. Over the years it had not only lost most of its bite, but also become rather annoying.

“Nonsense! ’DOOM' is an AMAZING word...especially when it's the impending kind.” The Irken chuckled as Dib glared and the other two humans looked at each other blankly. So unknowing. So unprepared.

Gaz rolled her eyes as her brother and his alien boyfriend continued to flirt in the most annoying way ever: the semi-secretive way that forced other, unwilling, people to be involved, the whole planet sometimes. It was like a type of exhibitionism. Their stupid fetish/game was out in the open for anyone to see, but few to actually understand...and that was probably the thrill of it. “Would you two sickos get a room or something?”

“What are you talking about, Gaz?” Dib looked to his sister with wide, unbelieving eyes.

“A room? What would we do in this...room of which you speak? Zim already has plenty of rooms!”

The half-demon gave them both an appraising look, catching on to Gaz's logic. “Well, you are holding hands.”

“NO!” The denial left Zim's thin, green lips before he and the Dib could actually pull their hands away from each other. “No we're not!”

“Totally not.” Dib stuffed both of his hands into the pockets of his trench coat to make sure that they stayed safely away from the Invader's. What was wrong with them lately?

“Whatever. Look, he's back.” Gaz nodded toward the screen, where Squee was now visible again, though there wasn't much to look at besides him this time. Everything was very dark, though there seemed to be some kind of ground. “I'm putting Letta back in.” Nimble fingers returned to the control panel to type in the code that Zim had given her earlier.

All the playfulness left Dib as he too took in the scene on the screen, remembering the lives at risk. “Be careful, Gaz. As soon as she's in peril, pull her out.” All he got in return was a grunt, which was actually the most comforting reply she could have given him. It was like when she was in the heat of battle on her Game Slave. He gave her a quick smile before turning back, also comforted by the gothic apparel that she was wearing tonight. If Gaz was on the task, there was no way they could lose. When other people failed, she would still triumph, even against insurmountable barriers, with as little as a well positioned kick.

----------Squee's Imagination-----------

Todd looked around in confusion at the lack of landscape that now occupied his mind. There was no horizon, no other objects that he could see. There was no moon, no stars. Even calling this state “night” was making an unfounded assumption. On the ground there was no grass, no rocks, nothing except some basic soil-like substance. It was almost black, though that could have been the lack of light, and kind of moist and sticky. His shoes seeped into it slowly, but steadily, a centimeter at a time. But there was no where else to stand, no truly solid ground. All he could do was keep stepping out of it, then back into it to make sure he didn't sink in the stuff.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of light and color. Turning his head to his left, he saw it again, full on. It was like a fake computer game effect indicating that another player was entering the game. The next time, Letta's figure appeared completely without flashing back out.

“H-hi, Squee.” The girl looked around uncertainly at the dark terrain, wondering what possible situation they would be subjected to this time.

“Letta! What are you doing back in here!”

“They need me to talk to you. Stop freaking out, okay? I can't take much more stress.” And she wasn't the even the one with an anxiety disorder. “What is this place?”

“I don't know...it's nothing...nowhere. I really don't know. What kind of a place has no visible limits, but no stars? Do you think it could be a cave...a really big cave?”

“No idea. Why is the ground so squishy?” Letta stamped one foot against the surface hard, discovering that it seemed to become more solid when pressure was applied. “Hey, check this out.”

Todd looked down at the stomping foot, wondering how he could even see in such a place. Crouching down, he slowly allowed his fingers to slip halfway into the substance before quickly curling them to lift some of the dark material, which he then rolled into a ball in his hands. “It's a dilatant colloid.” When he received a questioning look, he continued almost absentmindedly to move the thing between his hands as he stood up. “A mixture of solid particles evenly dispersed throughout another substance...like custard.”

“Custard?'

“Umhum. Fast movement or hard pressure makes it a solid and slow movement or gentle pressure makes it a liquid. See?” Opening his hands, the boy allowed the substance to return to the liquid state, watching as it spilled onto the ground, at first pattering like rain and then sinking back in as the force behind the droplets dissipated.

“Squee?'

“Yeah?”

“You're really weird.”

“...I know. But you asked.”

Letta bit her lip, deciding not to point out that that hadn't really been what her question had meant. She had known Todd long enough to know that one of the ways he dealt with stress or fear was objective analysis. It usually helped to keep his mind off of the more practical, dangerous aspects of whatever he was afraid of. At least that's what he claimed. But this was the boy who refused to drink tap water on the grounds that tiny crustaceans that harbored diseases were carried by the city's water system.

“L-letta.” Todd's hand began to tremble as he examined it. Blood. It was covered in blood.

“Shit! Todd, are you alright?” Seeing the dark ruby sheen on light peach skin, the young woman ran the short distance to his side, lifting the hand closer to her face to get a good look. “I don't see any cuts.”

Slowly, with mounting nervousness, he looked away from his hand and to the blond. “It's not my blood.”

“Then whose...” She stopped mid-sentence, following Todd's eyes to the ground. “No. No way.”

“Oh, God...” His voice came out barely above a whisper. It was all blood. Some kind of monstrous blood, like the kind that had attacked him in his room. And it was moving, rippling, pulsing faster and faster.

Letta gripped his wrist even tighter as congealed waves pressed against the bottom of their shoes. “W-what's happening now?”

“We've got to move!”

“Move where?”

“I don't know.” He searched the endless darkness fruitlessly. “Somewhere, anywhere. I think this is the center of the waves.” Returning the grip on her hand, Todd pulled her behind as he ran in a random direction. It was hard to tell distance without any surrounding features, so he just keep running until the waves had calmed down to a low trembling that matched his body. Then they just stood there, watching the ground jiggle like gelatin…something that he figured Zim was probably getting much more of a kick out of than they were.

Even though Todd's hand was covered in some mysterious type of blood, Letta held it tightly in her own as she stood as close as she could to the younger boy, just as much from her own fear as from a wish to protect and comfort him. “What i-is that?”

“I...I think something's under there. Or it's alive.” He was forced to widen his stance to remain steady as the vibrations got faster and stronger and the “land” started to curve upwards toward the place where they had been standing not long ago. But then they both fell to the ground anyway when the ground fractured ahead of them as something large and white rose above it. Whatever it was kept rising until it was several stories high. When it, and the ground, finally stilled, he stood back up, once again pulling Letta with him.

“Is that...a building?” She was practically hugging him now, but she couldn't help it. If it was a building, it was like none she had ever seen. She couldn't make out anything on it that she could clearly call walls, windows, or even a roof. The whole thing was too rounded, the openings in the surface too wide, its enclosure too uneven.

“Yes...and no.” It looked more like a human coral reef. It was made of a white, bony material, which was smooth in some places like it had been worn by an ocean of blood. In others, there were actually skeletal remains stuck together, or merged with the smooth surface, making up parts of the structure.

This was too familiar. This wasn't supposed to happen. He found himself hugging Letta back when torrents of black blood spilled from the gaping spaces on all of the uneven and disjointed levels of the thing. The blood had probably just hardened when the structure had moved, but it looked to him as if the “building” was throwing up. When the spilled blood hit the ground, not surprisingly, it thudded loudly, broke into smaller segments, and bounced a few times before stilling.

“T-todd...it's...it's still moving.” She wanted to look away, to bury her face in Todd's shoulder like she had done with Dib in the control room, but she couldn't. The fear had frozen her in place, watching the fallen blood as it became just liquid enough to reform itself into humanoid shapes that seemed to grow unnaturally from pools of blood on the ground. “Holy Hell! Where did you read about this!”

“I didn't.” If he had it wouldn't have been as bad. “I dreamed about it. Or something like it.”

“You dreamed it? You know, I think that you really might be crazy.”

“I prefer to think of it as problems in living.”

“That's a big problem. A really big one.” And it was getting bigger. The dark crimson, human-shaped creatures had grown more distinct. They seemed to have facial features underneath a thin layer of gel that covered, as well as made up, their bodies. Under that gel, solid black eyes with no pupils searched their surroundings as their arms grew into long, matching, black knives, making them lose some balance as they stumbled around the front of the bone structure.

Todd grimaced at the sight. It was almost as pitiful as it was scary. He let out a gasp when he felt something slimy touch his leg, looking down to see that more of the same red vines were now growing from the bloody ground like some sick, carnivorous alien plant. And one of them was making its way up his leg under his pants.

“Ack!” He quickly pulled away from Letta in a mad attempt to get it off of his skin, nearly falling onto the ground where even more of the things were lurking. When it finally came loose, he pulled the pants leg up to examine his leg, making sure that none of it remained. Once certain that he was free of it, he stood back up, breathing heavily. “It's everywhere. We're going to have to go in there.”

Now stamping her feet faster and higher than before to avoid the vines, Letta looked up from the ground to give the boy a worried gaze. “Todd, I don't know. Whatever is in there might be worse than this. I mean, these plant things aren't so bad. And it seems kind of like a trap, don't you think?”

“These things are worse than they seem.” He stopped his explanation there, not wanting to explain how the victim's consciousness was never allowed to die or move on, how the screams lived in the blood, how much the pain of living and dying was amplified. “It probably is a trap, but I don't know what else I can do. You, though, you shouldn't be here. You should get out.”

“But then you would be alone with...this.” She looked around her as tears blurred her vision a bit. What would happen to Todd if they just left him alone with the bear? Would it ever leave him or would it just continue to torture him forever? “I'm not giving up unless I have to.” And then she would have to make Zim get Shmee out any way he could because this was too much. Death had to be better than this.

As much as he wanted to argue, to insist that she go, the boy just nodded his head weakly, thankfully. Truthfully, he was terrified to be alone there, with only himself, Shmee, and his nightmares. He knew that if this went on long enough, he would eventually break, give in to the madness. There would be nothing left of him but these horrors. “Zim, Gaz? We need some weapons and some flash lights.”

“Finally. Here, try some laser-edged machetes.”

Gaz's voice was serious, but also excited: the exact opposite of her usual apathetic gloom. Todd figured that this must be what she was like at gaming events. When a pair of flash lights and two machetes blinked into the game much the way Letta had earlier, he stepped up to take one of each before the blinking stopped and the items fell to the ground as Letta did the same by his side. “Okay. We're going to have to keep moving fast enough not to sink or let the vines grab us. You ready?”

Letta shook her head, but didn't say that there was no way she could ever be “ready” for something like that and that running toward that structure went against every instinct in her being. “On three?”

A forced, but firm nod and Todd took a deep breath, beginning to walk in the direction of the “building”. “One.”

Matching his pace, Letta tucked the flash light, which was more compact this time, into her pocket before reaching out to take the boy's hand again. She still wasn't sure if it was for his reassurance or her own. “Two.”

Todd quickly copied her move, putting his own light in his pocket and taking the trembling hand into his own. “As soon as you need to, get out. I'll be okay.” Her hand tightened on his, and he returned the squeeze once more before letting go. “Three. Go!”

“You two, spread out! Duck under the knives when those things make a circle, and cut off their arms! They'll fall over!”

Obeying the gamer's command without much thought, which was easy when her brain felt so numb, Letta went to the far right while Todd went to the left. The red creatures appeared to notice them when they got within a few yards of their wandering, turning their too-round heads in their directions as their large, black eyes tried to zero in. Instead of coming straight for them, they turned in imperfect circles, dragging the long knives, which occasionally scraped across the ground, cutting shallow lines of blood on each side of their bodies.

Once up close, she could see that the creatures were all about eight feet tall. They looked a bit like humans, turned to gelatin and stretched. Underneath probably an inch of the blood-gel, they seemed to be made of the same red sinews that grew up from the ground, though those vines weren't growing this close to the structure, probably because the blades would continuously cut them apart.

As the creatures advanced in their strange manner, Todd waited until the nearest was just close enough, and just at the right angle, so that he could do as the purple-haired girl said, ducking under the long knife. When he came out from under the arm on the other side, the creature swung its second knife higher and faster, barely missing him as he jumped out of the way. He rolled on his side, getting to his feet as quickly as possible in order to duck under another knife before he was cut.

This time, right after the first knife passed, he held the laser machete up with both hands, surprising himself at how easy it was to cut through the thin flesh of the thing's arm. He felt a little sick in the pit of his stomach when the creature swirled around to face him, its gel covered mouth opening in an unheard scream. It fell forward, forcing the boy to fall on his back and land a hard kick to its chest to push it back and over before it landed on him. The fallen body slowed down some of the others as they had to cut through it with their knives before coming after him, and he took advantage of this to run as fast as he could to the entrance of the human reef.

Letta was relieved to find Todd already waiting anxiously for her at the bottom of the white enclosure where there was a large, dark opening. He seemed to have fared slightly better than her. He was covered in blood, again, but was otherwise unmarked. She had a nasty gash down her left arm where one of the creatures had grazed her with its blade as it fell, but even though it hurt like a bitch, it didn't seem too serious.

“Squee,” she whispered breathlessly, “I don't think they can see us here.” She spared a short look for the circling creatures, which were now several yards away from the entrance and seemingly ignoring them.

Grimacing sympathetically at the gash that stained the torn sleeve of the young woman's blue shirt a dark red, but knowing that there was nothing he could do to make it better at the moment, Todd retrieved his flashlight from his pocket, shining the light into the opening. “Yeah, I noticed.” That had actually been a little too easy. This was definitely a trap, but something was telling him to keep going. He had to get to the top level.

“So, we're really going in there?” Adding her own light to the darkness, Letta was only slightly shocked to see that an underground river surfaced from under bone-like rocks at only a few feet past the mouth of the structure. The water was so dark that nothing under the surface could be made out, but stranger still was that the river seemed to be flowing against gravity, uphill.

“We have to. Or I do anyway. Watch the first step. We need to move to the side before the water starts.” With that said, Todd took the first step into the darkness, feeling the skull-shaped rocks shift under his weight as he moved along the bank of the river for what might have been about thirty steps. Finally, there was some type of ground and he stepped onto it, shining his light ahead as Letta followed.

Releasing a deep sigh as she took a few careful steps away from the river, Letta bent down to gently scrape her fingers against the ground, just to make sure it was really there. Something about this place made her feel off balance, not just physically, but mentally. It was like nothing that she had ever learned applied to this place, but it was there, everywhere, at the center of things. A shiver ran down her spine as what passed for sand cut into her fingers. “Ouch! Ground bone...”

“Letta, get up.” Todd wished that he had a third hand to place on the girl's shoulder as he stood a little ahead of her, facing a very, very old man whose face, or at least the right side of it that was exposed to him, seemed to be split into many segments because the age lines ran so deep. His plaid shirt and white dress shorts stuck out in the stygian surroundings in much the same way as his one bulbous, yellow and bloodshot eye protruded from its socket to an unnatural degree.

Shaking most of the particles free from her bleeding fingers, the young woman rose to her feet, her eyes widening as they passed over the deformed being, which so far had remained perfectly still. He seemed to be resting in place, hunched over on a cane that had once been a human leg, but was now stripped of any meat, its skeletal foot grasped tightly in aged hands. It shouldn't have held together at the joints, but obviously the usual laws of the universe didn't apply here. Her posture became more rigid. She could have sworn that something beneath the huge tumor on his hairless forehead had just moved. No. Not moved. Crawled.“Squee, what is that thing?”

“Grandpa Hatey.” His light traveled down the old man's body quickly to land beside his feet on another relic: an old, dusty, wooden boat. “Charon. The ferryman.”

“Your grandfather is a Greek god?”

“No. Of course not. It's just the role; it's symbolic.” He shook his head at the silly extrapolation. But at least she knew who Charon was. To be honest that was kind of surprising in itself. “Besides, do you think a Greek god would look like that?”

“Ha. No. Why does he look like that? I've never seen anyone look that old.” The humor was forced and hollow.

They both jumped back when the light snoring suddenly came to an abrupt stop and the old body began to move in jerky, mechanical twitches like the old animatronics that Bloaty's used to frighten small children.

Sparks shot from the joints of Grandpa Hatey's legs, arms and neck as he stood up, but remained hunched, slowly turning around to face the two newcomers full on. “I'll tell you why I look like this!” A thin, too-straight finger shot out in Todd's direction. “Cause I's 'pouse to eat all my youngins first born! Orders from above, ya know? Just like with that little orange kitten. But he tripped me up, so now I don't look young and purdy no more! Didn't ya, boy?”

At the sight of the old man's face, which was missing from most of the left side where the skin looked to have been peeled off of an underlying metal skull, Letta dropped her flashlight to the ground. Quickly, she bent down to retrieve it before backing up even more. “He's not human.”

“That's right, girly, I's got enough metal in me that I might as well be a cyborg! And you can't kill cyborgs, can you, boy! Hehehehe!”

Todd's face scrunched up in disgust and fear as his grip tightened on his blade. “Listen, we know that you're not really Hatey, so are you going to take us over or not?”

“Don't take that tone of voice with me, boy! I might eat ya yet! Do you two got payment for passage? Cause if not, I bet some of my quarters are still in your greedy head! How’s about I collect ‘em with my dinner, eh?”

“I never had your quarters, you crazy, smelly, old bastard!” Wait! No. He needed to calm down, stay level headed. This wasn't his grandfather. This whole thing was too much like a dream, even while being too realistic for comfort. It was so easy to forget that it was an illusion, so difficult to stay lucid. “Err. I mean, yeah, we can pay. Hold on a minute.”

Before he even had time to pull Letta aside and ask the others for coins, four shiny, new quarters appeared before him. Despite the horrible situation, he smiled a little. “Thanks, Gaz. You think I could get a holster for the machete too?”

“Yeah, yeah. Hold on, you little whiner. I wouldn't get in the boat with him, by the way.”

The old man's one eye ball twitched. “Who you talking to boy? Where'd them coins come from, eh! I bet they come from your ears! You got all my money in that head of yours, don't ya! DON'T YA!” His tongue slipped out to run hungrily across sharp metal that rose slightly above his nearly toothless gums as he took a few swift steps toward Todd, making more sparks fly from the joints in his legs.

Grabbing the coins out of the air, Todd stepped back a pace before swinging his blade through “Hatey's” cane, which promptly fractured at an angle and fell apart.

The old man was sent hurling to the ground, landing roughly in the bone-based sand. He let out a pained groan as Todd kicked the remains of the walking stick away.

“Sorry, you're not coming along.” After making use of his new holster, the boy tossed four silver coins to the ground beside the man. “You know, orders from above.” He made a wide half-circle around the aged man to avoid his grasping hands on his way to the modest boat, taking the long navigating pole from its place as Letta boarded. Hopping on himself, he used the wooden pole to push off from the shore, letting the current move them up and back, away from the mouth of the structure.

As the boat drifted toward the middle of the river, Todd had to put more pressure into maneuvering as well as having to lean down to reach the bottom. Every now and then, he felt the pole bump against something in the water. Some of the objects seemed to float on the surface like dead bodies, while others would hiss and slither away or attempt to eat the pole until he was forced to shake them off vigorously.

He had tucked his own flashlight back into his pocket to use both hands to steer, guiding the boat instead by the meager luminance that Letta's provided as she shined her own from her seated position behind him. Because her light focused on the walls and surrounding shore of the structure, he couldn't see much of what was in the water in front of him, but he thought this might have been for the best. The sight of the alien-like life forms stretching in impossible angles to consume each other, sometimes without even possessing mouths for the process, on the banks was scary enough.

“Squee, where are we going?”

“I dunno. Not to the other side. That would be pretty stupid. Down the river somewhere, I think. Or up, I guess.” Technically, they had been following the current to an increasingly higher elevation for what could have been a matter of minutes or hours now. The slope of the river was gradual, and the river itself seemed to curve in varying degrees. Todd knew this instinctively from steering, but to Letta the progress was probably indiscernible.

The young woman sighed lightly to herself, partly out of frustration, but mostly to drown out the sound of what was probably some kind of tentacle monster tapping its appendages against the sides of the rotting wood that separated them from the dark water. Shifting the stream of light to the source of the tapping, she cringed as her suspicions were confirmed when she was met with a pair of yellow eyes that blinked at her with two sets of lids while arms with sharp spines clung to the boat. She apprehensively scooted over as much as the small space would allow.

“Letta, light!” Todd turned around to glance at the creature that was stealing the spotlight that should have been directed at where they were going. “What is-” He paused as the air shifted to his left and a small shriek bounced off of the walls. “Something is flying around in here.” Tightening the grip of his left hand on the pole, he retrieved his own flashlight, attempting to locate that “something”. Several more shrieks sounded in the distance, but the creatures were too fast for him.

“Oh, relax. It's probably just...,” the girl paused as Todd's light passed over what, in the darkness, had appeared to be a large stalactite, “bats.” She locked eyes with the pale and hairless being as the boat slowly drifted by. The creature was hanging upside down, attached to a formation that resembled a canine tooth, almost touching the dark water. It would have passed for a gargoyle if not for the head that turned red eyes in their direction, following their movement with a kind of acknowledgment.

“Yeah. Bats.” Just as Todd felt they had passed the giant, eerily human-looking bat by a safe distance, another screech sounded. This time it was louder, maybe because it was closer, but by the sound, probably because it was in pain. Quickly, he shone the light to his right. Once again, he failed to find the bat, but what he did find nearly had him losing his hold on the pole.

Brown eyes traveled appraisingly from the top of a blue-green, iridescent head of hair to a porcelain face with full, ruby lips that it framed. The hair came to several dead ends just below lithe shoulders and just above a pair of firm, naked breasts. Further down, scales that matched the hair in color merged smoothly with the skin to disappear beneath the water where a webbed hand with pointed fingers emerged to beacon them.

While Todd did nothing to answer the beacon call, he also did nothing to steer them out of the course that was indeed taking them in her direction. The pole scraped loosely against the bottom of the river as the boat moved, bringing them within mere feet of the mermaid. “She's so...”

“Beautiful.” Letta picked up his lingering sentence with an awed, far away tone. “You know, I had stopped believing that they were real.” Despite the persistence of the tentacle monster and his unsavory endeavors, she had moved back to the edge of the right side of the boat to be closer to the magical being before them, whose face remained majestically serene as her webbed hand reached for them.

“No, no, no! Back up, idiots! Don't get close to that thing! Don't get close to anything! I don't know how many lives you have left!”

Todd shook his head as if trying to clear it of a fog. He found himself suddenly dizzy. Everything that was happening seemed to be muffled, at a distance from reality. Gaz's words made sense, but they didn't seem to matter. The mermaid was very pretty, but something was off about her. Her face wasn't expressive enough. Her eyes never sought contact with their own. Her fingers were practically claws: the signature of a predator. But it was hard to really care.

His eyes widened as he recognized that familiar feeling that was so much like what he had felt on Pepito's couch. The thing was manipulating them, lulling them into complacency to get them close. He forced himself to turn away from the thing, to imagine the current of clean air clearing away the fog again. It took three good tries, but he finally managed it, his fear mounting as the danger of the situation hit him again. “Letta, get back!”

“Shh, Squee, you're going to scare her away.”

“Good!” He wanted to hit her with the stick when she stuck out her own hand toward the outstretched mermaid's because he couldn't let it go to pull her back. Instead, he settled for kicking her in the shin so that she fell on her butt in the boat just as the mermaid's placid mouth opened as wide as his father's had earlier.

The pained sound that the girl had opened her mouth to voice turned into a cry of fright as a second head, covered in blue-green scales like the rest of the body, shot out of the alluring being's mouth to lunge forward, baring rows of sharp teeth as it bit into the tentacle monster on the side of the boat. The vacant, large black eyes of the false head of the mermaid stared unseeing ahead as the monster hissed and then screamed as it was devoured and dragged back into the first mouth.

Todd's flashlight fell to the bottom of the boat as he grabbed the pole with both hands, pushing off as hard and fast as he could. As he did so, images of the creature flashed through his mind. Up close, just before the lunge, he had been able to make out very small, light scales that only gave the illusion of skin. It was all fake. All of the beauty was an adaptation to lure in humanoids: to lure in prey. A shiver ran down his spine at the thought. “Letta, give me some light! I can't see where we're going.”

Letta bent further down to pick up Todd's light, but just as she pointed the light beams in front of the boat, it came to an abrupt halt, sending them both tumbling forward. “Shit! I'm stuck in something!” She was still in the boat, but most of her upper body was suspended by red threads beaded in a sticky mucus. By the light that had fallen in a propped-up position on the bed of the boat, she could see that Todd was stuck in the same web-like strings that dangled from above, except that he had obviously been thrown out of the boat. He was now hanging just above the murky water, and the pole was nowhere in sight.

As soon as he took in the red appendages that held him up, Todd began to struggle against their hold. They were thinner and almost silky, but they were the same as the vines from outside the structure and from his room. There was no mistaking it. He swung his body back and forth, trying desperately to regain a hold on the boat, but then the tendons were moving, wrapping around his limbs and lifting him up and away from relative safety. His struggling came mostly to a stop as he stared up at the ceiling, making him suspect that the droplets of mucus on the strings contained a tranquilizing agent much like that of glowworm webs.

The vines were retreating into large cracks in the bone that they seemed to have broken through in order to fish for fresh blood. He could see Letta being lifted up after him as he neared a crack that he was apparently going to be forced through, but there was nothing he could do. He could barely move, and everything was getting fuzzy.

Notes:

--The name of this chapter is the name of the fic because this is kind of where the name is supposed to start making more sense. :) And it is a Blakean reference.

-“Problems in living” is a reference to the social constructionist view of sociologist Allan V. Horwitz in his book Creating Mental Illness, which is “a scholarly critique of our classification of mental disorders. Horwitz begins by stating boldly that many so-called mental disorders according to our current symptom-based system of classification are not really mental disorders at all, but normal responses to social stress, relationship problems, work or other problems in living, or social deviance that may be in some cases, culturally supported.” Source: http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cmi.html

-Word of the day: The adjective Stygian means "of or relating to the River Styx", and may also refer to anything that is dark and dismal. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx

--Just to avoid any confusion, the Styx was guarded by Phlegyas in most older versions of the myths, though Charon was the ferryman in some stories. But this is not supposed to be the actual Styx and there aren't multiple rivers like in Hades/Hell (where both ferrymen worked). I chose the allusion to Charon instead of Phlegyas because the depictions of Charon have been more in line with Hatey than those of Phlegyas.

Squee and Invader Zim characters belong to Jhonen Vasquez.