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9.
Alex’s eyes adjusted to the dim light.
Glowing things were stuck to the walls. At first he thought they were Art Deco wall sconce lights. When he examined them more closely, he found they were glowing sponges or fungi. They were glowing mushrooms; he recognized their layered shapes. He drew away in disgust. But he lingered a little, fascinated by how his hand glowed in their eerie light. He went from mushroom to mushroom, waving his hand—here yellow, there green, in a few places amber. He wondered if they were edible, and remembered horror stories of poisoning. Never eat wild mushrooms, a voice said in him. Then again, perhaps it would be better to end his life here, now, as it began, before any more pain, any other horrors.
Outside, if that was the right word, somewhere, the beasts roared his name in their language.
The water around his feet fascinated him. It was neither warm nor cold—it was almost exactly human body temperature, and filled with fine, lacy green kelp that resembled stringy spinach. At first he was repulsed, but when he touched the water and sniffed his finger, he found it had a faintly pleasant, clean taste almost like parsley. Yes, somewhere between parsley—and oats. They had oats in their barn in New York... what was he thinking? Heart beating fast with longing, he had a fleeting glimpse of a barn, and a horse with a girl on it—Maryan Shurey at 14, long-limbed, blonde, in jeans and a flowing white shirt, laughing as she waited for him to mount his horse Baldwin—how did he know these things?
His hands hurt where the Other had bitten him, his stomach bled where it had gored him with its teeth and claws, bits of his intestines hung out along with rotting chunks of torn umbilical cords and cheesy cakes of that wart-like mass through which the feeding had gone. At times, he doubled over with pain, holding this squishy pulp that sprawled on his gut like a twenty-pound tumor.
Always, whenever his mind wandered into the past, into his past or someone else’s past, he wasn’t sure, he heard that powerful throaty roar. The beast was somewhere close by. Its roar was strong enough so he could feel it in his frame. It sounded as if it had its snout to the ground—was there an opening, a door, a way in and a way out? He sensed its terrible and one-track intelligence. It had him and only him on its dog or bear-sized mind.
He was thirsty, so he knelt and drank. If the water wanted to kill him, let it. But it was sweet water, pleasant tasting, with a faint almost anise tinge, just enough to seem astringent without burning. Because of the dim lighting, he could not see well, but now he realized there was a film on the water, a bubbly sludge, that smelled like sweet kelp. The sludge had the same pleasant taste as the water. After a while, when it didn’t kill him—in fact, he felt great—he knelt down in the water and ate handfuls. He ate slowly, gingerly, and with increasing gusto. It didn’t feel much different from eating watery vegetable soup, or maybe oatmeal, and it filled the stomach.
With his most dire needs met, he explored around his environment more and more. He now realized that he was not yet thinking clearly. For example, did he not hope somehow to find sunlight and fresh air? He was a newborn, and he longed for a mother’s touch more than he cared about breaking out of the safety of this dark cocoon.
Perhaps he already sensed the utter hopelessness of his situation, and wanted to avoid confronting the truth.
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