Chapter 36: Conquest

It still wasn’t raining when Violet stepped through the vines and back into the light of an early afternoon. The clouds had thickened and the air felt denser, but the storm had still not arrived.

She put both arms into the air and stretched with a faint groan. A persistent metallic taste lingered at the back of her tongue, the same one that had bothered her in the morning, and Violet decided to break out a packet of hard candies.

“Are we going back to the main road now?” She asked, faded cellophane crinkling between her fingers.

i -- c o u l d n ’ t -- f i n d -- a n y t h i n g -- e l s e ---- The beast said, almost apologetically.

Violet offered out a piece of candy, which was bright orange and shaped like a barrel. The beast politely accepted, fabric rippling with unhidden satisfaction. Watching this, Violet had a thought.

“Can you taste anything?” She asked, holding out another piece of candy.

The beast’s movements stuttered and it glanced quickly, almost ashamedly, away before shaking its head. The movement was quick and the beast suddenly looked embarrassed, as though it had been caught in a deception.

“Of course it can’t,” the cat said. “Your friend doesn’t have a tongue.”

While her companion’s words were blunt, Violet didn’t think they were intended to be malicious. She simply shrugged before turning her attention back to the beast.

“I know you can hear things,” she said. “And…um…can you feel it when I touch you?” Violet began to extend a hand but the beast drew back. The movement wasn’t sharp or skittish, instead it felt…weary.

When the beast spoke next its voice was quiet.

i .. . t h i n k -- i -- k n o w -- w h a t -- i t ’ s -- s u p p o s e d -- t o -- f e e l -- l i k e

There was silent for a long time afterwards. Violet winced to herself, feeling bad for having aired the questions. Next to her, the cat’s ears had begun to twitch. It looked troubled.

“You poor thing.” It said at last.

Violet looked up to where the beast had maintained its gaze. The grin of its skull was just as broad as ever, but there was a tension at the edges of it now, as though her new companion were trying its very hardest to try and emote differently.

w h e n -- i -- s e e -- y o u

t h a t ’ s -- w h a t -- b e i n g -- w a r m -- m u s t -- b e -- l i k e

Violet wasn’t at all sure what she could say in response to a thing like that. The beast’s words were earnest and she thought that it was trying to inject at least some joy into the sentiment, but beneath it all yawned a sea of such intense sadness and yearning that it completely stopped her breath.

The cat stared. Its gaze had become very careful and its posture weirdly tense.

“And when you look at me?” It asked.

The beast didn’t seem to have heard the cat, its attention focused on Violet.

y o u -- m a k e -- m e -- w a n t -- t o -- r e m e m b e r

m o r e -- a n d -- m o r e

“That’s good,” Violet said, then glanced quickly down at the packet of hard candies. “…These are kind of sour, you know? Like a lemon.”

s o u r ---- The beast echoed, then slowly opened its mouth.

Violet gave it another lozenge and this time the beast only nodded before gathering itself and then executing a tiny shiver, like a person riding out an unexpected flavor. With that done it looked to her for approval.

All the while a low but persistent crackle leaked from beyond the rippling folds of its fraying fabric.

“What did my machine remind you of?” Violet asked, and immediately the beast ducked its head, but whether it was ashamed or simply unwilling to give up the machine, Violet could not tell.

She stared, then crossed her arms to add weight to the gesture. This was something her mother did at home, and though Violet doubted she looked very imposing, the beast did seem to shrink a bit.

Finally, it made a noise that sounded very much like a sigh.

d o n ’ t -- k n o w ---- It admitted, and Violet blew out a disappointed breath.

The cat snickered from where it had been observing the matter from off to one side. Whatever unease it had felt was clearly past, at least so far as Violet could tell.

When she moved to walk back towards the main road, the beast passed silently by. Its natural pace was slightly faster than she herself could walk, and though Violet knew that it was trying not to leave her behind completely, the beast was quite distant by the time they’d returned to the side street the building was on.

“I won’t lie,” the cat said, stepping neatly into the silence before it could gather too thickly. “I thought your friend was about to take your face off for a moment there.”

Violet scoffed, unwilling to entertain the tiny tingle of concordant unease that rippled in sync with the cat’s words.

“It would never.” She said.

“Or….” The cat’s eyes had narrowed just a little. “Or it might have wanted to wear your skin like a poorly tailored suit. That would have been plenty warm.”

“Stop it.” Violet warned, and the cat fell back from its reverie with a not at all genuine glance of contrition.

“Remember,” her companion said. “If ever that thing decides to hurt you, there’s not much I’d be able to do to stop it.”

Violet said nothing, only turned stubbornly away, pointing herself due north once again. She hadn’t noticed it before, but imprinted upon the darkening clouds at the northern horizon were prismatic hints of a deepening azure. The Glow was rising.

“Let’s just go,” she grumbled. “And no more talking about this.”

“If you insist.” The cat sighed, then zipped into place atop her rucksack, deciding to spare itself the hike.

Rather than going back the way they’d come, Violet decided instead to walk down a new path, if only so wouldn’t have to see the cherry grove and its governing body of spiders again. It was a crooked road she now walked along, but she could see the reflection of the Glow against the northern clouds and knew she was going the right way based upon that alone.

“I wonder….” Violet began to say, then decided that she didn’t particularly want to talk to the cat.

Her companion flicked the back of her left ear with the tip of its tail.

“You wonder…?” It gently prodded.

Violet’s gaze slid away from the Glow and settled instead upon the ground. The pavement remained more or less intact and the grass and flowers only ran in loose seams along which cracks they could most easily take advantage of.

“I was wondering if the Glow could turn, um….” Violet gestured vaguely to where the beast was drifting well ahead, pulling a vanguard for her. “Could turn it back into a human.”

“Your list of requests for the Glow has expanded quite dramatically.” The cat observed.

“It’s only….” Violet caught herself before she could say any more.

The cat laughed.

“Only ridding the world of demons, monsters and funny looking plants,” it said. “No big deal, that.”

Violet puffed up, ready to protest that once the root of the problem was dealt with then the plants would surely return to normal on their own, but she managed to catch herself just in time. The cat was teasing her, and any retaliation would only result in a needless and, for the cat, very entertaining argument.

The buildings lining the street were lower than the glass constructions which crowded the main road, made of brick and stone. Most had survived in reasonable shape, but here and there buildings had lost the entirety of their front walls, each grand facade now little more than an uneven mass of ragged scree.

It was strange being able to see the interior construction of a building from the street, the floors and rooms all neatly sectioned off like the cells of a beehive. Pipes and wires dangled loose where ancient collapses had tugged them out of place. A skinny copper water pipe had been bent into a rough L shape and jutted sharply out over the street, a bouquet of mossy flowers sprouting improbably from its tip.

A rusted metal bed-frame hung halfway off the edge of a third story drop, but though it seemed ready to finish its plunge at any moment, Violet could see a tawny scattering of swallow’s nests built along its underside. From the nearest one came a tiny flutter of motion, an iridescently shimmering green bird flitting off to complete some distant errand.

“They’re a bit like hummingbirds,” the cat said, tracking Violet’s gaze. “Always in too much of a hurry to talk.”

“And I suppose you’ve eaten a lot of them?” Violet asked.

The cat laughed.

“You know me too well.” It said, then settled back down between her shoulders. Ahead, the street widened a bit, the lefthand side plunging down into the blackness of a sinkhole. Violet paused a few meters back from its edge and peered down. She could not see the bottom from where she was, the hole was too deep, but interrupting the opposite side, tracing the progress of the street above, she could see a subterranean tunnel, lined with brick. Its bottom was smooth and plated almost entirely with a sheen of something translucent and formless that was threaded all throughout with crimson tendrils of fungus. It reminded her a bit of chicken fat, or lard that had sat out for too long.

A smell rose from the tunnel, subtle yet pervasive, like the scent of a hot day just after a rainstorm. Yet there was something more to it, a hint of acridity and decay that sat in the bottom of her lungs.

In the depths of the tunnel something that was not quite physical shifted and began to stir.

For a moment Violet could not put together what she was seeing, then it clicked and she leapt back with a jolt, her stomach clenching. The cat lost balance and zipped quickly to the ground, a patch of fur between its shoulders standing straight up.

“Did you…?” Violet began to ask, glancing quickly down to her companion.

The cat had seen the fungus, and the ugly stuff it had been attached to, but that wasn’t what she was trying to ask.

“It’s still not paying any attention to me.” The cat said, voice clipped and uncomfortable.

Violet took a pair of steps back, until she was out of sight of the tunnel. Still, the edge of the sinkhole loomed, a sliver of descent still perfectly visible. Beyond it, at the very edge of her comprehension, Violet could feel the influence settling once more. It wasn’t leaving or even stepping aside, she realized now. The presence was always there, and whether it was growing stronger or she was simply becoming more attuned, she could feel that now.

She blinked hard and managed to drag her eyes free from the sinkhole’s edge, staring down at the cat. The throb at the front of her head seemed to slosh now.

“You don’t feel any of this?” Violet asked.

“It’s….” The cat hesitated. “It’s like seeing a hawk dive at a rabbit. I know it’s there, but it’s not happening to me.”

Violet said nothing. After a moment the cat nudged up against her knee.

“Should we go a different way?” It asked.

Violet forced her gaze past the sinkhole and down the street, to where the beast had taken notice of their stillness and was patiently waiting in the shade of a spindly cluster of aspens.

“No….” She sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

The cat looked to the sinkhole. Violet blew out a breath.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said again. “Because the monster knows what we’re doing…it can see us. Going another way wouldn’t do anything.”

The cat blinked hard, trying and failing to hide a little shiver of discomfort. It didn’t seem to know what to say. Looking away from her companion, Violet continued on, making sure to skirt well around the side of the sinkhole. But though she kept her eyes away and her thoughts guarded, a distantly massive shift still registered from across that unknowable space the influence occupied.

Violet shook her head sharply but only succeeded in sending a dull wave of pain pulsing back and forth. It was a muddying thing, the pain, dulling all thought and blocking her off from great swathes of the world.

She could still see and hear and sense, but what she did what all of that was entirely dependent on how much focus could be applied. Where before Violet had thought of the influence with a cool rationality, or what she assumed was that, now her thoughts came in splinters, unhinged by fatigue and fear and pain, none of which she assumed the influence had any comprehension of.

The cat was still looking at her, a carefully muted twinge of concern burning at the back of its gaze, so Violet made herself move and stepped determinedly past the sinkhole. There came no special grip upon her mind, no attempt by the monster to hold her in place, for she was not slipping beyond its grasp. Really, the grasp was always there, in the same way that the Glow was always in the sky, even if sometimes she noticed neither.

From up ahead the beast clicked its jaws, the noise small and hollow. It was trying to say something to her, Violet realized, but she was beyond its personal sphere of influence. The pull of its voice could not reach her, though she could feel the faintest edges brushing her mind like loose strands of spider’s silk.

It wasn’t like the suffocating insistence of the monster, Violet thought. The beast’s voice was gentle and somehow hesitant, like it was being very, very careful not to cause any distress.

As she approached, Violet assumed the beast would repeat itself, but whatever it had been about to say had clearly been reconsidered, for it ducked its bony head and drifted backwards and at an angle, sliding off into the shadows cast by the balconies of an apartment building on the lefthand side of the street.

There were strings and greasy streamers of crimson overhanging many of the lower balconies like icicles, some beaded with a gelatinous, unpleasantly opaque moisture. But if the beast noticed them or the omnipresence of the monster’s guiding influence, it gave no sign.

Perhaps, like with the cat, it simply wasn’t being targeted.

That supposition, logical as it was, still sent a distinct and chilly jitter of fear through Violet’s center. Suddenly she felt very small and alone, all too aware of just how far away she was from home and anything familiar.

Violet took a deep breath, working to steady herself, and picked up on a clinging rottenness riding the far edges of the air. She recognized it at once; a sickly odor of earthly decay. The smell of something dead.

Once, back home, something small had died in the dark labyrinthine curls of space that existed beneath her house. The scent of its decomposition had not been overpowering, but Violet had caught sour hints of it for weeks, until at last the process was finished. And in the nights, smelling the half sweet stench of that rot, Violet had entertained many quiet fears about demons.

She looked to the cat, blinking herself free of remembrance, but her companion only wrinkled its nose, offering no other acknowledgment.

“I think we’re almost back to the main path now,” it said. “And still no rain. We’ve been quite lucky today, I think.”

Violet nodded vaguely, but her thoughts were elsewhere, as was her gaze. The block they had just entered held an alarming preponderance of crimson fungus, not just the unsettling growths deforming the balconies. Where before she might have actively avoided looking for such signs out of fear, now Violet felt almost drawn to each new spot and splash of the horrible stuff by a desire to know what could possibly be coming.

And still the rotten smell grew ever more intense.

It was as they were passing a low brick building that Violet somehow knew they were approaching the source. She broke from her path and took a jagged step to the side, coming to a halt. The cat did a double take, began to say something, then sighed.

“There’s nothing in there that you want to see.” It said quietly.

Violet took a deep breath. The ground floor of the building before her was shaded by the ragged remnants of a tattered awning, the front wall dominated by a wide glass window that had somehow weathered the years intact. It had once been a shop of some kind, for Violet could see an old sign above the empty doorway, the words faded beyond legibility, all symbolism gone but for a stylized rose.

Was she looking at a flower store?

The mere thought of anyone ever having had sold flowers suddenly struck Violet as weirdly, improbably funny. She had to bite down a shrill yelp of frightened laughter.

Whatever the lushness of the surrounding area, the shop itself grew nothing but a few sickly gray vines. Threads and tendrils of fleshy crimson wound possessively over the dying foliage.

Shakily, drawn by a compulsion that she could not understand but still knew to be entirely her own, Violet approached the yawning emptiness of the shop’s doorway. The beast had drifted closer, noticing her sudden detour, but still said nothing.

The cat’s fur began to rise.

Violet stepped into the doorway itself, shreds of white linoleum crackling beneath her feet. The dimness ahead had become all encompassing, the smell of rot so intense that she felt sick.

Her eyes adjusted, bit by bit, and she could see a ghostly facsimile of the shop’s interior, helped along by what pale streamers of sunlight managed to pass through the grime caked front window. Great shrouds of ancient cobwebs hung in the far corners, so thoroughly interwoven with hair thin threads of red fungus that Violet knew somehow there were no spiders left in the whole place.

Ahead of her stood a counter, its surface choked with the shredded remains of old seed packets. Beneath the rot Violet could smell dry earth and the last lingering edges of what might have once been flowers.

She took another step forward and there, in the corner where the counter met the shop’s righthand wall, Violet’s eyes fell upon a great irregular mass curled into the shadows. The stench was pouring off of it so thickly that she knew it had to be something dead, but the outline of its form was so nonsensical that Violet could not match it to any creature real or imagined. Legs protruded, or fleshly suggestions that had once held familiar properties, but the skin had gone pale as water and the spaces where they bent and crooked held no logic. And there were heads, or at least the curves of animal skulls holding form beneath the sag and droop of decaying flesh, but Violet could see more than one, and more than one kind of skull at that, and through the eye sockets and the seams in the bone pushed great boles of swollen fungus.

At last she realized what she was looking at. Tangled into the corner before her, heaped into a pile like a discarded collection of broken toys, were false animals, dead for long enough that they had begun to melt into one another. Their fur had disintegrated and their flesh bloomed open in unspeakable ways to let loose the annihilating fungus that had grown within them.

There was a numbness now, for though Violet could feel a great buzzing horror at the edge of her mind, it could not quite contort into the right form to truly be comprehended. On some level she was thinking of the signal-box and the dire works she had beheld there, but on another there came a refutation, for at the box there had been a purpose to the horror, an arrangement deliberate and cool. This felt different, crude and uncaring, the animals themselves discarded.

And then Violet thought of the procession of false animals she’d seen winding their way through the field of electrical transformers, and the wolf in their midst that had finally reached its limits and collapsed ignominiously, callously abandoned by the very force that had marched it to its death.

Had there been a realization in the moments before life fled? Had the wolf known on some level what was happening to it? And was the same thing true here as well?

And still the influence, or some distant level of it, held sway over the empty shop, crouching low over its conquest as it spread and grew and consumed. There was no room for anything but it, Violet realized, and suddenly noticed that there were no flies or ants or any of the other typical harbingers of decay. Normally a dead animal would be stripped down to nothingness and returned to nature as a whole, but here the death was silent and still. Even the bacteria seemed to shudder at performing its biological function.

Now, more keenly than ever, Violet felt the wrongness of this, the perversion.

And, incomprehensibly, she felt angry. It was a sharp, shivery sort of anger, bright with fear, always right on the edge of guttering out completely. Yet this emotion endured, because Violet knew with a clear certainty that she was tired of being afraid.

She took off her rucksack and dropped to one knee, heart thrumming in her chest. A sort of unreality had settled over the world now, or at least the dim, corrupted interior of the shop. And though she thought that surely at any moment the insanity of what she was doing would settle in and force her to run away, that impulse never fully landed.

“Violet?” The cat asked from next to her, but its question barely registered.

Violet found her bottle of cooking oil and undid the cap, then stood and doused the whole horrible mess before her. A part of her cringed in expectation of some great roaring response, the full force of the influence brought to bear, but instead there only came a shiver, a tiny flicker of reaction that carried nothing recognizable.

And so Violet took her spark lighter with both hands, held it out like a sword, and scraped forth a bouquet of white hot sparks.

Suddenly the whole shop was lit sun bright, the shadows absolute, the full horror of what the influence had done searing into Violet’s eyes. Then the oil lit with a white, smokeless flame and she danced back, a sting of heat flaring across her knuckles.

In an instant the false animals and their occupier were consumed, fire crisping the fungal tendrils that had expanded across the wall of the shop. From the space beyond space there came a sudden contraction that felt weirdly like surprise. There was no pain to it, for Violet did not think the influence knew how to feel that, but rather a splintery sort of shock. Yet curling from beneath the incomprehension was a slow realization, for it was looking at her now, and knew exactly what she had done.

Violet tried to take a step back but butted up against her rucksack and toppled, the spark lighter bouncing back out through the doorway of the shop. She squirmed free of the rucksack and stared to her work. Through the curling shimmer of the flames Violet thought that she could see the fungus writhing, but that had to be a trick of the light. If it could move….

A sickness rose into the back of her throat, but before it could take form there was a noise rising beyond the point of hearing, into some space that felt halfway between sight and sound. Violet tried to grasp it but it felt as though the sky and the earth and all the other vast things that could not be fully seen by any one person were being swallowed.

And so was she.

There was still an image of the world before her, but it had been twisted somehow, the brightness of flame no deeper than a line of atoms painted over the skin of reality. It all felt so terribly fragile, even the inalienable firmness of the ground beneath her could not be counted on for Violet could feel that a part of her beyond physicality was being dragged down and down past all available depths. In a sense this was instruction, through for what she did not know, but for the same fact that it would happen to her no matter what happened or where she ran or who she sought safety with, for in all the frailties of reality there was nowhere she could be safe.

And then the fire curled down into the center of the crimson, where the influence’s pull originated, and the whole structure fractured like the decline of a generations long night.

In an instant Violet was back, sour curls of greasy gray smoke swirling across the ceiling above her, the flames licking upon the counter now, beginning to spread. Already the edges of the cobwebs had caught. She stared uncomprehendingly and for a terrible moment felt unable to put it all together. There was still a blankness past the fabric of all things for she could not put together what normalcy had ever been and the absence of that fundamental truth made her want to scream.

There was a sickness, and a horror, and a profound, soul tearing panic. The cat was next to her but it was turning jagged, frightened little circles and its fur was standing straight. For a moment Violet was sure that this would be the state of things, until the fire came and wrapped them in oblivion, but the cat’s eyes were bright and then it was in her lap, trying to speak but barely managing it.

“You need to get out of here.” It said at last and then was pushing hard at Violet’s side with the side of its head, compelling her to move.

There was enough familiarity there, in the sound of the cat’s voice and the warmth and softness of its fur that she grabbed her rucksack and stumbled out of the shop on rubbery legs, collapsing onto her knees in the grass outside. A sour pulse of nausea bent her nearly double and Violet retched weakly, but through her vision clouded with tears and her stomach lurched, nothing came up.

The beast hovered close, shivering like a sick animal, jaws clicking uselessly as it tried to come up with something to say. Violet could feel anxious little crackles of interference pinging like hailstones against the edges of her mind and could not help but flinch away from them. The beast saw this and fell back a pace, bony chin tucked into the fabric of its chest.

After a moment the cat, still trembling, came to Violet’s side and put a hesitant paw upon her knee.

“I felt it…what it was trying to do to you.” The cat said.

There was a desolate hollowness at the bottom of her companion’s voice that scared Violet worse than anything. She couldn’t think of anything that could possibly be said in response, her mind was blank, every bit of her completely hollowed out.

Even the smoke rippling from the empty doorway of the old flower shop couldn’t give her any comfort.

An icy droplet of rain plinked against the back of her neck and a moment later the beast drifted slowly back over as a light drizzle began to fall from the overcast sky. Violet sat slowly up and forced herself to take a deep breath.

“It’s fine.” She mumbled to herself, but the words felt hollow and she was suddenly, intensely aware that they were only sounds riding upon a warm current of air that could all too easily be snuffed out.

The beast looked up into the sky, thin runnels of rain rolling down the sides of its face, then silently held a sheet of its fabric over top of Violet. A steadily intensifying patter drummed against the beast’s form and Violet managed a tiny smile that she didn’t think was too shivery.

“Well,” said the cat after a moment. “If it didn’t want to kill you before, it definitely does now.”

Violet looked to her companion, but though she knew its words ought to have been frightened, she could not exactly manage to feel anything. On top of that, the cat’s assessment felt…wrong, somehow.

“Nothing’s changed.” She said, then collected her spark lighter from where it lay glinting in the grass, and slowly stood up.

The cat’s expression was one of distinct unease but Violet hardly noticed. She felt…not broken exactly, but disjointed in a way that was hard to quantify. The nature of things had not completely settled back into their ordinary mold.

“We’ll set camp early tonight,” her companion said after a moment, desperately trying to smooth the fear from its voice. “You’ll have a big supper, I’ll fetch some columbine blossoms for dessert…it’ll…it…Violet?”

“Yes?” Violet asked, gaze dropping to her companion.

The cat’s ears were twitching. Its fur had still not completely settled.

“Are you okay?” It asked.

“I don’t know.” Violet said.

The beast said nothing but Violet saw it duck its skull slightly. The cat looked elsewhere, quietly, helplessly aggrieved.