Read Online Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea by Caitlin R. Kiernan - Free Book Online

creature’s gut and stood, half-blind, blinking up at towering ebony spires and soaring arches and stairways that seemed to reach almost all the way to the stars. The music poured from this black city, gushed from every window and open doorway, and I sank to my knees and cried.
    “You weren’t ever meant to come here,” Sailor said, and I realized she was standing over me. “You weren’t invited.”
    “I can’t do this shit anymore,” I sobbed, for once not caring if she saw my weakness. “I can’t.”
    “You never should have started.”
    My tears turned to crystal and fell with a sound like wind chimes. My heart turned to cut glass in my chest.
    “Is this what you were looking for?” I asked her, gazing up at the spires and arches, hating that cruel, singing architecture, even as my soul begged it to open up and swallow me alive.
    “No. This is only a dream, Dorry,” she said, speaking to me as she might a child. “ You made this place. You’ve been building it all your life.”
    “No. That’s not true,” I replied, though I understood perfectly well that it was, that it must be. The distance across the corpse-littered crater was only half the diameter of my own damnation, nothing more.
    “If I let you see, will you go back?” she asked. “Will you go back and forget me?” She was speaking very softly, but I had no trouble hearing her over the wind and the music and the wheezing Laskar coils. I must have answered, must have said yes, because she took my hand in hers, and the black city before us collapsed and dissolved, taking the music with it, and I stood, instead, on a low platform in what I at first mistook for a room. But then I saw the fleshy, pulsing walls, the purple-green interlace of veins and capillaries, the massive supporting ribs or ridges, blacker than the vanished city, dividing that place into seven unequal crescent chambers. I stood somewhere within a living thing, within something that dwarfed even the fallen giants from the crater.
    And each of the crescent chambers contained the remains of a single gray pilgrim, their bodies metamorphosed over months or years or decades to serve the needs of this incomplete, demonic biology. They were each no more than appendages now, human beings become coalesced obligate parasites or symbiotes, their glinting, chitinous bodies all but lost in a labyrinth of mucosal membranes, buried by the array of connective tissues and tubes that sprouted from them like cancerous umbilical cords.
    Anglerfish. Is it one word or two?
    And there, half buried in the chamber walls, was what remained of Sailor, just enough left of her face that I could be sure it was her. Something oily and red and viscous that wasn’t blood leaked from the hole that had been her mouth, from the wreck of her lips and teeth, her mouth become only one more point of exit or entry for the restless, palpitating cords connecting her with this enormous organism. Her eyes opened partway, those atrophied slits parting to reveal bright, wet orbs like pools of night, and the fat, segmented tube emerging from the gap of her thighs began to quiver violently.
    Can you see me now, Dorry? she whispered, her voice burrowing in behind my eyes, filled with pain and joy and regret beyond all comprehension. Have you seen enough? Or do you need to see more?
    “No,” I told her, waking up, opening my eyes wide and vomiting onto the floor beneath my bunk. The Laskar coils had stopped wheezing, and the crawler was no longer moving. I rolled over and lay very still, cold and sick and sweating, staring up at the dingy, low ceiling until the prospector finally came looking for me.
     
    When I left home back in Aries, I brought the monk’s book with me, the book from Sailor’s crate of discards. I sit here on my bedroll in one corner of one room inside the concrete and steel husk of a bombed-out federal compound in Lowell. I have come this far, and I am comforted by the knowledge that there’s only a