Page 87 of Inkpot Gods

“Are you two done debating the nature of plurality back there?” asks Dodger, voice sour. Roger returns his focus to her. She has her hand on the latch of the door at the end of the chamber, which isn’t a knob, but is one of those long crash bars usually found in theaters and public gathering spaces.

“We are,” says Roger.

“Cool.” Dodger pushes the bar inward, and reveals a chamber of horrors.

The room is large. That’s the least offensive thing about it, and so it’s the first thing that any of them take notice of. It’s a good-sized space, big enough to host ten or fifteen people without becoming overly cramped. It’s bigger than their kitchen, and they pretty regularly cram eight people in there. This was a working space before it was abandoned: even with the red runner lights painting everything slick and bloody, the various workstations and desks are obvious, although all of them have the same smooth, undifferentiated texture, like they’ve been wrapped in some sort of packing material by the people who used to work here.

Then the overhead lights crackle and come on, washing the red light out with white, and it becomes impossible to continue to deny what they’re standing in the middle of. There are cages along the walls, most closed, all empty. The floor is springy because they’re standing on top of a layer of what looks like pale human skin, waxy and bloated-looking, like a drowning victim. That same skin extends up the walls and over the workstations; it’s been ripped loose where they came through the door, opening a wound like a picked-off scab. Layers of damage and recovery show there, and that manages to pierce Roger’s horror with a new piece of information, which embeds itself even as his mind tries to reject it—if it’s been hurt enough to already be healing in places, they’re not the first ones here.

The rich, meaty smell of the space is explained. The skin has pores, little imperfections. Surely it also has glands, waxy patches, places where its essential animal nature can come through.

Judy almost drops her peach pit, eyes going wide with bemusement and disgust. “What is this?” she asks. “Roger…”

“We found the animals, and maybe the alchemists, too,” says Dodger, top lip curling back from her teeth as she looks around. “I have no idea what could have done this to them. Something they probably thought was really clever right up until they felt themselves being absorbed into the greater whole.”

“This is … wrong,” says Roger, hollow horror in his voice. “We need to go.”

“Yes, we do,” says Dodger. She turns back toward the door, and stops dead. The torn skin is already sealing over, becoming just another flat section of the wall; it’s happening so fast that she can virtually see it, see the muscle below the skin knitting itself back together.

(And what does a cavern of flesh need with muscle? The question is small, nagging, and terrible. If this is just skin and tissue made of liquified alchemists and their research subjects, it shouldn’t need any muscle. It has no reason to move.)

“Roger…”

“Shit,” says Roger. He freezes for a moment, clearly overwhelmed by the situation, then says, in a voice that leaves no room for argument, “You need to open for me.”

The flesh over the door continues to heal.

Roger takes a deep breath. When he tries again, his voice has subharmonics the human voice shouldn’t be able to convey, shadows and impossible distortions. “I command you to open, laboratory door. I am ready to leave.”

The door keeps healing.

“I … That always works,” says Roger. It doesn’t matter that the door doesn’t have any ears (or maybe it does, and that would be so much worse, somehow, than the alternative); the universe can hear him, and that means the universe should listen when he speaks. It always has before. People have come apart under his command, breaking down into their component pieces. Walls have fallen. Bullets have stopped, robbed of their kinetic energy.

“Maybe the rules are different here for some reason,” says Judy. “Like when we’re inside the everything.”

“Or maybe this is where we need to run,” says Dodger. She grabs hold of Roger’s arm and whirls, running deeper into the cavernous depths of the fleshy horror.

Roger grabs Judy’s hand in his own, dragging her along as Dodger pulls him in her wake, rapidly leaving the room where they initially arrived behind.

The door to the menagerie level is locked when Lilianne first tries the knob. She frowns before she tries again, wiggling it against the strange resistance she’s feeling. It’s not the feeling of a latch being thrown; there’s too much torque for that. It’s just like something is stopping it from turning, even when it naturally should.

“What’s wrong?” asks Smita.

“I don’t know,” says Lilianne, and twists harder. This time the knob obliges, rotating until there’s a strange popping sound, like a chicken bone being twisted out of its socket and finally ripping loose. The knob turns fully, and the door swings a few inches inward.

The smell that follows is bloody and carnal, carried by a gust of unusually warm, moist air. When it hits Lilianne’s skin she recoils, briefly convinced that the next time she looks at her hands, she’ll find them covered in a fine spray of bloody spots. Smita doesn’t seem to notice. She pushes on into the darkened entryway, walking toward the door at the far end.

It doesn’t resist her. When she shoves against the crash bar, the door pushes easily open, accompanied by a horrifying ripping, like someone has sliced halfway through a raw pork chop and is now tearing it in half. The room on the other side is bathed in white light, mingled equally with the warning red.

“Come on,” says Smita. She steps through.

Lilianne follows.

The room beyond—the menagerie level proper—is wrong. Everything is clean and polished, the floor made of metal grating that opens onto a vast drop down into deeper darkness below them, the walls studded with chrome and metallic plates, all of which are perfectly spotless. It feels like something out of a science fiction movie, or—

“What is this, a Resident Evil remake?” asks Lilianne, voice low and bewildered. “If anything moans, I’m leaving.”

“Noted,” says Smita.