Chapter 3: Welcome to the Flip Side

With a jolt that’s more mental than physical, I slip through the solid bottom of the boat and back into the water. I sink like a statue flanked by the erratic blackbirds. The medium’s completely wrong but I’m falling backwards at a skydiver’s terminal velocity: sixty meters per second. I can tell because I used to be into motorcycles. But riding is nothing compared to this. Nothing can ever compare to this. I’m being sucked down a maelstrom of hissing, exploding water; a human bowling ball down a slide that stretches all the way to the bottom of the sea.

I feel an intolerable amount of pressure and pain building against the tissues of my middle ear. Then I hear a light pop – hard to tell if real or imagined – followed by a gushing feeling of relief as cool water flows past the bleeding eardrum on either side of my skull.

I slide out of the sunlight into the twilight zone, two hundred meters below surface, and on till I finally pass the bluest zone of the sea that divers only dream of. I come to a world where every last thing that’s good and hope-bearing has been snuffed out. Because I chose to ignore my deco stop earlier, my dive computer has shut down and is now completely useless. I streak on farther down to a place where creatures don’t need eyes to live in the absolute darkness.

Deeper still… about a full minute of free fall…

… a minute and fifteen….

… a minute and thirty…

At this point I should be about half as far as James Cameron has reached; that is, inside a steel submarine with 2.5 inch-thick walls. Certainly deeper than is humanly possible. I’m in the Hadal Zone, named after the Greek god Hades and where the pressure should equal a ton on every centimeter of flesh. The ocean’s deepest level, six thousand meters under.

My back slams down against some firm but bouncy surface. I strain my eyes to see in the perfect darkness and, oddly enough, I’m greeted by dazzling light.

A solitary, unnatural glow is being held out to me like a lifeline. A nagging suspicion in my brain tells me this is exactly how a false hope would look if it ever took on a form. I’m in a dream inside another dream, a pocket of illusion that’s much too deep for me to surface out of.

There’s no other explanation than that an underground river flows in the center of the earth because I’m lying flat on another boat. A gas lamp is dangling from the boatman’s hand but it’s kind of sickening to watch because I can’t tell where the lamp ends and where his limb begins. The walls of the lamp also look like they were made right out of human skin, making the light muted and mutated. The word that pops up in my head is: {Anglerfish}.

This last thought, combined with the mounting feeling of vertigo ever since my eardrums shattered, proves too much for me. I spring up and vomit into the river.

“Now, now, you wouldn’t want to rock the boat too hard,” the ferryman, an old man in a brown hooded robe, warns in the voice of a man half his age and thrice his size. “Those aren’t fish you’re feeding, miss.”

My ears still seem to be functioning properly. With my head hanging over one side, I can all at once make out that the bloodless whiteness under the water is in fact a field of corpses packed shoulder to shoulder. Despite the boatman’s warning, I disgorge more of yesterday’s dinner. My eyes are tearing and my last meal is dripping down from my mouth in stringy bits.

The old man laughs as he rows with powerful, fluid strokes. I wipe my lips with the back of my hand. “Who are you and what is this place?”

“Fear not,” the boatman speaks unctuously. “You’re in the good, steady hands of your humble servant Kharon. I guarantee you safe passage. The peace you seek lies on the other side, just across the River of Woe.”

{Peace? Is that what I'm here for?} I think to myself. My head feels like a jar full of flies, noisy and furious. The stranger’s manner of speaking also hits me with an intense feeling of déjà vu. I feel certain that I’ve seen or even met this old man before, which is a virtual impossibility so my brain defaults to the explanation that it has all transpired inside yet another dream, and this last thought incredibly complicates things.

My head’s reeling as I take in my twilit surroundings. But something else pulls my attention back to the water. The bodies are not alone. I manage to isolate a few ribbony, luminous-white creatures twisting just beneath the surface, similar to jellyfish tentacles in constitution but each of them shaped like a giant polliwog with a shriveled head. The reason I didn’t notice them sooner is because they sort of overlap in their sheer number and they’re employing a form of camouflage. What’s white is actually their underbellies while the skin on their backs and the stuffing of their bodies are diaphanous enough to show me the bottom of the river, affording and shutting off glimpses as they writhe and roll.

The water’s teeming with them: a phalanx of living strips that switch luminescent then invisible, luminescent, invisible. One could even mistake them for the stuff the unreal river is made of, the water itself that buoys and carries the boat.

“What are they?” I ask, mesmerized.

“Discarded Umballici. Discordant chords. Possibilities and connections you’ve once had with others of your kind; now unrealized, now severed. They’re coming home to be crushed by the one great force that created them. They all wash up in the Drain of the World, towards the mouth of Spinstra’s Cave at river’s end.”

Spin-what? The water is moving so idly it almost looks stagnant. It eddies in places and occasionally pulls some of the white stuff under, only to burp it out again with a horrid noise. Swamp or river, the water might as well be a vat of toxic waste considering the lifeless bodies waiting at the bottom. I turn my attention to the banks where a jungle looms, thick and primordial.

“… a small price to pay for such express service...”

I understand the general idea of what Kharon’s going on about but it makes as much sense as the tangled worms of logic in a dream, which is what this is – or so I keep trying to convince myself. I forgo asking any other questions but as it is indeed with dreams or nightmares, the most fearsome character is the one who can read your thoughts. One eye glows like a cat’s from deep within Kharon’s hood.

“Certainly you know what an obolus is,” the old man thunders as he rises like a storm cloud at the opposite end of the boat. “You have family and friends. Or are you an orphan?”

With the agility of a much younger man, Kharon pounces on me to part my jaws and grope INSIDE my mouth. His uncanny strength strikes terror into me and all the muscles in my body turn flaccid in his grip.

“Nothing! Then you shall wait a hundred years ashore like the rest!”

Kharon’s nails grow long and talonlike and they cut deep, nasty gashes down both my cheeks. His hood thrown back, it reveals wispy hair on a mostly bald pate and the drooping jowls of a tramp. But though one eye turns to focus on me, the other remains unbudging, replaced with a modern-looking device that’s a cross between a monocle and a sniping rifle’s scope crudely wedged in the knothole that is his eye socket. Kharon’s grinning with wonky shark teeth and the stench of a vulture’s beak.

He capsizes his own boat.

Thousands of bubbles rise to meet me as I crash and flail underwater. Now I’m treading, fighting back panic. Some of the oversized polliwogs have gotten stuck to my hair and arms and they’re all squirming to be free and far from the commotion I’ve stirred up on the surface. The creatures emit tiny, dying squeaks as they burst at my touch, rapidly clearing the water within a one-meter radius of me. I know I should propel myself to the riverbanks but before I can put thought to action, the corpses reach out of the water with their tender, wrinkly hands.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a metallic glint that’s foreign to the thicket on the banks. This detail pierces my consciousness because I thought Kharon had materialized over there, but ferryman and ferry look undisturbed and have carried on along the water. I can hear the old man laughing at my plight and make out the huddled shapes of other passengers on the ferry. How I could’ve missed all those people in one small boat no amount of logic could ever explain.

The discovery races through my brain: there’s another entity present in the scene. Not sure if the surge of adrenalin in my veins is giving me hallucinations but I see four metallic objects superimposed on the figure’s face – like two pairs of goggles worn simultaneously, suggesting an insectile mask. I picture a long-haired, willowy AI-generated steampunk nymph, half her face swallowed by two pairs of eyes that warp her softness into something harsh and unsettling. I’m all out of time to indulge the fantasy.

A dozen icy arms smother and drag me under. I can hear Kharon’s fading laughter as I cough and gasp for air. It dimly occurs to me that this is the second time I’m drowning in the same day. The last thing I see is the bold flash in the jungle as my voyeur eagerly watches me die.