The Lamia

7-7

Dema worked her way free of the net, realizing that its folds had softened her fall and kept her from injury. She began to explore the bottom of the pit, and quickly learned that it was littered with bones. Ancient bones. Human bones.

At various points along the wall she raised herself up to the full extent of her long body, but the sides of the pit were steep and she could find no purchase. She explored the entire perimeter in this fashion, and found no way up, no openings, no access deeper into the cave. Unlike the cavern of her ancestry, there was no running water here, and no channels that had been carved by it. Like Lake Catemaco, this pit was formed of porous volcanic rock, and any water that chanced to enter would simply seep out through the bottom, leaving it dry. There was no way for her to escape.

She tried again to summon her shaman dream, to change her shape. But the dimming effect was still strong, even though the brujos were by now long gone. In fact it was stronger here among the bones than it had been above. She stopped trying to will herself into the shaman dream, and instead opened another aspect of her shaman awareness, the awareness that allowed her to tune in to a familiar, to learn another form.

As she had begun to understand, there were entities here. Many of them, associated with the ancient bones. But the only thing she could sense from them was the unending changelessness of their existence. Nothing changed here. Nothing had changed here in thousands of years. It was not simply that they had no hope of change. They no longer even had a concept of such hope.

And there were so many of them! Their sense, their certainty, of unending changelessness was so overwhelming that any attempt she could make to alter her own expectations of reality produced not the slightest ripple in the quantum sea of possibilities. She could not get even a hint of the agreement that normally came so easily to her. She will find no allies here, one of the brujos had said. And he was right. She was well and truly trapped.

She began to think of her sister Kore, how she had survived in snake form for ten long years in the drains and sewers of Chicago, living on rats and other vermin. Was that to be her own fate now? But there weren't even any rats down here. Unless a very foolish desert rat or rabbit came into the cave and tumbled over the edge, she would slowly starve to death, her snake-bones joining those of the ancients, as the brujos had predicted.

It would happen very slowly, she knew. In snake form she could survive for weeks, maybe months, without food or water. Her snake body's metabolism would simply shut down to a bare minimum. But that was little comfort.

She was determined not to succumb so easily. She arranged her long coils on top of the pile of netting, which was slightly more comfortable than the gravel and bones that littered the bottom of the pit, and tried to come up with a plan.

But there was not much to work with, and as the hours passed she found herself thinking of Juan. If only she had told him she was coming here. He might have warned her of this unexpected danger. He might even have joined her, and been there to watch her back. She imagined him there in Nogales, out in the desert with Pup, collecting medicinal plants.

Or Ryan, if even he were here, he could have been watching from outside the cave, and come to her rescue when the brujos left. Instead he was at home, swimming with the seals, or captaining his ferry. No, she was the Lamia, defender of the innocent, and she had come here to face the evildoers alone.

She was the Lamia, creature of the abyss, and here she was trapped in her natural element, with no way to return to the upper world. As the hours dragged on, she began to sink deeper into the snake dream. The long-stagnant expectations of the ancient entities began to work on her, compelling her toward acceptance of what she was, what she had become, destabilizing her sense of self, stripping away her humanity.

The dream state deepened, and she found herself in the abyss of the original Lamia, contemplating the evildoer above, the false priest who had driven her to this fate, the one she had sworn retribution upon. She recalled his bloodletting, first of innocent animals, then using her own sister as a sacrifice. The sense of injustice that had filled her then returned, and strengthened her resolve not to succumb.

The dream subsided, and she knew again where she was, though filled now with a deeply altered dreamlike sense of who and what she was. She became aware again of the ancient entities around her, and realized that they had shared her dream, and it had awakened in them ancient memories of their own circumstances.

They had been sacrificial victims too, some willing, some unwilling, but all originally expecting to awaken in the arms of their own dark Olmec gods, gods who had never come for them and who, Dema knew, were now long gone, if indeed they had ever truly existed.

The entities sank back into their own eternal night, heedless of Dema's attempts to give them hope of release, hope that might make possible her own release. She too again sank deeper into her snake dream, a dream of patient waiting, for what she did not know. Her snake metabolism slowed until, even with her lidless eyes wide open as always, in the dim depths of the pit she did not know the nights from the days.