Selfish Gods - Complete!

Chapter 41

The 5th time Elira was killed by the thing with the tentacles it was wearing red lipstick and the suckers on the tentacles were neon pink and day glo green. As it pulled her toward its mouth she found herself so transfixed by the lipstick she stopped fighting. It had the mottled gray face of a catfish, its lips thin but protuberant and downturned with heavy whiskers hanging over them. The lipstick looked as though a child had smeared it on and it was not just on the catfish-thing's lips, but all over its face, even around its small beady black eyes. 

When she woke up, flat on her back, staring into the familiar thick fog she started laughing. It was a giddy deep in her belly laugh that she could not control. Any attempt to stop laughing only resulted in more laughter and so she gave into it until she was crying and her face was hurting from smiling.

She sat up, looked around her, and said to no one in particular:

"Who is coming up with this bullshit?"

The fog swirled silently, sucking her words away into silence.

"Fine," She frowned. The increasingly weird catfish thing, the terrible memory played on repeat and the terrible uncertainty of it all she could more than take but the fact that she was doing it without anyone to talk to made her a bit sad. She longed for Celeste or Hilda or Delfina or even Kwaku's company but of course wanting it didn't make it so.

She drew her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them and thought. What was the point of it all? Why did the memory with her and Ares play right before the thing with the tentacles showed up? What the hell was she missing?

"Bah!" Elira shouted into the fog and then got up ran in the direction of the water dripping. She knew by now that nothing was going to get in her way before the memory; there was no point in being careful.

But then, she stopped. She had run in the direction of the water dripping five times in a row and it had always ended the same. The second time she had gone through the loop she had tried touching the other Elira and Ares when they appeared but her hands had passed through them like they were holograms. They had distorted slightly, briefly, and then reformed and continued, oblivious to her interference. The third time she had tried shouting at them - that hadn't worked either. The fourth time she had listened carefully enough for the tentacle so that she was able to ensure it didn't grab her from behind. That time she was dragged face up so she got a longer view of the catfish thing. She had been hoping she would see something new but the only thing she had noticed was its horrible makeup job.

Fuck it. Maybe the whole point was she wasn't supposed to keep going toward the dripping sound and watching that horrible memory play out over and over again.

She turned and marched away from the sound. As the dripping dimmed the fog thickened into something more sinister. It began to feel disconcertingly solid and when Elira looked down, at herself, she thought she saw a dozen pairs of ghostly white hands on her bare arms, their fingertips like smoke, their touch light but persistent. Before the image could really solidify in her mind she ran, shaking her shoulders to rid herself of the sensation, her hands out in front of her because she couldn't really see a damn thing.

When she slowed to catch her breath she realized she couldn't hear the dripping at all and it occurred to her that she might have made a mistake. What if this was how people got trapped in this place? What if they just got lost in the fog forever?

It was true, afterall, that Hilda had said that not everyone who went in came out.

Elira stopped walking. The weird fog hands were gone but her breath was starting to come in and out in ragged, panicked little gulps and she needed to calm down. She closed her eyes and forced herself to inhale once very slowly, hold it at the top then exhale very slowly. Then again, then twice more. Her mind began to clear and with the clarity came a new feeling, a kind of tugging. It was almost like the feeling she got when she forgot something and was trying to remember what it was and was just on the verge of remembering it; there was a place she was being pulled toward and though she could not quite perceive it she intended to follow the sensation.