438: Last Communion
Ziggurat #353
Lamont made a choking sound and bent to pick the little girl up, but was stopped by the gentle grip of Constance on his shoulder.
"The grove," Lamont repeated as he pulled up his own hood and followed Constance across the strange, yielding floor. As they walked, fine translucent tendrils emerged around their feet, like strands of spiderweb, groping at their ankles but finding no purchase beneath their sealed suits. The fact gave him little comfort. He had visited this level before wearing a vacuum suit—albeit without the hood pulled up—and had been drawn into the illusion so quickly that he had never suspected a thing. Clearly, whatever deal Constance had transacted with the specter at the top of the tower had exempted them. But like Constance, he felt no great assurance that the situation would last.
In his mind's eye, he envisioned the tree-like columns of the grove, arching into a branched canopy through which light filtered in a dappled rainbow. He imagined the pearlescent cobblestone path, illuminating in warm pastels in response to footfalls, and the gurgling brook of glittering, luminescent water that flowed through the fairytale haven. He imagined the mysterious, compelling form of the ivory statue at the center of the grove, abstractly geometric and yet somehow distinctly feminine in aspect. He compared that vision to what he now saw: A slender cylindrical obelisk, about two feet in diameter and rising some eight feet from an otherwise unremarkable spot in the spongy floor. It was reflective black, with a subtle hint of some geometrical pattern beneath its glossy surface. Several feet away, Lamont noticed a small figure that he suddenly recognized as little Maggie Downs, her light brown skin covered in a translucent mesh of fibers. She was shuffling slowly past them, mindlessly avoiding a pile of of metal pipes that had been abandoned on the floor, her hands engaged in some activity that had no apparent relation to her feet. Lamont made a choking sound and bent to pick the little girl up, but was stopped by the gentle grip of Constance on his shoulder.
"Leave her," she said. "This will all be done soon."
Lamont watched in stunned horror as the young woman touched a detail near the wrist of her vacuum suit, prompting the glove to retract into the sleeve, exposing the hand beneath.
"What are you doing?" He asked.
"What I said I would," Constance answered flatly. "Don't try and stop me, no matter what. I'll be alright."
Standing straight despite obvious exhaustion, Constance touched her bare hand to the smooth surface of the obelisk. Her body went rigid, as if she had touched a live wire, and her lips moved in what looked like rapid, silent speech. It was everything Lamont could do to prevent himself from interfering, and he was almost about to disregard her instructions when, without preamble, she pulled her hand away.
"We're here," she whispered.
Lamont moved to take hold of her, to ask what she meant, but she evaded his grasp, bending down to pick up one of the metal pipes. Gripping it tightly in her hands, one gloved and one bare, she proceeded to hammer at the cylindrical obelisk with explosive wrath. In the once smooth surface, their reflections fractured into a thousand broken shards.
THE END
The end? There seems like so much more the story is yet to be told.