Ba dum.
Ba dum.
Ba dum.
It was dark in here. Warm and dark and red.
It felt like a very old place.
He was suspended in the water. He could breathe it. Like those dreams about drowning, when he finally gave up but found he didn't die.
The swells of the water like the waves of the ocean, a motion so steady you could almost have faith in it.
It made him feel sad.
Ba dum. Ba dum.
It was warm in here. It was a place for sleeping.
In one of his hands was a rope. It was slick like an eyeball, white and soft and warm. Coiled, thick as a finger.
In the other was the knife. It glowed, soft then bright, then soft, then bright.
Ba dum. Ba dum.
The rope was all bloody on the end. The knife had a clot on it, too.
He looked out past them.
It was like being in the weblum.
The walls were striped with arteries. They swelled and relaxed with the sound of the heart.
And they rippled too, like a creature, with the water.
There was only one way to go from here.
In the direction of the rope.
He pulled himself along on it. Like his body would float away, like he was swimming through tar.
It was vast in here, in this tunnel. And it was dark, and he couldn't see where the rope was going.
There was another pathway out one side. But the rope didn't go there, and neither did he.
And a while later, another. But he stayed with the rope.
It was hard to swim in here.
On this part of the wall was a patch all in white. Raised and webbed.
He stopped. He touched it.
This is the scar that I named after you.
He pulled back and kept going.
There were more of them further on. Scars that may or may not have had names.
It was getting colder.
The walls were turning gray.
It was still now. The water and the walls. He clung tighter to the cord.
It was quiet.
The glow of the knife was steady now, but faint.
He held up its light to the end of the cord.
Something hard to see. Camouflaged in the gray.
A baby the color of death.
He let go of everything.
He nearly threw up.
It floated, still.
"What ARE you," Keith said.
The baby opened its mouth like it was trying to cry. But the sound never came.
It was so cold in here.
I'm sorry.
It was the voice from outside.
It's because I love you.
The wall broke apart, with a blade coming through.
It was bigger than he was, and that was just the part he could see.
He kicked off the wall, away.
The voice began singing.
He couldn't hear the words.
A different blade, from a different angle. It wasn't that close to him this time.
There were rotten things floating in the water.
The baby was alive and it screamed.
Keith grit his teeth and lunged over to it.
It was cold in his hands.
"Don't worry. I'm here to help."
He took it out of the way just as a third razor sliced through the spot where it had been.
They had to get out of there.
He grabbed the rope to pull them out. But it had no anchor, it drifted past his head toward the blades.
"Fuck."
He cut it off of the baby and tried to swim away.
It was like trying to breathe dead air.
A blade broke the flesh from above.
He swung his knife against it.
The knife activated at the touch.
The blade in the wall stopped. So did the singing.
I know you'll never understand.
The voice began to cry.
He had never heard anything like it before.
He clutched the baby to his chest. It was crying too.
He wanted everything to stop.
But the blades in the walls pulled out, dragging the gray-colored tissue with them, opening wide to a red cavity he felt like he had been in before.
It was bleeding.
And the sound of the heart came again, loud and fast, screaming.
"There's gotta be a way out of here."
There were tunnels he hadn't tried. It was one of THEM.
The blood was faster than him.
It pooled in the bottom, it weighed down his feet.
He held tight to the baby.
"Just a little further…"
It was a lie.
It was warm in the blood, it was coming up fast. He couldn't get out of it.
The exit wasn't TOO far away…
He just had to swim faster, over the blood, back to the maze…
The baby slipped out of his hands. It went under fast.
Nearly every part of him wanted to leave it.
He took a breath and dove beneath the blood.
Too thick to see, too thick to breathe.
The salt and the iron, warm, hot, choking.
He reached for the bottom and couldn't touch it, he couldn't find the baby, he couldn't hold his breath, he tightened his fists and breathed in the blood.
"…Keith? Keith! Wake up!"
He opened his eyes.
He gulped in the air.
Stars. Soil.
His mother.
She looked like she was worried.
"Was that… what's…?"
"You were dreaming," she said.
"Yeah. I guess I was."
And apparently he'd bitten his tongue.
"'Too much blood?'" she said.
"Hmm?"
"You tell ME."
But he didn't want to tell her anything.
He was feeling like there were a lot of things she had never told HIM.