Spelunking Through Hell: a Visitor's Guide to the Underworld by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

“Yes. Yes, it was too much to ask. Raising your daughter to think that her only value is in sitting pretty and pristine on a shelf somewhere doesn’t get you a functional person, it gets you a monster in waiting.”

—Laura Campbell

Sitting on the same bed, no longer naked, and somewhat annoyingly alone, because sometimes being an adult means putting duty first

The smell of the bromeliads was almost pleasant now that I understood where they had come from and why they been tended with such care. A lot of things are like that. They can seem off-putting or even bad until you get the proper context, and then they become vital and exactly as they’re supposed to be. I left the window open.

There was still enough sap in my system that the pollen alone wasn’t going to be enough to knock me out. I’ve never understood the mechanism by which swamp bromeliads do the things they do. I know some of the more insular cryptid communities use them in place of any more modern form of anesthesia, and it seems to work well enough. Thomas had probably saved a lot of lives by keeping those seeds in his wallet. And he probably kept that window closed and sealed whenever he had Autarch stuff to do.

I folded my hands under my head, on top of the pillow, and stared at the ceiling, allowing my mind to drift. It was probably for the best that I had this time alone: I needed it to sort through everything that had happened, and everything I’d learned. I’d always expected this moment, if it ever came, to feel like I was finished. Like I’d done everything I was supposed to do and could stop now. It was like as soon as Thomas disappeared, I had thrown out my old, ever-vague life plan and replaced it with a simple list of bullet points: One: Find a way out of my home dimension. Well, I’d managed that, and then I’d done it over and over again—lather, rinse, repeat— until one day I’d looked around and realized the only real anchors I had left were a dead girl, a house that wasn’t mine, a forest that loved me, and a colony of talking mice. My family was . . . well, they were people who were related to me, and I liked them, even loved them, but I didn’t know them. They weren’t enough to make me stay.

Two: Find Thomas. That was the one that had seemed impossible for a long time, and I’d been starting to lose hope when Annie found me at the Red Angel. It was a wild coincidence to base the rest of my life on, but being a Healy, I’ve learned to trust the wild coincidences. Grandpa used to say the family’s luck didn’t work that way before Dad brought Mom home from the carnival, but once he did . . . things just fell into place around her. Sometimes good things, like finding a dead babysitter who would stay with us forever.

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