I was trapped deep underground, until a doorway appeared impossibly in the cave wall. There was light in there, and I could see a room on the other side, with walls made of hewn stone. This was no cave formation.
Inside the room was a tremendous bath. It was built into a floor tiled with lapis lazuli. Luminous quartz blocks studded the ashlar above, lighting the bath’s steaming water in gold and cream colors. Running along the opposite wall was a lacquered wooden pew, dense with carvings of men and women in medieval finery, and a fool, crying tears that became a river and dissipated into scrollwork. Fluffy towels, a purple bathrobe, and slippers were on the bench.
When I stepped into the bath, I was surprised to find that the water was only centimeters deep, so that wherever I stepped hot sand rose up like dough. The sand was warm and as black as the cavern where I had been trapped.
I scoured my body with it and little white nematodes came out to writhe in the sand and die. Even more repulsive were the longer worms that thrashed and coiled from out of my armpits, my belly button, and my hair. I could taste the salt in the sand, and it sucked the water from them. Little red streamers appeared on my body where I ripped away their mouths with the exfoliant. I had lived for days, maybe weeks, feeding on the largest of those worms—they had been feeding on me too.
I felt too clean to put my worm-ridden clothes back on, so I retrieved my phone and my little metal scraping spoon, and left everything else behind. My father and I didn’t know each other very well, and then he had tried to kill me, so I tossed his oil lamp through the ragged doorway, back into the cave where his body moldered. I wasn’t feeling very fond of the gift. If I could make this cave swallow him whole, erasing him from the rest of my life, then that’s what I wanted.
Narrow stone steps took me up to a landing, crowded on one end with empty wardrobes and velvet-lined chests. Then there were white marble stairs that ended in a hallway, and that was lined with tapestries as far as I could see in both directions. It was too dim to look clearly, and those I passed were grimy and obscure, but here and there I had a glimpse of a woven city under siege, or the silhouettes of ships blossoming with cannon fire, or monks kneeling before floating golden symbols.
The next rooms were empty, or nearly so. Mossy strips of Versailles wallpaper curled to the floor in some rooms. In another there was a seven-poster bed, with heptagonal sheets folded in the center. A canopy of dust blew apart when I entered, bringing with me the first movement of air in years.
Everything was silent and still. It was like being back in the cave chamber—all I could hear was my own blood in my ears. But a few times I passed destroyed walls, where the imported stones had been blown apart to let in drifts of saprolite gravel pinched out from the surrounding bedrock. I passed by those dark openings as quickly as I could. They reminded me too much of the star-faced monster I had seen in the cave, which had disappeared back into the earth.
There was so much to examine, but I kept moving. Maybe that makes me a bad archaeologist, but after so many days of darkness, and overwhelmed by all that I was seeing, I didn’t even attempt to explain this castle under the earth to myself, or its connection to the uncharted cave system and its Paleolithic artists. I think I had convinced myself that I was in the sprawling basement of an abandoned country estate.
But I had to abandon that idea once I took the carpeted stairs to a little room with a paneled white door in one wall, and a narrow wooden staircase in another. There was a cabinet with white candles and folded vestments. There was a short, battered pew, stacked with fading papers and cracked hymnals. I do not remember the title of the hymnbook or the strange names of the songs within, but the liturgy was not Christian or from any other religion I recognized.
Though I had been incautious so far, something warned me of a presence on the other side of the door, so I only cracked it. I saw a soaring space on the other side—a cathedral the size of a stadium, with columns receding up until it strained my neck to look, to a ceiling obscured in fog and mysterious lights.
There were men standing in the center of the tiled nave. My instinct was to run out to them—the first people I had seen since Henri and Sylvie had dropped me off at the cave, right before my father tried to sacrifice me. I forced myself to look closer first. Some were in chartreuse robes, while others had green sashes over tuxedos, and the youngest men laughed together in bespoke suits.
Then there were the stretchers. At a remove, arranged beside a pillar, still and waiting for orders, were nurses with surgical gurneys at hand, each one with an unmoving body strapped to it. They wore scrubs and surgical masks in tones so muted that they seemed to disappear into the background.
I closed the door and went up the rectory stairs instead. They led up tightly, and onto a rough timber walkway extending along the wall of the sanctuary. The people were assembling below, lining up three to a row, with bound bodies and nurses behind each robed, sashed, or suited man. I took the walkway in the direction they were facing, and creeped along as well as I could in my pilfered vestments and bathrobe. Ahead was a narrow mezzanine floor, held against the wall on the back of broad beams.
It was piled with statues—arranged in storage, not on display. Squeezing between Heracles and Ladon, I could look down on the apse. Beneath me was a faded red couch of giant proportions, held in a gold frame. In front of it stood a mole as large as an elephant, poised, in white robes with purple trim. I could see its face waving around, tasting the air. I had seen that face in the cave, but only in a flash of greasy lamplight, the instant before the monster had slapped it out. What I had encountered was a ferocious animal, nothing like this creature, which nodded toward its congregation.
But I couldn’t see the man talking to the mole, so I scooted to another spot along the railing. Below me, the robed man was presenting his gurney to the robed giant. They had been too far below for me to hear what they were talking about, but the man abruptly entered an oratorical mode, and said, “Oh Queen of earth and Under, on behalf of [here he named one of the 14 largest banks in the world] we gift you this life of our people.”
The nurse pressed a button on an infusion pump and the young man on the stretcher opened his eyes. His head lolled around, but then he seemed to focus on the banker, now alert, his mouth making round contortions, like words.
“His vocal and spinal cords have been removed,” the nurse said. The banker made a vicious, silencing gesture.
“He is as you have asked,” the banker said, returning to his stentorial mode. “A skateboarder from Aleppo. He has excellent eyesight. His family is in Michigan now, and he has rode a jetski.”
The young skater’s mouth was shapeless now, then wide in an empty scream as the banker pressed a tool to the boy’s neck that made a high electric whine. The nurse eased the head back onto a velvet pillow as it separated from its body. A second nurse collected the blood in a basin and scuttled off.
“It will take hours to get through all of them,” a voice behind me said. I didn’t see anybody. There were statues, palettes of tile, and a plinth wrapped in brown paper with a sculpture on top. The sculpture was bound by thick top and bottom discs, like an hourglass. There was a face on the bottom disc facing up, and another face on the top disc looking down—they were locked in each other’s gaze. I realized this wasn’t merely a sculpture when the top face spoke next.
“The Queen knows she is a prisoner,” the face said.
Each, the bottom and top, were shorn of all hair, with their faces jutting from the black stone up to where their ears would be. They were as pale as marble, but their eyes and wet white mouths moved, and they made faces as they talked.
In terror I fell back into a pack of wooden statues—saints with long faces carved into rowan wood—which teetered like pins. I hugged them back into stillness before they could crash to the mezzanine floor.
“And she knows they hardly need her anymore,” the bottom said, their words hardly ending before the top’s began, “Her lineage gave us our culture, our language, our history,”
“but she’s just our shameful secret now,”
“and she is growing resentful, very resentful.”
“At least they used to observe the forms, wore the robes,”
“but she has no more power to compel them,
“and her forebears have bargained away the treasures of the earth.”
“Her mother has not been seen in hundreds of years.”
“Now it is her and her two sons, alone,”
“with only the experiences of becoming.”
“Through the heads they live lives on the surface.”
“With the sacrifice they become people.”
“They taste our life in our heads.”
“I don’t understand,” I interrupted. “Are you two what they do with the heads they cut off? The Queen makes living statues out of people?”
The two heads watched each other laugh.
“They were a process server, kidnapped while delivering a summons. And they were in a car accident and suffered injuries that would have been fatal until the elect intervened with their hidden medical breakthroughs,” they said. “We woke up in the Garden of Heads. We were given to the Queen as a gift in 1985. Civilization was at its zenith, and—wishing to show humanity’s power—our secret congress gifted her with us, to show that we could retain life in the head the same way she did. But she found us vulgar, and put us in storage. We have only seen each other’s faces since. Over time we have become closer to each other than any human relationship has ever been in the entire history of our species. It is not love. It is so far beyond love that we have coined a new word for it. Yes, but we only say that word to each other. Yes. We are the final we.”
A rowan wood saint statue fell to the floor with a loud wood-on-wood thunk. I must have put it back unevenly on the planks. I didn’t dare look over the side to see if anyone below had noticed.
Instead I got up on my toes and hissed at the faces. “How do I get out of here? How can I get to the surface?”
The two looked distressed, and then saddened by each other’s distress.
“Oh no don’t do that,” they said. “Why don’t you stay down here and write our testament? You could share our emotional technology with a lonely world.”
Then I heard a noise. It was like the sound of a dog’s claws sliding on kitchen tile. It was coming from below. I considered running back to the rectory at the bottom of the stairs, but the thought of being chased back into the cave was so terrifying to me that I could not bring myself backtrack. But it wasn’t an option for long, because a creature burst from the rectory staircase on to the timber walkway. Not quite as large as the Queen, this mole flopped forward, dragging its scoop-like claws along the railing as it came.
I ran away blindly, and let out a sob of relief when I saw the little stone door low down in the wall on the far side of the mezzanine.
“What year is it?” either the top or the bottom face shouted to my back.
“We didn’t even ask her flip to us so we could be on top for a while,” said the other, as I left them behind.
I fled into another labyrinth of unoccupied rooms, knocking over silver reliquaries as I pushed through a door into a tile lobby. Taking another door at random, I found myself in a mauve office, with cubicles, whiteboards, and all the furniture you would expect from a 90s business park.
After hiding in a coffee nook, with my breath still ragged, I saw that the dust I was kicking up was so thick that I was leaving a trail of footprints behind like in fresh powdered snow. I had to keep going. But when I came back out from around the corner, I looked up and there was the mole prince, probing the air in radiating patterns before standing on its back legs and advancing down the row of cubicles, his arms stretched wide. He was wearing a Tool t-shirt.
I ran and didn’t look back, until the office was behind me. The rooms were stone again, more castlelike. The hallways were gone, and I passed stone rooms breaking off into antechambers, or opening on halls with rectangular fire pits. I ducked into the darkest turn I could take, then around another corner, where I was suddenly confronted with a rancid smell like wet hay.
The room I had found was lit by an open gas flame atop a pipe jutting from the wall. It was a garderobe, with broad seats made of old wood slats, bowed and smoothed by generations of mole butts—their holes dropping to unknown depths. It was a dead end. Then I heard the heaving body and clattering claws, so I stood on the toilet seat and pressed myself into the dark recess. But the sound outside receded. I was shaking and didn’t dare move from my hiding spot.
Next to each toilet hole was a stack of pristine white towels and an immense tub of coarse black sand. I realized with disgust that the seat was crawling with the little white worms from the cave—the parasites that had grown large enough that I had eaten them like eels. The mole or moles using this bathroom were infested with them.
“You can come out now,” a voice said. It was calm and cracked, like an old relative’s. “I will be in my chamber next door.”
I had nowhere to run, and soon I couldn’t bear hiding any longer, so I exited the bathroom and stepped in to the Queen’s bedchamber. Her pink star face dangled like a wilting flower over my head even as she settled her bulk back on to an immense divan. The movement in her face was gentle, with each papillae waving in soothing coordination, as she brought her face down to the level of mine. I closed my eyes, and tried not to think about those fingers plucking my head off of my neck. But her face’s appendages only caressed my cheek, and then I could hear her words.
“I have kept you waiting in the cave for this day,” she said. It sounded spoken aloud, though I could see no mouth. At the same time as she spoke, my mind flooded with images. One of her sons had brought my father’s head to her after he suffocated in the cave. She sent the prince back to leave me my father’s lamp.
“I have experienced thousands of human lives. I have lived yours as you slept, and your own father is an open book to me as he digests in my mouldwarp pouch,” she said, patting down the dark hair on her bulging side. “Would you like him to speak to you, through me?”
“No!” I said, angry at the thought of my father worming his way back into my life, even after dying. “And why do you demand these sacrifices? If you can read our minds by touch, then why do you insist on receiving heads as tribute?”
Her face appendages shimmered—it was something like laughter. “That is a human choice. They do not risk my existence being known, and have for hundreds of years developed their little rituals and ways.”
“Well, why don’t you stop them? You are their Queen!”
Her thoughts became confused, as if she was mulling over something she had never considered. “It is not my concern, so why should I?” she finally said. “I am indifferent to their life’s furtherance and I am worthy of the sacrifice.”
“You kept me imprisoned, and brought me here,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I have tasted your thoughts, and I know you better than you know yourself,” she said. “You will help me overthrow humanity’s secret rulers.”