It wouldn’t be denied.
Ryan took up his wooden flensing knife and a lit torch and set off down a passage that twisted and narrowed until it was barely wide enough for his shoulders. All along the corridor, the filaments hung from the dripping walls, as gray and thick as tree trunks.
The larger part of him saw that Trader was right, that there was much important work to be done here. Much love to impart. Much care. Being in the caves was like being in fields of blooming flowers.
So much beauty.
On all sides.
Ryan chose a mature filament and began loosening its grip on the cave wall. The hairlike fibers made faint snapping sounds as he broke their connection with the limestone with the blade. The gray tentacle came free from its delicate, pointed tip to the wide root that exited from the rock face. The severed hairlets bathed his hands in their ooze.
He lifted up the freed tendril, but there was no ripe bounty at its widest spot, the place where it emerged from the stone. Instead he found a small, hard nodule no bigger than his fist. The fruit of the pool needed time and room to grow.
As Ryan the cruise ship stood there admiring the bud, Ryan the passenger, the spectator, had a sudden sense of the burning pool as an individual creature, of its mountainous vastness, of its hundreds of miles of intruding, interlacing filaments.
Of its infinite hunger.
Of its infinite evil.
“There is nothing to be afraid of, Ryan,” said a familiar voice behind him.
A gruff man’s voice.
Ryan smelled cigar smoke. He turned and Trader was standing there beside him. His old friend’s face seemed younger than Ryan remembered. The hair wasn’t quite as grizzled.
“You’re not dead,” Ryan said. “Thought Abe and you might have bought the farm.”
“Mebbe I am dead,” Trader said.
Ryan picked up the torch and held it closer to get a better look. “You’re a ghost?”
Trader laughed, but he didn’t answer. “I brought you here for a reason. I brought you here to show you that there is joy beyond all the hard living. That beyond the gate, joy awaits you.”
Ryan’s cheeks suddenly felt as if they were going split, his grin was that wide. Why in rad blazes am I smiling? Passenger Ryan thought. None of this is real.
“We are all here to show you…” Trader said, gesturing down the narrow tunnel behind him.
Ryan saw then that Trader hadn’t come alone.
Behind Trader in the passage were many figures, half in shadow and half in dancing torchlight. All of them were smiling; all of them he knew. Some were people Ryan had loved, while some were people he had chilled. Friends and enemies alike. His father, Baron Titus Cawdor, was there, as was his mother, Lady Cynthia, and his brothers. Lori Quint. Cort Strasser. Bessie and Cissie Torrance. And so many others. A line of familiar faces that stretched off into the darkness.
All dead.
All very happily dead, it seemed.
He could tell from their expressions that none of them blamed him for anything that he had done to them or hadn’t done for them. They forgave him completely. They understood him completely. They had overcome the shortsighted yearnings and judgments of the flesh.
In their gleeful faces was an invitation to join them, an invitation that held the promise of ultimate redemption.
Until it was actually offered to him, Ryan hadn’t known that he even desired such a thing. But now, while searching the eyes of those who had gone before him, he felt the same sort of intense, uncontrollable yearning that he had felt for the roasted globs: a marvelous scent on the wind drew him closer and closer, like a puppet on a string, to death.
Below the decks of the great, storm-tossed ship called Cawdor, a tiny voice screamed, “No!”
LEELOO BUNNY WALKED hand in hand through the caverns with her mother, Tater. Neither carried a burning torch because it wasn’t dark in the narrow passage. Their winding path was lit by hundred-foot-high bright tentacles in orange, pink, red and yellow. The rock walls and ceiling had turned transparent; all Leeloo could see were the filaments. And she could see them twisting all the way up to the summit, like the root ball of some enormous plant with the dirt knocked loose. The tendrils blurred and shifted, and became candy trees and popcorn bushes. In the distance, she could faintly hear cymbals and brass playing a lively marching song.