"It's not a sex thing."
The woman is talking out of Riley's laptop screen. Riley reaches for a pretzel and bites into it with a growing sense of dread.
The video continues: "Being a tradwife isn't a fetish. It's about finding your place in life, about growing into the woman that you've always wanted to be. It's a journey of discovery, learning that the best you that you can be is a helpmeet for the man you love. Of course," Marybel goes on, "when you do your part as a helpmeet, he is going to bring enthusiasm to the marriage bed, and ladies, that ain't half bad."
Riley lets herself slump lower into her chair. "Shit. If this drives me to using again, you fuckin' owe me."
* * *
Evening falls by the water. Riley likes it here, on the bench in between the park and the canal. The world is burning, and somehow all the troubles of her personal life aren't reduced to insignificance by the troubles of the world, but instead reflect them, perhaps inverted, in miniature. Yet at least she can still feed the birds.
Marybel arrives punctually and picture-perfect at the agreed-upon time. For once, Riley doesn't feel that twinge of guilt at looking so ratty out-of-doors. She pulls her arm back from its stretched-out pose along the bench --- might as well be polite and make room, no? --- and adjusts her sunglasses. "The falcon flies at midnight," she says.
"Excuse me?"
"Just seemed the kind of thing to say at a, you know, assignation in the park."
Marybel looks like she's found yet another reason to regard Riley as something the cat dragged in. But she sits on the bench and smooths out her skirt. "You're the woman who writes those stories," Marybel says.
"Those bloody, filthy stories," Riley agrees. "Those incredibly queer stories." She doesn't feel much like making this easy.
"I'd never be speaking with you," Marybel says, which is also an agreement. "But there are... things... in your stories that you couldn't know any other way."
"A girl has to make the rent." And, Riley thinks to herself, a girl has to process the loss of the only family she had left and the breakdown of her world. And playing up the heat was just a way to get subscribers. Until it wasn't. Or until the girl admitted it never really was. "Show me."
Marybel reaches into her bag. And then, in a moment far more simple than Riley had ever imagined it would be, the box is here again.
Lauderant, she thinks.
"What did you expect?" she asks aloud. "You make your entire brand all about boosting his ego. That house of yours was too clean for one woman who's busy pretending not to have a career. Of course he fucked the help, didn't he?"
Marybel's eyes are stinging with tears. A lot of it had been a lie, but she had always believed the marriage itself was true.
"Your husband is dead." Riley rips off that Band-Aid right now. "And so is whoever else he got to play in his games."
"I just want to understand," Marybel says, choking a little. "How? And why?"
Riley feels the tug of compassion; she can't deny it. But the woman beside her has made her living by spouting evil into the world, stoking the hate against Matt and Colin, and she can't deny that either. So, fuck it, she figures, and goes all in.
"You seek ... knowledge?" And now she stares dead-on into Marybel's eyes. "You choose ... the Lore configuration?"
In the dimness of a Chinese dive restaurant, the serious kind with the zodiac placemats, Colin is crushing fried wontons into his soup. "Why are you even helping her?"
Riley grabs a piece of something General Tso'd with her chopsticks. "I like how every time I scratch an itch, she acts like I've got fleas." From Colin's look, he's clearly not buying it. "Look, the game's afoot. We have to figure out how the damn box made it from an estate in the Berkshires to their little cottagecore paradise, right? We need to find the, uh —"
"The links in the chain?"
"You said it, not me."
* * *
Riley finds Marybel out back, behind the perfect house, burning papers in the barbecue pit.
"Hey," Riley asks, "what are you doing?"
"I'm getting rid of every trace of that... that... infestation."
"But we might need — hold on, it's important —"
And suddenly Riley knows with dead certainty what is in the burlap bag that's next for the fire. She lunges forward, crying out "No!" But she is too far away, and her grasping hands fail to close before Marybel has let it loose, arcing into the pit.
The flames are blue and green, spouting upward, dancing in their own wind, and the smoke is acrid. Marybel coughs, hard and convulsive. Riley shoots her a glare — did you not stop to think that burning some things could have consequences?! — instead of speaking. She reaches again, this time to pull Marybel away from the fire, but now there is a snap and a cyclone of sparks, and Riley turns away, turns her back to the flames, and suddenly her back is shot through with points of heat. She stumbles, pushing Marybel towards cooler air, but the stumble brings the smoke into her lungs, and the heat is taking shape inside her, threading outward from her core and inward from her skin and around her spine and heart.
* * *
The fire has died. Marybel bends over Riley, sees no breathing under those loose clothes, hopes that the body on her lawn is not a corpse. She reaches for Riley's neck to check for a pulse — and the pain slices her fingers down to the bone.
Marybel is bleeding, suddenly and freely, onto the blade that arose from Riley's neck. Marybel tries to staunch the flow, applying all the pressure that she can with her other hand. She is starting to go light-headed, as the blade retracts under Riley's skin, like a thing satisfied.
A tourniquet, Marybel thinks. She collapses to her knees beside Riley. My purse. Her belt. Anything.
And then something is clamped around the wrist of her injured hand. Something metal.
She looks up, follows the chain with her eyes, knowing that the Hell Priest will be exactly as Riley described.
"All that practice, and now you cannot pray?"
Her mouth is dry, and her inner voice can only loop through pins, flesh, blood, pins, flesh—
At a turn of the Hell Priest's hand, more chains encompass her. But the only break in her skin is the wound across two of her fingers.
"How remarkable," the Cenobite says. "No one who has ever tried to destroy a Configuration has been as careless as you. None of them exposed another human in a manner so ... cavalier." The scarified visage is studying Riley's fallen form with open curiosity. And then those eyes of black ice turn to Marybel. "We have your blood, child. If not you, then we will take another. And she..." A graceful, vivisected hand indicates Riley. "... She must be the mechanism. Convince her, if you can."
* * *
Riley swims back to consciousness with the Hell Priest bending over her. The Configuration is inseparable from her body, she realizes, the knowledge brought with the Configuration just as surely as the metal.
Lauderant, she thinks.
The change is already happening, the next stage bringing itself to the surface, but no facet of the Configuration is ever gone for good — only buried, and waiting.
"The metal aches to align," the Hell Priest says. "Approach skin and you will learn. You can reconfigure yourself," the Hell Priest adds. "All you must do is reorder the pieces of your life, little one."
"Oh," Riley says, and passes out again.
* * *
She wakes to metal—inert, not vital.
Chicken wire. Hurting in the ordinary way that ordinary chicken wire would hurt if it were being squeezed onto her face.
Her body is leaning against a wire-fenced cage, in a room with a concrete floor and no windows.
"I'm sorry," Marybel says, her voice gone eccentric with strain.
"Lady, what the everfucking fuck?" Best case, this was a place to hold an animal, a dog that was big but not as big as Riley.
"I had to hold you down without touching—without getting too close. This was all I had. I... They have my blood. Those things have my blood."
In the light of the bare basement bulb, Riley can see that Marybel is holding a gun. Riley knows drugs a lot better than she knows guns, but as far as handheld weapons go, this looks like a big one.
"OK, so," Riley suggests, "let's do the math, all right?"
"Those creatures have my blood."
Riley bites back a yes, we've established that. "Yes. I've been there. You need to find someone else to feed the box or else they'll take you. Is that what they said?"
"I have to feed someone to you," Marybel says. "And if I feed you enough..."
"Don't buy the wish bullshit," Riley says. "You want him back. I get it. I was trying to bring my brother back."
"And you gave up, didn't you? Whatever sickness inside you makes you the way you are, you didn't have the strength to finish the job. To save your own brother."
"Because I saw what their gifts are like!" Riley tries to keep her voice level in front of the lady with a Tarantino-sized handgun. "Do you want your husband back as a, a half-clockwork thing with no skin and razorblades in his tongue? You saw them, right? With the pins? What do you think they do when they keep their promises?"
"Stay quiet," Marybel says. She backs her way up the basement stairs, keeping the gun in a two-handed grip and aimed at Riley.
The light switch must be outside the basement door. Riley is first alone, and then in darkness.
* * *
Riley has been in the basement long enough to grow thirsty as fuck and to ache in wholly new places when she hears a different kind of noise above her.
Human speech. Two voices.
Riley can't quite make out the words, and then suddenly one of the voices is Marybel saying, "I promise we'll be alone," and the other is a man replying, "Thank God for apps."
Riley screams through her dry throat, "Guy, get the fuck out of here!"
There is a double slam, first of something against a body and then of a body against the basement door.
The light comes on.
Marybel is schlepping a body down the stairs.
He moves his head a few degrees, moans. Concussed?
"Marybel, listen to me," Riley says. "No one has to die. I figured them out before. We can do it again."
Perhaps the pause is indecision, or perhaps she is only gathering her strength.
"This is faster," says Marybel, and heaves her app date against the cage.
The metal inside Riley aligns. The pain of the blade bursting through her skin is not as bad as the sensation of her own muscles moving apart inside her thigh to clear its path and propel it upward.
Concussed or not, he screams.
"I'm sorry," Riley whispers.
The chains are coming for a man she doesn't know, who might just be a guy no worse than average trying to get laid same as most anybody, maybe because he was a creep, maybe because he was trying to get over the loss of his one true love. All Riley knows for sure is that his blood has flowed along the channel set in the blade, and that she hears bells beyond the basement walls.
"Please just be fast," Riley pleads under her dry breath to the Cenobites.
"Is that your first prayer to Leviathan, little one?"
Marybel throws a wet sponge atop the cage from arm's length. She watches Riley squeeze the water from it onto her face and into her mouth.
I might live long enough to get shot, Riley thinks.
Then Marybel is gone and the basement is dark again.
This can't be the end. I have to get out. I can get out.
I have blades inside of me.
Reconfigure my life, the Priest said. It should be so easy... What even are the pieces of my life? Addiction. Loss. Failure. Indecision. Guilt. My life is a trail of novel horrors and bodies of those I loved or should have loved. Addiction. Loss. Failure...
Curiosity.
I kept a level head while facing sadomasochists from Hell.
Their Priest saw something in me. Something that intrigued them. I was better prey... a different source of sensation... I don't know.
But I want to find out.
I used the box against them.
I appreciated its power and brought its blade into the deserving. The less undeserving.
Why did the Priest want to play longer with me?
Fuck if I know.
But I want to find out.
Metal moves inside her.
* * *
Riley pulls herself through the snapped wires, through the barely-adequate gap she has made for herself. She feels her muscles moving around and against new things inside her, a second skeleton that should never have been. The blades, retracting with agonizing slowness, widen the wounds around them as she moves. She finds the stairs by feel and crawls her way up them.
She has never known pain like this, in these places, from these sources. She keeps moving, a traveler through sensations that should have stopped her.
She hears no one.
Night has fallen, and it is raining outside.
The blades have retracted enough for her to stand.
Her phone and car keys are still in the charred and lacerated jacket that Marybel had left on the dining-room table.
Let her bring her next victim home to an empty house.
In the open air, shudders come over her and she has ro lean against the porch railing. As her body steadies, she discovers that she feels almost human again.
Riley calls Colin as she limps out into the rain. "I'm coming home, man. Don't touch me when you see me. It's important. Just leave room for Jesus, right? Oh, man, it's fucked, it's so fucked..."
"Do you know where you're going?" Colin asks the very reasonable question as Riley throws most of what she owns into a suitcase.
"I know I need to be away from here before anything comes down. Where I'm going... I'll figure that out once I'm in goddamn motion."
Colin edges back while Riley slings her bag over her shoulder and hauls up her suitcase and takes the very few steps to the door.
"At least let me—" He stops because Riley stops.
Because a woman is leaning against her car.
"Address was on your license," Marybel says. One hand is injured. The other is in her jacket pocket.
"Back inside," Riley says, not breaking eye contact.
Marybel is almost chipper when she crosses the threshold. "You know, I thought I might have to break in here to find out what you know. This is faster." She brings the gun out into the open.
"Can I just suggest," Riley offers, "that no guy is worth this?" Yea verily, the field where she grows all her fucks must be barren... Or it would be if Colin weren't very close to the line of fire.
"Two sacrifices by the time you saw the box again," Marybel recounts. "Then me. Then a trade, my blood for his. That leaves two."
"Sorry you're in this fix again," Riley comments.
Colin says, "Not quite as sorry as I am."
"What's your pleasure, then?" Riley asks.
"All they need are two lives. All you need to do is touch two people."
"Not gonna happen."
"Really? Even if they were dying anyway?"
Riley sees her muscles tense in anticipation of movement. She knows, and she moves.
The gunshot echoes through her dingy apartment, and the bullet meant for Colin lands in her gut.
She waves him back as she falls.
Addiction. Loss. Failure. Grief. Indecision. Curiosity.
Perhaps when she dies, the Configuration will become inactive, just a puzzle box once more, a danger without a hair trigger.
Perhaps when she dies, Colin will be a little safer.
Addiction. Loss. Failure. Grief. Indecison. Curiosity. Acceptance.
Metal moves inside of her.
From under the floor, she hears bells.
"Two sacrifices before you saw the Configuration again, little one. Then her blood, then his in trade. And then two rearrangements of life."
Wires are snaking out of her bullet wound and wrapping around her, cinching down tight, slicing her thrifted clothes and burying themselves in her skin.
The blue twilight of the Labyrinth surrounds them now.
"Lament, Lore, Lauderant, Liminal, Lazarus, Leviathan," intone the Hell Priest and the Cenobites.
The Priest glides on half-flensed feet to where Marybel stands, the gun fallen by her side. "Your actions have completed the cycle. What gift would you ask of us?"
The puzzle-box widow is amazed at the beings from Hell, amazed that the end came so much faster and easier than she had thought.
"Just walk away," Riley wheezes.
"I want him back. I want... what I didn't have before."
"Don't," Riley chokes out.
"Lauderant," Marybel declares. She looks from Riley to Colin with a bet you didn't think of that expression teasing its way onto her face.
Colin says, "You don't know what they mean by love. You don't know what you've just—"
The throaty purr of the Hell Priest intervenes. "No. She does not." A hand raises, muscles and tendons visible where the pale, faintly luminous skin is absent.
The chains come.
They encircle Riley, enclosing her in a living iron cat's cradle, lifting her... without breaking her skin any way that it isn't already broken.
The Hell Priest instructs, "Ponder, if you will, how she is not like what have seen before."
And then they are gone, the Cenobites, the light of the Labyrinth, and Riley McKendry.