An alteration is not a convenient or pleasant affair, but neither is it the opposite of those. In our everyday, ordinary transformations, the rate of change is slow enough for our minds to follow. Our perceptions of ourselves require time to adapt to reality, and ordinarily we are afforded that time. Even the bursting growth of adolescence is slow enough for our perception to accommodate.

When accidents happen, we struggle to adapt. I’ve heard of soldiers who swear that they still feel their amputated limbs as if they were never taken. The soldier’s mind needs time to fully accept their body’s new form, and until it does, the incongruity will cause considerable suffering.

With an alteration of the kind that occurs in The Pits, the change and the acceptance both come at once. Sometimes the new self-perception comes even before the form. You might feel you should be made of stone and be appalled by your soft, wormlike flesh, or shocked at your lack of fins while those have only just begun to sprout.

A couple of months before my argument with Moloch, before sending Miles up to the surface, I was scaling a wall over a rushing stream when I began to alter. Nauseated and dizzy, my grip on the wall loosened. Moloch, at the time more snail than a man, watched helplessly with eyes that wavered on their long, slimy stalks and opened his toothless mouth in alarm.

I barely noticed that I fell. I wrenched my briefs off even before hitting the water, as they were lodged where my tail fin should have been. I was shocked to find two legs, my legs, clinging to my waist like dry skin to be peeled off, like a wart to be removed, like leeches to be burned away. My body didn’t wait for me to strip to start altering, the skin quickly covering with scales, the strangely parted legs unifying into a single, mighty tail fin. My breasts… Whatever force engendered the alteration, it adhered to the basic principles of hydrodynamics, smoothing what could be smoothed, and covering in scales what couldn’t.

If I hadn’t already been given gills, I’d have begun to drown. My new body slid along the stream with smooth anastaltic movements, my arms pinned at my sides.

My sight had neared, I noticed as I tried to get a grasp on the bounty of Crystal strewn on the riverbed like shiny blooms—each one a year’s worth of unaltered excavation.
When Yitzhak had shown them to us, they were barely visible, even with the light from above. Now, with no light source, they were each like blurry moons in the night sky.
I was overwhelmed by the beauty of it. The world around me seemed marvellous and I was in perfect harmony with it: the water obeyed rules that seemed too obvious to me to explain; my gills took in the water better than ever, and my muscles swam through the rushing current with great ease, and I knew I could swim faster than anyone ever had before. Anyone unaltered, at least. But what did it matter? What did I have to do with the unaltered world? I was euphoric, swimming down the accelerating current, not noticing that I was reaching a waterfall until both the water and I were already over the edge, falling freely.

A moment of panic; confusion; weightlessness profoundly different than the one buoyancy provides; realisation, decision and motion, succeeding one another so quickly they might as well have been one thought—and I twisted to swim powerfully upstream not fast enough to climb but enough to bring myself to the wall the water was falling over and I scratched at it on my way down and my nails broke off.

Finally, a mighty crash.

The impact on the rock was tangential, indirect, yet my left side, particularly elbow and shoulder, flared with the pain of bones breaking. Numbness spread throughout my body. There was no air to knock out of my lungs, but the effect was similar as I rolled, limp, into the current.

Right under the waterfall was a deep depression, as there tends to be at the bottom of falls, a pool of water, and even through the pain I realised that if I hadn’t foolishly tried to turn back and hold on, my descent could have been painless.

I tried to orient myself as the current spun me around. It was impossible to tell above from below, rock from rock, darkness from darkness. I needed to swim to shore, or at least to the shallows where the stream was slower.

A light, then, shone at the corner of my eye like a sun in the water, an anchor to stabilise my twisting, turbulent world. Before I had time to think or even hope, some wild instinct directed me towards that light, bringing my one good arm and my limp tail to grasp and oar at the water. The light got closer, then farther as the stream carried me past it. The current quickened even more, and the flow narrowed, and I sensed another waterfall waiting. I brushed against rock, slowing only the smallest bit, and felt a rope, or perhaps a crude net, against my body. I reached for it with both arms but only my right hand gripped at it, while my left protested in a burst of pain. The grip of my delicate, scaled fingers was feeble. It wasn’t just the shock of the impact: even my unbroken arm felt degenerate now. More of a vestige than a member in its own right.

I lay against the rock, eyes closed, too exhausted to untangle the pondweed net that was knotted around me. I didn’t need to breathe air to know that my lungs had also changed. They were only a supplementary organ, no longer my main source of oxygen.

Once the exhaustion passed, I opened my eyes and saw a colossal beast emerging from the darkness, treading sideways on needle-like, albino legs, crustacean claws larger than a man on each side, and within them, delicate human hands, which held the torn net I too was clutching.

I knew that it might be a person, and yet I turned against the current in terror and went down towards the light that I had seen before, deeper now, into a massive body of unmoving water, a great hall whose depths was that light. There was a pull to it, a comfort.

Brighter now, closer now, I swam, and a more human part of myself realised that there might be a danger in that light as well, however enchanting it was to the eye. I soon saw that it was a ball hanging on a tiny appendage, and right beneath it, a woman’s face against a dark background. A large, protruding jaw, with sharp needle-teeth sticking out under two round, lidless black eyes. “¿Hola?” said a voice that was very low, but also very pleasant.

#

It took a month for my arm to fully heal. Alberto—the gigantic crab—insisted that his perception of time was perfect, like a clock’s. Osvaldo, his form far less fortunate, insisted that none of us could know if that was true, and the couple of lovers whose names I could never remember (Arlo and Carlo?) were too interested in each other to contend the claim.

That’s what Isadora told me, anyway, in her broken English. The rest only spoke Espanish (as far as I knew, at least).

It took a day for numbness to turn to excruciating pain; three weeks for the bones, set in flotsam, to mend; and a week for strength to return to the atrophied limb. I didn’t know if that was the rate in which fish bones usually healed. And all the while, I didn’t look over the edge even once, to see what lay further below. After all, I’d promised.

Isadora and I were curled in the cavernous labyrinth, lit by her appendage, using the narrowness as an excuse to have our bodies close. My hands behind my head, I listened to her sing in her smooth, delightful baritone. Her hands gestured in front of her, as if she traced the texture of her own song with webbed fingers. She used to be an alto, she told me, when she still sang in air.

“I don’t think he would know me now, you see?” she said after the song was done. “Not just this body, but more: I feel like I am someone else here.” Her voice was impossibly clear, for sound carrying in water.

Like many lovers in my situation, I could forgive her for talking about her late husband. We had not made love in these waters, nor even touched, as she’d made it clear she would not do so until we were on the surface. It would anger her two other suitors, otherwise. Alberto, I suspected, respected her choice, but Osvaldo was already bitter with frustration.

And so we lay there, warming ourselves in the fire of our own desire. “If only I had a mirror, to look at my own eyes…” she continued. I wondered if she’d find herself as beautiful as I did, the way her black eyes shone in blackness, the way her teeth interlaced perfectly, the way her gullet expanded and contracted as she swallowed fish whole. I couldn’t wait for her to come to the surface, for everyone to see how beautiful she was, even when a rational part of me warned me that they might not.

“There is a cave just like this, near the beach where we go in the summer, and Luca and I, before we marry, we sneak into it.” Her English was amusing in its imperfection, but not bad, as far as fourth languages go. Better than the couple of sentences she spoke to me in Espanish, when I’d just arrived. And there was some joy for her in it, I suspected, in solving the riddle of ordering the words one after the other.

“And inside, do you know what we do?” She was taunting me, but I didn’t mind. I nodded for her to continue. “We sing,” she said, and I was surprised to feel a pinch of hurt, somewhere in the recess of my chest. “Oh, such harmonies we make, with the echoes from the walls. He lead, and I follow. Wherever he lead, I follow.”

Not everywhere, I thought.

“I told you I tell you why I’m here, and I know we don’t have much time, now. I know you don’t press me because you are so nice.”

I laughed. Not audibly, as I no longer had a voice, but with my whole body, a wavy motion she had learned to read as amusement. She was very good at reading people.

“Because of faith. You can’t do anything good without faith.”

That stopped me laughing.

She sighed. “A war break, as you must  hear. A civil war. How strange to call a war civil, no? And Luca go like the rest, and he fight. I tell him don’t go, beg him on my knees, say that I do everything, if only to make him hesitate. But Luca say it is his duty, and that is the end. How could it be his duty? It is people that decide about the war, people who think of it and name it and announce it. How could the actions of someone else be his duty? But he say it is his duty anyway. His duty to España. It’s España on the other side too, no? And who is España, anyway? Do the mountains and trees decide we should go to war? So he pack what he need and go, and nine weeks later the soldiers are ringing at my door with their hats on their chests, as if it matters how nice they are, telling me my Lucasito is dead. They curse at the other side’s soldiers, I think for me, but it is probably just another Lucasito that shoot my Luca, brave and proud and foolish. I told Juan to make me a bath, and find all of the morfina we have in the house, and he, for the first time in his life, refuse. Juan was a servant at our house.”

That wasn’t the word Juan had used when he spoke to Moloch and me, I recalled, stilling my body lest a single movement expose my thoughts. He’d said slave. 

“A sweet boy. It was the only time he is rude to me. I ask him what I should do, and he say that if Ares take my husband, then we should take revenge on the god of war by taking that war away from him. That shall be our revenge. Juan was always talking about the gods, as if wanting  to show that he believed. Doesn’t matter.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine. I too had had that habit, trying too hard to hide my true faith, until my sister had shaken it out of me.

“And Luca, he was a merchant by sea. He know a lot and hear a lot, and he tell me once, in the dead of night as they say, about a buyer in the port of Leeds that tell him about the crystal.” I loved the way she said Crystal, the emphasis on the second syllable. “That it was so  kept a secret because no one believed it, and he don’t believe it, too. But Juan and I believe it. Or at least, we believe that it was worth to try to find it ourselves after Luca died, so we  go down into the caves, deep beneath the ground, weeks and weeks, going down without thinking about how to get back up again.

“We stopped at a place where there was a river coming from above, and we ate the fish that were coming down. Juan… he change a lot; you could still see him, within the crystal, but it looked like he is drowning. Could you imagine? Maybe you could. Sharp all over him, like knives, cutting everything he touch, even rock, like… Mantequia… that you put on bread? doesn’t matter. We stay there and we eat fish. Not cooked, we don’t have what to cook with. We stay there and we change. But we find the crystal. One day, I know it was time to go back up. We have enough of them. But Juan refuse. I remember feeling so guilty for taking him down, but when I offer to get back up, he doesn’t want to. He say if he go up, he die. There is so much crystal on him, he is afraid letting the sun touch him, that it turn everyone for kilometres around into…monstruos. He is afraid soldiers kill him for all the crystal on him. I tell him no one kill him, but he… what’s the word… he say again and again that he doesn’t want to die. I tell him I go up first, tell them he die, and come back with a plan to rescue him, hide him somewhere where he can heal. But he say that there is no where to hide but here, and in his eyes… Do you ever see the look in a man’s eyes when he decides…?”

I had seen it, yes.

She shook her head. “He push me to the edge of the river. Not push, he couldn’t touch me without making me bleed, but he stand in my way, and walk, very slowly, to the river, until I have no choice but jump. He didn’t want to kill me, see. He was so afraid of being killed by people, bad people who want his crystal. Where did he learn that the world was so bad? If it wasn’t for the net Osvaldo put in the water, I would go all the way down with the water.”

Osvaldo was the one to draw the net over the waterfall? That must have been a long time ago.

“The same net supposed to catch you, too, but it cut just the day before. I think it was Juan, or a piece of him, that cut it. I hope that he got back up, that he escape, but maybe he was too scared. Poor Juan, alone in that cave with the guilt. And I thinkt I see some cuts in the rock itself, like a crystal float down the water. Did you see him? You could not speak to him, could you, even if you meet. You don’t know Espanish, or Arábica. And I would suspect you killing him, coming the day after, but your heart is too pure.” She looked at me for a long moment, studying my face. “Too bad that you can’t tell me what you think.”

I could, and she must have known that. I could mime with my hands the act of Cain, if she’d asked me. But how would that have helped her? It would only be a fraction of the truth, and not a useful one. She would be better off thinking it was the guilt that tossed him into the water.

“But you can tell me what you feel, can’t you? You’re sad for him. Shocked that he even did that to me, you sweet soul.”

If only she’d been that good at reading Yitzhak’s emotions, she might not have been here. Then again, if she hadn’t been here, if her light hadn’t shone in the dark, making me swim down and finally brush against the torn net, I would just have gone ahead with the stream: all the way down, further than I could ever climb back.

She was closer to me now, her light washing over the both of us, her lips close to mine. I could feel her heart beating in the water.

“But more than anything, you’re excited. You’re excited and afraid all at the same time, about finally setting us free. But also sad. You will rather stay here in the water with me. You are only leaving for us. It would be too little, to call you a… What’s the word for héroe? You know what I mean. There’s a part of me that would like to stay here, too. Stay like this. But I have a…”

She looked up, as if she could see through the rock and water and more rock and more water to the Espanish sky above, and the sun. Perhaps she still remembered what it looked like. Now she was mute, and I was the one translating the silence. Duty. That was the word she was thinking of.

She turned her head, sensing something I could not yet. I felt Osvlado’s soft contrabasso groan before hearing it, something I could not have deciphered even if it were not in Espanish. I didn’t need to, as Isadora’s face told me everything. He was jealous, of course, and impatient, and, to her, childishly rude. And yet, there he was, crawling outside of our labyrinth, too large to follow.

She swam out first, and by the time I followed she was done scolding him in Espanish. It would have been comical, if it had not been so grotesque. I had not believed her, at first, when she’d told me that Osvaldo had once been a man, and not a gigantic flatworm they had found and befriended. But the way his body—as wide as a man was tall, and long as a train car, bruise-purple and smooth, apart from the jutting teeth, sharp as broken glass—shamefully curled at the words could not be mistaken.

“We are here for too long,” she said in English as I exited the narrow cave into relatively open water. “The others wait for us.”

There was no point arguing. I swam slowly, Isadora beside me and Osvaldo a ways behind us. Though I looked ahead, I was very much aware of his presence, the exact distance between us, looking for any quickening in his inhuman musculature.

I had learned to trust Alberto, even if our first encounter had been a frightening one, and the other two, the couple, never frightened me. But with Osvaldo, I was never sure. There was an instability in him, a madness that came from the extreme loss of form. (‘What cruel irony, no?’ Isadora had told me, ‘For a tailor to turn into a worm, to lose his hands and eyes.’)

He started talking—my bones shook—and she answered him with a sharp turn of her shoulder, as if to say ‘not now!’ I couldn’t blame him for trying – I too, wanted to converse with her all the time, doubly so when one of the others were near. It was the only form of lovemaking she allowed, and I knew I was not her only. It was enough, for now.

The smell of fish had been lingering in the water for a while now. The fish were raw, cut open and unboned, served in the hall where we ate and prayed, with a side of worms. My senses were keener in water now. In the air, I didn’t know if I could smell at all.

I swam ahead, abandoning the odd, three-way company we’d formed, and found in the dark the part of the body of water where the ceiling had been lowest. It was broken off from the rest of the water that had become my whole universe. I turned around the corner that led to the place, and marvelled, as I did every day, at the amount of work the couple had put into this place of worship. Though I had never spoken to them, nor they to me, I had learned to recognize them and their ways, the way one recognizes the deers that visit one’s garden.

Even now, their long, salamander bodies stood erect, their short limbs oaring by their sides, milk-pale heads peering through the water, shining in blue light as they used their mouth to seed glowing worms on the ceilings. Only the blue ones. Slowly, Isadora had explained to me, the worms would change colours to stand out from their kin, and those had to be taken out, replaced with new drop-ins that caught in the net. Those were the ones we ate.

They finished biting down the last errant worms, leaving the ceiling a mirage in shades of luminescent azure, then swam in helices one around the other in what seemed like the equivalent of a kiss. Quickly their bodies coiled together, tightened and detached. They must have recovered from their last lover’s spat, though what they quarrelled about I couldn’t guess.

The rest entered the hall, Osvaldo crawling, bashful, behind Isadora, Alberto’s steps even more careful in water. He clicked one claw in polite impatience.

Isadora swam to the surface, her ball of light in the centre of the glowing blue plane above us creating a clear image of a sunny day’s sky. Then they prayed, her singing filling the hall, divine, and the others mouthing the words as best as they could, even Osvaldo.

For all the time that I had been here, I had not learned a word in Espanish. But there was one word of their chant that didn’t require translating. Apollo. They were praying to the god of the sun.

The first thing Isadora had said to me after she’d realised that I didn’t understand Espanish was a plea for me not to look over the edge, over the next fall. She said the caves had a pull, and if I were to look further down, I would never be able to save them. She had made me promise, and only seemed pleased after I’d done so with my inner voice, though I didn’t know what she saw that let her know when I did. The second thing she told me was that the prayer had more intention than just addressing the god of light. It was for them, also, including her, to prevent them from worshipping the void that had held them in its gullet but did not swallow. Pray to the dark, and it take you. Refuse it, and it spit you out. Everyday, three times, we remember that we return one day. But you never fight against the pull, do you? I like to believe Apollo sent you down here to save us, but who knows?

She’d never asked me to join in.

The singing was over, and one of the couple went to distribute the freshly caught food. Isadora said something in Espanish, and repeated for my sake, as she did every meal, though I felt like she never quite got the phrasing as ritualistic as she would have liked. “All we bring to our mouth, even here, comes from the sun.”

There was a comfort in not being able to speak. I was never forced to either agree or disagree.

From a little basket the lover offered me a pair of headless fish, and waited for me to reach and take them from his hands. I didn’t. In confusion, he pushed forward, not touching me but nearing. He was confused by my refusal, but did not insist a third time. Instead he went to feed the rest, Isadora, Osvaldo, Alberto, and only then his long-bodied lover and himself.

Everyone gathered around Isadora, perhaps to eat by her light, perhaps just to be by her side. That was all she wanted, she had told me: for their group to crystallise into a solid whole. I once again made peace with the suspicion that her quiet affair with me, as well as with her other lovers, was fuelled more by her desire to keep us tethered than by a carnal one. A competition is a form of connection between the contestants, so she made certain to spread her affection very evenly between the three of us, so that we’d compete.

Alberto turned one eye-stalk to me, after receiving his meal, and brought a claw up above his mouth, opening it to reveal his delicate human hand. He scratched the shell between the stalks with soft fingernails, and chirped something, a stream of bubbles coming out his vertical mouth.

I looked at Isadora, who translated.

“Don’t you eat? You need your strength.”

I did. That was the point. I’d found that I was capable of eating great amounts, now, after developing the taste for raw fish, but it had slowed me to the point of unconsciousness. I had developed the habit of taking long naps after every meal, crawling with the last of my strength to a nook where I didn’t have to worry about Osvaldo following.

By way of a response, I took my leave. I wasn’t hungry, as if my body, too, understood what was expected of me, but I knew that my refusal to partake separated me from them.

While they ate, I swam around the place that had become my world. I took in the spirit of the place, its presence. The white rock hanging from the ceiling, the loud but not unpleasant crashing of water against water, the rushing of water down the stream where I was not allowed to go, over the edge I’d never look over. I was curious, of course, to see what Isadora thought would pull me further down, a nagging feeling that never quite subsided. But I kept my promise. I’d been dishonest enough for a lifetime.

Instead, I went to the labyrinth where I’d spent hours of enchantment with Isadora, to the nets that Alberto had fixed under Osvaldo’s guidance. The current was quickest here, but I was now strong enough to swim against it, to the depths beneath, where I’d first seen her light, and finally to the waterfall that had broken my bones and blessed me to spend some time in this tranquil, ordinary little world.

I peaked my head out of the water and looked up at the height I was expected to ascend. The source of the water was obscured behind a cloud of droplets, and too far to see. I was afraid, that could not be denied, but the fear had a counterweight now. I had people counting on me, real people I could see and touch—these strangers who were stranded here, they needed me. No one else could do it in my stead. And so, I knew with great certainty, I will save them.

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