Bufomagus

by Simon Whitechapel

The door swung inward on the mere touch of her fingertip and for a moment she hesitated to pass therethrough, fearing a waiting spell, a strange and sardonic doom. But she came of the City of Dice, whose folk worshiped fortuity, and her instinct to preserve self was overthrown by her upbringing to stake it. Wherefor she passed through, pushing aside dark arrases of heavy silk that slithered against her hands and face like lithe serpents, to see therebeyond a bare, high-walled chamber whose floor, walls, and ceiling were tiled with hexagons of black and white. Then the door, which she had held open with a rearward arm, swung irresistibly shut on her with a thud toned designedly, mayhap, to invoke the shutting of a tomb-lid.

And, impelled by the swing, she was in the chamber, on the floor. A second’s pause and then, plip, plip, plip, like a drip of rain or blood, she saw black toadlets hopping from the central hexagon, which was no hexagon, she saw, but the dark mouth of some pipe. Now seen, now not, landing on white, then black, the toadlets hopped to the walls. One, seeming oblivious of her, hopped to her toes; hopped again; rebounded from her foot; hopped again; rebounded; and she stooped to take it between forefinger and thumb and set it for examination on her palm. A moment it sat there, miniature and ugly but with eyes of minute gold, like a barbarians’ idol on a floor of white marble; and then she shook it off with a frown and murmur. Plip, plip, plip, the toadlets were hopping, and there on her palm, like a drop of the rain they mimicked, glistened some fluid the toadlet had released, pricking her, stinging her.

Poisonous? She stooped and wiped her palm on the tiles, but as she rose therefrom she swayed and nearly fell, hearing a earth-deep note rush up from beneath her, rising in pitch as it rose, lifting from her to vanish orthian beyond that hexagonal ceiling, high, high, high, in the heavens. And now, as she swayed and began to spin, teetotum on her growing delirium, the hexagons of the walls blinked and opened eyes on her; then of the ceiling; then of the floor; and their myriadic gaze was shafts of star-stained light, pinning her, piercing her even as she spun, as though she stood succedaneum for Sebastian, targe for ten thousand archers of light. The note reached her ears again, falling in pitch as it fell from heaven, and as it passed her the hexagons altered again, becoming pentagons, heptagons, tiling as perfectly as that which fell between, as they may not in sane reality. The note was lost in earth, too deep and too deep to catch, ready to rise again, to fall again, to rise again and fall, but the toadlets hopped on, plip, plip, plip, oblivious to her as she now was oblivious to them, carrying each its annihilatory dose.

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