Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

“Elver finds sunlight burdensome, and makes his forays into the light but rarely, such as when he initiates newcomers like yourself. To meet with him again, we must go below.”

Laura’s voice betrayed some nervousness. “Below?”

“Beneath the basement of the Hotel Fjaerland is a natural cavern, connecting via a passage to an underground pool of the fjord. Down to Elver’s domain we will march ourselves, and meet him again in joy.”

Mark imagined Ola imparted a lascivious tinge to these words, but he tried to ignore it. Had the three of them really enjoyed sex with a humanoid eel? But surely it didn’t have to come to that again. Mark told himself that he only wanted to find out if the strange and devious ålefisk man could somehow unkink their problems with the feds.

The hotel basement was pleasantly domestic, containing as it did racks of wine, skis and snowshoes, casks of pickled herring, jars of preserved berries, dangling, log-shaped hunks of smoked meat, and a workbench with little figurines of eel-men standing on two legs with their long tails curled behind them. Ola led them to a trapdoor and down a ladder to the underlying secret cavern.

The first sight to greet them there was less wholesome: the savaged corpses of the elderly couple who’d been the hotel’s other lodgers.

“Oh my god!” screamed Laura. “It’s a trap!” The oldsters’ pathetic, disemboweled bodies lay but a few metres away.

“Run for it!” cried Mark. “Back up the ladder, Laura!” He struck a defensive posture, fully expecting Ola to attack him.

But Ola only stood there gazing at them, her mouth set in a sad smile. “Oh, Mark and Laura, you know so little. These dear old ones, riddled with disease, they came down here to offer Elver their final homage, to lend him their good—their good vibrations?”

“I—I thought I heard you talking about this kind of plan before dinner last night,” said Laura. “But I didn’t realize you actually meant—”

“Elver grows strong from the numinous grants of his worshippers,” said Ola. “If one’s life is nearly at an end, it is well to pass one’s final energies to the eternal ålefisk.”

“Oh, sure,” challenged Mark. “That poor old couple came down here and invited that—that eel-thing to slaughter them like hogs? And you’re leaving them on the floor to rot?”

Ola winced, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Tonight I am burying these sad husks in the churchyard, of course. These were, after all, my parents.”

“Your parents?” whispered Laura, stepping down off the ladder.

“Yes,” said Ola, regaining her poise. She tossed her head in a haughty gesture. “My parents. Surely you can understand that I only wished them glory.”

The odd woman’s sincerity quelled their suspicions, at least temporarily, and, after a quiet exchange of words, Mark and Laura agreed to follow Ola further into the depths.

The echoing cavern was faintly lit by veins of luminous mould criss-crossing the dank stone. On the side towards the fjord, the walls funnelled into a downward-sloping corridor. Along the way they passed a squat stone altar in an alcove. Ola and Elver’s trysting spot.

Picking their way further along the uneven but well-swept stone floor, the trio soon reached a subterranean shore where the black water lapped. Here rested patient Elver, his exposed torso gleaming, his lower appendages submerged. He was holding the Yotsa 7 to one of his eyes with a curly tendril that branched from his side.

“Elver, my sweet,” sang Ola. “Show our new friends your thoughts.”

The glabrous surface of the eel man’s body abruptly became a high-res display—his subdermal chromatophores, densely packed, were synched to his mind. And now Mark and Laura took in a little movie scenario.

In Elver’s movie, passive viewers around the globe are watching video displays and hand-held gizmos. A steady parade of bad news and horrors marches across their idiot screens. In speeded-up time, the media slaves become increasingly bestial and depraved. But now, from above, a celestial rain of glowing counter-imagery descends upon the benighted citizenry. The images are elegant glyphs encapsulated in comic-strip-style thought balloons: quaint cities amid verdant hills, cathedral-like forests, rich fields of fruits and grain, treasuries of fish and cheeses, temples of learning, artists at work and orchestras at play, joyous carnal orgies, swift ships sailing beneath smiling skies, and scientists peering into the heart of the cosmos. In Elver’s movie, the recipients of his ideational manna brighten and perk up. They turn off their screens and address one another face to face, laughing and stretching their limbs. They’re fully alive at last.

Mark’s spirits rose to see the energizing thought balloons and their effects. He savoured the fusillade of upbeat glyphs, and revelled in the bountiful, idyllic futurescape that the images evoked.

But it was Laura who discerned the ultimate import of Elver’s show.

“That flood of counter-programming—the thought balloons—those stand for semiotic ontological transmissions from the Yotsa 7!” she exclaimed. “Elver wants to reverse what we thought was a one-way flow. We’ve been using the Yotsa 7 to perceive the hidden meanings of images, Mark. But now we can start with the most desirable meanings and wrap our images around them!”

“We’ll—we’ll make ads that people can’t resist,” said Mark, slowly. “Ads that change the world.”

“Indeed,” said the willowy Ola, leaning against Laura’s side. “This is Elver’s lesson. He is proud to have such clever devotees.”

Mark beamed as if he were still ten years old and receiving his father’s praise for a perfect report card. But he hadn’t quite lost his head.

“If we’re going to advertise, we need a product,” he said. “You need a cash flow to pay for ads. It’s symbiotic—and in a positive way if you have an honest product.”

“Elver’s Smoked Eel,” said Ola, not missing a beat. “With special labels and trademarked Elver figurines. Today we four are designing the packaging and the ads. And thanks to your wonderful Yotsa 7, we are folding in our most utopian dreams.”

“You two have thought about this a lot,” said Laura. She glanced over at Elver and giggled. The silent Elver responded with a nod.

“Our products will go everywhere, and their glyphic subtexts will remake the world!” declaimed Ola. By now, Elver had wriggled fully out of the water, settling himself near Laura’s feet.

“So let’s get it done,” said Mark, a little distracted by the thoughts evoked by the eel man’s proximity.

“Oh, and one other thing,” said Laura brightly. “We’ll work images of Mark and me into a lot of the ads. We’ll be wrapped around glyphs of love and trust and acceptance, you see. That way those government pigs will be primed to pardon our so-called crimes. In case we, uh, ever want to go home.”

“We will be mailing our press-kits to whomever you suggest,” said Ola smoothly.

The quartet worked congenially all that day in the mould-lit cavern. Elver wasn’t a bad guy, for being an immortal subaqueous demigod who communicated via pictures on his flesh.

Around tea time they took a break, and Ola fetched them a picnic basket of wine, berries, bread, and smoked eel-meat, along with a blanket to make it more comfortable on the stony edge of the underground lake.

As he lay resting from the repast, idly dreaming up still grander plans, Mark noticed one of Elver’s tendrils snaking across the cloth to alight on Laura’s leg. Laura sighed and smiled, shifting onto her back. Ola was watching too, and batting her eyes. Mark felt himself slipping into the same erotic intoxication that had possessed him the night before. He turned to look at the ålefisk man.