Oubliettes
The Otherworld, to Cheryl, had always been slightly vibrant with the sounds of distant machinery. Put your hand to a wall, and you could feel it faintly from wherever you were, conducted by the fragile network of metal and rust. Somewhere far away, an engine was in operation.
She'd seen the engine's operator. She'd never seen the engine. Until what Henry had said a few days ago, she'd never been interested in looking for it.
From the moment she rediscovered the Otherworld, Valtiel had made very sure to reveal himself to her, and never more. It's enough that she knows what she's looking for, and that simple principle--know what you're seeking, and what you'll do to find it--is almost everything she needs here.
She goes deeper than she has before, moving according to some instinct she can't consciously identify. It's dreamlike and surreal down here, obeying its own internal logic, and Cheryl steps in line with it without having to think about it much.
There are strangenesses down here in the maze; either others have been here at some point in the past, or some unknowable force wishes Cheryl to believe that. A hallway is lined with seemingly random stories from a Portland newspaper, with car ads and a "Peanuts" cartoon given equal prominence with stories of brutal murder; another is spattered with more blood than could have come from a single human, with no tracks or sign of where it could have come from. When the walls are bare, they have the texture of wet canvas and the warmth of a fever victim's forehead.
There are doors, and obstacles. Some of them would be impassable to anyone who wasn't raised in Dahlia's cult; no one else would remember the obscure hymns, or the prayers for the dead, and no power has thoughtfully placed the literature anywhere nearby. Some of them are nothing native to the Otherworld: tripwires that knock over stacks of boxes, a door that's been nailed shut from the other side, a partially ajar door with a rusty guillotine blade positioned atop it...
Something is moving around nearby through all of this. Cheryl is never sure whether it's mirroring her progress, stalking her, or simply very loud. Whatever it is, it's making a series of soft and gentle exhalations, and it never shows itself to her. Cheryl acquires a shotgun at one point, finding it sticking stock-first out of a bizarre synaesthetic mural (as if this place is offering her a weapon, or reclaiming someone else's), and keeps it handy in case whatever's making that sound decides to put in an appearance. It never does.
After something between an hour and a week spent in this place, Cheryl finds the last key she needs, and with it, removes the safety barrier preventing her from descending via a ladder. It is a very long ladder, and halfway down, her flashlight dies. Cheryl bites her lip to keep from crying out, and slowly begins to feel her way down through the dark.
Her foot touches a solid floor some time later, and she takes a second to stand still and let her arms rest. At that time, her flashlight snaps back on.
Gears grind, steam escapes, conveyors hum along, wheels spin, and brackish water rushes endlessly through gouts stained black. There is no one and nothing here to attend these machines, and some are beginning to spin out of control.
There's another doorway here, beyond which the flashlight's beam fails to penetrate. Getting there requires the navigation of a circuit between two of the largest machines, both of which have no obvious purpose and are operating spastically, as industrial machinery does in the moment before it flies apart. Cheryl would get her head knocked off by some rampant bit of metal before she was halfway to the door.
Cheryl blows out breath upwards, into her bangs, which are starting to show their black roots, and begins to inspect the machines' consoles. They were not made to be manipulated by human hands, but she thinks she can probably shut them down given enough time.
The question is whether she has that kind of time at all.