Free The Incompleat Nifft by Michael Shea

desperate feelers—made a mindless noise of woe, and churned up the speeding scum with their struggles. The sewer fell abruptly to a steeper pitch, and took a turn.
    As we slid out of that turn we saw the terminal arch of the tunnel far ahead, framing a burst of yellow light. We knew the hugeness of the smutty gulf beyond the arch by the way it swallowed up the howl of the falls. The giant reverberations fled away to unguessable distances beyond. At that point I knew— knew that we had been tricked, and all three of us were being abducted into the land of death forever. It was my blessed luck to be too stunned by the thought of the falls ahead to make any move at all. Therefore I did not draw my blade and assault the Guide of Ghosts. Woe if I had! Down that last slope the raft seemed hardly to rest upon the leaping, jostling waters, so smooth and fast we went. Then we plunged into the dreadful jaundiced sky that yawned out and down.
    We sledded out upon the empty air, and saw that we had issued from the face of a wall stretching past vision, with a hundred tunnelmouths to either side, puking and groaning their currents down. These waters braided in a vast feculent tapestry, whose lower reaches hung hidden in boiling fog. Into that fog we ourselves settled, the raft spinning, tilting, swooping—descending with the crazy zigzag of revelers staggering down a street, and falling no faster than a wind-buoyed leaf. The fog wrapped us close.
    We spun through the mist so long I thanked its being there to hide the drop from us as we first went over. Then we broke down into clean air, and found under us a huge black lake. We knew by the sound that we had moved far out from the falls, but even here the laketop danced and jittered like a tubful of shaken slops. As we dropped to the water it stirred my nape to see, under the surface below us, a blurred eye half as big as the raft. It blinked and submerged. The waters were alive.
    The shore was not far—a line of crags against the sky—but we saw much getting there. We moved steadily, by what means did not appear, and the water's denizens, as they saw us, all dodged our course. Some were rooted and could not: men whose legs fused and tapered to a stem and whose bodies hung just under the surface with every vein and nerve sprouting out of them, like fan-corals red and grey, and with their brains branching out above like little trees. Crabs with human lips scuttled up and down these nerve-festoons. And everywhere in the water were shoals of armless, bald homunculi, fat as sausages, kicking through the darkness. Scores more of these same creatures were to be seen bandaged in silk and trailed in wriggling, staring bunches by water-skating spiders big as dogs—though not spiders entirely, for men's faces were set in their flat forebodies, just behind the fangs.
    So many combats broke the surface, what must those depths have been like? Men backed with great limpet shells emerged here and there in a grisly wrestling that entangled their limbs and their slithersome, ropy innards as well, everted for the fight. Off to port something as big as a whale heaved up, foaming. All along its length ranks of spindly limbs flailed pitifully—they were human arms. We shortly understood their panic when that island of skin was over-swarmed by scorpion men and pinchers like flensing knives. With these they busily lopped the waving arms.
    Some shacks stood at the foot of the crag we drifted toward. Beyond that ridgeline which marched with the shore, was empty yellow sky, promising that the land fell away past the lake's brim. The Taker of Souls jumped out and beached us. We stepped onto the soil of Death's domain. It had an ugly resilience to the foot, a bruised and sweaty texture. The manlizard waddled toward the shacks, and disappeared between two of them. The Guide stood by the water, turning the smoky nothingness of his gaze on each of us in turn.
    "Mortals, to pass through this place, you must meet