Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  There had once been lights in the maintenance tunnel, but they’d gone dark, dying a quiet death who knew how long ago. There were rats too, but they were alive, plump, and healthy. Revenants were ravenous eaters, which made them sloppy eaters. Half a mouthful of their meal went flying with every bite. In the empty tunnels like these and in the sewers, the rats followed them or waited for them while they were out hunting. It was a good life for a rat.

  It was good for us, too.

  Full rats were slow and happy rats. They let you be. Hungry rats were desperate and bold, starving hyenas on a smaller scale. I’d spent a fair share of my life sleeping or squatting in houses and mold-infested two-room apartments where you could hear the rats in the walls, too many to count sometimes. When I was four I’d asked Nik if we could catch one and keep it as a pet. No? Why not? They weren’t as ugly as the Chihuahua that belonged to my babysitter across the hall. Nik had said they were dirty and carried fleas, lice, and disease. That hadn’t sounded any different from the Chihuahua, but I’d listened to my brother. Not that he was always right, although he was. Four years old and I’d known that.

  I’d listened because he was the only one who listened to me.

  Doing what he told me hadn’t kept me from being bitten three or four times on my leg, but I hadn’t minded. I’d understood. At four I’d known I was a rat myself, but I hadn’t been half as good at going after food as they were. They’d taught me a lesson: If you can’t find what you need for a growling stomach, you go and you take it. It’d been a lesson worth learning and worth the blood. I’d been asleep on our mattress on the floor while Nik took a shower for school in the morning. Sophia wasn’t there. She wasn’t there a lot at night and when she was, I wished she wasn’t. She hadn’t been there during the day much either, but it hadn’t mattered. Whether she was or not, Nik had taken me over to Mrs. Sheckenstein, who watched me while he was gone.

  It hadn’t mattered she’d smelled of a bathtub full of lavender flea market perfume and a full diaper or that she’d get irate at her TV talk shows and smack the screen with her walker. She’d fed me lunch, every school day, which had been as close as meeting a real live Santa Claus, flying reindeer and all, to my four-year-old self. And she’d taught me to play Monopoly and Clue and Texas hold ’em. She’d been a great old lady, who cackled each time I’d swept home a pot of Peanut Butter M&M’s, told me I had a gift at bluffing like nobody’s business. I’d known that once she’d explained bluffing was lying for fun. I’d lied that young for survival not fun, but it’d been nice to hear someone other than Nik tell me I was smart and good at something.

  When I had been bitten, Nik had come out of the shower to find me awake in my Batman shorts and a once red, now faded pink Flash T-shirt from Goodwill. I’d been sitting up, the blanket the two rats had crawled under tossed aside, and had been very cautiously placing my carefully hoarded seven M&M’s in front of the gaunt pair crouched by me. I’d been four, but I hadn’t been stupid. I’d had blood running down one leg where they’d tried to take a few bites out of me. If they were that hungry, they’d gnaw off the tips of my fingers if I let them.

  Nik’s face. It hadn’t worn that expression before that I could remember, not at four. It was gray under the dark olive, mouth open, not widely, but as if he had been in the middle of saying something and forgotten what it was. Now I knew he’d been horrified and guilt-stricken to come out and see rats had tried to eat his little brother. But at four, horror and guilt and the flu looked the same.

  His eyes unable to leave the blood and bites, he’d reached for the baseball bat he left propped against the wall. He’d hit robbers breaking through windows and Sophia’s “dates” with it several times by the time he was eight. They’d deserved it, but the rats hadn’t.

  “No! Don’t. They’re hungry, Nik. They didn’t bite me because they’re mean. Just hungry.” Niko and I had both known what that was like, but my brother had always given me a third of his food until I had turned eight myself and was skilled enough to steal at least the makings of one big meal or steal someone’s food at a fast-food place when they left it on the table to go to the soda machine with their cup. It’d been enough to split on the days at the end of the week when Nik’s paycheck had refused to stretch that far. I’d not been as smart as my brother, as polite or human—the human wasn’t my fault—with classmates or teachers and other authority figures, but I’d had my own talents. I’d been able to lie, steal, blackmail, and commit arson (only the once) like a motherfucker by the third grade.

  It was something that Niko hadn’t had it in him to do. He would try before he’d let me go without, but his morals would strangle and trip him up. Or, I’d told him, let me do what I’m good at, being sneaky. When you try and they catch you, and they will, they’ll drag you off to foster care or a group home, and I’ll be alone with Sophia. If I’m alone with Sophia, stealing won’t be a problem as I won’t eat.

  I’d been eight then, but when I’d made promises to my brother, he’d known they were real. I wouldn’t eat if the cops or the social workers took him. I wouldn’t eat until I saw him again and as poor a shoplifter as his conscience made him, that might’ve been too long. He’d given in. There was nothing else he could do.

  When I was four, though, hunger had been more familiar. “You share with me when I’m hungry,” I’d said. “I should share with the rats.”

  Nik had bitten his bottom lip until it was as bloody as my leg, but had let me finish feeding the rest of the M&M’s to the rodents before wrapping them up quickly in the blanket and shaking them out of the window, lucky we lived on the first floor, to be on their wild way . . . right back inside our walls, but we’d been young then. Not quite as smart as rats. Nik had cleaned my leg with peroxide, curiously upset to a four-year-old me who’d reassured him it hardly hurt. And the sight of blood hadn’t bothered me . . . ever, I guessed, as far back as I could remember. Blood was blood. Why would that disturb anyone? Except Niko’s blood. That disturbed me to the point of taking the baseball bat myself and making who’d caused my brother to bleed to bleed three times as much themselves.

  In the end I’d had my leg wrapped, and a brother who’d sat on the mattress with me while I promptly fell back asleep while he stayed awake all night, watching for rats. The next day had been a “field trip” to the free clinic for a tetanus shot that had hurt like a bitch. The four bites Mickey and Minnie had given me combined hadn’t been as painful as that.

  To this day, I didn’t hold a grudge at the memory. I had understood hunger and I could tolerate anything, rats included, over a Chihuahua. I didn’t bother to look down when several ran over my feet to flow into the darkness ahead of us. “You don’t have a problem with rats, I take it? In your future business, which I fear is spent entirely underground surrounded by disgusting smells, that if you did have such a phobia that you’d have to become accustomed.”

  In the spill of the flashlight’s glow I glanced over at Robin’s comment and laughed with not a shred of humor to show for it. “I told you about the future and the Auphe. My past you’ll have to get from Cal Junior. I left something for your curiosity. I know pucks and I know you—how insane it would drive you to not have anything left to find out, dig up. So never bitch I didn’t give you anything. But, just this once, no, I don’t have a problem with rats. Having a few take a couple of mouthfuls out of my leg when I was a kid is probably one of my happier memories.”

  I didn’t ask about Goodfellow and rats. As old as he was, he would’ve caught and eaten rat at some point in prehistory and counted it a choice morsel fit for a king.

  The maintenance tunnel was about a third of a mile long before we stood in a much larger area with crumbled pillars. Although these weren’t marble, I still thought it had to be a duplicate of the abandoned platform above us. Why they had a half-finished duplicate down here, I had no idea. There were also piles of trash, heaps of bones, and graffiti on one cracked
wall in what I suspected wasn’t brown paint, but dried blood, and in a language and alphabet I didn’t recognize. It curved and looped in a manner unfamiliar enough that it made my brain think about aching, then decide it wasn’t worth it. I gestured toward it. “‘For a good time, call Shub-Niggurath’?”

  “With her thousand young, I think she’s had a good time and then some. ‘Azathoth thinks he was here but being the blind, idiot god, who knows?’”

  “If you knew Lovecraft, tell me he was insane. I think I’d feel better about tentacles specifically and the universe in general.”

  “He was not”—his smile was sly and devious, the perfect reflection of his personality—“at least he was not until he mentioned to his substitute geometry teacher in high school how he wished to be a writer and that teacher told him a few stories.”

  “You are Satan, aren’t you? The fucking devil,” I groaned. “I knew it all along.”

  “How was I to know about the evolutionary unviable streak of mental illness that ran in his family? I did, if nothing else, support him in his hatred of geometry, Euclidean or non. That is the devil’s tongue; mine is simply hypnotically convincing, eloquent, provocative, seductive, and occasionally indecent.” He was shining around the spare flashlight I’d given him. Bright as it was, it couldn’t begin to penetrate the nearest alcoves. Everything past that was a starless night. “It was only three days. I was undercover. There was a wood nymph on the grounds, beautiful, with the softest bed of pale green flowering moss shading her—” I kicked him in the ankle while using my light to get a look in the other direction.

  Hissing in pain, he emphasized, “It was blooming for me, tiny star-shaped jasmine with a come-hither fragrance leading to a silken passage toward—” The second saving of my own personal sanity was a light rap of my flashlight to the back of his head to cut him off.

  “Do you write romance novels for great-great-grandmothers? For nuns?” I was weaving, the exhaustion of the fight with the skin-walker, the sleepless night . . . the crushing inability to turn and see my brother. And I was having a repeat of the spotty vision.

  “It is the poetry of erotic temptation, you heathen.”

  “But talk about a guy or guys that you’ve screwed, or when you did before Ishiah stamped monogamous on your forehead while slapping a chastity Speedo on you, and I’m tortured with ‘huge cock,’ ‘dick that could go all night and I’m talking an Alaskan three-month night,’ ‘an ass almost half as fuckworthy as mine,’ ‘hung like Seabiscuit on Viagra,’ and ‘dick holster’—that was new to me. Thanks for that. Where’s the ‘throbbing manhood radiating incredible heat, wrapped in silken skin and a passion that needed no words to breach my heavenly gates’?” Mrs. Sheckenstein read a lot of trashy romance novels out loud, very out loud as she was half deaf, so I wouldn’t be bored in between the poker games and her TV shows.

  I narrowed my eyes. There were more streaks I couldn’t blink away. They were dark now, not yellow. And they were coming toward us, sinuous and slinking as they moved.

  “That is the foulest of foul. Heinous enough to drain one of the will to live and so hideous to the ear that if you do, you’d pray to be struck deaf and blind. There is something profoundly wrong with you. And if you say monogamous once more”—he gagged twice when he said the word—“once and only once, I will take my sword and—”

  I slapped my hand over his mouth. This Robin wasn’t as familiar with me as mine had been after a few years. He was . . . he had . . . fuck, had, been easier to interrupt. Mine had learned to keep talking over me and if my hand had come near his face to casually attempt to stab it with an antique New Orleans gambler’s push dagger, the two-inch blade perfectly concealed in the palm of his hand. I’d wanted one, love at first sight, but he’d refused to tell me where he bought or stole it, the bastard. As he would’ve been a gambler in New Orleans a couple of hundred years ago, he’d likely bought it then and there.

  “Yeah, take your sword,” I said quietly. “Now.”

  Was that the scrape then quick scuttle of claws? I unholstered the Desert Eagle and shifted the light over to two pillars on the right. Nothing. Next to me Goodfellow had his sword out and it was one of his longer ones in spite of the shorter—helluva lot shorter—pricey suit jacket he was wearing with no addition of a long coat over it. “Where do you keep it?” I kept my voice low, but didn’t bother hiding the exasperation. “I’ve asked you before and you won’t tell me. Where the hell do you fit that in just a suit?”

  “Have you ever seen me nude in this not quite utopian future?”

  “Unfortunately. By accident.” I made sure the emphasis was audible if the words only just were as I swung the light to the left.

  “Then why aren’t you asking me where I keep my cock instead? The difference between it and the sword is negligible. In fact, the length of the sword may be somewhat less.” He examined it for comparison. I was relieved he didn’t whip out what he was comparing it with to be positive.

  The dark shuddered again. The light had touched them on this side, but if they’d been set a few inches farther back, it wouldn’t have. It wasn’t in the light themselves I saw them. I nearly did, but what had been a solid black shadow melted to a puddle of darkness in a blink of an eye and was gone. It was in the edges of the light, the faintest of dim glows, that I could make them out. Deep and velvety black—but without the depth or gleam of fur, there was a mass of them too entwined to separate and count. They were supple and boneless as weasels, if weasels were about six feet long, without any eyes that I could make out. I couldn’t see teeth either but there was the snapping of jaws with a ringing echo that is heard when there is a full mouthful of needle pointed fangs gnashing together. I pointed the flashlight directly at them. These didn’t melt—strength in numbers, always a bitch—but they did untangle their knot and writhe away from it.

  Unfortunately that writhing was bringing them toward us.

  They didn’t seem to like the light. They’d hump and slither away from a direct, head-on beam, but they’d keep to the dying glow where it dimmed to one side or the other. Apart, I could guess each would weigh about eighty or ninety pounds, but as their movement said every pound was pure, agile, and, knowing my luck, fucking gymnastic muscle. But with the no fur, no eyes, no mouth or teeth that I could see although I definitely heard that much, they were bizarre shadows except shadows aren’t that dense or solid that you could hear their teeth clashing and the scrape of nails against the cracked and crumbling floor.

  “No idea what they are,” I said grimly as I shot the one in the lead to see the bullet swallowed and hear the impact of it on a wall or pillar behind it. It’d passed through it as if nothing was there, but knew that wasn’t true. “No idea and don’t like them,” I corrected.

  I fanned the light back and forth to have them peeling off. It didn’t stop them, but it slowed them some. Goodfellow had stepped away from me to get space to swing his sword. It was a lighter version of a broadsword, heavier despite that but with more reach than the Roman short sword and more weight and force than his rapier. While I wished I hadn’t run that description through my head for a mental weapons checklist that was now labeled Goodfellow’s cock checklist, it’d been a good choice of weapon. It was too bad that it did nothing at all for the puck as the blade passed completely through the shadow and the shadow laughed. It was similar in no fucking way to the sound of a real weasel, but it was goddamn creepy as hell, no doubt.

  Robin swore and aimed his own light at it, shoving it right into its face. And I do mean “into.” His hand vanished in the shadow that made up the creature. It squealed and backed away swiftly as ribbons of black began to pour from where the light had gone in. More swiftly than that, its entire narrow head fell apart. Turning into a rain of ebon, it fell to the floor, bubbled, and dissipated with the same consistency of mist. Its body began stretching and thinning as it began to grow a new head to replace the lo
st one.

  I’d been counting and there were at least ten to fifteen of them. They were everywhere, then somewhere else. If one leaped into the darkened area our lights didn’t reach to our left, it would slither out from an equally lightless patch to our right. We couldn’t hurt them. Our weapons didn’t work on them. We could injure them with the flashlights, but not in a permanent way if they were growing back their heads. If anything, it irritated them more than anything else from the chorus of high-pitched squeals that had risen from the others in sympathy for the one who’d lost, and, goddamn it, seconds later grown its entire head back.

  “We should meander, I think,” Robin suggested, holding up the hand that was gripping the flashlight he’d used to attempt brain surgery on our new friend. It was covered with blood. The skin of the back of it had been practically flayed. Long slices that had torn through every piece of skin that was available without completely skinning it altogether.

  We couldn’t hurt them, but they had no difficulty hurting us.

  “Yeah, we should go.” Regroup. Get out of this damn dark tunnel up into the daylight and, if pushed, shoot anyone whose shadow seemed too big for them. “Go and drink more. I don’t think we really tried hard enough with the drinking.”

  They were coming for us, joining again into one mass undulation. They were between us and the direction we’d exited the tunnel onto the platform, but I’d been down here a few times before. I knew there was another way out. Stairs to a boarded-up door behind a fake facade of a small brick shop from WWII. Or, quicker and safer with instant gratification, there was another option. “I can gate us out of here,” I said as we backed away, pinning some in place and slowing other ones down. It kept them from leaping on us as a pack for as long as we could.