by Matt Snee
The air was foul and tight, possessed of God knows what kind of alien bacteria and other fauna. They splashed through thick puddles of waste water, running as hard as they could into the underground.
Could there be an escape? Jennifer recalled something her father had once written about in his adventures and a hope took hold of her. If this led to the lower cities of old, than it could lead to …
The worm caves.
She had never considered it, but as she did so now, she could almost feel the weight of her father's journal bouncing in her backpack as they traversed the sewers. There was a way out, she was sure of it, a way off the planet. Could they find it?
First they had to get beneath, far beneath where they were now. But by the land of the ground beneath her feet, she knew they were already headed in that direction.
“Where are we going to go?” asked Captain.
“Down below!” she exclaimed above the sloshing of water. “There's a way out!”
“Back to the surface? But what about the No-Shape?”
“No, something else, somewhere else!” She considered how she would explain it. “Your people, Earth, you know about worm holes do you not?”
“Yeah, they're like shortcuts through space, but … they're not real are they? And how are we going to find one?”
“We don't have to worry about finding them,” Jennifer told him. “They're down here. In the old city, old Zirroqua, beneath where we are now. The old civilizations, on Venus, on Mercury, on Mars … they used to use the worm caves to go between the planets, before space travel.” She thought about it more closely. “There were trade routes, between the planets, through the worm holes, into … the worm caves.”
“Caves?” Captain wondered. “Between planets?”
“They're carved in the lower stratus of space, kind of like the basement of reality, a heavy nether material that holds everything else up.”
“But that's insane!” Captain argued.
“That's because it is insane,” Jennifer answered, a little bit shocked with her own nonchalance.
“So what you're saying is if we go deeper, we'll find caves we can follow off planet, and escape?”
“Yes,” said Jennifer. “That's exactly what I'm saying.”
She smiled.
There was always an answer.
9. The Ruins
“Forgotten? Aye, entire worlds are forgotten.”
Lewis Darby, “Wrath of the Video Germ”
Soon there was a new darkness. A thick fear overtook them and almost choked the hope out of their souls.
Jennifer knew they had reached some untouched part of Zirroqua, something forgotten from a long time passed. The air was filled with ancient stenches. Beneath their feet was some sort of cultivated stone, rather than dirt or the clamshell configurations of the Venusian sewers.
“You okay?” Captain asked as they stepped through the shadows. The rolling din of the No-Shape could still be heard overhead, and only God knew what hell chewed on the surface of the planet.
“Yeah,” Jennifer answered, realizing the strange situation they had just escaped from. Perhaps Captain thought them safe—which she knew they were not—and was trying to reassure her things had gotten a little less desperate. “We're going to get out of this,” she told him. She led them through the darkened halls and dripping passageways with confidence.
“How do you know this place?” he asked.
“My father's books. He was here, once.”
“How?”
“He was an adventurer. No danger was too great for him. If he got it into his head to visit Venus disguised as a slave or something, he did it.”
“And these are ruins now?”
“Yes. They don't come down here. Not anymore. This is the past we're fleeing through.” The duo came to a tight corridor and were silent as they ducked through it. After that stood a wide hall. “It's the faded architecture of engines that were once great,” Jennifer added. “I don't know much about that goddamn slime, but I know they were more once. They were once artists and craftsman.”
“Now they're pretty gross,” said Captain.
Jennifer laughed and agreed.
* * *
This is a strange place, Captain thought. He realized how he had just escaped a somewhat perverse fate, but the noise of the No-Shape above them on the surface reminded him they were still in danger. He felt closer now to Jennifer that he did before; they were in this together, for better or worse, and he knew the only person he could depend on was her—even though he still didn't fully trust her.
She walked in front of him through the ruins, and at that moment she turned and gave him a quick gaze. He smiled. She didn't smile back, but instead showed worry through her eyes.
It became clear to Captain that as soon as he escaped one insane situation, he was thrown headlong into another equally if not more bizarre and dangerous one. I better shape up, he thought to himself, or I'm going to end up dead. Still, death didn't scare him as much as the confusion that flooded his cells and the disorientation he felt that obviously stemmed from the fact he was creeping through the underground of Venus. What did frighten him was being alone. What if Jennifer was killed, or something else happened to her? What would he do if it was just himself out here?
“It's up ahead… and down below,” Jennifer said.
The water between their feet started flowing faster, and they could hear a white noise ahead that could only be the sound of liquid rushing. They came to some sort of fork, where three paths lay in front of them.
“Which way?” Captain asked.
“The way down.” Jennifer stumbled. The light generated by her laser gun flickered for a moment, causing a brief second of deep shadow around them before she righted herself.
“You okay?” Captain asked.
“Yeah,” she said, feeling like a fool.
They could still hear the No-Shape, faintly, but underneath that and the moving water there was an incredible silence. This place seemed more derelict and spookier by the moment. But just when Captain and Jennifer thought it couldn't get any more perilous …it did.
A piercing roar echoed through the ruined aqueduct.
“What was that?”
“That is one of our obstacles,” Jennifer explained. “Untids.”
“Untids?” Captain gasped, wondering what that could be.
“Clam-ghosts. I've heard of them. My father wrote of them. They're mutations, gestalts of dissipated Venusians that have overridden scraps of organic machinery and amalgamated into physical beings.”
“Monsters?” Captain wondered aloud.
“Abominations, apparently,” Jennifer said.
“But what—” Captain was interrupted as the ground beneath his feet disappeared, and he was rushed headlong down through the water, into a pool below, absent of Jennifer's laser gun's light. As she chased after him, the light dashed across the wall, and Captain glimpsed a terrible, skeletal owl-like man crouched above him. He flinched backwards into even deeper water, submerging himself for a moment.
“Captain?” Jennifer called to him, pulling his arm and dragging him out of the water, until he was on surer ground.
He gasped and coughed. “What… what is that?”
In the light, the skeleton was clearer, and more decidedly owl-like, though also possessed two arms and legs like a human, but accompanied by an owl visage and long, wide wings. Whatever it was, it had been dead a long time.
“It's a blue owl!” Jennifer told him. “I can't believe it!”
“They were an ancient race, right?” asked Captain.
“Exactly. But it makes sense that the remnants of one is down here, it's just … it's just… astonishing.”
Now Captain's eyes dropped to what the owl was holding in one hand, a glimmering long knife made of a crystalline metal that he could not identify.
A realization dawned on Jennifer. “I think that is for you now,” she said.
“The knife? I
couldn't take it.”
“I think you must. We will need it soon. It is a legend.”
Captain hesitated and then pried the weapon from the skeleton's grasp. At last it seemed as though the skeleton was letting it go, and the cold metal fell into Captain's hands.
“It's heavy,” he said.
“It will cut through stone,” Jennifer explained.
“And now it's mine.”
“No,” she said. “It has always been yours.”
* * *
Battle awaited.
Soon the monsters were upon them, three of them. They were headless hulks, lumbering through the filth with great arms and uneven legs, their organs on the outside of their bodies, their massive chest-tongues whipping about to sense the world around them. Untids. Clam-ghosts.
Jennifer had described them as abominations, and they most certainly were. Nightmarish things that should only exist in the subconscious. But here they were real, and hungry.
“The only way to stop them is to pierce them in the heart!” Jennifer cried as she unleashed her laser gun at them.
“Which is the heart?!?” yelled Captain as one of the Untids lashed out at his leg with its thorny, yellow, wart-covered tongue.
“The green one!” Jennifer shouted back over the noise of the laser.
“Which green one?!?!?” screamed Captain.
The Untid Jennifer shot was too wet to burst into flames. Instead, great plumes of steam shot out of it as she melted its organs. A burst of the steam hit Captain in the face, and he flinched as he battled the second Untid; a moment the creature took advantage of by punching him in the belly.
Captain doubled over, fear shooting up his legs. But then he heard the whine of Jennifer's gun again as she shot the monster in front of him. Captain regained his senses and stabbed the creature in one of its green organs, hoping it was its heart. Sure enough, the monster screamed, convulsed, and doubled over.
There was one left, and it was the biggest of the lot.
“Watch out!” cried Jennifer as the monster's chest-tongue whipped above their heads. Captain slashed at the tongue, but missed, and then the Untid was suddenly closer, he could smell its foul odor and almost feel its powerful heartbeat.
Hoping to miss Captain, Jennifer shot at its side and steam spewed out of the wound into the air around them as the Untid burned. Now Captain stabbed at its green organs until finally it succumbed, falling into the slosh at their feet, its chest-tongue whipping once or twice more.
And that was that.
“Jeez,” said Captain.
“No time for shock or remorse,” said Jennifer. “Let's go.”
* * *
In the darkness, there was only the sound of the water rushing around their feet. It was frigid and raised the hair on both of their skin. Their shoes were soaked and their toes were stinging in the cold.
Captain wished he felt more, but mostly he was glad it hadn't been him, or Jennifer. He would be lost without her. “Now what?”
“Now we trick the universe,” said Jennifer.
“How?”
“With the fecundity of luck. These tunnels … they're old. We're going to see how old. I'm hoping … I'm praying … they go all the way.”
They trudged through the ruins of the aqueduct, the water gushing endlessly around their feet. They said nothing for a while. Captain was tired, and almost announced that he was so, but he imagined that Jennifer was too. He was sure she had a plan.
“What do you think is happening up there?” Captain asked. He thought he could still feel the vibrations of the No-Shape.
“Apocalypse,” said Jennifer. “If it's not over yet.”
“What will happen to everyone up there?”
“They'll die. They're probably all already dead.”
“The whole planet?”
She sighed. “Now you know why we're doing what we're doing.”
“So it doesn't happen on Earth.”
“Yeah.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“Patience,” Jennifer told him. “I've got a few aces up my sleeve.”
“Will the dead aliens help us?”
“Yes.”
His eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness, but still all he could see were vague, half-invisible shapes. “Do you think we'll make it?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“How long is it going to take?”
“To get to the Devasthanam?”
“Yes, that's what I mean.” Did he?
“A week maybe.”
“On foot?”
“I know it's crazy.”
“After the caves, then what?”
“Then we will be home.”
He sighed, her answers giving him no relief. “It's cold down here.”
“I know. I'm cold too.”
“How much further?”
“I don't know to be honest.”
“That's okay,” Captain soothed. “We're okay.”
They continued to trudge through the water.
* * *
When they came to the door, they were exhausted. Their legs felt like mud and their brains felt like smoldering fires. They saw the door's eyes first, through the darkness, glimmering and glittering. And then when they were close enough, it started to snicker, and Jennifer realized they were in terrible danger, more terrible than she had anticipated. This wasn't entirely unexpected, but she had not thought she would encounter a predator such as the door on Venus, and not now.
“What is that?” Captain asked, freezing in his steps.
“Shhh,” said Jennifer. “We mustn't look like prey.”
The door was huge, just what you would expect for a well-traveled gateway between planets. It was made out of some sort of dull stone, carved intricately into an animal's head. Once they came within a few paces of the door, they could see it was a monkey's face that moved and twitched as though it was alive. When they stopped in front of it, it spoke.
“Travelers, would-be explorers of the stars, I thank thee for coming on such a lovely morning. It will be my great pleasure to play with you today.” The monkey's voice was deep and booming, coming from out of the ground, but not electronic in any way. The words were cloaked in a thick, heavy accent that leaned heavily on consonants.
“Hello,” Jennifer said.
“Hello, hello.” The monkey laughed.
“Hello,” said Captain. The monkey was a little unsettling.
“Oh and hello to all of you too. I don't believe we've met before, so first I'll explain the rules. Basically, we play a riddle game. I ask you riddles and you must come up with the answers. If you answer three riddles correctly, I will permit you access to the tunnel and safety from the No-Shape.”
“Okay,” said Jennifer, clenching her fists. “I'll answer any riddle you come up with. We're not scared.” She had read about contests like this in her father's books. All creatures liked games, and if you wanted to succeed, you had to learn how to play them. But she reached out and grabbed Captain's hand. She was not invincible.
“Ready?” asked the door.
“Yes,” said Jennifer.
“Black as tar,” the door began, “at noon it is far.”
“It is night,” Jennifer answered.
The door smiled, but was disappointed. “I suppose that might have been too easy.”
“Oh no, great door,” says Jennifer. “It was most impressive.”
Doors like these were parasites, and Jennifer knew the creature was no primate, despite its “face.” It was just reflecting her ancestry back at her. If she could truly see the door as it was, she would probably see terrible fangs and mandibles, a predator's visage. Jennifer was sure there were other entrances to the worm caves, but here they were. The door had obviously set itself up here like a spider does in its web, hoping for prey. Spirits like this didn't consume just flesh; they feasted on souls.
“Now,” said the door. “How about the next one? Like the gnashi
ng teeth of deer in their sleep, that falling sensation when everything's breaking. Cold things burning, stomachs churning, it's the only feeling no one's intent on stealing.”
Jennifer thought about it for a moment before answering. Stumped for only second before she considered all the clues, she answered. “Fear.”
“Right again!” the door exclaimed, once again happy and disappointed. “Now, one more left!”
“Okay,” Jennifer said.
“Okay,” Captain agreed.
The monkey smiled. “The last guest to arrive, in pestilence it thrives, more silent than stone, in earth or fire is its home.”
Jennifer did not speak so quickly this time. The answer hid in the back of her mind, where she could not reach it. With such simple words, it seemed as though it would be obvious.
The monkey's mouth slowly opened, eager to eat.
But now Captain spoke. “It's death,” he said finally.
“Awww,” said the door. “You guessed it! So sad!”
Then there was a huge cracking sound that made them jump, and the door began to open in front of them.
“See you next time,” said the door. “Ha, ha, ha.”
Captain and Jennifer's eyes met briefly, and then they continued through.
10. The Worm Cave
Despite dad's (legendary) conceit, he never downplayed the importance of luck in his exploits. He seemed convinced, however, that he'd worked hard to be lucky.
Jennifer Pichon, memoirs
On the other side of the monkey door was a different kind of darkness, an unnatural, gray-red darkness, where all shapes were outlined in purple and the ground beneath their feet seemed to be made of shimmering amber ash. Captain noticed that even he and Jennifer took on a new silvery hue. There was no light source exactly, but instead everything suddenly generated its own light, especially the walls and floor beneath them, which looked carved brutally but efficiently.
“This is really it?” Captain asked her. “The caves between worlds?”
“Yes,” Jennifer told him.
“Does anyone else use them?”
“You'd be surprised who knows about this. But if your question is 'Are we safe here?' then the answer is mostly yes, but also mostly no.”