Netherkind

by Greg Chapman

  One of the Skiift came forward and thrust a sharpened javelin of wood towards his face.

  “Speak your name, Phagun!” it said.

  “Thomas…” he replied, trying not to look the Skiift in the eye.

  He saw their hides, scales packed tight like blood-soaked chain mail, impenetrable. He tried to fathom the physics of how the Skiift were able to become beasts and the ensuing concepts sickened him.

  They wore no clothing, yet they were devoid of any genitalia. Even their bodies and faces appeared genderless. The one with the spear looked him over with emerald, pupil-less eyes.

  “We have not seen you before among your tribe—explain!”

  The moss seemed to become heavier, forcing Thomas deeper into the soil. His breath became ragged, delaying his response, which only aggravated his tormentor.

  “Speak!” the Skiift said, pushing the tip of the spear into Thomas’ ribs.

  “I’m new!” Thomas cried. “I came from the city…the city of the humans!”

  “Are you a Phagun spy?”

  Thomas looked skyward, as if in search of guidance, but saw only roots in their thousands, some as thick as the columns in the Sederunt.

  “No, I’m not a spy! I was…cast out…by Gavenko!”

  The Skiift hissed at the sound of the King’s name.

  “You lie!” Thomas’ interrogator said, twisting the spear even further into his side. “We know he has scouts setting traps for our people!”

  “No!” Thomas said, struggling under the burgeoning earth. “I’m telling you the truth…the Lepers attacked us and—”

  The Skiift drove the spear between Thomas’ ribs and brackish blood poured from his pale skin. Thomas shrieked in agony. Another Skiift approached and Thomas looked as the scales of its skin slipped apart like falling dominoes to expose raw flesh. The scales took on an iridescence, unseen light refracting and blurring across them. Thomas screamed in terror as hair—or bristles—began to sprout from the raw meat flesh. Then legs—two, three, no six, seven, eight, longer and longer, broke through. The Skiift’s face altered too, eyes from green to black, the orbs matching the number of legs. Its mouth split vertically, and two fangs protruded, dripping with venom.

  The Skiift-spider lurched up onto Thomas’ chest and wrapped its legs around him in a foul embrace.

  “Tell us the truth or I will let him feed upon you!” the interrogator said, admiring the shape his brother had taken.

  “I’m not lying!” Thomas said, half-begging, as the venom fell onto his cheek.

  “Liar!”

  The Skiift-spider hissed and spread its fangs wide. Thomas could see deep into its black maw.

  “Enough!”

  The interrogator turned and the Skiift-spider returned to its true self as quickly as it had arisen. Another Skiift had entered the room and they seemed to follow his command, despite the lack of physical differences. Thomas was uncertain whether to be grateful for his arrival.

  “He speaks the truth,” the Skiift told the interrogator.

  “What—how do you know Re-Kul?”

  Re-Kul considered Thomas, helpless and broken. Thomas saw such age and pain behind this Skiift’s eyes and wisdom, knowledge of a war that had been waged far too long.

  “Because our Phagun informant tells me so,” he said, finally.

  The other Skiift began to argue their points against Re-Kul. So they didn’t follow him without question, Thomas thought. Their banter began to shake the roots of the great tree, until Re-Kul turned on them, his face peeling away to form the black beak of a raven. His caw silenced them.

  “Quiet!” Re-Kul said, his face returning in a fluff of feathers. “Shut your filthy mouths you foul beasts! You will hear me, or I will drag you back into the dark!”

  The Skiift complied and retreated, but they kept their untrustworthy eyes on the Phagun.

  “You have the right to speak Re-Kul,” the interrogator said. “But choose your words carefully.”

  Re-Kul stood beside Thomas and addressed his fellow beast-Fleshers.

  “You are right to be wary of these Phagun brutes,” he said. “They are two-faced, heartless savages that only thirst for murder and defiling flesh. They know only ugliness.” Then he looked down on Thomas. “But I am informed that this one is unique.”

  Thomas blinked, just as astounded as his captors.

  “He could be the key to our victory in the war against the tribes!” Re-Kul revealed.

  There were whispers among the Skiift, voices of dissent. Thomas imagined that there had always been dissent and there always would be. The Skiift appeared to be a very confrontational tribe.

  “All you do is talk of hope Re-Kul,” one of the other Skiift said. “There is no need for hope when we can rise up and wipe the other tribes from the face of the earth!”

  Cries of support rang out among the group and Thomas’ heart pounded. He dreaded the thought of them changing their shape and turning on him, tearing him to pieces with their claws or fangs or pincers.

  Yet he was intrigued by the news there were members of the Phagus tribe willingly passing on information to the Skiift, traitors in their midst. Who they were, Thomas could only wonder. He hardly knew his own kind, but he agreed with Re-Kul—he was one of a ruthless and bloodthirsty brood.

  Re-Kul stepped into the crowd with almost imperceptible speed, singling out the usurper in the ranks.

  “We are not as resourceful as the Phagus, Gra-Kith and they have positions of influence among the humans. If they were to unite—”

  “Then we would decimate them!” Gra-Kith said. “What we lack in strategy we make up for in strength and numbers—you know this Re-Kul!”

  “It would be a slaughter!”

  Gra-Kith spat at him. “You are a coward Re-Kul!”

  Uproar. Skiift jostled and lunged at each other, their bodies becoming birds, rearing horses, spitting cobras, snapping lizards—all enormous and enraged. Thomas was desperate to be free, but his wound and the moss held him fast. The struggle was set to boil over and trap the Phagun within its dark wave.

  Then there was the sound of laughter, a woman laughing condescendingly.

  The beasts slipped away and listened to the sound. From somewhere in the dark, heeled shoes clacked on stone, closer and closer. The woman’s laugh trailed along with her until she spoke with a cadence that to Thomas, was frighteningly familiar.

  “Boys, boys, boys,” the woman said.

  Re-Kul hissed at her silhouette on the earthen wall.

  “I think it might be time to hear a woman’s perspective on the matter,” she said.

  Thomas felt the urge once more, deep in his gut. The woman’s voice was infectious, setting his blood on fire. It had been so long since he’d felt such rage.

  Then the woman emerged from the dark to confront them. Auburn hair languished about her breast, fresh, pale flesh, eyes like fire, lips like blood. Those lips curled into a smile when she saw Thomas lying there, a weakling.

  “Hello Thomas,” Stephanie said. “It’s good to see you again sweetie!”

  11

  Deep beneath the remnants of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the human city they knelt, reverent, shrouded, worshipful.

  They loomed over the pit, heads bowed, eyes down, watching and waiting for their master to awaken, to hear his dreams.

  While the monks kept watch, others set about their pre-ordained tasks: some dragged in the corpses of human men and women—some long dead, others more recent—and piled them high, preparing them for the coming feast to celebrate their master’s awakening.

  Other monks sat naked in the dark, focussed on inscribing symbols, sigils into their skin, a monotonous task that involved dipping sharpened bamboo into wells of ink and piercing the tips into the flesh, ink and blood mixing under the surface.

  The patterns they made were intricate, carefully constructed, concentration hard on the monk’s paper-thin faces. The skin of one monk was covered in tattoos, from head to toe. To the
human eye, the acts the monks were performing would have been little more than self-mutilation, but to the monks of the Stygma, they were recording the words of the Great One—Okin.

  One monk cut these such words into his skin:

  No human could speak these words, but roughly translated the marks would read:

  Let Okin tear me asunder.

  The words were a key to the door of the soul and, with each word a monk carved into himself, another lock of that door was unlatched and a shard of Okin’s power revealed.

  As the monks continued to write, something stirred in the pit, a shifting deep in the earth. The venerate monks circling the pit began to rock and bow, their foreheads touching the decrepit soil of the pit’s edge. They knew their master was rising. The monks outstretched their hands into the pit, one on top of the other to hang in the black space.

  The slender fingers of their master emerged from the pool of the pit like worms to grasp the monks’ waiting hands. At his touch the monks pulled back, urging their master from the pit’s heart. Slowly he came: balding head, then chest and finally legs. Leathery grey-white skin wrapped tight over narrow bones.

  But this master—the prophet Shal-Ekh—was adorned in Okin’s gospel, symbol after symbol, covering his entire body. The Great One’s body of scripture for all to behold. And with each dream came new words to inscribe.

  Shal-Ekh narrowed his gaze in the cold light of the tomb, miniscule scripture on his eyelids. The white orbs took in the monks’ adoration and he let them take hold of him, to carry him to the waiting altar. They wrapped his frame in a funerary shroud and laid him gently down.

  His most trusted cleric, Gyardh, came to him. There was no hiding the love in his eyes.

  “My prophet,” Gyardh’s voice was little more than a whisper in the dark.

  Shal-Ekh held out his hand and Gyardh took it tenderly.

  “Tell us of Okin’s message to you, my prophet.”

  Shal-Ekh closed his eyes and remembered his stroll with the Great One in the night sky. His dream body was radiant and brimming with life again and he was allowed to drink from the waters of stars.

  “Do…not be afraid…” Shal-Ekh muttered.

  Gyardh leaned in closer, Shal-Ekh’s cracked lips touching his servant’s ear.

  “Afraid my prophet?” he asked.

  “A fateful prophecy…” Shal-Ekh said. “But do not…fear it.”

  The other monks gathered to hear their master’s words, clinging to each other’s robes, trying to warm skin that was stone cold dead.

  “We will not fear Okin’s word, my prophet,” Gyardh said. “We never have.”

  Shal-Ekh’s eyes widened with his own fear as he recalled his conversation with Okin, how the Great One’s hospitality was short-lived.

  “The Great One knows of my sins…all those years ago,” the prophet told them.

  The monks gasped and huddled even closer, trying to survive their master’s revelation. They all knew of their master’s sins, how he left them to go among the Phagus and then to the city of the humans. What he did in those places, the prophet had never spoken of.

  “How?” Gyardh said.

  “How can we think he does not know and see all,” Shal-Ekh replied. “He is the Great One.”

  “Will he punish you, prophet?”

  Shal-Ekh remembered the fury in Okin’s voice, how he chased him from the night sky, the dream world crumbling all around him. He shook his head as a way of reply, the bones in his spine grinding together.

  “No…he was angry, but not…vengeful,” Shal-Ekh said.

  There were sighs among the monks.

  “But…he gave me a warning.”

  “A warning my prophet?”

  Shal-Ekh’s chest heaved, with shortened breaths. “He is…returning.”

  The monks fell instantly upon their faces and began to weep. The monks who had been tattooing themselves willingly opened the veins of their wrists and grey blood flowed.

  “Why?” Gyardh said. “Why should he return to the world?”

  Shal-Ekh’s eyes filled with grey tears.

  “To end the war,” he said. “Once and for all.”

  Part Two: Flesh and Blood, Skin and Bone

  12

  Bryce Colton fingered the scar along his left temple as he waited impatiently outside the palatial home of Niles Harper.

  He hated being at Niles’s beck and call, but he loved his money, so waiting was the lesser of two evils in Bryce’s mind. He reached inside his battered leather trench coat and retrieved a small tin, faded with age, USMC embossed on the lid. He opened it and grabbed out a chunk of chewing tobacco and pushed it into his mouth. The rich flavours radiated over his tongue and his blood pressure began to drop in response. Tobacco was the only thing that kept his impatience in check, that and mindless bloody violence.

  Bryce pressed the brass knocker on Niles’s front door again and spat a wad of tobacco-soaked phlegm into a nearby bush. He so wanted to rip the knocker out of the wood and kick the door off its damn hinges. How much longer did he have to wait before the almighty bastard answered his fucking—

  The door opened and one of Niles’s aides—a foppish little fag, Bryce thought—flashed him a look of subtle fear.

  “Come this way,” the aide said, motioning for Bryce to enter the foyer.

  Bryce tore through the doorway, past the aide, his coat flailing behind him like a wraith. He spoke, a gravelly southern tone that escaped from the side of his mouth.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the drawing room Mr Colton,” the aide replied.

  Bryce dodged the staircase, passing a banister that sported a marble bust of Niles, his nose like a hook, his smile unintentionally looking more like a grimace. Niles was a contemptuous bastard and that was probably the only thing Bryce liked about him.

  Bryce strode down the hall, his Kodiak work boots simultaneously slapping and squeaking upon the polished marble floor. The aide tried to get past Bryce to open the doors to Niles’s drawing room, but the man was too broad and too quick. Bryce pushed the double doors apart, his arm like a battering ram.

  Niles, who had been sitting behind his desk at his laptop, stood bolt upright at the intrusion, his face a mask of annoyance.

  “Bryce—for Christ’s sake!” he said.

  “Where’s my money you fucking prig!” Bryce fired back.

  Niles put down his glass of scotch fiercely and stepped out from behind the enormous oak wood desk.

  “Who do you think you are?” Niles said. “You can’t just barge in here and demand money from me!”

  Bryce reached into his coat and produced a silver-plated Desert Eagle .44 Magnum handgun, released the safety and pointed it at Niles in one smooth motion.

  “You owe me Niles—two hundred thousand!”

  Niles’s face broke into a smile, he clapped his hands and began to laugh hysterically. Bryce wanted so much to blast holes in him, but he wanted his money even more.

  “Ah, Bryce, you are so fucking predictable!” Niles gasped.

  Bryce scrutinised the fattening billionaire over the gun sight and considered squeezing the trigger.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Niles walked back behind his desk and spun the laptop around to show Bryce the computer screen: a message—FUNDS TRANSFER SUCCESSFUL flashed repeatedly. Bryce frowned, he was dubious, because he knew all too well of Niles’s reputation for deception.

  “I realized I was overdue on your payment when I heard you were at the door. Naturally, I sent the funds to your account.”

  Bryce kept his gun trained on Niles and bent to squint at the screen. Niles didn’t seem at all intimidated by the gun in his face. When Bryce finally nodded, Niles grabbed his drink and took a mouthful.

  “But,” Niles said, holding up a finger. “There’s a bonus—if you’re interested.”

  “Interested in what?” Bryce said, his impatience rising.

  “Put your dick away and maybe I’l
l tell you.”

  Bryce stood with his gun level, he could have stayed in that position all day, neither his strength nor his self-belief wavering. Yet, his lack of patience would always get the better of him. He finally holstered his weapon and sat in a chair.

  “What’s this bonus worth?” Bryce asked, looking for somewhere to spit.

  “Triple what I just put into your account.”

  Bryce’s eyebrows raised in surprise, the scar on his temple flushing pink. Niles walked back to the front of his desk and retrieved a wastepaper bin and handed it to him. Bryce spat the entire gob of tobacco into it, forcing a grimace from Niles.

  “You’ve got to stop chewing that shit in my house, Colton,” Niles moved to open a side door and tossed the bin inside and closed the door, happy to be rid of it.

  “So what’s the job then?” Bryce said, cracking his knuckles loudly.

  “Oh, it’s not the usual fare this time,” Niles said, a glint of boyish excitement in his eye. “I just got word from Vorn that he’s finally snagged me a new specimen.”

  “Of what?”

  Niles took up the chair next to Bryce and lent in close.

  “Do you remember those killings—the beast attacks that I told you about?”

  Bryce recalled seeing the police crime scene photographs Niles had acquired: corpses stripped of flesh, half-eaten, claw marks in concrete.

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, Vorn thinks he’s found the beast.”

  Bryce’s impatience began to stir, and he missed his tobacco, he hated all the cloak and dagger bullshit games that Niles and Vorn played.

  “So what is it then, a mountain lion or something?”

  Niles grinned. “Oh, no, something a lot worse than that,” he said. “We’ll soon see because Vorn’s bringing it here.”

  Bryce frowned. “What do you need me for then, if you’ve already caught it?”

  “I need you to interrogate it.”

  Niles’s basement was so cold it could have doubled as a meat locker.

  As Bryce walked the aisles, his leather coat creaking as he went, he was amazed at how well the freezing air had preserved Niles’s artefacts. Bryce couldn’t see the value in some of the pieces, but then again, Niles was a billionaire and Bryce was just a bounty hunter. Bryce coveted guns and ammo, fast cars and fast women, not books and paintings or bones. Regardless of what he had to hunt or kill or steal for Niles, there was always a pay-check at the end of the day and the green meant the world to a bounty hunter. Unfortunately, in order to earn Niles’s money, Bryce had to subject himself to all kinds of strange sights and horrors.