Netherkind

by Greg Chapman

  BANG!

  The shot wasn’t perfect, but it had the desired effect, piercing one creature through its chest and bursting out the other side. The projectile, slowed, and its trajectory altered by rib bone and flesh, caught the second creature in the meaty part of its gut. The first creature fell dead, while the second only found itself more enraged and more eager to feed.

  Bryce turned and shoved Vorn and Niles away. “Run!”

  The second wounded Leper clambered onto Bryce’s back and brought him to the ground. He felt its foul hot breath on the back of his neck and heard the gnashing of its teeth. Bryce rolled onto his back and tried to shove the gun into the Leper’s mouth, but despite the fragility of its rotten body, it had supernatural strength and was able to hold the bounty hunter’s right arm at bay.

  As Bryce begged himself not to squeeze the trigger and waste a round, Vorn and Niles ran from the ensuing procession of Lepers hungry for their blood. Bryce stared the Leper in its decomposing face. He gouged at its lips and cheeks with his left hand and they came away like warm putty between his fingers. As he recoiled in horror, he felt his own skin begin to sizzle.

  “I wouldn’t touch it if I were you!” a voice beckoned from the dark.

  Bryce and his attacker looked to the source and found Nero in the shadows laughing. Then the bounty hunter felt his right arm take over, swinging the heavy gun into the distracted beast’s face, sending it careening away. Bryce felt his left hand melting under in the acidic juices of the Leper’s face, but his right arm ignored the pain and swung from left to right, putting two more slugs into the remaining beasts in quick succession.

  In moments, the Lepers were all dead.

  And Bryce had one bullet to spare.

  Bryce caught Nero in his sights and cocked the still smoking revolver with glee.

  The Flesher began to run, but not fast enough. The bullet caught him in the back, snapping his spine in two.

  25

  The Stygma monks sat in the bowels of the abandoned cathedral and sang into night. Thomas was surrounded by them, he was the centrepiece of their worship, their new idol. The grey dirt of the crypt was cold and dry and as lifeless as the crumbling statues that watched the spectacle from above. Thomas gasped as Shal-Ekh took up the sharpened piece of bamboo and plunged its tip into the greasy skin of his face.

  “Begin Thomas,” he said with a voice that was almost chant-like. “Tell me what he said to you so that I might write it down.”

  A brackish fluid, like oil, seeped from the wound Shal-Ekh had made in his cheek, but seconds later the bamboo ink filled the hole like soil being poured into a grave.

  “I can’t,” Thomas said, shaking in the firelight, body slick with sweat.

  “You must,” Shal-Ekh said. He withdrew the end of the makeshift tattoo needle from his face and stared at the Phagun Flesher. “We must interpret the Great One’s message to you before it is lost.”

  Thomas shook his head and his entire body followed suit. “I thought…I was supposed to write it?” he said through chattering teeth.

  “That is not entirely true, Thomas. It is correct that the sleeper must interpret and inscribe his own dream, but only if he knows how to perform the ritual.”

  Thomas closed his eyes and sighed, a slow exhalation tempered by his growing shock. He tried to focus on the chanting of Shal-Ekh’s people.

  “And you didn’t show me how to do it—that’s very clever of you.”

  Shal-Ekh tried to smile at his own absentmindedness. “I suppose it was clever, yet I imagine that deep down, I had my own reasons for neglecting to inform you of the ritual. I feel connected to you, Thomas, like our souls are inter-twined in this path you are on. I want only to help you.”

  Thomas wrapped his arms around his legs, a fierce cold prickling his skin as shock redirected his blood to all his major organs.

  “I need to feed,” he said.

  “No, you need to tell me what Okin told you.”

  Thomas grimaced. “I don’t know how!”

  “Thomas listen to your soul—it is dying to tell you the truth! Now speak!”

  All the other Stygma monks had lifted their heads in readiness to hear Okin’s message. All their eyes all stared at Thomas’ lips, wanting.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Thomas said.

  “At the beginning,” Shal-Ekh said, re-dipping the bamboo tip in the ink. “All stories have a beginning.”

  Thomas swallowed and dragged himself a little closer to the fire, he remembered going into the pool and its vortex sucking him down into the light, only to awake him in the—

  “I woke up in the city—the human city,” he said.

  Shal-Ekh scraped three symbols into his cheek. “Continue,” he said, his eyes closed, breathing shallow.

  “It was empty and after a lot of walking I thought I was lost—until I saw a man.”

  Thomas glanced up and saw that Shal-Ekh’s entire cheek was emblazoned with more symbols. The prophet re-dipped his pen in the ink and moved his hand across to the other side of his face.

  “Who was this man, Thomas?” the prophet said.

  “My very first meal.”

  Shal-Ekh opened his eyes briefly before closing them again. “Interesting—a glimpse of your past.”

  “Yes,” Thomas said and Shal-Ekh began to write again. “I fed on the man for the second time, but he wasn’t dead—he was Okin.”

  The monks gasped and Shal-Ekh’s eyes flicked open. He almost dropped his pen.

  “He was reanimated? Astonishing!” With his exclamation, there was a flurry of writing, ink and blood trickling to his lips.

  “Okin said he wanted to see my home, but I took him to the wrong one.”

  “The wrong home?” Shal-Ekh said, moving the pen to his forehead. “Where else did you live, Thomas?”

  “Well, that was the strangest thing because I had to dream about it to take him there—like a dream within a dream. It was all in my head, my old home.”

  “Where did you go?” Shal-Ekh said, his voice more urgent.

  Thomas looked at the prophet and his disciples and noticed the monks had taken up their own pens to tattoo each other, black on white.

  “Before…I was betrayed by Stephanie, I lived in an apartment on the east side—6939 Harrison Boulevarde, apartment 201. I showed it to Okin in my head—”

  This time Shal-Ekh did indeed drop his pen and began to scream.

  “What!?”

  Thomas lurched back as the prophet got to his feet and circled the fire to kneel beside him. His monks recoiled, sensing his distress and mimicking it.

  “What’s wrong?” Thomas said.

  “You are certain when you say where you lived?”

  Thomas was confused by the expression of unbridled elation on Shal-Ekh’s face.

  “Yes, why?”

  The prophet reached out and held Thomas tightly in an embrace that was more than friendship or love—more like reverence. Thomas pulled himself away.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Oh Thomas don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “Okin came to you in your world—not his. He needed to remind you of yourself. Don’t you remember what you said to me when you awoke from your visitation with the Great One before?”

  Thomas couldn’t and he found that frighteningly odd. “No what did I say?”

  “You told me you thought you had found yourself.”

  “I don’t…recall saying that and besides what the hell does that even mean?”

  Shal-Ekh sat down cross-legged, seemingly given new vitality by the telling of Thomas’ dream.

  “It’s the shock, Thomas,” he said. “The shock of meeting the Great One, he obviously revealed a great vision to you.”

  “And it’s a vision you know about?” Thomas said.

  Shal-Ekh turned away, his face a mask of shame. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “What is it then? Tell me!”

  T
he prophet shook his head slowly. “No, it is only for you to remember.”

  “You’re telling me that I’ve just had a dream that I can only remember parts of?”

  “You may have blocked some aspects out, yes.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Perhaps these are things you still do not want to hear—memories that you refuse to accept.”

  Thomas got to his feet, but staggered. “And you know what these memories are—how?”

  “Thomas, please sit down.”

  “No, what do you know about my old apartment?”

  “What did Okin tell you about your apartment, Thomas?”

  Thomas clenched his fists. “Stop it! Stop answering questions with more questions! Tell me why I can’t even remember my own fucking dream!”

  Shal-Ekh stood and tried to calm Thomas with a steady hand to his shoulder, but the Phagun just shrugged it away.

  “Don’t touch me—just answer me!”

  “Thomas, tell all of us the last thing you remember from your dream.”

  “No!”

  But Thomas could see the apartment in his head, sunlight on a tiny drop of blood.

  “Something happened in my apartment.”

  Shal-Ekh nodded, while the other monks recommenced their transcription of events on the flesh of their chests, backs and faces.

  “Yes, Thomas, something did happen,” the prophet said. “Do you remember?”

  “What was it, Shal-Ekh? Just tell me!”

  “I cannot, you have to remember on your own.”

  Thomas ran out of the crypt and up the broken stone steps, which carried him and his anguish through the remnants of the vestry and out into the main church, where the altar, long dead with rot, sat snapped in two. The pews too had been toppled over. The stained-glass windows, once mosaics of startling beauty, were all shattered and covered up with wood boards, slivers of light piercing through the cracks between.

  Thomas kept running up the aisle and at full pace, his Phagun heart pumping with primal fear, he crashed through the church doors and out into the night.

  He wanted to keep running, but the sight of the cemetery brought him to his knees.

  He had seen so much death in the world, in the cemetery, in the crypt below, in the Forest of the Skiift and even in the human city. Every second someone died and sometimes, in the dark, Thomas had been its deliverer.

  Yet, he knew he killed to survive and that was all he ever wanted to do—survive as himself. He was so determined to live as Thomas, but the truth he sought had taken on a life of its own and was infecting his very blood, like something was fighting for its right to live inside him too.

  Was it just the memory from his dream with Okin? Why couldn’t he remember what the Great One had told him? It was as if the dream had been cut short—killed in mid-thought.

  Thoughts of death again—why?

  He could barely believe it was night, the constant of time seemingly escaping him. He got up and walked up one of the aisles, between crooked headstones, all ancient and cracked with time. No one had been buried in the cemetery for a long time, there weren’t even any flowers to be seen, Thomas noticed.

  The Phagun felt strange that he should ponder humanity’s lingering connection with death, because he wasn’t human. He looked like a human, but that was the only characteristic he shared with them. Still, for some reason, in this moment of weakness, he related to the mortality of human life. There was something that stirred inside him when he looked at the graves, a pain, deep and old.

  A cold blast of air whipped through the cemetery and Thomas’ skin flushed with goose pimples. His skin crawled and in turn, his gut. He was famished and the urge crawled around his spine, demanding attention.

  But there were no meals, at least not for a member of the Phagus tribe. The gates of the cemetery—and the meals beyond—must have been half a mile away.

  He turned back to stare at one of the headstones, but when he looked a spark ignited inside his mind and for a millisecond, the image his eyes translated as a headstone was replaced—by a memory.

  In that split second, the cemetery was gone and, in its place, the Forest of the Skiift and in that forest, on its earthen floor was a hole—a grave. His mind’s eye peered down into the grave and in it was a corpse, ceremoniously formed in the sleep of death.

  The face the corpse wore was Thomas’.’

  The Phagun recoiled as the reality of the cemetery returned as suddenly as the changing of a photographic slide. But he still couldn’t get the image of the forest and its grave out of his head. As he reeled, footsteps urged him to turn around.

  “Do you remember yet, Thomas?” Shal-Ekh said. He was draped in his robe, its hood an open mouth swallowing his alabaster face.

  Thomas’ eyes were flooded with tears. “I’m dead,” he said. “In my head I can see myself dead—why do I see that Shal-Ekh?”

  The prophet clasped his hands together in a representation of prayer.

  “It is a glimpse of your path—one you’ve already walked.”

  “Please…help me understand.”

  “What did Okin tell you about yourself Thomas? He wanted you to see something.”

  Thomas dropped to his knees again. “He…’ his body was wracked with anguish. “He told me I hadn’t been born yet, but how can I be dead and unborn?”

  “You said you took the Great One to the wrong home, but that you dreamed of the right home. What did you see there, Thomas?”

  Tears fell from Thomas’ eyes, wetting the blades of cemetery grass, nourishment for the dead.

  “There was blood…a drop of blood.”

  “I know there was—because I put it there,” Shal-Ekh said.

  Thomas stared up at him wildly, shock and awe competing in his tear-soaked eyes.

  “What did you say?”

  “Look into yourself Thomas—see who you are! The answers you seek are all there, waiting for you in that first home!”

  “How do you know? What were you doing in my apartment?!”

  “It wasn’t your apartment then Thomas. It was just a vacant building, newly constructed. I was told to go there by the Great One.”

  Thomas hauled himself to his feet. Slowly, stricken with grief, he walked to Shal-Ekh and reached out to grip his robes, like a forsaken child.

  “Whose blood was it?” he said.

  “Yours Thomas.”

  The confusion Thomas felt didn’t only surface on his face—his entire body reeled.

  “What—”

  “It was before your time Thomas, but if you open the door to your soul—if you let Okin in, he will reveal everything to you: your past, present and more importantly, your future. Go back to that apartment and look for yourself. There’s a reason why you feel it’s your only home.”

  Thomas wept and Shal-Ekh embraced him.

  “You must go there Thomas,” the prophet said.

  “Won’t you come with me?”

  Shal-Ekh pulled gently out of the embrace and wiped away Thomas’ tears.

  “I cannot,” he said. “This is your journey, this is your flesh. Peel it away and all the truth will be there waiting for you, like the shedding of a second skin. Now go.”

  And Thomas ran again, the headstones, the symbols of death becoming a blur. He was leaving death behind and racing to be reborn.

  26

  Thomas looked upon his old home from the corner of Harrison Boulevard and for the first time in his life, understood real abandonment. The apartment building he’d called home at 6939 was totally derelict, a cold, empty soul lying dormant, but Thomas no longer felt lost in its presence.

  As he stood on that corner staring, oblivious to the procession of souls passing him on the sidewalk, he was focused only on his own spirit. He was meant to be here again. The building had always been waiting, for something—someone—to reignite it.

  Making his way to the place he’d first called home was like second nature to him, what he felt as he loo
ked upon the address was comfort and yearning. The horrific memories of the circumstances of his fleeing apartment 201 were trite now, nothing more than events that happened, had to happen.

  The drab ugliness of the building, with its rain-streaked brick façade and single revolving door—now locked—were so beautiful to Thomas. He caressed the brick wall, felt the familiar texture and peered through the glass doors to look upon the world inside. It was locked, yes, but that could hardly keep a hunter like him from reacquainting himself.

  He ventured up the alleyway to the rear of the building where the fire escape waited, beckoning him to climb. He scaled it rapidly, determination for memories and truth more potent than any hunger he could ever feel. He found the second floor and the window to number 201. With sharpened dexterity, he slipped his Phagun claws between the window-frame and lifted it open. Intoxicating fragrances wafted out from inside.

  For the first time in more than six months, Thomas placed a foot firmly on the floor of his old home. In that single contact, memories bled into his subconscious, memories of birth, awakening screaming for nourishment only to have to obtain it from himself. He smiled at his will to live and how it was still strong after all the years.

  But the memories he sought were older than that day and in way, they didn’t belong to him. Shal-Ekh had been the one to first stand in this room and after that, Stephanie. So how to gaze at dreams that weren’t his?

  Thomas walked to the spot on the floor where he’d dreamt of the blood—that single infinitesimal drop left by the prophet. He knelt down and touched the wood and saw the very faintest of marks. A perfect circle, a perfect cell growing a million times over, forging flesh and soul and identity. Thomas felt the urge swell in his gut, his fingertips still sensing the vague taste of blood. He licked his right index finger, touched the spot and brought his hand back to his lips. The dull coppery tang coursed through his tongue and up and over into his mind’s eye and he slumped into the wide arms of sleep and dream.

  When Thomas reopened his eyes, he was Shal-Ekh standing in the apartment.

  The prophet stood frozen with trepidation, staring at his palm. There, nestled in the white flesh, was his bamboo pen, the tool of the Stygma scribe, at its tip, a deep, dark redness, still glistening.