by Abe Moss
“The Throat of the World.”
Clark joined them to see its depth for himself, but after one glance decided that was enough for him. Emmett felt it, too. Looking in too deep, there was a distinct terror that came over him. The fear of falling in—not by accident, but by impulse.
“Do you hear that?”
He did. Like before, a low, drawn-out breath traveled up to them from deep inside the hole. A cavernous wind. An earthy, sour-sweet scent to it. Not offensive, but certainly not pleasant…
“He’s close…”
A rumbling overhead sent them all ducking their heads, afraid the house wasn’t done being torn apart yet. After a moment, Emmett realized it was a different kind of rumbling. Outside. In the skies.
“Thunder,” he said.
The light coming through the windows was red as ever, deep and almost dim—an unusual hue for a sunrise, especially a sunrise as prolonged as this one. Sensing something was amiss, Emmett circled the hole, making his way toward the front door, eyes drawn to the windows beside it where he caught glimpses of the porch outside, the yard beyond it. Bathed in the red glow.
Not quite like any sunrise he’d seen before…
“What is that…” he murmured. He reached for the door as another bout of thunder broke overhead. An unexpected storm. He opened the door. That red light spilled in, and a fierce breeze with it. He stepped out onto the porch. The branches of the trees bobbed and the leaves rustled noisily in the wind. “What… wait…”
It was certainly morning, and there had certainly been a sunrise at some point. He’d seen the start of it—the darkness in the windows becoming light. But the eerily gorgeous glow outside had little to do with any breaking dawn. As the sun had risen, a storm had also arrived, blowing in on the winds of their ritual. A storm unlike any Emmett had ever experienced. Fantastic. Surreal.
Magic.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asked, eyes to the clouds.
It was the clouds themselves. Rolling and thick and heavy with the promise of…
Red.
Emmett flinched as he felt a drop on his forehead.
“What are you looking at?” Clark asked, standing in the doorway.
“It’s raining…” Emmett said, low under his breath.
He held out his hand.
Several more droplets fell upon him, warm and sticky and red, and as he grasped what it was, he stepped back toward the doorway. He turned into Clark, who budged aside to let him in.
“Is that…”
“Close the door,” Emmett said, not wanting to see it anymore. Or smell it. Or taste it. “Clark, close the door.”
Enraptured by what he saw, Clark paused with the door ajar, staring at the gruesome rainfall gathering on the porch steps. Finally he shut it. The rain pitter-pattered peacefully on the roof. It dotted the windows, dirtying them with each crimson streak.
“Why is it doing that?” Emmett asked.
“He’s coming.”
Emmett turned as another enormous breath rose from the hole in the ground, filling the foyer with its old, pungent, deep-earth aroma. With the severed head held firmly against his belly between both hands, he approached the hole. The gusts were coming more frequently now. Warm and humid on his face.
“Emmett. Clark. Please…”
It was Eileen. Across the hole he saw her—her tear-soaked face begging helplessly.
“Let me go,” she said. “Please, let me go.”
Clark bowed his head shamefully, kicked a pebble of concrete across the floor, as though to say ‘nothing I can do.’
Thunder rolled. The blood was coming down heavier now. Their candles, halfway burned to puddles, became useful again as the windows darkened behind the downpour. It was disorienting—all the wrongness of it. He wished his mother had warned him, or prepared him in some way…
Emmett took a step back as another hot breath blew from the abyss, ragged and louder than any before it.
“Are you afraid?” his mother asked.
“A little…”
The pendant was getting warm against his beating chest.
“Me too.”
The sky trembled. Eileen was sobbing fiercely.
“She shouldn’t be here,” Emmett said. “She doesn’t want to be.”
The dark void at their feet exhaled once more into the foyer, lashing the candlelight in all directions, and carried on its breath was something Emmett immediately recognized. He’d heard it many times before.
“Do you hear that?” he asked his mother.
Those unearthly instruments played to them from the depths, their music coiling up the tunnel’s walls like ribbons caught in the stale breeze. Intimate. Melancholy. Stunningly dark.
There were other sounds, too. Movements. In the hole. Climbing up to them. Closer and closer.
“Pleeeaaase!” Eileen shrieked.
He looked over his shoulder where Clark was now seated on the ground next to Eileen, who persisted in her pleading. With his chin in his hands, Clark shrugged, as though he wasn’t sure what to do about any of it. Not Eileen or the bizarre events unfolding all around them.
“I’ve waited so long for this,” his mother said. “For us to be together. A family. Are you ready to meet him, Emmett? To see your father for the first time?”
Its movements echoed up to them as it climbed, the sounds of scratching, dirt crumbling and falling into the depths. Its breaths were labored—puffing and heaving.
“He sounds tired,” Emmett said, listening distractedly as Eileen’s desperate pleas went on endlessly behind them. It was getting to be more than he could stand…
“Even gods get tired, sometimes…”
Something else was approaching, moving fast.
“What is that…”
Emmett stumbled back as a buzzing, black cloud erupted from the hole—a swarm of flies. He swatted them from his face, holding his breath against the scent of death they brought with them.
“Somebody!” Eileen gasped, screaming herself out of breath. “Let me go… please, just let me go…”
“Mom…” Emmett said.
“Any moment now, Emmett. I can feel it. He’s here… Don’t you feel it?”
He did feel it. That energy. The magic. It was there again, hanging in the air like a pulsing, electric mist. His lungs swelled with it. His skin buzzed with it—buzzed like those black flies casting their shadows against the ceiling above their heads.
“Mom…”
“What is it, Emmett?”
“I think we should—”
Before he got a chance to say the rest, he glimpsed something down below. Something beginning to emerge. In the orange glow of the candlelight—in the red glow of the blood on the windows—a black, gleaming body protruded from the ground. It bobbed into view, hovered for a moment, then sank out of sight.
The mere glimpse of it took his breath away.
A hush.
It reached out with a single limb. It extended from the hole, tall as two people, up, up, up. It bent, curling toward the ground, marked by several knobby joints, like the knuckles of a giant, black finger. It touched to the floor with a heavy thud.
The music reached its height—booming and vibrant, pouring over the room like sweet, harmonious honey. In listening to it, Emmett felt a strange weightlessness come over him, as though forgetting his body’s place in the room. He observed himself—his arms attached to his shoulders, hands at the ends of his wrists, fingers wiggling—with a sense of no longer being contained inside those parts.
Transported.
Several more appendages reached into the air. They planted themselves around the edges of the hole. Thud. Thud. Thud. Enormous crab’s legs. Black and scaly. Armored. Something else climbed out from the earth then, too, slithered over the ground between its massive legs, wriggling and feeling. Dozens of them.
“Mom…”
The armored legs grated the floor as they flexed, straining to lift the rest of itself into the room
.
“I feel… weird…”
With a final push, sending tremors through the floor, its body rose up from the ground, swaying into the light. It emerged, and… emerged some more, infinitely tall, hunched beneath the foyer’s high ceiling, and it was… it was…
Shapeless.
That weightlessness in Emmett’s limbs traveled to his head. Fuzzy. Floating. He couldn’t make sense of it. What he saw. Just as he thought he could tell one thing from another—a piece beyond the whole—it changed, moving constantly into itself, out of itself, churning through and through like a viscous liquid, unfolding from itself hard and solid as oak. With nothing in his memory to compare it to, Emmett found himself thoughtless at the sight.
Marvelous.
Those wriggling things which slithered from the hole around its powerful legs were revealed to be dangling from its underside, long and worm-like. They writhed across the floor in search of anything they might grip themselves around. As several of them wormed closer to their little group—hunkered near the kitchen—and got a whiff of their presence there, the rest of the tendrils followed, braiding together like threads forming a rope in their direction.
Eileen let out a bloodcurdling scream at their approach.
Emmett clutched the severed head tight against himself as the thick rope of worms caught his scent, moving toward him, their ends coming together into a wet point.
“He sees you,” his mother said, her voice pitched with joy. “Emmett, say hello to your father.”
Those faceless tendrils hovered before his face as though inspecting him. He said nothing as they did. It felt out of place to speak to them.
Them. It. Him. His father. Faceless. Expressionless. Alien.
The tendrils pushed against his shoulder, as though testing how solid he was. Would his father be disappointed by his earthly form?
“I don’t know what to say…”
Eileen’s screams were like that of an animal now. Gibberish. Never-ending. She’d pushed herself against the wall and yet her feet continued to push and slide out from under her.
“Go on, Emmett…” His mother said, urging him to say something. Anything. “Go to him.”
“But, can he… can he…”
Thunder boomed. The ghostly music surrounded them, loud and full as a symphony. Eileen’s hoarse screams were on the verge of bleeding her throat. It was difficult to concentrate through it all.
“Can he… understand me?”
The tip of the worm-rope pushed against his chest, and one by one they separated, slithering over his body, over his shoulders, under his arms, along his hands and around the severed head he squeezed against himself. Warm and slick and throbbing. That floating, out-of-body sensation intensified twofold, and he opened his eyes wide in the wake of it, exhilarated.
MY CHILD
He gasped at the sound of its voice. A voice he’d heard before, those lonely nights in bed. The night of Clark’s birthday party. A voice reaching to him from an opened void. A voice which existed not in the room, but in his head. His thoughts. Immediate and everywhere.
DO NOT BE AFRAID
The worms laced behind his back, and he felt lightly squeezed by them. Gentle. Holding him. As comfortable and soothing as any embrace he’d ever shared with his mother. He sighed with relief, relaxed in its arms. His feet lifted from the ground, only barely, so that he hovered in his clutches.
“I’m not scared,” he said dreamily.
A tendril felt its way up the back of his neck, moved along the side of his head, stroking his hair.
I HAVE WAITED LONG FOR THIS MOMENT
Emmett blinked his eyes, felt a smile creep across his face. There was a warmth in its words which he felt coursing through his brain, his skull, his bones. A sunshiny glee. There came a sound, long forgotten to his ears. He’d heard it before. It’d just been a long time…
He was laughing.
YOU ARE EVERYTHING I HOPED FOR
He tried to contain himself, he was laughing so hard.
I TASTE INCREDIBLE DARKNESS UPON YOU
He inhaled deeply, catching his breath, smothering the laughter.
I AM SORRY
“That’s okay…” He closed his eyes, so relaxed he felt he could fall asleep if he wished. He’d been so nervous, so afraid… He understood now what his mother meant. Why she so longed for them to be together. To be a family. If this was what it meant, he thought, the darkness was more than worth it. “My mom took care of me while you were away…”
SHE IS MORE THAN THIS WORLD DESERVES
“I love my mom more than any person… ever…”
HER LOVE FOR YOU IS BOUNDLESS
In the midst of their conversation, one sound in particular broke through, interrupting Emmett’s state of ultimate peace. He slipped from that place slightly, brought back into the realm of the physical, where he felt his feet still dangling over the dusty floorboards, his hands still clasping his mother’s head-vessel to his belly. A sound of pain and urgency—of horror and malice.
Eileen continued to cry for help with the last shreds of strength she had left. Emmett’s heart could hardly take another second of it.
WHAT IS THIS CREATURE
“She’s Eileen,” Emmett said. “This was her house, before… well…”
WHY DOES SHE SQUEAL SO?
“She’s afraid…”
His father was silent for a time, as if considering Eileen, who appeared to have no shortage of breath as she continued to howl and cry and writhe within her restraints.
SHE, TOO, HAS BEEN TOUCHED BY DARKNESS
SHE SADDENS YOU
Emmett, held in his father’s tendrils, turned to see her then, cowering and babbling into the corner behind him, the flesh of her wrists and ankles rubbed raw and red. Her face was nearly unrecognizable to him now, the terror had altered it so deeply. Like a helpless bird in the grips of something immense and frightening, unable to fly away. On the brink of ruin. The elated rush he’d experience only moments ago was faded, and at the sight of her he was crushed almost to the point of tears himself.
“I want to let her go,” he told his father. “And… I don’t want her to be afraid anymore…”
Suddenly the tendrils loosened around him.
THEN REMOVE HER FEAR, CHILD
His feet touched the floor. The tendrils pulled away, grouping together into one large rope before him again.
“Emmett.” The severed head glowed in his hands. “Set her free.”
He looked between his mother and his father’s tendrils—his father’s body shifting in the dark background. He looked once more to Eileen, sniveling and gasping. Beside her, Clark was now unconscious on his back. Apparently, the spectacle had been too much for him after all.
He found the knife on the floor near the reading room. He froze as he picked it up, his eyes drawn to the hole—
—the gateway—
—where his father grew like a huge tree from the ground. A grotesque, squirming tree without form. Towering and foreboding, avoiding his gaze with its everchanging nature. The music surrounding it ebbed and flowed, and between its rising and falling Emmett could still hear the rain on the roof and windows.
He brought the knife to Eileen. He crouched before her, hesitating as she pulled her legs into herself, huddled and fetal in the corner.
“Eileen,” he said. “It’s me, Emmett.”
Covering her face, she peered at him only slightly, between her fingers, and as their eyes met she screamed.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, placing his hand upon her leg.
At his touch, almost immediately she swallowed her scream. Silent. Slowly, unsure, she lowered her hands, uncovering her face. Her eyes found his hand upon her, gentle and small. Her shoulders rose and fell with a great sigh as her body loosened. She looked into his eyes once more and, forgetting her fear, appeared lost now.
“Emmett?” she said. “What’s happening?”
“I’m letting you go,
” he said. “Here, hold still.”
He set Hollings’ head down next to them. With the knife, he sawed at the twine which bound her ankles together until the twine broke. He paused, expecting her to lash out, to kick him down and make her escape. Instead, all she did was watch.
“Let me see your arms,” he said.
She offered her wrists to him. He cut them loose in no time. He tensed, waiting for her stampede… but she didn’t move. Not at first.
Her eyes dwelled on the beast behind him—the unimaginable being which had climbed out from the depths of the earth and brought a torrential storm of blood across the sky with it.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “He won’t hurt you. Here.”
He offered his hand to her and she regarded it with an expression of disgust, as if his arm were made of many worms. But she was calm…
“Come on. I’ll help you.”
She took his hand. Though he was only a child, the power of the pendant lent him strength so that he was able to pull her to her feet. She stumbled, regained herself, her hand in his, struggling to peel her eyes away from his father.
“This way,” he said, and pulled her gently in the direction of the foyer, the front door—the beast. “Come on.”
“Sorry about all this,” his mother said as they walked by, and Eileen jerked toward the sound of her voice, panic in her eyes. “I wish things could have been different for you…”
Eileen’s breaths quickened. Emmett gave her arm a slight tug to keep her going, her eyes glued to his mother’s vessel on the floor. As she turned to him, she saw his father’s tendrils gathering gently toward her and she tensed. Emmett held tightly to her hand.
“It’s okay,” he said.
The rope of worms circled her, sliding along her shoulders from behind. She didn’t fight it. She closed her eyes. Her body slackened, suspended in his father’s arms.
Emmett waited, but not for long. A minute was all it took.
Eileen blinked. The tendrils released her. Wandering over the desolated room, her eyes returned to Emmett. He saw no fear at all in them now. A little confusion, perhaps, but that was all. She regarded the immense creature in the room with macabre wonderment.