by Martha Wells
It came to an end as suddenly as it had begun. Ten different guys had probably ridden that bull. The sweat was thick on its sides, its mouth foamed, and the sounds that came from its gullet no animal should make. Then it happened. The great beast gave one last massive thrust of its hind legs and then the rest of it tumbled over on its side. I knew then it was dead, probably dead before it hit the dirt. From somewhere deep below us, the earth rumbled.
The night sorta sputtered out then. The mood had changed. The Sons drifted away, one by one. The band stopped playing, packed up its kit, took down the stage, and was gone. It was full dark then, and the stars shone cold light upon us. Goat walked up, oddly somber. He handed each man a hundred dollars more than we were promised.
“You done good,” he said, glancing down at my stump hand. “Night went sour. Sorry about that.” He took a drag from his cigarette and coughed. “Piston and the boys’ll take you back. But they got clean-up duty tonight, so it might be a while. No idea what they’ll do with that shit.” He nodded at the dead bull. Flies had begun to gather. “Burn it, I guess.” Then he too was gone.
Before long, it was just us. Sam and Jake leaned against the rotted fence, kicking at the dirt, silent and sullen. I didn’t much feel like celebrating either, but there was no point in whining about it.
“I’m going to find Piston,” I said.
They just ignored me, and I didn’t bother in trying to talk to them again. I headed out down what had been the main street. With the band and the bikes and the stage lights gone, it was dark in the way only the far wilderness can be dark, where not even the glow of distant city lights can ruin the night’s completeness. In other words, it was dark as all hell, and even when my eyes adjusted, I could only barely make out the outlines of buildings. Add the unnatural quiet, and I admit to being somewhat unnerved. More than somewhat.
Laughter from one of the buildings. A beam of light and someone spilling out behind it into the street. I guess they saw me or heard me or something, because the next moment, the beam was shining in my direction. Then a giggle.
Tonto.
“Clown,” he slurred, drunk or high or both. “Zombie clown. I like you.”
A larger darkness stumbled out behind him—Piston. I expected Hog to follow. I did not expect him to be carrying someone else with him when he did. The two of them joined Tonto. I stopped dead in my tracks, suddenly quite aware of how bad things had just gotten for me. Tonto said something I couldn’t hear. All three of them looked at me. A woman screamed. Hog slapped her hard across the face and told her to shut up. I almost thought I could see blood dropping from her nose.
“You coming, clown?” Piston slurred.
“Where you going?” I said, as natural as I could. I took a few steps toward them.
Piston raised an arm and pointed out down the road, to the rock face of the cliff that backed up to the town, at a patch of black night a little bit darker than the rest. It had been obscured by the stage before, but now it was clear. They started toward what could only be the opening of the mine, the one that had given birth to the town and then killed it. I said the first thing that came to my mind.
“Well fuck.”
Every man—every woman too for that matter—has a moment where they have to decide who they are and who they will be. To decide whether to take a stand so they can stand themselves. This was my moment. The three men and one struggling woman disappeared into the darkness of the shaft. I knew what was next. They’d rape her, multiple times most likely. Then they’d kill her. And that would be it. No one would ever find the body, not down in that mine shaft. And just in case you think I was being all heroic, I also figured they’d kill me when they were done with her, the price of seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. So I made the only decision I could make. I followed them down into the mine.
I hadn’t exactly formulated a plan, but one thing was immediately apparent—I couldn’t see for shit. Fortunately, the three jackasses in front of me were as prepared as they were drunk, and I could follow the light of their bobbing flashlights. I stumbled after them, hoping to find a pickax or a shovel or just a damn big rock to use as a weapon. Otherwise, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I caught up to them. When that actually happened—and without said pickax, shovel, or damn big rock—I basically made small talk.
“So,” I said, in the hopes of announcing my presence without startling them and getting shot or stabbed, “what are we doing here, guys?”
Piston turned to me, and for the first time I saw the girl’s face. She’d been crying, which was no surprise. But I wasn’t prepared for the pain in those tear-filled eyes, or the look of absolute desperate hope that fell completely on me.
“You a believer?” Piston asked, in the strangest non sequitur of my life. Of all the things that had happened that night, it was his question that shocked me the most.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“You guess.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’ll see if we can’t make a believer out of you. And when you see what we got to show you, you won’t need faith.” He pointed to the wall of the mine. “You see that?”
And I did see it. A ragged opening, big enough for a man to enter through, but not comfortably. Obviously not a shaft running off the main or an opening made on purpose, either. If I had to guess, they’d been blasting when it broke through on its own. When something broke through. I thought back to the stories I had heard, about what had happened here, and I wondered just how much truth there was to the old local legends.
“Come on,” Piston said. “We got something to show you.”
“Yeah,” Tonto said. “Something to show you.” Then he laughed that big, stupid laugh as he disappeared behind Hog and the girl. Piston just kept on looking at me, and even through the gloom of the cave I could read his eyes. He was drunk, but he was sober enough to consider whether or not it was a good idea to have me along. Maybe he thought about killing me right then and there, I don’t know. But he turned and slipped through the opening, and so did I.
Through the crack in the wall I saw something I could never have dreamed of, not in my wildest youth, not at my drunkest. This was no new mine shaft, no undiscovered cavern or cave. This was a room, a great, giant chamber with vaulted ceilings and massive columns. Something made by man. I hoped man had made it at least. I’d never seen the like. It put the great Temple of Karnak at Luxor to shame, made a mockery of the most extravagant constructions of the Greeks or the Romans.
The room glowed with some strange phosphorescence, illuminating a thick and unnatural mist that rolled and roiled along the ground. Suddenly the three drunken thugs didn’t seem so fearsome, not nearly so as whatever lurked within this place, whatever or whoever had built it, and whatever had happened to those who had found it.
“Where are we?” I whispered into the darkness, as if there was any who could answer.
The trio and their captive stumbled down an arcade that lay between two great colonnades, and reluctantly, I followed. To flee into the darkened depths of the mine would have been more pleasant.
Tonto giggled. “This is neat. It’s even better than I heard.”
I felt a cold shiver arc down my spine. “You mean, you’ve never been here before?”
“Nah,” he said. “Goat wouldn’t let us. Only the higher…”
He surely would have said more, but Piston cut him off with a single look. Then he turned to me. “You ain’t gotta stay if you’re scared, clown.”
“No,” I said, “I’m good. Just wondering is all.” He grunted at that, and we continued to walk.
I could see that at the end of the arcade was some sort of stone edifice. If this was a temple, I supposed it was an altar, though unlike anything I’d seen before. The stonework was exquisite, a swirl of rises and falls, of deep cuts and shallow valleys. Almost hurt to look at it, as if whatever image it produced made the eyes rebel. But whatever it was and whatever it signified, it
s creator possessed unmatched skill. I had worked as a stonemason in my youth, and I’d seen enough to know that this was the work of genius. Before it lay a stone slab, and beyond that a deep basin of similar construction. I realized then why the girl was here.
“So what are you guys planning to do?”
Piston turned to me.
“You said you wanted to see God.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think I said that at all.”
“Well, too bad.” He jerked at Hog. “Get her ready.”
Tonto started to cackle again, and the girl screamed. Stupidly, I made a grab at her. I’m not sure what I thought I’d do if I got a hold of her, and I never found out. Piston threw me away with a single flick of his caber-like arm. I fell to the ground and the cold mist enveloped me. I felt instantly sick, like it was not mist at all but poison gas. I drug myself to my feet as Piston pointed a long dirty finger toward me. “And to think I was going to let you live.”
But I wasn’t paying all that much attention to Piston at the moment. My eyes were on the basin. At first, I thought that was where the mist was coming from, but then I realized I was wrong. The mist wasn’t flowing from the basin; it was flowing up and into it, as if somewhere someone had flipped a switch on a vacuum. Faster and faster it went, until in one soundless whoosh the last wisp disappeared over the edge.
For the barest of seconds, there was silence. And then, the roar. A column of viscous liquid, like oil, but somehow thicker and darker, erupted from the heart of the basin. Piston stumbled backward, and Tonto shrieked. I followed the flood up, up, up into the eternal darkness above. I supposed that if the temple had a ceiling, it was striking it, but we didn’t have long to wonder. Down it came again, but it did not crash to the floor. Instead, it gathered above the basin itself, swirling in a great, black ball that pulsated with life.
“Piston!” Tonto cried. “Piston, what’s going on?”
But Piston had no answers. We were all the same, standing witness to an event we were never meant to see. Then something happened I could not have expected—things got way worse.
The black sphere ceased to be a black sphere anymore. It bulged and split, and I thought I saw feet, hands, claws. Then there was no question. Some sort of beast was forming before us. It was not emerging from the dark sphere. They were one and the same.
Hog stared up at the birth of that hideous thing, and I suspect his grip slipped on the girl, because she did what any sane person would have done in that moment—she ran. No one tried to stop her. We might as well have been held to the spot by steel spikes. She might have made it, too, but just as she passed me, a whiplike arm of black ichor shot forth from the heart of the beast and wrapped around her throat. She gave a cry, tiny, more startled than painful, as if she simply could not believe this was happening to her. Then in one great jerk that may well have broken her neck then and there, she snapped back into the midst of the living void.
The beast took a step forward and I understood that it intended to make the girl’s fate the fate of us all. I glanced from Piston to Hog to Tonto. They looked like children, scared little kids. The tough demeanor, the ruse they played on people smaller and weaker than them, was gone. They saw the end of all things standing before them. Or at least, the end of all their things. The beast took another step. The entrance to the temple was behind me. If I took off, I might be able to make it while that monster was busy with the others.
But hell, I couldn’t do that. And I say again, it’s not that I’m some kind of hero. Truth be told I’m as scared of things that go bump in the night as the next guy. I just have a guilty streak, and if I’d let those poor sons of bitches die, I knew I’d regret it someday. True, they weren’t worth much, scum of the earth and all, and I figured they could add that girl’s death to their list of sins. But together, the three of them might just have enough good in them to be worth one of me. And a rodeo clown is kinda like a secret service agent. It’s his job to take the horn, no matter how piss-poor the guy he’s defending.
Piston, Hog, and Tonto hadn’t moved half an inch, but the beast—I don’t really know what else to call it—was walking or gliding or floating or whatever toward them. I raised my stump hand in the air and hollered my best imitation of the Rebel Yell. Great-Granddaddy would have been proud.
“Over here you bloated cloud of cow fart!”
Alright, so it wasn’t my best insult, but it worked. The thing didn’t much have a head, and I felt more than saw it turn, but I knew I had its full attention.
“You’re facing an honest-to-God rodeo clown, a card-carrying member of the Brotherhood of the American Bullfighter, local 229, and that’s what I do. I fight bulls twice your size and half as ugly and I’m not one bit afraid of you!”
And like a bull in the ring, it charged me. It came at me full on, what looked like liquid obsidian, if such a thing is even possible, forming into a mass like a locomotive. I let it come, right until it was almost upon me, and then I simply stepped to the side. It roared past, slamming into the wall of the temple.
“We call that the pasodoble,” I said. “It’s Spanish.”
The thing rolled over on itself, like a turning bull, and thrust at me again. So I stepped to the other side and it slid past.
“That’s the doble!” I hollered at it. It paused in place, floating above the ground. It no longer looked like some kind of Minotaur or classic monster out of a bad horror movie, but like a black orb of impenetrable darkness. I spread my legs and crouched, a linebacker waiting for the snap. In an instant a thick tendril of oil shot out at me, just like it had at the girl earlier. I dove forward, rolling underneath it and out of the way.
“That all you got?” I yelled as the tentacle recoiled back into the mass. But I was already breathing heavy, and I wasn’t precisely sure just how much I had left. I spared a glance at the Three Stooges. To my utter amazement, they still stood there, rooted to the spot with their mouths hanging open to the floor, and I even thought I saw drool seeping out of Tonto’s. Probably not an unusual occurrence.
I didn’t have time to say anything as a large arm the size of a telephone poll swung around toward me. I made a guess and lunged like I was going to barrel roll again. The column of ichor crashed to the ground and swept across it. I’d guessed right. Instead of rolling I leapt as far and high as I could, clear over it, landing on the other side on my feet. I ran, knowing the arm was probably swinging back even then.
I pointed at Piston and yelled, “Get through the door, you assholes!” Finally understanding sprung back into his eyes. He turned and said something to the other two, but I didn’t hear him. The roar of swirling air and massive movement filled my ears. By the time I glanced back, it was on top of me.
“Time to make the rounds,” I said to myself. I jumped to the side, right as the form almost touched me—and something told me that even the slightest contact meant death—and it slid past. But this time not all the way, just as I had anticipated. Instead it flipped on itself, attempting to double back on me. As it turned, I turned, and now we were locked in a dance of death, like a dog chasing its tail where the tail was me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the three bikers running for the crack. In a few moments, they would be there. They’d be free. And, well, I’d be dead. I couldn’t turn forever, and with no one to distract it, I’d never escape.
Then something changed. It sensed, or perhaps it saw, the three running. It stopped turning so abruptly that I almost ran into it, but instead I fell to the ground before it. It formed a wall and, like a wave rolling away from me, arched across the chamber. It waterfalled down in front of the entranceway, blocking the only exit. The three men ground to a halt, Hog slipping and tumbling. The wave crashed down upon him, swallowing him up. He didn’t even have time to scream.
“Shit,” I said, pushing myself up. There was a fairly hefty stone beside me and I picked it up, unsure of what good it would do. I was exhausted, but I began to run toward the inky, living
wall. Piston backed away, his hands up as if he was trying to explain himself to an angry lover. When he turned to run, another tentacle shot from the mass and looped around his right leg. With one giant lurch, it had him hanging in the air, suspended thirty feet above the ground. He screamed like a child, high-pitched and urgent, begging to be released, for whatever held him to just let him go. So, it did. His keening reached its peak and then was silenced, replaced by the crunch of his head splitting open on the ground, like a walnut smashed by a hammer. The creature slid forward over the body and the growing pool of blood, and when it withdrew, the floor was clear and clean.
Tonto was running toward me as I was running toward him, his eyes filled with madness and fear. I wasn’t sure exactly what we were going to do or where we were going to go, but I figured I’d die fighting, and maybe screaming, too. Tonto was almost to me when I heard a sound like a whipcrack and saw a serpentlike band wrap around his throat. His eyes went wide, and in another instant I knew the beast would have him. I reared back and threw the stone as hard as I could. To my amazement, it struck the tentacle and cleaved it in two. The larger part withdraw; the smaller fell to the ground where it exploded into black smoke upon contact. I was exuberant, and just as I was about to let out a massive war whoop, I looked up at Tonto. His hands went to his neck. His eyes were filled with fear and confusion. And then, I shit you not, he actually giggled. Right before his head tilted to the side and fell with a splat to the ground.
So that was it. They were all dead, and I was next. The black curtain before me expanded. Its height reached into the infinite darkness above, its width all the way to each wall. I knew then it had been toying with me all along. It could have had me at any point. Could have had any of us. But for some reason known only to whatever mad intelligence guided it, it had waited till now to show its full glory. It began moving forward, and I stumbled back. Past one set of columns and then another. Eventually I’d run out of room and it would take me, but I was in no hurry to see that happen, so I kept walking backward toward the altar.