Dreaming In Darkness

by Chamberlin, Adrian

  Following the path delineated by the burning tapers, we headed deeper. Moisture dripped from the ceiling, vivid green ferns sprouting from fissure in the tunnel walls.

  Neither Catrin nor I said anything; we simply ran. It had come to this: our survival depended on our primal instincts and nothing else. Fight or flight; that was what it came down to in the end. And we had tried to fight already.

  The screams of the cultists faded in the gloom beneath the world, but I could still make out the muffled chanting voices, the strange acoustics of the place making it sound like the reverberating incantation emanated from the walls of the tunnel itself.

  A peristaltic shudder passed along the length of the tunnel, raining clods of earth onto us from the roof of the tunnel and causing us to stumble.

  And then I heard a wetly rasping sound, like something large sliding along the tunnel towards us.

  Something was coming, something out of a nightmare.

  XXXVII

  The tunnel wound on tortuously ahead of us, with no end in sight. My legs and lungs burned with the effort of fleeing from the hideous worm that pursued us. It was catching up with us at last.

  In that moment I realised we could not escape the horror. My nightmares were coming true. It had always been about the story. The Lambton Worm of legend had returned.

  This wasn’t the time for rational thought. Reason had fled this place long ago. It was time for action, to rely on the primal, to trust in instinct. To fight; to resist with every nerve and fibre of our being.

  I stumbled to a halt in a pool of illumination cast by one of the rush-lights, and my hand slipped from Catrin’s. I turned, my entire body trembling, and not just from the seismic shudders passing along the length of the tunnel. It was as if we were in the belly of the beast, already swallowed by the horror.

  And then it came, moving along the tunnel in a series of peristaltic convulsions. Huge and monstrous, its eyeless head a mass of writhing tentacles and pseudopods, its body was a pulpy grey-black mass that receded into the darkness behind it. Its slug-like flesh glistened with the glutinous slime it secreted to ease its progress along the tunnel. Unbelievably, it was almost as wide as the earth-cut passage.

  The eerie, unknowable language still spoke to some primal part of my brain, soporific as a lullaby, so that all I wanted to do was stop and rest, right there in the middle of the passageway, even with the horror bearing down on us.

  And then I was aware of another chanting voice, repeating its own conflicting, discordant incantations over and over again. The harmonic clash jarred me from my reverie as surely as an alarm clock.

  I glanced at Catrin, seeing the intense concentration knotting her face as she held her hands towards the horror, her lips barely moving as she intoned her enchantment. My jacket had fallen open, exposing her breasts and belly and thighs, the pale flesh granted a golden glow by the flickering rush-lights.

  I was bewitched all over again.

  And then my attention was back on the horror, and what I had to do was clear. Taking one of the two remaining bottles from my bag I lit its dishcloth fuse with the flickering rush-light.

  The worm hesitated then, holding back, as if whatever alien intelligence or instinct that governed its actions understood what I intended. And in that moment I hurled the bottle at the beast.

  XXXVIII

  The brandy and lighter fluid cocktail hit the shapeless sack of the horror’s body and bounced off, falling to the floor of the tunnel and striking a stone that lay embedded in the floor.

  The glass shattered. Sticky alcohol splashed across the monster’s worm-like body and burst into flame.

  The mysterious chanting was replaced by horrible, shrieking screams as the worm writhed and twisted in burning agony. The blood thrilling in my veins, I snatched the last bottle from my bag and hurled it after the first. It smashed against the wall of the tunnel, raining flammable fluid over the writhing, boneless slug-like mass. The hungry flames spread quickly, consuming the horror.

  And in its torment, the monster’s convulsions worsened. Its body writhed and twisted, tying itself in impossible knots like a threatened hagfish trying to escape its own slimy secretions. But it failed to escape the persistent flames.

  Its writhing body slammed against the walls and roof of the tunnel, sending more tremors rippling throughout.

  Cold water splashed my face. I started, then looked up as another trickle of water dribbled from a crack above.

  Blind to the catastrophic damage it was causing, the chthonian horror continued its agonised, hissing convulsions as its slime-slick flesh bubbled and blistered under the merciless flames. Great gobbets of sick, grey flesh sloughed from the glutinous sack of its body, dropping to the floor of the tunnel where it continued to melt and burn.

  Hypnotised by the monster’s contorted death-throes, it was several moments before I realised Catrin had stopped chanting.

  I felt more drips of water splash my face, and was shaken from my horrified reverie. Precisely where under the estate were we? Could we actually be under the River Wear itself?

  Taking Catrin by the hand, I started to run once more, dragging her on through the twisting tunnel, leaving the convulsing, shrieking horror to its fate.

  The cave-in, when it came, sounded like the shuddering crash of a landslide and the roar of a waterfall rolled into one, and possessed the lethal powers of both combined.

  XXXIX

  The roar of the river flooding the tunnel behind us spurred me on to even greater feats of desperate, physical exertion. But still it was not enough.

  A wall of water slammed into us, picking us up and hurling us along the tunnel as if we were no more than leaves on an autumn river in spate. I snatched a breath as the rushing torrent pulled me under and held on tight to Catrin’s hand.

  At first we were whirled about the tunnel by the force of the current and we were lucky we didn’t smash our skulls open.

  As the torrent filled the passageway, and the initial force of the whirling current lessened, we were carried to the surface, although that brought our faces perilously close to the roof that passed above us in the darkness, the river having extinguished the rush-lights. Then the preternatural blackness began to lessen in intensity.

  I became aware of a dim light permeating the flooded tunnel. It wasn’t much, in the oblivion-black darkness, a barely perceptible purpling of the gloom, but it was enough. It was enough to tell me that it might be moonlight entering the tunnel from somewhere far above.

  Still clinging to Catrin’s hand under the water, I kept my eyes on the ceiling as we continued to be swept along in the darkness.

  And then I saw it: the mouth of a shaft above us, narrow and thick with ferns, but clearly an opening to the surface. Throwing out my free hand, my fingers clawed at the roots and earth above until I felt the hard protuberance of a natural stone shelf and clung on.

  Bobbing there in the water, giving ourselves the chance to recover our breaths, I then felt something slick and slimy brush against my body before slipping past. By the wan light of the gibbous moon penetrating the tunnel from the shaft, I glimpsed what looked like squid-like forms washed along by the current, sacks of cephalopodic flesh dissolving in the water as if it were acid.

  A portion of my strength returning, making the most of the last traces of adrenalin in my bloodstream, I helped Catrin lever herself up into the narrow confines of the shaft and gain a purchase so that she could begin the ascent to the surface.

  Was it the remains of a caved-in rabbit’s burrow, a long-forgotten well, or something made by the passage of such a thing as had chased us through the tunnels under the Lambton estate? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. All I knew or cared about was that it was a way out; a means of escaping our doom.

  With Catrin elbowing her way up the shaft as deftly as scaling a ladder, I began to haul myself from the water. Following Catrin’s example – finding hand and foot-holds in the pliant earth, and grabbing hold of rocks to he
lp me – I reached for a protruding ledge and went to pull my left leg out of the channel, only to find it snagged on something.

  I instinctively looked down, expecting to see my foot caught in the knotty loop of a tree root. And there it was, only rather than being a sunless, chlorophyll-free white, this particular tree root was slug-black and as thick as my arm. As I stared in burgeoning horror it tightened painfully about my ankle, then pulled.

  My hands grasping nothing but wet stone and damp soil, my arms shaking with weariness from the effort of the climb and all that had gone before, I could not resist. Losing my grip on the rock I plunged back into the water and was swallowed by the darkness.

  XL

  Catrin tells me she found me unconscious, half a mile downstream, on the pebbly foreshore of a bend in the River Wear, along with pieces of what looked like gelatinous jellyfish flesh, dissolving into slime at the water’s edge. I had no pulse and I had stopped breathing. She performed CPR and managed to resuscitate me, turning me onto my side as I vomited up a gallon of water.

  That’s what she tells me and so I have to believe her. But what I am certain of is that I was dead for a time, lying on the foreshore. And lost in a state of deathly oblivion, I saw the universe as it really is. For the first and the last time, I understood everything.

  How did Catrin resuscitate me? Was it really CPR that brought me back from the dead? There was no ambulance and I must have been underwater for several minutes, and lying on that river beach for even longer. But then, what else could it have been?

  Whatever she did, she saved me.

  And what of the worm? I often wonder what happened to that chthonian horror. Was it truly destroyed by the cleansing fire and the purifying waters, or did it too, somehow survive? And if so, is it even now lurking somewhere under the ground, in the dark beneath the world, recovering, healing, waiting?

  We made our way back through the woods, following the course of the river as it rattled over its gravelly bed – those magical purifying waters sparkling in the moonlight – until we made it back to the bridge, and my car.

  Fortunately the keys had survived everything, tucked into the pocket of my jeans, and the car started without any trouble. I drove us the mile or so back down the road to the eerily quiet village, stopping at Catrin’s so that she might find something to wear and pack a bag. Then we left, and never looked back.

  We barely spoke of what happened that night.

  We returned to London and made a life for ourselves there, a place where we could forget the past and the horrors we had witnessed in the caves beneath County Durham.

  In the end I had to admit defeat, refund my advance and return to the classroom. After all, I had dependants now.

  And it is only now, nine months later, that I feel able to pick up the proverbial pen and start writing again. Actually no, not able to; I felt the need to write again, to record the memories of that autumn, even if I never write anything else again. After all, it has always been about the story.

  Perhaps this is me exorcising my demons – and what demons they are – that I might start my life anew, as my baby girl begins hers. But within that story lies the greatest, most terrible truth of all; a truth more terrible and impossible than any fiction.

  As I gaze at my sleeping daughter, so peaceful in her state of blissful innocence, her sleep untroubled by dreams of darkness, I can’t help but feel guilty; guilty that we could have knowingly brought another living being into this world, knowing the fate that awaits us all.

  For the world we think we know is but a sham, a thin veneer that barely hides the madness that lies beneath, every pathetic existence nothing more than a capering shadow on a cave wall, dancing in the flickering firelight, as entities old as time, that some might call gods, worm their way through the deep earth beneath the world and into our dreams of darkness. It is at their whim that the guttering candle-flames of our lives are snuffed out. And when oblivion comes, it is forever, as endless as the slumber of those beings that lie buried beneath the roots of the world, dreaming in darkness.

  I sometimes catch a glimpse of that eternal darkness when I gaze into our daughter’s eyes, in the blackness of the dilated pupils, and I know then that the aching void awaits me still. It is all that awaits any of us, when Death comes to claim us at last. And sometimes that knowledge is the only thing that stops me taking an open razor to my throat in despair. For the darkness comes all too soon, without us hastening its arrival.

  The gods of oblivion will feast on my soul soon enough, and as far as I’m concerned, Shudde M’ell can wait.

  I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

  The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

  Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

  Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…

  The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

  The moon their mistress had expir'd before;

  The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

  And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

  Of aid from them – She was the Universe.

  (from Darkness, by Lord Byron)

  THE END

  NEW HEAVENS – John Prescott

  He walks under the full moonlit night.

  The sand filters through his toes and the surf beats lazily on the shore.

  He wishes he was far away from where he walks.

  He dreams of far-off vistas of worlds unknown and endless cities stretching to gaseous, multicolored heavens.

  The winds blow through his long, untended locks as eldritch gods awake from their slumber and dance across the stars. They look down upon humanity, plotting their return.

  He walks onward; the water claims his toes and frees them from their encrustation of sand while the moon performs her mystical magic upon the sea.

  He walks for an endless time, his thoughts guiding him.

  The water swirls and he barely notices.

  Silence falls around him.

  He stops and looks at the water’s blackness.

  He sees it swirl and then froth in a torrent of bubbling waves.

  A falling star catches his eye.

  He watches it race across the heavens and wishes he was at its head, screaming across the sky.

  He feels the touch against his leg; cold, clammy.

  He looks down and sees the writhing appendage slowly wrap itself around his thigh. He looks out to sea and sees shapes moving out of the rolling waves.

  He should be afraid, but he is not.

  He welcomes the cold touch.

  He does not wish to be whole again.

  He wants to be something else, something more...something eternal.

  He lies down on the sand and the appendage wraps fully around his body.

  He hears the shapes now.

  They sing; a long, low tenebrous chant.

  It soothes his senses and he feels himself drawn into the water.

  He does not fight it. He wants to become something more.

  Water fills his mouth and his nose.

  He swallows and inhales the liquid.

  He opens his eyes and sees the shapes.

  Dark demons of the abyss surround him and pull him deeper into the cold, wet blackness.

  The gods grant his wish and take him to the darkness below.

  He sinks further down through the inky blackness. He is changing, transforming.

  His time is coming.

  He will plot his return as the gods whisper into his ears his true purpose and change his form accordingly.

  He will be terrible and unforgiving when the monoliths rise.

  He waits, patiently, for his time.

  He is promised it will be soon.

  He is new now.

  His form is comforting.

  His thoughts are full and bloated with destruction.

  He glides effortlessly under the surface and listens for the call of ot
hers who wish to be like him.

  They will be his children.

  He will change them.

  He will lead them as the gods slumber in their ancient tombs, or dance across the heavens. Waiting till their time is right.

  Call to him...call to him...

  1

  We aren’t here anymore.

  When people by the hundreds started walking starry-eyed and soundless into the oceans that should have alerted us to the horror to come, but it didn’t. People watched on smartphones, TVs, and monitor screens with mouths agape as huge monoliths, triangular prisms colored by an iridescent green that hurt the eyes, erupted from the grounds and oceans and stretched skyward, over three hundred feet, all around the world. Each bore a unique set of ancient carvings, pictograms of untold horrors alongside unreadable texts running along the triangular surfaces that reached to the sky. They were constructed from a material unknown to mankind, formed by elements absent from the Periodic Table.

  It seems incredible, but the monoliths’ appearance did not trigger any alarm for the thinkers of the world or our glorious leaders, let alone the general populace. So what did we do? We grew accustomed to the monoliths; like so many of us that have historical monuments or earth-made treasures right in our cities and hometowns, we became oblivious to their alien majesty, just accepted them and blindly continued our daily lives. We trudged on like cattle, more interested in the latest social media update or who was trending on Twitter that week, to notice the world’s end unfolding before our eyes. Six months later, the realization of Earth’s passing finally hit her occupants. Now, even Hell seems a far better and cozier place to be.