by Rob Bliss
“Follow my voice,” she said, though it was still hard to direct myself given the echo. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” she continued as my arms splashed through the liquid, legs kicking.
Her arms grabbed mine and held on tightly, pulling me toward her. My feet felt something solid to stand on and I pushed my torso out of the liquid.
“Don’t wipe your eyes, I’ll do it.”
I felt bear fur smear across my eyelids and felt like a little boy having his face washed by his mother.
“Okay, you can open them.”
I did and saw only half of her face in a dull blue shadow. A pinprick light shone from far down a flesh tunnel ahead of us. Elizabeth’s cheekbone and one side of her jaw was hazily lit by the light.
“I guess we’re in the belly of the beast,” I said.
In shadow, I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or not. “Thank God I have this cloak. It protected me, but I got some of the acid on my hands and parts of my face. Burns a little, but tingles more. Doesn’t hurt, though. You okay?”
I nodded in the low light. “I think so. I guess my vest and jacket are keeping me safe too, but the bear got its claws into my back. Don’t know how long our magic clothing will survive.” Held my hand up out of the liquid. The steel caught a blue shine. “But I still got the knife. Cut that fucker up pretty good before it swallowed me.” I tucked the blade back up my sleeve and into the empty sheath. I noticed that the blue-gem ring Venus had taken from Gord and given to me was gone. Eroded by acid? Did it mean that, finally, Venus and I were no longer married? Who cared? A ring was a ring…it had always meant nothing…just like my marriage.
I heard the smile in her voice. “We might need more than a broken knife to get us out of this.” She looked at the light at the end of the towering tunnel. “Shall we venture into Hell?”
I smiled. “Ladies first.”
On hands and knees, we crawled, the tunnel high enough for us to raise our heads as we edged toward the blue. It stank like marsh gas and rot, decomposed flesh, shit and piss and bile. We choked and coughed as we crawled, tried to avoid breathing through our noses, thinking only that this was a prison attached to a prison, yet whatever path looked like an escape had to be tried. The blue light could be guiding us into a worse torment, but the tunnel of flesh was not an oasis.
We crawled and sweat poured into our eyes from the heat of the confined space. I wiped my sleeve across my face, now dry, the acid having evaporated, the slime burned off by the acid. The blue light grew brighter until it shone like a star, and Elizabeth and I had to stop and shade our eyes from it. She flipped the bear’s head of the cloak to cover her face and shield her eyes as she kept her head bowed and crawled looking at her hands. I slipped my jacket off, inspected the claw marks shredding the back, saw that the slices had begun stitching themselves back together. I draped the jacket over my head, likewise, crawling with my head bowed, not looking up.
We came to the end of the tunnel, which dropped off into a depression illuminated by a ring of blue lights. We couldn’t see below the haze of light from our elevated position. Elizabeth turned to hang her legs down over the slight incline, footholds of what looked like flesh-covered bone. A rib staircase that we had to climb down on all fours. I followed her until the stairs leveled out horizontally, and we stood. A plane of smoky blue light hovered a few feet over our heads.
Putting jacket and cloak back on, I gazed across this latest room. We stood amongst what looked like a forest of shoulder-high mushroom stalks made of thickly-veined flesh—half-animal, half-vegetable—with caps that inverted into wide oval bowls. We peered into the nearest bowl to see what looked like an infant, but one not entirely human.
Its tiny limbs flailed, grasping and kicking at heavy smoke that filled and flowed over the bowl like dry ice vapor. The cradle. A flesh tendril that was a series of red and blue twisted veins attached to the infant’s forehead by a sucker. Another tendril attached itself to the infant’s navel. Its flesh was covered with a bluish-white film, eyes and mouth closed, a paste of dark hair covering its head. A thin tail curled out from between its legs and flapped against the sides of the cradle. It breathed through flexing gills.
Elizabeth held a hand over her mouth. “That can’t be…oh God…”
I put an arm around her, pulled her in, had a feeling about what was going through her mind. “It’s not human.”
Horror etched her face. She whispered in terror, “That’s what’s inside me…”
“No. We don’t know that.”
She pushed my arm away and paced through the mushroom stalks, peering into each cradle, her revulsion growing. “These things…what the fuck are they? What is that woman? Your wife! Is she even a woman?”
“Elizabeth, please. Don’t jump to conclu—”
She spun on me, fury in her eyes. “I was just raped by my fucking brother! While he was getting it up the ass by some freak thing with a tail between her legs!”
The noise woke one baby, which began crying, wailing out a wet gurgle, which started the other infants heaving out their screams, the gills on either side of their jaws pumping like blacksmith’s bellows. The walls echoed with deafening noise.
Elizabeth wept, her maternal instinct overcoming any revulsion, hands dipping into the nearest cradle, picking up the infant inside. But she couldn’t lift it completely from its bed seeing it was still attached to the tendrils that, possibly, sustained its life. She trembled and tears poured from her eyes as the infant wailed out its pain.
I weaved through the mushroom stalks to help get her under control, took the baby from her hands and set it back down in its cradle. Coaxed her away and led her through the mushroom forest. I tried to peer through the blue-tinged darkness and roiling mist for an exit.
As I did, a tendril shot out from one of the cribs and attached itself to Elizabeth’s neck. She screamed, her cloak falling open. Another tendril shot out and sealed its sucker to her nipple. Tendrils speared from the mushroom cradles beside and in front of us, most of them adhering to Elizabeth’s body, wrenching off her cloak, sticking to her back, her ass, down either leg. They covered her from head to toe, front and back, her face almost completely covered. Some of them tried to latch onto me, but they fell away, retracted back into their cradles when they encountered my clothing. I easily pulled the ones off my face and neck. But Elizabeth couldn’t pull them from herself as readily.
I guessed why. She was female, and possibly pregnant, and the infants saw her as a mother, a source of milk.
I grabbed her cloak, threw it over my shoulder, and started to wrench a few tendrils off Elizabeth. They left round pock-marks on her skin. Like leeches, the suckers pierced skin-deep enough to draw blood, and the blood flowed, unable to coagulate. There were too many to pull off, so she began to weaken at the blood loss. I ripped at them, but they didn’t tear—merely pulled off, retracted back to their cradles, then shot back out again, aimed perfectly wherever Elizabeth was in the forest of mushrooms.
I pulled the knife from my sleeve and slashed at the tendrils. They severed easily and the hacked-off length of twisted flesh spewed out red and blue blood. The babies wailed louder, beyond a mere scream of hunger, into voices laced with metal—felt as though steel needles were rammed into my eardrums.
Adrenaline made my heart feel about to burst as I held onto Elizabeth and, with my knife hand, swept the space in front and around her, hacking through the thousand flesh ropes that suckered to her body. The metal screeching of the infants pierced through our skulls like skewers, forcing me to squeeze my eyes shut, but I tried to keep them open as I slashed and hacked.
I managed to cut away enough of the tendrils to push Elizabeth quickly through the forest. The tendrils kept coming. I felt the bear fur against my cheek, and it gave me an idea. Slashing away the tendrils on Elizabeth’s back, I quickly put the bear skin on to cover her. The tendrils continued to shoot out, but they couldn’t take hold of the fur as they could her skin. Cutting
more flesh cables allowed me to cover her with more of the bear fur. Eventually, I had freed her entirely so that she and I were able to run through the remainder of the mushroom forest.
I stopped and held her steady as I looked back, told her not to get out from under the bear cloak. In our wake were severed tendrils with flexing sucker mouths lying bleeding and twitching across the flesh floor. Both of our shoes were splashed with blood, and blue mist blew across the forest of mushroom stalks. The screaming of the babies began to wane, but I could see them in their cradles, gills pumping in agony, pink mouths wide—too wide for normal, human babies, their jaws unhinging—tiny fingers clawing mist, tails snapping against either side of the cradles. The tendril umbilicals which were suckered to their navels had retracted back into the cradles, flicking blood while spasming, painting the nestling infants in their own red and blue life fluids.
At the far end of the forest, we came to a slit in the muscle wall tall enough for us to squeeze through, the slit sealing itself behind us. Elizabeth and I sat propped back against the closed wall, huddled into each other. We could still hear the residual wailing of the infants, but once the wall had sealed, all noise from the other room broke off.
— | — | —
Chapter 19
“Are you okay?” I asked her while picking off a few remaining suckers, dead and drying up, from her bloody, exposed skin.
Elizabeth wrapped the cloak around her body as she shivered. Looked up at me with eyes wet and glassy from fresh tears. “I better not have one of those growing inside me. I will kill it…and if I can’t kill it, I’ll kill myself.”
I combed sweat-soaked hair away from her eyes. “Don’t say that. Don’t let this place—these people—win. They’ll try to destroy us if they can’t assimilate us.”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes, tried to blink away the images we had both just seen.
Nodding, she said, “You’re right. We have to survive this goddamn family. Send the fuckers to Hell, if they’re not already there.”
I wiped blood off her collarbone. The pock-marked blood spots seemed to have halted their flow since the bear cloak went back on her body.
“They seem to carry their hell with them,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Why wait until you’re dead to enjoy damnation?”
She smiled and I smiled with her, felt exhaustion move through my muscles, making me want to sleep for a thousand years.
“Are the children all right, Mistress Venus?” a tinny, radio-like voice asked.
We craned our heads to see a figure stooping over our prone bodies. A hand extended to feel the fur of Elizabeth’s cloak—how the person must’ve mistaken one woman for another. The female figure was blind. Copper wire sewed her eyes shut. Half of a gas mask stretched over her mouth and nose, the round filter also acting as a speaker for her voice.
She wore a nurse’s uniform from the 1950s—white shoes and leggings and skirt—down to the origami crane nurse’s cap perched on her head, hair tied at the back of her head into a bun.
Elizabeth and I must’ve stared at her in shock for too long.
The nurse repeated through her gas mask, fingertips brushing the cloak fur. “Mistress Venus? Do the infants have need of me? The mothers are busy making more milk.”
Elizabeth stuttered out a response. “No, the…ah…infants are fine.” She and I got to our feet.
“Your voice sounds different, Mistress.”
“Oh…yes…I’ve, uh, had a bit too much to drink. It’s been a busy night.”
The nurse reached out, touched my sleeve. “I’m sure your wedding was quite grand. Is this your groom?”
“Yes, thank you—this is Chris.”
I clasped the nurse’s hand. “Hello. The wedding was lovely. You must join the festivities.”
If a mask could smile…the nurse seemed happy. The eye muscles behind the sewn wire convulsed. “Thank you for the offer, but the babies need constant care, of course. The other nurses and I wouldn’t think of being relieved of our duties. Would you care to inspect the maternity operations?”
Elizabeth and I looked at each other, shrugged.
“Thank you, that would be nice,” Elizabeth said.
We followed the nurse, who stepped confidently as though she could see, leading us through a flesh hall that branched in an L shape, until we emerged into a vast room shaped like an immense square tower that stretched high overhead. Bright white light shone from every wall, the ceiling, the floor. We couldn’t see detail as we squinted, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the brightness. Once they did, however, it was still difficult to tell details since every direction was a uniform whiteness.
Nurses dressed in the same uniform as our guide, hair twisted into buns behind their caps, mouths covered by gas mask respirators, eyes sewn shut, were scattered throughout the room. Each one to a station. The mushroom cradles we had seen in the previous room rose out of the floor. A baby was put into it and tendrils grew out of the inner bowl of the cradle, attached themselves to the infant’s forehead and navel, then a fluid—possibly a thin red blood, transparent—filled the bowl, covering the baby completely. The wings of the inverted mushroom cap folded over the submerged baby, then the entire cradle and mushroom stalk sunk back into the floor, disappeared. When it rose up again, the baby was gone, mushroom cap unfolding to form a cradle to receive the next infant.
We looked up to see where the babies came from. High, high above our heads, women of various shapes and sizes hung down from the ceiling in woven flesh hammocks, their splayed legs sticking through holes. They held onto the supporting ropes of the hammocks as they wailed out their birth pangs, pushing.
We saw the head of a baby emerge from the mother and easily slip out. A rain of fluid fell as the woman pushed, followed by the baby who fell out tethered by its long umbilical cord. Like a bungee cord that wasn’t elastic enough to rebound, the cord unraveled to let the infant down into the nurse’s waiting hands. She cut the cord with a pair of thick silver shears which she had holstered to her hip, then put the baby in its cradle. The mushroom filled with liquid, folded its wings, and descended into the floor.
The nurse knew where to stand to avoid being hit by too much of the fluid or flesh that fell from the mother. (Perhaps this was the reason for the gas masks and the sewn eyes, I wondered.) The mess of filth beaded like water on rubber and was sucked down, the floor cleaned instantly. The entire white room stayed clean, as did the nurses. Once the baby had been freed of its lifeline, given over to its incubator, the long length of umbilical fell with the afterbirth. Elizabeth and I jumped out of its way. It coiled down and slapped wetly on the floor before a hole opened up and sucked it away. We couldn’t tell whether the floor was an organism or a machine, but it operated efficiently every time.
No mother was finished giving birth after just one child. Each pushed and groaned and wept, the hammock swinging slightly with her convulsions, until another baby crowned. It too somersaulted through the air, its umbilical spooling out behind it, becoming gradually stiffer as the infant fell closer to the nurse’s waiting arms. Between births, the nurse occasionally took a small facecloth from a pocket and dabbed the dew off her face. Readjusted where she stood beneath the mother, not always able to compensate for the hammock swing.
“How do you know where the baby is in the air?” I asked.
The nurse who was giving us the tour chuckled with the nurse doing the work. “Your husband is very curious about the process, Mistress. Unlike some of the others. We take it as a compliment.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, patting my arm and winking at me, playing the part of Venus to maintain our camouflage. “I’ve got a good one this time.”
The nurses hummed with content, then the tour guide said to me, “We have excellent hearing, Master. We hear the baby emerge from the mother and we hear the umbilical unravel. We step out of the way for the effluvia to fall and be sucked into the floor, then we return to our places beneath the mother. We can also
feel a change in the air pressure as the infant’s body falls toward us. Not to worry, no delivery nurse would dare move from her post while a mother is in birth suspension.”
Again, an umbilical rope and afterbirth fell and was absorbed by the floor. This happened across the entire room, mothers hanging from hammocks like flies in spider webs. Elizabeth and I watched in fascination and revulsion as the woman high above us delivered five babies. Then she sagged exhausted into the swaying hammock before it rose on its flesh ropes. A hole opened in the ceiling and she vanished. A few moments later, the hole reopened in the vast flat ceiling, and another pregnant mother in a hammock was lowered, screaming as the first baby pushed out of her, a nurse far below with open arms and shears waiting.
“Fascinating,” I said under my breath.
With excellent hearing, the nurse responded to me. “We’re glad you admire the process.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” the nurse said, enjoying the attention.
“Why do you wear respirators?” I didn’t want to say ‘gas masks.’
“Prolonged exposure to the birthing fluids becomes toxic. One of the reasons why the mother is suspended far above the effluvia. Same reason for our eyes being sewn shut—I’m sure that was your next question. We also have no sense of smell—you’re third question, perhaps?”
I chuckled mildly, as did the nurse. “How many babies on average does a woman have?”
“Seven.”
My eyes darted to Elizabeth, who squeezed a hand over her mouth as blood drained from her face.
“Is anything wrong?” the nurse asked.
Elizabeth coughed into her fist. “No, thank you, I’m fine. Too much champagne I’m afraid.”
“I understand,” said the nurse. “Perhaps you’d care to leave—I wouldn’t want you over-exposed to toxicity without the proper safety apparatus. But on behalf of all the delivery nurses, I sincerely thank you, Mistress Venus and Master Chris, for blessing these births with your presence. Another branch of the family will grow quite strong, I’m sure.”