Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The walls of that section were also of wood, and Noon had been attempting to climb up one, digging torn fingers and toes between the rough boards to find purchase, when the Foeti had lunged out of the shadows for the first time – its hairless head disproportionately immense, its naked body undeveloped, like an embryo as big as he was. He had dropped down from the wall and begun running, then. He had been running ever since. Sleeping when it was moderately safe enough to risk it. Eating what edible plants, mostly fungus, he could harvest, and whatever edible animals he could kill. Drinking water that trickled down tiled walls, or that pooled here and there, or that flooded whole areas of the Tunnel that he had to wade through. When he couldn’t run, he dragged himself along. He had even crawled on all fours.

  In some places he had found doors blocking his way. Doors of decomposing gray-green wood. Doors of metal almost lost under incrustations of red rust or green verdigris. To his infinite relief on each occasion, he had not yet encountered a locked door. But he had done his best to barricade them once he was on the other side. Several times, in narrow parts of the Tunnel, he had even constructed and barricaded his own doors to impede, if not halt, the progress of the Foeti. Of course, elsewhere the Tunnel was so impossibly wide that he couldn’t see its sides, let alone create a door to block it. Only a few miles back, in fact, he had encountered one such region of the Tunnel, its walls lost in gloom but the ceiling so low he had to tuck in his head to avoid bumping it against a smooth surface apparently made of thick black (perhaps volcanic) glass.

  Over the months, this subterranean and stressful existence had taken its toll on him. His hair, formerly long and worn in a queue tied with a black ribbon, had begun to come out in stringy handfuls. He had lost weight, his skeletal condition impossible to ignore as his clothing tattered away until all he wore now were a pair of ragged trousers cut off at the knees. Worst of all were the headaches, so severe at times that he wanted nothing more than to stop running, running, running, to just drop down and curl in a fetal position and wait for his enemy to overtake him at last...to deliver him from his torment. His skull seemed to be literally and steadily ballooning with his pain, as though filling up with infected pus...

  The forest of roots was so dense that when Noon suddenly emerged from it he was surprised, shaken out of his numb, robotic reverie – not having seen its terminus approaching. Ahead of him loomed a great staircase, the ceiling sloping up at a steep angle, vanishing into a murk no longer illuminated by dangling light bulbs. Straightening up, Noon stepped close to the bottom step. He prodded it with his toe, and reached out to run his hand over a black-painted wall with a crinkled texture. His suspicions about the surface of the staircase, walls, and the angled ceiling were confirmed when he tore free a little tab of the black material to reveal words beneath it, printed in a small type, black against white. Newspaper. The walls, ceiling and the stairs themselves were composed of papier-mache, covered over with a glossy black paint.

  Were the stairs of nothing more than glued paper, then? Would they support his weight? As he tested his foot on the first step, he realized there were odd symbols marked on it in a dark but flourescent purple paint. More symbols, but different, on the second step. And so on, these characters varying on each. Did they tell a saga? Some parable? But if so, was this story to be read from the bottom to the top of the staircase, or from the top to the bottom? Or might it be read either way?

  Noon had taken only three wary steps up the flight of paper or paper-coated stairs when a/the Foeti burst directly through the wall at the foot of the staircase. The thickly painted papier-mache there had flimsily covered over and hidden a doorway in the true wall beneath.

  Noon then began racing up the steps as fast as his legs could propel him, terrified to have his foe so close at his heels in so unexpected a manner. He could no longer be timid about the staircase’s sturdiness. But he needn’t have worried, as it turned out, about the staircase supporting him or the Foeti catching him – just yet, at least. After several moments, he realized the Foeti was not pursuing him up the steps, and after a few moments more, he reined in enough fear that he was able to stop and look back down the way he had come.

  There had to be more than one Foeti, he decided (again). The first one that had attacked him had been entirely bald. This one had long cobwebs of hair hanging over its face, through which its lidless black eyes glared. And whereas the first ones he had encountered had always been crawling rapidly on all fours, lately the ones in this vicinity seemed to spend more time scurrying along on their hind legs, bent under the weight of huge heads which were still not as huge as the heads of the first Foeti he had known. This one even wore primitive, torn clothing.

  The wild-haired Foeti had not advanced up even one of the steps, paced back and forth at their foot, emitting terrible cries of frustration. Was the thing concerned that the steps might cave in under its weight? No...Noon understood what the problem was. The symbols on the steps. The Foeti was afraid of them. This was confirmed when he saw the Foeti lash out, dig its nails into the bottom step and tear away a strip of the papier-mache as he himself had done. It flicked the shred away, and tore another free. Then, it began flailing madly with both of its thin but powerful forelimbs.

  Even if it should strip all the symbols from the bottom step (and now Noon saw that a concrete staircase lay beneath the paper facade), there was still the step above that, and the step above that. Assuming that the messages or spells written on them were all equally powerful, all equally frightening to the Foeti. But whether the Foeti should be delayed for minutes or for a day, Noon didn’t linger to waste any more of this precious time. Turning forward again, he continued mounting the increasingly shadowy staircase.

  As he ascended, it appeared to him that the purple symbols became more vivid. And soon enough, as the last of the light bulb illumination below him receded (and the Foeti was swallowed up in the dimness, apparently having only gained a handful of steps), the symbols actually began to glow in the darkness. It helped him know where to plant his feet, though the luminosity was far too feeble to show him how much higher the flight of steps would lead him.

  In spots here and there, the glossy black paint had been chipped or torn by the passage of creatures not impeded like the Foeti, maybe curious like himself about what lay beneath. The layers of glued newspaper revealed by these wounds shone white against the blackness, but it was still difficult for Noon to make out the letters on them in the scant light from the purple-painted runes. Leaning his face close to one torn patch, he thought he made out the words “impregnated” and “stillborn,” the rest too smeared and blurred with hardened paste. In a smaller wound, in a sans serif type, there was just the word “our.” A few steps higher, another little tear (or maybe just a spot carelessly missed in the painting, since it lay like a shadow directly beneath a high ridge in the wrinkly surface) showed only the letters “roborus,” in a more elegant type style – though Noon didn’t know whether that was the start, middle, or end of a word.

  Ahead of him, he began to make out a haze of dim light. Around this time, after it seemed he had been ascending the stairs for close to an hour, he also started to notice that the steps were marred in more than just little nicks and peeled strips. The papier-mache was warped, buckled, as if its paste had become fluid again, bubbled and then rehardened. Greater sections of the painted skin had split and pulled away from each other. As he climbed yet higher, he saw more and more damage until whole large areas of the papier-mache had become damp and sloughed away from the concrete steps beneath, only to resolidify again. The purple characters (less and less luminous the nearer he came to that pale light) were cracked, distorted, or missing altogether.

  At last, he stepped up into the light. Here, the staircase and the painted papier-mache ended. The walls, floor and ceiling of the Tunnel were again of mortared stone. The new light was of an intoxicating, unmistakable quality...a kind of light he hadn’t seen in perhaps a year.

  It was su
nlight.

  And with it, even more intoxicating, the smell of fresh air. Vegetation warmed by a summer sun. There could no longer be a mere desert above his head. The sunlight and fresh air came from four evenly spaced windows in the ceiling over his head, just out of reach of his outstretched arms when he tried to jump to touch them. These open windows were covered with heavy iron bars, too close together for him to squeeze through even if he could spring high enough to grab hold of them, but they permitted the sun’s gold (late afternoon, early morning?) light to filter through, a sweet-smelling breeze to waft between. And now he knew that it was intermittent rain coming into the Tunnel through these openings, and trickling down the stairs, that had caused the damage to the papier-mache, returning it to the formless mush it had started out as.

  Scanning around him for some forgotten tool or other item with which to pry loose the bars from one of the windows (should he even be able to climb up the blocks of the wall to reach them), Noon glanced back the way he had come. He heard one eerie, far-off wail from the pursuing lone Foeti, like the shriek of a hawk. There were no bird cries outside the four rectangular openings in the roof, but he did think he heard the shh-shh-shhing of sawing, sizzling insect noises in tall grass.

  His eyes were drawn back to the damaged papier-mache of the staircase he had mounted. The improved light made the newspapers it was composed of more legible. He saw part of a birth announcement page here, a column of obituaries there. One portion of the ruined top step in particular drew him closer. He crouched, cocked his head to examine it, at last broke that piece free in his hands to lift to his face.

  It was not merely letters or words that showed on the newsprint, this time, but a halftone photograph of a house. Was it from a real estate page? Did it illustrate the scene of some crime? The caption was partially torn away, revealing only the words: “...in the house at 101 Ada Street.”

  Even abbreviated, the caption made Noon’s heart spasm. Even before he had read it, he had thought the house resembled his own ancient domicile...through whose moldering floor he had plummeted into this unsuspected underworld. The photograph seemed to portray his home back in some older time, perhaps, when its wood was sturdier, its paint not yet worn away. If not his home, one very much in the same style. But the fragment of caption spelled it out beyond any doubt. The address it gave was definitely his own.

  His maple tree, growing so close to the house that its roots must have begun separating the very stones of the foundation, was missing from the picture, a mere sapling in its place. Was the picture so old that the sapling was the maple tree, in its infancy? Or...could this picture be of his house since he had fallen into the Tunnel? Repaired, repainted, resold? The damaging tree cut down, and replaced with a new one?

  A fresh headache was brewing like a storm in his poor stretched skull; he could ponder the photograph no longer, and slipped it into a pocket of his ragged trousers to examine again later on. For now, he wanted to concentrate on getting up to, and through, those metal bars over the four ceiling windows. He aligned himself directly below the first of the windows, and could hear more distinctly the sounds of insects in high, sun-yellowed summer grass. Bent blades of this grass even dangled down between the bars along the window’s edges. But as he stood there, inhaling, tilting his chin toward the fragrant air, a much cooler breeze washed over him. It was chilly, in fact, and caused him to look toward the windows spaced farther ahead. He found himself wandering forward.

  Noon stopped below the next of the four windows. His battered shoes crunched in a scattered heap of brown, dead leaves. A few brighter, more recently fallen leaves lay amongst them. He knelt, picked one up, twirled it by its stem. It was a maple leaf, and it was in fiery shades of orange and yellow. As he gazed straight upward, Noon thought he could hear tree branches rustling. The air had taken on a subtly different fragrance, and it had grown cooler. As he faced upwards, he saw a fresh leaf slip between the bars, and come spiraling lazily down like a stingray skimming through water. A fresh, red and gold leaf from a maple tree.

  Another icy breeze rushed over him. It came from farther ahead, and Noon went onwards, the skin of his bare arms turning to gooseflesh.

  He had taken only a few steps when he realized that the broad white blotch directly underneath this window was not sunlight on the floor. It was snow.

  Noon stepped into the crunching patch of snow, and into a silvery shaft of light that was like a solid column of frozen air. Above him, he saw only a blank gray sky between the bars, but a few stray flakes found their way through, drifted down, one of them alighting on his forehead as if in a frail attempt to soothe the agony distending his cranium, undoing his skull’s sutures.

  He knew what he would see next before he even walked over to the fourth window and raised his eyes toward it. Gilded dusk or dawn light beamed down, and the breeze was warmer and smelled of green growing things. Spring...

  Had there been a fifth window, would it look out upon summer again? A sixth, autumn? And on...and on?

  A slim arm thrust itself abruptly between the bars, its fingers grasping down at him futilely. Though it could not possibly have reached him, still Noon flinched violently. A woman’s arm, it looked like. He had seen woman-like creatures in the Tunnel before, but this was out of the Tunnel. Could it be a person like himself, trying to rescue rather than hurt him?

  Something, an instinct, made Noon look behind him. He saw another arm straining down through the ice encrusted bars of the third window. This arm, however, was little more than bones held together with frozen ligaments, blue tendons.

  Beyond that, yet another arm reached down through the second window, causing brittle leaves to fall between the bars. This arm, it appeared from where he was standing, was horribly black and decomposed, its skin sloughing away. And further on, a fourth arm clutched at thin air, writhing madly like a snake that had been run over by an automobile, flipping impossibly in both directions at the elbow joint. This limb was discolored, beginning to rot, but not yet as corrupted as the one which caused autumn leaves to trickle down.

  Each arm, despite its stage of decay, moved in an identical manner...right down to every jerk or twist of the wrist, every spider-like convulsion of the fingers...

  And each hand wore an identical, thin gold wedding band, like the one his mother had inherited from her mother, and which had in turn been given to Noon to place on his own bride’s finger on their wedding day. But no daughter of hers would ever wear it, since his wife had expired (and her child along with her) during labor. She wore the ring still in the velvet-lined jewelry box of her casket...

  No – even if he could reach those high windows, Noon knew this was not a good place to escape to. If he should bellow for help, who knew what other terrors might join this/these clutching being/beings.

  He continued on his way.

  Soon, the varied shafts of sunlight were lost behind him, as was the sound of insects, the smell of autumn leaves and clean snow. Transient impressions, ephemeral, already mere wispy memories swallowed by darkness.

  The Tunnel was now nothing but raw, dry earth beneath his feet, to either side and above, like the burrow of a giant animal or a titanic ant hill. For a time, he felt his way through absolute darkness. Something long and feathery – a centipede? – flowed across his hand as it moved across the dirt wall. But a suggestion of light showed ahead of him, and soon he no longer had to run his hand along the wall. The light grew...grew enough for him to see the changes that next shaped the character of the Tunnel.

  The walls, ceiling, floor were still mostly of dirt, but not entirely. A section of the floor was covered with a long, irregular patch of faded linoleum which lay fairly flat across the hard packed dirt. Its edges were broken, irregularly torn. The linoleum had repeating flowery patterns on it. Across the ceiling were scattered patches of white cork tiles, apparently anchored directly into the dirt. And on the earthen walls, again in patchy areas, had been hung sheets of old wallpaper, buckling and water st
ained, drooping over themselves...tacked directly into the earth without benefit of a wooden or plaster understructure.

  A lamp with a crystal shade hung from the ceiling. Its wiring must run straight into the dirt, as well. The dark spots in the bottom of the shade were doubtless insect carcasses. There were further signs that this part of the Tunnel had been adapted for habitation. Noon approached a table and set of chairs. There were three place settings; two for adults and a bowl for a child. The child’s chair was a high chair. Crusted bits of food – or were those desiccated insect carcasses as well? – lay scattered on the plates.

  He walked on; it seemed like he was passing through a kitchen which some force had stretched out, elongated and attenuated. There was an old refrigerator, oddly standing directly in the center of the Tunnel, but when he opened it up – praying for sustenance – it was not cold inside and there were only bad-smelling smudges where maybe food had long ago moldered and liquified. Further along, he saw a kitchen sink with cabinets beneath it, pushed up against one dirt wall. He approached this, hoping that water pipes had been fed into the dirt the way the electrical wiring had been (he had encountered a second, shaded lamp depending from the ceiling).

  The sink, he found, was full of water. And the faucets did work; both gave only cold water, but it tasted only slightly of rust and he eagerly cupped his hands under it, drank his fill and splashed handfuls of it across his face. His thirst slaked for the moment, he returned his attention to what he had initially seen inside the water-filled sink. At its bottom rested a rectangular wooden box with a sealed lid. Noon didn’t doubt that despite the lid, the submerged box must have become filled with water, soaking whatever the contents might be. He was curious enough to want to lift the box out of the sink and remove the lid...but at the same time, a great dread prevented him. The box put him too much in mind of a crude coffin. Of course, it was a coffin that could only accommodate the body of an infant, a newborn or a stillborn at that.