Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  Young Fabrigas decided to revive his mother, whom he had buried in the yard at the back of the mansion. The experiment was a great success – at least in a literal sense. She did indeed rise from the grave, still in her decomposed state, and she pursued her son out of the compound, and down the street, and through the deserted avenues of Carnassus’s Fancy District. The corpse followed her tearful son through the dark wet alleys, calling to him in a gravesick voice through bloody lips: ‘My son! My son!’ He fled into a sewer and she followed. He heard her voice always just behind him. The chase went on for hours until he could finally steel himself to return her to death, and to the pit in the yard.

  He dug down another three feet to ensure she would not rise again, and his shovel hit a solid object. He was digging down not through natural soil, but through an impasto of oily filth laid down over centuries. He pulled out the strongbox. Inside the box was a book and a note:

  Dear younger Fabrigas,

  You do not know us, though we know the older you. You are a good boy, but the man in the book you possess is a fool. He is meddling in forces he does not understand. It is sad that you had to go through such a terrifying experience to discover that. But it will get better. If you follow the instructions in the book we’ve given you very carefully, and keep to the simple life and good intentions of a monk, you will do powerful and wonderful things. This book holds the ancient hexagrams given to us by the Immortals – the oldest species in the universe. Their science is a wonderful thing. Do not listen to anyone who tells you this is magic. These are natural laws. Magic dies in its shadow.

  We are afraid to inform you that your early experiments in this field have attracted the attention of powerful monsters. You are now in great danger. This plague is just the beginning. We are in a battle to control these dark forces. It is a battle on a scale you could not even begin to comprehend. We will protect you, and in return we will ask you to play a small part in our struggle. One day soon you will solve a problem given to you by a drunk and will be invited to join a prestigious academy. So long as you stay there you will be well protected. Be sure to read our book before then.

  You might feel very alone and frightened, but you will not be alone for much longer. If you are brave and clever you will soon have a friend and servant. (See Chapter 48: Hexagrams of Entanglement.)

  Kind regards,

  Dark Hand

  PS If you bury your mother unprotected she will rise again in 3.5 days to torment you. Draw hexagram 84984 upon her forehead and bury her well.

  A few nights later Fabrigas heard noises in his room. Someone had entered without triggering any of his traps or alarms. Was it Mother? Had she risen again? Perhaps he had painted the symbol on her forehead wrong. Every night the noises arrived around the same time and sent him ducking under. This was not an easily frightened child. He was used to the ugly rhythms of the Sphere. He was used to the thrum of the shipyards and the hoots and cries from the slums nearby. But it is a fact that you can be as brave a boy as you like outdoors, but noises in your own room are impossible to bear.

  After weeks of this he gave himself a talking to. ‘Now, look. You’re not some baby who hides beneath his covers with a lamp. You are a man. A man of science.’ That night he sprinkled iron dust on his floor and caught the print of a man’s shoe. A man? Well, that was still to be determined. But something was there. Something.

  The buried book he had been given contained a great deal on the subject of invisible beings. It was possible, it said, to trap an invisible by drawing diagrams on the floor and placing a shiny object in the centre. He carefully drew the diagrams on the floor. He found one of his mother’s large soup spoons and polished it brighter than the moon. Then he put the spoon on the attic floor and went to bed. In the night he saw bright flashes through his blankets, smelled an electrical burning smell and was forced to admit that, though he was a man of science, he could not bear to look.

  In the morning there was a man in his room – a man with pointy ears and two horns on his head. ‘Is not the absence of presence frightening?’ said the man.

  The boy said nothing.

  ‘So well done you,’ said the man. ‘In all my time I never dreamed a human would trap me, let alone such a tiny one.’ The boy had said nothing. ‘I assume you are now too frightened to speak, so I will tell you what will happen. As you have managed to snare me I am now your servant for the course of your natural life. Which for me, fortunately, is a blink. Only you can see or hear me. I can’t kill you, if that’s what you’re wondering. I can offer you advice but I cannot physically interfere with your world. Do not call me “demon”. I hope all this is clear. We are going to have many, many great adventures together, I can assure you. Now, if you would be so kind as to tell me what this fascinating object is.’ And the creature held the spoon up to the sunlight which poured in through a slit in the roof.

  DARKNESS COMES

  ‘Well,’ said Carrofax now as he surveyed the starving and drunken group, ‘you have managed to get yourself into quite a mess.’

  ‘Yes, yes, so you’re back, do you want a parade?’ and everyone jumped.

  ‘So your boyfriend has returned,’ said the bosun, but Fabrigas ignored him, instead addressing an empty corner. ‘Why is it not getting dark? We need to get back to our ship.’

  ‘This is the bright side of the moon of a planet ringed by three suns. It only gets dark here when all three suns are aligned behind the planet, and that won’t happen again for another six naval months.’

  Fabrigas let the information sink in. Then he slumped down in a chair and rubbed his nose. ‘It won’t be dark for six months,’ he told his friends. ‘Why can we not catch a break on this mission? Is every universe against us!’

  ‘You are wondering why luck is against us?’ said Descharge, and he threw a small glance towards the girl.

  ‘If I could perhaps suggest, sir –’

  ‘No! We will find a way. There must be an escape. We could tunnel back to the ship.’

  ‘Through the steel plate?’ said Descharge.

  ‘There’s no way out,’ said the bosun, who was now lying on the bed next to the skeleton. ‘We’ll have to eat each other until there’s only one left, and knowing my luck that will be me.’

  ‘I could perhaps suggest –’ said Carrofax, but the old man cut him off: ‘No!’ He hated it when his servant tried to offer advice.

  ‘So you don’t want me to tell you how to get out of this?’

  ‘No. We humans will solve this. Maybe some kind of hotter-thanair balloon. Or a big fire!’

  ‘Well, I will not interfere, though you should at least ask the girl to tell you about the trapdoor.’

  *

  ‘Oh yes, I know all about the door,’ Lenore admitted. ‘But I did not want to go down there. Smells all of blood and death down there.’ She bit her lip. ‘Dark and dangerous. If we go down we’ll come up dead!’ This made everyone draw breath sharply. Everyone except Roberto, who was already sitting on the edge, dangling his legs into the hole in the floor and giving them a look that said, ‘Well? What are we waiting for?’ The hatch had an electric latch, but the boy had disabled it with a touch of his fingers.

  ‘Let’s not waste time,’ said Descharge. No one moved.

  ‘Silence is the key,’ said Carrofax, ‘and that’s all I’ll say. My lips are sealed.’

  Fabrigas leaned down to Roberto, seized the boy by both shoulders, then raised a long finger to his own lips. The boy nodded.

  UNDERGROUND

  Down a red steel ladder and into a short corridor leading to a heavy blast door which stood ajar. Beyond was another corridor that led to a smaller blast door and this one was locked. Roberto strode to the door, placed his fingers against the small keypad beside it, and in seconds they heard the clunk of the locks opening. Luckily, its hinges had been well oiled and it opened without much noise. A cloud of odour rolled out of the room beyond, a storm so noxious that they all put their sleeves to their faces. L
enore passed out. When they managed to rouse her she said, ‘We extremely very much should not go in.’

  Beyond the blast door was a small, comfortable lounge, like a doctor’s waiting room. It had wood-panelled walls, padded chairs, a standing lamp and a dead (non-lethal) potted shrub. It had a portrait on the wall: a king or emperor dressed in blue and green. Then there was an even smaller blast door which they all had to squeeze through. And beyond that door was … well … was something that was all but beyond belief.

  They found a narrow gallery: a long, concrete bunker with a pair of steel benches. Just off this room, behind a curtain, was a tiny, darkened booth. The booth contained a small altar. On top of the altar was an idol; beneath the idol was carved ‘Calligulus IV’, and beneath that was a brass legend reading ‘In His Name’. There were a dozen jars spaced along the benches in the gallery, each twice the size of a person, and each sealed with bolted iron caps. Inside each was a shape which appeared at first to be a skeleton with flesh still hanging on its bones, but on closer inspection was something even more terrifying. Fabrigas caught Roberto’s eye and pointed to the row of lights on the wall. The boy nodded, placed his hand flat on the lighting panel, and the room was suddenly bathed in a greenish light. Then Fabrigas walked carefully along each row, peering in at the shadowy shapes. Then he walked along the second row and did the same. Then he turned to a blank spot near the door and said, ‘Carrofax, I think you’d better explain this after all.’

  OUR MAD UNIVERSE

  A universe is a mad, bad place, full of deadly traps and toothy beasts. Take, for example, Bespophus, the moon of carnivorous plants. A botanist named Herbert M. Connofeast decided that he would create a zoo of his universe’s most deadly plant life on a small moon in his own solar system. The Venusian man-trap, shrieking ivy, daffodillus rex, antipodean brain-fungus, all these and more were brought to the moon and each deadly shrub was housed in a secure glass enclosure. The point, Connofeast said, was to educate children and to teach them that their species had nothing to fear from these plants so long as they understood them. This was, of course, complete insanity. People had everything to fear from these plants, and it took only a few weeks for the first party of schoolchildren to vanish. Only their shoes were found.

  The curators began to find it increasingly difficult to control the plants. The brain-sucking onto-lily, for example, spreads unseen below the soil and can grow at a foot per minute. If you do happen to be sitting in an outside privy while reading a newspaper, as the site’s head botanist Lord Beezely was one morning, then it’s almost certainly too late to escape. The plants soon began to interbreed, creating new and even more terrifying specimens, and within a single year the moon had become what Herbert M. Connofeast had always dreamed of: a living testimony to the majesty and grandeur of the universe’s most deadly veg. The moon was abandoned, obviously, but Connofeast refused to leave. By that time, spores had spread to the home-world nearby, causing disaster on a massive scale. Entire armies sent to the moon to destroy the plants vanished. Even when ships firebombed sections of the moon the plants grew back in days. As a garden, Connofeast’s zoo was a magnificent failure. But as an illustration of what life in a universe is really like, you could hardly do better.

  *

  ‘This is the laboratory where Connofeast engineered his greatest beasts,’ continued Carrofax. ‘His aim was simply to create the most fearsome shrubs imaginable.’ The others peered, horrified, into the giant jars and saw, suspended in embryonic fluid, sleeping plants with claws, fangs, eyes, plants bound not by roots, plants freed from the bonds of the earth. In the years since their creator’s death they continued growing in perpetual slumber, and now they pressed against the glass, faint smiles upon their sleeping lips – or so it seemed.

  ‘But why?’ said Fabrigas.

  ‘No one knows why the old man wanted to create such terrible creatures. Some say he had been given money by a foreign army to design plants as weapons, and certainly they are perfect predators: fearless, bloodless, and possessing natural camouflage. If you tear a limb from these plants it will regrow. Some say he was under the spell of a … demon.’ Carrofax paused for effect. ‘That room behind the curtain would certainly suggest so, and though I have never heard of this Calligulus it would be wise to assume that he is powerful and dangerous. Each of these beasts is a highly refined killing machine, capable of tearing you apart in a –’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Fabrigas took a long breath, then turned to his friends and said, ‘Everything will be fine as long as … we all remain … very … very … quiet.’

  At that moment there was a shrill squeal as somewhere within the walls a set of old gears were revived, and in the jars, fifty eyes snapped open.

  RUN, RABBITS, RUN

  ‘Stupid boy!’ cried Fabrigas, but even if Roberto hadn’t been deaf he wouldn’t have heard the old man above the sound of the hidden door sliding open. He was standing frozen beside the new portal, his hand still flat against the nondescript wall panel.

  ‘Your boy has found the only exit,’ said Carrofax. ‘It would have had to be opened anyway.’ The door revealed a dim tunnel. Upon waking, the plants had groggily assessed their situation, seen their prey, paused in astonishment, and now began to furiously test their enclosures, working away at the heavy bolts, pressing out at the glass with their shaggy limbs. ‘These jars weren’t meant to hold a full-grown plant. I’d say you have but five minutes before them,’ said the demon butler. ‘There is an escape machine on the far side of the maze. Isn’t that nice?’

  *

  There is nothing quite as frightening as a tunnel. A forest, no matter how deadly, offers all the points of the compass for escape. Including up. A tunnel only offers two avenues: the way you’re going, and the way you’ve been. And if your way is blocked by danger, and you’ve come from somewhere deadly, your options are few. You may as well just have a picnic and wait for the end. Plus, tunnels are usually very dark and cold, so bring a hat. Anyway, tunnels are frightening. So remember, if at any time you feel afraid and need a moment to recover, you can turn to here, your Little Page of Calmness (LPoC).

  *

  Our friends jogged into the dark maze, a misty mess of concrete tunnels lit sometimes by feeble lamps, past the occasional small heap of bones. Descharge calmly loaded his pistol as he went. ‘The old man must have used these tunnels to test his beasts. On goats, most likely. But who knows?’

  ‘I can fathom the fangs and claws,’ said the bosun, ‘but why did the madman have to give them ears?’

  ‘And why put your escape pod on the furthest side?’ said the botanist. ‘You wouldn’t read of such a conceit in the worst adventure book.’

  ‘Be quiet now, and follow me, yes,’ said Lenore, her lost eyes shining in the dimness. ‘No, it isn’t far at all. Come fast.’ And on they trogged (trotted, jogged), the bones crunching under their boots, until, far behind, they heard the smash of glass followed by a gurgling cry that swept past them in the tunnel, then returned, bringing with it a cloud of goaty death.

  ‘Oh good mercies!’ said the botanist.

  ‘Monsters monsters monsters monsters,’ whispered Lenore.

  ‘Run on!’ cried the bosun as he drew his crooked knives. ‘I won’t be more than a minute. I will speak with them and see if we can smooth this out.’

  And they did, because there was no time to argue. They ran on into a part of the maze where the lamps were burned out. A day ago they were merrily eating soup, now they were in a lightless hell, on a deadly moon, in an alien dimension, floating along after the pale, floating figure of a girl. Behind they heard the cry again, much closer, it gurgled in their ears. Every sound was amplified by the concrete tubes – they could even hear the slickety-slap of planty limbs scampering over the stone. They heard the bosun as though he was still beside them: ‘Come on then! I’ve seen worse!’ Then nothing, just the sound of their own breath, the thunk-a-thunk of boots, Lenore’s strange voice. ‘It’s not much further. That poor gi
ant.’

  Up a ladder to the next level. There were no bones now, just algae clinging to the walls that in the orange glow of the wall lamps looked like a creeping tide of blood. From beyond they heard another gurgling scream. ‘They’ve overtaken us somehow,’ said Descharge. ‘They’re fast.’

  ‘It’s hardly further,’ said Lenore.

  Slickety-slap, slickety-slap, another curdled cry from behind them. Another ahead, in answer. Perhaps, it was hard to tell. They turned a final corner and the girl stopped short. The lights were blown out for most of the tunnel’s length but at the end was a bright red ladder lit by a single bulb. ‘What is it?’ said Fabrigas.

  The girl raised a trembling finger softly to her lips and said, ‘Shhhhhhhhh.’ Ahead, in the darkness, they heard an echo. ‘Shhhhhhhhh.’

  ‘They have gone about us,’ said the girl calmly. ‘There’s a twosome. Stay still and say if you will your prayers.’

  Then, from the darkness, they heard a terrible echo. ‘Sssssssaaaaayyyy prayerssssssssss.’

  ‘It’s mimicking us?’ said Descharge.

  ‘Mimmmick usssssssssssss.’ The sound was like the tip of a blade on stone and it pranked the heart. Far behind them they heard another creature smash its cell, and they heard another rattling up the ladder.