We were still gawking when my fiancée came bounding into the kitchen with Neosporin and bandages. She fixed my cut while we stared into the Stygian tunnel. Another drop of blood fell from my head and –
“There!” her cousin shouted.
Something jumped in the dark. He was sure of it and so was I. Something clinging to one of the walls. A grey thing with something like a face, but not quite
“A man? Is that a man down there?” my fiancée asked.
The best word I could think of to describe what it did next was scurry.
“Something else,” I said. “Couldn’a been a man,” I whispered. “Tricks on our eyes.”
My fiancée bandaged my head, I closed the door, and we three went into the living room.
We grabbed more beer. Hoped alcohol and bullshitting would help fight the war we were losing against our imaginations. We talked and drank to help us pretend that we hadn’t seen anything. That little whisper of movement. That hint of shape. We drank until we started to forget and we drank until we fell into a terrible bout of
2. Interrupted Sleep
Months before that night, when my fiancée was off with her folks for Christmas, I decided to do something special for her return. A jaunt to a nearby Barnes & Noble yielded the latest DVD box set of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” A trip to a local liquor store and I had a nice bottle of wine. A metallic green bag from Duane Reade almost completed it, but not quite. So I bought a small tree. I put the gift bag and the tree on a table in the kitchen. On the wall behind that ‘Welcome Home’ assembly, I affixed a string of red LED lights in the shape of a heart.
Arms folded, surveying my accomplishment, I thought I’d done a damn fine job. It turned out I had. She was thrilled. And wonderfully pornographic sex followed.
We left the heart-shaped lights up far past Christmas. They looked too nice to tear down.
Now they were the only thing lighting the apartment save a slice of white from the streetlamp outside that cut through the edges of our bedroom blinds.
She and I left the bedroom door open so that there was some kind of airflow. The apartment had a habit of getting stuffy. Our building was old and sometimes we could smell it – that funk of age.
From where I lay, I could see the edge of the couch where her cousin was tossing and turning. I could also see the front door, bathed in the faint red light from the kitchen.
I closed my eyes and rolled onto my side. My fiancée exhaled as I wrapped one arm around her. I don’t know how long I tried to fall asleep in that position, but it didn’t work. I glanced at the red hue and turned away from her, tucking myself into a fetal position. When I opened my eyes to the red again, I was on my back, staring toward the kitchen.
Something was blocking my view.
I blinked.
At first, I only registered the light – or lack thereof. The usual diagonal slice of white light from the street had taken on more curves. Close curves. The red from the kitchen became a horribly thin outline.
Something spindly and dark, a shape – two arms, two legs, too tall, too skinny.
I closed my eyes again. A dream. Some weird cerebral stupidity brought on by alcohol.
But dreams don’t breathe.
I don’t know how long I stared. Movement wasn’t an option. Self-defense never entered my mind. I was frozen. I suppose if I’d been a “Real Man” I would have leapt off the bed and tackled the shape haunting me and my fiancée. But that didn’t happen either. I just watched it.
It started moving backward. Slow. It made no noise except for the harsh, chunky breathing. There were no footfalls. It moved with a quiet grace – if one could say that such a horror was graceful. I wondered if the thing was curious. Curious maybe about its new neighbors. Curious about the apartment. Curious about the people inside it.
I knew it had come from the tunnel. And I knew that the tunnel must have been a hundred years old. Maybe this was just some bizarre animal. Some benign, curious humanoid. I must have spooked it by waking up suddenly and staring it down. Maybe I had inadvertently saved myself and my fiancée by staying motionless.
It passed through one of those scythe beams of white light from outside. I saw part of its thin legs, a diseased light grey color. I saw its long, gaunt torso and its chest. All the skin looked pulled tight against bone. A skeleton dipped in candle wax.
Then I caught its eyes. They were headlight-sized – orbs of almost pure white with just a speck of black pupil in their center. As they slid out of the light, the pupils expanded and became manhole covers. Dilating the way the eyes of something used to blackness would.
And they spoke in a terrible, silent, animal way.
They said: Hungry.
Hungry eyes gliding away in the dark, carried inside a thin, long, ragged breathing monstrosity. Hungry eyes sinking back into the faint red glow of the kitchen. The eyes themselves never dimmed. They stared at me, bright white against the black corners of the apartment.
And then they were gone. There was a scratching sound from the kitchen that grew quieter as the slender thing moved farther away. Back into the tunnel.
The rhythm section in my chest went ballistic. Thumpthumpthumpthump, double-time, triple-time. For a moment, I thought I was having a heart attack. I felt a burn crawl up my throat. It became hard to breathe. I closed my mouth, forcing air through my nose to steady the pace.
I made a decision in my head. A stupid decision, but a decision nonetheless.
I rolled out of bed on shaky knees. My fiancée stirred but didn’t wake. I reached for the crowbar – still flecked with spots of my blood – and crept toward the kitchen.
Toward the red.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing. If what I thought I saw was still there, would I hit it? Would I freeze up again, brain in a blender? For all I knew, hitting it with a steel cudgel would do nothing more than piss it off. And those eyes had told me it wanted to eat. Devouring something which had just whacked it seemed like the natural choice.
I realized then, hefting the crowbar, seeing splotches of my blood on the hook end, that the damned thing might have my scent. My blood – those droplets that fell from my head, diving into the darkness of the tunnel. Was it my blood that had set the thing off? Drew it up from who knows where?
The kitchen was silent. The red heart hung lazy on the wall, LED bulbs doing their work without heat. The door was open.
I stood waiting, listening. If the thing was going to pop out at me, I intended to be ready. I had absolutely no intention of getting near the tunnel. So I stood, drums blazing in my chest, hands choked up on the crowbar.
There was no sound. The entire neighborhood seemed to have settled into its south Brooklyn quiet time.
I nudged the dumbwaiter door with the crowbar. The clunk of steel hitting wood a firecracker exploding stillness. And I told myself: Don’t go looking down there. Don’t look down there or you’re never going to sleep again. There’s that itch (ignore it if you’re smart). You want to see it (ignore it, I’m telling you, you obsessive bastard).
The same thing happens when I hear a word I don’t recognize. I have to look it up. Immediately. Ditto for when an actor’s name is on the tip of my tongue. I will spend hours scanning through the cast and crew of films I think the person might have been in – ignoring the world – until I know for certain who it is. At one point, my fiancée threatened to leave me because I wouldn’t stop working on the car. I had to get that exhaust system finished, damn it.
So I looked.
At the bottom, those hungry headlight eyes stared back.
All sense and rationality left me. All I could do was
3. Scream
“…Yeah… woke you guys up. But, I swear, it screamed, too.”
They looked at me the same way we gawk at hollering preachers. Like I was nuts.
“Don’t you think maybe it was just your mind playing with you?” my fiancée said. “And, I don’t know, maybe your scream bounced around off t
he walls in the tunnel, making it seem like there was another voice. I thought I saw something down there, too, but we were wasted.”
We were sitting in the kitchen, at the table. Light was only just beginning to crawl across the sky. Perhaps two hours had passed since I saw the slender thing. We were all still a little intoxicated.
I glanced at the tunnel door her cousin had his back to.
He cocked an eyebrow at me, “Three in the morning, dude – and we’d been drinking pretty goddamn seriously. I mean, sure, it’s spooky. But a tall skinny grey dude walking around the apartment?”
It always happens like this. Young people get drunk, one of them stumbles upon menace, and even though everyone else was sure they felt something weird in the air, nobody believes the guy who actually saw it. Crazy! Drunk! Crazy drunk! You dunno whatchusaw.
Cue the tense music. Quiet it down. Then crash the cymbals and hit the horns. It’s a jump-scare. Nothing there. A Boo! moment. Oh, but the audience knows. Yes, yes. They know that the whatchusaw is just off screen. Waiting.
The camera pans. Tilts. We zoom into the black tube, the road between apartment and horror. The road between rent-stabilization and nightmare entity. The mouth of madness.
We can see something in the tunnel. Far, far down. Just a hint of movement. We can’t see the actual bottom or how deep it goes. Maybe the tunnel in the building is connected to a vast network under Brooklyn. The audience wonders.
Wait. Is it a man down there? The mind tries to identify a human face on the thing, but there isn’t one. It’s more like a tool with eyes and teeth. Teeth in the malformed head of a tall, emaciated beast. It stalks underground with other hideous creatures. The imagination runs wild.
When the slender thing wants to come up, when it’s hungry, it twists and pumps its freakish appendages like a spider. It grips the sides of the tunnel and propels itself upward. It moves with a jittery, jerky speed that the human mind finds unnatural.
Hit the music again. This scare is for real. The monster is here. It’s the big reveal.
The audience jumps. Shrieks.
The door burst open. Grey spindly arms wrapped themselves around my fiancée’s cousin. He screeched. The thing ripped and tore at him. His chest welled with blood as its white talons dug in. Skin split as though being whipped.
My fiancée screamed.
I jumped back. Put myself between the nightmare and her.
Those big headlight eyes and their pinhole pupils glared at me. Rotated in their sockets like greasy marbles.
It stared. Daring me, like an animal guarding its meal.
The slender thing’s jaw unhinged like a snake’s. It slipped its enormous mouth around her cousin’s head and bit down, pinning his thrashing arms to the table with its grotesque long appendages. His screams became gurgles as it pulled him backward into the tunnel, back
4. Down
My fiancée left.
I had made a decision in my head. A stupid decision, but a decision nonetheless.
She wanted me to go with her. She wanted me to go to her parents’ house, out on Long Island. It would be quiet there. Nothing crawling out of black tunnels. Stay in touch with the authorities, but just get out. Get away. Get clear of that damned old hole.
The cops didn’t believe us, as one might have expected. The apartment was a crime scene. They were investigating. We made statements. Was it some kind of negligent homicide? An accident fueled by alcohol? They never found a body or anything in the building’s basement.
Give it to Missing Persons maybe.
I told them that the tunnel must lead to some part that they couldn’t find through the basement. I told them that this tunnel lead somewhere else.
They’d get back to me.
I told my fiancée to get out of harm’s way. Yeah. Go to your folks’.
No, I couldn’t go. Because I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that it was me the slender thing wanted. I had that itch. That itch I should have ignored. That itch that gets every character in horror movies.
She didn’t know that I saw it in the dead snow of television screens late at night. The nights when we argued, away from home at a nearby hotel. When she slept and I drank. I saw it. There. Saw it as I changed channels. Saw it when nothing fluttered on the glass but grey fuzz. Saw its shape shift along the length of the Sony. Saw it try to hide in the storm of white and black. Saw its eyes roll. Its jaws unhinge.
Red-eyed, crying, she left without me.
I went to the store. Got supplies. Road flares. Chemical sticks. Flashlight batteries. Rope. A curved ice axe. Got drunk. Slept it off. Started drinking again. Night fell. Made my way through the police tape. Stared at the door to the tunnel.
I called her then. Told her I loved her. Told her I would see her soon.
She cried.
I opened the door.
A breeze pushed my hair back. That cold breath of a tunnel system.
I popped a flare. Smoke crawled into my lungs. I coughed. I waved the heat from my face and dropped the sputtering thing into blackness.
One story, two stories, three stories, four stories, five stories. If I’d paid attention in physics class, I might have been able to calculate how far it fell.
It bounced to a bright red stop at what should have been the first sublevel, just below the basement. I waited. I listened. I watched the shadows to see if something would give itself away. The flare sparked without company. Crimson shot up, casting curved shadows like bright splashing waves in the dark.
I affixed the rope to the water main under my sink and tossed it behind the flare. After testing the rope, I began my descent.
The going was slow. My muscles ached as I forced them to hold my weight. Around me, I heard insects and rodents clamber. Then I hit bottom.
On one point, I was right, at least.
The tunnel from my apartment led directly to an area hidden from the rest of the subbasement by debris and crumbling architecture. The space was tight, boxed in by chain link fencing and fallen cement. That the cops had scanned it from the other side of the wire without finding much came as no surprise.
But I knew what I was looking for. A space through which a faint breeze might blow. A space that might be camouflaged. A space wide enough to allow the slender thing access.
I found it in the left wall, little more than a fissure.
The flare went out. I found myself in blackness. There was no hint of light.
I cracked a chemical stick, shook it, and laid it on the floor like some parody of Hansel, hoping that my breadcrumbs would stay where they needed to be.
The crags inside the breach tore at my body as I made my way through. Sharp points from broken and ruptured construction shredded my clothing and skin. After an eternity of rending, my flesh made it to the other side.
Though my body had been battered, my bag of tricks made it through unscathed.
I turned my flashlight on and surveyed the area.
The space before me wasn’t just a tunnel. It was a black maw. It stretched downward at a sharp angle, getting wider as it went deeper. The ceiling showed the skeletons of support beams. Spots where the passage came close to building foundations. The whole area gave a distinct impression of having been made. Dug out.
Not by just a thing, but things. One creature couldn’t do this alone.
I dropped another chemical light crumb. And walked.
Silence and darkness.
Half an hour passed. I had no idea how far down I’d come. I only tried to make sure that every time I started to lose the glow of a light stick, I laid another.
The beam of my torch caught something. No bones. A lump of clothes. Old. Dusty. A jacket. A pair of pants. Not my fiancée’s cousin’s. Older. In a pocket I found a Class A driver’s license that had supposedly expired in 1946.
Class A. A trucker.
Ten meters from that pile, I found another.
Class A, again. 1945.
How long had the creatures been hau
nting Brooklyn? How many people had been taken? Where did they come from? The back of a truck? Or had they always been here?
Here, under everything, slender bodies squirming through crevices. Crawling up into apartments and homes with sleeping occupants. Food. Observing subway cars as they shot by. Glaring at passengers from where the lights couldn’t reach. Wanting them.
I kept on, following the walls as they expanded and contracted. I noticed that the ground had the marks of being well-traveled. Hundreds of feet had battered the floor. Maybe more.
The air grew cooler.
Down, down.
I heard scratching around the bend. Slow, steady scratching. I turned off my flashlight and waited in darkness. My ears tried to adjust. My eyes couldn’t.
Scratch. Movement. Scratch. Pause. Scratch.
This is where the audience is at its most tense. They are readying themselves for either another jump-scare Boo! Or dreading the emergence of the creature. The director is toying with them.
Show us, already! they shout.
I hugged the wall, just before the bend, and crouched. I could see nothing. I fumbled in my pack for a flare. My hope was that sudden, bright light would blind it.
The scratching drew closer.
Feet dragging. Claws on the wall.
Then I heard the breathing. That sick sound. That sound of drowned lungs being pumped full and then drained. Hot moist pressure rattling around inside spongy flesh.
The wheezing drew closer.
I heard it shuffle in front of me. And stop.
It began to growl.
I exploded a flare. Red. Bright. Blinding.
It recoiled. Fell back against the opposite wall, using those terrible long arms to shield its huge sensitive eyes. The thing that had stalked my home. The thin thing that had burst up from my own kitchen and snatched away a friend. Now paralyzed. Now shocked and stunned into immobility.
It wheezed. Coughed. Looked pitiful.
I ran at it. I raised my ice axe in one hand and crowbar in the other. I bludgeoned it. Smashed its thin, ugly body. I drove steel into its wretched headlight eyes. I pierced it with metal. Warm liquid was hurled up at me in wet ropes.
Claws struck out. Nails dug into my cheeks. Talons pierced my chest.
The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Page 10