The opening widened at her touch. Soon it was large enough for her head to go through, then her body, and finally, with a little kick of her feet, her broad pelvis slipped through, followed by her legs.
Once she was across, the hole shrank back down to its original size.
“Am I supposed to do that?” The passageway was now so narrow Karen couldn’t turn to ask Chambers the question.
“I suppose so,” he replied, trying to take a step back and realizing the walls weren’t going to let him. “I’m afraid I can’t move backward to give you any more room to try.”
Karen slipped through more easily than Dr. Cruttenden, which left Chambers facing the ridged and puckered opening. Like the others, he took a firm grip on either side. The tissue—he couldn’t help but think of it like that—was warm to the touch, with a slightly slimy feel. It wasn’t unpleasant but, as it shrank from his hands, he knew he had only moments to push himself through or it would seal itself, this time forever. Once the opening was wide enough he pushed his head through, gripped the walls once more, and kicked against the lowermost step with both feet to propel himself through.
He imagined the sensation must be similar to that of being born. Karen and Dr. Cruttenden were waiting for him on the other side and, judging by their shared expression, they both probably had the same thoughts.
They were standing in a vast cavern.
It was well-lit, certainly enough to see the roof, and the walls, and the floor.
All were made of human flesh.
This was neither a butcher shop nor a charnel house, however. In fact it was anything but. There was not a trace of raw muscle or exposed tendon for as far as the eye could see.
There was, however, an ocean of extremely healthy-looking skin, covering a variety of body parts that undulated in a provocative manner as eyes were laid upon them. Chambers took a step forward and found himself standing on the muscled abdomen of a young man, his right toe covering the umbilicus. To his right the perfectly formed buttocks of a young woman moved back and forth softly against other body parts in a manner he found quite distracting.
“I suggest we get across this as quickly as possible.”
Although she was standing right beside him, Dr. Cruttenden seemed to be speaking from miles away.
“Yes . . .” Chambers could barely remember how they had gotten there as a delicate hand with the most exquisitely beautiful fingers he had ever seen began inching its way up the inside of his trouser leg. He batted at it absent-mindedly. “Yes . . . we must . . . we . . . what?”
It was no use looking to Karen for help. She had crossed to the nearby wall and was fingering a muscular arm whose biceps was flexing and extending the more she stroked it.
“Come on, Professor Chambers!”
Dr. Cruttenden took his hand. Chambers was struck by how repulsive it was. He didn’t want to hold this old lady’s hand. He wanted the lovely one that had tried to climb up his leg, or the other, equally sensuous one that was creeping toward him now, rolling over onto its back and wiggling its fingers playfully at him. He tried to break free, but Dr. Cruttenden’s grip was firm as she dragged him over to Karen.
“You too, young lady.” She tore Karen’s hand away from where she was stroking the inside of an elbow. Karen looked as if she was about to snarl at the lecturer for interrupting her. Then her face sagged as realization struck.
“What the hell was I doing?”
“Succumbing to the lure of this place.” Dr. Cruttenden gripped Karen’s right hand with her left and, with both of them now in tow, began to stride across the sea of slowly rousing flesh. It rippled and undulated as they walked. They made slow going across the surface, the soft sound of perfect skin rubbing against perfect skin giving a kind of whispering, sensuous voice to it as they walked. In fact Chambers was sure he could hear it talking to him.
Stay . . . with . . . us . . .
It was nonsense of course, and yet every part of him, every nerve, every fiber, and most of all, every particle of skin wanted to stay there, wanted to remain in this perfect world of perfect pleasures and become one with it. Every now and then he looked across to Karen and he could see she was feeling the same.
“Where are we going?” It was important he try and remain focused. But it was difficult.
“Away from here.” Dr. Cruttenden continued to pull them forward. “Look for somewhere that’s similar to the way we came in.”
“I don’t want to go . . .” Karen murmured.
“Oh, yes you do,” came the reply. “Because those who are trapped here want you to stay even more than you do. Look.”
Dr. Cruttenden was gesturing behind them. Chambers turned, to be surprised at how much distance they had already covered across the sea of flesh.
Flesh that was now rising.
“We’ve woken them up.” Chambers had stopped, but Dr. Cruttenden was insistent and dragged him on as she spoke. “We’ve disturbed them from their eternal immersion in each other, their eternal obsession with the flesh. And now they want us to join them.”
Slowly, clawing their way out of the ground across which the three of them had just been walking, parts of human beings were emerging. Very attractive parts, perfectly formed—a shapely female leg, a muscular male torso. As Chambers watched they began to join together, trying to create the semblance of a human form. Occasionally they got it almost right, but in many cases the results were grotesque—a hopeless mishmash of randomly jointed limbs, orifices, and skin.
“They have forgotten what it is like to be human,” said Dr. Cruttenden. “I’m not surprised they don’t know how to pull themselves together.”
A beautiful female body was marred by having seven limbs—four arms and three legs. The resultant fleshy creature scuttled toward them like a spider. From somewhere deep within glowed a face with the most beautiful smile Chambers had ever seen. Other creatures were more rudimentary. An arm fused to a leg, a shoulder to a hip; a handsome, impassive male head propelled along by at least twenty perfectly formed fingers projecting from the stump of its neck. One girl’s head was being pulled along by the arm that emerged from her throat. Her face would probably have been pretty were it not for the twenty tiny mouths that covered it, each with perfect teeth and tongues that flickered over the pouting lips like tiny pink snakes.
And yet he still wanted to stay.
“Stop looking at them!” Dr. Cruttenden didn’t let go, which was a good thing because without her, he and Karen would most likely be lost. “You’re just encouraging them!”
Oh, so it’s my fault, is it? The thought struck him as so funny he burst out laughing. Karen looked at him, shocked, and then she started laughing too.
“Come on,” he said, “we’re not teenagers.”
Ahead of them was a dot of yellow light. It was the only landmark in the entire place and it could be the way out. Chambers prayed it was. As they made for it he took another look behind him, and wished that he hadn’t.
The creatures had abandoned their attempts to create homunculi and were melding together again. But instead of an ocean of flesh, now they were forming a tidal wave, rising higher and higher and gaining on them all the time. If they didn’t hurry, they would be buried beneath it.
“Run!”
The flesh beneath their feet did all it could to impede their progress. Hands clutched, legs kicked, teeth bit. As the dot of yellow light increased in size, their efforts became more frenzied. Now Chambers could hear the tide behind him, the flesh no longer offering a sensuous whisper, but a carnal roar, desperate and hungry, as hungry as those petrified souls in Limbo had been.
Because they wanted the same thing.
The yellow dot was human-sized now, a shining oval that offered them egress from this orgiastic hell. Dr. Cruttenden passed through first, pulling Karen with her. At the last moment Chambers stopped and turned. The tidal wave was almost upon him. Over a hundred feet high, he saw faces leering, fingers beckoning, flesh enticing.
/> And there was something else as well.
Within that concatenation of living, throbbing tissue was an image, subtle at first but more obvious now he had seen it. An image of something horned, multi-limbed, and insectoid. An image that was all too familiar, that he had seen on the wall of All Hallows Church and now seemed as large and as overwhelming as that picture had suggested.
The Anarch.
TWENTY-SIX
THE YELLOW LIGHT THROUGH which they passed was warm and comforting. Chambers had little desire to leave its reassuring embrace, and when he emerged on the other side it was with a vague sense of disappointment, and an overwhelming desire to return to the golden aura that had made him feel so safe.
It was not to be, however. The light was gone, and in its place was a long refectory table that ran the length of the chamber in which they found themselves. The room’s walls were of rough gray stone, and for a moment Chambers thought they had gone back into Limbo. Then he saw the ornate windows of stained glass twenty feet above his head that met with a vaulted ceiling at least as far away again. The shades of green, blue, and red in the mullioned windows were too dark to be able to discern anything on the other side of them, but they were admitting a pallid light, mixed into a myriad hues by refraction and painting the banquet hall in shades that were not at all unpleasant.
That was what they had to be in now—a banquet hall. The refectory table that ran down the center of it had to be nearly twenty feet long and had been fashioned from polished pine. Instead of chairs, long benches of similar length had been positioned either side for diners to sit. Down the middle of the table, at regular intervals, silver candelabra had been placed. Each bore six red candles which burned with a light that seemed almost holy.
In between and surrounding the candelabra, delicious-looking food had been arranged. Roasts glistened on silver trays surrounded by crisp potatoes sizzling in the meat’s juices; dishes of lightly boiled vegetables steamed on shining plates; loaves of freshly baked bread sought to escape from handsomely sized wicker baskets; and in between these large courses, delicately interpolated between the highly polished platters, were shining saucers of canapés of all shapes and colors. Everything had been cooked to perfection, and the aroma in the room was so mouth-watering it brought tears to his eyes as well as saliva to his mouth.
“God, I’m starving.” Karen was already reaching out to pick up a fork from one of the many place settings, no doubt intending to plunge it into one of the slices of beef close by.
She was stopped by a sharp slap on the wrist from Dr. Cruttenden. Karen glared at her, but kept her hand at her side.
“We’ve no idea if any of this is safe,” said Dr. Cruttenden, obviously doing her best to resist temptation herself. “After everything we’ve been through so far, I find it hard to believe we are being allowed to break for lunch.”
Chambers had to agree. “I can’t believe I have an appetite after that last room we were in,” he said, “but I have. In fact, I honestly feel I could eat every scrap of what’s been laid out here and still have room for more.”
“Me too.” Despite herself, Karen was reaching out again. This time Dr. Cruttenden grabbed her wrist and forced it away from the table.
“I’m guessing you have an idea what’s going on here as well.” Chambers gave Dr. Cruttenden a suspicious look.
“Possibly,” she replied. “And never mind looking at me like that—once I’m sure, I promise I’ll share my suspicions.”
While Dr. Cruttenden was speaking, Karen grabbed a slice of ham glazed with honey. She held it up to her mouth.
“Share them now,” she said, “or I’ll eat this.”
The lecturer tried to tear the meat from Karen’s grasp, but the younger woman was too quick for her and dodged out of the way. “I mean it. Hurry up, or I’m swallowing it.”
Chambers couldn’t help but admire what had to have been a calculated gamble all along. The fact that he was as keen as Karen to hear what Dr. Cruttenden had to say prevented him from interfering. Eventually, after another couple of attempts to relieve Karen of the food, Dr. Cruttenden gave up.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you.”
There was a noise from the room next door. Up until then Chambers hadn’t been aware that there was one but now he could see, just to the far right of the table, an archway beyond which there was darkness.
“It sounds as if they’re coming anyway,” Dr. Cruttenden said. “And I have to admit I have no idea what we are going to do when they get here.”
“Who’s coming?” Chambers listened, straining to hear. Eventually he was rewarded with a wet, slithering sound that chilled his blood and robbed him of the appetite that until a moment ago had felt insatiable.
“Where are we?” Karen’s hunger seemed to have deserted her as well, to be replaced by a fierce determination to know what Dr. Cruttenden had on her mind.
As if oblivious to the distant sounds of squamous, slippery movement, Dr. Cruttenden folded her arms and looked around her before eventually making her pronouncement.
“We are in Hell.”
“I think we’d guessed that,” said Chambers.
“Well, I hadn’t.” Karen’s eyes glistened with the trace of tears, but her voice remained firm. “What does that mean, then? Are we dead?”
“Not necessarily.” Dr. Cruttenden was rubbing her chin. “We certainly shouldn’t give up hope. As long as we don’t give in to the temptation of any of these places, we should hopefully be able to escape them.”
“You know something about that too, don’t you? Exactly what kind of Hell are we in?” Karen wouldn’t let it go. Good for her, Chambers thought.
“What kind?”
“Yes. Are we in Catholic Hell? Puritan Hell? The Hell of some other denomination of Christianity? Or is it the Hell of an entirely different religion altogether?”
“We’re in Dante’s Hell.”
The stunned silence that followed was only broken by the sounds of whatever was making its way toward them through the darkness next door.
“Dante’s Hell?” Chambers repeated the words just in case he had misheard them. “You mean as in the Divine Comedy?”
“Written by Dante Alighieri some time in the early thirteen hundreds, yes,” Dr. Cruttenden was nodding now. “You know he envisioned a realm of torment consisting of nine Circles?”
Chambers had to admit his knowledge on the subject was shaky at best. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to remind me.”
“The Divine Comedy is an epic poem that details the journey of its protagonist, which is meant to be Dante himself, through Hell, Purgatory, and finally Heaven. Hell, or the Inferno as it’s sometimes called, was divided into nine Circles of suffering below the Earth. It begins with Limbo and then moves onto Lust.”
“The plain of stone and then that room filled with those flesh-creatures,” said Karen.
“Exactly. The third Circle is Gluttony, and here we have more food than we could possibly consume, and yet when we arrived here I’m sure we all felt ourselves more than capable of eating everything in sight.”
Chambers certainly had. “But we don’t feel like that now.”
“Because I don’t believe we are intended to reside on this level. We are meant to go on. How far I don’t know, but what I do know is that if we allow the souls that are imprisoned on any of these levels to trap us, then we will replace them and they will be allowed to escape.”
“Don’t let them catch us, eh?”
Dr. Cruttenden nodded. “Exactly, Professor Chambers. Exactly.”
“Did you say the early thirteen hundreds?”
They both looked at Karen.
“Yes,” said Dr. Cruttenden. “Is that significant?”
“Only because the reason we’re here is because of Geoffrey Chaucer, and you said he was born in that century as well.”
“He was, wasn’t he?” Dr. Cruttenden was tapping her chin. “I wonder . . .”
They
all jumped as a muffled slap came from just outside the room, accompanied by the sounds of labored breathing.
“I think we need to leave,” said Chambers.
“How?” Karen kept giving the doorway nervous glances. “That’s the only way out, and I think something’s waiting for us out there.”
It wasn’t something. It was a host of someones, and as Karen spoke, in they came.
To describe them as obese would have been unkind to those human beings who suffer from being a little overweight. The creatures that squeezed themselves through the ever-expanding doorway were obscene, mere semblances of the human form buried in an expanse of fat, their faces tiny caricatures of pinched human expression almost lost in the folds of a sea of gelatinous lipid. Each limb was so encased in thick rolls of the stuff that they could barely bend their knees and elbows, and instead they lumbered forward awkwardly, their movements spastic and almost infantile. Tiny black eyes peered from between fat-laden eyelids oozing oil.
Eyes that lit up when they saw the food.
There were five of them in the room now, and more trying to get through the door. Bloated, obscene, almost cartoon-like versions of men and women, dressed in what looked like black kaftans, all of them distracted from the intruders in their midst by the promise of yet more food to satiate their unending appetites.
“This may be our only chance!”
Chambers tried to ignore the soft slurping sounds coming from the table beside him. “What do you mean?”
Dr. Cruttenden pointed to the door. “We have to leave now, while they’re distracted!”
“But there are more of them out there, too!” Karen pushed herself against the wall as more of the soft shapes squeezed past her.
“Once they’ve eaten everything they’ll see us,” came the reply. “And then we won’t have a chance.”
“You mean they’ll eat us too?”
“Worse.” Dr. Cruttenden’s face was grim. “They’ll eat our souls and we will be forced to exchange bodies with them.”
That was enough. Taking a deep breath, Chambers pushed past the residents of the Third Circle of Hell, followed by the lecturer. When he reached the door, he grabbed Karen’s hand and together they squeezed past the seemingly never-ending parade of hungry souls keen to cram the latest offerings into their dribbling, food-encrusted mouths.
The Lovecraft Squad Page 25