“You are correct, as always,” said the Worm. “We believe the symbol was used to summon someone.”
“Becausssse you are mewling infants, with no idea of what you speak,” the Scryer said. “The symbol is not for summoning. It is for… what is your word? Aaadvertising.”
The Worm frowned. “Advertising? What do you mean?”
“It’s a calling card,” Dan realized. The Scryer turned to him, its upper half now completely solid, and its lower half becoming increasingly more so. “Whose?” Dan demanded.
“Aranok,” the Scryer said, squirming with either pleasure or pain. Possibly both. “The Inhabitant.”
“The inhabitant? The inhabitant of what?”
If the creature heard the question, it didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, it emitted a high-pitched, borderline orgasmic yelp as it arched its back and stretched out all four of its arms.
“This power,” it uttered. “It is a most welcome gift.”
The Worm’s bulbous eyes went to the glowing goo and the scattered pebbles. “Trinkets,” he said. “Enough to summon you, nothing more.”
Something about the way the Scryer was moving was making Dan uneasy. He felt that tingle across the nape of his neck as he replayed the Worm’s earlier words again.
Malwhere energy residue.
The phrase ticked over in Dan’s head. It was well-known among those with any involvement in such things that objects from the Malwhere brought with them a sort of invisible ‘power’ that clung to them like radioactive particles. For the most part, it was completely harmless, but certain species – Scryers included – could manipulate this energy, channeling it for their own ends.
The specimen currently suspended in the fog in front of them was almost certainly doing just that, but assuming the Worm hadn’t miscalculated, there should barely be enough energy to keep the Scryer corporeal in this dimension, and yet Dan would’ve sworn the thing was looking stronger by the second.
The fog swirled outwards, spreading tentatively towards the edges of the shape the Worm had drawn, as if searching for some gap in the outline’s defenses.
Dan looked again at the grit-sized pebbles the Worm had tossed onto the floor. The smear of mucus or bile or whatever it was continued to glow a luminous green, but its vibrance was fading, as if all the life was being sucked out of it. The Scryer should be fading, too, and yet…
Oh.
Oh, shizz.
Malwhere energy residue!
Dan’s head snapped up. “Ollie. Look out!” he bellowed, but the fog had already reached out for her, its wispy tendrils entwining around her wrists and ankles. The figure in the mist screeched as it doubled in size, then doubled again. The fog became a thundering tornado that stretched towards the ceiling, whipping and spinning and almost pulling Dan off his feet.
Ollie screamed. The sound was notable for two reasons – the first being its volume, the second, its brevity. She was wrenched off her feet as if she’d been hit by something big, heavy and fast-moving. Her whole body flipped as she was yanked into the fog. The shape that had been forming there howled in triumph and then Ollie tumbled down through the floor into the swirling nothingness beyond.
“Shizz. Oh… fonking shizzing fonk!” Dan hollered.
The demon-thing spun towards him, hissing and spitting as its jaws unhinged themselves, revealing a cavern of a mouth lined with hundreds of teeth.
The fury that had been etched on its face became a look of surprise when it spotted the hand cannon being levelled at its head.
There was a brief moment of confusion while the thing tried to decide whether to attack or flee. Just as it finally reached a decision, its head exploded, showering the room with grisly lumps of brain matter and skull fragments.
“Bring her back,” Dan said, motioning to the floor with his gun. “Worm! Bring her back!”
The Worm was gazing into the fog, transfixed. The skin on his forehead had crinkled in confusion, and the confidence he’d displayed prior to that moment was now nowhere to be seen.
“What is she?” he asked, not really aiming the question at anyone in particular. “The Malwhere energy. It must be…”
“Worm!” Dan barked, snapping him out of it. “Bring her back. Now!”
The Worm turned to him, as if only now realizing he was there. “Hmm? What? No. I can’t. She’s… She’s through there. She’s in the Malwhere. I can’t just pluck her out.”
Dan mumbled something fast, low and angry. Slamming Mindy back into her holster, he stepped closer to the column of fog. If he really peered into it, he could see a vast dark opening on the floor that seemed to stretch downwards towards infinity. Black lightning crackled in the darkness, doing very little to illuminate the gloom.
“Fonk it,” he said, raising a foot and preparing to step off into the abyss.
He stopped just in time, and returned his weight to his back leg. What was he thinking? He couldn’t just go jumping in after her. Not like this.
Spinning on his heels, Dan pointed to a plinth a few feet behind the Worm, and the object standing atop it. “The jetpack.”
The worm’s wet skin squelched and farted as he turned. “The what?”
“The jetpack. Throw me the jetpack,” Dan ordered, shaking off his coat and tossing aside his hat. He peered down into the chasm of darkness. “I’m going in.”
CHAPTER TEN
Dan fell. He’d love to be able to say he flew, but knew this this would be deluding himself. The flame-spewing thing on his back wasn’t so much keeping him afloat as it was rocketing him downwards. If anything, it was the exact opposite of flying, and was instead a sort of jet-assisted version of falling.
The air around him was thick with flecks of ash. They swirled around him like snow as he plunged down through the green-tinted darkness. Breathing here would probably be hazardous. Fortunately, he didn’t need to.
The hole in the Worm’s floor was somewhere behind and above him. Technically, of course, it wasn’t. There wasn’t a physical hole at all, in fact, and the oval of light Dan could see was merely the manifestation of an intangible passageway between dimensions.
Or something like that, anyway.
Dan fell. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, if not to the wind roaring upwards into them as he hurtled in the opposite direction. He couldn’t see the ground yet. This was good in that it would allow him more time to figure out what to do about it when it did appear, but bad in that he’d be traveling even faster when he inevitably smashed face-first into it.
He called Ollie’s name into the void, but the sound was ripped from his lips and torn to pieces by the oncoming wind.
Jumping into the Malwhere had seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time. Not a ‘good idea’ necessarily, but not a terrible one, either. As the air around him became hotter and more turbulent, though, he was starting to reconsider this.
Voices whispered in the darkness, sharp and sudden and close enough to make him lash out at empty space with both arms. Despite their closeness, he couldn’t make out what they said, but got the impression it was nothing particularly flattering.
There was another sound, too. A sound that made something coil itself into a knot somewhere deep down in his gut. He knew the sound, but couldn’t quite place it – a chinkt, like metal hitting gravel. It came at him over and over, slow and steady and rhythmic.
Chinkt.
Chinkt.
Chinkt.
Dan fell.
And he kept on falling.
* * *
Ollie blinked in the glow of a fire. Its blistering heat laughed in her face, its smoke snagging at the back of her throat. She took a step back from it, and something squirmed and wriggled on the ground beneath her feet. Lots of somethings.
“Sorry! Sorry! Coming through!” she said, hopping clumsily aside. The firelight picked out several ink-black leech-things that seeped into the ground as she watched. Something about them made her body convulse in horror, and
she quickly scanned the area immediately around her to make sure no more of the things were nearby.
Once she was satisfied that there was nothing fat and slug-like hanging around her feet, she took in her surroundings. This basically amounted to ‘big fire’ as the darkness meant there weren’t a lot of other surroundings worth mentioning.
The fire was certainly noteworthy, though. Mostly because of its size – which was enormous – but also because of its color, which was yellow. Only not a normal fire yellow that mixed and mingled with shades of orange and red, but a cold, green-ish yellow that made Ollie think of illness and disease, although she couldn’t quite say why.
The flames crackled and spat, and as they did Ollie became convinced she could hear them calling her name.
“Ole. Dol. Ole. Dol.”
“Hello?” she said. She took a step closer, but the heat pushed her back. The smoke swirled insistently into her airways, filling her lungs with fumes and her head with shapes and colors and twisting shadows.
“Oledol. Oledol.”
She realized it wasn’t the fire talking, but something just beyond it in the darkness. Something big. Something wrong. Something that made her hair hurt and her eyes bleed and her fingers turn into long flowing strands of delicately patterned flesh.
Although, come to think of it, some of that could’ve just been the side-effects of the fumes.
The voice and the shape, though, those were real.
“Hello?” she said again, but the word got tangled somewhere in the smoke and didn’t make it out of her throat. She exhaled slowly, then tried again.
“Who’s there?” she asked, but as the glow of the fire picked out some of the details of the thing beyond it, she realized she already knew the answer. She knew it like it was etched on her bones, like it had been there all along, even before she’d ever set foot in this place.
Ollie swallowed. The smoke and ash left a bitter taste in her mouth.
“Hey, Dad,” she said.
And then, she ran.
And she kept on running.
* * *
Dan didn’t remember hitting the ground. Presumably he must have, because he was now lying on his back in a shallow crater, which he was reasonably confident he hadn’t been just a few moments before.
There was a hole in his chest roughly where his heart should be. He couldn’t recall that happening, either, and yet there was something familiar about it. Something that wormed its way into his brain and set alarm bells ringing.
He tried to sit up, but pain burned across his torso, oozing from the wound like molten lava. His breath left him in one big, panicky puff. He watched it swirl upwards into the suddenly frosty air, before dissipating.
His breath. His breath.
But that didn’t make sense.
The pain flared up again, forcing him to grit his teeth and arch his back and hiss out curses until it eased. It had been a long time since anything had hurt like that. Anything that wasn’t his head, anyway.
He inhaled and exhaled again. The cold air tightened his lungs, but it felt great. Despite the hole in his chest, despite him lying in a crater in the ground, it felt great.
Dan tried sitting up again, bracing himself for the pain this time. It was only when he failed to get very far that he realized his hands were tied behind his back. His ankles were bound, too.
He definitely didn’t remember any of those happening, and yet there it was again, that niggling itch deep in his brain that knew this scene only too well.
Chinkt.
The sound came from somewhere beyond the edge of the hole, out of sight. It was dark up there, the hole in the sky now nothing more than a distant star, but even if there had been light the steep walls of the crater would have made it impossible to see the source of the sound.
Crater.
No. It wasn’t a crater. It was a… hole. That was the word Dan forced to the front of his mind. Hole. He was in a hole.
There was another word lurking behind that one, too. A word he tried not to think about, but this only made it stronger.
Grave.
He was in a grave.
He had been tied up, shot, and was now in a grave.
Chinkt. The sound came again, a shovel digging into gravel. Two figures leaned into view, their faces mostly obscured.
“No, wait, don’t!” Dan bellowed.
As the first of the soil fell on him, Dan kicked and roared and thrashed.
And he kept on thrashing.
* * *
The Malwhere Lord, Kalaechai, was what Artur might refer to as “a right wrong ‘un.” The ruler of one of the more Hellish of the Hell-like dimensions, Kalaechai’s hobbies included child-snatching, mass-torture, and genocide. It was the first of these which had most directly had an impact on Ollie’s life, having been snatched from her own world by the demon king’s minions when she was an infant.
She had grown up there in that terrible place. He’d called her his daughter, although had treated her as anything but. The closer she got to adulthood, the worse her treatment became, and if she hadn’t escaped when she did she knew she wouldn’t have lasted much longer.
Other than his top ten favorite torture and humiliation methods, Ollie didn’t know all that much about her ‘father’. This would’ve made choosing birthday presents tricky, but fortunately Kalaechai was an ageless eternal being, so she’d never really had to worry about it.
On her own ‘birthday’, which could be any day Kalaechai decided, she’d be given the gift of having her worst, most private nightmares play out inside her head. The visions were so vivid, so real, so horribly tactile, that she’d often scream for days.
Kalaechai liked it when that happened.
And now, here he was again. Ollie had been an idiot to think she could ever truly escape him. He had come for her a few days ago, but Dan had stopped him. Now, though, there was no Dan. There was just her and her ‘dad’ and nowhere to run.
She ran anyway. The darkness was all around her, the fire a speck in the distance somewhere far behind. Things slithered and squirmed on the ground around each frantic footfall as she powered on, searching for somewhere to hide.
Ollie couldn’t see the demon king in the dark, but she could sense him. No matter how fast she ran, he always moved just a little faster, got a little closer. He was toying with her, she knew. He could move as fast as he liked. He could lunge at any point, grab her, take her with him. She couldn’t even guess which direction he’d come from. Behind? Ahead? Inside?
What if the darkness was him? What if she was running through him even now, desperately trying to avoid a fate that had already befallen her?
What if she’d never escaped in the first place? What if Kalaechai’s latest form of torture was hope? A brief glimpse of how life could be, only for it to be cruelly stolen from her again?
That last thought made her stumble to a stop. Could that be it? Could Dan and Artur and everything else in Down Here have been some dream the Malwhere Lord implanted in her head? The idea of it made her chest tighten, forcing out a howl of raw, primal terror.
The darkness unfolded behind her, taking on the shapeless form of her adopted father. It had taken Ollie years to be able to see him properly – to decipher the way he seemed to be a million different things all at the same time.
She saw him now as she had seen him since childhood – as a man. He was tall and imposing, a cruel smile warping his face into something unnatural, his hands bending and unbending a thick leather strap.
Ollie thought of Dan and Artur and Funplings and sunlight. She thought of freedom and kindness and all those other concepts which she was scared now may not be real. May never have been real.
She screamed.
And she kept on screaming.
* * *
The weight of the soil was immense. It pressed down on him, clogging his nose, trying to find a way into his tightly-clamped mouth. Dan heard two car doors close, muffled and distant. He heard an engin
e hum into life, then listened to it until it had faded into silence.
The pain in his chest had also faded a little, but Dan didn’t know if that was a good sign of a bad one. Given that he was buried alive with no oxygen and no hope of escape, though, it was probably irrelevant. If anything, a jolt of fiery agony might be a welcome distraction from everything else that was currently going on.
He tried to think logically about this. He was tied up. He was buried. Those were both bad. But there was always a way out, he just had to think rationally about it, that was all.
Sadly, the part of Dan’s brain that was devoted to logical, rational thought was nowhere to be found. It had teamed up with the part of Dan’s brain that was devoted to being utterly incapacitated with terror, and they were both now rioting in the canteen, spray-painting ‘THE END IS NIGH!” on the walls.
The best he could do was squirm and tug on the restraints that held his hands behind his back. The pain as the bonds tore into his wrists was immense, and as he shifted around the movement forced soil further up his nostrils until the smell of wet dirt made him choke and gag.
His mouth opened, and as a whole lot of damp earth rolled down into his throat, Dan died.
And he kept on dying.
And then, he stopped. Or something stopped him.
It was in the soil, whatever it was. The soil was now in him, but something within it was seeping out and being absorbed into the more mucusy of his membranes.
Something was different. No, everything was different. Those parts of his brain that had been screaming and wailing and throwing things around were now just standing around in mute confusion, wondering why the lights were still on.
There was no pain in his chest now. Even the pressure of the soil felt like some distant memory. Dan heaved on the restraints holding his hands together. If they cut into his flesh this time, he didn’t feel it. There was a jerk as the bonds snapped, and Dan’s hands were free.
He didn’t feel the rush of euphoria he’d been expecting. There was no whoosh of endorphins to reward him. He knew why, of course. There were two reasons, in fact.
Firstly, he was dead. And dead men didn’t have much in the way of active brain chemistry or rushing hormones.
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