by Chuck Wendig
Neither is he.
“Nora. Sweetheart.”
She stirs. Moans. Her face a rictus of pain – like fingers pull at its edges, the skin tight against her skull. Here she looks small and weak. Once she would have played up that fragility to dupe him into helping her. But now it’s no ruse.
“Honey, please, god, Jesus, wake up.”
Her eyes flutter open. She sees him. Terror-struck. She swipes at him, tries weakly to push him away: “You monster, you’re a monster, get off me–”
“Honey, honey, we’re alive, but–”
“I hate you. I hate you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Her eyes roll unmoored in her eye sockets. Then they refocus. A small voice: “Daddy.”
“Nora. Sweetheart. I’m here.” He wipes hair from her brow. Feels the heat coming off her. “I’m going to go see if I can find a way out. I’m going to climb–”
“I didn’t do it.” Tears run down her cheeks.
“What? Sweetheart, just relax.”
“I didn’t kill Casimir. I loved him.” She blinks away tears, presses her face into his forearm. Damp and warm. “He and I were going to run away together and get married. And then work against his grandfather because, because he knew a lot about the Organization and he said, he said Konrad didn’t trust him or even like him and I loved him and…”
Her words dissolve under the onslaught of sadness. She sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry about all of it.”
All this has the whiff of the confessional. Mookie doesn’t like it.
“No,” he says. “No apologies. Not now. I have my own. Doesn’t matter. We’re gonna fix this, Nora. I’m gonna fix it. Stay here. Rest. I’m… I’ll be back.”
He kisses her on the brow. She’s burning up.
“Daddy, you never went to see Mom–” She starts babbling. “Werth is dead and Skelly is dead and I see Mom standing there next to you–”
It’s hell to turn away from her.
But he has to.
He walks, and then he climbs.
The walls are deeply pitted and pocked with chambers, almost like the eaves and pockets of a burial chamber – fortunately, that means he has plenty of handholds.
Unfortunately, one of his arms is broken and worthless.
–more useless than a pair of tits on a lawnmower–
Still, Mookie has to climb. There has to be a way out up here. A tunnel. A way up and through. Then maybe he can find a vein of Cerulean. The Blazes can’t cure Nora but they can forestall what’s coming. Buy them time.
A cruel voice asks, Time for what?
He can’t answer that. So he shoves the voice down in a dark hole.
He climbs.
One hand palms a rough rock. Heavy boots find a toe-hold. Then he pulls his prodigious body up with that arm, leaning into the rock so he doesn’t fall. He feels his hand one inch at a time up and up and up – sliding across sharp rock cutting into his palms, but he can’t just let go because he doesn’t have his other hand to anchor him.
It’s miserably slow going. He almost loses hold more than once. Hugging the wall helps, but as he climbs – ten feet, then twenty, now thirty – he becomes painfully aware that one of these times he’s going to fall and crack his head open like an ostrich egg.
And then Nora really will die down here.
It’s an unsolvable problem. He can’t go up. But he can’t go down. What was it Jess used to say anytime they had a fight? “It’s the Lady and the Tiger, Mikey. Can’t win for losing with you.” He suddenly misses her. It’s a physical pain, this longing – it lives in the space between his heart and his guts. God, how he fucked everything up.
Above him in the wall is a pocket carved out of the rock – big enough to fit him. He pulls his way up to it, draws himself into it with a long, guttural grunt.
Here he’s bathed in twinkling violet light.
On the wall of this little chamber are tiny mushroom caps. The caps glow purple. Not all of them, but the part that glows forms a small icon.
An icon shaped like a smeary, melting skull.
He plucks one. Smells it – earthy, moldy, but something else, too. A vinegar tang. His eyes lose focus. He feels dreamy, tired, unhinged and disconnected.
Mookie pulls it away from his face.
His fingers are stained with purple.
Caput Mortuum.
Death’s Head.
Not a pigment in the rock like Cerulean. Not a sap like Ochre.
It’s fungus. One of the Five Occulted Pigments – the most sought-after one – is a goddamn mushroom. He knows the legends. It’s life wrapped in the guise of death. Rumors say it’ll extend one’s life, cure diseases, maybe even make a person immortal.
He laughs. To be dropped down to the very bottom of the Deep Downstairs – to the nadir of the Underworld – is suddenly not a punishment, but a blessing.
He thinks suddenly: I could eat one. It would fix him up. But no. He doesn’t know what it’ll do. What if it put him to sleep while it mends him? Nora comes first.
Mookie pockets all the mushrooms he can pluck off the wall – almost a dozen – and begins climbing down, trying desperately not to fall.
“I’m coming, baby,” he breathes against the rock. “I’m coming to make it all better.”
Someone is standing over her. A shape. Gauzy and flickering. Mookie yells, screams, “Get away from her!” He runs toward Nora, boots cracking on crumbling rock. With each footfall new pain jolts through his shattered arm but he doesn’t care because whoever is standing over his daughter is going to pay.
The shape begins to move away from her. Walking slowly toward the shelf’s edge, toward the abyss, toward what Mookie assumes must be the Maw-Womb.
No.
No, no, no.
It’s then he sees. Sees that the person walking away from Nora is–
Nora.
Flesh shifting, shimmering. Opaque. Fading in and out.
Her ghost.
His daughter’s ghost.
Mookie wails. He refuses to believe it – she can’t be dead. Not now. Not after all this. Not after the fortune placed in his pocket: Caput Mortuum. Life-saving Death’s Head. He barrels toward the body. Collapses on it. Feels her neck.
No pulse.
Lifts his hands to her mouth. No breath.
He stands, almost falls, but gets his feet under him.
He hurries over to the ghost walking ineluctably toward the edge.
Nora’s eyes are empty caves. Her mouth a pitch black tunnel – soundless and without breath. Hitching step by hitching step she shambles forth.
He waves his hands in front of her. Tries to grab her, but his hands pass through her.
He weeps. Blubbers. Tries to hug her, hold her, shove her–
She moves past him. Through him.
She’ll walk to the edge. He knows that now. That’s where all the ghosts go, isn’t it? To the cusp and over. Into the abyss. Toward the writhing worm-gods beneath.
It’s then he decides: If she goes, I go.
Food for worms.
Gnashed by the teeth and heat and acid of the Maw-Womb.
He staggers back to the body. Weeping. Pulling her limp, rag-doll body close against him. He kisses her brow – a brow already gone cold. He wipes hair out of her lifeless eyes–
And leaves a purple streak across her forehead.
A message. An opportunity. One last chance.
He fishes in his pocket. Pulls out one of the mushrooms – still glowing in his palm, though the glow has softened. He pries open her dead mouth–
Mookie looks over his shoulder, sees her ghost is close to the edge now, moving faster than he anticipated. The ghost skips ahead five feet, then ten, disappearing and reappearing as she closes in–
He shoves the Caput Mortuum death-cap into her mouth.
Forces her jaw to chew. But it’s rubbery – a dead jaw is not meant to chew.
So he tak
es two fingers and shoves it down her throat. Far as it will go.
The ghost is almost at the edge. Arms out. Head up. An angel about to be received into hell.
He massages Nora’s cold throat.
Feels the clot work downward.
The ghost disappears over the edge. Mookie feels his heart fall with the specter – the sound that comes out of him is a strangled, grief-struck bleat.
But then:
Nora’s body shudders. Gasps. A great heaving intake of breath. A seizure overtakes her. She judders like a truck on rough road. A scream bubbles up and flies free–
Her eyes focus on Mookie.
“What have you done?” she shrieks.
And then she falls limp once more.
At her neck is a pulse. At her mouth, breath.
She’s alive. He holds her close. Kisses her temple.She’s alive.
28
This is the Ravenous Expanse. This is the Maw-Womb. A great abyss carved out of the rotten heart of the world. A deep nothing burning with distant fire. Toward the heart of the flame: the Deep Shadows, the Hungry Ones, Those Who Eat. I feel their hatred toward me even as they call me closer. They hate all us for what we have. It bleeds off of them, that jealousy. They have no fealty toward us or this place or to anything. Their loyalty is only toward themselves and their own cruelty. This is the knowledge I take with me to my death. I hobble to the edge, but I refuse to fall. I crawl back from the brink and nestle up against the wall, the infection in my side now like tree roots wrapped around pipes and breaking sidewalk. I slumber into death now – surrounded by the tiny violet eyes watching me from the outcroppings of rock above me and around me.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
Morning. Impossible to tell but for the brightening of dark to gray.
Skelly checks the address. It’s an old grocery store warehouse down by the harbor docks. They had a fire here years ago. Everything’s still closed up, scorched with the tongue-kiss of an old flame. She shows up in a black slicker and a Yankees baseball cap, her rockabilly persona drowned like a rabbit in a mud-hole – but she’s not here to show her colors.
Even though that’s what she’s supposed to do.
After leaving Werth with whatever it was he had to do, she and Burnsy parted ways. He gave her a pager number, to which she said, “People still use pagers?” His answer: it’s a dead technology. Then she checked on her girls. After scattering to the four corners of the city they’d meet back at another safehouse in the Meatpacking District.
And then yesterday night she got the call.
She let it go to voicemail.
Glad she did. It was him. The Boss. Calling a convocation of all the gangs in the city still loyal to him. Said he has “big plans”. Offered “new opportunities for leadership”. Didn’t mention the death of his grandson, which by now half the city had to have heard about.
A tantalizing call to those in the dark.
Tantalizing for those who want to play ball. And tantalizing for those who see an opportunity to make a move against the king and knock that daddy-o off the board.
But they don’t know what he is. Skelly knows. And so last night she made calls. Calls to every contact she had: Bull Mosley of the Black Aces, Denton Lansdale of the Bruisers, Carly Espinoza of the Railroaders. She couldn’t get anybody from the Immortals, the Sinner Kids, the Black Sleeves. The Lantern Jacks told her to go fuck herself. So did the Bloody Nomads, the Killarney Boys, and the Devil Bitches. She didn’t tell them the truth. Not all of it. All she said was that she had intel that this was a trap.
By the look of the cars here, the only one who really listened was Bull Mosley. Maybe he believed her. Maybe he just didn’t give enough of a damn to show up.
It’s two hours after the meeting was supposed to begin.
She steps inside the warehouse, ducking out of the gray day into deeper darkness.
A minute later she staggers back outside, and pukes in a puddle.
A tremor shakes the ground. A furnace blast of heat scorches the air. Mookie jostles awake. Nora still lies asleep in his lap. Mumbling. Moaning. As though caught in the throes of a never-ending nightmare. He feels her stomach, lifts her shirt – the fabric peels away from the flesh with a Velcro rip, the dried blood sticking them together. Underneath it, no gunshot wound. Just a star-shaped pucker.
She’s healed.
Again the ground shudders.
He looks down at the pile of Caput Mortuum mushrooms. They no longer glow. The light, gone from them. Are they inert? Powerless now? He thinks, eat one anyway. You need to heal. But… Skelly. Werth. Others might need them. Mookie pockets the rest of the spongy skull-shrooms, then stands up.
He shuffles slowly toward the edge, arm dangling. Passes the cold campfires and strange goblin altars. Sees his cleaver again there, decides this time to pick it up.
The rocky shelf cracks. Splits.
A brand new problem.
He steps close to the edge, careful not to go sliding into oblivion–
His foot slips.
His ass hits the shelf. He starts to slide–
Cleaver. He uses the cleaver and drives it into the rock–
It buries. Catches. He holds tight. It stops his fall.
Mookie pulls his body back over the ledge. Climbs to his feet. Now he’s able to see. The orange glow burns brighter. The worm-gods are closer to the surface. A breeding ball of hell-snakes. Rising slowly to the mouth of the abyss. They’re coming up out of the Maw-Womb. To be born. To be vomited up.
He hurries back. Wakes Nora. She sucks a breath through trembling lips.
“Something’s different,” she says.
“I was just gonna say that same thing.”
“Something’s different with me.”
He blinks. “You’re alive.”
“I’m alive.” Like she doesn’t believe it. “How?”
“These.” He pulls out a handful of the mushrooms. By now the purple glow has dimmed to a violet miasma.
“Death’s Head,” she says.
“Yeah. A lucky find.”
“Lucky.” But the way she says it, it sounds like she’s not so sure.
An explosion sounds from somewhere beneath them. It reminds Mookie of the dynamite blasts down in the Sandhog tunnels. Davey Morgan, even back then, was the Master of the Blast. He’d say, “Every explosion is a snowflake, you see? Every type of rock, every shape of the wall, needs a charge designed for it. Gotta find the right touch to bring it down proper-like. You don’t caress it just so…” He’d clap his hands together. Cloud of dust from slapped palms. “Boom.” Then he’d go about designing the borehole pattern that would open the tunnel but not bring the whole thing falling down on their heads, a cascading pattern of holes fitted for the dynamite–
Pattern of holes.
Pattern of dots.
Blast.
Bone dry.
“That’s it,” he says. A shiver runs through him.
“What?” Nora asks, weakly.
“That’s what you were mumbling about. A pattern of dots. Blast. Bone dry.” He closes his eyes. Rubs his face with his one good hand. “They’re going to kill New York City. The whole. Damn. City.”
Skelly stands outside for a while, drawing breath.
But then, inside, she hears something: a cough.
Someone is still alive in there.
Impossible. Through all that…
There, again: the cough.
She has to go back inside. Just to see. Just to make sure.
She creeps back inside.
Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look. Eyes shut. They’re all dead. Nothing worth lookin’ at, sugar-pop. Don’t breathe through your nose.
She almost steps on an eyeball.
Then almost throws up again.
From behind her, the cough. Sharp. Wet. It almost scares her out of her own skin.
In the corner, both legs broken in multiple p
laces, is Carly Espinoza. The head – and only female member – of the Railroaders. Blood wets her chin.
“I know you,” she bubbles. And coughs again.
“Carly, I’m so sorry…”
“Ain’t right. Ain’t… human. What he did. What he was. One minute he was the Boss and some of us was gearin’ up to maybe bring his ass down – and next minute he’s something else. Big and fast. Like an animal. Like the Devil.” Her eyes lose focus.
Skelly kneels down. Holds Carly’s hands.
“Guess he thought I was… dead. I ain’t dead, motherfucker,” Carly says. “I’m gonna kill him, girl. Gonna… kill him ten different ways.”
“I know.” Skelly doesn’t know what to say. She wants to run, go back outside and throw up again, forget all this ever happened. And yet, she remains. Stay hard. You’re tough. You gotta be. “What happened?”
“He… took a phone call. Then he left.”
“What did he say? On the call.”
“I… I dunno. Not much. Something about meeting people somewhere. The hole. That’s what he said. And something about the Lincoln Tunnel.”
“He said that? The Lincoln Tunnel?”
“N…nah, he just said, ‘the tunnel’, but what else could he have–” Her words are lost beneath a wet, rattling cough. She drools a pink froth: spit and blood.
Skelly stands. Blinking back tears.
Carly lifts a limp hand. “Help… help me up.”
“I… can’t. Your legs…”
“I’m OK. I’m gonna be–”
Her eyes roll back in her head. Her body seizes.
Skelly stifles her own cry as she runs outside. The morning air feels good. She breathes deep. Tries not to think about it. Gets out her phone. Calls the police.
Then she sends a text to Burnsy’s pager.
WE NEED TO MEET ASAP 911.
Because she knows what’s happening and where.
Mookie tries explaining it. Tells Nora that when you blow a hole in a wall, you drill these holes. Different pattern for different jobs. On paper, that pattern looks like a series of connect-the-dots – meaningless to anybody who doesn’t know how to imagine the blast pattern of a series of dynamite sticks. He explains that right now – maybe today – the Sandhogs will be working on digging Water Tunnel #3 like they always do.