Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He opened a door to a tiny hallway. Out here was the front door to his dream abode, and he pulled the door open to see who was calling on a Sunday evening . . . for he knew it was a Sunday evening.

  Just outside, standing in a pool of yellow light with the deepening murk of evening behind her, was a woman wrapped in a bathrobe. Her thick, coppery red hair was mussed as though she herself had just risen from bed. She was very attractive, despite the unnaturally huge grin that seemed to deform her lower face.

  The woman thrust her arms out at him. Startled, terrified, somehow he knew he must not let her touch him, and he was already jerking back and slamming the door shut. Her hands were apparently prosthetic, but useless—made of glassy green jade, with smooth unmoving fingers. When the door banged hard against her wrists, both jade hands were dislodged and one of them dropped to the floor of the hallway at his feet. It shattered . . . stray fingers skittering across the worn floorboards. He managed to get the door closed, and he bolted it.

  He stooped to gather the broken hand and disconnected fingers, and he carried the pieces into the kitchen, where he put them all into a white plastic shopping bag. As he did so, he noticed there was a ring stuck on one of the fingers: a gold Claddagh ring, with two hands holding a stylized human heart. The heart had a diamond in its center.

  He tucked the bag containing the smashed jade hand and the diamond ring in the back of a kitchen cabinet. Though he didn’t bang the cabinet door shut, the sound of it closing was as loud as a gunshot.

  He awoke with a start and sat up on the table with his heart thudding, thudding, as if the woman from his dream was thumping ineffectively, without hands, at the locked door of the cottage. He almost expected to see her shattered jade hands lying on the floor, but of course he could make out nothing in this utter darkness.

  Not quite utter. A line of dim greenish light demarcated the bottom edge of the cottage’s door.

  He could still hear the shushed, scuffing movements of bodies outside, passing through the bleached grass, nudging against the cottage’s stones. But that green light tugged at his curiosity. Getting down from the table as quietly as he could, he stole to the door, drew in a deep breath, clamped it off in his lungs, and slid the door’s peephole panel aside just a bare crack. He neared his eye to it, ready to flinch back in an instant if need be. He feared a finger or a stick being thrust through the slot unexpectedly.

  The source of the green illumination was immediately apparent.

  While he’d slept, the moon had risen, full and blasted with craters. Not corresponding to his memory of a much smaller moon, it appeared to occupy the same amount of sky as the swollen sun. How could that be? While a star could enlarge over time, a moon would not . . . unless its orbit was decaying and it was drawing gradually closer to the world it circled. This was, of course, assuming he was on the same world upon which he vaguely recalled having lived.

  The bloated moon’s bottom edge lightly touched the water’s horizon, like a stupendous child’s balloon buoyed there. And the moon was a phosphorescent green.

  He thought of the words green cheese . He didn’t know why. Maybe because he was growing increasingly hungry.

  The moonlight enabled him to make out the figures milling about the beach in the near and far distance, their white robes picking up the green glow. Dozens of them just within his narrow range of view.

  One figure stepped directly in front of the peephole, its face only a foot away, though its features were lost within the shadowed frame of its hood. Was it peering back at him through the thin gap? He had instantly hunched down below the peephole, poised at the cliff edge of panic, thinking: This is it. This is it. Now they come.

  But they didn’t come in numbers to pound or press against the door. He heard dragging, somnambulant footsteps as the person just outside the door continued along.

  Still bent below the spy hole, he edged its panel ever-so-gently closed again.

  After a time—after his heart had subdued itself—he returned to the table and stretched out upon it once more. If he dreamed again that night, he didn’t recall it the next morning.

  0. Carcasses

  When he again awoke, he sat up sore and achy on the surface of the wooden table and saw that the red-orange light of dawn had replaced the night’s fungal glow at the bottom edge of the cabin’s bolted door. He slid down from the table, went to the door, and cracked the panel over the peephole slot.

  All the robed figures had already risen back into the sky, once more hanging there motionless but for the rippling of their garments in the gusts off the water. Glinting drops still fell from the sodden robes of those miraculously undrowned people who had formerly been submerged in the water. He rather regretted not having witnessed the moment at which they all rose—might there be something to learn from the spectacle?—but mostly he was relieved that they were once again off the ground and inert. He felt it was safe to venture outside again and turn his attention to finding food and water. His stomach was like a piteously begging dog, and his throat was parched, his dehydration having brought on a deeply stabbing headache.

  He unbolted the door and stepped out from the cottage into the bloody glow of the monstrous sun that still hung low in the sky—as if its sheer bulk wouldn’t permit it to float any higher—and noticed something anomalous further down the shore in the opposite direction from the fortress on the high hill. It was impossible not to notice: a titanic black shape lying just at the attenuated edge of the water.

  He was certain, without hesitating to consider any other possibility, what that great mass was. It was either the very same leviathan he had seen the descending figures alighting upon last night or else one of its brethren.

  Shutting the door behind him, he set off down the strip of stony beach, following like a trail the dark humped band of slime that marked the border of the lake-or-sea, toward that much larger humped dark form.

  The languorous surf lapped around the massive shape. The closer he got to it—and the more colossal it became, like a battleship run aground—the more nervous he felt. What if the beast still had a spark of life in it? What if it should suddenly rear up, swing toward him? Once again he considered that it might be amphibious . . . might merely be basking in the morning air, not dead. But he detected no movement or sound of any kind. And as he drew nearer, he saw other things that convinced him he had nothing to fear from the behemoth.

  The beast lay on its side, its back toward him, and its smooth upper surface was covered with small, ragged craters, showing a yellowish layer of muscle or blubber under the rubbery black flesh. Red blood had run out from these circular wounds and down the animal’s curved body, turning the water around it pinkish.

  He had no doubt that the figures who had come down from the sky upon the beast had inflicted these injuries, though he didn’t know how. Had they dug their very hands into its meat? And though the wounds were so numerous that in places they overlapped and combined to form larger wounds, were they really so severe as to have proved lethal?

  When he had finally walked far enough alongside the creature, in its shadow, to arrive at its head, at least one of his questions was answered—that being the exact cause of its wounds.

  The beast had a long, narrow lower jaw like a sperm whale, lined with pointed ivory teeth the span of his hand. Its bulbous head was more like a pilot whale’s, however, and the beast had four eyes on this side: one large black orb, with three smaller black eyes arranged around it. Was it the same on the opposite side? He couldn’t tell, with its heavy head lying on its side in the thin surf. For now, he switched his scrutiny to the two human bodies that had been crushed between the spider-eyed animal’s great jaws.

  They were two of the people who had floated down from the sky last night like parachutists, maybe among those who had clung to the thing’s back, but they had slipped off. One was a young male, the other a middle-aged female, their robes torn and bloody. The creature’s jaws had crushed them so badly through the mi
dsection, its teeth stabbed into them, that loops of bluish intestines had been squeezed out from between the monster’s clamped jaws, one drooping end stirring in the water. The eyes of the pair were already turning grayish.

  Yet both blindly staring corpses were grinning. Their bared teeth were stained red, with shreds of black flesh and yellow meat or blubber caught between them.

  If there had only been one body, he might have thought that the person’s lack of hands was the result of deformity or an old injury. But the torn robes of both dead people were disturbed in such a way that he could see the man was missing both hands, revealing only smooth stumps, and the woman had no left hand.

  Behind him in the grass he found a length of dead branch, and he took off his shoes so as to wade into the water a little and poke with the stick at the sleeve covering the woman’s right arm. In so doing, he revealed another rounded stump.

  He looked up at the figures hovering above him. So none of them had hands inside those long baggy sleeves, then?

  Last night, the descending people hadn’t clung to this beast with their hands but with their teeth, when he had thought they were lowering their foreheads to its body in reverence.

  He could only imagine what might have happened to him last night, had he been vulnerable outside when they became active and settled to earth.

  Were they all grinning inside those deeply shadowed hoods?

  He looked down at the behemoth again, blood still trickling in thin rivulets from the myriad bite marks in its towering body. He noted that no flies had come along to buzz about the carcass, or even the intestines festooned across its jaw. It seemed that in this world the only living things besides plant life were the robed people, the leviathans, and himself.

  His moaning stomach hoped this was not true. But if it were, that there would be plant life that was edible. And so he continued moving along the shore, away from the beached carcass and the fortress further back, in search of whatever might sustain him.

  0. The Betrayal of Time

  Further inland from the water, now that the terrain was only mildly hilly, forest predominated. Tall grass and brittle underbrush—which itself looked as though it had perished of thirst—gave way to more and more trees, until finally the woods closed around him, shutting out even the gold-glinting suggestion of water. These trees of the forest proper were less stunted and contorted than those that grew near the water. They were taller and straighter, and the trunks of many of them as thick around as ancient oaks, but their bark was still a charcoal black. The leaves clinging to their branches, increasingly blotting out the pale orange sky and the figures suspended in it, were just as brown and shriveled as those that formed the thick bed covering the ground under his feet: layer upon layer of brown, decaying leaves. The uppermost layer he scuffed through was dry and crunchy, but beneath that the leaves moldered, damp and smelling of slow disintegration.

  Experimentally, he squatted down and pawed through the leaves, digging deeper, scooping them aside, slippery dark masses that he disliked touching, in search of insect life. Normally, wouldn’t one find scurrying pill bugs, silverfish, millipedes, other creatures that thrived in rotting leaf litter? Maybe even a salamander? Nothing—and when he came to the black soil he dug into that as well, but again without discovering earthworms or any other forms of life. The idea of eating worms, especially while still alive, was revolting, but he was growing desperate. He was not starving to death yet, but it was a real concern.

  Had all these animal forms gone extinct naturally, he wondered, or had the robed people—perhaps immortal—eaten them all over countless ages, night after night upon descending to the earth?

  He suddenly recalled the creature he had felt scamper like a tickling hand across his shoe in the fortress building. Did animals shelter in there, safe from the robed people? Or had he only imagined that sensation in the darkness? It was worth investigating later, at any rate.

  And when he returned to the water’s edge, he considered that he himself should sample the flesh of the beached whale-thing.

  For now he stood erect again, continued venturing deeper into this deciduous forest.

  He found no acorns as he kicked along through the leaves. He was also hoping to encounter mushrooms growing on the forest floor, but as yet he had spotted none. What he did start to see, however, were thick, woody plates of bracket fungus growing on the trunks of some of the trees. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever heard these were edible. Maybe? Perhaps certain types? He vaguely recalled some were used for medicinal purposes, but he didn’t trust his memory when he didn’t even know his name.

  He broke off a small chunk from the outer edge of one of these growths and nibbled on it gingerly. It was tough, and tasted much the way the leaf litter at his feet smelled: musty, moldy—the concentrated essence of forest. But he gnawed some more and broke off more pieces to eat later on if he didn’t develop a stomach ache or vomiting, pushing the fragments into his trouser pockets.

  He came upon a clearing, where again tall bleached grass grew. Boulders rose up from the grass here and there as if randomly deposited by some long retreated glacier, their flanks blotched with pale circles of lichen. Here he could once more see the multitude of robed humans caught unmoving in the air high above him. But it wasn’t the sight of their bodies that suddenly unnerved him; it was the deepening pumpkin orange color of the sky.

  Could it be possible? Was the sun, unseen behind the trees encircling the clearing, already descending? He had thought he had awakened to dawn, not the waning of afternoon! Had he really slept that long, then?

  No . . . no . . . he didn’t believe he had. Somehow, the sun did not cross the sky in this place, this time. Instead, in defiance of any laws of physics and behaviors of the universe that he recalled from his past existence, the sun seemed only to struggle up a short way into the sky before its great mass dragged it back down again into the same spot on the horizon. The days were short-lived, half-dead things. It was the night that went on and on . . . the night that thrived and reigned.

  He would ponder this maddening enigma later, when he was secure behind a bolted door. For now, he must get back to the cottage before the sun descended all the way.

  Before the grinning people without hands descended.

  He turned away from the clearing and plunged back into the woods. He had continued all this way in a straight line—he hoped in a straight line—and he must retrace that trajectory, lest he become lost and helplessly exposed out here.

  He forgot his hunger, forgot even his throat-cracking thirst. He would have no time to stop and sample the flesh of the slain leviathan. Two imperatives overshadowed every other thought: Run and Never stop .

  0. The Descent

  Low-slung tree branches seemed to grab at him to impede him, clawing at his cheeks and forehead and neck. He slipped once on the slick leaf litter under the deceptively dry upper crust, and went down hard with the air knocked out of him. He scampered back to his feet, though, and continued racing onward, dodging between the close columns of live wood.

  He began to despair that he had got himself turned around somehow and was only running deeper into the forest . . . until he started to see those goldish glints through the trees that told him the lake-or-sea lay straight ahead. At that point, however, the woods had grown so dark that several times he almost collided with the black trunks, veering around them at the last moment and one time bashing his shoulder badly against rough bark. The fragments of sky seen through the dead foliage overhead had gone from deep orange to purplish. Was there still time to make it all the way back to the cottage? He entertained the thought of climbing up into one of the larger trees and hiding amongst its boughs to pass the night, hoping that the grinning people would not spot him up there once they’d returned to the earth, but no . . . no . . . he couldn’t risk it. He had to reach the cabin—it was the only way he might survive.

  The tantalizing liquid sparkles seen through the trees were growing dimmer, lik
e cooling embers. The sun had almost sunk below the horizon.

  Then, just like that, he burst out into the open air, thrashing through tall dried-out grass, with the inky body of water spread before him. The purplish sky had that subtle milky luminescence, against which dangled the innumerable robed men, women, children.

  He sprinted along the shore . . . huffing frantically, doing his best to ignore how his throat grew ever more parched as he gulped air into his lungs . . . defying the wild drumming of his overtaxed heart. The muscles in his legs burned, and his skull was a solid ball of pain. His whole body seemed bent on betraying him, giving him up as a sacrifice.

  The leviathan was still there, of course, there being no high tide to draw it back into the water. It would no doubt rot where it lay. He was grateful for the sight of it, however grotesque, and more grateful for what he could now see not too much further beyond it: his little cottage made of white stones.

  Still, he didn’t know if his legs could carry him that far. He wheezed curses at himself. Groaned encouragement to himself. Come on . . . he was almost there . . . he could make it . . .

  The sun had entirely vanished beneath the line of water, fully submerged like one of those colossal creatures after they had briefly surfaced. In its place the sky was taking on that greenish tint he had noticed the night before. This time he understood it foretold of the later rising of the great green moon. He realized now that the moon would rise from the same spot into which the sun had sunk and take its exact place in the sky, as if they were two very different faces of the same gigantic orb.

  The people suspended in the air had begun their dream-slow descent.

  Run . Never stop . He panted entreaties to a God he doubted he had ever believed in before, and who probably didn’t exist anymore even if He once had. Dear God . . . please God . . .

  They were floating steadily lower, all of them at the same rate, as if tethered to invisible marionette strings. Maybe it was God who was their puppet master.