Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He thought he was going to vomit. He thought his bowels might let go. His legs were boneless—how could they continue to support him? He was weaving from side to side as he ran, like a drunken man.

  Lower . . . lower. He didn’t dare look up at those directly above him, lest he trip over something in his path, but he saw those ahead of him, their bare feet poking out from under their robes. The empty black hollows of their long gaping sleeves.

  The sky shaded darker by the second, even as its subtle green stain became more distinct.

  The stone cottage was not much further now . . . and yet, the descending people were just above its roof. They were going to come down directly in his path, blocking him . . . cutting him off . . .

  Grinning. Biting.

  Somehow, somehow, he managed to find a surge of energy, a spurt of adrenaline that jetted through him, and he flung himself forward crazily, sobbing a loud cry of desperation.

  One bare foot brushed against his shoulder. They were coming down all around him. He dove between them, dodged around them as he had the trees back in the woods. They seemed disoriented for a moment as their feet were planted solidly, getting their bearings as they awakened, but he could feel their eyes snapping alert as their gaze fell upon him.

  He had closed the cabin’s door when he’d left earlier to explore—but what if the little structure’s rightful owner had returned in his absence? What if the door was bolted on the inside?

  He fell against the door of black wood, and it gave inward without resistance.

  He spun around to find one of the robed people, a woman, stepping through the threshold, her eyes wide and gleaming inside her cowl. Her grinning teeth were clicking together rapidly. He snatched up the length of wood leaning beside the doorway and rammed its squared end into her nose, crushing it. Blood poured down over her bared teeth, but her grin didn’t even waver as she stumbled backwards. He slammed the door shut and dropped the thick board into its brackets to bar the door from being opened inward.

  But immediately, he heard the wood creak as weight was pressed against it.

  He didn’t even have the strength left to climb onto the table and stretch out. Instead, he crumpled to the floor and curled in on himself, wheezing like a man in his final moments. He retched, but nothing came up. It only seemed to tear the dry tube that was his throat.

  The ceiling creaked, too. Trickles of dust pattered down. They were on the roof.

  He heard them scrabbling at the outer stone walls, all around him. The creaking of the door became more pronounced. The board rattled a little in its brackets.

  They were going to get in, hands or no hands. It was only a matter of time. Surely, before the sun rose again and they rose with it into the sky.

  He wished he had a weapon. At this point, not so as to fight back against the horde, for that would be beyond futile, but something with which he might kill himself. A knife to open the femoral arteries in his legs, for instance. Suicide would be vastly preferable to having their many mouths on his body . . . their teeth clamping into his flesh.

  Then, suddenly, he propped himself up on one elbow, as if a voice had clearly called his name—a summoning voice that offered him an avenue of escape.

  He turned to face toward the back wall of the murky room, near the cold fireplace, where that trapdoor of black wood was set into the floor.

  He scrambled to hands and knees, crawled over to the spot, and found the trapdoor with his desperate, clawing fingers. Taking hold of the rusted bolt that secured the hatch, he drew it back with one strong jerk, then he lifted the trapdoor open by the ring in its center. He was again met by that expulsion of fetid air; but this time, instead of being repulsed, he welcomed it. He couldn’t see the rungs set into the side of the shaft below him—indeed, he couldn’t even discern the outline of the shaft’s opening—but he swung himself around, stuck a leg out and then down, and probed with it until his foot settled on one of the rungs. He leaned his weight onto it, fearing the rung might tear loose from the wall and he would be pitched into uncertain depths, but the thing held. Gripping the edge of the opening, he lowered himself down, easing his other foot onto the next rung.

  Before he descended too deeply to do so, he reached up blindly, found the trapdoor again, and eased it down into place over his head. He found no bolt on its inner surface to slot home. Without a means of locking the hatch on the inside, he may have only postponed his demise for a short time more, painted himself into an even tighter corner, but he held on to the hope that this inset ladder was here for a good reason—that something more lay below.

  Distantly above him, he thought he could hear the robed people thumping at the cottage’s door with their knobby stumps, but the sound was muffled through the thick wood of the lowered hatch.

  He hadn’t counted them, but when it occurred to him to wonder how many rungs he’d already descended, he guessed it was twenty. Even as he thought this, his right foot encountered a flat solid surface instead of a rung. He had reached the shaft’s bottom. He turned away from the ladder, holding onto one rung with his left hand just in case it was only a shelf he stood upon, a narrow ledge, before the shaft continued downward. Tentatively he stuck his right foot out further and further, sweeping it to one side and then the other. No—it was a floor, he was sure of it. Finally he let go of the rung and edged forward a few steps, reminded of his time seeking to escape from the lightless interior of the gigantic fortress or mausoleum.

  He shuffled along this way for a time, still wary of blundering into a sudden pit or further descending shaft or stairwell. Yes, he might have been in the fortress again . . . except for the fact that his sounds came back to him very closely, intimately, as if he were in a confined space. Testing this theory, he stretched his arms out to either side of him, and in fact both hands touched solid walls, cool to the touch like stone or concrete. He was apparently traveling along a narrow corridor or tunnel.

  Then he came to a place where the tunnel formed a T. He might have walked nose-first into the wall in front of him here, had there not been a faint light glowing from somewhere down the left-hand branch of the T. The right-hand branch was pitch black. Though the dim glow down the left branch was of a green tint, and he feared that might mean moonlight—which might mean he would be stepping outside into the night, vulnerable to attack—he felt he had no choice but to go where the light could show him his path. If it proved to be an open doorway through which the robed people might enter, he’d quickly retreat and retrace his steps, to grope his way down the right-hand branch instead.

  The glow increased in brightness, revealing to him the outlines of the tunnel, which had a low curved ceiling. Gradually, he could tell that the light emanated from certain spots spaced along the length of the tunnel. He believed these must be windows, letting in the moonlight.

  When he approached the first of these sources of light, however, he found that it was not a window offering a view of the night outside, but a thick glass panel as tall as himself and just as wide: one surface of a tank like a large aquarium, set back into the wall of white stone. He couldn’t tell where the tank’s lighting originated from, and decided it was the green liquid filling it that generated the luminance.

  Suspended in this glowing green fluid in no orderly fashion, but more or less evenly spaced apart, were a multitude of human hands of varying size and skin tone: the hands of elderly persons, with fat veins under thin wrinkled flesh; tiny pallid infant hands tipped with delicate fingernails; hairy male hands, slender female hands. All of them were floating motionlessly in the aquarium, their slack fingers slightly curled like those of sleeping people. Or dead people. Where the hands had once been—or should have been—joined to wrists, there were no raw cross-sections of meat and bone. Where a severing wound should have been, there was only smooth, rounded flesh. As if the hands had been seeded and grown in this vat, had never been attached to a body at all.

  Were their cells still alive, but in a kind of suspended anim
ation? Had they been preserved for some future use? To be grafted onto the arms of the possibly mutated, handless people outside? Or had they been removed from those people? If so, as punishment? Or perhaps in a willing sacrifice, an act of religious contrition? Was it their way of gradually divesting themselves of their human shells, toward a purely spiritual existence? But why save the discarded appendages, then?

  He pondered that if it was some type of preserving or nourishing fluid the hands resided in, shouldn’t they all be heaped in a great mass like lobsters at the bottom of the tank, not hanging there in one place this way? So was the solution viscous, thick?

  He stepped a bit closer to the glass, almost touching his nose to it, the green radiance painting his own hands as they hung by his sides. And that was when it struck him. It was not the medium the hands were stored in that produced the green glow. It was the hands themselves, filling the entire aquarium with their luminescence.

  Turning away from the tank, he continued down the corridor and was unsurprised to find that the other lighted panels spaced evenly along it from that point on—the panels set into the left side of the tunnel corresponding to the spaces between the panels lining the right side of the tunnel, for a staggered effect—also proved to be tanks filled with luminous hands pickled in viscous solution.

  He continued on and on, the corridor seemingly endless, past aquariums housing enough hands to equip all those robed people he had seen outside. The only change he encountered in his surroundings was a bit of damage to the tunnel, giving him the impression that it was of extreme age. He’d come across cracks in the ceiling, some that curved down along the walls between the tanks, and ultimately he saw tree roots that had pushed through the wider of these fissures, black and bristling with hairs, looking like giant centipedes. The musty, moldy odor of these underground passages was more intense now, apparently invading with the roots, if not emanating from them. The smell of the wildness of life, or the decay of life, or both.

  From the ceiling further along, one quite large tree root as thick as a bough had snaked its way in over time, hanging so low that he had to duck under it and sweep its dangling, off-branching lesser roots aside with his arm, like a curtain of limp tendrils.

  Broken bits of stone littered the floor, fallen from the fissures, and under the giant root he found one sizable chunk with a pointed tip like a prehistoric hand axe, which fit nicely in his palm. It wouldn’t be of much use if a horde of robed people came charging down the corridor suddenly, but it was at least a shard of comfort.

  A short distance beyond the spot where the root had breached the ceiling, he discovered another, more profound sign of damage to the tunnel.

  An even greater root had come down through the ceiling inside one of the tanks, like a monstrous black anaconda covered in long hairs, and exerted enough pressure over time to push the glass panel out of its frame. This had toppled into the corridor, where it lay on its face intact. The preserving medium had burst free, massed thickly both at the bottom of the tank and where it had spilled out onto the fallen glass panel in chunky, gelatinous mounds. It gave off a strong smell like semen. Without the glow of the hands that had once occupied the tank, the gelatin was a dead fishy gray, not green.

  Without the hands that had once occupied the tank?

  He looked up and down the corridor, unconsciously squeezing the rough-edged hand axe more tightly. They couldn’t have rotted without leaving bones, could they, however long ago this damage had occurred? Had the robed people taken them so as to reattach them? Or, ravenous as they were, would they even consume them?

  He resumed walking. The tanks beyond the ruined one were intact, filled with their gelatin and their placid dreaming hands, and the invading roots became less frequent, until even the cracks eventually tapered away. He might have believed he’d come back around in a full circle, except for the corridor’s unerring straightness.

  Then, abruptly, he stopped moving, standing dead still. He listened as a sound came to him, where before there had only been his own footfalls.

  It was a distant purring or soft rapid pattering. Was that a rainstorm, drumming the earth somewhere above his head?

  But it wasn’t above his head. It seemed to be coming from far back down the tunnel he had been traveling through. He stared back that way, yet saw nothing aside from the green light shining into the corridor, occasional tree roots hanging down, and that one fallen glass panel heaped with thick gray jelly.

  Though it was still muted and remote, the sound was growing steadily louder. It wasn’t rushing sea water, was it? Flooding through this tunnel? But it didn’t sound like advancing water. He couldn’t form a mental image of what it might be. He was torn between lingering to see what might be revealed and quickly resuming his path forward.

  Then, as the pattering noise grew more pronounced, more immediate, he finally saw what caused it—and his course of action was decided.

  Far back down the tunnel, a low wave was advancing, but it wasn’t water or any other liquid. This quickly approaching tide glowed green, its radiance rushing along the corridor like the light of a train barreling through a subway tunnel. Though they were still too distant for him to make out their individual shapes too well, he knew what these things were that made up the glowing tide: a swarm of human hands, scurrying on their fingers like tarantulas.

  He spun away and bolted.

  He was afraid of slowing his momentum, or even tripping over an unseen obstacle such as more fallen rubble and thus flinging himself onto his face; but he still couldn’t resist glancing back over his shoulder from time to time as he ran, to gauge whether the green hands were gaining on him. So far, he was maintaining the same amount of distance between the horde and himself, but he was running pretty quickly and so must they be, scurrying like a solid mass of rats from a fire below deck on an old wooden ship. The hands had flowed over and around the fallen glass panel and the mounds of jelly without impedance. In their fever to reach him, the hands were not only scrambling across the floor but over one another’s five-fingered bodies, some of them even occasionally hopping into the air, briefly, above the general stampede.

  How many were there? It seemed more than that one emptied tank could have contained. Had other tanks in this subterranean system been compromised as well?

  He prayed for another T intersection . . . another choice of directions, so that he might confuse his pursuers . . . at least have some kind of option. Better yet, he prayed for a door, or another ladder taking him upwards out of these tunnels. Yet so far he had seen none of these things.

  Until, finally, ahead of him he spied a staircase—a flight of steps shaped from the same unbroken white stone as the walls and floor. The last of the tanks set into this tunnel cast its illumination through an open doorway and onto the first of these ascending stairs.

  With his hoarse panting sounding like sobs, he dredged up a seemingly final reserve of energy, as when he had been racing to reach the cottage before the robed people came down from the air. He hurled himself at the stairs. When he reached them, he started charging up them without even breaking stride.

  The staircase was lengthy, angling up and up, but he could see a closed door of black wood at the top. It was not really that much farther from reach now. Yet . . . what if the door proved to be locked?

  The hands would have him, then. But what would they do to him? Claw him to pieces—or carry him outside, as a swarm of ants cooperate to hoist large objects, to deliver him to their grinning, voracious masters?

  Maybe it would be better if it was simply over. No more running, no more hiding. No more hunger, no more confusion. Or loneliness.

  He didn’t dare risk another look behind now, but he heard them flooding up the stairs after him. Were they closing the distance between him and themselves at last? Even if the door wasn’t locked, if it was stuck in its frame the effort to dislodge it might give the hands the extra few seconds they needed to overtake him. At least he saw no rusty bolt on this s
ide that needed to be wrestled back—just a handle like that on the door to the cottage.

  Yes, they were very close behind him now, he could tell. The green stain of light on the walls around him was washing forward, growing brighter, as myriad fingertips thumped against white stone, and fingernails scratched for purchase, and skin rubbed across skin in a lustful frenzy. He thrust out his own right hand ahead of him, his fingers spread to catch hold of that iron handle. At some point he had dropped his useless hand axe, after having held it so tightly that its jagged edges had sliced his palm, now greased with blood.

  His bloody hand slipped through the handle, clenched it, and he pulled. The door wouldn’t budge.

  Incandescent green on the walls, brighter and brighter. It made his own body fluoresce green.

  He yanked hard, tugged again, howled in misery—until he realized the door was meant to swing out, not in. He shoved against the ebony wood instead and almost tumbled onto the grassy ground beyond. He caught his balance, spun around, saw the hands pouring over the top stair, and slammed the door shut. They thudded against it, clawed with their nails. He knew that when enough of them came and piled up, compounding pressure, they would push the door open . . .

  No—there was a thick iron bolt on this side. With an internalized whoop of joy, he slammed the bolt into its slot.

  Grinning, he turned away from the door, rested his back against it, and gulped at fresh air. Now he could take in his surroundings—the scene that lay before him.

  It was still night. The robed people were not suspended in the sky, though thankfully none of them stood here atop this shaggy high cliff with him. The cliff overlooked that body of water that was either a great lake or the sea.

  To his right, the grass-fringed cliff ran on extensively while also rising higher, away from the ridge of exposed rock into which the black wooden door was set. At last, at this steep hill’s summit, an immense monument or sculpture rose against the night sky. He thought it must be as tall as a building of a dozen stories.