by Scott Hale
Thump, thump, thump, he thought, thinking he heard that familiar call not far off. It’s down here with me. It’s going to try to take me as soon as I have them. I know it.
Wood buckled behind him. One wave of screams crashed over the other. The barricade had broken, and soon, so too would the loyalty of those who had manned it.
A terrible thing was easy to shoulder, as long you didn’t shoulder it alone. With every crack of the shepherd’s crook—Fuck, it’s close, Atticus thought—he, now sole proprietor of certain miseries, suffered an onslaught of old agonies.
Thump: There, in his hand, his father’s knife, and in the other, Poe’s.
Thump: There, in his ear, Will’s voice, and the sound of toys overcome by work that didn’t need to be done.
Thump: And there, in every piece of him he had left, his daughter crying, her life as long as her fit.
The fungal walls continued to transition in color, until they were ashen and riddled with black, gawping growths. Atticus stopped, thought he caught a glimpse of the shepherd between the rows. New voices now, he heard, not far from where he stood. He followed the fungal wall as it ran unyielding alongside him, searching for a breach to breach.
“There,” Warren said, apparently still behind him. “Right before it dead-ends.”
The boss man was right. There was a desk. Beside it, an opening that had been cut into the fungal wall.
Atticus hoofed it, his helmet sitting loosely on his head. The voices were getting louder—was that Blythe on the other side?—and he heard horses snorting amongst a general commotion.
We’re here, Clementine told him. Take us home, my love. He started crying for the hell of it, taking pride in the fact he still could, and walked, weapons at the ready, into the loading area.
It took Atticus a moment to register what he was looking at, because it wasn’t something he’d ever seen before. It was a tree, or maybe it was a hand, twisting out of the ground. From its branches—or were they fingers?—thirty corpses hung, their naked bodies like fruit still waiting to ripen. There were no ropes around their necks, though. What kept them in place were the thick bundles of vermillion veins running from the tips of the branches, feeding into and latching onto their gaping mouths.
Where are you? Atticus felt cold, weak, as though all he’d been through was finally catching up with him. There were soldiers further back, in the loading area, by the metal doors, stocking the three carriages there with coffin after coffin. But they hadn’t seen him, and, really, he didn’t give two shits if they had.
He wandered over to the tree. It had no base, he realized, coming to the place it had ruptured out of. How large was it? How far down did it go? Was it some alien appendage? He gazed upon it’s rotten canopy, that arthritic nest of knuckles and human-shaped nails. Where are you?
“Gravedigger,” Miranda whispered. She sounded scared that they would be spotted.
Atticus ignored her. A hush fell on the soldiers ahead, so he was sure they’d already been seen. It didn’t matter. It was going to be over soon, anyway. He searched the corpses like they were cattle, weeding out those that had the defect of not being Clementine or Will.
“What the hell is this?” a soldier belted.
“Shit, hurry it up! Hurry it up!”
And then Blythe: “What’s wrong? Oh, who’s that over there?”
Where were they? He wheeled around the gateway, not afraid or reluctant to skirt the edge of it. He couldn’t begin to guess how far down the tree went. Miles, maybe. Eternities, even. He couldn’t die, but he wasn’t impervious to imprisonment by way of a bad fall, so he stepped back.
Thump, thump, thump.
And then the pounding of boots.
Where were they? Plenty of kids, with their distended bellies, apple colored and shaped. And teenagers, too—cut and stabbed and bludgeoned. Atticus could feel a finger being pointed at him, words being spoken of him. Where were they? He stepped over a root, an arterial thing. Older folks, hanging better off the boughs than the skin from their bones. Youth, he needed youth. The machete started swinging of its own accord, a response to the guard he saw in his periphery. Where were they? A woman, Clementine’s age and build, but, no, wrong color, wrong hair. A birthmark behind the knee. That tell-tale sign. Just had to find it. Unique to her. Unique and perfect. Will? A young man, throat bulging, vermillion liquid leaking from his ass. No, not him. Where were they? Where were they? Thirty, forty, no thirty here. Was he too late?
He wheeled and wheeled, a sky of heels. Where were they? Red hair, there, red hair. It sparked his heart. He stumbled over a root to reach it, but that’s all it was. A severed head, a mess of hair, with a neck that’d gone soft and separated from its body long before he’d gotten there. It was a woman, but it wasn’t his woman. Where were they? Where—
“Gravedigger?” Blythe cried out to him. “As I live and breathe. What are you doing here?”
Atticus spun around, every muscle in his back trembling. Blythe. The son of a bitch stood there, arms out and exhilarated, as though he’d run into a friend he hadn’t seen in years. The man was unchanged. It seemed no amount of depravity could messy that fresh-face he had.
Atticus started to wheeze when he breathed. Still bare-chested, he glanced at his side and saw the slit that led to his lungs had reopened again. He decided to let it bleed, to give the bastard a good show before this grueling play came to its much needed end.
Blythe set the lantern he was carrying at his feet. It lit up the cloak he wore, shone some light into the hood over his head.
“I apologize for not giving credit where credit is due.”
A few soldiers sauntered over to him, but he told them to get back to the carriages.
“Hi, there,” Blythe said, suddenly addressing Warren, Elizabeth, and Miranda. “Like I was saying—” he turned back to Atticus, “—I apologize for not giving credit where credit is due. We received a warning yesterday morning about a riot in Bedlam. Said some suspicious figure named ‘Gravedigger’ might be headed this way. That was you, wasn’t it?” He laughed, and as he laughed, Atticus realized the man was completely unarmed. “I didn’t even make the connection. What’s your name…? Doesn’t matter. Man, oh man, how… how are you here?”
Atticus dropped the sword, the one he’d stolen from the poor sap of a soldier by Bedlam’s river. If he was going to kill Blythe, it was going to be with something that was his from home.
“Where… are… they?” He could barely speak. His soul burned so hot that it charred his speech.
A horse neighed. A carriage door slammed shut. There was a banging, too, on the huge, metal doors that led outside, to Carpenter Plantation’s backyard. The piles of unused coffins, dark, like they’d been left out in the rain, shook beside them.
“Go ahead,” Atticus said to Warren and the Beauties. His eyes never left Blythe’s. “I’ll… I’ll be fine.”
Warren nodded. With Elizabeth and Miranda, he went not to the carriages, but back the way they’d come, to assist the other cabalists, who, after Jessie, maybe didn’t seem too expendable to the big brute.
“Interesting choice.” Blythe leaned back, watching them navigate the fungal walls. “And here I was thinking we were under attack because of what we were doing here.” He batted away a mosquito. “Where the hell are all these things coming… I’m sorry. Where are they? Gravedigger, what do you mean?”
He held the machete out, walked towards Blythe until the soldier took a step back. “My wife and son.”
Blythe furrowed his brows. He stepped forward, so that the tip of the machete was touching his chest. “You’re not here for revenge?”
“Oh, I am,” Atticus said, licking his lips. Blythe’s life was making him hungry. “But I can wait on that. Give them to me. Give me my god damn wife and son.”
“What did Bon tell you? You’re the Gravedigger, right? You killed him and he told you…? Huh.” Blythe’s eyes darted back and forth in his skull. “Your wife and son are wher
e we left them. At the kitchen table. In the chair and on the floor. Where you ought to be.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Atticus snarled. He pulled the machete back and socked Blythe in the jaw.
Blythe reeled. He knocked over the lantern and stumbled toward the tree. “Not bad for a dead man. Sheesh.” He stretched his mouth out. “You are dead. I killed you. Looks like a few others have, too. What are you? A ghoul? Like that friend of yours?”
“Where are they?” Atticus repeated.
The soldiers had finished loading the coffins into the carriages. For some reason, they had stood up another six of the coffins in front of the metal doors.
“No small talk. No more delays. Tell me!”
“You boys done back there?” Blythe yelled, ignoring him.
The soldiers in the loading area gave him the thumbs up and dispersed into the carriages. One hung back, to open the massive metal doors.
“Hold it,” he said, pointing up. There was movement in the tree limbs above. “One more for the road.”
A corpse, a teenage girl, plummeted from her branch and crashed between Atticus and Blythe. She crumpled like a doll, her broken legs going every which way legs shouldn’t. The vermillion veins that had held her up were still dangling out of her mouth, like parasitic anemones. The growths sat there a moment, stilled, and shivered to life. With a slurp, they retracted into her mouth and down her throat. Her legs quivered, corrected themselves; bones snapped into place, and the skin they’d punctured repaired itself. She didn’t live afterward, but she looked better than before.
Blythe waved. “Come get—”
Atticus stepped in front of the girl, blocking her from the soldier who’d started over.
“—Never mind.”
The soldier stopped, shrugged.
“Have a safe journey, Johnny.”
Johnny smiled, nodded, and turned with a skip back towards the doors.
“Your wife and son aren’t here. We killed them, yes, but we didn’t take them. I don’t know what to tell you, Gravedigger. I don’t know who told you that we did.”
Grinding his teeth, Atticus twisted his arm back and forth; the machete blade caught the lamplight and blinded Blythe.
Clementine? He bit at the inside of his mouth and drew blood. Will, I’m here. He searched the tree again, Blythe staying where he stood, but his family wasn’t there. Maybe the fucker had told the truth. Maybe they had never been. Answer me, he begged. Please. But they’d gone quiet. Because he’d failed them.
The soldier, Johnny, flung back a lever. Slowly, the loading area doors pulled back. The sleepy light of dusk wandered into the basement and stopped at the standing caskets. Outside, on the threshold, a handful of cabalists waited.
“Let me… have at the coffins,” Atticus said, desperate.
“They’re not here. I’d tell you.” Blythe began to back away. “You want to bring them back. Like how you came back.” He laughed, took a few more steps away from Atticus. “I’d like to see that. I’d help you for that reason alone. But you’ve gone quiet, Gravedigger, so I’m thinking you’ve realized you’ve been misled.” He slipped a hand into his cloak. It closed around something. “That’s Bon’s glove, isn’t it?”
Gary. Atticus remembered how jumpy the ghoul had been every time he brought up Clementine and Will. How unlike himself he’d been ever since he came out of the Membrane. He lied to me. Him and Mr. Haemo both. Why? What did they do to them?
The cabalists from outside marched down the slope, shouting at the soldiers in the carriages not to move.
“The Rapture and Brimstone at the front gates was impressive,” Blythe said. He went to pull his arm out of the cloak and—
Atticus ran forward and stabbed Blythe. He rammed the machete upward, into his ribcage. The soldier gasped, the hood falling from his head. With his last bit of strength, he revealed what he’d reached for inside his cloak—a syringe—and stuck it in the slit of Atticus’ throat. He pushed down on the plunger and smiled a bloody smile.
“What did you…”
The liquid inside the instrument drained into his skin. Immediately, his neck went numb. He ripped the machete out of Blythe and cleaved his skull.
After his neck, his face froze, too. Playing out before him was a scene he’d seen before. The cabalists were mumbling to themselves, inspecting the freestanding coffins while ordering Eldrus’ carriage not to move. His eyes became as rocks, his tongue a slab of stone. The numbness worked him over like a bad drink. He heard what sounded like wood splitting and fell to his knees.
“Get back, get back!”
Atticus couldn’t turn his neck anymore, so he turned what he could of his body instead. Each of the six coffins exploded open. Hundreds of vermillion veins blew out of them. They gored the cabalists, running through them as though they were paper thin. The veins shot every which way, the force of their stretching ripping apart the men’s bodies. Arms and legs and entrails spilled across the basement, while impaled torsos, stuck on the net, wept blood onto the quivering strands.
Atticus would’ve dropped his jaw if he could have. He heard Warren coming—that booming voice of his preceding him—but when he raised up to find him, he found the numbness had overtaken him completely.
“Burn it,” a carriage driver shouted.
As the vermillion veins lost their grip on the basement’s walls and fell to the ground, lanterns and burning rags were hurled from the carriages. End over end, they flew through the air, crashing into the stacks of unused coffins. The coffins erupted into massive flames.
Thump, thump, thump.
Atticus cried out pathetically. He could feel the shepherd’s crook pounding the floor, but couldn’t move at all to find it.
Thump, thump, thump.
The fire slithered out of the loading area, towards the claw-like tree. And like a claw, it splayed its branches, shook, and retracted into its ancient gateway, taking all the bodies still attached with it.
Thump, thump, thump.
Atticus screamed. The fire crept toward him, ready to overrun him. Warren! Warren! He thought and wanted to say. This can’t happen. Clementine. Will.
Thump, thump, thump.
A shadow grew over Atticus. Out the corner of his eye, he saw the crook and felt its crack. I… I’m sorry.
From behind, the shepherd laid its hand over his face, took off his helmet. It pushed its finger into his mouth and gums. With its other hand, the shepherd pushed through the wound in his side, dug into his lung, and started scrambling his insides.
CHAPTER XVII
The inferno spread fast. It shot across the basement and over the fungal walls, creating a deadly display of colors that almost made Atticus forget how much he’d fucked things up. When the fire started towards them, he prayed, begging for the ashy release of immolation. But the shepherd saw it coming. With a jerk of its head, it willed the fire away from them.
There was no pain as the creature lifted Atticus by his gum and lung. He should have felt something. The serum Blythe pumped into him was used to enhance sensation during vivisections. Yet, he didn’t.
As the basement burned around him, the Membrane began to materialize in billowing clouds of smoke.
“Why you always have to make things so complicated?” Clementine had asked him, that day he’d gotten stuck in Brinton’s grave. He never gave her an answer, because he never really had one. For as long as he could remember, that’s how he always did things. It worked for him. But as he swayed there in the shepherd’s hold, too feeble to fight back, he decided to try the simpler alternative.
He was going to give up.
The serum was already starting to wear off, but at that point, it didn’t matter much. The Membrane had begun imposing itself upon his reality. The fungal walls lost their mushrooms and became fleshy instead. The ground sucked inward, becoming like a narrow throat, resembling the tunnel he’d fallen through when he’d first died. Another town of trash materialized in the dark distance, where the m
etal doors to the outside should have been and were no more.
Atticus didn’t need to make this journey, make himself some sort of rumored hero, just to find them. He just thought they deserved better. Was the Membrane really all that different than life? It was same the shit-show, but without the dressings. Clementine and Will could make him forget that, though. Forget everything. Everything he’d done to find them, everything he’d become to save them.
“A shepherd watches over her flock,” the creature whispered into his ear. It sounded like his wife and son, and its breath smelled like theirs, too.
Atticus could turn his head, so he did. “You come to put me back with the rest of the sheep?”
The shepherd said, “No,” and lifted him higher. “You are a wolf. A shepherd watches over her world, to protect it from things like you.”
In the gash that ran down the shepherd’s head, he saw distilled memories gathered inside, like rivulets of water, beaded on grass.
“Take me to them,” he said. “I won’t fight you no more.” The fire closed in, the basement almost completely engulfed. “I just want to be with them again.”
The shepherd shook its head. It’s sewn-shut eyes and mouth fluttered as it said, “Too bad.”
A mosquito buzzed past Atticus’ face and landed on his shoulder. The Membrane heaved forward, became more defined, more distinct, as it grafted itself into his mind. Wind rushed past him, into him. The shepherd hummed a spell to take them back to that terrible place.
Fire snapped at his feet, rushed up his legs. Sacs of pus popped on his thighs as his hard skin cracked in the heat. Any other time, he’d have fought the shepherd tooth and nail. But he’d been fighting long enough. And maybe he didn’t deserve them after all.