by Tim Lebbon
Fat Frederick shook his head, muttering. Angela caught his eye. This wasn’t his first dead body.
“Oh fuck,” Cliff said. “Oh shit. Billy. Billy? Billy.” He moved from foot to foot. To her surprise, Fat Frederick embraced him.
“We need to hurry,” Lilou said. “He knows we’re here. We can collect the body later.”
“Collect?” Cliff asked.
Angela stood and turned her back on the corpse. She couldn’t shake the stomach-deadening shock. She felt watched. The sounds of grief formed a gentle echo in voice and breath, like a secret sea washing against the day’s shores.
“We shouldn’t have come,” she said, and Lilou turned on her. The nymph drew close quickly, silently, and Angela had never seen her this angry before.
“We’re here because of Vince,” she hissed. “This is all for him.”
“Please, don’t make me feel—”
“Guilty?” Lilou glanced at the dead man and turned away again, snatching up his torch and stalking along the tunnel. “Follow me, quickly. Before he goes even deeper.”
After only a moment of hesitation, Angela followed. Behind her she heard hesitant footsteps, and when she looked back she saw the two men following. Fat Frederick stared at her, his expression unchanging. His world had been torn apart, and she had no idea how it might be reconstructed, or even if it could.
Billy was a shadow behind them, and soon he was swallowed by the darkness.
Lilou led the way. Rats scampered ahead of them, or disappeared into cracks in the walls. They passed two junctions where the tunnel split, and she barely hesitated before choosing a route. They stepped into filthy water that came up to their ankles, and the scrape lines were no longer visible on the floor. Angela could only trust and follow.
At the second junction the surroundings changed. The tunnel was now carved into the rock of the land, rather than brick lined.
A few minutes later Lilou stopped. There had been no rats for a while, and something about the silence hung heavy, as if it was part of the darkness. The torch batteries were running low. Or perhaps darkness held weight, and the deeper they went the heavier it became.
“Close,” Lilou whispered. She walked toward an opening in the tunnel wall and Angela went with her, hefting the broken towel rail in her right hand. The two men stood either side of her, both of them aiming torches, and Fat Frederick wielding the gun.
The darkness beyond the opening shifted as the torches found it. Then the small cavern beyond was illuminated.
And she saw Vince.
Her heart dropped, she gasped, and he squinted against the sudden light.
“Vince!” she called. She couldn’t help herself.
“Angela,” he said. He sounded reduced, distant. He struggled in the metal chair, crying out as he squirmed against his bindings, and she could see that terrible things had been done to him. She was shocked at how real this felt. Last time she’d seen him, he had been leaving their home for work, just as he had countless mornings before. The world had been on an even keel. Nothing prowled the darkness beneath the city, no creatures from make-believe hid from hunters seeking to butcher them for crank medicines, or cook them for ultra-rich clients.
Yet this was her world now, and this bloodied, tortured version of Vince was the one she most recognised.
She took one step forward.
“Ballus,” Lilou gasped. Her voice was rough with hate.
“Watch out,” Vince breathed.
A shape moved across the opening, and then through it into the tunnel. A flurry of movement, a high, piercing shriek, and someone shoved her aside. Not yet to the chamber, Angela hit the wall hard. Winded, shocked, she slid to the ground.
A gunshot deafened her for a few seconds, the sounds—shouts, screams, and a maniacal laugh—fading back in with a low, steady whistle. In the weak light made frantic by movement, she tried to understand what was happening.
Cliff backed away, then surged forward again, bringing a heavy length of wood down on top of the thing that was attacking Fat Frederick and Lilou. Angela heard the stomp-stomp of hooves and saw what might have been sparks.
Another gunshot blasted.
Ballus, the beast that had taken Vince, leapt away from where Fat Frederick lay atop Lilou. The gangster’s left hand held her down, his right was aiming the gun. She struggled beneath him, desperate to escape. His face was bleeding. He fired again.
The satyr leapt back into the cavern, and for a second or two Angela had her first good look at him. She wished she had not, but at the same time she accepted what she saw, because there was no other choice.
“Vince!” she shouted, dashing after the monster. She could smell it now, a wet-dog smell mingled with the stench of filth and rot. She found herself strangely shocked that he would smell more animal than man.
Before she could reach the chamber the tunnel darkened. A flow of shadows poured out at them. They were the things that had come at them earlier, and Angela skidded to a halt, hands held out as if she could ward them off.
One of the shadows expanded in her vision and then closed around her, like slow-motion water sweeping across her skin, drowning her senses and taking her away from the world. She slapped her hands at the thing, waved the bar, hacking at nothing. Trying to breathe, she sucked it in. It was as heavy as the heaviest fog, tasting of time like a library locked up for a thousand years. She felt as if she hadn’t taken breath for a month. She screamed and gasped, clawing at the shadow where it hung around her head.
Something grabbed her hands and squeezed, and she turned her head slowly, expecting to see the monster before her, ready to tug her through the hole and into his lair where she and Vince would be tortured together forever.
Instead she saw Lilou. The nymph’s mouth moved slowly, but the words sounded and made sense.
“It’s nothing.”
Angela sucked in a shuddering breath at last. The tunnel grew lighter, and the thing flitted away.
“A dreg,” Lilou said. “Less than a memory. Don’t let it scare you, because if you stay calm, it can’t do you any harm.”
Even before the remnants of the dreg had faded away, Angela shoved forward again toward the opening, and Vince.
Lilou held her back. “He’s drawing us through.”
“He’s running,” Angela said. She could still see Vince in the chair, slumped forward now, barely illuminated by torchlight. “Wounded!”
Lilou shook her head, and then Angela’s view of her beloved was snatched away again as Ballus appeared in the opening. He reached out for Lilou, grasping, and for a second Angela saw only his face. It was a nightmare etched with inhumanity, hunger, and madness, and she knew that she would dream of him forever.
His hands closed around Lilou’s shoulders. Angela swung the metal bar and brought it down onto the monster’s arm, just above his wrist. He roared, and Lilou twisted her way free, falling to the left and shoving Angela aside as she did so. As Angela stumbled back into someone, Lilou fell and rolled, kicking out with her left boot as she came to a crouch.
Ballus was overbalanced and fell half through the opening onto his hands. Lilou’s boot caught him across the cheek with a heavy thud. Something cracked.
He laughed.
Angela stood and lashed out again, the bar ringing from his skull with a dull clang! The impact vibrated up her arm, hurting her shoulder and jarring her neck. She looked past this beast she could hardly believe existed at the man she knew so well, and Vince was struggling in his chair, squirming and writhing as he tried to free himself.
She raised the bar again.
“I’m gone!” a voice shouted from behind Angela. “I’m outta here!” Cliff ran back the way they’d come, dropping the length of wood and quickly disappearing into the darkness.
Fat Frederick pushed past Angela. She staggered and dropped the bar, losing it in the shadows. He stepped closer to Ballus, aimed the gun at the back of his head, and fired.
The bullet ricocheted
from the satyr’s skull and along the tunnel, sparking where it struck.
Angela couldn’t quite see what had happened. It was as if the scene had stuttered, a film with a few missing frames. Ballus was no longer on the ground, but rearing up beside the opening, a monstrous, impossible shape.
These are things that should not be. It was a surprisingly calm thought, and she was filled with a brief, intense certainty that she was about to wake up. She looked through at Vince and he was smiling at her, that lopsided grin she was so used to, and so loved. She’d wake next to him and tell him her dream, and he’d grasp onto the satyr concept and try to prove that she need not imagine one.
Lilou was frozen, standing with both arms twisted back over one shoulder. Something glimmered there. The metal bar that Angela had dropped. Her eyes flickered to Angela, and that single movement made the awful present more real than ever.
Ballus slammed both hands together on either side of Fat Frederick’s head. The gangster raised his arms to deflect them, preventing the creature from crushing his skull, yet he couldn’t stop the impact altogether. The slapping sound was almost gentle. The man crumpled, dropping the gun as his knees gave way and he slumped into the muck.
The satyr laughed, a shrieking sound that drew fingernails across the blackboard of her mind. The gun bounced toward her, and she winced, expecting it to discharge.
As the creature reared over the fallen man, lifting one hooved, hairy leg ready to bring it down on his head, Lilou struck. She had been waiting, Angela realised. Using Fat Frederick as a distraction.
The metal bar whistled through the air as she brought it around with all her strength, connecting with the back of the satyr’s head.
Ballus staggered three steps forward, striking the tunnel wall opposite the opening. The dregs swarmed around him like puppies attending a wounded parent. He whined and grabbed the back of his head. Angela saw his eyes actually swivelling in their sockets, but as Lilou stepped forward again his expression hardened.
He growled.
Another shape appeared in the opening, pale and bloodied.
Vince, she tried to say, but her voice failed to register. He had been so battered and abused that she hardly recognised him. One eye was swollen shut, his mouth leaking blood. More dried blood clotted his hair, his shirt was tattered and torn to reveal the damage done to his torso beneath. His jeans were dark and ripped. His hands were swollen and startlingly white, and around his wrists were bracelets of pouting wounds.
Yet his smile for her remained, and in that she recognised everything she loved. She was ashamed of ever doubting him. The idea of losing him again now, after all that had happened, made her heart grow cold.
Ballus leapt forward, Lilou swung the bar, and they met in a violent impact.
Vince half leapt, half fell, and he had both hands outstretched. A rope or cord trailed from one hand. He landed on Ballus’s back and threw the cord around his neck, pressing close to reach for its other end.
“Lilou, down!” Angela shouted, and the nymph must have understood the urgency in her voice. She slipped from Ballus’s grasp and rolled away, metal bar clang-clanging against the rock.
Vince’s flailing free hand grasped the cord and he swirled it three times, then a fourth, wrapping it around his forearm and then shoving backward, knee pressed hard into Ballus’s back. He screamed. She had never heard such a sound, and never imagined Vince capable of so much rage. It must have scorched his throat. The dregs flowed and twisted around his head, but his scream seemed to drive them away to nothing.
His smile was gone now, his face so set in fury that Angela couldn’t imagine it ever having been there at all.
Ballus tried to reach for him, but he was leaning too far back, all his weight pulling the cord into the satyr’s throat.
Angela glanced at Fat Frederick. He was motionless, and she was surprised at the pity she felt. He might well be a monster himself, but he had an innocent streak, and a passion behind his facade.
She picked up the gun. It was heavier than she’d imagined, and colder.
Lilou stood beside her, wielding the metal bar again.
“Lilou, we’ve got to—”
“Let go!” Lilou shouted. “Vince, jump off!”
Ballus staggered left, then right, hands flailing behind him but not reaching, eyes bulging. It looked to Angela as if Vince had the upper hand, but she also had to place her trust in the strange woman. This was her world, after all.
She pointed the gun.
“Vince!” she shouted.
Ballus crouched low, and she heard the twin shots of his massive goatish knees clicking. In that moment she saw what was about to happen, and she shouted her lover’s name one more time.
Vince let go one end of the cord and slumped to the ground, just as Ballus launched himself upward. He crashed against the tunnel’s ceiling. Dust and grit pattered down, and the satyr was instantly back on his feet. One hand pulled the cord from where it had buried itself in the fur and folds of his neck. The other held his huge, flaccid cock, waving it, and he grinned at Angela.
She pulled the trigger but nothing happened.
Ballus lifted one leg, pivoted backward, and slammed his hoof down. Vince rolled aside, and the hoof struck an inch from his head. Sparks and shards flew.
Angela squeezed the trigger again. Not even a click. She knew nothing about guns.
Vince crawled away from Ballus. Lilou stood with the metal bar raised again, shifting from foot to foot like a dancer. Fat Frederick hadn’t stirred, and Angela thought perhaps he was dead.
“Move again and I’ll shoot!” she shouted. Ballus laughed and stepped toward her. She tugged at the trigger one more time.
* * *
Vince could not understand how he was still moving. The ghosts of his hands reached out, slapped down, and pulled. His left arm still had the cord wrapped around his wrist, sunken into it. His right hand was pale like a landed, gutted fish. The pain was so intense, so prevalent across his body that it was almost numbing. His heart pummeled in rage, the fury seeming to have opened his wounds again, pulsing, bleeding into this hellish underworld.
I saw Angela, he thought, but already that felt like a dream. Maybe those dregs were smothering him again, edging him toward a nightmare-laden unconsciousness where he might remember some good times he had once lived. I saw Angela.
He wasn’t sure where he was anymore. Perhaps still in the chair and imagining all of this. Or on the ground, soaking up the cool dampness of this deep place. Lights danced around him, or they might have been in his head, pulsars of pain.
Ahead of him was only darkness, and it was from here that he sensed something coming.
Something huge.
It drove a breeze before it, a scent-laden wind that reminded him of the pulse of a tube tunnel. The darkness intensified, and whatever came bore a startling gravity.
He ceased crawling, because whatever was behind him, or in front, could not be escaped.
“I saw Angela,” he managed to croak, and he tried to turn to catch one last glimpse of the woman he loved.
She saw him. Her eyes were wide and frightened as she stared, because she felt it, too. Beside her was Lilou, that sweet, bewitching thing he had rescued, but that was part of a life before Ballus, the beast.
The beast was also staring. Not at Vince, but past him, at whatever was coming.
Vince smiled at Angela, and the smile she gave him in return melted the cold anger and agony around his heart. She had come to find him, and fight for him, and he hated himself for every mistake he had made that put her in such danger.
The thing was close. He could smell its forbidden scents, taste its mystery on the air it pushed before it.
Ballus backed up. Lilou reached for him but he kicked her aside, his foot connecting squarely with her chest and powering her back along the tunnel. Then the satyr was through the opening once more, disappearing into the cavern where Vince had been so certain he would die.
The shape passed him by. It might have stepped over him, or might have flowed. Its shadow was warm. He felt the overwhelming desire to reach up and touch whatever this was, but his hands would not obey such commands. It was huge, filling the tunnel and his mind, and he caught Angela’s eye again. She was staring at him, only at him, because to look at this other thing might bring madness.
Vince was already mad, and he looked.
As the creature pushed through the opening after Ballus, crumbling rock as it forced its way, Vince saw how tall it was, how huge. It disappeared as quickly as it had come, and a sound came that pierced him with horrible memories—Ballus laughed, high and wild.
Then screaming, impacts, falling rocks. Rats poured from the room, fleeing the thing that had appeared among them. Many of them rolled and thrashed, dying from shock or fear on the tunnel floor. Ballus’s screech came again, rising into a high-pitched roar.
Whatever the other beast was, it fought in silence.
Angela was by his side, holding him. He tried to speak. All the pain flooded in once more, and he groaned. Darkness pressed in, even though she wielded a torch and tried to light their world. Lilou was there, too, one hand pressed against her chest. But the look on her face was confusing. She looked… guilty.
“We have to go,” she said, and she was strangely calm.
“Oh Vince, oh baby,” Angela said, leaning over to protect him with her body. She held him and it hurt, but he never wanted her to let him go.
“We have to leave,” Lilou said again. Beyond her, Vince saw movement. The man sprawled on the tunnel floor was up on his hands and knees, swaying slowly back and forth and dripping blood.
Angela glanced back and saw, but did not react.
“It’s over,” Lilou said. “We need to leave!”
It didn’t sound over. The screaming continued, the heavy impacts, groans and grunts and shouts. There came a pause, followed by the sound of something huge being crushed, and then the cracking of bones and the spilling of something wet.
“Now!” Lilou said.
“I… can’t move,” Vince said. Even in pain he could remember the smoothness of Lilou’s skin, warm porcelain beneath his fingertips. A rush of shame overwhelmed him, and then a warm flush of love for Angela that he knew he would never lose, no matter what.