by Tom Fletcher
They saw people watching them: bald, pale people with sharp teeth and crooked smiles who stood in the mud and stared. Their clothes were ragged with swamp-rot, and rashes and sores covered their flesh. The odd figure was sitting cross-legged on platforms amongst the tree. Some had extra mouths or eyes. They saw one woman leaning out of a treehouse window who vomited a shower of tiny frogs into their path. ‘Sorry,’ she called down, her voice broken. ‘Too many in – in here.’ After they passed they heard her vomit again, and the frogs chittering as they plopped into the swamp. One night they heard splashing from behind them and turned to see a wild-haired man running in their direction; his arms terminated not in hands but in misshapen glass lumps. His wrists were semi-transparent, something between glass and flesh: you could see bones and blood in them. The man starting laughing hysterically once they’d turned to him, and waved his arms in the air.
‘See?’ Churr said. ‘Magic.’
‘The corruption?’ Alan asked.
Nora nodded. ‘I think so,’ she said.
‘Will it corrupt us?’
Alan had wondered at Spider and Churr’s strange behaviour during the journey on the raft; perhaps that had been the corruption at work. Neither of them had acknowledged it, so it was difficult to talk about. Maybe they were unaware of it. Maybe he too had been behaving strangely, and was equally unaware. He remembered Nora telling him to stop muttering …
They saw no snails as big as the one that had crested the rooftop the night Alan met Churr, but they saw colossal empty shells, some of which had been turned into homes. The trees were bigger now too, and they did see a slug the size of a motorcycle, wearing an empty saddle. They found half-submerged cages that looked empty until you got too close, and then a crocodile would burst from the swamp, growling and snapping against the metal bars. Thick vines hung from the branches around them. Sometimes they could hear hissing, and at night the insect sounds were loud and sleeping was difficult. They took turns to watch for attackers, human or otherwise.
Churr started to find plenty of targets for her crossbow: bright birds and fat little rat-things that jumped from tree to tree. She kept the colourful feathers to fletch the new bolts that filled the quiver. And Nora found chubby purple grubs – you couldn’t just pull them from the tree because they’d stick fast, but if you tickled their backs they’d just fall right off. Nora and Churr ate them alive, juices running down their chins, the grubs’ bodies wriggling from between their lips, but Alan couldn’t bring himself to. Nora squeezed the grubs over Eyes’ mouth. ‘These are rich,’ she said, ‘sustaining. They’re good for him – good for all of us.’
Once Nora shot at a flash of white darting in between the trees and came back with a large white long-haired cat. It didn’t have any mud or dirt on it at all. Everybody looked at it mutely.
‘I don’t think we should eat this,’ Spider said eventually, and the others all agreed.
Soon they realised that they were not the only ones travelling in that direction. The man with glass hands was one of them, and there were others, shaking so badly that they could only walk very slowly. Their limbs shuddered and their features twitched and they kept falling over. Others had less strange problems: lesions, body wounds, stomach problems. They came across dead bodies, slowly being claimed by the flora and fauna of the swamp.
One morning they met a girl with thin tendrils growing from her scalp, entwined with her hair. Her skin was dyed dark green, and she had the subdermal facial implants of a worshipper at the Dome of the Toad. ‘What is your ailment?’ she asked them, in a high, clear voice.
‘None,’ Alan replied. ‘Our friend here is injured, but otherwise we suffer no ailments.’
The girl’s eyes brightened. ‘Then where are you going? Do you know why we’re here?’
‘We’re looking for Dok,’ Alan said. ‘What do you mean, do we know why we’re here?’
‘Many of us do not know,’ the girl said, and indicated the forest at large, through which many travellers could now be seen. ‘We are drawn, but we do not know where. We wake up in the morning and something in us compels us to travel. It looks like those of us who suffer are compelled to travel to the same place.’
‘Those of you who suffer … ailments?’
‘Yes.’ The girl ran a hand through her hair. The tendrils writhed and she flinched. ‘Not usual ailments.’
The gutwood was increasingly busy with the ailing. There were people from communities that Alan recognised, like the girl from the Dome of the Toad, and hermits with their shell homes on their backs. There were perhaps more Glasstowners than any other type. There were bikers who’d obviously long since abandoned their vehicles; they plodded along, shades pushed up onto their foreheads, tripping over their beards and struggling to carry their own weight, and even the occasional resident from Wha House, recognisable by the distinctive hairstyle they were obliged to adopt if they wanted to stay there. Not all of them displayed a visible affliction, but their eyes were all feverishly bright and burning.
‘The source of the corruption is close now,’ Nora said, after two more days. The gutwood was almost as crowded as Market Top and the swamp, which had always smelled bad, was now thick with the dead and the dying, the bones and bodily fluids, and the air was increasingly difficult to breathe. But the trees were thinning out, and through them could be seen an expanse of space, and even some light – not just luminescence, but actual light, coming down from above.
And sure enough, soon they were free of the forest. The open expanse turned out to be marsh: black water, rotting wood and tufty grass. A network of wooden boards laid across it was jammed with people making their way towards something large, dark and bulbous. A thin mist cloaked everything.
Alan looked at Nora, and she nodded. ‘It’s in there,’ she said. She looked unwell. ‘A great sickness in the spirit is in there.’
They joined the queue and shuffled along the boards. Even here there were bodies: people who’d slipped or fallen or been pushed into the marsh, just left there. Some were fresh, some were just bones, many displaying signs of illness: skulls with more eye-sockets than usual, skulls with horns, hands with thick, bristling clusters of finger bones; skeletons of unusual size and arrangement.
‘This is it,’ Churr whispered. ‘This is where everybody comes when they’ve fallen through – when they’ve fallen right down, all the way through all of the levels, all the way down through Gleam, right to the very bottom. The bottom of the world.’
‘I suppose there might be others like us,’ Alan said, ‘people who chose to come here.’
‘Do we know that we chose?’ Spider said.
Nobody answered him.
‘There,’ Alan said, later, after the party had progressed a little. ‘Daunt’s people. See? Over there, not on the next path, but the one beyond that? Wearing the mushroom?’ They were dressed like the mushroom gatherers that Nora had killed. ‘The mushrooms must be inside, then,’ he said. ‘We haven’t missed them.’
‘Of course we haven’t bloody missed them,’ Churr snapped. ‘Some of us have been keeping our eyes open.’
The looming shape resolved itself into a building or, at least, the top of a building. It was a great dome, the rest of which had been swallowed by the swamp, and the boards all converged into a wooden walkway that ran around its circumference. From the walkway, steps had been carved into the dome, leading to a large hole. Alan suspected it hadn’t been part of the original building’s design; it was too jagged and ugly – not that the dome itself was pretty, because it wasn’t. It was made of something smooth, grey and featureless.
‘The original structure,’ Nora said.
‘You think there’s something in there other than sick people?’ Alan asked.
‘There’s something in there. Definitely.’
‘Not anything that’s particularly houseproud,’ Spider said. ‘Nothing that fancies cleaning up this mess.’ He prodded at a corpse lying in the sucking mud with his foot.
/> Alan spun around at the sound of a baby crying, but there were lots of babies and children being carried along the boards by harried parents, and when he listened more closely, there was a whole tapestry of baby cries winding through the general hubbub. The noise had accreted at such a slow pace that he hadn’t really noticed, but now he could hear babies crying, children wailing, the murmur of hundreds of low conversations and individuals talking to themselves, the occasional shout or scream as somebody’s pain became too great for them to contain. These were people in sorry states indeed, but they weren’t ill with diseases that Alan had encountered before. All of these people were suffering from wild, weird afflictions that appeared to have only one thing in common: they had compelled their sufferers here, to Dok.
Some had little to no control over their bodies or bodily functions. Others had bits visibly missing, or clutched at their bodies like they were missing something internally. Sometimes there were wounds, sometimes there were smooth, bloodless holes – one woman had a perfect circle cut out of her middle so that you could see through her, and yet she was staggering along, still alive. There was a little boy with a forest of long, sharp spines growing from his back, wincing as if every footstep hurt. A whole family couldn’t stop blue fluid pouring from their noses. An enormous man had a tiny version of himself sitting on his shoulder, and then Alan noticed an even smaller copy tucked into his shirt pocket.
Some of these were not afflictions; ‘conditions’ might be a better description, or – and the word came to Alan unbidden – effects. But the effects of what?
Eventually it was their turn to climb the ladder. Nora went first, and then Alan, who carried Eyes on his back. Eyes was still breathing, but shallowly now, and his face was emaciated. He was much easier to carry than he had been, so much weight had he lost. Spider followed Alan, and Churr came last.
Alan had no idea what to expect when he crested the broken edge, but even so, he was momentarily stunned.
The first thing was the smell. It was not the swamp stink that had permeated everything for days on end now, but something earthy, pungent and rich. It made him hungry. Then the sight: he was looking down into something as busy and intricate as an ants’ nest, except that the tiny grey things hurrying around beneath him were not insects, but people: bald men and women wearing uniform dark robes, their hems sweeping along walkways made of wood or platforms that were … they were mushrooms, Alan saw: large, flat mushrooms growing from the interior walls of the structure. The walls were liberally scattered with torches that burned and shed good light, and much of the stone and wood itself was luminous with what he presumed were some other kinds of fungus.
There was no swamp in here, though the building was tall – or, rather, deep – and obviously extended far below the level of the swamp surface, so the swamp must be pressing in all around. All those tons of sludge: the very thought of it made Alan cold. There was fluid running down the walls, and long green streaks of slimy lichen. The wooden walkways spiralled down round the interior, spanning the gaps between the giant mushrooms, all the way down to the distant bottom, where – Alan squinted to see properly – it looked as if a massive white tent gently inhaled and exhaled. He knew that didn’t really make sense, but that was the impression that he had. And then he realised that he could hear it. As the white thing expanded and collapsed, there was a sound like breathing, except … except it was almost musical, like the sound of air passing through a squeezebox. He could see people going in and out of the white thing, and judged that it was about the size of a large house. He suddenly felt vertiginous.
‘What the fuck is this?’ he said, but Nora shook her head and no one else said a word.
They clambered down a ladder and dropped down onto a wooden platform that mirrored the one on the outside. Spider and Churr were behind them. From here, they could go down to the left, or one that led to the right. Alan was so busy trying to absorb it all that he missed the figure standing right in front of him.
‘Greetings,’ said a smiling woman wearing a clean grey robe, ‘my name is Ippil. Welcome to Dok.’
‘Thank you,’ Alan said uncertainly.
‘What are your symptoms?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘With what are you suffering?’
‘I’m not – I’m not ill.’
‘Your friend, the one on your back. You came with him? What are his symptoms?’
‘Um – his eyes are gone. He’s blind. But recently he got an infection and it’s bad, it’s got into him deep. He won’t wake up.’
‘Well then, you brought him to the right place. We will take him from you and do what we can.’ Ippil gestured to another woman standing next to a trolley, who came and helped Alan lift Eyes onto it. She wrapped a blanket round him and went to take him away.
‘Wait,’ Alan said, ‘where’s she taking him?’
‘The Sanctuary,’ Ippil replied, waving the woman with the trolley away. ‘The creature below.’
‘What?’
‘The Pale Goddess. The Sanctuary. The Giving Beast.’ Ippil pointed. ‘The big mushroom at the bottom.’
Other travellers were constantly arriving on the platform and being dispatched to the left or the right by people in robes. Mostly, like Eyes, they were being directed leftwards.
Alan looked down at the Sanctuary. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘We are the Pilgrims,’ Ippil said. She opened her arms wide. ‘This is where we’re led, and this is where we stay. Now, if you came in order to bring your friend and you yourselves are not ill, then you take the right hand path. But first, hold out your arms.’
Alan looked at Nora, who nodded, and the four of them held their arms out straight in front of them.
Ippil walked along the row, carefully studying their hands. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’re okay.’ She smiled again. ‘You can go now.’
Alan set off before Ippil could change her mind, though he wanted to know why she had checked their hands. She made him uneasy.
‘We’re not safe here,’ Nora whispered, as they followed the spiral down. ‘I can feel it. It’s down there.’ She pointed down towards the Sanctuary. ‘The corruption.’
‘That’s it? The Giving Beast?’
‘No. It is deeper than that. But not much.’ She looked around for Churr, and then took her hand and the two of them walked on together.
‘The corruption,’ Alan said. ‘Are you starting to get the feeling that that’s what we came for?’
PART THREE
24
The Giving Beast
On their way down they noticed Pilgrims dangling from ropes, gently plucking outlandish-looking mushrooms from the walls. They placed their spoils gently into muslin bags that they then dropped over their shoulders into open backpacks. They worked with practised ease, quickly and confidently, never dropping a thing. Churr and Nora exchanged glances, and Alan thought he knew why. The backpacks were the same as the ones Daunt’s mushroom gatherers had been carrying. Maybe Daunt’s gatherers are not truly gatherers, he thought. Maybe ‘thieves’ was a better word for them.
The deeper they went, the more the fungi, Alan noted, but the wall within reach of the walkway was completely harvested – presumably so that visitors or patients could not help themselves. Obviously the Pilgrims knew they were potent, or valuable. Maybe Daunt’s gatherers were not even thieves – perhaps they had just come here and bought them. Alan’s lip curled. So much for the brave explorers!
But he was jumping ahead. He didn’t know how it worked yet, and more importantly, he still hadn’t spotted any of the pale green caps that he’d come for, though he’d seen every other colour under the sun, and a fair few that he suspected could only be found down here, far, far away from the sun: bright reds, ill greens, rich purples, stinging yellows, glowing whites, shiny blacks, strange pointed things and low, flat ones. There were big, bulbous, powdery puffballs that were mostly coloured orange-brown; masses of tiny bats swarmed around them, flicking out lo
ng tongues to gather the powder. Alan didn’t know much about mushrooms, other than their effects when ingested, but that struck him as unusual.
Churr was almost salivating. ‘There!’ she whispered, just about resisting the urge to point. ‘Look: old Green’s teeth! And there, spirit wings! Tunnellers! Dream-meat! Toadhats!’
‘Stop it,’ Alan hissed. ‘They’ll think we’ve come thieving!’
‘Any idea how many bugs all this could fetch? A fucking mountain! Why doesn’t Daunt just march on down here and take it? That’s what I’d do. That’s what I will do.’
‘I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t do it until after I’ve got what I want.’
‘I’m not sure that was the deal, was it?’
‘Just …’ Alan fell silent.
‘I really do bring out the cock in you, don’t I?’
‘Doesn’t take much, to be fair,’ Alan muttered. ‘It’s pretty close to the surface.’
Nobody spoke.
‘Might want to rephrase that,’ Spider suggested.
‘Shut up,’ Alan said as Nora giggled. ‘All of you, shut up.’
They descended the rest of the way in silence.
*
They were met at the bottom of the walkway by an older Pilgrim who’d done a bad job of shaving his head and had a couple of missing teeth. He introduced himself as Weddle as he gave them a thorough look up and down.
‘So, you’re here with a sick friend, yes?’
‘Oh,’ Alan said, ‘yes. Yes, that’s right.’
‘Yes, yes. Very well. Yes, then, if you’d like to follow me, I will show you to your rooms.’ He gave a little bow and hurried off. He was small, but he moved quickly.
‘Our rooms?’ Alan said, following. ‘But we don’t have any bugs—’
‘Yes, no, well, we don’t use bugs here,’ Weddle said.
‘Then how do you know how long we can stay?’
Weddle turned, looking confused. ‘You will stay until your friend is better, yes?’