The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  (forget that guy, listen to me kid)

  ing at him. The Mariner turned up the stereo and

  STOP WRITING. STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING. GET OUT

  OF THE HOUSE OR

  (keep pulling up the water)

  YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. .EID OT GNIOG ERA UOY

  I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.

  I put the pen’s nib to the paper and

  I AM GOING TO RIP YOU IN HALF AND FUCK YOUR RAW GUTS.

  tried to write. Judy Garland’s soulful, haunting voice was drilling “Over the Rainbow” into my head from the sides, and the yellow-coat man was drilling from the front, and this Hel guy was drilling from the back,

  (left, right, left, left, no, left)

  I AM GOING TO DRAG YOU INTO THE DEEP AND THE DEAD AND THE DARK

  “Somewheeeeerrrrre over the rainbow....”

  AND LICK YOUR WET RED BONES WHILE EVERYONE FORGETS

  YOU EVER EXISTED.

  “Where skies are bluuue....”

  _______

  The tunnel begins to rotate, or perhaps it is gravity getting more comfortable, and the water pours across the bookshelves as Noreen finds herself running across the spines of water-fat tomes. The rushing cavewater threatens to sweep her feet out from under her.

  The thing that is the true form of the unremembered man looms behind her, the Nameless Feaster, gazing down at her with that blazing-hot electric Sauron eye, that great swinging backburner sun.

  The shelf, the books, the walls and all come to an abrupt end. Noreen is running straight at the precipice of a waterfall.

  There is no time to hesitate.

  She leaps without pausing from the edge, and a gargantuan maw slops shut where she had just been. Unspeakably foul ichor splatters across her back.

  YOU CANNOT WIN.

  She lands on her knees and then her stomach, on a steel catwalk brown with age, one leg dangling into space. Blood drips from a deep scrape, a thin flap of skin fileted from her left knee.

  She scrambles to her feet and bolts forward again. The tears in her eyes—she is weeping with terror—stream out of their corners and trickle backwards across her temples.

  Ahead is that citadel again, a misshapen spindle of refuse reaching into the beams of blue-green light that buzz down from holes in the void ceiling.

  She redoubles her efforts even as the catwalk begins to twist in midair.

  The Feaster is devouring it in her wake, the steel screaming, scraping, and spiraling into the nothing beyond the Eye. The railing and the grating come off in sections and whirl away like playing cards in the wind.

  The vacuum of the thing pulls gently at her hair and clothes as she runs, it is so close. The constant trilling drone from the cave-sky is being drowned out now, by the sucking-roaring of the Feaster behind Noreen.

  She is now mere seconds from entering the Spindle. The entrance gapes before her. She can hear her boots echoing inside.

  And then—sorry Charlie, the door slams shut.

  The Tower of Silence

  LUCKILY, NOREEN IS ON THE inside of the door as it shuts. At first, she didn’t make it, and I had to go back and edit her through it, but the words didn’t seem to want to be edited. Something was pulling the other end of the rope, and it was pulling hard.

  Even as I crossed out words and wrote new ones, I found myself writing the same words again, and having to cross them out again. Several times I realized I was scribbling gibberish and had to mark that out as well.

  I looked up at the ghoulish spectre outside the window and shouted, “Stop! Get the hell away from me!”

  He laughed.

  It was a terrible sound, a grating, grinding vibrato that reminded me of bad transmissions and subway trains. EVERYTHING DIES, he said. YOU DIE WE DIE WE ALL DIE FOR ICE CREAM. AHAHAHAHA

  His hideous face fell, and he said with a deadly seriousness, YOU ARE SHIT. YOU ARE A SHIT WRITER AND A SHIT ARTIST. YOU ARE WASTING

  YOUR TIME. THIS ISN’T

  EVEN

  REAL.

  Unbidden, I got a mental image of myself lying curled into the fetal position, somewhere out in the desert all alone. He/I was shaking and drooling a thick foam, his/my sightless eyes gazing at the backs of his/my upper eyelids. The sun had risen in full, and was beginning to turn the hardpan sand into a griddle.

  Even then, sitting there at the card table in the House of Water, I could feel the heat of it. Sweat sheeted down my face and back, funnelling into the crack of my ass and hanging from the tip of my nose.

  FORGOTTEN AND ALONE.

  you try so hard to be the strong one, boy. You always have.

  you push the world away, neglecting your friends and loved ones, you self-serving, condescending piece of shit, and you break yourself trying to prove you’re better than what you think your family, your friends see in you.

  you think you’re a “lone wolf”, but all you are is a scared little boy trying to tell himself that since his daddy didn’t need him, nobody needs him.

  for what? Cry it out, bitch.

  it all comes to naught in the end. Give up and walk away.

  you don’t have to be strong anymore. You will be forgotten no matter how hard you work...no matter how hard you try.

  (I am your father’s muse, Ross. Listen to me,) said Hel Grammatica. The Silen’s raspy voice was as clear as a bell. (Ignore him. I can’t keep this up for long, I’m really pushing)

  BE GONE, WATER-CARRIER, roared the other, the Unremembered Man, the Feaster. His voice was like a roach on a wedding cake.

  (my voice to you right now, but if you can get her to the top of the tower of silence, everything will be okay. I’m down here waiting. I’ve got the others with me, Sawyer and Walter, they’re okay. You can’t save everybody but if you can get us out of the Void, we can work on finding the T—)

  The house around me shimmered, and I could see through the walls into a bright and rainless expanse. The Formica of the table under my forearms began to disintegrate and grow gritty with sand, and also hot. I could hear the rustling of wind-blown desert brush over the Sea of Dreams.

  The rope in my hands slipped, and I panicked, reaching for it.

  A terrifying, ripping screech startled me. A blotch appeared on the paper.

  I hadn’t even realized the Mariner had changed the vinyl on the turntable—the strains of The Beatles’ “Come Together” thumped out of the headphones now. The sweat-drop on my nose fell on the bottom end of the paper like a signature, blurring the ink-spot (set the world on fire!).

  The desert reeled away from me like a drop of dish-soap in a bowl of pepper and water, leaving me sitting at the table with my feet (in wet sand / on floorboards).

  I used the song’s rotary-phone backbeat as a handle to anchor myself and put the pen to the paper again.

  _______

  The inside of the spindle is a depthless black, only pierced by a shimmering shaft of light, the blue-green of the ocean, that comes down through a hole in a low ceiling. It’s so dark in here that the column is almost a solid thing, a rotating obelisk of ice confined to the space in the center of the round room.

  The pulsating thrum is unbearable here. It emanates from the light, a wheedling, harrowing drumbeat that reverberates in the massive room, rolling around the hollow walls like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.

  It is nothing compared to the stench permeating the air, a filthy, raunchy smell that reminds Noreen of both french fries and roadkill.

  It is nothing compared to the constant metallic creaking and snapping thundering from the walls as they groan in the agony of stress.

  The entire tower sounds as if it is being slowly twisted to pieces.

  She feels instinctively for a light switch, and she’s touched the wall before it occurs to her what an exercise in futility that is. She finds the unmistakable smooth surface of polished metal, and for some reason, it is greasy, as if coated in lard.

  The floor is a catwalk of steel grating, as slimy as the wall but the texture
of the grill provides grip.

  She feels her way around the room, keeping her eyes on the light for perspective. It spills through a deep funnel in the center of the floor, and grows stronger as Noreen circumnavigates the wall.

  When she returns to the side where she came in, she freezes in terror and confusion.

  The door is gone.

  That’s when she sees that the floor has become the same smooth steel as the walls. Her second epiphany is that the tower is rotating, very slowly, like a gigantic auger drilling into the floor of the void, and she is walking up the thread of the auger’s screw.

  She is climbing the inside of a huge screw-conveyor, and it is moving in reverse, drilling into the rock like an oil-platform.

  Bones lay in haphazard sorts across the floor here. Some of them are locked into restraining cuffs mounted on the wall like tools on a pegboard. As she watches, a human skull buzzes across the steel, carried by the vibrations of the tower, and topples clattering into the hole in the middle of the room.

  Another bone follows it—a long, knobby femur—and then another, a curving rib-bone. A skirl of terror whips through Noreen as she understands, setting her scalp on edge.

  The walls are greasy because they are dripping with adipocere.

  Corpse-fat.

  A pelvis falls from the hole in the ceiling and strikes the side of the pit, shattering like a ceramic gravy-boat. The shards flash white and then they’re gone into the deep and the dark.

  She follows the curve of the climb with her eyes, and she’s able to make out human skeletons locked into cuffs. They are queued endlessly around the interior wall into the darkness at the apex of the curve, gradually shaken apart at the joints as they make their way downward into the depths of the abyss.

  They swing free on bands of rotten ligament and tumble like pickup sticks into the pit.

  “Oh Jesus God,” says Noreen, wiping her hands on her clothes.

  She keeps talking to herself, mumbling ecclesiastical names as she ventures onward and upward into the upper reaches of the Tower of Silence.

  As she goes, the bones lining the walls become less and less defined.

  Blow-flies crawl across ragged strips of leathery fiber. Grinning skulls gradually turn into the gaping, gore-eyed Edvard Munch screams of train-station mummies, their taut skin shrink-wrapped by death and thirst.

  Each corpse is less deteriorated than the last, but only just.

  The longer Noreen walks, the brighter the light gets, until the room is the frigid blue of sunlight filtering through the non-Euclidean frozen shapes of Arctic waters. It’s as if she is walking around and around the inside of a Zoroastrian dakhma hermetically sealed under the North Atlantic ice.

  An hour into the climb, the parade of shackled bones encircling her become shriveled and hoary bags of bulbous angles. Their desiccated brown eyeballs dangle in sockets like olives in knot-holes; their arms are drawn to their chests, some as if they died begging, some in protective affect.

  She keeps her face averted. Tears have begun to stream down her face in earnest.

  She can hear groans from somewhere up above. Most of them are in a language Noreen doesn’t speak: gutteral, exhausted, nonsensical rambling, barely audible over the beating-fluttering pulsation of the spindle.

  The sounds of life stir her out of her anguish, propel her up the fat-slimed metal spiral, past the motionless scarecrows...until she sees the first of them. A man hangs from the wall-shackles, bristling with long locks of grimy, gray-gone hair.

  His eyes glitter in the pits of his eye-sockets, and his sunken cheeks cling to his greening teeth.

  “Help,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Please.”

  A woman dangling next to him hears, and gazes at Noreen with rheumy eyes. “Per favore, lasciami uscire.”

  _______

  I sat back in the chair and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, my temples throbbing. The Sea of Dreams washed ashore before me, inky and thick, like the cast-off of an oil-spill. Even the words from the ink pen stood up from the paper. As it dried, I could run my fingertips across it and feel the ink protruding from the paper, like Braille.

  “What is this?”

  The Mariner lifted one of my headphones and said, “Keep your pen on the page and your eyes on the sea. Keep pulling.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, looking up at his seashore eyes.

  “You have found her, now go and get her,” sang the Beatles.

  His face was grim. “He’s in the house with us.”

  Normand chanced a fire. The smoke curled from the half-dead embers, mixing with the eternal fog that engulfed this cursed land. He looked around at the ruins surrounding him, a building that had once been sleek and utilitarian. Even in ancient disrepair, it was obvious that in its own time, the structure had been exponentially more advanced and comfortable than anything in Ain.

  He was beginning to understand just how long the Antargata k-Setra had been here, dying in this half-sunned netherworld. Whole civilizations had come and gone before he and everything he’d known had even been born.

  He curled up on the demolished sofa and tried to catch some sleep before continuing, but his thoughts were, as always, plagued with worry about the events taking place back home. He hoped he was not too late.

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 7 (unfinished) “The Gunslinger and the Giant”

  The Goat-Fish

  SHE PICKS UP A FEMUR AND hammers the man’s shackles with it, trying to break them. The left one’s cotterpin cracks in half and slides out; his arm free, the emaciated prisoner sets to freeing his other arm and then the woman next to him.

  Before Noreen can pardon any of the others, however, she hears one last burst from the voice in our heads.

  (It’s harsh, but you’re going to have to leave them to their own devices. We may not be able to save them, but if we can get out, we can prevent the Feaster from bringing any more of them down here. Just get yourself to the—)

  The girl understands, even though the transmission fails. She starts running.

  The floor is no longer slick with decay, so there’s no more reason to be cautious. The men and women cuffed to the wall cry out for release in a hundred different languages as she sprints past them, but there’s nothing she can do but hope they can free themselves. The regret is a swelling knot in her chest.

  Not all of the shackled are human; some of them seem to be Tekyr, some of them are Iznoki, some of them are even the shadowy, white-masked Bemo-Epneme of K-Set. Some of them are of some species Noreen doesn’t even recognize, and they plead in languages she’s never known; she realizes that they are the citizens of other worlds alien even to Destin.

  The Tower of Silence is a place of sacrifice, she can see now; it is filled with abductees from myriad planes of existence, thousands of people from a hundred storied worlds fed rotting to the unseen thing under the rock.

  There is something going on here, deeper and larger than she’d ever expected. The Feaster’s master schemes to devour the whole of existence, and someone—or something—is giving it the leeway to do so.

  Her mind is occupied with deduction when she hears a voice and halts in her tracks.

  “Baby!” exclaims Sawyer.

  He is cuffed to the inner wall of the tower; just above, the top of the massive dakhma opens onto the dark elements. A dazzling beam of blue-green light swords down from some point high above, filling the tower with luminescence.

  She can see over the parapet and it chills her to realize that the other beams of light she has been seeing since emerging from the well end in towers just like this one. It is an endless dark forest of neglect and obscurity. Spearing up from the shadowscape are thousands of black death-spires screwing into the rock, feeding forgotten people from countless worlds to the Feaster’s ancient master.

  In this instant, she understands what’s happening.

  She is underneath the Vur Ukasha, in the Void-Between-The-Worlds, and something—the
thing suckling at the towers as they drill the dead through the rock—is down here, waiting, preparing itself, getting ready to surface.

  “It’s about time,” someone says, snapping her out of her reverie.

  Noreen turns to see a short little man, half her own height, and slender, with pink skin and piercing golden eyes. Tiny goat-horns jut from the crown of his bald head, and he’s grinning. Tiny puppy-teeth shine white in the glow of the beam.

  “Nice to meet you,” says Hel Grammatica, the Silen and muse of Edward Richard Brigham. “Normie’s gonna be ecstatic that you’re all three in Destin. Remind me to send Ross a Christmas card. Now could you kindly get us out of these cuffs?”

  _______

  The study door slammed shut with a hollow bang; I spun in my chair to see the Mariner leaning against it. Tendrils of shadow snaked around the edges of the door, licking like tongues of black flame, and I could hear it rattling softly in the frame. Ink’s Swarovski crystal glass glittered with sweat on the windowsill.

  I turned back to my task, but I could hear him cursing the being behind the door.

  Looking down at the pen-rope, I got an idea.

  I let go of it, and it began to wash back into the Sea of Dreams.

  Noreen smashes the cuff with the knob of the femur. To her dismay and shock, they both break into pieces at the same time. Hel swings free, dangling by one pink wrist.

  “Well, it’s a start,” he says, and grabs his forearm with his free hand. The tattered gray robe tied around his waist flutters in the breeze as he braces himself and sticks one of his goat-horns into the keyhole of his remaining shackle.

  The shimmering light extinguishes, and then flares to life again.

  They look up and see that clouding overhead is an obscene stormfront of writhing black feelers, and at the forefront of that clicking-billowing-thrashing is the burning yellow god-Eye.