“Here…here…here…” the dead bodies instructed.
With a silent swell of relief, I realized the clown king had stopped walking. The cloud of shadow billowing around him began to dissipate. He stood slightly hunched over at the front of the altar with the pile of corpses at his feet and the hanged body still swinging over his head, waiting for me.
“Tscharia,” the corpses told me.
Weary, I approached the altar. What else could I do?
No matter what I’ve told you before or what I tell you hereafter in this account, I assure you that I’ve never been more scared in my life than in that moment, and I can’t imagine any scenario where I ever will be again.
Yet I limped on anyway, because that’s what fleet soldiers are taught to do. Keep marching, one foot in front of the other, come Hell or high water. I had the Hell part taken care of, but I could have done with a wave of high, fresh water right about then. Drowning didn’t sound so bad. Comparatively.
GATEWAY
The sculpture hadn’t disappeared. I figured that meant the clown must not have been in the cathedral the whole time, and if he had, it was up among the balconies like I’d initially suspected. The idea that he might have been channeled through the sculpture itself somehow and yet remained physically separate only occurs to me now, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense. People all over the universe worship relics and talismans based on the idea that some measure of power is contained within the objects. I wouldn’t be surprised if that belief was a reality on Furnace. The clown king was worshipped through blood and souls, after all, so by all accounts of black magic and the Old Testament, his power was sufficient to manifest through the icons of the macabre rituals. He could have materialized from any piece of the cathedral at any time.
When I reached the last row of pews before the altar, I stopped walking and bit my lip. I couldn’t force myself any closer to the demon. His hot breath hit me from fifteen feet away and was punctuated by the smells of rot and infection that comprised his physical form in lieu of bones and sinew. His black eyes bore heavily down on me. His razor-toothed mouth was drawn back in a snarl. I didn’t need to venture any closer to know he could kill me with a flick of his wrist.
Steeling myself, I cleared my throat and asked the question I’d decided most important. “Why am I here?” I said.
“Here…here…here…” the corpses mocked.
Neither my question nor the obedient prayers of his acolytes had any effect on the clown king of Tscharia, however. He hissed sharply, though not in a particularly menacing way. It was still terrifying. His voice somehow managed a grinding squeal and throaty growl simultaneously. The sort of voice that rattles you from the boots to the eyeballs.
It was obvious within moments that he didn’t intend on answering the question.
Maybe you’re not asking the right one, I thought.
Either way, I couldn’t allow the silence to stretch any longer. I figured the more I engaged him, the greater chance I had to survive. If silence persisted and he decided he wasn’t getting what he wanted from me, there was a strong possibility he would torture me out of sheer boredom.
“How do I get home?” I asked.
It was a desperate question and I didn’t expect him to answer it. How would he know what I had to do to get back? As far as I could tell, he didn’t even know what galaxy I came from, let alone which individual planet. Still, I had to ask it on the slim chance that he’d brought me, specifically, to the planet for a reason, not just marked me for torment once we crossed paths. I shuddered to think what my purpose could possibly be within his greater plan, but if it got me home, I was willing to hear him out.
Once again, though, he didn’t answer, so it was a moot point.
I couldn’t stop talking anyway. I didn’t know what silence meant.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“Tscharia…Tscharia…Tscharia…” the corpses whispered in unison.
Still, the clown king said nothing. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the perpetual half-grin, half-sneer he wore across his rotting lips had deepened with each question I posed.
I was just about ready to give up when he took a sudden, jittery step forward like his whole body had been rocked with electricity. Maybe it was just poorly controlled rage. Maybe hunger. I shuffled back toward the door, knowing there was no way I’d reach it in time if he decided to rush me. I also knew I had to continue filling the silence, but none of my questions had worked so far and I was running low on mental ammunition.
Keep trying.
“What is this place?” I asked quickly. “What is Tscharia?”
He stopped walking and tilted his head to the side.
“Here…here…here…” the voices said.
With slow, haunting grace, the clown king pointed toward the sculpture. I didn’t need to ask whether or not he wanted me to approach it.
“Tscharia.”
I glanced back at him warily. I couldn’t decide whether or not I should trust him. Once I was convinced he wouldn’t snatch me up before I obeyed his order, I stepped out from the aisle and approached the right side of the altar. The sculpture stared down at me in solemn appraisal. It was only a journey of about fifteen steps, but it felt like a thousand. I’m sure the clown king made it that way just to watch me squirm. Even under the most mundane of circumstances on Furnace, he still wanted to see me suffer. Suffering, after all, was the most precious commodity on the planet.
“Here…here…here…” the corpses chimed in.
“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped. It was pointless, but it felt good. I was tired of hearing them drone on, especially now that they’d been safely pinned away from me.
At some point while the cloud of shadow had enveloped the altar, the head of the sculpture had been reattached. The line where it had split was still visible. When I reached out and tapped its brow, driven by a foreign compulsion which I can only surmise was forced upon me by the clown king, it fell backward again. This time, it completely shattered on the floor.
I turned back to the demon with mild trepidation, wondering whether or not he would be outraged that I’d desecrated his likeness. His stare was so weighted and intense that my stomach churned, but he didn’t appear any more or less agitated than he had been before.
“What do you want me to see?” I asked, averting my eyes and trying to make it seem like I’d only done so because I was interested in the sculpture itself. Not because he terrified me, in other words.
In response, a cloud of gray smoke floated out from the sculpture’s neck, drifting towards me with an oddly familiar smell. I leaned carefully over the throne for a closer look.
At first, I couldn’t make sense of the shapes beneath the fog, but my eyes gradually focused on a rectangular shadow that seemed close enough to touch. The opening was dark even when the smoke began to clear, but even so, I knew a stone staircase when I saw one. I also knew it couldn’t be a stone staircase leading down from the neck of the sculpture. There wasn’t enough room and the floor beneath me was solid.
I stared into the darkness for a few moments, trying to decide what I was expected to do next. Now that I’d bought what time I could, I wanted to avoid interacting with the clown as much as possible, and that meant keeping questions to myself. However, once it became apparent that I couldn’t figure it out on my own (I couldn’t see anything but the steps themselves, after all, and there was no way I could fit through the neck of the sculpture to descend), I was forced to seek clarification.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”
With a crooked grin which could have easily been mistaken for a grimace, the clown king pointed back to the sculpture.
I shrugged, uncomprehending, and reached an arm down the sculpture’s throat. I rotated my wrist, checking to see if there was anything within reach of my fingertips. An artifact. A scroll. Anything that might have some arcane significance to this arcane culture I’d stumbl
ed upon. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a great idea to stick an extremity into utter darkness anywhere on Furnace. But nothing would have been able to drag me through the opening, I assured myself, and if something unfathomable actually could have, the contortions necessary to compact me down to size would have killed me before I met whatever lurked in the shadows. I’d probably lose an arm at worst, and the alternative was crawling back to the mercy of the clown king.
As I searched around the top two steps, though, the sculpture began to melt around me. Slowly at first, and then so quickly that I had to withdraw my hand and leap backward to avoid the burning liquid.
Within moments, the throne was empty. The melted remnants of whatever alien element the natives used for sculpting was rapidly cooling into a paste over the seat. The throne itself was still intact, having been made of harder stuff (maybe gold) than the sculpture. A lever had appeared at the back. How I could no longer see the staircase with the statue gone was beyond me, but I didn’t ask any more questions. In fact, I was done asking questions for a long time.
Without hesitation, I pulled the lever and the seat of the throne creaked forward, dropping with a loud clap against the hollow base.
“Here…here…here…” the voices groaned.
I glanced back at the clown king one last time. His wide, mischievous grin spurred me down the steps so quickly that I nearly took my own head off ducking into the darkness.
“Tscharia,” he said. His voice echoed after me down the narrow stairway. “Wherever you go, I will find you.”
A wild panic gripped me. Something like claustrophobia, except in reality, it was the need to descend further into the confined space. Anything to get away from the clown king before he decided instruction from afar wasn’t enough and he had to give me a hands-on lesson to make sure I saw things his way. I could still hear the voices of the corpse-chorus raising exaltations to their deity and briefly worried that they would follow. What if I wasn’t supposed to go down the stairway, I thought? What if I’d fucked everything up and now they were going to make me pay for it?
Before I could digest the idea of crawling back into the evil cathedral, however, the seat slammed back into place and I was suddenly alone in total darkness. Comforting darkness. At least in the darkness, I realized, I wouldn’t have to see death coming. I wouldn’t have to behold whichever deformed creature finally ended me. I supposed that alone was worthy of celebration, but I also supposed I might as well attempt to find the bottom of the stairs while I waited. The urgency I’d felt to return to the Hummel had all but disappeared, but I still preferred to make it back. In one piece, if it could be helped. The only logical progression, therefore, was to keep pushing on until I either hit a dead end or found my way to the fleet ship at the bottom of the crater.
So I kept going, running my hands along close, damp walls that stank of heat and sulfur. It was easy to keep straight because the path never deviated. I only felt whispering creatures brush past me a handful of times through the whole walk. I was too tired to care.
I couldn’t see anything in the cramped tunnel aside from a few shadows here and there which were either a degree brighter or duller than the perpetual darkness. It took about forty-five minutes before the familiar smells started hitting me, though I failed to place them right away. It wasn’t until the familiar sounds started up that I realized where I was going, and then the psychological torment began in earnest.
My mind became fixated on the steady, maddening drip of liquid on a hard surface. After a while, I sort of tuned it out, though it continued to register in the periphery of my thoughts. I repeatedly caught myself matching rhythms to it in my head. There’s another definition of insanity for you: humming along with the drip of liquid in a pitch-black underground tunnel (which may well have been sealed on both ends) on an alien planet with an army of demons above me. I guess that’s a little long-winded for Merriam Webster.
As soon as I realized where I’d wandered, however, the sound died abruptly in my throat. In its place, I heard the unmistakable, ambient growl of a spaceship. I guess I’d been smelling the lubricants and oils and electrical casings for a while, but it wasn’t until I heard the familiar thrum of energy somewhere in the distance that I was able to place it.
A ship, I thought, my heart rising cautiously in my chest. Maybe I will get the hell out of here, after all.
I wasn’t convinced quite yet, but it was the first time I’d felt genuine hope since leaving Europa. As I ventured deeper and deeper into the ground and the temperature rose to nearly unbearable levels, though, suspicion started growing faster than hope and eventually strangled it completely.
Whose ship is this? I wondered.
If it was underground with the entire decrepit city built atop it, the chances that it would ever unbury itself and be spaceworthy again were nil. I didn’t think it was the crashed ship of an alien species in the corpse fields, either. I couldn’t imagine their vessels pre-dating the city itself.
Then whose is it? And why does the clown king want me to see it? Is he going to bury me alive down here?
The idea didn’t fill me with as much dread as perhaps it should have. In fact, the prospect of a quiet death in the privacy of the underground ship, especially without a sadistic demon in sight, seemed peaceful. Maybe the demon clown had taken mercy on my soul after all.
Or maybe you’re in for an even bigger shit-show down here. What do you really think’s waiting for you at the end of this tunnel? Pizza and beer?
I shuddered. If abominations like the Watchmen were able to live above ground in the Furnace wastelands, I couldn’t imagine what manner of beast lived underground amid the oppressive heat and toxic fumes of a dying spaceship.
Maybe it’s the real king of this place. Maybe the clown just provides its meals.
“Screw it,” I muttered.
It’s not like I had options. The only alternative to following the tunnel until I reached an outlet—or more likely spotted something that made me shrivel up and die at the mere sight—was to spend another hour or so retracing my steps in the darkness, only to return to a bunch of confused, masochistic corpses and the evil clown who’d fucked everything up for me in the first place.
So I kept moving.
Gradually, I noticed a faint light ahead. It was so dull that I thought it might be another mysterious shadow passing by, but its stationary persistence quickly made me realize that the light belonged to something other than a living creature.
Please tell me it’s a door, I thought.
Something inside me knew that this was exactly what the clown king had sent me down to find, and whether it turned out to be a good or bad thing in terms of my survival, I wanted to see what was so goddamned important that a creature as evil as he would forsake a tasty meal and a great deal of pleasurable torture so that I could encounter it.
I started jogging a little. I’m sure anyone who saw me would have laughed at the pathetic, limping gait I managed while ducking repeatedly in case something jutted from the ceiling or walls. But I had to run, because it seemed every time I slowed up even a little bit to give my body a break, the light stretched farther and farther away from me. If I didn’t pull out all the stops, I realized, it might disappear. And who knew if I’d ever find it again? Who knew if it would ever even reappear to be found? It was a chance I couldn’t take.
By the time I saw the pedestal with its glowing orange pentagram, I felt on the verge of physical collapse. Not for the first time, mind you, but this particular feeling was rivaled only by the pain of scaling the hill at the border of the corpse fields. I’d sworn I would accept death rather than subject myself to that torture again, but that wasn’t true. It’s a wonder. I’m continually shocked and somewhat humbled by my body’s dominant will to survive, which apparently supersedes all concerns of physics and psychological fortitude.
Now that I had some light by which to view it, I could see the interior of the ship around me. It looked like I’d been w
alking through some kind of long maintenance shaft ever since I’d descended the cathedral steps. The sheer enormity of the vessel implied by this realization was startling. Fleet warships like the newly-christened Doorway are big enough to walk through for days, but I’d envisioned a much smaller ship beneath the cathedral until I calculated how long I’d been walking and what portion of the tunnel comprised the maintenance shaft. The height of the tunnel told me that the ship was built for creatures much taller than the average human. Maybe the size of the clown demon and his Watchmen, in fact. It stood to reason, therefore, that the full scope of the ship was absolutely colossal. I might never have found an end to it.
I stepped away from the glowing pentagram to assess the height of the ceiling, guessing whether or not the clown king could have walked upright without difficulty. By my estimation, it fit perfectly.
All right, I thought, leaning against the pedestal and staring into the dull orange pentagram. I found it. What now?
I leaned over as far as I could before the gash in my ribs prevented me from dipping lower, trying to see if there were buttons somewhere to activate the artifact. I figured there might a message inside. Coordinates. Pictures. Anything that would make locating it in the bowels of the dinosaur ship seem at least somewhat worthwhile. After all, I’d basically signed my life away by venturing so deeply underground without verifiable exits for miles. Even if I retraced my steps to the cathedral and found it staffed by a rescue team with cold drinks, med kits, and comfortable beds to rest in, there was a strong possibility I would expire before I ever reached it.
I fumbled around the pedestal for a while. Cursing. Kicking. Pressing my swollen knuckles against the pentagram. Doing anything and everything to get it up and running. In the end, though, it snapped to life on its own, or at least I think it did. I may have set off a chain reaction with one of my ingenious attempts at hacking into the device, but I wasn’t moving at all when it finally ignited and descended into the pedestal with a whirring sound.
Furnace Page 21