Helpless as a sponge, I absorbed ever more of the distressing details around me. On the vaulted ceiling, wispy organic stalactites, perhaps composed of microbes in a matrix of their own waste, strained upward but only had it in them to swing in convulsive ellipses, like a disorganized legion of dowsing rods. Occasionally a scattered handful of these filaments snapped off after too much exertion and plopped into the water beside me or the stones in front of me. I had no urge to learn if they held together and resumed futile skyward wriggling in the muck or on the paving. Just so long as none of them rained upon me.
From the clumps of solid refuse, blessedly unidentifiable, that bucked or drifted in the writhing current, I gathered that the water was only ankle-deep. Something to store for future reference in case I absolutely had to wade in. And no matter how nonviable these pieces of waste were and always had been, they were steeped in alien life, the same as Morgan or the slime on the wall. They contained no anatomy, no means of propulsion, but were moving nonetheless, in a manner as undefinable, as wrong in human terms, as the “color” pervading them. Almost slipped more than once as that unholy motion distracted me in passing till I was looking backward, unmindful of my treacherous path.
Also preying on my attention was the mystery of what should have been here but wasn’t. Where were the rodents, the possums, the raccoons, all those skulking members of buried ecosystem, or their carcasses anyway? Those hardiest of goldfish flushed down the toilet? The roaches, the bugs in general? Never dreamed I’d be distraught over a scarcity of vermin. Might they have staged their own underground exodus in the same hours as Occam’s dogs in the streets overhead?
Nothing to hear in this domain outside the squelching of my shoes upon the tainted stones. Might as well be listening to the void. But then through tarmac and earth, as if from another dimension, penetrated the squall of widely dispersed sirens and a coarser momentary racket, as of a helicopter touching down, and shortly the stop-and-go grind of a heavy vehicle. Not at all farfetched to envision freaked-out commuters calling the Staties, the National Guard, the CDC on their cells as they sped along the outbound bypass, regretting now they hadn’t made more of everything awry in town the last few weeks. Hell, wouldn’t put it past the Third Floor to throw up craven hands and pawn off this crisis on a higher authority. Typically, for them, after the point where any human agency could do any good.
Again, survival dictated I keep a low profile, forget about stepping into daylight except where the coast was expressly clear. Went without saying, personnel in uniforms and hazmat suits would take no kindlier to me than cops and other officials usually did. To see me rise in ambulatory shape from the depths would hand them a red-letter excuse to detain or dissect me, depending on the captors. Was I bordering on paranoiac here?
On reflection, I could only be thankful my first symptoms of delirium weren’t making me more dysfunctional. I also had to begrudge these first responders some sympathy, considering their reward for fulfillment of duty, if they lingered too long, would be a uniquely hideous death. Nor would I fare any better unless my path connected soon with an escape hatch beyond earshot of armed patrols and Westcott’s enforcers. Yes, my life hinged simultaneously on staying hidden and burrowing out. A contradiction that latched onto me and gnawed at my grip on coherence.
And so my feet adjusted before my awareness did as the paving began to slope more and more pronouncedly. When I did notice, it startled me off-balance. I toppled backward and slid down what had become a chute as much as a channel. Let out an indiscreet bellow as the slime smeared and impregnated my trouser seat and jacket. No stopping me till the incline ended at a junction with a brick-lined passage, where the heel of my right shoe dug into the slime beneath the shelf. My plunge had taken a second or two but felt more like an eon. Wrenching out my foot used up a great deal less subjective time. Still not soon enough to save my sock from getting drenched. Managed to keep my hands dry and stand up by using my knees and elbows. Bravely putting all my weight on left foot, worked my right loafer off and tipped it on its side with my toes, to drain it of sloshing muck.
Was grimacing at the amount of liquid that remained to meet my instep, then stiffened like any small species near the bottom of the food chain. Voices from the sunlit world! “Hello? Hello?” Indistinct conversation then passed between speakers who may not have wished to be overheard, who were on to me because of my outcry at the wrong place and moment. I wasn’t about to gamble that these searchers were benign. Or break my pose so long as it felt likely someone might have an ear to the ground. My obstinate hand had not let go of the handkerchief, which I plastered over my mouth again. Primarily now for muffling breaths I could only hold a minute.
In the oppressive hush, the sewage rushing down the sluice into the cross channel gurgled and hiccupped as if meeting obstacles. Curiosity, for the umpteenth time, got the unwise better of me. At first squint, a modest cairn of rounded, polished rocks was blocking the base of the incline and clogging the intersection. A harder survey corrected me. As best the mutable light would divulge, the rubble was of an unclean white or pasty brown, and of a uniformly glossy texture, organic instead of mineral. And it was all a single gnarled, bumpy mass, in which black, twisted impurities were embedded totally or in part, as if in aspic, and ranging from the size of mice to overfed rats. Yes, certainly, because that’s what they were. Dead and at various stages of dissolution, and delicately quivering in concert with their glistening matrix, suffused with the same blind, hankering life. The entirety of the thing was immobile but acrawl in a way that made my own skin crawl.
What the hell was I gawking at? The answer was already floating within reach in a shadowy eddy of my mind, but I was reluctant to admit it was more than a joke, an urban legend. The tons of oils and grease that fast food joints and housewives heedlessly poured down the drain were reputed to accumulate as “sewer fat” in cities worldwide, and what else might this be? It was definitely organic inasmuch as the “color” had seized upon it, and rodents had seen fit to feed on it, only to die stuck in the gunk or incapacitated by the presence they’d been ingesting.
So much for the whereabouts of at least some underworld fauna, and when the glow entered into a more translucent phase, I could even discern black specks like currants or raisins that gradually resolved as flies. And some of these flies, in keeping with last summer’s hefty mosquitoes at the reservoir, I’d initially mistaken for baby mice. Altogether a relief when the air grew too violet to see through again. It couldn’t last. In a rapid swing toward rosy light that made my eyes ache, the tumulus of fat had started quaking more markedly, though the flow of sewage against it seemed unchanged. I felt the same alarm as when the vestiges of Morgan proved animate. Had my breathing, my tumble into its vicinity, or my concentration on it activated some hapless tropism, like Morgan’s urge to approach me because I was there? Whether budging an inch closer to me was even possible or not, I knew I’d hallucinate something to that effect if I dawdled any longer.
Oh hell! I couldn’t pinpoint from where it came, but no doubt about it, the groaning, creaking, scraping of ponderous iron meant a manhole would soon be open. Whoever had heard me and helloed wasn’t going to leave it at that. Made no difference to me that these persistent scouts might intend no harm. My choice was exclusively fight or flight, and fighting had never worked before. My choice of direction was also exempt from debate. To backtrack was tantamount to doom, to wade across the squalor was unthinkable. I headed to the right, along the cross channel, as hastily as the slippery bricks allowed.
Seconds were manifestly of the essence. Something steel thunked into the paving stones from that same nonspecific location, followed by the squeaking of feet down a ladder. My two pursuers helloed some more, and to my satisfaction they were more muted by distance than they had been while on the street. I scuffled onward, encouraged. Rewarded myself with a cagey smile.
They evidently had a lot to say about conditions down here, but I could make out no more than
inflections of disbelief and disgust. Well, better for everyone if they reconsidered their rash mission and climbed back out. Whether they wanted to assist or capture me, they’d deflected me off my path, ensuring I’d never reclaim my car or my general bearings, and damn them for that. They’d given up on hailing me, but their echoing, agitated whispers from nowhere brought to mind the chittering of mice I’d have heard here before. How would these persons deal with the abominable but harmless spectacle of “sewer fat”? Horrified exclamations and a shocking burst of gunfire broadcast the answer, with chilling implications for the kind of greeting I might expect. I stepped livelier on my advance to parts unknown, noting ruefully that the bricks were slicker than the fieldstones had been, and the shelf some inches narrower.
Nor had I thrown the whisperers off my trail. No, of course not. The coruscating slime was preserving footprints with the fidelity of wet cement. What kind of fiend was I alleged to be who slunk around in loafers? Had that question concerned the searchers at all, they’d have dropped it the instant an inauspicious change engulfed the tunnels. There was no letup in the air’s random, stark chromatic flux. But everything for a heartbeat puckered toward darkness and just as briefly brightened into glare, before fading to baseline pallor. Whatever development this portended, how could it possibly be good for me? Or for anybody?
After a vague interval, the waning and waxing of the glow recurred, independent of any shift in hue. The third instance may or may not have involved a shorter wait. Yes, as the next half dozen pulses proved, a subtle increase in frequency was underway, though with plenty of time between each for me to fret about how infinite this tunnel had come to seem. And much worse, more and more of the missing fauna had begun to show up, bloated in the sewage, littering my trail. Disfigured or in collapse, rats, possums, cats, and others too fragmentary to classify, infused with postmortem life, rallied their piecemeal anatomy to squelch forward. They were oblivious to me as I trod among them, and for the time being, not so numerous that I had to test their tolerance of a brusque shoe pushing them aside.
Meanwhile, the glowering, disembodied surveillance I’d weathered all along had flared up front and center in my head again, exerting more feverish pressure on me as the clutter of animals expanded. The pulsations into and out of darkness were spaced, I estimated, a little under a minute apart, and reminded me unwholesomely of uterine contractions. The men on my trail may not have picked up that similarity as they soldiered steadily on, but their speech had become more subdued, more sporadic, their tone more sepulchral, as my overwrought mood would have it.
The disintegrating bestiary’s mushrooming ranks were oriented neither toward the sky nor toward me as their arbitrary focus, but were gravitating like iron filings toward a secret lodestone. What were my pursuers making of this, if they had the composure to observe carefully, and what the hell was I to make of it? And what difference did it make, since I had nowhere to go except along with the macabre parade?
The intervals between blackouts had been shrinking almost imperceptibly, with the small blessing that the darkness itself never comprised more than a blink. A soundscape had begun to build around me, ubiquitous but coming from nowhere, and it was slowly blotting out the increasingly hoarse, excited whispering of the men on my trail. Again, human brain and sensory organs were ill-equipped to neatly interpret the “color’s” effects. What started as a protracted groan of scraping timbers or millstones became a fugitive arc of voltage, and then the creaking of timbers again. The prospect wasn’t encouraging in any case, and the volume from afar had already become grating. Assuming the worst, which had always proved wise, everything around me would soon split asunder.
The tunnel, though, stretched mockingly on and on, and the bombardment of my eyes and ears intensified, with nothing for me to do but shamble along, like the proverbial frog in the kettle as the water came to a boil. After a while the accelerating lapses into darkness verged on strobe-like, making it impossible to plant my steps with any precision. And the host of animate carcasses had grown too numerous to sidestep. All the squeamishness had been harrowed out of me by now. The rats, the raccoons, the foxes wheezed and crunched as my feet sank into them like they were wads of carbonized newspapers. No reprisals, no protest, no resistance, but I pressed my handkerchief tighter to my mouth, stuffing up my nostrils, as the gray powder billowed up and dispersed like multicolored spangles. An abhorrent mush of bone slivers and flesh clung to the undersides of my loafers, causing my feet to wobble.
Far ahead in the chaos seemed to hang a dim cat’s eye of stability, like a hazy moon in first quarter, then half, then practically full as I clumped nearer. This, I took it, was where the mangled animals had been driven to congregate. An oasis of calm earthly light, or an outbound route toward which vestigial reflexes still struggled, or a conduit through which the “color’s” victims could reach that much closer to the sky, if they could only climb with demolished limbs? I guessed this cement pipe might have been part of some discharge system for overflow during a flood, or else a remnant of some renovation or extension of the sewers, aborted when funds dried up.
I was wading up to my knees in the flimsy, twitching faunal wreckage, and it was hindering my push toward the opening, which acquired new urgency when that rarity of rarities, a human voice, roared through the electric racket, “You! Stop right there! Stay where you are!”
Naturally I shoved faster through the mass of broken specimens toward the mouth of poorly lit salvation. If gunmen were chasing me, this kaleidoscopic glow would handicap their aim, and even if they’d been trigger-happy earlier, how could they justify their miserable subsurface trek if they killed me outright, without learning anything? Clumsily I kicked writhing obstacles aside and set my feet on the slick, gory bricks. Held my breath and boosted myself on the heels of my hands into the pipe. Narrow in here. I was liable to scrape my back and scalp unless I crouched carefully, but I had no right to complain. An ill-conceived shot whistled toward parts unknown as I slapped the handkerchief back onto my face and shook my head. Stupid rookies!
But had I necessarily been the target? Or had the warning been shouted at me? Nothing more vital than to scurry like hell toward the tiny coin of daylight at the end of this gloom. Still, I had to pause, one foot in the air, alert for something materializing out of the blue. The glow behind me no longer wheeled haphazardly up and down the spectrum, but stalled at that most cryptic, jarring wavelength. To say it brightened would have been a glib misstatement. More to the point, it blushed or combusted, and instead of giving off heat, projected waves of resentment, of hatred, from which I was only partway buffered in this concrete tube.
If not for the grace of lucky timing, or of alien efficiency snubbing one victim in favor of two, it might have been me and not one of my pursuers who shrieked through the roaring static, “Get it off me! It burns! I’m on fire!”
His comrade was yelling, “Get what off you? What is it?” And then that second man was also shrieking hysterically. I resumed my stooping exodus, grateful now that the caking organic residue under my soles quieted my steps. What few intelligible words overtook me stirred memories of those last sheets in A. P.’s wastepaper journal, when he complained of waking up both raw with sunburn and shivering with cold, and of enduring deep but somehow invisible bite wounds. I pitied those men their agonies, though I couldn’t distance myself from them fast enough. Why pretend I could do them a bit of good? I only wished for the feeding frenzy to be over, but was under no illusion it would be quick or merciful.
Previously I’d experienced alien presence as diffuse, insidious, virus-like in its influence. This concentrated, deliberate sentience again reminded me of A. P.’s laments about his consciousness displaced and his body pirated, of sleepwalking to the reservoir shore. It gave the hungry “color” both more vivid identity and more nebulous purpose. Was it consuming these trespassers because it needed every scrap of nourishment to advance in its life cycle? Or did it have to purge impurities in its
intangible corpus before transition could begin? Or did it simply despise intact humans? I left off contriving rhetorical questions. They failed wretchedly at drawing my attention from the protracted suffering, and I was disgusted with myself for brooding that the “color” must have been saving the lungs for last.
All right, study the cement just ahead of my scrambling feet, then. It was damp, with streaks of dark or rusty stains, and muddy spots. And at face level hung gritty tatters of old cobwebs that I didn’t always dodge successfully. No trace of spiders or millipedes or other typical denizens. The “color” must have summoned them weeks ago. Without the unearthly glow, it was much dimmer in here, yet much easier on my eyes. Might almost have been relaxing, apart from the noise that set my blood to pounding through my veins, and the fear that I’d still be on the menu if and when the noise subsided.
In my stricken state, I wasn’t aware the mayhem was over till sometime after the fact, and a shaky glimpse backward established that the strobing had recommenced. Either end of the tunnel now seemed a long way away. I broke into a sprint. Not daring to turn my head again or to remove the handkerchief from my face.
I alternated every second between expecting that first wave of agony to rake through me and shuddering with relief when it didn’t. The disc of daylight continued to hover tauntingly small in the murk. Tried to ignore a stitch in my side and a scorching sensation in my chest. Fatigue slowed down my aching legs, I got my second wind, and to my amazement I was tottering at the mouth of the pipe, blinking painfully in the afternoon sun and processing that the Miskatonic flowed about fifteen feet below. The pipe projected from a steep, weedy embankment dotted with hunks of masonry and brickwork. I let my vertigo ease an instant. As escapes went, this one felt simultaneously miraculous and anticlimactic.
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The Color Over Occam Page 24