by Harvey Click
“Good Garrick,” she said. “That’s a good Garrick, just stay over there.”
He tilted his head and stared at her.
“Garrick, try to remember who you are,” she said. “You’re Garrick Haldan, and I’m your good friend, don’t you remember? We’re good, good friends.”
He smeared regurgitated meat into his sores and bawled louder. Mary raised her voice.
“Yes, we’re good friends, aren’t we? I know you’re sick right now, but you have to think, Garrick, you have to remember who you are. Here I am, your very best friend, and some bad, bad person has strapped me into this bed so I can’t move. I need to get up and these bad straps won’t let me. You gotta help your good friend, Garrick, you need to unbuckle these straps. Aren’t you gonna help your very best friend?”
The hooting sobs subsided. He picked a scab off his face and ate it. “Ell?” he said.
“Yes, that’s right, help me,” she said. “I’m your very best friend, and you need to help me.”
He wiped more vomit from his gown and held it out. “Goo?” he asked.
“No, Garrick, I don’t want any goo, thank you, I just want you to undo these straps. They’re bad straps.”
Garrick licked the vomit from his hand and shambled closer. He plucked at one of the straps and said, “Eee!” He stuck out his tongue at her and licked his teeth.
“You can do better than that, Garrick. It’s easy, like unbuckling a belt.”
He chuckled and picked his nose.
Mary put a scolding tone in her voice. “You unbuckle these straps right now, Garrick, or I’m gonna be real angry.”
He frowned and fumbled with the strap binding her shoulders. He chewed his tongue as he concentrated, and it was bleeding before the buckle opened.
“Eee!” he sang, clapping his hands and farting loudly.
“Good Garrick,” she said. “Very, very good. Now do the next one.”
By the time he got it unfastened, he’d chewed halfway through the tip of his tongue. He took less time with the next one; he was learning.
She was able to sit up then, and he backed away, covered his face, and peeped out at her between his fingers. She worked on the last strap near her ankles, but her fingers were so numb that she wasn’t doing a much better job than Garrick, and she realized she was chewing her tongue as well. When the buckle finally gave way, she rubbed her prickling legs and looked around.
Something funny about the room: the walls were glistening.
Garrick pulled his hands away from his face and said, “Pway?”
“No, I don’t want to play right now,” she said. “Go sit on your bed.”
He stuck out his lower lip, toddled over to his bed, and sat there pouting. “No pway,” he said.
The floor and walls were covered with glowing mucus. It was frothing up from the cellar through the trapdoor and stinking of dead fish. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to stick her bare feet in it, but maybe she wouldn’t have to. Her hospital gurney had wheels.
“Okay, Garrick, we can play,” she said. He looked up hopefully. “I’ve thought of a fun game,” she said. “Why don’t you push my bed around the room? Won’t that be fun?”
“Fuhh!” Garrick grinned and stuck out his tongue, its tip nearly severed. He got up and shuffled over.
“Push me over there,” she said, pointing at the dead disciple. Garrick pushed. “Okay, let’s stop here.”
Mary reached down and pulled the corpse’s dagger from its scabbard. She scooped up a glob of slime with the blade and examined it. It looked like semen, except it was squirming. The glob separated into little droplets that elongated into tiny wriggling worms. She shook them off the dagger and wiped it clean on the disciple’s dress.
“Goo?” Garrick asked.
“Yeah, fucking goo all right. Okay, why don’t you push me over there?” She pointed to the door where Letha’s boys had exited after strapping her to the bed. “This will be fun.”
“Fuhh!” He pushed the bed faster and faster. “Fuhh! Fuhh!”
“Jesus, Garrick, slow down!”
Too late—he slipped on the mucus and fell face-first into it. “Waah!” he squalled.
The stuff was so thick on the ceiling that it was beginning to drizzle down, and each drop was a glistening worm. Mary brushed squirming globules from her hair and pulled the sheet over her head.
“Quit bawling, Garrick, and get up. I’m getting mad.”
He got up sniffling with his bottom lip pouting out and wriggling worms hanging from his face. They explored his skin for a moment and fell off. They didn’t seem to like him.
“Push,” Mary said. “And remember, we don’t run in the house.”
The doorknob was slimy, but it turned. She peered down a narrow corridor that soon curved out of sight. It was sweating worms too, and the walls seemed to undulate.
“Dexter!” she yelled. She kept yelling his name until a disciple appeared around the bend. He held a flaming torch to the floor, scorching the carpet of worms in front of him.
Mary covered her face with the sheet. “Athena commands you to state your business,” she said.
“I’ve come to beg mercy, O merciful one,” the disciple said.
“Tell Athena what it’s like upstairs,” Mary said.
“Very bad, gracious beauty. A big white snake ate Brother Samuel, and the bathtub sucked down Brother Paul like a sinkhole. I pulled him out, but his legs were gone.”
A glistening stalactite drooped down from the ceiling toward his head like an enormous white leech.
“Above your head!” Mary shouted.
“Yes, it’s all above my head,” the disciple said, jabbing the floor with his torch. “I’m beneath the worms and the excrement of worms as I humbly serve my goddess. But I pray that she remember my great love and—”
“Look up, asshole!”
He looked up just in time to watch a gaping white mouth swallow his face. The leech slithered down his whole body like a thick condom that shook and throbbed as he struggled inside it. When it completely covered him, the squirming goo let go of the ceiling and oozed away down the corridor like a python made of melting vanilla ice cream.
He had dropped his torch, and Mary told Garrick to fetch it. He grabbed it by the wrong end, and his hand smelled like barbecue when he stumbled back to her.
“Fuhh!” he said.
“Yes, fun,” she said. She shoved the torch at a mouth stretching toward her from the wall. It shrank back and waited. So fucking much fun.
“Dexter!” she called. “Dexter!”
The dripping white hallway was silent. Mary shook the sheet draped over her head, and a puddle of worms slid off. But for some reason they weren’t on Garrick. They’re not interested in the dead, she thought. It’s the living they want.
The torch hissed as she stabbed a white boa constrictor oozing down from the ceiling. “Dexter!” she kept yelling. “Where the hell are you?”
What now, go back to the chamber or try to make it up the squirming hallway? A worm fell into the torch flame, making it spit and sing.
“He cheated me,” a voice said. “I’m in pieces. Here a piece, there a piece, everywhere a piece piece.”
Letha’s face flickered in the orange flame. “I float in fragments,” she said. “Not much left of me now.” The flame hissed and spat. “Cypher’s torn me to shreds.”
“Too bad, you fucking bitch,” Mary said.
“Your breeding impresses me, Aztec trollop, but let’s not waste our time on courtesies,” Letha said. “I’ll get you out of here for a price.”
“What price?’
“You help Garrick,” the flame said. “Cypher’s demon is eating me, but I won’t let him eat my son. Get him away from here.”
Mary thought it best not to mention that the worms didn’t seem interested in Garrick. “Okay, sure, I’ll do that,” she said. “But first we get Dexter. He goes with us or it’s no deal.”
“Dexter’s safe and
so is Grimes,” Letha said. “I had my men lower them from the roof as soon as this nightmare started. They’re in a boat right now rowing to shore.”
“Maybe you’re lying.”
“You want to argue or you want to find the exit?” the flame asked.
Something was coiling down from the ceiling. Mary hacked it in two with the dagger.
“All right, tell me how to get outta here,” she said.
“Go back to the big chamber,” Letha said. “Behind the other door you’ll find a steel vault with an exit to the lake. It takes the worms a long time to digest steel.”
Her face flickered out of the flames.
“Okay, Garrick, let’s go back to our play room,” Mary said.
He pushed the bed slowly, maybe not having so much fun anymore. The flame-face seemed to have made him wistful.
The round room pulsed like a heart, ceiling sagging and dripping between its pillars. The floor tilted, and Garrick fell into a slush of worms. This time he didn’t bawl. He picked himself up and continued pushing, his ruined face weighted with sadness. He seemed to be maturing.
The torch spat and hissed. “Everything’s churning,” Letha said. “A piece of me here, another piece there. Not easy to talk.” The flame went silent.
The steel door beyond Garrick’s bed was still intact, though a layer of slime was working on it. Mary turned the knob, but nothing happened.
“Talk to me!” Mary shouted. “How do I open this damn thing?”
The flame sputtered and sang:
“Three times clockwise,
seven withershins,
reverse snake-eyes,
once backwards again.”
“Jesus, what the hell does that mean?” Mary asked.
The flame didn’t answer. Mary turned the knob three times clockwise and seven times the other way. Reverse snake-eyes? She turned it clockwise twice, counter-clockwise once, and the door swung open. She shook worms off her hands and peered into a large vault piled with boxes.
“Push me in, Garrick,” she said.
Letha was right: whatever was digesting the tower hadn’t made much progress inside the steel vault, though everything was covered with a thin dew of milky slime. Mary threw off the worm-infested sheet and shut the door.
“Now what?” she asked the flame, but it didn’t answer. “Come on, you flaming cunt, talk.”
It didn’t.
Mary noticed a box full of sandals, slipped on a pair, and got off the bed. The floor was slick, and it shifted like a ship deck as she squeezed between a row of boxes to a steel hatch. Seven chains dangled above it, maybe for hoisting in supplies. An aluminum rowboat and a pair of oars leaned against the wall. She was reaching for the latch when the flame crackled.
“Wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” Letha said. “The door’s booby trapped. The third of seven three times pull—”
“Skip the Goddamn nursery rhyme,” Mary said. “Just tell me in English.”
“Let me think, I only remember it by rhyme. All right, pull the third chain from the left three times. Pull the fifth chain twice and the second chain once. Then pull . . .”
Mary heard weights falling inside the wall after she pulled the last chain, and the steel hatch lifted open. Cold night air blew in, and the lake roiled wildly a few yards below her feet.
“Help me with the boat, Garrick,” she said, but the floor suddenly tilted, and she skated out the doorway and landed in the cold water. A swift current tugged her away and let go of her about twenty feet from the tower.
There was something wrong with it: the stones looked like glistening white scales. She saw Garrick staring out at her from the doorway.
“The boat!” she shouted. “Shove out the boat, Garrick!”
“Bo?”
“Yes, the boat! Push it out. Hurry!”
The scaly tower lurched toward her and sent Garrick hurtling out the door; then an undertow grabbed a hold of Mary and hauled her down like a chain. She felt something clawing at her legs as she fought her way up.
It was Garrick. She pulled him to the surface and struggled to stay afloat while he clung to her shoulders, vomiting water and bloody flesh.
The tower, or whatever it was, twisted and swayed above them like a white serpent in the darkness. Long snaky tentacles were oozing out of the stone.
“Baa,” Garrick said.
“Yes, bath,” Mary said. “It’s time for your bath now, Garrick. Take it like a good boy.”
She took his hands from her shoulders and held them away from her, as if the two of them were dancing. Like Ginger and Fred, she thought. Like Ginger and Fred in the land of the dead.
She had hoped he wouldn’t understand what she was doing, but his expression said otherwise. He tilted his head and whimpered.
“You’re a good Garrick,” she said. She let go of his hands and swam quickly away. When she looked back, he was gone.
She turned and glimpsed a rowboat emerging from a clump of fog. “Dexter!” she yelled. “Dexter, it’s me. Over here!”
Fog swallowed the boat again. A strong eddy tried to tug her back to the tower, and something wrapped around her waist as she swam. For a moment she thought it was Garrick, but it was something else, something coiling around her like an enormous snake. It yanked her up out of the water into the cold air high above the lake.
It was a long, thick tentacle reaching out from the tower. At the tip of it was a fat pulsating bulb with two red eyes staring at her. A wide mouth yawned open beneath the eyes, and a black snake-tongue darted out and tasted her face.
Mary screamed.
Gunfire cracked twice, and the bulbous head jerked and bellowed with white pus bleeding out of two bullet holes where its nostrils ought to be. Another shot exploded, and Mary plunged into the water.
The rowboat slid out of the fog, and she grabbed the prow and hung there choking water until a hand grasped her wrist and hauled her aboard. Her eyes were blurry, and she felt rope binding her arms against her sides before the grim face grinning down at her came into focus.
“Where’d you find that honky-tonk dress, Pocahontas?” Ryver asked. “It just ain’t your style.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The walls of the chimney were rippling with warm slime, and Dexter felt as if he were climbing down an esophagus. There was a wide cavern at the bottom with a spongy floor, and he saw Grimes and Blondie waiting for him in the mouth of a tunnel that looked like another glistening gullet.
Grimes aimed his flashlight at the scum writhing on the wall. Thousands of white worms were oozing out of the stone.
“Just look at them,” he said. He scooped up a handful and watched them crawl around in his palm. “They’re pure ectoplasm, flesh from another world.”
He crushed them in his fist, and when he opened it the many small worms had melded into one fat worm about four inches long. It raised its head and peered at them with tiny red eyes. Grimes tried to shake it off his hand, but it clung to his skin and he had to scrape it off with his dagger.
“Damned thing bit me,” he said.
He hacked it to pieces on the floor, and each piece became a smaller worm with its own set of red eyes.
“Let’s get moving,” Dexter said.
They hunkered down and followed Blondie into the tunnel. Soon the ceiling was so low that they had to crawl on their hands and knees. Dexter kept his head covered with his cowl, but the warm rain of worms kept splashing on his face.
“This demon you call Zyx,” he said. “What exactly is it?”
“Nobody really knows,” Grimes said. “Some say in the beginning it was Leviathan, the foul sentience that ruled chaos before our universe burst from a puncture in nethertime. The Bible says it was destroyed long before man appeared, but nothing like that is truly destroyed. It lay buried in the bowels of hell with only worms as company, and a few sorcerers with good ears heard it tunneling beneath their feet. They ordained it the Lord of Worms and named it Zyx, signifying the alphabet
of time turned backwards. They gave it strength with their spells as it brooded and burrowed beneath the dirt, waiting to return to our world and return our world to chaos. Now I daresay its waiting is over.”
Grimes buried his dagger to the hilt in the undulating ceiling. Worms fell out like drops of white blood, and the wound quickly sealed shut.
“The ectoplasm is digesting the stone and turning it into living flesh,” he said. “Zyx designed the tower, and now I see why. It’s intended to be his body on earth. The chambers and tunnels are designed to be his organs and arteries.”
Dexter heard a slurping sound in front of him and aimed his flashlight at Blondie’s legs. The squirming tunnel was swallowing him headfirst like quicksand.
“Jesus,” Grimes said.
They grabbed Blondie’s feet and tugged him out. One eyeball remained in his skull, but the rest was bare bone.
“This is obviously a dead end,” Grimes said. “Nowhere to go but back.”
They scurried on their hands and knees back to the cavern beneath the chimney. The rope ladder had fallen and now it lay at Dexter’s feet, slowly sinking into the softening floor—its hooks must have slipped out of the ooze up there. He shined his flashlight up the glistening shaft. Even if there were a way to gain a foothold, the peristaltic rippling would swallow them back down.
“Somehow we have to climb back up,” Grimes said. “The ectoplasm probably hasn’t seeped all the way up the tower yet. Maybe we can escape from the roof.”
“You ever climbed up a throat?” Dexter asked.
He looked down and saw a wide slit opening up in the gelatinous floor. Grimes tumbled into the mouth and disappeared, and then the floor wriggled like a slippery tongue and sucked Dexter down as well.
He slid through heavy wet darkness that crushed the air from his lungs, but it was a short ride. A few seconds later the warm slime retched him back up, and he found himself lying at the bottom of the chimney again. The floor shuddered and belched up Grimes beside him. They lay there panting and drenched with worms.
“It’s the netting,” Grimes said between gasps. “I coated it with something called cabiric alloy. It’s acutely poisonous to Zyx, so he couldn’t swallow us.” He paused to catch his breath and wipe worms from his face. “The Philosopher gave me the formula.”