by Nick Cutter
Staring down, Micah pictured something hunched just past the mouth of the tunnel. His mind couldn’t entirely compass it. But the outline was of a person of unfathomable age: two hundred, three hundred, a thousand years old. He pictured this corrupted thing quivering in the darkness below, leering with its young-old mouth, its gums black as tar—
Micah’s jaw tensed. “I am coming,” he whispered.
He stuffed the flashlight into his pocket and dropped one foot down until it touched the first rung of the ladder. He gripped the ropes as the ladder swung out from the rock, throwing him off balance. He stabilized himself and followed it down. The flashlight shone inside his pocket, its tepid glow illuminating the space directly below him.
It came then. Thick, throaty—the laughter of a child.
Shapes swarmed in the darkness below. Alien, twisting movements. Micah’s bladder clenched. Fear poured into his brain; he stood rooted for a span of time he could not judge, then slowly pulled the flashlight from his pocket. When he shone it down, nothing was there.
The ladder slapped the stone. His foot found the basin floor. He released the ladder and turned, kneeling, shining the flashlight into the tunnel.
The beam outlined the start of a cave system carved through the rock. Micah crept to the tunnel mouth. It stretched twenty feet or so before hitting a bend. The tunnel was honeycombed with holes—some small, others big enough to accommodate a person’s body. He wondered just how large this network of tunnels could be, and where they all might lead.
Body tensed, head throbbing, he forged into the alkaline dark.
14
“DO YOU LIKE TO PLAY . . . games?”
Minerva stopped. The voice belonged to a small child. She turned toward it, summoning every ounce of her willpower. Something squatted in the dark not far from the cleft, which she had arrived at some minutes after Shughrue. The moon gave only a hint of this thing’s contours.
“Games,” the voice called. “Shall we play?”
Her paralysis was absolute. With a fervency she hadn’t felt since she was a girl, she wished she could squeeze her eyes shut and just disappear. Wink out of existence and appear somewhere else, ten thousand miles away where the sun was shining and the world made sense.
“We will play.”
The voice became stern. Minerva could see it better now. She wished she couldn’t. She wished she were blind. It sat in the moonlit sand with its long legs crossed, knees flared out so as to resemble wings. Its pendulous stomach spread across its thighs.
“Come,” it said.
Minerva went to it. There was no option. Its voice was a summoning. She sat before it and crossed her legs in kind.
“Do you like games?”
She shook her head numbly.
It smiled. A repellent sight. “I thought all children enjoyed games.”
“I’m not a child,” she managed to say.
“You are all children of eggs,” it said.
She said, “What are the rules?”
It tittered. “My rules.”
“What are the stakes?”
“Everything you owe, my dear.”
A seed of terror planted itself in her stomach. “What do I owe?”
Another dry titter. “Everything. Nothing. The game decides.”
A cloud scudded over the moon. The landscape went dark. The creature’s eyes glimmered wetly.
“Let’s play, Minny! It will be ever so much fun!”
Its voice had changed. Gone were the breathy baby syllables. Now it spoke in the voice of Minerva’s dead brother. Little Cortland Atwater.
“AND THE NAME OF THE star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died in the waters, because they were made bitter . . .”
Revelation 8:11. Wormwood, Wormwood, the name of the star is called Wormwood . . . It was a favorite passage of the Reverend’s. The waters turned bitter; many people died. He had always liked the sound of that.
He was inside a burrow carved into the rock. He was the worm now. But not a worm in wood, oh no. A worm in its wormhole. No roots to get in his way. No birds pecking at him with their sharp beaks. He was hidden safely, deep within the rock. It was dark down here, though. So very dark. That scared him a little. But this was a quibble. The father would pay him what he had earned soon.
Laughter drifted through the rock, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Children’s laughter. He’d never cared for it. No matter how many shrieking infants he’d blessed or how many apple-cheeked little shits he’d kissed on the forehead, he couldn’t stomach kids. Their sticky hands and gap-toothed smiles and their stupidity—everything that people seemed to love about them, Amos loathed. All children were useless until they had grown old enough to contribute to his coffers.
But currently, that laughter sounded quite sweet to his ears. Angelic, even.
It was hard to say how much time had passed since he had climbed down the rope ladder to the secondary tunnel system. There was no natural light at all, but the rock held a strange glow. He had begun to crawl through the main tunnel, scraping his knees, inching toward the hum that emanated from someplace ahead. The tunnel walls were pocked with holes—burrows, it almost seemed. Big ones. They reminded him of termite boreholes, or honeycombs where bee larvae might pupate. But the bugs that would nest in holes of that size would be . . . no, they were not bug burrows.
He’d kept crawling toward the heart of that hum. Yet the closer he had gotten, the more scared he became. The fear pulsed in his brain, taking on terrible forms. He pictured an enormous chalice inside the rock—a bowl teeming with massive insects. Beetles the size of border collies. Bloated roaches with wings fanned out like garbage can lids. Millipedes with legs thick as a baby’s arm. Tens of thousands of them, blind from lack of sun, their bodies either transparent or foggy white so you could see the queer workings of their guts. Skittering madly inside the smooth rock basin, trundling over the corpses of their dead. The basin was studded with huge bean-shaped sacks that burst with wet pops, spewing forth flabby larvae with skin that sweated like gray sickly cheese, these revolting grubs that mewled like newborn babes. The bowl was too steep for any of them to escape; all they could do was squirm and shuck madly, waiting for an unassuming visitor to tumble down from above . . .
The image entombed itself in his head. He couldn’t shake it. Suddenly frightened by that hum, he had crawled into one of the burrows off the main tunnel. It was so tight that his shoulders brushed the sides. He couldn’t say how far or deep he pressed into the hole. At some point, it had swollen into a bubble. He curled up. The rock was warm as flesh. It felt like a womb. The darkness pressed against his eyeballs. He was careful where he set his hands—in some silly chamber of his mind, he thought he might touch the resting shape of . . . well, something. Whatever might slumber deep in this rock. He pictured a hairless rat with yellowed teeth like shards of broken crockery; he pictured his hand closing on its tail, thick as a garden hose, a whip of oily flesh . . .
The image spooked him. Still, at least a giant rat would be of this world—a common enough sight, even if blown up ten times its normal size. What he really feared was that he might encounter something not of this world. Something he wouldn’t find in his worst dreams, because, after all, those dreams were still culled from the sights and sensations he would have experienced while waking.
He let go of a jittery laugh. The rock sponged up the sound so quickly it was as if he’d never made a peep.
The breath whistled out of his lungs. He was safe here. He would wait and recite some scripture to calm down.
“The name of the star is called Wormwood . . . Wormwood . . . Wormwood . . .”
The laughter came again. Dancing and sprightly, tickling the hairs of his inner ear. Almost a song, holding lyrics that he couldn’t quite make out.
Distantly, he heard something or someone pass the mouth of his burrow—he already thought of it in that possessive way: his burrow. Was it one of
the outsiders? Rage flooded through him; the air flared red before his eyes. They would not take his gift. The father owed him. He had given it what it wanted. But Amos was too terrified to move. It was as if he had crawled to the very bottom of the earth, down with the hiss of unseen voices and the punch and seethe of machines made from bone and teeth, machines whose purpose he could not understand. The father’s beautiful instruments.
“Wormwood,” he whispered hoarsely. “The name of the star . . .”
MICAH FORGED DOWN the tunnel. He wasn’t focused on the Reverend anymore; that bloodlust had sluiced out of him. His every muscle was tensed and screaming. A tiny voice inside his head yammered for him to stop, for God’s sake, go back.
The smell was stronger as he navigated toward its source. He gagged on the putrid stench, a smell like rotted offal marinating in mothballs—so powerful that it was more a taste. The rock seemed to throb—thu-thump, thu-thump—shuddering slightly like a thick artery.
His boot brushed something, making a metallic jangle. He shone the flashlight on a manacle, hand-forged and browned with rust. How old could it be? A hundred years? The sort of thing a slave would have worn . . . except it was too small to fit around a man’s wrist.
He continued on. He was scared, oh yes—terrified—but that rested easily within his mind. It was a perfectly natural reaction, so he did not try to fight it. He came across a shoe next. A child’s size, incredibly old. He picked it up, trembling. Faded but still legible on the bottom of the vulcanized rubber sole: Charles Goodyear, 1871.
He encountered other artifacts: tatters of clothing, a busted pocket watch. A wooden doll with the eyes scratched out.
The tunnel bent gently, the rock running smooth as alabaster. He shone the flashlight along its upper curvature, which was so low his head brushed it even as he crawled. It was carpeted with an odd fungoid growth, black and spiky. He raised the flashlight beam to it. The fungus broke apart. What he had mistaken for fungus was in fact a dozing ball of sightless spiders; they scuttled down the tunnel’s circumference, dancing lightly on the rock, vanishing into tiny holes in the floor. Micah noticed that the floor and walls were pocked with thousands of similar holes, tiny pits of darkness the flashlight beam could not penetrate. What else was hiding in there?
The father the father is so thirsty so hungry meat for the feast . . .
The air got progressively more rotten. He pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth, breathing shallowly. He spotted a bone. Bleached white, picked clean. It could belong to an animal. But animals were too wary to venture down to such a place, weren’t they?
He stared closely at the bone—a long, elegant filigree, the tips polished smooth by time or by . . . by something sucking on it until the ends went smooth.
Which is when he heard them. The worst, the most awful sounds.
“THERE ARE CALIBRATIONS of the nerve endings, Minny, that you have never known to exist,” the thing said in little Cort’s voice. “There are registers that you have never felt, the way dogs can hear sounds humans cannot. I can help you reach them. It will be my pleasure.”
The thing’s long-fingered hands moved in graceful patterns, its nails tapering to sharp points. Their movements were hypnotic. Minerva felt as if she’d chugged codeine cough syrup.
“Lay your hands out,” it said as Cort. “Palms up, Minny, pretty please.”
Helplessly, she obeyed. It touched a fingernail to a spot on her wrist where the veins ran blue under the skin. The pain was instant and exquisite, like nothing she had ever known. Too painful to scream, even. Its finger withdrew. Her skin had not been broken. There was no mark.
“I can open you up,” it said in Cort’s voice. “I can make you feel as you have never felt before, Minny. Things precious few of your kind have ever known. Would you like that?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want you to.”
The creature made a frowny face. Its voice was now a babyish coo: “Why-sy why-sy, pudding and pie-sy? We could have such fun, you and I-sy.”
It reached again. Minerva flinched. Its finger slowly retracted. Its head was cocked on its thin neck, its eyes reflecting the moonlight.
“It hurt,” it said in her dead brother’s voice. “When the snake ate me. It hurt so much, Minny. You didn’t do anything to help.”
She let out an airless gasp. “Cort, no, I wanted to—”
“But you didn’t,” the thing said spitefully. “Wanting to isn’t doing, Minny. And now what am I? Shit. Snake shit.”
“Stop,” she whispered.
“It was pink, Minny. The sun shining through the snake’s skin. The light was pink inside its mouth. Pink with black threads where its veins ran. There was the smell of squashed grasshoppers. I suffocated, but it took a long time. A lot longer than you’d think. My ribs were broke and my lungs filling with blood, but I think I screamed. Do you remember how my screams sounded? I bet you heard me. You weren’t far away. Just up that tree. Safe and sound.”
“Please stop,” she begged.
The creature touched her other wrist. The pain was immense, world-eating. Its finger withdrew. It blew gingerly on her flesh. The pain receded.
“Shall we begin, my love?”
“No, please no . . .”
It shook its head with what appeared to be true sadness, as if to say the following events were beyond its power to control. “We must.”
“No, no, no . . .”
It said, “If it’s information you seek, come and see me. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three.”
“Wh-what?”
A macabre smile. “The game, my dear.”
This horrid thing wanted her to answer riddles? She almost laughed at the banality. Then she remembered the words scrawled on the wall back at the Preston School for Boys.
Why is 6 afraid of 7?
789! 789!
“What if I don’t play?”
“You will, my dove.” It spoke as one might when an answer exists beyond all doubt. “And you will lose, because your kind always does. The pain you experience will exist beyond your wildest conception; your purest amazement will be in just how deeply you can feel.” A forlorn sigh. “Your suffering will show me nothing new or novel. I have played this game too many times. There are no secrets your kind has left to tell me.”
“So why even play?”
An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?
SSSSSLLLLLLLLLLLLUUUUUHHHH . . .
A sucking, slurping sound. Prolonged and somehow chunky. There was a hideous eagerness to it.
These noises drifted through the tunnel and slid into Micah’s ears. He was unprepared for the blast of panic that filled him. He sensed an opening ahead. He clapped his fingers over the flashlight lens, letting just enough light seep through to illuminate the rock directly in front of him. He did not want to announce his presence to whatever might be lurking ahead. He crept forward, blood blitzing through his heart—he was dizzy with the pulse of it.
The sounds intensified. Good Christ, what could be making them?
The tunnel ended. He was able to stand up again. He had entered some kind of vault. Some kind of—lair was the word that skated uneasily through his mind.
He was in a bubble deep inside the rock, perhaps at its very center. He could not intuit its size, but by the frail light leaking through his fingers he saw the walls on either side of the tunnel running upward to give a faint impression of scale. It was less a bubble than a cube.
Or a . . . a box.
The sucking sounds were louder. Whatever was making them was in here. Carefully, heart thudding, he lifted one finger off the flashlight beam. A slice of light fell across the chamber’s floor. The rock was black as obsidian. The sounds stopped. There was a pregnancy to the pause; Micah pictured a thousand eyes swiveling in his dire
ction.
Amos Flesher, he thought. Is that you?
But he knew it wouldn’t be the Reverend, much as he dearly wished it. There was only so much threat Flesher could pose. The noises in the dark unlocked a far more potent terror. They whispered directly into his veins, mainlining fear into his heart.
The father . . .
He lifted another finger off the flashlight lens. He could see the odd bone fragment and moldering tatter of clothing. Uniforms? The flashlight dimmed briefly, the contact points on the batteries failing for an instant. Oh Jesus. Not now. Don’t let that happen.
He lifted a third finger. A crease of light cut across the chamber and touched the rock wall thirty-odd yards away—
Something skittered across the beam. A white, wormish fluttering. A network of tubes or something—his instinctual impression was of a gargantuan maggot hacked into sections, the segments stitched into a vaguely humanoid form.
He lifted his final finger clear as dread knotted in his throat. He swept the beam across the chamber, trying to take in as much as he possibly could in hopes of understanding what he was dealing with—
He saw it then.
15
THE STRANGEST POSSIBILITY trip-trapped over the surface of Minerva’s brain once the game had started. She thought: What if God or Buddha or the Creator or who-the-fuck-ever had come to her as a freshly conceived zygote; what if the Creator had said: Listen, you, this is how your life is going to unspool. Dead father, dead brother, sadness and rage and regret aplenty, and the whole shebang’s gonna end on the far side of the desert with some unearthly creature making you answer riddles. Knowing all this, chum, you sure you want to ride this merry-go-round?
What would she have said, knowing the shape of her life to come?
“If it is information you seek, come and see me. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three.”