by S. A. Sidor
Still, we waited.
Time is not the same in the Underworld. It must move slower, or not at all. What came through the door came at a choppy pace, stuttering like a flipbook animation.
I gawked.
What was it?
A jet of blood so copious that I mistook its shape for the improbable head of a red horse – its wild, scarlet mane flowing, the horse screaming… but it was a monk who was screaming… he followed his leaping blood from one world to another as he stumbled over the threshold with his legs shaking, wobbly as a newborn colt’s. But here was as far as he would ever go. The time lag mended. At full speed his two hands clasped a ruined throat. He gurgled. Bug-eyed, bewildered, damned. Collapsing dead.
Bedlam cries followed upon his heels. His brother monks were running.
They rushed out of the Ka like guests from a burning hotel.
Pushing one another, squeezing against the doorjambs, clawing at the air. Fear released from their collected mass like musk and compounded to the odor of pure animal panic, which soon clouded the underground hall. I covered my nose. It might’ve been an amusement to watch bad men struggle, if not for the bite marks. Such ragged lacerations. Scores of them. The result of a frenzied attack. The salty metal stink of blood unsprang a memory in me of farm butchery at the time of harvest. Our vampires had hunted quickly. Slashing monk skin to tattered, pink ribbons. I once saw a beggar ravaged by dogs in Cairo. He was less unstitched than these friars when he died.
“Here they come, Wu. Be brave.”
I braced my legs on the rocky ledge.
Wu’s hand gripped my shirttail.
“Hold. Hold them here for McTroy!” I shouted.
Wu said nothing. From the corner of my eye I saw his fire. The torch rose and waved for the monks to take notice. The horde responded. To say they flooded onto the rope bridge is no exaggeration, for they did not move so much like a group of men but rather as a single thing: a snaky, foaming (at the mouth), and unstoppable tide of wounded, terrorized flesh. When they reached the midpoint of the bridge, the ropes sagged into a great curvaceous belly. Still they kept loading onto the span. Some toppled over the sides. Or jumped. They did not scream as the pit ate them. This detail led me to conclude they were suicides. The survivors were close enough now that they could see me silhouetted beside the open flame. They did not slow but dropped their heads (the first few did) and charged for us.
I met them with determination.
Swinging my ape-headed stick like a baseballer’s bat. The sound of ebony striking flesh-covered bone is both hard and soft. I did not, could not, look at any individual gore-painted monk as I beat them back. There was no time. I simply repeated my swings as often and as ferociously as I could. What answered me were grunts, sighs, and occasionally a sound like cracking dice which I later realized were liberated teeth. These sensations only came to me in retrospect. For in the moment I lost sound, felt as though I were plunged under thick syrup, and despite my trying, I could not swing a very fast bat and was sure that I would be overrun. Wu, for his part, acquitted himself admirably. He yelled like a boy possessed, and his yell disquieted even me. His small flying fists and furious low kicks struck blows that stole the air from drug-saturated monk lungs and brought the brothers down with looks of surprise and, yes, fear. They feared a boy! And well they should have. What Wu lacked in training he more than made up for in passion. He singed the men who darted beyond my reach. Tonsured hair still burns. The monks’ blood-smeared skin smelled like pork roast. He batted them roundly and sparks flew each time he hammered away.
A pair of actions saved us: one a surprise, the other a well-planned tactic.
The surprise was that the stampeding monks, after we batted the first dozen or so to their knees, clogged their own passage over the bridge. They piled up. They tripped themselves and acted as a barrier to their brethren at the rear of the pack. Violence broke out among them, and this fortunate outcome lessened the burden on Wu and me.
As the last monk fleeing the Duat launched himself onto the bridge, McTroy, whose patience was that of a seasoned hunter of wild game and wilder wanted men, fired a bullet into the nether regions of the bridge and, striking rope that he had already partially severed, pushed the structure past its limits. The rope failed. The entire bridgework tilted dramatically, pitched to one side, and spilled better than half the monks into the crevasse. While the earlier death-seeking monks had fallen silently, submissively, chasm-bound, these monks screamed until their breath ran out, and so, for the record, the unfathomable depth of the pit was proven once and for all.
Wu and I stepped away from the edge.
Two categories of monks were left on the remains of the bridge: clingers and climbers. Climbers were the more immediate threat. McTroy picked off a half-dozen before they could clamber to our far shore. His shooting turned the remaining climbers into clingers, and gravity began to peel them away at a rate of approximately one every ten seconds. The agitation on the bridge caused a second rope to snap. Ten of the most vicious devil-worshippers adhered to the bridge. There was no question they would die if they stayed where they were, and so they began to scurry in the most spidery manner toward Wu and me. I readied my stick. Wu’s firebrand was but a smoldering stump, yet he was game for action. I do not know if any of the monks gained demoniac powers in their travels to the Duat. But I do know that the ones creeping along the web of ropes had eyes of pulsating, clotted red and an abundance of muscle growth I have never observed before or since. I was seriously in doubt whether or not we could fight one let alone ten of them. Before I could tell Wu to make a run for the escape tunnel and the well’s mouth, McTroy fired another shot.
His aim was true.
The bridge fell away completely from our side of the chasm. Its last connection to the Ka door side only served to dash those final ten monks against the stone wall. They dangled helplessly from a single rope into the pit. The bridge was no longer a bridge.
I gasped in relief.
Short-lived relief as it so happened.
Some facts from the world of the supernatural and occult are more important than others. These particular facts were greatly significant to us that night in the Temple Underneath: Mummies are slow. Ghouls are leery. Neither is much afraid of vampires.
Not one of them had ventured onto the bridge.
They stood at the edge of the other side of the crevasse. They had fat, red candles sputtering in their grubby hands. They were watching us. Waiting for something. A few moved off to one side in the direction of McTroy’s notch. But there appeared to be no rush on their part. McTroy held his fire. I couldn’t see him, but then again, I never had throughout the battle on the bridge. The mummies and ghouls did not talk to us or to each other. Looking bored, they played with their weapons in the candlelight.
I did not spot Amun Odji-Kek anywhere among them.
It took me a minute.
My mind was fatigued and jittery from fighting. Every nerve in me twitched from an electrical storm blowing along the ridge of my spine.
But when my brain gears finally meshed, I quickly covered Yong Wu’s eyes.
Wu did not see. And I did not tell him.
His parents occupied the Ka doorway.
They were not alone.
Odji-Kek wrapped his knuckles in their long white hair and bashed them together like a pair of marionettes. Then he dragged their limp bodies back into the Duat. The sorcerer stepped through into our world again and quickly sealed the Ka door behind him. Wu’s parents were trapped in the Duat. Kek turned away from the stone wall calmly, a banker locking his vault, and showed the interdimensional door his wide and bandaged back. He smiled at me.
It was then I felt the earth vibrate and I knew the worm was crawling again.
34
Dealing with the Worm
“Do you feel him?” Kek called out across the crevasse. “The Grub of the Desert rises. As he rises, your chance for escape falls. Did you think dropping a few idi
ots down a hole made you heroes?”
I hated to admit that I was feeling rather heroic in the moment. With a few jaggy words he was able to take that away. My teeth gritted so I feared they might crack. It required all my strength not to turn and run. During my life I have discovered that many powerful men seize upon what little spark of gumption they find in those they deem beneath them – to grind it out like a cheap cigar, toss it in the gutter, and then piss on it for spite. This even proved true for a two thousand year-old magician who had brought himself back from the dead. He wanted us to know we were dog shit stuck to his heel. Call it domination or old-fashioned schoolyard bullying – I’m ashamed to say it worked on me as a drop of sulfuric acid would, eating down, eroding. I began to doubt myself.
I should say here that being in close proximity to either Odji-Kek’s magic or the door to the Duat (perhaps both in combination?) had a profound effect upon my five senses – they were intensified. I saw things larger, more vividly, this despite the parsimonious light. Sounds gained depth and sharpness. Smells, touches – each were more acute than they had been. My attention twisted in and out of focus. A torrent of stimuli threatened to drown my logical and orderly brain. I verged on tears, on laughter, on spouting snippets of pure nonsense. This giddy augmentation deepened my reality and paradoxically made my experience of it feel unreal, akin to a waking dream. While this breaking free of the ordinary came with a rush of exhilaration, I also tasted a dash of sorrow, because the ordinary does have its comforts.
How these sensory changes altered young Yong Wu’s still developing mind is a subject upon which I might only speculate. Add to the mix his raw emotions involving the uncertain fate of his parents, and however one classifies it, the Temple Underneath amounted to a hallucinatory assault upon the child, the boundaries of which I still cannot draw.
Wu pried my fingers from his eyes, wanting to see the mummy.
Odji-Kek walked to the edge of the chasm. “Tsk, tsk,” he said. “What do you know about bravery? It is more than killing ants.”
Using his bare hands, he tore the root of the bridge from its moorings. A knot in the rope the size of a very decent cabbage dissolved to particles as he twisted it between his fists. All it took was a sudden worm-induced updraft to scatter these fibers like the filamentous seeds blown from a dandelion clock. He clutched the rope end. I wondered what he was intending to do with it and knew only that it would be bad.
Knocked-about and bleeding, the final ten monks clung to the netting of the bridge as they cheered on their rescuer. With one arm he supported them over the pit. They trusted him. They were fools.
He opened his hand.
The monks fell, screaming.
“I care nothing for ants,” he said, dusting his palms.
El Gusano’s dank odor filled the chamber. His slithering made the rocks drone.
“Worship me,” Kek said. “Get on your knees and beg for your lives.”
“I will not,” I said.
“It is your only choice. You have dug a god up from the sand. Honor me or die.”
“We will not!” Wu shouted. He threw what was left of his firebrand. It fell short.
Kek leaned over to watch the flame plummet.
I had almost forgotten McTroy hidden in his dark crag along the ledge. As Kek straightened to his full, towering height, McTroy fired one of his Army pistols. The bullet struck the Egyptian sorcerer-priest in the back of the head. I fully expected him to tumble into the abyss, and so I cried out a premature “Hurrah!”
Amun Odji-Kek remained upright.
But the bullet had hit its target. Kek’s head jolted and a tuft of hair lifted out of place, curving upward like a broken, shiny black wing. There it stayed.
He glared in surprise.
A trace of smoke showed me where McTroy secreted himself in the rocks. The ghouls turned in unison, training their weapons on him.
“Good shot,” Kek said. He regained his composure. Smoothed his hair. With an elegant finger he explored his right eye. Deeply. Producing a succulent sound from inside the socket. The prodding turned my stomach until he finally called, “A-ha!” and, making a hook with his forefinger, he fished out the still-smoking lead slug. It was a bloodless operation. But it left me dry-mouthed. He flicked the ammunition in the pit.
“I hope you have learned something,” he said.
Kek’s unharmed eyes shined rich, lemony amber, as if they had been freshly shellacked. Their pupils were slit vertically, a notable feature of jungle cats, but not what one expects to find in the faces of people. Remarkable though they were, it would have been a stretch to call them supernatural. On the surface, Kek appeared like a man. Of course we knew him to be other. For one, he would not die. Two, he did not bleed. And three, perhaps also four, his physical strength and mental powers exceeded the limits of humanity. If Kek were my teacher, I trusted he would be proud of how quickly his lessons impressed me. I had always been a good student.
“Tell the ghouls not to fire upon Mr McTroy,” I said.
“Why would I do that, doctor?”
“Because we are prepared to go now. To leave here. Please, understand me.”
I kneeled on the stone floor. I laid my stick down and bowed. I groveled.
Wu dragged on my shirttails. “Stop, sir. You mustn’t do that. Stop it!”
“Get down, Wu. Our fate lies ahead of us. Embrace it.”
“No, no… we must not listen… this is evil–”
I grabbed the boy and pressed him flat next to me. I held him there. I spoke firmly and loudly. “Who are we to stand against gods? We must jump at the chance he is offering. It is our best option. The worm will soon be upon us. I see his mighty back.”
Kek kept the ghouls at bay with a raised finger.
“Let the cowboy live,” he said. “Bring him to me. Do it now.”
Red candles and guns shifted onto the ledge. I hoped McTroy had deciphered me.
The chasm filled with maggot. Like a waxen, lumpen whale he floated up and filled the gorge with himself. I had not yet seen El Gusano in his worm-form. He was much different than his younger relative, the worm-sister’s offspring whom I had battled in the bowels of the skull rock. Here a question popped into my head for which I never found an adequate answer: Are not most worms hermaphroditic? Never mind this. His size was gargantuan. Days earlier he had tunneled under the train tracks, and I now could see how that engineering feat was possible, for had he lazed on a set of rails, one might easily have mistaken him for an idle engine (if viewed at a distance). His body spilled out in a boneless, uniformly cylindrical pattern, tapering at both extremities such that the head and tail were indistinguishable. When at rest he would mash the ground mercilessly without space for a draft of air. This grandeur of size only multiplied his repugnancy: bald, segmented horror the color of raw pork sausage links and very like them in shape and plumpness. But how he moved!
Part liquidity, part animal sentience, and a third part gross obscenity.
He would be our ticket. To death or freedom, I knew not which.
I hoisted Wu by his collar, clamped him round the waist, and yelled.
“Jump, Wu! Jump as far as you can!”
We leaped onto plush maggot-back. The touch was – ugh – moist, the texture doughy, without scales, cave-cool. An oil-like lubricant sweated out of the beast in heavy globules, painting our clothes with residue that promised to stain everything permanently. The smell– I wanted an immediate, scalding hot bath and a bar of soap.
Instead, I hugged the mammoth crawler and coached Wu to do the same.
“Grab him! We mustn’t be thrown off. Hold on!”
The worm felt our presence upon him. He reared the way a horse would rear if it were a limbless, grossly fat, dirt-borer by nature. That is – he proved incapable of bucking us off in the narrow (for him) confines of the abyssal channel; so he opted instead for a robust side-to-side thrashing. The cliffs of the chasm cracked into webs and star patterns; plates of loosen
ed wall fell like melting ice sheets. I lost my grip for a moment and flew over the top of Wu. His clawing fingers unsuccessfully sought a rib or wrinkle in the slick skin as he skidded back into me. We refastened ourselves together and clutched the invertebrate leader of the banditos. Worms, thank God, are not noisome creatures. In the skull rock the nephew worm’s mouth had emitted only an eerie pip-pip-pipping. El Gusano did him better. He vented basso profundo grunts, growls, and a cannon-like BOOM that rattled the monastic ritual chambers.
The ghouls assembled above us. Transfixed by the worm rodeo, no doubt.
I dared to turn my head, glimpsing their omnipresent weaponry. Stickmen sporting a hodgepodge of Sunday outfits they’d pilfered from graves. Those leathery, false faces they always wore – sliced from the same bodies. They weren’t fooling anyone into thinking they were alive. They could not hide their defiling nature. I almost pitied them. Having passed on shooting McTroy, they were eager to shoot something.
Us, most likely, I thought as we bounced.
The shots began.
Being correct was little solace.
A steady pock-pock-pock of slugs punched El Gusano’s humpback and burped out gouts of tepid worm-slime. His bellowing picked up a screechy quality. We felt him tremble like a feverish baby. Tiny, nervous wavelets rippled front to back. Pock. Pock. I am no worm mind-reader, but I think he wished he had his human form so he might talk to his compañeros. Pock. They did not seem to understand they were hurting him. Or they didn’t care. Pockety-pock. A thrown knife whizzed by and stuck with a thwaptt! Next a war hammer went spinning past my jaw and lodged in his jelly blubber. Blood pumped up gray around the handle. The leakage made holding him more difficult. The ghoul’s shots were getting better, though the worm shimmied and rocked in an attempt to avoid them. Dust from the pulverized walls helped to hide us. But it would not last.
“We must move, Wu.”
“Where?”
Pockpockpock.
An excellent question. The head seemed a wrong choice. Tail, then.