by Chuck Wendig
Below it sits a swamp of brackish, gray water. Plumes of mineral mud blooming, swirling, and sinking. Fish the color of bone with eyes like beads of blood appear when it clears, then dart forward, stirring up fresh clouds of turbid murk.
A heady fog rises from the water’s surface.
Nora and the others tromp through the brackish swamp. The water is knee-deep now. On the craggy shore—a shore on which they cannot walk for how sharp the stones there are—the so-called “gophers” hop and gambol, their eight legs finding each purchase. Hairless, colorless heads with flesh ear caverns tilt and listen, as each isn’t blind so much as they have no eyes to begin with.
The first sign arrives as a fly. Fat and well-fed. A wing buzzes in Nora’s ear and she swats it away—but then another lands on the back of her hand as they close in on the town. Hrothk clumsily swats at a few. Tracks one with his gun-hand (though blessedly does not fire). Norky seems oblivious. Burnsy tries to eat a few. “Hey, what? I’m hungry,” he says with a half-hearted shrug.
The second sign is the smell.
Not just death, but the vinegar tang of roadkill left long to pickle in a hot, damp ditch. Sweet and sour. Nora’s stomach—growling just five minutes ago—flops over and she has to struggle not to upchuck.
Through the mist, they see a shape. A body. On a spike. Impaled there like a doll: stuffing gone rotten, limbs drooping.
Then others. Corpses draped over wooden walkways. A Half-and-Half, his face like the bark of a tree, dangles from underneath a hut by his ankles, his body stuck with sharpened sticks, his body swinging so that his moss-vine hair draws rippling patterns on the water-top. A woman in ratty clothes leans out of the hut’s window, almost like she’s just watching them pass by, almost like she’s still alive. And then her mouth moves to say something and Nora waves and calls to her—
But the mouth opens and a cankerpede crawls out, the segments of its long body clicking together like playing cards in the spokes of a child’s bike. The critter skitters.
Norky whimpers. “I... I don’t understand.”
“This is some brazen shit, right here,” Burnsy says, swatting at a fly.
“Goblins,” Hrothk says. “This was a gob job.”
Nora holds her wrist over her nose. Trying not to breathe in that way. “The gobbos haven’t been active lately. Back home, at least, they’ve been quiet. Staying below ground. Mostly in their temples and camps. But this is something else. This is a Hell-town. These people knew how to thwart a goblin attack—you don’t get to survive down here if you can’t push back a band of gobbos.”
“This was no band,” Hrothk says.
She shakes her head. “Then it wasn’t gobs. They always attack in small groups.”
“Bullshit,” Burnsy says. “You weren’t there. At Daisypusher. Day the goblins swept over us like a goddamn tsunami. Them and those fucking Reaper-cloaks. Vollrath.” He visibly shudders. “Your father was there that day. Helped save our undead bacon, much as I hate to admit it.”
The Vollrath. She thinks about those things every day she’s down here. Just black sheets, as empty as outer space. Eyes of the void. Fingers like knives that don’t cut flesh but cut into your mind, dissecting everything about who you are and were and would one day become. Cutting up her memories. Holding them up like old photo negatives. Why, she still doesn’t know.
Though they’re more notable now for their absence. She’s looked for them. Touched her hands to the walls and felt out as far as her mind would take her—and nowhere could she sense them. Which was even fucking creepier than if she know where they were and what they were doing.
“Okay,” she says. “We don’t stay long. We go up there. Look around for resupply—they have to have a market, or food, or something that the gobbos didn’t touch. Then we get out of here. Norky, you say this is the start of it?”
Norky, though, is staring at the bodies. Eyes flitting as fast as the flies.
“Norky!” she says, and it jars him from his grim reverie.
“Sure, sure, this is the, ahh, Screwthread, and the Blackwood River should start just on the other side of town.”
“Then we go through the town. Get to the river. You think they’ll have boats?” But again he’s lost. Staring. Jaw agape, loose skin hanging from it like a bedskirt. “Boats! Will they have any!”
“Yeah. Yes. They should, right? They should.”
“Then let’s go shopping.”
*
Towns in Hell aren’t exactly thriving metropolises, but this one was doing better than most. The dead have piled up. Dozens scattered around. Not just dead. Ruined. That’s the gobbo way: they are ruiners, never content merely to kill when they can humiliate and maim. These bodies bear the signs of such grotesque violation. As Nora enters into one hut, inside she finds two swamp-folk positioned, naked, on a wooden plank—two men, each with cheeks bulging from swallowing each other’s genitals.
Someone suddenly bumps into her—Norky.
She pulls away, irritated. He smiles, sheepish, his grin like teeth in stretched taffy.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says.
“We split up. This isn’t splitting up.”
His eyes fall on the two dead men. The fabric of their shirts squirm and shift from flies and the children of flies, worms. As he gawks, he mumbles, “I... don’t really want to be alone out here. I thought I could come along with you.”
“Why not the others?”
“The golem scares me. The other one reminds me too much of the, ahh, the Skinless? It makes me uncomfortable, if I’m being honest.”
“You’re no prize to look at, either. Besides, Burnsy has his skin. It’s just... burned. He’s like one big skin graft.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. So can I come with?”
It occurs to her how much she dislikes Norky. And that’s not his fault, not really. It’s part of how he looks (gum under her shoe), part of how he acts (nebbish and afraid), but mostly it’s because she’s never responded well to weakness.
She remembers a girl. In elementary school. Had a strange name. Iara? That what it was? Whatever. This girl adored Nora. Idolized her for reasons Nora never really understood. Nora was quiet, reserved, sat in the back, often scribbling or studying. Maybe the girl thought she saw a kindred spirit? Stupid. She would trail after Nora on the playground like a lost puppy. Panting and whimpering. She’s surprised the girl didn’t roll onto her back and piss her pants in submission.
Nora couldn’t stand it. And she snapped. They were, what, in fourth grade? And she destroyed the poor girl. Called her a grub, a scrub, a dork, a needy little nerd, told her to leave her alone, go home, play with her dollies and her microscope but never talk to her again, ever, ever, ever. The girl sobbed. Not just crying, but ugly crying. The breakdown. The snot bubbles. The strings of spit connecting her lips.
Through the blubbering and hitching cries, the girl cried out, “Noooo!” like that could somehow stop everything.
Thing is, they had an audience. Nora didn’t mean for that. She wasn’t putting on a show. She was earnestly trying to get this girl to stop following up her ass. But some of the cool girls were nearby—girls who wore makeup and talked about kissing boys and who knew, even at that early age, words like “blowjob” and “humping” even if they didn’t really know what those words meant yet. Cool kids. Bad girls.
And they loved it. Ate it up like a spoonful of strawberry jam. They watched Nora demolish this girl, Iara, into tiny little breadcrumbs. They, like seagulls, hopped and squawked, delighted at what they were seeing.
Nora hated herself in that moment. And hated those girls, too.
But then they asked her to join them at their lunch table the next day.
And Nora said yes.
Those girls became her crowd. Not her friends. Not really. Did she ever have friends? Real friends? Maybe a few. None that lasted. None that didn’t betray her or ended up betrayed by her. (Her policy over time became first strike—humiliate or be humiliated, e
nd of fucking story.)
She learned an important lesson that day:
Neediness was weakness. And cruelty was strength.
Of course, what came of it? Cool crowd in school, but now here she is, down in the fetid backward nowhere of Hell itself. And Iara, last she heard, was a doctor. Obstetrics. Graduated from Yale.
So, with all that playing out in her mind, she thinks to maybe give this mutant freakazoid a little extra leash in terms of... well, if not empathy, then at least sympathy. She’s still a user, an abuser. She feels that in her bones. Feels that she could just tear this Half-and-Half down, rip his skin off with the sheer might of her callousness, strip him down to nothing and then break even that down to its constituent parts.
But she doesn’t.
Instead she says, “Yes. You can come with.”
That’s progress, right?
*
They pick and poke through houses. Norky trails behind. Sometimes she looks out and sees the other two in huts and houses across the way—a glimpse of the golem’s white-cloaked head, or the shine on Burnsy’s glistening scalp.
They find a few things here and there—canned goods, jugs of water, cans of gas, some suspicious-looking meat jerky. Far less than she had hoped. All the while they have to pick past and through bodies, flies, piles of gobbo shit (sloppy mounds thick with bones and loose teeth and covered in bugs).
And they’re almost at the end of Muskrat, and still no sign of a boat.
In the last building, a longhouse, she lifts up a ratty old mattress and finds a bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola. Real sugar. She pops the top and the stink that comes out of it is vicious—a fermentation sizzle that burns her eyes. Nora drops the bottle. The ruined soda fizzes. Stains the mattress.
At least no bodies in this room.
Norky suddenly ooohs. He trundles over to a desk, and pulls from it a map next to an old-timey spyglass—this map made of parchment. Inked with a very fine hand. He holds it up. Licks his rubbery lips. “Look-look-look. What a map. Shows the rest of our journey.” She peers over his shoulder. “The cartography is amazing and, if I’m reading this right—and oh, boy, I bet I am!—then the river’s mouth is thattaway.”
He points toward the far end of the longhouse. The wall there is corrugated iron with a window cut out and covered over with a ratty NASCAR blanket. Nora, curious, walks past the bunks and heaps of debris and stands at the window. The blanket smells of cigarettes and swamp water. She lifts it—
And there juts a little wobbly dock.
And at the end of the dock—a hundred yards out—is a rickety boat. An army boat, like something you’d see in Vietnam. A PT boat, right? Here she breathes a sigh of relief. At least they know they have a way forward. A way up the river—or, according to the map, down it, since it seems to flow toward the ocean.
Someone’s on the boat.
That can’t be right.
Out from the far side of the boat walks a woman. Bald. Nude—but her flesh is banded with striations of scale that spiral up and down her body. A Snakeface? Like no Naga that Nora has ever seen. The woman moves with a serpentine grace, hypnotic to watch, and she finds herself staring...
Behind her, a floorboard squeak.
Then something slams hard into her head. Her whole body jukes sideways and all she sees for a moment is a white flash that drowns everything out, a hot bright curtain of concussive misery. As she drops, it’s like the tumblers in a lock clicking—
So much skin
Skinless King
Maps
Cartography
No—
—trap
Above
...as Below
Then Norky brings the heavy thing down on her head again and all goes dark.
15
I died down here. I followed the ghosts as far as I could go. A sick and broken man I heard the Bleak Hymn and found my way to the Ravenous Expanse, and I found the way to stave off death with death—a vaccine of sorts, where exposure to the sickness cures the sickness. (And death, to be sure, is merely that: a sickness that can remain a temporary state.) I took one of the little mushrooms with the glowing violet eyes and I ate it to return myself to some semblance of life. It changed me. The god-worms sang louder. I had no gates. No Ochre to open portals and escape. And I still found myself sliding down into the deepest nowhere, into the abyss where the god-worms turned and churned. I fell. My body, broken on a rock. I cut my skin off with a piece of obsidian, slicing it off in sheets, using scree and dust to write a message, to translate the Song of Lith-Lyru, the Song of Despair, to paper. My words. My gospel. My resurrection.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Nora’s everything is a bird flying into light and out of it—from bright to dark, from sun to shadow. Her world awakens, bleary, dreary, drifting... then plunges back into nothingness once more. Images find her, burn hot across her vision, and then fade, like a picture remaining on a television even after it was turned off—
Norky, grabbing at the top of his head. Pulling his skin off in clumps. Exposing the red meat underneath.
Nora, dragged along a dock. Her heels juddering against damp wood.
The woman. On the boat. She changes. Like she’s just a seed, and from her grows a massive thing—a serpent with black scale, a worm of divine proportions, one of the Hungry Ones. She sings. A crass ululation sung by a slithering god.
Goblins. Coming up out of the water. Down out of cracks and crevasses above. Racing toward her and Norky. Past her. Shrieking. Babbling. One with a chipped axe. Another with a pair of rusted knives. Bodies gray the color of puddle-drowned nightcrawlers. Some nude. Others with rags and stolen clothing: a Bart Simpson T-shirt (Cowabunga), a pair of muddy Hawaiian shorts, a swaddling of gauze, a blood-caked hoodie. They stream past her. They don’t care about her. She tries to cry out—
Hrothk. Up in the air. At the end of the god-worm’s maw. Its jaw crushing him. Dust streaming from his cracked limbs. Rocks breaking off him, splashing into the swamp. The god-worm plunges downward. Slamming him into the swamp water. His gun goes off. A jet of black blood arcs. Doesn’t matter. His limbs thrash. And then they fall still and sink beneath the waters...
Somewhere, Burnsy screaming. Goblins howling.
Norky rolls Nora onto her back.
He’s not Norky anymore. All the loose skin is gone. All that’s left is a lithe, skinless body. Long and lean: human, but with a praying mantis grace. White eyes stare down through the red volcanic craters that are the man’s eye sockets. A pink tongue slides across skinless lips. Genitals hang small from the body—like a plum turned inside down, juice dripping.
“Nora Pearl,” the man says—no gargle, no gurgle, but a voice that’s clean and deep and crisp. “You wished for an audience with the Skinless King, and now you have one. Shall we take a boat ride?”
“Please,” she says, a spit bubble forming at the ends of her lips.
“Downriver we go,” he says.
His raw red hands reach for her.
And somewhere she hears Burnsy scream.
Darkness overtakes her. The bird flies back to shadow.
*
A splash of brackish, stinking water. Nora gasps as it strikes her face. The gasp is half-scream. She hangs below her stretched arms, wrists bound with wire and wound up through a rusted eyebolt. Her limbs burn, feel like ropes pulled too tight, the fibers hot like they’re about to catch fire. The ground sways beneath her. Still on a boat.
The room isn’t much to look at. Might have once been a galley. White counters smeared with sticky filth. Cabinets cracked—doors hanging off hinges, other doors missing entirely. She sees canned goods: peaches, a bloated soup can, Alpo.
The Skinless King steps into view.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Let me go,” she hisses.
“Too early to make demands. Not very polite. In my days as an academic if you wanted some
thing you had to go through channels. Had to be polite. Go to dinners. Offer research, evidence of what one deserved. Only way to get the grant, or the equipment you needed, or, or, or. You couldn’t just... demand. As you are doing.”
“Go to Hell.”
“Another mis-step. You want something from me but you have only the stammered rage and clumsy pleas of a toddler who wants a toy off a high shelf. I heard tell you were something of a manipulator. Someone whose tongue was a lockpick. Metaphorically speaking. But you cannot be that girl. We haven’t even begun to break you down yet and already this is the ugliness that seeps out? It’s a bit pathetic.”
“You’re Oakes,” she says, slurring—the sound of the concussed.
“You already know that I am.”
“You pretended to be Norky.”
“Norky was never real, if that comforts you.”
As if you care about my comfort.
“Why?” she asks. She tries to adjust for comfort but it only makes a lightning bolt of pain arc across the back of her shoulders and up each arm. Her fingers are numb.
“Why the masquerade?”
“Why come to me at all?”
“You can sense things. As I can. For we are both given this crass facsimile of life, thanks to the glory of the Caput Mortuum—the Death’s Head. Just as you could sense me out here, I could sense you. And then one day, that little radar blip in the back of my mind started to move. And I could... detect your intentions. I had my people look, and what did they find but you, intending to procure a ticket on the 13 Train.”
She draws a deep breath. It’s hard. Her lungs feel like they’re on fire. Sucking in a single breath is like one of the trials of Hercules. “Why not let me come to you?”
“Your time for questions is over. My turn. Why did you seek me out?”
“You know why. You can ‘detect my intentions.’”
“Only in part. And I can guess why you’re here, but I’d rather hear it from you.”
“I want out,” she growls. “Out of Hell.”