Eight Black Offerings

by Lamb, Robert

He pulled the shirt up and exposed the right side of his torso. Scarlet veins visible under his pale skin, webbing out from the black, rotting wound his side. Griggs could plainly observe the ribs rising and falling with each breath, underneath the tight canvas of burned flesh.

  “It stung me, I guess,” he said, letting his shirt fall to conceal it again.

  “Now, why ain’t I dead, right?” he asked, gesturing wildly. “Why ain’t my heart stopped cold with this shit? Why’s it been like one long fucking meth bender since the wreck? I don’t know … don’t even know if there’s really any percentage in asking. But then I started trying to wrap my head around the way it made me feel -- and not just feel, but think, ya know? Best I can figure, that thing came from someplace else, some place deep down…”

  He trailed off, staring down wide eyed and twitching, as if he might, by sheer junkie will, see through the floor and into the bowels of the earth itself.

  The train began to slow towards its next stop. The man shot his glance back to Griggs -- put a hand on his shoulder.

  “This is it,” he said. “No or never.”

  Griggs stared out the window again, at the alternating stretches of solid concrete and hungry darkness. “Help me up,” he said. “Help me walk.”

  ***

  They disembarked at the next stop and the stranger, who finally introduced himself as Alan, picked the lock on an “authorized personnel only” door and led the way through a cluttered storage room, down a corridor, and out into the darkness of the subway tunnels.

  They crept along the walkway, guided by the glow of Alan’s flashlight. Griggs kept his back against the wall for support, kept one hand firmly on his guide’s shoulder and side-shuffled his way down the tunnel. Their progress was slow and labored, but relentless.

  In the dark, Griggs detected a slight glow emanating from Alan’s neck. He soon realized it was where some of the blackened flesh crept above his shirt collar, the pulsing vein at its center burning with soft, scarlet luminosity. It brought to mind the things that lived in deep-sea trenches.

  “The wreckage is still a good ways up ahead,” Alan said. “But what we’re looking for is going to show up a lot sooner.”

  Griggs’ breathing became more and more labored, his knees and back throbbing from the weight of his burden. He also soon began to notice patches on the tunnel wall covered in dark slime. At one point, he nearly tripped over something large and wet on the narrow walkway -- something that made a sound like rotten fruit as it tumbled down to the tracks below.

  Panicked, he’d struggled for balance, started to lower himself down to the safety of a seated position -- but Alan grabbed him under one arm and hauled him back to his feet.

  “Not yet,” the stranger grunted, “If you sit down, I might not be able to get you back up -- and we’re so close I can fucking feel it.”

  All Griggs could feel, however, was weariness -- in his limbs, in his breathing, in every sad inch of his pathetic hide. His vision blurred when he looked at Alan’s flashlight and he saw a thousand torch beams searing down a thousand tunnels.

  And then he heard it.

  They both recoiled, Alan jerking his head around to stare back down the way they’d traveled. The sound was unmistakable: not the movements of secret things in the dark, but the growing vibrations of an approaching subway car.

  “Train…” Griggs said. “I thought the--”

  “Come on!” Alan yelled, tugging him up by the arm. “We gotta get you into the next alcove!”

  And he realized it was true -- while his slender guide could, in theory, simply cling to the wall and let the train pass, Griggs’ bulk was too much. A passing car was bound to rupture him, rip his belly open like a sack of garbage.

  He thought again of the windows suddenly awash with dark green liquid, the sounds of movement on the roof.

  “Move!” Alan screamed, grabbing him by the shirt collar.

  Griggs began to shamble at full speed behind him. How far back was the last alcove? What was their interval? He hadn’t thought to notice or keep track. What if he wouldn’t fit?

  Soon, he’d feel the subterranean ozone wind rushing in approach of his death. By the time the lights were visible, it’d be too late.

  He thought of the dancing paper, the rat squirming its way into some hidden hole.

  Better to just fall in front of it, should it come to that – better to just have it all at once.

  His breathing became a series of labored gasps, each racking his entire torso.

  “I think there’s one up here!” Alan screeched. “Just a little farther!”

  But he could already feel the wind building up. His vision blurred out a little more with each struggled step and he felt his insides tremor.

  Recklessly, he pushed himself harder. The ledge became slippery, his footing even more uncertain

  “Here!” Alan cried. “Quick, get--”

  He stopped and Griggs stumbled into him.

  “What’s wrong?” he cried, his voice probably too soft to be heard at all.

  And then he saw it.

  The stranger’s flashlight beam illuminated a wall of black, rotting meat where his refuge should have been -- every inch of the alcove packed solid with hewn slabs of flesh and the jutting remains of broken, crustacean-like appendages, each the size of a tree branches.

  Oh god, oh god, oh god oh god…

  The wall leading on beyond was smeared solid with inky fluid.

  Behind them, the roar grew louder.

  Alan reached his arms into the rancid meat and pulled out one of the dripping, segmented appendages, let it tumble down to the tracks. Then another. In a frenzy, he grabbed hold of the edges of a chunk the size of a side of beef and began to tug on it, throwing all his weight into wrenching it from the clogged alcove, opening it like a slow-hinged doorway to a world of oily rot.

  The lights of the approaching train began to glow behind them, casting their long, doomed shadows down the tunnel ahead. Griggs felt his bowls loosen, felt the hot trickle of urine down his leg.

  Trembling uncontrollably, he made ready to let himself fall.

  “Here!” Alan yelled, “Just enough room!”

  Another slab of flesh finally came out, tumbled down wetly to the tracks.

  Griggs felt himself pulled toward the meat-choked alcove, felt Alan viciously trying to shove him, back first, into the hole he’d dug out, wet and slick in the flashlight’s glow. It smelled like rot smothered in incense, a great heap of spiced decay.

  Cold, foul liquid poured over him as Alan pressed him into the spongy meat. More of it shifted, fell around him in ropey strings.

  “You’re almost there!” Alan screamed.

  And then the light was upon them, blasting full force.

  He heard the screech of breaks, felt his foot slipping against the edge of the walkway as Alan continued to push him in with a desperate cry.

  Alan slipped and the two of them collapsed against the meat, their legs splaying out over the edge of the walkway. Griggs tried to scramble back up, but only slid a little further. He rolled onto his side and suddenly felt most of his belly hanging out in the train’s path.

  Gasping, he looked up and saw only blinding light – heard only the groan of metal.

  And then the flashlight beam moved away from his face.

  “It’s him!” Boomed a voice.

  A single open-platform maintenance car coasted to a stop just a little behind them – not the unstoppable bullet of a subway car, but something far smaller, far less sleek.

  Griggs stared in numb disbelief.

  Its bed was cluttered with green boxes and portable lighting, along with what looked like a small crane. Several men crouched here and there amid the clutter. Some were dressed in bright yellow rain coats; a couple of others seemed to be transit police.

  Oh god…

  Griggs fumbled in his pocket for the loose collection of sleeping pills. He wouldn’t let them take him -- not to some cell, not to som
e doctor’s probing needles.

  He pulled out a fistful.

  Alan grabbed his hand. “No you don’t!”

  Most of them spilled from his fist in the struggle -- the rest Alan forcibly tried to keep away from his face. Griggs looked up to see one of the men in the florescent rain coats jumping across the gap onto the walkway. He could already imagine the words: “Mr. Griggs, your wife has been very worried about you … We have to get you to a doctor right away … This is a restricted area, we really…”

  “We have found you,” said the man in the yellow coat, his face half lost to black skin and creeping red veins. His eyes, like Alan’s, burned with manic intensity. “The One whose coming was foretold by the Great Mother’s wound.”

  The man lifted the right side of his raincoat and revealed a dark, wet wound in his side, pulsing red veins fanning out around it through his torso.

  At that, the other half-dozen men on the maintenance car unbuttoned their raincoats and pulled open their shirts. Each bore the same cancer-black puncture in their right side, pierced through the ribs like the work of some deranged Caravaggio. One man, standing towards the back, was almost completely charred from the venom – hunched over, wheezing and twitching, but eyeing Griggs with intense interest all the same.

  “We’ll take you the rest of the way down,” the man in front said.

  Griggs kept his fist tightly clenched. Alan kept his grip on the wrist. He didn’t move -- wasn’t sure he could now that he was off his feet.

  “Where?” He asked.

  “To the Great Below,” the man said. “The vent is just ahead”

  A tremor moved through him again, his perspective shattered into a thousand separate streams before he felt his consciousness collapse back to its normal proportions.

  Rise.

  He swallowed, hard and dry.

  Rise.

  He opened his tightly clenched fist, revealed an empty palm.

  “Oh god…” Alan moaned.

  “How many?” the lead stranger asked.

  Alan grabbed Griggs’ jaw and pried it open. He felt the dirty, probing fingers fumbling around in his gums.

  “Couldn’t have been many,” Alan said, “I’ll gag him.”

  Griggs felt the fingers shoot to the back of his throat.

  “No!” a raspy voice called out from the maintenance car, “Too risky…”

  Alan pulled his fingers out and Griggs doubled over in coughs, in revulsion, but he didn’t vomit. He felt the numbness inside him tremble, felt his consciousness swell again, but it held. He looked up to see the source of the raspy voice: the hunched-over man from the back of the cart, his head completely scourged and hairless from the poison coursing through him.

  “We have to take him down now,” the dark man continued. “It can’t happen here…”

  Somehow, they managed to get him to his feet. They seemed worried, but not irate. With the utmost care, they hefted him across the gap to their open-roofed vehicle. He managed to exert enough energy to keep from being complete dead weight, but the pills were already taking hold of him. They eased him to the floor beside a generator. One of them even gathered some coats and tarps for him to recline on.

  Before the engine started again, Griggs noticed something shining in the meat still clogging the alcove, gleaming like a jewel set in black flesh.

  It was a single, great eye.

  ***

  Between the roar of the engine and the drugs filtering through his system, he began to sleep -- began to feel his consciousness drift apart into a thousand dream fragments, a thousand pieces that, together, formed a staggering mosaic.

  He saw the Great Below the strangers had spoken of, saw the mind-numbing expanses of desert and strife, the fire storms and poisoned oceans that carved the inner hells.

  Jungles of thorn and venom crowded the fore hills of jagged, black mountains. Volcanic peaks bled forth rivers of living sewage, the banks of which swarmed with mammoth, wingless birds. Their eyes were mounds of scar tissue, their flesh crawling with a tapestry of scabs and vermin. Occasionally, the great beasts wandered far enough from the banks to sniff out the mountain-bound slave caravans of chained, humanoid rabbits -- and fell on them ravenously.

  The slave drivers -- squat and bundled from head to toe in crimson scarves -- scurried for the cover of thorn trees as the birds fought one another over their leporid prey. They pecked at eyes long lost to past scuffles, added further gashes to each other’s ravaged, hoary heads. The chained, furry things at their feet merely shrieked in terror as they were gobbled whole.

  When the most gluttonous bird had eaten its fill, its brothers fell to ripping at its bloated abdomen with greedy talons and hungry beaks. Streaked in bloody bowel, already searing with the agonies of near-digestion, the rabbit men’s still-squirming bodies tumbled out onto the ground like dripping newborns, only to be gobbled up one again.

  The wastes stretched on. Everywhere, there was strife, everywhere there was death.

  He glimpsed where armies of vaguely anthropomorphic horrors lay in besiegement to a mountain fortress. The warriors’ faces were consumed by enflamed flesh, lost to the twisted in-growth of their spiral horns, their bodies thickly muscled over twisted, elephant man skeletons. Wave after wave, they sacrificed themselves in great piles against the high walls of the fortress -- falling to rains of arrows, burning pitch and worse.

  Great rotting titans manned the towers high above, each bound by chains to their fortifications, where cloaked, man-sized beings prodded them to action with flaming tridents and spears. With each fiery wound to their flanks, one of the howling giants would plunge its claws into its own stomach and tear forth a squirming troll-child, then heave the dripping, thrashing mess down onto the besiegers like a boulder.

  The ripped remnants of each titan’s gut then sizzled and smoked with regeneration, till such time as the sinking of a flaming pike bid them plunge into their bodies once more for fodder.

  And the sky above -- if it were truly sky -- burned with an unnatural amber-orange glow that made him think of rotting jungle flowers, the rancid sweetness of spoiled fruit.

  Griggs heard again the voice of compulsion:

  Rise.

  He glimpsed the untold hordes rising up from even greater depths, out of the breathing tunnels that buried still deeper into greater planes of Boschian misery…

  Rise.

  …spiraling up from the very bottom of the universe…

  Rise.

  He saw the black legions swell, felt them wash over both the besiegers and fortress like a wave, over birds and prey, over canyons of blood and temples of bone.

  Griggs’ consciousness collapsed back on itself and he saw darkness again, felt the floor beneath him moving, felt himself swaying on some uneven platform. He opened his eyes to the flickering glow of electric lanterns reflected against a ceiling of wet, black rock.

  Wrapped in bits of tarp and a few ragged winter coats, he was strapped securely to a makeshift litter built from pipes, aluminum sheeting and oily rope. The blackened men bore him, awkwardly navigating the oddly-hewn tunnel that twisted down at a steady rate of decent.

  His bearers didn’t say a word to him, slowed only as the difficulties of their path required. At one point, one of the men collapsed wheezing to the tunnel floor. Their progress stopped for but a second.

  “Leave him,” Alan said, “He has succumbed.”

  ***

  Hours passed before they lowered the litter of pipes and rags to the ground, each of its five surviving bearers groaning with relief. Griggs, still wrapped in a pile of coats, looked uncertainly up at the great rock cavern surrounding them

  The strangers cut loose his bonds and extinguished their flashlights, but he could still hear them near him, wheezing and struggling for breath in the dark.

  Despite their hours of passage through the black tunnel, it was not the perfect dark of some subterranean cavern that surrounded them. The darkness seemed wet somehow, moist and g
listening with the faintest scarlet illumination, clinging to the jagged rocks and vaulted ceiling far overhead. There was the faintest movement of air through the chamber -- a horrible warm breeze that smelled of rot and fetid waters.

  And there was something else here was well, something that called out to him wordlessly, stirred the vast numbness inside him.

  His vision shifted to the perspective of legion again and he saw the great chamber illuminated in sparkling crimson. The strangers knelt to either side of him like royal subjects, the twisting black trails of their poison showing strongly on their arms and faces. Half of Alan’s beard had fallen out, replaced by black ruin.

  The strangers turned their bowed heads towards something ahead in the darkness.

  Griggs followed their gaze and saw, at last, the instrument of his change, one of the beings whose movements he had surely heard on the roof of the subway car, whose sibling’s torn carcass they’d found mashed by the train’s velocity into the alcove. This was the one whose kiss had filled him with this strange purpose, whose sting had turned the strangers into obedient preparers of The Way.

  The creature’s form was roughly that of a gargantuan arachnid -- its gleaming black carapace that of some unimaginable crustacean, as if born to inhabit oceans of boiling tar. The steam rising from its surface betrayed the epic heat of the biologic processes within. Its blood must boil, he realized, the thing’s massive heart like that of a spitted pig, cooked until it furiously began to pump with the boiling juices of its own roasting.

  It crouched not like a spider set to pounce, but as if lost to some form of Tantric meditation. Its two front pairs of legs crossed, the lacework of overlapping limbs creating the shape of a diamond. Its great head was bowed, its eyes closed. At first he took the being’s mouth parts for a great beak, but quickly understood them to be more akin to the closed and coiled tentacles of a cuttlefish. They drifted and caressed each other ever so slightly, as if afloat in dreams.

  Slowly, Griggs moved from the litter, struggling against the torment of his weight and girth. At first he crawled across the cold rock floor -- the rough and ragged edges of the stone cutting into his palms -- but at last he rose to one swollen knee. Then the other.