by Mark Tufo
We turned to follow suit. Slick, but it would only be a matter of time until we tired or made an errant turn and those tentacles would be the end of us. I moved in past the sweet spot, to the swirling, stomping mass of legs. The dust storm his feet were kicking up was a choking clog of fine debris turning to mud in my throat and lungs. It took every sense available to me to avoid being trampled and still I would occasionally be nicked from the side or pushed from behind.
“Think, Talbot. What would I do in this situation?” I took my belt off. And yes, while I was scared enough to shit myself, I wasn’t in any imminent danger of doing that just yet. Maybe later, if I lived. I’m sure there were still plenty of nightmares ahead to witness. Anyway, this wasn’t your traditional leather belt with drilled holes and a buckle; this was more of your garden variety rope I just used to hold my pants up. Amazing how you can keep a physique when there’re no more fast food or snack cakes available. I scanned quickly, looking for one of the legs that didn’t quite have its shit together as well as the others. Like, at some point it had just quit working properly and Mr. Bledgrum had not yet gone to the orthopedist to get it checked out. I found a perfect one that was mostly just getting dragged along.
Bledgrum again changed direction rapidly. It seemed he was actually helping me out as his busted limb now rushed up to meet me. In hindsight, it may have appeared that Bledgrum knew exactly what he was doing. My next set of maneuvers, while not technically flawless, were still adequate enough to get me perched up on the knee joint of the bum leg with the rope completely looped around it. I had an end of the rope in each hand, and while not the most comfortable mode of transportation, I was moderately safe. Then I had the crushing thought that all he really needed to do right now was sit down and my hitchhiking ride was over.
I was feeling somewhat pleased with myself at this very moment, you know, having averted death and all that with nothing but my brains and my belt. My heart was starting to come down a couple of hundred beats per second. Sweat was still dripping in my eyes but that was to be wholly expected at this point. Yeah, that’s when it got interesting; there seemed to be a reason this leg had problems. It was littered with soccer ball sized pustules. They were dark gray, almost black—hard, knotty bumps that seemed to have a lot in common with warts. Only these were festering and oozing a greenish, slimy puss. So, what I thought was sweat upon my brow was actually some sort of stinking demon virus.
“Oh man, this can’t be good,” I said as I twisted my head from a rivulet of the substance nearly a hand span across. It didn’t help that as this leg was dragged along it continually opened up scabbed-over sores. Soon I was covered in a thick viscera of hot, sticky fucking goop. I’m not even the slightest bit ashamed that I puked, at least twice. And still, that smelled better than the ulcerating holes. What I am a bit ashamed about admitting was I’d not even taken a moment to try and locate the cat. He had saved me, that was for sure, though I don’t know why. I doubt there could be a worse fate than what Bledgrum proposed should he catch me. But, I guess there is always worse; maybe Sebastian wanted to make sure I got the uglier fate. Had the cat been upfront from the beginning I think perhaps we could have outrun the brute and possibly found a safe haven. Then again, maybe I was giving Sebastian too much credit. He was still just a cat, after all.
I spun my head around as I caught sight of something streak past; it was Sebastian. Not going to lie, there was a huge stab of jealousy as he jumped and grabbed hold of a leg with his claws fully extended. In two seconds, he’d settled in on that leg. I wasn’t jealous because of the claws, but rather that the leg he’d chosen seemed to be free of any and all wart-like protrusions. I would have paid him handsomely to share his ride.
I read somewhere that dinosaur nervous systems were so slow it could take minutes until they registered pain caused by an injury; that was not the case with this guy. The moment Sebastian sunk his claws into that leg, Bledgrum had let loose with that woeful clacking racket. He started staggering back and forth in obvious pain.
“Big motherfucker like this is crying for his momma from cat claws?” I yelled out.
“There is a venom in them,” Sebastian answered, smugly, I thought.
“You put them in my mouth! Will it kill him?” I hoped and didn’t.
Sebastian shook his head.
“Silver have any special effect?” I asked as I looked to my axe.
“Does he appear to you to have any werewolf traits?”
“I hate you,” I spat out as a particularly thick globule of something slid past my lips. I could ride the phlegm express into eternity or I could do something. I chose to do something because when one is as bright as I am it is not wise to sit around and think too much; can get into way more trouble if given enough time to come up with something sound.
“I would not do that if I were you,” Sebastian warned as I climbed higher up the leg.
“There’s a reason we are who we are,” I told him back. It was an easy enough climb as I used the burgeoning crusty sores as handholds. I just hadn’t realized how high I would have to go. From a distance, the legs had seemed pretty short, and in comparison to the rest of the beast they were. But I was still somewhere in the neighborhood of the top of a traditional telephone pole by the time I got to where the leg joined the base. In the grand scheme of things, forty feet doesn’t sound so high, but I can guarantee if you were sitting on the top of one of those poles with nothing but a dinner plate-sized scab to hold on to, you’d be as terrified as I was right now.
Sebastian had much more easily climbed up his appendage. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Payback.”
“Payback for what? He has done nothing to us yet.”
“Proactive revenge.”
“There is no such thing.”
“There is now!” I yelled as I dragged the blade of my axe against the soft, gray underbelly of the hideous thing. The flesh parted easy enough as my blade was sharper than it had a right to be. What I had not accounted for was the seven or eight feet of blubber that needed to be carved through to get to anything vital. As if in reward for my courageous action, large, yellow gelatinous chunks of congealed matter poured down over my head to the point where I had to stop what I was doing and hold on for dear life lest I be forced from my perch by the deluge. This probably doesn’t need further embellishment. Once most of the disgusting innards had fallen out I crawled back up. I was three feet inside the monster, and the smell will probably take years of hard drinking to purge from my memory, but I’ll give it a shot. It smelled as if I’d crawled up the rectum of an E-coli victim who had eaten a particularly bad batch of pulled pork soaked in blue cheese. Yeah. Hot, liquefied shit with the taint of rotting bacterial infection. That basically sums it up.
I was gagging something fierce; long ribbons of drool hung from my mouth but I just kept cutting away. And still, I wasn’t clear for what purpose. I hacked and slashed, cutting great swaths of fibrous material. At this point, I was so lost in the savage act I never once pondered the ultimate outcome. I dared not go any higher up, afraid that I would forever become entombed within the beast, which is where I didn’t want to end up in the first place. I reached up and gave one final hack. A small pink ribbon of intestine pushed through like a hernia and then the weight of it forced the opening wider as if Bledgrum were giving birth to his guts. I was almost rendered unconscious as that first piece bounced off my head and unwound its way to the ground.
“What have you done?!” Sebastian shouted.
I climbed down about ten feet and went to the far side of the leg as the small gap I’d created had begun to widen on its own. It was like watching the San Andreas fault widen right before my eyes and it got wider and longer with every step Bledgrum took. Intestines free-flowed like a plate of spaghetti tilting into the sink, though this was pasta I never wanted to have. Huge sections plopped out, some never making it to the ground as they became entangled in his legs; those that did were summarily mashe
d into the ground. The clicking intensified as Bledgrum was in some serious distress. Mile after mile the beast plodded on, tripping on its own innards, leaving a slime trail that I’m sure was visible from space. He was doing irreparable damage to himself as he tore through and crushed everything that fell from him.
“We’re going to need to leave,” I said to Sebastian as a giant rippling tremble shook Bledgrum’s entire body, I knew a death rattle when I felt one. Bledgrum was moving much more slowly when my feet touched the ground, making the escape from the many legs less dangerous, as any freight hopper will tell you. Five minutes later Sebastian and I were off to the side and behind the behemoth. If he could still detect me I was no longer of importance as he stumbled forward.
“This isn’t good.” Sebastian seemed exceedingly nervous.
He plodded on. More and more material gushed out; looked like a garbage truck that had sprung a bad leak and some of the foulest refuse known to man was pouring into the street. There weren’t ever going to be enough hazardous material teams to deal with this cleanup.
“Souls must be a pretty hearty meal.” I managed to say. For the life of me, I could not look away from the spectacle ahead of us.
Sebastian said nothing. Bledgrum began to wobble in earnest as more and more of his legs stopped working or got knotted to the point where they could no longer move. He listed heavily to the left, sort of corrected himself, and then just toppled over. The thunderous sound and impact must have been heard multi-dimensionally because within a moment we had Azile on the spirit hotline. “Killed Bledgrum? What?” She seemed perplexed and was firing off questions faster than Sebastian or I could register.
“There are consequences, Michael!” she exclaimed.
“You know, dear, I was a little under the gun. I had to do something,” I explained. “And I’m not understanding why this is such a bad thing. He was a huge monster that did horrible things. If anything, I think I should be getting some sort of medal, maybe a key to the underworld or something.”
“I’m sure the citizens will be lining up,” she said sarcastically. “I want you to think about spiders, Michael.”
“Why? I hate those fucking things.”
“Do it!”
“Great! Okay…I’m thinking of those eight legged freaks of nature. Now what?”
“Let’s pretend Bledgrum represented every spider on the planet and you just eradicated them.”
“Holy fuck—I am a hero!”
“Just because you can’t stand them doesn’t mean they don’t play a vital role in the balance of the universe.”
“Meh. There were people that would have argued clowns had a purpose at one time. If you ask me the world is much better off since they stopped existing.”
“We’re not talking about clowns, Michael! Spiders consume more insects than any other species on the planet. Without them, we would be overrun by pests; disease and plague would run roughshod over the world. It would only be a few years before not much existed on the planet, save them. It would be worse than the zombies and the Lycan combined.”
I was beginning to get an inkling that I had screwed up on an epic scale, but it had been him or me and it still didn’t stop me from trying to justify or at least minimize my actions. “Yeah but, um, Bledgrum isn’t a spider. Plus, he wanted to kill me first.”
“I realize he wasn’t a spider. You of all people should recognize an analogy!”
Holy shit. She was pretty hot under the collar. Probably a good thing we had a dimension separating us.
Chapter 4
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 4
Sebastian and I didn’t hang around long; what was happening now did not need to be witnessed. Things, lower on the food chain, were coming up out of the ground and eating Bledgrum’s parts. I say “things” because to describe them turns my stomach. They were roughly human-shaped, albeit much smaller, a third of the size I guess, somewhere in the fifty-pound range, so, human-child size. At first, I thought it was some sort of rainstorm as the ground began to swirl in dozens, then hundreds, of places. Then the earth began to swell in those spots like a rapidly expanding pimple on a teenager's face. Then it would burst and instead of the welcome white glob of grease, out came these carnivorous parasites. They were bipedal; that’s all we had in common. They were a deep, coal black; their feet had large hooks, much like the vestigial dewclaw dogs have, though this one they used to dig at their food. They did not possess hands; rather their arms ended in a flat, pointed appendage, like a broad scythe, useful for fast digging. I could see no eyes; I guess they would have no reason for them at the depths they lived.
Tiny slits on the sides of their heads were, I imagined, for hearing; occasionally they would swivel those slits our way and listen intently. It was unnerving, being detected by these things, though I doubted they ate much live meat. Their mouths were a black hole, somehow impossibly darker than the rest of them, and in stark contrast to the white razor-sharp, interlocking teeth. Was sort of happy those things were more on the scavenger side than predatory.
“What are those?”
“You can call them sand sharks.”
“Good enough. We should maybe get out of here,” I told him.
“Gabriel says your connection has been restored. Azile wonders if perhaps you have done enough and should go back,” Sebastian relayed. I was doing my best to hide from the incoming calls; I didn’t need caller-id to know who was trying to get a hold of me.
“I’ll decide that at the gates. As of yet, I have done nothing.”
“Oh,” Sebastian looked back, “I think you have done plenty.”
We walked for hours; the light never wavered from an odd, twilight hue— a sort of un-light. Seemed like something important I should ask in regard to, but I was still completely covered in a thick layer of Bledgrum’s bodily fluids and now that it was solidifying, movement was becoming hindered, and well, just plain disgusting, and it was all I could think about.
“Anything like a river run through this place?”
“No,” came quickly and succinctly.
“No body of water I can use to clean up?”
“None.”
“I feel like you’re lying; either one: because you don’t want to take the time to let me clean up, or two: you enjoy seeing me in such distress.”
“There is what appears to be watering holes here, but they are made of lies. You would be better served diving into a pool of lava than dipping into these illusions. There are many things here that will appear very much as they do in your world; this is a deliberate attempt to ensnare the unsuspecting. Ironically, the things that appear to offer the most comfort or salvation are the ones you must be the most cautious of. There is no easy succor here; do not look for it.”
“I guess we should stay close, then,” I told him.
“Dangerous things in your world are still dangerous here.” He turned what I’d hope was levity on its ear. “It would be wise to stay away from those things as well.”
The landscape seemed to be devoid of life, though there were times I could see something flit past from the corner of my eye or scurry along a hillside, creating a small amount of scree. The terrain itself held no plants, harbored no trees. It was rocky and barren like the photos of the surface of Mars that I had seen. Though instead of the heavy, iron-rich reds, we were stuck with the more spirit-crushing drab grays that seemed to be prominent in the underworld. If this place wasn’t in need of a paint job I don’t know where was.
I really didn’t know what I expected the gates of the underworld to look like—perhaps some formidable, burning mountainous wall with large, grated steel doors nearly a hundred feet tall covering a gaping wound in the cliffside, keeping in all that would seek to bust out. It should have been something epic; hell, I would have even taken that huge wooden gate that led visitors into Jurassic Park. What I got instead was something that looked like it had been built by a couple of kids with stuff they’d salvaged from an old barn.
“You were expecting something like St. Peter’s gates I assume?” Sebastian asked as he looked over at me.
“I’ll be honest; I don’t think much about that barrier, but I figured something that was designed to keep in the worst this place has to offer would look more formidable than an old horse gate, maybe something like the black gates of Mordor.”
“There is a lot of power down there.”
“Magic?” I asked.
“Perhaps in your eyes it would appear as magic, but magic implies something can come from nothing. There is a great energy source used to thwart nearly every attack.”
“If you say so.” I started hiking down the small ridge we found ourselves on and was heading straight for it.
Sebastian bounded in front of me. “I understand my words matter little to you, but I will say them nevertheless so that I may keep peace with Azile. Not for me, mind you, but for her.”
“I’m listening.”
“Once you cross over, you are dead.”
“That simple?”
“Your body, the one which lies upon Azile’s couch, may resist for a moment or two, then it will convulse, gasp for a last breath, and be done.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t think Azile would have let me come if it was that easy to drop dead.”