Authors: Dru Pagliassotti
New Title 1 (23 page)
Amon dropped the scrap of dried flesh, scooping it up with a midleg and holding it tightly to its concave gut as it continued to scuttle forward on seven legs.
“I will bite you and tell you what I see, if you want,” it suggested.
For a moment, despite its tone of voice, Jack was tempted to try the experiment. He looked down at his bare wrist, sticking out beneath the leather cuff of his jacket, and wondered what it would be like to have a devil’s teeth sink into his veins like needles.
“Why are you asking, Jack?” Andy asked, sounding disturbed.
“Perception.” Jack struggled to put his thought into words. He couldn’t think of any way to say it that wouldn’t sound insane. “Communion’s all about understanding someone else’s point of view, right?”
“I would call it translation,” Todd said. “The best we can ever achieve is an imperfect translation from one viewpoint to another, although sharing flesh makes it easier.” He stopped. “This one?”
Andrew and Jack both stared down at the curving stairwell. It seemed to drop into darkness, its steps tilted at strange angles, a sharp coil of jagged vertebrae forming a handrail that would draw blood if used.
“Yes,” Andy said. “I think that’s it. Jack?”
He nodded.
“It seems more literal than the other visions, Edward,” Andy said, looking up. “The field of blood was our north campus, I’m sure, and the worms our serpents. But this looks very much like what the angel showed us.”
“You’re seeing it through the same perceptual filters you used when you experienced the vision,” Todd said, sounding unconcerned. “Remember, we’re not really walking through a tunnel of bone, and this isn’t really a staircase. Everything’s an energy field.”
“You mean, everything’s God,” Andy said, smiling slightly.
“I mean it’s
energy
,” Todd repeated. “Which can be neither created nor destroyed—simply transformed. Or translated, if you’d rather.”
“A physicist’s version of moral relativism,” Andy commented.
“I didn’t say the transformation was morally neutral.” Todd stood to one side. “Since Melech gave you two the vision, I’ll let you descend first.”
“Hmph.” Andy cast the big man a skeptical look. “You’re the one who set us up.”
“You didn’t have to investigate the email. You were free to ignore it.”
“I’ll go first,” Jack said, forestalling further verbal fencing.
“Don’t be silly.” Andy caught his sleeve. “You’re still as white as a sheet.”
“I’m the conjurer. I need to go first.”
“You’ll go behind me, and I’ll protect you, just like always.” Andy slid in front of him and took the first step down into the darkness.
Ally crept down the broken, shaking steps as quietly as she could, keeping the flashlight beam on the stairs right ahead of her feet. She edged carefully around jittering chunks of rock and kept one hand on the vibrating wall.
The smell was growing stronger; a rich, meaty scent. Old blood, she thought, nauseated. It reminded her of the smell of dirty bathrooms, when Housekeeping hadn’t cleaned out the tampon bin quickly enough. But this was much, much stronger. She stretched the neck of her shirt up over her nose and mouth.
Then her flashlight beam touched the floor of the cellar. She stopped, flinching.
Peter stumbled against her, then grabbed her, steadying them both. His flashlight beam edged around her feet and touched the floor, too.
She heard his indrawn breath.
Some of them might still be alive, she thought desperately. Please, God, let some of them be alive.
Let me get out of here alive.
What little enthusiasm she’d mustered for the adventure collapsed.
The floor was carpeted with meat, raw and bloody, crushed and mangled, quaking slightly in the shudders that kept rocking the ground. Pale stuff glistened through the blood here and there; broken bone or gristle—she wasn’t sure which and didn’t want to know.
If I puke, the monsters will hear me, she thought, pulling her hand off the wall and pressing it against her mouth.
She sank down and sat on the step, closing her eyes and swallowing back bile. The concrete jerked and quaked beneath her.
If I puke, I’ll start crying, and then I’ll die, because monsters kill girls who cry.
She heard Peter scuffle behind her, then run back up the stairs.
Good idea. Maybe I should run back upstairs to puke, too.
But she knew that if she did, she’d never come back down again.
Might not be people. Might be...neighborhood pets.
Jarret crouched down above her. She could smell gasoline on his hands. One of the bottles must not have been wiped off well.
“You want to go back upstairs?” he breathed in her ear.
She shivered, then shook her head. No. She hadn’t come this far to back off, now.
She forced her eyes open again. Special effects. It’s just special effects, like in the movies.
Jarret looked pale and horrified, but he was still there. He met her eyes, and she saw that he was shaking, too.
“We’ve got to see,” she said, louder than she’d intended. She jerked around, watching for the serpents, but nothing jumped at them.
“Want to wait for Peter?” he whispered, glancing back up the stairs. Ally buried her mouth and nose in her sleeve, trying not to smell anything, and hesitated. He might come back. Guys puked all the time, right?
But Peter had been reluctant to come here ever since she’d suggested it.
She knew she shouldn’t be disappointed in him. It was okay for guys to be scared. But still, she didn’t think she’d be able to keep going out with him, if she lived through this.
She wanted a boyfriend who was at least as brave as she was.
She stole another glance at the charnel floor. It wasn’t quite as bad if she kept telling herself it was just a movie effect. Like one of the
Hellraiser
movies. Plastic and chocolate syrup, right?
“We’d better keep going,” she said, after a long minute. Her shaking hadn’t stopped, but she didn’t think it was going to.
Jarret nodded. His flashlight was still tucked away. His fingers were white on a bottle of gasoline and a lighter.
She stood and slowly, carefully, set one foot down onto the shaking floor.
The meat squelched beneath her borrowed socks and began to soak through. It was warm.
Bile rose in her throat again, and her stomach burned. She choked, swallowed something sour, and shuddered.
I’m not going to puke. Not. Going. To. Puke. It’s just a bad horror movie.
She dragged her eyes up and lifted the beam of the flashlight. Maybe if she didn’t look too carefully at the floor, she wouldn’t see anything she couldn’t explain away as special effects. She breathed through her mouth, as shallowly as she could.
In front of her was a cracked and sagging wall and a dark archway. Ally concentrated on it, grinding her teeth together to keep from making noise as her feet sank into soft flesh.
Grinding her teeth was bad, because it meant she had to breathe through her nose.
Her flashlight beam touched something that moved, just beyond the doorway. She whipped the light back down to her feet, her convulsive trembling getting worse.
Jarret stepped up to her, so close that his arm brushed hers. He held up the bottle and lighter, giving her a look.
She took another step closer, tentatively lifting the flashlight’s beam back up and through the doorway.
At least one serpent was in there, squirming back and forth. The light played over its vast side, its blood-smeared pale scales, a flash of cilia, and a bony jut of its exoskeleton.
Trying very hard not to whimper, Ally moved the beam around.
The cellar extended downward, much deeper than it had originally. Long, tall tunnels pierced it—wormholes—and its concrete walls had broken and sunken into dark, compressed-dirt cavern walls. The floor was gone.
She took a short step closer, dropping the beam lower. The writhing mass of carapace and scale was deep, as if the floor had sunk another ten feet or even more. She couldn’t see the bottom, but it had to be as bloody as the floor she was walking over, because the writhing serpents’ sides were covered with gore, and blood splashed as the creatures slid over each other.
Ally turned and raised a shaking hand, gesturing to Jarret.
There couldn’t be anyone alive down there. Time for fire.
Domitor’s frill of sensory organs and genitalia rippled and flushed in expectation as he watched the kine kneading and seeding the field into a mating-bed of nutrient-rich soil. Next to him, Carnifex crouched, her razor claws retracted, her egg-polyps pulsing as she shared his eagerness. Soon the mating-bed would be ready for them to descend upon the kine and inject them with germ-plasm that would mingle and merge inside the kine’s warm, welcoming host bodies. Then their spawn would grow and devour and absorb and learn. Through them, permanent passages to the void would be created, and the sigil-guardians would be scattered, and Verminaarch would be able to suck yet another endoverse dry of its manifold energy-states.
Domitor felt satisfaction. After too long a delay, he would be able to complete his life-duty, and Verminaarch would be pleased with him and grant him more power, another endoverse to explore and conquer.
Carnifex dampened herself with a feeding-tube that dripped acids, softening her bladescales for the impending mating.
Domitor groaned in expectation.
Why do we not join them?
Viator asked, watching the mate-pair from the limis hyperspace where she and Auctor crouched.
The planespawn will require our genetic traits, as well.
The probabilities have not collapsed yet,
Auctor cautioned, his bodyeyes fixed on a million fluctuating spacetimes and divergent endoverses. In far too many of them, the hypospatial beings who traveled through the limis just a thought away from his staring, recording sensory organs succeeded in securing this dimension.
Auctor had been charged by Verminaarch to watch, record, and learn. He did not have a genetic predisposition to take risks. He continued to keep his restless mate in check, content to wait.
Let Domitor and Carnifex take the risks. They carried the biological programming for it.
Viator swept out her tongues, tasting the pathways, and thrust her narrow head around.
I sense the same traveler. Let us destroy this threat now and join our broodgroup.
Auctor turned more of his eyes toward the hypospatial entities and dedicated more of his data-processing energy to determining their threat levels.
Todd jerked, catching a glimpse of dark, shiny tubes shooting down past the stairwell. He stumbled and grasped the sharp handrail, barely feeling the long gashes the spinous processes left in his palm.
