The Blue Blazes (20 page)

 

PART THREE

MEAT & MONSTERS

 

20

 

I seek to push deeper into the Great Below. Deeper than any human has pushed. I want to see the Ravenous Expanse. All I have are stories carved into walls or overheard from a roving pack of gobbos. I want to see the deepest gods, Those Who Eat. I want to stand at the edge of the Maw-Womb. I think I hear them, those gods. It’s just a tickle at the back of my mind, like a little earwig burrowing into my ear. It’s like tuning a radio past the static and listening for the snippets of voices in the chaos, and what I hear, what I’ve put together, is that if I go deeper, if I go to the heart of the Underworld, I will find the secrets of this place. I will learn why the goblins exist. I will learn what the worm-gods want. I will know where to find the Occulted Pigments and what they do. By forging downward I will learn the fate and future of the world above and how our two worlds need one another, because I believe that they do. When I go down into the Expanse, I will have the truth of this place hewn into my heart.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Gasp.
Twitch. Thrash.

Skelly lurches awake on a pile of bones.

Animal bones, by the look of them. The delicate skeletons of mice and rats, of squirrels and pigeons. Larger bones, too: cat bones, a dog skull, the antlers of a deer, the horns and half-a-skull of a big bull. A mound. Tall as Mookie. Big as a Jersey sand dune. And this one is not the only one – the room is a wide-open cavern, heaped with piles of bones and bodies.

All of it bathed in the eerie green fire-glow from trash barrels, oil drums, and torches stuck atop crooked poles. Light and smoke like waltzing wraiths.

Shapes move in the half-light. Gobbo-shapes. Some squat and plump, others with sagging chests, scurrying about on bony arms and knobby legs. The smoke climbs up sheer walls, walls unexpectedly straight for this place – the Great Below, a land of craggy caverns and twisting tunnels, of slanted walls and jagged teeth.

This is one of their temples, she thinks.

On the walls, gobbo faces are carved into and out of the rock: broken teeth and howling mouths, crumbling noses and cratered cheeks. The eyes, though, the eyes are always cast downward. Looking to something far below.

To the carvings on the floor, maybe. The floor is marked with long, dark, lean shapes, winding around the piles of the bones and bodies. Like snakes encircling wrists, like ropes around necks.

A moan. Behind her. Skelly almost cries out, almost weeps in shock–

A man’s voice: “Shhh.
Shhhh
. If they see you’re awake, they’ll come.”

She turns. Sees someone else here atop the pile of bones. Sprawled out, half-covered by dead animals. It’s an old man in an MTA uniform. Half his face frozen in a palsy, the eye sagging in its socket, the mouth drooping like a melting clock in a Dali painting.

“Who… who…”

“I’m Walt Meyers… I… I work for–”

“The MTA.”

“Right. The uniform.” A wet, humorless chuckle. “I did maintenance. On the tracks. I… I’ve been here a couple weeks.” His breath is a damp wheeze. “I don’t feel great. Think I’m on the way out. You don’t want them up here. They… they did things.”

He lifts his arm. A couple bones rattle. The uniform is torn under the armpit and–

Eggs. She knows what they are. She’s heard the stories but never seen them up close and now she wants to cry out, maybe throw up. They’re like frog eggs she used to see as a kid when she’d stay on her uncle’s farm in Jersey. They had a creek, and there in the creek she’d see these globby, translucent eggs that almost looked like frog eyes. Dozens of them clustered together in the water, the tadpoles inside visible and twitching.

These are like that. But bigger. The things inside aren’t tadpoles. They look like fat grubs pulled out of a tree or up from a sickened lawn. Bulbous and without limbs.

Grubs. Baby gobbos.

“I got ’em here and got one behind the ear–” He turns his head and there, on the palsy side of his face, a single egg covers his whole ear. When he moves it quivers like a Jell-O mold. “And a half-dozen between my legs, too. They… they broke my knees. Snapped ’em when I tried to get up and run. You can’t run. You can’t hide.”

Tears weep from his one good eye.

“We have to get out of here,” she tells him.

“There’s no escaping this place. People have tried. We’re not alone here. Soon as your eyes adjust you’ll see them. Some are dead. Some close to it. Occasionally one wakes up on the pile, crawls down the heap. Or makes a run for it. Like me. They catch you. They’re everywhere. And when they have you that’s when they come up. Lay their eggs. Some don’t lay eggs at all. I watched two of them attack a heavy-set fellow two piles over and…” His voice drifts off and he licks his lips. “Here.” A dry whisper.”You wanna see something?”

He gestures with his head.

Skelly follows his gaze up.

The floor is all dark shapes, and at first she thinks the ceiling is, too.

But soon as she realizes the reality, Walt confirms it. “It’s a map,” he says. “Took me a while to figure it out. Lot of it is just nonsense, what I guess must be tunnels or passages folding in on each other. But in the middle of it is something I know all too well – the subway map. Just Manhattan, not the boroughs, but you can see their curves, how some are together and then breakaway. Can almost make the shape of the island. Like Manhattan’s circulatory system. It’s almost…
arterial
.”

Skelly tries to parse it. A map. Of the underground of the city. Or at least, what’s just beneath it – what in the Underworld they’d call the “Shallows”. She can see the pocket where the town of Daisypusher sits. A lot of the tunnels are thin and small, noodles and tapeworms tied into one another. But along the far eastern side of the map runs a big fat line, like a pipe. And another thick line is carved at the top of the island and runs into it, and a third one comes in toward the bottom but doesn’t seem finished. Where this tunnel ends is a symbol like Skelly’s never seen before: a triangle with what looks to be a mouth in its center.

She points the thick lines out. Asks what they are.

“I was trying to figure out the same thing, but then I realized–”

A scream cuts the air like a hatchet. A woman’s scream. Walt reaches up, pulls her low to the pile, hisses, “Look.”

A young woman stands atop a pile of corpses. She’s far enough away Skelly can’t make out much about her face, but she sees the woman turn and shake and begin to flail, head cast back so far the scream rises out of her like smoke from the burn barrels.

The gobbos come fast. But not fast enough to catch what suddenly erupts out of her. Her body twitches like it’s being shot. Skelly hears the wet
pops
and sees the silhouettes of things wrenching free from her body. The scream is cut to a gagging sound. The shadows of grubs fall from her armpits. From between her legs. From up and out of her mouth.
Plop, plop, plop
.

A splashing sound. Then a chorus of high-pitched squealing, like someone trying to drown a litter of piglets in a washtub.

The gobbos come. Take away the grubs. It calls to mind ants carrying larvae.

As for the woman’s body? It collapses onto the pile. Utterly still.

Just one more for the mix.

Skelly bites her hand. Stifles her own cry. Can’t stop shaking.

“That happens,” Walt says. Then, sadder, more distant, “That’s what’s gonna happen to me.”

Not me, Skelly thinks.

“Don’t think about it. Here, look. Those pipes there on that map,” Walt says. “Those are water tunnels. The city’s water comes from upstate. Reservoirs. Two tunnels are done, but the third’s being dug. You can see the third ends at the funny-looking symbol there. Don’t know what that is.”

Her first thought: I need to tell Mookie.

Her second thought: And then he needs to come down here and burn this place to the ground.

But that means she has to leave. Has to find a way out – through the bones and bodies, through the dozens of goblins crawling all over this place.

She feels at her side. Her knife is gone. She feels a tiny stab of remorse at that – the knife was a custom job. Cost her a pretty penny. Though now she’s not so sure the skull fetish is one she wants to keep.

On her other hip is a surprise.

Her skates. They’re still there. Laced to her belt loop.

“I’m going to get out of here,” she says, untying her skates. As she does, the heel of one skate knocks loose the jawbone of what might be a deer skull. The bone bounces down the heap, rattling against every other bone as it falls.

Oh, no.

Gobbos – some just shadows, some lit against the flickering green fire – stop. And turn. They start jabbering, grunting. Picking up weapons.

Then they start moving toward the bone heap.

 

Candlefly tries to remain calm. But he knows his rankled irritation is showing. Even as he speaks he hears it bleed through.

“What was
that
, exactly? You reap what you sow?” He takes a few steps closer to the thug’s troublesome daughter. “Some kind of code phrase, perhaps? I have a great deal riding on this–”

Nora frowns. “Please. We don’t have code phrases. We’re not close.”

“Then what was it? Please.
Do tell
.”

“You wanted him to come,” she says. “If I got on the phone and sounded all weepy and needy and nerdy, he might not have bought it. But play it tough and he knows this is the real deal. Hello, I’m not very nice to him, if you haven’t noticed?” She squirms. “You going to untie me or what?”

Candlefly hesitates. Then he nods toward Sorago.

The Snakeface glides silently toward her, begins undoing her bonds.

“You didn’t need to keep me tied up in that chair,” she says.

“Yes. Well. I wanted to make sure you kept your end of our bargain.”

As she stands out of the chair, she stretches. “I did. He’s on his way.”

“A nice touch with the–” He points to her bruised face. “The makeup.”

“Good enough for a cameraphone.”

“You really don’t care for him at all, do you? Your father.”

The girl hesitates. As though she’s thinking about it, earnestly considering it. “No. I don’t know. He wasn’t a good dad.”

Candlefly chuckles. “Trust me from experience. Few fathers are good fathers. You should respect yours a little more.”

“Oh? You have kids?”

“Two. Adelina and Oscar. Twins.”

“You trying to convince me to grant my father clemency?”

“Clemency. Oh my. Such a big word for a little girl.”

She stiffens. “Not so little. And I like books. You got a problem with that?”

“Of course not.”

She looks at the floor. “Hey. I gave him chances. Chances when I was a kid. Chances when everything fell apart. Chances even now. Just a few days ago I offered to have him work for me. But
once again,
he refused.” She rolls her eyes.

“A missed opportunity.”

“I guess so.” She looks up now at him. She’s got fascinating eyes – pointed and gray, like the tip of a sharpened pencil. And it’s like they’re pleading with him. “You won’t kill him?”

“No,” he lies. “We won’t kill him.”

Another pause. Finally, she nods. “Good.”

“Let me ask you something else.”

“If you must.”

“It must have surprised you. To find Casimir like that on the floor. Having met a truly brutal death.”

Her gaze meets his. “I already told you, I killed him.”

“Did you?”

“I did.”

“Ah. Well! You’re lucky then that I consider his death no more than a speed bump in our relationship. Besides–” He can’t help but smile at this. “It’s nice to be working with someone so robust. So
vigorous
. What you did to the young man was…” He shudders, as though feigning excitement at the girl’s deception. “What a partnership this will be, Miss Pearl. A brand new day is here.”

 

She struggles to unlace the skates. Get them on her feet. The gobbos are coming. Clambering up the heap. Bones clatter. Goblins hiss.

One skate on.

And now they’re here.

A gobbo with sallow cheeks and bulbous blood-red eyes comes at her, jaw creaking open and a tubule tongue searching the air – a glistening egg already gleaming at its tip, pushing out like a cancerous tumor through bubblegum-pink lips.

Skelly cries out. Swings with her one free skate. The wheels are Zombie wheels with hard, anodized aluminum centers. She clocks the gobbo in the side of the head, makes a mushy dent. The tongue recoils, and the creature rolls down the bone-heap with a rattle.

She kicks out. Sends another one tumbling.

A third comes up on her left. No tongue, and it takes her a second to realize what’s in the thing’s hand. It’s a Christmas stocking – grimy, greasy, and it swings like it’s got something heavy in the foot. Then she hears the jingle of change–

The gobbo swings the Christmas stocking right at her head.

She’s too slow. She feels it. She brings the skate up and
knows
it’ll land too late–

The gobbo is suddenly bowled backward.

With Walt on top of it.

Skelly backpedals, the osseous heap shifting beneath her. It’s hard to get purchase, hard to find stability–

The gobbos come at her.

But Walt is there again. He launches himself in front of her. Waves his arms–

“I’m all egged up!” he cries, a yawp of throaty rage. “You come at her, you might hurt your precious
babies
. That what you want?”

They hiss. Test him by swinging weapons – knives, broken bottles, boards with nails in them – at the air in front of his head. He whimpers with every swing.