Dank air filled my lungs as I moved down the ladder.
A faint, yellow glow, somewhere below and out of sight, offered my eyes enough light to make out the vague shape of a stone walkway about fifteen feet down. Beside it, I saw golden twinkles from the light reflecting off running water.
I had made it about halfway down when the ladder turned to ash in my hands and beneath my feet, and I fell the rest of the way to damp, cobbled stone.
The hatch slammed shut above me, suddenly and furiously, snatching the grey winter night sky away as if to tell me the world I had been a part of was gone now; done. At least for me.
I rolled over and propped to my knees to get my bearings.
Lamps fixed upon stone walls, their incandescent bulbs offering dim light that revealed both mine and the other side of what seemed to be some sort of canal. Ahead of me about eighty or so feet – a causeway stretched over the water with domed shafts on either side.
That ticket… it said something about Under– something, and Waterworks.
Behind me was a dead end, just an algae-caked grating that dark rushes of water flowed through, headed in the direction of the causeway. I paced back and forth beneath the ladder, trying and failing to come to grips with everything.
I thought about the other words on the card. Something about some kind of chronicles with some weird spelling. I thought about what the strange man had mentioned.
“For now, I suspect he just wants you to see…”
None of it made any sense. I had to be dying up there in the cold or from the smack, or both.
I fell to my knees and pitied myself.
And this is how it ends. What a waste
I had resigned to my fate; to what I had finally done to myself after these two long years of dancing with my Mistress of Ruin.
A part of me was relieved.
After a while, I began walking the stone path along the water toward the causeway, when I heard the distant voices of what sounded like men.
The muffling of the distant echoes made it too hard to decipher their words, I could make out that there were at least two of them. They seemed to be prattling. They were coming from the leftward shaft ahead of me. The soft glow of lantern light began emanating from its opening. As the voices loudened, their words unclouded.
“ – Aye, the last time I was back in these ways I was chasing that damned Davies girl. Fuckin’ bitch slipped right out of me webs, she did,” A throaty voice said with an accent that wasn’t quite British.
A tighter, scratchier voice replied, less muddied but still thick with that strange accent. “Been that long? I wonder where the Assembly put her to serve Ol’ Mari for being so naughty?” The voice spasmed an ugly titter that rebounded from the walls more harshly than the rest of their words.
“I know where they put her.”
“Oh, you do, do you? Have an audience with the Assembly, eh?”
“I do. Well, not I — Argus knows one of the chamberlains in the Tunnel. To this day, she’s still in the Daughter’s Chair serving as steward until Lady Guinevere comes home to our Mother Marigold.”
The deeper voice sounded almost harmonious as he uttered the name of their mother.
The higher voice gave an incredulous squawk, “You say so?”
“Aye… poor girl.”
An eruption of laughter swelled in the passages as their light drew near the threshold of the shaft.
I pressed my back against the wet stone wall in a dim place that was in between two of the fixed lamps. I wasn’t quite shrouded in shadow, but with nowhere to hide it was the best concealment I was going to get.
They passed the threshold and came into view on the causeway. They weren’t men at all.
One stood large and broad and completely devoid of any hair. With clawed, webbed fingers, he held a strange and ornate lantern made of copper. His grey skin took his lantern light and wore it proudly with the sheen of an amphibian. Little ear holes burrowed in on the sides of his head. Thin lips and mouth much too wide to belong to any man’s hung below two, minor nostril slits.
And above those – beady, lidless black eyes with rings of flecked gold at their centers. They glimmered from the lantern’s light like ambers.
The other seemed to share the same general features but was smaller and slighter in frame. Atop his head, he wore a sheened fedora, its large brim masking much of his face.
Both dawned olive-colored trench coats that looked like they were made out of vinyl or something waterproof.
Their long, rudder-like tails flittered from in between their coat seams and occasionally swept the floor.
The bigger one held the lantern out in front of them and they peered into the dead-end corridor inquisitively. “So, Twas you rubble, or another of the runners?” The smaller hollered to the dead-end corridor ominously, sealing the words with a mirthy hiss.
Shadows had masked me for the moment, but I knew I didn’t have long. I thought about jumping across the canal, but fifteen feet? And without even a running start?
I could plunge into the water, I’d thought, but those creatures - those impossible things that could only exist in a child’s nightmare – seemed to be built for it.
With nerves wire tight, I decided my best chance was to stay put. Maybe I could use the skills I’d learned in law school to talk my way out of the situation.
It was all I had.
The two creatures moved a mere few steps forward before the bigger one spotted me. They approached and stopped about ten feet away. A sharp smile rose on the big one’s face, revealing a mass of needle-thin teeth in pink gums.
“It looks like it’s a runner… ye might get to show off yer handiwork yet, Danforth.”
Danforth quacked an excited little laugh. The big one went on, speaking directly to me now, “Go on, come on into the light so yer pal Burcher can have a good look at ye.”
Knowing I was exposed and - at least for the moment - helpless, I did as he asked, ghost white and hands shaking. My nerves felt like they had enough charge in them to jump a car battery.
Upon my revealing myself, they looked at each other with mildly confused glances. Burcher spoke again, “A big one… and ye’ve got that stinking fuzz on yer face. I don’t remember seeing the likes of ye brought in. How old are ye?” Genuine curiousness coated his question.
“I –don’t know what’s happening.”
I held my palms outward, displaying open hands in an unconscious attempt to diffuse what didn’t seem like it was going to be a friendly encounter.
“HOW OLD ARE YE!” Burcher snapped at me with a guttural growl underneath that told me there was as least as much monster beneath the surface as there was man, and that monster was prone to anger.
“I’m twenty-seven.” None of those smooth words I had planned were going to come to me, I was certain of that now.
“Twenty-seven? A full growner?” Danforth asked, disbelieving.
Burcher took a step forward and held the lantern out for a better look. He smelled like murky water and musk that reminded me of catfish.
“Ye lying to us, boy?”
“He isn’t lying. He’s even got a grey or two in that fuzz of his. Not much of a boy at all, is he?” The golden, flecked rings in their eyes glimmered as the lantern light reflected in them, like circles of fire in black, oily pools. With a brief clicking noise, translucent membranes flicked closed and open again in each of Burcher’s blazing beads to wet them.
“Look I just wanted out of the cold. The ladder, it jus—”
“What ye mean, ladder?” Burcher chopped the words right from my mouth with his question. Those dubious and mildly amused expressions on their faces snapped away in an instant.
“Where did ye hail from, boy that was?” He asked with a low, oiliness that almost sounded serene; almost hid the sardonic tone beneath it.
A pause, and then Danforth joined in with the same sweet, sickly bemusement of his partner.
“Yes, boy nevermore… tell us where you came from.” The words from his mouth had tails on them, lingering in the air with nothing else but the gurgle of the canal’s running water to keep them company.
Without turning around I pointed a trembling, dirty finger backward at the hatch I had crawled down from. “I came from up there…”
Their gold rings shifted up to where my finger led them for a moment and then returned to me, humorless.
I turned to look at where the hatch had been and there was nothing. Just damp, algae-covered stone and shadow.
“I was going to freeze to death… This man, he gave me this ticket that led me here through, that, I swear to Christ in heaven, was just there a moment ago! I — I can just go. It’s clear I’m trespassing here and I’ll just leave…” I was pleading now.
They stared at me in silence.
“Please… I won’t tell anyone about this place. I’m really terribly sorry.”
“Oh, we know you won’t tell anyone,” Danforth said.
Something about his words reminded me that I was talking to creatures that couldn’t exist in the real world.
I lowered my arms and cast a downward glance, “I’m dead, aren’t I?”
They only answered with bellows of hoarse laughter as if they had been caught off guard.
“A man, ye say?” Burcher asked with remnants of laughter still airing through his teeth.
I nodded.
“And what does this man look like?”
“He looks like a walking corpse, in a blue suit and a sandy-blonde, ivy league parted hair,” I replied. It was the most honest description I could possibly give.
They straightened again and exchanged glances, looking as though they were deciding whether to be concerned.
The smile that had taken a brief leave from Burcher’s thin lips curled back into place. “He didn’t do ye any favors by sending ye down here. And no, yer not dead. Although ye look like ye should have done yer old world a favor. Some bag of shit, are ye. I can smell the stink of poison in those pores.”
“There is no death in Undehael, boy nevermore. Not for your kind.” The gold-flecked rings darted back and forth in calculation beneath Danforth’s hat brim. “We ought to take him to the Assembly, so they can figure out what to do with his claims on how he got here.” His hat wobbled for a moment as if something alive stirred underneath it. With a swift, catching grab he fastened it back down again.
Burcher nodded in agreement. “Ye still wanting to brush up with some time with the knife? I don’t see a reason he can’t be in his skinnies when we take him in.”
Danforth nodded and lifted a sharp smile as his eyes trained on mine.
“Please, I didn’t ask for any of this. I just want to go home!” I began taking slow steps backward. Sick glee lit their faces and their smooth, grey tails twitched like excited worms. They stepped forward with each of my own backward paces.
“Danforth has brought something for ye, in case we did find a runner down in these parts. Show him, Danny.”
Danforth reached into his jacket and pulled out what only could be described as plastic skin that looked form-fitted for a child. He held it out on display for me, outstretched at the arms. Its shining, bald head warbled for a moment before folding forward. He flicked his wrists and it tottered over the other way. Other than its sheen, the skin could pass for that of a real child’s, save for there were no ears, and the nose, although its shape was in place, had its nostrils sealed over. The sockets where the eyes were supposed to be were instead lidded with translucent, little hollow bulbs. The only true opening on the head was at its mouth. Although no real, living child was inside, a very real sorrow lived on its face. It was the face of despair. It was the face of the hopeless.
“See, Dan here is a bit of an artist when it comes to putting skinnies on. He doesn’t even need a popper. Ye a bit bigger than we expected, but I’ve saw him once fit a girl near seventeen or so hands high. And a plump one too, she was. I’m sure we can get ye to squeeze in. Ye know? It’s funny, we brought one in close to ye age just today and he’s due for a–”
I wailed, tripped over my own feet, and fell back to the wet stone. I scrambled back down the walkway away from them, back toward the dead end. It was nothing but the flailing of terror.
The water was the only place I could go. I knew I was as good as caught if I went in there. The two – things, were silent now. The rings of stilled fire in their eyes glinted at me, cold now and with predatory calculation. They were going to move in for the grab.
I knew I had to act now.
Think Angelo. Think Goddamnit –
The coin I had put in my pocket with the insignia of the double image of the splayed man and the tree, that both Billy and that card had told me to hold on to, suddenly felt heavy in my pocket.
“It will be your light in the dark…”
I clasped it through my shirt. It sang to me in a way I can’t quite explain, almost like the sweet ring of a tuning fork.
An idea
The lantern the one that calls himself Burcher is holding. It looks like it’s an oil lamp of some kind.
Breaking it and burning them with it was a stupid thought. It was also probably going to get me nowhere, but it was the only thought I had.
And the coin had reassured me.
Burcher, who was now just within reach of my ankles, slipped suddenly on the wet slush that had formed from the disintegrated ladder and the water that had been beneath it. He toppled, and I lashed out like mad and grabbed the lantern, yanking it from his hand with two, hard jerks. I swung it down on him in a long, plummeting arc with all the force I could conjure.
The lantern exploded on his shoulder. Swaths of gluggish oil blanketed him, and an eager and hungry flame chased it, unfurling and growing ravenously until the creature was in a blaze. Inhuman roars of anguish rung the walls of the shafts as he writhed. Danforth reached out to pull him toward the edge of the water but must have gotten some of the oil on his arm. As he grabbed for the burning Burcher, the hungry flame reached out and crawled up his sleeve, and set the brim of his hat alight.
He howled a tighter, but equally monstrous roar and flung the hat off. Suckling and attached to the top of his head was something in between a lamprey and a tadpole. Its tail coiled around his crown. He’d dropped the skinny he had been holding on display for me to shield the thing as he dove into the water.
I ran past them as fast as my legs would take me, cutting tight and hard down the shaft they came from. I didn’t know if it was the right move, but it didn’t matter. I was running and they were burning – at least for now.
A second, larger splash echoed behind me. I kept running. shaft after shaft, turn after random turn – I ran, hoping I didn’t come to a dead end.
Thankfully, I never did. The place seemed to be some sort of grid of winding canals and connecting corridors, but the water always seemed to flow in the same general direction.
Having felt I had lost them for a moment, I slowed down to think and catch my breath.
It all just felt too real. My lungs burned; my legs burned; I felt my soiled skin from three days without a wash. As fucked-up crazy as everything was, I was beginning to have a hard time buying my theory that this was the swan song of a junkie’s brain or a really fucked up bad dream.
I wasn’t craving a fix at all, which puzzled me, but everything else in the sensory department seemed to be working just fine; seemed to have shown up for work.
Although endless questions still swam around in my head, I still needed to find a way out. Making sense of it all would have to come later.
I eventually made out the faint light of an opening at the end of a canal I had been following for some time, careful to zig-zag into an adjacent corridor and then snake my way back across again in the hopes it would keep those fucking monstrosities off my trail.
The static hiss of cascading water grew louder as I kept moving.
A spillway
A glimmer of hope lit in me, but still had no idea where Burcher and Danforth were, and the steel wires of terror were still wound tight in me.
But if I’m honest – a part of me thought it felt good.
It was a sharpness; a quick-scanning decisiveness I’d always harbored but hadn’t felt since I had given myself my all-consuming Mistress of Ruin. It was an old friend I had missed dearly.
As I drew nearer to the opening of the spillway, I noticed there were no more adjoined corridors or shafts I could use to could hide if I heard the two things that were hunting me.
If I were at the precipice and those things happened to spot me and close in, I would have no choice but to go down into wherever it led. Either that or receive an appointment for a fitting with that “skinny.”
And I had hurt them, hurt them badly by the sound of it. If they were that nasty before…
The way they were talking earlier implied there were more of them. Many more. I knew I was fucked anyway if I wandered the grid for too long in this ungodly canal system.
I decided I was going to go for it, and if there was any sort of path down, was going to jump. If it looked like it was going to be an abrupt end to my squandered life, well, I’d never much liked myself, to begin with. It’s been a hard and lonely journey and I have nobody to blame for it but myself. Besides, ending things on my own terms was going to be better than whatever they had planned for me.
Unless there really is no death in Undehael, as Danforth had said.
I pressed on, the dreary yellow glow from the incandescent lanterns offering soft orbs of light along the dank, stone walls.
It was almost as if those walls wanted me to come to the spillway,
Come. Come and see what lies below. It’s not like you have a choice anyway, Angelo. And besides…
It’s warm down there.
I walked the stone side path up to the water’s edge and placed a bracing hand onto the slimy stone frame to look below.
A formation of stalactites blocked much of my view, but directly beneath me about fifty feet –of water — lots of it.
The canal poured out into a great cave lake of some kind.
Glimmers of light from a source much brighter than anything that had been in the canals dance on the caps of the unsettled water below. I tried my best to make out where its source was coming from, but I couldn’t get any good view.
Through a thin sliver of an opening in between two stalactites, I could make out, twinkling blue lights of varying brilliance, blanketing the dark surface of the lake, out too far for the main source of light to reach. It reminded me of the night sky.
Within echoes, and growing in loudness from the hollows of the canals behind me, gnashed two furious voices I had hoped to never hear again. They were guttural and half-animal now, speaking to each other in a harsh language I didn’t recognize at all. It sounded like didn’t know where I was just yet, but that was going to change fast.
The water below looked deep – deep enough to jump. And just to the right of the plunge pool along the cavern’s wall, I made out a stone dock. Some kind of civilized life was down there for sure, and there was a good chance there were more of those awful things I was running from.
The coin in my pocket felt heavy again, and sang to me in its strange way, just like it did just before Burcher had slipped.
It reassured me. It wanted me down there.
It was keeping tabs…
The terrible voices grew from some perpendicular shaft. They were getting close. I clasped the coin through my shirt, for the second time, and I jumped down, descending once more… into the unknown murk below.