The water was warm; warm as a drawn bath.
I resurfaced and gasped for air that was fat and heavy with dankness and decay.
The smell was overwhelming.
I grabbed for the dock and fought back a lurch. The thought of a swimming, tailed horror somewhere beneath me overwhelmed any fear I had of exposing my full body on the dock, and so I clambered up on all fours in breach.
Dripping and bleary-eyed, I turned and looked before me. Carved into the massive, domed cavern wall, was a city.
Highest on, at the cavern wall’s crest, clung hundreds of crude dwellings that looked closer to domed burrows of animals than that of men, each with a single, circular hole in its center.
The holes leered down like hateful, singular eyes, blanketed in shadow and only visible due to their immense blackness in contrast with the hoary stone, just out of reach of light that reached upward from what looked to be some sort of light tower beneath them that stood proud at the city’s center.
I thought I could make out a tailed, humanoid creature clamber from the wall into one of the dwelling’s holes.
I hid behind a pillar to my left that seemed to be aiding in support of the overhang of the spillway, and I resumed my gazing.
The tower – maybe two-hundred-feet or so tall and engraved with intricate, oxidized copper engravings that spiraled around it – provided virtually all of the light for the city, save for the interiors of what looked like shops with drawn blinds along a waterfront promenade. The shops too looked to be carved from the cave wall itself, with architecture that was at once chaotic and Euclidian and stacked crowdedly. The buildings cradled the tower, wrapping it in a semicircle curvature, only leaving room directly behind the beaming pillar for a yawning and enormous tunnel to beckon onlookers into its blackness. Over the curved crown of the tunnel, hung oxidized, copper letterings:
All Hail the Marigold
Marigold…
I remembered the two creatures in the canals mentioning that name earlier…
The great and black lake below the city extended out beyond the lightower’s eminence, and the water twinkled out into the unknown dark with strange, black buoys capped with blue lights that glowed varying degrees of brilliance.
I poked my head around the pillar for a quick glance up at where I had jumped down from to see if Burcher and Danforth happened to be up there.
They still don’t know I came down here, thank Christ.
I had no idea where I was going to go from the small, stone dock, but I still had time, and that was good.
A door opened to one of the buildings near the promenade’s wharf across the water from me. It was another of those sick abominations, slender like Danforth, except this one wore nothing but form-fitted, knee-length shorts, and on his head was what looked to be a black trash bag, rolled just above his mouth with two little eye holes cut out of it. It reached back into the darkness of the doorway and pulled out a boy that looked to be about sixteen or seventeen with a rough and hateful yank by the neck.
It must have been the boy Burcher had mentioned. He was the thing’s prisoner.
There was no fight in him. Once, maybe, but the hanging, solemn face he wore told a tale of a spirit that had been broken some time ago.
He looked like the saddest boy in the world.
The creature guided him with a series of intermittent tugs over to a large metal contraption at the water’s edge; an amalgamation of crude copper levers and glazed wood, with the vague outline of a Vitruvian man at its center, and a mess of copper piping behind it. Above the contraption was a wooden platform, where a pile of long, black tubes lay. A copper ladder bolted to the side of the platform reached down to the wharf’s stone basin.
Several more of the amphibian men emerged from the same doorway the boy and his captor had come from. Two of them climbed the ladder to the platform and the others began cranking on levers and pulleys from behind the contraption.
The boy’s captor dragged him, finally, in front of the copper calamity and lifted him parallel to the silhouette of the Vetruvian man. The others reached through the piping and latched his limbs into place, and then his entire body, with restraints that clasped from the sides rather than wrapping around his appendages entirely.
A small noise left the boy’s mouth and he made a face that would’ve produced tears if there were any left. But there weren’t. The well had been depleted. All that was left was a face that knew long ago that his prayers to be saved weren’t going to be answered.
One of the amphibian men from behind cranked and jimmied away at a few pieces of copper and several, long blades unfolded in front of the boy, down his limbs and vertically along the center of his body. He closed his eyes and murmured something before a final crank sent them gliding through the boy’s skin with a single, quick glint.
Another creature cranked away, and jointed copper rods with prongs on end reached through to the boy’s seamed skin like horrible mechanical spider legs…
And with a harsh, popping noise, the skin departed from his body in a single motion, pulled through the back of the machine, and out of sight.
The noise the boy made still haunts my ears in the quiet of the night.
I cupped my hand to my face to hold in a scream and folded into the ground behind the pillar. Tears poured from me. I was in Hell, I had to be.
The boy never once lost consciousness. Not from being skinned alive and not from what came after.
One of the creatures on the platform held a strange, pneumatic gun with three copper claws and shoved it in the boy’s eye sockets one by one, pulling the trigger and taking the eyeball out in its entirety as his shrill screams returned. The thing then thumbed dark, red balls into the boy’s sockets that were slightly bigger than the eyes that had resided there before.
I wasn’t a coward. I clawed for him in the air helplessly as they mutilated his body, but the one-hundred-fifty feet of water between us; the creatures… there was nothing I could do but watch.
More cranking and his hands were pulled down to his side. The amphibian man that had originally dragged him out from the building pulled out what Burcher and Danforth had called a “skinny,” and stretched its mouth to fasten it around a pentagon-shaped ring that hung beneath the skinless, eyeless boy. God… he looked like a monster.
Another crank and the ring slid upward, replacing the skin that had just been taken from him, just as tightly as his own had been; tighter even. The boy groaned as it wrapped his head snapped free from the ring. The deep red from the balls where his eyes once were shone through thin material around his sockets.
The two creatures on the upper platform walked one of the long black tubes upright and locked it into a guide frame above the boy. A webbed, clawed hand reached from behind and pulled his head back.
As they guided the tube down to the boy’s mouth, I lost all sense of self-preservation and wailed in horror; in desperation. For the boy. For myself.
“Ah, God! No more! No more, God damn you!” I cried out from across the water.
The creatures stopped what they were doing, and mild, twinkling surprise danced in the golden rings of their eyes as they studied me.
With no point in hiding any longer, I stood out on the stone dock across from them, naked to the gaze of anyone and anything that cared to look from the godforsaken promenade of that godforsaken city.
After a long, inquisitive look, the creature with the black bag over his eyes smiled with that same, awful mess of need-like teeth in gums that Burcher had shown me earlier. He began laughing a horrible, hoarse laugh as something squirmed from beneath the bag on his head. The others on the popper joined him in laughter.
Pairs of golden rings peered through the blinded windows of the shops on the promenade; pairs of golden rings peered from the little black holes of the cave wall dwellings on high.
Hundreds and hundreds of eyes peered down at me, accompanied by a massive swell of hooting, sinister laughs that sounded neither animal nor human.
The two creatures on the upper platform of the popper held their gaze on me with sardonic smiles as they hammered the tube into the mutilated boy’s throat, wedging his face permanently upward and sky-gazing. His neck swelled as the tube sunk down.
I cursed them. In horror. In rage. In despair.
And they laughed harder. The workers stapled the ‘new skin’ around the boy’s hyperextended mouth to the buoy. They unlatched his limbs and one of the boy’s trembling hands reached up toward the tube he had been gorged with beyond all comprehension. Aside from his arms, the upper part of his body was now stiff and immobile. One of the creatures on the upper platform screwed a light bulb into the top of the tube, while another from the ground gave a final crank, and everything was set free.
Those on the ground carried him over to the water and threw him in.
With new eyes, I looked once more at all the black tubes in the water with the countless blue lights. The denizens of the city of Undeheal were still laughing.
They were… children
And There’s no death in Uneheal
The low, mournful wail of a horn cut all of the insidious laughter out of the air. Metal rattled open somewhere from the blackness above, and then I heard the dry, rustling of wings. Insect wings. Swarms of them.
Out of the darkness above I saw a large, strange black beetle land on one of the blue bulbs that were brightly lit. Its abdomen swelled and illuminated with the light as the bulb dimmed to a faint whisper. Aglow, the beetle spread its wings again and departed toward the tunnel behind the light tower. Thousands of its brothers and sisters followed, each taking their own and leaving only dim whispers in the dark.
The weight of it all had become too much, and I fell to my knees. I realized I was just so tired of… everything. I belonged down there in that fetid water. Not those children. I watched the horde fill the gaping maw of the tunnel with blue brilliance, when something came awake in my mind.
She was like a budding flower, growing from a place in between the real world and the imagined. Dozens of orange, teardrop-shaped petals spread open, their edges ruffled and tinged red.
They looked somewhat like… the petals of a marigold.
It was her.
The horn had awakened her, and roused from her slumber she saw me and planted herself in my mind.
The woeful cry of a woman echoed from the depths of the tunnel.
Each strange petal unfurled, one by one, and every one of them showed me things that both broke my heart and filled me with utter horror.
I saw the mirror of a woman with a beautiful mind, rich and filled with worlds endless.
I saw her love for the creatures in the city of Undehael, and then I saw that love sour and turn to hatred.
She was, all at once, once, their mother; their goddess; their prisoner.
She had found something in the dark, something that seemed like it could blur the lines of Heaven and Earth, and she had paid for it.
It took the sight from her; it took her beautiful mind, and she became a prisoner to her own creations.
And blind and in the dark, they fed her with the young, dreaming minds of despair. And she hated it. And yet she needed it more. For she could not overpower her insatiable hunger.
And she was growing…
Another mournful cry from the tunnel.
She showed me more. A daughter… her last light in the dark. And she both hated and loved that light with the bleeding heart of despair.
Because the daughter could set her free from it all.
But the Mother’s hunger was all-consuming.
Two, heavy splashes in the water brought me back to the world around me. The countless eyes that lived in the creatures’ heads across the water still trained their golden rings upon me, but the smiles below them had been replaced with a blankness; a knowing that I had seen their mistress.
Their Marigold.
Their captive Mother.
Burcher and Danforth emerged from the water and hoisted themselves onto the dock.
Undoubtedly, they had heard all of the laughter.
Danforth, now shirtless but otherwise unharmed, was holding the flimsy and partially melted plastic fedora to his head, shielding the thing that was attached to him from view.
Burcher’s jacket had been grafted to his body in an amorphous mangle of white flesh and melted, olive-colored vinyl. One of his eyes looked as though it had burst from the heat.
Burcher seethed, “Look at ye now… ye’re proper fucked. Ye’ve seen what we do to good little boys and girls… and look at what ye’ve done to me!”
In my head, I felt the Marigold both hated Burcher and yearned for what he had planned for me.
“See her in that noggin, don’t ye?” he said with a curled lip that flickered to a hateful smile for a fleeting instant.
“You’ll feed her like the rest for all time, even when this place can’t hold her any longer.” Spittle flung as he laughed hoarsely.
That heavy feeling of the coin in my pocket again, and then … something else in my mind.
Something on the edge of the imagination and reality, like her, but much older.
A pair of sanguine eyes, like two dim, red stars in the abyss, pulled the Marigold down into obscurity. I could feel her shock, and then her rage as it overwhelmed her. She hated them. She feared them.
A third cry from the tunnel, now filled with the shrill fury and hatred of the helpless upon seeing their enemy.
With blinding speed, the coin tore through my pocket and halted abruptly between Burcher and Danforth and me. They paused for a moment, puzzled at what hung so still in the air before them. The coin began to gyrate, slowly at first as pieces of the man and the tree on its face folded and unfolded at different angles until the edges of the coin didn’t resemble a coin at all.
The dim red stars in my mind tremored as the thing in the sped faster and faster, and then they lit the sockets belonging to the face of a dark and monstrous wolf. It was beautiful. It was dread incarnate. It snarled in fury, presenting a wreckage of teeth too great and horrible to belong to anything of the world we knew.
The face tremored along with the eyes with a mad, wild intensity.
“Now, you see,” he whispered into my mind.
The gyrating thing that was once the coin was now spinning so fast, gales of wind blew my hair and clothes and flapped the vinyl that had been melded onto Burcher’s skin. The Marigold cried out in rage from the tunnel and Burcher lunged forward.
From the coin, a quick pop of red light flared as Burcher approached, sending both he and Danforth into a mess of organs as they flung throughout the air in all directions. Red beams in wide arcs began emanating from it as if it were scanning the dread city.
The countless creatures on the promenade of the city of Undehael – those who had been filled with such horrible laughter moments before – now bayed with rage. Those working the popper charged for the water to close in on me. Those up in their dwellings crawled out of those black holes they had peered from with their golden-ringed eyes and descended the cave walls and the buildings like swarms of insects.
The Wolf in my mind never said another word. He just seethed and tremored with what I could only interpret with my human mind as complete and utter madness.
The wolf opened his mouth and a sanguine glow that matched his eyes pulsed from the depths of his throat.
As the coin whirled and the beams sent their red arcs to touch every edge of the dread city they could, vocalic pulses of sanguine light began strobing from it. The same strobes emanated from the wolf in my mind, permeating me through my very bones; through my very soul.
The Marigold loudened her shrill, hateful cries of despair, and I replied with my own. Into the strobing, horrible light I screamed with madness. The creatures were closing in. The light pulsed faster, and I screamed louder.
In a final moment, The mad grimace of the wolf curled into a toothy, knowing grin. And then nothing but a flash of that blinding red light, followed by empty darkness.
A driver had spotted me near the frigid water’s edge of Red River in Cedar Hill, Missouri, underneath a bridge. I was over three-hundred thirty miles from Chicago. When the police got to me I had been half-frozen to death, although I don’t remember anything from then or the next few days afterward.
My family was just as confused as I was about how I had gotten there but were mostly just grateful that I had been found alive. Once the hospital released me, my mom and dad welcomed me home under the condition I go to an inpatient rehab first, to which I agreed.
My old mistress had departed from me; gone forever and never was coming back, but there was no way to explain to them the things I had seen, the things I had experienced in the city of Undehael.
And their Mistress. I’d never truly seen her, but I had felt her despair; her yearning. I had felt her growing in the dark somewhere at the end of that tunnel; fed by the dreams of children driven mad from suffering.
That was eight months ago.
After I went through the motions of inpatient rehabilitation that I knew I didn’t need but nevertheless owed my family, I moved in with my parents for a short time until I got a job working at a local factory to save up enough money for my own place.
While living in their house, I noticed a five-part series of books on an oak bookshelf in their reading room, collecting dust in the corner.
They were titled: The Norahdrin Chronicles.
Between the H and all of the surreal horror that had been occurring in that godforsaken alley, I couldn’t remember what it had said on there.
Tainted: The Norahdrin Chronicles
No one else had been home to hear my pitiful wail of terror as it dawned on me.
I stood trembling in the hallway for what felt like an eternity, just staring at the door to the reading room. In there, at the very least, was a memory of my own horror. A tainted dream of misspent potential and hopelessness and suffering. But maybe it was more than that…
All Hail the Marigold
The words had been in my mind nearly every moment since I’d woken up in that hospital in Missouri. Although I never truly saw her, I knew her very well. She had been a slave to her own yearning, just as I had been. She had hated herself for the unimaginable torment she’d brought upon those poor people, and yet took what was left of their minds with gluttony and ecstasy, in exchange for their eternal despair.
Because there is no death in Undehael. Not for us.
I crumpled into a ball in the hallway, knowing I had to eventually see the books more closely for the sake of what was left of my own sanity. The air thickened, and I thought I could see two, dim red stars, just out of my sight, but when I would look there would be nothing.
I felt that Wolf, and his awful, knowing smile. He wanted me to see down there in the dark, and I did. And now he wanted me to see what was in that reading room.
After a while, I made my way in and picked up the book with the Roman Numeral III on its spine, as it was the only one that was loose. I couldn’t bear to grab one of them with anything more than a delicate pinch of my fingers. I pulled it out and studied the cover.
The Norahdrin Chronicles
The Copper City
Book III
By G.B. Underhill
On its cover, was a picture of a subterranean city with a wharf not unlike the one I had seen in my drug-fueled insanity. The city buildings and the rest of the cave wall, however, looked very different. The shop windows harbored fish and goods that seemed to be on display, and the promenade was lined with happy, human citizens going about their day. The light tower in the city’s center gleamed as its copper engravings sang with its light, weaving around the pillar in intricate detail.
Hundreds of people stood around its base, and on a platform, was a pale, muscular, and beautiful woman dawned in barbarian armor. Long, shining silver hair flowed from her head, and strange tattoos covered her from foot to neck.
There was no tunnel, beckoning from behind the light tower.
There were no oxidized copper letterings, hailing that dread mother and her city of horror.
There were no tailed, amphibious creatures posing as men.
And there were no glowing beacons of lost hope and despair.
The blurb read:
The Mighty Guinevere; the greatest of the fabled Norahrdin warriors, whose strange and mysterious inkings spring alive to come to their aid in battle, has returned to the home of her birth – The Copper City.
And things are good, for a time. Things are peaceful. Things are just.
But war and strife are entwined within the destinies of each Norahdrin, and the path they lead winds only under the guise of free will, for they are the eternal protectors from the greed and dominion of The Engineers.
Defeated and exiled to the far reaches of the subterranean waterworks of her lost city, Guinevere embarks on the long and harrowing journey back home to free her land from the clutches of her own mother.
Her strange and wonderful magic could not save them before, but with a new, uncanny group of friends she finds along the way, will she prevail?
It was a young adult fantasy series.
My sister used to love reading fantasy books when she was in her teenage years, and I must have picked it up at some point a long time ago and not remembered it, I’d thought.
But when? It was the last thing I would ever do…
Those fucking monsters Burcher and Danforth had mentioned this Guinevere; something about how The Marigold had The Daughter’s Chair waiting for her upon her return.
I read through the book with a pouring, cold sweat and feverish need that had rivaled me at the peak of my heroin addiction. There were similarities, but the city, The Engineers, none of it was what I had seen.
And never a mention of any Marigold.
Never any mention of those creatures, save for a small group of nomadic hunters the main characters cross paths with during their journey back.
The series was, more or less, an epic power fantasy meant for teenage girls.
I was more confused about it all than I had ever been. This wasn’t something I would have ever read growing up and I didn’t remember my sister ever mentioning this series to me.
And that horrible, acrid-smelling man with the strange skin, Billy, and that disembodied voice with him.
And that Wolf that felt older than time itself, and both so beautiful and so horrifying I’ve never been able to cement a clear image in my head.
None of it made any sense, except that I had to be touched with madness.
I got my own apartment and was supposed to be planning to finally finish taking my Oath and get licensed to practice law (if I could convince The Board I was fit to do so), but Undehael had consumed me, and I fell into a deep obsession.
The author was semi-well-known within the niche she wrote in, but she didn’t have any adapted work on television that I could find or any real reason I might have passively seen or heard the story, other than it resting on my parents’ bookshelf for years.
It turned out that G.B. Underhill was a private person and had used a pen name for everything she had ever written. The picture she used on the back of her books was AI-generated. After some digging on the internet, I did eventually find her. Her name is Galilee Baker, from Cedar Hill, Missouri. The small town of sixteen-hundred people I had been found in under that bridge, three hundred miles from where I had last been seen, and nearly frozen to death.
Some threads suggested she was terminally ill, and was spending the last several weeks of her life with her family and her daughter, to whom she had dedicated The Norahrdin Chronicles and everything else she wrote.
I’m planning to make my way there to talk to her; to try to — well, I don’t know.
Maybe I am insane. It would make more sense than anything and in all honesty, I’d welcome it as a relief.
But when they found me under that bridge, not three miles from G.B. Underhill’s home, it had been on December 13th, 9:27 PM, only one hour after the cold blast of the decade had hit Chicago. The little junkie den I had been in had made the news. Every one of them had frozen to death. An image leaked online and was used as a scathing indictment on the failings of the city and its handling of the homeless. There were pictures of their dead faces frozen in silent screams, just the same as the ones that hung on their faces when Billy entered that alleyway, forever changing my life.
I’m leaving in the morning for Cedar Hill. I must get to Galilee Baker before she’s gone. I have no idea what I’m going to say, but I have to believe she knows something about all of this.
Those dim, red stars have never left my back since they reappeared in my parents’ hallway. I can feel its; his sardonic smile beneath them as they burn low and sanguine, at once stern and wanton, and amused at my ignorance.
I know this much: I’m caught in the middle of something beyond us. There is a horrible corruption building in the dark; a sickness born from the minds of those that build worlds from dreams. And I don’t even think they know it.
And those eyes would have left me alone long ago if he were done with me.
He showed me, and I saw.
Someone just knocked at my door. The acrid smell of ammonia is burning my nose, even though I’m all the way in my living room. It has to be Billy and his friend around his neck, coming to finally tell me more.
And thank God, whatever God is.
Maybe it’s him.
*
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