“The sp-spider, you say…” he mused, running a finger carelessly up the line of one of the massive keloid scars that viciously decorated his face. “Been to see Cliemene, I see.”
“How did you know?” I asked. There was something strange about the odd little leper. I got the feeling there was more to him than met the eye—much more—and had flashbacks to the Ravenous Beast I’d faced when first arriving in the game. Sluck was like an iceberg, the terrible truths about who he was lurking beneath the oily black waters of a dark, impenetrable ocean.
“Sluck also knows many th-th-things!” he replied, vaulting forward with remarkable speed, looking up at me with strange, proud eyes. “But do you know what you are doing here?”
His question struck me like a slap in the face. Those eyes of his had seen straight through my outer façade and into my soul, exposing my own doubts that I’d wrestled with on my long journey here. I felt defensive, as though I were being berated on the witness stand or interrogated by the police, and I snapped back at him.
“Of course I do! You think I would have come all this way if I didn’t?!”
Sluck’s cracked and skewed lips twisted in a grin filled with pity and amusement, and he scratched the top of his deformed head with the smallest of his two fingers.
“You—you don’t know…” he replied, almost speaking to himself. Somehow, this understanding had him even more interested in me and he examined me again like a zookeeper might examine one of their animals. “But you—as you said—came all th-th-this way anyway…”
Aside from the odd sounds ahead of us, the cave was quiet. Even the roar of the falls was gone, merely a memory of the horrors of the city that stewed above us. It was as though we’d stepped into a soundproof room—a sacred place not meant for visitors—or anyone living.
“I—I had to…” I spoke like a sheepish student who’d forgotten to do his homework. Sluck merely looked back at me. “Sluck, why did you tell me to fear the Smithy, Wilhelm? He wasn’t dangerous.”
Sluck coughed and laughed to himself, shaking his head like a joke had just flown right over my head.
“You are a quick one, young Seeker,” Sluck said, again, more to himself than to me. “But tell me—what will you do when you find him? The Spider?”
A heavy breath ran through me as I faced his impossible question. The truth was, I didn’t know what I’d do. I didn’t even know what to expect. All I knew was that I had to find the spider. I had to seek the monolith. I knew that if I didn’t, the drive would burn my mind until I could no longer resist. It was an itch that was impossible to scratch, and it was my only hope.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him dismissively. His question felt like a challenge—just another obstacle getting in my way of wherever it was I was supposed to go. I was floundering around without a guide or real destination, and what was worse, I didn’t have anyone by my side.
“Is that what you’re doing?” Sluck said with a devilish grin. “Not worrying about it?”
“Look, either help me or get out of my way!” I snapped. The strange chamber had me on edge. The feeling of death was so heavy in the air I could practically feel it. Sluck simply stood there smiling, rubbing his deformed fists together.
“Fine,” I growled. “Get out of my way. I have places to be.”
“Ah, but young Seeker,” Sluck interrupted, stepping in front of me to block my path. “Have you not looked around you? You are already there.”
I started to speak but stopped as Sluck took a dramatic step back, and like an ancient hunter kindling a flame against the cold tundra, cupped his hands over the bundle of feathers, raised them to his lips, and gently blew.
Slowly, a white flame appeared, illuminating Sluck’s disfigured face. There was a barely perceptible flicker in his eyes, not from the light of the fire he held in his hands, but from something inside of him—amusement, maybe—that set me on edge and caused me to step back and draw my axe.
“P-p-p-peace, young Seeker,” Sluck said gently, like a father might say to his son. “You have nothing to fear here.”
The strange leper limped forward, the light from his hands beating back the shadows that seemed to drip from the walls. He knelt forward like a knight giving honor to his king and gently pressed the glowing ball of feathers against the ground.
Embers burst and flared like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. All of the deep colors of the rainbow danced like tiny savage pagans giving homage to some god whose name was lost in time. The cinders were hypnotic as they swirled above the dark ground of the cave, gathering and chasing after each other, racing away into the darkness ahead.
In the shadows, the sound of wet tissue breaking increased, and as the sparks begat flames, grew and expanded, tracing lines across the ground like electrical conduits, I saw things move.
Legs. Countless legs, emerging from eggs of deep purple, the color of raw meat. The tops flopped open like someone being scalped, spilling the tiny baby spiders out with a flush of white slop that created the sickly sound I’d heard before.
There were countless eggs, stacked upon each other, some growing out of others, cascading up towards the wall like tiered farmland. Sluck’s sparks swept through them, setting them alight like pieces of kindling. Their cries pierced the air like tearing metal and they burst out of existence, leaving only the flames that curled and crawled up the wall, burning away the darkness to reveal something more horrifying than I’d ever imagined.
“Oh my God…” I muttered as I stared. Somewhere, as though existing in another time and place entirely, I heard Sluck’s voice whisper.
“Young Seeker. Allow me to introduce you to the Spider.”
60
The Spider and Answers—Sort Of…
“A strange suspicion sits uneasy within me. Questions plague my mind, keeping me awake at night, questions of the nature of reality, the answers to this world that seem intent on eluding me. But if you ask me, this world we inhabit is merely a façade, a glossy layer on top of the real world below, meant to distract us from the ancient heavenly connection that cries out to us!”
—from the diaries of Allen Greenberg the Philosopher
I felt like I was staring at some horrible mural birthed from the mind of a mad artist who’d succumbed to religious fervor and submitted himself to his twisted creation with a furious reverence that had pushed him into places no man should go.
The wall seemed alive, tormented with twisting tendrils and bulbous arteries, swollen with a decadent life force that fed to its center where a man—or at least what could somehow be considered a man—seemed to have grown out of the dirt.
His legs were gone—no, not gone, just imperceptible beneath the mess of putrid ivy that crawled across him—and his arms were splayed out on either side in the shape of a cross. His head hung forward, limp like that of a corpse. All around him, the wall bulged as though infected by cysts threatening to burst forth at any moment. Long sweeping curtains of snot-colored silk hung at odd angles, and as I stared in sheer shock and horror, the flames from Sluck’s fire began to slowly devour them.
My eyes were glued to the terrible sight, and a strong sense of revulsion grew within me. I fought to force it back, but the sheer horror of the altar was too much for me and I vomited to the side, collapsing onto my knees with one hand in the dirt. The sense of gravity, or pure purpose, was like a hand closing around me. Pressure pressed against my skull as I forced myself to look back at the man, if that was what he was.
It was impossible to tell where his body ended and the terrible organism began. Or were they the same? The flames burned wet as they chewed at the hanging vaults of dreadful silk. I pushed myself to my feet, wiping away the sick from my lips, and watched as the man began to stir.
“C-can’t…can’t be…”
His voice was hollow and dry, as though his soul had been sucked out of him, and a shiver ran through my body like the one you get when you write on a chalkboard. He groaned, his eyelids fli
ckered, fighting against thin strands of silk that crept from his eyebrows to his cheeks and lips.
He was old, terrifyingly ancient, but looked like he had once been strong—an old warrior imprisoned by a powerful curse from which there was no escape. He groaned again and fought to open his eyes.
“Not…not possible…” he spoke, his lips almost glued shut by the webs. “You—you—you…”
He coughed, spat, and threads of white tissue exploded from his mouth onto the rows of corpse eggs beneath him. I felt the urge to hurl rise up again within me, but fought it back down. I glanced around for Sluck, to see what his reaction was to the horrifying scene, but the lumbering man was gone. Somehow it didn’t surprise me.
“Sss…sss……” the man’s hissing sound got my attention again, and I looked up at him as the lines of flame danced around him. The eggs (his eggs?) were melting, forming slushy rivulets of liquefied tissue. I stepped aside to let one pass. I heard it softly puddle behind me.
“Sssoooo…..s-s-s-s…” The man’s words choked in his throat. He spat again—more cobweb threads emerging from his mouth like silly string sprayed from a dying can.
“STUPID!” he finally roared, his lips peeling away at the webs that encased them. They fell and hung free from his chin like an old man’s beard. He raised his eyes to mine, and as they met, a feeling of completion filled me, as though I’d just completed the game’s most difficult quest, but somehow I knew that this had absolutely nothing to do with the actual game itself.
The man’s upper body hung free of the wall, while his limbs were held fast in place, causing his back to arch at an obviously painful angle. Raising his head seemed to be causing him horrendous pain. He stared at me with a bleeding intensity and I suddenly felt exposed, in danger, despite the obvious fact that he couldn’t reach or touch me if he wanted to. There was something about this man…
“Shhh…shhh…shhh…shhh…help!” he cried out as milky white tears began erupting from his eyes, bulging from their ducts like balloons inflated past their limits. My jaw quivered. My throat contracted. I thought of just how far away I was from everything, here in the Bowels of Quelan, facing someone more important than the game, someone beyond the game.
“HELP M-M-M-ME!” His words seemed to almost break him as they fought through his lips, but they were enough to shock me from my stupor. I leapt into action, dashing through the eggs, scattering their husks with my boots. My axe carved a triumphant ditch as I swept it up and out, snipping ribbons of web from the wall. They drifted slowly down around me as I unleashed on the man’s sickening prison.
One of the thickest arteries that rippled across the spot where his legs should have been burst as I severed it with my blade. Something like blood spilled, followed by black vapor that stank like sulfur. Flecks of jagged ash and ember floated with it, stinging my eyes as I continued to cut away at whatever it was that was holding the man captive.
“Shh…sss…un…be…be…lievable…” the man stuttered. But his voice was growing, filling with tiny shots of strength as my blade cut back and forth, back and forth across the nauseating organism that seemed as though it had been secreted by the very earth itself.
“VILE, BETRAYAL!” the spider cackled, his tongue cursed with madness.
A heavy chop from my axe freed his right arm, and his body slumped forward but still held fast. His hand was pallid and frail, pruned as though he’d spent too much time underwater, but he used it all the same and began to tug at the webs that clung to his lips and eyes.
“Hang on,” I assured him as I tore furiously at the veins that imprisoned his legs. “I’m gonna get you out of here.”
But as I chopped away, shielding my eyes the best I could against the acrid smoke that filled the air as it spilled from the veins and arteries that fell away as my blade ripped through them, a horrifying truth appeared.
The man, the spider, had no legs. His torso stopped at the waist. Everything else beneath it was whatever organism had imprisoned him. The flesh was tattered like a piece of paper hastily torn from a notebook. It was as though this thing had been slowly devouring him.
“My legs!” he cried, his voice stronger than before. He screamed a horrible scream that shook him free of the wall. He swung forward, but his left arm was still imprisoned, and he swung there, shouting and slapping at the wall in a desperate attempt to free himself.
“I’ve got you!” I shouted, slicing up with a precision blow from my axe. It tore away the last of the tendrils that held him up, and he fell to the ground and rolled through the burst eggs beneath him, wrapping himself up in their muck before coming to a halt at my feet. With a painful groan, he rolled from his stomach onto his back and looked up at me, his chest heaving, his skin glistening with the thick layer of placenta-like slime.
“Pffffft!” he hissed, spitting and wiping at his lips. “Sickening fucking horrible shit! Goddamn it! FUCK!”
I took a step back. Despite having no legs, the man’s rage was undeniable, and I’d seen more than enough in the chamber to know that I had no idea what I was facing or what was possible here. This was beyond anything I could have imagined, and there was no telling what was coming next.
“Are—are you all right?” I stammered. It was a horrible sight. Although I didn’t know him, it was hard to have anything but pity for the man as he writhed around, desperately trying to free himself from the awful ooze that clung to his half-body.
“NO I’M NOT ALL RIGHT!” he screamed, his voice like a thousand nails. I stepped back as he rolled himself down the slope, away from the shattered, burning eggs, and into the soft dirt of the chamber. The earth worked like a sponge, sucking the moisture from the slop that surrounded him. He thrashed violently, slapping away the clumps of mud and soil before finally slumping down onto his back, exhausted.
“Un—real!” he gasped, sucking air like someone who’d almost just drowned.
I stood there a moment watching him. The scene was almost too much for my mind to process. Every one of my senses was under assault, from the stench of the eggs and the muck, to the heat on my back and the revulsion in my stomach, to the indescribable way the chamber seemed to suck up sound, to the impossible to explain sense of gravity that washed over me in waves like an ocean of destiny calling out for me to plunge myself into its depths.
“Miserable fucking thing…” he muttered, hissing and spitting the whole time. “Impossible mistake to make! IMPOSSIBLE!”
“Uh…excuse me?” I said cautiously. “Who—who are you?”
“Who am I?” the spider roared, spinning onto his back to glare at me. “Hah! Well of course you wouldn’t recognize me like this! Who would? I’m Mizaguchi! Kotaro Mizaguchi!”
61
The Father Revealed
“I must confess, my friend, that the curiosity of the lesser minds—if you don’t mind me referring to them that way—have begun to confound me in many ways…there are aspects of them I do not fully comprehend, contradictions that seem to deny all biological programming and instinct. With your permission, I will continue my quest to understand them.”
—Baselight
My mouth hung open. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right and shook my head to rid myself of the stupor that had fallen over me.
“You’re—who?” I gasped.
“Mizaguchi!” he snarled, attempting to get to his feet, then collapsing back onto the ground as he remembered he had none. “Fuck! Curse this dreadful body!”
In the edge of my vision, the embers of Sluck’s flames licked up the last of the webs that hung from the walls of the strange chamber. I was gently aware of the sound of the slop from the crushed eggs working its way through the soft dirt towards me. I felt as though I’d stumbled upon the man behind the curtain and was witness to something no one was ever meant to see—in fact, something that was never meant to have happened at all.
“Mizaguchi…” I said slowly. “As in…the Mizaguchi?!”
“Yes,” he replied, a litt
le less angry than before. “That’s me.”
My heart leapt as I started to fanboy. Mizaguchi? The creator of Blood Seekers and countless other games? The father of the most advanced AI to ever exist? And here he was, lying in the dirt before me with half his body torn away. It seemed…odd, to say the least.
“But…why?” I asked suspiciously. “I mean—how? It doesn’t make any sense. What are you doing here?”
“Same as you!” he cried out, sloughing off a damp sheet of earth and spider’s webs. “Stuck! Imprisoned here by that damned AI of mine!”
“AI?” I asked.
“Baselight!” he shouted. “Baselight, the son of a bitch!”
He could have been speaking another language.
“I’m sorry,” I said slowly. “I don’t follow.”
“You mean, you don’t know what’s going on here?” he asked, flabbergasted. “You aren’t aware that the entire game world has been taken over by the artificial intelligence specifically designed to manage it?”
It was a revelation, one too large for my tired mind to process. All I could do was slowly shake my head.
Taken over by an artificial intelligence…how could that be possible?
“Well, what do they think up there?” he shouted, sounding like a man teetering over the edge of a precipice, ready to fall if given half the chance—maybe even wanting to. “They think that I’m responsible?!”
“No!” I blurted out quickly. “I mean—there’s speculation since no one has heard from you—”
“Because I’ve been trapped down here!” he shouted, slamming his fist into the dirt. “How could I ever have been so stupid?”
The Monolith Page 40
