by John Shirley
Outside—outside the ruins of the pub, but still within the great cavern—they saw that Geoff was being pulled upward, straight into the air . . . his screams muffled by another hand, clamped over his mouth.
The two arms lifting him up seemed at least a hundred yards long, perhaps longer. They extended to become mere convergent lines in the distance overhead, reaching clear to the distant cavern ceiling, where they joined with a blob of gray that could only be dimly made out, perched on a dark shelf within an enormous crack. Garth let go, cursing himself, and a moment later Bosky lost his grip too, and fell seven feet to the weedy turf in the open space behind the pub, landing on his back, the air knocked from him when he struck, still clutching one of Geoff’s sneakers in his right hand.
Wheezing for air, Bosky stared up at Geoff’s frantically waving legs. His best friend receding into the misty blue air overhead . . . drawn up and up, dwindling with distance, until at last he was pulled into the crack, to vanish with the gray blob into the shadows.
Bosky watched for a long time, hoping for some other sight of Geoff. But nothing moved up there.
“Bugger this,” Bosky said in a low voice when he’d gotten his wind back. He stood up and fixed Garth with a hard look. “That hole up there goes somewhere, Granddad. And some have disappeared into other holes, lower down, near the edge of town. I’m going to get a gun from that cabinet, and I’m going to go in one of them holes. There must be a connection, a tunnel system to the ones up above. I’m going to climb up and see what they’ve done with Geoff. I’ve had enough.”
Garth swallowed and licked his lips—but said nothing.
Bosky shrugged and turned, stalking off toward his house. Garth watched his grandson go. Bosky’s father, Garth’s son-in-law Pauly, hadn’t been a bad sort, except for the drinking binges. Driving drunk one night he’d crashed into the river in flood season and drowned. Ill-luck for the boy, who’d loved his father, and Bosky hadn’t been right since. But now, at last, he was showing some character. Something that ought to be encouraged—in Hell or not. So Garth sighed and turned to Skupper and Butterworth, gaping from the doorway. “Well, gentlemen: I’m an old man after all. What difference does it make if I die a day or two sooner? May God bless and keep you.”
He started off to find Bosky, wondering if he had any provisions left to take along with them.
Skupper and Butterworth stared after Garth. Then they went silently back to the bar.
~
Constantine woke up in darkness, profound darkness, on what felt like stone. He couldn’t remember having fallen onto it, not exactly. There had been that endlessly spiraling descent, feeling his way along—and then he’d run out of steps. And out of floor. He’d pitched into a hole. A moment of free fall and then—it was as if he’d been swatted like a fly. He’d supposed himself killed.
No such luck. Only knocked out for a bit.
He sat up, bones aching but intact, and got to his hands and knees, looking around for some source of light and finding none. Pitch black. The bottom of the chute was rough, stony, cold, and bone dry; the air smelled of mushrooms and, faintly, of decaying flesh. A chorus of unintelligible whispering was heard from not far away. Now and then, the dripping of water; the occasional low groan, and a sound that might have been something big and soft being dragged across a floor.
Constantine had no other impressions, because he couldn’t see a damn thing. The words stygian and inky came to his mind and they seemed inadequate. It was darkness without relief.
There was another quality to the blackness too—it seemed to have a palpable weight of its own, a fulsome presence that pressed against him. He remembered a line from the Bible, Exodus 10:21, Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward Heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.”
Constantine got carefully to his feet, waiting for his eyes to adjust, to give him some faint sense of the extent and shape of his surroundings. It never happened. He reached up above him, feeling about—and his hand came into contact with a damp stone ceiling a few feet over his head. To the right and left he felt nothing. “Lady!” he hissed into the darkness, hoping that the dripping water might put him in contact with her. “What happened to the light you gave me earlier?”
Something in the darkness sniggered at that.
“He thinks he wants to see! Oh but he don’t, he don’t!”
Did he hear that with his ears or his mind—or his imagination? Constantine wasn’t sure.
“Lady!”
No reply.
He thought of a spell of illumination that might work here. He yearned to try it out—he felt unspeakably vulnerable in this blackness. Something could be sniffing at him, opening its great toothy mouth for him right now, and he’d never know till it closed its jaws.
And if the spell didn’t work, there was always his cigarette lighter, though he was reluctant to use its fuel up. How, after all, would he light his cigarettes if he ran his lighter fuel down?
Some instinct warned him against creating light, magically or any other way, just now. If there were dangerous creatures about him in the darkness, they might be as unaware of him as he was of them. A light would only attract them.
But without a light he might blunder into a pit, or into that toothy maw . . .
Just wait, he told himself. Hold off.
So he moved slowly ahead—he hoped it was ahead—with his arms outstretched, feeling his way with his feet.
Fuck me, this could take weeks. I’ve only got five days.
Still he tiptoed slowly forward, feeling his way. The ground seemed more or less flat, though now and then something brittle crunched underfoot.
A dozen yards on he ran into someone else feeling their way along. Their fingertips touching his.
Constantine recoiled, swearing, “Fucking hell . . . !”
“Here, who’s that?” said a voice, accompanied by foul breath, close at hand. “I don’t know that voice. I thought I knew every voice in the deep dark.”
The voice had an odd accent Constantine had never heard before. Almost British but not quite. “My name’s John,” he said. “Who’s that?”
“Arfur, you can call me,” said the voice. A man’s voice, cracked, aged, laborious. “The Brits called me that.”
Constantine took a step back from the smell—a stench of decay and never-washed feet and mold and feces. “How long have you been here?” Constantine asked, wondering how he could get some kind of directions to the Palace of Phosphor without revealing himself to be an intruder. Whoever he was talking to, in the pitch blackness, might be a sentry of some kind—or prepared to call one. It was best he enter the realm of the Sunless unnoticed by its lord if he could, especially considering that MacCrawley was involved. And it made sense that anyone with the title “Gloomlord” was someone best approached circumspectly. A title like that, Constantine reflected, wasn’t exactly a declaration of welcome on the mat.
“Me?” Arfur seemed baffled by Constantine’s question. “How long . . . Why . . . I’m not at all certain, but . . . well, what year is it, friend?”
Constantine told him.
There was a long silence. Then the stranger jeered, “You lie! I came here in the year 1829! I could not have lived so long! Unless . . . but no! I eat, I sleep, I work—I am no ghost!”
“But then the Gloomlord is said to be a long-lived bloke, eh?” Constantine prompted. “If he can live so long . . .”
“His Majesty is no mere mortal man!” There was a touch of reverence in the cracked voice. Then bitter laughter. “And of course it is our toil that gives him his immortality. But one day, one fine day we shall be given our freedom, and wealth beyond imagining!”
“One fine day,” Constantine agreed. Thinking: In which century? The twenty-fourth?
“Why do you tell this lie about the years?” Arfur asked piteously. “It is hard enough here, finding our way about by smell, by the threads, and the clack-smacks. D
oing the bidding of the gripplers. Hard enough, hard enough.”
“Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean to upset you. When was the last time you beheld the Gloomlord, Arfur?”
“Beheld him? How should I behold him? Never saw him even when we passed by the palace. They locked us in here and we’ve never been out since. No, never do they let us out of the lower galleries. It will take a good long time, I should suppose, to adjust to the light of the upper world when the time comes. But perhaps the King will use his magic so that we do not suffer. Now then, when did you say you got here?”
“Well, in fact—I’m a newcomer,” Constantine admitted.
“What! When did you come past the palace?”
“Oh, not so very long ago,” Constantine said, improvising and aware that someone else was drawing near; snuffling sounds were heard, clickings and crunchings and gruntings and nasty giggles and a wave of awful odors. “Promises were made, as you know, and I’m eager to get to work!”
“That’s the attitude! We often get whiners down here. I don’t mind telling you they’re like as not to become grist for the mill, eh! One has to put one’s shoulder to the wheel or one falls under it!”
“More or less that way on the surface,” Constantine remarked, mostly to himself. “Your Gloomlord’s a right old Tory . . . a bloody neocon . . .”
“But ho, they bring us our meal! You’re in luck! You may eat before you serve the wheels! Here, my friend, put out your hand!”
Constantine put out his hand and encountered another hand, covering a large fired-clay bowl of what he supposed to be food, mildly warm. He was hungry and patted at it with his fingers, wondering if he dared eat any. But the hand was in the way . . .
Then he realized that the hand over the bowl wasn’t in the way, it was in the bowl, severed at the wrist. He could feel the bone-ends protruding from the stump. Constantine drew back his own hand in revolted haste.
“Should be nice and fresh,” Arfur was saying. “He’s just come from the surface. He was supposed to work at the wheels with the rest of us, but he would whine and run mad! Still, I’m glad he did, in a way—I was so very hungry! And you and I share the hands!” As he spoke, Constantine could hear him crunching and slurping at his own meal. Sucking flesh from fingers. “We will have more help here, and soon,” Arfur went on, the words mushy with the meat in his mouth. “No doubt they are still being sorted. Go on, eat up, don’t be shy! You won’t get better grub any time soon! Think of it as sausages. ‘Bony sausages,’ we call them!”
“Where do you come from?” Constantine asked, to change the subject. “I mean, you know—originally.”
“Me? Why . . . I . . .” There was a meditative chewing sound. “Oh it’s so long since I thought of it . . . I almost forgot . . . but of course it’s Boston I’m from.”
“In America?”
“Where else? A Boston bean, the other sailors called me, when I was pressed into the Royal Navy. Stepped off an American merchant ship in Portsmouth, got myself drunk, punched a bailiff in the beezer, and they condemned me to be pressed. Some had steam engines on their ships—perhaps you’ve seen them, they’re all the thing in the shipyards—but we had none, and a storm smashed us on a lee shore. We all found ourselves clawing for a hold in the sea cave, glad to be able to breathe. The rising tide trapped us and we went more deeply into the cave and there was nowhere to go but down. We soon encountered the gripplers—and then the King’s soldiers. They brought us before the palace . . . Oh, what a glorious sight! The King Underneath, the one you call the Gloomlord, declared us trespassers, but said we might work off our crime and receive a great reward. Some, of course, were eaten—but there are a few left from that crew . . . See here, are you going to eat that?”
“Ah, no, I ate just before I . . . signed on. I was just wondering if you had any notion when you’ll be . . .” He broke off, feeling a hand on his ankle. This one was still attached to an arm, for it was feeling its way up his leg. Constantine jerked away from the probing touch. “Here! Is that you clutching at me, Arfur! We’ll have less of that!”
“No, ’tisn’t me. Lord but this whiner had a tender palm . . . No, ’twasn’t me; there are those here who look for fresher meat. Give him a swift kick and he’ll sheer off.”
Constantine kicked out, but two more hands clamped on to his legs, others his arms, and he felt a long tongue rasping at his right ankle, and another—reeking sickeningly—on his neck, and someone muttering foully, “I wants to suck out his eyeballs. Do but hold him and I’ll suck out his eyeballs while he yet lives . . . that’s the delicacy, the texture, the fresh warm softness of them . . .”
Constantine began to shout a spell of illumination—but a big horny hand clamped over his mouth, gagging him. A long rough tongue lapped at his eyes . . .
“Avast, there, let my friend go!” shouted Arfur. “If anyone’s to eat him it’s me, and I’ve not decided!”
There was a scrabbling, a struggle in the darkness, and Constantine felt his right hand set free. He reached into his inner coat pocket, fumbled out his lighter, terrified he would drop it, opened it with a practiced flip of his thumb, flicked it alight—
Their screams at the sudden light were piteous, like small girls with their skirts afire. His captors released him and backed hastily away.
Constantine saw a dozen figures in a ragged ring around him. They were only roughly in the shape of men, though he could see that they’d once been human, for within the scabrous gray-green growths of fungus coating them were bits of uncovered human flesh; here a nose, there an ear, there a partial chin, a few threadbare rag ends of clothing. For the most part they were covered with the growth, like barnacles on the hull of a ship but rougher, more uniform. They looked almost like figures of stone. Many had one eye covered by the growth. Their remaining eyes peered at him, blinking, half blinded.
The nearest, probably Arfur, still had a human finger stuck in the corner of his mouth which he worked at like a child slowly chewing up a long piece of candy. There were wooden bowls on the floor here and there, with ragged bits of a person in them, along with what looked like sections of mushrooms. In one of the bowls was the partly gnawed head of what might’ve been a teenage boy with ash-blond hair.
“It’s well you can’t see yourselves,” Constantine said. “The Gloomlord has betrayed you gits! And if you’ve got any humanity left in you, you’ll take your revenge on him! Just look at you!”
As he spoke he lifted the cigarette lighter’s flame to see beyond them. The low ceiling soon ended, opening up in a vast chamber. He caught a dim glimpse of a farther wall on which were stone wheels, each with a handle, and at which other crusted unfortunates toiled, monotonously cranking the wheels to provide the motion that turned a disk up above, itself connected to a mechanism he couldn’t make out. Much was obscured by the intervening guidance strings stretched weblike across the cavern.
And many hands—gray-black, four-fingered, on long, long arms—were snaking toward him across the floor. Coming with a multiple slithering, the hands were on arms that seemed to go on and on, reaching to big gray blobs in recesses along the walls . . .
“The gripplers is coming to see to him!” one of the scabrous figures declared gleefully. “He’ll soon change his tune! He’ll dance a new jig for us!”
Constantine was fairly sure that once those four-fingered hands had good grip on him he’d be done for. He tried to think of a quick-and-dirty spell to deal with this peculiar situation but none came to him.
Still the hands reached for him—closer now—
He had a thought. These men were sailors. He had no rum, but . . .
“Who wants tobacco?” Constantine asked casually, plucking a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it.
“Oh my sweet Lord—is that tobacco?” cried Arfur, peeking through the fingers covering his eye.
“It is!” Constantine shouted. “If those things crawling on the floor grab me . . .” He was backing away from the gray hands—the grippler
s, he supposed—but even in the dark he sensed they were gaining on him. “. . . I’ll chew the tobacco up and swallow it! But if you want it—and if you don’t make a snatch for it—and if you protect me—”
And he blew a seductive plume of smoke toward Arfur.
Arfur made an anguished bugling sound and then pounded toward him, his eyes squinted against the light. The other encrusted men were hanging back, still afraid of the light and the gripplers who were almost upon him. “Put out the light and I’ll carry you!” Arfur shouted.
Constantine switched off the lighter, and darkness fell like a guillotine blade. He felt himself swept up in powerful, crust-covered arms. “I’ll carry you to the resting repository! The gripplers will have to come out of their crannies to find you there and there’ll be just time for a smoke! Oh it seems ages since I’ve had a smoke.”
“It is, mate!” Constantine assured him, as—in pitch darkness—Arfur leaped skillfully about, holding Constantine above the gripplers, their finger-centered senses seeking him on the floor. Using his heightened sensitivity to the gripplers’ presence, Arfur slipped past the grasping hands, running up between the arms . . .
To where? Constantine wondered. There was no telling where this grotesque was carrying him.
Constantine focused his attention on the psychic field emanating from his own body, compressed its energy, and then extended its receptivity . . .
He obtained a sort of psychic bat’s-eye-view of their surroundings, then—an unsteady, monochromatic image derived from sheer soul-prescience. He glimpsed a row of tunnels in the wall beside the wheels where the damned of this outer darkness toiled.
Between the tunnels were big irregular cracks where the gripplers’ arms retracted to become part of the main body, which were little more than leathery, hairless blobs. The gripplers’ arms literally grew out of, and shrank into, the big shapeless bodies, stretching out or sucking back in like polyps from an amoeba. There was something like a face on the blob, too, a wide lipless, drooling mouth, stretching much of the width of the body, and the suggestion of nostrils—but no eyes.
