by John Shirley
Then the image faded; Constantine couldn’t hold it for long, especially down here, so far from the places he drew on for power, so close to the energies sustaining those who would destroy him.
Suddenly they came into a more enclosed space; the air here was moist and close. A tunnel of some kind.
“Here we are!” Arfur said, putting Constantine down. “Now for that baccy!”
“Certainly,” Constantine said. But instead of handing over the cigarette he took a long step back. “How far back does this tunnel go?”
Even as he spoke he could hear the gripplers slithering toward him across the floor, searching, sniffing him out . . .
“This is the resting repository, friend,” Arfur said. “It only goes back a hundred paces. There is no outlet. There is no way out of this region at all, once you’re in!”
No way out. Bugger. Had the Lady of Waters been playing with him, putting him here? Was she taking some kind of revenge on him for his avoidance of paying his debt by consigning him to this pitch-black nightmare forever? But she was an elemental—demons and fairies were known to be deceptive, flagrant liars in fact, but not elementals. There must be a way out, and up to the Gloomlord’s palace.
“Now as for that smoke,” Arfur prompted.
“Yes I have it here for you. You say there’s no way out, but there’s a place where food comes in, and new people. If something can come in that way, something can go out that way. As for me, Arfur, I didn’t tell you the full truth about how I came in. I dropped from a hole in the ceiling. Where else do people come in?”
“So that’s why you came from that quarter—I was puzzling on it. That’s where we shove the old bones and feces. New food and workers are lowered down the great shaft, but straight and sheer and black the shaft is, and no way up! And the gripplers, they unload whatever comes down. They’re always there, there’s no way to get past them even if there was a way up it! Well—there’s one spot maybe, where you might come to the shaft. I used to work on it, before I despaired . . . but no way to get to the lifting chain from there . . .”
“And where would that spot be?”
“Beyond the wheels, to starboard as you leave the tunnel. It sounds . . .” He broke off, listening. “Sounds as if the gripplers have missed us, for the nonce—they have moved past the mouth of the tunnel. But they will be back in moments! There isn’t much time—and the little cigar is going out!”
Constantine felt Arfur shambling toward him and he held out the cigarette, butt first. “Here, take it, mate—though I’m sorry to get you started again after all these centuries. Somehow they’ve muddled your sense of time, Arfur, and kept you alive—maybe with that, ah, growth on your skin . . .”
Arfur was sucking at the cigarette. The cherry of the butt glowed in the darkness. He coughed, and then said, “Strange and wonderful tobacco. How the taste of baccy takes me back.” He sighed. “That growth on the skin, as you call it, that’s the protective coating that gives us life. We would not survive the harsh conditions here without it, they tell us. It comes from the gripplers. They suck a man into their maw and spew upon him, and the spew takes root, a fungal thing that enters itself into the deeps of your—but hark, now, stranger! The gripplers are here! Oh how I pray they don’t know it was I—”
“I’ve found another smoke in my coat, Arfur! Lift me up and carry me out and it’s yours!” Constantine whispered.
“But they’re . . . they’re going to . . .”
Constantine decided some outpouring of power was needed to give them an edge, a momentary out. He turned his attention inward, conducted certain ambient psychic energies—prana, thinly available here—that could be converted into light. He extended his hand, visualized certain runic symbols, muttered a name of power, then loudly spoke the words:
“Ignis Ico, Ilaturs!”
A ball of red light formed over Constantine’s upturned palm and he saw the long gray arms of the gripplers—six of them—snaking toward his ankles from the mouth of the “repository.” The light flared up more brightly as he pulsed energy into it and the hands drew back like startled snakes, uncertain, confused by the burst of warmth and luminosity. The flare of light brought the tunnel around them into view: the walls dripping with slime, the floor unspeakably filthy, edges thick with toadstools.
“You need to have a word with an interior decorator, mate!” Constantine said.
Eyes protected from the light by his fingers, Arfur whispered, “Drive the gripplers back and I’ll show you a place you might escape from them . . . but only for a time. Hurry—they are returning!”
The four-fingered hands were once more snaking nearer . . .
Constantine felt his internal energy weakening. He needed real food, and rest. But he reached into the place within himself, the place shown him by the Blue Sheikh, which connected to the source of the All. “Cover your eyes, Arfur!”
Letting the fine vibrations flow into him, Constantine conducted them along both arms this time, facing his palms together, and called out,
“Ignis Ico, Ilaturs—multus plus plurinum!”
And the fading glow surged up, redoubled, quadrupled, so that it pulsed mightily between his cupped hands, like a bursting firework.
The gripplers flinched well back once more, fingers trembling.
“Come on, Arfur!” Constantine shouted. “Let’s scarper!” They rushed out the entrance of the “resting repository” and into the open space of the greater cavern.
“This way!” Arfur called.
Constantine had to let the fireball diminish. He felt too weak to extend his prescience, so he simply took out his lighter. He flicked it alight and made out Arfur ahead of him, stumping hurriedly along.
Arfur led the way past dozens of crusty once-men, stolidly cranking wheels and murmuring to themselves of their forgotten lives, and shrinking back from the sudden alien glare of the lighter as Constantine passed by.
Arfur stopped at a vertical, slightly curving crack in the wall, wider at the bottom, a crevice big enough for some large creature to wedge into. “Once a grippler was laired here, but it was called away to bring more ‘volunteers’ down. Here, you can see the wall inside the crack is rough enough to climb, and it opens at the top . . .” Arfur began to climb, showing the way.
Constantine closed the lighter. The circle of light vanished and, trying to remember the route he’d glimpsed, Constantine felt the wall inside the crack, and climbed in darkness—slipping only once, but never quite falling—until they emerged through a hole into another space entirely, about forty feet up. It was warmer here, uneasy with a background radiation of strange energies, and loud with the chugging sound of unseen machines working eternally away in the darkness. It was just as black as the cavern and tunnel below.
“Arfur? You there?” He knew he was there, actually; he could smell him.
“Yes. You’ll feel a round stone structure here on your right. It contains the turning axle of the great machine. You follow it along, and there’s another crack—I could feel cold air blowing from it, and so found it, long ago, and by feel alone I widened it myself, using a broken piece of iron I found. It leads into the great shaft from above. But a cable’s length below us is the floor, where the gripplers pick up our goods: a fine basket of bats, with guano for relish, yesterday. There also the gripplers take the new recruits to be coated. The walls are sheer, and rise many hundreds of feet. There is no hold, no way up . . .”
And yet, Constantine mused, taking a few cautious steps through the darkness—he was feeling his way along the curved stone wall Arfur had mentioned—something’s lowering things to the bottom, and if that whatsit can lower things then it can bloody well raise them up too.
“Look here, Arfur,” Constantine began. “Suppose we work together to get out of here. I might find a cure for that coating of yours.”
“Do you think it possible? But to defy the King Underneath . . .”
“What has cooperation got you? Now if we were to—
”
But he was interrupted by Arfur’s shriek as several gripplers, feeling their way up the hole they’d crawled through, fastened themselves around Arfur’s legs. “They’ve got me! Help me!”
Constantine stumbled back through the darkness, caught Arfur’s crust-covered fingers flailing about, and tried to pull him back.
“Use your power, friend, use your light!” Arfur begged. “Please, in the name of God, they’ll punish me; they’ll pull me apart and feed me to the others!”
Constantine reached down inside him but in the sudden urgency of the moment—and after the psychic exertion he’d already made—he couldn’t make the contact. Still, he tried, shouting,
“Ignis Ico, Ilaturs!”
But it was no use just saying the words, you had to have the right inner state to go with them. The light didn’t come. He felt himself skidding along the floor as he tried to drag Arfur back by main strength—and suddenly lost his hold on Arfur’s fingers. “Arfur! Where are you!”
There was no reply, only a tussling sound, followed by a gurgling, a crackling, a ripping . . .
Arfur screamed, and . . . the scream was abruptly cut off.
Constantine listened, but only heard the sound of something, several things, being dragged away . . . and another sound. A furtive slithering. The gripplers coming back up the hole to look for him.
He backed away and thumped into the curved wall. He turned and felt his way hastily along it. He felt a movement of cooler air, and up ahead saw a faint, faint light defining a roughly diamond-shaped crack in the farther wall. In the upper world the light would probably not have been visible, but here, where there was no other light at all, it could just be made out. He hurried to it and climbed partway through the break in the wall, then lowered himself and hung by his hands in the shaft, holding his breath . . .
Constantine hung heavily in darkness, as quietly as possible. The light was from far up the shaft. He could hear machinery clunking, grinding; felt the whisper of rising air lifting the hair on the back of his neck. He waited, dangling in a void, his arms aching.
The gripplers came. He could hear the fingers snuffling inquisitively around in the chamber he’d just left—he could picture them clearly, in his mind’s eye, four-fingered hands, like something on toads, tip-tapping their way along the floor, bloodhounds with their smellers in their fingertips, picking up his scent . . .
His arms throbbed; he felt like his shoulders were slowly, slowly dislocating.
He could hear them coming closer now, tippity-tap, slither, tippity-tap, slither, closer and closer, looking to grab his wrists, perhaps to fling him down the shaft to their fellows, where the other gripplers would pull him apart or, maybe worse, impregnate his skin with fungi that would send their roots worming into his flesh, his veins, and finally into his brain . . .
Tippity-tap, slither, tippity . . . tap . . . tap . . .
They were moving off. He’d managed to dangle lower than the upper edge of the floor and, as he’d hoped, they’d missed him.
Constantine waited, listening. Slither, scrape . . . then nothing.
They were gone.
But still he hung by his hands, wanting to scream with the pain in his arms, his fingers . . . till at last he had to pull himself up, or drop.
Grinding his teeth with the effort, cursing his bad wind from smoking, he pulled himself up inch by inch, caught the edge of the wall with an elbow, and dragged himself back through the aperture. Then he lay for a time on the floor, panting softly in the darkness.
Now what? he thought.
Behind him, there came a sound. The creak of a pulley . . .
5
YOU’RE AT HOME IN THE PIT, AFTER ALL
“It’s not so very much to ask, Vicar,” Bosky insisted. “All I’m asking is that you baptize my bullets!” He lifted up the 30.06 hunting rifle his father had left him and shook it emphatically at the vicar. “I’ve got two boxes of bullets in my coat pocket.”
The vicar was sitting on a chair in the darkest corner of the room, his head bowed, lank dirty-blond hair drooping over his pale, long-nosed face. Bosky supposed he was praying, but after a moment it was clear he was quietly sobbing.
The sitting room of the vicar’s cottage was dimly lit, everything bathed in the dull blue light of the cavern that had swallowed the village. Inky shadows pooling around the furniture, their shapes defined in ghostly blue, and a man weeping in the corner.
“It’s no use, Boswell,” Vicar Tombridge said, using Bosky’s real first name (Bosky’s mother, an English teacher, had done her thesis on James Boswell while she was pregnant). “Baptisms are no good in Hell, nor blessings of any sort.”
“Bloody . . .” Bosky choked off the epithet. “Not you too, Vicar! You ever hear of anyone going to Hell the way we came here? You see any flames?”
“But the demons—I have seen those! Their grasping hands! They got my neighbor, Mr. Prakesh! There was no harm in him, poor man . . . The hands of Satan will come for me soon, for I’m the true sinner here! Boswell, listen to me—run from thoughts of lust! Perhaps God will give you a second chance and let you out of here, you innocent child!”
Innocent? Run from lust? Not likely on either score. Bosky thought about Marianne LaSalle, the exchange student he’d shagged in the churchyard of St. Leonard’s. Good times. They’d been stoned, and forgot the condom. What a relief when she said she’d gotten her period.
The vicar was babbling on, “Men in the sickness of their souls taking advantage of artless young girls . . .”
Marianne had been two years older than him, nineteen, and the whole thing had been her idea. Not that he’d resisted. He’d been sorry to see her return to Paris.
“You cannot hope to throw down the powers of darkness, boy, with a bullet dipped in holy water. Come here, sit by me and we’ll pray together for forgiveness, for release from this circle of Hades.”
Bosky’s granddad Garth came to stand in the doorway then, listening.
“I intend to get out of this death trap, Vicar,” Bosky said, “and not with prayer! We can find our way back up, through the caves round about here. But first we’ve got to shoot the things you call demons! Maybe they’re demons, but that don’t mean they’re like demons in Hell. Maybe you can kill the buggers. Me and me bruvs, we saw some magical-like . . . things, stuck in the ground, out on the edge of town. Marking off the boundary, like. D’you get it? Someone’s done this to us! If it was God who sent us down here, he wouldn’t need to use magical gimmicks! He’d wave his hand and down we’d go!”
Tombridge only groaned. “Don’t deceive yourself!” But Bosky waited stubbornly, looking steadily at him, arms crossed, and at last Tombridge gave a long sigh of resignation. “If you want to go into the chapel, it’s open. There’s a baptistery with blessed water in it still. Fortunately Becky Withers was away for the day with her husband and baby when we were taken. I baptized the child and they went from the chapel to see her mother in Plymouth, so perhaps she was spared. But the rest of us . . . are damned.”
“Probably wasting your time, boy,” said Garth, coming in. “But I’ll waste mine too, if you like.” He raised a flashlight. “Even brought us an electric torch. And in my pocket, a little food—what hasn’t spoiled. Sausages and cheese and bread gone all cardboard. Come on.”
They left the vicar to his weeping and went outside, both of them glancing up at the distant, misty-murky ceiling, looking for movement, for the drooping hands of the demons that had taken Geoff away, Geoff and quite a number of others. Bosky saw nothing up there just now. He looked back at the cracked street and caught a movement across the way, a woman’s face in the window of a low redbrick house. Bosky raised a hand in greeting to her, instinctively trying to be encouraging, but she only darted back, pulling the curtain.
“They’re all so scared,” Bosky said.
“Can’t blame them,” his granddad said. “Most of them think they’re already dead, and judgment’s soon to come. And if th
ey’re not dead, then what is all this? I’m not yet sure this ain’t a dream myself.”
“I’m dead certain it ain’t a dream, Granddad,” Bosky said. “It’s a miracle, in a way—an evil one. But it ain’t no dream and it ain’t Hell. Not yet.”
They went into the chapel and found the baptismal. There was a little more color here, in a sickly sort of way, coming from the stained-glass windows, and a green-blue sheen fell over the stone baptismal: a basin carved with baby angels, set on a low dais to one side of the altar.
Bosky set the rifle aside, took out the box of bullets, and opened it.
And then sat back on his haunches. “This is stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking . . . It ain’t going to bloody work . . .”
“I doubt it works, too, lad,” Garth said. “But who knows? Why not try?”
Bosky sensed Granddad was just trying to keep him going with a little harmless encouragement. He shook his head.
But then he rocked back on his heels as the baptismal began to seethe, its waters boiling, sending up a quivering light. A majestic woman’s voice, emanating from the font itself, said,
Approach, bring your weapons hither . . .
“Stone me!” Bosky blurted. “Granddad—did you hear that too?”
“I did! And look!” He moved cautiously closer to the baptismal, pointing to the woman’s face appearing in the water, like a reflection—when there was no woman there to be reflected. She was a beautiful woman, made of light and ice and bubbling water, manifesting even as the waters quieted . . .
“An angel!” Bosky breathed, impressed.
An angel? The woman’s face seemed obscurely amused. Yes, if you like. The ancients knew me by another name. But I have always given my blessings to those who properly acknowledged me.
The woman’s voice resonated in Bosky’s mind in English, and yet he seemed to hear the words echoing indistinctly in other languages, languages he had never heard before but somehow recognized.
