by Laird Barron
But what force? And tethered by whom? If the ancient men of Sarnath had opened it, in their city’s last days…
Ajal’s reveries were interrupted by the clattering of junk, and then footsteps in the mucky soil. He sank from his seat into a low crouch, and crept behind a ruined steel desk. As he peeped from behind it, a group of shadowy figures appeared, silent but for their footsteps and labored breathing. Twilight had rendered their faces indistinct, but when one figure bent down to peer into the gate as it drifted past, a little daylight from Ajal’s world was cast into its face. A little, only, but enough: Ajal recognized the bulging eyes, and the pouting droop of its lips, like the mouth a huge, awful fish; he recognized the rippling gills on its throat, and the rotten-grey-green hue of its skin.
Valiant as he was, Ajal gasped aloud at the sight before ducking back down into hiding.
Though he hardly dared move, through the legs of the desk he could see their feet as they turned, hissing softly. They were turned toward him now, he knew.
Listening. Waiting.
One pair of webbed feet approached, sloshing in the mud. Ajal clenched his body and then, with a sudden burst of desperation, he flung himself skyward, ascending rapidly. As he rose, he glimpsed the thing’s yellowish bulging eyes, wide and angry, but also full of awe…as if it were astounded to see a living, breathing man at all, let alone a flying one. Then Ajal soared off over the towering ruins, toward the glorious pink of the sunset-lit coast. Below, up ahead, a bundle of massive, broken high-rises stood ankle-deep in seawater, leaning upon one another. Lights flicked in some of the upper floors, and Ajal imagined, without thinking, a few desperate humans gathered through fires, surviving perhaps by scavenging the fruits of the poisoned ocean.
He soared toward one of bright windows, gazing into the firelit room beyond the smashed glass. Around a bonfire fed by a pile of shattered furniture, he saw a circle of figures gathered like little puppets set out to cast enormous shadows on the walls behind them. Most were adults but a few children sat scattered among them, all in rags, with matted, greasy black hair. A nasty stink filled the air; it smelled like rotting fish, like a seeping wound, and Ajal shuddered when he made out what they were cooking over the flames: a black snake-like fish, as long as several grown men and studded with dozens of bluish, human-like eyes hung in a metal net over the fire; its open mouth revealed a terrifying set of fangs, and dozens of fins sprouted from its sides, stretching out like enormous great webbed hands, or wings perhaps.
Ajal’s stomach churned, and he gagged. One of the figures nearest the window, a child, turned and glanced up toward him. When it cried out, Ajal cried out too, at the familiar, awful visage: the child’s bulbous eyes, its gilled throat, the tiny quivering nostrils of its boneless, flat nose. The others swiftly rose, swarming toward him, and Ajal leaped from the window, letting himself fall until a breeze caught him like a dead leaf and bore him off into the deepening darkness. He searched at window after window, but found no humans, only these chimerical horrors that combined the most revolting features of frog and fish with the human form. Out to sea, he glimpsed a rusty-hulled ship drifting through the waters in the distance… a ghost ship, or perhaps it was piloted by these things, these monsters, or descendants of man regressed back into the sea.
An impossible prophecy he’d once read in an ancient scroll—one housed in the now-lost library of Oriab—surfaced from his centuries of memories. It had claimed that all the worlds, one by one, would be flooded by an avenging army of the servants of a mad ocean-god from some other reality. When he’d read it, he’d discounted it as ancient superstition, the blooming of man’s natural fear of the sea…or perhaps the sort of thing a god told a civilization in order to call it to heel.
But after the horrors in the ruined towers…it was almost enough to stop his heart, to remember that black city, once-sunken and now ascended from the waves, glistening and laden with kelp and air-drowned deep-sea monsters…and the hungering god at its heart, that had vowed to devour the world…
Ajal’s every instinct fought to drive him back to the junkyard, to plunge through the portal and to the safety of his world. Yet the city called to him. Though his hands shuddered, through he soared through the fog-clotted sky with his eyes shut against the whole world, he felt the enigma of the southern city tugging at him. Terea would know, would sense his fears. If Terea were to come to this world…she would insist that he go there, seek out the city.
Ajal had read all he could about that place, since that first, accidental visit of his. He had sought out the accounts of all of the great dreamers in history who’d glimpsed the risen city, in ages past. Not that the accounts made much sense: each had either died, or gone mad, or vanished mysteriously. No account could be trusted. Ajal moaned as all this sensible reasoning filled his mind, though: duty, good sense, investigation…these were not reasons to go to that place, that awful-angled drowned aquapolis. The mere thought of returning there filled him with a dread so immense one could not hope even to name it, and yet…the reasoning felt like excuses.
It was the calling that drew him. Some awful part of him hungered to return there.
In the darkness above the junkyard, hovering Ajal looked down to where the portal ought to have been…but what he found was no mere troop of the creatures. This was an army: hunched fish-men pushed and shoved one another, bickering voicelessly as they fought their way toward the slowly drifting portal. Whenever one got close, a sudden jolt drew it silently through with a flash of light. The light was cruel, to Ajal: it revealed the mass of creatures, the hundreds of them gathered in the junkyard, silently clawing at one another with webbed paws as they fought over the entranceway to his world.
Shuddering, he soared away, terror-weakened, a distant, low call echoing once more through him.
***
Ajal found himself soaring through darkness across the southern ocean, drawn along by a force he could neither name nor resist. The voice in his mind, deep and gurgling, communicated only a dim awareness, elusive consciousness. The surface of the ocean was broken by waves taller than any skycraper ruin, somehow unnaturally sustained, that bore somehow still-living victims in their crests, teeming bodies screaming for help as he flew past overhead.
The waves were headed the same place he was going, those waves full of minds to be shredded and savored.
And then returned the groping within his own mind, as a hand might heft an egg before cracking it into a frypan, or pinch at the flesh of some beast being fattened for slaughter. Then the sun rose, a searing eye rising from black water. The waters roiled beneath him, underwater explosions spraying saltwater up on gassy jets from the depths. Ajal’s dreamer-eyes discerned the gas as luminous white vapor, and it stank of the sea, of the breaths of living things, of the guts of enormous hidden monsters from below.
The waves—teeming with faintly malignant awareness—seemed almost to steer themselves into those gaseous eruptions, so that their unwilling, terrified passengers were tossed skyward, only to be caught up again when they fell: an exquisitely cruel game formed from the eschatological wreckage of the world.
Then, in the distance, Ajal glimpsed it: the city. Horrible, hazed with green mist, still-familiar and still-terrifying though it had been drowned when last he’d seen it. But now the black polis had risen to the surface, perching upon a monstrous promontory of inky, jagged igneous rock. Chants filled the muggy air above its gargantuan edifices, and as Ajal sank toward its blade-sharp parapets and baffling, alien-geometried roadways, he glimpsed the central mountain shimmering in the searing sunlight… and thereupon, a great black throne of stone, carven from the mountain itself—and upon it…upon that awful throne…
Ajal rebelled, even as he felt the tendrils of that dreadful god’s vast feeding maw drift through his mind. He shrieked, and hurled himself up into the air, only to be yanked back down. The thing whispered into his mind, not in words but through notions barely comprehensible. All Ajal truly understood was the mos
t base of them: vague anticipation, half-appetized interest in Ajal’s terror, a dull but gnawing hunger, and a terrifying sense of reognition. It had enjoyed the search, the hunt, and even the wait, but now, all that was done.
Poor Ajal fought, as the god summoned him down into the bewildering streets of the city, reaching out past the jagged sills of dark-glassed windows and rusted-iron doors slathered in immense barnacles. His head ached, as if some invisible fishhook had speared him in the brain.
Then the air itself suddenly thickened, hoisting Ajal upward and hurling him toward the gargantuan figure enthroned at the peak of the island’s mountain. He saw enormous yellow cats’-eyes buried in a wrinkled wall of burnt-maroon flesh, and then a maw gaping wide, the jagged, long yellow teeth—human-like, chillingly—ringing its interior while from the lips grasping, boneless appendages spread wide. In a blur, they closed about him, forcing him between the gnashing teeth…
By sheer force of will alone, he fought to free himself, even to wake, but the tendrils gripped his mind, digging into him, claiming and marking him. The chanting inhuman voices, the screams, and beneath it all, that rumbling noise that he knew—was absolutely sure—was the sound of the ancient god-thing laughing. A toxin spread within him—not within his dreaming flesh, but rather through his consciousness, and then the hellish maw closed around him, wide as a world and terrifying with its countless barbed teeth curled row upon vicious row. Within the vast throat, a dozen boneless, fingerless appendages wrapped round him, snake-like, shoving him deeper into the crushing darkness, and then—
Ajal woke, dizzy, in Terea’s steel-woven tent.
He sat up, and searched his memories, calling for a guard to whom he could relate them before they faded, for dreamers often forget what they have seen when forced to wake this way, but he found nobody nearby. This was…unusual. Terea had always assigned guards to watch over his body during dream-voyages. But now Ajal was alone.
He rose to his feet, eager to find Terea and warn her of what he remembered—of danger beyond the portal, for the vast maw remained terrifyingly clear in his mind. However, at the tent’s door, he paused with a shudder. The opening…it appeared to him as another yawning maw. His eyes widened, he shrieked in terror, and he imagined the doorway slamming shut on him, chewing him up and swallowing him into some dark, gloom-filled chamber crammed with lost, mad souls.
Ajal sank into a crouch and shuddered, muttering to himself for hours and weeping, calling out to Terea, and tearing at his own skin in order to stay awake, for he did not dare to sleep. Shuddering, he tested the steely maw with his fingertips, terrified.
It did nothing. It was merely a doorway.
When lucidity returned, he realize the desert outside the tent had grown calm and still. Once again, he was overcome by a burning need to find Terea, to warn her…for he had sensed something within that distant god-thing’s hunger, a desire to devour more prey than him alone. Its appetite was for worlds, for whole civilizations…
When Ajal finally tore open the door and stepped out into the deepening twilight, not a single human soul stood near Terea’s tent. Even the mechanical things carpeting the walls of Sarnath seemed somehow quieter and calmer now, their riotous activity noticeably diminished. Ajal found there neither corpses, nor any sign of even the mildest struggle.
But then a distant flash caught his eye; it came from above Sarnath’s highest spires, revealing the silhouette of a tiny human figure before it. That, he realized to his horror, was Terea! She must have fought her way to the tower-top! As he strained his eyes, he discerned a crowd of tiny figures behind her, their blades flashing and firearms blasting into the darkness, the distant gunfire audible a moment later. A battle raged upon the tower-top, above which he knew the portal hung, spewing mechanical things down into the world. As thick greenish mist rolled in from the lake, Ajal cried out softly, knowing what would happen to Terea if she made the crossing into the other, awful world.
The ravenous, many-appendaged maw yawned immense before Ajal. He was seized by panic, his mind and bladder emptying themselves all at once. He squatted low, cringing in terror through long minutes, and mumbling to himself of doom, and death, and hopelessness, as the cold, sickly-olive mist of the great lake spread out around him.
He was roused from his mental fugue, after an inestimable stretch of time, by the light touch upon his shoulder, of a hand—or what felt almost like a hand. Glancing upward, he immediately recognized the figures gathered nearby: bulging-eyed, greeny-gray, the gill-throated horrors of the lake!
When he shrieked, the monsters recoiled, the soft eyes squinting in what seemed almost like terror, and backed away from him.
Ajal fled to Terea’s great steel-woven tent, and with a final glance toward embattled, wondrous, doomed Terea upon the distant tower-top, Ajal plunged inside, sealing the entrance behind him. Ignoring the pounding of his heart, and the tyrannical calling of the distant god-thing’s endless, constant summons, and the scrabbling of inhuman webbed hands at the walls of the steel-woven tent, Ajal crouched, alone, in the darkness of his master’s refuge, his eyes wide.
By the time Sarnath’s mechanical monstrosities set upon the fish-men, filling the night with their soft, hissing screams, he was certain Terea had reached the gate, and gone through to the other side…and that she would soon meet the fate that lay beyond, in the belly of that island-god’s endless, awful hunger. He fought against his last remaining instinct, to rise again in dreaming form, and go to her, to warn her: he knew she could not hear him in that state, and even if she could, she would ignore his warnings.
So Ajal only rocked back and forth, his eyes wide, the terror of sleep keeping him shivering awake through the night. Whether day might come again, he could not guess, nor whether he would resist the god-thing’s awful call long enough to see it come; but he clung to the world, to his body, listening intently to the machines’ endless chittering in their vast swath round New Sarnath. If only he could remain wakeful till morning, perhaps he could set back out across the wastes, alone; perhaps, if he found a calaphax, or a hidden cache of supplies…he might not survive long, true, but he would flee the portal, and the still-echoing call from beyond it…Yet to do so, he would have to survive until the day’s first light, and resist those strange tendrils that even now tugged within his skull.
Thus Ajal, the greatest dream-voyager in the world, came finally to hate and to fear slumber itself.
The Long Dark
Wendy N. Wagner
Pa’s secret weighed down Ylie’s feet as he ran through the stone tunnels to deliver the week’s shift schedules, and it kept him from answering all the curious greetings that came his way as he ran. Usually, he stopped in for drink of water or a bit of bread or just to earn good favor taking someone’s message from one end of the underground city to another, but today he ran faster and faster, as if the pounding of his secondhand boots could drown out the urge to spill out his father’s secret like a sack of tailings.
It hurt him to ignore the people who called his name. He knew that most people depended on runners like him for news, for entertainment, for the sense of belonging to something larger than their little tunnel and their small work. The people who flagged him down were never miners or the families of miners, but shopkeepers and old women, the kinds of people who had done well for themselves in Patrie’s past, but now found themselves alone and isolated in the ever-quieter tunnels. He felt bad, running past them without offering anything more than a smile. He knew his speed gave them false hope. He wasn’t carrying some important, exciting message from the mine’s head office; he was just trying to keep his father’s secret and finding it harder every day.
He lowered his head and ran faster.
A figure stepped out in front of him. “Ylie. A word.”
Ylie slid to a stop. “Sister Hauer.” He opened and closed his mouth, searching for the appropriate pleasantry. The priest rarely came down from the observatory on the surface, and in her long black robe, sh
e was a formidable figure. “Good dark to you.”
The woman did not reply for a moment. The robe’s hood shrouded her face in shadows. “It is a good dark,” Sister Hauer answered in her dry voice. “My sky eyes have seen lights approaching from Kalifa.”
For a second, Ylie was too excited to remember to be nervous of the black-robed woman. “A ship? They’re sending a ship?”
“It would appear so. You should return to the office immediately and let them know.” Hauer held out a piece of onionskin folded in half. Ink stained her long fingers, so that the nails were like the black claws of the creature in the school kids’ whispered stories. “Take this to your father when you have finished.”
Ylie hesitated. Paper. He hadn’t seen paper in over a year. It was the kind of Kalifan luxury that ran out between shipments from the neighboring planet, and he had never owned any himself. It wasn’t for people like him and his pa. They had memories and slates, and that was good enough for them.
But Sister Hauer wasn’t folk, he reminded himself. Sister Hauer was a sky-watcher, a priest with book learning, pledged to serve the people of Patrie. Paper was probably ordinary equipment to a priest.
He reached for the folded slip. “I’ll go as fast as I can,” Ylie said.
She stepped in closer to him, still holding the paper tight. He could feel the rasp of her skin against his and smell a strange scent that seemed to billow up out of her robe, a spoiled metallic smell that made him want to pull away from the old woman. “Don’t slow down,” Sister Hauer warned.
The paper pulled free of her horrible hand. Ylie spun around without answering and broke into a run.
The mine’s office was a long ways away, dozens of levels below this one. He’d be running all night, he supposed—the mining office would be striking new orders for the miners once they got the news. Ylie picked up speed. As he ran, he wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and thought that her metallic smell still clung to it, thick and nasty, and just faintly sweet.
