There must be seepage from one of the shafts. Even as he ran forward the last few yards, Driscoll knew in his inmost soul that the leakage was almost certainly from Shaft Number 247. Not only Wainewright’s story but all his inquiries had prepared him for that. There was a strange stench in his nostrils now; one that was vaguely repellent but at the same time familiar.
Driscoll stumbled on something slimy and almost fell. He swore and recovered himself, but he was badly shaken just the same. The torch beam trembled as he waved it wildly across the floor. Dark rivulets of water flowed across the tiling; curiously, there were many dry patches, which told Driscoll immediately that there were a number of shafts involved.
He was almost there now. His footsteps echoed monstrously back from the ceiling. He was no longer conscious of the water slopping over his feet. Driscoll was only vaguely aware of why he had come here. But there was a strong compulsion at the back of his mind; he had to come. And he knew it had something to do with Wainewright.
He stumbled again and almost fell. He put out his hand to the shafting and supported himself. He saw without surprise the black-painted letters as his torch danced across them: SHAFT NO. 247.
There was a strange odour now; something that he had not smelled before. He could not place it and paused hesitantly, the torch in his suddenly nervous hand trembling across the arched metal ceiling of the tunnel. There was dampness, of course; that was something to be expected with the water underfoot. But there was something else, something almost obscene. An animal smell, pungent and rotting to the nostrils; reptilian, if you like.
Driscoll had once visited the zoological gardens long ago, where the few remaining specimens were kept. The aquarium had particularly fascinated him. There was something of that now. The great saurians, some almost a hundred years old, sleeping caked in their beds of mud; glazed green eyes immobile for hours on end. The torch wavered again, and Driscoll sharply snapped his mind back to the present.
He moved cautiously, deliberately blocking out the heavy miasma as he splashed the last yard to the shaft. It was enormous; he couldn’t quite remember its original purpose, though it was primarily to do with inspection. Wainewright had been correct about one thing. There was rust on the casing and the bolts. He touched the cold metal with a tentative forefinger, saw it come away red in the light of the torch.
The inspection-chamber hatch was ajar. Driscoll soon saw why. There was something protruding from it. Something grey and rubbery from which the stench emanated. Driscoll did not like to touch it. Instead, he worked the hatch pivot with his torch. The thing that was jammed in the gap moved as the aperture grew. It looked like an embryonic hand with tiny fingers. Driscoll was startled; his hand slipped on the torch, the metal slid back with a harsh rumble, disturbing in the gloom of the tunnel, and the mass fell with a slopping splash into the water, where it was presumably carried away. Driscoll felt relieved.
The inspection chamber was empty, as he had hoped. The door that connected with the Outside was firmly closed and latched. Driscoll bent his head and listened intently. He could hear nothing but the sound of running water. It was absurd really. He did not know what he expected to hear.
But there was another odour; something like a musky perfume that made his head swim. Driscoll knew what had fascinated Wainewright and his friend Deems before him. The heady odour had something in it that reached back deep into his roots. He saw green fields; a blue sky; corn waving in the breeze. This was not something on the vision tube, but an atavistic memory of reality.
Driscoll staggered and reached out a hand to save himself; he saw the message pad then, lying in the bottom of the chamber. He knew before he picked it up that it was Wainewright’s. It bore his own name, he saw without surprise. It merely repeated in block capitals: FREEDOM! And underneath, in smaller letters: UNTIL WE MEET OUTSIDE. A scribbled W ended the message. Driscoll stood and an overwhelming sadness enveloped him; a sadness that was dispelled only by the faint wail of the emergency-squad siren. He took the message pad with him as he went splashing back up the tunnel.
Driscoll was suspended, of course. Someone must have seen him before he regained his quarters, or perhaps the cameras had been working before the lights came on. Hort did not ask to see him; there was merely the dreaded green chit with the official stamp slipped beneath his door as he slept. There would be an official hearing in a week’s time.
Driscoll did not wait for the hearing. Something had happened to him. He was hardly conscious of it himself. Nothing seemed to have changed, yet everything had subtly altered. There were no more chess games with Karlson. Nothing was said, but Karlson was never in evidence when Driscoll took his meals. Strangely enough, Krampf, the only person in Central Control who secretly irritated Driscoll, seemed sympathetic at this time of crisis.
Twice Driscoll had met him in the corridors, and it seemed to him that there was a strange secret compassion in his eyes. But he dare not speak to Driscoll; no one dare while he was awaiting the hearing. Similarly, he was no longer welcome in Records, and Driscoll felt he would be under surveillance if he went out. He was no longer trusted; that was the brutal truth. And a person who was no longer trusted here was a nonperson.
He kept his cabin; he could use the restaurant facilities and watch the vision tube. In effect he was limited to eating, sleeping, and passing his time as best he might. No messages came for him; there was no communication from above apart from the green chit; and Hort certainly had no wish to see him. That might prejudice the proceedings.
Driscoll thought about it for three days and three nights; then he made up his mind. It was night as time was measured here, and there would be few people on duty. Driscoll packed a few things; he carried with him a hammer, a wrench, and heavy-duty wire cutters with insulated handles, together with a food supply for three weeks. At the intersection of the first corridor he smashed the camera lens there. He went purposefully down the passages, smashing every installation he could find. Within a minute the alarm was reverberating along the corridors. Driscoll did not care. He was running strongly now, every sense alert.
He was smashing light fixtures too; he was surprised how easily they broke. No one had ever done this before. It was absurdly easy. At the time he hoped that the tunnel section was not guarded; there could be no turning back now. He found his way with difficulty. He must have fused something at the last light installation he smashed, for all these corridors were plunged into darkness.
The small cone of his torch wavered ahead, steadying on the smooth metal surface of the tunnel walls, the heavy bolts and rivets overhead. Here was the place; there was no one about. Water dripped somewhere up ahead as Driscoll splashed unhesitatingly through the puddles. The strange nostalgic stench was in his nostrils. He adjusted the pack on his back and set off at a staggering run over the last quarter of a mile. His heart was beating a little more unsteadily than he would have liked. Still there was no siren of the emergency squad.
The shafting was in front of him. Driscoll could almost taste the stench in his nostrils. It was not oppressive. On the contrary. He breathed deeply. It brought back things he had forgotten ever existed. Sunlight; waving corn; clouds moving across a blue sky; a woman’s smile; a child tottering toward an old woman in a white dress.
He stood before Shaft Number 247, noting its massive strength and immense size. Quite without surprise he saw that the hatch of the inspection chamber was half-open. It slid easily beneath his touch. Dance music was reverberating from somewhere; a girl in a bathing suit plunged into blue water, droplets of spray raining downward; there were flowers and with them the fragrant perfume that had been lost for so many decades.
The girl was smiling again. A grave grey-eyed girl, with tawny-gold hair. Driscoll stepped into the inspection chamber. It was cold, and he instinctively shrank at the dampness which settled on his face and clothing. A hurdy-gurdy was playing, and he could smell roast chestnuts. A child bounded past on a scooter, his feet making a click-clacking n
oise on the setts of the paving. There was the distinctive impact of a cricket bat connecting with a ball on a summer afternoon. Driscoll nodded at the ripple of applause.
He could see the point now. Everything down here was negative. He had to know. He thought of Krampf, Deems, and Wainewright; of Hort and Karlson. He had no real friends; hitherto, the only reality was the tunnels burrowing beneath the earth and the remorselessly efficient humming of the machinery.
It did not seem to be enough. Driscoll set his teeth. Perspiration was streaming down his face as he reached out to the interior hatch of the inspection chamber of Shaft Number 247. A child lifted her head and put her arms round Driscoll’s neck. He was smiling as he began to turn the bolts.
His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood
POPPY Z. BRITE
“To the treasures and the pleasures of the grave,” said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.
“To the funeral lilies,” I replied, “and to the calm pale bones.” I drank deeply from my own glass. The absinthe cauterized my throat with its flavor, part pepper, part licorice, part rot. It had been one of our greatest finds: more than fifty bottles of the now-outlawed liqueur, sealed up in a New Orleans family tomb. Transporting them was a nuisance, but once we had learned to enjoy the taste of wormwood, our continued drunkenness was ensured for a long, long time. We had taken the skull of the crypt’s patriarch, too, and it now resided in a velvet-lined enclave in our museum.
Louis and I, you see, were dreamers of a dark and restless sort. We met in our second year of college and quickly found that we shared one vital trait: both of us were dissatisfied with everything. We drank straight whiskey and declared it too weak. We took strange drugs, but the visions they brought us were of emptiness, mindlessness, slow decay. The books we read were dull; the artists who sold their colorful drawings on the street were mere hacks in our eyes; the music we heard was never loud enough, never harsh enough, to stir us. We were truly jaded, we told one another. For all the impression the world made upon us, our eyes might have been dead black holes in our heads.
For a time we thought our salvation lay in the sorcery wrought by music. We studied recordings of weird nameless dissonances, attended performances of obscure bands at ill-lit filthy clubs. But music did not save us. For a time we distracted ourselves with carnality. We explored the damp alien territory between the legs of any girl who would have us, sometimes separately, sometimes both of us in bed together with one girl or more. We bound their wrists and ankles with black lace, we lubricated and penetrated their every orifice, we shamed them with their own pleasures. I recall a mauve-haired beauty, Felicia, who was brought to wild sobbing orgasm by the rough tongue of a stray dog we trapped. We watched her from across the room, drug-dazed and unstirred.
When we had exhausted the possibilities of women we sought those of our own sex, craving the androgynous curve of a boy’s cheekbone, the molten flood of ejaculation invading our mouths. Eventually we turned to one another, seeking the thresholds of pain and ecstasy no one else had been able to help us attain. Louis asked me to grow my nails long and file them into needle-sharp points. When I raked them down his back, tiny beads of blood welled up in the angry tracks they left. He loved to lie still, pretending to submit to me, as I licked the salty blood away. Afterward he would push me down and attack me with his mouth, his tongue seeming to sear a trail of liquid fire into my skin.
But sex did not save us either. We shut ourselves in our room and saw no one for days on end. At last we withdrew to the seclusion of Louis’s ancestral home near Baton Rouge. Both his parents were dead—a suicide pact, Louis hinted, or perhaps a suicide and a murder. Louis, the only child, retained the family home and fortune. Built on the edge of a vast swamp, the plantation house loomed sepulchrally out of the gloom that surrounded it always, even in the middle of a summer afternoon. Oaks of primordial hugeness grew in a canopy over the house, their branches like black arms fraught with Spanish moss. The moss was everywhere, reminding me of brittle gray hair, stirring wraithlike in the dank breeze from the swamp. I had the impression that, left too long unchecked, the moss might begin to grow from the ornate window frames and fluted columns of the house itself.
The place was deserted save for us. The air was heady with the luminous scent of magnolias and the fetor of swamp gas. At night we sat on the veranda and sipped bottles of wine from the family cellar, gazing through an increasingly alcoholic mist at the will-o’-the-wisps that beckoned far off in the swamp. Obsessively we talked of new thrills and how we might get them. Louis’s wit sparkled liveliest when he was bored, and on the night he first mentioned grave robbing, I laughed. I could not imagine that he was serious.
“What would we do with a bunch of dried-up old remains? Grind them to make a voodoo potion? I preferred your idea of increasing our tolerance to various poisons.”
Louis’s sharp face snapped toward me. His eyes were painfully sensitive to light, so that even in this gloaming he wore tinted glasses and it was impossible to see his expression. He kept his fair hair clipped very short, so that it stood up in crazy tufts when he raked a nervous hand through it. “No, Howard. Think of it: our own collection of death. A catalogue of pain, of human frailty—all for us. Set against a backdrop of tranquil loveliness. Think what it would be to walk through such a place, meditating, reflecting upon your own ephemeral essence. Think of making love in a charnel house! We have only to assemble the parts—they will create a whole into which we may fall.”
(Louis enjoyed speaking in cryptic puns; anagrams and palindromes, too, and any sort of puzzle appealed to him. I wonder whether that was not the root of his determination to look into the fathomless eye of death and master it. Perhaps he saw the mortality of the flesh as a gigantic jigsaw or crossword that, if he fitted all the parts into place, he might solve and thus defeat. Louis would have loved to live forever, though he would never have known what to do with all his time.)
He soon produced his hashish pipe to sweeten the taste of the wine, and we spoke no more of grave robbing that night. But the thought preyed upon me in the languorous weeks to come. The smell of a freshly opened grave, I thought, must in its way be as intoxicating as the perfume of the swamp or a girl’s most intimate sweat. Could we truly assemble a collection of the grave’s treasures that would be lovely to look upon, that would soothe our fevered souls?
The caresses of Louis’s tongue grew languid. Sometimes, instead of nestling with me between the black satin sheets of our bed, he would sleep on a torn blanket in one of the underground rooms. These had originally been built for indeterminate but always intriguing purposes—abolitionist meetings had taken place there, Louis told me, and a weekend of free love, and an earnest but wildly incompetent Black Mass replete with a vestal virgin and phallic candles.
These rooms were where our museum would be set up. At last I came to agree with Louis that only the plundering of graves might cure us of the most stifling ennui we had yet suffered. I could not bear to watch his tormented sleep, the pallor of his hollow cheeks, the delicate bruiselike darkening of the skin beneath his flickering eyes. Besides, the notion of grave robbing had begun to entice me. In ultimate corruption, might we not find the path to ultimate salvation?
Our first grisly prize was the head of Louis’s mother, rotten as a pumpkin forgotten on the vine, half shattered by two bullets from an antique Civil War revolver. We took it from the family crypt by the light of a full moon. The will-o’-the-wisps glowed weakly, like dying beacons on some unattainable shore, as we crept back to the manse. I dragged pick and shovel behind me; Louis carried the putrescent trophy tucked beneath his arm. After we had descended into the museum, I lit three candles scented with the russet spices of autumn (the season when Louis’s parents had died) while Louis placed the head in the alcove we had prepared for it. I thought I detected a certain tenderness in his manner. “May she give us the family blessing,” he murmured, absently wiping on the lapel of his j
acket a few shreds of pulpy flesh that had adhered to his fingers.
We spent a happy time refurbishing the museum, polishing the inlaid precious metals of the wall fixtures, brushing away the dust that frosted the velvet designs of the wallpaper, alternately burning incense and charring bits of cloth we had saturated with our blood, in order to give the rooms the odor we desired—a charnel perfume strong enough to drive us to frenzy. We traveled far in our collections, but always we returned home with crates full of things no man had ever been meant to possess. We heard of a girl with violet eyes who had died in some distant town; not seven days later we had those eyes in an ornate cut-glass jar, pickled in formaldehyde. We scraped bone dust and nitre from the bottoms of ancient coffins; we stole the barely withered heads and hands of children fresh in their graves, with their soft little fingers and their lips like flower petals. We had baubles and precious heirlooms, vermiculated prayer books and shrouds encrusted with mould. I had not taken seriously Louis’s talk of making love in a charnel house—but neither had I reckoned on the pleasure he could inflict with a femur dipped in rose-scented oil.
Upon the night I speak of—the night we drank our toast to the grave and its riches—we had just acquired our finest prize yet. Later in the evening we planned a celebratory debauch at a nightclub in the city. We had returned from our most recent travels not with the usual assortment of sacks and crates, but with only one small box carefully wrapped and tucked into Louis’s breast pocket. The box contained an object whose existence we had only speculated upon previously. From certain half-articulate mutterings of an old blind man plied with cheap liquor in a French Quarter bar, we traced rumors of a certain fetish or charm to a Negro graveyard in the southern bayou country. The fetish was said to be a thing of eerie beauty, capable of luring any lover to one’s bed, hexing any enemy to a sick and painful death, and (this, I think, was what intrigued Louis the most) turning back tenfold on anyone who used it with less than the touch of a master.
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