The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  More worms were pouring through the plaster as if Rayne’s room was moving. They twitched out of the ceiling and wound down the wall. They knocked her models onto their sides, and swept them off the mantelpiece. From her shelves a stack of tiles on which pills were made fell and shattered. A flask smashed, spilling heavy mercury. Its curved shards rocked like giant fingernails. A jar tipped over and ovate white pills cascaded onto the floor.

  Rayne flinched. ‘Hey! Stop destroying my house!’

  The worm-woman created two more beautiful female heads on stalks from somewhere in its belly and raised them to the level of the first one. It moved them about in front of my face. I couldn’t choose which to focus on and I felt myself going cross-eyed.

  ‘Are you the same Vermiform as before?’ I asked it.

  ‘We are always the same.’

  ‘Well, you’ve grown.’

  ‘We were asked to find you, Comet, although we do not appreciate being a Messenger’s messenger. Cyan is in Osseous – for the moment. She is in deadly danger. She is trapped in the Gabbleratchet.’

  The Vermiform paused, as if it expected me to know what the fuck it was talking about. Its surface covering the walls smoothed and stilled, lowering slightly as the worms packed closer together. It became denser and more solid, and the shapes of the furniture buried under it bulged out more clearly. I had the impression it was deeply afraid.

  Rayne asked, ‘Gabbleratche’? Wha’s tha’?’

  ‘Why are you frightened?’ I added.

  The layers of worms blistered as individuals stretched up indignantly. They looked like fibres fraying from a flesh-coloured tapestry. The necks bent and the heads swayed. Their lips moved simultaneously, and its voice chorused like thousands of people speaking at once: ‘The eternal hunt. It is travelling through Osseous at the moment. We must try to intercept it before it veers into another world carrying Cyan away for good. We cannot predict it. No one can pursue it. Time is of the essence.’ The worms around my feet reached up thin strands and spun around my legs.

  I tried to wipe them off. ‘What do you mean, “we”? I can’t Shift. If I take an overdose the Emperor would feel it. He promised he would cut my link to the Circle and let me die.’

  At the other end of the room the worm tentacles were picking Rayne’s clothes out of the wardrobe, filling them, and making them dance about. Rayne folded her arms. ‘Tell us more.’

  This vexed the Vermiform. ‘Dunlin asked me to fetch Comet, not an old woman.’

  ‘An old woman! Do you know … ! Dunlin? … Jant, why is i’ talking abou’ Dunlin? Does i’ mean t’ former King?’

  ‘Yes. He’s still alive, in the Shift.’

  ‘Jant! Wha’ have you done?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’ I addressed the Vermiform: ‘Did Dunlin see Cyan?’

  ‘Yes. He saw the Gabbleratchet snatch her. Dunlin was advising Membury, the Equinne’s leader, how to wage war against the Insects when the hunt appeared. We saw it cut a swathe through the Equinne troops. Those who survived have taken shelter in their barns.’

  ‘Can’t Dunlin command these eternal hunters?’

  ‘No. The Gabbleratchet is unfixed in time and space. It was ancient even before the Somatopolis achieved consciousness. We do not pretend to understand it. It never separates and nothing controls it. It eats what it rides down. Cyan mounted a horse when the hunt was still and it ran with her. Like the others it has abducted she will fly until she dies of starvation.’

  ‘Fly?’

  ‘Yes. Be careful the instant you arrive. We are easy prey. If it catches us, it will tear us apart.’ The Vermiform’s three heads on long necks danced about on the surface of the worm quilt like droplets of water on a hot stove. ‘We will take you through bodily, without causing a separation of mind and body. It will not strain the circle that suspends time for you, so none of your co-immortals will feel the effect of it labouring to keep you together.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t like the sound of this. So I won’t be a tourist in the Shift but actually there in the flesh? So this ‘Ratchet thing can eat me? No way, it’s too dangerous.’

  The Vermiform washed up around my legs and bound them together. ‘Make haste. Be ready.’

  I wasn’t ready at all! The room started shrinking: the ceiling was lowering. It drooped in the middle, sagged down, brushed my head. The corners of the walls and the right angles where they met the ceiling smoothed into curves, making the room an oval. I saw Rayne protecting Cyan with her coal shovel raised, then the walls pressed in and obliterated my view. They came closer and closer, dimming the light.

  From the box-bed Rayne must have seen worms hanging down from the ceiling, bulging out from the walls, passing her; closing in and leaving the furniture clear until they tightened around me in a flesh-coloured cocoon.

  I struggled but the Vermiform held my legs tight. The meshed worms masked my face. I closed my eyes but I felt them squirming against the lids. They let me take a deep breath, then pressed firmly over my lips. Worms closed tightly around my head, all over my body, seething upon my bare skin. I pushed against its firm surface but had no effect. It was like one great muscle.

  I couldn’t move, panicked. I was bundled tight! Hard worms gagged me. My chest was hurting, every muscle between every rib was screaming to exhale. I was light-headed and dizzy. I lost the sensation in my fingers, my arms. The curved muscle under my lungs burned. I held my breath, knowing there was nothing to inhale but worms.

  I couldn’t stand it any more. I gulped the stale air back into my mouth and exhaled it all at once. I sucked on the worms and my lungs stayed small, no air to fill them. I started panting tiny breaths. My legs were weak, my whole body felt light. I started blacking out.

  The next breath, the worms peeled away and cold fresh air rushed into my lungs. I collapsed to my knees, coughing. The Vermiform extended grotesque tendrils and hauled me upright.

  CHAPTER 8

  I was standing on the cold Osseous steppe, where the horse people come from. It was twilight and silent; the sky darkening blue with few stars. Around me stretched a flat jadeite plain of featureless grass. A marsh with dwarf willow trees surrounded a shallow river; deep clumps of moss soaking with murky water and haunted by midges. Far on the other side of the river a silhouette line of hazy, scarcely visible hills marked the end of the plain.

  In the distance I saw a village of the Equinnes’ black and red corrugated metal barns, looking like plain blocks. Between them was one of their large communal barbecues, a stand on a blackened patch of earth where they roast vegetables. A freezing mist oozed out between the barns to lie low over the grassy tundra.

  I couldn’t see any Equinnes, ominously because they spend most of their time outdoors and only sleep in their barns. They’re so friendly they normally race to greet strangers.

  The Vermiform had reassembled – she stood a head taller than me. She said, ‘We told Membury and the Equinnes that even when the Gabbleratchet vanishes they must not come out for a few hours.’

  ‘Where is it now?’ I asked. The Vermiform pointed up to the sky above the hills. I strained to make out a faint grey fleck, moving under the stars at great speed. It turned and seemed to lengthen into a column. I gasped, seeing creatures chasing wildly through the air, weaving around each other.

  ‘It has already seen us,’ the Vermiform chorused. Worms began to slough off her randomly and burrow into the grass. ‘When I say run, run. It won’t be able to stop. Don’t run too soon or it will change course. Be swift. Nothing survives it. If it catches you we won’t find one drop of blood left. Beware, it also draws people in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t look at it for too long. It will mesmerise you.’

  It was an indistinguishable, broiling crowd, a long train of specks racing along, weaving stitches in and out of the sky. Their movement was absolutely chaotic. They vanished, reappeared a few kilometres on, for the length of three hundred or so metres, and v
anished again. I blinked, thinking my eyes were tricking me.

  ‘It is Shifting between here and some other world,’ said the Vermiform, whose lower worms were increasingly questing about in the grass.

  The hunt turned towards us in a curve; its trail receded into the distance. Closer, at its fore, individual dots resolved as jet-black horses and hounds. The horses were larger than the greatest destriers and between, around, in front of their flying hooves ran hounds bigger than wolves. Black manes and tails streamed and tattered, unnaturally long. The dogs’ eyes burned, reflecting starlight, the horses’ coats shone. There were countless animals – or what looked like animals – acting as one being, possessed of only one sense: to kill. Hooves scraped the air, claws raked as they flew. They reared like the froth on a wave, and behind them the arc of identical horses and hounds stretched in their wake.

  They were shrieking like a myriad newborn babies. Dulled by distance it sounded almost plaintive. Closer, their size grew, their screaming swelled. As I stared at them, they changed. Yellow-white flickers showed here and there in the tight pack. All at different rates but quickly, their hides were rotting and peeling away. Some were already skeletons, empty ribs and bone legs. The hounds’ slobbering mouths decayed to black void maws and sharp teeth curving back to the ears. Above them, the horses transformed between articulated skeletons and full-fleshed beasts. Their skulls nodded on vertebral columns as they ran. Closer, their high, empty eyesockets drew me in. As I watched, the skeleton rebuilt to a stallion – rotten white eyes; glazed recently dead eyes; aware and living eyes rolled to focus on us.

  The horse’s flanks dulled and festered; strips dropped off its forelegs and vanished. Bones galloped, then sinews appeared binding them, muscle plumped, veins sprang forth, branching over them. Skin regrew; it was whole again, red-stained hooves gleaming. The hounds’ tongues lolled, their ears flapped as they rushed through hissing displaced air. All cycled randomly from flesh to bone. Tails lashed like whips, the wind whistled through their rib cages, claws flexed on paw bones like dice. Then fur patched them over and the loose skin under their bellies again rippled in the slipstream. Horses’ tails billowed. Their skulls’ empty gaps between front and back teeth turned blindly in the air. The Gabbleratchet charged headlong.

  I shouted, ‘They’re rotting into skeletons and back!’

  ‘We said they’re not stable in time!’

  ‘Fucking – what are they? What are they doing?’

  ‘We wish we knew.’ The Vermiform sank down into the ground until just her head was visible, like a toadstool, and then only the top half of her head, her eyes turned up to the sky. Her worms were grubbing between the icy soil grains and leaving me. They kept talking, but their voices were fewer, so faint I could scarcely hear. ‘The Gabbleratchet was old before the first brick was laid in Epsilon, or Vista or even Hacilith; aeons ago when Rhydanne were human and Awian precursors could fly –’

  ‘Stop! Please! I don’t understand! You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Our first glimpse of the Gabbleratchet was as long before the dawn of life on your world as the dawn of life on your world is before the present moment.’

  Never dying, never tiring, gorged with bloodlust, chasing day and night. The Gabbleratchet surged on, faster than anything I had ever seen. ‘How do you think I can outrun that?’

  ‘You can’t. But you are more nimble; you must outmanoeuvre it.’

  I saw Cyan on one of the leading horses! She rode its broad back, decaying ribs. Her blonde hair tussled. Her fingers clutched the prongs of its vertebrae, her arms stiff. She looked sick and worn with terror and exhilaration. I tried to focus on her horse; its withers were straps of dark pink muscle and its globe eyes set tight in pitted flesh. The hounds jumped and jostled each other running around its plunging hooves.

  On the backs of many other horses rode skeletons human and non-human, and corpses of various ages. They were long dead of fear or hunger but still riding, held astride by their wind-dried hands. Some horses had many sets of finger-bones entwined in their manes; some carried arms bumping from tangled hands, but the rest of the body had fallen away. They had abducted hundreds over the millennia.

  The Gabbleratchet arced straight above me and plunged down vertically. White flashes in the seething storm were the teeth of those in the lead. The moonlight caught eyes and hooves in tiny pulses of reflection.

  I had never seen anything fly vertically downward. It shouldn’t be able to. It wasn’t obeying any physical rules.

  Cyan clung on. I wondered if she was still sane.

  ‘Run!’ shouted the Vermiform.

  The Gabbleratchet’s wild joy seized me. I wanted to chase and catch. I wanted the bursting pride of success, the thrill of killing! Their power transfixed me. I loved them! I hated them! I wanted to be one! I tasted blood in my mouth and I accepted it eagerly. My open smile became a snarl.

  The dogs’ muzzles salivated and their baying tongues curled. They were just above my head. I saw the undersides of the hooves striking down.

  ‘Run!’ screamed the Vermiform.

  I jumped forward, sprinting at full pelt. The hunt’s howling burst the air. Its gale blew my hair over my eyes and I glanced back, into the wind to clear it.

  The lead beasts plunged into the ground behind me, and through it. The air and ground surface distorted out around them in a double ripple, as if it was gelatinous. The whole hunt trammelled straight down into the earth and forked sparks leapt up around it, crackling out among the grass. It was a solid crush of animal bodies and bone. I saw flashes of detail: fur between paw pads, dirty scapulae, suppurating viscera. The corpses the horses were carrying hit the ground and stayed on top. They broke up, some fell to dust and the creatures following went through them too. Cyan’s horse was next; it plunged headfirst into the earth, throwing her against the ground hard. She lay lifeless. The stampede of manes and buttocks continued through her. The column shrank; the last few plummeted at the ground and disappeared into it. Two final violet sparks sidewound across the plain, ceased. All was eerily quiet.

  The Vermiform emerged beside me but its voices were awed. ‘It’ll take a minute to turn around. Quick!’

  I ran to the area the Gabbleratchet had passed through, expecting to see a dent in the frozen soil but not one of the grass blades had been bent; the only marks were my own footprints. The hairs on my arms stood up and the air smelt chemical, the same as when I once visited a peel tower that had been struck by lightning. There was no reek of corruption or animals, just the tang of spark-split air.

  I turned Cyan over carefully. She had been flung against the ground at high speed – faster than I could fly – and I thought she was dead, but she was breathing.

  ‘I can’t see any broken bones. Not that it matters if that thing’s driven her mad.’

  ‘Pick her up,’ said the Vermiform.

  I did so and she jolted awake, gasped, open-mouthed. ‘Jant? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just keep still.’ The Vermiform sprang up from under my feet and wrapped around us. More worms appeared, adding to the thread, beginning at my ankles then up to my waist, binding us tightly together.

  Cyan waggled her head at the deserted tundra. She screamed, ‘Do you have to follow me everywhere? Even into my nightmares?’

  The worms nearest her face grouped together into a hand and slapped her.

  Cyan spluttered, ‘How dare –!’

  The hand slapped her again, harder.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  A horse burst from the ground, bent forelegs first. It pawed the grass without touching it. Its enormous rear hooves paced apart. Long hair feathered over them; its fetlock bones swayed as it put its weight on them and reared.

  Cyan wailed, ‘What does it want?’

  Its fore hooves gouged the air, its long head turned from side to side. It couldn’t understand what we were. It sensed us, with whatever senses it had, and it shrieked at us. It could not know its
own power nor regulate its voice to our level. It gave us its full unearthly scream, right into my face.

  The Vermiform tightened around my legs.

  Its tongue curled, its jaw widened, it was bone; no tongue but the jaw dotted with holes for blood vessels and peaks for ligament connections. Its incisors clamped together, the veins appeared running into the bone, the muscles flowered and rotting horseflesh became a whole beast again. It turned its mad, rolling eye on me. Sparks crackled over us, tingling. Hounds and horses began springing up around us. No soil stuck to them; they had treated the earth as if it was another form of air.

  The horse arched its neck. I looked up into the convoluted rolled cartilage in its nasal passages. Its jutting nose bones thrust towards me, its jaw wide to bite my face. Slab teeth in living gums came down –

  – The Vermiform snatched us away –

  Its coils withdrew and dropped me on a hard surface. I sat up and crowed like a cock, ‘Hoo-hoo! That was a neat move, Worm-fest!’

  Beside me Cyan crawled and spat. I helped her up: ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Jant, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to rescue you.’

  ‘Rescue me? Sod off! What just happened? Did you see those horse things? … Argh! Worms! … What the fuck are these worms?’

  ‘Allow me to introduce you to the Vermiform,’ I said. It was writhing around my feet in a shapeless mass. If it had been human, it would have been panting.

  ‘We must keep going,’ it chorused.

  Cyan said, ‘A horse was lying down and it seemed friendly. I climbed on its back. I didn’t know that was going to happen … Oh, god, what is this place?’

  A water drop landed on my head. Good question. I looked around and realised we were in a gigantic cavern, so vast I could not clearly see the other side.