by Brian Keene
“That’s what they call all the different worlds. All the different realities. They’re levels. Each level can be reached by going through the Labyrinth.”
“Dez, don’t take this the wrong way, but what the fuck are you talking about?”
He sighed, clearly impatient with me. It was a full minute before he spoke again, and when he did, his tone was like somebody explaining something to a small child. My first urge was to tell him to stuff his condescending tone up his fucking homeless ass—but I needed him. And in truth, it wasn’t his fault that I wasn’t schooled in Whack-Ass Magic Shit 101.
“The universe is made up of different levels,” Dez said. “You’ve got planets and solar systems and dimensions and alternate realities. Each of these is a level.”
“Right,” I said. Now I was the one growing impatient. “You told me that already. I’ve got it.”
“There are other levels, too—places like the Great Deep and what you’d call Heaven and Hell, and the lost level that nobody ever comes back from. I used to be able to explain it better, but I can’t anymore. It has something to do with strings.”
“String theory?”
He snapped his fingers, grinned, then nodded. “That’s it! String theory. Picture the planets—Earth or Mars or Venus. Each of those planets has different versions of themselves. Different levels. To get to them, you go through the Labyrinth. It’s like a shortcut. It winds through space and time to all the different levels.”
“So how come we don’t use it?”
“Because most human beings can’t see it. You have to know magic—or be crazy. But the Thirteen use it. That’s how they get around to all the different levels. He Who Shall Not Be Named actually lives in the center of the Labyrinth. He squats there like a big black spider and sends out feelers through the Labyrinth.”
“Well, he’s here now. And I don’t care what form he takes or what his real name is. The only thing I need to know about He Who Shall Not Be Fucking Named is how to stop him? How do we make the darkness go away?”
“We can’t. Haven’t you been listening, Robbie?”
“Yeah, Dez. I have. But it’s hard to understand. You keep talking in circles and repeating yourself and going off on wild goddamn tangents. Work with me here, dude.”
“It’s too late to banish it now. The darkness has eaten too much. It’s too powerful. All we can do is keep it outside. It can’t totally possess us and it can’t cross the barrier, but it won’t leave either.”
“There’s got to be a way, man! You stopped it from coming in. You took away its ability to possess people. And what about out there at the edge of town? The salt and the symbols. You chased it away with that once before.”
“I kept it out. That’s all. I confined it to the edges of town. But we can’t make it go away. That’s impossible. Early on, before it completely breached our world, we could have. It’s been done before, on different Earths. But not now. The darkness is too strong now. It’s consumed too much.”
“Fuck…”
“Yes.”
“So, it’ll just keep taunting us? Making itself look like our loved ones or something we’re scared of?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“So we’re screwed.”
“It could be worse.”
“How could it be any fucking worse?” I threw up my hands in despair. “What? I’m supposed to be thankful that we’ll just starve to death instead of being eaten? I’m supposed to be grateful it can’t possess us, too?”
“It can mess with our minds, though,” he said. “Our emotions. It makes us get angrier than we really should. Makes us kill each other. Or shows us what we’re most afraid of or what we want the most.”
“Yeah, I figured that out already. You told me that already. You’re repeating yourself again. And even if you weren’t, believe me, I know all about it. It’s happened to me, and I’m still pissed off about it. Happened to my girlfriend and my friends, too. But what I don’t understand is why would the darkness do that? It wants to eat us, right? Why make us kill each other inside Walden? It can’t eat us if we die inside the town limits.”
“It wants us to come out. It wants us to breach my barrier. If things get bad enough inside town, then people will run into the darkness instead.”
“No way. That’s suicide. There’s no way it could make everyone do that. Things can’t get that bad. I’ll eat a bullet first.”
“You might, but others might not. They might not be that brave. But it doesn’t matter. The darkness is very strong. And patient. If we don’t come out, it will make us come out. We will turn on each other. We’ll start sacrificing each other to it. You wait and see.”
“Well.” I sighed. “That was the other thing I’d come here to talk to you about. You said earlier that you know Anna is running around town and telling people that you’re a witch. But that’s not all. Some of the other people in town think that you…”
I paused, realizing that Dez wasn’t listening to me. He’d turned his attention to the heater. Its glow was beginning to fade.
“I’ll need to get more kerosene soon,” he said. “Kerosene smells funny.”
Suddenly, I felt like crying. I was frustrated and scared and fed up.
“Dez, how did you…get like this? I mean, you seem pretty smart. At least about what we’re dealing with here. You know all this magic and stuff. Why are you…?”
“Homeless?”
“Yeah. For starters.”
“I’m not homeless.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “This is my home.”
“But why not go to the YMCA or stay at the shelter in Verona? Why live here, in this shack?”
His voice grew quiet and haunted, and he stared straight ahead, as if seeing something inside of the glow of the heater.
“It is said that there are seven—seven people across all the levels who can band together to defeat the Thirteen. Me and six of my friends once thought that we were the seven. But we were wrong. A long time ago, we tried to stop another of the Thirteen.”
“The darkness?”
“No. Its name was Meeble. Others call him Croatoan, but his real name is Meeble. He is not as strong as the darkness, but he was still more powerful than we were. Unlike He Who Shall Not Be Named, Meeble only has one form. He looks like a cross between a monkey and a cat. Compared to some of the other Thirteen, Meeble is slow. He spreads his destruction town by town, village by village, city by city. It takes him a very long time to destroy a world. He tried it here, on our planet. He was working his way through West Virginia when we found out about it. He came in the night, killing small mountain towns where not many people lived. He’d destroyed six of them before we found out, and by the time we arrived, he’d destroyed two more.”
“What do you mean? How do you kill a town?”
Dez frowned. “The same way you kill a person. We beat him, though. We made a stand in a town called Huttonsville. They had good lemonade there. And blueberry pie—except that they called it huckleberry pie.”
“Dez…”
“Right. Sorry. I’m drifting again. We fought Meeble in Huttonsville. We waited until we were sure he was in town and then we bound him to that place. He couldn’t get out. Neither could anyone else. The battle went on all night and into the next day. See, he’s weaker during the day, so that was good. We sent Meeble back and closed the Labyrinth door that he’d come through, but not before he killed a bunch of us. Maria lost her head. Hembeck got strangled with his own guts. My best friend, Levi…Meeble tore him…and then he was in all these pieces, and I tried to put him back together, but I couldn’t…I couldn’t figure out where everything went, and he was so slippery and…and then the pieces got all sticky.”
“Jesus Christ…”
“No,” Dez said. “Not at all. What Meeble did…it hurt me. Made me like this. Mental and emotional trauma, the doctor said. Sometimes I forget things, but that’s okay. I still remember all the words and names and symbols. All th
e spells. And really, that’s all that matters. Those are what’s important. But I can’t remember other things. I can’t…”
His words dissolved into sobs.
“Hey. Hey, dude, don’t cry.”
“I…why do I have to remember what happened to Levi? That’s the part I’d like to forget, but my stupid brain won’t let me.”
“It’s okay,” I said, reaching for him.
He shirked away. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch. No touch. Bad touch.”
I sat there, unsure what to do. Dez drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs—rocking slowly back and forth on the air mattress. He sobbed quietly. I picked up the soda can and took another sip.
“I can’t think too good,” he cried. “Not about stuff like having a job and taxes and getting married and things. All I can do now is this. Magic. I can’t do anything else. But that matters, right? I saved us. Didn’t I save us?”
“Yeah, Dez. You did, man. You saved us.”
I tilted the can back and swallowed the last sip. The warm sweetness made me sick to my stomach. I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I sat there and waited.
Dez continued rocking back and forth. He stopped crying, and began to mutter under his breath. It sounded like he was reciting something from memory.
“First among the Thirteen is Ob, Lord of the Siqqusim, who is also called the Obot, who is also called Mictla-techuhtli, who possessed both Lazarus and King Niqmaddu the Third upon their deaths and spoke from their heads. Second among the Thirteen is Ab, Lord of the Elilum, who is also called…”
“Dez?” I reached for him again, but then pulled my fingers away before I could touch him.
“…is Api, Lord of the Teraphim, who is also called Huehueteotl. Fourth among the Thirteen is Leviathan, Lord of the Great Deep, who is also called Cthulhu, Kraken, Tlaloc, Dagon, and…”
“Dez? Dez! Snap out of it, man. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure something out. Listen, there’s still some stuff I need to tell you. Are you listening to me? You need to be careful when you go outside. You need to watch your ass out there because Anna and some of the others think you’re to blame for this whole mess. Okay? Dez?”
“…and the waters covered the Earth…”
It was no use. Wherever Dez was at that moment, it wasn’t in the shed with me. It sounded as if he was reciting some kind of school report or something. Sighing, I stood and got ready to leave. As I’d expected, Dez didn’t seem to notice.
“Listen, man,” I tried one final time. “I’m gonna take off. You rest up for a bit. But remember what I said. You need to be careful outside. Later, if you feel up to it and the coast is clear, sneak to our place. Do you remember where I live? The apartment building I was standing in front of when I gave my speech? If you can come there, we’ll keep you safe. Okay?”
“I saved us,” he repeated. “I saved us all.”
“Yeah, you saved our ass, Dez.”
And he had. Christy was wrong. We weren’t dead. We were alive. There was no light to go into and this wasn’t Hell or Purgatory. The darkness was alive, but so were we. Dez had seen to that. Our friendly neighborhood crazy homeless magus had saved all of our lives.
But knowing now what we were facing and understanding just how desperate our situation was, I was beginning to wish he hadn’t.
The walk home seemed especially long, and the darkness pressed in on me from all sides. I saw people fighting. I saw all kinds of depravity. Insanity.
And I didn’t even care.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Time passed. I wish I could say that one day blended into the next, but it wasn’t like that. Like I said before, there’s no telling the days from the nights when you don’t have the sun to guide you. Christy tried marking the passage of time by how often we slept, but she slept more and more often—sometimes thirteen or fourteen hours at a stretch, and then twenty or more. Pretty soon, she was waking up only long enough to eat and drink or go to the bathroom, and sometimes, not even then.
We stayed inside, forced into exile from the anxiety over T and Mario and Anna, and from all the other crazies now roaming the streets, and from the deeper, more primal fears of what lay out there on the edge of town, surrounding us completely. I repeated Dez’s story to Christy, Russ, and Cranston. I’m not sure how much of it they really believed, but Russ and Cranston had seen enough with their own eyes to know that the darkness was supernatural, and Christy’s terror was stoked by our own. Even though she still believed that we were dead and this was some fucked-up afterlife way station, she was scared enough not to leave the building.
We rationed our food and water, and tried to keep ourselves active and occupied. I started doing sit-ups, push-ups, and jumping jacks, but gave up after a few days. Just like a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape, except this was more like an End of the World resolution. Christy and I read and played games and talked, until we were sick of all three—and of each other. Even when we made a concerted effort to keep our distance from each other and not interact much, we still fought and argued over the stupidest, most trivial things. The worst part was that we didn’t know if it was the darkness making us do it or just plain old cabin fever. Once again, we ended up spending a lot of time on different sides of the apartment—not just avoiding each other, but living totally separate lives. Secretly, I was relieved when she started sleeping all the time. Although I’d never admit it to her—especially not after what had happened at the pet store—there were times where I came close to killing her. I’m betting that there were times when she felt the same way toward me. I wonder now how many times she almost tried, and what I would have done if she had.
Cranston and Russ felt the madness, too, and as a result, we interacted less with them, even though they were prisoners in the building just like we were.
Cranston ended up moving upstairs with Russ. We nailed the windows in his first floor apartment shut and put thick sheets of plywood over them. Then we barricaded the front door with heavy beams, and chained the storm doors shut from the inside. If we needed to get out, we could—but T and the others would have a hard time getting in. We’d hear them before they did, and that was all that mattered. There was no hesitation in Russ or myself. The first person who crossed that threshold was going to catch a fucking bullet.
But that was okay. Murder seems to be par for the course in Walden these days. I remember when I used to sit in the living room and hear birds chirping or cars cruising past or kids playing down in the street. Now all I hear are screams and shrieks and gunshots. All I hear is madness and mayhem.
All I hear is darkness.
I can hear it right now, in fact. Coming closer. I need to finish this up and get a move on.
They caught Dez. We heard the commotion a few nights ago. One minute it was relatively quiet, and the next the streets were full of people shouting and cheering. I was instantly alert. My pulse raced, and my face felt flushed, but a strange sort of calm came over me. It was like that moment when the dark clouds that have been overhead for the last hour finally erupt into a thunderstorm.
“This is it,” I warned Christy. “They’re going to try to break in.”
But I was wrong. They weren’t. Not yet.
We ran out into the stairwell and found Russ and Cranston, who’d been coming to find us. Both of them had heard the commotion as well.
“You guys know what’s going on?” Christy asked.
“I was up on the roof,” Russ said. “Having a cigar. I need to finish them before they all dry out. All I know is that there was a fire off in the distance and there’s a whole bunch of people in the street.”
I frowned. “You don’t think they’ll burn our building down, do you?”
“I don’t know what they’d do. But the fire wasn’t that close. If I had to guess, I’d say it was down near the church where Dez was hiding out.”
“But someone already burned that church down.”
Russ shrugged. �
�Maybe it was another building close by there.”
The noise in the street increased, growing more frenzied. All four of us went up onto the roof and peered out over the side.
Cranston began to tremble.
Christy gasped. “Oh my God.”
I said, “Fuck me running.”
Russ said nothing. His expression was grim.
The crowd had Dez as their captive. We watched helplessly as they paraded him through the street. His hands and feet were tied together behind his back, and he dangled from a winch on the back of a tow truck. I stared at the vehicle. It was Tony’s tow truck—the guy who’d been parked out in front of our apartment in the tractor trailer. It was his stolen vehicle. I couldn’t tell if he was behind the wheel or not. Whoever it was, they drove slow—excruciatingly so. Dez twisted and spun. People spit on him and threw rocks, empty cans and bottles, and other debris as he went by. Anna led the procession, shouting Bible verses about witches and what to do with them. Our own little redneck, truckdriving, Bible-thumping version of Cotton Mather.
I glanced toward Dez’s shed. The fire was still smoldering, casting an eerie glow on part of the town. I couldn’t see what was burning, but I guessed that they’d set his shed on fire, and captured him when he tried to escape the flames.
The procession stopped right in front of our building. The driver killed the tow truck’s engine. Dez screamed at them to let him go. I scanned the crowd, recognizing several faces. In addition to Anna, I saw T and Mario. Ollie Griffin, the guy we’d given the batteries to at the grocery store, was there, too. All told, I estimated there were over a hundred people in the crowd, with more on the way. They approached from side streets and alleys. Some were probably just curious about what was happening, but most looked angry.
“This is what the wages of sin brings us,” Anna shouted, pointing at Dez. “We all stood aside while this witch practiced the black arts within our town. He brought this darkness down upon us. Now we are being punished by God.”
“Stay here,” Cranston whispered to Russ and me. “I’m going to go downstairs and get the pistols and the rifle.”
