Monstrocity

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Tiles have dropped from the corridor’s tessellated walls. I see a small dark animal dart around the corner ahead of me. I walk across a sodden mattress there in the center of the passageway. Empty cans and bottles, used condoms like dead jellyfish. Is it the maintenance crews or the youths and mutants that lurk in these tunnels that keep the utility lights functioning?

  The passage opens into a convergence of passages, branching off toward other stations or toward stairways to street level. All of the exits at the tops of these stairs would be sealed up, now (unless youths or homeless people have since broken through them, to better interconnect their haunts). I consult my print-outs again from the urban explorers site, then take a passage on the far side of this intersection. This will lead me toward the old Webster Street Terminal. And that will be the station closest to the spot where the sunken portion of street was deposited when the earth yawned open two decades ago.

  The new passage I take has fewer functioning lights spaced along it, and half of these flutter erratically like guttering candles. There is an ad display that still functions, though, remarkably...it picks up a current broadcasted loop of advertisements and plays them brightly to no one but me. At least it helps to light my way...but by the time I reach the end of this long, glossy corridor, both ads and utility lights have abandoned me. I switch on my flashlight, and a moment later I enter Webster Street Terminal.

  There has been a lot of water damage. A puddle that is really more of a pond covers half the platform. The support girders look like stalactites under their crust of corrosion. One might think they’re part of a sunken ship, some are so thickly caked; they’re almost organic looking. Trash and broken glass litter the floor, and there is graffiti but not a fraction as much as at Steam Avenue Station. My beam is strong, but it can’t reach into the tunnel that gapes at the far end of the platform. No lights show in there; it is a tunnel that is disused, and even caved-in at various points under tons of rock, concrete and steel. It is my destination...for directly upon its bed will lie the Church of the Burning Eye and its immediate environs.

  I venture further along the platform, shining my beam across the faces of vending machines, the candy and sandwiches long since stolen, but there are still newspapers in a dispenser and I bend down close to its dusty window to read the headlines from an issue that came out when I was only eight years old.

  “You aren’t going in the tunnel, I hope,” crackles a voice behind me.

  I whirl, pointing the flashlight, fumbling the shotgun up with my other hand. Its stubby thick barrel catches on the flap of my coat; fuck it – I’ll shoot through the coat if I have to, no matter how nice and suede-like it is.

  Two mutants stand on the platform, facing me, starkly illuminated in my beam. There are mutants and there are mutants. These are really, really mutated mutants.

  At first I think it’s only these two, until I realize one of them carries a small mutant. This one is having a steady seizure in its friend’s arms, and it’s wrapped in a ragged blanket like an infant with a head the size and shape of a watermelon that’s rotted a slick bluish-black. It has small entirely white eyes that stream gummy tears and reflect my flashlight like the eyes of a hyena. It doesn’t seem to have limbs. The thing holding it has mottled blackish-purple skin like a fly-blown corpse swollen with gas. Unlike the infant, it has hair, though wispy as a mummy’s. Its face is so bloated and lumpen that I can’t tell which of the badly-placed creases are the eye slits and mouth. It wears a stained T-shirt advertizing the band Lust Monkeys. One arm is skeletally thin but at least has a hand, the other arm three times as thick as one of mine and ending in a kind of bony ball. The third mutant by way of contrast has bright pinkish skin but covered in yellowish nodules or tumors, piled upon each other in abundance here and there until they’re like an uneven covering of fleshy soap bubbles. This one at least has a more human face, but I can’t imagine how it can be alive with that tremendous hole right through the center of its bare chest, as if a huge cannonball was fired through it and the wound’s edges healed up.

  I retrieve my voice from where it ducked down inside me. “Why shouldn’t I go in the tunnel?” I ask warily.

  “Some kids went in there to party, fool around,” mumbles the larger of the two black-skinned mutants through its swollen face, “about two months ago. They never came out again.”

  “One of our friends heard them screaming,” adds the pink mutant.

  “Don’t you ever go in there?” I ask, still pointing my gun despite the fact that the trio don’t appear to be armed (in one case, literally).

  “No,” both of the large mutants reply simultaneously.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “There’s poison in that tunnel,” says the pink mutation.

  “Poison? Radiation?”

  “No, not that. Something else. There’s evil in there. The crabs...”

  “Crabs? And what are those?”

  “I saw one once,” the black mutant manages in a crusty voice through its obscure mouth slit. “Like a crab walking on two long legs, with more legs like arms up front. But no head. Just like a flower where a head should be. A flower or a plant, with the leaves all moving.” It wriggles the fingers of its good hand creepily to illustrate. “It came after me but I got away.”

  “So why do you stay around here? What’s to keep them from coming out here after you?”

  “They don’t leave the tunnel,” the black mutant says. “And my father here,” at this he lifts the quivering infant a little higher, “can make scary sounds...really high sounds that the crabs don’t like.” I think the black mutant is smiling. “It makes them squeal and run.”

  No wonder they don’t carry spears or makeshift zip guns. I lower my own gun, convinced by now they mean only to warn me. “Are they mutants, too?”

  “No,” says the bubbly one, his one unobscured eye grave. “They’re demons.”

  I glance in the direction of the tunnel’s maw, swallowed up in the blackness around it, like a black hole in black space. “I don’t want to go in there,” I say, “but I have to. I have to look at the church...”

  “The church is theirs now. They’ve changed it,” says the black one.

  I look at him dubiously. “How do you know, if you never go in?”

  “I’ve been a little ways in the tunnel – that time I saw the crab,” he replies. “But my father went all the way in once, with two other men. One of the men didn’t make it back, though it wasn’t a crab that got him...father thought it was a couple of men in robes. Father used his sounds to scare off whatever it was that was chasing him and the man who carried him.”

  “Don’t go in, mister,” says the pink mutant earnestly. He nods at the small mutant, who is quaking more violently, his eyes streaming more profoundly; clearly agitated. “Pete’s getting upset. He’s worried about you. And he thinks you’ll stir up the evil.”

  “I’m sorry. Really,” I say. “But I’m not evil. I’m not one of them. I want to fight them. I want to stop the evil from spreading.”

  For the first time, I hear a gurgle come from...Pete, as if he’s choking to death on phlegm. The pink one bends his head close to his twisted lips. Several moments later, he straightens again and looks grim.

  “Pete says he wants to go with you, then. To protect you. That means we’ll be coming, too.”

  “Well...I appreciate that, but...I don’t want you to be in danger, either...”

  “Pete insists.”

  I nod, watching the limbless, swaddled creature’s eyes flash at me in my beam. “Well...all right,” I stammer. “Thank you, Pete.”

  ***

  I OFFER TO wait until my new companions can go fetch their own flashlights from wherever it is they camp, but the black mutant, Falco, mutters, “We don’t need flashlights, Chris.”

  Hoop, the pink one with the great hole in his middle, leads the way down to the train bed and into the great tunnel itself, wide enough to accommodate two sets of repulsor tracks r
unning in opposite directions. I’m in the middle (and I do need a flashlight), and Falco brings up the rear with his father Pete cradled in one arm.

  I hear water dripping from the ceiling in places, actually trickling in sheets down the curved wall elsewhere. I hear small living things scuttle off into alarming cracks in the walls, or behind heaps of crumbled concrete, before my beam can touch them. There are places where girders spring up from the middle of the train bed to support a sagging area of ceiling. No way these columns were here when tubes used this chute; they must have been added after the quake to prevent even more buildings from dropping into the underneath. Some of the bigger fissures in the walls look caulked up, as well. Still, I wouldn’t want to be here when another big quake hits.

  Silently we pass through a spot where the tunnel rumbles, the air vibrates subtly. Can’t be a tube in a parallel tunnel; they aren’t that noisy. Must be some hulking machinery or other behind the wall. It fades away behind us and the atmosphere is sepulchrally calm once more. No one talks, but once or twice I think I hear Pete gurgle softly.

  Hoop comes to a stop and I nearly walk into his back. Aiming my strong cone of light past him, I see why. The tunnel ahead is packed to its high curved ceiling in heaps of shattered concrete, twisted girders, mounds of ceramic tiles popped out of the ceiling and walls like shed dragon scales...even a mostly buried hovercar or two. My guide points one of his heavily blistered arms, and whispers, “The maintenance crews just cleared the catwalk after the quake, so survivors could be evacuated from the church. We can get around that way.”

  “Were there any survivors in the church?” I whisper.

  “I believe there were only a few people in it at the time, and only one of them died. Come...” Hoop stretches on tip-toes for the catwalk’s metal railing and slings himself up pretty nimbly.

  After hoisting myself up onto the narrow walkway with more difficulty (I won’t hand my shotgun ahead of me no matter how friendly my companions might seem), I step back so Falco can pass Pete up into Hoop’s waiting hands. Then I lean down to help pull Falco up, his heavy disfigured arm making the act awkward for him. (When he practically stumbles into my arms I get more of a lungful of my new friend than I might have hoped for; he smells as much like a corpse as he looks.) After giving Pete back to his son, Hoop takes point again and we begin squeezing past the mountain of rubble that chokes the old subway’s throat. It’s a tight corridor; more than once I catch my coat on a metal strut or jag of stone. Water plunks on my head. I cough at the kicked-up dust that settles on my shoulders and on my face. Motes of it swarm in my beam like plankton. I notice there is no more graffiti. No more discarded beer containers.

  The corridor goes a long way, like a mine shaft or a cramped tunnel inside a pyramid. Along the way I see a few more vehicles pinned in the debris, and when I shine my torch into one that’s crumpled up close to the catwalk I wish I hadn’t: the mummy-like cadaver crushed against the control panel has all of his teeth and none of his eyes.

  But at last, the mountain starts to slope down at an angle away from the ceiling. Here, it’s more apparent than it was in the packed section of tunnel that the ceiling has been replaced since its collapse two decades ago, so the street could be rebuilt over our heads. But the sunken remains of the old street, for financial considerations, have not been cleared off these old repulsor tracks. Ahead of us is a chunk of the Punktown of twenty years ago, secreted away nearly intact, preserved in the amber of darkness.

  The old street rests on a thick jagged base or platform of underlying concrete, dirt and rock, so that the few structures resting atop it all but brush their roofs against the replaced ceiling. We scramble our way up onto this level plateau. The pavement is mostly unbroken, except at the sides where it snapped off against the curved tunnel walls. There’s a small Tikkihotto bakery that is pretty much just a shell, its flat roof fallen in and a big ruptured sewer pipe jutting up through its guts, but I can still see ads posted on its buckled but unbroken plastic front window. There’s a mail box standing beside it, bolted to a surviving strip of sidewalk. I wonder if there are still letters inside waiting to reach the hands of lovers and bill collectors.

  Beyond the bakery there’s a brick tenement building shorn off at the second story (probably by repair teams so as to reseal the ceiling, rather than in the quake), the bottom floor housing a Tikkihotto apothecary (more signs, some in English and some not, in its display window)...and there are apparently a few more structures in various states of ruin beyond the largest of these derelict edifices, but that’s the one we want; our destination. We’ve reached the Church of the Burning Eye.

  Actually, this temple is only one story high, with a flat roof that’s mostly held up, though I can tell it’s caved in here and there, and mounds of rubble on the roof threaten to flatten other sections. There are few windows, and there’s no ornamentation; unprepossessing for a church. It looks like it might have once been a small school or day care center. I notice something right away. Nowhere is there any representation of the symbol of the church, like the one I painted on my shirt front – the sign of the Elders, the gods this obscure sect worships: nowhere do I see the eye inside a five-pointed star, with its wavering flame for a pupil.

  “They took the eyes down, didn’t they?” I whisper to Falco.

  “Yes. The demons. Or the robed men.”

  Ice picks are punched through my ear drums. I drop my flashlight and clamp my palms over them, crunching my face in agony. My brain is liquefying, turning to steaming blood that will soon be leaking between my fingers. I’m going to cry as I sag to my knees. And then the ice picks are slipped out again and I gasp and sob at once and pitch forward onto all fours.

  Hoop crouches beside me, a hand on my back. “Are you all right?” he hisses.

  “What was that?” I pant, dragging my flashlight to me.

  “That was Pete. He saw one of the demons, behind us.” He supports me as I stand. “It’s gone, now.”

  “He’ll bring the ceiling down on us again, doing that,” I say, glancing at the teary-eyed, quivering little mutant. Pete seems to be looking at me.

  “Let’s get out of the open,” Falco suggests, leading the way to the church’s open threshold, its doors hanging half off their hinges. “We’d better let Pete go first.”

  “Yeah,” I agree, nervously looking all around me as I follow. Hoop sticks close behind me.

  The vestibule and room beyond it are barren. Was the furniture removed or was there never any in the first place? No paintings, tapestries, plaques, idols, candle or incense holders, anything that might prove this to have been a place or worship. Though I do notice that the ceilings are all painted black, whereas the walls and floors are white. We pass through a hallway into a large central chamber like a classroom without desks, but this time there is something which suggests worship.

  There’s a bed in the middle of the floor, with a nice brass headboard and sheets that look like they might be white satin under the thick, crusted tar of black blood like one huge scab. There is a young man’s naked torso on the bed, with a hole yawning in the chest. A thick white candle, unlit, pokes out of the wound now. I spoke too soon about there not being candle holders. Strands of web seem to radiate out from the body and I follow one with my beam. It extends from where it’s pinned to the candle to the wall at my right. There, a human heart is nailed to the plaster. I follow another of these cords, which look like white plastic twine, and it is pinned to the forehead of a human head spiked to the wall through the ears and eyes. I know what else I’ll see these cords connected to, ringing the room. An arm. Another arm. A leg. Another leg. A single finger pointing toward the black ceiling that looks like gaping night sky. Blood streaks down the walls from where they are mounted like terrible artifacts on display in some museum. What spider wove this nightmare web?

  “We’re not alone,” Falco whispers.

  I begin to turn. I expect to hear Pete’s terrible, inaudible attack again. Instead,
a voice I know.

  “Is this where you killed Jelena, too, Christopher?”

  A figure in a black uniform stands in the doorway behind us, pointing an ominous, two-handled assault engine that can fire just about any projectile or beam you might think of; simultaneously, too. The figure’s head is hidden inside a glossy ant-like helmet, and I know this provides the wearer with night vision so they can see in total darkness. Despite this and the distorted voice, I recognize...

  “...Saleet,” I say, holding up a hand to Pete to indicate that he should refrain from his shriek. As I turn more fully to face her, I make sure to keep my hands out away from my sides, away from the shotgun slung over my shoulder.

  “Are these your accomplices, Chris, or were you going to murder them, too?”

  “Murder us?” Falco says, stepping away from me. Hoop starts backing up, too. They see this forcer pointing a gun at me and I can’t blame them for their doubts.

  “I wasn’t going to murder you!” I protest as they start edging toward another doorway on the far side of the room, ducking under the strands of the plastic web.

  “Hey!” Saleet jerks her gun at them. “I’m not done with you!”

  “They’re harmless, Sal.” I block her and I hear Falco and Hoop dart through the doorway, in search of a back way out. I hope they make it home safely. “They don’t know anything; I ran into them and they helped me find this place.” I look over her shoulder. “Is Lardin here with you?”

  “No. This was a personal investigation, Christopher. I’ve been following you.”

  “You know I didn’t kill that prosty.”

  “Maybe not...but coincidentally you fucked her. And you visited the crime scenes where her parts were found. And now, conveniently, here you are with another person dismembered in the same way.”

  I take one involuntary step closer to her. “The truth scan proved I didn’t kill her, that I don’t have anything to do with the killers or even know who they are.”

  Saleet takes one hand off her gun to unlatch and remove her tough but lightweight ceramic helmet. She steps closer to me to see me in the light of my torch. “Then how do you explain this, Chris? What is this? And how did you know about it?”