Monstrocity

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Saleet...”

  “The place is on fire very badly...” Her voice breaks.

  “Saleet. I know what happened to him...”

  “You know...”

  “Come here and talk to me,” I say quietly. I can barely stand looking into her black, anguished eyes. “I need to see you in person.”

  “Is he dead, Chris? Just tell me if...”

  “Saleet. Please. Come see me.” And I break the connection.

  ***

  HER BLACK UNIFORM is white with plaster, and someone’s blood is caked on her boots. Her sidearm’s holster is unsnapped. I point to it. She glances at it and snaps it, saying, “I had to shoot over the heads of some looters. It’s absolute chaos out there.” Her eyes lift. “Tell me, Chris.”

  “Please ...sit down.”

  “Fucking tell me!” she shrieks, stepping toward me, and I flinch hard.

  So I tell her. Tell her everything. The two of us standing there facing each other in the center of my flat that has been riven as I know my life is now to be riven.

  When I tell my girlfriend that I murdered her father she blinks hard, there’s an almost invisible spasm in the muscles of her face and the clench of her jaw, but she does not scream, does not lunge at me, does not unsnap her holster again. With dark lips pressed firmly together, she silently listens to the rest of the story...the tanks I found, the fires I set. But though she doesn’t interrupt me, fat tears begin to drop from her eyes to tumble down her cheeks, tears like those of a little girl.

  The story is over. Now it’s my turn to be silent. She nods at me, as if I’m still talking and she’s listening, absorbing it.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I want to put my hand on the back of her head and draw her face against my shoulder, but I’m afraid. And that would be too mockingly paternal a gesture.

  Saleet nods again, her expression frighteningly blank. She takes a step back from me. Her eyes still on me. Then she turns, walks to the door, and leaves my apartment.

  I’m still standing in the same spot. I stand here a long time, staring at the closed door. Then I look again to the jagged crack that splits my wall from ceiling to floor like a suture in the skull of a giant.

  ***

  A PATTERN, A network, a latticework, a nervous system, a web...and Saleet was drawn toward me along one strand, only to slide away from me down another. Gabrielle and Saleet’s father drawn toward me, as if I am the spider at the center of that web, only to die at my hands. All the strands converge at me. Yes. I feel like it’s me who is Ugghiutu.

  All these interlacing secret maneuverings, this intricate synchronicity, only to weave a tapestry of desolation. Well, we’re all a little safer – for now. I mustn’t be selfish. But I feel like I’ve been sacrificed to a greater end. I was a pawn, in a way, in a larger conflict I can’t encompass with my limited human mind.

  I mustn’t be selfish, Dawn Andrews told me...I must join the ranks of the Children of the Elders. But Dawn is dead now, and I don’t know who the other members are, how to contact them.

  Perhaps they’ll find their way to me along the strands of the weave.

  On the news, I see that most fires have been beaten while some still rage three days after the earthquake (mostly in rough parts of town where the firefighting teams are reluctant to go, and shot at when they do). Little Manila is almost entirely gutted. Several sections of the subway system have caved in, and a train full of passengers remains buried; they think the people aboard might still be alive. Maybe injured, maybe starving. When I hear a story like that I always hope there are no children involved.

  Looters in packs are dragging people out of their hovercars at intersections, stoning them with big chunks of fallen stone and clubbing them to death and driving off in their vehicles. I watch aerial footage of this taken from helicars and police hoverobots, called into service to contain the rioting. I see a man in the civilized emblem of a business suit crawling on all fours, his face lost in blood, while several youths run at him when not slamming him with cinder blocks, leaping on his back and springing off it jubilantly, frolicking like kids dashing through an open fire hydrant. These are the people I’ve saved from the snaking arms of Ugghiutu’s children.

  I had hoped to see the opposite. A decrease in crime, in mental illness, in murder and rape. I had hoped the disruption in Ugghiutu’s plan would lessen his influence. That he might fall deeper into slumber, and the poisonous tendrils he inserts into our minds would withdraw. Either he is too powerful to be greatly inconvenienced by my efforts, or else I have overestimated his strength and the hold he has over our city. Perhaps even if I had killed that powerful being, dreaming in some overlapping dimension, the people here would be just as hateful, just as dangerous, just as poisoned. Maybe a god can’t be blamed for their actions. Maybe all together, they dwarf the corruption of all of the Old Ones combined.

  Maybe it isn’t Ugghiutu who makes Punktown more evil, but Punktown that makes Ugghiutu more evil.

  There is a news story that makes me stop munching my junk food dinner so as to listen more closely. The three surviving top executives of Alvine Products and the driver of their hoverlimo have been shot and killed, apparently by a looter, when the limousine stopped at a traffic light. Witnesses say that the assailant, however, did not steal the limo or even enter it so as to rob the victims. Perhaps just a thrill killing; a lot of that is going on as well in the current climate.

  Witnesses describe the killer as a young Kalian woman with a military-style assault engine.

  ***

  AFTER FIVE DAYS of letting the VT run constantly, even when I slept, I shut it off, and the silence inside my apartment is like standing at the bottom of the sea. I’ve heard no further mention of the destruction of Alvine or the murders of its executives since yesterday.

  I’m out of work again so I need to conserve my resources, but my supplies have run low and I figure it’s a bit safer to venture outside today. I leave my flat for the first time in several days, walk far enough to buy half an Italian sub and a cheap six pack of Knickerson (Knickers off, as we called it in school), and when I return to my building I find Saleet sitting on the front stoop. She stands as if to greet me but doesn’t smile, doesn’t say a word. “Hi,” I say softly, then to spare her from having to return my greeting, I nod at the front door and say, “Come inside...”

  I let her go first up the stairs. She is out of uniform, her long hair flows down her back like a waterfall of night, and she wears an indigo blue t-shirt that is very tight and has a soft sheen like velour. Her snug Kalian skirt is of metallic silver thread, and clings nicely to her full hips and bottom, though I feel guilty watching her body move under the material so I lower my eyes and notice that she is barefoot. Her strong calloused feet have been recently tattooed in lacy black web-like patterns. It’s a traditional Kalian decoration – worn more in the past than today, however – revealing Saleet’s attraction to her own culture, but at the same time I seem to recall that it was forbidden for anyone but a husband to see these intimate tattoos, which simultaneously reaffirms Saleet’s commitment to rebellion. I follow her with lungs that ache nostalgically at the scent like sandalwood she leaves in her wake.

  While I close and lock my door, she takes in the crack that splits my wall. I hold a bottle of Knickerson out to her but she shakes her head, goes and sits on my folded sofa bed. Without opening a beer either, I go and sit beside her. I sense it’s what she wants me to do.

  “I want to tell you a story,” she says very quietly, looking across the room instead of at my face.

  Timidly, I say, “All right.”

  “It’s from my childhood. It’s a folktale.”

  “I like your stories,” I tell her very gently.

  And so, in that same soft voice, as if translating a dream while asleep, she begins...

  THE GHOUL AND THE GRAVE WORM

  DETARK WAS A boy of seventeen, and was glad that his father owned a farm on the very outskirts of the vill
age, for the youths of the village often mocked him for the heavy and badly deformed foot that caused him to walk with a struggling limp. These boys joked that Detark did not need a plow to till his father’s fields; he could simply walk along and drag that useless appendage of his through the soil. Young girls were not likely to mock him openly, but he thought he saw them whisper and giggle when they believed he did not see. Now that his schooling was over, he was relieved that he did not need to venture into the village center except to run errands for his father. Whether sowing or harvesting crops, Detark would gaze at that distant large village with its silhouetted rooftops and spires with a mix of anxiety and bitterness, as if the town itself leered at him in contempt. Its presence oppressed him. The open vastness of the sky above these fields was far friendlier, for being so utterly empty.

  Detark’s family had owned this land for generations. It had been captured from an enemy tribe by proud warrior ancestors. As a boy, Detark had pretended he was one of these heavily-armored warriors, and his mother had even made him a tunic with their sign: the profile of a bird-like Utalla demon, its long silhouetted beak open in a war cry. And Detark’s father fashioned for him a sword of wood, and a wood-bladed lance which was dubbed Utalla’s Beak. His father explained that their ancestor Lurrik Abdar-tuul had been a powerful warrior who had wielded a lance which he called Utalla’s Beak, with which he had beheaded the chieftain of the enemy tribe. But Lurrik, two dozen arrows embedded in his black armor when he made his way back to his home, died the day following his great victory. A single arrow, its tip poisoned, had found its way through the plates of lacquered tortoise shell of which his armor was made.

  There were several barrows on the farmlands of Detark’s father. This was another reason why village boys mocked him. Who, they asked, would want to eat crops fertilized by the moldering bodies of buried soldiers? Look at what eating these corpse-tainted crops has done to Detark, they would laugh, pointing as always to his leg. Their favorite nickname for him was the Ghoul.

  One early evening, Detark was plowing a field in the shadow of the greatest of these raised burial mounds, upon which only a sparse and wispy grass would grow. The darkening air was growing cool, and Detark knew he must return to the farm house very soon. Just this last row, he told himself, following the glebbi named Churt as it pulled the old plow. Detark glanced toward the village, hatefully outlined against the last blood-like streaks of sunlight. When he looked back to Churt, it was just in time to see her swallowed up by the earth and disappear with one frightened bleat. The plow was jerked forward, out of his hands.

  Detark understood what had happened instantly; a hollow in the earth, near the base of the barrow, had opened up. The tunnels of the barrow must have extended beyond the humped mound itself. Churt had dropped down into those caverns, and now his father’s best plow would be lost as well. He lunged after it, as quickly as his poor leg would allow, reaching out to grasp at the handles even though he would never be strong enough to pull the plow free, attached as it was to the body of the far heavier glebbi.

  Detark saw the plow vanish utterly into that gaping maw. He lurched forward with one last desperate effort, and before he could stop himself and hurl himself backwards, he felt more earth crumbling beneath his feet as the hole began to widen.

  The drop was not terribly great, and the heaped dirt that had fallen with him broke his fall, but Detark saw that poor old Churt lay dead beside him, the plow’s blade having landed upon the neck of the glebbi, severing it neatly.

  With tears in his eyes, agonized at the loss of the loyal beast and ashamed at having disgraced his family, thus living up to the mockery of the villagers, Detark looked up at the violet sky that had once been his vast friend, now a small circle hemmed in by the edges of the pit. That ceiling was too high to reach even if he stood upon the handle of the plow. He must try to find another way out of these ancient burial tunnels, as hopeless as that surely must be, for he had seen the entrance to this and the other barrows and they were packed solid with stones. Still, he must try to find his way upwards to that doorway, and once there attempt to heft all those heavy stones aside.

  Detark detached the lantern that had been clipped to Churt’s harness, lit it, and began his exploration. This tunnel, he saw, ended in a blank wall of dirt at one end, but at the other there was a circular opening. He approached this threshold and held the lantern out in front of him so as to examine it before entering. The new corridor was like the inside of a great cylinder, its walls gray and oddly glossy as if tunneled through polished stone. He ducked his head and stepped into it. And Detark had not gone far through that circular tunnel when he saw figures waiting for him ahead. Fierce-looking men in barbed and bulky tortoise armor, carrying spears and bows and swords. He nearly fled with a shriek back the way he had come. But fighting against his fear, he took several steps further toward the figures.

  He nearly shrieked again. For inside those horned black helmets he saw the faces of skeletons and mummies, grinning as if in amusement at his folly. This revelation was almost more horrifying to him than if these soldiers had been alive, even though he knew now they could be of no real threat to him. And in any case, these men had been of his own blood. They were the casualties of Lurrik Abdar-tuul’s battle to win these lands. This was not some army of ghouls, as his imagination had initially taunted him, but of heroes.

  And indeed, when Detark grew bold enough to draw closer to these ranked suits of armor, which stood along either side of the smooth corridor, he saw that one of these suits still bristled with two dozen arrows. In its gloved fist it clutched a lance with a cruel, curving blade that still looked razor sharp these centuries later. Yes, it was the armor of Lurrik Abdar-tuul, out of which his face grinned boldly, even though his eyes were gone and his skin had become a dark leather clinging to his skull. That halberd he gripped, of course, was Utalla’s Beak.

  Abruptly the earth shifted, and Detark lost his balance, had to clutch at the suit of armor to keep from falling. It must be an earthquake! That was why the earth had opened up under Churt! The very ground seemed to be shifting and rippling fluidly beneath Detark’s feet.

  But as he clung to Lurrik’s looming armor, Detark heard a strange hissing as of steam from a geyser in the earth. He had heard that sound once before, as a much younger child. Once a great worm had come into the village on its many rustling legs, glowing white in the night. He had seen that glow across the walls of his bedroom, as the ghastly illumination came in through his open window, but his mother had seized him before he could look out the window at the monstrosity. His father had taken up his musket and made ready to defend his family and flock. But the giant worm had gone on past them toward the town, and later they heard scores of musket blasts and distant screams. They learned, come morning, that four villagers had perished at the jagged jaws of the great worm before it was killed.

  And now, Detark recognized this hissing sound as the same he had heard that night.

  He realized where he was at last. Not inside a barrow tunnel as he had thought...but inside the very belly of a worm. It had opened wide its gut to lure him in. And before it had swallowed him, it had swallowed up these stiff ranks of armored corpses as well, thinking them living men it had encountered below the earth.

  The creature was burrowing upward through the soil loosened by his plow. He judged that they were moving in the direction of the village that so vexed him.

  Though Detark hated that place, despised those people, he knew he must protect them. Because though they might never understand or even accept him, he was one of them, and their foe was a common one.

  And also, he felt he must honor his heroic ancestors by liberating their bodies, so blasphemously removed from their revered tomb and swallowed up by this mindless demon.

  Still clinging to the armor that was the coffin of Lurrik Abdar-tuul, Detark put his hand around the shaft of Utalla’s Beak. He then stepped back from the corpse, and with a tug, dislodged the lance from its gr
ip.

  The lance was tall, nearly touching the curved ceiling of the worm’s gut already. Detark grasped the handle firmly in both fists, and thrust upwards a mere few inches further. That crescent of blade stabbed cleanly into the roof of flesh. Detark then began loping along down the corridor, hoisting the weapon as if carrying a flag proudly into battle. He could imagine all those glorious soldiers running after him with their swords raised high.

  He slit the worm’s belly open as he moved, slashed it the length of the long corridor, and he heard the hissing grow louder and angrier. Before he had reached the end of its gut, the worm heaved up out of the soil, and began to writhe upon the earth in violent convulsions. Suddenly the long corridor buckled and curved, twisted and coiled around Detark. He had to let go of Utalla’s Beak, and pushed his way through the great slit he had carved in the monster. He heard the suits of armor being ground together behind him like the gnashing teeth of a dying giant.

  He emerged into cool open air. Yes, his friend the vast sky, now black and sown with the seeds of stars! Detark scrambled to his feet in time to see the last spasms of the giant worm, its hundreds of bone-like legs curling inward in death, its ghostly luminosity already fading away, steam rising out of its slashed back. Some of the suits of armor hung out of that wound or had been thrown clear during its final torments.

  Turning toward the village, Detark saw that they had come very close to its border, and people were already converging upon him with muskets and lanterns, having been alerted by the demon’s dreaded hiss.

  The villagers stood in awe, absorbing the scene. The riven worm, the strewn armor, and the Ghoul with his clubbed foot. In his fist was Utalla’s Beak, which he had seen lying in the grass near the monster.

  Detark was never called the Ghoul again.

  And when he died, many years later, having sired strong sons and grandsons who farmed his land after him, the bones of Detark the Worm Killer were interred beneath the great barrow on his property...to join those of Lurrik Abdar-tuul and his men.