by Files, Gemma
“Let’s get gone!” Hickshaw’s voice echoed back from below. A gust of hot filthy air rose up as the three charged down. One of the brown-draped stumps whirled when he collided with it. It had a round white flesh mask with bugged eyes, and he swiped out with the male statue’s gold leg, planted a great bloody bruise across its face. Blood flew up like drops of wine, and Hickshaw smiled, throttling his club, clumping down five steps, then five more steps to the next landing. Close enough to rasp his heels came Chawkins and Fawcett.
At the next landing the stumps were more elaborate. The walls were crusted with branches, whorls and knots of leaves. Sapling spines rattling with aggrieved motion. Hickshaw shook his club, shedding bright drops. He bashed a stump in the side, felling it with one blow. It sang shrieks as it rolled down the steps. A few stumps were trailing them, so Hickshaw set Chawkins spinning to guard their backs. She swerved to bash loose gouts of blood and flesh with the female statue’s golden arm, glints of gold in a red spray. To Fawcett: “Smash down front.” “Yaaaaarrrrrhhh—” The gold phallus of Bacconyus fell and rose, dripping gore.
Ten more steps down, there were larger stumps, twice again as tall as the others, with wobbling weak heads. These stumps were scared of the cousins, shrinking back to sit on large chairs with eight legs each. Hickshaw released his peoples’ traditional fear of furniture like a squirrel from a trap. Who’s afraid of a skeleton? He smacked a chair with his legclub, producing a hollow note, a foul salty exhalation, a splintery scream that reminded him of the time his great-uncle was eaten by termites. He waved his empty arm forward, and they went down ten more steps.
Here the stumps quaked and shook, rooted. Peaked tables crowded the landing’s edges. Hickshaw tested one with his club and it lurched backwards out of his way, its legs bending like articulated stems. A clamor filled the open space, above and below them, mostly above, before and behind them, mostly behind. They charged through the last landing, crowded with asymmetric stepstools and flowery gibbets, and then they were at the bottom of the Stair.
Bulky furniture danced all around, just out of reach of their weapons. The drawers were hissing, threads had come out the front of them, out of keyholes with toothy edges, flicking about, tasting the air. Hickshaw saw before them a shimmering black curtain which stretched from the ceiling and reached almost to the floor. It bellied in and out. He thrust with his legclub and the fabric of it split. “Chop with me!” Fawcett and Chawkins stepped forward, slashing up and down, and soon the curtain was a row of rags, curling guts of cloth, and the three cousins stepped through to the other side.
The clamor behind them faded. The air hummed between its cells, desperate. A tremendous room, long and egg-shaped, stretched away from them, dark but for reflected glimmers and made to seem tiny by the way it was filled almost to the ceiling with a strange item: a sleeping couch, standing on hundreds of thin fussy clawed legs, atop heaps of moldy skulls and gold things like cups and plates and saucers. The couch’s legs rose to a waxy rim, layered with scale like a flower about to burst from the bud. Its bulk rose and fell like the breathing of a sleeping beast. The air was fertile with the smell of rot.
Hickshaw walked closer over the clattering treasure and picked up a skull. There was a round hole at the crown. “Look at that.” He pegged the skull at Chawkins, and it shattered on her shoulder.
Chawkins and Fawcett staggered around picking up plates and skulls and daggers, but they couldn’t hold more than a few items at a time, and they kept dropping the extras, which clattered down off their knees.
“Should have brought some bags or something.”
“Looking for a magic goblet...” sang Hickshaw.
The shadows crept close and dense beside and around the massive couch that puffed up to near the ceiling. Hickshaw found himself walking closer to it, staring up at it, trying to imagine its purpose, or who would build such a thing, but the effort was too great.
Above the rim the couch’s legs came out of were billows of stuffed fabric, pink, puffy, wrinkly and shiny, like crushed satin. In vertical rows along the upholstery were sphincters where clusters of long tapes emerged to whip around, lashing the shadows. Broad arms above the clusters of tape, a ring of them like Hickshaw’s own crown of leaves, curved, many-jointed arms, which moved in a manner both lewd and predatory. Like an orchid vibrating as it is reamed by a bee, or a sweet blossom that tempts a fly and sucks it into a striped bladder. But Hickshaw’s brain was desert dry, immune to the hypnotic humming and resistant to symbolic suggestion.
However, he still took a step back, shattering a skull underfoot. The couch was rocking back and forth. If Hickshaw could have imagined a titanic piece of furniture with unimaginable intelligence he might have thought the couch was mad at him, he might have turned and fled, or he might have collapsed, his mind broken by sheer wrongness. Instead he stepped sideways, then stopped to nudge aside a shattered skeleton.
Under the pelvis was a golden goblet whose thick stem and wide, deep bowl were carved with a pattern of grape vines and a sprawling orgy. He scooped it up, brought it close to his eyes, sniffed it—was that the smell of the fermented grape? He looked down into the bowl again, his fingers clenched tight around the stem, and found a small purple puddle there. He squeezed harder, the fibers of his fingers creaking, and shimmering wine welled up in the goblet.
A toothed tape fell from the couch’s rim, draped across Fawcett’s shoulder, and ripped him in half. A cloud of dry splinters, behind it half-Fawcett laughing in shock. Hickshaw’s goblet was half full. Fawcett dragged his torso over greenish gold. “Plant me quick, cousin, I can’t feel my legs!” The goblet was three-quarters full. Another tape, covered with drooling suckers, spooled down and noosed around Chawkins’s neck. It curled tentatively, lifting her up to the ceiling. “Glkk!” she said, then managed to detach her head with her thrashings. The goblet was full. Hickshaw watched his reflection dance for a moment inside the wine, and then he drank.
Copyright © 2013 Caleb Wilson
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Caleb Wilson’s fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series, and most recently D. F. Lewis’s anthology Horror Without Victims. He and his wife live in Illinois and work at a public library.
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COVER ART
“The Rickety Tower,” by Jeremiah Morelli
Jeremiah Morelli lives in southern Germany and currently works as a middle school teacher for English and Art. He sees his painting mainly as a hobby, though he has been selling prints for several years. Colorful, whimsical scenes are what he likes most, and he hopes to publish a children's book one day.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press
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