by Chuck Wendig
She pivots. Down the steps. Feet running a rumbling drum roll – fast, too fast, almost tripping, toe of one foot almost catching the heel of the other–
She catches herself on the railing. Down, down, down. Go, go, go–
Ninth floor.
She’s watching her feet now.
Mistake. Nora almost runs into him.
The other one. Of course the other one. Spall and Lutkevich. Those names, you always say them together. Partners in knee-capping.
(Partners in… throat-ripping?)
The skinny one has that same smile. Waves the same way. Wiggle, waggle.
She’s caught. Trapped like a rat between two cats.
Except this rat has a trick.
Her hand darts into her pocket. Finds the scales there – scales from a dead Snakeface, scales purchased from an old blobby half-and-half at the Oddments bazaar. Magic trick time. She pops one scale under her tongue. The taste is like licking a bloody battery.
The trick is she disappears. She can’t feel it, but she can see it. Disconcerting as all hell to have your hands fade from view, to lose sight of your own peripheral eye sockets – you never think about those until they’re gone.
The killer before her looks shocked – one minute she’s there, the next, poof.
Good. She leaps the railing – hits the stairs going down. Body slams against the wall. Feet still echoing. The scale hides her from sight, but she’s still on all the other senses. They can hear her. Smell her. Nora wishes suddenly she didn’t wear that perfume all the time – the one that smells like gardenias, the one her father bought her a few years ago for Christmas.
No time to worry about that now.
Eighth floor. Through the door. Another stairway on the far side. It won’t connect up to the tenth floor but connects to all the others. In the hall, a small black kid peers out his door, holding a raggedy Elmo doll. As she darts past, she gives him a gentle shove backward, whispers, “Hide!” Then she closes the door.
Nora keeps running.
She tries to soften her steps. Bolts across to the far side of the hall. Opens the door. It squeaks. It bangs.
Still, she’s on the other side. The lights are brighter here. Doesn’t matter, they won’t be able to see her. And nobody’s here.
Time, then, to wait. To hide in plain sight.
Nora eases up against the corner. Presses herself tight against it. Willing herself small. Calm your breath. Her teeth start to chatter. She tenses her whole body till it stops.
Nothing. No movement. Nobody here.
Just the buzz of fluorescents. The distant sound of someone yelling.
She’s not sure how long she stands there. Two minutes? Twenty?
But she’s lost them. She has to have. She creeps out from the corner. With each step she brings her foot gingerly down, soft heel to easy toe. Tip-toe gently toward the steps –
Bam. Something hits her in the solar plexus. The air goes out of her. She staggers back, looks forward. Nobody’s there and–
The air shimmers.
The other fat one appears. Smiling.
“We have magic, too,” is all he says.
Then someone grabs her from behind. Long arms wrap all the way around her. It’s impossible, even as tall as the other killer is. These arms feel like they wind around–
Like snakes.
Oh, no.
The thin one laughs as his fangs sink into her neck.
And he keeps laughing. She can hear that laugh, echoing into her heart and her head. Dull and throbbing around her fading pulse-beat. She tries to cry.
She can’t.
19
This is what I have discerned from looking upon their cave drawings and reading their crass hieroglyphics found at their temples: I think the gobbos are slaves. We think them as animals, as monsters, but I believe they are a race of people – subterranean hominids long separated from the genetic line that created us, or created the Neanderthals. I further suspect they found their way into the dark to survive some cataclysm of the above world. The Deluge? An Ice Age? Some… volcanic pyroclasm? Their myths are unclear. They came down here thinking they were alone, but they were not. Entities waited here at the bottom of the labyrinth: Those Who Eat. Chthonic gods, entrenched at the center of the maze like worms in a dog’s heart. And I believe those gods enslaved the gob-folk, whether out of fear or appeasement, or out of love or even some other heretic magic, I cannot say. I believe if we can break the goblins free of those gods, they can be tamed. Even made to live among us as people. Wouldn’t that be grand?
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
“Skelly’s gone,” Mookie says. His voice is more a croaking bleat than the booming growl he’s used to. He drops her Bowie knife on the ground. “I found this. Nobody’s seen her. Which means they took her. Which means I lost her.”
Burnsy paces in front of Mookie just outside his house. Around, the dead of Daisypusher hover. Some clean up goblin bodies. Some weep. Some console.
“Was she someone to you?”
“No. Yeah. I dunno. A friend of my daughter’s, I guess.” Just one more way I failed you, Nora.
“She seemed all right,” Burnsy says. A tepid sentence, but spoken with the weight one criminal affords another. She’s a stand-up guy. Like you could trust her.
Could he? Mookie doesn’t know. Was she planning to stab him in the back when he wasn’t looking? At this point, it doesn’t matter.
The cleaver hangs at his side. Wet with clotting gobbo blood. And matted with hair.
“I gotta go after her,” Mookie says.
“Do you?”
“This is on me. Maybe if I figure out where they’re going, I can catch up–”
“Where are they going? They could go south. Could go north. Could find a shaft down into the Tangle. Will she be a breeder? A sacrifice? A test for their weapons? Food? A free fuck? You don’t know what they’re gonna do with her, which means you don’t know where they’re taking her. The Underworld’s a big place, in case you hadn’t heard.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Then, quieter, “I still have to try.”
Just then – a raspy throat-clear at the door. It’s the woman in the pink robe.
“Burnsy,” she says, holding out the scalloped box.
“What the–?” Burnsy steps up, takes the box. “Florence, what the hell is this?”
“The girl gave it to me. Said to protect it. I think those gobs were lookin’ for it.”
“It is Ochre,” Mookie says. The Golden Gate.
Burnsy takes the box, then mists himself with the blue spritz bottle: a nervous gesture if not a necessary one. “Yeah. It is.”
“Why would they want it?”
“No idea. I don’t even know what it does. I just know it opens a gate.”
“To what?”
On this, the dead man says nothing. Does he have an answer? Or doesn’t he want to say? Whatever the case, Burnsy hands the box to Mookie. “Here. Take it. If I’m gonna be looking into this murder thing for you, then someone’s going to need to protect the box. I figure a human cement mixer like you ought to do the trick.”
Mookie takes it. “You sure?” The dead man nods, but then says:
“That means you don’t go after Skelly. I can’t have you carrying this stuff straight to the gobbos. If they were looking for this, then you need to take it up top.” Burnsy lowers his voice: “Mook. Go find your daughter. Quit fuckin’ around down here. If they think she did it, then they’re gonna go after her. And you need to be there.”
“You’re right.” Mookie slides the box of what-may-be-Ochre into his satchel. Next to the container of Vermillion. Golden Gate and Red Rage. Both myths until now. Could that mean that the Death’s Head is real? Maybe, Mookie tells himself, he can still find it. Can still bring it to the Boss and cure him. Especially now that Casimir is dead. He suddenly thinks to ask Burnsy, “What do you know about sacrificial offerings? We found
marigolds, mezcal, chocolate on the kid’s body.”
“Day of the Dead-style ofrendas? Sounds like someone’s trying to appease someone. Or something.”
“Found two broken chain links in the pockets, too. Iron.”
Burnsy’s crispy brow furrows. “Sounds like a summoning and binding.”
“What?”
“Someone called up something from the Underworld and then… locked it the fuck down. Bound it. Maybe to the body.”
“That’s bad, right?”
“It’s rarely good.”
“Thanks for your help, Burnsy.”
“We’re not fuckin’ fuck-buddies. But I’ll go do the job. I’ll find the ghost of the grandson. And I’ll keep my barely-there ear to the ground for your girl, Skelly.”
“I can’t leave that task to you.”
“You gotta. Because you have other shit on your plate. But you owe me, Mookie Pearl. You owe me and my family like you wouldn’t believe.”
From Daisypusher to a long unused subway station. Then to a subway tunnel. Then to the 2nd Avenue station. Then up the stairs. To the street.
Into the light. Again.
Everything hurts.
Afternoon coming into evening. Mookie hasn’t slept. He’s barely eaten. He had the hell kicked out of him by not one but two goblin hordes. And the mistakes he’s made seem like ghosts walking with him as he staggers up out of the subway tunnel.
Skelly: dragged away. Lulu and Karyn: one dead, the other forced to be alone. Werth: maybe betrayed him.
And his own daughter? Hates him. Hates him enough to go after his entire Organization. To maybe murder a young man. To bring it all down on Mookie’s head.
His ex-wife. Jess. Jessamyn. When was the last time he even called her? To check in? To do more than send her an envelope full of money?
Jesus. What an asshole he is.
No wonder they all hate him. No wonder everybody betrayed him.
Grampop’s voice in his head: You’re dumber than a truck full of broken toilets…
As his phone finds the signal, his cell dings. A text message coming in.
Mookie comes up to the corner, people moving in streams past him, and he checks the phone, shielding it from the glare of the sun.
One message from Werth. All caps.
CALL ME.
Mookie thinks about ditching the phone. But he doesn’t know that Werth sold him out. And he doesn’t know that Werth knows he suspects, either.
He dials the old goat.
Werth answers.
“Werth, what the f–”
“Mookie, shut up and listen. We have your daughter. You hear me? We have your girl.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“I want you to come in, Mook. It’s time to talk this out. Things have changed, you understand? You need to get right with this. There’s still room for you here.”
“Still room? Room for what? The fuck are you talking about?”
“The Boss is… listen, things have changed. Candlefly’s got the wheel.”
“Candlefly? And you’re on board?” Goddamnit. “You sniveling fuck.”
“I’m texting you a couple pics so you know we’re serious.”
We’re serious. Werth and Candlefly?
“I’m glad Nora shot you,” Mookie growls. “But I won’t be so gentle.”
“Shut up and look at your phone.”
The phone dings.
Deep breath. He looks.
“Nora,” he says. Voice a pained whisper. It’s her. Sitting on a chair in a wine cellar. Hands bound behind her. Feet bound to the chair. They beat her. Her face is bruised and bloodied. Head slumped forward. Mookie imagines that Werth did that. To get even.
Back on the phone.
“See?” Werth says. Sounding strained. Tired. Like all this was inevitable. “You can still do right by us. Come in. Play nice. We can all get on the same page. You can make out good. They wanna do right by us if we do right by them.”
“I’m going to break you in half. I’m going to beat you to death with your own horns. I’m gonna shove your hooves up your–”
“You don’t have room for that kind of bullshit here. The house, Mookie. Be here in the hour or else.”
“I don’t know she’s alive. Nora. It was just a pic. She might be–” He can’t even say the last word. It catches in his throat, a frog in a net. “I don’t know she’s alive.”
“Here.” A fumble of the phone. Skin or fabric rasping against the receiver.
Then: “Mookie.”
Nora. It’s her.
“It’s me, honey. It’s Daddy.”
All she says is, “You reap what you sow.”
Then Nora’s gone and Werth is back on the line.
“Satisfied?”
“Go to hell.”
“The house. One hour. Or she eats a bullet.”
Click.
PART THREE
MEAT & MONSTERS
20
I seek to push deeper into the Great Below. Deeper than any human has pushed. I want to see the Ravenous Expanse. All I have are stories carved into walls or overheard from a roving pack of gobbos. I want to see the deepest gods, Those Who Eat. I want to stand at the edge of the Maw-Womb. I think I hear them, those gods. It’s just a tickle at the back of my mind, like a little earwig burrowing into my ear. It’s like tuning a radio past the static and listening for the snippets of voices in the chaos, and what I hear, what I’ve put together, is that if I go deeper, if I go to the heart of the Underworld, I will find the secrets of this place. I will learn why the goblins exist. I will learn what the worm-gods want. I will know where to find the Occulted Pigments and what they do. By forging downward I will learn the fate and future of the world above and how our two worlds need one another, because I believe that they do. When I go down into the Expanse, I will have the truth of this place hewn into my heart.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
Gasp. Twitch. Thrash.
Skelly lurches awake on a pile of bones.
Animal bones, by the look of them. The delicate skeletons of mice and rats, of squirrels and pigeons. Larger bones, too: cat bones, a dog skull, the antlers of a deer, the horns and half-a-skull of a big bull. A mound. Tall as Mookie. Big as a Jersey sand dune. And this one is not the only one – the room is a wide-open cavern, heaped with piles of bones and bodies.
All of it bathed in the eerie green fire-glow from trash barrels, oil drums, and torches stuck atop crooked poles. Light and smoke like waltzing wraiths.
Shapes move in the half-light. Gobbo-shapes. Some squat and plump, others with sagging chests, scurrying about on bony arms and knobby legs. The smoke climbs up sheer walls, walls unexpectedly straight for this place – the Great Below, a land of craggy caverns and twisting tunnels, of slanted walls and jagged teeth.
This is one of their temples, she thinks.
On the walls, gobbo faces are carved into and out of the rock: broken teeth and howling mouths, crumbling noses and cratered cheeks. The eyes, though, the eyes are always cast downward. Looking to something far below.
To the carvings on the floor, maybe. The floor is marked with long, dark, lean shapes, winding around the piles of the bones and bodies. Like snakes encircling wrists, like ropes around necks.
A moan. Behind her. Skelly almost cries out, almost weeps in shock–
A man’s voice: “Shhh. Shhhh. If they see you’re awake, they’ll come.”
She turns. Sees someone else here atop the pile of bones. Sprawled out, half-covered by dead animals. It’s an old man in an MTA uniform. Half his face frozen in a palsy, the eye sagging in its socket, the mouth drooping like a melting clock in a Dali painting.
“Who… who…”
“I’m Walt Meyers… I… I work for–”
“The MTA.”
“Right. The uniform.” A wet, humorless chuckle. “I did maintenance. On the tracks. I… I’ve been here a couple weeks.”
His breath is a damp wheeze. “I don’t feel great. Think I’m on the way out. You don’t want them up here. They… they did things.”
He lifts his arm. A couple bones rattle. The uniform is torn under the armpit and–
Eggs. She knows what they are. She’s heard the stories but never seen them up close and now she wants to cry out, maybe throw up. They’re like frog eggs she used to see as a kid when she’d stay on her uncle’s farm in Jersey. They had a creek, and there in the creek she’d see these globby, translucent eggs that almost looked like frog eyes. Dozens of them clustered together in the water, the tadpoles inside visible and twitching.
These are like that. But bigger. The things inside aren’t tadpoles. They look like fat grubs pulled out of a tree or up from a sickened lawn. Bulbous and without limbs.
Grubs. Baby gobbos.
“I got ’em here and got one behind the ear–” He turns his head and there, on the palsy side of his face, a single egg covers his whole ear. When he moves it quivers like a Jell-O mold. “And a half-dozen between my legs, too. They… they broke my knees. Snapped ’em when I tried to get up and run. You can’t run. You can’t hide.”
Tears weep from his one good eye.
“We have to get out of here,” she tells him.
“There’s no escaping this place. People have tried. We’re not alone here. Soon as your eyes adjust you’ll see them. Some are dead. Some close to it. Occasionally one wakes up on the pile, crawls down the heap. Or makes a run for it. Like me. They catch you. They’re everywhere. And when they have you that’s when they come up. Lay their eggs. Some don’t lay eggs at all. I watched two of them attack a heavy-set fellow two piles over and…” His voice drifts off and he licks his lips. “Here.” A dry whisper.”You wanna see something?”
He gestures with his head.
Skelly follows his gaze up.
The floor is all dark shapes, and at first she thinks the ceiling is, too.
But soon as she realizes the reality, Walt confirms it. “It’s a map,” he says. “Took me a while to figure it out. Lot of it is just nonsense, what I guess must be tunnels or passages folding in on each other. But in the middle of it is something I know all too well – the subway map. Just Manhattan, not the boroughs, but you can see their curves, how some are together and then breakaway. Can almost make the shape of the island. Like Manhattan’s circulatory system. It’s almost… arterial.”
