by Chuck Wendig
“Let’s go find ourselves a ghost,” he says.
Then he guns it.
Time oozes. It twists. It crawls, centipede-like, away from Nora’s grip. She does not know how long she’s been here. How long since they killed her father, since they shot her in the stomach. How long since she thought she had the world in her hand and Mookie Pearl by the leash. How long since it all went to shit.
How long since Candlefly – whose face was now a mincemeat pie baked in a bloody crust – dropped her here in this bedroom to bleed out and die. How long since he whispered in her ear, “You betrayed me, and so now you suffer a death that creeps up on you, the anticipation slow as your misery mounts.”
She lies on the bed. Breath coming in little shallow rabbit gasps.
I’m dying.
Bullet in her middle. Tore up – what? Her stomach? Liver? A kidney?
A little voice reminds: It was always going to come down to this. You knew that, didn’t you? You kept coming at the beast. One day the beast would return the favor.
Then, a defiant voice: Not. Dead. Yet.
She slides a trembling hand into her pocket. Finds her tin of blue. Pops it: not much left but enough for now. She almost fumbles it, drops it on the bed but manages to cup her fingers into a little shovel and scoop out some Cerulean.
Nora presses powder to each temple. Blue flecks flaking onto the white pillow and bedsheets.
It washes over her, a tide of fire, hot like a habanero, then warm like whiskey.
Soon her breathing grows deeper. Fuller. The Blue won’t mend her – it’s strong enough for superficial wounds but not a gut-shot.
But it’ll keep her alive for a little while longer.
She stays like that for a while. Stilling her breath. Willing the wound to go numb. Trying to imagine how she’s going to escape. Trying not to think about her father. That last one: an impossibility. Her mind wanders to him. Is he dead? He must be. This moment, she thought it’d bring her happiness. To see the man who poisoned her life himself poisoned? But was that what she wanted? For her father to die?
It isn’t. She just wanted him to finally pay attention. That was all. All of this was to force him to see her. To see who she was, and who she’d become because of him.
And now he’s dead.
And she’ll be dead soon too if she can’t figure out what to do next.
I’m gonna die.
Again.
Skelly escaped the gobbo temple and thought that was the end of it. Now here she is, reminded of her own mortality once more. Death doesn’t stare her in the face so much as whip past her at what feels like a hundred miles-per-hour.
The quad barrels through downward-sloping Underworld tunnels. The quad bounds and growls. Tires bounce over hard rock, giving the whole vehicle a bounce and a lift where Skelly’s stomach feels like it leaves her body and gets left behind. Burnsy’s loving it. Hooting. Letting go of the handlebars and holding two blister-red fists up in the air. It’s then she remembers:
He was a stuntman.
I’m driving though hell on a four-wheeler with a formerly-living stuntman.
Once again her brain reiterates what she now feels is absolutely true:
I’m gonna die.
It’s not liberating, this feeling. Her life does not flash before her eyes. She is, in fact, married to the moment. Married to every scraggy rock that passes within inches of her skull, bound to every rough-rimmed pothole the quad drops into, fixed permanently with the air in her face and the bite of the goggles around her eyes and the skitter of roach-rats and cankerpedes as they flee before the coming four-wheeler.
Once upon a time, she fancied herself a tough bitch. Now she’s not so sure.
At least she isn’t pissing her pants. Small favors and all that.
The tunnel twists. It pulls hard right; tires grind on loose stone, spraying gravel against the wall like buckshot. Then a serpentine left – before curving right again.
Suddenly – whoosh – they’re out of a tunnel and into a wide-open cavern, a massive sepulchrous chamber with twisting salt columns that look like piles of melting soft serve peppered with ice crystals. The ceiling looks melty, too – colors like paint melting. But that’s not what truly draws her eye and lends this cavern a graveyard vibe.
The room is home to what must be hundreds of statues.
No. Not statues. Skeletons. Put back together. Rearticulated. Made to stand up. Hollow-eyed skulls tilted on bowed spines so they are forever staring down.
At first she thinks they’re children, but as soon as they pass one and she sees the deformation of the bones, the bulbous off-shape of the skull, she realizes:
These are goblin skeletons.
As if she were not afraid enough.
Burnsy must sense her fear – maybe in the way she grabs him tighter. He shouts back at her, “Goblin graveyard! Don’t worry! They fear their own dead – won’t come near the place!” The quad winds through the bone garden. Then he yells, “Hold on!”
They hit a skeleton. It bursts. Bones rattle around them. Something that might be a knucklebone pops off the front of her goggle.
She’s about to scream at Burnsy, but then he points–
“There! There!”
A flickering shape at the edge of the bone garden. Pale. Human. Walking forward, toward a tunnel. The shape blinks in and out of existence. Erratic and intermittent, a light switch flipped on, off, on, off by a mischievous child.
A ghost.
She’s never seen one. She knows they’re down here, but unless you’re looking for them, they tend to be invisible. Just foggy shapes at the periphery of one’s eye.
But they’re looking for this one, and so there he is.
Burnsy revs the engine, and the four-wheeler lurches ahead of the flickering specter. Then he cuts the brakes and spins the quad around as it stops. Skelly’s stomach, trailing behind, suddenly comes plunging back into her body. A wave of nausea mitigated by a spike in adrenalin damn near knocks her flat.
Burnsy kills the engine. All is silence. The ghost makes no sound as it moves toward them in a herky-jerky shuffle. It stares at nothing – the eyes are barely eyes at all, more like holes in an old tablecloth. The toothless mouth stretches open impossibly, the throat a black cave that keens with a faint moan that calls to mind a distant wind. The body is naked. The flesh pale, smooth like porcelain, the manhood a shriveled, crooked thing.
Burnsy hops off the quad. Skelly follows, her legs almost giving out.
He lifts the seat. From underneath he removes a flat metal shape – brass, ornate. He pulls up, and it pops into the shape of a hollow cube. Each piece looks delicate as a bird bone, all the little Byzantine brass bits tied together at junctions by fraying red thread. The corners of the box are little decorative skulls – human – with brass tacks for eyes.
“Soul cage,” Burnsy says, striding toward the ghost. He stops ten feet in front of it and waits, holding the cube up in his blood-blister hands.
Skelly moves to his side as the ghost continues inevitably toward them. She cannot repress a chill. Visions of death wash over her. She sees herself, dead by a hundred ways – hanging, burning, gunshot, drowning, plane crash even though she’s never been in a plane. She sees Lulu, her neck ripped open. Her own mother, dying in a hospital bed from emphysema – the gurgled whisper of a woman drowning in her own body.
Burnsy elbows her. The death visions break apart like old bread. “Getting near a ghost and staring it down does that to you,” he says, like he knows.
“Don’t know what you mean, jellybean,” she says, but even she hears the quaver in her voice.
“The soul is in the heart, in case you were wondering. That’s the core of us. Not what’s in our heads, but what’s felt in our hearts.” He holds the soul cage at chest level, and step-by-erratic-step, the ghost comes toward them. Burnsy doesn’t shove the cage at the specter but rather lets the specter walk up to the cage–
It disappears through th
e wraith’s chest.
The ghost freezes perfectly still – as if someone hit the pause button.
There’s an electric snap – the hard smell of ozone followed by a whiff of the grave.
The ghost’s mouth opens even wider. The eye sockets stretch and distort. Limbs stiffen and begin to elongate and then droop like wilting flower stems–
A scream rises from its mouth. This is the scream of a victim, a man about to be murdered, a woman watching her own child die, the sound not just of death but of great suffering and sorrow wedded together in one horrible howl.
Another electric snap.
And then the ghost is gone.
And the vision hits them like lightning.
Here, then, is Casimir Zoladski. He’s entering the Boss’s house. Keys on a hook. Jacket on a hanger. Upstairs. Calls, “Dziadzia? You here? Granddad? Haversham?” Shoes echoing in the hallway. Someone behind him: the Boss. His grandfather. The old man is without a scrap of clothing. His white shriveled body sags. Wisps of hair on his chest, arms, thighs. Pubic bush like a wire brush.
The old man coughs. Can’t help it. It’s the cancer.
Casimir spins. He has something he can’t help, either: he laughs.
The Boss’s cough subsides.
He stares at the boy with some commingling of hate and pity.
“You’re not ready for this, are you?” the Boss asks.
“Dziadzia. You…” Casimir fails to speak the obvious: “You’re naked.” Instead he shifts his tone to one of caution and uncertainty: “You’re supposed to be at a meeting with Haversham. Are you OK?”
“I’m OK.”
“I’ll call Haversham–”
“No, you won’t.”
Casimir looks at his watch. His thoughts, broadcast: I’m supposed to meet her. Images in his mind: a girl. Tartan skirt. Blue cardigan. Mean eyes and a wicked smile resolving into a softer, happier countenance. A name: Nora Pearl. He’s waiting for her. He loves her. Or thinks he does. Could be little hearts around his head like pink birds.
“Answer the question,” the kid’s grandfather says, sneering.
“What… what question?”
“You’re not ready for this. To take over.”
“N…no. I’m not.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“I know. It’s just–”
“You’re weak. I knew it all along. Your father was weak, too, but in a different way. He was weak in the mind. You’re weak in the heart. You don’t have the stones for this.”
“I don’t.”
“Then I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for–”
The Boss roars, leaps. Hands around the kid’s throat. Casimir backpedals. The Boss begins uttering something, some strange chant or prayer. It sounds like “Ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta,” and it gets louder and louder as he wrings the boy’s neck–
Casimir tries to turn, but falls–
The Boss is on him. Grabs his grandson’s head with preternatural strength. Smashes it forward. Just once. Once is enough to pulp the kid’s face like an orange shoved into the bell of a juicer. The young man’s body shakes violently. The Boss rides it out like a rodeo cowboy.
And then the body is still.
Blood pools.
The old man walks away. Returns with a brown paper bag.
The objects of ritual. A marigold in each hand. Broken iron chains in the pockets. A smear of chocolate on each fingertip. And then a splash from a bottle of mezcal poured on the blood pooling beneath his smashed-in face.
All the while, that chant–
ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
ugatha thra iss ashana ugatha vithra mell tanta
Then the Boss’s body tightens up as though in a seizure of his own. Fingers stiffening and splaying outward. Jaw creaking as it extends wide, wider, widest. Eyes rolling back.
The floor shudders. Dust falls from a light fixture.
A black shape rises from below. Swirls around him, a tornado of ink and shadow – tentacles, worms, fingers, whirling around and around–
Then entering his wide-open mouth. Squirming like snakes. His cheeks bulging. His abdomen distending like a starving child’s belly.
Thirty seconds of this. Then a minute. Then five.
The last of the shadows – a flicking tail – gulp down and are gone.
The Boss eyes go all black: an oil spill. Then clear again.
Brown irises are now crystalline blue.
The Boss makes a sound like: Guhhhhh.
Then: another whipcord of lightning. The world lights up. Goes dark.
Burnsy falls on his ass. Yelps as he does. Skelly’s already on the ground. Curled up in a ball. Holding her throat.
The soul cage glows. Faint light. Slow pulse. It makes a sound, too, a sound you can’t hear so much as feel. Like a television left on in the other room with the volume down, just a faint white-noise whine.
The ghost of Casimir Zoladski is gone. Trapped inside the cage.
“It’s… done,” he says. Then he shivers. He babbles, he can’t help it: “I do this all the time but – never gets easier. The death. How they die. They’re trapped in there. Replaying that moment. As they… march on. Restlessly shambling through the Shallows, through the Tangle, all the way toward… well, toward the end, I guess. Toward whatever waits in the Expanse.”
Skelly sits up. Stares at the soul cage vibrating.
“He killed his own grandson.”
“Yeah. Fuck.”
“Wh… why? What happened?”
“Some kind of summoning. I told Mookie that’s what it might be. But it ain’t in the kid. It’s in him. In the Boss. Bound in his… skin. Or maybe it’s wearing him like a fucking jumpsuit. I don’t know. But it’s something from the deep. From in the Tangle. Or maybe from all the way down.”
Now she’s really shivering. “You ever been… all the way down?”
“Into the Expanse? No way. I don’t know anybody from Daisypusher that has. I mean, I’ve heard the stories. I’ve even heard of maps you can buy that’ll take you there, but I figure they’re a load of unhappy horseshit. Not exactly a short trip, either. The Tangle is hundreds of miles long in every direction. Probably more. And frankly, I dunno why’d you wanna go. If this place really is home to a host of starving and insane subterranean gods, I can’t see the value in walking up to their front door and paying them a visit.” He waves it off, pulls out that blue mister bottle and spritzes himself with water. “Fuck it. We gotta go. Get this soul cage back to Mookie. Give him the ghost. Show him what we saw. You ready to ride?”
Skelly’s about to say something about, uh, hell no, she is not ready at all to hop atop the Vomit Comet again and would he please be so kind as to drive just a little more slowly so she doesn’t become a ghost herself, OK, thanks, daddy-o?
She doesn’t get those words out.
There’s movement at the far end of the room. And sound: a horrible, discordant sing-songy chant. Like a choir of oinking pigs and snarling wolves.
Gobbos. A dozen of them.
Carrying a pair of corpses.
The goblins don’t see them. Not yet. Too many salt pillars and skeletons are in the way, and they’re a hundred yards distant.
She ducks and hisses, “I thought you said they never come down here!”
“They don’t! But they still bring bodies from time to time. You kill any back at that temple?”
“I dunno. I think maybe.”
“That’s probably them. Nice work.” She’s not sure if he’s being sarcastic or sincere.
“We have to find another way. Go deeper to find another way.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” But he doesn’t move. He’s staring ahead. “See over there?” She follows his pointing finger, and sees two salt columns that have collapsed.
“Yeah, so?”
“Let’s roll.”
She gets
on, thinking he’s going to turn this thing around, head the same direction the ghost of Casimir Zoladski was heading.
That’s not what he does.
Burnsy starts the engine.
“Oh, no,” she says.
“Oh, yes,” he answers. Revving the engine. Grrrrrooom.Vrrrggrrrgrrroom.
“Oh, no no no no no hell no.”
“Oh, yes yes yes yes fuck yes.”
The quad leaps forward like a starving puma. Tires breaking goblin bones. The gobbos ahead see them. They begin to gibber and wail in alarm. Corpses drop. Weapons up. Rusty machetes and glinting shivs. One’s got a slingshot, with something squirming in the slingshot’s pocket. And still Burnsy heads right toward them.
Accelerating.
She figures out what he’s doing two seconds before he does it.
It’s too late–
He cuts the quad left, then right again–
Tires bounce up onto those collapsed salt columns.
Columns that, fallen, form a ramp.
Skelly screams.
The quad races up – and is suddenly airborne.
Gobbos watch from beneath. The slingshot lets loose, but whatever creature serves as ammunition rebounds off the four-wheeler’s undercarriage with a metal plunk.
The quad in flight, Skelly experiences an odd moment of bliss – an absurd sensation that all her life has led to this strange and singular moment. Ramping a jacked-up hell-quad over a dirge-singing pack of goblins with a burned-to-death stuntman at the wheel.
I’m flying, she thinks, half-giddy.
The tires hit ground. The flight is over. Her pelvis almost shoots up through her ribcage.
23
I asked Danny – Cerberus – how he does it, exactly. How does one navigate the Tangle as a living dead man? What is his secret? He explained it to me thusly: he can feel all the ghosts of the Great Below. Always. Together they form a sensation that exists at his margins, a psychic awareness that is hazy, non-specific, and ever-present. He can, with some concentration, explore this formless mass of spirit psyches like a man reaching into a murky pond to feel around in the mud for a snail, or a coin, or a lost key. He can see who they are, can even see through their eyes, and in this way can begin to put together a picture of the spectral movements through the Shallows and into the Tangle – and so, a map, an imperfect map, is formed. Of course, that ends once the ghosts reach the nadir of this place. Once they approach the Ravenous Expanse, he says, they disappear – like a candle flame snuffed beneath an overturned cup.
