Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Off from the foyer, two dark corridors disappeared into the depths of the temple. One was so narrow a man’s shoulders might brush the sides, making Nir wonder what size the worshippers of Ugghiutu had been, but the other was a wide hall with a vaulted ceiling. Down its length, on either side, it was flanked by a row of columns of that same purple stone. Each column was surmounted by a fluted capital, carved to look perhaps like coiled vines. The hall stretched off into utter blackness.

  Nir had heard every variation on the legends. Most agreed that the worshippers of Ugghiutu had performed sacrifices of both beasts and humans in this place, supposedly extinguishing entire tribes of primitive men and women. Others said these poor victims were not killed, but spirited away to that other plane where Ugghiutu himself made his home. There, the human men would become slaves, the women playthings. But sacrifice was the preferred version. And yet, the worst version of all held that the cultists of Ugghiutu still existed—that they had not died out centuries before, leaving the temple abandoned, but still dwelt in its deep recesses, keeping from the windows, venturing out only at night. Lying in wait for some foolish youth to come through the door when they were wont to leave it invitingly open.

  Nir looked out again at the storm. The rain was so heavy that he could not see the jutting rocks of the chasm through it. He heard hail clicking against the dome far above him. Thunder rumbled, as if from within the very depths of this building itself.

  He was no foolish youth, nor was he a brave warrior. But Nir was a man, curious and questioning. A little exploring he would do . . . just a peek into a room or two beyond this foyer. Not so much that he would become lost. Yes, he could remain here like the goats until the storm had passed, but he was not a goat. He was intrigued by this alien place, despite the myths, despite the flutter of his heart and the way his blood seemed to skitter through his veins. This place made his thoughts skitter through his brain. He had never in his life ventured off the Great Plateau, with its great flatness, its great sameness. What he saw here would sustain him for years to come, and his children when he fathered children; and his grandchildren after them would have a tale to listen to in wonder, a tale other than of tending goats day after day on the mind-numbing emptiness of the grasslands.

  The darkness at the end of the tunnel gave him pause, however. He turned and glanced up the ramp the one goat had half ascended. At its top, he saw a window letting in the dark light outside. It was enough light to make up his mind to take that direction, and Nir put his first step upon the ramp as timidly as if it were a tightrope across a ravine.

  He stole up higher, craning his neck to see into the second floor of the temple. If the cultists were still in existence, if indeed their method was to leave the door open to lure travelers, they might be hiding in that chamber even now, knives in hands, cowls over their heads, shading faces that might be human, or might not. But then, if they wanted him, they could just as easily burst in upon him in the foyer, couldn’t they? Overwhelm him before he had a chance to dash out into the rain? He tried to convince himself that it was of no more risk to continue up into that new chamber.

  Nir had his own dagger, and he held it before him as he padded to the top of the ramp.

  The oval window was to his right. It had no glass, and the rain made the floor a pool, hail clattering in. Nir shielded his face and rushed quickly past it. The chamber was lit weakly by another portal at its end, this one also letting in the storm. Other than that, the walls were empty. No tapestries, no paintings, no weapons on display or sculptures in alcoves. There were no furnishings. The place had been gutted, it would seem—abandoned at some distant time. But why?

  No cultists lurking. Encouraged, Nir pressed on stealthily past the second window and through a threshold into another room.

  This chamber was larger, and surprisingly well lit. The cause of that was a wonder all its own. The domed ceiling was a cap of crystal, thick and wavy, distorting the view of towering spires outside, the view further distorted by the rain flowing in heavy curtains down its sides. Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the room more brightly.

  Nir turned to touch the stone of the place for the first time. It was so smooth it was slippery, yet not as cool as he expected it to be. The purple was marbled with streaks and veins of white, subtle in most places but sometimes forming patterns like lace or great spiderwebs fossilized inside the rock. This circular room’s walls had odd nodules protruding from it at random, some small as nuts, others large as melons, and not carved separately and inserted into the walls, but carved from the walls themselves. In fact, Nir realized at last, he saw no seams in any of the walls where they might have been assembled from various pieces. Even the floor and ceiling merged smoothly into the walls without angles, without seams. As impossible as it was to contemplate, it would appear that the temple had been entirely carved out of one immense boulder of that strange purple stone—so alien a mineral that Nir wondered if it had fallen from the stars.

  He passed under the huge lens, gazing up through it and listening to the hail against it. Again, a threshold on the opposite side, and he stepped through it dagger first.

  Another ramp, this one spiraling upwards to a yet higher section, perhaps inside one of the shorter towers. Nir began to ascend. His knife inadvertently scraped against the wall as he advanced, and he flinched.

  The room when he came to it was long and seemed infinite; another hall extended into blackness, but with a ceiling so low Nir didn’t have to bow his head yet felt that he should. There were no cobwebs to worry about tangling in his hair, however. Perhaps even spiders whispered amongst themselves of Ugghiutu’s temple.

  Nir halfheartedly started down the hall. A little light came up the spiraling ramp behind him from the room with the lens, but the darkness ahead seemed more than his eyes could adjust to. Another few steps and he had decided it was best to turn back. But then something to his right bent his gaze there.

  It was a small pit in the floor, against the wall. Nir took one step closer to it and became paralyzed at the contents of that pit.

  Bones. Ribs curled like great fingers poised to clutch at him. Skulls grinning to mock his fearful, still fleshy expression. The half-crushed skull of some large animal, perhaps a cow. Bones picked so clean that their very color had been sucked away, from ivory to bleached white.

  Sacrifice, Nir’s mind hissed at him. Sacrifice . . .

  His gaze lifted. A bit beyond the pit was another; another beyond that; and yet another, to the left. These small pits, all filled with skeletons and skulls, stretched off at intervals on either side into seemingly limitless darkness.

  Yes, Nir decided, it was time to return to his goats. And perhaps the chasm could afford him enough shelter after all. If the goats wanted to remain here until the storm abated, let them. Stupid animals—what did they know?

  Nir turned to retrace his steps, and thunder grumbled behind him. It was a very near sound. It was thunder in this very room.

  And there was a clattering, but not of hail. Nir whirled around, brandishing his dagger before him, so puny a weapon that it might as well have been a feather.

  Even before he had fully spun about, he felt the floor shift beneath his feet.

  It was some ingenious trap, for the floor was sinking away, sinking below the level of the many pits, so that these began to spill their cargo of bones across the floor in the clatter he had heard. The floor began to disappear under the tide of bones. And yet, it did not sink consistently. Where once it had been flat and even, now it sank lower in some places and bulged higher in others even as Nir watched in frozen disbelief. It was as though the hard, solid stone had become some pliable clay. It still seemed solid as ever beneath his feet, but he did not want to remain to see how long that lasted. Again, Nir whirled and this time bolted, even as the tide of bones began to pour toward him.

  He nearly tripped plummeting down the spiraling ramp. A skull rolled past him, ahead of him down the ramp. Nir jumped off the side o
f the ramp, dropped the rest of the way, and tore into the chamber with the vast crystal dome.

  The hail had stopped. The rain was slowing, the storm passing as swiftly as it had come. Thank the Elder Gods! Nir dashed on, across the polished floor—this one, so far, still motionless. But the walls . . . if only the walls were motionless. Peripherally, not daring to look directly, Nir saw that those strange nodules distributed across the walls were moving about aimlessly, like kittens playing under a blanket. But he didn’t hesitate to examine the phenomenon, plunged on into the next room . . .

  . . . and was flying up into the air, his feet skidding out from beneath him. He fell painfully on a bed of hail and water. He had forgotten the two open windows in this chamber. In falling, he struck the back of his head sharply against the hard floor, and his knife went spinning out of his grip.

  He lay on his back, dazed, and felt the floor vibrating beneath him. The entire structure trembled subtly as if an earthquake had come. But worse still were the audible rumbles, the groans in the depths above him. Not of thunder. Spirits of cultists, perhaps—if there ever had been cultists dwelling within this place.

  Nir forced himself to his feet and staggered on, careful when he reached the second window. The rain had stopped altogether now, he saw, and the sun was even beginning to show as the black wall of clouds drifted on. Nir saw that the grass outside was carpeted in a gravel of hail and was about to stumble on when something else about the scene held him.

  It was the shadow of one of the temple’s spiraling towers, lying across the hail. As he watched, the spire’s shadow was coming apart, the twisted spiral untwisting, coming undone like the coils of a rope. The coils threw shadows, and the shadows writhed and undulated like great tentacles in the air.

  The room jolted. Again Nir nearly lost his footing. He gripped the edge of the window for support and saw the landscape shift outside. Slowly, it began to crawl past his eyes.

  The temple was moving—moving toward wherever it was it vanished to, when it could not be found.

  The realization was enough to shake Nir once more out of his paralysis. He hurried on and gratefully reached the head of the ramp in the foyer.

  He saw three things all at once, which whisked the blood from his veins, the breath from his lungs, and the hope from his heart.

  In the vaulted hallway branching off from the foyer, the fluted capitals atop the rows of columns had come alive, the coils uncoiling, wavering, a forest of hungry limbs. Worse still, the foyer itself was empty. The goats were all missing. Had they left the building or vanished forever inside it?

  That all depended on when the door had shut. Because it was shut. And even from here, Nir could see that it was useless trying to force it. Its edges had smoothly merged with its frame, leaving not a seam.

  He was trapped. His tales for children trapped here with his seed. Just his lucky goats, maybe, to sketch at least a bit of legend about him. The legend of another curious fool.

  But Nir heard a loud crunching behind him and realized what it was: the bed of hail, crushed beneath the temple as it dragged itself toward the plateau’s edge. The sound was clear through the open oval window.

  Nir whipped around and lunged back into the room where he had fallen. The near window was almost entirely sealed as the door had sealed, but the far window was just beginning to grow smaller. Nir got to it as quickly as he could without slipping in the two pools of water. It was half closed now, but left him enough room to squeeze through, head first. There was no time for grace. He hung from one hand to right himself, and the window was about to close around his hand when he let go and dropped down the outside wall of the temple.

  He hit the bed of icy gravel, rolled onto his side, and behind him heard a monstrous, deafening avalanche of sound as the Temple of Ugghiutu plunged over the rim of the Great Plateau.

  But when Nir rose to his feet and followed the broad, deep path to the edge, he saw nothing but jagged rock below.

  *

  Only one of Nir’s goats was found to have escaped before the temple’s door sealed up. He kept it as his pet and closest friend. They had much in common. Both were legends for having been the only survivors, of their respective species, of those who had seen inside that forbidden structure.

  And their experiences were not doubted. The gray fur of the goat had been bleached white as surely as Nir’s hair had changed white from black.

  Much mystery remained for the grim sermons of the priests, for the bedside story and fireside tale. But now, at least, one thing had been made clear about the Temple of Ugghiutu, thanks to the herdsman Nir. And that was this: there never had been a Temple of Ugghiutu.

  There had only been . . . Ugghiutu.

  Drawing No. 8

  1

  Maxim Komaroff only half remembered the dream, but its overall effect had been so profound that when he woke, he poured himself a cup of coffee and set to work sketching out what he remembered of it, perhaps in an effort to call more of the details to his waking mind.

  In this dream he had been standing in a spacious room with a polished black floor and a single circular wall surrounding him, like the inside of a dome, also black and smooth as onyx. From the high concave ceiling, four young girls were hanging upside-down by their ankles. The cords that bound their ankles were smooth and black as well, more like rubbery tendrils than any kind of rope, and seemed to grow from the ceiling of stone itself.

  All Maxim had for a studio was the living room of his small flat, in an apartment block in the colony-city known as Punktown, on the planet called Oasis. Seated at his drawing table, wearing only the boxers he’d slept in, Maxim portrayed in deft pencil strokes the four hanging girls as ballet dancers. He made them fresh young teenagers, virgins he felt, on the brink of womanhood. He couldn’t remember them precisely from the dream, but somehow he had known they were dancers of some sort, though he couldn’t recollect their costumes. Following his muse, or whatever other name he might ascribe to his artistic instincts, he pictured these four girls as wearing black leotards that left their slender arms and legs exposed, lacy black tulle skirts, and black ballet slippers. Their arms hung down limply, their fingertips just falling short of grazing the black floor. The skin of their limbs was not just pale, but ash gray.

  If their fingertips fell short of touching the floor, their hair was so long it did reach that far. The hair of all four of the dancers was such a pure flat black that it ate the light like a black hole in space and didn’t even shimmer, hanging so thickly it hid the girls’ faces. But their slim necks were bared, and each throat gaped horribly where it had been slashed to the bone, half decapitating them.

  The blood had run down into their hair, soaking it. Somehow the blood was black, not red.

  In the dream, Maxim had been holding a long tube of rolled-up paper under his arm like a lance. He knelt down onto the floor below the quartet of dangling girls and unrolled the paper. It proved to be a large white disk. He stood again, approached one of the pretty corpses, and took her by the waist. Then, looking down at the disk, he moved the girl as she hung there like a pendulum.

  Her soaked hair was a giant brush. It left swathes of black blood on the white paper.

  After a time Maxim had moved on to the next dead girl and taken her slim waist in his hands as a male ballet partner might, to swing her carefully also and thus render another portion of the drawing that was forming on the circle of white paper.

  On he went, from girl to girl, cautiously tiptoeing around the perimeter of the image so as not to tread on it.

  Maxim left himself out of his pencil drawing, preferring to keep himself at a remove. After all, in the dream he had seen all this through the first-person perspective. But it wasn’t just that. Though he found the vision of the suspended dancers itself compelling, he was uncomfortable with the memory of how he himself had manipulated the bodies in the dream. Funny, though . . . he didn’t have the sense that he was the one who had cut the girls’ throats. Still, by
painting with their blood he was surely an accomplice to that inexplicable crime.

  On his pad, though, Maxim did depict the same image that had finally taken shape on the circular sheet of paper in his nightmare.

  The image was a round symbol resembling a black sun ringed by a corona of wavy tentacles, with a white spiral like a single hypnotic eye at its center.

  2

  Later that same day, Maxim’s potential client—a Kalian man—asked him if he were familiar with the Alfreda Cubillos-Garavito Museum.

  As an artist, Maxim was of course familiar with it, as he was with all the major museums in Punktown, and the many smaller and more obscure galleries throughout the city besides. In fact, if he had to choose, the Garavito Museum might be his favorite. Whereas a museum like the Hill Way Galleries neatly segregated its collection into categories based on time periods, distinct art movements, and types of media, and most especially the cornucopia of sentient races that had settled in this sprawling megalopolis, the Garavito Museum took a less orthodox approach.

  Situated on the city’s affluent Beaumonde Street, the museum had originally been the personal residence of powerful industrialist Rafael Garavito and his wife, Alfreda Cubillos-Garavito. To please his famously beautiful wife, formerly a fashion model, Rafael had filled their unusual home with art treasures from all across the worlds of the Colonial Network, and then some. After his death, his wife had relocated from Oasis to Earth, opening their former home to the public as a museum. This was why the pieces of artwork were distributed throughout the museum in such a seemingly disorganized, yet aesthetically appealing, way. Even the building’s lavish furnishings were as they had been during the occupancy of the Garavitos. Maxim figured the widowed Alfreda, probably in her seventies now, was living in a house every bit as impressive on Earth.