Don't Go Alone

by Christopher Golden

  “You must understand that they are no different from us.”

  “What?” Yelagin said, shaking her head in confusion. “They’re nothing but different from us.”

  Vasily did not so much as glance at her. He focused on Demidov. “There's beauty here. A whole world of wonder. When the shaft opened above them, they went up to explore, just as we came down. They're studying us, beginning to learn about our world. Already they have touched us deeply. Amanda suffered a terrible injury and they have repaired her, strengthened her.”

  Things moved beneath the skin of Hart’s neck, and something twitched under her scalp, her hair waving on its own. Demidov stared at Vasily, gorge rising in her throat, hoping she would not see the thing she feared more than anything. Was that his cheek bulging, just a bit? Where his temple pulsed, was that merely blood rushing through a vein or did something else stretch his skin?

  “Who's speaking now?” she asked.

  Vasily frowned. “Anna, my love, you must listen. There's so much we can learn.”

  She could not find her voice, and did not dare ask who Vasily meant by we.

  “Dr. Glazkov,” Yelagin said, shifting nervously as the small tumblers skittered above her head. “Whatever there is to learn, we'll find time for that. But some of our team has died and I don’t see Professor Brune with you. Captain Demidov and I should report in. You know this. Can you get us to the surface? Whatever these things are, whatever you’ve discovered, our superiors will want to know. We need to—“

  “Stop, Kristina,” Demidov said.

  Yelagin flinched, staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.

  “This isn’t Vasily talking," Demidov said. "Not anymore.”

  Vasily smiled. Tiny tendrils emerged from the corners of his mouth, like cracks across his lips. “The truth is the truth, regardless of who speaks it.”

  Demidov raised her knife.

  They swept over her.

  Yelagin screamed and they both fought, but there were simply too many of the creatures, binding them, twisting them like puppets.

  Dragging them down, deeper than ever before.

  

  It made her think of what drowning must be like. Tendrils gripped and caressed her, surging forward, one creature passing her to another like the ebb and flow of ocean currents. Sometimes tendrils covered her eyes and other times she could see, but the eerie phosphorescence of their limbs—so bright and so near—cast the subterranean labyrinth into deeper shadow. It was difficult to make out anything but crenellations in the wall or the silhouettes of Vasily and Hart. The sea of tumblers brought her up on a wave and then dragged her under again, carrying her onward. Demidov caught a glimpse of Yelagin, and felt some measure of relief knowing that whatever might happen now, they were together.

  She tried not to think about Vasily, tried to just focus on her own beating heart and the desperate gasping of her lungs. Had it been Vasily speaking, lit up with the epiphanies of discovery? Or had these things been masquerading as her man, recruiting for their cause, attempting to find the proper mouthpiece through which to communicate with the hostiles they’d encounter above ground?

  The image of the things twisting beneath the skin of Hart’s face made her want to scream. Only her focus on surviving gave her the strength to remain silent. Every moment she still lived was another moment in which she might figure out how to stay alive.

  The ocean of tumblers surged in one last wave, dumped her on an uneven stone floor, and withdrew. She blinked, trying to get her bearings. Glancing upward, she saw that they had brought her to the bottom of the original vast sinkhole. Demidov stared up the shaft, the gray daylight a small circle far overhead, just as beautiful and unreachable as the full moon on a winter’s night.

  Not unreachable, she told herself. You could climb it if you had to.

  But she’d never make it. For fifty feet in every direction, the glowing tumblers shifted and churned, rolling on top of one another, piled as high as her shoulders. Demidov didn’t know what they wanted of her, but she had no doubt she was their prisoner. The tumblers parted to allow Vasily and Hart to approach her once more.

  “Anna,” Vasily began. “They need an emissary. There is so much—“

  “Where's Kristina?” Demidov demanded. “Private Yelagin. Where is she?”

  With a ripple, the ocean of tumblers disgorged Yelagin onto the ground beside Demidov, choking and spitting, tears staining her face. Demidov took her arm, helping her to stand. In the weird phosphorescence, she looked like a ghost.

  Yelagin whipped around to face her, madness in her eyes. “I saw Budanov! He’s down here with us!”

  “Budanov is dead.”

  “No!” Yelagin shook her head. “I swear to you, I saw him clearly, just a few feet away.” She swept her arm toward the mass of writhing tumblers. “He’s in there somewhere. They’ve got him!”

  Demidov stared at Vasily, or whatever sentience spoke through him. “Give him to me.”

  Vasily and Hart exchanged a silent look. Things shifted beneath Hart’s skin, bulging from her left cheek. A tiny bunch of tendrils sprouted from her ear for a moment, before drawing back in like the legs of a hermit crab.

  “He is injured,” Vasily said. “They can help him. Heal him.”

  Demidov heard the hesitation in his voice, the momentary lag between thought and speech, and she knew this wasn’t Vasily speaking. Not really. Not by choice.

  “Give him to me,” she demanded, “and I’ll carry your message to the surface.”

  The things pulling Hart’s strings used her face to smile.

  Vasily nodded once and the mass of tumblers churned. Like some hideous birth, Budanov spilled from their pulsing mass. One of his arms had been shattered and twisted behind him at an impossible angle. Broken bone jutted from his lower leg, torn right through the fabric of his uniform. His face had been bloodied and gashed, but it was his eyes that drew Demidov’s focus. The fear in those eyes.

  “Private—“ she began.

  “No, listen!” Budanov said, lying on the stone floor, full of madness and lunatic desperation as he glared up at Demidov and Yelagin. “There’s an airstrike coming! Any minute now…Fuck, any second now! They’re going to—“

  Demidov stared up at that pale circle so high above.

  She could hear them now, the MiGs arriving, the familiar moaning whistle of their approach. They had seconds. A terrible sadness gripped her, a sorrow she had never known. She looked at Vasily, feeling a hole opening up inside her where the rest of their lives ought to have been. He gazed back at her, mirroring her grief. Then she saw the twitch beneath her right eye.

  “All the things we could have taught them,” he said, and she wasn't sure whether it was her Vasily talking about them, or them talking about everyone else.

  The scream of bombs falling. The roar of an explosion high above—a miss. A shower of rock cracking off the walls of the shaft.

  The sea of tumblers closed around Demidov and she shouted, reaching for Yelagin. They covered her, lifted her, hurtled her along as the MiGs roared and she felt the first explosion, the impact, the flash of searing heat as the tumblers rocketed her into their tunnels. They burned, and her skin burned along with them, and then she felt nothing at all.

  

  Just a pinch, at first. That’s all it was.

  Then a scrape.

  Demidov flinched, surprised that she was still alive, but in pain. Searing pain, scraping pain that made her moan and wince and whisper to God, in whom she had never believed.

  Her eyes fluttered open and for a moment all the pain faded, just a little. The city around her—city was the only word—could not have been real, and yet she was certain it was no dream. For a moment she let her head loll from side to side, gazing at the beauty and wonder of its whorls and curves and waves, and the strange spires that looked more like trees, towering things whose trunks and branches were hung with thousands of tendriled creatures, all glowing with that pale, gho
stly light. She and Yelagin had glimpsed it from far above, but now she was here in the midst of it. She was in their home.

  Another scrape and the pain roared back in.

  Groaning, Demidov looked down and saw them on her naked skin, a hundred of the tiny things, their tendrils caressing and scrubbing her raw, burned flesh.

  “No!” she cried, trying to shake them off and then whimpering with the agony of movement, lying still as her thoughts caught fire with the horror of their touch.

  She remembered the bombing, the blast that scoured the tunnel even as they rushed her away.

  “They saved your life,” a voice said.

  Demidov recognized the voice without turning toward him. She steeled herself, because she knew that when she let herself see Vasily it would look like him, but it wouldn’t be him. He surprised her by not speaking again.

  Swallowing hard, feeling the gently painful ministrations of the tumblers, she looked to her right and saw him standing nearby, watching over her. They clung to his clothes and skin and hair. When he spoke again, she might have glimpsed one inside his mouth, but it might have been a trick of the light.

  “Yelagin?” she asked. “Budanov?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Demidov sighed, squeezing her eyes shut. “Why save me?”

  Vasily’s reply came from just beside her. “I told you. They need an emissary.”

  She opened her eyes and he was right there, kneeling by her head, studying her with kindly, almost parental concern.

  “There are other shafts. Other holes. They’ve been opening up all over this area. Some will be destroyed, as this one was. But not all.”

  Her burnt skin throbbed, but she could feel that the stroking of those tendrils had begun to soothe her.

  Demidov exhaled. “Vasily…”

  He ignored her, forging ahead. “They'll share some of their gifts with you,” he said. “Teach you wonderful things, including how it is possible for them to heal the damage to your flesh—“

  “Vasily?”

  “—and then you will carry their message to the surface.”

  “Vasily!”

  Blinking as if coming awake, he looked at her. Vasily had stubble on his face and his dark hair was an unruly mess, just as it always had been. For that moment, he looked so much like himself.

  “What is it, Anna?” he asked, eyes narrowing, as if daring her to ask the question.

  She almost didn’t. Just getting the words out cost her everything.

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  Vasily did not look away, but neither did he give her an answer. Several seconds passed before he continued to describe the mission the tumblers intended for her to undertake.

  Demidov tasted the salt of her tears as they slid down her scorched cheeks and touched her lips. She hung her head, Vasily's words turning into nothing but a low drone.

  Her right arm had not been burnt. That was something, at least. She stared at the smooth, unmarked flesh.

  A shape moved beneath her skin.

  MECHANISMS

  by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola

  On that particular October morning—a lovely fall day, a Wednesday—the autumn light fell across the rooftops of Oxford with a hint of gold sufficient to transform the view from mundane to wondrous. Colin Radford, a young man of serious scholarship, found himself so taken by the panorama visible from the classroom window that he had difficulty following the threads of Professor Sidgwick’s lecture on Suetonius. This was especially troubling when Colin considered that the biographies which comprised the Roman Historian’s De Vita Caesarum had been amongst the most compelling reading that the young man had encountered in his time at Oxford, second only to the comedic plays of Aristophanes.

  Colin Radford adored university—all the thinking, the constant discourse over questions of philosophy, scholarship, and theology. At times, he felt as though he had been waiting all his life to escape dreary Norwich, with its forbidding cathedral and the chill wind that swept across the Channel all the way from the Russian Steppes. He had found in Oxford a truer home, where men put their minds to work upon the mechanisms of intellect. There were kindred spirits here, competitive though they might be.

  So, for Colin to allow his mind to wander required a vista of unparalleled beauty. And yet on certain mornings, Oxford glistened in such a way as to have earned the lyrical nickname that romantics had bestowed upon it.

  The City of Dreaming Spires, they called it.

  Had he known on that morning that he would never see it again, Colin would have been filled with such grief as to make him weep. And yet there was much more grief to come.

  

  A Mods student named Chisholm hurried into the room the moment the lecture concluded, earning a disapproving glare from Professor Sidgwick, even as he handed a folded sheet of cream parchment to the bespectacled old man. Colin watched Sidgwick dismiss the lad with a sniff and then glance at the note, which could only have come from the Headmaster’s office. Somehow, even before it happened, he knew what would come next. Sidgwick lifted his gaze, glanced around the room, and they locked eyes.

  “Mr. Radford, come here, if you please.”

  Colin felt a strange heat prickle his face. He did not fear Sidgwick the way he knew some others did, though if he thought the professor had caught him drifting during the lecture he might have done well to be afraid of his wrath. Yet the look on the old man’s face, the way he stroked his pointed beard, and the almost militaristic manner in which he held that crisp letter still half-raised in his right hand made the young scholar cringe.

  “Yes, sir,” Colin said, and as the other students departed, he made for the lectern.

  Sidgwick looked at him over the top of his spectacles. “You’re from Norwich, lad? I’d never have thought it.”

  The significance of this—whether it contained compliment or insult—escaped Colin, so he did not reply.

  “Instructions from the Headmaster,” Sidgwick said, proffering the note in his right hand, fingers bent as if in a claw, half-crushing the parchment. “You’re to return home at once. You’ve a train leaving in less than two hours, so you’d best be on your way.”

  Poison twisted in Colin’s gut. Expelled? How could it be? He’d done nothing.

  “But, sir—” he began.

  Sidgwick must have read his reaction in his face, for the old man instantly waved a hand in the air as though to erase such thoughts.

  “It’s not expulsion, boy. You’ve been summoned.”

  Reluctantly—as if by not doing so he might avert his fate—Colin took the note.

  “But why?” he asked as he unfolded it and began to read.

  Sidgwick did not wait for him to discover it on his own. “It appears,” the professor said, “that your father has disappeared.”

  

  The Radford ancestral home rested on a hill in the city of Norwich, on the eastern coast of England. The 17th century manse neither perched nor loomed upon its hill, and though there were many trees on the sprawling grounds, neither could it rightly be said to nestle there. Even to say the old house ‘stood’ on that slope, with its distant view of the blue-gray waters of the English Channel, would have been a kindness. No, Colin had always thought of the house as resting there, after more than two hundred years providing hearth and shelter for the Radford family, its halls echoing with the shouts and laughter of Radford children.

  Now, as the carriage which had awaited him at the train station climbed the long drive up to the front door, Colin stared at the house and considered another interpretation for his insistence upon the lazy imagery that accompanied the house’s personification in his mind. Absent his father’s inhabitance, the house seemed a body without its soul, a still husk of a thing, awaiting burial. Whether his own arrival might breathe some new life into the stones and beams of the place he quite doubted, as he had no intention of remaining forever, or even for very long, once his father’s whereabouts had been asc
ertained.

  For all the golden, autumnal beauty he had cherished in Oxford, here in Norwich there was only gray. The sky, the stones, the prematurely bare trees, the pallor of its citizens, and the wind-chopped water of the Channel, all gray.

  The carriage came to a halt and it was not until he had climbed down and retrieved his single case that he realized he had taken for granted the comfort afforded him by the familiar clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the road and the rattle of the conveyance itself. Without it, here on the hill, the only sound remaining was the wind, which, when it gusted through the hollows and eaves of the old house, moaned with the grief of a forlorn spirit or a heartbroken widow.

  Fortunately, Colin Radford did not believe in ghosts. Prior to university, he had lived all of his life in this house and he knew it as a lonely place, but not haunted.

  Still, he hesitated as the carriage driver snapped his reins and the carriage began to roll away. The sound that had been a comfort receded, and soon, not even its promise would remain and the wind would rule. Better to be inside. The timbers and stones still moaned, but sorrowful as they were—gray sounds in a gray house in a gray city—they were familiar sounds.

  As he started toward the door, it swung inward. Colin looked up, expecting Filgate or one of the other servants, but the silhouette that greeted him—stepping forward, bent and defeated—belonged to the nearest thing the estate did have to a ghost: his grandmother, Abigail.

  “Took your time about it, didn’t you?” she said.

  Trouble on the rails had delayed his arrival in London until after the last train had left for Norwich for the day, so he had been forced to spend the night in the capital and board the rescheduled train this morning. But the old woman’s disapproving tone and baleful gaze discouraged any explanation. Let her think what she wished.

  “I came as quickly as possible,” he said, carrying his case into the foyer, where he set it down as Grandmother Abigail closed the door.