by Scott Hale
“Hundreds,” Aeson whispered.
“And those that didn’t die are lost to us, in the thralls of the Void,” Faolan said.
“We are nearing extinction.” Anguis stepped up to the center of the lair and cast his beaming gaze upon Gisela. “We cannot reproduce. Those that we did create with the Blue Worm have been killed or made insane. We cannot live a long life. Those that do become as Gisela. Our time has always been limited. And now it has run out.”
Vrana clicked her claws on the ground. “You’re going to kill everyone because… we’re dying out?”
Anguis laughed, said, “We are going to kill everyone because it is the kind thing to do.”
Vrana started forward, screaming, “How can you even do something like this?”
Aeson looked at Faolan and Nuctea and nodded. Together, they reached to their stomachs and, with no effort at all, tore away the skin there. Except it wasn’t skin. It was a porous material, like a sponge, and behind it, inorganic organs were lodged, pumping clear liquids into the tubing running out of them.
“Without a tongue, one can speak freely, I imagine,” Nuctea said.
“Without a mind, one can think freely, I imagine,” Faolan said.
“Without a soul, one can be free, I imagine,” Anguis said.
“Homunculi.” The words were barely words as they escaped Vrana’s beak. “You’re… you’re homunculi.”
“Every elder that obeys tradition is,” Anguis said. “We can do what you cannot. We are what you and they were supposed to be.”
“So close,” Nuctea said.
“I could almost touch it,” Faolan said.
The lair was beginning to fill with pressure. Behind the stones that surrounded them, they could hear something surging; a great swell in search of release.
“We need to get out of here,” Vrana said.
“Not yet.” Aeson threw the book at Anguis, but missed. “What the fuck is going on? Why did you give me this? Tell me!”
“The Night Terrors were not meant to survive,” Anguis said, placing his fake skin back into his stomach. “They were experiments; man-made creations. They were created by Frederick Ødegaard, his wife, and their team in an attempt to perfect humanity. We were supposed to have all of the humans’ best qualities, and none of their weaknesses. We were to be the paragons by which the human race would follow, for it had stagnated in a pool of its own selfishness and greed.
“Then the Vermillion God woke, and the humans rejected It and drove It back into Its slumber. It unleashed Its last teaching, the Trauma, upon the world. In that waking nightmare, the humans were reduced from billions to thousands and made Corrupted. The natural gave way to the supernatural. Though the Night Terrors’ numbers were few, we flourished, and picked up the punishment of the Corrupted their God had left for them.”
The ceiling split into hundreds of cracks. A large chunk of stone broke free and crashed into the ground, narrowly missing Nuctea. Despite almost dying, she didn’t seem to care.
Anguis had to shout, because Kistvaen was tearing itself apart. “We were meant to be better, and so we created a culture around being better. The humans had created the Trauma, the ultimate example of their inferiority and need for guidance. Over time, thinking this, it became easy to convince ourselves we were necessary.”
Faolan shouted over the rumbling, “Sounds nice, doesn’t it?”
Nuctea joined Anguis. “If you tell yourself something long enough, you begin to believe it. But you cannot wash off the blood of before.”
Anguis took off his snake mask and dropped it to the ground. It broke upon impact, and sent shards into the pentacle’s trenches.
Vrana took Aeson’s hand, gently, not violently, and said, “We need to leave right—”
“What else kills humans? What else wears flesh and bones?” Anguis asked through a toothy grin.
The sounds of Kistvaen’s forthcoming eruption died away. Aeson stopped feeling the mountain tearing itself apart. He stopped seeing the lair, and the elders, and Gisela, and Vrana within it. His mind’s eye closed, and when it opened again, he saw her, it, clad in flesh, armed with bone, dragging its dripping sex across the folds of his brain.
Vrana answered for him. “Flesh fiends,” she said, dropping Aeson’s hand. “We’re flesh fiends.”
“The flesh fiends were not meant to survive,” Anguis said, steadying himself. “They were created by Frederick Ødegaard, his wife, and their team in an attempt to perfect humanity. We were supposed to have all of the humans’ best qualities, but the experiment was a failure. We acquired only the worst that humanity had to offer. Hunger, lust, greed, selfishness, self-righteousness; unbridled, unrelenting violence. We were deformed, deranged. We bred quickly, and our lifespans were even quicker. Ødegaard tried to teach us, to control us, but we were unreachable. The need to kill and defile was too great.
“Those flesh fiends that had not escaped into the Old World were ordered to be terminated. Then the Vermillion God woke. In the chaos that followed, and the Trauma that twisted this world, the flesh fiends thrived. We murdered and raped our way across the continents, and because we often killed at night, the humans began calling us Night Terrors, instead.”
The farthest wall in the lair caved-in. Steam and fire exploded through the fissure.
Aeson couldn’t move. And neither would Vrana.
“The Trauma was long, and our evolution faster than most,” Anguis said. “During the Trauma, some flesh fiends began to develop small communities. They began to control their urges. Slowly, over time, the need to kill became controlled, and the flaws of the original fiends were bred out. The longer we lived, the more civilized we became.”
“When they say… our ancestors used to be much more blood-thirsty…” Aeson mumbled.
“They meant it literally,” Nuctea said.
“Even now, we’re not all that different,” Faolan said. “We’ve just built a society around it and justified it.”
“Flesh makes fiends of us all,” Anguis said. “And we are fiends in this flesh. We became civilized, but the more we aged, the greater the likelihood those uncontrollably violent tendencies would emerge.”
“Like Gisela,” Vrana whispered.
“We had endured the apocalypse and our own biology. We went to the Dead City in search of answers and came back infected, and the plague of infertility spread through the villages. We could not live long, nor could we breed. We tried in Eld and Lacuna to repopulate our ranks, but it was never enough. We were not meant to survive, and it was not until now that we truly realized it.
“Caldera was built under Kistvaen because our predecessors knew that a day would come when we would need to be destroyed. Now, not only do we need to be destroyed, but so, too, does the rest of the world.
“The Vermillion God is waking. The Disciples of the Deep are gaining ground, while the Holy Order of Penance is sacrificing its people by the thousands to regain their monopoly on the religion of the world. The Disciples will win, once the swell of belief is too great for the God to ignore. It will wake and It will ensnare this world in Its vermillion grip. There will not be another Trauma. The Corrupted will yield. And there is nothing we can do about it. More than half of our people died in Angheuawl, or on the roads. Penance has taken Rime. Lacuna is gone. We will die out, and so, too, will the world. This world has been dying as long as it has been living. It will be better this way.”
Another piece of stone broke free from the walls. Falling, it crushed Nuctea where she stood.
“Goddamn it,” Vrana cried. “Aeson, fuck this. Let’s go.”
“Who are you?!” Aeson yelled.
Faolan went to the center where Gisela lay. The cannibal crone awoke immediately and started tearing her apart.
“How… how can you do this?” Aeson said.
“We are homunculi. We were born and raised in the mokita machines of Ødegaard’s hospital. Vrana has seen them. The glass tubes filled with strange liquids in the hidd
en labs.
“We were the prototypes for the flesh fiends that followed. But we are without flesh. We are the teachers. We are the ones who make the decisions even the cruelest of beasts cannot. When the flesh fiends showed they could be more than instinct, we were the ones to give them purpose. Animal skulls instead of human skulls. Controlled killing rather than senseless killing. The entitlement never went away. We were always better, but it was okay, because no one said it was not.
“The scales are not balanced, you see—”
Gisela let out a gleeful scream as she plunged her hands down Faolan’s throat, tearing her mouth agape.
“—but soon they will be.”
“Aeson,” Vrana growled, “please.”
“There’s nothing you can do anymore,” Anguis said, going to Gisela and kneeling beside her, waiting to be dined upon. “The mass of the eruption will ruin this world. The ash will be enough to choke out all life. God will not claim this planet, and humanity will finally find perfection, in the calmness of the Abyss.
“Go, now, Aeson, with Vrana. Adelyn is looking for her, and I should like the two to be reunited, as we all will be, soon enough, in flames.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Skeleton lifted R’lyeh’s dead body and laid it over Camazotz’s back. The bat twisted its head to have a look at its corpse cargo. Its eyes, small in comparison to its bulky head, sized the girl up. The Orphanage had a niche when it came to down-and-out kids who’d been cast aside. Was that sadness in those black orbs, or inky indifference?
Camazotz opened its mouth and bared its nearly toothless mouth. The Skeleton took the fang he’d used to call it here and wedged it back into the bat’s mouth. It squeaked, pleased, and in return, left a drop of its blood upon his digits. Its blessing, its boon; a one-way ticket to immortality.
“Appreciate it,” the Skeleton said. He wiped the blood on Camazotz’s horned nose. “Little one’s lived long enough.”
The bat stared blankly at the Skeleton, its fetid, blood-fouled breath coloring the snow that fell around it. Camazotz didn’t understand why he wouldn’t save her. Truth be told, neither did he. He didn’t understand much these days. The farther the Black Hour’s growth spread across his body, the harder it became to make sense of his thoughts and whether or not they were his, or its. Every suggestion that seeped into his skull could’ve been of sinister intent. Herbert and Hex had called him paranoid. They weren’t wrong about that.
Before mounting Camazotz, the Skeleton brushed R’lyeh’s hair aside. Death never made anything pretty. The girl didn’t wear It well. She was a slimy thing, with blotched cheeks and torn up lips. Fragile, too, like she might break if he didn’t handle her with care. He kept wanting to call her Vale—the baby girl he’d lost—but that wouldn’t be fair to her. She wasn’t his. They weren’t the same.
You let her die, because you wish someone had let you die when you were young.
“That was years ago,” the Skeleton said to the heart. “R’lyeh got dealt a raw deal. Worse than my own.”
You could not save her. How will you save Clementine and Will again?
“They don’t need saving. They just need to be rid of me, ‘til I’m right.”
Camazotz glanced back, confused.
You will never be right. You cannot even remember why you abandoned them to Hex and that Cult.
“To get the weapons…”
That is not what you told R’lyeh.
“The shepherds are tracking me, not them.”
You do not believe that.
“I don’t trust myself around them, alright?” The Skeleton pulled the cloak closed, as if that would silence chaos. “I get suspicious.”
We know.
“Get to thinking I brought them back to a worse kind of hell.”
You did.
The Skeleton scoffed and mounted Camazotz’s back. He tightened his legs around the bat’s body the best that he could, and held onto R’lyeh for dear, albeit fabled, life.
“You know what… Shut up. Heard enough.”
You are not sad she is dead.
The Skeleton ignored the Black Hour’s attempts to get him good and pissed. He didn’t have any skin, so it was easy to get under. With R’lyeh dead, he could offer her the kindness of touch he couldn’t before. His hand pressed against her cheek; a firm grip, his bones encaging hers; a hug, which, leaning over, he gave her.
He was sad for the girl, though he couldn’t show it as much as he would’ve liked. That part of him had gotten worse; however, when it came to emotional intelligence, he was, admittedly, dumber than a box of rocks. Might’ve been the moment when he was R’lyeh’s age, and he killed his abusive mother for killing his abusive father. A thing like that would change a person. He went to the local pimp, Poe, for him to make it better, but instead he rubbed that blood in, deep, and blood became the feeling he felt on most occasions, if such a thing were possible.
Yeah, he was sad for R’lyeh, but Death had come many times for the girl before. The Skeleton, of all people, knew that if you refused Death enough, Death may not come back. Things without an end eventually lost their meaning. He’d lost his end; thought it would’ve been Clementine and Will, but Hex knew the horror he’d become and made no bones about sharing it with them. Maybe he’d made them horrors—Clementine and Will—to make it easier on himself. Or maybe he just wanted to save them again. The dead were known to dance in loops. They laid claim to routine, like Gary had with the graveyard.
The Skeleton was dead, not immortal. There was a difference. If he’d seen it sooner, he wouldn’t be here, in the Dead City, with another dead body before him. He’d be amongst the living, learning how to live again.
“Son of a bitch,” the Skeleton said. He was a few traumas shy of psychosis, he knew that, but damn, he should’ve realized this sooner. “I’m a moron.”
Camazotz huffed in agreement. It stretched its wings and arched its back and waited for the Skeleton’s command.
It is the flesh that fools you.
The purity of bone, the Skeleton thought, touching his chest.
Flesh holds all the secrets. With bone, everything is laid bare. If Clementine and Will did not have their flesh, you would know the truth of their souls.
“I am not going to flay the falsehoods from their bodies.”
Fancy talk. You sound like us.
“Always whispering in my ear.” The Skeleton corrected his speech. “Can’t be helped. Come on, Cammie, let’s get.”
Camazotz reared back and began beating its mangy wings, creating a blinding wall of snow. Clinging tightly with his legs, the Skeleton leaned forward and pulled R’lyeh’s body against his, until her head was lodged underneath his ribcage. He pressed his palm over the Red Worm’s stone, making sure that it wouldn’t slip off her body. She’d earned it, and he planned on burying it with her in Alluvia. He’d never been to a Night Terror village before. Shame there wouldn’t be anyone there to greet him, to give him the chance to talk-up R’lyeh and all she’d done. Dreams of being a librarian never really came to fruition for the Octopus, but being a badass? Never broke a sweat trying. The Skeleton couldn’t be sad for her, but he could be her blood and spread it around. It was, after all, the substance of her making; and the sustenance of her undoing.
What about all the weapons? What about all the guns and the vehicles and the fuel depots and that helicopter you saw? The bat cannot carry all that.
Higher and higher they lifted into the air. The peninsula shrank beneath the Skeleton, from miles in size to meters. Camazotz braced itself against winter’s current and rode the frigid tide. The Skeleton held on tightly to R’lyeh, but it wasn’t needed; the cold and her skin had begun to form an icicle stitch between her and the bat’s fur. Soon, if he wasn’t careful, whether he wanted it to happen or not, she’d be a part of Camazotz’s Orphans, for the bat had grown fat with the blood of Gallows; in particular, the blood of Penance, and the blood of Alluvia. To think there might be a possibilit
y the girl would be resurrected in a vampyric communion involving the blood of her dead mom and dad didn’t sit well with the Skeleton.
“I’ll come back,” he said, finally acknowledging the heart. “Got to check on Clementine and Will.”
You heard what the Virions said. The Green Worm imbues everything that it touches. You will risk exposing the world again.
“Only the unbelievers. Everyone believes in God. It’s just no one is going to want It.”
She is a liability. Her body is a breeding ground.
“It won’t be a problem,” the Skeleton said. “If it would be, you wouldn’t have said something.”
You’re getting smarter, country boy.
“I expect that I am.”
The Skeleton turned around and gave the Dead City a good gander. Sickly pillars of smoke were pouring out of the Virions’ home base beneath the collapsed skyscrapers. He could hear the whirring of their spacecraft, and it didn’t sound any better than it had before. He didn’t really care if they made their pilgrimage to the stars. In fact, he was kind of hoping they wouldn’t. R’lyeh’s death, in a way, was on their mutated hands. He wanted some good, old-fashioned revenge before the reckoning.
Clementine and Will would’ve liked to have seen this place, the Skeleton thought to himself, as Camazotz made of it a miniature with distance. Will always fancied himself something of an archeologist; those holes he’d dig while digging graves years ago led him straight to Ronny’s shop and ancient wares. It was there he learned about machinery and inventions; and it was from his son that the Skeleton was educated on such matters. Ships had always been Will’s obsession. Vessels to take him places that weren’t filled with shit-kickers and dust. He would’ve liked the spacecraft. A ship for the sea above.
While Clementine’s fascination with the Old World came mostly from trying to learn as much as she could about the lives of those who’d lived in it. The Skeleton reckoned she wanted to see if she could find a kindred spirit amongst those millions of spirits; if at some point, someone like her had lived, and if they had, what they’d done with their life until their death. Clementine only managed to connect with those who bore the same scars as her; they were wounds of initiation into the coven of hurt women, of which she was the sole member and leader. He should’ve brought her something back, a souvenir of some sort. The corpse of R’lyeh was the only thing he had to offer, and while she was a hurt woman through and through, it wasn’t the kind of memento those with flesh knew what to do with.
