by Scott Hale
Hearing wings beating, Vrana kicked off the ground and started flying, near one of the cables connected to Dis. She squinted the angels’ light out of her eyes and, yes, she saw it. Right before the saliva wall, a second staircase plunging deeper into the animated dark.
“The Worm Chambers are down there.” The Maggot bashed its body into the Skeleton to keep him focused. “After that—”
An angel flew out of Dis, the cable between its wings.
Vrana spun out of the way. Steadying herself in the air, she glanced back.
The angel kept going, flying without beating its wings, until the chasm-black swallowed it whole.
Then came more angels out of Dis, wings stilled, the cables wedged into their backs. The creatures scattered, taking to the various lines; they spread across the hollow, blanketing it in their penetrating light.
They can’t fly. It’s just for show, Vrana thought. They can’t go anywhere except where God’s already said they can go.
Reaching Dis, they spent no time sightseeing. As angels departed above them in droves, like migrating birds, Vrana and the others hurried along the outer wall. Chunks of dried spit broke away underfoot. When they braced themselves against the wall, it crumbled and came away in sheets. Then it dawned on Vrana, as they reached the second staircase, that this was probably the first time since its construction that anything had ever touched it. Like all God’s creations, it was perfect, until you realized it wasn’t.
“I can’t,” the Skeleton said, stopping at the top of the second stairs.
The Maggot bashed him from behind, sending him tumbling along the open-faced well.
“Holy Child!” Vrana cried.
“He’s fine,” the Maggot said.
She and Neksha hurried down the steps. The Maggot plop, plop, plopped down in front of them. The Skeleton, nearly wheeling off into a plummet, caught himself on the edge and kept going. The angels trained their beams on them, following their every move. But once they were far enough down, and Dis was no more than a pinprick of light in the Deep’s eternal night, they were finally alone again.
The open-faced stairwell plunged into the belly of the chasm like a jagged knife. Without supports, it was fixed to nothing. This might’ve alarmed Vrana a few weeks ago, but now, she barely batted an eye at the impossible idea. In a way, it was comforting. At least the place was consistent in its inanity.
Two or six hours down the stairwell—it was hard to tell—Neksha broke the silence: “Why are we going to the Worm Chambers?”
No one responded. Instead, they waited for the mumiya’s words to draw in predators lurking in the Deep’s shadowy folds, or escapees from the Black Hour’s leaking menagerie.
The Skeleton groaned. He started tearing at his Black Hour shell, ripping free whatever hallucinations had probably taken root there. When he attempted to flee back the way they’d come, the Maggot threatened to wallop him with its head. Vrana didn’t think he’d care enough to listen, but the Skeleton did. Picking at himself, and pissed, he carried on.
“The Worm Chambers are the quickest way to God’s gut,” the Maggot said. “Once we’re inside It, we’ll find Its heart in no time.”
Vrana laughed. “There’s going to be Worms of the Earth in this chamber?”
“Yep,” the Maggot said.
“I don’t think Atticus is in any condition to be fighting one.”
“He won’t have to. They’ll be asleep. The Worms are forbidden from being awake in the Deep.”
“Why’s that?”
“So they don’t try to overthrow It.”
“Isn’t that what the Mother Abbess is trying to do?”
“Just imagine how much she could’ve accomplished if she’d been let loose in here.”
“Kind of wish she had.”
Neksha finally found a decent way to stack his wrappings. Bouncing atop himself like a spring, but holding steady, he said, “Are you going to make it, Skeleton?”
For once, the Skeleton stopped. He turned sideways, stared at them. The black mass clinging to his bones swelled. He made a fist, and he said, “I cannot make any promises, my brother. I have grown rather weary.” A beat. “Tell Clementine to put on the same ol’, same ol’. Will and I’s worked up a hunger out here in the field.” Then he turned back around, and kept descending.
Vrana drew close to the Maggot.
Anticipating her, it whispered, “Yes, I can take the heart.”
Waterfront rising. Murals in blood. A name tag that reads “Splatterpunk.”
After the Black Hour wave had subsided, the Maggot finished: “But not to God’s.”
“Why?” Neksha snapped, almost offended. He’d been listening in.
“I’m a failed Worm. The moment I enter God, Its immune system will kill me.”
Vrana clicked her beak. “Immune system?”
“The shadows,” the Maggot said. “They tend to It, like lice. Look, we’re here.”
The stairwell came to an abrupt stop. Ahead, a small, disconnected archway stood, the passageway within barely large enough for the Maggot to pass through. Inside, an enclosed room awaited.
The Skeleton came off the steps, fell elbow first into the archway. He held out his free hand, said, “Give me a second,” and shook for a while.
Vrana crept up behind him. She stole a glance into the room—dark pillars of muddled colors, and twinkling—and whispered, “Hey, man, what’s going on?”
He drove his skull hard into his forearm, as if he were about to puke. “The heart’s killing me.”
Vrana’s feathers stood on end.
“I’m always dying, but not like this. It’s too much. I can’t… see straight. One foot’s here, the other’s in the Membrane. It’s in my head, making me feel things I can’t be feeling.” His shoulders slacked. “It just keeps showing me Clementine and Will. Says they’re back in the Membrane. I think I’ve seen them, in my dying.”
Yellow tendrils of fire. Starlight. A remodeled psychiatric hospital.
“You’re doing this for them, aren’t you?” Vrana said, trying to ignore the Black Hour wave.
“Don’t know why I’m doing this anymore.”
“’Cause it seems right.”
“That why you’re doing it?”
Vrana clicked her talons together.
“Guess that’s how gods get to live so long. Not faith from their followers, but doubt. Son of a bitch.” The Skeleton stepped back, faced her. “The Black Hour’s going to die from this. I know it. It’s never stopped me like this before.”
“Mr. Haemo wants that,” Neksha said, chiming in.
Dust storms on a highway. Pockets full of ballots. Gnashing teeth. Orange skin.
All of them stared at the mumiya.
“The worse you become, the louder his voice gets in my head.”
“Why’s that?” the Skeleton asked.
Neksha said, “I am still not sure.”
“What’re we sure will happen if the Black Hour stops?”
The Maggot’s upside-down crucifix mouth tented. “No more spellweaving.”
Vrana cocked her head. “I thought the Blue Worm bestowed ancient knowledge? That’s how the Night Terrors made Kistvaen—”
“Where do you think the Blue Worm got the ancient knowledge from?” the Maggot interrupted. “God does not share Its power, but It knew It could tempt lesser beings with the magic of Exuviae.”
“All spellweaving is channeled from Exuviae?”
The Maggot secreted its affirmation. “Your kind wouldn’t exist if not for Exuviae.”
“What?”
“The homunculi were grown in the Mokita machines by Frederick Ødegaard.”
“I’ve been to his hospital,” Vrana said.
“So you saw the machines?”
She nodded. “There was a strange liquid inside them.”
“That’s not science. It’s Mokita. Oil—”
The Skeleton glanced at his Black Hour-slickened frame, the mass that enveloped
him glistening like grease.
“—from the enemy.”
The Maggot lurched onwards, urging the Skeleton with it into the Worm chamber. Vrana didn’t bother asking any more questions, or entertaining any more possibilities. It was just as fascinating to her as it was pointless at this point. In the twilight of her people’s extinction, hearing about their origin was nothing more than fun facts to share with Aeson the next time they met.
Vrana had seen pillars from outside the room, but once in it, she discovered the pillars weren’t pillars at all. They were glassy tubes, not all that different from oversized IVs, inside which unformed Worms churned. They stretched upwards for miles, where each of them was capped at the top by an island of land, giving them the appearance of gigantic toadstools.
There was one tube for each color. Red. Blue. Green. Gray. Yellow. Purple. White. Some were filled more fully than others, while the Green and White tubes were nearly empty, recognizable only by the smeared dregs inside. And what was that around their bases? Waving off the nagging Maggot, Vrana headed towards the Blue Worm’s tube—it was, in a way, a surrogate parent to her—and went down on her haunches.
The tube didn’t touch the ground, because there was no ground to touch. Directly below the tube, the floor fell away, like a trapdoor. Vrana, minding the bruise-colored material dangling off the tube, glanced into the hole.
And then she reared back.
Digested gore shot upwards in a thick, fecal geyser. When it hit the tube, the orifice at the bottom expanded, vacuuming the excrement. Immediately, it was assimilated, and the bruise-colored material within enlarged.
When the stream slowed to a sputter, to a stop, Vrana chanced another look.
“Offerings,” the Maggot whispered. “From God’s bowels.”
The hole was clogged with blessed feces. A glutinous mire of sacrifices reduced to the basest of components. She didn’t see flesh or blood, or even bone, but an underground sea of shit. Fertilizer on tap, for the hungering Worm-men of the Apocalypse eager to sup from this giving rectum.
“But—” Vrana dug into the feathers around her neck, clutched the Blue Worm’s necklace, “—I have it right here.”
“That won’t stop people from trying to summon it,” the Maggot said, voice even quieter than before. “The Worms will always grow.”
Vrana got up. “But the bodies… God doesn’t eat them right away.”
The Maggot blubbered out a laugh. “These offerings are thousands of years old. God is constipated with devotion. No more talking.”
Vrana started to say something, but the Maggot shushed her by shooting out a jet of its dissolving secretion, narrowly missing her. She wasn’t about to argue with it.
Good thinking, Aeson whispered to her.
Shut up, she said, with a hidden smile.
They passed through the Worm Chamber as quietly as they could, spending most of their time wrangling the Skeleton, as he kept trying to run back towards Dis every chance he got. Every Worm tube—
A little boy, coal-colored, comes running out of the mine, carrying his family on his breaking back.
—like Blue’s, had its own direct line into God’s digestive track, and seeing this, Vrana understood why they had to come here. If they were going to find Its heart through Its bowels, this was the place to do it.
The Maggot had told them to keep walking straight, to where the next archway was posted against black oblivion, but Vrana’s curiosity got the better of her. Instead, she drifted the way she used to in the Garden of the Elders—in aimless wonderment, in hopeless hesitation.
Tea kettle screaming. Train tracks vibrating. Bound, the secretary bites through her hands rather than her ropes.
She found the Red Worm’s tube, and to no surprise, found it swollen, filled, as far as she could tell, all the way up the island to which it was connected. Somewhat adjusted to the place, she started picking up on details she hadn’t realized were there before; like the metal chains around the tubes, like the twinkling gems lodged into the upper islands’ undersides. If any Worm were to wake again, Red would be first, for violence was part and parcel to the human experience. All killings were offerings, in their own way, to this nesting demi-fiend.
The White Worm’s tube was nearly empty. When she leaned into the hole out of which it fed, she saw the stream of sacrifices had nearly hardened over. Either the offerings to Justine had dried up, which didn’t seem all that likely, or God had cut her off. When she was inevitably put down, it looked as if it might be for good.
The Green Worm’s tube, almost as empty as the White’s, was different in that it wasn’t. Rather than being stuffed with the substance of its making, the Green’s tube was filled with a swirling gas that was escaping from hairline cracks along it. The Skeleton had said he and R’lyeh found the Green Worm in the Dead City, that’d been lying in wait there this entire time. Here, it looked like it was running on fumes, yet, somehow, it seemed as if it’d found a way to break out of its casing. Was that how the Maggot had escaped? What could a Worm do if it were completely beyond the control of the God-Horror that’d birthed it?
She thought about asking the Maggot, but now didn’t seem the time or the place.
“I can’t!” the Skeleton cried.
The Maggot stopped. Neksha’s body unraveled. He quickly put himself back together.
A monolithic shadow grew across the room from behind them.
Vrana started to turn around…
And the Maggot shook its head back and forth. Keep going, it seemed to say, and keep going, they did.
Barely.
A crumpled newspaper. Fire hydrants spewing blood.
The second archway wasn’t but thirty feet away, but this shadow was trailing them. It loomed over them, beyond them, and what it touched was erased from their perceptions. The ground become black, infinitely deep and devoid of depth at the same time. The tubes they passed were expunged from their peripheries, until, for Vrana, it felt as if she were going blind, not just in her eyes, but in her mind; as if something were clopping across her lobes, killing the lights in its choking grip.
Every part of her told her to turn around, to drive Death with Death’s ax into their stalker. Not to kill. To protect. But she’d trusted the Maggot thus far, and they had so much farther to go.
She focused her attention on the remaining tubes. There, the Yellow’s, unsummoned for so long, it was ready to burst. Piles of coins were scattered around the feeding hole. Greed, she thought, while not thinking of the shadow. What good is Greed in a dying world?
The Skeleton went sideways, nearly bumping into her. Clutching his ribcage through the black mass, he marched forward, gritting his teeth until they exploded out of his mouth. It was only seconds before they were back in there, perfectly reformed with imperfections.
The shadow grew even larger, more encompassing. It amplified that ghostly feeling within Vrana, teasing out even more loneliness and despair. She started to cry. Her free claw, with its own free will, found Neksha’s hand and held it. She wasn’t just walking over her own grave now. She was trying to dig herself up.
There, another distraction. The Purple Worm. The material inside its tube was fluctuating, because it was constantly being passed back and forth between it and God’s innards. The stream wasn’t only shit, but viscous fluids, too. She smelled blood, piss, and semen, and musky discharges. It should’ve inspired revulsion, yet she was salivating, and all the veins in her body were throbbing; and if she just put down the ax, her hands would be free enough to rub out the loneliness between her thighs.
“I can’t!” the Skeleton cried.
The giant black shadow split apart, became snake-like in shape. Vrana could feel it rearing up.
“Don’t. Turn. Around.” The Maggot said. “Don’t. Look. At. The. Warden.”
The Warden slipped over the Purple Worm’s tube, eradicating it. Vrana’s ecstasy fell from her like a blanket. She felt naked without it. Quickly, she trained her eyes on
the last tube, the Gray’s, and they bulged from their sockets.
There were Corrupted in the feeding hole, reaching up out of it, just barely missing the Gray matter encrusted on the tube’s rim. There were men and women, and even children, crammed there. Some had pickaxes, others, shovels. They were so skinny, so malnourished; their skin was gray, and their eyes were gray; and there was a reverence in their ravaging as they worried like Scavengers on the scraps of Worm above them.
“Why are you here?” the Warden bellowed.
Vrana’s body went ice cold. She’d hoped it’d been one of the Corrupted who’d spoken, but she knew better.
Again, the Warden rumbled: “What is this?”
The Skeleton, with the Black Hour at the wheel, wheeled and made a run for it.
Neksha lunged at him. Instead of holding him back, Neksha unraveled his arm and quickly wrapped it around the Skeleton’s. He did the same for one of his legs, attaching it to the Skeleton’s, and then anchored the both of them there, until they were non-identical conjoined twins.
“I see why you have returned,” the Warden said.
Twenty feet from the second archway, the Maggot shouted, “Run!”
Vrana didn’t need to be told twice. She ran harder than ever before. Sloppily, too; tripping over herself. She didn’t get more than a few feet, though, when she noticed she and the Maggot were by themselves. Neksha and the Skeleton hadn’t followed.
“Your friends are leaving you, Skeleton,” the Warden said.
Shit, Vrana thought. She hadn’t turned around, but she knew what’d happened: to keep the Skeleton from running, Neksha had truly bound the two of them together. They weren’t going anywhere. Not like that.
“What is that you have in your chest?” the Warden hissed. “How… No! You cannot!”
That was her cue.
Or at least, it should’ve been.
Rather than spinning around, going in ax blazing, she stayed, her back to her menace, and her friends. All this talk of ghosts and graves got her thinking about R’lyeh. The little girl who’d been fed violence, instead of honey. Vrana had done her best to pretty up R’lyeh’s rest as best as she could, but it was too little, too late. Geharra was a wound that’d cut too deep, and the Dead City, the infection that’d rotted her out. If only someone had stopped her, made her stay; put a book in her hand, rather than a dagger.
