They came from below, too. It was too dark to see, but weren’t those eyeballs in the wet ground beneath her? She could feel the motion of them blinking against her cheek. Lips sought her, the jagged edge of a tooth catching the bridge of her nose. A word bubbled up, or a noise that might have been a word—lost in the mindless panic of her thoughts.
She stopped fighting. It was too much, too much. Just let it happen, she told herself. Just let it be over. Maybe this time she wouldn’t come back. Maybe this time hell would let her go home.
And she heard laughter, deep inside the cavern of her thoughts. She heard his laughter.
I knew you’d come, Christoph had said.
It was a hallucination, a memory, but her fury was real. It burned its way through her, its force nuclear.
“Never,” she told him, spitting the word into the gulping face beneath her.
She planted her hands in rot, pushed hard. The dead Engineers above her pressed back but she was stronger than them. She was stronger than the dead. She felt them give, felt one of them slide away. Screaming, she braced her foot and shoved, driving herself forward. The blood beneath her helped and she slid through it, her hands clawing at the pit, dragging herself out. A hand looped around the side of her head, a finger hooked in her cheek, and she bit hard, chewing on the corpse-cold flesh until it tore free.
Never, she said, pulling, kicking, finding a gap in the chaos and sucking in a lungful of air. It was like nitro thrown into the engine of her rage and she screamed again, a feral cry that seemed to carry a power of its own, that seemed to shake the world to pieces. She grabbed hold of faces, skulls, arms, whatever she could find, ratcheting herself out inch by inch by inch until she could get onto her knees, then onto her feet.
She stood there, every bit of her sticky with blood, her breaths ragged. The dead brushed past and as she heard them collapse onto the pile, she imagined them folding onto one another, a living, breathing, shrieking sculpture that grew and grew and grew.
No time to wait for them to notice she was free. She moved, her feet crunching old bones, blood bubbling through her toes. Somebody walked into her and she punched them, as hard as she could, her fist disappearing into the festering shell of a skull. She shook free the gore, stepping over the twitching corpse, shoving another dead man to the side.
A growl rose above the screams, and she felt something big move past her. There was a savage howl, a tearing of flesh. There were more noises ahead, a shriek that might have been a demon. Pan waited for the sting of teeth, for oblivion, but it didn’t come. The path seemed to clear, those feeding-time noises following her as she broke into a run, slipping, tripping through a swamp of remains.
Please please please, she prayed, and she wasn’t even sure what she was asking for until she slammed into something too hard to be human. She staggered back, stars exploding against the night. Then she reached out, finding it again—a wall, beautifully solid.
There was a moment of panic when she slid her palm along it and there was only a smooth, unbroken plane. Then she found a jagged edge, enough to grab with her fingers. She levered herself up, her bare feet finding purchase. The noise behind her was a solid force and it seemed to buoy her up, allowing her to stretch and find another handhold. The wound in her side sloshed, but the adrenaline was numbing the pain.
How long to go? She hung on to the rock, the ridges eating into her palms, tearing her feet. It was still so dark that she might as well be hanging on to the edge of a black hole. One slip and she’d be back in the pit—and she knew she didn’t have it in her to fight her way out again.
So she climbed, resting when she could, pushing upward even when it seemed like there was nothing left of her. Even when it seemed like she was a husk, drifting on the wind. She climbed until she reached for the rock and it wasn’t there, just a big nothing that she hauled herself into. Crawling away from the edge, she couldn’t even be sure if she was laughing or crying or screaming. Whatever it was, it carried that same word up from inside her, spewing it out into the ash.
“Never. Never. Never.”
And she kept saying it, a heartbeat that carried her out of the nightmare and into the blissful reality of sleep.
* * *
“Open your eyes.”
The voice drew her from an abyss, one that didn’t want to let her go. She pushed up like a swimmer who has dived too deep, seeing the glorious glow of sunlight just beyond the surface.
“Pan.”
She peeled open her eyes, light flooding into her skull like water. The pain was quick to move in, too, every part of her blasting a siren of agony. She curled onto her side, blinking until the world spun into shape—the desert, the sky, and a face with a goofy grin leering down at her.
“Hi,” said Marlow.
It seemed to take an age for her to work up a word, and when it came free it was made of dust.
“Hi.”
“You’re definitely Pan, right?” Marlow said.
She fought the pain long enough to raise her hand, extending her middle finger. He laughed.
“You made it out. How?”
She kept her hand there and Marlow grabbed it, easing her up. She felt like a baby learning to sit, her body too weak to hold itself. For a second she thought she was about to fall flat on her face but then Night was there, arms wrapped around her.
“Easy, hermana,” she said. “I got you.”
“How?” Marlow said again. “I mean … I didn’t think you were coming back from this one.”
“You always come back,” she managed, the sunlight still running into her, chasing away the last of the shadows. She looked at her hands, stained red and black, flecked with scraps of … meat? Her entire body was crimson. When she tried to lift her T-shirt it was stuck to her, and Night had to help her peel it loose. The wound there was a mouth, something as fat and red as a tongue sticking out. She shook her head, pushed the T-shirt back in place so she didn’t have to look at it anymore.
How had she gotten out?
“I don’t know,” she said. “There were demons down there, too, I think.”
“Yeah,” said Marlow. “About that.”
He looked to the side, and she followed, a brutal rush of adrenaline twisting her insides, making her groan.
A demon stood there, maybe thirty yards away. It had three legs, and a fourth that looked half chewed, swiveling uselessly in its socket. Its gray skin was a patchwork of scars. Its face was the same as every other demon’s—just a ragged hole lined with teeth.
A second demon lumbered across from it, treading circles in the ash. This one had six legs, and all of them ended in what could have been human hands. It looked hungry, huge gobs of saliva dripping from its jaws. But after growling softly at Pan it crunched onto its haunches, making a noise that could have been a sigh.
“What … in the hell…” said Pan. Both demons looked her way when she spoke—not that they had eyes to see with. The first one whined, walking in circles before lying down. Then, incredibly, it yawned.
“Yeah,” said Marlow, shrugging. “Weird, right?”
“Why haven’t they, you know, eaten us?”
Marlow spluttered out a sigh. “Have you seen the state of us, Pan?” he said, nodding at her gore-encrusted skin. “I wouldn’t touch us either.”
“It’s more than that,” said Night. “I think they might have saved us. I think they killed the ghosts.”
Pan frowned, remembering the growls in the canyon, the snap of jaws. Had those demons been down there with her? Had they chewed a path through the dead? It seemed impossible, but then what in this place didn’t seem impossible?
“Why?” she said.
“My guess,” said Marlow, “is because of that.”
He moved, the sky behind him a churning vortex of darkness. It was hard to look at. Painful to look at. The more she stared at it, the more it felt like somebody was squeezing her eyes, trying to pop them like grapes. She looked away and carried some of that dar
kness with her, great big spots of it hanging in her vision. They faded after a while, but she thought she could see a shape in them, something that looked like an immense black mountain.
She looked again but Marlow held a hand up in front of her face.
“Don’t stare,” he said. “I think it’s like looking at the sun.”
“It’ll burn your eyes right out,” said Night.
“Help me up,” Pan said, holding out a hand to Night.
Marlow helped, both of them hauling Pan to her feet. The world spun, like it was trying to knock her back down, but she stood her ground. The pain was a dull pulse inside her. She could bear it. As soon as she was standing the demons pushed themselves up. They made no move to attack. The first one just stood there, snorting, the second walking awkwardly, heading toward the distant storm.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” said Night.
“They want us to follow them,” said Pan.
“I think this might be our escort,” said Marlow, nodding in wonder.
“But that’s crazy, right?” Pan said. “We’re not actually going to go?”
A throbbing growl rose up in the first demon’s throat. It pawed at the ground with razor-tipped claws.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” said Marlow.
He was right. They didn’t have a choice. They didn’t need one, either. Pan closed her eyes, saw Christoph’s grin, his dark eyes burning.
I knew you’d come.
Hell had taken the worst of her life and made it real again. And that seriously pissed her off.
“So we go find this asshole,” she said. “We go find him and show him.”
“Show him?” said Marlow.
“Show him that we’ve got nothing to lose,” she said.
She took one step, then another, clenching her fists. The first demon bounded alongside them, keeping its distance. The second howled into the day.
“Show him that he may be the Devil,” Pan said. “But he should never have messed with the Hellraisers.”
SAFE PASSAGE
He was right, it was an escort.
The demons padded along slowly, like horses at the head of a funeral procession. They followed the conduit, heading for the ruptured sky. The pipe grew taller and wider the farther along it they walked, becoming more grotesque with every half mile. The mechanical parts clicked and whirred, those black veins bulging like they were trying to make contact. The surface was slick and greasy, and Marlow was so thirsty he had to resist the urge to lick it. He wasn’t sure how long you could last without a drink, but they were going on three days now and his organs were as dry as raisins. His kidneys, especially, ached like he’d been kicked by a mule.
The farther they walked, the more conduits they saw. Another large one snaked toward them from the right, just as big and just as ugly. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, they reached the point where the two conduits met. There was no join, as such, they just seemed to grow into each other, like the limb of a tree meeting the trunk. They were forty feet tall at this point, made up of thousands of metal components that spun like atoms. It was mesmerizing, hypnotic.
With nowhere else to go, the demons bounded off the ground and onto the conduit. Marlow gritted his teeth against the nightmare visions as he climbed after them. Night was already there, and her face was as ashen as the ground they’d just left.
It wasn’t hard to see why.
Ahead, for as far as he could see, the world was a machine. Hundreds of those weird conduits merged into one another over the next half mile, looking like some deranged labyrinth. The noise they were kicking out was enough to make Marlow’s teeth chatter, almost enough to mute that world-shaking pulse.
All of the conduits led the same way.
All of them led to him, Marlow guessed.
He stared at the sky and it was as if a charge had been detonated in the side of his skull. He screwed his eyes shut against a sudden torrent of horror that passed through his thoughts, like he was sitting next to a slaughterhouse conveyor belt.
“And I thought the Red Door was bad,” Pan said, talking about the infernal portal they’d had to pass through every time they entered the Engine. Incredibly, she was smiling. Marlow smiled back, and as he did, some of the horror flowed out of him. He rubbed his eyes, glanced back at the dark horizon.
It was a mountain, but a mountain made of moving parts—of cogs and gears and pipes, of pistons and chimneys, of springs and levers and counterweights, of organic veins that wove in and out of the mechanism, pumping black. The entire Engine—because that’s exactly what it was, even bigger than the one back in the Nest—moved with a fury that threatened to overwhelm him, as if the whole of the earth had shattered into squirming parts.
Marlow felt something drip into his mouth, tasted copper. When he put his fingers to his nose they came away red. Pan’s ears were bleeding hard, great red drops pattering down onto her shoulders. Night had her fists pressed to her temples like she meant to cave in her own head.
He glanced back, wondering whether he could go, just put his head down and run. But he was pretty sure the demons weren’t going to let them go. Every now and again they’d sniff Marlow or Pan or Night, as if to remind themselves who they were escorting, but they never showed any sign of aggression. It was like the creatures back in Meridiana’s cavern, he thought. They’d been gundogs, perfectly obedient.
The only difference was these dogs had the Devil as their master.
That mountain of madness up ahead grew bigger with every step, the conduits sloping toward it like foothills. The going was getting tough, Marlow’s whole body trembling with the effort of the climb. The storm dominated the skyline. It was vast, huge clouds of smoke and debris churning around it like dirty water down a drain. It looked like it was moving in slow motion but he knew it was just an illusion caused by the sheer size of it. He couldn’t work out if they were one mile away or a hundred; the fractured landscape of hell made a mockery of time and space. The constant, beating sound of it was like the world ending.
“We should probably work out what we’re going to say,” Pan said, looking to the top of the mountain. “When we get there.”
“Hey there,” said Marlow. “We know you’re the Devil, Lord of All That Is Evil. But we think it’s time for a major reboot on your public image. Think of us as your new PR team. Let us go and we promise we’ll tell everyone you’re awesome.”
“Riiiight,” said Pan.
Night coughed out a laugh.
“Sorry. It’s the nerves talking. I mean, you know, the abject terror. And the hunger. Anyone else looking at those demons spraying saliva everywhere and thinking they might want to suck it up?”
“Ew,” said Pan, licking her own chapped, desiccated lips.
“But yeah,” said Marlow. “What do we say?”
He clambered over a section of metal that grew from the conduit, hopping down the other side and continuing the upward slog.
“Who says it will even give us a chance to speak?” Pan said.
“I don’t know,” said Marlow. “It might not. But there’s got to be a reason these demons are keeping us alive, right? It’s got to be curious, if nothing else.”
“But you said you’d seen them attack Engineers,” said Pan, looking at Night. “We saw it, too, back in the first building we took shelter in.”
It seemed like a million years ago, that wall of screaming faces, the men and women and children who had rooted themselves there for a hundred thousand years. Marlow saw the demons clawing at them, peeling them loose, and suddenly understood.
“Because it frees them,” he said. “They were bound to one another, wrapped around one another like … like some rat king. The demons killed them so they could be reborn on one of those mountains, so they could be free again.”
“Free in hell,” said Pan. “What good does that do them?”
“Them? Maybe nothing,” said Marlow, nodding ahead. “But him. What if, I mean, may
be he needs them to be free. Maybe he wants them to come to him.”
And the thought that they were walking into a trap, walking into the vast, open maw of the Devil, made his heart hurt.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Marlow. “We’ve lost our lives, we lost our souls, too. We’ve got nothing left to lose.”
But he wasn’t so sure about that.
Up ahead, the monstrous Engine formed a solid cliff face, the churning storm directly above it. It was made of the same stuff as the conduit, what must have been a million pieces of machinery ticking and whirring and moving in perfect harmony. Through those mechanisms of dark metal he could see enormous veins, thousands of them, each black and moist and flexing as something pumped through them. The mesmerizing mass of movement was broken up by several openings, as dark as tombs, and the demons led them straight to one of them.
Marlow craned his head up, the storm overhead now, those huge clouds spiraling like vultures. Every time that infernal pulse thundered out across the world he saw the Devil imprinted on his retinas, a disease that crept ever deeper into the flesh of his brain. He could see its expression, stuffed with glee.
He could see it smiling.
All around him pieces of the world were fighting against gravity, rising up toward the chaotic sky. He could feel that pull, too, invisible fingers on his skin ready to lift him up and devour him. Whipcracks of negative lightning sliced through the clouds, so dark that it was like the world being sheared into pieces. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it.
“In or out?” said Pan, looking into the fissure in the Engine, at a flicker of light there. “Door number one or door number two.”
Choices.
Press on and face whatever awaited them inside, or surrender themselves to the never-ending nightmare of hell. Both ways led to death—and death, and death, and death—but only one would lead to answers.
“Door number one,” he said. “It’s always door number one.”
He walked up the final stretch of slope, entering the tomb. It was like falling into a grave, the sudden quiet as suffocating as dirt. He had to ball his fists, clench his jaw, to stop the explosion of cold fear inside him. It was a passage like you might find in an old church, only the walls were made of machinery instead of stone. The floor was trenched by a million footsteps.
Hellwalkers Page 9
