The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  But all was silence. The hand’s firm grip upon him began to slacken, and soon it fell away altogether. Gabe slowly turned.

  It was like looking at a ceramic mask made to resemble Blue. Or more like a mask of Blue’s face that had shattered and been reassembled, something approximate but skewed. Its limbs were Blue’s limbs, though somewhat elongated; its wide eyes enlarged, then shrunk, the bridge of its nose knotting before straightening. All of its features appeared to twinkle and alter, along with the wavering curl of a familiar and ambivalent smile. He could tell it was trying to appeal to him, to give him what he wanted to see. But he knew.

  “You’re not him,” Gabe said, his voice coarse. He shook his head in disappointment, if not outright rebuke, anger flaring through his fear. He hadn’t searched these many days and weeks to settle for a substitute. “You’re not Blue.”

  The creature shook its head. For a moment Gabe thought it was answering but it was only mimicking him, and once Gabe stilled it did too. Its green eyes brightened and dulled, then brightened and dulled once more, a reflection of the throbbing catacomb walls that was the only light by which to see.

  This place, Gabe thought. It’s lit from within.

  The cavern walls, the smell of the sea, the syrupy trickle of biofilm bubbling up from the rock bed: all of it pulsed with mesmeric luminescence. There was no such thing as true darkness down here.

  He had reached the place below the world.

  Gabe waited for the simulacrum of Blue to say something, or even just to move, but when it failed to do anything he spoke again. “Where is he?” Gabe demanded. “Where’s Blue?”

  The creature cocked its head as if awaiting a distant command, no longer occupied with Gabe’s presence. Something else had its attention, an event of great importance taking place deeper inside the warrens. If I follow this one, it will lead me where I need to go. He didn’t know how he knew this, only that he did. It will show me the way. And I will find you. He felt it beneath his skin.

  The creature backed away. Its movements were herky-jerky yet deliberate, and as it receded Blue’s features evaporated, leaving only shadow and leafage and the suggestion of domed eyes. It crept toward a crack in the stone wall no wider than a foot and poured itself through the breach, disappearing like an envelope passed through a mail slot. Even with his pack in front of him Gabe could just barely fit. He shuffled along the strip of uneven rock between the cave walls, expected the encroaching rock to be damp and cold but instead he found it warm to the touch, almost like flesh. There were places where he felt his way forward that his fingers sunk into the stone. The modest pressure shaped the rock as if it were made of sponge, the walls organic and pliable.

  He continued after the creature, waded across the unbalanced topography and into the broad gap of a crevasse until he was almost entirely submerged in brackish fluid, the smell of which was both repulsive and alluring. Jagged ridges stung Gabe’s feet through his soaked sneakers, but they enabled him to scale high enough that he was nearly out of the muck altogether. All shall be well, he prayed. All shall be well.

  A labyrinth of passages led him higher, then deeper underground once again, to an unnervingly humid area within the caverns. There was something wrong here, very wrong. And it was only once he stepped down into a papery puddle of ash that Gabe caught the pungent scent of scorched earth and meat. The warrens beneath the mountain had burned through. The signs of fire were everywhere here, seared across flame-licked granite and soot-caked limestone. He was perspiring profusely, the heat beginning to overwhelm him, and he stopped to breathe next to a thin seam in the wall. An arid wind issued from the gap, as well as an unsteady light, sparkling like a candle’s flame. Godfather Death, stay away a little while yet. I need just a little more time.

  Gabe glimpsed something moving through the gloom, an effulgent figure that tramped slowly toward him, its face a shadow against the dark. It was one of them, and it frightened him in a way the first had not. Taller and thinner, there was an imperious, almost regal air to its posture, an aura of knowingness. Its elegant, sticklike arms reached forward and took hold of the stone seam between them, needle-thin fingers stretching and widening the rift slashed into the rock until it was wide enough to cross.

  The creature drew closer, and Gabe shook. For the first time he regretted coming there. To the place beneath the world, to the cove, Cape Breton, all of it. He was petrified.

  But then, mere inches away, it spoke.

  Blue spoke.

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  found

  found

  us

  you found

  us

  Blue sounded far away, even though he spoke inside Gabe’s head. The words tentative, like an echo, as if his voice were transmitted from a distant planet.

  Gabe looked upon him, what Blue allowed to be seen of his flickering form. Limbs those of a praying mantis, fingers the stiff branches of a gray birch, Blue’s head bowed with the veined and leafy shape of his brain beating steadily beneath the thin translucent membrane of his skull, electrical impulses flaring across its surface like a solar storm. He was nothing like Gabe had ever seen.

  “I knew it,” Gabe said, and grinned like a madman. He was thrilled with expectation, tears of relief at the corners of his eyes. It was the very sensation of being alive. “Ever since I first heard your voice, I knew. But I had to be sure.”

  He stepped forward, but Blue raised a wraithlike gray hand and shrank from him.

  no

  look away

  “I have to see you,” Gabe said. No pretense of composure, not anymore, he couldn’t have come so close to Blue’s dark divinity without taking this last step. There was no enthroned Hades here, no one to forbid him from doing so. “Please. I need to see your face.”

  After an unbearable length of time, Blue’s head bobbed as if nodding before he slowly raised it, and for a moment his old green beach glass eyes materialized in the empty space between them. But then Blue let him see behind the disguise. Gabe’s breath snagged, and the air thickened, like breathing in steam. Blue’s eyes, they weren’t the ones that Gabe had known. Still glowing green, yes, but now the multifaceted eyes of an insect.

  What a thing of awe he was, that he should have to be hidden away beneath the earth! And now Gabe knew why Blue’s people hid, what would happen to them if they were to surface and show their true faces to the world. They would be devoured, their flesh and blood consumed like cakes and wine; they would be used up until there was nothing left.

  “My God.” He reached out to take hold of Blue’s face, the razor-edged cheekbones that tapered into a bristled ram’s horn chin. But when he touched Blue’s skin, the world went spinning out from under him. A lightning strike of scattered pictures, along with a rushing of wind and the buzzing of bees, of insects that burrowed and bit. Fires underground, flames and the assaultive stench of smoke, a mournful dirge of dogs baying for their mother . . .

  Gabe felt himself falling, and yanked his hand away.

  should have

  should have stayed

  away

  “I couldn’t,” Gabe whispered. Stung, he looked down at the dim space between them. “You know I had to come. I had no choice.” The answer was as plain as the dirt on Gabe’s face, the blood and ash beneath his fingernails. He loved Blue. And what’s more, he needed him, Blue’s honey-sweet energy washing over him even now and stronger than ever. No candy bar or moonshine, endorphin rush or baby’s smile, sexual low or heroin high could compete with it. No distance between them, he read Blue’s compound eyes like sacred parchment. Gabe, steadfast as ever, would never leave his side again.

  Blue’s eyes glistened, and instead of words Gabe received an image of Elisa. She was hunched over, hands held fast to someone else, both of them inert. Naked and pale, she cradled the unmoving figure, her bent arms obscuring their faces like the branches of a weeping willow. The pair were dusted with cave sediment, their limbs overgrown wit
h creeper vines, skins flecked with lichen. She was somewhere close. How long has she been down here? Gabe thought.

  Blue shimmered, and he cocked his head.

  time

  is not as important

  down here

  not the way it is

  above

  you have already been with

  us

  longer than you know

  “Elisa. Where is she?”

  with

  the others

  down

  in the

  locus

  of the

  hive

  “Can you take me there?” There was so much more to see.

  After a few moments Blue grudgingly turned. Deeper inside the hive it was warmer still, and as Gabe trailed after Blue’s shifting form he became saturated with sweat. The walls of the cave perspired as well, everything part of the same immense life form and heaving with hot breath. He couldn’t keep up but followed by instinct, advancing through the ever-winding paths. It gradually dawned on him that they were traveling in a series of tightening circles like the spiral of an enormous mollusk shell, the Great Snail at the center of the earth. I have been in a mouse hole and a snail shell and down a cow’s throat and in the wolf’s belly. And now he had become his own channel, who could carry others inside of him.

  Blue vanished somewhere ahead, and Gabe grew anxious, clasping his hands together to keep them from shaking. He emerged inside a cavern far greater than any he’d seen, the domed ceiling studded with stalactites and vaulted with what appeared to be the concave leviathan bones of a mammoth sea creature. And now a whale has swallowed me. Dim shadows scuttled back and forth behind a curtain of thick gelatinous tissue obstructing his path, shadows that undulated and shuddered, expanded and contracted in a network of pulsating lights. From behind the partition came braying wails, savage ululations both mournful and ravenous. Gabe placed his hands over his mouth with a little room left to breathe and pushed himself through the membranous wall.

  At once his vision refracted. Phosphorescence blinded him, but at the same time burned through his senses, a kaleidoscope of emotions flooded one into the next. The new frequency. He blinked hard through scattered visions of trees with sparkling silver leaves, willing his sight back to him. And what he saw were bodies. Hung like slaughterhouse meat in the luminous field of energy, from the walls, the cavern roof, throughout the viscous webbing strung around him. Human bodies, mostly, of varying ages and shapes, some naked while others wore the moldered remains of clothing. Scattered among them were a few large dogs, as well as other animals, small woodland creatures and subterranean mammals, all suspended in the murky wall of glimmering mucilage like fish tangled in an invisible net. Each figure remained perfectly still, only to twitch at irregular intervals as if jolted by an electrical current.

  The howling cries were louder on this side, much louder, and he removed his hands from his mouth and brought them to his ears. Where the hell is Blue? His breath grew erratic as he ingested the heavy perfumed vapor that permeated the air, radiant flares sparking at his eyes. He examined one of the sleeping figures, a nude and elderly woman with gray hair sprouting from her skull in uneven patches. She was curled into a ball and cradling a meaty, engorged tuber in her arms, as if to shelter it from harm. The protuberance was semiopaque with the delicate wet coating of a shelled egg, a dark embryonic shape writhing inside its beating green core.

  Gabe recoiled and hurried along the wall, past more bodies in stasis. They’re all fast asleep, the whole of the court felled by a curse of deep slumber. Each grasped their own writhing tuber, the mesmeric pulsations within the sacs harmonized in a throbbing murmur of light and vibration that made the cave walls hum like a colossal tuning fork. The thirteenth fairy didn’t get invited to the christening. Even the animals in their vast assortment clung to smaller sacs, their furred bodies motionless but for shallow breaths suggestive of hibernation.

  He halted beside a man clad in the shreds of a soot-stained union suit and a pair of brittle leather suspenders. The man clung to his own swollen grub, the heart of which drummed steadily with the same phosphorescent green glow, pounding with bass-heavy life. Gabe placed a hand beneath the man’s head and lifted it to inspect his face. It was Donald. A somewhat younger version of him, yes, maybe sixty years old or so. Either this was a copy or it was the real Donald, the human one lost to the world above with a replacement sent up in his stead.

  Maybe the Donald I know isn’t someone who has trouble remembering after all. Perhaps his burden was that he couldn’t fully forget who he had once been, and the underworld where he was born. Maybe it was only his life above that was falling away.

  Gabe leaned closer. He pressed his forehead to the man’s temple and tried to see inside. Flittering, sun-bleached images of trees and water, of a brown-haired woman beneath a broad-brimmed hat and two little boys building sandcastles on a far-flung shore, laughter and blinding brightness.

  “Donald?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  Oh Charlie, Charlie, get out of bed!

  He put his ear to the man’s mouth, and though the cracked lips failed to move, Gabe could nevertheless hear a clamorous riot of words tumble forth, chanted with a youthful and cheery vigor in Donald’s own voice.

  Oh Charlie, Charlie, get out of bed! Oh Charlie, Charlie, get out of bed!

  Sudden movement behind him, and Gabe turned to glimpse a shifting, incandescent shape; he wasn’t alone with the sleepers any longer. It was Blue, scuttering past as if guided forward on an imperceptible tether. He followed after him, called out, but Blue didn’t stop, only continued to stride in the direction of a stone archway. Gabe hurried through the crudely linteled entrance of sparkling black rock, and he froze.

  Darkness. But then his eyes adjusted, and he tuned into a throbbing light, many of them, above and below and all about. The balloon-shaped tubers resembling amniotic sacs were everywhere, variegated and bursting verdant green, then sickly yellow in a steady strobe, their casings coated in a viscous film of sap affixing them to the cavern ceiling and walls. There were flickering figures scattered about as well, others like Blue and the creature who had led Gabe upon his arrival.

  The Other Kind. Gabe’s rib cage rattled, his chest on fire with yearning and fear, and he began to tremble violently. They’re here, they’re really here. And just as he knew this to be true, he also knew that he was in the place Elisa had told him about. The heart of the hive, where Blue and the others had brought her the first time, steam hissing from a dark and gaping pool at its center. He had entered the throne room.

  Across the pool, toward the far side of the room and its shadowy recesses, there was a commotion of figures, the source of the violent screams. A constellation of movement in unstable forms, Blue among them, was gathered around a singular and unchanging mass that twitched and writhed as if in its death throes. Far larger than the others, its wet and leathery skin flashed red beneath a spectrum of color emanating from a sagging cluster of black dangling tubers above, as well as from the luminous radiance of the creatures surrounding it. It was the one from Elisa’s nightmares, though it also reminded Gabe of the angel painting inside the closet at the Colony. Borealis the Mother was sent up from the Heavens of the Faraway World to bring comfort to the New Children of the Screaming Places.

  But this mother brought no comfort, not anymore. Wilted antennae horns drooped over the mirrored domes of its massive eyes, once-mighty wings of scaled and iridescent membrane folded over it like a crimson veil and crisped with dark gray ash. Its needle-ridged mouth slowly opened and closed, gasping like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. Its gargantuan body was being hollowed out, scraped clean by its subjects, jagged mandibles slicing through meat and tendon alike. It cried out in a keening moan, and the whole of the hive rattled, jolted on its foundation.

  The Queen. Her subjects were busy devouring her.

  Before he could stop himself, Gabe stepped forward and screamed.

&nbs
p; “You’re killing her!”

  Silence fell over the throne room, a thousand eyes cast in Gabe’s direction through the intermittent strobe. From the shadowed corners; from where the Queen lay; from the ridged stone walls: they all observed him with a removed dispassion, as if from a warehouse catwalk. In a staggering blur of motion the Other Kind heaved back, each one of them, the collective swarm tensed like a whip about to strike and accompanied by an ear-splitting shriek of what sounded like indignation. Gabe fell to the ground and threw his hands over his head in a defensive crouch. He knew in his heart that Blue wouldn’t, or couldn’t, save him.

  But nothing happened. Is it a warning? He risked peering through his fingers. By the stroboscopic light of a single tuber he saw his own features cast upon the face of the creature nearest him, adhered to the cave wall and tilted at such an inconceivable angle that its head appeared separated from its body. It was like looking into a distorted mirror, at a wax museum replica of himself that had begun to melt. Gabe averted his eyes, only to have them fall upon another with his face, its arms thrown over its head in cowering imitation. They all had his face now, every one. Any one of them can be me. Any of them. Even Blue.

  He stared back at himself from every corner of the throne room, a thousand Gabriels when even one was sometimes too much to bear. He could be replaced in a heartbeat. And how replaceable he had felt, for far too long to remember. How insignificant. As a child, just another mouth to feed, and now grown he had become something to be taken for granted, or otherwise mistreated. It was all written there, upon his many frightened faces, and inside his many eyes.

  A moment later their appearances shifted, features fanning past like the letters on a train station Solari board. One after the next they had the eyes of insects again, hexagonal compound mounds of shining twin honeycombs, faces hided in bark with mouths knotted like wood. Then they changed once more. In a single instant one stood tall and thin as a bamboo rod, and in the next another shifted with a sluicing sound into a crouching figure the size of a small child, an emerald tint to its papery skin. In a sweeping tide they withdrew their communal gaze and returned as one to their feedings and cleanings and excretions, newly cool in their other unknowable ministrations.