He made it to the wheel before the freak with the auger cock reached the ladder. Damn, there was so much water and muck, he found it hard to believe the guy didn’t dissolve outright. Didn’t gag and go down strangling.
“Give me the strength,” Jim said to himself—no, to someone, any power at all. “Please, let me do this.”
He grunted and leaned into the wheel, grabbing it with both hands, straining his arms and shoulders. He wiped the repulsive slime on his hands off on his trousers and shirt, then grasped the wheel again, moaned and squealed and croaked with the effort. Felt it jerk in his fingers as the veins in his wrists and forearms and forehead popped. It occured to him he had no idea what this wheel even controlled. Please, don’t let it be only the air conditioning.
The freak had come alongside the ladder. He was reaching out for it…
And then the wheel turned, practically spinning, screeching until Jim winced from the pain in his ears. He turned it again. Again.
Water at the intersecting tunnels began to swirl, lots of it, being sucked into what Jim guessed to be a big drain beneath. He positioned himself at the top of the ladder, ready to kick again if the man managed to climb up. But the freak was being pulled back with the black, brown and yellow vortex.
««—»»
Jason heard the roar as the huge drain swallowed the funnel of water. He felt three years old again, messed up on acid his folks had given him, tripping out as he stood over the toilet, flushing it over and over. Whoosh! Scream. Whooshsh! Scream.
They had pinched him black and blue, slapped him, tweaked his little dinger, yanked out some of his hair by bloody babysoft roots, getting nothing out of him but Whwhooooshsh! Scream. Unable to look at them, seeing only the swirl of the awful water.
“What did you see in there?” Mom and Dad had eventually asked him. But he’d never said.
He hadn’t thought of it in thirty years—or had he always kept it in the back of his mind? Not the flushing and the couple of gallons vanishing. What he’d seen.
A beast bigger than he would ever be, bigger than the black moon, bigger than the Prince of Dark Bodies. It rendered everything else into nothing, into whimpering/puling/puking nightmares of absolute zero. If it scratched off all that was outside and peeled and flayed until it reached original identity, what did it have to play with? Faceless fears and all the refuse it could eat.
He tried to shriek now, hearing the granddaddy of all thunderous Whwhwhwhoooooooooooshshshshsh!-es! But the impure waters filled him up, bursting through his seams from a forceful gravity acting on it through him. He went down, sucked through the drain, squandered and jettisoned.
««—»»
Would he reincarnate again as he had so many times before?
Dorien didn’t think so.
She watched as the professor turned the wheel the other way, grumbling that it was harder to close the thing than it had been to open it.
Then he paused as if listening.
“Waterfalls?” she heard him whisper. “Goes so far, infinity’s own underground.”
He crouched down. Some of the lost were sobbing near where he’d manhandled the wheel. He told them gently, “Hey, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid. Freak’s gone.”
“Are you alive?” the goddess asked him.
He looked up at her. He stood and patted himself down. “I’m no longer injured. I was dying, I remember that—oh, so very clearly. There was a whole lot broken inside me. I’ll admit I must have been a bag of glass. If this is all healed, then I must be dead, right?”
He glanced around at the slightly moving bodies. He blinked, overwhelmed. “What do I do now?” he wondered.
She gestured to the lost and to the uncountable tunnels and conduits. “Tend to the works, help the children. You’re the new plumber.”
She turned to go, becoming smoky at her edges.
“What about you?” Jim wanted to know.
She might have sounded tired if she’d been human. But she wasn’t, so her voice was simply worn-away stone. “I have to go back. I’m always going back. The shit never stops.”
— | — | —
About the Author
Charlee Jacob has published some sixteen years in the horror and fantasy genres. Her publishing credits include more than 700 poems and around 240 stories. Her novels include THIS SYMBIOTIC FASCINATION, HAUNTER, VESTAL, and DREAD IN THE BEAST and STILL. Disabled, she has taken up painting as one of her forms of physical therapy.
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