Vivisepulture
Page 30
I looked back. The sluggish, flowing thing was forming to the waist. I saw, then, where we had gone wrong.
“She didn’t leave him,” Walther got out. “He didn’t kill himself because she left him. He killed himself because he couldn’t get rid of her. Oh dear lord.”
The shape that was pouring out was a woman’s, and she was crawling towards us even as the slime built her. Her face was still turned down and, of all the things in the world, I did not want to see it. Joseph Wentworth’s dead wife - his supposedly missing but really- what? The wife he must have murdered, disposed of unspeakably, was regurgitating herself here, shuddering with rippling animation. It was a dead woman made of a million million living things that thrived and decayed to make her substance.
“Towels, Michael!” Walther said, and I grabbed two without thinking. He ripped them from my hands.
The tank, I thought. The septic tank. I would not want to be the one to empty that. No doubt Mrs Wentworth’s remains were still there, but what she must have done to the three plumbers, to drag them into the pipes…
“If I’d known it was a murder I’d have had the heavy kit,” Walther muttered. The thing surged forwards another foot, the slime filling out hips, thighs. It was propping itself up on its glistening arms now, the head lifting. Numbly I heard Walther saying, “Because of course she didn’t get him. She didn’t get her revenge, and so we’re all Joseph Wentworth, to her. So stupid, so stupid.”
The thing from the pipes lifted its head and I saw its face. Probably I should have screamed but in fact I just shouted out “Oh fuck!” and recoiled against the irretrievably jammed door.
“Get behind me, Michael!” Walther said, but by that time I already was. The eyes were the worst. They were sucking holes. The mouth was the same, perfectly round and gurgling like a drain. There were no other features.
Walther interposed himself. He was…
He was wearing a towel around his waist, and his trousers were about his ankles. He had another towel on his head, folded up and back as though he had just washed his hair. He was standing very oddly, weight on one hip, head tilted to one side. He was never the most manly of men, by anyone’s standards, but right now he was flat-out camp. He was hamming it up like some pantomime dame.
“Oldest trick in the book,” he said, without look round at me. He was looking the thing in its horrible face, and not flinching. “Older than books, in fact. You can do a lot of fooling the invisible world, if you just play a bit of dress-up.”
“Are you… supposed to be in drag?” I got out. I had my eyes fixed on his back. I had seen enough of the late Mrs Wentworth.
“Well, dearie, give me better tools and you’d be amazed, but this is the best I can manage for now.”
“But...”
“Quiet.”
The thing was standing now, swaying, its substance quivering as it was impossibly held in place. I could not watch. The stench of it was choking me. I fixed my eyes on Walther’s back, hearing that ghastly sucking sound that her face was making.
It had reached out a hand that was black and gleamed wet in the light. Walther held himself very still, like a man watching a rearing snake.
I heard a noise. It was a gurgling, thick sound, but somewhere in there was human despair, and out of that sound the creature was suddenly no longer holding itself together. With a tremendous slap the gallons of slime hit the bathroom floor, and then they were being drawn back into the pipes again with incredible speed, so I expected to see the plastic bulge and split with it. Walther and I did not move until all that was left was the familiar slick of muck on the bathroom floor. After that I tried the door, which opened after a little sticky resistance. White-faced Ms. Levinger stared at me, and then at the apparition of Walther in his grotesque drag.
“I can’t help you,” he explained to her later, when he had a chance to re-dress and to wipe off Ms. Levinger’s lipstick, which he had also slapped on very inexpertly. “For very specific reasons that have nothing to do with my skills, it is simply not possible for me to deal with this.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Ms. Levinger demanded. I could see her point. Walther had come into her life and turned a moderate problem into a serious supernatural horror, and now he was leaving her with it.
In answer Walther opened his wallet and found a card. “This is one of my competitors,” he explained.
“Wiccan Consultant…?” she said blankly.
“She dabbles in my field,” Walther explained. “For the purposes of this case, though, she has one crucial attribute that I lack. Call her. You may find that she has something of a waiting list. She seems to get all over the world being pagan.”
“But...”
Walther held up a hand. “Michael knows some people who are good at making unattended vehicles disappear. As part of our service, I think we can dispose of the vans for you. Otherwise questions might be asked. Beyond that, your immediate problem should solve itself very simply if you just call a female plumber. I understand there are several around these days. Call a female plumber and make sure she doesn’t use any male subcontractor. That will put your bathroom back in action.” He saw, and in fact I saw, something in her face that suggested that once this was done, she would let the rest go.
“No men in the house, Ms. Levinger,” he warned. “If this is not dealt with, this house will never be safe.”
From her expression she did not necessarily consider this a bad thing. Whether she did ever have the ghost laid to rest, after she had restored her bathroom to its pristine glory, I never found out.
THE LOST FAMILY
(A new story from the world of “The Fall of Hades”)
by
JEFFREY THOMAS
“Please be careful not to dislodge me, madam,” Jay said, riding across the woman’s back. “If I fall from this distance I’ll surely break.”
Vee paused in her climb to glance downward, into the shaft through which she ascended. They had entered the vertical service shaft through an access hatch on Level 119, but the shaft ran deeper than that. Maybe all the way to the basement?
“Even if you didn’t break, Jay, sorry but I don’t think I’d go down there after you.”
“Understood,” Jay said drily. “All the more reason for caution, if you will.”
The Angel named Vee had heard there was a settlement called Freetown on the 128th floor of the Construct. A large colony where the Damned lived cooperatively alongside Angels, and even Demons – though not all races of Demon, surely, for she had just barely escaped a pack of small, skull-faced Demons several levels below her present position.
She had learned of Freetown from Jay, her only companion in her exploration of the Construct. Only recently had she awakened from centuries as a catatonic prisoner of war, many levels below in the bowels of the Construct, without any memory of her past either as a mortal woman or, after her death, as an Angel. Nor did she remember the infernal war she herself had apparently participated in – the Armageddon that had left the last remaining Damned, Angels and Demons sheltering inside the impossibly vast structure called the Construct, with the shattered remnants of Hell outside its walls buried under solidified lava.
In this utterly alien world, Jay had served as a most useful guide; the Virgil to her Dante. But to add to that he also shot bullets, being a mecha-organic rifle grown from bone, with a single eye and a pair of lips set into his side, and the sentience of a Demon. To top off his usefulness, he could jack into the Mesh. And it was through the Mesh that Jay himself had learned of Freetown. For Vee, who couldn’t recall anyplace from life or afterlife that might have felt like home, it sounded as good a destination as any.
Vee had gained the many floors of her ascent by any number of means – from crawling up through ventilation ducts to riding freight lifts, from metal spiral staircases to opulent marble staircases. Presently she ascended to Level 120 by shimmying up a thick bundle of cables that ran through a concrete shaft. Corroded rungs
were set into the side of the shaft, but after one had pulled out of the wall in her hand she had decided the cables were safer. Also set into one wall were a series of lights, about every third light still providing illumination. The Construct’s technology had been added to over the centuries, but many systems had never run down even without repair or modification after nearly two thousand years. That said a lot about Demonic technology – but then again, it was only an illusory corporeality anyway, like Vee’s own body.
Illusory or not, by the time she reached the top of the shaft and passed through the soaring heights of Level 119 into Level 120, Vee was gulping make-believe air and sweating make-believe perspiration inside the form-fitting second skin of her rubbery black jumpsuit. Her shortish, reddish hair was plastered in spikes across her forehead.
She poked her head up through the opening warily at first, poking up the blunt muzzle of the bone gun with her, but she saw no one about. For all the many Damned, Demons and Angels who made their home inside the Construct, they were so dispersed and the Construct so unthinkably immense that anywhere you went within it seemed desolate. Sometimes Vee felt that she and the gun were the only beings in the entire structure. Sometimes she wished they were.
There had been a metal plate in the floor covering this opening at one time, but it had been unfastened and set aside before her. She was grateful; though she had a few simple tools in the pouch slung over her back, it would have been awkward if not impossible clinging to the rope of cables and unfastening the cover herself. Plus, if those skull-faced Demons had continued tracking her and were to follow her up the shaft, it would have been all the more unpleasant trying to get that cover off.
She pulled herself out of the hole and to her feet, turning this way and that alertly. However peaceful Freetown might truly prove to be she couldn’t as yet say, but she had not only encountered hostile Demons since awakening from her coma, but hostile tribes of Damned and Angels as well.
She was in a room so long and wide that three of its walls were lost in the murk. The nearer fourth wall was composed entirely of huge windows that had once let in the glow of Hell’s churning red sky. Now, outside the windows was only solid volcanic stone flush right up against the panes.
A forest of riveted metal support columns lay around her in all directions, and the ceiling – low in this particular room, not reflecting the true ceiling of Level 120 – was similarly crisscrossed with support beams. But other than that, and puddles on the floor where water had leaked through the ceiling here and there, the room appeared absolutely empty. It had the look of a construction project that had never been finished. She was surprised one of the larger, more ambitious tribes hadn’t staked out this open territory in order to build a community.
She had opened her mouth to express this thought to Jay – and to ask if he had any idea what direction they should take from here to find a means of continuing their ascent – when she caught her breath.
She smelled the Demon before she saw it. It was a scent of incense, burnt into the entity’s flesh. Up close she knew the scent would be choking. She didn’t want to get close enough to experience that.
A moment later and she could hear its approach, too, but by then she had already ducked behind the nearest support girder, wide enough to mask her long lean body. Peeking around its edge, she stared into the dark haze of the distance where the lights were too far-spaced or feeble to illuminate. A pair of white eyes beamed from the shadows, followed gradually by a hulking dark shape that began to form from the gloom.
Jay had told her that when the more human-like races of Demons had begun sympathizing with the rebellious Damned, Hell’s response had been to mass produce less anthropomorphic Demons. This was one of them. It was a bulky thing, so wide it barely passed through the spaces between the metal pillars. It looked like a great soft body partly hatched from a hard chitin exoskeleton; a horrible synthesis of obese human and predatory insect. It was sepia in color, though its scorpion’s forelimbs shaded to black.
Its glowing white eyes slowly turned this way, then that, sweeping the girder forest. Was it patrolling its territory? Hunting? Or merely pacing this vast room in a mindless state to pass the hours of eternity, like a sleepwalker, just as she herself had lapsed into catatonia in the Construct’s dungeon? It didn’t matter; whatever motivated the creature, it was a being she didn’t care to encounter – certainly not one of the Demon races she expected to find living in Freetown.
Could she cross the room column to column, waiting for its head to swivel in another direction each time she needed to advance? But how wide was this room; how long before she found a doorway? After her arduous climb, she didn’t want to backtrack to the shaft and descend, then have to seek out another means of gaining this level. She might run into those little skull-headed Demons again; out of the frying pan and into the fire. Anyway, if this Demon were to look into the shaft while she was descending, though it was far too large to follow her inside it might still find something heavy to drop down on her, or even snip the cables free with its pincers.
No, she would take her chances crossing the room, advancing toward the creature as it advanced toward her until they’d passed each other. Its bulk and slowness were to her advantage. When she saw the Demon turn its burning eyes away from her, she darted to the next closest girder. That incense scent was stronger. She only hoped the Demon couldn’t sniff her out, too.
Vee had advanced a half dozen girders and was growing more optimistic about stealing past the Demon without it becoming the wiser, when she heard Jay whisper, “Madam! Behind you!”
Pressed close to her present shelter, Vee looked over her shoulder. Through the metal tree trunks she caught a glimpse of eyes like very distant headlights, moving slowly at an angle from left to right. Another wandering Demon. She was lucky Jay had spotted it; with him, she had three eyes.
The one in front of her was shambling nearer. How much sooner before the one behind noticed her? And how many more Demons might be patrolling this great room? A dozen? A hundred? This could well be why the space hadn’t been claimed by would-be colonists.
Vee glanced around the floor, looking for a plate covering another shaft entrance. Unless one were hidden by one of the scattered pools, there didn’t appear to be any. Scattered pools…from leaks in the ceiling. Vee cast her eyes to the ceiling. A system of open latticed joists. Yes! She could crawl along the lower portion of the beams, above the heads of the Demons until she found a safe spot to return to the floor…a spot with an exit from this chamber.
The rivets in the girder were large, distended, and she planted one foot on the lowest of them to boost herself up. She needed both hands free to take hold of the girder’s rusting, flaking edges, so she had quickly secured Jay through the straps of her pouch, across her back, just as when she’d climbed the rope made of power cables.
Vee made it to the top of the column and immediately pressed herself flat across one of the iron beams, a surface just broad enough to conceal her. The Demon that had been ahead of her began to pass directly below her. It stopped suddenly, swivelled its head, appeared to be sniffing at the air or listening. Vee held her breath – not that her body actually needed to take breath in any case.
Finally, as if reluctant to give up the scent, the Demon gave a deep, irritable grunt and continued on. Answering grunts came rumbling from three or four other directions. Vee congratulated herself on taking this approach instead of the former.
Not that it was easy inching along on her belly, the beam’s surface interrupted in the center by the angled latticework that connected upper and lower portions, crowding her movements. And she did her best not to let the bone gun scrape noisily against the metal. It would be a slow, stealthy process. She was still learning patience, having to accustom herself all over again to the notion that the immortal didn’t need to hurry.
She soon came to one of the spots where water had leaked through the ceiling, maybe from a fractured pipe somewhere above. Here,
the concrete of the ceiling went from water-stained to actually fallen away, chunks like miniature islands scattered in the puddle below. When Vee was under the irregular hole, she lifted her head and tried to peer into its depths. Her thoughts were rolling. If she pulled herself up inside there, would the going be easier? Or would the risk of falling through another weak spot be too great? Maybe she’d be able to keep to straight lines where the ceiling joists lay beneath her.
She waited until none of the Demons – and she saw three of them now from her vantage point -- were facing her way, then rose and pulled herself up through the opening, expecting its ragged edges to give way under her weight at any second. She made it up without even an untoward sound, however, and positioned herself over where she knew the joist would be. Then, she looked about her.
She was in a narrow crawlspace through which a large water pipe ran (and it was indeed rusted through at the point just above the hole in the concrete), plus some thinner conduits and power cables fastened along the space’s confining walls. She could almost rise to a crouch but remained on hands and knees. Just a little light bled in through the hole, and through a few more far-spaced gaps ahead and behind her. Anyway, all she had to do was move in a straight line now. She was very satisfied -- except which direction to follow? She decided just to keep heading in the direction she had already been taking, and started crawling forward on hands and knees.
Gradually a light source shone up ahead like a beacon, and it became brighter the closer she drew to it -- this time not the weak glow up through a collapsed section of concrete. This light came from the left-hand wall: a solitary fluorescent tube affixed there. Directly opposite the light, a panel was set into the right-hand wall. An access hatch for the crawlspace, no doubt. Vee went into wary mode again, but was also hopeful that this would deliver her into an area where she could walk upright, maybe find a secure shelter in which to rest. Already being dead, she couldn’t die, but she could feel fatigue.