Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits

by Chuck Wendig

  “That is true. Would you have?”

  “No.”

  “Then this is all magnificently irrelevant. Shall we?”

  He nods, at least comfortable that they have a way back up.

  Except, as they step forward, he shines the light back one more time—

  And the steps—and the pit—are gone. Sealed over by a white concrete wall lined with a tangle-snare of thin, green vines like veins.

  “This place isn’t right,” he says.

  “Just figuring that out?”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be. To be clear, no, this place is not normal. The shell was built by humans, but has since been... repurposed. This is a creation of the divine. It sings of impossibility. It throbs with life. My mind can’t probe it, but I feel it there. Waiting all around us. Pulsing.”

  They walk. First, through the metal tube—and, nestled in amongst the glowing fungi, Cason sees another nuclear trefoil sign hanging on the wall. As if those who worked down here could possibly have forgotten that they were doing their job within spitting distance of a world-ending missile. What a fear that must’ve been; to know that one day the klaxons would sound and the lights would flash red, and up out of the fields the American missiles would fire and, not long after, the Russian missiles would fall. And the world would be obliterated, bombed into an irradiated nuclear-winter wonderland.

  Cason shudders at the thought. He remembers as a kid being afraid of nuclear war. His father didn’t help, telling him the Russkies were coming.

  I survived the imaginary nuclear war. But can I survive this?

  Metal gives way to concrete—bunker-like, the paint an olive drab. The walls are cracked; branches and vines grow out of each breach. The floor is again spongy with moss, and now with leaves—leaves that occasionally drift down from broken panels where the boughs of underworld trees hang low.

  The remnants of the silo—of humanity—linger, too. A corkboard once on the wall, now hanging cockeyed off a furry, coiled vine. Down the hall sits a metal water fountain—that by itself a scary idea, for who would want to drink the water that passed this close to a nuclear missile? But here the fountain has been disassembled, articulated into pieces by impertinent, invasive branches. Cason sees black thorns dripping tarry red goo, each big as his thumb.

  “Those don’t look like something I want to touch,” he says, shining the light. Not that he really needs the flashlight—all around, the mold and the mushrooms are glowing. The beam serves more as a pointer than anything else, and now they point out the barbed thorns.

  Psyche steps over and bends down, smells them.

  “Godsblood,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Ichor. The gods are filled with it. It’s blood, like a human’s, but thicker. More sap-like. Yours is probably ichor-ish. Which rhymes with ‘licorice,’” she adds, not at all playfully.

  “My blood isn’t entirely human.” A statement, meant as a question.

  “No, probably not.”

  “I’m not entirely human.”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “I’m still getting used to the idea.”

  “I suppose that’s fair. It took me a while to find comfort in the idea when I fed on the food of the gods and become one of them, thanks to Zeus.”

  They continue to walk. Stepping over knobby roots that look like knees, ducking under broken ceiling tiles or bundles of dead wire hanging down.

  “Zeus. I can’t believe he’s real. I read about him in school. Everybody did, I guess. Everybody’s first taste of mythology. I hated most of my classes, but reading those stories... it’s like comic books, you know? Heroes and monsters, gods and goddesses. Turns out it’s all real. What’s Zeus... you know, do?”

  “Zeus hasn’t been seen in the half-a-century since we were Exiled to this place. The last someone saw him, he had taken command of a derelict boat—an old oil tanker beached somewhere off the Mumbai coast. The Pavit, I think it was. He got onboard, called lightning to his scepter. The boat shuddered, slipped back into the sea, and he sailed away. Nobody’s seen him since. The boat washed up on shore again a year later. Hera went and looked; he wasn’t on it. Not that she could ever find him when Zeus went wayward.”

  Cason tilts an ear. Thinks he hears something—a rustle, a rasp of something rough—but then it’s gone.

  “Exiled,” Cason says. “You keep using that word. Why are you here?”

  He feels Psyche in his mind.

  He sees. He feels. The Exile. Fifty years ago. All the doors and portals closing. Gateways slamming shut. Gods speared with white fire, thrown down from the myriad heavens to earth, or pierced by swords of light and slammed up through the world’s crust—infinite dimensions folded against one another like playing cards, a single hole, as though from a bullet, punched through all of them, gods with bull-heads, goddesses with chameleon skin, demons and goblins and creatures of light and monsters of shadow all dragged through the hole just before it closes. Drawn forth by winged, sexless humanoids with golden skin and gemstone eyes. Ejected here. Closed off. Together.

  It’s then Cason sees.

  “God,” he says. “The... our God, the...”

  “His proper name is Yahweh. Jehovah.” Said with ill-concealed disdain: “The Lord. We simply call Him—”

  “The Great Usurper.”

  “Correct.”

  “So. He just... took over Heaven.”

  “All the heavens, all the worlds and overworlds and underworlds. Uniformity, He said. Sanctity. Stability. We were not a part of that. The world was increasingly smaller, more connected, and we were chaos when He wanted order. He had the power to do it. The belief. The angels. We were already marginalized. And so He cast us out and cut our power to a fraction of what it was. So now He sits on the throne at the top of the heavenly Spire, this world and the many universes His, all His.”

  “Sounds pretty shitty.”

  “A bold understatement. For us it was like being locked out of our homes and forced to wander the trackless wastes, cold and hungry. It was jarring, to say the least. But maybe it was for the best.”

  He turns around, gives her a quizzical look.

  “Well,” she continues. “The gods, as we’ve learned, are fickle, dramatic, sometimes even insane. With all that ‘endless divine power,’ we represented a true danger to the world. Perhaps the Usurper had it right to lock us out. Cut us down at the knees. Not better for us, of course. But better for this place and its people.”

  Cason’s about to say something else, but whatever it is goes out of his mind—ahead, at a T-intersection, he sees an image carved in stone, easily as tall as him. “Take a look at this.” He waves her on.

  The image is carved out of the cement, the contours lined with lichen and fringed with moss.

  Cason can barely catch his breath while looking at it.

  It’s the Antlered God from his dream. Lean, long face—a stag’s face, but human. Black almond eyes. Antlers not like that of a deer or an elk, but almost like trees formed of pointed bone, trees whose snarled branches grow and twist to the heavens. The Horned Beast has a broad, bare chest, narrow hips, and a studded, thorned phallus hanging between a pair of furry thighs.

  All around the Antlered God are the beasts of the forest—but mutated, like creatures born of a disturbed child’s mind. Wolves with tusks. Pigs with snake-tails. Owls with human faces roost in the antlers, while long-legged razor-mouthed rats stalk the ground.

  The ground itself is a twisting knot—like they’re all standing on a maze carved out of the very earth, a twisting double-back labyrinth that spirals in on itself.

  “I dreamed of this,” he says in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Psyche says nothing.

  He turns to ask her if she knows the figure in the carving—

  But she’s not there.

  And the walls of the hallway are gone. Stretched out before him is a forest. Like from hi
s dream. No walls, no more missile silo. No boundaries at all. Twisted black trees grow together above his head like intertwined witch-fingers. The ground is lumpy, mossy, littered with twigs and leaves. No sky can be seen, but moonlight shines through branches.

  Some of the signs of the missile silo remain. He sees the corkboard, the water fountain, the nuclear sign. But they hang from trees, or sit on the ground.

  No walls. No structure at all.

  And no Psyche.

  Then—somewhere—he hears leaves rustling. Twigs snapping.

  Something moves—a lean, rangy shadow—between two distant trees.

  Behind him, something chuffs, snorts. Cason turns and sees nothing there.

  For a few moments, all is quiet.

  Then: shapes emerge from all sides, blasting out of the brush, shouldering between tall trees and bent saplings—dark shadows with yellow eyes and white teeth, coming for him, hissing and howling and spitting.

  Cason turns to run, but a tree branch snarls around his foot, and the forest tilts as he tumbles, the flashlight spinning away, the light dim, then dark.

  The ground shakes.

  The creatures pounce.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Children Of The Antlered God

  JAWS SNAP CLOSED in front of his face—wolf jaws that hang not on a wolf at all, but thrust from the face of a boar, spit-slathered tusks gleaming. Cason grabs those tusks, twists, throws the beast off him—the creature rolls away as two more dash forward from the shadow. One a skinny fox with a spiral of goat horns and paws like a human child’s hands, the other a chimera of indistinct origins: rat’s head on a long, leathery neck, the body a hairless pock-marked tube of sagging skin, its six limbs more like spider’s legs than anything else.

  Other beasts dance in the margins—yellow eyes, white teeth, growling, hissing, circling, circling. Cason tries to stand, but the rat-chimera pounces, knocks him flat to the ground. The horned fox pounces at his front, little needle teeth coming right for his face—eyes, nose, all the soft bits. He grabs its head, holds it as the teeth tick and tack in front of him.

  The rat-thing bites the back of his neck.

  Pain shoots up into his head, across his shoulders and into his arms.

  He tries to stay calm, tries to think, Okay, I’m a tougher guy than I ever figured, I’m not even a guy so much as I am—Well, he doesn’t know what he is. But he can’t worry about that now. Point is, he can survive this. Bloodied and beaten, but alive.

  Cason rolls, crushing the rat-thing beneath his back while hoisting the horned fox into the air—it writhes and yowls, bushy fox tail whipping the air.

  He hurls it hard against a tree, hears its back break. It lays, twitching.

  Up, up, up, go! Cason lurches, but it feels like his legs want to go out of him, like they’re made of rubber bands dangling from his hip sockets—he feels suddenly sluggish, slushy like a winter puddle, and it’s then the thought strikes him:

  The bite was venomous.

  Down, down on his hands and knees. He reaches for his bag, but it seems miles away, now. The world slides into deeper darkness. All around him, shadows encroach. A black blob with a crocodile’s maw. A falcon’s beak with human eyes set above it. A mangy dog with feathers instead of fur. The beasts creep forward. A new wretched thought strikes him—Nergal. These are Nergal’s pets. Like his seven warriors, his guardians, they are—

  But his thoughts die incomplete. They’re suddenly a jumble as the venom seizes, wracking his body with spasms.

  He collapses. Hears the ginger tread of the approaching monsters.

  His fingers sink into the forest floor. Deep through moss and leaf layer, down through dark earth and into the domain of the earthworms.

  And suddenly: a terrifying bloom of awareness. A feeling like falling.

  The forest is alive. He can see it. He can see the roots and shoots, the runners and briars, can feel every stone, every mote of dirt. He can feel the beasts, too—he doesn’t see them so much as discern their shape in the deep of his mind, and there he sees the crocodile maw drawing open on its leathery hinge, opening wide around his skull, ready to snap closed and take his head clean off its shoulders.

  Panic causes his mind to lash out.

  He seizes the beast’s jaws, not with his hands but with his mind.

  He wrenches the jaw wider, wider, until the bones creak and the tendons snap and suddenly the monster’s head rips in half.

  Cason signals to the others: run.

  And they do. They do just as he asks. They turn tail and flee, whimpering into the shadows as if castigated by their master’s hand.

  Their master, Cason thinks.

  They ran like he commanded them.

  That’s not normal.

  It’s lights out. He lets the venom take him. Into sleep or death, he’s not sure.

  But something stops his descent.

  Out there. In the forest. There’s a mind—it evades him like a firefly ducking a child’s swooping jar. He reaches for it, and it moves. A blue mote, flashing, flickering. He expands his mind like a net, drops it down—

  Cason.

  A small voice, a scared voice.

  Alison.

  Alison is here in the missile silo. In the forest maze.

  Alison. His wife. His love.

  Cason growls. Feels his forehead burn like two cigars are pressing into his flesh. He growls and shakes his head like a wolf tearing meat off a carcass—the venom inside is part of the beasts, and the beasts are part of the forest, and that means it does what he commands. He screams inward at the poison lancing through his body and suddenly it lurches up out of his mouth and nose in a black, tarry stream.

  Clarity rings like a glass bell.

  Cason stands. Head no longer burning.

  He hears Alison’s voice, now—small, but real. Not in his head.

  “Cason...”

  He runs. Ducking branches. Leaping roots. Tearing through coils and tangles of pricker bush. Ahead, two of the shadow-beasts gather, but when they see him coming they yelp and whine and flee in opposite directions.

  A sign to his left, hanging from a twisting branch. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY: It is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the Installation Commander. Next to it, a desk ripped almost in half by a boulder.

  “Cason!”

  Her voice—calling through the woods. Echo, echo, echo.

  He finds what might be a deer path. Or, at least, the path that the beasts wander—a muddy rut carved through the forest floor. His feet pound, pinwheeling out of control, boots almost slipping time and again on the greasy earth—

  The path turns inward, and inward again, tighter and tighter, a terrible spiral—

  Another sign. A nuclear trefoil.

  A water fountain.

  A stone frieze of the Antlered God.

  I’m traveling in circles.

  Cason leaps the path, runs straight toward the voice without care for the obstacles in his way. Cracked boulder, fallen tree, a rocky furrow—

  A broken desk. An AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign.

  He growls. Kicks the desk. His boot gongs against the metal.

  Alison’s voice—indistinct, this time, a cry of pain—

  He feels the pain. He feels her out there.

  And that’s the secret. Isn’t it? This forest. He’s part of it. Somehow. Or it’s part of him. He reaches down, pulls a clod of earth, and again the awareness rises inside him, like a blush of food coloring inside a glass of water. He can undercut the maze. He can cheat.

  He feels her out there.

  Cason closes his eyes and walks forward.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Root Cage

  HIS HEART BREAKS and reforms all in a single moment: there stands Alison. Contained within the exposed roots of a tree, the twisted bark tendrils forming the bars of her cage. The tree itself is a blasted dead thing, rising into the forest ceiling, the bark stripped away and bitten into as if ligh
tning has clawed its way through. The ground inside the cage is an ankle-deep pool of brackish, dirt-flecked water.

  Alison is beaten and bloodied—eyes ringed in puffy purple bruises, capillaries burst in her eyes and her cheeks, bottom lip split, the chin crusted with black blood. Someone hurt her, and when he sees that he wants to find whoever that is and break their bones inch by inch until their skin is just a sack for a shattered skeleton.

  But then she smiles and it washes away the anger. Like an antiseptic poured on a wound to clean away the infection.

  “Al,” he says, almost crying. Cason drops the bag he’s been carrying, slams himself up against the root cage. He reaches through, touches her hand—she pulls herself toward him and touches her forehead to his.

  “I... I don’t know how long I’ve been here,” she says. “It feels like forever.”

  “I’ll get you out of here.” He draws a deep breath. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” She blinks back tears. “Someone brought me here and... please get me out. Please.”

  He grabs at the roots, pulls with all his might. Agony assails the muscles of his arms, his back, his hips and legs—and still the roots remain.

  Again, it strikes him, the realization coming faster than before.

  You control this place.

  The roots are just part of the forest.

  He calms his heart, stills the flutter inside his chest and gut. Zeroes out any of the noise in his mind as he leans up against the cage, feels the craggy dry bark scraping the calluses on his palm and fingers, feels the faint throb of life still living inside this tree.

  Then he grabs that tiny pulse and pulls it like a fishing rod.

  The bark cracks, splits—

  And two of the tendrils pull free of the earth, dirt raining from fine roots at the base. Then those two tendrils curl up into tight spirals, opening the way for Alison’s escape. She gasps, weeping—

  Cason feels her wrap her arms around him. It all feels right.

  But something smells wrong. Literally. A stink crawls into his nose.

  The smell of smoke and burning. Lit match-tips. Charred leaves and ashen bog.