Monk Punk and Shadow of the Unknown Omnibus

by Aaron French

  Joe carried with him a few last notes she had scribbled in her unsteady hands, observations for her only daughter and the two grandchildren she never met.

  Before drifting off to sleep beside the embers of his campfire, Joe traced the path of a falling star as it sped across the twilight, dislodged from its family and sent spiraling through the void without apparent destination.

  ***

  Sometime long after sunset Joe awoke. Dawn seemed distant and inaccessible. The wind still stroked the treetops and the chill on the air had grown more perceptible. Joe could hear the rushing waters of a nearby stream where he had refilled his canteens earlier that evening. Beyond that, though, he could hear other sounds – less palpable but no less real.

  The moon bathed the forest in a bluish-gray tint so that shadow concealed little more than natural hues. The mountains themselves glowed with an uncanny radiance. Joe felt a low rumble unsettle the ground beneath him, and he heard the clang of pickaxes striking stone. The mountain seemed to cringe with each blow, recoiling in pain.

  Joe shivered in spite of himself.

  He lay awake, wincing with each perceived blow, imagining the arch of each pick, and the coal-black fingers coiled around each hickory handle.

  Then, he heard a scream.

  Joe scrambled to his feet, searching the shadows for signs of life. The bulk of the Cataloochee Divide pitched itself against the twilit ceiling behind him, the Balsam Ridge lumbered grimly to the west, and Mount Sterling ascended from the boulder-strewn banks of Cataloochee Creek. The recurring collision of metal and stone intensified, and the valley floor throbbed with inexplicable misery. Joe felt the sharp tooth of each pickaxe, felt the earth tremble beneath man’s instruments of torture.

  In the next instant he believed himself overtaken by madness: Joe heard another scream... and another. This time it was not a single, solitary scream piercing the dusk – this time, Joe heard a symphony of grief-stricken cries. The basin buzzed with disembodied shrieks and howls.

  Then, silence.

  Above him, the celestial sphere crept slowly toward the distant dawn. The forests huddled in their self-authored shadows, seemingly oblivious to the entire event. Joe reluctantly dismissed his apprehension as calm slowly returned to the valley. Knowing sleep would not return soon, he took up a spot on the ground close to the remnants of his campfire and prodded the cinders with a short twig.

  ***

  “Please,” the thing whimpered. “They’ll find us if you don’t hurry.”

  Joe knelt by the suffering man. The wretch was so close to death that Joe had nothing to fear, and he found himself offering the man water from his canteen.

  “No time,” the man said. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to get him out.”

  “Get who out?” Joe said, fighting back waves of revulsion and nausea. “Where were you – where did you come from?”

  “Below – the tunnels – they’re everywhere, beneath every city...”

  “Was there an accident?” Joe eyed the dying man’s twisted, gruesome body – recognized the telltale signs of torture. The broken shackles on his blackened legs confirmed his intuition. “Who did this to you?”

  “Them... Les Habitants des Endroits Sombres – the Dwellers of the Dark Places. They’ve always been there, below the surface.” Bloody tears cascaded down his grimy face, scabs wept and slivers of burnt flesh fell to the ground. “The Frenchmen warned us about them... they came in the night, took us from the trenches.” The man lifted a hand to wipe the tears from his checks. “God, Joe, you’ve got to hurry... Josh was right behind me – get him out, Joe – get him out.”

  At that moment Joe trembled. He cursed himself for not seeing it earlier: This miserable thing barely clinging to life had once been his brother.

  “Jonathan?” Joe slipped a hand beneath the man’s head, lifting it gently from the ground. “Oh God, Johnny?”

  “Joe, get in there... they’ll find him – they’ll find all of us.”

  Joe did not hesitate. First, he thrust an arm into the embers – and, finding no base, he dove in headfirst. The warmth of the coals in the fading fire stung as he passed through the portal, but the heat he faced on the other side surpassed any pain he had felt in his lifetime.

  Below ground, he found himself in a cramped tunnel vaguely lit by distant, raging fires. Instantly, his flesh roasted on the bone, singed by some far-off conflagration. Joe’s eyes burned and his desiccated lips blossomed with scabs. Unseen flames sent short-lived sparks of light through the passage, crafting long epochs of darkness punctuated by brief moments of illumination.

  “I’m in hell,” he muttered, struggling to keep his sanity.

  “No,” a voice answered. Joe circled around on his heels, scanning the ephemeral radiance and the pools of pitch for signs of life. For a moment, the shadows slithered aside, revealing a crouching form. “This is not hell. You’d have to be dead to be in hell.”

  “Josh?” Joe started to move toward the sound of his brother’s voice.

  “No – don’t come closer. You’ll lose the portal. I don’t know how John found it in the first place.” Josh – five years older than Jonathan and Joseph – strained to his feet. He inched out of the shadows awkwardly, grimacing with each arduous step. “You two always had a gift, though – you had a connection that went beyond blood.”

  “What is this place?” Joe glanced toward the ceiling of the tunnel. Only a faint, crimson ring set apart the portal from the rock.

  “Another world – a world within a world.” Josh shook his head. “The Underworld of mythology. Only, there are no gods down here – just men and monsters.” Josh paused a moment, then murmured, “Monsters and slaves.”

  “We have to get out,” Joe said, tugging on Josh’s arm. Though still cloaked in shadow, Joe could feel blisters and lesions peppering his brother’s flesh. “We have to get back home – Johnny’s waiting for us.”

  “You’ll have to help me.” Josh finally slumped forward onto Joe. “My leg’s broken – I can’t...”

  Joe quickly adjusted himself so he could lift Josh up into the portal. As he steadied himself, Joe heard the sound of pickaxes break the long silence. Distant screams echoed through the caves.

  “So many men,” Josh said, gazing down the passage. “They used the cover of the war to take as many of us as possible – to carve out their tunnels, to work in their mines, to forge their weapons. To them, we’re no better than beasts. Our lives mean nothing.”

  “What if they follow us?”

  “Don’t worry.” Josh stretched his arms toward the ceiling of the narrow passageway. “I think we’re safe now... I haven’t seen any signs of them since we escaped.”

  Even as the words whispered over Josh’s tumescent lips, something wormed through the gloom farther down the tunnel. Joe could hear it hissing above the hammering clatter of enslaved, wailing workers.

  He thrust his brother through the portal, sending a shower of embers cascading down into the tunnel. In the sparkles of glistening orange light, Joe saw something peel itself from the shadows – something impossibly reedy and sheathed in a husk of emerald scales. Frozen in horror, air caught in his lungs, he waited anxiously for the next flicker of light from the distant raging fires to expose the face of this underworld atrocity.

  Only its eyes slipped from the shade. Narrow, askew, and hideously scarlet in hue, the shimmering orbs pierced the darkness and scrutinized him – examining him from head to toe.

  Joe felt his brother seize him by the collar – felt his own legs push off the floor of the tunnel. Beneath him, the serpentine beast coiled against rock. It hissed and thrashed its long, tapered tail as its two skeletal arms clawed at the darkness. Joe flinched as he passed through the circle of cinders, shook as the frosty air of the Appalachian night bit into his flesh.

  “Christ,” he yelled, crawling back onto the valley floor. “What is it?”

  Josh was too busy to answer him. He pried the canteen away from his b
rother’s rigid fingers. Jonathan stared grimly at the heavens, his eyes now void of life.

  The reptilian beast burst through the faintly glowing ashes of the campfire, hissing and growling. Its scrawny arms scratched the ground as it strove to pull itself out of the underground passage. Joe kicked dirt and rock in its face hoping to drive it back into the bowels of the earth, but the beast only grew angrier.

  The torrent of creek water gushing from Joe’s canteen cooled the embers in the fire pit, blotting out the orange and crimson specks glowing in the coals. The creature shrieked in agony, first pulling, then pushing itself into the ground. The portal solidified as the water extinguished the vestiges of the fire, and the reptile-like thing finally collapsed.

  Cut in half, the beast twitched dreadfully until the first light of dawn crept into the valley. Beneath the sunlight, the thing’s scaly hide sizzled and cooked.

  Josh finally fell to the ground, all his energy depleted.

  “Is it over?” Joe watched as the beast dissolved into a tarry heap of bones. “Will they come back?”

  “No, not for us, not here...” Josh sat up, gazing at poor Jonathan.

  “The war is over,” Joe said. He suddenly realized how long his brothers must have suffered in servitude. He remembered the Battle of Cantigny, wondering how many of the casualties had actually been snatched by the Dwellers of the Dark Places – how many other soldiers in other battles had been lost to the underworld beings. “Some say it was the war to end all wars.”

  The sun hovered over the slopes of Mount Sterling, chasing shadows across the basin. The brothers would have to dig a grave for Jonathan before they could move on toward the next settlement, and it would be slow-going with Josh’s leg. They would have to hike all day and well into the night, but Joe knew they would keep moving.

  Neither one of them would want to spend another night alone in the Cataloochee Valley.

  About the author: Lee Clark Zumpe has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy and speculative fiction since the late 1990s. His short stories and poetry have appeared in a variety of publications such as Weird Tales, Space and Time and Dark Wisdom; and in anthologies such as Horrors Beyond, Corpse Blossoms, Abominations, Withersin’s Unkindness and Cthulhu Unbound, Vol. 1. His work has earned several honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections.

  Quietus

  A. A. Garrison

  Before he destroyed the cosmos, Roger was a middle-aged man who maintained a sordid rental trailer a half mile from his house. The young female tenant had moved out, and so he took an afternoon to clean the premises in preparation for her successor. Inside was a wealth of trash and clothes, and after three trashbags of refuse, he came upon a well-used digital camera that he began to throw away but didn’t. He tried it and it powered on, awarding him a slideshow of pictures starring his former tenant and a handsome young man in various locales and moods.

  He viewed the pictures, at first intrigued and guilty, then quietly disgusted. The camera depicted a world human yet wholly alien, because it in no way included him. Still he watched, and as the slideshow neared its end, the girl and her swain were replaced with pictures of Roger’s very own property. He raised the tiny screen to see better.

  The first of this new set was from outside, showing the trailer in full. Then the front porch. Then inside: the living room, the hallway. The bedroom, as it had been during the woman’s tenancy. The penultimate involved the bedroom ceiling, where a square of paneling led to the trailer’s nonfunctional attic. The very last showed the panel open, then the series concluded and the camera went blank.

  Afterward, Roger made for the rear bedroom as outlined by the narrative. There he stood on a dresser left by the woman and slid aside the attic panel with one hand, as a waiter would a salver. He poked his head through and initially saw only insulation and roofing shores and spiderwebs and dark. Then he discerned a faint square of light deeper in the attic, which would have been unnotable except that the attic continued further than it should’ve. Roger made a “Hmmm” noise.

  He lowered himself precariously and went outside and stood studying the bedroom. Out here, it ended as it should and the world was in order. He then went back inside and repeated the gymnastics and again found the attic reaching longer than physically possible, lit with a faint square of what could be daylight. He stepped down and opened a window and poked through, and there was no magical extension of the attic to speak of.

  He periscoped back into the attic, and the impossible scene hadn’t changed. Some thinking, then he struggled into the place that should not be and examined the daylit square: a panel. When he lifted it away and looked through, he was met with another bedroom, exactly like the one he had left.

  He knuckled his eyes and looked again and it was still there. He toweled sweat and waited, then descended into the bedroom that both was and was not the one of origin. This bedroom, also, contained the dresser that he’d used as a stepladder, so he employed it as same and then stood walleyed in the otherwise empty apartment. He looked through the door and there was the hallway, a golden wash of midday sun. He called hello and got no answer.

  Seized by a sudden and ragged fear, he sprung back onto the dresser and put his head through the panel. His panel of ingress remained, several feet down the narrow attic throat. He dropped back down, reassured.

  The trailer was in every way identical to its counterpart, including holes in the walls and a missing swatch of carpet. Roger hallooed again and continued on without awaiting answer, sweating in runny beads. He approached the front door and opened it warily and outside was the world he knew. Along with his pickup truck, and in it a figure fitting his description.

  Roger gasped and slammed the door, back through the trailer and into the unaccommodating attic. He refit the panel behind him and completed the passage faster than he should’ve, incurring a fortune of splinters and contusions then dropping recklessly. He found a corner and sat staring at the ceiling for no short time, his heart threatening escape. The drive home was unhappy. He did not sleep that night.

  ***

  The next day, Roger called in sick to work and didn’t eat. He considered psychiatric counseling or hard drugs, but instead returned to his rental trailer and its wrong bedroom. He again scaled the dresser and raised the panel and peered through, and the evil extension remained. He grunted and closed the panel and back into the corner, again staring at the ceiling as though divining answers.

  It was over an hour before he could repeat yesterday’s journey.

  The second trailer was unchanged, but now the truck was gone; Roger left through the front door and surveyed the unguessed world lying in wait. The trailer was sited on a small wooded lot, with a parking apron and a short gullied driveway, and it all appeared kosher. The gravel was gravel and the trees trees, and the sky held no surprises.

  A car passed on the nearby road and it operated in the expected fashion. Roger found himself walking and he soon came to where his own house should be and was. He looked at it as if it had spoken.

  With criminal dexterity, he crossed the road and the lawn recently cut and into the backdoor. The driveway was empty of both his truck and his wife’s station wagon. The door was locked, but his key fit.

  Each fixture was as it should be, and this disturbed Roger more than calmed him. The pictures of him and his wife, the clothes in their closet, the food in their refrigerator. They had furloughed to the Bahamas last year and his souvenir piece of coral was atop the bedroom dresser as usual, its sea-carved topography selfsame to the one he left that morning. He picked it up and hefted it and laid it down, and his hand came back shaky. The liquor cabinet yielded the expected stock, and he took two shots of gin before a third and fourth. He then quit the house and repaired to the trailer and its portal to his world, the drink warm in his gut.

  No sleep that night, either. When his wife asked what was wrong, he said he was sick.

  ***

  Roger spent the
next day in bed, during which he hatched a plan. He waited for his wife to leave, then got up and dressed and left the house. It was afternoon.

  He visited a nearby convenience store and bought a gas can and filled it, then to the trailer for the third time in as many days. Armed with his cellphone, he left the truck to repeat the strange trek that had seen him sleepless. Once in the other place, he checked for his truck and it wasn’t there and so he again strolled the half mile to his house. He dialed a cab using his cellphone, and the device functioned flawlessly. The dispatcher said twenty minutes, and Roger said that was fine.

  He confirmed the driveway empty and again entered his home’s improbable twin. Inside, he beelined for his upstairs study and the lucrative wall safe there. After taking down the Picasso print he’d never liked, he tried the safe and it opened using the combination he knew, yielding the ten thousand dollars he’d worked for. He fit the brick of cash into his pants, the pocket bulging obscenely, then removed some passbooks and other fiscal documents and closed the safe and replaced the picture that only his wife thought wasn’t ugly. He was heading out when he heard a motor in the driveway, too early to be the cab.

  He looked outside: his wife’s car, his wife approaching the house. He panicked and started for the backdoor but was too slow. They met in the hallway.

  “Roger?” she said, quizzically. A shopping bag depended from each arm.

  “Hey, hon,” Roger said, biting back an awkwardness he’d never known.

  Suspicion in the eyes. “Where’s your truck?”

  Roger said something like “Oh um, it’s...” and trailed off. He considered breaking for the backdoor, but then his not-wife was saying more.