The Croning (35 page)
Rourke nodded. He looked at Don. “The powers on high have invited you on an all-expenses-paid vacation to their domain. They could’ve sicced the Limbless Ones on you in your home, could’ve had you bundled to a neat little dolmen not five miles from your backyard. Yep, the Mocks didn’t pick that land for the view or the green pastures. No portal in that dolmen, alas. More of a chute for live meat—”
“Barry, let’s not traumatize him excessively, shall we? He’s been a real sport.”
“
Mea culpa
,” Rourke said. “As I was saying, this is the kind of invitation very few receive. Make it easy on yourself. The devil only knows what will happen if you decline.”
Don considered this for a few moments. Slowly, because of his divided attention, he said, “If these masters of yours are so powerful, why do they need human skin? Rather low-tech solution for infiltrating the ecosystem.”
“To monitor an ant colony one inserts a probe,” Wolverton said. “It’s not a case of simply tearing off a man’s skin and wearing it as a cloak. The process is one of grafting, of co-opting aspects of the central nervous system. This process also facilitates communication. I suspect the mechanisms in play are infinitely more sophisticated than our lunar rockets or deep sea vessels, or superconductors.”
“Communication is a small piece of the whole deal,” Rourke said. “Sol and Luna are too bright, the world too warm. The light isn’t their favorite thing—”
“Barry, enough.
They
don’t appreciate that kind of talk, do they?”
Rourke licked his lips, glancing around the cavern. He composed himself and continued dryly, “Get down to the nitty gritty, they want to scare the shit out of us. Letting the mask slip and the zipper show in the costume is half the fun! Man, read your old-school fairy tales. Rumpelstiltskin has everything laid out if you squint at it right. That’s the Bible on the Dark Ones. What they want, what they’re like.”
“What about Bronson Ford?” Don said. “Barry, is your kid an ET, or Satan spawn? We had a great conversation at your house last weekend, Connor. Me and the kid yukked it up, big time. I suppose he was trying to clue me in on this whole scene. Too bad for me my memory is a sieve.”
“He wasn’t cluing you in, he was sucking your fear,” Rourke said in a decidedly petulant tone. “He’s got it in for you. He likes to watch you dance as the iron shoes heat up.”
“It is a rare honor to speak with Him,” Wolverton said, ignoring Rourke. “He is powerful among his kind and not given to conversation. It was he who commanded that you be brought here to this sacred nexus and given the opportunity to join our fraternity. Beyond that portal lies a vista of evil splendor. A new life. Go through the membrane and be with your sweet Michelle in the dark. Be changed, and return as part of something much, much larger than one’s self.”
Without being aware of moving, Don stood fifteen or so feet from the ziggurat, Rourke at his side to steady and direct him. Wolverton remained behind, encircled by a ring of torches that spontaneously burst into flame and revealed more of the cavern—the vault of the ceiling raised still higher than the illumination. Ancient runes and alien carvings decorated the rough walls which were glaciated from eons of water drip and pierced by vermiculate openings. Some of the holes were sufficiently large to admit a small animal, others were fully cave entrances. Don recalled Ordbecker’s comment:
There’s a honeycomb under this mountain.
Except, the honeycomb extended farther than under Mystery Mountain, didn’t it? This suspicion was confirmed as the blackness of the ziggurat’s hole glinted with specks of light, phosphorescent gases and clouds of nebula dust, and his breath billowed forth like frost.
The image rippled and the stars vanished and the veil parted with the soft, wet noise of a live birth. Black yolk sloshed in a minor flood down the foot of the ziggurat where it pooled and stank of offal and innards gone rank in heat. Gazing into the dripping hole was akin to gazing through a reversed telescope. Something large obstructed the throat of the tunnel between stars—a great, squat pillar the dimensions of an apartment building, or an aircraft conning tower, that quaked and quivered as only living flesh may do.
The being uttered a sibilant cry that echoed for miles and scratched at Don’s mind, wheedling his name in an alien rebus of maggots and bones and a toothless maw drooling a slow waterfall of gore. The tongue of a colossal, putrefying worm murmured and cajoled and offered to enter his anus and lodge in his cerebral cortex, to inject him with a love greater than the Milky Way. It promised to raise the rotting corpse of Jesus or one of a hundred saints, and make them dance for his pleasure. It sang.
Don’s bladder failed. He took a knee upon the hard cold ground while corrupt whispers susserated in his head, and ghostly images of his naked wife, his crying children, a barking dog, lunatics in masks, and rivers of blood whirred past with the gut-churning intensity of a diabolical kaleidoscope. The accompanying sound effects stretched his sanity like a rubber band. Through this cacophony he heard Michelle scream in mortal agony. A shrill, animal cry that terminated within moments.
Rourke leaned over him and took his hand to help him rise. “It’s either this or get sliced in a blood ritual, Don old chum. Wish I could do more. Best get moving. They don’t tolerate delays.”
Don bared his teeth and clouted Rourke with the pointy stone his hand had closed upon as he knelt. Rourke’s left eye rolled back in shock. His right eye deformed and collapsed as the edge of the rock squashed it into the socket. The man’s blood fanned in a kite pattern toward the hole and the figure that awaited, and suddenly untethered from Euclidean principles, Rourke’s feet drifted free of the floor and he rotated end over end and fell with lazy velocity through the opening. He dwindled, dwindled, and the hole irised shut leaving the bare, stony flank of the ziggurat, and the keening ceased upon that instant.
“My stars, Miller. You’ve got gumption, as the toothless set are wont to say. I like you more and more.” Connor Wolverton laughed in genuine wonderment. He turned his head to the left and said, “Well, this has gone slightly pear-shaped, hmm? What shall we do with him?”
Ramirez (self-styled as Burton, apparently) detached from the shadows; a trapdoor spider emerging from its killing blind. His face had slipped nearly sideways and Don only recognized him by his pilot’s jumpsuit. He waggled his overlong fingers at Don in greeting. “Oh, I’ll think of something fun,” he said through a mouth that opened vertically, and advanced, scuttling at terrific speed.
No wonder the man was careful to wear his helmet and walk in the shadows of the trees earlier today—these Dark Ones must fare quite poorly in direct sunlight.
Don held on until the last second and then sprang forward and tried to crush his skull with the bloody rock. That didn’t work.
Ramirez caught and embraced him. His breath was poisonous. His tongue lolled, fat and toadstool white, and glistening slime. As that horrid tongue wormed its way into Don’s mouth and down his throat, Ramirez chortled. “
We knew you’d refuse our offer. One Miller is the same as the next. Your stock never learns, never changes. Take a long look into the Dark, Donnie boy. I’ll see you again in thirty years
.”
Don was paralyzed as the tongue bore deeper until it tickled his guts. During those moments of agony and fear he longed for death, at least unconsciousness, and was denied both. He felt every moment of exquisitely gruesome violation. The monster’s tongue violently retracted with a spray of bile, and Don vomited and shrieked his outrage. Ramirez merely grinned with inhuman malignance and tossed him into the pit in the floor.
Long way down.
The Croning
(Now)
1.
W
hile Don lay semiconscious in the dark wood after fleeing whatever had emerged slothing and chuckling from the dolmen, he dreamed of choking on Ramirez’s tongue; dreamed the brute tossed him into the pit in the cavern floor and Don hurtled formless and weightless, not toward a subterranean abyss or underground lake, but outward into the cosmos. He accelerated through star fields past the reach of the mighty Hubble Telescope. His astral projection zoomed toward a blot of pitch between glinting points of light and as he closed the blot spread in a vast, terrible stain to encompass the width and length of numerous solar systems; a small independent galaxy that seethed and undulated. The moving clot contained many dead, thin-shelled worlds.
Within these hollow planets, far beneath barren surfaces, darkness reigned. Seas of warm blood filled the central caverns. The Children of Old Leech, whose native name was an unintelligible snarl in his mind, lived in the gory seas and writhed upon shores of diamond-hard bone and in millions of tunnels carved and inlaid with more bone harvested from a host of victims from ripe blue and green planets much like Terra.
The Children oozed and squirmed in noisome mounds, and even in the dream Don thanked God he only glimpsed impressions of them. For they were the stuff of nightmares; maggoty abominations possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering.
Moments prior to waking, Don dreamed of falling back to Earth. He drifted, ghostly and unnoticed, through the living scene of a tale that would one day be scriven in children’s books and made legendary.
The Dwarf arrived at court in the dead of night on the dark of the moon. Stunted and misshapen; protuberant of eye, hook-nosed, clothed in the mangy pelt of a wolf from the Black Forest, he hopped and trundled. His legs were deformed and he dragged a clubfoot. He sneered and snickered behind a greasy beard and mocked the soldiers who escorted him, heedless of their swords and ominous demeanor. Every one of them to the last man Jack would’ve gladly drowned the evil dwarf in a cistern, or cloven his pate with a swipe of a blade.
The Dwarf had come to the capital to claim his blood debt—the first-born son of the Queen herself. This in return for perpetrating the hoax that the Miller’s Daughter could spin gold from flax. Of course, the lady had sought to renege upon the arrangement after she was made queen and became gravid with child. With diabolical perverseness, he agreed to rescind the deal if she could guess his name within a month. Thus, she’d dispatched spies, courtiers, and assassins to the four corners of the kingdom to learn the little brute’s name whether it required cajoling, crookery, gold, or a pair of red-hot pokers. As the dark of the moon drew nigh, all reported failure, except for her best man, a wily stable boy and former lover she’d raised to the royal entourage upon her own ascension. He repaid her kindness with good news—he’d spied the little fucker dancing around a bonfire in the mountains, cackling to a covey of witches and demons about how the Queen, dumb sow that she was, would never in million years guess the dwarf’s name was Rumpelstiltskin. Etcetera, etcetera.
The royal guards brought R to the Queen’s private antechamber. The chamber was dim and the Queen waited alone, garbed in her winter robes. She was pale from fear, her lips pressed into a grim line. They danced the dance that fairytales recounted for centuries afterward, although the coarseness of the Dwarf’s language as he mocked the Miller’s Daughter pretending to royalty, and the bizarre references he made to diabolic compacts and Dark Ones who dwelt between the stars, were uniformly excised.
When the Queen finally summoned the courage to utter the creature’s name, a marvelous, and frightening sequence of events transpired—most of which was also left upon the cutting room floor of children’s literature.
First, the dim lamps guttered and nearly failed.
A throng of children entered the room via the main entrance, or crept from behind tapestries and clambered up through grates in the floor. Upon closer inspection these were not children, they shone with a sickly wet pallor of burrowing creatures and moved in a sinister and disjointed fashion. Grubs or worms with vestigial limbs and rudimentary visages. A pair of these abominations fell upon each guard. It was over quickly; cries throttled, the men were ragged from the room and back into the vents.
By the poor light Rumpelstiltskin doubled in size, then doubled again. His dwarfish proportions remained the same, but he towered as a goliath, fully the height of three big men. He laughed that the Queen’s spy had indeed witnessed his ritual in the mountains. Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t really his name, it was the name of some stupid dwarf he’d molested and skinned ages ago. Nonetheless, a deal was a deal. He grasped the Queen when she tried to flee and lifted her to his mouth. He crunched off her head.
When the Dwarf turned, his face was slick with blood, his expression ecstatic and enraged. The beard had thrown Don until that moment. Across time and space and mutable reality, he recognized, as he always did, Bronson Ford’s grin, his inscrutable hatred.
2.
He awoke to weak sunlight streaming through the branches and the bitter taste of pine needles and bile. Thule raised his snout to sniff the air and grumbled. Don spent several minutes working with his cramped and knotted muscles and gathering the intestinal fortitude to make it to his feet. Without his glasses, the world was blurry and strange. He recriminated himself for neglecting to carry the second pair—those were stashed snug in a drawer back at the house. If Michelle had nagged him once, she’d nagged him a thousand times to keep the spares in his pocket. He leaned against the bole of a tree and composed himself, spending a few minutes squinting at the compass. The device seemed to be working again.
Don focused as best he could and took a heading. As he walked, grabbing limbs and shrubs for support, the pink and purple clouds that fogged his mind gradually dissipated and he had an analogue to the reputed out-of-body experience so commonly reported across the world; he shook himself and emerged from the stupor that had cocooned him for years, decades, the waking coma that had divided his personality and diminished him. He thought of that big scientist Cooye who died in a car wreck, the series of plates that allegedly detailed the event, how Ron Houghton had promised to have a buddy give them the once-over for authenticity. What happened to those damned things? What had become of Frick and Frack, the government agents?