We beat the F&L thugs to the entrance by a few minutes—we could hear their cries and catcalls, the swish of their torches, smell the bittersweet decay that coated anyone who handled fungal weapons for too long—but they passed us by as we descended ever deeper into the hole, down a ladder.
“Where are we going?” Mary asked me. I don’t know if she really wanted an answer or not. She smelled like fear, her perfume gone sour.
“Keep following me,” I told her. To her, it was dark as we came to the end of the ladder and into a tunnel, but my eyes were different than they had been. I could see things she couldn’t. I could see markers in the tunnel. I could see colors spiraling out of the dark. I held her hand—cold, and clutching my hand desperately—as we walked through the passageway. It was wet now—we were wading through thick, shallow water, the tunnel beginning to slope downward, so we had to be careful not to slip. Through the darkness, I could see the sightless eyes of certain mushrooms, the fiery green of creeping mosses. We could hear dim, dumb shudders above from some kind of bombing: I remember being, insanely enough, happy to hear that sound. Surely it would make Mary realize we could not have stayed aboveground?
Of course, as a corrective counterbalance, the smell coming from below us was rank, stifling. And then, as if to undo all of my reassurances, there came the sound of scuttling, of scattering. That’s when I think her spirit really broke and she began to panic. She pulled away from me, to turn back, to run. I held on to her wrist, would not let go. I had to put my hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming.
“We’re lost, my love, if you make a sound,” I said. “We’re dead. You understand?” She nodded, and I took my hand from her mouth. Her eyes in the dim light were white and wide.
The sounds came from below us, moving fast. Something wanted out. Something wanted to reach the surface. It wasn’t my place to stop it even if I could, which I couldn’t. There was no time to do anything but what I did: I pulled Mary inside of my greatcoat and pushed her into the side of the passageway, my coat covering both of us, and the coat itself covered with the protective spores. They had begun to take root and form fruiting bodies. I had to hope it would be enough.
The scuttling sound and the smell became more intense. I could tell Mary was still stifling her screams. She was shaking, her body tight against mine. Nothing at Blythe Academy, or in her relatively short life so far, had prepared her for anything like this moment.
Then they were all around us—gray caps, racing up the tunnel, speaking in clicks and whistles. One even brushed against my coat, but they were in such a hurry that they did not stop, and before long there was silence again, save for the echo of their progress to the surface. Something was going to happen tonight; my instincts had been right. It would be much safer belowground than above, because tonight even the gray caps would be on the surface. I shuddered, pulled Mary closer.
“Can you go on?” I asked her.
“I think so,” she said, her voice calmer than before.
I’ve often wondered since if that was the point—if it was in that tunnel, as the gray caps passed by, that she made her decision. If she had decided then that she refused to believe any of it, no matter what she saw. If she was going to disown me, discredit me because of that moment. Or this moment. Or the moment after that. I’ll never be sure, but I do wonder. For me, though, the moment was a sweet one: to smell her hair, to feel her next to me, to know we were both still alive, and together.
Meanwhile, in the darkness caused by the boarded-up window, Sybel and I awaited our own fate. We had no recourse to the underground, no thought that it might be safer there than where we were.
Sometimes we heard strange sounds that could not have been real—gurglings and shouts and screams, but oddly twisted, as if distant or distorted. At other times, it sounded as if soldiers fought with swords on the street below. The sound of leafy vines growing and intertwining at great speed. The sound of buildings collapsing—a dull, muted roar, then the sweet exhausted sigh of wood or stone hitting the ground. A smell, sharp yet musty, began to enter the apartment.
Sybel began to rock back and forth, holding his arms over his knees.
“We should leave,” he said. “We should get out of the apartment. Find a high place.”
“Don’t say that,” I said. “This is the safest place to be.”
Sybel smiled and gave me an odd look. “The Borges Bookstore was the safest place to be, and they burned it down.”
Sybel was beginning to scare me.
Something scratched at the outside of the door. A slow, tentative sound. It could have been anything. It could have been the wind. But the breath died in my throat. I realized every nerve in my skin had come alive in warning. I shut my eyes for a long time, as if willing the sound to go away. But it did not. It became louder, gained in confidence, precision. Scrabbling. At the door. At the window. I heard it sniffing the air. Reading our scent. I shivered, caught in the grip of nightmare. If we hadn’t boarded up the window, it would have been looking in at us at that very moment.
Sybel moaned, took me by the arm. “Janice, I think we have to leave.”
I held the gun tight, so tight my knuckles ached. “But where can we run to, Sybel? And how do we get out of here? I don’t think it’s possible now.”
“Do you think you could slide out of the bathroom window?” Sybel asked.
A knock at the door before I could reply—but not at the height I’d expected; lower, much lower.
I stifled a scream. “It’s too close. It can hear us right now. It can hear us talking. It knows what we’re going to do.” I held the gun like a club. I was no use to anyone. The fear had gotten too far into me. This wasn’t like trying to kill myself. I could face the fear of that now, but not this fear—this was too different, too unfamiliar.
Sybel grabbed me by the shoulders, whispered in my ear, “Either we go through the bathroom window or we’re dead. It’s going to come in here and kill us.”
“Yes, but Sybel,” I whispered back, “what if there’s already one at the bathroom window, too? What if they’re already back there?”
Sybel shrugged. There was an odd, fatalistic light in his eyes. “Then it doesn’t matter. We’re dead. I’ll go first. If they get to me, go back into the apartment and lock yourself in the bedroom, and hope dawn comes soon.”
I hugged him. I’ve never been more terrified than at that moment—not even now, writing this account. I don’t know what came over me. I’d seen the horrors of war, become clinical and precise in the cataloguing of them, but somehow this was more personal.
The thing at the door knocked again. Then it spoke.
In a horrible, moist parody of a human voice, it said, “I have something. For you. You will. Like it.”
Was this the first time in Ambergris’ history that a gray cap or a creature sent by the gray caps had spoken to a resident of the city? Most assuredly not—history is littered with the remains of those who have had such conversations; at least a dozen, two dozen. And yet, that night more than one hundred people reported having such contacts. What did it mean? At the time, no meaning would have penetrated my fear. {Mostly meant what a clever mimic, a parrot, means: nothing. A lure. Bait. A tripwire. A distraction. Delivered by their drones. Now I wonder if this was another harbinger of the Shift.}
We made our way to the back of the apartment, to the bathroom. I helped Sybel clamber up to the window. Behind us, the creature with the wet voice was banging on the door like a drunk and making a low gurgling laugh. “Let me in!” it said. “Let me in! I have something for you.”
“Quickly,” I said to Sybel, as he fumbled with the latch. “Come on!”
Sybel undid the latch. He looked down at me.
“Open it,” I said, bile rising in my throat.
I flinched as Sybel opened the window, gun held ready.
Fresh air entered the apartment. Fresh air, the distant sounds of battle, the roar of flames in the middle distance, over the sil
houette of rooftops, but nothing else.
Sybel pulled himself through. Then it was my turn.
The creature began to pound on the front door. It began to laugh—great, rippling waves of laughter. Perhaps it was calling to others of its kind. {It was gathering its strength—it had nothing but a collective consciousness; it was but the sum of its spores.}
I stood on the toilet seat and pulled myself up to the window ledge by pushing off against the wall with my left foot. A narrow ledge, a narrow window.
The banging behind me had become splintering.
Sybel offered his hand and pulled me through.
The splintering had become a rending. The door would be broken down within the minute.
Sybel shut the window behind us. The night was glistening with stars masked by patches of fog; there was a chill to the air. The fires on the edges of the city raged on.
Shivering, pistol stuck through my belt, knives in my pockets, as much a hazard to myself as to others, I stumbled out onto the second-floor roof. There wasn’t much room. I had to engage in a close shuffling dance with Sybel so we could both leave the storm drain for the roof proper.
Behind us, a muted roar. A shriek. Something I’d never heard before, something I never want to hear again. {No matter where you are now, I’m afraid you’ll be hearing it again. What we all heard in that moment of the war was the first groaning, rust-and-flesh-choked stirrings of the Machine. It fed off of that energy. It needed it. Forever after, my finely tuned senses could hear that hum, that vibration, in the ground. It terrified me.}
How do you control your fear at a time like that? I couldn’t. I could barely stop from wetting myself. Bombs are different. Reporting is different. This time, I couldn’t get outside of myself. I couldn’t get outside.
“What now, Sybel?” I asked. I was breathing hard. I think I might have been whimpering.
“Now, we go higher,” Sybel said.
Looking at him, I saw a sudden confidence in him that I had not seen before. As a Nimblytod, high places were his birthright, no matter how long he had lived in the city.
So we went higher, following the curve of the roof to a point where we could pull ourselves up to the next level and the next, until we were on a real roof—a slanted, tiled affair a block away from my apartment. We couldn’t see over the other side of it, and we didn’t want to. On that side lay an unimpeded view of the street—and whatever had come through the door to my apartment.
We tried to be quiet, but the creature somewhere below had already heard us. Was tracking us.
Sybel knew this better than I.
“It’s at the bathroom window. It’s coming out onto the rain gutter,” he said. He looked to our right. Three feet separated us from the flat roof of the next building. It was higher, but we could see the edge of a wall in the middle of that roof.
“We need to jump to the next roof,” I said.
Sybel nodded.
He went first, so he could help me if I didn’t quite make it. A smooth, graceful run; the leap up into the night; and then landing on all fours on the other side. I tossed my gun and knives over to him. I could hear scuttling sounds behind me. There was a smell now, like rotted flesh, but mixed with a fungal sweetness.
I ran toward the gap as fast as I could and jumped, the ground spinning below me, the flames to the west a kaleidoscope; came down heavily on the other side.
Sybel helped me up and we ran for the wall. Once behind it, out of sight if not out of smell, Sybel handed back my pistol and knives.
We could already hear it sniffing our scent from the other roof. We could sense its enjoyment. The sound of that thing slowly coming toward us will never leave me.
“It knows exactly where we are,” Sybel whispered.
We could hear it getting closer and closer to the gap between the roofs.
I was babbling by then. Praying to Truff, to Bonmot, to anyone I could think of. Even now, in this afterword, with the hole in the ground behind me, my typewriter slowly turning into fungal mush, I am babbling, thinking of that moment.
We waited. We almost waited too long. Its smell came closer, came closer. It jumped onto the roof—we could hear it leap to clear the gap with an effortless stride, heard its claws scrabble to find purchase on our side. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.
“What do we do Sybel what do we do?” I kept saying, over and over again.
“Be calm and quiet, Janice,” he said. “Just be calm. When I say, stand up and fire at it.”
I looked up at the few stars through the moonlight, the clouds and the smoke that had begun to move in over the city. It was a cool night. I could feel the rough chill of the stone wall against my back. The seconds seemed to stretch out for a very long time. I had time to think about my gallery, to wonder if it would still be standing in the morning. I had time to think about Duncan and Mary, and to ask myself if I had been too harsh, if it had ever been my place to disapprove. I experienced a twinge of regret—that I had never married, never had children, never lived a “normal” life.
You understand, I hope: I thought I was going to die.
We almost waited too long. We thought it was farther away. But then it began to run at us. It had played its game of Stalk as long as it wanted to—now it meant to finish us. It was talking as it ran at us: “I have something for you something for you something for you you will like it you will like it you will like it,” like the chant of some senile priest counting beads cross-legged in the Religious Quarter.
That’s when we rose, in our fear. We rose up, and we emptied our pistols into it. It was dark as the night and yet transparent—you could see the stars through it when it got close. It was thick. It was thin. It had claws. It had fangs like polished steel. It had eyes so human and yet so various that the gaze paralyzed me. It was indescribable. Even now, trying to visualize it, I want to vomit. I want to unthink it.
Our shots went right through it. It veered to the left, misjudged the distance, and struck the wall in front of us, reared up again. We shot it again—tore great holes in its fungal skull, its impossible body. It roared, spit a stream of dark liquid, and tried to come up over the wall at us. Sybel stuck the muzzle of his pistol under its soft-rigid chin and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent the creature screaming and stumbling to the edge of the roof, and then over—falling. Still talking. Still telling us it had something for us that we’d like.
We stood there, numb, for a moment. Some things cannot be described. Some things can only be experienced.
Gone was the fear. I couldn’t feel it anymore. I just couldn’t. I had no room for it; it had no room for me. It had other places to go, other people to visit.
“Come on,” I said to Sybel. “We have to get off this roof. There might be others. They will have heard. We’ll seek refuge in the Religious Quarter. It might still be safe there.”
Off the roof and into the night.
And how did that feel, you may ask. It was terrible, I tell you. Terrible. It was an experience to inoculate you against horror forever.
Meanwhile, Duncan and Mary traveled ever farther into the depths….
So down we went, ever down, until the tunnel leveled off and an odd green phosphorescence that even Mary could see began to rise from the walls, the ground. Now we walked across a thick green carpet of blindly grasping tendrils. Soft and silent, so that our every sound was sucked into that which we trod upon. Ahead, we could see nothing but the continual wormhole of the tunnel, with no possible deviation, no other possibility.
“How much farther? Where are we going?” Mary asked, her voice flat and dull.
“Not much farther,” I told her, heartsick at how every step seemed to make her more distant, even though we walked shoulder-to-shoulder. “We’re going somewhere we can be safe.” As safe as we could be anywhere, at least.
The fungi on my body had come alive the farther down we traveled. They pulled at my coat, they curled across my chest. They knew they were ho
me. They wanted to return, but I wouldn’t let them. If they returned, I would never leave.
At the same time, I could hear Mary next to me, her every sound magnified by my heightened senses. Her breath, the nervous movement of her hands, the tread of her shoes.
“I don’t know why this is necessary,” she said at one point, the fear gnawing at her face in the green light.
“We have to,” I said. “If we’d stayed aboveground, we might be dead by now.” The dim dumb hum and throb of explosives somewhere over our heads punctuated my point. The emptiness of the tunnel just confirmed it.
And yet we were not alone. Mary just couldn’t see them, floating in the air around us, as oblivious to us as Mary was to them, conforming to their own rituals and needs. I still didn’t know what they were, nor could I even describe the shape of them. Perhaps they were red-tinged megaspores, diaphanous, translucent. Perhaps they were some other organism altogether. I’d learned long ago not to wince when I walked through one.
“You trust me, don’t you?” I asked her while all around us the tendrils swayed, and the green was not one green but a thousand shades of it, and the intensity of the voices in my ears made me want to shout to be heard, although I knew no one could hear them but me. The blind voices of the fungi, calling out. So beautiful. So unbearable.
“I don’t know if this is about trust,” she replied. “This isn’t real, Duncan. I don’t accept that this is real. You’ve fed me a pill. I’m having visions.” It was odd to see her, usually so strong, so weak when out of her element.