Aaaiiieee!

Ouroborus

The roots of great trees had burrowed through the ceiling over many years, growing ever downward and piercing into the floor as well. Into the walls, too…squeezing between mortared stones, the larger roots even nudging blocks out of their sockets so that they had fallen to the endless Tunnel’s floor here and there. Some of these roots were as big around as trees themselves. Noon marveled, because he estimated this stretch of the Tunnel was hundreds of feet below the surface. Not only that, but by his estimation the surface in this region was now a blasted desert devoid of any life. The forest that had once covered this area should be decades extinct. Maybe the trees were indeed gone, but their roots continued to dig blindly deeper and deeper, as if to one day sip the very magma from the planet’s core. These roots still alive like nerves after a tooth is extracted. Refusing to die, determined to survive at any cost, but without quite realizing why they should do so. Just like Noon.

This spider-webbed lattice, this living weave, became so tight in spots that Noon could barely squeeze himself through it. He didn’t want to draw his machete and hack at the roots, because he didn’t want to leave a trail the Foeti could easily follow. Yet who was he deceiving, in that concern, but himself? Though the floor of the Tunnel here was of uneven flagstones, not dirt as it had been some miles back, he knew he was leaving plenty of signs of his passage for the Foeti and other denizens of the Tunnel to follow. The Foeti might not possess the sense of smell, but it/they could see clearly enough—just as other entities might not have the sense of sight, but could sniff the blood in his veins from a mile away.

It was difficult to tell how far behind him the Foeti was/were. The Tunnel made its/their cries echo and distort. It/they might be lost way back in the steam as black as squid’s ink which he had groped his way through an hour ago, or as close as the beginning of the root forest. Its/their wails sounded like a nursery of newborn infants drowning at the bottom of the sea.

Though the wails sounded like multiple creatures to him now—and on a few occasions he had injured the/a Foeti so badly that he was sure it would die of its wounds—he was not certain if there were many of them, or only a single individual. His opinion on the subject changed from day to day, from hour to hour.

In any case—and fortunately for him—even if the Foeti was/were fairly near, the tangled roots were too dense to see through very deeply…and though there were bare light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, they were spaced far apart so that the gaps between their pools of light offered brief shelters of darkness. He only hoped that nothing hostile was lying in wait for him in one of these intervals of darkness. The bulbs rested against the roots here and there, and their heat had scorched them black in spots though they hadn’t caught fire. Fire was perhaps Noon’s worst fear. If he ever came to a place in the Tunnel that was filled with flame, he would have to wait for the fire to die down before he could proceed. In that time, the Foeti might catch up to him. And if the fire was of a kind that would never die away, then he would have to turn back. That was simply impossible to contemplate. In all this time of running through the Tunnel, he had not once turned back.

He estimated that he had been running for a year, at least…ever since he had fallen through the hole in the rotted floor of his moldering house in the old, old city—waking from unconsciousness to find himself in the Tunnel. The ceiling far above him, with just a dim bluish light showing him the hole his weight had broken open, so high and out of reach. Luckily, the floor of the Tunnel had been of a thick black soil in that section (churned up by a seething population of nightcrawlers), and it had broken his fall.

The walls of that section were also of wood, and Noon had been attempting to climb back up, digging torn fingers and toes between the rough boards to find purchase, when the Foeti had lunged out of the shadows for the first time—its hairless head disproportionately immense, its naked body undeveloped, like an embryo as big as he was. He had dropped down from the wall and begun running, then. He had been running ever since. Sleeping when it was moderately safe enough to risk it. Eating what edible plants, mostly fungus, he could harvest, and whatever edible animals he could kill. Drinking water that trickled down tiled walls, or that pooled here and there, or that flooded whole areas of the Tunnel he had to wade through. When he couldn’t run, he dragged himself along. He had even crawled on all fours.

In some places he had found doors blocking his way. Doors of decomposing gray-green wood. Doors of metal almost lost under incrustations of red rust or green verdigris. To his infinite relief on each occasion, he had not yet encountered a locked door. But he had done his best to barricade them once he was on the other side. Several times, in narrow parts of the Tunnel, he had even constructed and barricaded his own doors to impede, if not halt, the progress of the Foeti. Of course, elsewhere the Tunnel was so impossibly wide that he couldn’t see its sides, let alone create a door to block it. Only a few miles back, in fact, he had encountered one such region of the Tunnel, its walls lost in gloom but the ceiling so low he had needed to tuck in his head to avoid bumping it against a smooth surface apparently made of thick black (perhaps volcanic) glass.

Over the months, this subterranean and stressful existence had taken its toll on him. His hair, formerly long and worn in a queue tied with a black ribbon, had begun to come out in stringy handfuls. He had lost weight, his skeletal condition impossible to ignore as his clothing tattered away until all he wore now were a pair of ragged trousers cut off at the knees. Worst of all were the headaches, so severe at times that he wanted nothing more than to stop running, running, running, to just drop down and curl in a fetal position and wait for his enemy to overtake him at last…to deliver him from his torment. His skull seemed to be literally and steadily ballooning with his pain, as though filling up with infected pus…

The forest of roots was so dense that when Noon suddenly emerged from it he was surprised, shaken out of his numb, robotic reverie—not having seen its terminus approaching. Ahead of him loomed a great staircase, the ceiling sloping up at a steep angle, vanishing into a murk no longer illuminated by dangling light bulbs. Straightening up, Noon moved close to the bottom step. He prodded it with his toe, and reached out to run his hand over a black-painted wall with a crinkled texture. His suspicions about the surface of the staircase, walls, and the angled ceiling were confirmed when he tore free a little tab of the black material to reveal words beneath it, printed in a small type, black against white. Newspaper. The walls, ceiling and the stairs themselves were composed of papier-mache, covered over with a glossy black paint.

Were the stairs nothing more than glued paper, then? Would they support his weight? As he tested his foot on the first step, he realized there were odd symbols marked on it in a dark but flourescent purple paint. More symbols, but different, on the second step. And so on, these characters varying on each. Did they tell a saga? Some parable? But if so, was this story to be read from the bottom to the top of the staircase, or from the top to the bottom? Or might it be read either way?

Noon had taken only three wary steps up the flight of paper or paper-coated stairs when a/the Foeti burst directly through the wall at the foot of the staircase. The thickly-painted papier-mache there had flimsily covered over and hidden a doorway in the true wall beneath.

Noon then began racing up the steps as fast as his legs could propel him, terrified to have his foe so close at his heels in so unexpected a manner. He could no longer be timid about the staircase’s sturdiness. But he needn’t have worried, as it turned out, about the staircase supporting him or the Foeti catching him—just yet, at least. After several moments, he realized the Foeti was not pursuing him up the steps, and after a few moments more, he reined in enough fear that he was able to stop and look back down the way he had come.

There had to be more than one Foeti, he decided (again). The first one that had attacked him had been entirely bald. This one had long cobwebs of hair hanging over its face, through which its lidless black eyes glared. And whereas the first ones he had encountered had always been crawling rapidly on all fours, lately the ones in this vicinity seemed to spend more time scurrying along on their hind legs, bent under the weight of huge heads which were still not as huge as the heads of the first Foeti he had known. This one even wore primitive, torn clothing.

The wild-haired Foeti had not advanced up even one of the steps, paced back and forth at their foot, emitting terrible cries of frustration. Was the thing concerned that the steps might cave in under its weight? No…Noon understood what the problem was. The symbols on the steps. The Foeti was afraid of them. This was confirmed when he saw the Foeti lash out, dig its nails into the bottom step and tear away a strip of the papier-mache as he himself had done. It flicked the shred away, and tore another free. Then, it began flailing madly with both of its thin but powerful forelimbs.

Even if it should strip all the symbols from the bottom step (and now Noon saw that a concrete staircase lay beneath the paper facade), there was still the step above that, and the step above that. Assuming that the messages or spells written on them were all equally powerful, all equally frightening to the Foeti. But whether the Foeti should be delayed for minutes or for a day, Noon didn’t linger to waste any more of this precious time. Turning forward again, he continued mounting the increasingly shadowy staircase.

As he ascended, it appeared to him that the purple symbols became more vivid. And soon enough, as the last of the light bulb illumination below him receded (and the Foeti was swallowed up in the dimness, apparently having only gained a handful of steps), the symbols actually began to glow in the darkness. It helped him know where to plant his feet, though the luminosity was far too feeble to show him how much higher the flight of steps would lead him.

In spots here and there, the glossy black paint had been chipped or torn by the passage of creatures not impeded like the Foeti, maybe curious like himself about what lay beneath. The layers of glued newspaper revealed by these wounds shone white against the blackness, but it was still difficult for Noon to make out the letters on them in the scant light from the purple-painted runes. Leaning his face close to one torn patch, he thought he made out the words “impregnated” and “stillborn”, the rest too smeared and blurred with hardened paste. In a smaller wound, in a sans serif type, there was just the word “our”. A few steps higher, another little tear (or maybe just a spot carelessly missed in the painting, since it lay like a shadow directly beneath a high ridge in the wrinkly surface) showed only the letters “roborus”, in a more elegant type style—though Noon didn’t know whether that was the start, middle, or end of a word.

Ahead of him, he began to make out a haze of dim light. Around this time, after it seemed he had been ascending the stairs for close to an hour, he also started to notice that the steps were marred in more than just little nicks and peeled strips. The papier-mache was warped, buckled, as if its paste had become fluid again, bubbled and then rehardened. Greater sections of the painted skin had split and pulled away from each other. As he climbed yet higher, he saw more and more damage until whole large areas of the papier-mache had become damp and sloughed away from the concrete steps beneath, only to resolidify again. The purple characters (less and less luminous the nearer he came to that pale light) were cracked, distorted, or missing altogether.

At last, he stepped up into the light. Here, the staircase and the painted papier-mache ended. The walls, floor and ceiling of the Tunnel were again of mortared stone. The new light was of an intoxicating, unmistakable quality…a kind of light he hadn’t seen in perhaps a year.

It was sunlight.

And with it, even more intoxicating, the smell of fresh air. Vegetation warmed by a summer sun. There could no longer be a mere desert above him. The sunlight and fresh air came from four evenly spaced windows in the ceiling over his head, just out of reach of his outstretched arms when he tried to jump to touch them. These open windows were covered with heavy iron bars, too close together for him to squeeze through even if he could spring high enough to grab hold of them, but they permitted the sun’s gold (late afternoon, early morning?) light to filter through, a sweet-smelling breeze to waft between. And now he knew that it was intermittent rain coming into the Tunnel through these openings, and trickling down the stairs, that had caused the damage to the papier-mache, returning it to the formless mush it had started out as.

Scanning around him for some forgotten tool or other item with which to pry loose the bars from one of the windows (should he even be able to climb up the blocks of the wall to reach them), Noon glanced back the way he had come. He heard one eerie, far-off wail from the pursuing lone Foeti, like the shriek of a hawk. There were no bird cries outside the four rectangular openings in the roof, but he did think he heard the shh-shh-shhing of sawing, sizzling insect noises in tall grass.

His eyes were drawn back to the damaged papier-mache of the staircase he had mounted. The improved light made the newspapers it was composed of more legible. He saw part of a birth announcement page here, a column of obituaries there. One portion of the ruined top step in particular drew him closer. He crouched, cocked his head to examine it, at last broke that piece free in his hands to lift to his face.

It was not merely letters or words that showed on the newsprint, this time, but a halftone photograph of a house. Was it from a real estate page? Did it illustrate the scene of some crime? The caption was partially torn away, revealing only the words: “…in the house at 101 Ada Street.”

However truncated, the caption made Noon’s heart spasm. Even before he had read it, he had thought the house resembled his own ancient domicile…through whose moldering floor he had plummeted into this unsuspected underworld. The photograph seemed to portray his home back in some older time, perhaps, when its wood was sturdier, its paint not yet worn away. If not his home, one very much in the same style. But the fragment of caption spelled it out beyond any doubt. The address it gave was definitely his own.

His maple tree, growing so close to the house that its roots must have begun separating the very stones of the foundation, was missing from the picture, a mere sapling in its place. Was the picture so old that the sapling was the maple tree, in its infancy? Or…could this picture be of his house since he had fallen into the Tunnel? Repaired, repainted, resold? The damaging tree cut down, and replaced with a new one?

A fresh headache was brewing like a storm in his poor stretched skull; he could ponder the photograph no longer, and slipped it into a pocket of his ragged trousers to examine again later on. For now, he wanted to concentrate on getting up to, and through, those metal bars over the four ceiling windows. He aligned himself directly below the first of the windows, and could hear more distinctly the sounds of insects in high, sun-yellowed summer grass. Bent blades of this grass even dangled down between the bars along the window’s edges. But as he stood there, inhaling, tilting his chin toward the fragrant air, a much cooler breeze washed over him. It was chilly, in fact, and caused him to look toward the windows spaced farther ahead. He found himself wandering forward.

Noon stopped below the next of the four windows. His battered shoes crunched in a scattered heap of brown, dead leaves. A few brighter, more recently fallen leaves lay amongst them. He knelt, picked one up, twirled it by its stem. It was a maple leaf, and it was in fiery shades of orange and yellow. As he gazed straight upward, Noon thought he could hear tree branches rustling. The air had taken on a subtly different fragrance, and it had grown cooler. As he faced above him, he saw a fresh leaf slip between the bars, and come spiraling lazily down like a stingray gliding through water. A fresh, red and gold leaf from a maple tree.

Another icy breeze rushed over him. It came from farther ahead, and Noon went onwards, the skin of his bare arms turning to gooseflesh.

He had taken only a few steps when he realized that the broad white blotch directly underneath this window was not sunlight on the floor. It was snow.

Noon stepped into the crunching patch of snow, and into a silvery shaft of light that was like a solid column of frozen air. Above him, he saw only a blank gray sky between the bars, but a few stray flakes found their way through, drifted down, one of them alighting on his forehead as if in a frail attempt to soothe the agony distending his cranium, undoing his skull’s sutures.

He knew what he would see next before he even walked over to the fourth window and raised his eyes toward it. Gilded dusk or dawn light beamed down, and the breeze was warmer and smelled of green growing things. Spring…

Had there been a fifth window, would it look out upon summer again? A sixth, autumn? And on…and on?

A slim arm thrust itself abruptly between the bars, its fingers grasping down at him futilely. Though it could not possibly have reached him, still Noon flinched violently. It looked like a woman’s arm. He had seen woman-like creatures in the Tunnel before, but this was out of the Tunnel. Could it be a person like himself, trying to rescue rather than hurt him?

Something, an instinct, made Noon look behind him. He saw another arm straining down through the ice-encrusted bars of the third window. This arm, however, was little more than bones held together with frozen ligaments, blue tendons.

Beyond that, yet another arm reached down through the second window, causing brittle leaves to fall between the bars. This arm, it appeared from where he was standing, was horribly black and decomposed, its skin sloughing away. And further on, a fourth arm clutched at thin air, writhing madly like a snake that had been run over by an automobile, flipping impossibly in both directions at the elbow joint. This limb was discolored, beginning to rot, but not yet as corrupted as the one which caused autumn leaves to trickle down.

Each arm, despite its stage of decay, moved in an identical manner…right down to every jerk or twist of the wrist, every spider-like convulsion of the fingers…

And each hand wore an identical, thin gold wedding band, like the one his mother had inherited from her mother, and which had in turn been given to Noon to place on his own bride’s finger on their wedding day. But no daughter of hers would ever wear it, since his wife had expired (and her child along with her) during labor. She wore the ring still, in the velvet-lined jewelry box of her casket…

No—even if he could reach those high windows, Noon knew this was not a good place to escape to. If he should bellow for help, who knew what other terrors might join this/these clutching being/beings.

He continued on his way.

Soon, the varied shafts of sunlight were lost behind him, as were the sound of insects, the smell of autumn leaves and clean snow. Transient impressions, ephemeral, already mere wispy memories swallowed by darkness.

The Tunnel was now nothing but raw, dry earth beneath his feet, to either side and above, like the burrow of a giant animal or a titanic ant hill. For a time, he felt his way through absolute darkness. Something long and feathery—a centipede?—flowed across his hand as it moved along the dirt wall. But a suggestion of light showed ahead of him, and soon he no longer had to run his hand across the wall. The light grew…grew enough for him to see the changes that next shaped the character of the Tunnel.

The walls, ceiling, floor were still mostly of dirt, but not entirely. A section of the floor was covered with a long, irregular patch of faded linoleum which lay fairly flat across the hard-packed dirt. Its edges were broken, irregularly torn. The linoleum had repeating flowery patterns on it. Across the ceiling were scattered patches of white cork tiles, apparently anchored directly into the dirt. And on the earthen walls, again in patchy areas, were hung sheets of old wallpaper, buckling and water-stained, drooping over themselves…tacked directly into the earth without benefit of a wooden or plaster understructure.

A lamp with a crystal shade hung from the ceiling. Its wiring must have run straight into the dirt, as well. The dark spots in the bottom of the shade were doubtless insect carcasses. There were further signs that this part of the Tunnel had been adapted for habitation. Noon approached a table and set of chairs. There were three place settings; two for adults and a bowl for a child. The child’s chair was a high chair. Crusted bits of food—or were those desiccated insect carcasses as well?—lay scattered on the plates.

He walked on; it seemed like he was passing through a kitchen which some force had stretched out, elongated and attenuated. There was an old refrigerator, oddly standing directly in the center of the Tunnel, but when he opened it up—praying for sustenance—it was not cold inside and there were only bad-smelling smudges where maybe food had long ago moldered and liquified. Further along, he saw a kitchen sink with cabinets beneath it, pushed up against one dirt wall. He approached this, hoping that water pipes had been fed into the dirt the way the electrical wiring had been (he had encountered a second, shaded lamp depending from the ceiling).

The sink, he found, was full of water. And the faucets did work; both gave only cold water, but it tasted only slightly of rust and he eagerly cupped his hands under it, drank his fill and splashed handfuls of it across his face. His thirst slaked for the moment, he returned his attention to what he had initially seen inside the water-filled sink. At its bottom rested a rectangular wooden box with a sealed lid. Noon didn’t doubt that despite the lid, the submerged box must have become filled with water, soaking whatever the contents might be. He was curious enough to want to lift the box out of the sink and remove the lid…but at the same time, a great dread prevented him. The box put him too much in mind of a crude coffin. Of course, it was a coffin that could only accommodate the body of an infant, a newborn or a stillborn at that.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the kitchen table, the place setting for a child. He decided not to touch the box at all.

Under the sink, he found a glass pitcher with a plastic top such as juice or lemonade might be made in. He filled this with water, and then took it with him as he continued along.

Maybe it was the coldness of the water he had gulped down or splashed on his forehead, but his headache surged with unprecedented force, until he had to stagger against a wall for support and press the palm of his free hand against his temple. When his damp hand came away, it was matted thick with hair from his head.

Onward, he stumbled…ever onward. But finally he fell onto hands and knees, and he remained that way, crawling along slowly to conserve his strength, waiting for the pain to recede. Or would it recede? Could he, in fact, be dying?

He realized he had lost his machete somewhere behind him. He had found it almost a year ago, amongst a pile of rusting tools and machine parts, in a section of the Tunnel that had seemed to him like a mad factory half lost under dust and corrosion. He couldn’t tell exactly what the subterranean factory had been designed to produce, but it appeared to be simply heavy doughnuts made of metal. The factory had been long dead when he encountered it, and yet at that time he had heard a distant boom, boom, boom and metallic clank, clank, clank from deep behind the machines, behind the walls, from some engine that he never saw but which never stopped running. He imagined that sound in his skull now, the sound of his pain. Maybe the engine had been inside his skull all along.

He didn’t go back for the machete. In fact, he no longer had the water bottle in his hand either, but he kept crawling along on hands and feet, scurrying faster and faster to the throb inside his head…a mechanized rhythm that seemed to be unrolling, even manufacturing, the Tunnel ahead of him…as if nothing but oblivion existed ahead of him until mere seconds before his advance.

A heap of debris, at last, blocked his path. Boards, spiked with nails. A musty armchair. A carpet, impaled on some of the more jagged boards. There was no more electric light here, but a pale bluish glow leaked down from high above. Noon took in his surroundings more closely and noticed that the walls were no longer of packed dirt, were covered in boards instead. The floor itself was of a spongy, thick black soil that his hands sank in to their wrists. (A nightcrawler slithered over his fingers, unseen beneath the loam.) Finally, he lifted his agonized, tear-streaming eyes to the ceiling far above him.

The ceiling was of wood, with a broken hole through which that misty bluish light shone. He recognized the light. He realized he recognized the armchair and the carpet in the heap of debris that had fallen from above. They were articles from his own moldering home in the old, old city.

He had, at last, come around to the beginning of the Tunnel again.

A sound on the other side of the heap of debris caught his attention—a little groan, as of pain. Noon hunkered down lower to the ground, straining his hearing, but it was difficult to hear past the boom, boom, boom, clank, clank, clank. There truly seemed to be a whole factory crammed inside his skull, so terribly swollen and heavy did it feel. Something slithered down the back of his head, and then over his shoulder. He thought it was another centipede until he glanced quickly and saw a wispy hank of his own hair falling to the soil. As his hair was sliding away, so did his final rags of clothing seem to be drooping off of him. Impatiently, he clawed the last remnants away from his body.

Another groan, and through the tangle of boards he saw a figure rise up. It was the most human-looking Foeti he had seen yet. Its long hair was tied in back with a black ribbon, and it slapped the black soil off its full set of clothing. It seemed to be trying to get its bearings; looked up at that hole in the ceiling so far above. As Noon spied through the fallen debris, he saw the upright Foeti walk to the wooden wall, dig its fingers and toes between the warped old boards in an attempt to climb all the way up to that bluish light of freedom.

He must not let his enemy, his nemesis, escape. He must kill it before it killed him.

With a terrible cry that sounded inhuman even to himself, Noon lunged out of the shadows. The human-appearing Foeti dropped off the wooden wall, looked his way only for an instant, and then began running off down the Tunnel.

Noon chased after him. Pursued him. Running. And running and running.