Nightcrawlers

39

St. Aubin was not dead.

Maybe not truly alive anymore in the normal sense of the word, but he was certainly not dead. His mind was some trembling yellow thing that skulked and shivered in the dim corners of his brain. Now and then sanity would rear its head and tell him in no uncertain terms the levels of madness and horror he had sunk to, but mostly he kept it locked away in a musty trunk.

But he was still a man and still had a sense of identity, even though he had trouble remembering exactly who he was or how he’d come to be in this predicament. He subsisted mostly on the raw, rough gruel of instinct. It was this that fed and filled him, kept his limbs moving and his mind focused and resilient. If it wasn’t for this atavistic drive, he would long ago have drawn into himself and slammed the door shut.

He was crawling through sloping, narrow tunnels on his belly. Tunnels so small and cramped that the sides brushed his shoulders and the roof brushed the top of his head. Caked with filth, he crawled on and on through that black, sucking mud. Like some insane mole, he was quite blind now in the absolute darkness and moved only by feel, his fingers constantly searching and divining the suffocating dimensions ahead.

Part of his brain remembered, but his conscious mind kept these memories buried.

It was important not to recall certain things.

Like those grubby, fleshy hands that had pulled him away from Kenney and dragged him down that endless, meandering tangle of pest holes, finally depositing him in some profane den where still more hands accepted him and noses sniffed him and fingers explored him. He could remember this part very well, for the uneven walls were lit by a dim illumination that radiated from what appeared to be a peculiar blue-green mold imbued with some weird bioluminescence. He could not see clearly, but well enough as in twilight or pale moonlight.

That’s when he began to put things together.

They thought he was dead.

They had tucked him into a tight, cloistered cell that had been dug out of the slick, dripping clay walls. And as they did this (and he let them do it, God yes, he had, paralyzed both physically and emotionally with terror), he saw other forms pressed into countless other cells. And knew, despite the grainy light, that those tangled, knotted things were the bodies of men and women that had been stuffed into those holes so they could soften to pulp, and decay properly before being eaten.

And he was just another one.

Yes, yes, the food is the flesh and the corpse is the meat, the blood is the wine and the unplucked, untasted cadaver is the bread to be broken by grisly hands to stuff in the mouths of ravenous ghouls. It all fits and it all works and it all makes a beautiful sort of sense, doesn’t it? Well… DOESN’T IT?

And, God, but it did, oh sweet Jesus in your lofty throne high above the charnel pits far below, it made perfect sense. Not men and women down here. Oh, no, no, no, no, perish the fucking thought, friends and neighbors. These were not men nor women nor humans exactly, just… just… obscene, debased, degenerate things that cannot walk in the light but must creep in the tomblike darkness. Worms, human maggots that feast upon the dead, sharpening their claws on coffin lids and their teeth on pitted bones.

And if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands and no one laughs when the hearse goes by… hee, hee, haw, haw.

His mind swam in and out of this self-perpetuating sea of dementia. He recalled waking and seeing that the others had left and there was only some ancient, stick-thin creature in attendance. It looked to be a woman, incredibly old, her face invisible beneath a mop of dun, colorless hair woven with sticks and clods of dirt. Her chest was writhing with some horrible podia like teats on a mother hog. She crouched there in the corner, oblivious to all and everything, nibbling at her own fingers. St. Aubin could hear the grinding of her teeth, the wet and abominable sound of her smacking lips and investigative tongue.

And it was bad enough, plenty bad enough being trapped in that hideous lair where human beings were tucked away like fat spiders in a hornet’s nest, but it got worse. For there began a bizarre, offensive melody of guttural squealing and yelping sounds. And he saw that the sounds came from the wall directly opposite his own, echoing from countless holes sunk into the clay… and in those holes, squirming, distorted, ghastly things. The old lady dragged herself across the floor and began rending something in a cell directly below St. Aubin’s. He heard a wet, pulpy snapping and something like rotting cloth being torn. He was thankful for the gloom, for he couldn’t see what she carried and what she fed the things in those grisly holes.

Maybe he couldn’t exactly remember his own name, but he knew one thing: He was in a nursery, being seasoned and softened for those appalling and toothless, infantile mouths.

He might have passed out then or crawled into some crack in the floor of his mind where it was dark, cozy, and safe. When he opened his eyes, the mold was shining brightly, revealing something that made his eyes roll in their sockets and his teeth chatter wildly until his gums ached.

That… that… that… what is that I’m seeing? What is that thing that comes out of the darkness?

He could not be sure, only that the sight of it made him piss himself.

There was a thing standing there… well, not exactly standing, but suspended by wires like a marionette, only they were not wires but dozens and dozens and dozens of ropy strands of the pink fungal material that infested the subterranean world of the corpse-eaters. And they were not exactly hooked to her—because, oh yes, it was certainly a her—but growing into her and out of her, connecting to a huge pink and pulsating mass of morbid tissue that looked almost quilted, soft and spongy and dripping pearlescent red tears. The strands pulled her, stretched her, flattened her and elongated her, making her into a woman and something quite beyond a woman.

At the sight of it… of her… of it, St. Aubin made a sound somewhere between a giggle and a low shrieking.

A stink came off the woman-thing.

It smelled like sour urine and polluted tidal flats and corpses in green ponds.

She’s astride a lovely pink web, can’t you see that?

Yes, now it was apparent: a glittering pink web that grew within her and without her because she and the fungus were one. The webs were strung with shining silken cases and ruby blood-egg clusters all done up in a finery of feathery tapestries spun from spider-mesh and spider-gauze, a threadwork and maze, a black widow’s deadly nest.

Listen, listen… can you hear her? Can you?

There was a scrambling of limbs, a wet sound and a dry sound, a slithering noise and then the sound of fleshy tearing. The woman split open and something repellent bubbled out of her. It was vile and undulant, a pink and creeping horror limned by soft light. It was the fungus and it poured from her, it gushed and foamed and when its flowing mass retreated back into her… there were something like glistening eggs strung on the strands like beads on a thread.

In his mind, St. Aubin saw that each one held a squirming larva.

In the light, of course, there was no way he could really see this, yet the image was quite vibrant in his mind. He tried to think it away and blink it away, but it remained. And when he looked over at the woman who had sewn herself back up again, she was a globular mass of bleeding eyes.

She was the haunter of the dark.

She was the despoiler of men’s minds.

She was a living flux of plastic tissue, of fungus, of woman, a biological machine that reinvented itself with a child’s aberrant imagination. It sprouted malformed heads that were huge and bulbous. It became a pale writhing thing like a fetal termite. It threw out a dozen limbs that were not exactly arms or legs and a dozen grasping human hands sprouting chest to crotch like the teats of a cow. Its face became the grotesque, cartoonish saw-toothed grin of a jack-o’-lantern and a veil of gray fungus. Its head mutated into a cluster of blind white eyes and then a semihuman monstrosity that looked like something dumped from a bucket in a dissection room.

She/it/they were slithering and writhing and viscidly alive. Something made of a thousand moving parts… mouths filled with teeth and fingers tipped by claws and tentacles and bat wings and accordions of gleaming bone. But for it all, she was still oddly embryonic and unformed. She was forming herself into everything she had encountered in every murky crawl space and stinking drainage ditch she had crept through, every putrefying corpse and roadkilled animal she stumbled across, every fly and worm and crawling thing that had infested the corpses she fed upon. And much of it was just pure subjective impression.

Regardless, all of it, every bit of it was not intended to frighten him and he knew this. There was a very real agenda behind it all and when he realized it, it was a ray of light chasing away the darkness in his head.

It’s for your benefit, all for your benefit. She’s trying to amuse you. She does not want you to be scared. She wants you to be amused so you will not be afraid. Whatever she was and whatever the fungus creature was, they are not hateful creatures.

“But I don’t want this,” he found himself saying. “I don’t want this at all. I want to go… don’t you see? I want to go!”

Now she was a thing of glossy pink webs. The great strands and ropes of tissue connecting her to the ceiling and walls and even the floor were thickening, replicating themselves until they were a tangled forest, darning and hemming and sewing themselves into mantraps and funnels and nooses. She would stop him. She would knot him up and snare him because she wanted him to stay forever.

Come to me, she said inside his head. Come to mother. Join me as the others joined me and were remade by me. I’m soft and warm and comforting. Come dream with me.

St. Aubin could no longer seem to think.

His fingers fumbled around him until his left hand clutched the phallic shape of a mushroom. At first, it felt greasy and foul… then, like velvet. He held it in his hands, the silkiness of it bringing a sort of tactile rapture that made him moan. It felt so wonderful. Somewhere during the process, he brought it up to his mouth and kissed it.

His lips tingled.

It was amazing. It was so soft, so very tender. It was like the cheek of a baby or the down of a chick, both and neither. A bunny’s fur felt almost coarse in comparison.

He licked it and it fired his taste buds into new realms that made him tremble and gasp, whimper for more.

He bit into it.

Dear Christ.

It was a rare delicacy, sweet and savory and mouth-watering. It triggered the release of endorphins in his head that flooded his body with a sense of contentment, satisfaction, and pure biochemical joy.

You have eaten me… now enter me.

The sound of her voice made him feel like he was drifting on a lofty, featherbed-soft cloud through a sky of cotton candy. He could not be certain in those dizzying moments whether she came to him or he came to her, he was only aware of contact. Of his own hands reaching out to touch her and bisecting her central, webby mass, which felt warm and seedy and joyously pulpous like the guts of a pumpkin. That was the ecstasy of it, the tactile delight. He wanted to run his hands through her and swim through her.

And she was only too happy to accept him.

It was like being buried in the cold guts of a fish, being sucked into a bog of wriggling entrails. He melted like tallow as he fell into her and there was no pain because unlike Godfrey, he was not frightened of her. She pulsed and purred, coiled and bled pink rivers of tissue until he was engulfed in her depths.

There was a purity to it.

And a beauty beyond words.