James Enge - This Crooked Way

I made it all the way to the center of the crowd, where Morlock, his lower body out of sight, was scrabbling desperately at the lip of the mouthlike hole, trying to pull himself out. His mouth was gagged and each of his wrists was looped with a twisted cord, as if they had been bound together.

I left the knife in a nearby Bargainer and bent down to grab with both hands at one of Morlock's arms.

Morlock's mouth was moving; it looked as if he was shouting some sort of warning. But the plugs in my ears kept me from hearing him, and the gag in his mouth kept me from reading his lips.

The ground crumbled under my feet. We fell with several Bargainers into the gaping earth.

My death grip on Morlock's arm saved me. When we had fallen several feet we jerked to a halt. Looking up through the shadows and the clots of dirt falling from the ragged edge of the hole, I saw Morlock had caught hold of a tree root. He didn't manage to hang on to it, but it slowed us down. He caught the next one and held it, but it bent ominously under our joint weight. There was another root protruding from the hole wall, not so far off, and I managed to pull myself onto it.

Both of us were so out of breath that talking would have been out of the question, even if we didn't have our ears plugged. While regaining my wind, I looked around at the questionable situation in which we found ourselves.

We were about midway down the gullet of earth, between the hole in the surface (still mouthlike, but more of a spreading grin now) and the bellylike chamber at the bottom. There was light coming from both directions-from the sky above and from a purplish luminescence emitted by a moss that grew thickly on the curving walls of the chamber below. Immediately under us was a pile of human bones, naked and fleshless with the fluted marks of chewing all over them.

Scattered around the floor were various Bargainers, flopping around like birds caught in a net. One or two were motionless, perhaps impaled on the sharp broken bones that were scattered over the floor of the chamber.

And there was something else. It was hard to tell exactly what it was. It looked like two bladders of unequal size, half filled with some sort of fluid, connected to each other by a thickish cord. One of the bladders was about as long as a man's arm; the other was less than half that long, and not as broad. There seemed to be some sort of hair or fur on part of the smaller bladder.

It was alive. It moved about the bone-paved floor by rolling, and as it rolled I could see it had some appendages-not arms and legs, really, but just floppy little things where arms and legs might be, or might once have been. I couldn't tell what sex it was, or if it had one, but I began to realize that some of the features on the less hairy side of the smaller bladder constituted a face. There was a slack half-open mouth, crusted with filth from the floor; above it a floppy boneless nose, two ear-flaps protruding from the surface of the bladder, and two dark glaring eyes. And across it all was a scar or seam, a dark purplish mark dividing the face almost in half. It passed between the eyes, to the left of the nose, and over the mouth, apparently sealing the lips together at the mouth where it crossed them, so it was almost as if the thing had two mouths.

The Boneless One (I didn't doubt that's what I was looking at) rolled over to one of the fallen Bargainers, a man who was struggling to regain his feet. Its two mouths pressed against his arm, as if in a kiss. The life went out of him in a moment and he fell dead to the ground.

After a while it rolled away, or started to, then paused. The appendages on one side of the body flapped uselessly. It was almost as if they were trying to hit the other side of the Boneless One's body. Finally the Boneless One rolled away toward another fallen Bargainer, a woman who was twitching limply, apparently unable to get up.

This time it looked as if one side of the Boneless One's face was trying to keep the other side from making contact with the victim. Again the useless appendages struggled, each set lashing out at the opposite side of the shapeless body. When the woman screamed, seeing the monster beside her, and began to edge away across the bone-strewn floor, the Boneless One gave up its pointless struggle against itself and rolled quickly over, locking its lips on the woman's left leg. She stopped moving instantly; her face became calm; her eyes closed. Her life was gone, her tal consumed. The Enemy moved on toward the next body.

It was weird, but I thought I knew what was happening when the Boneless One fought itself. I figured that we had done it, Morlock and I. If he had cut the anchor-worm as I did, it must have divided the Boneless One's influence into two unequal halves. In doing so, we had somehow divided the Boneless One itself, as if there was no difference between the Boneless One and the space where its influence ran. So now there were two Boneless Ones sharing the same body, and obviously each resented the other. I sort of hoped they would figure out some way to kill each other, but I didn't figure it would happen within the next few minutes.

Maybe, I thought, we should just drop down into the pit, seize some sharp broken bones for weapons, and try to poke the thing to death. It seemed like someone would have tried that, during the centuries the Boneless One had been eating human lives in this pit. But maybe they fell so far and hit so hard that they were stunned and the Boneless One got them before they could recover.

Then again, maybe that skin wouldn't be so easy to poke through. It could roll over the carpet of shattered bones without apparently taking any harm at all, not even a scratch. That brownish, pinkish, grayish surface was probably harder than leather. It would take more than a rotten bone to chew a hole init…

Chew. I looked again at the bones. They had been gnawed; the toothmarks were clearly visible, even in the wretched purplish light. By what? If the Boneless One was truly boneless, it wouldn't have teeth. Besides, why should it gnaw flesh if it lived on the tal that sustained life itself?

Rats. There must be rats down there. Maybe a lot of rats. The rats would come in and clean up the meat after the Boneless One had drained the life. So why hadn't they appeared yet?

The Boneless One finished a third victim and paused, in midcareer toward a fourth. Its right pair of leathery lips wrinkled, as if it were saying something. The left pair of lips twisted in response, and my nerves were struck with the muted sound of the Silent Word. Then the left pair of lips seemed to say something, and the right pair of lips responded with the Silent Word.

Was there something happening up above-some battle between the Bargainers controlled by the two warring segments of the Boneless One?

Maybe. Or maybe each side had called out to a cleanup crew of rats, and the other side had knocked them out. Because they were each afraid. Afraid of rats under the other's control …or under no control.

Rats! Morlock could summon the rats, if he only had his magic pipe with him. Then I realized he probably did: when I had last seen it he had been tucking it into his sleeve.

I looked toward Morlock, trying to catch his eye. He was hanging on to a root with his left hand, stripping the gag away from his mouth with his right hand. He stared bemusedly at the Boneless One as it drained the life from a fourth victim. I shouted, but he didn't hear me. I grabbed a clump of earth from the side of the pit and tossed it at him. Then he turned toward me, his eyebrows raised as if in inquiry.

"Rats!" I shouted. But either he didn't hear me (or couldn't read my lips) or he didn't see what I was driving at. Desperately, I tapped my left arm with my right hand, and then mimed playing a flute. All this activity caused my grip on the root to loosen and I almost fell. But by the time I had regained my perch Morlock was laughing (not at my acrobatics, I hope) and drawing the pipe from his sleeve-pocket.