Tim Curran - The underdwelling

Jurgens stood up, shining his flashlight in every direction. “Keep away from us, you hear me? Whatever in the fuck you are, you better keep away from us! You come by us again and we’ll kill you! Do you understand? Do you fucking understand me?”

“Don’t,” Boyd told him. “Don’t do that…don’t threaten her.”

“Breeeeeeeeeeed!” came the wailing voice. “Meeeek-naaaaaar!”

Maki was sobbing under his breath. “It’s a ghost,” he was saying. “We’re trapped down here with a ghost.”

Boyd was going to tell him he was wrong, but maybe he wasn’t. There was no way you could catalog that thing. Maybe it was alive and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, Maki was right: she was a shadow, a wraith from antiquity.

The chittering rose up again and it was very close now.

Jurgens moved in a circle. “Get the fuck away from us!”

Maki was with him now, brandishing his flashlight like a weapon.

“Don’t,” Boyd said. “Dear Christ, don’t do that…”

What seemed mere feet away, she let out a whining, pathetic shriek of utter agony and desolation and loneliness. The sound terrified Boyd and mainly because he heard the desperation in her voice, the cold cawing of millions of years that had scraped her mind raw. But Jurgens and Maki did not understand that. She was just a monster and they planned to deal with her as men had always dealt with monsters.

They ran at the direction of her voice and it was the worse thing they could have done. Maybe she did not understand the hateful things they called out to her or the threats they made, not in words, but she understood the tone. She knew she was threatened and she responded accordingly.

Boyd saw it happen and was powerless to stop it.

Something incredibly fast and unseen hit Jurgens. Hit him hard, tearing his throat out with a spray of meat and blood that splashed against the petrified trees and struck Boyd in the face, hot and steaming. Before Maki could utter so much as a cry of surprise, she took him, too. Boyd heard something thud into him and he was yanked high up into the air like a meat hook had caught him between the shoulder blades. Boyd heard him scream from the tops of those trees. A scream that was silenced by something wet shoved into his mouth. And then Boyd saw a blur of moment and Maki’s corpse landed not four feet from him, its face threaded with blood, eyes wide and staring, mouth yawning wide, unnaturally so, as if something had been forced in there that dislocated his jaws.

Boyd heard himself begin to sob.

Jurgen’s corpse was up there somewhere and Boyd could hear blood dripping earthward like a gentle rain. Plop, plop, plop. The light of the lantern illuminated the forest to about twenty feet up and he could see the glistening red drops rolling down the trunk of a petrified seed fern. He was hearing other sounds, too.

The sound of chewing.

And wet sucking sounds.

He felt his mind go. It vacated his brain with nary a scream or a mad peal of laughter. It just went and he was content with that.

He heard her coming down the trunk of a tree with the skittering sound of dozens of legs. She paused on the log that had broken his leg, not five feet away. He could hear her breathing.

But he could not see her.

In that same scraping, almost metallic squeal of a voice, she said, “Booooooyyyyyd?”

He was looking right through her, looking at something that cast no image, something invisible and ancient and lonely. She uttered a cooing sound that made his flesh crawl.

“It’s okay,” he said, cold sweat running down his face. “I won’t hurt you…I won’t leave you…”

She moved forward, cooing.

Yes, she was coming for him now.

And he knew she wasn’t going to kill him. She had responded to him right from the first and he knew it. He heard her crawl atop Maki’s corpse. She smelled ancient and dry, like hay stored in a closed-up barn. Maki’s head was lifted up and something stabbed into his throat. There was a sucking, slurping noise.

“Oh no,” Boyd whispered under his breath. “Oh Jesus…”

That slurping sound continued and he saw blood…a stream of blood being sucked from Maki’s throat with gulping sounds like a thirsty man downing a beer. The stream of blood was sucked into the air, probably into her mouth, then it diffused into several rivulets and filled several kidney-shaped sacs that must have been her stomachs…all three of them.

Boyd watched.

He heard her make smacking sounds as she finished up.

He was shaking, and moaning deep in his throat and that wasn’t from what he had just seen, but from what she was doing: stroking his arm with something like a spurred finger. And cooing in his ear.

Boyd opened his eyes.

It was pitch black.

He did not know how much time had passed. It might have been six days or six months as far as he was concerned, because his mind was lost in a white fog of madness. He was inside one of the cells in the ancient honeycombed trees, a cell near the very top. This is where she had brought him. Where she kept him and cared for him.

His leg had become infected the second day and he submerged into a mire of fever dreams, calling out to people who were not there and remembering a reality that no longer existed for him. The infection would have spread and killed him eventually, but she would not have it. Devoted and kind and heartsick for company, any company, she had tended to him. She had sucked the poison from his legs and cooled him with water she sprayed onto his face.

When he woke from the fever, he screamed.

And she cooed her love for him.

He lay there, trying to remember the world before the cell, but it was all becoming rapidly grainy and indistinct. A dream-world, a pleasant fantasy slipping from his grasp. The lanterns and flashlights were gone, but no matter, their batteries would have been long exhausted by now.

The darkness was forever.

But he was never alone in it.

He recalled when she had first come for him, how she had been almost shy. She had sat at his feet for some time, cooing and clicking, sometimes making a low and haunting musical sort of piping. But he had held out his hand and she had come, hungry for companionship, shattered by an eternity of ungodly isolation. It had not been easy at first getting used to her, the feel of her touch or the squeal of her voice. All those clicking, spidery limbs like tangled, knotty bamboo, the bony rungs of her body that were set with spiny hairs. Her fetid breath, the stink of age and corruption, a sickly warm miasma flavored by what she had been eating.

He did not know what she was.

She was not a spider exactly, but maybe something like one. Something with a convoluted, glossy exoskeleton and countless whispering stick-like limbs. Her flesh felt oily and damp like wet seal skin. But she was no insect or arachnid. She had a head. A long, narrow head and something like a face. A head draped with a mop of greasy, webby hair that undulated like worms when you touched it and a face set with no less than three oval mouths. Sometimes, she would lie next to him and lick him with her tongues, cleaning him and keeping him healthy.

At first, he’d wanted to scream, but even that had passed. He even got used to the food she chewed for him into a fine, moist pulp and regurgitated into his mouth. He did not like to think of what the food was, being that there was only one possible source of meat in the cavern.

It took some getting used to, just as it took getting used to the way she called his name, that rusty, scraping wail that was like the agonized mewling of a cat wailing in the dead of night. “Boooooyyyd,” she would shriek with that pathetic childlike screech that was so lonely, so destitute like the squall of a terrified child. “Booooooyyyyd…”