Artyom Dereschuk - Hate the Sin

“Man, screw you. Uneducated smartass.” -The first one grunted and walked away.

Corpse Eater felt a sting of envy that they knew so much about the world around them. Though that knowledge wasn’t useful, having at least some school education before the war must have had its perks.

After a few minutes of walking in the dark, the procession stopped again. The boy heard the gasps of surprise and awe coming from the front, and realized what they probably were looking at. The Portal.

The boy remembered how impressed he had been by mere photos, but he was absolutely sure that the real thing, which was just beyond the veil of darkness, was far beyond that, far beyond anything any of them had ever seen in their petty lives. He could understand what an effect it would have on simple soldiers who, for most of their adult lives, knew only death, dirt, and whoring.

As the procession started to move again, the wave of bewildered and awed gasps was slowly rolling closer to the back of the group, until a beam of light glanced past the portal’s support and the boy saw it again. The memory of his previous impressions was still fresh in his head, but seeing it with his own eyes made him question if any medium could convey the sensation that was experiencing.

It had been built long before their ancestors started walking the earth and would most likely outlive humanity itself. Before its timeless nature, the enigmatic secrets it was bound to contain, and the unthinkable evil it could spew into the world under the sun, their very quest for survival was seemingly insignificant. Their mere desire to exist and live, spawned as a necessity by their mortal coils, was almost vulgar and blatant before this ageless structure—something that one should be ashamed of and never mention.

“Unreal,” the boy heard Homewrecker gasp. Involuntarily, Corpse Eater took his light and guided its beam up at the portal to get a better look at it as he was passing through. Whether he would survive or not didn’t concern him at that moment; for the first time in his life, he was free from that drive to live, and it was refreshing. All that mattered was to suck in that impression that the gate had on him and to make it his own.

“Who could possibly build something like that?” the boy wondered. “Spirits? Demons?”

At that moment, he doubted that the gate had anything to do with humans at all, dead or otherwise.

At that moment, his idyll was interrupted by a sound from behind them. Somebody was whispering in the darkness.

He turned around together with Homewrecker, and his friend cast him a concerned look: “You heard it too, right?”

Their lights weren’t revealing anything to them, which, considering the circumstances, was a good thing. But they were pretty sure that there was something in the darkness worth their attention. They knew that undead eyes, hungry for vengeance, were staring at them at that very moment, biding their time, and the boy was strangely sure that even if their lights went out, those eyes would still be able to see his every move.

“Hey! We think we’ve heard something!” Homewrecker called for a few soldiers who were walking closest to them. A few of them turned around, and one of them lazily asked: “You think or you know?”

“I’m sure I heard something!” Corpse Eater spoke up before his friend had such a chance. Even though it wasn’t entirely true, it would be better to make sure that he had the soldiers’ attention. “They’re somewhere here, following us!”

That had the desired effect; the soldiers tensed up and raised their weapons. The boys did the same, staring into darkness and straining their eyes, trying to find something. As he felt the pull of the cable again, he slowly started walking backward. In his mind, he already had a clear picture of what could happen: the cable pulls him down and he tumbles and falls, just as one of those creatures emerges from the darkness with its claws ready.

Slowly, moving at the slowest pace the tug of their long resin-covered leashes allowed, the boys entered the Underworld.

Absolute darkness. Cold, damp air. Shuffling of a hundred feet. Racket of the generator. Heads going in and out of sight as the lights shook and trembled.

As they descended down the tunnel, Homewrecker suddenly noticed that the air which had gotten more and more chilly as they moved downward, was getting warmer all of the sudden. Although it was a welcome change, it didn’t make Homewrecker feel any better; the boy’s scared mind painted him a picture that they were descending right into the throat of an underground leviathan. After all, weren’t they looking for the herb which grew “at the base of the giants’ feet?”

Perhaps at any moment, he could expect a long tongue to emerge from the darkness in front of them and crush the entire brigade under its weight before they would have a chance to react, before proceeding to swipe them all up like breadcrumbs.

The tunnel didn’t go on for too long; after a while, the brigade reached a crossroads. The tunnel continued straight, but had two new ones branching out from it and going down, in different directions. The General must’ve ignored them because the brigade just continued to go straight. Homewrecker, though, couldn’t help but wonder where the tunnels headed.

He, Corpse Eater, and a few other soldiers, were making sure nothing would attack them from behind, so they were trusting everyone behind them to keep their eyes peeled for attacks at the head of the formation. Their eyes weren’t looking ahead like everyone else’s, and they were too tense to look away even for a second when they heard a second wave of awe approach. They heard that the soldiers behind them weren’t scared or intimidated. That was all that mattered to them at that moment.

They only turned around when they realized that the ceiling above them was suddenly gone.

At first, Homewrecker thought that they had entered a hall of some sort, but he was very surprised when he felt soft ground under his feet. Looking up, he didn’t see the ceiling—only tiny yellow lights. He initially thought that they were stars but, after looking at them for a few seconds, he realized that the lights were slightly moving—like fireflies. Curiosity took over and the boy guided his light upward, to see that the ceiling, even if very distant, was still there. It wasn’t an even surface like in the tunnels; the ceiling of the hall was covered in what seemed like roots and even some strange, unseen plants. An entire forest upside down, hanging above them.

“Don’t point the lights up there!” he suddenly heard the old man from the front of the formation shout at them. The boy didn’t follow the old man’s advice immediately, mostly because he was bewildered by it. Do not point your light at the ceiling? Why? Wasn’t it his job to illuminate everything?

But a moment later he got the answer to his question; defying all common sense, he saw shadows charge across the unseen woods above, and heard their many claws and fingers grab onto the branches. Without sunlight, his mind was quickly adapting to the new environment, and he was now relying on his hearing rather than eyesight, which was providing a primitive but very descriptive and apt picture of what was going above.

The monsters that dwelled in the Underworld were rushing toward the spot of light, and if they reached it, the boy suddenly realized, they would start looking for the source of it.

Would they think that the lamp on his shoulder was a particularly fat firefly? Would they dare to come down to him to check?

He grabbed the light and made it point forward, but as the spot of light traversed the ceiling on its way down he—and everyone else—noticed that the lush black woodland above housed more than one type of creature. Some of the hungry things that the boy had carelessly attracted were no bigger than a dog, albeit with at least twice as many legs, which they used to carelessly traverse the environment. But others… others were big enough that they had to move the forest out of their way as they gracefully sloughed across the ceiling’s surface. Their grey skin glistened and glimmered as they crept forward, and their strange appendages, too indistinct to be called limbs, were holding on only to the toughest of trunks.