Sigmund gave up trying to drive the car by the time they got to Von Neumann Avenue.
“Sigmund!” his dad said when Sigmund took his hands off the wheel. “What are you doing?”
“It doesn’t need me, I guess.” Sigmund gestured as the wheel turned itself to round them onto Briers Way.
David watched in existential horror for a moment, before swallowing and closing his eyes. Sigmund didn’t blame him. They could barely see through the ash and smoke, and the air was heavy and scratchy and smelled like sulphur and rendered fat. The car wasn’t driving fast and, as they crawled through the streets, he could see vague, malformed shadows writhing along sidewalks and in abandoned front yards. There were a lot of them. Lain claimed they weren’t aggressive, but Sigmund was thankful he was in the car. He felt even better when he found the button on the dash that put the convertible’s top up.
His father opened his eyes at the sound, and afterward had taken to staring out at the streets.
“What are they?” David finally asked. His voice sounded flat, dead. Sigmund hadn’t heard that tone in a very, very long time.
( . . . monster . . .)
When he turned, Sigmund found his father looking at him. “Lain calls them draugar. I guess they’re . . . ghosts?”
Dad seemed waxy, pale, and old somehow. Sigmund didn’t like it.
(“—monster strangling my son.”
“Dad, don’t call him that.”)
“Ghosts? They’re dead people?”
“I guess. I don’t know really.” Sigmund thought about the things he’d seen shuffling through the mall, chained behind the cash registers. Were they ghosts? He’d never heard of anyone dying tending the tills at Angus & Robertson. Maybe it didn’t work that way.
(“Then what the hell should I call him?”)
“Are they . . . dangerous? Will they attack us?” Dad didn’t sound afraid. He didn’t sound much of anything.
“Maybe. Lain says they’re like vermin.”
That did provoke a reaction. “The ghosts of dead people are vermin?” Great, now his dad was pissed off for some reason. What the hell, man!
“Jeez, Dad, I don’t know! I don’t even know if they’re people or just . . . just ghosts! It’s not like I’ve done this before either, okay?”
(“Just . . . just call him Lain, Dad. I don’t know.”)
The car’s steering wheel was trimmed in chrome and black leather. Sigmund picked at red stitching and tried not to fume. Or pout. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see David looking at him.
His dad was quiet and still for what seemed like forever, then, “I though . . . I thought I was doing all right. As a father.”
“Dad.”
“My son comes home and tells me he’s gay—”
“I’m not—”
“And I think, Okay, David. You can handle that. No problem. I looked it up online, how to meet your adult son’s first boyfriend. I thought I was going to do fine.” Dad paused, face gaunt and pale, lines etched around his mouth and on his brow. Then, “But this? I can’t deal with this, Sigmund. I don’t even know what this is. And I just . . . I just wish . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to, Sigmund heard the end of it anyway: I wish your mother was here. And it hurt, because Dad never, ever said that. Never spoke about Mum, really, even though he’d never remarried and even though he visited her grave constantly when he thought Sigmund wasn’t looking and even though he kept her photo on the bedside table and all of her things still in the closet, like she’d just gone away for business and would be back at any moment.
Sigmund had been three when she’d died. He didn’t even remember her. Would probably walk past her on the street without recognizing her, even after seeing her photo just about every day for his entire life. Mum was an abstract concept, as distant and foreign as the surface of the moon or 1964. Other people had been there, had seen it, but not Sigmund. Its importance filtered down through their experiences, not because it mattered to Sigmund directly.
So his mum had died. Technically, Sigmund didn’t even really know how she’d died. Dad, and the doctors, had said it was postpartum depression, but three years after Sigmund had been born? PPD wasn’t fatal by itself, and it wasn’t like Mum had hung herself in the basement or taken a pill cocktail or gone down-the-highway-not-across-the-street. Sigmund had thought so, all through his teens. Had gotten into a huge fight with his dad about it, even though he knew his dad wasn’t lying. It was how he’d gotten to see the death certificate.
No suicide. She’d just died, PPD being listed as a contributing complication. Dad had said it was the best explanation they had. Lynne’s physical and mental health had deteriorated after Sigmund had been born, for no discernible reason. They’d seen a litany of specialists, all of whom had said there was nothing physically wrong. They’d tried psychiatrists, but the drugs were all side effects, and therapy didn’t help. They’d hid it all from their son, even after Lynne’s death, because his parents never wanted Sigmund to come to what David had described as “the wrong conclusion.”
“S-stop the car!”
Sigmund jerked at the abruptness of his father’s voice. “What?”
“Stop the bloody car!”
David was staring out the window with one hand on the door handle, as if he was ready to leap out at any moment.
There was just one problem: “I don’t know how!”
“The brake, damnit! Hit the break!”
Sigmund did.
Surprisingly, the car responded, screaming into a one-eighty that threw up a wall of greasy ash in its wake. It’d barely finished moving when Sigmund—heart hammering and back pressed into his seat in terror—heard the passenger door pop and his dad leap out.
“Dad!”
David shot the briefest of glances back. “Stay there! I saw . . . I’ll be right back!”
“Dad!”
But his dad wasn’t listening, instead lurching off in an awkward run through the fog. Toward a side street, between two low, squat apartment blocks.
“Dad!” Sigmund threw himself out of the car, nearly forgetting to pop his seat belt in his panic. What the hell was Dad thinking?
“Dad! Dad, come back! It’s dangerous!”
But David had vanished into the fog. Sigmund was about to give chase, when the sound of the car’s horn made him turn.
“My dad, I have to—” he managed, before wondering why he was justifying himself to a car. A car that was lowering its roof and windows and, Sigmund noticed, had opened its glove box.
Giving one last glance back where he’d seen his dad vanish, Sigmund jogged back to the car and leaned over the passenger’s side to peer into the glove box. It was full of weird detritus: half a chewed sneaker, a Collingwood Magpies belt buckle, and a key. It was big and black and had one huge button as well as the actual metal key shaft. The chain was a silver horse’s skull. Sigmund took the offering, stuffing it into his pocket.
“Um, thanks,” he said, feeling only vaguely dorky for talking to an inanimate object that obviously wasn’t.
The car turned off its lights and its engine, which Sigmund took to mean that it would wait for them. He gave it a hesitant wave, before jogging toward the gap between the buildings. The one he’d seen Dad enter.
Away from the car, the fog got very thick, very fast. Sigmund was kicking up clouds of ash with every step, his jeans soon coated with oily, pale gray filth from the knees down. It wasn’t cold, which was something, but it wasn’t hot either. Almost as if temperature was something that happened elsewhere, not here. Temperature and everything else, maybe: Sigmund’s footsteps seemed muffled in the silence, his fingers numb. It occurred to him that maybe the fog wasn’t fog. Maybe his eyes just weren’t working right.
He blinked. “Dad!” The sound of his own voice echoing off the buildings was reassuring in its clarity, and Sigmund steeled himself and entered the alleyway. It wasn’t wide—he could touch both walls if he held out his arms—but it was strewn with trash bags and mounds of rotting somethings. Some of it looked like it’d been knocked over recently, skittering things Sigmund decided to think of as cockroaches scurrying in between the piles. He hoped it’d been his dad who’d stumbled.
He thought he could maybe hear something up ahead, so kept walking. This always happened, didn’t it? They’d been doing fine in the car, but Dad just had to leap out and run off on his own, so of course Sigmund just had to follow. Alone. He vowed to make Dad watch more horror films with him
(if)
when they got out of this mess. Obviously Dad was suffering from a lashing of potentially fatal Genre Blindness.
Then again, so was Sigmund.
Maybe that was the secret. It was easy to yell at the screen from the sofa at home, but maybe when they got out there, among the blood and bile, people fell into the story whether they wanted to or not. Sucked in by some terrible, inexorable gyre.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
A shuffling noise behind Sigmund made him turn. Through the haze, he could just about make out the grotesque shape of a draugr, watching him from the entrance to the alley. He stood frozen for a long moment, heart hammering and unsure. The thing didn’t make any attempt to follow.
“Vermin,” he murmured to himself, forcing his muscles to unwind. “They’re just like . . . like huge rats, man.” Huge, glistening, almost-but-not-human-shaped rats. Fantastic.
He turned, forcing himself to continue down the alley, ears straining to hear even the slightest whisper of noise from the watching draugr. A few more feet and he emerged into a courtyard between the buildings. In the Really Real World, Sigmund could imagine it would be a nice place to sit and read. In Niflhel it was . . . less like that.
“Dad?” He couldn’t see the other side of the courtyard through the fog, but he thought he could hear noise. He hoped it was his father.
“—nne! Stop! Wait, please!”
“Dad!” Sigmund turned. That had been his father’s voice, though the way it echoed between the buildings made it impossible to tell where it had come from. It’d sounded close, but in the bleak and vast silence of the dead city, it occurred to Sigmund that he really had no way of telling. Sound traveled pretty far in silence, didn’t it? Like, people in the outback reckoned they could hear the sound of birds flapping their wings, miles and miles away.
“Dad?” He inched forward, farther into the courtyard. A cracked fountain came into view, still half full of oil-dark water, as well as the skeletons of trees and a few rotting benches. And then, just beyond that, a weirdly dark patch of ground that Sigmund couldn’t identify.
He was almost standing on top of it when he realized it was a hole. An impossibly huge, impossibly round sinkhole plummeting straight into the earth. Unobscured by the fog, yet all Sigmund could see within was blackness. It wasn’t better.
There were noises coming from the hole. The sound of shuffling movement, clinking metal, and a murmuring that Sigmund couldn’t quite make out.
“Dad?” But the only thing he got in response was the sound of his own voice, echoing back at him.
He inched around the hole, being careful not to get too close to the drop. Eventually, he came up against the wall of one of the apartments ringing the courtyard, and the sight of it made him stop. The hole bisected the building, as if some giant had taken a clean, semicircular bite out of the whole thing. Sigmund could see inside the floors like it was some kind of perverse dollhouse. A TV, half of someone’s couch, a room that looked like it belonged to a little girl.
“Holy shit.”
This, he thought, was getting into real impossible geometry territory. And Sigmund watched TV, he played games and read books. He knew what it meant when the impossible geometry in the hell dimension started ramping up.
It meant he was fucked, is what it meant.
There was nowhere else to go. He’d seen his dad run into the alleyway, though, which meant he had to have passed through this courtyard. So he must’ve seen the hole, but then what?
Sigmund turned, and started pacing back around the circumference. Sure enough, he was soon stopped at the point where the second apartment block had also been sliced clean through. There was no other exit to the courtyard, unless his dad had climbed into one of the ground-floor windows—Sigmund repaced the boundary of the space to be sure, but none were broken or opened—or slipped quietly back through the alley when Sigmund’s back was turned. But why would he do that?
Sigmund peered down the alley just in case, but the only thing he could see was the draugr, flopping itself back and forth in the narrow space
(narrower? it was wider before, wasn’t it?)
like a wet, sagging pendulum. The idea of squeezing himself past it was abhorrent, and Sigmund backed away.
That just left the hole.
Sigmund returned to the edge and stared down. The blackness made it impossible to tell how deep it was. He dropped to his belly and wriggled right up to the hole’s rim, then used the flash from his phone’s camera to try to see the bottom, but this darkness was unmoved in the face of technology. It started up about three feet from the top and that was apparently where it was staying. Sigmund tried tossing a stone into the maw and listening for the bottom, but got nothing. Nothing except the sound of distant movement and that voice, speaking words he couldn’t hear.
“Hello?” he finally tried. “Dad, is that you?” And then, somewhat optimistically, “Lain?”
And then, for one terrible moment, the noise from the hole stopped.
(okay, that’s . . . that’s just great)
Sigmund was still staring over the edge, fingers gripping against bisected pavement and the entire front of his body damp from the wet-ash ground, when he noticed the stairs. They were easy to miss: a narrow, awkward line cut into the edge and just barely peeking out above the blackness. They would’ve been completely invisible from even a foot or so back. As it was, they didn’t look encouraging. The walls of the hole were made from slippery, mud-covered rock, and the stairs were barely wide enough for a person, let alone in possession of something as gauche as a safety rail.
It occurred to Sigmund that he was going to have to walk down the stairs. Which was crazy, because there was no way in hell Sigmund would ever even attempt something so ridiculous in the Really Real World: Dad or no Dad, he’d break his neck. But they weren’t in Panda anymore, Toto. This was the Bleed. And things in the Bleed, Sigmund was beginning to realize, ran less on logic and more on narrative. So he went down the giant scary sinkhole, even though doing so was a suicidally Bad Idea, because going down the giant scary sinkhole was what he was supposed to do. The only reason the thing existed in the first place was to make him go down it. It was probably a Campbellian metaphor of some kind.
“Okay, Sussman. We can do this.” And then, because lying made him sweat and itch, “Maybe.”
The initial logistics turned out to be not terribly complex, albeit still terrifying. Sigmund ended up sitting himself on the edge of the hole, tips of his sneakers barely brushing the first step as he did so. Then it was just a matter of lowering himself down and . . .
He was in. Standing on the first step, head and torso still above ground level. Terrified, but determined in the face of that one, tiny, success.
Getting down the next steps proved more difficult. They were narrow, slippery, and tilted at irregular angles. Sigmund ended up sitting and sliding himself down on his ass. It was wet and muddy and cold and totally gross, but at least he wasn’t in (as much) danger of breaking his neck. The stairs were sturdy, though, which was both relieving and surprising, and as long as he took things slow and kept his left shoulder pressed hard against the wall, Sigmund figured he should be able to make it down to the bottom.
Wherever that turned out to be.
He’d been shuffling downward for about a minute when two things occurred to him. The first was that, despite the blackness, it wasn’t actually dark. He could see about three feet in front of him and three feet behind, and that was it. That was always it. The light on his phone didn’t help, even if he extended it out at arm’s length. The walls of nothing were intractable, almost as if someone had turned the world’s draw distance right down in the video settings. Sigmund couldn’t even see the glow from the opening anymore, even though it couldn’t have been much more than twelve feet above his head, if that. Sigmund wondered, if he turned around and started climbing upward, whether he really would emerge back out into the courtyard within a minute or so, or whether the hole had swallowed him completely. Was, even now, extending upward, the exit getting farther and farther out of reach with every passing moment.
The second thing that occurred to Sigmund on his descent was the fact that the walls of the hole were solid. Sigmund wasn’t a civil engineering expert, but he figured that, right now, he was supposedly underneath an apartment block in a major city. Cities had things underneath them, like sewers and cables. A sinkhole should bisect those; he should be seeing the severed ends of water pipes and arcing wires jutting from the walls. He wasn’t. What he was seeing was solid rock, or something close enough, and surely that was unusual, too. There should be dirt or clay or something, right? At least for the first few meters down.
But all there was, was rock.
Sigmund’s phone said he’d been traveling downward for around ten minutes when he realized that the circumference of the hole was getting smaller. It felt like it’d been longer. Maybe it had been. Maybe time was as distorted here as space was.
Either way, Sigmund was certain the stairs had been spiraling around the wall, and that the spiral was getting tighter. He wondered how he would check. If he reached his arm out, would he find his fingers brushing stone? If he kept going, would the hole grow tighter and tighter until he was wriggling through it, feet first, like a worm? Would he keep going if it did, or would he turn back?
Could he turn back?
And then, quite suddenly, there were no more steps.
The realization was jolting, unexpected, Sigmund finding himself sitting on the floor at the bottom of the pit, feeling around with his hands before the truth of it set in.
He’d made it.
He stood, carefully. His limbs felt both stiff and like jelly, all at the same time, and he had to steady himself against the wall in order to make it upright. Once he did, he just leaned there for a while, trying to still the heart that he hadn’t, until that point, realized was racing. He glanced upward, and saw a small circle of silvery light hung against the blackness. It might have been the entrance to the hole, but what it really looked like was the moon.
Sigmund’s phone said he’d been traveling downward for about twenty minutes. It felt more like a thousand years.
On the other hand, at least the phone’s light worked like it was supposed to, away from whatever intrinsic claustrophobia clung to the stairs. In the harsh glare of the LED, Sigmund saw that he’d arrived at the mouth of some great underground cavern. The walls here were still the same slimy, muddy rock but now laced through with a network of massive roots. Sigmund touched one, expecting flesh or something equally horrific, and was surprised when he encountered simple wood.
He ventured farther into the damp, dark space, footsteps quiet and slow. The roots got thicker and denser as he progressed, until the rock walls almost completely disappeared. Unlike the stairs, this place was warm. Like the stairs, it smelled of cave—that dark, earthy sort of smell—but there was something else, too. An edge of something unpleasant, something rotten.
Sigmund moved deeper into the cavern, into what must have been a truly enormous space. The light from his phone was effective, but it illuminated only one wall, the rest being lost in darkness. It would have been sort of cool, almost—exploring some unseen world like a supernatural David Attenborough—if it weren’t for the fact that Sigmund knew he wasn’t alone.
The murmuring and shuffling sounds he’d heard in the courtyard hadn’t gone away. They’d grown clearer, in fact. Clear enough that Sigmund could tell the words weren’t being said in English. They didn’t sound like happy words, and down here they were accompanied by what sounded an awful lot like the clinking of chains.
The smell got worse as the sounds got louder. A deep body stench: sweat and piss and shit and vomit and blood and death. By the time the stairs had vanished beyond the reach of Sigmund’s light, the smell was a tangible thing, pressing itself against Sigmund’s throat, sending him retching and choking on his own bile.
Still, he kept walking. It wasn’t that he was afraid, exactly. Sure, he was shaking and his grip was damp enough to make holding on to his phone difficult, but the terror lived somewhere deeper than physical fear. He knew where he was. Or, rather, a part of him did. The part that had been here before.
The edge of something caught on the light, and Sigmund veered toward it. Away from the wall, into the blackness, stumbling over slippery roots.
The new shape was large, rectangular, pale, and awfully familiar. It should’ve been. Sigmund had been walking past it nearly every day of his adult life and many times before. Three huge stone slabs, a hole piercing the center of each and a strange depression in the top. In front of the LB headquarters it was an eccentric and slightly ugly piece of modern art. Here it was . . .
Here, it was.
The stone blocks were taller than Sigmund, but a large, arching root rose up beside them. Sigmund crawled up it, fingers digging between whorls in the bark, trying not to slip on the surface and wishing he didn’t feel like he’d done this all before.
The noises were coming from the top of the slabs. Incoherent whimpering, punctuated by the clinking of metal and, this close, a hissing sound.
Slowly, Sigmund stood up, already knowing what he’d see when he peered over the stone. And there, chained in place by heavy irons wrapped around his chest and his hips and his ankles, was a man.
An apt description, really. The thing certainly had been a man at some point, though now only the barest of evidence survived. A gaunt, bloodstained outline of something that had once lived, and now only waited.
Sigmund could see the thing’s scarred lips moving in time with its cracked voice, milky green eyes staring sightlessly into the void, not responding to Sigmund’s light or his presence. The clinking sound came regularly, every few seconds, caused by the violent jerks that ran through the thing’s limbs. Jerks caused by a poison drip, falling in its face from somewhere in the darkness up above. Each drop burning into flesh with tiny, hissing bubbles, turning lips and sockets a rotten, necrotic black.
Sigmund wondered how long the thing had been here, alone, that it didn’t even scream.
Next to the figure’s head, sitting on the slab, was a stone bowl. Sigmund had seen that before, too, though only more recently and that version had been cracked. This one wasn’t.
Which made it a small thing, really, to pick the bowl up—it was surprisingly light, though Sigmund doubted that would last—and hold it out, over the man’s face, and catch the drops.