Pacheco’s skin is taut, a semi-scorched raisin; he’s in the middle of a circle drawn in the sand, its edges smoking as if under a magnifying glass. The ritual has him spent. He’s prostrate and gasping for breath, as if he’s in a pool and caught under a tarpaulin, in an airless vacuum. The whites around his pupils bulge, swell, glazed with a vacant film. A thin froth cakes his cracked lips. His arms shake, pillars in the sand, holding aloft his old man’s body and the heavy armor encasing it.
“Sirs,” The Digger whispers, shuffling forward, his steps tired, his hands caked with dirt. “Are you alright, sirs?”
Pacheco throws his head back and screams to the smeared black heavens. As if a reflection in a funhouse mirror, the great beast, Moltep, does the same. Their screams ripple through the newly dug-up throng of other beasts like a sonic boom. Eleven other misshapen aberrations have come to join their associate, Moltep. The Digger has dug them up, exhumed them from their sleeping hovels beneath the wastes. They’re an amalgam of forms and shapes: faces twisted into bent grimaces, viscera exposed through missing flesh. The wind tears through the air of the wasteland, but the groaning of all the ancient sinew and keratin shaking awake rises above it in an ugly, terrible cacophony. The land is completely dug up, the Digger’s hands reduced to callouses and pulp. He hides beneath them, deathly afraid at what he has done. His father is going to be awfully displeased with him, to say the least.
The screams of the beasts are like sharpened fingers digging into the Digger’s skull, poking and and prying the gray matter so that some parts turn mushy. He feels himself slipping, slipping into the cold mush of unknowingness. Panic sets in. He wants to run, to escape what he has just done. Oh, god, once his father finds out. He takes a quick step, instantly tripping over his shovel and falling to the ground. The exhausted man can’t be sure, but he thinks that the creatures are laughing at him, as he lay helpless at their feet and other assorted appendages.
“And where do you think you’re going, Narcissus?” Pacheco’s cape picks the Digger up by the throat, then pummels him into the ground. Narcissus looks up, into eyes that burn with a newfound madness and evil intent. The beasts crowd around Pacheco, so a sea of faces swim above the Digger’s field of vision, faces with missing chins and lower gums like rocky crags, faces without faces, eyes like hair follicles, incongruous and ubiquitous, growing from sinewy shoulders and hamhock hands.
“What’s with the look, good friend Narcissus?” Pacheco smiles, a humorless grin. “You look like you’ve seen a monster.”
“Sirs, pleases...” The pale man with the turnip face says, his voice barely a whisper. “Jusd led me goes. I promises, sirs, dad I will jusd go my liddle Diggerly way. I will nod barely makes a peep...”
“Shut your mouth, fool. I’m frustrated, Narcissus. Extremely frustrated. And do you know why?” The Digger looks up into all the melting faces of the beasts standing above him, a mob of fluid shapes, melting into one another, seemingly one. And Moltep, the first, the beginning of it all, says,
“Aak, aalok. Moltep.”
“There, there, Moltep. That’s enough. No, Narcissus, I’ll tell you why I’m frustrated. It’s called fruitless labor. It’s called wasted effort. It’s called, I put my life on the line to get that damned barkskin back here and can barely pull her idiot friend through the Fade. That ritual should not have failed, my flower headed friend. The pages from that book are burned into my memory, Digger. Word for damned word.”
“Sirs, I knows nodding of whad you speaks. I nows nodding of no booksy, pleases, sirs, pleases...” Pacheco lifts Narcissus by his overall straps, and the loose flesh sinks into the denim, like sand in a burlap sack.
“Yet, you think, you actually think, that I did it wrong. But how about you answer this: If I didn’t know what I was doing, then how was I able to get all my friends up and out of the ground, hm? How did I do it so seamlessly, without them eating so much as a flower petal off your lumpy little head? Because I’m not a fool, damn you! I know what I’m doing!” Pacheco arches an eyebrow, and nods as he searches the Digger’s face, as if he’s seeing something for the first time. “But still, still... something went wrong. Something. The procedure, it was a ritual of desire. The peoples who authored that book called it so. It’s purpose is to bring your deepest desire directly to you, whether it be riches, knowledge, water, or a barkskin too clever for her own good.
“My intentions were clear. What else could I want more than that damned barkskin, hm? So why is it that that man, the thin one with the long hair and sharp face, why is it that he got pulled from Phyrxian, and not the girl? Something is not right. There’s some strong science afoot, or old magic like I’ve never seen. I made it all the way to the pilot’s bay. I could smell her, I could taste her! But why was he all I could drag out? Tell me!”
“Sirs, are you sures you are compledely wells?”
Pacheco drops the Digger to the ground, paces back into the sea of asymmetrical limbs. “This is unbelievable. How is it that every possible thing can go wrong for me, but right for that mutant? For that science experiment? Hm? How is it that I’m jilted at every god damn possible turn!”
Narcissus watches as Pacheco mindlessly walks up a beast’s long, flat tendril, the black cloak trailing and making the occasional odd, half-realized shape. The doctor seems completely at ease around the beasts, unaware even that he is amongst them. The barkskin vexing him has his full attention. He keeps muttering to himself, occasionally punching his hand, all while the tendril lifts him up into the sky. All of the beasts watch the doctor, their heads and bodies slowly moving, floating with his motion.
“Bud sirs, if you gods da man, den where is he? Did you kills him, bury him in da Fadesy? I cerdainly do nod sees him...eck!” Moltep swoops his giant arm down, grabbing Narcissus’s head between thumb and forefinger. The beast plucks him up, like a tick from its backside, and brings him up to eye level with Pacheco, who stands like a gargoyle on the corrugated skull of one of the beasts.
“Someone took him.” The words seethe through the doctor’s teeth.
“Oh sirs, please, led’s me down... my neck is on fires...”
“I would have killed him. I would have slowly cut him up, and stuffed all his little pieces down his throat, until his stomach burst from being so full of himself. But I was robbed of that little luxury, Narcissus, all because someone, or something, took him, swooped in, and grabbed him from between my jaws.
“You see, when one builds a bridge between worlds, such as I did between here and Phyrxian’s barely sustained one in the Fade, you run the risk of allowing others to scale on from other, often undesirable, places. And I felt it, a pull from somewhere along the bridge, like a magnet, trying to get the man back to Phyrxian, pulling him away from me. Do you follow?”
There are flashes around the Digger’s vision, like firework plumes in negative exposure, silently blooming bruises. His neck burns, as if the knotted muscles were soaked in gasoline and set alight. He can feel things tearing beneath the skin, things coming apart.
“Well, Phyrxian has no doubt made it to the coordinates that I had set. The center of everything. The spoke of all existence, the world at the center of all worlds. I found it, Narcissus. I found it, was so close, but the barkskin rebelled against her one true purpose, and ruined everything. She’s young, and selfish. She thinks her well being is of more importance than that of reality, than that of Yama Dempuur, than of restoring past glories to what they once were. A barkskin actually believes this, isn’t that something? Can you believe the selfishness and self-absorption of one person, Narcissus? Hm?”
The Digger’s eyelids are well below half-mast, his hands grasping at the pockmarked surface of Moltep’s thumb. His breathing is shallow and fast.
“What is wrong, Narcissus? No ‘sirs’ or ‘pleases’ for you? Have you finally reached the limits of your endurance? Have I finally pushed your frail little body too far? Well, just in time then. I have no more use for you. There is no more ground to be dug up, no mor
e of the old legends to be brought back to the surface. I fear, then, that this is where I bid you farewell. Moltep, if you’ll be so kind.”
Moltep starts to squeeze. The Digger’s drooped face contorts into an inkblot, a plum in a vice grip, juices running like fast moving rivers beneath its thin, plasticky skin. His eyes roll back, and his tongue lolls out. A sound like a cough being torn apart by sharp teeth escapes from Narcissus’s throat before Moltep’s index finger and thumb touch together. Wormy strands of red and gray catapult through the air, falling like kamikaze gnats on Pacheco’s cloak and face. The Digger’s body dangles like a deflated latex glove from the beast’s huge hand, slips a bit, then falls, a thin stream of blood trailing from the crushed, headless neck as it makes for the ground. Pacheco wipes the dark murk from his face with the back of his hand, a ghost of a grin stirring in the corpuscular muscles around his mouth. Digging up the beasts seems to have bestowed upon the good doctor a sick sense of humor.
“Back to the ground from which you came, Digger.” And the beasts around Pacheco roar, the air trembling around their heads. Cutting through their din, like the chink in a bike chain worsening with each revolution, is Pacheco’s laughter. It asserts itself in a terrible way, a cluck-clucking from deep in his throat. The beasts grow quiet and timid at it, until it is the only sound. The holes the beasts have come from have grown even more huge, and there’s a heaviness to how vast and deep they are. Pacheco abruptly stops laughing, as if he too becomes aware at how eerie his laughter sounds in the silence of the wasteland.
“This world is dead,” He says to Moltep, who stares at him with a pair of gibbous eyes hanging above a jutting underbite. “Yet you know the way out of here, don’t you? You know how to get to the center of the spiral?” Moltep nods, the muscles in the side of his neck bulging out with each dip of his chin. Pacheco laughs again, satisfied. “I knew you would. It’s why I dug you up. Amesh spoke of the power of chaos in his Infinite Duality. He spoke of how chaos is attracted to power, that the very nature of being is defined by this magnetism. You primordial beasts consume power, and are drawn to it. You can therefore feel Helios and Hyperion, can’t you? You know the way to the center of it all?”
Something dawns on Pacheco as he speaks to Moltep. “Is that why this pathetic little man killed your brethren before you could wake? Was he protecting Helios and Hyperion? Or was someone else protecting them, and just using the Digger as his lackey?” Pacheco asks the questions out loud, but he knows Moltep will not speak to him, at least not in a language he understands.
“Aak aalook,” Moltep says, the same phrase, the same mysterious intonation. Pacheco cocks his head to the side, for he thinks he hears something in Moltep’s words, an underlying sound. It sounds like a cacophony of voices screaming from a chamber buried underground. They are in terrible pain. Pacheco feels himself being drawn into it, the screams growing louder. Moltep stares at the man, the eyes unblinking. It’s Pacheco’s cape which snaps him out of his reverie, the ragged tip coming up and tickling the space under his nose until the old man sneezes. Pacheco looks around himself, a wave of panic suddenly washing over him. What have I done? I killed a man who never wronged me. I have dug up creatures from the abyss, creatures who I have no right to control. Damn it all, he thinks, until his calmer self prevails.
I must get to the center of the spiral. At any cost. Pacheco bends down and croaks to the beast upon whose head he stands in a tiny whisper: “Charge forth, Nameless One, god from the Primordial, from far beyond the tender theorizings of man and his concepts of reality. Go!” Nameless One rears up, its head resembling the body of a black squid, the body a seahorse’s with millipede legs, tightly compacted appendages on a gargantuan body. For a moment, Pacheco feels he is falling, that all is slipping out from him, that the wasteland is beginning to dissipate, gasoline in a hot pan. Then Nameless One grabs hold of Pacheco, keeping him from falling, and rushes forward. There is a static crackling in the crispness of the air, the tattered fringes of Pacheco’s cape licking at the cornices of the ravaged world. Where they are running towards, Pacheco is not sure, except that it will be closer to the source and the beasts know what lies beyond the mist. Surely such powerful beings can do things he can’t even begin to wrap his mind around. He hopes, for his own sake, that he is right. If not, he’ll be joining the Digger in whatever hell the man has found himself in.
Moltep and the eleven other beasts spiral in around Pacheco and Nameless One as they rush for the Gray. The beasts, chaos made manifest, the antithesis of life and order, coalesce in one huge throng of roiling limbs and asymmetrical bodies. The crackling comes from every direction now, the ground upon which they run as translucent and fragile as cellophane. Parts of this world are indeed falling apart, without the Digger to keep them together. It seems that only the butte at the center of the landscape and a circle of land around it are remaining intact. All else is just about ready to come down.
“Damn, we are not going to make it to the fog,” Pacheco curses. As sudden as a crack of lightning, Moltep launches himself into the air, arcing ahead of Nameless and the other beasts, a purple cannonball sailing through the sky. Moltep climbs higher and higher into the aether, his body growing larger the further away he gets from the ground. The muscles in his back and shoulder bulge as he lifts his giant arm over his head, until he snaps it like a mousetrap, down at the mist Pacheco and the beasts are heading towards. The mist ahead cuts to sinuous pieces, revealing a pathway of rubble and reddish stone beyond it.
Moltep hangs in the air a moment, spinning like an asteroid in cold space. The beasts stop their charge towards the edge of the wasteland, staring silently at the path which has appeared before them. It hangs in black space, made of a dusty red stone and extending as far as Pacheco’s one eye can see. Driftwood of various sizes make up the railings, all connected by a series of thick hemp ropes. “Good, Moltep. You found the bridge away from here. Now, come.” Pacheco whispers the words to the beast levitating above, his words not so much a command as an incantation. Moltep slowly falls back to earth, his huge body shrinking as he comes closer and closer to the throng of primordial beasts he leaped from.
“You become bigger as you escape this hell-hole, eh, Moltep?” Pacheco says, as the great beast with the one misshapen arm softly lands on the translucent earth. “This world makes you small, makes you adjust to its limits. Your true form becomes apparent in the infinite, in the limitless chaos from which you were born. And where you would have died, had I not dug you up. How many of you old stories there must have been in the ground, whom the Digger killed. An infinite number, perhaps. And you lot are what’s left.” A fire burns in Pacheco’s eyes. Riding atop one of Nameless’s tentacles, he rises above all twelve of the beasts. His cloak snaps open as a wind screams from out from the newly revealed bridge. The beasts all bow before him.
“Beasts of chaos, of a time before order existed, I’ve bound you to my cause because I need your strength. To you, there is only pain and destruction. You cannot begin to comprehend structure, hierarchy, or balance, concepts which the worlds of Helios and Hyperion have been built around. But chaos is the fulcrum on which all the worlds are now teetering on, and threatening to fall into. As creatures of this chaos, you must help me tame it. Let us venture forth, along this forgotten bridge between the worlds. We’ll tread where few have dared go before us, to the center of time and space. If you can lead me to the center of the spiral, I promise you, you will have your freedom from the rational worlds. You will be great creatures of chaos again, free to consume and roam space as you will. Come! We go to find the two gods of order, the father and son, Helios and Hyperion. We will find them and bind them!” The wind screams as they slowly march forward, over the bridge. Shapes swirl about them, echoes of the chaos that hangs just over the edge of the pathway, a madness that, unbeknownst to Pacheco, is beckoning him further and further away from the light.
Chapter XII: “Down the Foxhole”