The door creeps open and the Digger peeks out, lips pursed and jaw tight. The night has passed, taking its loud, unruly guests with it. “Oh, dahling, why did yous leave me, so?” He says, walking out, shovel on his shoulder, jar of preserves in his pocket. His bony shoulder is tightly bandaged with a mildewed cloth. The sky is a smudged gray blue, a curtain which touches down upon the ground in all directions. His perch atop the butte doesn’t afford him the same telescopic view of the surrounding area as the day before. In fact, something is very, very different.
He makes his way down to the stairs, past the scabby mud and jagged glass, serrations tipped with ocher. The two dinner guests, as well as his darling, had bolted across and down the hill the night before. They were undoubtably reckless on the stairs, which were delicate, and required gentle steps. He tests the first plank, only moving to the next when he’s satisfied it will hold his weight. He does this the entire way down the steep edges of the butte, slowly descending, his feet on autopilot, his mind stuck on the night before.
He was afraid of the shining one, the one with the name like an insect. Beetle Bob? Cricket? Roachy? He wasn’t sure, but he got so shiny it hurt, all because the younger man had told him a story, what he had said was the greatest story of all. But he had never really told him a story at all, had he? The young man with the long hair had just said a few words, the beginning, maybe, which made the Digger think that it was a tale more dangerous than anything he’d ever dug up before. After the man with the name like an insect had thrown him through the air and hurt his poor little back, he didn’t want to get too close to him again. So he had peeked from the top of the stairs, watching as they descended the butte to the plains below. But what was that he had seen, emerging from the Fade? It looked like a ball of shadows, the size of a pond, its surface rippling in the wind. It floated over the highland, ahead of the Fade, plopping down on the ground a ten minute walk from the foot of the staircase. Was it a story, a monster he had failed to dig up? No, no, no. Stories were in the ground. They didn’t come out of the Fade. Right?
A tall figure in a billowing cape had descended from the black mass on a ramp. He ran in one direction, towards the egg-shaped metal contraption that had appeared past the ring of blood on the same day his darling had come to him. The three escaping dinner guests had run in the other direction, towards the shadowy ball with the gnashing tendrils on its skin. The Digger watched as the ramp closed behind them, as the figure with the long cape had climbed into the metal egg, how he’d try to run after the great black lake as it took off, into the sky, fire roaring from its bottom, sending a cloud of black and brown smoke into the desert around it and burning the ground. He couldn’t watch any more: the Fade was almost upon the ring, and it would shake his world to pieces as it tried to break through it. It had never come so close. The nothingness was attracted to Long-Hair’s story and Beetle Bob’s brightness, Narcissus knew. It always wanted what it couldn’t have, which was anything of substance, of purpose, of distinctive identity. Its appetite for the marrow of reality was insatiable. Therefore, the Digger had to go back underground. Let those terrible dinner guests get washed away by the Fade, what did he care. He’d be safe and sound in his little Digger basement, with jars of meats to last years and years and years.
From the tippy top of the stairs, the Digger sees the exact circle that he had made with prime story blood. All that pink tissue under the sandy crust, with blue veins like tree roots, cherished secret treasures. They spurted when he hit them right. The black veins black, blue veins red. The latter spurted the highest, sweat treats for the tongue. In an empty tin he’d collected as much he could, and made the circle in the sand, just like his father had told him to do.
“Fadder said do me, said, keep da shadows oudda your backyard by spilling dreamsy blood. Is dat what he said?” The Digger spins the handle of his shovel around in his calloused palms, looks out into the mist, an opaque veil starting at the exact mark where he’d drizzled the red and black blood, a spiraling harlequin helix, hissing as it touched the earth.
“So, da Fadesy do nod cross da dreamsy blood, bud comes so very close dis dime. Dis is very inderesding,” The shadows liked to keep their threats fresh and full of violent intention; he never knew when they’d come for him, so he kept the circle of blood as fresh as he could, as often as he could. Still, while the shadows liked to slink around the highlands, as close to the Digger’s butte as they could, the Fade had never come so close. He’d only spied it in the distance, ripping across the land, the shadows billowing about and whispering to him that his end was near, that the Fade would erase everything, including his little Digger shack at the top of the hill.
“Bud id never came close to my home. Dose derrible dinner guesds come, and dey bring da Fadesy wid dem. Dose terrible, bumblering fools! Nidwids!” His steps are slow, tired: he was awake all night, waiting for the worst to happen. It made for a restless night. “And now, dey are gone, dose fools are gone, and dey left such derrible wedder!”
Narcissus walks into the mist. It completely envelops his head, his body. The white flowers clinch shut, the air like that of an ice box, saturated with a damp coldness. He keeps on, the ground disappearing in heavier and heavier tendrils. Soon, the sound of his footsteps disappears, and all he can see is his shuffling legs, his pale arms.
“Is dis da Fadesy?” The whispered words seem to get caught in the mist, and drift lazily up to his ears. “Well, dis is nod so bad, afder all. I like da Fadesy. Id is quide cool on my skins.” His breath sounds like a far off waterfall, of snow slipping off a metal roof. It’s the only sound he can hear. But even that slips away, swallowed up, finding its way to the middle of Winter’s cold, still heart. He gasps, the air so thin and cold. He clasps his throat, looks desperately around, eyes wide as potatoes. Then there’s the sound of crunching sand and gravel beneath his feet, and then the sight of the yellow ground. The mist begins to clear, and then he’s clean out of it, back over the ring he had made on the ground.
He stops, looks down, back, down again.
“How dids I ged from one side of da ring do da udder?” The backside of the butte stands before him, the stairs hidden from view. He went in through the mist, and in a few dozen steps, he had been brought to the complete other side of the circle.
“Bud... where ams I do dig? How do I go finds da stories...oh my good god...” The Digger’s heart slips from his chest. A tall shape in black metal stands in the shadow of the butte, a black cloak arched over a hunchback. It shuffles around stiffly, but then stops. The head pivots around, autumn glass eyes catching the soft light. Its wings open. Moth wings. It starts gliding towards the Digger.
“You!” The figure’s voice is harsh, monotone, a raven clearing its caw. “Are you from this world?” Pacheco has by now come near enough that the Digger can make out the purple ruts in his gray face, the felt eye patch, the boxy helmet with the visor nestled on his forehead. He sees the heavy black armor, which seems to be shaped by an inner frame rather than the definition of a human body. The moth wings are actually a rigid cloak, which whips back into place as the only other person in this world comes within a stone’s throw of the Digger. It hangs from Pacheco’s shoulders like a snake from a vine, poised to strike.
“Do you speak? Do you understand me?”
“Yes, mosd kind sirs, I do undersdand yous,” The Digger twists the shovel handle around in his hands.
“Then tell me where I can find something to eat. Sustenance.”
The Digger sways. “Susdenance, sirs?”
“Yes, sustenance. Food. Water.”
“Oh, yes, bud of course.” The Digger thinks a moment, testing the tips of his finger nails against each other. “You can follow me, sirs. I have foodsies at my home.”
Pacheco follows the Digger’s outstretched shovel with his eyes. “You live atop the hill?”
“Yes, sirs, my dahling and I...” The Digger covers his open mouth with his grubby hands, nostrils as wide as owl eyes. He remembers that the
tall man in the armor and cape was either looking to catch his darling girl or the two unwanted dinner guests. Pacheco takes size of the squat man, of the wasted looking skeleton in the denim rags. “You’re what kept the Fade away from that hill?”
“Me?” The Digger breathes a sigh of relief. “Oh nos, sirs. Da circle of blood is wad did da drick. I only puds da circle dere and keeps id freshy fresh.”
“Blood?” Pacheco says, his tone circumspect. “What do you know of blood science?”
“I know nuddings, sir, of sciences. I am bud a simples romandic, who loves his dahling so...” The Digger covers his mouth again, afraid he’ll say too much again.
“Who is this darling you speak of...” Pacheco says, but then his eyes widen too. His hand shoots out, the small chains in his armor sounding with a crack, a silenced pistol, and grabs the Digger’s white narcissus stalks. The Digger goes to stab his attacker with his shovel, disembowel him. He wants to blow small bubbles in a pail of his black (red? purple?) blood, maybe with his darling by his side, but Pacheco’s cape catches the metal tip before the turnip faced man can even cock his arm back.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” Pacheco says, tightening his grip on the stalks in his hand.
“Oh my goodness god... Please...” The Digger falls to his knees, loses his grip on the shovel. His hands tremble around his head, hesitant crab claws. “Dad hurds my head so, sirs.”
Pacheco can feel the stems going to pulp in his hand. “What did you do with the barkskin?”
Tears stream down the Digger’s cheeks. “Please, sirs...”
“Answer me!”
“I knows nudding of any bar kins, oh, pleases sir, please...”
“This ‘darling’ you speak of, did she have dark brown skin and white hair?”
“Yes, yes, shes hads browny, browny skins. And hair so preddy, so whide. Bud den she geds older, wrinkles like old mead in da hod, hod sun. She sdops dalking, and den I am da only one who speaks, undil dese wicked dinner guesds come, and she runs off wid dem. Oh, goodness god, please, it hurds...”
Pacheco takes in the Digger’s story for a moment. The facts seem to check out, considering what he himself had experienced the evening before. So it was the girl who stole his ship, it was without question, but she had joined up with two others, who may or may not have been dangerous. They apparently overcame the man with the flowers on his head, which did not seem to be an altogether difficult task. Without much resistance, Pacheco takes the shovel and throws it, before letting go of the stems. They flop over, the stems crushed to mush, a copious amount of chlorophyl leaking out of their broken skins and onto the Digger’s head. “Where were they headed?” Pacheco asks. The Digger sobs, prostrate, head tucked between his forearms, his hands gently fingering the damaged plants.
“Oh, sirs, please, I am jusd a humble old digger. I only makes holes here all by my lonesomes. Somedimes I find da monsders under the ground. Dey sleep, bud I hear dere dreams in my dreams. Dey wand do wakes up, you see. Dere dreams are like big waves dat are only gedding bigger and bigger, aboud do crash on da shore...Oh!”
The Digger’s fingers crunch under Pacheco’s boot. “Stop with this nonsense. Where was the barkskin headed?”
“Oh sirs, I do nod knows whad you are asking, oh, please, stop...”
“The girl! Your darling!”
“Oh, sirs, my dahling, I did nod ever tries to kills her. I loved her so, sirs, so, so much. She widdered away. She durned do a mummy, sirs.”
“Because you starved her of sunlight, you idiot.”
The Digger’s back shakes. He tries to move his head around to look up at Pacheco, but Pacheco’s foot keeps the Digger’s body from turning. His eyes are wide, turned so far to the right of their sockets that the blood vessels swell, looking ready to burst. “Bud she came backs, sir, even afder I dought she was dead. She came back to da waking life. Once dat man wid da red beard and da glowing skin shined so brighd, so brighd dat all da empdy basemend lid up, she came backs!”
“Is this the other man you spoke of, who she escaped with?”
“Yes, sirs, him and anudder man, an eensy beensy liddle man with tighd shord pands and sweady, longy hair, dey dook her away. Dey dook her to da big monsder you came here in, and flew aways!”
“So it was her! That crafty little wench,” Pacheco feels a series of neglected muscles tug at the corner of his mouth: he almost smiles. He hadn’t played a game of wits like this since his younger days at the academy, and he was, to his mutual disbelief and pleasure, that he was enjoying it. That barkskin was craftier than most Yamass he’d met. It was making things interesting.
“Yes sirs, id was my dahling. She was da one. Oh, sirs, please, my fingers hurd so much now, pleases, sirs, please...”
Pacheco takes his boot from the Digger’s hand, steps away. His brain whirs like a just-oiled sprocket in a dusty machine. He looks at the Oisin, which he managed to pilot through the Fade and back to this nearly wasted world. How did this simpleton know to lay blood on the ground like that to keep the Fade at bay?
“There’s something I’m missing here, something important,” Pacheco whispers to himself. He sips at the water tube in his helmet, and scrutinizes the curvature of the close horizon, the fog that wraps around the scrubland much like back at the Coral Islands.
The Digger hears him, and answers. “Da Fadesy is like da shadows. Id does nod like da blood of da sdories. My fadder told me so,”
“Who was your father? How did he know this?”
“My fadder is da big boss man. He runs da show. He said do me, said ‘You keep refreshin’ this here ring of blood, alright? Only thing keepin’ things as they ought to be.’” The Digger imitates a southern drawl perfectly, causing Pacheco’s one eyebrow to rise.
The sunken eye throbs, as it closely analyzes the ground directly beneath the wall of mist, the brown line in the sand. Pacheco walks up to it, crouches down to his haunches, picks at the sand. Again, Pacheco almost smiles. “Amazing, isn’t it? Done right, you can stop the antithesis of reality with a little hemoglobin and plasma.”
“Sirs, I know noddings of hemer goblins or spasms. Bud dis blood, id is da blood of old, old sdories, older dan da Fadesy, older dan all da worlds. Older dan Helios and Hyperion, even.”
“Older than Helios and Hyperion, you say?” Pacheco lets the sand run from between his fingers, back to the earth. He dismisses much of what the Digger says as the garbled nonsense of a recluse, but occasionally, there’s a specimen that sticks out, shines above the rest.
“What is your name?” Pacheco says.
“Oh, my poor, poor liddle name. Id is long forgodden, buried wid me when my fadder drew me oudda his kingdom.”
“You don’t remember your name?”
“No, sirs, bud da mens, dey called me da Digger, jusd likes you do, jusd likes I do. Dad is whad I does, afder all. Dig, and dig, and dig,” On and on he repeats the words. It’s a mantra that seems to take him somewhere, to far off holes that he once dug, to past treasures and future bounties.
“Da men, dey also calls me Narcissus. And it seems like it may be mys names.”
“Narcissus? Well, then, you’re an old one, aren’t you? I remember you from my childhood. I’d almost forgotten all about you.”
“Mosd peoples have forgodden, sirs. Dad is why I am here, you see. Dad is why I am lefd do dis. Nobodies remembers dis poor liddle Digger, cerdainly nod as I once was.” As worlds changed and empires rose and fell, the story of Narcissus evolved, or devolved, if your opinion was like Pacheco’s at that very moment. A story where obsession, death and tragedy were the underlying tenets had led to this, to a man who had loved himself into such a twisted, lowly being as the Digger.
“The men... tell me about the men she escaped with.”
“Well, da one, sirs, he has dighd liddle pands, and strong legs, bud is skinny, wid wild eyes. He was loud and sdarded all da troubles. Oh, sirs, dey was such bad troubles. And den da udder one, he fell asleep
quicky quick, jusd one hid do da chin, and he fell on his rump. Bud afder da firsd man tells him da beginning of a sdory, an old sdory dat I dare nod say again, da second man goes boom! so brighd, likes I dold you, and da whole basement is lit up like da biggest fire I ever seen!”
“And what of the barkskin? The girl?”
“When da brighdly shining man shines even more brighdly, my dahling wakes up, quicky, and den dey all run off, leaving me all alones again.”
Pacheco’s cape snaps awake, wraps around the Digger’s throat, lifts him into the air. He shakes in the air like a wet napkin, kicks his feet. “Sirs, please!” The Digger coughs some wormy phlegm onto Pacheco’s torn cloak.
“You do realize you just aided and abetted to a serious crime against the nation of Yama Dempuur, do you not?! Do you not?!” Pacheco throws the Digger to the ground, loosening the cape’s hold on the man’s neck, but keeping him locked down to the earth. He has lost his temper, and doesn’t feel the Digger is worth him trying to keep it under control.
“I am so very sorry, sirs, bud I knows nod whad I did. Da men god free, den I ran fasd away afder dat. I dried do keep dems in da basement, bud dey were doo sdrong for me. I evens dried do sdop dem adop da hill, bud da shiney man, he send me flying drew da air, and I hurd my liddle heads. Wid da Fadesy coming, I wend and hid behind da rocks. I am so sorry, sirs. I wish I had sdopped dem!”
The Digger’s already white knuckles are like a set of bleached pearls, his fingers clawing at the rough fabric of the cloak. His face is a sunset reflected in a mud puddle, his mouth a row of desperate zipper teeth. Pacheco steps back, and his cape slinks back to its resting place on his back. Placidity washes over him.
“A sulphur skin. I thought the last of them had been seen when the mines of Icharia were lost to the Fade. Funny that one shows up here. And funny that Phyrxian was hijacked by not just a barkskin, but a sulphur skin as well. Next, you’ll tell me that the third man was an arm eater.” Pacheco thinks a moment, the tension returning to his face. “He wasn’t an arm eater, was he? Answer me man?”
“I... I do nod knows, sir...”
Pacheco hears the weakness in the man’s voice, and realizes that he’s had enough. He still has use of him, and doesn’t want to bruise him up too bad. “Do you believe in luck, Narcissus?”
His crushed stalks resemble a failed combover, drowned with pomade. The petals fall from the limp flowers, which frame the sides of his face. Narcissus, the Digger, caresses his throat, and croaks, “Yes, sirs.” Then, when he doesn’t get an immediate answer, asks, “Was dad da righd answer sirs?”
“Gather yourself up, and follow me. We have a lot of work to do.” The expeditionary leader turns, his cloak cracking in the quiet of the air as he does so. Rather than glide, Pacheco walks, so that Narcissus can stumble after him like a roach with a snapped leg. They both stop in front of the Oisin, which has been landed with hardly a grain of sandy soil or the leaf of a shrub disrupted. All that alludes to the barkskin’s prior crash is the coat of dirt on its nose. Otherwise, it is a bleached smooth ostrich’s egg, the windows and windshield engineered to be hidden from an outside observer’s view. Pacheco’s cloak pulls him back up to the hatch, and he goes inside, Narcissus watching anxiously from below him. Seconds pass, then Pacheco thrusts his head back out the open door, the thread-thin eyebrow above his good eye arched.
“I felt it.” Pacheco says.
“You feld whad, sirs?”
“The stories, or monsters, or whatever you call them. Buried around here. I thought you were crazy, but they’re really buried out there, aren’t they? And they’re hungry, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sirs, dey are very hungry, all of dem. Dey want to eats all of dis, jusd like da Fadesy.” The Digger starts to fidget in his oversized overalls. “Pleases, sir, led me go dig da holes. I have to keeps dem asleep, or else dey will wakes up, and dad will nod be good, no, nod ad all,”
Pacheco looks out into the scrubland, and hrumphs. “Be patient. There will be plenty of time for that.” Then he goes back in through the hatch. “Catch!” He yells from inside. A burlap sack gets tossed out, its revolutions placid, its arch, parabolic. Narcissus catches it, followed by the two heavy metal pipes which Pacheco throws after it. Pacheco leaps down from the hatch, and beckons the Digger to follow him. “You wanted to dig a hole? Then let’s go.”
“Oh boys, oh boys!” The Digger would clap his hands together if there weren’t things piled up to his nose. “We ged do pud da sdories do sleepsies again. Oh boy, oh boy,” Pacheco lets the Digger palaver on and on while he shuffles after him, balancing the poles, his shovel and the heavy bag in his arms. Pacheco looks into each hole as he passes, occasionally flipping up his eye patch and scanning the deepest recesses with an eye and an empty socket.
“Where are the stories, Narcissus?”
“I am nod sures, sirs. Dey haves to...” the Digger trips over his two feet, and comes down on his bony shoulder. The bag never leaves his arms, and stays hugged to his hollow chest despite the fall.
“Careful, you fool! There are...” Pacheco notices Narcissus’s aversion to a particular hole, its edges yellowed and decayed, an old wound on the earth. “What are you carrying on about? What’s the matter with that hole?”
“Id’s... Id’s nudding, sirs. Absoludely nudding ad all. Dis is jusd a hole, dat is all, jusd a hole dat I dug a long time ago. Nudding to sees here.”
“Liar,” Pacheco makes his way to the edge, gazes into the darkened recesses of the pit. “I can feel it too. Come, bring me the bag.”
Pacheco carefully, almost reverently, pulls a small machine from the contents of the sack. It’s no bigger than a human skull, a gun-metal cube. Two of its surfaces are grilled, and the corners extend out into extreme points. Pistons protrude like mechanistic quills from two of the other surfaces. It resembles a small engine, and that’s more or less exactly what it is. Following its removal from the bag is a series of tubing, which Pacheco puts on the ground, next to the lip of the pit.
“Get in.” Pacheco says.
“In da hole?” Narcissus asks.
“Yes. You have to dig for me.”
“Bud dere is already a deep hole heres, sirs.”
“We have to go deeper.”
The Digger swallows. “Deeper?”
“Yes, deeper, until you see it. And when you do, you will not kill it, no. You will insert this needle,” Pacheco lifts up one of the long pipes, twists it. A thin metal needle snaps out. “and then I will do the rest.”
Narcissus rubs his eyes with the back of his free hand, and sniffles. “Sirs, am I able to ead anyding now? I am so hungry.”
“You will eat after you dig up the story. The sooner you do that, the sooner you can eat.”
The Digger moans, and takes hesitant steps towards the hole. A draft comes up, and envelops the little man’s pudding face, cools the chlorophyl pussing from the cracked flower stalks. He hears a whisper, its timbre as deep and dark as the hole. Its like the voices of the shadows who slink around the night drenched highlands, their words sneaking in through a pair of unsuspecting ears and reverberating around the cranial cavity, overlapping echoes of varying delays, never able to be pinned down, reduced to their pernicious source. They want to drive you mad, and have yet to fail in their task. But the Digger can not understand what this particular whisper is saying. If they’re words, he doesn’t understand them. It’s an ancient story, he knows that, one of the oldest and most terrible.
Narcissus lifts himself down into the hole, afraid because he can not see the bottom. How deep could he have possibly dug? Not this far down, that’s for sure. His lower body is gone, consumed by shadow. He squints up, the silhouette of Pacheco walking about the edge, taking the poles apart, plunging the unpointed halves of them into the earth at opposite sides of the pit. Narcissus’s throat is dry, and he thinks of the stores of goods he has beneath his house, of the mirror with the tarnished gold frame, of the smokey crackle of the fire, meat juice tr
ickling over his lips. He wishes he never left home this morning.
As if in reaction to Narcissus’s feet touching down on it, the ground hums. The drone throws the Digger up against the wall. “Sirs!” He screams. Pacheco rushes to the edge, sees nothing more than a little white onion in an oily puddle, the Digger’s scalp, sun-caked.
“What’s wrong?”
“Da ground, id’s shaking, id’s shaking!”
“Oh it is, is it?” Pacheco says. “That’s very interesting. Start digging.” The cloak, his wings, crack open as he turns around, and goes back to arranging the tools around the hole. Narcissus moves with trembly legs towards the center of the pit. The drone sends shockwaves through his legs, his hamstrings vibrating like tautly strung strings. He lifts the shovel above his head, and Pacheco sees it, like the cusp of a coral crown peering out of waves with long, seemingly still, troughs. The doctor hears the sound of the shovel tearing into the earth, and it’s like air escaping out of a punctured space vessel and into space. Narcissus tosses the dirt up and out of the hole, and proceeds to dig.
Pacheco finalizes his set up. The small machine has two wrapped copper wires running from it to the two poles, which Pacheco has planted straight up in the ground on opposite sides of the hole. Both poles have a tube that snakes from their tops into their second, disjointed halves, which have the long points of the needles retracted within them. Pacheco holds them in his hands, as he stands over the little machine, looking out into the small circle of desert, trying to reach out to any of the other stories which might be buried. Without his book, he’s doing this all by rote, but the pages are clear in his head, and it’s all second nature.
“Sirs! Sirs, I dinks I founds id! “ There is a layer of purple underneath the Digger’s feet, with clods of dirt dotting its surface. He can smell the old blood coursing underneath the purple skin, can already taste its sweetness on his tongue. The droning and the shaking are forgotten by the Digger, even if only for a few seconds, until they grow to such terrible heights that they consume his feeling of accomplishment and make him scramble to get out of the hole.
“Sirs, quick, I musd kill it now,” Narcissus says, clawing at the sides of the pit to grab Pacheco’s attention. But the scarred man only watches, jaw agape.
“No, Narcissus, we’re not killing it. Not at all. We’re letting it live. We’re letting it free.”
Narcissus throws down his shovel, and tries with both hands to get out of the pit. It’s deeper than he is tall, an extra half of him, and his chicken bone arms don’t have enough piston power to lift him.
“No, sirs, no, you do nod knows whad you ares doing! Id will come oud and kills us! Oh, I should have never lefd home today. Oh, woe is me, a poor, unfordunade Digger.”
Pacheco picks up one of the needles, weighs it in his hand. The purple skin that had been buried beneath the scrubland throbs, grows like a blister on a sandpapery tongue. The dirt from the hole sticks to it, the ground breaking as it grows. Pacheco raises the pipe to his good eye, aims it at the bubble. Blood vessels line its surface, a blood network, like an inverted globe with schizoid lines of latitude and longitude.
“Oh, goodness God,”
There’s a small latch on the side of the pole. Pacheco clicks it, and it fires.
The needle thunks into the swelling flesh. There’s a sound like a balloon deflating, then, beneath them, a basso profundo belching, that seems to stretch from one end of the highland all the way to the other. The belch subsides; the hole takes on the quietude of an empty church, and the Digger can hear his eye lashes brushing on each other as he blinks. The bubble of purple flesh is leaking, a thick crimson bordering on the gelatinous. The Digger seizes up the shovel as quickly as he can, bars his chest with the wooden handle, guarding himself. Eyes wide, he looks skyward. Pacheco gazes down at him, a length of tubing running through his hands, attaching itself to the needle.
“Don’t you even think about it.” Pacheco hisses.
“Bud sirs, sirs, I musd kill id. You do nod know whad will happen, if, if...”
Pacheco’s cloak wraps around the Digger’s neck, and pulls him up in one fluid arch. He sails through the air soundlessly, crumbling in a pile after bouncing on the ground once, twice. The good doctor turns back to the pit, to the tubing in his hand, now coursing with the blood from the monster’s flesh. It pumps in his padded gloves, past them and to the machine, which whirs with life, the photovoltaic cells on the back of it glowing with a ghostly light. Part of Pacheco’s findings in the Oisin were the packets of freeze dried algae, bioengineered to come to life once bathed with sunlight. Their cells were similar to that which lined a barkskin’s top two dermal layers. It enabled them to transform sunlight into a bottomless well of kinetic energy. They were a sort of battery that even a simple machine could utilize. Even the Fade.
There are a row of glass tubes within the machine. The colonel watches as they fill with a thick red liquid. Two full, then three. He sees dark, almost solid shapes swimming up the tube through the blood: clots. The wound is already healing itself, even with the needle embedded a foot beneath the skin. The machine begins to struggle and sputter; the clots must be suffocating the filters. The circumference of the hole puckers up, the sudden movement jostling Pacheco off his feet. The colonel looks down, sees the body of the beast buried beneath the earth, or at least a substantial part of it, all throbbing muscle and surface veins.
Pacheco scrambles for the machine, which has tilted on its side and has begun to make a gurgling sound. It’s drowning on the tubes of blood, which are spilling out onto the parched ground, drinking it up greedily. He lifts the machine back up to its right side, then cups his hand under the blood, letting it become a deep pool in his palm. Over his shoulder, the beast’s flesh is ballooning out of the pit, the earth cracking around it, lifting like the tongue of a shoe or a carpet being rolled up. Pacheco grits the teeth in his tiny mouth. He takes the blood in his palms and splashes it in his face. He then traces the symbol, the father and son spiraling around each other, Helios and Hyperion, on his high forehead. The blood has solidified quickly, become a black mask. A massive arm emerges from the hole, sinewy and hairless, covered in placental goo. It grasps at seemingly nothing in the sky, and then slams down to the ground, digging its fingers in, working to pull its body up and out. The beast’s hand is alone bigger than the colonel. Pacheco throws the empty tube away, grabs the next one, and quickly pours it on the ground, enclosing himself within a small circle. Pacheco steals a look at the Digger, who resembles the burlap sack he had brought the tubes and machine in, and lies in a lifeless heap a ways away. He watches as a stocky back breaks free of the earth, sending a hail of rocks through the sky and on his helmet. The back is wide, the purple skin stretched so tight it has the luster of rubber. A ridged vertebrae erupts out of the ground, a serrated hill between a set of massive shoulders.
Then the head emerges. Pacheco almost screams.
It is small, the eyes vacant, white and staring, the nose nothing more than a horizontal slit, the mouth a set of lipless, rectangular teeth, clenched tight. It is breathing hard through its nose slit as it continues to hoist itself up and out of the ground. Pacheco struggles the temptation to wipe the blood from his eyes; he doesn’t want to risk ruining the blood mask.
“Aak Aalok,” the beast says. Its voice sounds like its being transmitted through a wet scab, a wafting wet breath that cools the warm blood on Pacheco’s face, sulfurous, moribund.
“Aak Aalok, Hhak moltep.”
“I do not speak your language, demon,” Pacheco says, “But come! We have much to discuss. Or can you not writhe your grotesque self out of that measly little hole?”
The beast struggles with its submerged arm, finally tearing through the ground like wet cardboard, lifting it to the sky. While the first arm is packed with tight fitting muscles, the second is atrophied and malformed. Still, each seems as strong as the other, and the beast uses both to lift itself out from the ground.
&n
bsp; “Moltep, moltep,” The beast says, it’s bloated stomach emerging from the ground. All around him, the earth falls to pieces, and float away, into the gray mist. It’s as if they’re at the center of a formative star, dust and gas swirling about their heads. The plot of earth that Pacheco stands on, within the circle of blood, remains in place. All around Moltep, the rocks and mist drift apart, revealing empty space, save for the oldest stars which the beast remembers and puts into the sky in all the right places. The earth falls away from the beast’s legs, short compared to the rest of its body, three times the size of Pacheco. Cirrus star dust twists around the beast’s head, it’s eyes glowing through, faint beams of light, barely realized, young and weak and smothered by darkness, coming forward, withered black hand reaching towards the man who released it. “Moltep,” It is not so much a spoken word as a sound that emanates from the world of the beast’s creation. Pacheco realizes that he’s slipped, that he’s somehow been hypnotized, that he’s dreaming.
“My mask is... the...” His mouth feels like flypaper, the words the carcasses of insects caught in the film. The beast, Moltep, takes a step towards him. The distance between them seems vast, but the beast all consuming, with the girth of a galaxy, that he’s already almost on top of Pacheco, ready to consume him.
“My mask is the... mirror... through which you see yourself.” Moltep’s hand, which swings through the air, stops in mid-air at the Colonel’s words. “It is made from the same blood which courses through your veins. I am the world you see, the world you create. I am the beginning for you, and the end. I am all, because I am you.”
The beast hesitates, seems to shrink. The earth around Pacheco’s circle in the ground returns. The sky, however, still remains populated with the sparse coat of ancient stars. “I bind you to me, Doctor Colonel Rolando Pacheco, Expeditionary Leader of the Phyrxian.” Pacheco practically rips his vocal cords out by shouting his title at the beast. He still has a tube in his hand, a quarter full of the black blood he drew from the needle. His arm cocks back, and then he launches the tube at the great beast.
“I bind you to me!” Pacheco repeats, as he throws the contents of the tube forward. Moltep reels at the impact, the blood smoking upon contact with the air, then catching fire after only a few moments. Moltep recoils as the blood splashing on its forehead is really a hammer, and falls to its knees quickly, squealing like a castrated pig. It tries to wipe the blood away, but it quickly pulls each of its hands away, as if the point of impact burns at the touch. Smoke rises, a purplish gray smoke, not unlike the hue of Pacheco’s skin. The release of the beast has affected the scrubland quite a bit. Much of the ground around the quaint little circle in the sand has broken off and now floats freely. The butte remains, as does most of the ground around it. I’ll have to fly towards this Moltep creature, Pacheco thinks. He goes to rush towards the beast, but his leg seems to be caught on something. He looks down. Wrapped around his ankle is the Digger, his grip a bear trap.
“What are you doing? Get off of me.” Pacheco says. His cloak becomes rigid at the frayed tip, and angles in between Narcissus’s arms and the colonel’s leg.
“Oh, no, sirs, please, please.” Narcissus sounds weak, hurt. He’s curled up like the fetus of a newborn bird, his eyes fleshy slits over swollen eye bulbs. Pacheco feels a twang of pity hit him in the temple, but quickly squashes it. He must get to the beast. He must finish binding it to him.
“If you don’t get off of me by your own accord, I will forcibly remove you.”
Narcissus feebly takes his hands off of Pacheco’s leg, but stays in the tall man’s shadow. He won’t retreat from the circle. Pacheco cracks his cloak, the loose fabric becoming stiff and straight, and he glides forward, Narcissus following his descent with a crescendoing moan. Pacheco nears the beast, notes how it’s hunkered down the same way the Digger is, although its withered arm does a poor job of hiding its smallish face. The blood on the beast’s head still smolders, the charcoal fuchsia now an acrid, sallow smoke. He looks in the creature’s eyes, the blank corneas tinged with a faint amarillo. He nods, and reaches his hand out to it. He wants Moltep to come to him, to trust him. The beast lifts its huge girth up off the ground, the definition of its dark, slimy skin getting lost in the blackness of the sky. Its eyes shine down like two small moons.
The Digger looks up, then quickly puts his clasped hands back over his eyes. He can’t believe what he sees. The beast, the sleeping story now awakened and walking the world, (his world!) has scraped the precious blue from the sky. It is now stars, dotty old stars, like a spider’s prey, made fat and tied up in an invisible web.
“Do you see, Narcissus? Do you see what has been sleeping beneath your feet? Don’t hide your face, you coward, there is nothing to be afraid of. The creature does exactly what I want it to. If I wanted it to tear you apart, all I’d have to do is think it. But we’re psychically connected. So my will, is its will.”
Pacheco walks back into the circle where the Digger cowers. He lifts the pallid man’s chin up with the hem of his cloak, to where their eyes meet. The colonel’s face cracks into a smirk. “As long as you do what I say, Narcissus, then we’ll have no problems. Yes?”
The Digger nods.
“Good. Now, let’s find us some more stories.”
“More sdories?! Bud, sirs...” Narcissus throws a hand up to his mouth, eyes the beast standing behind Pacheco. “Sirs, dese sdories, dey needs to eads someding. Dey will ead us evendually, no madder whad you dell dem.” He whispers.
“Fortunately, my friend, I’ve learned a few things in my travels, things which will help me in just such a situation as this. This blood mask, for instance. It acts almost as a mirror does for a young child, Narcissus. When it looks at me, all it sees is itself. Surely that’s an analogy you can relate to, yes? Blood: so bloated with symbolism, yes?Even at a primordial level, blood is a life force. The creature’s blood, as my mask, becomes a part of me, and I, a part of it. It grants me mastery over it.”
“You are da masder?”
“Yes, I am the master. It’s all in a book, you see, that I found once, long ago, when I was a young man. It was one of the first expeditionary voyages I had ever made, led by one of the greater explorers my people had ever known, Captain Lacko. We’d journeyed far through the Fade, farther than anyone had before, yet there had been heavy losses of men. I was the ship’s flight surgeon, and I quickly experienced how frail a yama’s body was. We couldn’t stay in the Fade for very long, but being so deep, so far away from any worlds that we knew, we didn’t have a choice. Many of my fellow soldiers succumbed to slow, painful deaths, and there was nothing I could do. It was only when we came out in a cold, forgotten ruin of a world, which had almost entirely been reclaimed by a thick, primeval jungle, did I find a solution, in the depths of what was once either a hospital or temple. It was a book, the title of which was ‘The Vulture and the Throne,’ or something to that effect. The book’s language was faintly familiar to Yamas, enough that I could decipher the meanings of its contents. A book of ritualistic science. Primitive alchemy, actually, but highly effective. Knowledge of the sort that Ameshka Vega had forgot generations ago.
“Through my background in science and medicine, I was able to glean a more profound understanding from many of the rituals depicted. The peoples who had once inhabited the ruins, depicted on the walls in stone carvings as bird-humanoids, had come by a powerful sort of knowledge. They had figured out, through bodily manipulation, how to traverse time and space. They didn’t need vast Earthly resources, and neither did they propose procedures which had negative energy returns. Whatever their input, they received an equal output. They used their vital life forces, such as blood and air, to reshape reality, and fix it to their own needs.
“As I read further, I saw just how I could save the rest of my ailing crew, how I could help them survive and delve even deeper into the Fade. My task was immense: I had to replace a portion of their blood with chaos, exchange the liquid of life for t
hat of madness. It was quite something to try and wrap my head around, to make tangible a concept such as chaos. But the book laid out the procedure for me to follow, and there wasn’t much time for me to grasp it all. In my hastiness, I only saw one way to perform the procedure, and couldn’t think of any alternatives or delve further into the book. It’s why I am missing an eye, Narcissus. It’s why I have to wear this unsightly patch. I made the sacrifice, you see, one measly eye for the power of extra-dimensional sight. It’s what we needed to go further into the Fade, you see, to find the paths that had been right under our noses, but hidden to our plebeian senses. This empty eye socket is much like the holes you carve into the earth’s flesh, only this one has a rim of withered skin, tightly bound to an empty socket, and cannot look away when terror rears its awful head. For the way deeper into the Fade, the paths that our new sight would see, were those of madness.
“I had to cut my eye up after removing it from my head, as the three dimensions it had been privy to were being exchanged for tens of dozens more. It made sense, in a twisted sort of way. I then placed the pieces at all the points of a drawing I had made in the sand, my body numb with anesthesia. The drawing was of a series of overlapping triangles, and at the center, I placed my surgeon’s table. From this perspective, I could reframe each of my patient’s understanding of reality, one by one. First, I suppressed each man’s hematological regenerative capabilities, to make room for the darkness that would inhabit them. As I read aloud from the book, and got the levels of their blood to the proper levels, the triangles in the sand floated up, changing the world around us. Everything became sharper, more angular. Suddenly, reality was all straight lines and doorways.
“I returned to Yama Dempuur a hero for having found a way to surpass our Yamas limitations, but no one was savvy to the truth. For, you see, I never told anyone of the book that I found, that its drawings and diagrams were what granted me my insight. It was an externality that I kept secret all this time, my eye the only thing which has scanned its pages. Of course they saw how grotesque we had all become, how all of our bodies developed a purplish hue and had grown gaunt, but they were too wrapped up in what we had accomplished. They wouldn’t even listen to Lacko’s diatribes, at how I had unlocked some dark force and had compromised the ethics of Ameshka Vega. He faded away into drink and ignominy, and only stories of his younger days survive.”
“Bud sirs, den why do you dells me, a poor, unfordunade Digger?”
“Because I no longer have the book, damn you. It’s in the ship! Phyrxian! The barkskin has it now.” Narcissus cowers under Pacheco’s glowering voice. Moltep the beast rears up, its shadow blanketing the butte in a heavy veil of darkness.
“Fortunately, I know many of its pages, down to every line and diagram. One in particular begs me to perform it, right here, now. It will bring that damned barkskin back to us, no matter how far in the Fade she has escaped. It’s a bridge building ritual, you see. It’s primitive, and I’ll have to do it from memory, but they’re in the Fade now, where nothing at all exists. Their senses of reality will already be taxed, and it shouldn’t be too hard to draw her back to me. Those two men she’s with, they almost undoubtably have no idea how to cope with the Fade, and will most likely make their attachment to reality loose as it is.”
The beast reaches its great arm up into the obsidian sky, its stars like great holes made by raspy moth teeth. The muscles rush down, stop atop the Digger’s discarded shovel. As if it’s picking a flea off its skin, it lifts the shovel off the ground, and drops it on Narcissus’s lap. The Digger looks up, starts shaking his head as Pacheco smiles.
“No, no, no, please, sirs, oh no, no...”
“Yes, Narcissus. Dig me another hole.”
Chapter VIII: “The Gaping Maw”