Aaaiiieee (26 page)

This spider-webbed lattice, this living weave, became so tight in spots that Noon could barely squeeze himself through it. He didn’t want to draw his machete and hack at the roots, because he didn’t want to leave a trail the Foeti could easily follow. Yet who was he deceiving, in that concern, but himself? Though the floor of the Tunnel here was of uneven flagstones, not dirt as it had been some miles back, he knew he was leaving plenty of signs of his passage for the Foeti and other denizens of the Tunnel to follow. The Foeti might not possess the sense of smell, but it/they could see clearly enough—just as other entities might not have the sense of sight, but could sniff the blood in his veins from a mile away.

It was difficult to tell how far behind him the Foeti was/were. The Tunnel made its/their cries echo and distort. It/they might be lost way back in the steam as black as squid’s ink which he had groped his way through an hour ago, or as close as the beginning of the root forest. Its/their wails sounded like a nursery of newborn infants drowning at the bottom of the sea.

Though the wails sounded like multiple creatures to him now—and on a few occasions he had injured the/a Foeti so badly that he was sure it would die of its wounds—he was not certain if there were many of them, or only a single individual. His opinion on the subject changed from day to day, from hour to hour.

In any case—and fortunately for him—even if the Foeti was/were fairly near, the tangled roots were too dense to see through very deeply…and though there were bare light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, they were spaced far apart so that the gaps between their pools of light offered brief shelters of darkness. He only hoped that nothing hostile was lying in wait for him in one of these intervals of darkness. The bulbs rested against the roots here and there, and their heat had scorched them black in spots though they hadn’t caught fire. Fire was perhaps Noon’s worst fear. If he ever came to a place in the Tunnel that was filled with flame, he would have to wait for the fire to die down before he could proceed. In that time, the Foeti might catch up to him. And if the fire was of a kind that would never die away, then he would have to turn back. That was simply impossible to contemplate. In all this time of running through the Tunnel, he had not once turned back.

He estimated that he had been running for a year, at least…ever since he had fallen through the hole in the rotted floor of his moldering house in the old, old city—waking from unconsciousness to find himself in the Tunnel. The ceiling far above him, with just a dim bluish light showing him the hole his weight had broken open, so high and out of reach. Luckily, the floor of the Tunnel had been of a thick black soil in that section (churned up by a seething population of nightcrawlers), and it had broken his fall.

The walls of that section were also of wood, and Noon had been attempting to climb back up, digging torn fingers and toes between the rough boards to find purchase, when the Foeti had lunged out of the shadows for the first time—its hairless head disproportionately immense, its naked body undeveloped, like an embryo as big as he was. He had dropped down from the wall and begun running, then. He had been running ever since. Sleeping when it was moderately safe enough to risk it. Eating what edible plants, mostly fungus, he could harvest, and whatever edible animals he could kill. Drinking water that trickled down tiled walls, or that pooled here and there, or that flooded whole areas of the Tunnel he had to wade through. When he couldn’t run, he dragged himself along. He had even crawled on all fours.

In some places he had found doors blocking his way. Doors of decomposing gray-green wood. Doors of metal almost lost under incrustations of red rust or green verdigris. To his infinite relief on each occasion, he had not yet encountered a locked door. But he had done his best to barricade them once he was on the other side. Several times, in narrow parts of the Tunnel, he had even constructed and barricaded his own doors to impede, if not halt, the progress of the Foeti. Of course, elsewhere the Tunnel was so impossibly wide that he couldn’t see its sides, let alone create a door to block it. Only a few miles back, in fact, he had encountered one such region of the Tunnel, its walls lost in gloom but the ceiling so low he had needed to tuck in his head to avoid bumping it against a smooth surface apparently made of thick black (perhaps volcanic) glass.

Over the months, this subterranean and stressful existence had taken its toll on him. His hair, formerly long and worn in a queue tied with a black ribbon, had begun to come out in stringy handfuls. He had lost weight, his skeletal condition impossible to ignore as his clothing tattered away until all he wore now were a pair of ragged trousers cut off at the knees. Worst of all were the headaches, so severe at times that he wanted nothing more than to stop running, running, running, to just drop down and curl in a fetal position and wait for his enemy to overtake him at last…to deliver him from his torment. His skull seemed to be literally and steadily ballooning with his pain, as though filling up with infected pus…

The forest of roots was so dense that when Noon suddenly emerged from it he was surprised, shaken out of his numb, robotic reverie—not having seen its terminus approaching. Ahead of him loomed a great staircase, the ceiling sloping up at a steep angle, vanishing into a murk no longer illuminated by dangling light bulbs. Straightening up, Noon moved close to the bottom step. He prodded it with his toe, and reached out to run his hand over a black-painted wall with a crinkled texture. His suspicions about the surface of the staircase, walls, and the angled ceiling were confirmed when he tore free a little tab of the black material to reveal words beneath it, printed in a small type, black against white. Newspaper. The walls, ceiling and the stairs themselves were composed of papier-mache, covered over with a glossy black paint.

Were the stairs nothing more than glued paper, then? Would they support his weight? As he tested his foot on the first step, he realized there were odd symbols marked on it in a dark but flourescent purple paint. More symbols, but different, on the second step. And so on, these characters varying on each. Did they tell a saga? Some parable? But if so, was this story to be read from the bottom to the top of the staircase, or from the top to the bottom? Or might it be read either way?

Noon had taken only three wary steps up the flight of paper or paper-coated stairs when a/the Foeti burst directly through the wall at the foot of the staircase. The thickly-painted papier-mache there had flimsily covered over and hidden a doorway in the true wall beneath.

Noon then began racing up the steps as fast as his legs could propel him, terrified to have his foe so close at his heels in so unexpected a manner. He could no longer be timid about the staircase’s sturdiness. But he needn’t have worried, as it turned out, about the staircase supporting him or the Foeti catching him—just yet, at least. After several moments, he realized the Foeti was not pursuing him up the steps, and after a few moments more, he reined in enough fear that he was able to stop and look back down the way he had come.

There had to be more than one Foeti, he decided (again). The first one that had attacked him had been entirely bald. This one had long cobwebs of hair hanging over its face, through which its lidless black eyes glared. And whereas the first ones he had encountered had always been crawling rapidly on all fours, lately the ones in this vicinity seemed to spend more time scurrying along on their hind legs, bent under the weight of huge heads which were still not as huge as the heads of the first Foeti he had known. This one even wore primitive, torn clothing.

The wild-haired Foeti had not advanced up even one of the steps, paced back and forth at their foot, emitting terrible cries of frustration. Was the thing concerned that the steps might cave in under its weight? No…Noon understood what the problem was. The symbols on the steps. The Foeti was afraid of them. This was confirmed when he saw the Foeti lash out, dig its nails into the bottom step and tear away a strip of the papier-mache as he himself had done. It flicked the shred away, and tore another free. Then, it began flailing madly with both of its thin but powerful forelimbs.

Even if it should strip all the symbols from the bottom step (and now Noon saw that a concrete staircase lay beneath the paper facade), there was still the step above that, and the step above that. Assuming that the messages or spells written on them were all equally powerful, all equally frightening to the Foeti. But whether the Foeti should be delayed for minutes or for a day, Noon didn’t linger to waste any more of this precious time. Turning forward again, he continued mounting the increasingly shadowy staircase.

As he ascended, it appeared to him that the purple symbols became more vivid. And soon enough, as the last of the light bulb illumination below him receded (and the Foeti was swallowed up in the dimness, apparently having only gained a handful of steps), the symbols actually began to glow in the darkness. It helped him know where to plant his feet, though the luminosity was far too feeble to show him how much higher the flight of steps would lead him.

In spots here and there, the glossy black paint had been chipped or torn by the passage of creatures not impeded like the Foeti, maybe curious like himself about what lay beneath. The layers of glued newspaper revealed by these wounds shone white against the blackness, but it was still difficult for Noon to make out the letters on them in the scant light from the purple-painted runes. Leaning his face close to one torn patch, he thought he made out the words “impregnated” and “stillborn”, the rest too smeared and blurred with hardened paste. In a smaller wound, in a sans serif type, there was just the word “our”. A few steps higher, another little tear (or maybe just a spot carelessly missed in the painting, since it lay like a shadow directly beneath a high ridge in the wrinkly surface) showed only the letters “roborus”, in a more elegant type style—though Noon didn’t know whether that was the start, middle, or end of a word.

Ahead of him, he began to make out a haze of dim light. Around this time, after it seemed he had been ascending the stairs for close to an hour, he also started to notice that the steps were marred in more than just little nicks and peeled strips. The papier-mache was warped, buckled, as if its paste had become fluid again, bubbled and then rehardened. Greater sections of the painted skin had split and pulled away from each other. As he climbed yet higher, he saw more and more damage until whole large areas of the papier-mache had become damp and sloughed away from the concrete steps beneath, only to resolidify again. The purple characters (less and less luminous the nearer he came to that pale light) were cracked, distorted, or missing altogether.

At last, he stepped up into the light. Here, the staircase and the painted papier-mache ended. The walls, floor and ceiling of the Tunnel were again of mortared stone. The new light was of an intoxicating, unmistakable quality…a kind of light he hadn’t seen in perhaps a year.

It was sunlight.

And with it, even more intoxicating, the smell of fresh air. Vegetation warmed by a summer sun. There could no longer be a mere desert above him. The sunlight and fresh air came from four evenly spaced windows in the ceiling over his head, just out of reach of his outstretched arms when he tried to jump to touch them. These open windows were covered with heavy iron bars, too close together for him to squeeze through even if he could spring high enough to grab hold of them, but they permitted the sun’s gold (late afternoon, early morning?) light to filter through, a sweet-smelling breeze to waft between. And now he knew that it was intermittent rain coming into the Tunnel through these openings, and trickling down the stairs, that had caused the damage to the papier-mache, returning it to the formless mush it had started out as.

Scanning around him for some forgotten tool or other item with which to pry loose the bars from one of the windows (should he even be able to climb up the blocks of the wall to reach them), Noon glanced back the way he had come. He heard one eerie, far-off wail from the pursuing lone Foeti, like the shriek of a hawk. There were no bird cries outside the four rectangular openings in the roof, but he did think he heard the
shh-shh-shh
ing of sawing, sizzling insect noises in tall grass.

His eyes were drawn back to the damaged papier-mache of the staircase he had mounted. The improved light made the newspapers it was composed of more legible. He saw part of a birth announcement page here, a column of obituaries there. One portion of the ruined top step in particular drew him closer. He crouched, cocked his head to examine it, at last broke that piece free in his hands to lift to his face.

It was not merely letters or words that showed on the newsprint, this time, but a halftone photograph of a house. Was it from a real estate page? Did it illustrate the scene of some crime? The caption was partially torn away, revealing only the words: “…in the house at 101 Ada Street.”

However truncated, the caption made Noon’s heart spasm. Even before he had read it, he had thought the house resembled his own ancient domicile…through whose moldering floor he had plummeted into this unsuspected underworld. The photograph seemed to portray his home back in some older time, perhaps, when its wood was sturdier, its paint not yet worn away. If not his home, one very much in the same style. But the fragment of caption spelled it out beyond any doubt. The address it gave was definitely his own.

His maple tree, growing so close to the house that its roots must have begun separating the very stones of the foundation, was missing from the picture, a mere sapling in its place. Was the picture so old that the sapling
was
the maple tree, in its infancy? Or…could this picture be of his house
since
 he had fallen into the Tunnel? Repaired, repainted, resold? The damaging tree cut down, and replaced with a new one?

A fresh headache was brewing like a storm in his poor stretched skull; he could ponder the photograph no longer, and slipped it into a pocket of his ragged trousers to examine again later on. For now, he wanted to concentrate on getting up to, and through, those metal bars over the four ceiling windows. He aligned himself directly below the first of the windows, and could hear more distinctly the sounds of insects in high, sun-yellowed summer grass. Bent blades of this grass even dangled down between the bars along the window’s edges. But as he stood there, inhaling, tilting his chin toward the fragrant air, a much cooler breeze washed over him. It was chilly, in fact, and caused him to look toward the windows spaced farther ahead. He found himself wandering forward.