On what might have been the fourth day of their journey, echoes of a terrible clamor drifted to them around a river bend—a guttural chorus of whoops rose and fell in discordant rhythm with shrill blatts of flutes and the omnipresent din of Arthur’s shrieks. The boys stooped to conceal themselves among the bushes. Soon they beheld an encampment across the water. Several naked giantesses danced around a bonfire that blazed pure white as molten gold and sent forth a plume of white smoke.
The giantesses loomed as tall as any three mortal women standing upon one another’s shoulders. Perhaps they’d survived a recent battle, for bruises and lacerations marked them and they drank heavily from a communal gourd. Lushly compelling as their bodies might be, less attractive, to Dred’s thinking, were their gargoyle heads and cyclops eyes that glinted with fearful malice in the leaping flames. Their hair coiled in tall beehives. Apparently the giantesses resided elsewhere for no dwelling structure was evident; only poles driven into the trampled earth, each surmounted by the bloodied skull of some hapless beast or humanoid. The boys exchanged glances of awe and fear and then quietly moved away.
They did not get far.
“Hail, trespassers. I am Noman, collector of lost dreamers.” A cyclops stepped from the brush and blocked the path. She dressed in a leather harness. Light from the bonfire sparked in her buckles and along the edge of a bronze sword in her hand. The pupil of her baleful eye bubbled and retracted from the fire glare. “This is the sacred river, Alph. It flows from a cleft in the mountains, the womb of Gaia herself. Her virgin claret stains your lips, your teeth. Foolish children. Come with me to the fire. You will die out here.”
“You’ve seen . . . It,” Dred said. “You’ve seen the Red Sultan.”
“So shall you.”
“The screaming,” Crabbe said.
“Frightened?” Her reply might’ve been for either of them. She chuckled. “The shrieks of an immortal titan stuck fast in the web of the Underworld. He gave us fire. Eons past. His very name is forgotten. The God Heads were displeased. So the titan suffers.” She leaned forward to Dred’s level. “Come with me, children. The Underworld lies near and it is ever hungry.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Crabbe said, and leaped forward and plunged his spear into her widening eye until the point burst through the opposite side in a splash of bone and brain. The cyclops sank to her knees and toppled sideways. She lay twitching in a thickening pool of blood. Her beehive hair spilled in glorious waves upon the dirt.
“She might’ve been friendly,” Dred said, although he doubted it.
Crabbe pointed to a lumpy shadow swinging among branches near head-height. Dred poked it with his spear until it swayed into a beam of firelight—small arms and legs distended from a net. Small eyes blinked and small mouths worked in mute horror. Other child faces were slack or made death grimaces. Some wore nightcaps and pajamas. He prodded again with his spear butt and the whole squirming mass revolved into darkness again.
The boys looted the cyclops’ corpse of a waterskin and various sundries and hurried onward. The jungle thinned and gave way to a plain. The river curved into abiding gloom. However, Arthur’s phantom shrieks grew more intense, rebounding from a line of shadowy peaks; specifically a volcano that would not have seemed amiss in a Saturday matinee adventure program.
They climbed through foothills and boulder fields, then along a dry creek bed that deepened into a ravine where ancient lava flowed. The ravine gouged its way into a canyon and darkness fell upon them. Dred fashioned torches from bundles of twigs and strips of his shirt. Crabbe dipped the torches in pitch from the cyclops’ supplies and ignited one and they proceeded upward, cocooned in a reddish bell of light. In time, the pair emerged on a slope near the rim of the volcano.
Battered and exhausted, the boys made the summit.
Dred regarded the caldera and what awaited them therein. “Aw, no.” Tears of horror spilled over his cheeks.
AT THE CALDERA OF THE MOUNTAIN OF HELL
My slaves will
serve you well,
the black sun said as Mac bolted into the ziggurat. The alien god then whispered a profane and awful string of syllables. Mac instantly forgot, but he detected it lurking like an infestation of maggots within a pocket of his brain.
Ironic that the barb of my name fits so snugly in the divot Tom dug in your subconscious. Utter the curse and you will find succor.
Mac traveled at improbable velocity through freezing nothingness. Wheedles of an idiot flute trailed his passage. He materialized on the rim of a caldera in a night land. “Bloody hell,” he said.
“In this perversion of reality, our manifestation is largely symbolic,” Great-great-great grandfather Seneca Tooms said in a voice of thunder. His disembodied head gently revolved, tethered by a cord of nerve fiber that descended from an iris in a black dome of sky. He floated alongside seven other long-deceased Tooms patriarchs—terrifying busts (an anti-Rushmore) hewn from the necks of high-rise colossuses to form a ghastly mobile of Olympian proportions. Ichor dripped from the iris along the exposed nerve cords and spattered their leering visages. Fat drops beaded on their lashes and hung from their noses. Below lay the throat of the caldera, oozing dank mists.
“Largely, not utterly,” Great-grandfather Atticus said. His tongue distended and retracted with a will of its own.
“We guard the way,” Great Uncle Cotton Tooms said. “We lick clean the unwashed. We devour the unwary. We vomit the unworthy.”
“We’d shit em,” Atticus said. “But there’s not an asshole between the eight of us.”
None of the others spoke. Mordechai, Theocles, and Zane glared and smacked their squirming lips. Solomon and Hewitt gaped in inchoate rage or exultation. Their protuberant eyes shifted in constellations of congealed blood and shattered veins. The idiot flute melody issued from their slack mouths.
The mists of the caldera receded and a panoply of shivering star fields was revealed. Arthur Navarro, grown to titanic dimensions, lay spread eagle upon a tor of black crystal jutting from the ocean of galaxies. His limbs were skewered with crystal spikes. Suppurating wounds masked him. Grisly lacerations crisscrossed his immense form. A vulture-headed woman clad in a shimmering white girdle crouched atop his chest. She dipped her beak into his exposed intestines. Titan-Arthur howled and the stars rippled and changed.
Dred and Telemachus Crabbe straggled at that very moment over the rim of the volcano. “Mother!” Dred fell to his knees with all the drama of an actor in a production of Shakespeare. Vulture-headed goddess or not, a mama’s boy always recognizes his own mother.
“I’m having an epiphany about our lineage,” Mac said. He shuffled his feet. His toes poked through the ragged mukluks. “Toomses are all the evil of the world. Aren’t we?”
“Most of it for the last millennium, for damn sure!” Atticus cackled and his eyes slipped in their cavernous sockets.
Mac recalled Grandfather Danzig’s love of models—planes, ships, cities. Especially cities. He could imagine the old man moving pieces on a board, arranging assassinations, kidnappings, rocket launches, and remote expeditions, all with the ultimate goal of manipulating his grandsons into fight or flight responses. “Why the charade of the probe? The insanity with poor Arthur and his brothers? Why fake an expedition to unearth the ziggurat? If the Tooms patriarchs are allied with Mr. Gray, the Emperor, whatever you call it, then they know everything. They set the cult upon us. Allowed Zircon to kidnap us. Risked our lives with the corrupted Spetsnaz and the maze . . . Why? Is this some bizarre test? A trial?”
“Gauntlet,” Dred said, still clutching his head in both hands as he rocked. “Mac, it’s a gauntlet.”
“Gauntlet!” the heads cried in unison and the earth trembled and small rock slides plunged into outer space.
“The Gauntlet is an ancient family rite,” Seneca said. “On every world and across infinite realities, different families, but always the same gods and the same rite. Resources, peons, the lives of your friends, your less gifted relatives . . . expendable in the pursuit of true power. It’s a rare son of the old blood who runs the Gauntlet. Lear and Andronicus were favored to make a run—Mervin, Nestor, and Gage were not. Only the Toomses who undertake and survive this harrowing are fit to enter the inner circle. Congratulations, kids!”
Mac said, “Our bothers . . . They died in the Gauntlet?”
Seneca laughed. “No, silly boy. Your uncle slaughtered them. He’s a firebrand, our dear Andronicus.”
“Didn’t stand before us with knocking knees or pissed pants, either,” Cotton said.
“Are you afraid to gaze upon the unholy radiance of our patron in darkness?” Atticus rolled his gaze upward to indicate the seeping vault. “Shall I open the way? Shall I send you before our benefactor?”
Dred wailed and covered his face. Mac took a protective step toward his brother.
“Oh, calm yourselves. In the fullness of time, you
may
become one of us, an eternal servant of the Gray Eminence. Meanwhile, the worlds are your oysters. Shuck them and make merry.”
“How now?” Crabbe said. He stood, pale and blank, as if perceiving his surroundings as a violent hallucination.
“Be still, cur,” Cotton said. “You exist to serve as a dog fetches conies and licks the boots of its master.”
Seneca said, “Hold fast, brothers. Far too much golden about this one. I say we corrupt him a tad. Let the aptly named Telemachus partake of the sweetbreads of immortality.”
Mac waited for the harrumphs and mutters to subside. “We came to retrieve our friend.” He nodded toward Arthur. “If such a thing is possible.”
“As you wish, it will be so,” Atticus said. “Mortals exist in our domain as consciousness lent substance. Dreams given the illusion of flesh—your corporeal bodies were destroyed instantly within the ziggurat. From minute particles shall you be restored. ”
“There
is
a price.” Seneca whistled, shrill as a nail through the ear. “Endless suffering.”
Theoris Tooms’ spine contorted and split in a long vertical slash. A pair of wings unfurled and she shot from her perch upon titan-Arthur. She divided into three smaller, human-sized versions of her principal self. The trio ascended to the rim of the caldera with such speed, Mac was unable to avoid grasping talons that sank into his shoulders and pinned him flat to the dirt. He cried out in agony and she vomited her gory repast down his throat. It went likewise with Dred and Crabbe.
Shock and revulsion overcame Mac. He didn’t resist as his mother the vulture goddess bore him on high with two powerful beats of her wings. She flung him into the gaping maw of Atticus. Great-great-great Granddad champed his teeth on Mac’s thrashing body and ground his bones to meal.
PLACENTAL EXPULSION
Mid-August of 1956, The
Anchorage Daily News
reported that a beluga whale beached herself near the port of Whittier, Alaska. The cow whale had been dead several days and was a feast for carrion birds when a kayaker spotted her. The man approached the carcass and prodded it with a paddle. He was surprised that the edge of the paddle sank into deliquescing blubber. Gasses of decomposition reacted and the whale burst like a four thousand pound piñata, nearly drowning the fellow.
The paper omitted the rest of the story: four adolescent males were discovered within the remains—curled into the fetal position and comatose. Representatives of Sword Enterprises arrived at the hospital to whisk the mysterious patients away.
Subsequently, the reporter fell into a sizable inheritance and promptly quit journalism. The kayaker vanished while paddling in the sound and is presumed dead.
TOM FOOLERY
Three weeks at a private sanitarium in upstate New York wasn’t all bad if one happened to be a Tooms, or in Telemachus Crabbe’s case, a boon companion. Mac and Dred soon recovered sufficiently to swim in the pool, play squash, and devour three four star meals a day. Afternoons were for long strolls around the expansive property, birdwatching, and checking the fences for weak spots. Crabbe did not accompany them on these excursions—he’d lapsed into a state of melancholy. Sequestered in his chamber, Crabbe penned an extensive journal he referred to as preamble to his memoirs. The brothers tactfully avoided mentioning that Mr. Nail would likely confiscate any physical record of the events surrounding Ugruk Glacier.
Scant news penetrated the high walls and electrified fences of the sanitarium. News stories were concocted to explain various odd events; Uncle Nestor and Dr. Bravery apparently emerged from the depths of the glacier unscathed. Numerous Sword operatives and consultants were less fortunate. Scores of men perished in some kind of mining explosion. Page three fodder.
The brothers agreed to dispense with psychiatric modalities and comforting explanations for their night terrors, and day terrors. They clasped hands and swore to remember what happened within the ziggurat and after. They vowed not to dismiss the horrors of the astral beyond as mere hallucinations or temporary mental aberrations. Psychiatrists and Sword propagandists be damned. Neither parent nor uncle nor aunt had deigned to visit them in this wellness prison, so their relatives could be damned too.
Mental trauma notwithstanding, the boys
had
recovered physically; perhaps too well. The old scar on Dred’s knee healed without a trace. All of his scars (and Mountain Leopard Temple bestowed many) were gone. The chunk of NCY-93’s recording crystal lodged in Mac’s gut had melted away. His skin was smooth and unblemished as the day he’d first entered the world. It bothered him to feel almost preternaturally healthy, as if the spring in his step could lead to an effortless leap over the sanitarium wall, or kicking right through it.
One afternoon, they went for their customary ambit of the grounds.
“You, me, Crabbe . . . ” Dred tossed a bread crust for the pigeons that clustered around the flagstone walk. “Sword propaganda can deal with the mysteries surrounding us. Arthur was
dead
. Doornail dead. Doesn’t it defy the laws of nature for him to exist?”