Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (31 page)

Cason looks to Psyche, eyebrows raised.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Half-gods first,” she says, gesturing to the hole.

Down, then, into the dark.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Spiral Forest

B
OOTS ON METAL
steps as they sink into darkness,
clunnnng, clunnng, clunnnng
. The stairs are a tight spiral, so that Cason’s elbows and shoulders are always colliding with the sides and the railing. He smells the must, the dust, the distant acrid tang of metal, but then sometimes that other breath rises from below—cold-yet-humid, carrying with it a pungent, musky smell. Of animal glands and human sweat. Of cut grass and pulped wood. Of life in its myriad forms. It’s dizzying.

Down, down they go. Cason first, Psyche second.

Ten steps. Then twenty. Thirty, forty.

The steps stop making the
clunnng
sound when they step upon them. Instead, Cason’s boots step on something soft. Spongy and almost slippery. He reaches into his bag, pulls out a small flashlight.

Click
.

Each step, a green brighter than he’s ever seen—a carpet of thick moss. The walls, too, are striated with moss and black mold, and lined with the occasional woody vine.

“I’m guessing this isn’t what the missile silo used to look like,” he says.

“A terrarium of atomic death?” Psyche says, voice echoing from above. “Certainly not, no.”

“Keep going?”

“I do not think we have a choice.”

“What? Why not?”

“Shine the light up.”

He does. Sees her staring down with her frizzled hair and pursed lips—

But above her.
The steps are gone
. The center pole to which they are attached remains, rising into shadow, but ten feet above her, the stairs just... end. Or, rather, begin.

Fear crawls into his heart, nests there. Has babies.

“I... guess we keep going.”

“I concur,” she says.

And they continue their descent.

A
NOTHER FIFTY STEPS
down.

Here, the stairs really do end. The last step hangs loose like a busted piano key, dangling into what appears to be a bottomless pit.

A pattern of orange mold clings to the wall near Cason’s head: a clumsy, crooked spiral, glistening in the torchlight.

He shines the beam dead ahead. Here is where their ride officially ends. A round metal hallway waits ahead, the floor a metal grate tented and dented by the intrusion of pushy thick roots growing from underneath.

The metal hallway emits a faint, eerie luminescence, like the light reflecting off a long-disused swimming pool—swimmy, sickly, shifting. Born of a chain of mushrooms growing up out of the walls like steps, or rungs.

“This is us,” he says.

He hops down. Careful not to, well, go falling into eternal darkness.

There’s a flutter of wings and Psyche stands next to him.

He sighs. “You can fly.”

“We already knew this.”

“The steps end, but we could’ve just... flown back up.”

“That is true. Would you have?”

“No.”

“Then this is all magnificently irrelevant. Shall we?”

He nods, at least comfortable that they have a way back up.

Except, as they step forward, he shines the light back one more time—

And the steps—
and
the pit—are gone. Sealed over by a white concrete wall lined with a tangle-snare of thin, green vines like veins.

“This place isn’t right,” he says.

“Just figuring that out?”

“Don’t be a smartass.”

“I wasn’t trying to be. To be clear, no, this place is not normal. The shell was built by humans, but has since been... repurposed. This is a creation of the divine. It sings of impossibility. It throbs with life. My mind can’t probe it, but I feel it there. Waiting all around us.
Pulsing
.”

They walk. First, through the metal tube—and, nestled in amongst the glowing fungi, Cason sees another nuclear trefoil sign hanging on the wall. As if those who worked down here could possibly have forgotten that they were doing their job within spitting distance of a world-ending missile. What a fear that must’ve been; to know that one day the klaxons would sound and the lights would flash red, and up out of the fields the American missiles would fire and, not long after, the Russian missiles would fall. And the world would be obliterated, bombed into an irradiated nuclear-winter wonderland.

Cason shudders at the thought. He remembers as a kid being afraid of nuclear war. His father didn’t help, telling him the Russkies were coming.

I survived the imaginary nuclear war. But can I survive this?

Metal gives way to concrete—bunker-like, the paint an olive drab. The walls are cracked; branches and vines grow out of each breach. The floor is again spongy with moss, and now with leaves—leaves that occasionally drift down from broken panels where the boughs of underworld trees hang low.

The remnants of the silo—of humanity—linger, too. A corkboard once on the wall, now hanging cockeyed off a furry, coiled vine. Down the hall sits a metal water fountain—that by itself a scary idea, for who would want to drink the water that passed this close to a nuclear missile? But here the fountain has been disassembled, articulated into pieces by impertinent, invasive branches. Cason sees black thorns dripping tarry red goo, each big as his thumb.

“Those don’t look like something I want to touch,” he says, shining the light. Not that he really needs the flashlight—all around, the mold and the mushrooms are glowing. The beam serves more as a pointer than anything else, and now they point out the barbed thorns.

Psyche steps over and bends down, smells them.

“Godsblood,” she says.

“What?”

“Ichor. The gods are filled with it. It’s blood, like a human’s, but thicker. More sap-like. Yours is probably ichor-ish. Which rhymes with ‘licorice,’” she adds, not at all playfully.

“My blood isn’t entirely human.” A statement, meant as a question.

“No, probably not.”

“
I’m
not entirely human.”

“We’ve been over this.”

“I’m still getting used to the idea.”

“I suppose that’s fair. It took me a while to find comfort in the idea when I fed on the food of the gods and become one of them, thanks to Zeus.”

They continue to walk. Stepping over knobby roots that look like knees, ducking under broken ceiling tiles or bundles of dead wire hanging down.

“Zeus. I can’t believe he’s real. I read about him in school. Everybody did, I guess. Everybody’s first taste of mythology. I hated most of my classes, but reading those stories... it’s like comic books, you know? Heroes and monsters, gods and goddesses. Turns out it’s all real. What’s Zeus... you know,
do
?”

“Zeus hasn’t been seen in the half-a-century since we were Exiled to this place. The last someone saw him, he had taken command of a derelict boat—an old oil tanker beached somewhere off the Mumbai coast. The
Pavit
, I think it was. He got onboard, called lightning to his scepter. The boat shuddered, slipped back into the sea, and he sailed away. Nobody’s seen him since. The boat washed up on shore again a year later. Hera went and looked; he wasn’t on it. Not that she could ever find him when Zeus went wayward.”

Cason tilts an ear. Thinks he hears something—a rustle, a rasp of something rough—but then it’s gone.

“Exiled,” Cason says. “You keep using that word. Why are you here?”

He feels Psyche in his mind.

He sees. He
feels
. The Exile. Fifty years ago. All the doors and portals closing. Gateways slamming shut. Gods speared with white fire, thrown down from the myriad heavens to earth, or pierced by swords of light and slammed up through the world’s crust—infinite dimensions folded against one another like playing cards, a single hole, as though from a bullet, punched through all of them, gods with bull-heads, goddesses with chameleon skin, demons and goblins and creatures of light and monsters of shadow all dragged through the hole just before it closes. Drawn forth by winged, sexless humanoids with golden skin and gemstone eyes. Ejected here. Closed off. Together.

It’s then Cason sees.

“God,” he says. “The... our God, the...”

“His proper name is Yahweh. Jehovah.” Said with ill-concealed disdain: “
The Lord
. We simply call Him—”

“The Great Usurper.”

“Correct.”

“So. He just... took over Heaven.”

“All the heavens, all the worlds and overworlds and underworlds. Uniformity, He said. Sanctity.
Stability
. We were not a part of that. The world was increasingly smaller, more connected, and we were chaos when He wanted order. He had the power to do it. The belief. The angels. We were already marginalized. And so He cast us out and cut our power to a fraction of what it was. So now He sits on the throne at the top of the heavenly Spire, this world and the many universes His, all His.”

“Sounds pretty shitty.”

“A bold understatement. For us it was like being locked out of our homes and forced to wander the trackless wastes, cold and hungry. It was jarring, to say the least. But maybe it was for the best.”

He turns around, gives her a quizzical look.

“Well,” she continues. “The gods, as we’ve learned, are fickle, dramatic, sometimes even insane. With all that ‘endless divine power,’ we represented a true danger to the world. Perhaps the Usurper had it right to lock us out. Cut us down at the knees. Not better for
us
, of course. But better for this place and its people.”

Cason’s about to say something else, but whatever it is goes out of his mind—ahead, at a T-intersection, he sees an image carved in stone, easily as tall as him. “Take a look at this.” He waves her on.

The image is carved out of the cement, the contours lined with lichen and fringed with moss.

Cason can barely catch his breath while looking at it.

It’s the Antlered God from his dream. Lean, long face—a stag’s face, but human. Black almond eyes. Antlers not like that of a deer or an elk, but almost like trees formed of pointed bone, trees whose snarled branches grow and twist to the heavens. The Horned Beast has a broad, bare chest, narrow hips, and a studded, thorned phallus hanging between a pair of furry thighs.

All around the Antlered God are the beasts of the forest—but mutated, like creatures born of a disturbed child’s mind. Wolves with tusks. Pigs with snake-tails. Owls with human faces roost in the antlers, while long-legged razor-mouthed rats stalk the ground.

The ground itself is a twisting knot—like they’re all standing on a maze carved out of the very earth, a twisting double-back labyrinth that spirals in on itself.

“I dreamed of this,” he says in a voice barely above a whisper.

Psyche says nothing.

He turns to ask her if she knows the figure in the carving—

But she’s not there.

And the walls of the hallway are gone. Stretched out before him is a forest. Like from his dream. No walls, no more missile silo. No boundaries at all. Twisted black trees grow together above his head like intertwined witch-fingers. The ground is lumpy, mossy, littered with twigs and leaves. No sky can be seen, but moonlight shines through branches.

Some of the signs of the missile silo remain. He sees the corkboard, the water fountain, the nuclear sign. But they hang from trees, or sit on the ground.

No walls. No structure at all.

And no Psyche.

Then—somewhere—he hears leaves rustling. Twigs snapping.

Something moves—a lean, rangy shadow—between two distant trees.

Behind him, something chuffs, snorts. Cason turns and sees nothing there.

For a few moments, all is quiet.

Then: shapes emerge from all sides, blasting out of the brush, shouldering between tall trees and bent saplings—dark shadows with yellow eyes and white teeth, coming for him, hissing and howling and spitting.

Cason turns to run, but a tree branch snarls around his foot, and the forest tilts as he tumbles, the flashlight spinning away, the light dim, then dark.

The ground shakes.

The creatures pounce.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Children Of The Antlered God

J
AWS SNAP CLOSED
in front of his face—wolf jaws that hang not on a wolf at all, but thrust from the face of a boar, spit-slathered tusks gleaming. Cason grabs those tusks, twists, throws the beast off him—the creature rolls away as two more dash forward from the shadow. One a skinny fox with a spiral of goat horns and paws like a human child’s hands, the other a chimera of indistinct origins: rat’s head on a long, leathery neck, the body a hairless pock-marked tube of sagging skin, its six limbs more like spider’s legs than anything else.