A World of Horror, page 23
I release the rope when my descent becomes a gentle slope and stalk unhindered down the sandy, stony passage carved into the land. These places are rough and rounded like warrens as they burrow through the white-red-banded sandstone in search of the blue-red-green glint of precious opal. I’m aware the depths should be consumed by darkness at this hour, yet I’m able to see enough of my surroundings to leave the Mag-Lite untouched.
The pale lime bars glowing on my wristwatch spin closer to the designated time. I halt in the next cavern and swing the backpack from my shoulders. Pelesit removed from one pocket, knife withdrawn from another, I give a final precise gash to my scarred finger and run rivulets of red around the bottle’s opening.
Do I announce the cricket’s release? There were no words taught to me, no grand ritual. The bomoh had little warnings to offer regarding the Pelesit’s other form, an essential part of my plan, but she didn’t give me much advice on enacting these final steps.
So I remove the stopper and turn the bottle up, as though the gem-green vampire is a fluid to be poured, libated, consecrating this soon-to-be hallowed ground.
There is no obvious movement. No theatrical flow of spooky mist or gelatinous goop to herald its escape. The cricket is gone from the glass vessel in my hand, and a young and feral-looking child crouches on the sandstone ground instead.
Black hair, straight and hanging over eyes and ears, like my own. A small, jutting chin and defiant button nose protrude in warm olive tones. Its gender, if it has one, is indeterminate under simple gray clothes, another similarity. Bare hands and feet appear normal, slightly grubby, like any child.
It has accusatory eyes the color of spring, unlike me.
I possess hundreds, maybe over one thousand photographs of the cricket from its months in my care, every conceivable angle and lighting captured in compressed image files, yet it feels wrong to take a picture now. I obey my misgiving, leave the camera untouched, and offer an impassive expression to gaze upon the Pelesit-in-human-shape. The child parts its petulant mulberry lips, and vivid crimson gushes out.
At first, I believe it’s regurgitating the blood I’ve fed it for months, though the illogicality of such an idea is almost immediately apparent at the freshness and sheer volume of liquid pouring from its open mouth, soaking into its shirt, far outweighing the scant drips I’ve given. From somewhere behind its little pearls of tooth is a darker sanguine stump. Whatever nub remains.
True to myth, the wise woman had bitten out the demon’s tongue to enslave the summoned shadow.
The bleeding child begins to cry, a convincing sound of terror and pain. An instinct deep within me twitches, tenses. I find I don’t want to do this, this sacrificing. At least not with a young, helpless human, and the Pelesit’s current form is impossible to tell apart from the real thing. The wet, gurgling wails make my insides cringe and writhe with trepidation. I want to rush to fix whatever harms this little one. To soothe it and offer comfort. And, in equal measure, I’m shocked by my reaction. Is this what I would feel as a father? If I survive, victorious, if I dare let myself seek out the trappings of having my own family, would I be overcome by a protective wisdom, all righteous fury, when something causes my offspring distress?
I quash the musings and try to ignore the sobbing child and how much its sounds move me. I have to rationalize away my emotional response. This is the same creature I’ve held contained in a bottle and fed my vital fluids. Not some five-year-old, lost, alone, hurting. Not a little boy with shaggy black hair whose daddy just went limp on a hospital bed, who has been hustled out of the stark, stinking ward, made to sit by himself in a barren waiting room, whose chest feels like it’s caving in around the sudden absence of its hero, its father, its rock, comedian, protector . . .
Then the dozen cruel Mamu arrive.
They glide into my limited range of vision with their protruding eyes fixed on the crouched Pelesit. My pulse stutters, adrenaline rushing to keep me alive and fighting. The cannibals’ shapeshifting is etched into my memory, but here in the underground I discover their bodies glow maroon in the darkness, emitting an illumination so red and dim that my brain is unconvinced there is light at all.
I fully understand why Granddad felt so compelled to sacrifice, to appease their wrath. They emanate power, like a scent, a whisper on the stale air.
The child’s shrieks of horror renew as continual blood loss from its severed tongue makes the Pelesit grow visibly weaker. It topples to its side and tries to crawl away from the approaching monsters with skinny arms. Blood and mucus and tears wash down its young face.
I can’t help the Pelesit, nor can I stand and watch. Its panicked eyes glitter peridot, small, grubby hand outstretched toward me. Its bloodied mouth shapes words of beseechment I will never hear. I want to leave. I need to turn away and escape while my poisoned bait lures in the enemy. My body is wracked with tremors of indecision. Here is the terrific culmination of my work. It’s nearly over, and I’ve surely won. I can make my father proud by daring to subvert the murderous destiny Granddad had tried to foster onto me. Yet Dad would not have let anything hurt a child and I’m aghast at the disgrace of my present weakness.
The Mamu strike, and my options are stripped away. The unhallowed spirits fall upon the human-bodied demon with a low, grinding chuckle in approval of my offering. The child’s heart finds more blood to pump from its bitten and torn body. Its whimpering softens, then fades, replaced now by squelching and lapping. I’m frozen in place. The Mamu fossick around in the spilled guts, pulling long strings of intestine up like floss between their vicious teeth. Clods of darker organ meat patter to the sandy tunnel floor as they chew, falling out of open mouths in ragged pieces, only to be snuffled back up before they plunge their shifting faces into the child’s cavity. They crowd in, they chew, they rumble to each other in voices too low for me to fully hear.
They strip every available shred of flesh and meat from the child’s bones, cleaning brain and gristle from the skull last, then sit back on their varied haunches to lick and groom away the remnants of gore from their faces, muzzles, mandibles.
Moments of slavering pass before they turn to me, altering their appearances into the uniform bodies that Granddad most often described. The static-frizzed hair and bulbous eyes, long claws and longer teeth.
I turn to run, but the dark glow from the Mamu has changed my night vision and the tunnel is black against black. I remember my entrance to these tombs, but the electric terror is making everything disorienting and alarming, too chaotic to navigate as I shamble forward into the darkness. I flail over my shoulder for the zipper pull and extract my Mag-Lite as though unsheathing a sword. The torch glares warm white light down the carved tunnel.
I feel the Mamu pursuing, a gusting heat on the back of my neck, and the sound of many feet and snapping teeth always just behind. I don’t look back, not even once. My strides lengthen. The violently bobbing light shows my way is clear. My legs burn with the flood of lactic acid, muscles unused to such strenuous athletic efforts. I struggle against the tightness in my chest, knowing as long as I can get out of the underground, I will be okay.
A fierce bellow makes me startle hard enough to almost drop my light. One of the creatures at my back is falling. I hear the scuff of its stumbling, the grunt and expulsion of air as it collides with the hard stone wall, and feel the ground shake when it collapses in a heavy heap.
I don’t try to stop myself laughing, as wheezing and difficult as it is. My plan is working! I sense others go down behind me, two and three at a time. I give a victorious whoop. Joy floods me. There are no more signs of pursuit and I can see the bright tail of my climbing rope splayed across the floor ahead.
Safe and exultant, I now glance over my shoulder, and see one of the slain Mamu prone on the ground. Ridges of loose, cream sand bulge up around its face and bushy shoulders. I have no urge to check any closer for the surely-absent signs of life, content with its motionlessness and akimbo limbs telling me the bad spirit, the plague, the infestation is poisoned and gone.
I return my torch to my bag and have a grateful, celebratory gulp of water before rising out of these accursed tunnels.
The Mamu have been a looming threat for as long as I remember thanks to Dad and Granddad’s frank discussion in my presence as a little boy, then, after, my grandfather deciding far too early on to keep me peripherally aware. In the years since his first confession, then the fatal reveal, I had dedicated so much emotional and mental resources to the dangerous existence of evil spirits and other impossible beings. To the reality of “magic.”
What would I do with myself now?
Some part of me always believed they would get me. That this mad play with the Malaysian Pelesit would fail, end tragically for me. The rapturous triumph is almost too much.
I’m greeted above ground by the perfect, luminous disk of my precious full moon riding high overhead. So instrumental in my success. It lights this strange new world with its reflected glow, showing the rise and fall of the landscape. Coober Pedy to the north sleeps on, unaware how close they’d all come to being consumed.
The Universe itself commemorates my euphoria with a breathtaking show of shooting stars, more meteoroids than I can count blazing across the sky in brazen magnificence.
I dance in place, feet scuffing and batteries clattering together. The slight sound reminds me of the digital camera stowed in my backpack. Now is the perfect time for a photograph. The moment of my supremacy. I can document my glorious ascension to Unknown Hero. Savior.
I unpack the camera and flick the dials to On and Auto, positioning myself toward my caravan trailer to have the vast, mounded field all speckled with pits in the background and point the lens at my grin-stretched face. The device gives an electronic whirr before its flash shatters my sights. I answer the rush of discomfort with a string of colorful swears and fumble the settings off blinding to snap another, far less jubilant, shot.
The miniature screen glowing from the back of the camera displays the most recent image. I squint down at my pale likeness, and despite the mishap with the flash, my eyes still show a crinkle of delirious joy, and moonlight shines off my exposed teeth. I hit the zoom button with my thumb and find spots of similar luster in the scenery behind me. Bone-white vertical lines, like long teeth. Pairs of bold orbs above each elongated grimace. Looming forms which shouldn’t be rising from the sandstone . . .
I try to tell myself it’s the light of falling stars caught in digital stillness, and maybe trees I never noticed.
My gaze flickers up to survey my surroundings, searching for the inconceivable presence, knowing the lie I’m feeding myself. Even the lunar brightness cannot defeat the temporary nyctalopia of the camera flash then staring into its illuminated screen. I can’t see details in the distance.
But there aren’t tall trees in my vicinity, only shrubby mulga. Shadows are rolling toward me from all sides, black beings low to the ground, matched by gloomy, clotting vapor blotting out the silvery moonlight. Goosebumps erupt as something booms.
I recall the old tales, the sounds of explosions and the air filled with black mist.
I silently plead for this tremoring sound to be a storm, or an earthquake, or a meteorite collision. The rumbles are sub-bass, felt more than heard, refreshing my fear in a cold wash.
I refuse to believe more evil spirits can exist. I killed them. I won. Granddad confirmed their numbers multiple times. There were only around a dozen Mamu, he said, all of which are lying poisoned and accounted for down the closest pit, felled by their hunger and my cleverness. In his decades of obsession, he only ever proved a handful existed, and I destroyed them!
I cling to that information. A life preserver in my time of need. It’s unforgivable arrogance to have never considered there are more Mamu than the rare few seen by Granddad. His feeding them might have removed a limiting factor on their population and caused them to multiply.
If the Mamu have bred, they now awaken en masse in true vengeance for an offense brought against their kind instead of being placated by another generation of blood and sacrifice.
The terrain I’d parked upon rises in a slight plateau above shallow basins of rock and sand hills, evidence of excavation left by miners, all reds and whites and drab olive greens in daytime. An ideal stage on which to turn, to discover my fate, to meet my end.
I pray the blackened clouds bring rain.
ASHLEE SCHEUERMAN is the author of the dark fantasy novel, The Damning Moths, and its looming sequel. Her short apocalyptic fiction is published in the award-winning and acclaimed horror anthologies, Surviving the End, Qualia Nous, and Lost Signals. Ashlee resides in Western Australia with an excessive collection of pine cones, a medley of pets, and her family who forgive her for taking too many photos of bugs, clouds, and sunsets. You can visit her website at www.AshleeSch.com.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I acknowledge the Indigenous People of this land as First Australians, and I recognize Elders past and present. I appreciate the importance of storytelling within Indigenous culture, and understand how intrinsic it is to their identity.
THE SHADOWS OF SAINT URBAN
Claudio Foti
When it comes to sub-genres or tropes of horror, my vote for Number One Scariest has always been Religious Horror: For if the Devil exists, by his very nature he is the champion of monsters, and all things horrific are in some way of His arrangement . . . it’s really very emotionally devastating. The idea, the prospects, the insidious battles waging in subtle ways in all aspects of our life is terrifying, or at least just damn creepy.
So when I began to read Claudio Foti’s submission, I immediately braced myself: There it is . . . a Catholic Professor on mission from the Pope to investigate strange occurrence within the church itself, and who better to tell such a tale than an actual horror author living in Rome?
What lies in the shadows around us, the world of darkness that is constantly emerging, shifting, following us? Find out with Professor Michele Bergorio as he steps into The Shadows of Saint Urban . . . and remember to leave the lights off at the door.
***
At the center of Rome, just beyond the Aurelian Walls, there is a green park called Caffarella. Quite old, wild, and rich in history, this park still is one of the most important treasure chests in the Eternal City, filled with its lore and legends. It’s a place where dreadful ghosts still wander restlessly and disquieting things occur . . .
***
PROFESSOR MICHELE BERGORIO PARKED HIS CAR in Via della Caffarelletta and strolled toward the park, enjoying the fine spring day. He’d parked farther from the appointment place than needed, but he knew that at his age—almost sixty—and with his girth, a nice stroll “in the countryside” would be good for his health, or at least that’s what his physician had recommended during his last check-up.
He crossed a small wooden bridge surrounded by rushes and gnats and walked at a brisk pace across a wide field. It was midmorning and hot already. By the time he left the field behind and reached the long vat that had been a drinking trough of the Vaccareccia, he carried his jacket under his arm, and a lock of his gray hair stuck to his sweaty forehead.
Perhaps I overdid it, he thought, removing his glasses to clean them.
It would have been far easier to park in front of the church, but he was almost there now. He took a moment to catch his breath.
“Here, in front of the Vaccareccia,” a voice lectured from behind, “we have this drinking trough, once graced with the Torlonias’ coat of arms and a large gargoyle. The first was stolen in the 1970s, the second destroyed some twenty years later, during the excavations to lay an electric cable . . . ”
Bergorio turned to see a plump lady using her telescopic cane to indicate the trough to a host of elderly people, all equipped with gloves, shorts, T-shirts, and canteens, standing around like feral beasts ready to pounce, leaning on their trekking poles.
Bergorio walked on with a smile, envisioning that host of Nordic walk fanatics as they trekked all over him. Ahead was the Caffarella, which he knew well, because he was from the area and as a young man had often gone hiking there, at a time when monuments and historical remains weren’t fenced and everything had a wilder, more natural look.
As he turned left, he was surprised by the shrieking of Brazilian parakeets flying above. He knew of the existence of that colony, and of the legend according to which the original parakeets had escaped from an aviary and then reproduced safely and abundantly in an environment free from natural predators. He smiled at the thought that those parakeets had adapted far from their tropical climate of the Eternal City, and he thought of what else might do the same.
He walked under white cedars, pedunculated oaks, cornelian cherry dogwoods, elms, and white willows, full of pollen that covered the ground like snow, passed by some mulberry trees, and finally reached the small, long iron bridge stretching in front of the Nympheum of Egeria. There he lingered for a moment to look at what was left of the statue of the god Almone before tackling the sun-drenched uphill path that led to the Sacred Wood.
He finished that uphill climb, panting, and grabbed onto the drinking fountain by the church where the appointment was. He cleaned himself up as well as he could, trying to look presentable again, then entered the wooden enclosure, heading for the front door, where a plump man trotted forward holding a set of long keys.
Bergorio took a moment to look at the church of Saint Urban. It certainly was one of the best Roman architectural works that had survived through the centuries, mostly due to its transformation into a Christian place of worship. He ran his hands over his long gray hair, trying to comb it some, and settled his glasses to better examine the inscriptions. He’d always felt attracted by the place, but it was usually closed to the public.
“It is well preserved, that’s true,” he said to himself, “but who knows how many times it was desecrated and robbed, since it stands on the Appia Pignatelli, outside the Aurelian Walls.”
