Sybel shut the window behind us. The night was glistening with stars masked by patches of fog; there was a chill to the air. The fires on the edges of the city raged on.
Shivering, pistol stuck through my belt, knives in my pockets, as much a hazard to myself as to others, I stumbled out onto the second-floor roof. There wasn’t much room. I had to engage in a close shuffling dance with Sybel so we could both leave the storm drain for the roof proper.
Behind us, a muted roar. A shriek. Something I’d never heard before, something I never want to hear again. {No matter where you are now, I’m afraid you’ll be hearing it again. What we all heard in that moment of the war was the first groaning, rust-and-flesh-choked stirrings of the Machine. It fed off of that energy. It needed it. Forever after, my finely tuned senses could hear that hum, that vibration, in the ground. It terrified me.}
How do you control your fear at a time like that? I couldn’t. I could barely stop from wetting myself. Bombs are different. Reporting is different. This time, I couldn’t get outside of myself. I couldn’t get outside.
“What now, Sybel?” I asked. I was breathing hard. I think I might have been whimpering.
“Now, we go higher,” Sybel said.
Looking at him, I saw a sudden confidence in him that I had not seen before. As a Nimblytod, high places were his birthright, no matter how long he had lived in the city.
So we went higher, following the curve of the roof to a point where we could pull ourselves up to the next level and the next, until we were on a real roof—a slanted, tiled affair a block away from my apartment. We couldn’t see over the other side of it, and we didn’t want to. On that side lay an unimpeded view of the street—and whatever had come through the door to my apartment.
We tried to be quiet, but the creature somewhere below had already heard us. Was tracking us.
Sybel knew this better than I.
“It’s at the bathroom window. It’s coming out onto the rain gutter,” he said. He looked to our right. Three feet separated us from the flat roof of the next building. It was higher, but we could see the edge of a wall in the middle of that roof.
“We need to jump to the next roof,” I said.
Sybel nodded.
He went first, so he could help me if I didn’t quite make it. A smooth, graceful run; the leap up into the night; and then landing on all fours on the other side. I tossed my gun and knives over to him. I could hear scuttling sounds behind me. There was a smell now, like rotted flesh, but mixed with a fungal sweetness.
I ran toward the gap as fast as I could and jumped, the ground spinning below me, the flames to the west a kaleidoscope; came down heavily on the other side.
Sybel helped me up and we ran for the wall. Once behind it, out of sight if not out of smell, Sybel handed back my pistol and knives.
We could already hear it sniffing our scent from the other roof. We could sense its enjoyment. The sound of that thing slowly coming toward us will never leave me.
“It knows exactly where we are,” Sybel whispered.
We could hear it getting closer and closer to the gap between the roofs.
I was babbling by then. Praying to Truff, to Bonmot, to anyone I could think of. Even now, in this afterword, with the hole in the ground behind me, my typewriter slowly turning into fungal mush, I am babbling, thinking of that moment.
We waited. We almost waited too long. Its smell came closer, came closer. It jumped onto the roof—we could hear it leap to clear the gap with an effortless stride, heard its claws scrabble to find purchase on our side. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.
“What do we do Sybel what do we do?” I kept saying, over and over again.
“Be calm and quiet, Janice,” he said. “Just be calm. When I say, stand up and fire at it.”
I looked up at the few stars through the moonlight, the clouds and the smoke that had begun to move in over the city. It was a cool night. I could feel the rough chill of the stone wall against my back. The seconds seemed to stretch out for a very long time. I had time to think about my gallery, to wonder if it would still be standing in the morning. I had time to think about Duncan and Mary, and to ask myself if I had been too harsh, if it had ever been my place to disapprove. I experienced a twinge of regret—that I had never married, never had children, never lived a “normal” life.
You understand, I hope: I thought I was going to die.
We almost waited too long. We thought it was farther away. But then it began to run at us. It had played its game of Stalk as long as it wanted to—now it meant to finish us. It was talking as it ran at us: “I have something for you something for you something for you you will like it you will like it you will like it,” like the chant of some senile priest counting beads cross-legged in the Religious Quarter.
That’s when we rose, in our fear. We rose up, and we emptied our pistols into it. It was dark as the night and yet transparent—you could see the stars through it when it got close. It was thick. It was thin. It had claws. It had fangs like polished steel. It had eyes so human and yet so various that the gaze paralyzed me. It was indescribable. Even now, trying to visualize it, I want to vomit. I want to unthink it.
Our shots went right through it. It veered to the left, misjudged the distance, and struck the wall in front of us, reared up again. We shot it again—tore great holes in its fungal skull, its impossible body. It roared, spit a stream of dark liquid, and tried to come up over the wall at us. Sybel stuck the muzzle of his pistol under its soft-rigid chin and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent the creature screaming and stumbling to the edge of the roof, and then over—falling. Still talking. Still telling us it had something for us that we’d like.
We stood there, numb, for a moment. Some things cannot be described. Some things can only be experienced.
Gone was the fear. I couldn’t feel it anymore. I just couldn’t. I had no room for it; it had no room for me. It had other places to go, other people to visit.
“Come on,” I said to Sybel. “We have to get off this roof. There might be others. They will have heard. We’ll seek refuge in the Religious Quarter. It might still be safe there.”
Off the roof and into the night.
And how did that feel, you may ask. It was terrible, I tell you. Terrible. It was an experience to inoculate you against horror forever.
Meanwhile, Duncan and Mary traveled ever farther into the depths….
So down we went, ever down, until the tunnel leveled off and an odd green phosphorescence that even Mary could see began to rise from the walls, the ground. Now we walked across a thick green carpet of blindly grasping tendrils. Soft and silent, so that our every sound was sucked into that which we trod upon. Ahead, we could see nothing but the continual wormhole of the tunnel, with no possible deviation, no other possibility.