Ashes and Entropy Read online

  “You’re so worthless you don’t even realize you’re less than a speck. A grain of sand. An atom. Wilburn thought he was important. The Three Eye told him the truth.”

  I want to say he’s crazy, but I’m too concerned with loading Mr. Mossberg. The yacht rocks back and forth, see-sawing in the ocean. I stumble and fight for balance, and then I have to start looking for that damn shell again. “What’s happening to you?” I ask. The question tumbles past my lips before I can stop it, a direct line from brain to tongue.

  He laughs, and his gills spray more pink froth across his neck and shoulders. “The Three Eye has been asleep a long time. Without an emissary, he cannot wake. I’m…we’ll say especially suited for the job. He needs me, and so I became a part of him. He made me better. He made me more.”

  “So you killed Wilburn? You killed everybody?”

  “They were meat. All of them. Don’t you miss meat?”

  “Not that much.” My fingers finally close around a shell. I slide it home and snap Mr. Mossberg shut.

  “That won’t help.”

  For an eyeblink, I consider a snappy retort. Then, I pull the trigger. Twice. The first booming shot takes off Gregory’s left hand, but the second sends his lungs out his back. Not as much damage as I expected. Mostly brackish water across the deck. The lawyer hits the floor, though, and I decide I’m satisfied.

  I take two steps forward, lowering the shotgun, when I hear him wheeze and he sits up. Not good.

  “That hurt,” he says, and his voice is more garbled than before. “You dirty motherfucker.”

  No time to answer. I’m digging for shells again.

  He makes it to one knee. Deep breaths. He rasps his hate. With his remaining hand, he makes a fist and pounds it against the deck. “Doesn’t mean anything,” he says. His fingers curl around the amulet and squeeze. “The Three Eye makes me more, I told you. That last guy, he was scared of it. I’m not. I keep this around my neck, and I can’t die. Keep it above water, and the master comes. It’ll be here soon, and it will eat whatever I leave of you. Your pretty little bitch downstairs, too.”

  “You, too,” I say. My fingertips graze a shell, but another idea blooms.

  “I’ll live forever at his right hand.”

  “Sure. But what if I just kick the living shit out of you?”

  That laugh again. He’s closer. My eyes tick from his gaze to the red wreckage of his chest, the metal medallion bouncing off his ribs. “Smack talk?” he says. “The last defense of the defeated.”

  “Does that thing make you sound like an asshole, too?”

  He bares the daggers in his mouth and charges. An icepick of fear finds the base of my spine and slows me for an instant, wrecks my great plan. I swing Mr. Mossberg, but it glances off Gregory’s shoulder instead of crashing into his temple. Keeps him from hitting me like a stampeding rhino, at least. He still takes me to the floor, and I only manage to keep some of my air. My arms feel weak, but I get one against his throat and shove. He hisses and growls, clacks his teeth and sprays my face with breath that smells of brine. I feel his bare ribs against me, chipped and splintered from the twelve-gauge slug.

  As much as I don’t want to, I jerk upward and crunch his nose with my forehead. He howls, and black blood pours from his ruined nostrils, patters onto my face. I turn away and clamp my mouth shut as I keep digging through my pockets with my free hand.

  There it is. My fingers close around steel, and I rip the handcuffs free. Gregory’s rasping something at me, but it’s all just static as I snap one bracelet on his wrist. He doesn’t appear to notice. When I grab the wrist and shift my weight beneath him, trying to torque him to one side, he finds my shoulder with his teeth. Agony erupts as the bite sinks deep. My vision turns to white fire, and everything else disappears. I think he might be wrenching his head back and forth, trying to tear a part of me loose, but thinking is harder than hell.

  Something rips free, and the pain is so sudden and searing it sends my body rigid. I scream until I choke on the air. The teeth attack again, digging deeper. My entire body spasms, useless.

  When he yanks the second chunk of meat from my shoulder, I remember I don’t fight fair. I look long enough to see him through a fog of pain, and then I bury my entire thumb in his eye. Gregory screeches, and I laugh despite the agony burning a path through every goddamn inch of me. He rolls away, hands clutching his face, and I get back to my feet. I kick him hard in the ribs. Just wanna enjoy myself a bit. Then, I plant a knee in the prick’s spine, yank his arms back, and cuff him. Might as well be hogtied.

  I check my shoulder, and it’s real bad. Blood pumps out of it in a way that can’t be good. Something in the wound sizzles, and I figure that’s even worse.

  I rear back to deliver a kick, this one right to his dome, but a sound freezes me. Something massive and deep, like a foghorn that I feel in the center of my chest. My head throbs, lights strobing in my vision as the sound comes again, turning me to look at the violent ocean.

  What I see pulls me from shelter onto the sun deck. The lashing rain sends a new firebrand of agony through my wounded shoulder, but I don’t make a sound. All I can do is stare at the ocean and try to keep my sanity from crumbling.

  The thing on the horizon is massive, rising out of the sea like a mountain range birthed from the center of the world. Black crags split the waves, and I can only watch as they shift side to side and continue cresting. The sound comes again, a seismic roar that makes the yacht thrum beneath my feet. Everything tilts, and I realize the monstrous beast rising from the sea is changing things, displacing so much water the yacht is sliding across the ocean’s surface. I want to believe it’s something natural, a new land formation and not some kind of creature, but then its head breaks free of the water. Everything from my sanity to my knees goes loose and watery, and I fall to all fours, peering up as a head covered in ancient rock and growth looks to the sky with three glittering eyes and roars, turning my hearing into an electric squeal. Pain lances my skull, and I can’t do anything but writhe on the deck, hugging my head with both arms and clamping my eyes shut.

  It bellows again. I can’t hear anymore, but I feel the cry vibrate through my bones. Maybe I’m screaming, too. I can’t be sure. Nothing’s real anymore.

  Something hooks my thoughts, barbed point snagging hard. Something Gregory said that would have sounded mad before the entire world stopped making sense.

  Keep it above water, and the master comes.

  The words cycle through my head, tell me to move. I don’t want to. All I want is to stay curled in a ball and hope my death doesn’t hurt so much. I wish I could apologize to Cynthia, tell her I’m sorry I didn’t try to stop it, but those words keep spinning, telling me there is something else I can do.

  Goddammit.

  I feel another roar shake every single inch of me. This time, I know I scream. I feel my throat rattle with the power of my fear. Still, I fight the rocking ship and climb to my feet. A few staggering steps, and I think I can stay upright.

  Gregory is right where I left him, on his knees and bent forward, trying to stand, eye leaking onto the deck. Seven hurried paces take me to him, and the kick I deliver to his temple puts him back on his belly. He shouts something, but it don’t matter. I drop a knee on his back to hold him in place and grope for the chain around his neck. He fights, thrashing under my weight, but I’m a big guy and he’s got no leverage. Seconds pass between us, and then I have the chain in my hand. A quick jerk, and it snaps free.

  I close my hand around the amulet before it can slide free, and the world retreats again, disappearing toward the farthest horizon. For an instant, I feel weightless, untethered, but I bite down hard on my lip and get back to work.

  Four desperate, loping steps, and I hurl The Three Eye with everything I have. The grimy mass disappears first into a wall of rain and then down into gray foam. The world snaps back into place with a percussive impact, like all the air rushed back in to fill a vacuum. It slams i
nto my chest and knocks me on my ass. My gaze moves to Gregory, thinking I should keep my eye on him, but his cheek is painted against the deck, sobs quaking through his body.

  A wave crashes, only I don’t think it’s a wave. I think it’s something massive and alien returning below the surface, chasing a medallion I found on a dead body. Returning home.

  I grab everything I can, and I pray. I beg any god that’s listening that the yacht won’t capsize, and I plead that the monster on the horizon stays underneath the waves. If it does—if I survive—I’ll find Mr. Mossberg and finish off Gregory before heading below decks to see if Cynthia’s okay. If it doesn’t…?

  ~

  Everything is darkness. Pain. Time has stretched. Maybe minutes. An hour. Who knows? Not me.

  Soft hands touch my cheek. When I open my eyes, will I see Cynthia?

  I hope so.

  THE CHOIR OF THE TUNNELS

  by Matthew B. Hare

  The tunnels beneath the city are easy to enter, horribly so. You wouldn't know this from the way people whisper about them, all fever-pitch, all shadowed. It seems as though the entrance should be behind gates, guarded, thrice-locked with silver. Therefore, only we broken people wander the darkness of the tunnels.

  There are many reasons to go into the tunnels of the unfinished subway, though most don’t go far. In the winter, the homeless population of the city migrates to the shallow outer ruins, going no farther than a yellow line half a mile into the black. The line runs from roof to the floor of the main tunnel, a clear border between the shallow ruins and the deeper places, impossibly bright in color after all these decades. No one knows who painted it.

  There are artists and urban explorers who go into the tunnels in search of inspiration or raw video footage. Once I saw a man offering tours to college students. A homeless acquaintance of mine told me that last November the tour guide stumbled, shaking, out of the deep and over the yellow line without his tour group. A reeking black liquid dribbled down his chin and onto a stained brown shirt. Three of the oldest vagrants crouched over his shaking form and (said my acquaintance) calmly escorted him back into the darkness, where he disappeared forever.

  I am not an artist, and I am in no way homeless. If I wanted to, you understand, I could go back to my apartment and suffer the paranoia of my neighbors or the cold mechanical drip of a nine to five job. I could easily do that, if I wanted to put up with any more wild accusations and mumbled judgments. Sometimes I lie awake and imagine it for novelty's sake. But the air of the tunnels is stale, sulfurous, and cool against my tongue; and I find the greasy dark moss that grows in patches on the concrete to be a fine pillow. Life underground suits me, and you would be surprised at how many stories one gathers. Stories can be fine company.

  Still, the tunnels were—compared to the noise above—peaceful and still.

  Things changed when the choir came to the tunnels.

  One grows familiar with the sounds of the unfinished subway—not to imply that the tunnels have just one sound, just as no city has just one sound. The subtle drip of water through the cracked concrete, the scampering of vermin, the inexplicable hum of the deeper parts beyond the yellow line...we knew them all. But on that day, everything went quieter, and so subtly that only we veterans of the tunnel knew. We felt it rubbing up against our eardrums, a sandpaper quiet. Wrong.

  Shortly after the sounds changed, my acquaintance came up to me as I lay with my head on the dark moss of the underground, my skull bursting with a rotten watermelon sort of migraine. This happens to me sometimes. She could not stop looking back past the yellow and into the dark as she told me about the choir in the underground.

  "I don't know how many of them I heard," she said without meeting my gaze. "There must have been twenty or thirty, all singing one song. I don’t know what they were singing, I guess, but I used to be in choir. When I was a kid, I mean, in Catholic school.” She paused, gathering herself. “I remember how hard it was to synchronize with the other girls. What I heard down here, it was perfect. Professional. And the song was, it was...” She stared at the point beyond the yellow line where the last light faltered. “...I don’t have the words for it,” she said at last. “What do you think? You've been deeper than any of us.”

  That's true. I'm not one for false modesty. But it's not like I go into the deeper tunnels to remember what I find there. I don't bring a source of light, and I pay no mind to my surroundings. I go with the understanding that I will probably never come back, and with a certain sense of horror that I always do.

  My opinion is worthless. I told her that. She shrugged and said that she was going to go back the next day, and asked if I wanted to. My skull swelled with the sickness of the migraine, gushing pink. I raised a finger coated in rotten melon in front of her. “I'm sick. Can't you smell it?”

  “I know you're sick,” she said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude.”

  It was okay, I told her, and I asked her to tell me what she saw.

  The next day she went back without me. She did not return...but time is different underground. The others and I assumed that she had simply lost track of it.

  She did not come back the next day.

  Or the next.

  Now, you must realize that people disappear here in the tunnels. Many people want to disappear. But my friend, she had never seemed like that sort, though neither of us even belonged with this crowd of outcasts.

  I missed her dearly. There aren't many minds in the underground as brilliant as my own, which—pardon my disrespect—even she did not match. But she appreciated my brilliance in a way that I found endearing, like a child or a loyal dog. Besides, she understood the paranoid minds of those around us, and we had spent many nights in hushed conversation by some rotting corpse of a train discussing all of the undergrounders who were plotting against the two of us.

  Realizing that the others would not be persuaded to set out, I took matters into my own hands on that third day after her disappearance. I brought with me a flashlight borrowed from a new arrival—a fool, really, who didn't yet realize the bartering power he had with a source of light down here—and a canteen. There was no need for rations. For the open-minded, every tunnel teems with delicacies.

  The light made my familiar tunnels strange. In the darkness everything is texture and sound. My surroundings are limited only by imagination. By light, the tunnels are grimy and infested, a half-finished land of rats. I had no plan or direction—my friend had not provided enough information—and so I wandered these now unfamiliar places alone, listening. Watching.

  Turning the light off from time to time helped me get my bearings and let me save battery power. In the darkness I couldn't be distracted by the pallid color of my own skin or the wreckage around me. All was sound, touch, and darkness.

  Some time into the tunnels, I heard the singing. Not the singing of a choir, no, but the singing of a single woman alone here in the abandoned subway. Knowing the voice, I clicked on my flashlight and raced towards her ragged, dehydrated singing. She spat the notes—some half-familiar gospel tune—and they grew drier and drier till they were hardly notes, not even a melody, then, till they were nothing but coughs, sputtering, and one final wet crack.

  I found her body five minutes later, suspended from an iron bar jutting out from the half-poured concrete. Numbly, I focused on that bar first, and then the cord wrapping around it, tracing it down around her neck and into her mouth.

  Over and under her teeth, into the bottom of her mouth.

  It was not a cord.

  In the dim light I began to notice the changes. A patchwork grid of fresh scars ran across her skin, oozing something like mucous or oil. Her abdomen—I found myself hiding behind clinical language, now—was unnaturally swollen, making her limbs seem shriveled in comparison.

  Her dead eyes were closed, thankfully, but that did not help too much. I could not look away from the long, blackened tongue she had wrapped around her own neck.

  For a whi
le I sat there cross-legged beneath her corpse, watching the liquid drip onto the floor, paying no mind to the toll on my flashlight. I do not have many friends down here, as I've mentioned.

  I do not have any friends down here.

  The bulb went dead with a brief, blinding flash just as I was reaching to turn it off, casting a wheel of fire on the tunnel walls. Her bloated silhouette burned into the back of my eyelids. I stood up and began to walk, listening for the choir of the tunnels. She had seen them. Now I needed to.

  Don't believe that it was out of any sense of revenge or justice. I find both concepts equally warped. No, it was either curiosity or a sense of kinship with my gently swinging friend that drove me to keep walking. The ground underfoot went from concrete to dirt as I descended, and from dirt to stone. The sound of wind through the tunnels—no, from the tunnels—was unmistakable, now. It smelled of flowers and rotting teeth. The image of her body and the wheel of fire floated in my eyes against the black.

  Somehow I was unsurprised when I found the green line. The yellow one above had, I'd always assumed, been something unnatural. The green line, phosphorescent and perfect over the organic stone of the tunnel, proved me correct. The walls, too, glowed a faint, barely noticeable green. They were warm, nearly living beneath my hands. Their faint illumination reflected on strange viscous fluids that ran back and forth through the tunnel ground like the slime trails of some enormous slug.

  Then, for the second time, I heard singing. One voice first, a clear and bright soprano, followed by three more in a perfectly synchronized harmony that set my heart pounding and my old teeth grinding. Four, five, six, and no, it wasn't in harmony or dissonance, wasn’t like anything I had heard before. It was something new, monstrous, heartbreaking. Each new voice danced around the others like autumn leaves.