Veniss Underground (8 page)

Shadrach shivered, untensed his shoulders, took a deep breath, and quickly walked around the corner.

Which dead-ended almost immediately. Had Dr. Ferguson tricked him? But he still heard the moans, the cries. They seemed to come from
below
him. He stepped forward and froze as stairs leading down appeared to his right. They led to a metal gate, and beyond the gate . . . a writhing, seething pit of flesh. Children were doing unspeakable things to discarded bodies. They were plucking the eyeballs out of heads lodged between the bars of the gate. The heads at first appeared to belong to people peering out of their prison, but in fact they were disembodied, misshapen, bloody, wan, the eyes open and staring, and the children were plucking the eyeballs out as if searching for shells on the beach. Beyond the gate and its meerkat guard, the major organs lined the walls in special self-cooling “jars” that preserved their contents against all vagaries of environment. Livers, kidneys, hearts, whole nervous systems—like viney trees—resided in these closed worlds, backlit by a greenish murk. Brains on brainstems fulminating in clear canisters, lives on life support and, most predominantly, legs and arms divorced from their former owners, now lying in moist piles or stood up like mannequins.

And yet these vitals, these essentials, were ignored by the leering, ghoulish potential buyers, who haggled and fought over the items that lay in the foreground.

The meerkat attendant said, finally, in a raspy growl, “Going in or leaving?”

Shadrach stared at the meerkat blankly as it repeated itself, then nodded as the creature held the outer gate open for him. He collected himself as the gate closed behind him, and said, “I'm looking for someone who may still be alive. Where do I go? What do I do?”

“If you're lucky,” the attendant said, “the person you're looking for will be toward the back, where the freshest ones are kept.” He smiled, revealing yellowed teeth. “You'll get used to it. They all do.”

The inner gate opened and he walked inside.

The sound, blocked by the gates, swelled up now: the endless chattering banter of merchants showing their wares, an obscene sound that howled through his skull. The heart's desire to see the beloved whole and unharmed could not survive the realities of this place. As his eyes took in what his brain could not contain, Shadrach felt beaten, defeated, and out of him came a sound so deep, so full of anguish, so indefinable yet so
human,
in that most inhumane of places, that even the gangrenous children stopped their febrile entertainments among the body parts to watch this tall, stricken stranger with astonishment.

The place smelled of the charnel house, as well it should, for not all of the parts were fresh, or even usable for transplant, and as Shadrach wandered aimlessly up and down the aisles, he wondered what they did with their parts, these buyers. That green leg there, half–rotted away—what use did the tiny man with one eye have for it, that he should barter so furiously for it? That crushed head with the brains falling out into mush—who could want such a thing? When had below level come to mean such decay?

Finally, he managed to ask a woman for directions and, finally, he made his way through the carnage to the place he had been told to go. But all that he found was a mountain of legs, in all states of disrepair, guarded by a sullen, naked dwarf.

“Where do I find the organ donors?” he asked the dwarf.

The dwarf made a digging motion and pointed to the pile of legs.

“In there?” Shadrach said. “Inside the pile?”

The dwarf nodded.

Shadrach bent over and threw up into the offal that surrounded him. The dwarf watched and smiled and offered no help.

Shadrach straightened up, helpless in the grip of nightmare. His body knew better than he what to do. He took off his jacket and laid it to the side. Then he entered the pile of legs.

It was a huge pile, as big as a mountain, and very few of the legs had been capped for preservation. Most were uncapped and moldering, some crudely frozen. The pile smelled of dead meat. It tasted like dead meat. It was dead meat. But Shadrach continued on in the midst of it. He soon found that he sank through the top layer, but that underneath tunnels had been carved in the flesh, so that he could at least make his way to the center of the mound. He did not so much pull legs aside as wade through them until they surrounded him, the tunnels, the trails incomprehensible to him in that pale pallor, that catalogue of death. Their touch against his face, his arms, his legs came tough and solid, jellied and soft. They vibrated with his passage. They quivered. Some moved slowly, as if in memory of life, of other limbs. His face grew red with gore, yellow with thick fat. He had to climb to the top of the pile to breathe, then “dive” back into the search. At times, more complete bodies confronted him: a rag of black hair, a dilated, staring eye, and he would tense in anticipation of finding
her
, only to be disappointed. He couldn't imagine the reality of that place, and so it became unreal to him: the set of a holo, the deck of a ghost craft.

It took nearly half an hour, but eventually he found her, near the bottom, still hooked up to her life-support apparatus, in a long, rigid cocoon, only her face open to the air, and that covered by a clear sheath. She had lost a foot and breast in addition to her already missing eye and hand, but otherwise remained intact.

“Nicola,” he said. “Nicola.” He did not know how to hold her, did not know if it would hurt her for him to touch her. Would it hurt him? But in the end he forgot to think and hugged her to him, kissed her bruised forehead, discarded the sheath, though not the tube, and kissed even the vacant orbit. For, despite everything, she was
alive
.

He picked her up and began the long, arduous journey back, the legs a forest, a tangle from which he built a ladder, a bridge, to get to the top, and from there, down the mountain of flesh.

As he carried her, as he looked into her ruined face, he mistrusted the love that welled up inside him. Why should he love her so much more when she was like this, helpless, than when she was healthy and whole?

He said her name over and over again to himself, like a mantra, as he walked, as he ran, as he cursed and screamed his way through the great cathedral, promising himself he would kill Dr. Ferguson if ever he saw him again.

         

SHADRACH TOOK
her farther underground, toward the only place he could be sure still existed: home. As he ran—an awkward, lopsided gait—he looked back over his shoulder as if pursued by something, only to find he carried it with him. He took her through noisy crowds celebrating events long past and through silences alternately like tiny blessings or lesions, places where exposed mine shafts waited to make the silence even more complete.

In those silences, in that darkness, he clasped her to him and drank in her fragrance. He pulled her hair to him, kissed her head. Cradled her. Listened for her breathing. How he loved her. How he loved her in the silence. In the immensity of empty halls carved from solid rock, the stillness broken only by the sound of water droplets falling into puddles, amongst the shadows, the emotion closed in on him, possessed his body so completely that it scared him. He knew, looking into her dreaming face, that he would do anything for her. For now that he had recovered her all the other fears, dreads, insecurities, petty irritations, had been devoured by one great, all-consuming terror: that he might lose his beloved. Would he know who he was if she died? Would he care?

And still he ran.

Hours passed into memory. He found a place in his mind that locked him into the silence, locked him into glimpses of his beloved when, like a miracle, like a curse, light crept in and made her face visible to him.

Finally, half-senseless with fatigue, Shadrach staggered up to the door of what he had always known as his parents' home. Nicola's weight in his arms he ignored; it was only the thought, heavy as the stone above his head, that she might be damaged beyond repair that pulled at his arms and gave him no rest.

The simple metal door had a faded address printed on it. A slit for courier deliveries—no different from any other door in the passageway. Hundreds of doors shone a diseased greenish silver in the emerald light of the sidewalk lamps. The air smelled damp and stale, too often recycled. It sparkled with floating motes of mineral dust. In dark corners, garbage moldered, as it probably had for months. Faint chalk lines showed where children had marked out the boundaries of obscure games, but no one stood in the passageway now. Such emptiness disturbed Shadrach. It was well past midnight and miners should have been coming home from the end of their shifts.

The dull drone of a holovid at low volume came from beyond the door of the place where he had spent the first twenty-four years of his life. The sound unnerved him; it made him think that the past ten years above ground had been a dream—that he would knock and his mother would unlock the door, walk back into the house, and he would follow her, sit down in front of the holovid after a long day at the mines. He could smell the mild shampoo his mother used on her hair.

John the Baptist squirmed in Shadrach's pocket as if impatient.

But he didn't have the strength to knock, so he tap-kicked the door with his foot. He was afraid that if he let go of Nicola, he would collapse on the doorstep.

Nothing happened for a moment. Shadrach thought he might faint. Then the sound of the holovid stopped abruptly. Shadrach held his breath. The door slid open just wide enough for the long muzzle of a laser rifle to slide out until it rested against his forehead. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. To come all this way, just to be blown to bits on the doorstep of his father's house.

From the darkness, he felt the scrutiny of another's gaze. It wasn't his father, of that he was sure. He stared into that darkness and tried to smile. His gun was in its holster at his side. The muzzle of the rifle felt cold against his skin.

“Who is it?” A hollowed-out voice, as if from a great distance.

“Father?” Shadrach said. “My father lives here.”

A deep huff of laughter, unexpected but self-assured, echoed from the darkness. The door slid all the way open. A gaunt, ragged man with long hair—substantial as shadow and clothed in a long black robe—stood there. Only the eyes in the strangely elongated, bearded face declared themselves: a fierce green, like two shards of emerald in a setting of badly tarnished silver.

It was not his father. His movements preternaturally quick, the man came closer, still holding the gun to Shadrach's head. The man had unusually long arms.

The man said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I'll tell you if you'll lower your gun.”

“No. Who are you?”

Shadrach grunted with the weight of holding Nicola. He shifted his hands. “My father . . . does my father still live here?”

“I'm the only one who lives here.”

“For how long?”

“Three years.”

Shadrach's arms became suddenly twice as heavy. A ponderous weariness stole over him. And yet a voice inside sneered at him and said, “What did you expect? You left them here.”

“Do you know who lived here before you?”

The man shook his head.

“Do you know where I can find them?”

The man made the huffing sound again. A smell hung in the air—like fire-bitten twigs or lemon rinds exposed to the gutter.

“I've aimed a gun at your face, you're carrying a dead woman, and yet you ask me questions,” the man said in a low, predatory voice. “I smell animal on you. Have you killed an animal?”

“She's not dead!” Shadrach's shout reverberated down the corridor.

As the sound echoed, they stood there silent, Shadrach staring into the past and the man staring into the passageway, Nicola between them like an offering. All Shadrach wanted to do was kill this person who stood between him and home. Nicola was slipping from his grasp. Could he reach his gun in time?

He was saved from the decision by his adversary. The man withdrew the gun, held it at his side. In a hesitant voice, as if against his own best counsel, the man said, “You can come in for a few minutes. I don't want to leave this door open any longer than I have to.”

Shadrach nodded, weak with his burden. “Thank you. Thanks. That's very kind.” It was the first act since he had come below ground that seemed to have any humanity to it.

The man motioned him in, said as he passed over the threshold, “If you try to rob me, I'll kill you.”

“I'm not armed.”

“Yes you are—I can smell the metal. But don't worry—if you reach for your weapon, you'll be dead before it's in your hand.”

“I believe you.”

         

AND SO
he entered his father's house again after ten years of self-imposed exile. Even though his family no longer lived there, it was exactly as he remembered it. The same fuzzy holovid played some maudlin melodrama. The old table had lost two more chairs. A new couch stood to the right. Since the old bed was gone, the couch must convert into a sofa bed. The hologram of his parents on their wedding day no longer floated in the middle of the room. The bookcase opposite looked a little more ragged, a little more unsteady. The few books that were left had a warped, tattered look—perhaps the final proof that his father was gone. Unlike most, his father had revered books, thought of them as artifacts to be cherished, even though he could not read. The room flickered under the white of a bare fluorescent globe. The smell of fire-bitten twigs was thicker here.

The man stared at the woman in Shadrach's arms and said, “She's stronger than you, isn't she?” That quick gaze from the ruins of the face—sharp, fierce.

“She is carrying me.”

The man nodded. “You should sit down. You should set her down. My name is Candle. I'm a priest.”

“Thank you. My name is Shadrach Begolem.”