He could not be sure, only that the sight of it made him piss himself.
There was a thing standing there… well, not exactly standing, but suspended by wires like a marionette, only they were not wires but dozens and dozens and dozens of ropy strands of the pink fungal material that infested the subterranean world of the corpse-eaters. And they were not exactly hooked to her—because, oh yes, it was certainly a her—but growing into her and out of her, connecting to a huge pink and pulsating mass of morbid tissue that looked almost quilted, soft and spongy and dripping pearlescent red tears. The strands pulled her, stretched her, flattened her and elongated her, making her into a woman and something quite beyond a woman.
At the sight of it… of her… of it, St. Aubin made a sound somewhere between a giggle and a low shrieking.
A stink came off the woman-thing.
It smelled like sour urine and polluted tidal flats and corpses in green ponds.
She’s astride a lovely pink web, can’t you see that?
Yes, now it was apparent: a glittering pink web that grew within her and without her because she and the fungus were one. The webs were strung with shining silken cases and ruby blood-egg clusters all done up in a finery of feathery tapestries spun from spider-mesh and spider-gauze, a threadwork and maze, a black widow’s deadly nest.
Listen, listen… can you hear her? Can you?
There was a scrambling of limbs, a wet sound and a dry sound, a slithering noise and then the sound of fleshy tearing. The woman split open and something repellent bubbled out of her. It was vile and undulant, a pink and creeping horror limned by soft light. It was the fungus and it poured from her, it gushed and foamed and when its flowing mass retreated back into her… there were something like glistening eggs strung on the strands like beads on a thread.
In his mind, St. Aubin saw that each one held a squirming larva.
In the light, of course, there was no way he could really see this, yet the image was quite vibrant in his mind. He tried to think it away and blink it away, but it remained. And when he looked over at the woman who had sewn herself back up again, she was a globular mass of bleeding eyes.
She was the haunter of the dark.
She was the despoiler of men’s minds.
She was a living flux of plastic tissue, of fungus, of woman, a biological machine that reinvented itself with a child’s aberrant imagination. It sprouted malformed heads that were huge and bulbous. It became a pale writhing thing like a fetal termite. It threw out a dozen limbs that were not exactly arms or legs and a dozen grasping human hands sprouting chest to crotch like the teats of a cow. Its face became the grotesque, cartoonish saw-toothed grin of a jack-o’-lantern and a veil of gray fungus. Its head mutated into a cluster of blind white eyes and then a semihuman monstrosity that looked like something dumped from a bucket in a dissection room.
She/it/they were slithering and writhing and viscidly alive. Something made of a thousand moving parts… mouths filled with teeth and fingers tipped by claws and tentacles and bat wings and accordions of gleaming bone. But for it all, she was still oddly embryonic and unformed. She was forming herself into everything she had encountered in every murky crawl space and stinking drainage ditch she had crept through, every putrefying corpse and roadkilled animal she stumbled across, every fly and worm and crawling thing that had infested the corpses she fed upon. And much of it was just pure subjective impression.
Regardless, all of it, every bit of it was not intended to frighten him and he knew this. There was a very real agenda behind it all and when he realized it, it was a ray of light chasing away the darkness in his head.
It’s for your benefit, all for your benefit. She’s trying to amuse you. She does not want you to be scared. She wants you to be amused so you will not be afraid. Whatever she was and whatever the fungus creature was, they are not hateful creatures.
“But I don’t want this,” he found himself saying. “I don’t want this at all. I want to go… don’t you see? I want to go!”
Now she was a thing of glossy pink webs. The great strands and ropes of tissue connecting her to the ceiling and walls and even the floor were thickening, replicating themselves until they were a tangled forest, darning and hemming and sewing themselves into mantraps and funnels and nooses. She would stop him. She would knot him up and snare him because she wanted him to stay forever.
Come to me, she said inside his head. Come to mother. Join me as the others joined me and were remade by me. I’m soft and warm and comforting. Come dream with me.
St. Aubin could no longer seem to think.
His fingers fumbled around him until his left hand clutched the phallic shape of a mushroom. At first, it felt greasy and foul… then, like velvet. He held it in his hands, the silkiness of it bringing a sort of tactile rapture that made him moan. It felt so wonderful. Somewhere during the process, he brought it up to his mouth and kissed it.
His lips tingled.
It was amazing. It was so soft, so very tender. It was like the cheek of a baby or the down of a chick, both and neither. A bunny’s fur felt almost coarse in comparison.
He licked it and it fired his taste buds into new realms that made him tremble and gasp, whimper for more.
He bit into it.
Dear Christ.
It was a rare delicacy, sweet and savory and mouth-watering. It triggered the release of endorphins in his head that flooded his body with a sense of contentment, satisfaction, and pure biochemical joy.
You have eaten me… now enter me.
The sound of her voice made him feel like he was drifting on a lofty, featherbed-soft cloud through a sky of cotton candy. He could not be certain in those dizzying moments whether she came to him or he came to her, he was only aware of contact. Of his own hands reaching out to touch her and bisecting her central, webby mass, which felt warm and seedy and joyously pulpous like the guts of a pumpkin. That was the ecstasy of it, the tactile delight. He wanted to run his hands through her and swim through her.
And she was only too happy to accept him.
It was like being buried in the cold guts of a fish, being sucked into a bog of wriggling entrails. He melted like tallow as he fell into her and there was no pain because unlike Godfrey, he was not frightened of her. She pulsed and purred, coiled and bled pink rivers of tissue until he was engulfed in her depths.
There was a purity to it.
And a beauty beyond words.
40
Chipney had been stumbling through the underground maze for so long now he couldn’t be sure where he was.
The creatures had entered the tomb and dragged him back below, down one passage and into another. They could have killed him, but that hadn’t seemed to be their primary motivation. It was like they just wanted to keep him down there, good and lost.
But why? What could the possible point of that be?
Somehow, he still clutched the riot gun but the flashlight was dimming. It wouldn’t last long now. The passage he was in twisted and turned, offered endless offshoots and, Jesus, he was moving in circles for all he knew. He had trouble remembering where he was and how it was he had gotten to be there.
He had to dig himself out, but he feared that was impossible now.
This place was a stagnant, compressed, opaque envelope of filth and decay and pestilence. It was all over his skin, in his hair, up his nose, on his tongue, running from his eyes like dirty tears.
But for all that, he could feel a small, weak breeze on him.