I look up at the intestine monster inching overhead and a shock of wrath fills me. Going to eat me, were you? Think you’re so highly evolved, with your traps and your stupid number of different mouthparts? Well, you picked on the wrong Earthman, baby! I duck past the thing’s blindly questing head, snapping sparks from my lighter to show where it is, and then I’m beneath the glistening cables of its appalling body.
Human ingenuity is still sleeping on the job. What steps up to bat is sheer rage. It’s not just the justifiable anger I might feel towards a hideous monster that’s tried to eat me, it’s all of it: it’s being lost in this godforsaken place for so long, it’s the scritchy scratchy whispering which even now is scraping in my head like a cheesegrater. It’s the gravities and pressures, the cold, the dark, the hunger and most especially all the goddamned monsters that make this place even more miserable than it needs to be.
I reach up with a roar of fury and grasp two handfuls of slippery cables, and I pull. I haul the thing down bodily from the ceiling, rip it from the stone like tearing ivy from a wall, leaving a pattern of wet suckers behind. I pull its substance taut between my knotted hands and I tear and rip. I get my foot on its thrashing, clattering head and I pull cables of gut from it, pop, pop, pop! I tear open individual coils with my bloody teeth, is what I do. I stamp on it and I wring it, I crush and I tear. I forget I ever had a knife, or any tool. All the tools I need are my body and my rage.
Some time later I come back to myself, covered in ichor. I have followed the coils of the thing to its heart, a great bloated body with half a dozen ropy arms leading off down various corridors. I’ve utterly disembowelled it, and when a thing’s mostly made of bowels that’s quite the undertaking. I am victorious. I am savage. I beat my chest and bellow like an animal.
After that, listening to the echoes of my whooping bounce back to me from the walls of the Crypt, I have the grace to feel somewhat embarrassed. I am British, after all, and I feel my behaviour may have crossed some subtle line of etiquette. Let us never mention this again, Toto.
Once my adrenaline (or whatever I have in its place now) has ebbed to more socially acceptable levels, I am left with that cursed scritching still making a home for itself in my skull. I’d thought this beastie was to blame, a telepathic lure into its nasty sticky trap. Apparently it just had the bad luck to be between me and whatever is actually tormenting me. Still, I feel the Crypts are a marginally better place without it, so no regrets, right?
I flex my arms. They look beefier than Gary Rendell’s used to be, and Gary was a fit bloke, believe me. And Gary’s me, of course. I mustn’t forget that, only sometimes it can be hard.
I am the monster-killer. I am what the monsters in the dark are scared of, or would be if any of them had enough of a brain to be scared with. I am the thing the Crypts cannot kill, and something out there is fucking with me. That strikes me as a bad policy decision on its part and I am going to track it down and register a complaint with extreme prejudice.
With that resolution, this rough beast slouches off towards where the scritchy is strongest, casting about like a hunting dog at each crossroads and intersection. Sometimes the gravity crushes me. Sometimes the atmosphere is poisonous. Always there is the cold and the dark, but now I have a purpose. Someone’s trying to ruin my day and I am going to return the favour, Toto, of that you can be sure.
IT’S NOT LONG before I see light ahead, a clear green-white illumination that flickers occasionally like nothing in nature. I had been thinking about telepathic monsters, native fauna of the Crypts that have evolved alongside countless travellers until they were able to pierce any alien skull with their infuriating hook. This is something else, though: a traveller like me. Is it the source of my torment, or is it just another innocent bystander? I feel a rush of anger, as though dismembering the trapper barely tapped my vast reserves of fury, but I fight it all down. I am an ambassador for Earth, after all. I have walked with the Egg Men and the Pyramid People and a dozen other sentient races. None of whom I have been able to communicate with, it’s true, but so far I’ve not killed anything that hasn’t tried to kill me.
This rage is a new and disturbing facet to my personality, and I suspect it’s here to stay. I take some deep breaths and relax my muscles, willing the sensation to sink back down to where it came from. I feel it recede, but not very far, like a predator just beyond the reach of my campfire, growling softly to itself. It’s as much as I’m going to get from it, I know. Time to put my best face on and my best foot forward, and go and meet the neighbours. Maybe they’ll let me borrow the lawnmower. And by lawnmower I mean instantaneous teleportation device that can get me home, because some bugger’s got to have come up with one, surely, somewhere in the universe.
Except, of course, if they had, they’d never be here. They’d not need to walk the long roads between the stars by foot.
So, all very calm and collected, I approach on my bare tiptoes, creeping to each corner and peering round, seeing that corpselight radiance grow steadily stronger. Then I come to a chamber – I see the walls widen out, and the light throwing shadows there, some still, one moving.
I don’t know why the Crypts have these larger chambers. Many of them are lairs for monsters, which know these places are oubliettes for travellers to end up in, but I’m assuming that ‘zoo dungeon storage’ was not their original purpose. Some but not all have the floriate Maker sculpting on the walls. Others have been repurposed by latecomers, home away from home for some alien civilization that has left only its broken artefacts and its dust. Whatever their purpose, walk long enough in these dark halls, and you’ll find the walls opening out about you, the brief illusion of space and freedom, before you realise it’s just another part of the same damn maze.
The chambers mess with gravity too, which I’ve learned the hard way. Perhaps that’s their function, some vital engineering component that regulates the Crypts’ insane relationship with physics. This chamber is no exception. Creeping close, I feel the sickening shift in my stomach, and a flat corridor becomes a treacherous slope opening down onto a cuboid room that seemed level a moment ago, but now funnels down towards one of its corners, where a mound of detritus, shed carapaces and broken stone has collected. That’s where the camp is.
My eyes see the lantern first, of course. It’s a rod as tall as a man, curved at the top like a shepherd’s crook. In that open loop the light hangs, supported by nothing but reaching out cracking tendrils of energy to its frame like a Van Der Graaf generator in a bad SF movie. It’s soundless, steady save for its occasional fluorescent stuttering.
There are some packs, too. I take them for dead insects of unusual size at first, segmented bodies and stiff curved legs. Only later do I understand them as luggage.
There is a fire. That’s the touch that really speaks to me. All that high-tech lighting, and the traveller has lit a fire in a metal bowl. Perhaps its super-advanced heater failed, but I have a sense of something ritual, something from home. It’s got a fire because the flames are pleasing to it, because they hold back the grim nature of this place in a way artificial light cannot.