Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator Read online

  “A story.” He struggled for recollection. “It was by a writer called – let me think – yes, Reynolds. Very similar structure, a massive spiral. Time itself decayed – regressed – as you descended it. The setting was more arid, if I’m remembering right.” He was rambling, and stopped himself. “Books,” he teased. “Did you ever come across them?”

  “There’s a library,” she retorted acidly. “A big one. Maybe you’d like to see it?”

  “Where?”

  She pointed along the spur, to the root where it fused into the mega-structure. A large domed edifice nestled there, pale gray against the cluttered, inky backdrop of the spike.

  “The lighter building?”

  She nodded.

  “How far is that?” The scales were still disconcerting.

  She pursed her lips, pondering. “We could probably get there in an hour, I suppose.”

  “An hour!” Alison grumbled.

  “You have to stop fretting about time, Mom,” Suzy scolded gently. “It doesn’t work like that here.”

  “You mean …?” Jack began, as an unseen door began to creak open, on the far-side of his mind.

  “Don’t ask!” Alison interjected fiercely.

  He wasn’t going to saunter into that hurricane, especially trusting his curiosity as little as he currently did. Alison had more than earned her present position as the warden of secrets. If she thought there was something they didn’t want to meet, lurking at the end of that question, it would be madness to second-guess her. Still … Mental gears had begun to grind, and they refused to return to rest. Some kind of time dilation, which had to mean they were thinking in the machine, accelerated beyond themselves.

  It inclined to an alternative interpretation of the Reynolds structure, whose time gyres were differentiated by refinements of matter. Could the levels of the cyclopean screw correspond to echelons of duration? Great mechanical twists of inwardness? It was odd to be noticing it only now. Why had he never made the connection before? After Susie had consumed the instruction manual – she had been absorbed in it for weeks, as if lost in a religious tract of unfathomable significance – it had been left lying around, crumpled, the inner pages coming unstapled, and he had definitely registered it, deliberately, consciously attentive. The structure was depicted starkly, its spiral groove unambiguously marked, yet it had somehow eluded him.

  “This might be it, you know,” he thought aloud.

  “What might be what?” Alison asked.

  “It’s one of the Filter theories. Absorption into simulations. Cultures swirling out of the universe like dirty water down a plug. Derealization vortices.”

  §12. Alison was not seeing a virtual mega-construct from a science fiction novel, but rather the Tower of Babel. The elder Marten van Valckenborch’s painting of 1595 had captured it best, with its hint of spiral torsion amid doomed industry, as the incarnated project ascended into darkness. The Dutch Renaissance spoke to her in a way she had never seriously reflected upon, and a large print of this work – a personal favorite – graced the wall of her office. Perhaps she had hoped that its depiction of extravagant enterprise, twisted about an occult core of invisible insanity as it wound upwards to collapse, would find echoes among the tortured systems-builders with whom she professionally conversed, brought onto her client list by comparably ruinous cravings for the absolute. It had taken a while before she realized that no small number of her clients were soaking up the image as keenly as she had done, and were finding something very different in it.

  ‘Simon’ had been lucidly forthcoming on the subject, as on so many other things. He had made no attempt to disguise his fascination. On their very first meeting, when she ushered him to the comfortable chair that served as an analytical or therapeutic couch, he had strayed instead over to the wall where the picture hung. Not only was the work familiar to him, he had made very deliberate efforts to see the original in Dresden, cataloguing the experience as among the most memorable of his life. When he saw it, though, then and now, he also saw through it.

  The name he gave it said everything. It was simply the ‘Evil Tower’.

  “‘Evil’?” she had queried, skeptically. It struck her as an atypically vulgar description.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he added quickly. “It isn’t a judgment about the phenomenon, it’s the judgment inherent in the phenomenon. Nemesis. The demonstrated judgment. Second-guessing the lesson is the sin.”

  Now she was here, in the shadow of the broken tower, its eclipsing vastness palpable upon her skin. Alison wriggled out of her backpack and rummaged through it. There wasn’t much inside. A few pieces of clothing, an aluminum water bottle, some light, simple tools. The most substantial object was a crude blade, attached securely to the side of the pack by criss-crossed straps. It was a kind of machete, not especially sharp, its cutting edge besmirched with brown stains. “Am I really going to need this?” she muttered disgustedly, under her breath.

  “Unlikely,” Suzy replied.

  “Thank goodness for small mercies.”

  “Or thank something else, for this.” Suzy extracted a compact matt-black weapon from a fold in her tunic, and held it up for them to admire.

  “Can I look at that?” Jack asked, his voice stretched wolfishly.

  “Sure,” Suzy said, scanning their immediate environment with trained efficiency, then handing the killing tool over.

  It was the size of a small machine-pistol, almost square, with a flattened barrel culminating in a horizontal slit.

  “The ammunition is some sort of disc?” he asked. “Like a coin?”

  “These,” Suzy answered, pulling out a spare magazine and popping the first round carefully into her palm. “They’re sharp,” she warned.

  Jack took it from her gingerly, to inspect. It was something like a circular razor blade, roughly two centimeters in diameter, thickened slightly towards the center to add mass, but even there under a millimeter in depth – the shape of a miniature buzz-saw galaxy. There was no doubting it was an enemy of flesh. He handed it back nervously. The fact his daughter was confidently wielding this thing was horrifying, but a little less horrifying than his rapid acceptance of its necessity.

  The weapon now made as much sense as it was going to, without dismantling it in a laboratory. The propulsion mechanism was a solid-state unit, completely sealed. When a magazines was clicked into the side of the device a tiny blue light winked on, indicating the marriage of a scythe-disc with the projector field.

  “This thing is preposterously advanced.”

  “Jack!” Alison gasped, appalled by his admiration.

  She still wasn’t seeing what the existence of a device like this said about the world.

  §13. The path wasn’t quite a road. It would have been difficult to drive a vehicle along it, even a horse-drawn cart, and there were no signs that anybody had ever tried. It dropped down below the spur-crest, to a level roughly ten meters off the ridge, and the same distance again above the dense jungle line.

  There were signs of furtive activity in the vicinity of the nearest hab-cluster.

  “Pralh,” Suzy said, before anyone had a chance to ask. “More than a few. But it shouldn’t be a problem. They’re not likely to be organized.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Skirt the cluster. Go around them. Ignore them if we can. If they get in the way, kill them.”

  “Suzy!”

  “That’s the game, Mom. Get a grip.”

  “So, what are these ‘Pralh’?” Jack asked.

  “I’ll explain later,” Suzy replied impatiently. “You can assume they’re NPCs. War-fodder. The only thing that matters to us now is getting past them.”

  “We can do that?”

  “No problem.” She patted the micro-scythe weapon. “They’re primitives.”

  Alison couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “If I’d known what this disgusting game was all about, I’d have …” she exploded, inconclusively.

 
; “But you didn’t, did you mom?” Suzy countered. Then, more gently: “No one knew. It grew itself. You think I wanted it to be like this? I’d hoped to marry a handsome prince, or something.”

  “So why keep coming back?”

  “It seems … important.”

  “How could it possibly be ‘important’?” Alison shot back, reflexively, but she wasn’t even convincing herself. There was too much of it for it to be anything other than important. “People struggle for centuries to shovel this garbage out of the world, and it just ends up here.”

  Suzy wasn’t in the mood for this fight. She indulged her mother with a ‘do you even read the news?’ look, and said nothing.

  Jack wasn’t so ready to let go. “It’s almost as if there’s some kind of deep conservation law.”

  “Can you please shut up Jack, this is all just a game to you … Oh, fuck!” She was close to tears.

  “Try not to lower the tone Mom,” Suzy pitched in cruelly.

  “This is such fascist bullshit.”

  “Listen Mom,” Suzy said, her voice firm far beyond her years. “If you don’t cut this out, totally, you will get us killed.”

  The words worked, sorcerously. Alison froze, shifted inwardly, passing through an instantaneous metamorphosis. “OK,” she said.

  “You have to toughen the fuck up,” Suzy added, with brutal redundancy.

  Alison merely nodded.

  “Don’t, Suzy,” Jack said softly. It was at once the least he could say, and the most. Deplorable as his daughter’s words had been, they were no less right. This place made its own demands, and Suzy was incontestably their channel.

  He tried to absorb what he was seeing. From their position, high up on the escarpment, the panorama was stunning – or strategic. Emerging through the vegetative chaos, flecks of ramshackle settlement, and epic devastation, there were patterns. The jungle was rippled, in circles, and rings, its distribution of forms and colors betraying a history of semi-continuous, traumatic bombardment, attested by the occasional ochre wounds of raw impact craters. The dappling of overgrown splashes radiated into the habitation shanties – which thickened upon the slopes, and towards the great spike, like an inverted diffusion wave – buckling and blackening their edges. It was as if they were clutching at the skirts of a towering dark mother, even as she repulsed their affections with storms of hell-hail.

  The hab-thickets closest to the Ashenzohn uplift told a deeper and subtler story. It took a geologist’s eyes – for which Jack’s were but a poor approximation – to comprehend it thoroughly. Patterns of sedimentation, folding, subsidence, and weathering composed a graphic record, whose themes were only partially abraded into the noise of interminable detail. The main theme, in particular, was starkly striking. Each successive layer of encrusting development was more friable, chaotic, and primitive than the last.

  “It’s falling, isn’t it?”

  “The Empyre?”

  “Is that what it is? What it calls itself?”

  “It’s an old name.”

  An inaudible hum slithered into his thoughts from the scenes of dereliction, the remains of a song long decayed into silence, descended from some attenuated Ancient Order of Existence that had clambered up to the brink of the celestial plane, stretched fractionally further, then burnt, tumbled …

  “Do you think it understands itself?” he asked, no longer having any idea what she might know.

  “Still a little, maybe …” she mused. “At a certain point, when you know everything will be lost, you begin to take memory very seriously – but by then it’s too late. Mostly, people here are just struggling to survive. That gets more difficult every year.”

  The game would be like that, he realized suddenly. It was ingenious, in a way. Every level was more difficult than the last. The trend smoothed out, to some extent, into a descent path. The further you panned out, the more it would appear as a continuous down-slope. Harshening resource constraints, environmental degradation, food shortages, social disintegration, lashing the population remnants into a tightening circuit of cruelty, as the walls of the world closed in.

  They had reached the outskirts of continuous urban structure. As detail exploded into view, form melted. War damage and improvised construction bled into each, coagulating into an indissociable complex of creative destruction. Remnants of ancient masonry supported the ramshackle mass, scorched, raked, and pitted by paused furies.

  “How can there still be such sophisticated munitions?” Jack asked, probing the shrapnel-pitted stone with his fingers.

  “Magic.”

  “Oh, c’mon Suzy,” he said, disappointed.

  “No, I’m serious,” she insisted. “It’s Clark, the ‘any sufficiently advanced technology’ quote everyone knows, but you have to run it backwards. Military capabilities that once made sense relapse into obscure affliction as the world decays.”

  “Whose ‘capabilities’?”

  She said nothing, but simply pointed towards the cloud-shrouded upper reaches of the spike. The seething vapor mass was wrapped about the unseen pinnacle as if glued to it, internally agitated by a turmoil of green phosphorescence, ceaselessly racked by the bound discharges of an artificial electric storm.

  “What is that?”

  “Phyl-Undhu,” she said, as if nothing could be more obvious. “It’s what we’re all looking for, isn’t it?”

  §14. The outer slum-belt of Ashenzohn wasn’t a nice place, even slightly. It had been deeply ravaged, repeatedly, until its most basic substance was indistinguishable from devastation. The words ‘holocaust of freedom’ were nagging at Jack’s mind, for no reason he could understand, until he consciously registered the graffiti that had to have subliminally directed his thoughts. Cthulhu is calling was scrawled on the wall in some thick black substance, and then, a little further down, the future belongs to the squid. It seemed obvious that ‘squid’ mostly meant ‘not us’ – not at all us – but the invocation of a Lovecraftian Outer God was messy. How could it possibly have arrived here, unless through narrative corruption? He began to argue the point, in a stumbling fashion, but Suzy shrugged it off. “Perhaps we share an Outside.”

  “Do they even have cephalopods here?” he asked, switching tack with agility.

  “Sure, in the swamps, nasty ones.”

  “Tentacle gods?”

  “You can imagine a world without tentacle gods?” she laughed. “Get real.”

  Perhaps he would have laughed too, were it not for the shifting shadows of potential assassins, preying upon the ungraspable outer-edge of vision. Alison was lost in a daze, somewhere far beyond fear. He tried to interpose his body mass between hers and the glimpsed menace. The effect was a drunken, looping locomotion without real practical purpose. Suzy, calmly attentive, knew what she was doing, and progressed steadily towards their destination, with a potential to deliver massive violence – instantiated by the scythe-gun – accompanying her like an utterly reliable friend.

  Nothing came at them out of the fate-shredded slums. A sullen populace, proud only of its verminous resilience, avoided the streets as if they were death zones.

  “They mostly emerge at night,” Suzy muttered.

  Those trapped outside, in the grim half-light, consisted predominantly of nervous peddlers, or beggars spat out from the wars, bodies obscenely re-sculpted by amputations and flesh-melting burns. Dead looks were exchanged, but all interaction bled away into apathy, leaving only a residue of dull hostility and revulsion.

  Where the warrens fell away before the firmer architecture of the superior levels, maze-like alleys converged upon widening avenues. A desolate public plaza marked the zone of transition. Along its longest, gently curving wall there was stretched an enormous bas-relief. Rippling out from the center of the carvings, in waves, were crowds of people, mashed horribly into each other, crushed and trampled, as they fled in shrieking panic from the incomprehensibly lethal influence of star-headed monsters. The alien beings had been depicted as malignan
t giants – perhaps 15 meters tall – clustered together in the center of the scene. The hint of a whorl ran through them. Jack suspected they were approximately anthropomorphized stellar masses. All about them, humanoid bodies lay scattered in tangled heaps. The killing mechanism was unclear.

  “Jesus Christ!” he muttered.

  “Not exactly,” Susie replied, smiling crookedly.

  He recognized the grim joke from an old horror movie – Hellraiser? Had Susie been exposed to stuff like that already? It was an absurd question, of course. They were inside something right now that was almost certainly worse – not only vividly and viscerally threatening, but far darker in its ultimate implication. They would find their way out of this, eventually (he still believed), but there would be no ending in that. The ending was here – and close now. It was the thing they were approaching.

  §15. As the incline steepened, the city opened out. The fetid warrens of the scurf population lay far below, their smashed subhuman detritus gradually replaced by the first tentative signs of civil life. Security personnel filtered the pedestrian traffic flows, checking appearance and documentation, systematically reproducing the Stump’s vertical social stratification with unconcealed intent. Suzy evidently possessed some ostentatious credentials invisible to her parents, because she was able to lead her little party up through the check-points without the slightest suggestion of even transient interference. Unable to settle upon an alternative explanation, Jack began to suspect that her venom stripes were a key.

  The approach to the library was a passage slicing through rings of crystallized ritual. The Stump’s semi-public information depositary, it emerged, was a religious nexus, from which institutionalized mysticism radiated outwards, in rapidly decaying ripples. A fog of heady, alien incense thickened in the streets. Glyph-spattered ceremonial gateways punctuated the road-side, beyond which black-robed devotees prostrated themselves before the occult evocations of their shadow-wrapped shrines. From the surrounding temples came the sounds of chanting, maddening in its rhythmic elusiveness, as the cults ceaselessly re-habituated themselves to subtly-variegated pneumatizations of the archaic Anglossic Cycle: Ibdhjad, Aj, Baa, Caf, Dia, Eja, Fam, God, Hagg, Idu, Jaeo, Kul, Los, Mona, Nemo, Omana, Padbbha, Qumn, Rakht, Sigol, Tactt, Umneo, Vfisz, Wumno, Xikkth, Yodtta, Ziltth. With each gyre of their world’s descent, the secret of language receded ever deeper into itself.