***
19
***
Billy Jukes could hear the worms singing. They were shrill as scratched glass and popped like pustules underfoot, spitting their layer of phosphorescence and grey, inconsequential organs into the fray. Some part of him tried to step in the footsteps of the child, but it was futility; its feet were so much smaller than his.
These caverns, like the blood works of a body too immense to comprehend, were filled with trails, tracks, and carpets of phosphorescence. In this room the worms dripped from the ceiling, threatening to fall into his hair and eyes, and in the next they ran in a ditch down the edges that dropped away into the cavern below. Billy was lost hopelessly in this place. If the child were to let go of his hand, to disappear into the vessels of the veins, he thought he would go mad before he ever reached the sun again.
The child was a sexless thing, wearing the second-hand remains of a white taffeta dress, though it never once turned to look at him as it walked. Dragged behind its determined gait he saw its face in pieces, in the bits that came as it turned or pulled him aside. Its nose turned up to an endearing little snout and its eyes were wide and dark, like Billy's. He thought its hair must be so, too, but it had been cropped off too close to its head, and clumsily, for its scalp bore wound where the careless dagger had strayed off into the skin.
Its skin was the color of ash. Billy thought it might darken considerably if the sun shone on it.
Underfoot something popped with an uncomfortable squeak, and he startled and looked back at his darkened footstep. Something lay where the heel of his boot had trod there, and though he couldn't pause to see it before the worms covered over he caught the impression of a flaccid hairless thing, like a boneless mouse, twitching its nubby legs around an exploded abdomen. As he slipped down the slope into the next corridor he caught it try to flop like a landed fish as the worms sank into the cavity.
He heard laughter.
He wasn't sure when it became so clearly audible over the shrill sounds of the lights but it echoed from some distant cavern, through the apparent aqueduct of worms. The child's fingers tightened around his own. He wasn't sure if it was smiling or not, but its face had pulled up that way, and somehow he thought he shouldn't be comforted.
They dropped through a valley where the worms disappeared. He could see without them now, anyway, his eyes wide and black like a cat's. Instead other things seemed to occupy the floor, though not nearly so densely. They squeaked. Their hot, flaccid bodies tripped over his boots, but it wasn't until he felt soft fingers grasp his leg hairs to climb that he yelped and kicked the fleshy things away.
They moved down.
And down.
The aqueduct of worms, a culmination of those fetid ditches, curled back into existence on some far distant wall. The child dragged him towards it, and in those archways underneath there were doors; splintering, hinged salvage pieces in the shape of coffin lids. Billy pulled back from the ominous portals so the child opened them for him, and pushed him carelessly inside.
It was like looking at the faces of an obscure, incestual village, gathered in the tavern on a Sunday. There were a three hundred of them at a guess. Their faces shone from rough hewn tables of mismatched wood and sprawling games; laughing, whispering, shouting, giggling, dancing, groping, shrieking, and celebrating. They wore clothing not fit to be buried in, and many of the children ran nude, though even then their genders were obscured by the sheer carelessness of it all. They all looked as closely related as brothers, which bothered him the most, especially in a dark corner where two children, hardly as old as him, were shamelessly making love against the wall without reprimand from their elders.
It took him a moment to realize the child had let go of his hand.
He nearly choked in the sudden wave of panic that flooded from his ribs; he couldn't be alone here, even if his guide was no more his friend than these people. The torn taffeta dress was easy to trace. It was relatively clean compared to the ruined funerary garb of the others, and its yellowed, muddy skirts shone out. The child had drifted towards a huddle of naked children on the edge of the cavern, tormenting a dog.
Billy bumbled after it. He tripped on the sprawled legs of an old man sleeping in the midst of conversation, and turned red with shame as he skirted past the oblivious sweating pair (though the girl did look up at him with a hazy, unconcerned gaze, at to his horror smiled sweetly at him.) The children ignored him as he breached its sides.
It wasn't a dog they were taunting in that huddle; a fat, quivering pile of flesh danced in the middle, as large as a spaniel, with a long pink worm of a tail draped hopelessly across the stone. The children tossed something between them, giggling as the thing watched with wide, anticipating eyes and snapped at the high arc with no chance to catch it. It had whiskers on the stubby melted mess of its face.
The child in white threw the taunting toy at Billy. He caught it automatically, blinking in surprise to find it sitting in his hand. The fat, flaccid rodent dragged itself to his feet and its hot belly spilled on his toes as it stared up, blinking its black eyes expectantly. Billy looked down at his hands. It looked like a stew bone, picked nearly clean and filled with a spray of bone and tendon that made it difficult to strip. He thought it was a paw. Perhaps remnants from a butchered bear? He was about to drop it to the beast in disgust when his brain slowly registered the presence of a thumb.
Billy Jukes yelped, and dropped the hand.
The thing at his feet jumped an entirety of two inches to catch it, its folds slapping against Billy's leg with the effort, and it dragged itself away with a self satisfied trot, the hand firmly clenched in its teeth.
The children stared at him. Their identical eyes looked shocked at his disgust, as though he'd startled at a mouse instead of a stripped human hand.
Their eyes WERE identical. Like siblings from a close-bred family, they shared their black eyes, their upturned noses, their thin, boyish lips. They looked like the face that stared up at him from the water barrel each morning.
A dawning comprehension crept into Billy's mind and he backed away, his hands covering his mouth. They DID look like him. Was that why the child had brought him here? Or more importantly, why he had followed it?
The child in white cheerfully babbled something at the naked girl next to it. They giggled conspiratally and lunged forward to take Billy's hands, dragging him by the wrists further into the crowd. These people did not bathe. He could smell the stench of their bodies but something else, too, something warm and rotten, and his mind fleetingly wondered if the boneless rats had died down here.
It wasn't the rats.
As he was pulled towards a table in the back of the chamber, Billy suddenly stopped, and tried to back away. He'd seen this before. In a woodblock print Flint kept in his chambers (along with a dozen other obscenities, all carved by the same artist and kept in a roll in his writing desk) In the print a man lay vivisected on a surgeon's table, his cruder organs pulled out carelessly with a hook yet somehow he was still screaming into the ink. Holding the hook, with two darkly stained hands plunged deep inside his ribcage, a woman squatted over the body, naked and obscene. A torn end of entrail had found its way to her toothless mouth.
Flint had left these prints out for him to see, one night, when he called Billy in to help with his personals. He'd wanted to see his reaction.
It didn't mimic the woodcut exactly, of course; the man was dead by many days, and missing broad slabs of his body. He still had both his hands, though. There was a woman kneeling prettily on the table by his side. If he closed his eyes and thought of it hard enough he could almost pretend she was a weeping widow alongside her desiccated husband. Her head was not bowed with weeping, however. This woman tugged the wet, foul bits of his liver apart with savage twists and brought them to her lips, the other hand holding her hair daintily back from the mess.
The two children with Billy, the thing in the salvaged dress and the naked girl, grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him forward. He stumbled and caught himself on the edge of the splintering table.
The man's skinless ribcage was only inches from his face.
Before Billy could pull away a pair of hands caught the back of his head. The child tangled its fists in his ratty hair and pushed him towards the corpse with preternatural strength for its size.
The woman politely offered him a piece of the liver with a broad, flirtatious smirk.
Thirty minutes later, Billy had woken up. His wrists were bound to the supports of the bunk by Mullins' blue sash and his ribs were soaked with a disgusting cold sweat. His throat hurt, like he'd been screaming. In the dark he saw Mullins sitting patiently on the floor.
All the pirates were staring at him.
Mullins had moved to untie him by the time his heart slowed down. The others voiced mixed exclamations of relief and disgust and rolled over to sleep again.
With his wrists unbound, flailing no longer a danger, Billy had pulled his knees to his chest and puffed quietly in the dark cabin. He knew Mullins wouldn't ask him about his nightmare. He had a healthy respect for a man's demons, or a boys, in this case.
Sighing, Billy only nodded at him, lowering his eyes to his knees. "I'm alright now."
Mullins nodded.
Billy was, of course, lying.
19
***
Billy Jukes could hear the worms singing. They were shrill as scratched glass and popped like pustules underfoot, spitting their layer of phosphorescence and grey, inconsequential organs into the fray. Some part of him tried to step in the footsteps of the child, but it was futility; its feet were so much smaller than his.
These caverns, like the blood works of a body too immense to comprehend, were filled with trails, tracks, and carpets of phosphorescence. In this room the worms dripped from the ceiling, threatening to fall into his hair and eyes, and in the next they ran in a ditch down the edges that dropped away into the cavern below. Billy was lost hopelessly in this place. If the child were to let go of his hand, to disappear into the vessels of the veins, he thought he would go mad before he ever reached the sun again.
The child was a sexless thing, wearing the second-hand remains of a white taffeta dress, though it never once turned to look at him as it walked. Dragged behind its determined gait he saw its face in pieces, in the bits that came as it turned or pulled him aside. Its nose turned up to an endearing little snout and its eyes were wide and dark, like Billy's. He thought its hair must be so, too, but it had been cropped off too close to its head, and clumsily, for its scalp bore wound where the careless dagger had strayed off into the skin.
Its skin was the color of ash. Billy thought it might darken considerably if the sun shone on it.
Underfoot something popped with an uncomfortable squeak, and he startled and looked back at his darkened footstep. Something lay where the heel of his boot had trod there, and though he couldn't pause to see it before the worms covered over he caught the impression of a flaccid hairless thing, like a boneless mouse, twitching its nubby legs around an exploded abdomen. As he slipped down the slope into the next corridor he caught it try to flop like a landed fish as the worms sank into the cavity.
He heard laughter.
He wasn't sure when it became so clearly audible over the shrill sounds of the lights but it echoed from some distant cavern, through the apparent aqueduct of worms. The child's fingers tightened around his own. He wasn't sure if it was smiling or not, but its face had pulled up that way, and somehow he thought he shouldn't be comforted.
They dropped through a valley where the worms disappeared. He could see without them now, anyway, his eyes wide and black like a cat's. Instead other things seemed to occupy the floor, though not nearly so densely. They squeaked. Their hot, flaccid bodies tripped over his boots, but it wasn't until he felt soft fingers grasp his leg hairs to climb that he yelped and kicked the fleshy things away.
They moved down.
And down.
The aqueduct of worms, a culmination of those fetid ditches, curled back into existence on some far distant wall. The child dragged him towards it, and in those archways underneath there were doors; splintering, hinged salvage pieces in the shape of coffin lids. Billy pulled back from the ominous portals so the child opened them for him, and pushed him carelessly inside.
It was like looking at the faces of an obscure, incestual village, gathered in the tavern on a Sunday. There were a three hundred of them at a guess. Their faces shone from rough hewn tables of mismatched wood and sprawling games; laughing, whispering, shouting, giggling, dancing, groping, shrieking, and celebrating. They wore clothing not fit to be buried in, and many of the children ran nude, though even then their genders were obscured by the sheer carelessness of it all. They all looked as closely related as brothers, which bothered him the most, especially in a dark corner where two children, hardly as old as him, were shamelessly making love against the wall without reprimand from their elders.
It took him a moment to realize the child had let go of his hand.
He nearly choked in the sudden wave of panic that flooded from his ribs; he couldn't be alone here, even if his guide was no more his friend than these people. The torn taffeta dress was easy to trace. It was relatively clean compared to the ruined funerary garb of the others, and its yellowed, muddy skirts shone out. The child had drifted towards a huddle of naked children on the edge of the cavern, tormenting a dog.
Billy bumbled after it. He tripped on the sprawled legs of an old man sleeping in the midst of conversation, and turned red with shame as he skirted past the oblivious sweating pair (though the girl did look up at him with a hazy, unconcerned gaze, at to his horror smiled sweetly at him.) The children ignored him as he breached its sides.
It wasn't a dog they were taunting in that huddle; a fat, quivering pile of flesh danced in the middle, as large as a spaniel, with a long pink worm of a tail draped hopelessly across the stone. The children tossed something between them, giggling as the thing watched with wide, anticipating eyes and snapped at the high arc with no chance to catch it. It had whiskers on the stubby melted mess of its face.
The child in white threw the taunting toy at Billy. He caught it automatically, blinking in surprise to find it sitting in his hand. The fat, flaccid rodent dragged itself to his feet and its hot belly spilled on his toes as it stared up, blinking its black eyes expectantly. Billy looked down at his hands. It looked like a stew bone, picked nearly clean and filled with a spray of bone and tendon that made it difficult to strip. He thought it was a paw. Perhaps remnants from a butchered bear? He was about to drop it to the beast in disgust when his brain slowly registered the presence of a thumb.
Billy Jukes yelped, and dropped the hand.
The thing at his feet jumped an entirety of two inches to catch it, its folds slapping against Billy's leg with the effort, and it dragged itself away with a self satisfied trot, the hand firmly clenched in its teeth.
The children stared at him. Their identical eyes looked shocked at his disgust, as though he'd startled at a mouse instead of a stripped human hand.
Their eyes WERE identical. Like siblings from a close-bred family, they shared their black eyes, their upturned noses, their thin, boyish lips. They looked like the face that stared up at him from the water barrel each morning.
A dawning comprehension crept into Billy's mind and he backed away, his hands covering his mouth. They DID look like him. Was that why the child had brought him here? Or more importantly, why he had followed it?
The child in white cheerfully babbled something at the naked girl next to it. They giggled conspiratally and lunged forward to take Billy's hands, dragging him by the wrists further into the crowd. These people did not bathe. He could smell the stench of their bodies but something else, too, something warm and rotten, and his mind fleetingly wondered if the boneless rats had died down here.
It wasn't the rats.
As he was pulled towards a table in the back of the chamber, Billy suddenly stopped, and tried to back away. He'd seen this before. In a woodblock print Flint kept in his chambers (along with a dozen other obscenities, all carved by the same artist and kept in a roll in his writing desk) In the print a man lay vivisected on a surgeon's table, his cruder organs pulled out carelessly with a hook yet somehow he was still screaming into the ink. Holding the hook, with two darkly stained hands plunged deep inside his ribcage, a woman squatted over the body, naked and obscene. A torn end of entrail had found its way to her toothless mouth.
Flint had left these prints out for him to see, one night, when he called Billy in to help with his personals. He'd wanted to see his reaction.
It didn't mimic the woodcut exactly, of course; the man was dead by many days, and missing broad slabs of his body. He still had both his hands, though. There was a woman kneeling prettily on the table by his side. If he closed his eyes and thought of it hard enough he could almost pretend she was a weeping widow alongside her desiccated husband. Her head was not bowed with weeping, however. This woman tugged the wet, foul bits of his liver apart with savage twists and brought them to her lips, the other hand holding her hair daintily back from the mess.
The two children with Billy, the thing in the salvaged dress and the naked girl, grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him forward. He stumbled and caught himself on the edge of the splintering table.
The man's skinless ribcage was only inches from his face.
Before Billy could pull away a pair of hands caught the back of his head. The child tangled its fists in his ratty hair and pushed him towards the corpse with preternatural strength for its size.
The woman politely offered him a piece of the liver with a broad, flirtatious smirk.
Thirty minutes later, Billy had woken up. His wrists were bound to the supports of the bunk by Mullins' blue sash and his ribs were soaked with a disgusting cold sweat. His throat hurt, like he'd been screaming. In the dark he saw Mullins sitting patiently on the floor.
All the pirates were staring at him.
Mullins had moved to untie him by the time his heart slowed down. The others voiced mixed exclamations of relief and disgust and rolled over to sleep again.
With his wrists unbound, flailing no longer a danger, Billy had pulled his knees to his chest and puffed quietly in the dark cabin. He knew Mullins wouldn't ask him about his nightmare. He had a healthy respect for a man's demons, or a boys, in this case.
Sighing, Billy only nodded at him, lowering his eyes to his knees. "I'm alright now."
Mullins nodded.
Billy was, of course, lying.