simon p. murphy
Mystic
Mundus remembered few things from before when the night came to stay. He remembered the days, and how they had slowly become enervated as the months passed. At first, it was merely that the sunlight waned in vitality; but as time progressed the heat of the sun itself became like a sickly torpor induced by a viral infection, or the clammy, greasy heat given off by boiling tallow. Soon even the sun itself ceased to awaken from its sidereal slumber, and there was only darkness. Night was no longer clear, cool and starlit, but murky, lusterless and warm with decay, ripe with a kind of consumptive fecundity which had the terrible power to alter. Mundus could not know whether it was only this city or the entire world that had fallen prey to this change. So few things remained the same that any such inquiry seemed impossible. Until one day, when for the first time in many years Mundus snared a vision of deliverance through that pervasive veil of darkness immeasurable.
He had received the letter at his apartment. Someone had simply slipped the envelope beneath his door, disappearing into the blackness of the corridors before Mundus could catch so much as a glimpse. He had considerable hesitation in opening the envelope, which was addressed simply 'Mister' - there was no positive attention in this city of creeping forms and dripping shadows, no possible recognition that brought anything other than the promise of horror. Mundus could not comprehend the letter's origin. He knew no-one, and in fact had spoken to no-one for more than a year. Normal people seemed to simply disappear or fade from recognition, becoming something else, becoming parts of the city. Isolation was the only salvation Mundus could have imagined. That is, until he mustered the courage to open the envelope.
The letter read simply this:
Mister,
There are others like you. We are leaving together soon. Come to number 52 Peal St. tonight. It is the time we've been waiting for. Make sure you are not followed by anything.
Yours truly, Kitty Lamb.
The letter was in his pocket as he left his apartment, entering the smoky drizzle of rain. Mundus wondered if it was even possible to leave. Yet the hope of escape was delicious, and it was the only stimulus that could ever have compelled him to leave the relative safety of his own dysmal suburb.
The city was enormous, and he traveled for hours on foot. In the dark crevices between buildings he saw sprouting bundles of swollen mushrooms, noxious with color. They seemed to have transposed every hue from a spectrum of delirium, pulsating with a strange nightmare existence somehow flourishing at the feverish extremes of vibrancy and putrefaction.
Since his earliest memories Mundus had occasionally experienced a form of synaesthesia, where sound often intermingled with vision, sending nauseating sensations over his flesh. He had not felt it for many months, but he could now sense the harmonic vibration of the disintegrating city creeping over his skin, its vile music oozing into his ears, its symphony of decay.
The neighborhood through which Mundus had entered seemed decrepit as any other, until a bygone church snagged in his vision. The church had partially submerged into the miry ground beneath it so that the curvature of the roof ridge sagged like a deteriorating spine. Mundus could see that the adjacent buildings were also sinking, but the church was the most prominent feature, its crooked steeple straining to the sky like an atrophied arm in desperate supplication as it mutely drowned over insufferable decades.
The paint of the church was cracked and peeling to the point where it was impossible to determine what the original color might once have been, and the damp brown beneath the flaking layers betrayed the silent feasting of worm and rot.
Mundus' heart fluttered as the groined doors burst open, expunging a disheveled figure in the form of a squat, gnomish priest. He hurriedly wound a rusted chain about the metal handles of the door, sealing them with a pendulous brass lock. The priest cast a furtive glance at Mundus before skulking away into the twisted alleys behind the senescent church. At the upper boundary of his vision it seemed to Mundus as if he had seen the whites of huge eyes peering out from within the blackness of the belfry. But when he focused his vision upon the tower there was only still darkness. Mundus hurried on his way without a backward glance.
Mundus refused to accommodate the sight any longer and walked on through the faint curtains of rain that persisted. He thought he knew which part of the city he was now in, although he had never become intimately familiar with the perverse geography, which anyhow seemed always to change every few weeks. Instead of having been arranged into a sufferably navigable grid, the streets were like routes that had been scored erratically by the elements into the surface of some dirty sediment, interlaced at absurd angles of variable severity.
Mundus felt disoriented as he negotiated the contorted web of city streets. A figure beneath a dull streetlamp peered at him from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Mundus could not tell whether it was male, female, or something else altogether, but the gaze was penetrating, and there was a palpable sense of hatefulness emanating from deep within. He felt the stare remain even as the figure turned those gleaming eyes away - even when Mundus had turned into another street, obscuring the unwelcome observer from view.
The strange names of various streets and alleys began to nudge Mundus into a growing awareness. That vague faculty beneath consciousness told him he was close to his destination. Mundus withdrew the letter from his pocket, gripping the damp paper taut in his gloved hands. He had found the street named Peal. Feeling coldness breathe through his skull, he paced beneath the leering buildings searching for the number recorded on the rain-smudged paper.
There was no light in any of the buildings on the street although the darkness was deepening. The streetlamps seemed either dead or dying, a precious few dripping with a smoky-blue phosphorescence. There was no sky above, only cascading ramparts of tumorous clouds, insulating the darkness of the city from any starlight that might have shone beyond. In truth, Mundus did not know if there was such a thing any longer.
He began his silent trek down the street named Peal. The winds carved out a dissonant whistling over the jagged topography of jutting houses, a discordant melody like the whining of a musical instrument forbidden to be played because of its antiquity.
Mundus passed a decomposing building, the guttering of which was gushing with filthy water, spattering crudely onto the fractured pavement. A faint light glowed in a basement window. Mundus strained his eyes to identify the source of the weak glow, but he soon realised that the window was filled with a misshapen silhouette swaying from side to side with agitation, rapidly shaking a strange head shaped like an anvil. Mundus shuddered and hurried past.
The quality of light from the streetlamps was so poor that Mundus was forced to check street numbers with the naked flame of his lighter. He stood in a broken foyer, feeling especially vulnerable in the soft, trembling flicker of fire between his gloved fingers. The numbers of the house had either fallen away or been removed. The dark impressions of numbers branded on the rotting wood told him that this was not the house he sought.
A shape now slithered in the greasy darkness peeking between the mildew-stained curtains. Mundus was electrocuted with fright as a squeal rang out from behind the curtain, less like a woman's voice than a horrified hare. The lighter slipped out of his trembling hands and extinguished on the porch as he stumbled back, tumbling onto the broken sidewalk. He didn't dare retrieve it from beneath that dark window. He crept over to the next building.
The neighboring house was in no better condition. The façade was crumbling like the ceremonial mask of a corpse, the rot from behind having crept into the plaster. As Mundus treaded cautiously between the warped, straining legs that were the porch columns, he saw that the door of the rotting house was slightly ajar. The fecund darkness within was thick, and the leather of Mundus' gloves creaked against the deafening silence as he closed a fist to rap on the decaying door-frame. Wet shuffling grew within the darkness of the house, and the vague outline of a small, hunched figure appeared before Mundus.
"M-Mrs. Lamb?" he asked without managing to hide the trepidation in his tone.
"Oh you came - I didn't think you would come", the old woman spoke in a croaking whisper. "Come in, come in my darling".
"Careful, sweetheart, there's no light in here", the figure warbled just as Mundus began to discern her features. It was an exceedingly aged woman, perhaps older than ninety years, and her hair was a clump of wetly glistening curls. Her face was deeply grooved and wrinkled, and the eyes seemed merely empty sockets in the tarry darkness. She wore a loose-fitting robe over her hunched back, although Mundus couldn't possibly discern a color under the conditions. She held out both hands to him through the doorway like an eager lover. Mundus was hesitant, and he waited a few more moments before his eyes adjusted to the oily darkness within. He reluctantly took her hard, almost wooden hands, thankful that his gloves spared from him any unwelcome intimacy of texture. As he passed through the doorway he felt the fetid dampness. Drips of viscous moisture spattered across his forehead and drummed faintly against rotted floorboards, a pattering concert of ruin that seemed audible to his very blood.
The damp darkness grew strangely warm as he was drawn in deeper by those wooden hands. The woman muttered insensibly as they entered another part of the house where a little light from a stuttering streetlamp seeped through a broken pane like marsh gas.
"Now I know you are aware that we need to be very secretive about all this... business", she mumbled as her head bobbled in the dim light, clasping his hands more tightly. "I don't need to tell you that if... if they were to find out, they could make things a lot worse for us, you know." she added as her head tremored in the blackness before continuing.
"Some of us have been very secretive. Some of us have been planning to leave the city for a long time, but we promised all together that we would not leave until everyone that wanted to come had the chance." Mrs. Lamb seemed to cock her head slightly in the faint glow.
"You're the last one. We've been watching, and waiting for exactly the right time. Are you glad to see me? Is this what you've been wanting all this time?"
Mundus couldn't contain himself any longer, and cried out. There had never been any other hope, and the horror of his life had gone for so long without the smallest prospect of deliverance. Unable to restrain his emotions, he cried aloud as he hadn't done since childhood, clutching his hands to his mouth in a vain attempt to stifle his sobs.
"I'm so afraid," Mundus muttered uncontrollably, "I didn't think there was really anyone else, I never knew there was any... any way out".
"There is, love, there always is," Mrs. Lamb whispered mechanically, patting his shoulder with a gnarled bunch of fingers. " 'Seek and you will find' - that's what I always say".
Soon there came a shrill whining noise issuing from the storey above. There were at least two distinct cries, particularly strange because the voices at once sounded vaguely infantile and yet somehow perturbingly decrepit.
"Oh dear," Mrs. Lamb sighed. "Now you've gone and woken up my baby".
Mundus felt as if his tears had frozen in his eyes, although he couldn't immediately locate the cause. He instinctively jerked his hands away from the woman and was left unsupported, swaying adrift in the rotting darkness.
"If we're leaving with the others tomorrow, then we've special arrangements to make," Mrs. Lamb's wavering voice croaked from somewhere in the blackness. "All my things are upstairs". Mundus swore he heard her chuckle as she said this.The two-fold mewling now reached a piercing crescendo.
"The train is big enough for all of us - all your friends," she declared hoarsely, "It leaves tomorrow night". She chuckled again, this time with palpable irony. "There's a secret tunnel, like you always dreamed there was, right beneath those mountains that you're always looking out to, but you can never seem to reach".
Mundus froze when it dawned upon him that he was being mocked. Even in that damp warmth he felt the frigidity of horror send frozen fangs into his teeth, his fingers, his eyes. Even the boiling acid that was his blood did nothing to thaw his chilled flesh.
She turned onto the darkness of the staircase and began to climb with an urgent, ape-like waddle, only barely visible in the contaminated glow from outside. Mundus felt his body react, free from the cold clutches of morbid fear. Guided by something beneath volition, Mundus uncertainly climbed the first step of the staircase after the woman and reached out, bunching her curling doll-hair in his gloved fist.
He tugged firmly, tearing away the glistening wig, along with a full hood of what looked like wrinkled, flapping rubber. The creature stood deathly still on the stairs without so much as turning. Mundus dared not look directly at that twisted, fungus-white form he had exposed.
Fumbling his way through the darkness and back onto the street, he ran harder than he thought possible, accompanied by the infernal music of cackling laughter that sang through his bones. He ran with no consideration of direction, for he now understood that in this city where night never sleeps, there was no path that would fail to lead him back to the center.
He had received the letter at his apartment. Someone had simply slipped the envelope beneath his door, disappearing into the blackness of the corridors before Mundus could catch so much as a glimpse. He had considerable hesitation in opening the envelope, which was addressed simply 'Mister' - there was no positive attention in this city of creeping forms and dripping shadows, no possible recognition that brought anything other than the promise of horror. Mundus could not comprehend the letter's origin. He knew no-one, and in fact had spoken to no-one for more than a year. Normal people seemed to simply disappear or fade from recognition, becoming something else, becoming parts of the city. Isolation was the only salvation Mundus could have imagined. That is, until he mustered the courage to open the envelope.
The letter read simply this:
Mister,
There are others like you. We are leaving together soon. Come to number 52 Peal St. tonight. It is the time we've been waiting for. Make sure you are not followed by anything.
Yours truly, Kitty Lamb.
The letter was in his pocket as he left his apartment, entering the smoky drizzle of rain. Mundus wondered if it was even possible to leave. Yet the hope of escape was delicious, and it was the only stimulus that could ever have compelled him to leave the relative safety of his own dysmal suburb.
The city was enormous, and he traveled for hours on foot. In the dark crevices between buildings he saw sprouting bundles of swollen mushrooms, noxious with color. They seemed to have transposed every hue from a spectrum of delirium, pulsating with a strange nightmare existence somehow flourishing at the feverish extremes of vibrancy and putrefaction.
Since his earliest memories Mundus had occasionally experienced a form of synaesthesia, where sound often intermingled with vision, sending nauseating sensations over his flesh. He had not felt it for many months, but he could now sense the harmonic vibration of the disintegrating city creeping over his skin, its vile music oozing into his ears, its symphony of decay.
The neighborhood through which Mundus had entered seemed decrepit as any other, until a bygone church snagged in his vision. The church had partially submerged into the miry ground beneath it so that the curvature of the roof ridge sagged like a deteriorating spine. Mundus could see that the adjacent buildings were also sinking, but the church was the most prominent feature, its crooked steeple straining to the sky like an atrophied arm in desperate supplication as it mutely drowned over insufferable decades.
The paint of the church was cracked and peeling to the point where it was impossible to determine what the original color might once have been, and the damp brown beneath the flaking layers betrayed the silent feasting of worm and rot.
Mundus' heart fluttered as the groined doors burst open, expunging a disheveled figure in the form of a squat, gnomish priest. He hurriedly wound a rusted chain about the metal handles of the door, sealing them with a pendulous brass lock. The priest cast a furtive glance at Mundus before skulking away into the twisted alleys behind the senescent church. At the upper boundary of his vision it seemed to Mundus as if he had seen the whites of huge eyes peering out from within the blackness of the belfry. But when he focused his vision upon the tower there was only still darkness. Mundus hurried on his way without a backward glance.
Mundus refused to accommodate the sight any longer and walked on through the faint curtains of rain that persisted. He thought he knew which part of the city he was now in, although he had never become intimately familiar with the perverse geography, which anyhow seemed always to change every few weeks. Instead of having been arranged into a sufferably navigable grid, the streets were like routes that had been scored erratically by the elements into the surface of some dirty sediment, interlaced at absurd angles of variable severity.
Mundus felt disoriented as he negotiated the contorted web of city streets. A figure beneath a dull streetlamp peered at him from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Mundus could not tell whether it was male, female, or something else altogether, but the gaze was penetrating, and there was a palpable sense of hatefulness emanating from deep within. He felt the stare remain even as the figure turned those gleaming eyes away - even when Mundus had turned into another street, obscuring the unwelcome observer from view.
The strange names of various streets and alleys began to nudge Mundus into a growing awareness. That vague faculty beneath consciousness told him he was close to his destination. Mundus withdrew the letter from his pocket, gripping the damp paper taut in his gloved hands. He had found the street named Peal. Feeling coldness breathe through his skull, he paced beneath the leering buildings searching for the number recorded on the rain-smudged paper.
There was no light in any of the buildings on the street although the darkness was deepening. The streetlamps seemed either dead or dying, a precious few dripping with a smoky-blue phosphorescence. There was no sky above, only cascading ramparts of tumorous clouds, insulating the darkness of the city from any starlight that might have shone beyond. In truth, Mundus did not know if there was such a thing any longer.
He began his silent trek down the street named Peal. The winds carved out a dissonant whistling over the jagged topography of jutting houses, a discordant melody like the whining of a musical instrument forbidden to be played because of its antiquity.
Mundus passed a decomposing building, the guttering of which was gushing with filthy water, spattering crudely onto the fractured pavement. A faint light glowed in a basement window. Mundus strained his eyes to identify the source of the weak glow, but he soon realised that the window was filled with a misshapen silhouette swaying from side to side with agitation, rapidly shaking a strange head shaped like an anvil. Mundus shuddered and hurried past.
The quality of light from the streetlamps was so poor that Mundus was forced to check street numbers with the naked flame of his lighter. He stood in a broken foyer, feeling especially vulnerable in the soft, trembling flicker of fire between his gloved fingers. The numbers of the house had either fallen away or been removed. The dark impressions of numbers branded on the rotting wood told him that this was not the house he sought.
A shape now slithered in the greasy darkness peeking between the mildew-stained curtains. Mundus was electrocuted with fright as a squeal rang out from behind the curtain, less like a woman's voice than a horrified hare. The lighter slipped out of his trembling hands and extinguished on the porch as he stumbled back, tumbling onto the broken sidewalk. He didn't dare retrieve it from beneath that dark window. He crept over to the next building.
The neighboring house was in no better condition. The façade was crumbling like the ceremonial mask of a corpse, the rot from behind having crept into the plaster. As Mundus treaded cautiously between the warped, straining legs that were the porch columns, he saw that the door of the rotting house was slightly ajar. The fecund darkness within was thick, and the leather of Mundus' gloves creaked against the deafening silence as he closed a fist to rap on the decaying door-frame. Wet shuffling grew within the darkness of the house, and the vague outline of a small, hunched figure appeared before Mundus.
"M-Mrs. Lamb?" he asked without managing to hide the trepidation in his tone.
"Oh you came - I didn't think you would come", the old woman spoke in a croaking whisper. "Come in, come in my darling".
"Careful, sweetheart, there's no light in here", the figure warbled just as Mundus began to discern her features. It was an exceedingly aged woman, perhaps older than ninety years, and her hair was a clump of wetly glistening curls. Her face was deeply grooved and wrinkled, and the eyes seemed merely empty sockets in the tarry darkness. She wore a loose-fitting robe over her hunched back, although Mundus couldn't possibly discern a color under the conditions. She held out both hands to him through the doorway like an eager lover. Mundus was hesitant, and he waited a few more moments before his eyes adjusted to the oily darkness within. He reluctantly took her hard, almost wooden hands, thankful that his gloves spared from him any unwelcome intimacy of texture. As he passed through the doorway he felt the fetid dampness. Drips of viscous moisture spattered across his forehead and drummed faintly against rotted floorboards, a pattering concert of ruin that seemed audible to his very blood.
The damp darkness grew strangely warm as he was drawn in deeper by those wooden hands. The woman muttered insensibly as they entered another part of the house where a little light from a stuttering streetlamp seeped through a broken pane like marsh gas.
"Now I know you are aware that we need to be very secretive about all this... business", she mumbled as her head bobbled in the dim light, clasping his hands more tightly. "I don't need to tell you that if... if they were to find out, they could make things a lot worse for us, you know." she added as her head tremored in the blackness before continuing.
"Some of us have been very secretive. Some of us have been planning to leave the city for a long time, but we promised all together that we would not leave until everyone that wanted to come had the chance." Mrs. Lamb seemed to cock her head slightly in the faint glow.
"You're the last one. We've been watching, and waiting for exactly the right time. Are you glad to see me? Is this what you've been wanting all this time?"
Mundus couldn't contain himself any longer, and cried out. There had never been any other hope, and the horror of his life had gone for so long without the smallest prospect of deliverance. Unable to restrain his emotions, he cried aloud as he hadn't done since childhood, clutching his hands to his mouth in a vain attempt to stifle his sobs.
"I'm so afraid," Mundus muttered uncontrollably, "I didn't think there was really anyone else, I never knew there was any... any way out".
"There is, love, there always is," Mrs. Lamb whispered mechanically, patting his shoulder with a gnarled bunch of fingers. " 'Seek and you will find' - that's what I always say".
Soon there came a shrill whining noise issuing from the storey above. There were at least two distinct cries, particularly strange because the voices at once sounded vaguely infantile and yet somehow perturbingly decrepit.
"Oh dear," Mrs. Lamb sighed. "Now you've gone and woken up my baby".
Mundus felt as if his tears had frozen in his eyes, although he couldn't immediately locate the cause. He instinctively jerked his hands away from the woman and was left unsupported, swaying adrift in the rotting darkness.
"If we're leaving with the others tomorrow, then we've special arrangements to make," Mrs. Lamb's wavering voice croaked from somewhere in the blackness. "All my things are upstairs". Mundus swore he heard her chuckle as she said this.The two-fold mewling now reached a piercing crescendo.
"The train is big enough for all of us - all your friends," she declared hoarsely, "It leaves tomorrow night". She chuckled again, this time with palpable irony. "There's a secret tunnel, like you always dreamed there was, right beneath those mountains that you're always looking out to, but you can never seem to reach".
Mundus froze when it dawned upon him that he was being mocked. Even in that damp warmth he felt the frigidity of horror send frozen fangs into his teeth, his fingers, his eyes. Even the boiling acid that was his blood did nothing to thaw his chilled flesh.
She turned onto the darkness of the staircase and began to climb with an urgent, ape-like waddle, only barely visible in the contaminated glow from outside. Mundus felt his body react, free from the cold clutches of morbid fear. Guided by something beneath volition, Mundus uncertainly climbed the first step of the staircase after the woman and reached out, bunching her curling doll-hair in his gloved fist.
He tugged firmly, tearing away the glistening wig, along with a full hood of what looked like wrinkled, flapping rubber. The creature stood deathly still on the stairs without so much as turning. Mundus dared not look directly at that twisted, fungus-white form he had exposed.
Fumbling his way through the darkness and back onto the street, he ran harder than he thought possible, accompanied by the infernal music of cackling laughter that sang through his bones. He ran with no consideration of direction, for he now understood that in this city where night never sleeps, there was no path that would fail to lead him back to the center.