The Underdwelling

18

Boyd opened his eyes.

It was pitch black.

He did not know how much time had passed. It might have been six days or six months as far as he was concerned, because his mind was lost in a white fog of madness. He was inside one of the cells in the ancient honeycombed trees, a cell near the very top. This is where she had brought him. Where she kept him and cared for him.

His leg had become infected the second day and he submerged into a mire of fever dreams, calling out to people who were not there and remembering a reality that no longer existed for him. The infection would have spread and killed him eventually, but she would not have it. Devoted and kind and heartsick for company, any company, she had tended to him. She had sucked the poison from his legs and cooled him with water she sprayed onto his face.

When he woke from the fever, he screamed.

And she cooed her love for him.

He lay there, trying to remember the world before the cell, but it was all becoming rapidly grainy and indistinct. A dream-world, a pleasant fantasy slipping from his grasp. The lanterns and flashlights were gone, but no matter, their batteries would have been long exhausted by now.

The darkness was forever.

But he was never alone in it.

He recalled when she had first come for him, how she had been almost shy. She had sat at his feet for some time, cooing and clicking, sometimes making a low and haunting musical sort of piping. But he had held out his hand and she had come, hungry for companionship, shattered by an eternity of ungodly isolation. It had not been easy at first getting used to her, the feel of her touch or the squeal of her voice. All those clicking, spidery limbs like tangled, knotty bamboo, the bony rungs of her body that were set with spiny hairs. Her fetid breath, the stink of age and corruption, a sickly warm miasma flavored by what she had been eating.

He did not know what she was.

She was not a spider exactly, but maybe something like one. Something with a convoluted, glossy exoskeleton and countless whispering stick-like limbs. Her flesh felt oily and damp like wet seal skin. But she was no insect or arachnid. She had a head. A long, narrow head and something like a face. A head draped with a mop of greasy, webby hair that undulated like worms when you touched it and a face set with no less than three oval mouths. Sometimes, she would lie next to him and lick him with her tongues, cleaning him and keeping him healthy.

At first, he’d wanted to scream, but even that had passed. He even got used to the food she chewed for him into a fine, moist pulp and regurgitated into his mouth. He did not like to think of what the food was, being that there was only one possible source of meat in the cavern.

It took some getting used to, just as it took getting used to the way she called his name, that rusty, scraping wail that was like the agonized mewling of a cat wailing in the dead of night. “Boooooyyyd,” she would shriek with that pathetic childlike screech that was so lonely, so destitute like the squall of a terrified child. “Booooooyyyyd….”

Yes, he had even gotten used to that.

It was amazing what you could get used to, given time.

He could not know what she was or what her race had been. Only that she had known a terrible, wasting loneliness that ripped open her mind. She had waited in stark, hopeless, solitary desertion as her kind had died out. As the continents shifted and the great reptiles gave way to the megafauna, as the great Permian age was devastated by mass extinction and the Mesozoic seas became deserts, as mammals claimed the land and men learned to walk and then run, filling the lands above like racing white ants.

How many days?

How many fucking days had it been?

He had read somewhere once that the average human mind will crack after three or four days of absolute darkness. The lack of sensory stimulation makes the mind turn back upon itself and submerge. Boyd could not be sure if he was insane or not. All he could do was wait in the cell. Wait for her to return because she always did.

Listen.

Yes, he heard her. She was coming. Ticka-ticka-ticka. She entered the cell and squatted at his feet. He had not seen her for many hours, maybe days. She smelled different. That’s how he began to judge her moods, by the smell she extruded. Today it was very sweet like the odor of cherries. He had never smelled that before. When she was scared it was an odor like dry straw. When she was angry it was the smell of pale green bogs. But this… this was new.

He spoke to her but she did not respond.

She waited there at his feet.

It seemed to go on for many hours.

When Boyd opened his eyes, she was still there. She was making a high singing sort of noise and just beneath it, something else: a fleshy, moist sort of sound like ripe juicy tomatoes were sliding out of her.

And the smell… black, diseased, horrid.

That’s when he knew. That’s when he understood.

That’s when it all began to make a curious and revolting sort of sense.

As she had hibernated through countless ages, a flat dormancy had brooded within her. She had carried a secret from the Permian, she had carried the seed of her kind which waited within her, gestating through the eons.

She was a female.

It was only natural that she give birth.

When it was done and he was whimpering under his breath, she sidled up next to him.

She wanted him to touch her.

At first, Boyd was offended as he felt them clustering on her back, squirming and writhing, but soon he learned to accept. And as they accepted him and ran over him like tiny, mewling rodents, he actually knew he would come to care for them. They flooded over him in a swarm of leggy young, nipping and licking at him. Down there in the dank subterranean blackness, he could remember that once he had been married to a woman named Linda and that she had carried his child.

He had been a father once.

And now he was a father again.

A father with hundreds of children that crawled and skittered and nipped.

He was a lot of things, but he certainly was not lonely.

But as the hours passed, he knew she was growing edgy, tense. She was feeling threatened and he smelled it on her. And sometime later, he knew why: the rumbling. The rock-crushing rumble of a drill. They were digging him out. They were coming to get him.

Oh no, he thought. Don’t do that.

You don’t understand.

She’s very jealous…