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The city of nightmares, Windhelm. Part 2
Mevela 26th, 1125 Dom.
I came to the end of the tunnel, where the soil turned rotten and green and slimy and where touching the sides of the walls I could feel the indentation of scratch marks and whatever other scars across the walls. It was here that I found it, I guess. I say guess because there was nothing defining the catacombs anymore. No title, no plaques, nothing but the growing walls and the strange marks of traveling nightstalkers etched into the walls like hieroglyphics.
Squish. I retracted my palm and looked at the thin lines of slime breaking from my finger tips to the walls. The thin membrane acted quick to fill the space my hand had taken.
I turned on my lantern. The passage was narrow and a straight way to downward stairs. Walking; something tumbled beneath me.
A skull. I flinched back, the shadow spread across the horizon, a shadow puppet elongated and screened against the tall ceiling.
“Jesus Christ.” I held my chest with my hand. There was a whole wall of skulls on little stone platforms leading down the stairs, some of them collapsed so that at a decline the skulls rolled down a bit and to my feet. It was like this, the narrow passage, all the way down. The broken ground turned to stairs leading up and behind me - a noise.
What? I turned. A noise of foot steps approached in heavy gait.
I grabbed my knife. Flung around. The lantern almost slipped from its metal handle.
I lowered my body to the incoming stranger and in the glow of the light…Justinian.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked. “Why’d they let you through?”
“They didn’t. I slipped them.” He said.
“What?”
“I th-th-thought you needed help.”
“I don’t need help.” I said. “Go back with them, this isn’t a place for people like you.”
“What’ya mean? I can fight you know? I’m trained.” He said.
“This isn’t something for you to protest. You understand?”
“A-a-and how are you going to make me go back?” He asked.
It was about the only time I’d seen him make a stern pose, with his hands by his side and his whole body quivering. But he was right. I wasn’t going to carry him back or push him through the hole or make him walk. To be honest, it’s like he reminded me of myself. I shook my head and turned around, my hand against the oozing wall.
“You stick close and if I tell you to run, you run. Alright?” I asked.
“Y-yes.”
“You don’t disobey, you understand?”
“I understand.”
“And we are not fighting. Period.”
“Ditto.” He said.
“Repeat what I just said.”
“I run if you tell me to run. I stay close if you tell me to stay close. No fighting. No disobeying..” He said, nodding his head all exaggerated-like.
“God damn is this a mess.” I said. I carried on, both of us did I mean, through the expanding walls. Stairs that led to rooms with vaulted ceilings and old tattered banners eaten through and fluttering against the small drafts that escaped from cracks in the walls. Rooms so big that the glow of my lantern didn’t reach and I lowered it just because it was becoming a liability. Piles of skulls, tablets, vases, rusted knives broken at the hilt rested in the undulating dirt floor. The tiles were eaten through, moss and dungeon-blooming fauna sprouted with eagerness through loose fitting concrete.
“Mark the walls.” I said. Justinian squirmed for his blade and patted himself. I took the knife from his front pocket and handed it to him.
“Here.” I said. He smiled and etched a big x on the wall near me, a book case sat dilapidated and in pieces next to him. The papyrus was ripped and tattered on the floor.
Room by room he marked the X’s. And after ten minutes I’d already lost track. An oppressive space that made me forget, or maybe my eyes were too drawn to the deathly decorations across the walls. Coffins and tombs dug into walls. My hand knocked something, I looked down. A bony hand fell to the floor, a turned skull looked to me inside one of the catacombs.
I had to slap myself to focus on the mission; onwards.
This place wasn’t meant for the living or for the able. It was a dead city born for the underground, for the creatures underground. I stepped over a curlicue of cobwebs growing door frame to door frame like barb wire. The rooms narrowed. The corpses lined across the walls were disappearing. The buildings were losing their definition and the tombs were collapsing.
A stutter of noise like small fly buzzing. I backed myself to a wall, a corpse behind me pressing against my shoulder.
I clung to the wall, Justinian clung to me. I extinguished the fire of my lantern. The noises grew louder and louder down a spiral staircase. We inched forward, down steps, into a hall.
“You get ready to run if I say so, alright?” I said. Justinian kept staring at the wall, at an eye-less skeleton staring back at him. His face looked white even in the darkness.
I shook him. “Are you listening?”
He looked at me but I wasn’t sure if he was even there anymore.
I went through the hall, following the noise. Justinian walked close enough for me to hear his breathing. We went down the steps, held the door frame, which was pulverized and full of scratch marks. And for a moment in this room I thought everything was natural, everything normal. Until my eyes adjusted. Until I saw, all around the room, strange moving objects. And I realized the whole room was full.
I stopped breathing. My sinuses cleared. My whole body was still.
The room moved. They were all around the room.
Justinian took a heavy step back. It echoed.
I looked back and it was like the living walls were all pissed, ‘cause I heard them screech.
“Run!” I grabbed his hand. He almost slipped, but came through.
I turned on the lantern, pointed it back. It was like staring at a flood of black.
Through one door, out the other, my eyes on the X’s across the walls.
I pushed Justinian in front of me, kept myself in the backline.
“Follow the X’s!” I screamed. He kept running, didn’t even listen. I looked back and forward. They scattered across the walls, they crawled on all six of their legs, eating the very floor as they came through. The giant white skulls across their carapaces made that much worse by the rising smoke and glare of the light.
We went through the halls. Through the narrow halls, where corpses were eaten and crumbled and stomped over by the stampede. The sounds of squeeks and of trampled bone in the air like mice and elephants both decided to make a festival of the place.
Then they flooded from the holes in the walls, then they came around and I ducked - holy shit - one of them flew over my head, with such speed that it struck the wall across and knocked its own head. It didn’t stop. None of them did. The corpses around us exploded, the creature went through the weak dirt, tunneling out like sharks in mud. Flying almost, out of one hollow and into another. Into the ceremonial room - I noticed a vase in the corner, ran to it. We were almost there, Justinian stopped.
“L-let me help!” He screamed. I kicked a vase down as blockade. It rolled down a hall and ran over one roach.
“Run!” I said.
But he wasn’t listening, just looking back and forth.
“What’re you doing, run!” I said.
But the dumbass didn’t listen. He just kept looking back and forward with his shivering sword out.
“Run, Justinian, run!”
It came from the side. He didn’t see it. My eyes widened, because I knew before him.
Two scythe like arms struck his abdomen.
I bolted for him, grabbing papyrus on scattered book shelves. Lantern on my waist, knife in my other hand. I grabbed the monster by Justinian and turned it over, stabbing at its neck in between its carapace. My blade squished inside its soft flesh, it screamed and buzzed and squirmed on the floor. Then I turned over the creature and rolled it down the hall, like a barrel.
“Justinian?” I looked down. Pulled at him by the shoulders.
He looked at me, blood pooling in his mouth, hand grabbing onto my own.
He wasn’t dead yet.
Not yet not yet not yet
I looked behind me, the flood approached.
And I knew then and there, looking at the wound across his abdomen and his spilling guts that I had to carry him. I put him over my shoulder and tossed the papyrus at last down the narrow passage. They fluttered in the air, I tossed my lantern over them. Corpses inside the walls, cobwebs, paper; all of it lit up and smoked the area. Black columns that burned my eyes. I pulled Justinian up, holding him by his shoulders as he held his stomach.
“Come on, you’ll make it.” I pushed him into the hole, the first hole I’d taken to get here. Behind me the squirming increases. The buzzing. Screeching almost. Through the fire I could hear them like the trot of death’s horse coming towards me. And behind me Justinian worked with bloody hands to push over brick and rock.
I followed suit, working at the hole to close. The last image, before the final brick came down, was one of a nightstalker against the backdrop of flames with his giant white skull glowing, enduring.
Death always endures.
