Inside
There is no way out of the Crucible. The worm burrows, but there is no way out.
INSIDE
a Susurrant Horror story
Inside
They tell me that I should fear the voices. That I should flee them.
The voices are little spiders, they say. Spinning little webs all about, to tangle me up. I do feel tangled by them. I feel them scratching, even when I can’t hear them.
But not always. Sometimes it is quiet, and we can live as we were meant to inside the Crucible. Peaceful, and contended. It is stuffy sometimes, and the mildew and dust choke me up, but I can’t fathom it being any different. My chest sometimes feels like it’s longing for something else, something fresher – but if such a thing exists, I never knew it.
Mother complains about the dark, too. She whispers sometimes, that it is hard to see. “Feels like it’s getting darker in here.” But it’s only whispers, and only to Father, who nods and does not speak of it any further. She does not want God to hear her, I think. Or perhaps the Minister, his hard, dark eyes carving through souls like a knife. I don’t mind the dark, though. “Our little worm,” Father had called me, once, and every so often he repeats it. “She doesn’t mind burrowing in the shadow at all.”
But the truth is, I do not know what they mean. I never knew the other side of it.
I am a worm, wrapped in dark, and it is all I will ever know. There is no ‘something else’.
There is no way out of the Crucible.
Well, that is…save for the Leaving. But I’m not to talk of the Leaving. Not, at least, until we have to.
--
I have chosen to explore. To burrow, and to tunnel, and to become slick with the grime and gloom of this place. I don’t have a lot of free time outside of sermons and cleaning duties, but sometimes I do. And then the Crucible is mine. I think the others – the adults, that is – see me as a worm, too, in that they don’t see me at all. There are no other children.
“God blessed us with just you.” That is what Mother had said.
But as I scurry and revel in the shadow, I can hear the hard stare of the Minister. He is an interruption to the contiguous gloom all about, and I don’t like it. I don’t like him. He is pale and spectral, as though he floats in the darkness that is my home. His voice is brittle, like the flakes that fall from the old, dry walls of the pantry. “God does not care for idle children.”
I am overcome by the urge to dart my tongue at him, but I hold back. I fear the Minister. Instead, I attempt to summon something like bashfulness, and remain silent.
He continues, bending awkwardly toward my low position. He is awkward, I consider, and it feels like heresy to think as much. “These are harsh times, young one. Great work is needed from everyone. Even you. Have I not told you that God is sorrowful, and we must give him our strength?”
I scurry away, and feel his gaze burning as I do so, even penetrating my wreath of black.
God is sorrowful. That is what the Minister always tells us. God is weak. God failed to save the world, and only humans – only great and prescient humans – designed the Crucible. But we must support God, and perhaps one day he will find the strength to defeat the demons, and revitalise the world.
The demons.
The Minister spoke of them, as whispering things in the dark. They whisper, yes, but they also gibber and rant. Sometimes they knock, from far away, and their knocks should be ignored, for they bring great evil. When he spoke this way, of those creatures, I shuddered, because I had heard them. I was mistrustful of the Minister and his gaze, but something about that rang true.
He had once concluded a sermon with a simple, “Even little worms cannot defy our duty to the sorrowful God.”
My Father had smiled knowingly, perhaps sensing that it was a clever and well-intentioned joke, as the Minister knew of my affectionate nickname.
I remember my Mother’s face, however.
It had been blank. Stony. Veiled and lacerated uncannily by the same shadows in which I thrived.
--
I rush through the cramped halls of the Crucible. I take in the smells – acrid and damp – and the warped world which materialises through the gloom. It is so familiar to me.
But as I burrow in the dark, there is a fear burrowing through my mind. One I do not understand. My Mother had, in hushed tones, spoken of famine. “There isn’t enough. I’m worried. The mushrooms aren’t growing. Do you think there might be a Leaving?”
But the concept of the Leaving is so remote from me that it, itself, does not seem to be the niggling fear. Life in the Crucible is forever. If anyone were to Leave, it would not be me, or my Mother or Father, or – regrettably – the Minister. It is a distant, distant supposition.
And yet, still, it surges through my mind as a distant yet imminent terror.
Something else is there, too, and at first I am unable to understand that it is external from me. A vocal tendril reaching out from the shadow.
A whisper.
Except there is force behind it, even if it seems far away, and muffled.
Let us in, it comes. Let us in. We just want to help.
There are knocks, now. Slow, and fast, and all kinds together, weaving into a cacophony. The demons are at the gates. Their whispering words transmute into singing, but I can’t be sure if it’s actually singing.
I flee, back towards my parents.
They are not there.
“Where are they?” I scream, to nobody in particular.
The Minister separates from the shadow, inspecting me with his rat-like eyes and his gaunt face. “Your Mother wants you to come to her. We must hurry.”
Thoughts of Mother overwhelm anything else, and for the moment I forget all about the whispers, and the demons at the gate. There is only Mother, and what she needs from me – her little worm.
I follow quickly, trying to match the Minister’s long strides. He does not merge with the shadow like I do, but in his paleness is a wan and uncanny candle through it.
This is his domain. All of this. He created it, invited people into it so he might save them from the demons, and that we might pray to the sorrowful God, and live and die in the darkness.
And die.
He has brought me to the banquet hall. Candles flicker – so many of them, I cannot see – my usual dark-senses are flooded out by them. I cannot make out faces at the table, only blurs, as when the wet grime sometimes falls into my eyes when crawling and scrabbling.
But I adjust.
The Minister is sombre. “You must sit, Grace.”
I do, because I do not know what else to do. I sit, and I search for Mother, but I cannot find her. Father sits away from me, down the long table. His eyes are downcast. He is sad. He is pathetic.
The Minister has seated himself as well, at the head of the table. He is obfuscated by the longest and most slender candle and its haze, but I can still see the shape of him through that brittle voice. “Leavings are a time of sorrow, but also of joy,” he resounds, gratingly. “When they come, they are a necessity. When one departs, it is through the will of the sorrowful God.”
Briefly, I think to the demons – are they still there, outside? Flitting in the destroyed world of the apocalypse beyond the Crucible, waiting to impart their evil?
And yet when I envisage demons, all I can see is the Minister.
“Dinner is served.” He announces this with finality, and revels in it. A large cloth is removed from the centre of the table, and dinner is revealed.
Mother is still, and silent. I had always fallen asleep long before her, and she always woke before me. I had never seen her like this.
So still, and so silent.
“Indulge.” His brittleness is coated in perverse enjoyment. That truth radiates through me.
The guests indulge.
They open her, and extract from her. They immediately become beasts. Become demons. Mother’s blood is watery, and slips to the table like soup. A frenzy rises amongst the guests and soon they are fighting over one another. I cannot look away. They delve their hands deep and pull out long, bloody tubes which squirm like great worms. They are her insides, now outside. Now outside. They bite down, and they consume. They consume. I cannot look away.
Father stands and wobbles, and approaches the repast. Slowly, so slowly, he reaches toward Mother and pulls parts of her towards him. Towards his mouth.
I look away.
The Minister watches me.
He is a demon. Whatever he is, he is a demon.
I want to stand. I want to fight. I want to save Mother, but she isn’t here anymore. Wherever she has gone, I hope it is not to the embrace of this sorrowful, terrible God. I hope she has gone somewhere where there is light, and sky.
Even in my shock, I hear the demons. I hear their distant rumble, now accompanied by other sounds – a screeching. And suddenly there are other noises too, more familiar: more real. The sound of footsteps on stone, of stone breaking. Of the voices of men. Real people.
Not demons.
They enter the banquet hall. None of the guests, save for the Minister, stop to look at the newcomers. Mother’s flesh and blood is all they see now.
One of the newcomers makes a strange noise, and it takes me a moment to realise he is retching. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, with alarm. “Fucking hell. What the fuck is going on?”
But Father and the other guests cannot see. Their vision is all red.
Another voice – an unfamiliar voice, but lightly whispering as though one of the demons – draws to my side, and there is a touch on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “We tried to come sooner. My God. I’m so sorry. We didn’t know where you all were being kept. Let’s get you out of here. You’ll be okay.”
I am numb.
I hear that I am hissing, that I am trying to run.
Not from them, but from where I know they want to take me. They want to take me to the world of light. I know now that there is a world of light, beyond this terrible place. But it is not my place. I am a worm. A creature of darkness.
I flee into the embrace of the dark. That’s what I want, more than anything, even more than I want Mother. I was born into it, into the blood-soaked soil and caverns, and they will never find me.