This story is a sequel to the 2017 story “The Tunnel Boy,” which you can read here.
I remember the fugue best, almost better than I remember the tunnels. I remember thinking that I must be dead, and the tunnels were life – either that or I had finally made my way to being alive. I spent most of the next few days in bed, so exhausted I had to think about every breath. What hurt most were my bones, my muscles, the parts of me hiding deep under the skin. Like my drifting mind, my bones would not be quiet. They loved everything. I felt their hunger for the bedspread, their curiosity about the headrest, their frenzied contemplation of the floor and ceiling. Something inside of me had changed and it didn’t feel like me anymore.
As far as my professors were concerned, they were very sorry that I had thrown up – not a lie – and most of them told me where to find the homework, which I hardly planned to do. How do you slide back into a routine after something like that? If there was an answer I sure as hell didn’t know it. I didn’t even want to know it. What kind of a person would I be if I could wrap my head around this? Would I even be one anymore?
My dreams and my sheets were a mess, soaked through from the clothes I hadn’t cleaned or changed out of. I could still smell that place, but I didn’t dream about it. Instead I found myself on a cracked, corpse-gray plane that stretched out forever, low-hanging mist obscuring anything that might interrupt it.
A few dozen feet from me was a man, Eastern European looking in that stereotypical sharp and stern way, maybe in his late thirties or early forties. He sat, in his monk’s robe and braided crown of marigolds, hunched over and furiously scribbling in an open book, worn and leather-bound. I walked up to him and he held his free hand out to stop me, still writing with the other.
“Cut it out, kid,” he mumbled. “Gonna make me lose my spot.”
I tried to get back into it. I stumbled to the shower after a good few days in bed. Was I hungry? I couldn’t figure that out, but I was definitely dirty. I passed the sink I’d thrown up in. It had been cleaned, but I knew it was dirty too. Dirty in the same way I was.
Something about the shower drain gurgling under me made me uneasy. I thought of that huge mouth with its filthy teeth, thirsty forever like the drain. Something like gravity pulling everything in. That mouth was still out there somewhere. I kept that in mind as the drain guzzled down almost all my proof of that trip, proof I didn’t want anyway. Could it be called proof if it ultimately proved nothing? My clothes and sheets held onto the rest, but I would wash those soon too.
My first day back in class deteriorated gradually, like my trip through the tunnels. First, Calculus, exactly as boring as ever. My bones hated that one, rejected it. “If you’re taking Physics One,” the professor said, “you know that these equations are only abstractions of real processes that happen on every level in the world we live in. It all makes sense according to the laws of nature.” My marrow swam with disgust, leaked it out into my veins. There had to be another layer to reality. Otherwise, how could I have ended up in that place? That dry erase board was a liar. Liar, liar, liar. The chant of my blood.
I excused myself to go to the bathroom. No one watched me leave. I itched my arms and legs in there for ten minutes, begging them to quiet down. They didn’t.
There’s a kind of fly called a botfly that catches mosquitoes mid-flight and lays its eggs on them. When the mosquito lands on you, the eggs hatch and the maggots crawl down into the hole the mosquito makes, where they grow inside your skin, feeding on the meat around them. They’re courteous passengers, with the decency to secrete an anesthetic so you barely notice them. Some people who end up with these botflies report a fondness for them, like pets or even children, often allowing them to make their pupa in a cup of dirt once they drop out of the wound. Sitting there on the toilet lid, bargaining and bickering with this feeling deep within me, I began to feel something similar had happened to me in that place. But what anesthetic did this passenger use to dull me down? What was it doing to me that I couldn’t see? And, when it decided to crawl out and make its pupa – so to speak – what would emerge?
My phone buzzed. Reminder – Physics 1 Lab, 11:30 AM. I emailed my professor, told her I hadn’t gotten better, and went back to my dorm.
As I put the code in, the door to the tunnels taunted me off to the side before the hall with all the rooms. Maybe the answers are in there. But I didn’t feel any pull. Whatever allowed me into that place had passed over like the shadow of a cloud on a sunny day. Now I had to stay here, stuck in the Sun, with my bones screaming for the shade.
The instant mac and cheese looked bad. So did the ramen. You know when you’re hungry but mostly because you’re bored and nothing really looks good? That’s where I was at. I hadn’t eaten in days, but food didn’t seem important anymore. I wasn’t going to die, I hadn’t lost weight or anything, I just wasn’t interested in eating.
Sprawled out on my bed – dirty, but dry and crunchy now – I thought about my ferryman and the kindness of monsters as sleep took me again.
There I was. That cracked plane, that low fog, that strange man scribbling away. Exactly the same as last time, only now I could smell something kind of like vinegar.
I walked to him. He held his hand to stop me again, but I kept going. He didn’t look up at me.
“Listen. What I’m writing here is very important. It’s the only thing I have. I won’t be interrupted.”
I read the words. There were only three, written over and over again in different orders. In disbelief I opened my mouth and they came out in the order I knew them:
“As I am, I am As.”
“Oh, good,” the man grunted. “He reads.”
“You’re not a dream.”
“No, I’m not. Hell, what does it matter? I…” He paused for a moment to get back into the groove of scribbling. “I used to lie and say I was. Just to make it easier. Usually got ‘em to wake up right away, too, which is a treat.”
“Where are we?”
“This isn’t a real place, far as I can tell. It’s something I made so I could hang on to…” He gestured at his body, at the book. “This.”
“You wrote the words on that banner.”
“I haven’t made any banners. Maybe you saw something like that, yeah. Try as she might she can’t get rid of me all the way. I feel myself bleeding through in her work sometimes. I’m a clinger.” As I am, As I am, I am As, As I am As…
“Her?” I hadn’t been this lost since… well, the tunnels. “Who is her?”
“I called her my queen. We called her our queen. There was more to it, a lot more, but that’s all I’ve got for you. She wore away most of it. Took her a while, but we’re not exactly short on time.”
“Is there anything you can explain?”
For the first time, he looked up at me. His eyes were so old and so sad. “Yeah. Buckle up. Get ready. She’s coming. And you’re at the center this time, so you don’t even get the mercy of losing yourself to her when everyone else does. Not that the Empty Faith is any better.” He turned back to his book and started writing again. “Seems you’re at the center of it a lot, for some reason.”
I felt the dream fading, the waking world pulling me back up. “Wait!”
“Not in my control, sadly.”
“Have you met me before? Another me? Is that what this is about?”
“Kid… I think you’ve met another you before. It’s not that unusual. Expand your brain a little.”
And then he was gone.
I wrote the words on a sideways sheet of loose-leaf paper. ‘Hot dog style,’ the teachers used to call it.
AS I AM I AM AS
Redundant, the last three. I scribbled them out.
From the way he was writing, it worked both ways. ‘As I am’ and ‘I am as.’ They both meant the same thing. ‘As’ was a name, not a word.
Maybe… initials? A-dot-S I am? I went through all the people I knew with those initials in my head, everyone I could think of. Friends, family, people at school, scientists and celebrities, dictators from history and demons from the Bible… no luck. Nothing really fit. I could be reasonably sure the monk from my dream wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Shepherd, Alicia Silverstone, or my stoner friend from high school, Andy Stevens. He felt older than that anyway.
A-dot-S. Maybe the A wasn’t a first name… he looked like a monk, so maybe he was an Abbot? Abbot something?
Was any of this even important? I needed to go for a walk.
Eight-fifty-two PM. Long past dark in October. Cold night air, too crisp for the dampness that lingered around the edges of the sidewalk, where the wind peeled leaves up and stuck them back down in another spot. The city nearby turned the sky a toxic yellow-black, more of an orange down at the horizon. All beautiful in its way.
I started down the path toward the other end of campus. Maybe I could grab some coffee, get my brain jogging. Use it to help swallow all the ibuprofen I would probably need before the end of the night. Figure this whole mess out, if it could be solved. I thought for a minute about what I would order, and then I saw it.
In front of me on the sidewalk rested something that looked like five squirrels. All smooshed together, meat bleeding out the sides of the thing like a pile of roadkill, only it didn’t look disorganized to me. It didn’t read as injury. Just another way of putting an animal together, one that didn’t follow the old rules.
The thing looked at me with at least four eyes, and before it caved in like a condemned house, I swear it smiled.
My bones thought that was just perfect.
I tried not to scream before I bolted back to my dorm.
Three allergy tablets. One always made me drowsy, so three should put me out, I figured. I collapsed on my bed and waited for something to happen for what felt like an hour. Just when I thought sleep would never come, I felt my breath hitch, and then I was back with the marigold monk in that other place.
“Abbot!” I shouted, making him jump. “Does that mean anything?”
“Jesus, kid!” He set down his pen, and for the first time something like excitement entered his grim face. “Yes. That’s part of it. I… thank you.”
“You’re a monk. You were a monk of some god, right? Something you called your queen. She’s responsible for what I saw in the tunnels.”
“That all tracks.”
“I think she’s getting stronger. I saw something outside, it was like…” He started laughing and I trailed off. “What? What could be funny about any of this?”
“I’m sorry, kid, I don’t mean to be cruel.” He picked his pen back up, fading back to his usual self with a residual trickle of amusement. “You just don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“That this isn’t new to me. It’s not new in any sense of the word. This has been happening for longer than you can possibly imagine.” Writing again. I am As, I am As, I am… Abbot S, I am Abbot S…
“Hey. I brought you that information, the word abbot. The least you could do is try to help me out.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You clearly know something.”
The abbot’s hand shook and he threw down his pen again. “Would it honestly help you to know? It’s never helped anybody before.”
“Before. I don’t know what that means, before. You say this has been going on for a long time, whatever this is, but it’s also something that happened before. You could start by explaining what the hell you mean.”
He sighed. “I can give it a shot. But you’re not gonna like it.”
“I don’t like any of this. Not liking this isn’t going to change anything. I still want to know.”
“You’re right. It’s not going to change anything. But I’ll tell you what I know.”
I woke to the sound of my alarm going off. These must really be dreams, I thought, because dreams always end like that – right before they get interesting.
It’s almost worse when things go wrong in the daytime than at night. Light never spared me in the tunnels, and neither did the Sun today. Part of me wanted to call my campus a liar. Another part, that part in my bones, loved the change. Finally, some fresh air.
I saw a tree weeping huge gobs of wax like a fountain. Pus, maybe. It melted down the trunk and hardened at the base in a growing pile. The hardened stuff flaked off and wafted through the air like sick pollen, drifting past vague shapes of dark brown veins against the trunk.
Infection. Just something a body could do. Why did it have to be bad? Maybe it was better. Maybe the itch of the mosquito bite just made you feel alive.
“I had a dream last night.”
I whipped around toward the sound of the voice. A young woman, about my age. Her eyes were covered in the dust of sleep. Every part of her eyes.
“I had a dream and you were in it.”
“I’m sorry, I really have to get to class.” I turned around, walking faster. She kept up and kept talking.
“I dreamed about a huge cave, so dark and so cold. Every surface was coated in condensation, only it wasn’t water, or lime, or… no.”
“I don’t want to talk to you!” I started running.
“It was bile!” She screamed, keeping up. No one else seemed to notice her. I didn’t look at their faces long enough to try and figure out if anything was wrong with them too. “It was enzyme! It was her!”
“Get the fuck away from me!”
“And I started to get it,” she panted, legs flying, almost outpacing me. “She was the bile. She was the dark. She was that whole place.”
I turned around and pushed her to the ground. Nobody around us skipped a beat. They stumbled forward, intent on ignoring. Want to get to class on time, we’re pretty sure.
“Fuck you. Stop running after me. You’re fucking scaring me.”
She wasn’t, though. I wasn’t scared of her. I was scared of how much my blood agreed with every word she said.
“You were swimming in her ocean, at the center of it all. Bile in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin.”
“Stop.”
“I saw you.”
“Stop.”
“You loved it!”
And even as I ran the quarter-mile away toward class, leaving her behind to shriek her words at people who wouldn’t listen, I knew she was right.
On some level, deep within me, I did love this.
Not the thing in my blood and my bones, not the parasite from the other side. Me. We’d grown so close. Where did I begin and end?
Normal. Normal. This is normal.
I careened past the health center, the alumni union, the free gumballs in the student center lobby, breathless, almost spitting through the grimace trying to paste itself on my face.
How long to the building?
No time at all to the double doors of the library. I bolted in.
The library. My library. Never had it not been busy. But no one walked the aisles today.
I could smell the books extra strong today. They smelled like they had remembered they were supposed to be dirt. Trees removed from decay. And oh, the words inside! Where had that ink come from? Who could wait to find out? I couldn’t. She couldn’t.
What was left to do but wander the place I’d gone so many times to calm down? I remembered wishing everyone would shut up while I tried to work through some problem or another. Now I wanted them back. All their chatter, all their human error. Their inane comments, their insults, even their absentminded slurs and horrible comments that made me second guess this school.
I suppose I got my wish when I passed the big salt water fish tank in the center of the study room. “Hey, guys.” What were those pressed against the glass? Intestines? Maybe stretched out arms? Villi, or hair? What did it matter? Protrusions are protrusions. I hoped the fish and the sea stars had died rather than become a part of the mass spilling out the cable gaps in the aquarium hood.
It was horrible. I couldn’t stand it. And yet…
I touched it. Ran my fingers across the few inches of quivering flesh that poked out of the top. I remembered tearing a membrane somewhere, defiling it, just to get away from things like this. Get away. Who would want do something like that? Who had done something like that?
Not me. Not her.
My fingers enjoyed the drip of it. I’d finally scratched an itch the thing inside me had been dying to get. In satisfaction it retreated, and I felt separate again. The kid who went into the tunnels and brought this thing with him. The kid who wanted people came back, and he abhorred this thing, and those things walking around outside, just waiting to become.
With my hand still wet, my ears ringing, and the yolk of my backpack still hugged to me, I curled up on the floor and reached out for the abbot again.
“How do we stop her?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you were going to tell me.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not!?”
“Because there is no stopping her.”
“Don’t talk like that. There’s got to be something.” In stories there had always been a trick. The monster has a weakness, a true name that needed to be spoken. There was nothing in the universe that could not be stopped by someone, at some cost.
“There’s not.” He said it with a confidence I refused to accept.
“There is always something. You can help me. You know about this thing.”
He looked up from his book, dull resignation in his eyes. “You just don’t get it, do you, kid? This is what she does. She’s done it more times than you or I could count and she never gets sick of it.”
“That’s the other thing I don’t get about you. There’s no way something like this happened before.”
“It hasn’t. Not here. Earth, yes, she takes it over and over, but not the same one.” His voice grew louder as he fumed and frustrated. “There’s a different Earth for every possible physical outcome, right down to the atom, and every single one is her favorite toy. She plays with it until it breaks and leaves a mess for him to clean up. That was the deal they worked out at the start.” He returned to his book, frowning. “I am… I am As… Abbot…” The more he wrote, the more he softened. “Reality is littered with the Earths she’s ruined. You can’t stop her. No one can. Believe me, kid. You try and steer this thing, you just end up in the gutter.”
We stayed there a minute, him writing, me staring off into the fog. I tried to think of some protestation to hit him back with, but really, would anything work? It’s not like he had a reason to lie to me. I knew deep down that he wasn’t. Everything fit together, especially according to the thing inside me. And that wasn’t lying either. I didn’t think it could lie.
“I didn’t mean to yell earlier,” he said. “You’re not the problem here. It’s just… once you’ve had this conversation enough times, you have to get right to the point.”
“You’ve had this conversation before… with me?”
“You and everyone else.”
“You don’t seriously mean everyone else.”
“I might as well,” he said with a chuckle. I didn’t feel much like laughing, but I heard myself giggle anyways.
“So… what do you think I should do, then? What’s worked before? Or had the best outcome, I guess? If there is one?”
The abbot put his pen down and thought. “There’s one thing I can try. Maybe it’ll soften the blow a little bit.”
“I thought you couldn’t–”
“Steer this thing? I can’t. But I can push it around sometimes.” He winked. “I think you’re about to wake up.”
“Will I see you again?”
“As just me and just you? Probably not. Full speed ahead with her agenda.”
“In case I don’t see you again… thank you. For trying.”
“I’m not a fan of trying. It only ever hurt me. But let’s see where this goes, eh?”
I felt myself rising from sleep. “Hey! One more thing!”
“What?”
“Abbot! You’re an abbot!”
“Oh! You’re right, I am! Thanks, kid!”
“Don’t mention it!”
I woke up outside. Maybe. Outside and inside were starting to feel like the same thing. I was in the library still, but it wasn’t a library anymore. It was just part of the landscape. Sky doesn’t stop being sky when there’s a roof in the way. I moved the roof aside.
Up in the sky, a little closer than the Moon, I could see bits of somewhere else. It was done leaking in. She was pushing it in now, flooding this Earth, my Earth, with everything she wanted to put here from the start. How to describe it? Like floating islands, I guess. Connected by strands I knew were there but couldn’t see. My bones could see them. The new order inside of me recognized them. These were the tunnels I’d wandered into, and they were properly here now, joining with this world like a ship finally coming to dock.
Blood drenched the sky. I thought about the library roof. Earth had a new roof now. We were in that cave, the one with the bile, the one the girl had screamed at me about. It had swallowed us up. It was not infinitely large, but it was too big to wrap your head around. Bigger than the Sun, bigger than stars.
“Friend?”
I turned toward the voice. It was my ferryman. A tunnel had opened behind me, another entrance to that place, like the one I’d walked out of when I said my goodbyes. He still had my shoes, dangled around the fat folds of his neck by the shoelaces. It must have been difficult for him to put them there without hands.
I stumbled toward him and wrapped my arms around him. We stood there and cried, maybe for a few minutes, maybe for an hour. I felt the world buckling around me. I heard screams, and rejoicing, and revelation. I felt the abbot in each sound. I felt myself in each extreme.
“It’s you,” I finally said. “It’s you in my bones.”
“We are back at the campus,” the ferryman said, almost in the tone of a joke. “We are back at the building.”
“Sure are.”
I let myself look into the sky. The Sun was gone, had been gone a while. In its place, descending past the Moon at what must have been an astonishing speed, were things that looked like huge diamonds. At least a dozen of them. These weren’t hers. They were too clean and geometric for her. Maybe they belonged to the other one the abbot had mentioned, that she had made a deal with.
“I don’t think I know where to go,” I told the ferryman. “Do we need to go somewhere?”
“We can go. This friend can show you.”
I walked with him – side by side this time – through the door, back the way we came.