I don’t think I can ever have sex with a woman again.
Ouroborus
The roots of great trees had burrowed through the ceiling over many years, growing ever downward and piercing into the floor as well. Into the walls, too…squeezing between mortared stones, the larger roots even nudging blocks out of their sockets so that they had fallen to the endless Tunnel’s floor here and there. Some of these roots were as big around as trees themselves. Noon marveled, because he estimated this stretch of the Tunnel was hundreds of feet below the surface. Not only that, but by his estimation the surface in this region was now a blasted desert devoid of any life. The forest that had once covered this area should be decades extinct. Maybe the trees were indeed gone, but their roots continued to dig blindly deeper and deeper, as if to one day sip the very magma from the planet’s core. These roots still alive like nerves after a tooth is extracted. Refusing to die, determined to survive at any cost, but without quite realizing why they should do so. Just like Noon.
This spider-webbed lattice, this living weave, became so tight in spots that Noon could barely squeeze himself through it. He didn’t want to draw his machete and hack at the roots, because he didn’t want to leave a trail the Foeti could easily follow. Yet who was he deceiving, in that concern, but himself? Though the floor of the Tunnel here was of uneven flagstones, not dirt as it had been some miles back, he knew he was leaving plenty of signs of his passage for the Foeti and other denizens of the Tunnel to follow. The Foeti might not possess the sense of smell, but it/they could see clearly enough—just as other entities might not have the sense of sight, but could sniff the blood in his veins from a mile away.
It was difficult to tell how far behind him the Foeti was/were. The Tunnel made its/their cries echo and distort. It/they might be lost way back in the steam as black as squid’s ink which he had groped his way through an hour ago, or as close as the beginning of the root forest. Its/their wails sounded like a nursery of newborn infants drowning at the bottom of the sea.
Though the wails sounded like multiple creatures to him now—and on a few occasions he had injured the/a Foeti so badly that he was sure it would die of its wounds—he was not certain if there were many of them, or only a single individual. His opinion on the subject changed from day to day, from hour to hour.
In any case—and fortunately for him—even if the Foeti was/were fairly near, the tangled roots were too dense to see through very deeply…and though there were bare light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, they were spaced far apart so that the gaps between their pools of light offered brief shelters of darkness. He only hoped that nothing hostile was lying in wait for him in one of these intervals of darkness. The bulbs rested against the roots here and there, and their heat had scorched them black in spots though they hadn’t caught fire. Fire was perhaps Noon’s worst fear. If he ever came to a place in the Tunnel that was filled with flame, he would have to wait for the fire to die down before he could proceed. In that time, the Foeti might catch up to him. And if the fire was of a kind that would never die away, then he would have to turn back. That was simply impossible to contemplate. In all this time of running through the Tunnel, he had not once turned back.
He estimated that he had been running for a year, at least…ever since he had fallen through the hole in the rotted floor of his moldering house in the old, old city—waking from unconsciousness to find himself in the Tunnel. The ceiling far above him, with just a dim bluish light showing him the hole his weight had broken open, so high and out of reach. Luckily, the floor of the Tunnel had been of a thick black soil in that section (churned up by a seething population of nightcrawlers), and it had broken his fall.
The walls of that section were also of wood, and Noon had been attempting to climb back up, digging torn fingers and toes between the rough boards to find purchase, when the Foeti had lunged out of the shadows for the first time—its hairless head disproportionately immense, its naked body undeveloped, like an embryo as big as he was. He had dropped down from the wall and begun running, then. He had been running ever since. Sleeping when it was moderately safe enough to risk it. Eating what edible plants, mostly fungus, he could harvest, and whatever edible animals he could kill. Drinking water that trickled down tiled walls, or that pooled here and there, or that flooded whole areas of the Tunnel he had to wade through. When he couldn’t run, he dragged himself along. He had even crawled on all fours.
In some places he had found doors blocking his way. Doors of decomposing gray-green wood. Doors of metal almost lost under incrustations of red rust or green verdigris. To his infinite relief on each occasion, he had not yet encountered a locked door. But he had done his best to barricade them once he was on the other side. Several times, in narrow parts of the Tunnel, he had even constructed and barricaded his own doors to impede, if not halt, the progress of the Foeti. Of course, elsewhere the Tunnel was so impossibly wide that he couldn’t see its sides, let alone create a door to block it. Only a few miles back, in fact, he had encountered one such region of the Tunnel, its walls lost in gloom but the ceiling so low he had needed to tuck in his head to avoid bumping it against a smooth surface apparently made of thick black (perhaps volcanic) glass.
Over the months, this subterranean and stressful existence had taken its toll on him. His hair, formerly long and worn in a queue tied with a black ribbon, had begun to come out in stringy handfuls. He had lost weight, his skeletal condition impossible to ignore as his clothing tattered away until all he wore now were a pair of ragged trousers cut off at the knees. Worst of all were the headaches, so severe at times that he wanted nothing more than to stop running, running, running, to just drop down and curl in a fetal position and wait for his enemy to overtake him at last…to deliver him from his torment. His skull seemed to be literally and steadily ballooning with his pain, as though filling up with infected pus…
The forest of roots was so dense that when Noon suddenly emerged from it he was surprised, shaken out of his numb, robotic reverie—not having seen its terminus approaching. Ahead of him loomed a great staircase, the ceiling sloping up at a steep angle, vanishing into a murk no longer illuminated by dangling light bulbs. Straightening up, Noon moved close to the bottom step. He prodded it with his toe, and reached out to run his hand over a black-painted wall with a crinkled texture. His suspicions about the surface of the staircase, walls, and the angled ceiling were confirmed when he tore free a little tab of the black material to reveal words beneath it, printed in a small type, black against white. Newspaper. The walls, ceiling and the stairs themselves were composed of papier-mache, covered over with a glossy black paint.
Were the stairs nothing more than glued paper, then? Would they support his weight? As he tested his foot on the first step, he realized there were odd symbols marked on it in a dark but flourescent purple paint. More symbols, but different, on the second step. And so on, these characters varying on each. Did they tell a saga? Some parable? But if so, was this story to be read from the bottom to the top of the staircase, or from the top to the bottom? Or might it be read either way?
Noon had taken only three wary steps up the flight of paper or paper-coated stairs when a/the Foeti burst directly through the wall at the foot of the staircase. The thickly-painted papier-mache there had flimsily covered over and hidden a doorway in the true wall beneath.
Noon then began racing up the steps as fast as his legs could propel him, terrified to have his foe so close at his heels in so unexpected a manner. He could no longer be timid about the staircase’s sturdiness. But he needn’t have worried, as it turned out, about the staircase supporting him or the Foeti catching him—just yet, at least. After several moments, he realized the Foeti was not pursuing him up the steps, and after a few moments more, he reined in enough fear that he was able to stop and look back down the way he had come.