Sydney helped Karnage up the rungs, and the two of them pulled themselves through the open grate. Karnage felt like a rat crawling out of a drain. Every movement echoed through the cavernous darkness. The only light in the room was the ring of white light around the grate. All that it illuminated was Karnage and Sydney and a soft circle of grey floor.
The ring of light pulled itself from the edges of the grate, and pooled into a puddle under their feet. It shot a squiggling luminescent tendril forward and formed a second puddle just a few feet ahead of them. A third tentacle shot out of the second pool, forming a third, and then a fourth formed out of the third. The pools propagated themselves off into the distance until they were barely visible at the edge of a black horizon, ghostly white lily pads in the dark, quivering and fidgeting.
“That looks like a path,” Sydney said.
“I know,” Karnage replied.
“Think we should follow it?”
Karnage shook his head. “Fuck no.”
“Me neither.”
The lily pad beneath their feet flickered for a moment, then winked out.
“Is that supposed to be a hint?” Sydney asked.
“If it was,” Karnage said, “I’m not listening.”
The next nearest lily pad winked out. Then the next and the next in a chain reaction of winks that looked like a long line of eyes closing in a Rockettes-style routine. Finally, only one tiny pinpoint of light flickered in the distance.
“I think they really want us to follow the path,” Sydney said.
“Well, they can go fuck themselves.” He looked up into the dark. “I’m not gonna be led around like a rat in a trap! You hear me?!”
The pinprick of light shot off angry squiggling lines in all directions, stretching from horizon to horizon. Then, impossibly, the lines turned sharply upward and shot up walls the height of cliffs. They disappeared behind dark rounded masses above them, and spanned out, soaking the walls in a grey luminous glow.
Karnage and Sydney stared up at the dark mounds high above. White light flashed and popped from bulbous mound to bulbous mound. Suddenly, the mounds twitched, and the entire ceiling slowly lowered towards them.
“Back through the grate!” Karnage shouted. But it was too late. The grate had slammed shut behind them.
They looked up and watched as the ceiling slowly moved down.
As the ceiling grew closer they saw it was composed of thousands of translucent spheres of varying sizes. Dark shapes bobbed within them. The spheres stopped lowering just inches above their heads. The sudden stop forced the dark shapes to float down against the bottom of their spheres. A human face appeared. It was a man with his knees hugged to his chest, sleeping peacefully. He bobbed back up and disappeared into the mists of the sphere.
“They’re human,” Karnage said.
“Not all of them.” Sydney reached up and grabbed a sphere the size of a basketball. She pulled it down. Its curled dark shape bobbed down and up, a tail clearly drifting from its back. “This one’s got a cat in it.” Sydney let the ball go, and it pushed up into the mass, forcing the other spheres to make room. The spheres rippled and bobbed out.
There was a faint rumbling, and suddenly the spheres parted to make room for one the length of a bus. It pushed itself well down through the mass, forcing Karnage and Sydney to drop to the floor. The sphere slowed to a stop inches above their heads, and moved back up again. The enormous black shape within pushed at the curve of glass for an instant, before the sphere and its contents disappeared back up into the ocean of spheres. Karnage and Sydney looked at each other in shock.
“Was that… a whale?” Karnage said.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t see it if you will.”
They tentatively stood. Karnage looked at the millions of spheres floating above them. “What do you think? Two of everything? Maybe more?”
Sydney shook her head. “What the hell is this?”
“Maybe it’s their larder.”
The spheres began to rise. The grey lights flickered out of them and moved back into the walls. The lights in the walls narrowed into tight lines and pulled back down into the floor where they collected in a pool of light under Karnage’s and Sydney’s feet. The room descended into darkness, but Karnage kept staring up, thinking of the millions of spheres hovering above him.
The puddle of light under their feet flowed forward, pulsing patiently just in front of them.
“I think it wants us to follow it again,” Sydney said.
“Yeah.” Karnage stared at the pulsing spot of light. It waited patiently as he tried to stop thinking about what loomed above him. He looked at Sydney.
“Well,” he said, “so long as they’re bein’ polite.”
CHAPTER FIVE
They followed the light across the floor for what felt like days. It stayed a half-step in front of them, rhythmically jumping ahead to prevent them from touching it with the tips of their feet. Karnage’s feet were starting to hurt and his neck ached from looking down at the light when it finally stopped moving.
Once they were standing on it, the glowing pool shot a coil of light forward that instantly sped straight up a wall directly in front of them. The lights flared out into tiny filaments and outlined a door the size of a hangar bay. The filaments broke apart, and rained down into a large glowing ring around the door. The door spiralled open with a loud aching groan. The lights flowed back into the lily pad under their feet. The lily pad drifted through the doorway, and pulsed patiently on the other side.
Karnage and Sydney followed it into the room. Once they were through, the lily pad shot strands of light in all directions. They travelled twice as far as the first room, literally disappearing over the invisible horizon. They were barely visible as thread-like strands as they snaked their way up distant walls the height of mountains. The lines eventually disappear behind an ever so slightly mottled ceiling in the distance. Pinpricks of light flickered and danced across the ceiling like stars. They grew larger in size as they slowly descended, finally revealing themselves to be glowing spheres.
The spheres were immense. Each one was many times larger than the biggest ones they had seen in the other room, each one practically a mountain floating unto itself. The dark masses moved down, revealing incredible shapes: great pyramids of crumbling stone; mammoth pointed steeples of a giant cathedral; winding twisting walls that looked like finely carved chunks from the Great Wall of China. Each monument ended in a perfectly smooth scoop of earth that encased its foundations. It was almost too much to take in.
Sydney craned her neck. “It’s like a giant museum.”
“Yeah,” Karnage scowled. “And we’re the exhibits.”
The spheres floated back up as the light drained from the walls. It shot back across the floor and coalesced into a tiny lily pad, bobbing and pulsing before their feet, urging them forward.
They followed into the darkness.
CHAPTER SIX
The light led them through another airplane-sized door into another room. This one wasn’t pitch black. There were faint flickerings of green in the distance that highlighted floating orbs. The toxic smell was more pungent in the air, and the white light didn’t launch boldly into the room. It cowered near their feet, before working up the courage to flicker and bob forward. It jumped erratically as it climbed the walls, as if trying to avoid the pulses of green light that occasionally ran through the room.
The light briefly flashed in one of the larger spheres, and the silhouette of the dark blob within was all too familiar to Karnage.
It was a giant horned worm.
“Jesus.”