“Shadow,” she said.
I jerked my head and my light. My carnivorous shadow friend fluttered away from me.
I got my foot on the ladder and started climbing down. It was hard to do with my flashlight, and I knew if I dropped it, I was dead meat. Maybe the things wouldn’t come down here, but even still, if I dropped the light, when I went up, they’d be waiting.
The deeper I went the stinkier it got.
What had seemed like depth from the bridge, darkness in the light, was something moving, gurgling, and stinking.
Ed functioned as a fish, but had never been completed. Like Bjoe said, someone forgot, or the mechanisms just played out too soon. Still, Ed was working all right, and his innards were working satisfactorily enough to manufacture what we in the bathroom business (which is pretty much all of us), would describe as pure-de-ole- identifiable-for-a-fact-you-bet-your-smelly-ass S-H-I-T.
No question there.
13
I shined my light down there. The tunnel was pulsing, sucking in that nasty goo. I thought, well, I die this way, it isn’t a death I ever expected. It was, to put it mildly, a unique way to go. Had to be better than cancer or some sort of horrid disease, going slow, like being gummed to death by proteindeprived octogenarians.
In a way, it was no less dignified than aging and lying in your own shit and being eaten away slowly from the inside. Of course, if I were home, who was to say I wouldn’t just die quick of a heart attack at the age of eighty while in bed with a twenty-five-year-old hooker with her little finger crooked up my ass.
So, that thinking business, sometimes it was better not to do too much of it. It could get you in trouble.
I was pondering this to the point of almost feeling that hooker’s little finger in my tail, when suddenly, above me, there was light.
Not heavenly light, but light. And it was too much light for Reba’s flashlight. Light from a distance, filtered through something the consistency of a gunnysack. It held for a long moment, then went out.
“The bus,” Reba said. “Oh, God, Jack, come up.”
I carefully padded my way up the shit-slick ladder onto the bridge, somehow maintaining my grip on the flashlight.
When I was standing beside her, she said, “Wait.”
I waited. The birth of the universe couldn’t have been any slower than that wait.
Then, the light.
When the beams hit, the darkness shredded like something dark tossed into a fan. There was a sound like a baseball card in bicycle spokes, the bicycle being peddled fast.
“The darkness,” Reba said. “It’s absolutely alive with them.”
“They may be the dark,” I said.
When the bus’s head beams went out, I made a swooping movement with my light and Reba flashed hers about too. After a moment, I used the light to nab the direction of the bus, though I couldn’t actually see it in my feeble beam, and pulled the flashlight over my shoulder. I did this repeatedly, signaling for them to come.
“Oh, Jack, behind you.”
I turned with the light. The darkness sucked back a bit, the bridge trembled.
“Sorry,” Reba said. “I had the light on it, but it was still coming.”
“They’re not as afraid now,” I said. “They’re getting brave.”
“Look.”
We could see from a great distance the bus beams moving toward us, two headlamps that looked to be the size of the tips of our thumbs.
Seeing the light grow and brighten was as hypnotic to us as it might have been to a moth. Soon, we stood on the bridge in a bath of yellow. It was heartening.
We worked our way back to the bus, and to get in the door, we had to step momentarily out of the glow of the bus’s head beams and into shadow. Our flashlights seemed less bright than before, and I could feel those things all around us, closer, touching, almost tasting us. Steve, sitting in the driver’s seat, worked the door lever and let us in. As the door slammed behind us, Steve, eyes wide, said, “You don’t want to know what was right behind you, almost up your asses.”
Inside, everyone gathered around, and we told what had happened. Steve drove the bus right up to the edge of the divide. He let the bus idle. The lights struck across the chasm like a golden honey bridge.
“It’s ugly down there,” I said. “Once you go in, you might be wadded up with the turds. If you aren’t, you’ll be stuffed with turds, won’t be able to breathe. I don’t see a way to make it work.”
“We haven’t got but one choice,” James said. “We got to go back into the light. Maybe Bjoe will let us stay with him. He might do that. Or we have to fight him. Hell, Grace can kick Bjoe to death. We can become the leaders. We can’t get out without being killed, and we can’t stay back here in shadow, so seems to me, that’s the only way to go.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “we’re a little outnumbered. Not even Grace can fight all of them. Not even with our help.”
“Bjoe might listen to reason,” James said. “I mean, we’ll be in the bus. We’d have some protection, and we could fight them if they try and come in. I think we got a better chance that way instead of waiting for our fucking ears to pop, diving into that shit, and hoping we aren’t made into turds or stuffed with them.”
“He’s got a point,” Homer said.
“Much as I hate to admit it, he does,” Grace said. “But I’m not big on going back. A place I’ve already been that isn’t good, doesn’t seem worth going back to.”
“Fucking news flash,” James said. “We’ve already been here, too, and it ain’t for shit.”
Steve had killed the engine while we were talkin’. Now he turned the starter and fired it up again.
“Hey, man,” I said, “what’s the scoop?”
“I don’t want to go back,” Steve said, “and we’re at the end of the line here, so why don’t we go forward?”
“You been sniffing glue, doing the bag?” James said.
“Do you feel it?” Steve said. I had, but it hadn’t really registered. “We’re surfacing.”
Everyone was silent for a moment, then Homer said, “Yeah. We are. But for how long? It may have been kind of my idea, but I’m liking it less all the time,”
“We can’t go back,” Steve said. “There’s only one place to go… Into the shit.”
“Oh, man,” James said, “you don’t mean it?”
“The bus is our only protection,” Steve said. “It might survive the process.”
“And if it does,” Homer said, “we’ll squirt out the fish’s ass and into a whole hell of a lot of deep water. We’ll sink like a goddamn brick tied to an anvil tied to a Cadillac transmission.”
“We have to be ready,” Steve said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” James said.
“When we shoot out-”
“-you mean if we shoot out. And if we do, we’ll sink, like the way Homer said.”
“-we have to be ready to open windows. They slide down, so the water pressure ought to allow that. We slide them down, and we swim out.”
“Oh, that’s a good plan,” Homer said. “And why don’t we find something heavy to tie to our dicks to make it just a little fucking harder?”
“We haven’t got much time,” Steve said. “My ears are clearing. We’re reaching the surface.”
“Count my ass out,” James said. “Give me a flashlight. I’ll take my chances back with the cannibals.”
“It’s now or never, folks,” Steve said.
I gave James my flashlight, said, “Good luck, man.”
“It would be best if we all went back,” he said. “Best all around.”
