Authors: Joseph Williams
I made my way out among the spooks, no longer frightened that they would reach out and throttle me. I didn’t even look at them as I shouldered my way toward the pews. My eyes were locked on the upper balconies, certain I would catch his movement eventually. A sign that he was watching me. Waiting for me. Maybe a symbol I could decipher into every answer I needed to leave.
He’s my only way home
, I thought.
The insanity of the notion made me laugh involuntarily. A short, barking sound that made my raw throat burn anew. How could
that
bastard be my only way home? To even joke about it was ridiculous. He was the reason I’d gone through all the shit on Furnace in the first place! If Teemo and I hadn’t spotted him approaching us down the city street, we wouldn’t have shot the flare that drew the rest of the squad to our location and got them killed. I don’t know the specifics of the initial melee aside from what other surviving crewmembers have filed in their reports, but I know we wouldn’t have sent the flare up right away if we hadn’t seen the clown demon. And if that son-of-a-bitch hadn’t bit through my helmet and dragged me off to his city hideaway, then I wouldn’t have had to cross the wastelands, lava lakes, mountains, corpse fields, or the city itself just to get back to where I’d started.
So for my rambling brain to even
suggest
that the clown demon could be anything but a mortal enemy was beyond absurd.
And yet, blame it on the dehydration (or I will for you), but there seemed to be truth to the idea. Why else would he have allowed me to live for so long? Why else would he have lured me into the cathedral and frozen the undead spooks when they were about to gut me (by then, I was sure it was him and not just some blessed coincidence)?
Because it’s more fun for him this way. He enjoys watching you suffer. As soon as you die, the game’s over and he has to return to his miserable existence on this miserable planet with nothing but corpses and man-eating monsters for company.
That also had a ring of truth to it, probably more so than the idea that this undoubtedly malevolent creature had somehow turned benevolent simply by kidnapping me and then watching me escape. Like a case of reverse Stockholm Syndrome.
“What do you want?” I asked.
My voice was much calmer this time. Steady and patient. If I didn’t hear an answer by the time I reached the door, I decided, I would leave the cathedral altogether and see if I could find answers elsewhere in the city. Or maybe I’d just book it to the far gate as fast as I could and pray I didn’t cross paths with any other demons along the way. I probably wouldn’t get far, but far crazier stunts have worked on the battlefield through the ages. Miracles and tragedies occur every single day.
“Did you
bring us here?” I pressed. “Is there a reason we were pulled here or was it just bad luck?”
No answer.
I was halfway to the large wooden doors, spinning in circles to scan each empty balcony. There was still no sign of movement.
Fuck it, then. You’re chasing shadows.
I wanted to believe it, but I still felt the clown’s eyes on me. They were heavy.
It’s all in your head. Of
course
you feel like something’s watching you. Something’s been watching you since you stepped out the airlock.
The head of the sculpture was pointed in my direction. Its empty gaze seemed somehow meaningful. I frowned and fought (unsuccessfully) to suppress a shudder, remembering the first time I’d encountered something extraordinary on Furnace aside from the crash itself. The memory filled me with dread.
My mother’s severed head. Rolling across the dusty ground like a tumbleweed. Her mouth stretched back in pain.
I clenched my fists and jaw.
“Was that you?” I shouted. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got, and I was already heated. At the rate I was going, I’d snap any moment unless an aneurysm dropped me first.
The spooks in front of the altar still hadn’t moved. I didn’t see anything on the balconies, either.
“Screw it,” I said. To punctuate my disdain, I spat precious saliva on the marble floor. “You’re nothing.”
The moment I turned my back to the altar, though, the whole congregation roared to deafening life again.
“Jesus!” I exclaimed.
The sound of every corpse screaming at once made me duck reflexively, like the sonic boom was actually a Tikhonov mine.
I probably should have headed straight for the doors then. I scrambled for cover behind the pews instead.
This is what you wanted all along, isn’t it?
I thought bitterly.
The spooks turned toward me but started dismantling the décor around the altar—ropes, string, nails, and banners—and separating the materials one by one rather than engaging me. They unwound the fabric in tandem, each completely focused on the task at hand. Like they didn’t notice me at all.
I stood and rapped my swollen knuckles on the back of the pew, just to see if I’d draw their attention again, but they kept on sorting. One of them even turned toward the sound, but not to look at me. Instead, he scooped up the head of the clown king and placed it back atop the sculpture’s neck.
Crowning the king,
I thought.
When I was certain their attention was otherwise occupied, I wandered back down the aisle toward the altar, careful to keep the pews nearby in case I needed a quick blockade.
The resurrected humans finished sorting the décor and started dragging the piles over to the sculpture in unison. They didn’t speak, yet somehow operated in perfect synchronization anyway.
“Here…here…here…” they chanted.
Not
this
bullshit
, I thought.
“Tscharia…Tscharia…Tscharia…”
They laid the fabric over the sculpture’s shoulders and draped bits of string over his face, making the detached head wobble to the point that it seemed like it would drop and shatter against the floor with any additional weight. For my part, I didn’t think that would necessarily be the
worst
end to the bizarre ritual, but somehow the head stayed put. Just to spite me.
When they finished dressing the sculpture, each damned soul returned at once to reclaim their stations. Those who’d been tangled at the front of the altar when I’d entered crawled back together, contorting their bodies enough so others could fit in the macabre puzzle they formed with their rotting limbs. Those who’d been pinned to the walls staggered over to a simple wooden table behind the altar and retrieved large stakes along with a blunt steel instrument. A group of them worked together to toss the knotted end of a rope onto the balconies and somehow managed to make it stick on the first try. They pulled themselves up the wall with the rope, then pinned themselves in tiny, wooden slats between stones with the stakes they’d brought from the altar.
“What the fuck…” I muttered under my breath for probably the hundredth time since I’d arrived on Furnace.
I watched with numb fascination as one by one they climbed to willingly impale themselves against the cold stone.
By my estimates, the process took the better part of five minutes. When it was over, the last corpse holding the rope walked it over to the altar, swung the slack over a dim chandelier I hadn’t noticed until that moment, and methodically hung himself above the corpses. There was a loud
crack
as he leapt and the drop caught him, nearly ripping his head from his body in the process. He started a pendulum swing in front of the clown king statue, which looked every bit like the Lincoln Memorial in its somber, slouched appraisal.
Before the hanged corpse stopped swinging—before, in fact, I could even process my surroundings well enough to realize I should get the fuck out of there as fast as possible—shadow enveloped the altar and consumed the tangle of bodies.
I sensed movement in the cloud. I also sensed that the others were gone and only two eyes watched me, but they were
powerful
eyes. Eyes that made my legs tremble. A stare that slithered into the core of my being. Violating. Every injury I’d sustained in the prior twenty-four hours stood out in maddening clarity.
I’d gotten my wish, I realized, and he’d kept his side of the bargain.
The clown had come to parley.
There was no escape now that I’d lingered long enough for the sculpture to become possessed, so I stayed where I was and prepared the best I could for an audience with the Devil himself. Unlike during the wild shootouts I’d had with lesser demons on the planet’s surface, I figured I’d get a good opportunity for distracting banter before the creature decided what to do with me.
Wherever you go, I will find you
, his voice called out. Not through the air, though. Fired directly to my brain. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe it was memory. I still don’t know.
A moment later, his ghastly form emerged from the billowing cloud of shadow. Nothing of the sculpture remained, although bits of string still hung over his diseased face and a jagged line circled his neck where his head had been knocked off.
His presence was even worse in the flesh than I remembered. Bigger. Stronger. Uglier. His eyes were more menacing than the rest of the demons combined, even the Watchmen from the corpse fields. It was the feeling of cruel knowledge in his stare. The cold, calm assessment. The raw power. Like he knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t care at all.
If I hadn’t already known it, the sight of him emerging from shadow in full regale would have been enough to convince me he was the monarch of Tscharia. The king, chief, emperor. Whatever you want to call it, that’s what he was on Furnace. It was clear not just in the way he carried himself, but in how the whole room seemed poisoned by his presence. The cathedral itself shrank to avoid his gaze, yet I was locked in place by wonder and indecision.
How could I have ever thought that he was on
my
side, I wondered? Did I really want to stay and see what horrible fate he had in store for me?
Ever since I crossed the corpse fields, I’d been trying to convince myself that he wasn’t as bad as the others simply because he hadn’t killed me right away. He’d carried me off and toyed with me, which, truth be told, suggested whole new levels of psychotic tendencies but was still preferable to immediate torture and mutilation for the delight of Furnace’s demons. I guess if they’d taken me before the clown king had, though, I would have been dead already or at least suffered my
first
death. It was still unclear how many lives each soul had to lose on Furnace, or if life was truly unending and each victim was sentenced to eternal torment in the interstellar version of Earth’s Hell. Like a holo-game. Re-spawn after re-spawn, forever and ever. But the point is, if I’d avoided the clown king altogether, I would only have been an anonymous corpse suffering the same fate as thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions) of other innocent souls.
But I was marked. That was the trouble.
I didn’t fully understand it until I watched the clown king beckon me forward from the darkness with one long, gnarled finger, but it began to come together in my head. He had a plan. He’d set me aside for a greater purpose.
The shit was hitting the fan.
All along, I’d taken solace in the fact that he
hadn’t
torn me apart when he bit through my helmet or when he had me locked away unconscious. But as much as I’d hoped for a loophole to salvation, I suddenly decided it wasn’t in the cards. I couldn’t appeal to the abandoned sense of goodness in him or some crude, psychotic desire to make my life a game solely for the chance to survive.
The truth was much more heinous than my contrived, naïve hopes. He didn’t just want my soul, he wanted me to be his personal gateway to the suffering of entire worlds. I hadn’t been spared because he thought I was an all right guy. He
needed
me.
“Here…here…here…” the dead bodies instructed.
With a silent swell of relief, I realized the clown king had stopped walking. The cloud of shadow billowing around him began to dissipate. He stood slightly hunched over at the front of the altar with the pile of corpses at his feet and the hanged body still swinging over his head, waiting for me.
“Tscharia,” the corpses told me.
Weary, I approached the altar. What else could I do?
No matter what I’ve told you before or what I tell you hereafter in this account, I assure you that I’ve never been more scared in my life than in that moment, and I can’t imagine any scenario where I ever will be again.
Yet I limped on anyway, because that’s what fleet soldiers are taught to do. Keep marching, one foot in front of the other, come Hell or high water. I had the Hell part taken care of, but I could have done with a wave of high, fresh water right about then. Drowning didn’t sound so bad. Comparatively.
GATEWAY
The sculpture hadn’t disappeared. I figured that meant the clown must not have been in the cathedral the whole time, and if he had, it was up among the balconies like I’d initially suspected. The idea that he might have been channeled through the sculpture itself somehow and yet remained physically separate only occurs to me now, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense. People all over the universe worship relics and talismans based on the idea that some measure of power is contained within the objects. I wouldn’t be surprised if that belief was a reality on Furnace. The clown king was worshipped through blood and souls, after all, so by all accounts of black magic and the Old Testament, his power was sufficient to manifest through the icons of the macabre rituals. He could have materialized from any piece of the cathedral at any time.
When I reached the last row of pews before the altar, I stopped walking and bit my lip. I couldn’t force myself any closer to the demon. His hot breath hit me from fifteen feet away and was punctuated by the smells of rot and infection that comprised his physical form in lieu of bones and sinew. His black eyes bore heavily down on me. His razor-toothed mouth was drawn back in a snarl. I didn’t need to venture any closer to know he could kill me with a flick of his wrist.
Steeling myself, I cleared my throat and asked the question I’d decided most important. “Why am I here?” I said.
“Here…here…here…” the corpses mocked.
Neither my question nor the obedient prayers of his acolytes had any effect on the clown king of Tscharia, however. He hissed sharply, though not in a particularly menacing way. It was still terrifying. His voice somehow managed a grinding squeal and throaty growl simultaneously. The sort of voice that rattles you from the boots to the eyeballs.
It was obvious within moments that he didn’t intend on answering the question.
Maybe you’re not asking the right one
, I thought.
Either way, I couldn’t allow the silence to stretch any longer. I figured the more I engaged him, the greater chance I had to survive. If silence persisted and he decided he wasn’t getting what he wanted from me, there was a strong possibility he would torture me out of sheer boredom.
“How do I get home?” I asked.
It was a desperate question and I didn’t expect him to answer it. How would
he
know what I had to do to get back? As far as I could tell, he didn’t even know what
galaxy
I came from, let alone which individual planet. Still, I had to ask it on the slim chance that he’d brought me, specifically, to the planet for a reason, not just marked me for torment once we crossed paths. I shuddered to think what my purpose could possibly be within his greater plan, but if it got me home, I was willing to hear him out.
Once again, though, he didn’t answer, so it was a moot point.
I couldn’t stop talking anyway. I didn’t know what silence meant.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“Tscharia…Tscharia…Tscharia…” the corpses whispered in unison.
Still, the clown king said nothing. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the perpetual half-grin, half-sneer he wore across his rotting lips had deepened with each question I posed.
I was just about ready to give up when he took a sudden, jittery step forward like his whole body had been rocked with electricity. Maybe it was just poorly controlled rage. Maybe hunger. I shuffled back toward the door, knowing there was no way I’d reach it in time if he decided to rush me. I also knew I had to continue filling the silence, but none of my questions had worked so far and I was running low on mental ammunition.
Keep trying.
“What is this place?” I asked quickly. “What is Tscharia?”
He stopped walking and tilted his head to the side.
“Here…here…here…” the voices said.
With slow, haunting grace, the clown king pointed toward the sculpture. I didn’t need to ask whether or not he wanted me to approach it.
“Tscharia.”
I glanced back at him warily. I couldn’t decide whether or not I should trust him. Once I was convinced he wouldn’t snatch me up before I obeyed his order, I stepped out from the aisle and approached the right side of the altar. The sculpture stared down at me in solemn appraisal. It was only a journey of about fifteen steps, but it felt like a thousand. I’m sure the clown king made it that way just to watch me squirm. Even under the most mundane of circumstances on Furnace, he still wanted to see me suffer. Suffering, after all, was the most precious commodity on the planet.
“Here…here…here…” the corpses chimed in.
“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped. It was pointless, but it felt good. I was tired of hearing them drone on, especially now that they’d been safely pinned away from me.
At some point while the cloud of shadow had enveloped the altar, the head of the sculpture had been reattached. The line where it had split was still visible. When I reached out and tapped its brow, driven by a foreign compulsion which I can only surmise was forced upon me by the clown king, it fell backward again. This time, it completely shattered on the floor.
I turned back to the demon with mild trepidation, wondering whether or not he would be outraged that I’d desecrated his likeness. His stare was so weighted and intense that my stomach churned, but he didn’t appear any more or less agitated than he had been before.
“What do you want me to see?” I asked, averting my eyes and trying to make it seem like I’d only done so because I was interested in the sculpture itself. Not because he terrified me, in other words.
In response, a cloud of gray smoke floated out from the sculpture’s neck, drifting towards me with an oddly familiar smell. I leaned carefully over the throne for a closer look.
At first, I couldn’t make sense of the shapes beneath the fog, but my eyes gradually focused on a rectangular shadow that seemed close enough to touch. The opening was dark even when the smoke began to clear, but even so, I knew a stone staircase when I saw one. I also knew it couldn’t
be
a stone staircase leading down from the neck of the sculpture. There wasn’t enough room and the floor beneath me was solid.
I stared into the darkness for a few moments, trying to decide what I was expected to do next. Now that I’d bought what time I could, I wanted to avoid interacting with the clown as much as possible, and that meant keeping questions to myself. However, once it became apparent that I couldn’t figure it out on my own (I couldn’t see anything but the steps themselves, after all, and there was no way I could fit through the neck of the sculpture to descend), I was forced to seek clarification.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”
With a crooked grin which could have easily been mistaken for a grimace, the clown king pointed back to the sculpture.
I shrugged, uncomprehending, and reached an arm down the sculpture’s throat. I rotated my wrist, checking to see if there was anything within reach of my fingertips. An artifact. A scroll. Anything that might have some arcane significance to this arcane culture I’d stumbled upon. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a great idea to stick an extremity into utter darkness anywhere on Furnace. But nothing would have been able to drag me through the opening, I assured myself, and if something unfathomable actually
could
have, the contortions necessary to compact me down to size would have killed me before I met whatever lurked in the shadows. I’d probably lose an arm at worst, and the alternative was crawling back to the mercy of the clown king.
As I searched around the top two steps, though, the sculpture began to melt around me. Slowly at first, and then so quickly that I had to withdraw my hand and leap backward to avoid the burning liquid.
Within moments, the throne was empty. The melted remnants of whatever alien element the natives used for sculpting was rapidly cooling into a paste over the seat. The throne itself was still intact, having been made of harder stuff (maybe gold) than the sculpture. A lever had appeared at the back. How I could no longer see the staircase with the statue gone was beyond me, but I didn’t ask any more questions. In fact, I was done asking questions for a long time.
Without hesitation, I pulled the lever and the seat of the throne creaked forward, dropping with a loud clap against the hollow base.
“Here…here…here…” the voices groaned.
I glanced back at the clown king one last time. His wide, mischievous grin spurred me down the steps so quickly that I nearly took my own head off ducking into the darkness.
“Tscharia,” he said. His voice echoed after me down the narrow stairway. “Wherever you go, I will find you.”
A wild panic gripped me. Something like claustrophobia, except in reality, it was the need to descend
further
into the confined space. Anything to get away from the clown king before he decided instruction from afar wasn’t enough and he had to give me a hands-on lesson to make sure I saw things his way. I could still hear the voices of the corpse-chorus raising exaltations to their deity and briefly worried that they would follow. What if I wasn’t supposed to go down the stairway, I thought? What if I’d fucked everything up and now they were going to make me pay for it?
Before I could digest the idea of crawling back into the evil cathedral, however, the seat slammed back into place and I was suddenly alone in total darkness.
Comforting
darkness. At least in the darkness, I realized, I wouldn’t have to see death coming. I wouldn’t have to behold whichever deformed creature finally ended me. I supposed that alone was worthy of celebration, but I also supposed I might as well attempt to find the bottom of the stairs while I waited. The urgency I’d felt to return to the
Hummel
had all but disappeared, but I still preferred to make it back. In one piece, if it could be helped. The only logical progression, therefore, was to keep pushing on until I either hit a dead end or found my way to the fleet ship at the bottom of the crater.
So I kept going, running my hands along close, damp walls that stank of heat and sulfur. It was easy to keep straight because the path never deviated. I only felt whispering creatures brush past me a handful of times through the whole walk. I was too tired to care.
I couldn’t see anything in the cramped tunnel aside from a few shadows here and there which were either a degree brighter or duller than the perpetual darkness. It took about forty-five minutes before the familiar smells started hitting me, though I failed to place them right away. It wasn’t until the familiar
sounds
started up that I realized where I was going, and then the psychological torment began in earnest.
My mind became fixated on the steady, maddening drip of liquid on a hard surface. After a while, I sort of tuned it out, though it continued to register in the periphery of my thoughts. I repeatedly caught myself matching rhythms to it in my head. There’s another definition of insanity for you: humming along with the drip of liquid in a pitch-black underground tunnel (which may well have been sealed on both ends) on an alien planet with an army of demons above me. I guess that’s a little long-winded for Merriam Webster.
As soon as I realized where I’d wandered, however, the sound died abruptly in my throat. In its place, I heard the unmistakable, ambient growl of a spaceship. I guess I’d been smelling the lubricants and oils and electrical casings for a while, but it wasn’t until I heard the familiar
thrum
of energy somewhere in the distance that I was able to place it.
A ship
, I thought, my heart rising cautiously in my chest.
Maybe I
will
get the hell out of here, after all.
I wasn’t convinced quite yet, but it was the first time I’d felt genuine hope since leaving Europa. As I ventured deeper and deeper into the ground and the temperature rose to nearly unbearable levels, though, suspicion started growing faster than hope and eventually strangled it completely.
Whose ship is this?
I wondered.
If it was underground with the entire decrepit city built atop it, the chances that it would ever unbury itself and be spaceworthy again were nil. I didn’t think it was the crashed ship of an alien species in the corpse fields, either. I couldn’t imagine their vessels pre-dating the city itself.
Then whose is it? And why does the clown king want me to see it? Is he going to bury me alive down here?
The idea didn’t fill me with as much dread as perhaps it should have. In fact, the prospect of a quiet death in the privacy of the underground ship, especially without a sadistic demon in sight, seemed peaceful. Maybe the demon clown had taken mercy on my soul after all.
Or maybe you’re in for an even bigger shit-show down here. What do you really think’s waiting for you at the end of this tunnel? Pizza and beer?
I shuddered. If abominations like the Watchmen were able to live above ground in the Furnace wastelands, I couldn’t imagine what manner of beast lived
underground
amid the oppressive heat and toxic fumes of a dying spaceship.
Maybe it’s the
real
king of this place. Maybe the clown just provides its meals.