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a tale best left unheard . . . 
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“Hey, Kid?!”
The Boy called out. “Hey, Kid? Don’t run off again! I won’t hurt you!”
He paused, breath catching in his throat, before adding, “I need your help! Please?”
And then: “No! Wait!”
The Boy’d been chasing that light for hours now, although he never seemed to close the distance. Each time he grew discouraged, he recalled with misplaced hope that the dark, empty space between himself and The Kid Who Held The Flashlight also never seemed to grow. It didn’t seem to matter how many times, or how often, he lost sight of him up ahead.
The sewer was a thirsty thing, drinking sound the same way it drank the light beyond.
Every cry from his throat was inhaled mid-echo by the cathedral hush that pressed in from all sides. The sound of The Boy’s voice bouncing hither and yon on the grubby walls was broken only by the slop of his sneakers through the foul black water. As he trudged on, each step with a splash or slosh, the muck clutched at him halfway up his shins in the dark, round tunnel, he couldn’t help imagining he’d been swallowed into the decomposing throat of some slain giant.
He held a glowstick out in front of him, casting an eerie green light that refracted off the slime climbing the walls. The glow shimmered across the slick surfaces and rippled on the thick, dark water below.
If he stood on tiptoe, he could almost touch the ceiling, but he didn’t bother. He didn’t want to. That, too, was coated in the foul black slime, even more thickly here than the mucous sheen that wept from the walls around him. In the dull green light, the mildew clinging to the upper arch seemed to waver, flexing inward and outward like lungs. Breathing. Like the tunnel was breathing. It was subtle, rhythmic, and more than once he swore the breath could maybe be heard in moments when he strained his ears hard enough and listened close enough.
The walls, he could see in places, were made of brick, though most of it vanished beneath layers of mildew and rot. The filthy water stretched out before him in a neverending river, backlit in shimmering emerald and black by the green beacon he held. It flowed forward until it was swallowed by the darkness ahead; darkness that marked the abrupt, choking endpoint of his sight.
He hadn’t known a place could feel so confined while still seeming to stretch on forever and ever.
The squelch beneath his sneakers shifted; the wet thud of each step thickened somehow, as though the walls around him were drawn back just far enough to give the sound more room to exist.
He still felt as though he was moving through swampwater or mud, but the splashing evolved into a broader sound that might have the power to linger in the walls the same way his earlier shouting down the tunnel had…but not quite. It didn’t grow louder and it didn’t exactly bounce from wall-to-wall, but it seemed to broaden. The breadth of his footsteps expanded as though something vast was being pried quietly open nearby. Then, in the same moment that his ears noted the tonal shift, he found himself already standing in it...
Another intersection.
The new tunnel ran perpendicular to the path he’d been already walking, spreading off to his left and reaching forward with the same sort of ceaseless boring yawns voicelessly expressed by the tunnels that The Boy’d been following for the last ten or twenty minutes since he took the last right.
The intersection was built from the same stagnant dark and slimy mildew as the way before this, and before that, and before that. It was made with the same stink, the same bricks, the same forever-damp. The offshoot was painted in the same sweating memories of dark, wet time; its surfaces shimmering in shades of verdant green and gleaming lacquered obsidian as he thrust the arm that held the glowstick down the new path and compared it with the old.
He hadn’t seen it coming. There’d been no curve, no widening. This new pipeway, same as the last seven or eight branches off to the left or right, or, on several occasions, both directions at once, appeared out of nowhere. One step followed another and then, without warning, the tunnel widened and he was presented with a choice in the silent dark.
This time, he didn’t turn. He was almost certain he wasn’t supposed to. He kept going the way he was headed before the fork appeared. He only looked. He looked long enough to wonder if he was making a bad decision or a good one. Telling himself again that this wasn’t the way The Kid with the flashlight’d gone. Then, The Boy kept moving the same way he’d been moving before.
The next fork came much the same way. And the one after that too.
They appeared like tricks of the eye. Side passages revealing themselves only the moment he was walking past them, like reality only decided to render their existence in that same instant, drawing them into the tunnel after the fact to see what he’d do. They felt penciled into his peripheral vision…outlines of ghosted shapes not fully present until he turned his head this way or that, drawn out only by a subtle shift in the sound of his own steps.
Sometimes he turned. Most times, he didn’t.
He couldn’t ever be sure, not really, whether these moments prompting sudden indecision, forcing an unexpected choice, were even real. Would this sewer act this way if The Boy was not himself but someone else? What if he was naturally someone confident and less indecisive? He thought that his mother was like that, maybe. Would this place still split itself open so often, forcing conscious decisions, if he were his more adaptive, less insecure mother?
Whether the decisions mattered at all, he didn’t know.
There were times he imagined walking forward without pause, without curiosity. Head down, eyes on the water. No attention paid to the paths that revealed themselves. If he walked like that, with intention or commitment, would the forks stop opening? Would they split the tunnel like gashes in wet skin, bleeding the dark out sideways?
Blood.
That’s what flowed down here.
The soaking viscous muck at his feet, breath-held and thick was the city’s blood.
If he stopped acknowledging those perfectly straight arteries that branched from the main path at clean angles, would they vanish entirely? Or if they were truly part of the sewer’s intended design, would they fold away before he reached them? Would they retract into whatever intentionless geometry they’d grown from?
He didn’t know.
What he did know, what he started to believe, was this: it didn’t matter.
The system wasn’t a puzzle to be solved. It just was.
Every intersection was just another artery split in the inner city’s circulatory system. Every offshoot, just another line carved in service of movement, of pressure, of life. These sewers existed to force something unnatural through the insides of the ironworks and asphalt that sprawled above. The city by daylight, by the glow of neon at night, should be something inanimate. Made to appear alive...but not actually be that way. This series of manmade structures, and the veins below it, carried something older than the city itself. Something dark. Something that granted breath and a heartbeat beneath the playgrounds of the massive concrete organism.
Whether The Boy turned or not didn’t change the fact that the sewerwater-turned-blood sloshing thickly at his feet would still move, because the metropolis it existed beneath had a pulse it should not have and now, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he moved through the subterranean veins that lie beneath the urban sprawl. An amoeba. A parasite. A human virus.
What he believed was that no decision he made mattered. Not really. Or even at all. Deciding to leave this path and take that...to take every right intersection that presented itself...or to simply move forever forward...nothing he chose would change anything. He’d always find The Kid ahead eventually, because blood only moved in one direction. And although the sewer had hundreds…or maybe even thousands of arteries, they could only ever flow the one way.
Eventually, he would pass through the heart. Maybe he already had. Maybe he’d been there and left again, spiraling out into one of the smaller veins, doomed to return without knowing. He couldn’t tell.
Every pulse from the world above led in a single direction. Every pulse moved either to or from the heart.
If The Kid With The Flashlight was in this same circuitous system, their paths would cross. Not by choice, but eventually. Inevitably.
Another fork approached.
It announced itself the way they always did. Without warning. The light caught something in the water that hadn’t been there before. The sound of his footsteps shifted. The air pulled at him differently...as if the space had changed shape and the tunnel had quietly turned itself inside out. A path opened to his left again, continuing past the lane he’d been moving down, and stretching onward into shadow to his right.
He looked left, holding out the glowstick and squinting, looking for something…literally, anything…that looked different. Each new branch made him clench his eyes, straining to see farther than before, hoping this time he’d spot something that broke the pattern. A grate in the low ceiling above? An inlet dug into a curb to drink away pooling rainwater? Something he could climb up and out of. A service ladder leading to a manhole? A pipe going directly up? He didn’t care if it led to one of the city’s dirty fountains or someone’s filth-encrusted toilet in the slums.
Again...just more of the same. Another copy of the tunnel he’d already been walking.
He turned his head the other direction. This time, to the right…he saw something different.
Far down the waterlogged lane, almost too distant to make sense, there was a flicker.
A glinting pinpoint of white.
He froze.
It wasn’t steady. It shimmered. It moved without moving, like a celestial beacon through clouds or billows of smoke. A little smear of it wavered against the distant wet walls, so faint it almost disappeared when he blinked. Then the figure with the light in its hand turned. Not fully or dramatically.
Turned just enough…and the light came with it.
The beam shifted, catching him where he stood, dumbfounded with his glowstick held perfectly out before him. Its sickly jade glow ready to inspect the new path. The light moved directly into his eyes, pausing him and forcing him to stillness…that was the instant the faint white pinprick was no longer quite so distant.
It was brilliant. It was blinding.
The light did not just shine. It expanded. Surrounding itself in a ring. A burning corona of hot-bright intensity that flared out from its origin like a sun dying in the cold vacuum of some vast and indifferent galaxy. It gleamed in a perfect circle, far beyond the place in the sewer-dark where the glowstick’s green gave out. Far beyond the six to ten foot stretching reach of his sight in this lightless hole.
It hovered now…a star suspended in space and time. A radiating disc of unburning fire suspended in shadow; burning bright with cold.
He could not see the figure anymore.
Then the flashlight vanished sideways down another branch as The Kid holding it ducked into another artery even farther down. As quickly as it flared, burning as brightly as a star at the moment of its end, the light collapsed and dark filled the void. The bright beam of the flashlight transformed into a singularity, sucking the emptiness ahead of The Boy into a single inward gasp of the foul sewer’s penumbrous breath.
He stood there, glowstick trembling in his hand, his own breath caught somewhere between lungs and throat. The water lapped at his ankles. The algae living on the surface, and probably within the brick behind him, continued to sweat. The tunnel seemed to widen for a moment, then constrict and he called out into the darkness:
“No! Wait! Kid! Don’t run off! Why…why? Kid!? Hey, Kid! Come back!”
For a moment, The Boy stood at the tunnel crossroad finally ready to surrender to the breakdown he’d tried expectantly to brace himself for. It loomed in the back of his mind from the moment he opened his eyes, no idea where he was or how he’d gotten here. Disoriented, The Boy quickly patted his pockets and found himself in the dark, without a phone and on the verge of hyperventilating in panic. He sat in foul-smelling water that coated his upper-legs despite his shorts…seeping through them…his sneakers and shins submerged in a slick film of slime. There was nothing in his pockets save for a single round tube. A tube made of plastic.
At first, in the tight darkness of the city’s pipes, he wasn’t sure what it was as he held it with both hands, but after about a minute, running his fingers up and down the cylinder and tracing the caps at each end, he realized it was a glowstick. When he snapped it alive, he breathed a sigh of relief…for a moment…then the panic returned with undue haste.
He sat in the viscous sewage longer than he cared to admit, only springing to his feet when something unseen in the shallow current brushed against his ankle. He shot upward, fully and firmly on his feet, moving fast away from where he’d awoke.
Originally determined to find a service shaft, he walked the dark pipes, hand sliding along the wall with nothing but the green, otherworldly glowing tube of plastic to light his way. He fought the urge to vomit while his fingertips passed over the oily, rotting coating on the bricks at arm’s reach on either side. The walls, the ceiling and the water dulled every sound other than his sloshing footfalls and ragged breaths.
Once his confused anxiety faded, it left behind a deep self‑pity so strong he nearly wept.
Then he saw the shape outlined in light beyond.
He guessed the distance between himself and the distant silhouette to be about a hundred yards. Maybe less. The Boy felt certain it couldn’t be more and he could tell from the shape of the outline in the dark that it was the shape of someone else stuck down here with him…had to be.
He knew this for sure when he shouted out, “Hey!” and the shape and light spun around. The black shadow vanished, replaced by a beam pointed straight into The Boy’s eyes.
When the illumination turned back again, a full one-hundred-eighty degrees, it paused there for a moment…just a moment…an intake of breath, held. Then the light shifted right and bounced once, then twice, before disappearing down a tunnel to the right. The Boy understood then that whoever held the light beyond had taken the fork at full speed, running as the dark closed over the empty space left in the Flashlight Kid’s wake. The Boy picked up his own pace, drudging through the shin-high, syrup-thick, dark miasma that engulfed his sneakers. The Boy couldn’t match the stranger’s speed, but neither did he fall behind. He might have sprinted…really sprinted…were he not so certain he’d trip and land in the polluted, and foul-stenched wastewater lapping at his legs and trying to peel his trainers away like swamp mud, determined to pull them off. He moved like someone trying to quickly cross a bog and failing to move as fast as he meant.
Now, as The Kid ahead of him veered into a sidepath he couldn’t quite make out, The Boy raised one leg, pressed his foot unsteadily against the slick wall and focused on his balance so he wouldn’t fall. He pulled at the laces of one shoe and then the other, tightening both, and tying each with a double knot. Now overtight to the point his feet throbbed with the hammer of his pulse, he took off running with renewed determination. He moved as close to “full sprint” as the foultide of putrid liquid in the sewerpipe allowed, heading after the Flashlight Kid where he’d disappeared down the right fork ahead.
He raced down the tunnel, feet slapping the black murk and flicking giant, pregnant slops of the effluvial mire into the air behind him. The sludgewake at his back created a quickly dying tide, slapping rhythmically against the sides of the city’s bowels.
The tunnel didn’t narrow, but in the jaundiced, frail light of the glowstick it seemed once again to pull inward, the way he’d imagined earlier when he thought he saw the ceiling breathe. Now it seemed to grow close around him, closing in and then falling away as the weak glowing light held in his fist bounced. The walls moved as though he’d passed through the stomach and into the large intestine, pushed along by rhythmic, involuntary muscles through an endless black digestion.
Sloshing, the sound of the sewage beneath his feet resounded in rhythm with his heart, while over and over, the echoes of each footfall expanded, then constricted again with intersection after intersection appearing and disappearing. They came more frequently than before…more frequently than he felt reasonable. It happened with nearly every fourth or fifth step he took now.
He ran not simply to catch the Flashlight Kid, but to outrun the feeling that everything above was so far away…miles away…and his life, interrupted, was completely out of reach. Meaningless. Everything replaced by this dark maze of rot and ancient intent lurking in the void ahead of him; to his left and to his right, as well as behind.
As the riverdrift of the dark flow pressed him to go further and further into the depths of the pipes, a certain fourth or fifth step opened up another intersection. Somehow, this, he knew instinctively was the branch along the path where he must turn with an abrupt right-face and continue. The current shifted direction as The Boy shifted direction and distantly, perhaps seventy-five yards ahead now, a faint white light pulsed dimly around another corner in the tunnel. It might have gone unseen if the passage were not so wholly and completely dark.
He didn’t slow. Cupping his hands to his mouth, he called out,
“Heyyyyyy!”
And before he realized his grip had changed, the glowstick slipped from his hand and plopped into the sludge. The sprint he’d barely managed was ground to an abrupt halt with a second and third stride slowing him to a full stop. Turning, he saw the bleak, dark effluence slowly molding itself around the stick’s ailing light and hoped desperately to retrieve it. To not be fully lost in the dark. He took one step back, followed by another only to watch, too far to reach and hopeless, as the slurry of black grime swallowed the phosphorescent bit of plastic whole. It stole with it the faint green breath of light and the sewerpipe began to choke on the sudden dark.
“Nooooooo!”
He heard himself crying out the word as he fell onto his knees and began frantically digging through the excrement that flowed unnaturally thick along the concave curve of the pipeway floor. The Boy found himself so close to the water now in the empty dark that its horrible miasma, prior kept at arm’s length, fully assaulted his nose. He felt the scent like fingers of something filthy and inhuman digging upward through his nostrils…up and then moving down, down, down. Fingers, then hand, then arm, clawing along his neck and forcing itself to be swallowed. He felt the digits wrapping themselves around each organ in turn on their way down…gripping his lungs, and then his heart. Then his spleen…until they found the curve of his stomach and squeezed…and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed with such force he believed it would turn completely inside out.
He felt a surge of vomit rush out along the same path the hand had taken down as it withdrew, its work complete.
The expulsion broke past his lips and struck the surface of the sludge. His hands kept moving below the water, frantic and blind. He tried to steady his breathing and failed. As his fingers brushed the unseen glowstick, he grabbed it tight and forced himself upright. He rose too quickly, bent over again, and vomited a second time before finally catching his breath.
He found a dry patch on his chest, near the upper cloth of his shirt, and wiped his mouth. A little lower, he wiped the glowstick clean. Then he took a moment to take a breath, make sure he’d caught it fully, and took up again after Flashlight Kid as quickly as he could manage.
“Kid!” He slowed slightly, calling out, “Kid, please?! I won’t take it, but I need that light! Don’t you see, Kid? That’s how we find a way out of here!” Then he picked up his pace again.
He couldn’t see The Kid ahead of him anymore, but he’d been gaining. He’d been closing the distance. The flashlight ahead was faint and dying steadily, but it came from the circle of another intersection of pipes, a branch that had opened on the left of the path about twenty yards away.
As he drew closer and closer to the artery where the gleam of the flashlight grew steadily dimmer, he began slowing to prepare for the abrupt redirection into another offshooting vein of the sewerpipe. The impending turn, now imminent, he pivoted his left foot readying himself to follow his intended path and as he did so, The Boy began to slide, skidding off balance and unable to catch himself mid-fall, he went down. The Boy landed, body still moving full-speed, hard on his shoulder, taking his entire body beneath the dark surface-tension. He, unstopped by the blight of liquefied putrescene, without thinking, gasped reflexively, taking in a mouthful of the thick offalwater around him.
He sat up quickly, as the pungence of something entangled with flavors of organic but inhuman waste and the metallurgic foulness of iron pitted with rust moved down his throat. It slid thickly, rancid, like a mouthful of cold, rotten chowder. As he gagged, his mind swam with the screams of meteors as big as city buses ripping their way through the atmosphere of an alien world. He felt the soup change direction and return itself to the pipe and as he found himself sicking-up again, other images treaded the depths of his mind, slowly rising to the surface.
Fully conscious and awake, he dreamed nightmares, open-eyed. Fist-sized cybernetic invertebrates. Spidering their way through eruptions and clouds of debris, each pressing its skullless cerebral mass one by one into blinding, incomprehensible ruptures in reality. One-by-one passing through. Escaping a collapsing dreamscape. One part organic and the other mechanical. The robotic cephalopods crawled along the fractures of their reality as it choked to death all around them. They bent themselves into the cracks. They pulled themselves forward. Each limb tangled across nearby surfaces, a dozen arms writhing in chaotic motion, while pulsating knots of translucent thought architecture floated on gummy membranes of skin stretched thin. Squid-shaped neuron jellies sprouted dozens of feelers of gleaming alloy, gunmetal blue and slick. Clusters of obscene ball-and-socket joints, innumerable tendrils forcing through time and space as their home collapsed. Going somewhere else. Going where?
Somewhere safer.
Somewhere…
…Here.
Wide-eyed, The Boy pushed himself upright and started moving again, following the direction he’d meant to take before the fall. Overwhelmed, he quickened his pace into the tunnel’s newest leftward branch, moving now with the awareness that whatever these tiny eldritch horrors were…their gelatinous labyrinthine folds of intelligence sparking with the light of impulse jumping from synapse to synapse…creeping by way of robotic limbs beyond count and writhing like nightcrawlers…they moved unseen in the darkness of the sewerpipe’s clotted depths.
He kept moving quickly down the corridor, slowing only to gag, and gag again each time the thought of the horrid mouthful of chowder…putrid, black, interstellar bile, and human excrement…replayed in his mind. Yet, he refused to stop, dry-heaving while keeping pace as best he could manage.
The other Kid seemed to move through the tunnels like he knew them well. How could he when every tunnel looked the same as the last?
What if the new paths appear because he decides they will appear?
What if?…he thought…what if I can see them in the corner of my eye only because I decided I would? What if I could open one?
The Boy decided that if he could, he’d open a new corridor in the same moment as Flashlight Kid did, and turn…and there he would be, right in front of him…
And when he resolved he would do just that if he could…were he given the ability to open new sewerpipes by will alone, he decided he would just open one right here and turn left and there The Kid would be, facing away, flashlight in hand, opening a new gash in sewerland reality as simply as opening a vein…
The Boy turned.
And there The Kid was, in a brand new tunnel that hadn’t been there before he decided it was meant to be, and as though the very thought became manifest, The Kid was faced away from him.
Stunned into quiet stillness, the Boy didn’t move. The timing of their breathing was somehow in perfect sync in the sewagewater-soaked dark. The Kid gave no sign that The Boy was even there, close enough to reach out and touch him…
So The Boy did just that. He reached out with both hands, grabbed the Flashlight Kid by both shoulders, and spun him around. He threw the glowstick to the ground and before it even began to sink, he yanked the flashlight away from The Kid in one rapid, and fluid motion.
The Boy shined the light into The Kid’s face and instinctively The Kid raised his arm to shield his eyes from the glare, but not before the eyes of one passed over the other for one moment, like a shudder or a hiccup…of recognition.
The Boy lowered the flashlight a few inches.
The Kid lowered his arm.
What was happening?
How could there be a mirror down here of all places in the world?
No. Not a mirror.
How?
Their eyes locked now and The Boy felt his eyes grow wide as he watched The Kid’s eyes grow wide in perfect unison. The Boy and The Kid each took a step backward. Each of their jaws slacked now in shock hanging slowly open. Together they sang the same notes of a silent duet in the filthy dark tunnel.
Then the sewer fell away around them.
The sound of water, the sound of their breathing…all of it fell away. Even the steady dripping woven into the sewer’s very walls seemed to fall away.
The Boy was looking at himself.
The Kid was looking back…at himself.
They each took another step back, then slowly another. They continued slowly backing away without breaking gaze for what seemed like minutes and The Boy wanted to say something. He couldn’t say something. What could he say to himself? Recognition hollowed him out. There was nothing to say. He didn’t know what was happening, and nothing inside him felt real. He couldn’t be there…because he was here…he was right here. He couldn’t be twenty feet away from himself, staring back at himself.
It defied logic. Defied reason.
Something moved above them in the dark. Moving somewhere behind The Kid’s head. Sounding like iron nails tapping against the slick stone ceiling…a firm, quick, distinct tapping sound of metal on brick, despite the thick mildew coating every inch of tunnel above.
The Boy’s eyes flicked upward and he traced the ceiling with the beam of the flashlight…but before he could see, one of the creatures from his mind—one of the creatures that couldn’t possibly be real—dropped from the ceiling, landing square on Flashlight Kid’s dirty hair. The impact soft. Wet. A lump of metal and flesh, glistening in the beam of light. The Boy watched, frozen, as the thing unfolded. Small mechanical tendrils dug into The Kid’s scalp and opened its mouth revealing a ring of razor-sharp and shiny metal teeth gleaming by the light of the flashlight.
The Kid’s eyes shifted away from The Boy’s. They lifted, slow, terrified.
The creature moved in an instant. Moving from the crown of The Kid’s head in less than a second. Milliseconds. It dropped from his hair, and over his browline and down his face so quickly, The Kid couldn’t have closed his mouth if he’d wanted to. It moved faster than recognition. Faster than reflexes. Reaching his mouth and forcing itself inside. The Kid convulsed in place, not falling, as his throat bulged and the bulge moved down his neck and the creature drove itself deeper.
Within every foot of darkness behind The Kid a chorus of clicking metal tendrils arose. The Boy cast the flashlight along the distant walls…along the ceiling…they rippled in the thick dark water, churning it into a slow-moving rapid of current behind him and a dozen, then more crawled up from the sewage. Dropped from the ceiling onto The Kid’s head.
Closed every inch of space between him and them.
Every inch.
Their mouths opened, as they skittered across his body. His mouth still hung agape and one after another they crawled inside. Seeking entry through other openings big enough to accommodate their small, fist-sized forms and finding none, they tore open their own.
The Boy stumbled backward, choking on the air. He could hear the wet tearing noises of the metal teeth as they ground through skin and through bone. The Kid had been dead before he could have known he was supposed to forfeit his dying breath in exchange for a scream and within seconds, the body began to sag beneath the feeding mass. Torn apart. Swallowed. The squid-like creatures worked with the calm efficiency of machines, eating until the shape of The Kid began to collapse.
Then the voice came:
“Hey, Kid?!” it called out from somewhere far away behind him…
“Hey, Kid? Don’t run off again! I won’t hurt you!”
If The Boy couldn’t recognize he’d called those very words earlier to a silhouette clutching a flashlight in the dark a hundred yards away, he’d surely recognize the sound of his own voice. The sound of his own desperation.
The Boy turned. The flashlight wavered in his grip as he pointed it down the tunnel.
A figure stood there in the distance, shin-deep in the polluted, mucky black of the slowly advancing sewerwater current. It wore the shorts he wore. The same shirt, once white, but not as stained as his own was…not yet.
“I need your help! Please?” the figure called out.
The clink of metal came quietly behind him. Then another. Then dozens.
He turned back and all that remained of The Kid were his shoulders and head, now lolling forward and back, rising up a foot from the water where he’d stood only moments earlier. His legs were gone. He watched as The Kid’s skull dented, pulled inward by something within, and then collapsed entirely. He gasped as the collarbone cracked as one shoulder was yanked downward by an unseen hand yanking at what was left of The Kid’s musculature, and pulling half of his torso down into the filth in the process.
And then The Kid was out of sight. Just completely gone. It could have happened within the span of two minutes, but The Boy was sure, even without a watch, that it certainly hadn’t been three.
He ran the flashlight along the curvature of the walls, of the ceiling, they were still twenty feet from him, the distance that he and The Kid had each backed away from the other, but the sound of clicking rose through the quiet, growing louder as each many-jointed chromatic tentacle inched the eyeless membranes of gelatinous gray matter forward along the ceiling and the walls. One by one their jaws opened and closed, quietly flashing rows of gleaming platinum teeth. The tunnel filled with the sound of their clicks as quietly, from everywhere in the dark, they began to hiss. One, then another, until the sound seemed to stretch through every inch of sewerpipe.
The Boy stepped back, holding the flashlight out before him, the beam trembling across the water and catching the rolling boil of the tiny rippling waves as they slowly advanced.
He wanted to run.
He wanted to escape.
He wanted…
…an opening.
As he thought it, the air shifted and the walls tore to his left and to his right. Just outside his periphery. All he needed to do was look at it.
To turn toward it.
To run.
He darted down the tear in reality that opened before him. A massive yawning sewerpipe stretching endlessly to his right.
And he was already out of sight when he heard himself crying out the words:
“No! Wait!”
From somewhere else in the distant dark place that lay beyond the light.
