Layer 01: Where Shamblers Dwell

Deep below the land you or I could inhabit lay a hollow so foul it could only be called a lair. The floor glistened with various excretions and slimes, while the air was thick with a green haze- or perhaps it was a smoky veil that only appeared green under the sickly, mysterious cocoons that dangled from the ceiling. Either way, it would be indescribably rank to a human nose, not that any drew breath here. The only things even resembling humanity in this pit were long dead and festering. Don’t mistake this room for a necropolis, though; it was undeniably teeming with life. For all the telltale signs of radiation, poison, and things too ancient to have scarred our evolution, the most primal fear a potential observer would feel would be towards the walls. The five of them were coated in a writhing coating of skinless flesh, peppered with eyes and pupae not unlike a bagworm’s in shape, but large enough to hold a horse and made of computer components, all steel and silicon. Every so often, one would rattle like the tail of a peeved serpent, and a tube of green liquid would slide down to it from a complex web on the ceiling. This room was a combination nursery and stomach.

“You won’t tell anyone about this, right?” I feverishly questioned the masked figure in white. “I’m really not supposed to tell anyone about the Master’s machinations, but it… it’s just too much. He’s gone too far. He’s no longer serving the Precursors, he’s gunning for their throne, and that kind of blasphemy makes me sick.”

“Don’t worry.” The voice came from behind me. “Your secret’s safe with us.” A grotesquely muscular man wearing the crown of a Hercules beetle approached me. “Nature is now its own beast, free from the dogma of any of our forerunners. If you feel this is right, your making it to us is a sign of your strength, and strength is all you need in the Swarm.”

“STRENGTH IS ALL YOU NEED,” came the chant from the faces in the walls. Dozens of them, stacked upon each other like cells in a honeycomb. Though, calling them faces was a bit of a misnomer- there was only the suggestion of features beyond a pinched mouth and uncannily large eyes of black glass. Now that I’m looking, it’s kind of hard to pick out one face from the next, when they all run together…

I was snapped out of my thoughts by a commanding voice. “At any rate, simply relax. You did the right thing,” said the beetle-crowned man. “We rely on people like you to stay on top of things. Won’t you at least give us your name?”

“No, I’m sorry,” I replied with a nervous chuckle. “I really must be going. My family is waiting for me.” I said, heading towards the sole entryway into the room.

My path was blocked by a wall of chiton and muscle. “Don’t worry about it, friend. We know what you had to do, to get as deep in the Ancient Chambers Society as you did. Your family is waiting for you, but not at your home. Won’t you stay just a few more minutes? We can get you something to drink and discuss the Chambers further. I’m not sure on a few details-”

“I’m sorry, I really must be going,” I insisted, and stepped around him,

Only to find my path blocked again.

By a wall of faces.

No, these weren’t faces. I was trapped by a wall of gray flesh, tiny mouths, and bulging eyes.

Tiny mouths that opened impossibly far, and spewed crimson at me with the force of a fire hose. Blood knocked me back, and I hit my head on the waxy cobbles at my feet. No, not blood, the coppery smell was missing. In its place was an overwhelming sweetness, not like any fruit of this world but all of them artificially blended together. It was an overwhelmingly saccharine miasma, a stink like viscera stuffed with cherry syrup and just as offensively crimson. Red and warm and heavy and hot and nothing and dark and blinding and sweet and red and sweet and sweet and sweet and sweet and sweet

“Rejoice, failed husk. You have earned the grace of Mother Titania. Go home. Walk among men and crave the Royal Jelly. When you return, aching and hatched, longing for something half as sweet, we will finally have a use for you.”

I came up sputtering. I had no idea what this rat bastard was on about, but I hadn’t left the crazies in that chamber besieged with stench, clearly. But hey, he’s letting me go free, free from this grid of faces and the Swarm and the waxy cobblestone and those muscles that were more bone than flesh-

Yes, it wasn’t until I was once again under the sliver of a moon and the purple sky that I remembered the Jelly. It was gone from my mind the moment I stopped drowning in it, and never came back until I was too deep in normalcy to risk letting slip words of cults or abominations. And come back it did! I staggered home, my sinuses saturated with fermented flowers, and attempted to sleep. It was an eternal waking petrification of my own making: I was too consumed by my itch for the Jelly to escape to a world of dreams, where fountains of the stuff lay. By the time the sun’s rays singed my vision, sheer exhaustion led me into a restless sleep.

Layer 02: I Cannot Stomach These Forms And Colors Anymore

Immediately, I was shot through with a bolt of tension, the kind that beads up sweat on your palms and spreads quicksilver beneath the skin. The kind that makes your brain stem light up like a Christmas tree, the kind of panic that we tell ourselves only animals feel so we may sleep unchallenged at night. But that storm still rages within me and all who have gazed into the abyss for sufficiently long. I saw serpents, and tears, and I saw my family again. I saw all my evils as a microcosm of humanity’s evils, my slaughter of the innocent for understanding this world as parallel to so many cycles, and yet I internalized none of it. All of it rang true, but none of it spoke to me, because I didn’t regret, for an instant, selling my soul. I saw more.

I saw great beasts walk, live, die, love, kill, all as humans did on a much grander scale. Planets were kingdoms. A king’s robes would be dyed in hues out of space, then stained with blood thinner than tears and darker than the vacuum above. I saw the birth of humanity, first as mangled homunculi who walked as if they felt no pain in their twisted forms, and then as something recognizable as a person. I saw them forming hives, no, villages, all for the sake of overlords from space. I saw them fight for their own favorite forms, and laughed above it all, knowing everything they would forget.

As all do, those elder beings died, and in such secrecy their lives couldn’t be proven. Everything they contributed to humanity was attributed to other such beings, or concepts, or entities, those beings that became known as gods, demons, and later, philosophies and ideologies. I saw humanity spread across the planet, fight, and kill each other, as proxies of beings that could no longer reap the benefits. I saw them fight for their favored ideas, those shapes in their head, and I wept, knowing everything they had forgotten.

In comparison, my own sin was a mere speck. So what, I took a few lives? I became a being who could speak on the founders of conscious thought. I didn’t know if anyone else had made it this far, if these doors had been opened yet, or if they could be closed behind me, and I had to find out no matter the cost. I took on more of a burden than those ingrates, those who died in my wake while I suffered on with guilt and madness! I, who would find out the truth, I who had faith in myself, I, who relieved them of the pain of knowledge, got nothing but the world’s scorn and shit!

I must know more. I must know more. I must know more. But that is where my pitiful humanity shattered my sleep. I awoke drenched in sweat, with more of a hunger in my head than ever before. That hunger was all consuming. I could not feel anything but the itch for more, more dreams, more knowledge, more prophecy, more Jelly.

Right.

The Jelly.

I looked down at myself.

Overnight, my skin had blossomed into a patchwork of spongy off-white spheres, fed by my sweat and my desire. Once again, the bolt of terror tore through me, but only for a second. The hunger gnawed back into my consciousness with even sharper incisors. Weremyfingersalwaysthislong I must return to the Jelly. Wasmetalalwayssosoft I must consume all the Jelly I can find. Whatishappeningtome I must drown in the Jelly! All these thoughts, I must drown them in the Jelly and let them float out of my mind! My will is the pith of a pomegranate, and I am starved for the seeds, so drown me in that Jelly and let everything else float away to those who need it more. LetitnotbesaidIamanuncharitableprotector I must find the Jelly.

Weeks passed.I scraped and scratched and hunted for any drop of the red stuff I could find. I took all kinds of sap and nectars and mixed them in filthy mugs trying to approximate that Royal Jelly, to no avail. No human narcotic could replicate that sensation beyond taste, either, but I tried them all in a futile effort to keep myself away from that vile Swarm. Then I partook in all of them in combination, again and again, with disregard for side effects or unlisted ingredients, without even a hint of the feeling from the Jelly. My eyes, already darkened from lack of sleep, grew at once bulbous and began to sag to comical degrees. The skin around my nose burned up and fell away from so many cut powders until I breathed through a skeleton’s nostrils, and my lips shriveled inwards into a puckered, warped parody of a grin. Flesh flaked off of my bones in strips, and I wasn’t sure if it was from filthy paraphernalia causing rampant rotting infection, filler ingredients in the cheap serums I escaped to, or the intended effects of some part in the cocktail. My face had followed my mind down the path of distortion, but I wasn’t giving up on the Jelly. Not when I was one step closer to finding a way out.

Nature. Of course. It had to be in nature, the realm of the Elder’s forgotten children. (In these weeks, I had taken to seeing everything through the lens of that dream, the only thing I could believe was True.) It started off small-scale; I’d steal small animals from pet stores and feed them only nectar, as much as they wanted, until the rodents ate themselves to death. And then I drank their blood, that blood which should have been sweet but instead went down like warm sea water, the kind that served as a cosmic petri dish in my dream. In the way of all things, as I’d seen, I wouldn’t let their deaths be in vain. I would uphold the cycle, honor their heat, and consume them. If it meant getting closer to answers for my fellow humans. It was a small price to pay. It just escalated from there when an unenlightened face in the crowd wandered into my camp. A bolt of panic shot through me once again, bringing tides to my palms and earthquakes to my flimsy joints.

I couldn’t stop. I found myself drawn to nature’s swarms, cracking open hornet’s nests and beehives with a hope-drunken fervor. Handful after venomous handful of stinging, frothing fury crunched beneath my molars. My hands and mouth swelled up and inflamed to several times their original size, but I could hardly feel it when compared to the spoils of my conquests. Each nest was worthless; hornets yielded only rotten meat, which my lips and cheeks were rapidly becoming anyway, and the paper pulp of their nests, which filled my stomach at least. Bees’ nests fared little better. After tasting the Jelly, honey was nearly unpalatable in its bitterness, and the wax soothed my skin enough to feel the residual pain of the stings again. I would never go for bee nests, were it not for the smallest treasure chamber tucked away inside the most cloistered box: the queen’s chamber and her tiny dollop of Royal Jelly. It didn’t come close to the delicacy produced by the swarm, but it dulled my itch, if only ever so slightly.

I was finally granted access to the hive one day. I don’t remember how I got there, but once more I stood at that spindly spire that stretched, like a brittle spear, towards the heavens. It bore bronze branches that splintered off from the main trunk but were too small to hold any actual rooms. Surely, I thought, this spire isn’t tall enough to disguise full rooms as miniatures from an underlooking view. I wish I had appreciated that, my final sane thought, before pushing forth into the tree. That tree with rot in its roots, a hollow trunk, and faces in the walls. The place where I first lost my mind- and came back for more. Every cell in my body was screaming for me to run away except for the tiniest node of my brain, that which magnetically drew me back to the hive.

Layer 03: With Roots Above And Branches Below

I found myself in the middle of a spiral staircase, passing landing after landing but never stopping. From pulsating spore-like eggs near the ceiling, a sickly yellow haze illuminated the stairwell. The walls were covered in metallic motifs of so many spindly-limbed humanoids, their near-perfect silver gleam only silenced by dancing shadows from the glowing pods. In such a beautiful lair, I was a puppet to a mind not my own, climbing on as my legs, shot through with necrosis and vile venom, exhausted themselves beyond any ability to be moved by human will. My head grew lighter the higher I climbed, but that only made my overwhelming desire for Jelly displace what remained of my consciousness further. Was the chamber so high up last time?

Was it above ground at all?

Am I being exhausted, like a gazelle chased down over miles, as my body eats itself to keep moving forward? Am I hunted by something beyond my comprehension? Will my labor be rewarded?

Just as I started to doubt, the umpteenth door opened with a creak. Inside was a room with three walls of a deep velvety red, hardly visible under an intricate web of silver and brass adornments, all distinctly macabre or occult. Skulls of various creatures in profile were a common motif, as were spiders and other stereotypically spooky creatures. It seemed anticlimactic, after the legitimately eerie trek, to be greeted with decor out of a 1930’s Universal monster movie. The only thing out of place was the largest decoration. On the wall opposite the door, above the lone window (stained glass, of course) hung a pair of silvery Sock and Buskin masks large enough to be worn, but too distorted in their respective joy and despair to fit on a human face.

Upon entering the room, everything changed. I turned around after stepping in to see a wall of gray flesh

So many eyes

Mouths everywhere

The man dressed as a beetle

I grew fainter. The cravings almost wore away what little solidity remained in my stance. I tried to brace myself with a hand on the floor, but I jerked it back instinctively after the moist floor dilated at my touch. The floor, the ceiling, the back side of the door, all were built from the Swarm and studded with twisted alien features.

“You OK there, my boy?” asked the buff man in the beetle’s crown, from his chair upholstered in velvet. “You need something to drink?”

Something in me snapped at those words. My jaw clenched and my spine seethed, the numb headache igniting into something far more sharp and concentrated. I hissed, “YOU KNOW DAMN FUCKING WELL WHAT I NEED TO DRINK! I NEED TO FUCKING DROWN IN THE STUFF, YOU FUCKING SNAKE, AND I NEED TO DROWN IN IT NOW!” Even in my enraged state, I surprised myself. I didn’t know I was capable of making such guttural sounds with a human throat. In an age more receptive to prayers and superstitions, I must have sounded like I was speaking some unholy tongue. HOWDAREHETAUNTME! DOES HE HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT HE’S PUT ME THROUGH!

“You seem upset,” he said with a chuckle, “so just tell me how you reacted to your first dose.” He indicated to the chair next to him, a recliner from a more civilized age of exposed gears and form interwoven with function. Sitting on it, I could feel my resentment drain away with rivers of comfortable heat, like water rinsing dried blood down a shower drain.

Layer 04: Fairy Empire

And so I told him of my enlightenment that came to me in a dream… Or something. I couldn’t tell him where I joined into the spiral of human malice, I just couldn’t relieve my actions a third time. But I told him of my visions of shamblers and squid-headed monstrosities walking the earth, of their passing into the planet, our crafted replacement idols, and how history shaped in their wake. The whole time he said nothing, but silently nodded with his chin in his paw-like hand. “It sounds like you read the Records.”

“The records?”

“The Akashic Records. Stored in the collective unconscious is the entire history of this planet and everything on it, in fleshy server rooms called Chambers. We only access them when we put aside ourselves and enjoy indulgences from our forerunners; our Elders, those imperfect beings who died so that we may approach utopia. It sounds like you read a pretty tough portion of them, especially for your first visit. I doubt anyone could have seen what you did. Good job.”

I was stunned. I again felt it, that bolt of unsteadiness. I never thought I’d find pure anxiety comforting, but after the months I’d had, I welcomed signs of my humanity. Those thoughts were swept away by the realization of what I’d heard. I bolted straight up. “Does that mean I need to see more? Can I have more Royal Jelly? I can know more?” I inquired fervently.

“Unfortunately, not yet. You didn’t react well, I think it’s safe to say. If you think it went well, we can look into it, but you need to hear something.

What you saw wasn’t the whole “truth” as you might read it in a war. It’s just one of many speculations on the nature of our universe, presented as objectively as possible- that is to say, as though you believed it. And it sounds like what you saw resonated with you, which is great! But we need to discuss-”

I cut him off at the first sign of resistance. “So you’re denying me more knowledge?” I stood up. “I went for so long without coming back here, only to finally make it over, climb this spire, and then be denied the Jelly? Is that what you’re saying?”

“We’re just c-concerned that you’re taking th-this a little too seriously, is all. Remember, you only saw a possibility of the world’s origin, so, ahhh…” he trailed off.

“SPIT IT OUT!”

“Maybe Royal Jelly isn’t so much of a match for you,” he said. My gaze flew about the room while he spoke. “That’s all I wanted to... teeeeeeeeeeee

His voice lost its clarity to me at that moment. My ears began to ring. Time slowed to a crawl. On my hand

That same hand I braced into an insectoid eye with

Was a familiar red syrup

I licked my palm, and my brain lit up like my neurons were soaked in gasoline, just waiting for this match. In that moment, those smudges of jelly from those waxy, imperfect hives may as well have been dogshit stuck to my shoe for how appealing they were. This was the closest to satisfaction I had reached in the weeks I spent tantalized. Everything was on fire with the urge for more. I licked my filthy hand until my neurons cooled and I could taste the coppery bite of my own blood. The man in the beetle’s crown was still talking, unaware of the madness I had oh-so joyously indulged in. I lunged for the wall, only for his blathering to abruptly cease as he tackled me backwards.

My withered,almost shrink-wrapped form was able to slip through his arms, causing him to land face-first and stun himself. I kicked at his face once, softly, experimentally, to a small pained groan. It was almost funny! I did it again, and this time couldn’t hold back a giggle. I kicked harder. Something crunched, he yelped, and I cracked up. I kicked his ear like one would a soccer ball. Blood trickled out and he let out a single pained sob. Again and again I wailed down kicks, bruising and battering the man who tried to hold me back, going into fits at his various responses. I decided to try something different. “Last one…” I taunted, and waited five seconds. No reaction. I let loose with my heel at the top of his head. No reaction. I attempted to spin kick the horn off his helmet. It snapped, but the man wearing it had nothing to say. I poked him with my toe, in the eye, and nothing happened. I kicked his eye, and felt it give way, but the beetle man still lay silent. Either he’s dead or very unconscious, I thought, and turned my attention to the other eyes, those lining the walls.

I poked one experimentally. It winced with lids of gray flesh. I poked again. Royal Jelly pooled up in the corner. Now we’re getting somewhere. I jammed as many of my lengthened fingers into as many eyes as I could. I closed the door and ran the distance of the room, trailing my claws into as many eyes as I could, with the joyous malice of a child pressing all the elevator buttons. I threw the chairs into the walls, stuck shards of the beetle crown into the all-encompassing pupils, poked and prodded and did the due diligence of a proper scientist. Every drop of Royal Jelly went down like… well, like nothing else. It was intoxicating beyond words. But I needed more.

I pulled a book of matches from the pocket of my jacket, lit one, and put it to one set of the wall’s lips. It started sobbing, but before it should have felt the heat of the flame. It anticipated pain and feared it. I tried it on another mouth and found the same thing. After putting the match out in a particularly dry eye, I rummaged through my pockets. I found a salt packet, which I applied to as many eyes as I could find. They shriveled up like a slug would, and promptly wept delicious tears. I threw pins like darts in the walls, and they were even more effective than the matches. I stuck them between my fingers, as if they were spiked knuckles, and swung wildly at the walls. That was the ticket. The ceiling, wall, door, floor, all erupted into delicious weeping. Jelly streamed from their eyes like ambrosia from Olympian fountains. I drank tears from distorted masks of grief in a frenzied voracity. I slurped, I licked, I guzzled, I soaked my maw in that delicious Royal Jelly, that power, that taste, that can only be earned through fear. The faces began to regurgitate Jelly, out of terror at my avarice, and I only continued.

If they would only reward me when I scared them, then I would become a nightmare. I dug my lengthened fingers into the bulging, alien eyes around me, past puckered mouths to the rawest throats, all in the name of that most intoxicating elixir. I now thrived on fear and repulsion, on tears and vomit, all in the name of the truth. There had to be more to the Records than what I’d seen. There had to be meaning for the curse I bore, for the hollowness within humanity.

As I pried, as I defaced the hive, my mind expanded until its vessel was no longer sufficient. Gray matter wound into ropes and burst through my skull, finally relieving me of the throbbing pressure that plagued me for months. Brass motifs and metal embellishments rattled and broke free of the walls, shaping themselves to fit my needs as they metallically grafted me a new form, one with too many arms and too few fingers. One too spiny and cold to be called human, or even of flesh.

The Man In Yellow began to transform, not that he cared in his intoxicated furor. It started simultaneously at his prying, quivering hands and his equally unsteady heart. Each set of unnaturally long fingers fused into a single pincer, with the once-deft thumb becoming nothing more than a flimsily opposable scissor blade. His chest, covered only with his tattered yellow blazer and loose skin that hung off his bones like damp clothes off a scarecrow, took on a much more imposing form as metal began flying to and layering itself on it. After frighteningly little time, his once-human body resembled the trunk of a metal snake or the jointed carapace of some shellfish time forgot.

This distortion spread, like embers through paper, to his limbs. The arms were first to go: this new parasite ate what remained of his sickly thin upper arms until only a ball joint remained, then put that energy to use growing his forearms to wholly unnatural lengths. With a stomach-rending snap the ulna and radius separated, unzipping the claws into a crusher and blade. From those two pieces, the strong upper part regenerated its opposable blade, and the part once called a thumb became a spear-like point, fit to scrabble and heave this new monstrous form across the terrain. Each remaining bone warped into the proper shape to hold new elbows, shoulders, and joints that humans had no need to name. His legs, similarly, were consumed at the thighs and split at the tibia and fibula, but for the briefest of moments struggled to rend the still-intact feet. They fell before the metallic embers, though, and each ragged half became encased in brass to form more claws. Finally, as before, everything bent into shape to accept articulation. The Man In Yellow could now properly be called an arthropod, a being with jointed limbs.

Finally, the Man In Yellow’s head. That pulverized parody of a handsome countenance, rendered raw by contaminated serums. As if predestined, the final piece of greebling to grow over his face was a mask caught in the throes of mad laughter. Its weeping partner remained stuck to the vermilion wall. The metal spread to the man’s now-sparse hairline before stopping and re-molding itself to the raw features beneath, serving as a second skin. His ears, once gnawed down to fractions of their former size, grew to grotesque lengths and pointed tips, and were the only flesh visible above the neck.

And thus, the Steely Manticore was born. I, the parasitic ego that consumed him, was set free from the Swarm, and now that you’ve read this passage in the Wired Phantasmagoria, maybe a little part of me is in your brain now too. Feed me well while I stay, please!

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Alistair sighed. Who could believe this shit? “I suppose I have to,” they said aloud. It’s in the job description of any self-respecting occultist loon to believe, or at least Want To Believe. They stood from their chair, silver chains jangling and purple cloak unfurling down to their shins. “It’s time to go to work.”