Mammon - The book of Two

Mammon

Evaporating sweat brought what was left of the cloth of her tunic uncomfortably tight across her back. Imogen felt filthy and slick with grease across her whole body, the supple skin that folds within the recesses of her elbows, behind her knees and around her ankles were stuck with grit and dirt giving her the impression she was wearing sandpaper, the condition of her knickers and the texture of the whole area known only to her and her wax strips were so contaminated with Hell knows what Imogen thought it best not to find out, it didn’t stop her constantly pulling at the restrictive elastic and bunched fabric riding up far too far. The expertly constructed stone tunnel she was in was welcomingly cool with breezes of air that chilled her sweat glistening skin to the bone; after the desert furnace it was Heaven sent.

“Are we in the sewers?” she asked of the creature that slunk behind her, there was no shadow here for it to hide in as there was precious little light to generate any and Imogen hoped the thing would remain in it's prefered location and not take the opportunity to get familiarised with walking within her sight. “It reminds me of the Victorian arches in the London super crap highways.”

“Catacombes.” somehow the voice of the thing fitted precisely into the description of this place, cold, dry, dead.

Imogen felt the walls which were cold and rough, stone. The blocks fitted perfectly together offering no visible line between each one, they rose a good height above her vertically and then arched together leaving a crisp line straight down the middle. In a manner not apparent and unknown to her, Imogen could see a slim river of poor light running down the crease, it was like the grey greasy used water running down a street gutter after a particularly dirty car had been hand washed, or the fatty scum drained from the used water tank of a fast food van. Whatever the cause or reason it illuminated just enough to see the darkness.

Statues formed scenes lining the way, skeleton headed dandys danced with skull children, not just a carved stone childs body with it's skin stripped bare but a skull the size of a coconut with fatty little baby arms reaching out with stubby little fingers. Women as thin as sticks of straw bowed to horned men who displayed their arousal openly in a manner that Imogen almost approved of, the sculptor must have had a lot of stone to work with as it was more generous that the rubber similarity Imogen had tucked behind an old bible , just in case her mother came round and ‘tidied’, in her bedside bottom drawer.

Other figures and carvings lead down the passage they now walked with their footsteps echoing just a fraction to slow to coincide with their footsteps and not always as regular which set off all the inherited early warning systems to danger built into her pre-historic center of her brain.

Arches opened gulfs in the walls as crossroads were made and to Imogen’s eye the crosses were not always straight but bias ever so slightly in favour of the left. After several crossroads were met and passed Imogen’s mind conjured an image of a large wheel and she must be at one of the outer circles running in a diameter to the hub with numerous spokes stretching out to where a tyre should be…...or, and this new thought made her shudder, a giant cobweb with an equally sized predator sat in the center awaiting patiently it's prize. The term ‘capture spiral’ burnt into her mind.

“Thank you Mini Beast club.” she said under her breath as the anatomy of web construction carefully explained to her much younger self by an enthusiastic Bug Explorer was presented front and center from the archives of her brain.

A series of bells tolled hollowly thrusting walls of sound as solid as floating bricks sounded like punctuation through the vaulted tunnels so strongly they pushed a force wave wind of tonal sound that shook them to the core.

“A call to prayer.”

“Here? I wouldn’t have thought that possible.” commented Imogen.

“Prayers are made, I never said they were answered. Hope can carry a weight that would crush a body; the hope that puffs up the soul calls out to ignore the pain, carry on just one more day, tomorrow will bring solace, only one more mile till it's over, make it round the next corner or just one more night or help will be here soon. Yet here prayers are cried into the dirt while hope that they will be realised is smashed under the heel and torn apart by clawing hands. No. No help comes no matter how desperately hope is called.

It wasn’t seen, not here in the catacombs but it was felt. Bodies, or at least the vestiges of memory that hung around the souls, passed on mass from where they despaired to where they were summoned. Imogen called to mind Sunday services she had been dragged to for family reasons including the recognition of hatching, matching and dispatching, she had enjoyed the last the most, they were short and ended up with lots of relatives personally spoiling her and her sister  for reasons at the time she did not know as a child; where she was forced to sit quietly on hard numbing benches and trapped within the dead grey stone of the church. She oft wondered during these aeon length times how so much stone could stay up so high above her head, she put it down to magic from the man in a dress who stood boring them all with his voice that sucked all the enjoyment out of such an echoey space. In these times she would wrinkle her nose and try her own magic to make them fall onto him. When not fantasising over falling masonry she would spy out small devil and animal headed gargoyles that appeared to be created straight from the grey stone pillars and walls that had crawled out of the shadows to colonise the inside of the church just as their larger brethren had done to dominate the parapets and spires that thrust heavenward like dragon teeth of the roof. In her imagination the small gargoyles would crawl across the walls to wage war on their opposite number, dragging them onto their own side, devouring their stoney flesh and leaving their stone bones to decorate the many macabre dioramas and death head reliefs that lines the walls of the public galleries. She would swear, but only in the strong light of day and well away from the church and it's yards of bones, that once when the service was at its longest and a cousin’s babe in arms was remonstrating at it's loudest, one which was swinging as always from the pinnacle of its pillar winked slyly at her.          

“Abandon hope all ye that enter here.” she said remembering a joke sign propped up proudly on a desk in the telesales office she worked in for a few days one summer.

“Hope springs eternal, but not at the base of the well of despair. No, hope was abandoned and forgotten a very long way from here.”

The creature seemed to suck air through it's teeth in a manner that suggested humour, not that it had made a joke or at least not to Imogen’s mind but maybe it had taken some enjoyment from it's last statement of fact.

The bells had fallen silent. Imogen had stopped listening to them but in their absence they were at their most obvious.

The souls had settled or at least the sounds of their movement had ceased and in their place a swish of cloth being dragged lifted from the silence and a thick column of brown robed, and for the lack of a more apt description, monks swept through the corridor. Imogen felt a pressure on her body and let herself be pushed into a recess behind the disturbing statues; although in her current dishevelled state and appearance in this dim light she would have blended into the decorations perfectly or if not adding to their horror if only slightly.

Numerous robed bodies purposefully strode forwards. Imogen tried to count and got past twenty and into thirty or more, each leaving in their wake a scent of mouldering cloth and aged sweat that mixed to penetrate through her nasal passages all too easily and unwanted.

The procession passed by and Imogen who had stayed still with her head pushed against the exposed leg of a bowing girl felt another force and unceremoniously setting her onto her side with her legs in the air. In the space she occupied only moments before were two habits and to her horror they were both still inhabited. This issue was being proactively resolved by the creature who appeared to be enjoying his task and looked more rounded now and less insect limbed, the grasshopper legs and arms filled out and appeared fleshy as if he had started to feed and gain weight after an eternity of starvation; where the nourishment was coming from was a mystery Imogen hoped never to solve.

Plucked like an oyster from it's shell, the slick fleshed things slopped onto the ground looking to all the world in their nakedness as if phlegm had been hocked up and spat out in disgust. They were humanoid in appearance, bald headed with large oval runny eyes, the pupils of which were huge in this poor light. There was no muscle tone to the limbs and the flabby skin hung in woeful bulges from the bone except at the hands and feet where the coverings of skin were pulled very tight giving the impression of long jointed claws.. Imogen had never seen such pitiful creatures and she would have felt compassion and sympathy for them if it hadn't been for their twisted look of hate burning in each unconscious eye.

The creature saw her looking and for a moment the two travellers made a brief visual contact before Imogen pulled her gaze away to look at anything but the thing. After looking at the robeless bodies the creature looked almost warm.

“Do not think sorrow for them for they would fell no sorrow for you.”

“What are they?” Imogen asked wanting to define them, to name them and understand.

“They are and what they were.” the creature easily lifted one from it's position on it's belly throwing it over, it landed wetly and with a splat that brought bile into Imogen’s mouth. On their backs they looked worse with a distended boil like stomach and withered genitalia. “They are called here Master but only here they command anything, what they were were nothing. Less than nothing. Nothing they will be again. Now hurry, you will see and you will understand.”

The creature held a squalid robe out with intent and Imogen’s stomach fell into a pit as she understood what was expected of her.

Silently two robed figures, with hoods hung low over their faces, marched off towards the centre of the web.

Their pace across the seemingly endless passages caused them to catch the collective of monk like Masters easily, none of the leaders looked around as they fitted in with the group and matched their pace so they were just a footstep away. As predicted they marched onwards to the hub, the centre and the awaiting souls stuffed inside the chamber who were as low as they could get with heads feverishly rocking in their desperation that they were creating pits within the dirt floor, every limb was bent so they were as low and as small as a body could possibly be.

The first Master into the high domed chamber which easily spanned the distance of several football pitches in length by kicking a prostrate soul a murmur rippled out in a growing circle and the prayers stopped. There wasn’t silence, no auditorium this large filled with this many beings could ever be silent with the gentle lapping of movement and shuffling of the dirt but there was a sense that every single one of the things on the floor, even the ones over a hundred meters away and not directly in sight, were doing their level best to appear frozen. None moved. None spoke. Hope had fled.

Clubs of stone created from the broken arms off statues slid out of the Masters’ robes and violence descended.