Within Us All

By Simon Logan

Artwork by Simon Logan

Every time a new prisoner was brought in, the excitement began and it was no different this time.

Vincent was crouched in his corner as always when Keeler began sniffing the air. The man’s tongue flicked in and out between his scabbed lips as if he were a lizard tasting the hot Colombian sky now hidden from them. Some of the others in the cell looked up at Duggan as he put his porn mag down and took out the key from his pocket.

Most gathered at the bars to the cell. Vincent remained where he was, his head buried between his crossed knees, the vague hope that he would fall into the darkness there and emerge some place else, anywhere else, lingering forever more in his head. He watched a stag beetle scurry across the dusty stone floor and into one of the many coin-sized holes in the walls insects use to traverse the dungeon.

The dim orange light of the usual two torches was abruptly added to, becoming thicker and more yellow as the new prisoner was led into the cell by Duggan and the other guard from upstairs that everyone referred to as Colonel. None of the prisoners tried anything as Duggan entered the cell and deposited the latest, a potato sack tied over his head and a blood stain on his torn trousers. This new one wore no shoes and Vincent could see the strange feet that scraped on the ground behind him. They were clawed, and looked like the mandibles of the beetles that infested the place, nibbling on the prisoners’ flesh while they slept. The malformed digits grew black towards their ends and one joint curled in on itself, bone meshing with bone.

"Be nice children," Duggan said as he backed out of the cell. His tobacco-stained teeth gleamed at Vincent as he watched the dungeon master lock the gate again.

Vincent thought of hyenas gathering around a fresh zebra corpse as his cellmates moved in on the new addition. Keeler was prodding the potato sack with the sixth and seventh fingers on his right hand, his tongue constantly darting in and out, in and out, in and out.

Ferrerra, the shit-girl, was the only one other than Vincent that didn’t seem interested. She stayed by the cell’s only toilet, her good arm wrapped around it’s u-bend, her crooked arm, the one with no flesh, just hardened cartilage, hooked into the rim. The toilet was full to the brim with rotting faeces and decaying hunks of matter and she lapped at it gently with her tongue and the side of her face. Flies and wasps buzzed around her head. Vincent had seen her do nothing else since he had first been captured by the Polizia Del Terra, though maybe that wasn’t as long as it seemed.

An hour passed and the thing in the sack still hadn’t moved. Most had lost interest in it and returned to the small pleasure that kept their twisted minds ticking over - be it picking at scabs, singing old Colombian field-hymns or practising different grins.

Vincent had begun to think the thing was yet another D.O.A. but almost as soon as the last flicker of interest had vanished from the remaining prisoners, hands slipped out from under the sack - gently and slowly so that no one would see. But Vincent saw.

The hands were like the feet - clawed, shelled and blackened at the ends, perhaps charred - and tore a neat line up the sack, slicing it open. The man inside’s eyes met with Vincent’s. They were calm, milky. The sack discarded, the man just lay there, unmoving.

"Where am I?"

He mouthed the words, eyes still fixed on Vincent and it seemed that although the cell was no more than 15 feet by 15 feet and that there were now thirteen prisoners including the body of Gerd that festered in one corner, nothing else existed except the two deformed men.

Vincent didn’t answer for a long time. He dreamed that as long as he didn’t interact with the dungeon, didn’t acknowledge that he was there, that maybe one day it would just cease existing. That this nightmare place would grow tired of taunting him and return him to the life he had led before being found.

Maybe it was because of the weakness seething in his bones, or the gluey eyes of the new prisoner, fresh from above-ground, still with the taste of real air in his scalp and the blue sky in his mind, that Vincent answered the man.

"A prison."

He spoke aloud but none of the others were interested in his words. A small fight had broken out between the awkwardly obese Allalabel and six-armed Lopez. Keeler tried to suck the blood that oozed from Lopez’s back.

"Why?" Again, the newcomer mouthed the word.

Could he not speak? Or did he just choose not to?

"You’re a drug baby," Vincent told him. "Your deformities are a result of the concoctions your mother took while she was pregnant."

"My mothers dead." Perhaps a trust now formed, the man spoke aloud. His voice was a rakish grind.

"Therefore they must punish you instead."

"I don’t understand." The man’s clawed hands clicked and scraped the stone floor. A beetle scuttled over to him, black shell shining the colour of an oil slick.

"You don’t need to. My name is Vincent."

"Ugly. I’m Ugly."

"That’s your name?"

"That's what they call me."

And then Ugly closed his eyes and the claws stopped clicking.

Later - there was no time in the dungeon, only later, later still - Duggan appeared with a hog’s tray filled with sweet-smelling vegetables that crawled with microscopic life. He opened the cell gate, dropped the tray to the floor, spat into it, then left once more, whistling drunkenly as he engaged the lock.

It was only then that Ugly crawled to his bleeding knees and over to the wall next to Vincent, where he slumped heavily.

"They would have eaten you too if you hadn’t moved," Vincent told him as they watched the others fight for the diseased scraps.

"Why aren’t you like them?"

"I haven’t been here long enough. I remember life above. They believe they are what they are told they are and so act like it."

"And what are they?"

"What are we, we," Vincent corrected, watching Ferrerra take a handful of mushy leaves and dip them in the toilet’s waste before stuffing them into her mouth. "We’re the infected. Mutants. Genetic, drug-induced mishaps. The dying embers."

And Vincent went back to staring into the darkness pooled in his lap, watching memories play there.

Most of the others were asleep when Ugly asked him, "Don’t you want to get out of here?."

"Yes. But I don’t want to go back up there."

"Have you ever tried - to escape?"

Vincent’s lower lip was much bigger than it should be and hung down onto his chin slightly, making it difficult to speak at length. He scooped up a trickle of saliva with his middle finger.

"At first. I got into the tunnels once. They surround this place. The secret police use them to move around from installation to installation. But there was so many of them, so winding -and I had no light. I was caught in no time."

Ugly’s feet were clicking on the ground, perhaps involuntarily. Beetles scuttled towards him, gathering by his disfigured toes.

"My hands and feet speak to them," he told Vincent.

One particularly bloated-looking bug crawled up Ugly’s leg and over his chest. The man waited until it was on his chin then bit down. One clawed hand snatched the tiny beast and held it aloft as the contents of it’s abdominal carapace leaked out.

"It’s what I lived on up above, on the streets. My friends."

The cavern that the cell was built into was cut in half by the immense gate that separated prisoner from guard. Torchlight painted the walls at all times; there was no night or day here, not so far under the ground. Just an endless, unforgiving stream of time that filled Vincent’s head with pain.

"My father, he worked the poppy fields," Ugly explained, unprompted. "When he came home at night, his hands would be covered in seeds. My mother would scrape them from his palms into a big bowl and make a stew with them. She said they had medicinal uses. To keep us all strong." A pause. "Does anyone know we’re here?"

Vincent nodded carefully. "Yes. People know. But no one that matters. Our country is dying, Ugly. All people think of when they hear ‘Colombia’ is drugs. Our existence can no longer be acknowledged."

"Why don’t they just kill us?"

"Maybe one day. But for now they are still interested enough to test on us every now and then. Find out exactly what made us what we are."

Vincent closed his eyes, but did not sleep. He opened them again when he heard a soft, wet sound coming from close by.

Duggan was masturbating behind his desk, grunting and smiling as he stared off into the distance. The torches were beginning to die, their light weak and saturated with heavy particles of dust.

The sound came not from the guard, but from Ugly, lying next to him. Vincent watched in fearful amazement as the other man’s stomach rippled gently as if the beetles he so loved were breeding beneath his skin. Tiny wisps of steam rose from the pores around his belly button.

"They’re coming."

And Vincent started as he realised Ugly was awake, smiling though his eyes were closed. One clawed hand rested on his thigh, a black mandible stroking the flesh above, arousing it to a more frantic shuffling.

Then, as an ocean wind drops and leaves the water calm, the rippling stopped. Ugly purred contentedly and his hand returned to the stone floor, where it patterned out an insectoid call to the black-shelled denizens of the cavern.

Later, Lopez died from the wounds he’d garnered from his melee with Allalabel. He was sprawled out in the middle of the floor, two of his six arms near the point of severance with only a single tendon supporting each of them. A small pool of congealing purple-red blood halo’d his head.

The usual sounds were in the dank air - moans and whispers so disjointed they seemed to come from the walls themselves; the incessant dripping of water from underground streams; and the maddening mixture of rants, lullabies and insults that served as background music in this place.

But there was something missing.

This song had been playing constantly ever since Vincent had been dumped in the prison so almost instantly he recognised that participating noises was gone. He closed his eyes to concentrate harder, shifted his position to move off the growth that spurted from his side like a second head.

The insects.

The clicking, the scuttling, the scraping.

It was all gone; silent.

Vincent glanced around the cell, looking for one, just one, black beetle moving across the stone. He couldn’t find one.

"They know what’s coming."

Ugly’s voice, from a few feet away. He was sitting up against the adjacent wall, back to it, legs splayed. The naked flesh of his abdomen and lower chest undulated with a quiet fury. He had a faint smile on his crooked face.

Smiles were something Vincent was suspicious, and jealous, of as his distorted lip and sunken right cheekbone made it impossible for him to mirror the gesture.

He had never smiled in his life.

"I told them," Ugly continued. His lobster-hands rubbed together, sparking. "They are far away now."

And Vincent realised that some time between Ugly’s arrival and this very moment, he had become deathly afraid of the other man.

At the next feed, Vincent grabbed a chunk of swollen meat that seemed to melt under his hand. He hadn’t eaten in five feeds now and could easily see the veins that tattooed his body beneath his translucent skin. He swallowed before his taste buds had a chance to realise anything had been in his mouth. Sustenance, its all sustenance.

Ugly was still in exactly the same position as before, the movements under his skin more wicked than ever. Something very sharp was living within him, poking and prodding at him, curious to experience the world without the veil of blood and cartilage in the way.

His eyes finally left Vincent (had they really been there all that time? how much time?) and landed on the gate. Duggan stood before it, fat belly separated into three-inch sections by the bars he pressed himself up against, chewing on something as he stared inquisitively at the new addition to the family. A shiver seemed to run across him when Ugly clicked his claws and the guard returned to his desk like a scorned dog.

The cavern was suddenly very quiet and once more Vincent was certain it was only he and Ugly that lingered in that evil place.

"People only see the darkness on my outside," the man said, not grinning now but smirking.

And as he spoke the first split appeared in his stomach. A single tear of blood welled, then spilled towards his back. A tiny black leg poked out from the wound and swivelled like an antenna.

Then another crack appeared just below the man’s left breast. It half-mooned before a bug with two giant incisors crawled out and fell to the floor.

Vincent watched in dull horror as wound after wound appeared and insect after insect emerged. At first it was ants and small spiders, but as Ugly’s blood began to coat him completely, the creatures grew. Soon the giant stag beetles that had, until so recently, inhabited the caverns arose from within him, proudly strutting atop his belly.

The insects crawled across the stone floor, seeking out darkness and warmth wherever they could. Some disappeared into holes in the wall; others into human holes. But none of the other prisoners moved, a strange paralysis having overtaken them for although their eyes were open they did not try and escape the infestation. Even Keeler, a set of six mantises swarming into his mouth and up his nose did not scream.

But all of their eyes were wide and wet with fear.

The insects were avoiding Vincent. Something long with hundreds of legs and seven or eight sections to it’s dark purple carapace stopped by his left leg before moving on to the corpse of Lopez.

When he looked back at Ugly, the man was wide open from groin to clavical. The skin on his stomach had been shredded to fine strips and lay on his lap in a sticky mess of blood and bodily juices and drowning ants. His rib cage was exposed and there were hints at the organs beneath.

And suddenly the prison was alive with screaming, screaming, screaming and everything was moving again.

The others had snapped out of whatever reverie the invasion had put them in and they were leaping about the cavern, smashing into the walls and the gates, spitting bugs from their mouths and scraping them from their skin. The ground swarmed and seethed, spilling up onto the walls like a storm sea.

Ferrerra writhed before Vincent, whose turn it now was to be frozen, unable to scream for even through her deformities and broken mind she knew that to open her mouth was to invite in the hordes; their droppings and their larvae.

Is that where they had all come from? he wondered absently. Had they been born in Ugly’s bloodstream as he fed on them while up top? Or had he called them with those atrocious hands and feet, speaking insectile words without ever moving his lips, calling the legions to him, tot heir street master?

Vincent scurried backwards as the massive Allalabel charged towards him, crying blood red tears as his tongue was gnawed at. He dived to one side and Allalabel carreened into the wall where Vincent had lain, splitting open like a bag of rotten fruit upon impact and a hundred thousand fat moths fluttered out from the limp mess the man had become.

There was nowhere to run to in the cell. Three or four prisoners hammered hysterically on the gate, dust puffing out from the points where metal met stone but there was reinforced concrete there too so the gate just creaked and stayed where it was.

Duggan came running into the cavern from one of the passageways, finally responding to the screams of over a dozen drug babies, glassy uncomprehending eyes locking with Vincent’s for just a second.

"Help us!" someone cried and then everyone joined in, one insane chorus chanting at the dungeon master and laughing too.

Vincent was shoved to one side, then another, as the prisoner’s desperation grew. Only one set of bars and two inches of space seperated them from their escape but that was all it took to make one world into another. The cell was rapidly filling with dark, many legged creatures that were crawling up the cell gate and cloaking the light from the torches on the other side.

The hoots and squawks and shrieks filled Vincent’s ears and brought blood to his vision. He was hit hard from behind as someone charged at the gate and he fell to his knees before Ugly.

Eyes still open, the insects’ source wasn’t moving. His face wore no expression, his arms and legs spread wide, palms upwards, corrupted ankles splayed outward. His insides, now devoid of the flesh to keep them in place, had slid outwards and onto the floor beside him leaving an empty crimson hole.

And as Vincent knelt next to it, he became entranced by how dark it was, and warm it looked - so much more so than the shadowy folds that appeared when he crossed his legs and wished he could fall into them. He glanced at the gate, now three-quarters cloaked by hard-shelled bugs and their feathery legs, and knew that by now Duggan was halfway to the surface and would never return. Perhaps no one would. Just seal the surface and leave them there to rot with time, forever hidden.

Still not a single insect had touched him and Vincent knew that it was something to do with the clicking of Ugly’s warped digits, still moving on the ground beneath him. Was there message of avoidance meant to be a punishment or a salvation?

Whichever, Vincent knew that soon he would be alone in their place, alone with the bugs and the bodies and all he really wanted was to hide in the darkness, away from it all, away from himself and so he crawled towards Ugly - and into him.

Head first, then neck and shoulders, and still he kept going, deeper into the corpse as it’s claws clicked and scraped on the ground beside it, and then it was his hands, spreading the immense wound wider, allowing him access to the comfort beyond.

Ugly let Vincent enter him without a sound, save the wet slurps of his muscle being pushed aside.

The sounds of the insects, the screams, the metal grating against it’s concrete supports and the wind blowing far above, faded away from Vincent and already he was feeling safe again. Only very vaguely did he wonder where the blackness would lead for he didn’t really care as long as it was away, away.

And so he crawled in further until his hips vanished, then his thighs. He was curling up inside the body as if returning to the womb except this time the womb would birth him with proper hands, a real face and the correct mind. After so long spent wishing, he had finally been granted a way out.

And for the first time in his life, Vincent smiled.

End.