and the decaying skin wrinkled on his thighs as he took in a few sad breaths.
He stared at José María for a second, then slashed his cheek with a talon. José María’s scream went unheard in the vacuum of sound around us. Black blood sprang from his cheek. The monster licked the blood with a sweep of his tongue.
“What is your name, then?” I said.
The breath of the beast rolled down over my face. The breath was feces and fetid vegetables. It was maggots and sulfur. He heaved, breathing hard, and then spoke his name.
The word the beast spoke was long and strung together by many syllables. Each one rolled out of his throat as music, like a wet whisper. Its sound was like a flute and a rattle.
It was a word I had no comprehension for.
“I cannot pronounce that,” I said.
The beast stared down at his body, as if evaluating a thought.
“That is my name. I can’t help you learn it,” it said. “I can’t help you say it, either.”
“Fine. I’ll call you X.”
“X—” he said, and the single syllable melded with a bell tone. The music the creature made sounded exactly like a letter X, except wet and hollow at the same time.
“And now you can let me feast on your gift,” it said.
“He is not your gift,” I shouted.
What I saw in that monster’s eyes filled me with dread.
He’s old. He’s really, really old.
He was ancient. And he didn’t really care about us. That’s the reason his stare felt so odd.
“X, you said I was a wanderer,” I said.
“Yes, and we send wanderers back from where they came. Last time someone wandered through my gate was six hundred wheels ago.”
“Wheels?”
“600 wheels, yes,” said the creature.
“How much is that in years?” I said. His harp laughter danced in the air. With each cackle, his teeth bristled.
Those teeth. There’s so many teeth in there .
“You , too, have an obsession with time,” X said. “Interesting. Many wanderers share that defect. You’re a wanderer; you should know how many years there are in a wheel, and how many wheels there are in what you call a year.”
“I should?”
The creature smacked his lips.
“Let me show you something,” X said.
X scooped us under each of his arms, like kittens, and we walked along the edge of a precipice. As we leapt among the rocks, I smelled the mountain and its metal notes.
We moved closer to the edge of the precipice.
I could see that we were high up, but it wasn’t until we came close to the edge that I understood what lay below.
Dear God.
I had never seen a place more vast than this, not even when my father took us to the Grand Canyon. The immensity terrified me, and though I didn’t want to, I held on to the bony arm of the creature to make sure I didn’t fall.
Up above, a screech broke out—identical to the one I heard when we arrived in this place. A bird swooped upward, headed for the mountain.
On our left, the precipice of the mountain at first looked like outer space. As X approached the very edge of the rocks, his cones grew deeper and their music more melodic, revealing detail. Behind us, the mountain loomed over us. And now I understood that the mountain was minuscule in comparison to the precipice beneath it.
I looked down.
A land lay before us, as big as a planet, deep, so deep. It was a place built out of night.
Inside this deep space, a circular pattern emerged, and it coiled round and round, like a corkscrew. The circular canyon definitely had a topography. It was like a sinkhole with walls that curved in toward the center in a spiral.
This was nothing like the Grand Canyon. It was bigger than planet Earth and filled with a darkness that smelled of things forgotten and forbidden.
The coil moved downward, starting from the mountain where we stood. Thanks to the light from X, I could see tiny knobs of shimmering lights along the ridges of the coil, each one connected to the other by rivulets of black liquid like pearly tar. Those little
He stared at José María for a second, then slashed his cheek with a talon. José María’s scream went unheard in the vacuum of sound around us. Black blood sprang from his cheek. The monster licked the blood with a sweep of his tongue.
“What is your name, then?” I said.
The breath of the beast rolled down over my face. The breath was feces and fetid vegetables. It was maggots and sulfur. He heaved, breathing hard, and then spoke his name.
The word the beast spoke was long and strung together by many syllables. Each one rolled out of his throat as music, like a wet whisper. Its sound was like a flute and a rattle.
It was a word I had no comprehension for.
“I cannot pronounce that,” I said.
The beast stared down at his body, as if evaluating a thought.
“That is my name. I can’t help you learn it,” it said. “I can’t help you say it, either.”
“Fine. I’ll call you X.”
“X—” he said, and the single syllable melded with a bell tone. The music the creature made sounded exactly like a letter X, except wet and hollow at the same time.
“And now you can let me feast on your gift,” it said.
“He is not your gift,” I shouted.
What I saw in that monster’s eyes filled me with dread.
He’s old. He’s really, really old.
He was ancient. And he didn’t really care about us. That’s the reason his stare felt so odd.
“X, you said I was a wanderer,” I said.
“Yes, and we send wanderers back from where they came. Last time someone wandered through my gate was six hundred wheels ago.”
“Wheels?”
“600 wheels, yes,” said the creature.
“How much is that in years?” I said. His harp laughter danced in the air. With each cackle, his teeth bristled.
Those teeth. There’s so many teeth in there .
“You , too, have an obsession with time,” X said. “Interesting. Many wanderers share that defect. You’re a wanderer; you should know how many years there are in a wheel, and how many wheels there are in what you call a year.”
“I should?”
The creature smacked his lips.
“Let me show you something,” X said.
X scooped us under each of his arms, like kittens, and we walked along the edge of a precipice. As we leapt among the rocks, I smelled the mountain and its metal notes.
We moved closer to the edge of the precipice.
I could see that we were high up, but it wasn’t until we came close to the edge that I understood what lay below.
Dear God.
I had never seen a place more vast than this, not even when my father took us to the Grand Canyon. The immensity terrified me, and though I didn’t want to, I held on to the bony arm of the creature to make sure I didn’t fall.
Up above, a screech broke out—identical to the one I heard when we arrived in this place. A bird swooped upward, headed for the mountain.
On our left, the precipice of the mountain at first looked like outer space. As X approached the very edge of the rocks, his cones grew deeper and their music more melodic, revealing detail. Behind us, the mountain loomed over us. And now I understood that the mountain was minuscule in comparison to the precipice beneath it.
I looked down.
A land lay before us, as big as a planet, deep, so deep. It was a place built out of night.
Inside this deep space, a circular pattern emerged, and it coiled round and round, like a corkscrew. The circular canyon definitely had a topography. It was like a sinkhole with walls that curved in toward the center in a spiral.
This was nothing like the Grand Canyon. It was bigger than planet Earth and filled with a darkness that smelled of things forgotten and forbidden.
The coil moved downward, starting from the mountain where we stood. Thanks to the light from X, I could see tiny knobs of shimmering lights along the ridges of the coil, each one connected to the other by rivulets of black liquid like pearly tar. Those little
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