Mama

Chapter 12 of Signature.

Signature

Chapter Twelve

Mama

The Heart was a huge amphitheater-like depression, complete with a flat raised stage covered with the sacred skeletal remains of tortured and hanged Honeycomb Rats. There were wall niches for a hundred sputtering torches. The stage’s convex bluff featured letters carved four feet high, spelling out the word CAVALRY.

Three cruciform figures dominated this stage, each with an identifying name chiseled in small caps:

Chris was a four-foot cross of rusted pipe lengths, situated nearest the cavern entrance.

Cross, a posted leaning six-footer at center stage, had been fashioned of thousands of bone fragments sewn with lengths of human hair.

Double-Cross was a large cross-shaped hollow chipped out of the far wall, with matching shackles and complementary blood gutter.

Hunched at the foot of Double-Cross, Abel and Izzy were frantically administering to a mortally injured Titus Mack, now wearing only a bramble crown and a filthy rag wound up like a diaper. Double-Cross, by the wrist shackles and blood stains in the hollow, was obviously a stoning platform. And Mack, by his bashed appearance and wretched collapse, had just as obviously received the full treatment.

Chris, a spooky affair, supported a complete human skeleton, char-painted overall except for the broken teeth and polished cave pearl eyes. The blacked bones of this skeleton, like the cross itself, were attached by long strands of woven human hair. There was hair everywhere; strung into decorative coils and streamers, hung about like cobwebs from walls that glistened with layers of plastered human fat. The stench of that burnt hair permeated the Honeycomb Heart.

Tied to the skeleton’s clavicle, one end of a long hair-rope passed through its skull and out a hole bored in the cap, causing the dreadful bone monster to dance about grinning when the opposite end was pulled. This rope threaded a steel ring in the rock ceiling, and thence passed down to the central Cross, where it terminated in a noose around the scrawny neck framed by Madame Rat’s great waving mane of ash-white hair.

Mama was an emaciated nude woman in her nineties, nailed to a cross of sewn tibias and femurs. Every square inch of the woman’s epidermis had been attacked by lash and stone, so that now her body was a red and purple monstrosity; half-healed at the sites of recent abominations, waxy pink from the lingering kisses of countless torches.

Mama’s eyes had been stabbed so often that only the sockets remained, yet these two frightening hollows followed Amantu’s every movement. All her toes had been lopped off long ago, her nose torn from her face, her breasts ripped out of her chest. A hanging prune on either side of her head showed how the constant thrashing had torn off her impaled ears.

The stump of her left arm waved about crazily, while the putrefied forearm and half-hand, still spiked to the cross’s horizontal arm, hung at an angle; a withered black stem on a bone-yellow branch.

Mama’s right arm was intact to the mid-palm, where the fingers and meat of the hand had been ripped off in her frenzy, leaving only a gristly thumb. From this digit grew a foot-long curved yellow nail, chipped round the edges but with a tip sharp as a razor. Despite her unbelievable condition, the Mater Infector cackled gaily as her toothless old head rocked every which way, rattling the grinning black bogeyman beside her.

“Hammer!” Abel gasped, jarring the professor from his trance. “Over here, man! It’s Ti! Give us a hand!”

Mama’s head swung toward the sound and back to Amantu. She laughed hysterically while he backpedaled to his friends.

Mack’s eyes were rolled way up, and he didn’t appear to be breathing. His face and neck were a pox of cuts and contusions.

“Grab his chest!” Abel grunted, squeezing around to raise a sprawled leg.

Izzy took the other leg as Amantu, poised behind Mack, clasped his hands at the chest and strained to haul him upright. The man was a dead weight, the leverage all wrong. It took the Group three separate, protracted struggles to rock him into a standing slump. They walked him in a tight circle.

With Amantu’s back to Cross, Abel and Izzy lifted on Mack’s legs. There was a giddy moment when the professor’s body weight was the winning force, and it seemed they’d be able to stand the man straight. The next moment Amantu was staggering back under his own impetus, as though in slow motion. His startled expression matched those of his friends as they stood gaping, the unconscious astronomer propped between them.

A sharp pain ripped across the back of Amantu’s neck.

The Hammer whirled. Mama’s sockets were fixed on him, her gummy jaw hanging. He snarled at that black empty mouth, and at the instrument that had sliced him--she was dangling her long curved thumbnail in his face, its stiletto tip gleaming with sputum and blood from her just-slit tongue--before his huge bull’s knuckle of a fist slammed flush into her mangled Halloween face.

The impact doubled the frail old woman at the waist, shattering the cross and sending a hundred bone spurs through her back and out her belly. Her ecstatic death scream, echoing throughout the Heart and out into the adjacent tunnels and caves, was immediately answered by shrieks of unbearable envy.

In an instant mobs of cripples were pouring into the chamber.

The Group dragged Mack off the stage and slammed into a facing wall even as a dozen howling men and women leaped tooth and nail on Mama’s impaled corpse.

Only the shared body of Titus Mack kept the Group a group. They clung tenaciously, clearing a path along the tunnel’s wall by elbowing and kicking, by side-arming, and by occasionally butting heads.

Amantu, as backwards-striding front man, bore the brunt of the punishment. He held the position admirably, but was increasingly prone to bouts of faintness and confusion. The human flow thinned as it poured past. The Group found harbor in a wide hollow.

Amantu smacked against the rock back-first, slowly slid to his rear, and sat slumped with his head between his knees, still hanging onto Mack. Sweat poured off his nose and chin.

Abel rolled back an eyelid. “It’s his heart, damn it. Entirely too much for him. We’ve got to rest.”

The black head rose and fell. “No! Titus must be evacuated. I shall recover.”

Izzy found the carotid with one hand and fanned the professor’s face with the other. “He needs oxygen, Josh. This place is suffocating.”

“I will be…right.” Amantu, squeezing out from under Mack, forced himself erect by walking his spine up the wall. He slapped a hand to the back of his neck.

“No, Hammer,” Abel said, “you will not. Not without adequate rest.”

But the professor was already scooping up Mack. “Later, Josh,” he puffed. “Later.”

Izzy and Abel exchanged glances, grabbed a limb apiece, and swung their way out.

Something subliminal in Mama’s scream reverberated into the deepest tunnels, bringing armies of ravening rats up every passage. The beasts leapt on the thrashing cripples, driving their fangs into anything moist. The Group fought them back with torches, making their way against the stream on the theory that moving away from the Heart was moving toward an exit. The flow decreased steadily, and by the time they were stumbling alongside the tribe’s cavern only the oldest and sickest rats were hobbling past, more confused than galvanized by the ongoing excitement.

Amantu’s faltering progress made Mack’s ill-distributed weight that much more cumbersome, and Izzy was at times a near-hysterical anchor. In the end their destination was determined solely by Abel’s inspired guesswork, yet it was more luck than inspiration that brought the Group staggering up to Dan’l’s Gate.

They conquered one step at a time, using their own sagging bodies to lever Mack to the top before kicking away the camouflage and collapsing as a unit on the stinking earth.

Topside it was bright daylight; they could see the observatory as a dirty white bubble in the distance. Abel shaded Mack with his body while checking vitals. He was a long while at it.

“AJ,” gasped Amantu, “we must proceed. There is nothing we can do for him here.” To make his point he resumed his position as lead man, raising Mack’s torso from behind, preparing to stride in reverse.

The men took their places and commenced half-carrying, half-dragging Mack. After a few yards Izzy threw on the brakes and dropped to his knees.

A chill raced up Amantu’s spine and he shuddered. A dozen cripples came swarming out of the spider hole, vanishing even as he shook his head. He wiped his eyes.

There was a yelp.

Izzy lurched to his feet. “I’m up,” he cried, “damn you!”

Abel kicked him again. “Then lift, damn you.”

The three put their backs and hearts into it, awkwardly raising Mack a foot off the ground and stumbling along for thirty yards before staggering to a halt. Inch by inch the body dipped. When his rump touched the ground they all went down with him, Amantu keeping the body up in a sitting position.

“This,” Abel gasped, “won’t…do!”

“It will do,” grunted Amantu. He turned on his knees until he was poised back-to-back, then ran his arms under Mack’s. “It will have to do!” Throwing high his chin, he roared to his feet and began a resolute march.

“By the Mercies,” Izzy hacked, “you, Hammer, are a man!”

He grabbed one of Mack’s trailing legs. Abel hoisted the other and Amantu lowered his head.

Izzy and Abel ran across the Outskirts pushing the professor like a plow, steering him with side-to-side thrusts. Their grunts, at first syncopated, became synchronous and locomotive-like as they blindly pressed forward. Mack’s head bounced and dangled, his frame swung one way and the other, his fingertips swept the dirt. As they picked up steam, each Group member in turn gave vent to a primal growl. Upon merging, the compound call rose in pitch and intensity until it was a sawing, full-throated howl of indomitable will.

And the bubble became a blister, and the blister, a dome.

And the Group slammed onto Mack’s porch almost unknowing, burst through the wall, and collapsed in a heap on the soft gel floor.