Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [53]
“He wants me to go with him,” I translated. “Shit” slipped out next.
“I’ll go.” Jeffree stepped beside me, hand forward. “Carlton Damon Carter and me. Will film it. We’ll bring the footage back.”
The creature, seemingly sensing the meaning of the discussion, let me loose. He looked at me with those eyes. I met them, barely. Long enough to motion over to Mister Adventure Man.
“But let’s get this straight now: it’s called Jeffree’s Tube.”
“Fine,” Captain Jaynes offered. He was already backing up out of there, the others following.
“And we’ll call them Carlton’s Carrions. That has a real ring to it.” Carlton Damon Carter looked up from his lens at this, smiling.
“They’re not birds, Jeffree. And you can’t name everything,” I told him.
“Look, if we go down, we take the risk, then we make the decisions. That’s supposed to be how this deal works, right? Finders keepers. That’s the deal. Whoever goes down there owns this. Movie rights, book rights, TV rights. Action figures. Because I don’t see anybody else stepping up.”
And with that, everybody stopped stepping away. And slowly, one by one, stepped forward.
We all went. Everybody but Garth, who was out of breath and exhausted from the task of carrying his own weight, but he was my boy, so I argued successfully that he should stay above to serve as our lifeline in case we disappeared below. As for the rest of us, down we trudged behind the snowmen, deeper into the subterranean blue, not knowing what awaited us. Down into the ground at the end of the world.†
The beings were fast, the lengths of their gaits alone put us at a disadvantage. Jogging lightly for a bit as the labyrinth of tunnels moved farther down, we struggled for purchase when the surface became steeper. As the angle increased, so did the time these creatures kept their feet to the ground, using the rough ice of the floor to add a skating motion to their stride. The farther down we went, the wetter the ice that surrounded us seemed, glistening in a slow but undeniable melt. This, of course, was the opposite of what I’d expected; it should have been colder the deeper we went away from the sun. But the caves that widened to cathedral heights dripped above us. We were silent, focused on not busting our tails, until we arrived maybe a half hour later at an opening that brought our path to an end, dumping us out into a hollow so fast it took a moment to realize that the blue sky we now saw far above us in the cavernous space was a distant frozen ceiling.
Americans use the description “as big as a football field” as if that is a legitimate form of measurement. But really, what other single unit of measurement is there that’s comparable? The space here seemed to be at least the size of one large sports arena, possibly two, seats and concession stands included. And there were enough creatures present to fill that field’s audience as well. Thousands, tens of thousands, of the humanoids could be seen moving about below us as we stood at the tunnel’s mouth. In an instant, creatures that seemed the greatest rarity in the universe now outnumbered our own group by a legion.
“We are going to be very famous,” Jeffree said, looking around. The sweat on his brow steamed. Carlton Damon Carter, his eyes nearly as wide as his lens, nodded in agreement as his camcorder took in the wonder.
“We are going to be very famous. We are going to be very famous, and very, very rich,” Nathaniel declared as he pulled Angela by her gloved hand over to him. She looked at me, though.
“You said it was true,” she said, dumbfounded. I was struck by the privilege of witnessing this spectacle and the dizzying possibility that my strange obsession might come to fruition. But the way Angela looked at me was the greatest treasure and maybe the whole point.
All around us, the creatures climbed along the walls, drifting upward in lines to the ceiling in hivelike precision. In fact, the hollow itself was just