All Souls' Day

V

After a minute or two of a quiet hike along the bottom of what seemed like a large drainage pipe, they were finally at the end of the tunnel. It, in turn, opened up to another yawning chasm. A massive cylindrical space that endlessly reached above and below to unseen heights and depths.

At least a thousand feet away beyond the foggy gloom in the distance was the other side of the shaft. Circumscribing it all around was another narrow walkway. This time, thankfully, was a shallow wall between the walkway and the bottomless drop beyond. It was some strange bit of alien architecture topped with intimidating spikes and lined with all manner of what looked like long running pipes of some kind. Its presence gave them all a little sense of reassurance—even if that sense was not exactly merited.

"So what happens if this gate is closed?" the younger Christina asked, as she stepped out on to that narrow walkway with the child in tow.

"Shh!" the older Christina replied, before stopping dead in her tracks and turning back to Phil, who was trailing at the end of their narrow line, all shuffling along the walkway. "Do you hear that?"

Phil listened intensely for a moment. A low murmuring drone echoed from the abyss below. And it was quickly growing louder. Phil nodded with a gulp and gestured to her to continue.

"We have to move, quickly," the older Christina said in a strained whisper. "Move, move, move!"

They all picked up the pace of their shuffling. That pace was ultimately set by the awkward steps of the little girl with her little legs. The younger Christinas had no idea what was coming, but based on the panicked disposition of the oldest, who was quickly leading them toward some kind of grate, it couldn't be good.

The increased pace finally got the best of the youngest Christina in the group. Right as their elder leader was opening the stone grate door, the little girl slipped and nearly tumbled onto the spiked wall to her left. The middle Christina holding her hand pulled her back with a gasp.

In the meantime the sound continued to grow louder. And louder. The walls were rumbling by the time Phil at the end was crawling through the grate. An ominous deep bass accompanied by a shrill whine. The new tunnel they were in was large enough for the three adults, when bunched up together, to stare back out the metal slotted fins of that grated stone door.

"I wanna see," the little girl whispered as she jockeyed for a position.

Her request was met with a harsh refusal from the older Christina who sternly wagged her finger with an angry chopping motion, as she shook her furrowed-brow face "no." The little girl then complied, albeit it with a fair amount of sulking.

As they looked on through the grate, the sound grew nearly deafening. And as it finally appeared, whooshing up from the abyss, another sound. A ghastly ethereal roar. An inhuman roar, that nevertheless had some strange vocal quality. It was like the sound of a loud torturous scream of a man, which had been somehow recorded and sped down. The sound stretched low in pitch and long in time. With that frightening sound came an even more frightful sight.

"Wheel..." Phil whispered with some mixture of awe and dread.

Before them, hovering in the middle of that great shaft beyond the door was an unfathomable monstrosity of seemingly mechanical mayhem. Defying all commonly intuited laws of nature, what floated before their eyes was a conglomeration of rings. Rings within rings. Massive rings, at least two or three stories of a modest building in size. Always moving within each other, even as the whole of that mass hung weightlessly in the middle of the dark chasm. And upon each ring were eyes. Endless columns of eyes, covering the surface of those rings. Rings of eyes all rotating past one another within a great abominable ball, floating above a great abyss.

That grotesque horror hung in the air for an interminable moment, before slowly starting to ascend again. The three breathed out a collective sigh of relief. The older Christina just started to turn away, when all three were shook to the core by another sound. A shrill familiar voice just beyond them in the tunnel...

"I wanted to see!" that voice shouted. The impertinent cry of the little girl, now sitting on the tunnel floor with her arms crossed indignantly.

The little Christina's shout was met with a roar. The "wheel" returned, and with haste. Those spinning wheeling rings of eyes came right up to the edge of the walkway. The tunnel rumbled all around. They instinctively covered their ears, before backing away from the door.

Then, just as quickly as it had whooshed down, it flew back up, ascending in a flash and taking its terrible sound with it.

"God damn it!" the older Christina exclaimed.

"Wh-what the hell was that thing?" the younger asked, trembling with wide eyes in the dark.

"To and fro, throughout the whole earth..." Phil muttered.

"What?" the younger Christina said.

"Wheels," the older Christina explained. "At least that's what Phil calls them. They're the eyes and ears of this fucking place."

"I saw a lot of eyes," the younger Christina replied. "But I didn't see any goddamn ears. How the hell does that thing—?"

"We should keep moving," Phil interjected with a sigh.

The older Christina breathed out a sigh and shook her head. "Fuck! Let's go then."