The Lost Level
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ALSO BY BRIAN KEENE
THE LEVI STOLTZFUS SERIES
Dark Hollow
Ghost Walk
A Gathering of Crows
The Last of the Albatwitches
Invisible Monsters
THE EARTHWORM GODS SERIES
Earthworm Gods
Earthworm Gods II: Deluge
Earthworm Gods: Selected Scenes From the End of the World
THE RISING SERIES
The Rising
City of the Dead
The Rising: Selected Scenes From the End of the World
The Rising: Deliverance
THE CLICKERS SERIES (with J.F. Gonzalez)
Clickers II: The Next Wave
Clickers III: Dagon Rising
Clickers vs. Zombies
NON–SERIES
Alone
An Occurrence in Crazy Bear Valley
The Cage
Castaways
The Damned Highway (with Nick Mamatas)
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Dead Sea
Entombed
Ghoul
The Girl on the Glider
Jack’s Magic Beans
Kill Whitey
Scratch
Shades (with Geoff Cooper)
Sundancing
Take The Long Way Home
Tequila’s Sunrise
Terminal
Urban Gothic
COLLECTIONS
Blood on the Page: The Complete Short Fiction, Vol. 1
All Dark, All the Time: The Complete Short Fiction, Vol. 2
Trigger Warnings
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.
This novel is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
The Lost Level
ISBN: 978–1–937009–10–6
Copyright © 2015 by Brian Keene
Cover Art © 2012 by Kirsi Salonen
Title Design © 2015 by Geoffrey Blasiman
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
www.apexbookcompany.com
CONTENTS
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 — A Traveling Man
2 — Blades of Grass
3 — Cave and Cache
4 — Breakfast with the Reptilians
5 — Steel and Scale
6 — Under the Light of Night
7 — The Final Fate of Flight 19
8 — Grey Water
9 — Special Delivery
10 — The Cowboy’s Tale
11 — Slaughter on the Shoreline
12 — The Octophant
13 — Ghosts of the Fourth Reich
14 — The Temple of the Slug
15 — Homecoming
Afterword
About the Author
About the Artist
For
Mark and Paula Beauchamp…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks, first and foremost, to Jason Sizemore and the Apex Books team for their infinite patience and understanding when this project inexcusably went way beyond deadline. Thanks, as well, to Maurice Broaddus for preventing them from killing me. Thanks also to my valiant pre–readers, Mark “Dezm” Sylva, Tod Clark, and Stephen “Macker” McDornell—and also to Bryan Smith and Mary SanGiovanni who acted as additional pre–readers. Thanks to the Apex editorial team: Lesley Conner, Sara Price, and Janet Harriett. Thanks to the cover artist Kirsi Salonen. Thanks, as well, to John LeMay, for lending me his Jeep. Thanks to Cassandra, Kasey Lansdale, and Kelli Owen. Special thanks to Joe R. Lansdale for convincing me to step outside my comfort zone. And as always, more than anyone else, thanks to my sons.
And finally, a note of appreciation and admiration for the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Sid and Marty Krofft, Roy Thomas, Joe R. Lansdale (again), Mike Grell, John Eric Holmes, Karl Edward Wagner, Otis Adelbert Kline, Carlton Mellick III, H.G. Wells, and others who inspired this lost world/time travel homage.
1
A TRAVELING MAN
MY NAME IS AARON PACE, and I’m writing this by hand in a spiral–bound, college–ruled notebook that I found in a student’s backpack inside of an abandoned school bus. All three—the notebook, the backpack, and the school bus—have seen better days. For that matter, so have I.
The notebook paper is wrinkled and curled, and many of the pages are water stained or smudged with dirt. The backpack is one of those vinyl and canvas kinds you can buy at Wal–Mart, emblazoned with cartoon characters on the back. I don’t recognize any of the cartoon characters, but there are a lot of things in this place that I don’t recognize, because they’re not originally from this world. The backpack is one of those things. I found it attached to a child’s skeleton in the back of the bus. It is still in relatively good shape—the backpack, rather than the skeleton—but both shoulder straps have been slashed, rendering it useless and impractical for my purposes. The skeleton is missing its lower half. The hips and pelvis are shattered. I have no way of knowing if that happened before or after the child died, but I suspect it was the former. The bus has some broken windows, four flat tires, and a giant gash in the side where something clawed through the metal to get at the kids inside. There are dried brown smudges splashed all over the vehicle’s interior. The splashes could be old dirt, but dirt doesn’t usually have a spray pattern. More likely, they’re blood.
There is a lot of it, but then again, that’s also not uncommon to this place. This is the Lost Level. This is where things become lost. Why should blood be any different?
It’s impossible to know how long the bus, the backpack, or the skeleton have been here, because there is no time in the Lost Level. The sun—if that’s what it is, and I have strong suspicions that it’s not—never changes position in the sky. We live in a perpetual state of high noon. If we have a moon or stars here (or things masquerading as moons and stars) then I’ve never seen them. The only visible body in the heavens above is that ever–present sun, mocking us with its cruel, unforgiving light. But despite the constant illumination, it is easy to find darkness here. There are deep canyons and a massive, spiraling network of caves and tunnels below ground where the light never reaches, and there are sections of the forests and jungles where the vegetation grows so thick that the sun’s rays can’t penetrate it. Go look in any of those places, and you will find darkness.
And if you can’t find it there, then all you have to do is look inside yourself.
There is a darkness inside of me. I have lost everyone that I care about—from both before I came here, and after. Especially after. They are lost, and I am lost.
Lost here in the darkness of an eternal sunshine.
Lost in the Lost Level.
Anyway, I suppose I should recount how I got here and what has happened to me since then, before this pen goes dry or I run out of paper. Or I get eaten. Or worse. I’ve given up hope that anyone from back home will ever read this, but it’s important to me that I get it down on paper regardless, if only just to prove that I once existed. That I was once alive, and had thoughts and feelings. It would be nice if, after I am gone, others knew my story. Perhaps, one day, someone from my world will stumble across this notebook, and read what I have written here, and I will live again, if only for a little while and if only within these words. And who knows? Maybe that’s what passes for an eternal life inside this place. Perhaps that is the best we can hope for in the
Lost Level.
I doubt there is enough paper for me to tell you everything. I’d need a dozen notebooks or more for that. But it is my sincere hope that I can at least tell you how I came here and what happened after. That I can tell you about Kasheena and Bloop. If you have just arrived here, some of this information might just save your life.
I’ll write as much as I can, until I run out of room. Which, when you think about it, is how life goes. Our story continues until there are no pages left to write it on.
So…my story. I was born and raised in Byron, Minnesota. My father was a Methodist minister and my mother worked from home part–time as a court stenographer. Every day, they’d send her audio recordings of court cases, and she would transcribe them. It seemed like boring work, but I never heard her complain. I had two siblings—an older brother and a younger sister. We were never wealthy, but our parents made sure we never wanted for anything, either. In short, I had a good, safe, middle–class upbringing. We lived in a parsonage next to the church, who paid for the home, thus freeing my parents of the responsibility of a mortgage.
As a kid, I read a lot of comic books and paperback novels. Sometimes I wonder if people back home still do. Read paperback novels, that is. Right before I came here, there was a lot of talk about electronic books. I doubt something like that would ever truly replace printed books, but I can’t be sure. Some of the things I’ve found here can only have come from a future timeline, and given that they are far enough advanced that I can’t figure them out, reading a book on a computer doesn’t seem so far–fetched anymore.
Anyway, I was a voracious reader. I especially enjoyed sword and sorcery tales and loved reenacting them in the woods behind the church. Using sticks or plastic swords, I fought mock battles with my brother and our friends. In high school, I took up fencing. I also joined a Historical Reenactment Society and worked summers at the local Renaissance Fair. Both activities allowed me to hone my sword–fighting skills even more. When not doing that, I dabbled in Live Action Role–Playing games with my friends. Not only was I proficient with a sword, I also became pretty good with firearms, thanks to the father of a friend of mine who used to take us target shooting and deer hunting each year. Tramping around the Minnesota wilderness in winter will toughen up any kid. I was a deadly shot with a rifle, bringing down my first buck—a six pointer—when I was twelve. With a pistol, from a distance of seventy–five yards, I could put a grouping of six shots close enough together to fit a half–dollar over them. Eventually, I earned varsity letters for football and wrestling, as well.
I hope you don’t get the wrong impression. I wasn’t a jock by any means. If anything, I was considered an oddity by my fellow teammates because of my interest in things like reading and the fact that, in addition to my athletic ability, I studied and applied myself and got good grades. Indeed, my books granted me educational opportunities that my otherwise middle–class upbringing could have never afforded.
Something else I discovered in high school was a rabid interest in occultism and religions other than Christianity. Maybe this was my own form of teenage rebellion against my father, although if so, I wasn’t consciously aware of it. I loved my father. I respected him and the rest of my family, as well. But all the same, I didn’t share my family’s beliefs. When I sat there in church on Sunday and listened to my father’s sermons, I didn’t feel anything. In truth, I would venture that a portion of the rest of the congregation didn’t feel anything either. That had nothing to do with my father’s skills as an orator. He was passionate and emotive and always tried to make things interesting. Overall, he was an excellent speaker. Despite this, I sometimes glanced around and saw old men sleeping, women balancing their checkbooks or fanning themselves with church programs and staring off into space with dazed expressions, and small children playing with cars or dolls beneath the pews. It eventually dawned on me that these people were not there every Sunday because they believed, or because they enjoyed listening to my father speak. They were there only because it was what they were expected to do. They were expected to attend church services every Sunday. For them, it had become habit. Routine. The church lacked energy. It lacked spirit. That bothered me. I wanted to feel that universal spirit I’d heard so much about. I wanted to be filled with it. And if I couldn’t find it with God, I reasoned, then perhaps I would have better luck finding it elsewhere.
A trip to the local mall provided me with a start. I went inside the bookstore there and found the occult and metaphysical section, which was comprised of exactly two shelves sandwiched between Bibles and Western novels. I’d already read my father’s Bible and my grandfather’s complete (if somewhat battered) collection of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour westerns. What I wanted was in that small middle section.
That first visit to the ‘New Age’ section introduced me to the Simon paperback version of the dreaded Necronomicon. I was familiar with the book from my readings, but too young to know that the Simon edition was a fake. Attracted by the lurid cover and the book’s reputation, I bought it and read it. Hell, I devoured that book. It was like a switch had been clicked on inside of me (sadly, it wasn’t until years later that I beheld the real Necronomicon). I returned to the bookstore every week after that, and soon I’d discovered everything from Crowley’s Magic in Theory and Practice to Lavey’s The Satanic Bible to various paperbacks on Wicca and other pagan religions. After reading everything my local bookstore had to offer, I started perusing the free occult texts that were available online.
By the time I earned a full scholarship and entered college, I’d worked my way through most of the readily available occult tomes and now spent my weekends haunting antiquarian bookstores, looking for the rarer, esoteric volumes. And that was how I first discovered the Labyrinth.
I could fill up the rest of this notebook writing about the Labyrinth, and still not explain it fully. Since I don’t have the time or capability to do that, I will have to give you the CliffsNotes version. If you have a layman’s grasp of string theory, or if you’ve ever read a Marvel or DC comic book, or watched an episode of Doctor Who or Star Trek, then you’ll understand the basics of the Labyrinth. Provided they have those things where you come from, of course. Not every place does, as I’ve learned from some of my fellow castaways over the years.
The Labyrinth is perhaps best described as a dimensional shortcut through space and time. It touches and connects everything. Most of humanity remains ignorant of its presence, but it is explored and utilized by madmen, magi, occultists, and a few in the highest levels of world government. The only times the rest of humanity sees the Labyrinth is when we die, dream, have an out–of–body experience, or alter our consciousness in some manner, perhaps while under the influence of certain perception–enhancing substances. It is not actually a labyrinth, but that is how mankind has perceived it over the millennia, and thus, that is how it has gotten its name.
Imagine the universe. Picture our galaxy and all of the other galaxies beyond ours, both known and unknown, that make up the universe. Then consider all of the planets in each of those galaxies. The Labyrinth connects to all of them, and by utilizing it, one can travel from planet to planet and galaxy to galaxy. But it goes far beyond that. Interplanetary travel is just the beginning. Our planet, our galaxy, and our universe have different versions of themselves that exist in other dimensional spaces. Some people call these alternate realities. Devotees of the Labyrinth refer to these alternate dimensions as levels. As one occult tome explained it, “Just as there are different planets in the sky, there are also different versions of those planets, existing simultaneously on a different level of the universe. Beings, including humans, can traverse this multiverse of levels by means of The Labyrinth.”
By using occult methods, one could access the Labyrinth and through it, visit an Earth just like the one I came from, or maybe one where the Germans won World War II, or where North Korea launched a nuclear war in the year 2008, or where dinosaurs never became extinct and
continued to evolve instead. And just as you could travel to alternate Earths, so could you explore the alternate realities of other planets—a Mars filled with lush vegetation or intelligent life, if you liked, or a Mercury cool enough to walk on. All of these levels were accessible to a practitioner who had the knowledge and will to do it. And I resolved that I would be such a practitioner.
The one thing I came across time and time again in my studies was the mention of a “Lost Level”—a dimensional reality that existed apart from all the others, a place where the flotsam and jetsam of space and time occasionally washed up from across the shores of the multiverse. It was supposedly a place where one could encounter creatures and beings and objects from, quite literally, anywhere in the multiverse. All mentions of the Lost Level warned that while it could be accessed by a traveler, there was no escape from it. The Labyrinth led into it, but there was no exit, except in death—and even then, the scholars seemed divided. Some said souls and spirits could escape the Lost Level. Others said those energies remained trapped within it. Regardless, the one thing I’ve learned since my arrival here is that no one gets out of the Lost Level alive.
I wish now that I had heeded those warnings, but I was young and headstrong and stupid. I have matter from the entire universe beneath my feet, and yet I am homeless.
Accessing the Labyrinth—finding a door, opening it, and traversing the dimensions—was a long and complicated process, and again, I’ll have to be brief in my explanations of it. During a careful study of ley line maps, I found a place of power at a lake about one hundred and twenty miles southwest of Duluth and decided to begin my experiments there, as such places were traditionally favorable for rituals such as this. On my first attempt, I went there in the afternoon, chose a remote location far removed from prying eyes, and set up my tent. I’d fasted all day, and I was lightheaded with hunger and a strange mix of fear and excitement. It was hard to stay focused, but I did my best. I felt ready. Pure. Having a healthy body, mind, and spirit is important in magick, as is possessing a sense of self–assuredness and confidence. The key to success is making the universe revolve around you—understanding that you are the focal point of all that occurs.