by Glyn Iliffe
A second scream, more horrible than the first. He increased his pace, sprinting now between the tree roots and leaping over the rocks that littered the sloping floor of the forest. On and on, fearing that he would not be in time to save the child. He glimpsed signs of broken vegetation, and here and there a deep footprint in the soft earth. Then the ground began to rise up in steep banks on either side of him, forming a narrow gulley that sloped down into darkness.
He followed it as it bent round to the left, then stopped. Beneath the exposed roots of two elm trees was the mouth of a cave. It was half hidden beneath a curtain of trailing brambles, and the smell from it was enough to make a man retch. But the feeling of menace exuding from the impenetrable blackness was far worse. He half expected to see the lion’s green eyes watching him from its shadows.
Then he noticed something among the rocks strewn about the mouth of the cave, a hint of white in the brown gloom that filled the gulley like a fog. He walked slowly towards it, his knuckles white as they gripped his club. It was a man. Or the remains of one. He lay slumped against the rock, his legs splayed out before him and his hands resting by his thighs, the bony fingers curled up into the palms. By the broken sword and shield either side of him, Heracles guessed he had been one of the warriors sent from Cleonae to kill the lion. Now all that was left of him was bones, covered here and there with patches of dried brown skin and the torn fragments of a woollen tunic. His skull had fallen to one side, the mouth open in a final scream and the empty eye sockets staring out in helpless terror. What had devoured his flesh in such a short space of time, Heracles did not care to think.
Another scream echoed out from the depths of the cave, startling him from his thoughts. He ran forward into the entrance, brushing aside the curtain of hanging brambles and stepping into total darkness. The dim radiance from the gulley behind him failed to reveal anything other than a wet gleam from the stone floor, though by the echo of his first few footsteps he knew he was at the start of a long tunnel. How far it descended into the earth he did not know, but he gripped his club and prepared to advance.
Then he remembered the fate of those who had gone before him. The thought of Molorchus’s daughter, alone in that Stygian darkness and half mad already with terror, was unbearable. But he would not help her by rushing in like a fool. First, he had to find the other exit from the cave and block it, so the lion could not slip in behind him. Then he had to make a torch to guide him in the darkness.
He returned to the gulley. Sensing the girl did not have long left to live, he scrambled up the steep bank and into the trees.
Chapter Ten
The Monster's Lair
Heracles ran through the forest, glancing left and right for any indication of a second entrance to the lion’s den. Then he heard another scream, this time prolonged and taut with unendurable anguish. He clenched his fists, wanting to shout out his fury, but as the shriek trailed away – he hoped the child had fainted – he realized that the sound had not come from the gulley behind him, but from the trees ahead.
The second entrance , he thought, and ran on. Then he saw it – a large boulder overshadowing a dell in which several thick bushes were growing. Reaching the lip of the hollow, he peered down into the gloom and saw a deeper blackness through the interlaced branches of the shrubs. The stench of death emanating from the hole was overpowering, but he needed to be certain this was the other exit from the monster’s lair. Leaving his club on the grass, he scrambled down the slope to the mouth of the tunnel. Suddenly, the loose earth gave way beneath his heels and he tumbled forward. Throwing out a hand, he grabbed one of the bushes. The momentum of his fall pulled it loose, dragging it down with him. Then, as the near vertical tunnel opened up beneath his feet, the roots held and he was left hanging over a pit of total darkness. He glanced down into the shadows, listening to the echoes of the falling earth and rocks as they bounced off the sides of the tunnel.
Fearing the noise would draw the monster – and half expecting to see its green eyes light up in the blackness – he looked up at the hole above and reached for the root with his free hand. It gave a downward jerk as he seized hold of it, releasing a shower of dirt into his face. Knowing it would not hold much longer, he shook the dust from his eyes and looked around him. Just beyond the reach of his arm, a large stone protruded from the wall of the tunnel, where he could see giant claw marks in the hardened earth. At the same moment, he heard a low growl from the passage below.
He reached out his leg and kicked himself away from the wall of the tunnel. As he swung back in, the root snapped. He leaped for the side, his fingers seizing hold of the stone. It held his weight, and he shot his other hand up to grope for a second hold. Finding one, he pulled himself up into the mouth of the hole. Then he heard the roar of the monster below, and the sound of its claws scrambling up the sides of the tunnel.
He seized the roots of another shrub and hauled himself into the dell, pulling his legs up behind him just as a giant paw emerged from the shadows, clawing at the grass beside him. He leaped to his feet and ran to the lip of the hollow. Seeing a large moss-covered rock nearby, he uprooted it and lifted it above his head, his muscles straining as he threw it down into the hollow. The lion gave a bellow of pain and disappeared.
He looked around for other rocks, but there were none big enough to block up the exit from the tunnel. Then he noticed the tall slab of stone that overshadowed the hollow. It was twice his height and as broad as it was tall. He ran to the other side of the rock and leaned his shoulder against it. Digging a heel into the earth behind him, he pushed with all his strength.
The stone did not move. It had been set in the soil long ago and refused to be shifted by a mere man. But Heracles was no mere man. He was the son of Zeus! Hearing the roar of the lion as it clawed its way back up to the mouth of the tunnel, and thinking of Molorchus’s daughter alone in the dark, he summoned the immense strength given to him by the father of the gods and, with gritted teeth, pitted himself once more against the pillar of stone.
It began to give, its deeply set roots shifting beneath the assault. And as the hard-packed earth below cracked and crumbled, so the rock above began to lean forward, until the soil could no longer hold its weight. Heracles felt the movement and leaped back, just as the slab tottered and fell into the dell. A cloud of dust billowed up from its edges, filling the humid air and forcing him to shield his eyes with his forearm. He heard a muffled roar from beneath the rock, but it was a cry of frustrated rage rather than pain.
Springing to his feet, he picked up his club and dashed headlong through the trees, back to the gulley. He waited at the top of the bank, expecting the lion to rush out from the mouth of the cave. But it did not come. It knew that if he hoped to save the child, he would have to enter its lair to rescue her. As if to remind him of the fact, a scream resonated out from the throat of the tunnel, followed by another and another, each more hysterical than the last. Heracles felt his sense of desperation turning into anger. Molorchus had said his daughter was only ten years old, and he doubted a girl so young could endure such horror for much longer. Not without losing her mind forever. His only consolation was that the monster would not kill her until he had taken the bait in full and entered its den to face it in battle. But it wanted him to come rushing in, unprepared, thinking foremost of saving the girl, not of killing the lion.
But to do so would be to throw away his own life, and the child’s with it. He had to be calm and think, subduing his anger until it was an asset, not a hindrance. And so he began to gather wood and kindling for a fire. When it was ready, he took a piece of flint from his leather bag and struck it against his knife over a nest of dry grass and leaves. Eventually, one of the sparks caught in the tinder and he soon had a fire blazing. The forest remained eerily quiet around him as he worked, and he kept glancing over his shoulder at the mouth of the tunnel, half expecting to see the lion in the shadows. Thankfully, the screams had stopped, though he knew that if he did not work q
uickly they would soon start again.
Breaking off a young branch from one of the smaller trees, he split the end with his knife and began to pack the notch with thin strips of bark, winding them round as tightly as he could to make a torch. He held this against the fire until it caught, then retrieved his club and slid down the bank to the mouth of the cave. Pushing aside the brambles, he entered the tunnel with the torch held above his head.
The flame was bright, revealing a passage that stretched away into the darkness before him. Its walls were curved and ribbed, as if delved by a giant worm, and the low ceiling was broken by the roots of the trees above, which seemed to writhe like grasping fingers in the flickering light. The air was cool and still, carrying no sound but the hiss of the torch. But it was foul with the stench of putrefaction, and he had to resist the temptation to hold his cloak over his nose and mouth.
He walked forward, listening intently for the sound of movement ahead and watching for the glint of green eyes in the shadows. The floor began to descend at a steady angle, taking him deeper under the earth until – when he glanced back over his shoulder – not a glimmer of light could be seen from the mouth of the cave. The walls began to narrow and the ceiling – now too far below ground to be penetrated by the roots of the trees above – became lower, so that at points he had to crouch and hold the torch out in front of him.
His unease grew. He hated confined spaces, not being able to stand to his full height or reach out with his arms without feeling walls or ceilings close around him. It was too much like being in a tomb. Then he thought of the untrained farmers who had come before him, packed into that narrow space, unmanned by fear but driven on by the need to save their daughters and sisters. And so he, too, would go on – for the girl’s sake, and for his own. He gritted his teeth against the sense of panic growing within him, and peered into the gloom ahead.
At what point had the lion attacked the others, he wondered? He tightened his fist about the torch and advanced. And as he pushed on into the pitch blackness, the flames struggling against the shadows, so the walls began to expand outward. The ceiling, too, slowly lifted to the point where he could stand again. He felt his resolve return, and despite the stench growing ever stronger in his nostrils, he pressed on towards the monster’s lair.
Then he saw something glinting in the darkness ahead. He thrust the torch before him and raised the club behind his head. But it was not the gleam of a malevolent eye, or the reflection from bared teeth. It was long and metallic with a dull sheen. He advanced slowly, the glow of the flames picking out more objects scattered across the smooth clay: broken spears, a woodsman’s axe, a few daggers and the sword he had first seen in the torchlight. There were bones too. Lots of them: brown with dried blood, rather than white, as the skeleton by the mouth of the cave had been. Some were half covered with strips of skin or the torn fragments of clothing, but the flesh had all been devoured. Most by the monster that had slain them, he guessed, and the remainder by the rats and other lowly scavengers that had found their way into the tunnel.
He counted four torsos at least, the ribcages standing proud and useless without hearts and lungs to protect. Two had the skulls still attached – one of them crushed and broken – while two more lay among the human debris that littered that part of the tunnel. The farmers – for that was who he guessed they were – must have been ripped to pieces. The bones of dismembered legs and arms lay discarded about the floor. And the hard-packed earth of the walls was stained darker in many places by the blood of the victims, whose deaths must have been terrible. Of the three other men, there was no sign. Dragged deeper into the lair for food, he assumed.
He understood now the intelligence of the creature he was hunting. It had not attacked the farmers in the narrowest part of the tunnel, where its own movements might have been restricted. Rather, it had waited for them to pass through the bottleneck, so that when it attacked them they would not easily have been able to flee back up the tunnel. Picking his way carefully through the carnage, he paused to pick up a discarded bag. There were three unused torches inside, the heads wrapped in fat-soaked linen and tied about with hemp. Throwing the bag over his shoulder, he moved on.
Before long, he sensed he was approaching an open space. The walls on either side of him fell away and a current of fresher air made the glow of the torch expand. He waved it this way and that, searching the cavern for signs of the lion. The monster was not there, though. Instead, he discovered the walls had only receded a little and that he had reached nothing more than a widening in the tunnel. As he moved forward, he saw a fork in the passage. He walked a little way along the left-hand branch, feeling the ground rise beneath his feet and guessing it led up to the other exit from the lair. He raised his torch a little, disturbing a colony of bats hanging from the ceiling. They flew squeaking at the light, fanning the flames as they passed and forcing him to duck. He listened to the soft sound of their leathery wings disappear up the tunnel he had come by, and then silence returned.
Or it seemed to have. For after a while he became aware of another sound – faint, like spasmodic breathing, coming from the other branch of the tunnel. Returning, he listened carefully and realized it was the sound of crying – distant still, yet unmistakable. The sobbing was pathetic and helpless, and it appalled him to think of the suffering behind it.
Knowing he had wasted too much time already – and yet conscious of the fact the lion could have been waiting at the end of the other passage, leaving him endangered from behind as well as in front – he opened his stride and almost ran up the tunnel. Suddenly, he no longer cared where the lion was lurking. He was sick of prowling through the shadows, his senses enlarging every sound while his uneasy thoughts gave way to paranoia and threatened to unman him. The time had come to face the monster and kill it. Or be killed.
The floor of the tunnel flattened out briefly, then began to climb again. The reek of decay that had filled his nostrils for too long became stronger and the sound of the sobbing louder and more frantic, until he could not stand to listen to the child’s distress any longer.
‘I’m coming!’ he shouted.
The sound of his voice was startlingly loud in the empty tunnel. He retreated against one of the walls and gripped his club, ready for the attack that must now come. But when the harsh echoes of his voice had fallen away, the sound of sobbing had gone with it and all that was left was silence. Cautiously, he peeled himself from the wall and carried on up the tunnel.
‘I’m coming,’ he called out again. ‘You’re safe now.’
He wanted to give the child hope, but his words sounded empty and desperate. He could sense the danger now ahead of him. The air was thinning and he knew that soon he would step out into the monster’s lair, where it was anticipating his arrival. He remembered the mutilated remains of the farmers, and wondered what savagery he was about to encounter.
Then the walls and ceiling disappeared and he stepped into a large, open cavern. The torchlight failed to push the darkness back by more than a few paces, and the only sound was the echoing drip of water. He moved forward, horribly aware of the space opening up all around him – space that exposed him to sudden attack from any side. He turned full circle, the torch held high above his head and his club extended before him like a sword.
Then he trod on something. His foot slid, unbalancing him, and he heard something snap beneath his sandal. He looked down to see the white slats of a bared ribcage, grinning at him through the torn fragments of a woollen tunic. He had stepped into the cavity where the stomach had once been, breaking one of the rib bones. And yet the corpse had not been scavenged clean of its flesh like the remains he had found in the tunnel. The lower organs had been torn out and their rotting remains spread over the floor beside the body, while the bloody and putrid remains of the lungs and heart were slowly oozing down over his toes.
He jerked his foot away, his lips drawn back in disgust. Raising his eyes a little higher, he saw the decaying remains of
the upper torso: shoulders, an outflung arm still clutching at a leather shield, and a distorted face locked to one side with four deep gash marks running through the cheek and neck. The soldier’s helmet was still pressed tightly down on his head, though all that remained of the cheek guard was the flap of a leather hinge. Heracles stepped back and circled the torch around himself. Here, at last, was the source of the stench that had assaulted his nostrils since before he had entered the gulley. The bodies of the three missing farmers – and the soldiers and huntsmen who had been sent to track the lion before them – were spread across the cave floor. Scattered among them were the remains of the hostages the monster had taken. Like the men in the tunnel, all had been slain and dismembered; but unlike the others, their flesh had not been eaten, but left to decay. And as he stared in revulsion, he saw that every part seemed to crawl with living things, the lowest order of creatures feeding on the decay. He turned and vomited.
The lion sprang at him from out of the circle of darkness. Its forelegs were splayed before it, the razor-sharp claws curving out from its front paws like sickles. Spittle trailed out from its gaping jaws, the double rows of teeth like ranked spear points. Heracles dived to one side, twisting as he flew and lashing out with the heavy club. The lion passed over him like a shadow, and yet there was substance to its phantom form. His club connected with something hard, a blow that would have caved in a man’s chest and sent his soul gibbering down to Hades. The lion curled up in midair, roaring with pain as it crashed to the floor.
Heracles fell heavily into a pile of bones and putrefying flesh. He pushed himself to his feet, just as the lion scrambled back onto all fours. Kicking out body parts behind it, it came bounding towards him. Again it leaped at him, deafening him with its roar as it lashed out at his face with its left paw. He fell backwards, his instincts taking over as each moment seemed to stretch out and almost stop. He could see the lion’s claws arcing through the darkness towards him and smell the dreadful stench of its breath as the torch fell from his fingers. In the same instant, he pulled his head back just enough for the massive paw to waft the air a finger’s breadth from his face. The movement threw him off balance. His heel slipped and he sensed the ground coming up to meet him.
