by Heide Goody
The door squeaked in fear, tried to screw up its knothole eyes and then the lock went click.
“Well done,” it said, in a trembling, sullied whimper. “You have solved my riddle, weary – dear sir.”
“That’s more like it,” said Rod and pushed through into the next section of tunnel.
There was another identical face on the other side of the door.
“Would you like to know the answer?” it asked.
“Not particularly,” said Rod.
“You’ll kick yourself when you hear it.”
“Not interested.”
He closed the door rather than leave it ajar, hoping it would lend some minor structural support to the unstable tunnel.
“I’ve got one for you though,” he said. “A riddle.”
“Have you?” said the door eagerly.
“Aye. When is a door not a door?”
The weird squishy wood face did its best thinking impression. “I do not know, sir.”
Rod holstered his pistol and carried on down the tunnel.
“What is the answer?” the door called after him. Rod ignored it. “When is a door not a door, sir?”
As he walked on, it shouted out to him. “Tell me! I must know! When is a door not a door? Please! Tell me!”
Rod wasn’t in the habit of causing mental anguish to woodwork, but riddle-spouting gits deserved to suffer.
02:04am
Prudence leaned her weight against the twisted cement-coated body of Crippen Ai. She could feel the mind of the creature within the stone casing, and by physically pressing on it she hoped to mirror her mental efforts and push through to its inner thoughts.
She was only peripherally aware of Steve the Destroyer, wittering to no one about something he had found down the aisle, but his voice faded as Prudence slipped inward…
……
……
……
…Her feet touched down in a hall of monsters. She knew this place. She had been here in her mother’s womb.
Human furniture – metal chairs and metal tables – cluttered portions of the floor, scattered about as an afterthought by the Venislarn inhabitants of this unnatural and geometrically inconsistent space. Huge wall mirrors reflected this reality, and others.
This was a place where the local Venislarn waited. Royogthraps would wetly toy with their food in dark corners. Draybbea would slouch in oozing puddles, or hang like damp washing from ceiling roosts. Uriye Inai’e would wrap themselves around their slowly-digesting dinners and their plots of conquest. This was normally a place of waiting, a departure lounge, but there was now (and Prudence could sense that this was now, occurring at this moment, a short distance across the city), there was now a sense of action and urgency, a readiness to move.
Some of the human slaves of Yo-Morgantus hurried on errands. Others were snatched up by trailing limbs and put to other uses that Prudence could not quite see or comprehend. The August Handmaidens of Prein, the nine which were left, arrayed themselves in military formation. A stone Skrendul, standing in nightmarish stillness in the corner, was drawing out of its hibernation. Patterns etched into its moss-encrusted flesh shifted and locked into formations that would drive mortals insane.
Through all of this, Prudence walked unnoticed. She could smell the rotting heat rising from a nearby pool. She could hear the rustle of stick-dry Presz’lings legs. But none saw her.
An August Handmaiden of Prein presented itself to a naked woman on a slightly raised dais. The Handmaiden was called Shara’naak Kye. The woman was named Brigit and was the mouthpiece of the god Yo-Morgantus. Prudence found she simply knew these things. Knowledge wasn’t something to be learned, but unlocked from where it already existed in her mind.
“We seek your authority to seize the kaatbari child,” said Shara’naak Kye.
“To what end?” said Brigit. She slinked around the Handmaiden’s legs, stroking them slowly with her fingertip.
“We demand vengeance,” said the Handmaiden. “Morag Murray killed our sister in Edinburgh. She killed our sister in Bournville. She killed our sister at Millennium Point.”
“She only killed one of them.”
“She was the cause!” said Shara’naak Kye bitterly.
Brigit sighed, bored, and walked away. Prudence noticed that as she moved, she did this slow swaying, wobbling thing with her hips and bum. Prudence wondered if it was deliberate or if there was something wrong with her.
“Is there any reason I should acquiesce?” said Brigit.
“There has always been amity between yourself and the entourage of Prein,” said the Handmaiden. “Hath-No approaches and brings our armies with it. Even now, an alliance between us would be beneficial.”
Brigit laughed but Prudence didn’t really understand why.
In the shadows behind a mirrored pillar, Prudence saw something move. It was dark, the dark of charred flesh. Blue-white slime steamed in the cracks of its baking skin. Its many irregular limbs spasmed in agony, desperate to move but trapped in this one pose.
“Crippen Ai,” said Prudence.
She was abruptly thrown upwards, through the ceiling of this place, and up into the night sky above the city. There were the glows of fires and other things in the distance. Cars piled up in twisted wreckage on the streets directly below. A police van, its blue lights silently twirling, drove at speed to the north of the city. Something shimmered on the horizon in that direction but Prudence could not make it out in the dark.
Crippen Ai, quivering in burning agony, hung in the sky behind her. As he pulsated, flakes of his crisped flesh fell away.
“You can see everything that’s happening?” said Prudence.
Perhaps in response, Prudence was yanked across the sky, away from the Cube and the Library. Prudence tumbled end over end, passing through a swarm of fiery mouthed Tud-burzu and over a parade of paper-thin hort’ech dolls that asked nothing of their human audience but their eyes.
Below her now was a village or a workplace, clusters of buildings dotted with lawns and parkland. The bezu’akh annihilator kicked through buildings and stomped on the ground. Its scale dizzied Prudence. Even up here, she was only level with its pustulated shoulders. Joints that had not yet decided where to settle rotated and ground against one another. It breathed as it danced – and it was dancing – and its breath, sweet and oaty and sour, was both of something new-born and already rotting. The annihilator had come into this world already dying.
“Crippen Ai,” she called out, twirling in the air to seek him out. “Is this happening now? Is this already happening?”
She could not see him, but wherever he was, he pulled her back down. She did not cover her eyes as they passed through the ground; she knew she was here only as an observer, not physically present.
She stepped onto a solid floor. Impossibly, there was light. Little lamps hung along the wall of the tunnel. Dust and earth filled the air. The ground rumbled under the annihilator’s foot and more earth fell into the tunnel. Coughing as he ran ahead of the collapse, her mum’s friend Rod stumbled past, bounced off a wall and through a doorway.
Prudence followed.
She was in a treasure house, not unlike the Vault at the Library, but very unlike the Vault. Where the Vault had dull books and rows of objects that looked mundane but which were dangerously magical, here there was nothing but glitz and sparkle and shine. Jewelled daggers, crystal lanterns, statues of brilliant amber, intricately painted clay, shimmering insect cases. In tiered shelves like in a shop display, candles burned eternally. Music box dancers turned: brightly painted but nonetheless sinister marionettes lolled with only temporary lifelessness. This place was exciting and beautiful, and Prudence could feel the raw danger radiating off it all.
Rod ignored all the treasures and went to the far wall. He slapped it. He thumped it with his fist.
“Would it hurt to have put in another exit?” he panted.
Prudence studied his face. His eyes flicked to t
he doorway, to the unseen carnage going on above, to the side. It was a fascinating expression on his face. There was sheer exhaustion and defeat – she could tell that he was trapped, doomed – but there was an unstoppable air about him. He was a car that had run out of road but the wheels were still spinning, the engine unable to slow.
“Is this where he’s going to die?” she asked.
02:09am
If he was going to be killed by a cave-in, Rod wanted to meet that death on his feet.
He couldn’t clearly express why an upright death was any better than a prone death, but he supposed if he was going to be buried alive, he wasn’t going to obligingly lie down and wait for it. After several long minutes of standing like a wrestling action figure prepared for the roof to fall in, Rod quietly considered the possibility that the earth-shaking giant had passed by and there would be no more cave-ins for the time being.
He kept such thoughts quiet, barely acknowledging them. Rod did not believe in coincidences, or fate as such, but he believed that the universe had certain rhythms. What went up had to come down. For every drum roll there was a cymbal crash. For every idiot who declared, “It’s okay. It’s stopped now,” there was a horrible final surprise.
So, whilst clearly broadcasting the silent opinion that, yes, this one surviving space in the mine might be obliterated at any moment, Rod forced his body to adopt a more relaxed pose and inspect his surroundings.
Beyond the doorway, the tunnel had vanished. There was a minimum twenty feet of caved in tunnel between his current position and where he’d last seen Maurice. Maurice had either fled back to the ladder or he was dead.
“I have no mouth,” said Rod in apology and farewell.
His mind immediately went to Omar and the others at the consular mission. He took his phone out. There was no signal. He tried to call Morag nonetheless, but the phone could not connect to the network.
So, he was trapped and had no means of contacting the outside world. No help would be forthcoming.
He looked at the shelves of treasures around him. A dolly made from twisted black wheat stalks. A jewellery box inset with pearls. A glass dish with scalloped edges decorated with eye motifs which never seemed to be quite still. A ceramic skull. A melted crucifix. A rusted spearhead.
“…And a cuddly toy,” said Rod, and chuckled at his own weak joke. “Another cultural reference you wouldn’t get, Nina.”
On a higher shelf he saw a red jewel resting in a bronze dish. It was an unevenly-carved jewel, almost in the shape of a crouching cat. He laughed, a full and honest laugh this time. Rhythms of the bloody universe.
He had seen the jewel for the first time years before, in an underground chamber (but not like this), in a moment when death seemed close at hand (but not like this). He could feel the tug of it already.
It was the Azhur-Banipal shad Nekku. “The stone of the King in Crimson,” he said in recognition and acknowledgement.
He had seen it that one time, beneath the Syrian Desert, and managed to resist its demonic lure. Even now it was whispering without words, promising him his heart’s desire, if he simply picked it up. But he knew the offer came with a terrible price. In the desert tunnels, he had felt arms wrapped in ragged cloths reaching out for him. The image had invaded his dreams in the years since. To touch the jewel was to give oneself to the King in Crimson. Rod didn’t know who that was. The who’s who of the Venislarn world was not his area of expertise.
“Yeah, not today, mate,” he said and looked elsewhere.
On a middle shelf on the other side of the room was a pendant necklace. He would have assumed the material was gold, except it was marked with a mottled tarnish. The pink sphere of the pendant stone was mounted on baroque filigrees of metal.
“The Gellik orb,” he said and picked it up.
This was a perversely annoying turn of events. He had come here to find the orb, so it could be used to summon the potentially world-saving Vivian Grey back to the mortal realm. And here he was, orb in hand, with no way of returning it.
He pocketed it and moved to the leading edge of the cave-in. Huge clay clods of earth made up the majority of the material. Rod dug his fingers in and heaved. Although fistfuls came away in his hands, there was no way he could move those massive chunks. He shook the muck from his hands and forced himself to consider his situation clearly.
“Got the orb. That’s a positive. Not currently dead and not injured. That’s another. Trapped and alone. No back up. Air will run out in—” He sniffed as though that could somehow magically give him some idea. “—a few hours’ time.”
He looked at the lights on the wall and sought out a switch. There was none. That was a disappointment. If the whole chain of wall lamps could be controlled from this end, he might have been able to use the on-off switch to send a Morse code message to Maurice, if Maurice was somehow still alive. If there had even been the smallest air vent, he could have tried to signal out, even pass the necklace orb up to someone on the outside. He looked through the shoe boxes stacked underneath the shelves on both sides, hoping to find that mysterious something that might help him, but found only more occult knick-knacks and weird objects. He discovered little of note (although he found out Omar possessed two mummified severed hands – both right hands, not even a matching pair).
“I’m trapped. In a tunnel. And I’m going to die,” he said finally, then wondered how many times in his life he’d had cause to say that.
His gaze returned to the blood-red stone of the King in Crimson. He sighed. “Do you actually grant wishes?” he said wearily.
The act of addressing it made him shiver. He felt a presence directly behind him. He could not see the King in Crimson’s shadow looming over him. He could not smell the rot of his ancient flesh. He could not hear the rustle of his bandaged limbs or the rasp of his tomb-dry breath. But Rod could sense the King, fully realised, inches away from him.
He resisted the urge to turn round. This was not merely because he was afraid (and he was afraid of seeing the foul god-king in the flesh) but because he suspected he would see nothing at all, yet feel a fresh presence behind him. Always behind.
“You grant wishes,” he said, making it a statement this time. “If I take the jewel, you will grant my wishes. You will take this orb thing and give it to someone at the consular mission so they can use it. You will do that before you drag me to hell, or whatever.”
There was no reply, and he’d expected none. Rod had set out his stall and that was as much of an agreement he hoped to get. He reached forward and, hesitating only to lick his suddenly dry lips and flex his suddenly sweaty fingers, he took the stone of the King in Crimson from its bronze dish.
It was cold to the touch.
A hand came down on his shoulder and long thin fingers gripped him like a vice.
Rod stilled his quivering breath. “How do,” he said.
Something brushed his back, touched the hair on the back of his head. The cowl of a robe brushed his ear. Rod felt breath on his cheek, the smell of dry rot and old meat.
“Your soul is mine,” whispered the King in a voice like the wind.
“Right you are,” said Rod.
A second hand gripped his other shoulder. “I had a school P.E. teacher who did that,” said Rod.
“P.E.?”
“Come behind us and put his hands on our shoulders, like. Stand real close. I’m not saying the man was a pervert. Mr Crockleton. I’m sure he thought he was just being all friendly and… Point is, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now.” Rod attempted to shrug him off but the King held tight.
“You’re mine. The deal is done.”
“Aye, but the wishes.”
“One wish.”
“What? No way, mate. A deal like this, I should get as many wishes as I like and then—”
“One wish, patron!” hissed the King.
“Don’t take the bleedin’ mick. At least three. Three wishes is traditional.”
“Thr
ee then…” said the King. Rod wished he’d driven a harder bargain.
He took the orb from his pocket and held it up high so that the creature behind him could see it clearly. “First wish then. See this? This orb?” he said, just in case the damned King thought he was referring to his hand. “I need it to get to Morag at the consular mission office. I need her to get it now and safely so that she can use it. That’s Morag Murray. The Birmingham consular mission office.” He wanted to give a postcode but couldn’t remember it.
The King was silent.
“Got that?” Rod tried to look aside, get some acknowledgement from the King and when his eyes looked back, his hand was empty. Necklace and orb pendant had vanished. “Right. Good.”
Rod felt a renewed fear. The orb was gone. Hopefully delivered to where it could do the most good. Now all Rod had left to worry about was himself.
“Now, getting me out of here,” he said. He turned to the collapsed tunnel beyond the doorway. “I want to be able to shift that lot.” He tried to face the King in Crimson but the risen horror turned with him. Rod glimpsed the skeletal fingers on his shoulder. They were black and cracked, like rotten banana skins. “Can you make me stronger?”
“How strong?” the demon rasped.
“You know, super strong.”
“How strong?”
“How strong?” Rod held up his hands in exasperation. “Super strong. Strong enough to knock out a bleedin’ god with a single punch,” he said peevishly. “That strong!”
The King in Crimson was silent.
“Is it done? Have you done it?”
The King in Crimson was literally breathing down his neck. “It is done.”
“Good. Fine.” Rod hurried to the landslide and dug his hands into the nearest chunks. He pulled at them ferociously, expecting new energy to flow through him. He clawed and scrabbled and nearly ripped off one of his nails in his haste.
“I said super strong, yeah,” he said, sensing that nothing had changed.
