The Mortality Principle

by Alex Archer

  Before they reached the end, the unmistakable sound of a gunshot echoed through the tunnel behind them.

  Annja spun on her heel, ready to face down an invisible foe, but before she could move, a second shot and a third rang out, followed by an agonizing cry that filled every inch of the tunnels.

  It was the sound of death.

  “Garin!”

  30

  They ran.

  The beam of the flashlight roved across the ground and walls as they raced back to the main tunnel. Over and over they called Garin’s name, but there was no response. Annja knew that there was something wrong. Garin had the gun. That meant Garin had fired the shots. But that scream… That had been Garin’s voice, and now he wasn’t answering them.

  Roux was thinking the same thing.

  He had drawn his own gun, ready to take on the killer himself.

  But if three shots hadn’t been enough to bring the killer down, why should five, six or seven be enough to do the trick? Roux’s insistence that the killer was inhuman haunted Annja. What if he was right? What if there was no way to stop it?

  There was always one way.

  Cold steel.

  Annja gripped the hilt of the sword, the blade across her chest so that it was both at the ready should the brute go for them but safe from sliding between Roux’s ribs if she should stumble.

  The echo of the gunshots and the cry had long since faded by the time they came to what had to have been their source. They moved quickly but carefully, checking the two cellar rooms into which the passageway opened. There was no sign of Garin or the killer. No sign that anyone had been down there at all.

  “There must be more rooms, more branches we missed somehow,” Annja said. “They can’t have escaped the tunnels.”

  “Not without leaving a trail,” Roux agreed. “One or both of them are hurt. Bleeding. Garin’s strong, but there’s no way he could lift the creature without help. So if he put it down, it’d still be down.”

  “But if it was Garin, who fell?” Annja asked, even though she knew the answer without needing to hear it.

  “Then God help him. This way.”

  Roux followed another turn, almost missing an opening in the tunnel as something came barreling out of it.

  The figure slammed the old man against the tunnel wall, driving the air out of his lungs and sending the flashlight flying from his grip. The light died as it hit the ground, plunging them into darkness.

  Annja held out her sword, more in defense than attack.

  It wasn’t as if she could swing it, and risk slicing into Roux as much as their unseen assailant.

  “Roux,” she called, and heard his groan coming from the ground. That was enough.

  “Stay down,” she commanded, taking a step forward, feeling her way in the darkness with the tip of her weapon. A toe nudged Roux’s body. She felt him shrink from the contact. She swung tentatively, the sword slicing through air until it made contact with stone and sent a shower of sparks to the ground.

  She took another step forward and swung again.

  Still nothing.

  She heard Roux scrambling for his flashlight. It wouldn’t help. Switching her grip to one hand, Annja slipped her left hand into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. All it took was the touch of her thumb on the screen and it lit up.

  There was nothing between her and the curve in the tunnel.

  “You can get up now,” she told Roux as she increased the intensity of the glow from the phone and switched it over to the flashlight function.

  The battery needed charging, but it would last long enough to do what she had to do. “Come on,” she said. “But this time, stay behind me.”

  Roux didn’t argue with her.

  She took a breath as they reached the bend, and pressed herself against the tunnel wall, listening to a strange sound coming from around the bend. She strained, expecting to hear breathing, or even the sound of gurgling as pain ripped through the man around the corner. But the sound was neither of those. It had an even rhythm, but it was not the sound of a living thing. All she could hear was a steady click, click, click.

  She took another breath before stepping around the corner, knowing that the killer was almost certainly only a matter of feet away.

  Annja pushed herself away from the wall and took the step.

  She held out her sword in one hand, her phone in the other as if its glow was a shield.

  The light was enough to startle the thing that was waiting for her on the other side.

  Thing.

  She stared at that strange, incomplete face, lit by the light from the phone as the killer raised its hands to shield its eyes from the bright glare.

  At first she thought that it was going to turn and run, but then it staggered forward, striking out at Annja. Its great fists slashed at the light, the creature seemingly ignorant of the threat her sword presented. Annja pushed the blade as hard as she could, feeling it slide through its heavy coat and into the softness of the flesh beneath.

  Strangely so much of the thing was in front of her that was far less than she had expected. She expected a blast of foul breath but none came, a waft of stale sweat, but there was nothing. She expected a heat against the coldness of the tunnel, but there wasn’t any.

  She noticed a faint smell, an aroma she could not quite place. And a vibration that ran the length of her blade all the way into her fingertips.

  Most surprising of all was that there was no pain in its childlike sketch of a face, no change in the thing’s expression despite her sword plunging into its body.

  Annja pulled at the hilt to free the sword, but as she did, the thing swung a fist at her.

  The impact of the blow sent her sprawling.

  Roux, standing behind her, broke her fall.

  Before she hit the ground the world turned black.

  31

  Somewhere in her dream she heard her name being called over and over again.

  A hand slapped at her face, stinging her back to consciousness as if she were being interrogated, only she had no idea what the answer was to what they demanded.

  “Annja! Annja!” She began to recognize the voice through the blinding pain inside her head. She opened her eyes to absolute darkness.

  “Roux?”

  “Welcome back. I was beginning to think it had broken you once and for all,” he said, helping her into a sitting position. She opened her hand to reveal that she was still holding her phone, the screen still glowing. His face was haunted in the sickly light.

  “You should know me by now,” she said. “I’m tougher than that. What about Garin?” she asked.

  “Gone.”

  “Gone? As in dead or as in run away?”

  “Gone as in not here. There’s no sign of either of them.”

  Annja struggled to her feet and felt around for her sword. There was no sign of it. She battled down the urge to panic and reached out into the otherwhere to retrieve it, knowing that it would have faded from this plane of existence as her consciousness lapsed. As soon as her fingers closed around the hilt again, the moment of panic she’d felt melted away like frost.

  “We need to find Garin,” she said, drawing comfort from the weight of the sword in the darkness.

  “He’s a big boy,” Roux said, fiddling with his flashlight in an attempt to draw some sort of light from its broken bulb. It was a fool’s errand. “He can take care of himself.”

  “Obviously he can’t. You heard that scream as well as I did. He’s in trouble. We aren’t walking out of here without him.”

  “Remember—”

  “Yeah, that he’s one of us. So we are not abandoning him. I wouldn’t abandon you.” It was as simple as that. “Now, you’ve been here before. Is there another way out of here? I felt that breeze on my face. That wasn’t blowing down through the shaft.”

  “One of the cellars has a door, an iron gate. Had an iron gate. It was locked when we were down here before.”

  “
They aren’t here. They can’t have gone out the way we came in without getting past us. Could they have gotten to the gate without passing us?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember,” Roux started to say, blustering, but Annja was fed up with the old man’s stalling. Every second counted. She’d been on the receiving end of a blow from that brute, and it had damned near crushed her skull. She’d be hearing Garin’s scream in her sleep for months.

  “Just show me,” she said.

  As if on cue, the flashlight flickered for a moment, then burst into life. She had no idea how he’d fixed the broken bulb. It didn’t matter. Roux started to lead the way back through the maze of tunnels. There were more offshoots than she’d noticed on the way in. A lot more. Some even looked fresh. Had the killer been carving out a new lair down here?

  “He really will be fine, you know,” Roux said, but it sounded like he was trying to reassure himself, not just her. A few minutes ago he’d been blaming Garin for all the woes in the world and had believed him capable of mounting a killing spree by proxy. “We’ve been through worse.” Again, she didn’t know who he was trying to convince, himself or her.

  Annja kept pace with the old man as he moved quickly along the corridor. The flashlight played over the detritus of the castle, odds and ends that were no longer wanted but that no one could bear to throw away. They were signs of life that proved someone came down into this pit.

  At the far end of the room she saw an iron gate set into the stone wall.

  It hung open.

  32

  Stone steps worn smooth over centuries by the shuffling of tired feet spiraled upward on the other side of the gate.

  Annja couldn’t imagine the giant killer having come this way; the stairwell was incredibly cramped. It wouldn’t have had the room to maneuver, surely? It would have been a tight squeeze for Garin.

  Assuming Garin is on his feet and not being carried by the thing, Annja thought.

  The door at the top of the stairs was closed. A faint glow of a light crept through the gap at the bottom. Roux paused when he reached it. He raised a single finger to his lips. Annja nodded, understanding.

  The old man killed the flashlight and lifted the latch slowly, easing the heavy door open a crack as silently as he could.

  Roux peered through for a moment before he opened it fully, allowing the light on the other side to flood into the stairwell.

  Annja couldn’t see beyond him.

  She followed Roux into some kind of scullery—a living, breathing part of the castle’s day-to-day life. There was no sign that anyone had been working there that morning, but the place was clean and well tended.

  Annja wondered if it was a visitor attraction or a working kitchen.

  It took a second for her to notice that someone stood in the room’s other doorway.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked as she met his eye, wondering how she could possibly explain the presence of the great sword in her hands.

  She half turned sideways, shielding the sword with her body as she slipped it back into the otherwhere. The newcomer missed the minor miracle; he only had eyes for the 9 mm pistol Roux pointed squarely at his heart.

  After the initial shock of discovery, Annja noted the man’s uniform. He was a security guard. He looked too old to be a serious deterrent to anyone.

  He wasn’t the killer.

  “Did they come this way?” Roux demanded.

  The guard shook his head, not following. Roux repeated the question in Czech.

  “I have seen no one. Only you. I heard a noise. I came to investigate. I hoped it was one of the girls making tea. There is nothing to steal here. Please. I don’t know you. I will tell no one you were here. Just…” He raised his hand, palm out, to show he was harmless. “Don’t make this worse than it is.”

  Roux slipped his gun back inside his jacket. The relief in the security guard’s face was clear to see.

  “Listen to me carefully,” Roux said. “I do not mean to alarm you, but we have every reason to believe that there is a killer inside the building.”

  “But…how?”

  “We pursued him down a shaft on the other side of the wall, which opened up into your cellar network. We lost him down there.”

  “Are you police?” the man asked, still staring at Roux’s gun hand.

  “Interpol,” Roux lied smoothly, pulling what appeared to be an ID from his pocket. “Have you seen anyone come this way?”

  “Nothing at all, sir,” the guard said, suddenly eager to defer all responsibility to Roux.

  “Do you mind if we take a look around?”

  “Most of the castle will still be locked. I’m not sure I can open up anything until the manager arrives.”

  Manager? That was more than enough to convince Annja that this was a commercial enterprise rather than a family estate. There could be any number of places where the creature might try to hide in a place like this.

  “I’m sure you can,” Roux said. “This man is dangerous. We need to bring him in before he can hurt anyone else.”

  “The front door was open when I got here,” the guard offered. “Maybe he already slipped out before I arrived.” He thought about it. “The outer gates were locked, though. We could check the outbuildings while we wait for the manager?” He motioned them out through the doorway he stood in.

  Annja noticed the key in the door, and for just a moment the idea of locking him inside—for his own safety as much as anything else—crossed her mind. It was tempting. But if they were wrong and the thing was still down in the maze, then they’d be locking him in with the creature. Not good.

  “How many people work here?” Annja asked, walking alongside him, leaving Roux trailing behind them.

  “Full-time? Six. The rest…give time free…more in summer. Students.” He led them along a corridor and up a flight of stairs that brought them out near a pair of solid wooden doors. The heavy modern lock looked out of place on the dark oak.

  “This way,” he said, leading them into a courtyard. High walls enclosed the small space. The morning had already grown light if not bright and the sound of traffic, slow but steady, had begun to fill the air. It wouldn’t be long before the world was full of the hustle and bustle of life, muted here in comparison to Prague, but vibrant just the same.

  “Are any of these buildings unlocked?” Annja asked.

  “Some. They have nothing valuable in them. Most will be locked. If you find any doors unlocked, look inside.”

  He tagged along behind them, curious.

  “Just one thing, then you’re good to go about your duties,” Roux said. “The stairs that brought us up from the cellar. Is that the only way in and out of there?”

  “From the cellars? No. There are a few, I think. One for sure brings you out to the rear of the castle, but no one could have come up that way.”

  “No?”

  The guard shook his head. “There was a major collapse a long time ago. The entire roof came down. It’s perfectly safe now, but there’s never been the money to repair it, so it’s just a dead zone. There’s a vast section of the maze cut off because of it.”

  “Ah,” Roux said. “You’ve been most helpful.”

  He waited until the guard had closed the heavy oak doors behind him, then he turned to Annja. “A vast section of the maze. We were wrong, weren’t we? We left it to burn but it had another way out.”

  33

  They were interrupted in their search by the arrival of the manager, who had Annja’s cameraman, Lars, in tow.

  “I take it this is who you are looking for?” the man asked Lars. “Now perhaps one of you would be kind enough to tell me what’s going on here?”

  “It’s a long story,” Annja started to say, but the man didn’t look particularly interested in hearing it.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to leave,” he said. “If you would like to film inside the castle—” he paused to motion toward the camera case, which was now on the gro
und beside Lars “—you’ll need to put your request in writing and I will make sure it is seen by the board of trustees, but it will take time to get it approved as they only meet once a month.”

  Annja was about to protest when Roux took a tight grip on her arm and started to propel her toward the gate. Annja had expected him to flash his fake ID and demand that they be allowed to search for Garin. He didn’t.

  “What the hell is going on, Annja?” Lars asked when the heavy gates were slammed behind them.

  Annja wanted to tear the place apart stone by stone. And that was all she wanted to do. Garin was in there. He had to be. He’d do the same for her if their roles were reversed. For all his bluster and selfishness, he’d put his life on the line for her every single time she’d asked, without question.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” she said.

  “Nothing to worry about? Seriously? You dragged me out of bed, only for me to sit in a traffic jam for a couple of hours and leave me to hang around out here like a bad smell and it’s all good?”

  All she could do was act as if there was nothing wrong.

  Thinking on her feet, she said, “I needed some shots of the castle at night. We managed to get access to some tunnels beneath the cellars. It’s a maze down there, but it was a one-shot deal. We won’t get the chance to go down there again.”

  “That’s a shame,” the cameraman said. “We could have used some nice wobbly infrared footage, heat-sensor stuff like those ghost hunters use. That would have cranked the tension right up.”

  “I managed to take a few minutes’ worth of stuff with this.” She fished her phone out of her pocket. “It’s not great quality. Really shaky-cam stuff. What do you think?” She called up the video file to show a few frames of the footage she’d recorded while they had been down there, using its light to guide their way. The screen showed the tunnel in a grainy color, the passage shifting and going out of focus for a moment before sharpening up again with every step she took.

  “It might work. It’s got a real found-footage feel to it,” he said. “I can try to get it cleaned up. Use a few editorial tricks to loop it to make it feel longer. No one will notice. Dub in some heavy breathing and you can do a voice-over. It’s certainly different to the usual stuff we shoot, and that’s what the suits want, right?”