A few minutes later, the hulking giant reptiles came to a stop, and the one carrying Mia lifted her off his shoulder and slammed her to the ground. As it turned out, the bag over her head snagged on a clawed wing and was partially torn in the process of throwing her to the ground, fraying and splitting so she could look out with her right eye. Happy to be able to see again, hoping they wouldn’t pay any attention to her or notice that the bag had torn, she cautiously took a look around. Although the view she had was limited, she could see they were on the platform of a subway station, the walls covered with white tiles, green and black trim, concrete floors, painted metal benches. But there were no people here, no subways running either. Everything was deserted and quiet. She couldn’t see her kidnappers standing behind her.
Directly in front of her, a stairway descended to the platform, the bottom steps about twenty-five feet away. She heard the footsteps first, coming down from the top of the staircase, but soon after she could see a pair of black wing tip shoes descending. Looking through the torn black bag, she wasn’t surprised when the owner of the shoes turned out to be Chase. Then she closed her eyes hoping he wouldn’t notice that she could see now either, and listened to him step over her as he approached the guard-goyles who had taken her.
The guards growled at Chase, all speaking at the same time in the harsh language that hurt her ears. He bellowed at them, “Speak English, you mallum xul! It’s been the kind of day where I don’t have patience for an insufficiency of vocabulary regarding nouns. It gives me a headache and takes too ezeru darisum lapan hamta labirukmeh long to express yourself!”
“Talmai, we have put some space between us, but we are still being followed by Enoch and his people. What do we do now? We’ve been running through gateways, back and forth through multiple worlds and realms, but nothing has shaken them off our tail. They seem to know what we are doing.”
“Was the kelba spistah awake? She could be sending a signal of some kind.”
“There’s not been a peep out of her. No outrage, no shouting, no begging, except for some whining when we first bound her. I’d say she’s been asleep the whole time.”
“There’s one more doorway to try. It’s risky and we may have trouble with the Sarrabu Guardian there, but those following aren’t permitted to enter Itimah Kittsum. Once there, we can choose a destination using the eshik located in his realm and lose our pursuers for good.”
The hair on Mia’s arms stood on end at the sound of the howl made by one of the reptilians behind her. “Garrr! No! I won’t do it! You’ll not make us go down into the center of the Earth, down into Itimah Kittsum! The Sarrabu is the jailer there, keeping the fallen host of heaven locked in that place of chaos and horror. If we get nabbed, there is no escape from that place. Not ever. Once a prisoner, there’s no going back above the ground. Ever. We would be trapped in Erset la Tari, never to inhabit human bodies again. Endless years in chains enduring dark and flame. No! Won’t do it!”
“Raggis, you dare to speak against my command? Khuum pomukh! You will obey me! I am the Koru Elenu mah Behl Eri. No one defies my commands without living to regret it!”
Chase’s voice changed and sounded different to Mia, his voice deeper and the words less defined. Then she heard something that sounded like large sails billowing in a stiff gale, and then loud gurgling, and then she felt the heavy thud of something very heavy falling onto the platform.
“Well,” Chase said. “That puts an end to Raggis’ objection. I have said we will go, and that is what we will do. Anyone else care to disagree?”
There were several growls, but no more verbal protests. Chase said, “Go now. I will carry the kelba eresh.”
Looking through barely opened eyelids inside the torn black bag, she saw him reach down for the climbing rope that tied her wrists to her ankles. What she saw wasn’t a human hand! She didn’t get a good look, but she had a brief glimpse of an extremely huge paw, beast-like with gray bumpy skin, black fur, and yellowed claws. Chase had morphed like the guards had done, and was now some kind of gigantic nightmare beast. But not reptilian — she had glimpsed a head with snout and horns like a bull, the giant body of a man with gray bumpy skin. Grabbing the rope binding her hands and feet together, he swung Mia upward and then behind onto his back. Once again, she had been painfully slammed onto a hard back with leathery wings, scratched by the claws along the top edge.
As the four monsters slouched toward the opposite end of the platform, they passed the twisted body of one of the gargoyles lying in a pool of black blood. Taking a gateway door that opened onto a stairway leading down, Chase and the three remaining monsters exited the subway station. This time Mia was being carried higher on his back, her head also more elevated this trip, making it a little easier to endure being carried, but there was still a lot of jostling and jarring. With the black bag partially split open now, she could see the stairsteps ascending behind her. Her kidnappers were running down and down and down, the stairs never curving and never ending. Their descent was impossibly fast, impossibly long. She would not have believed it just a day ago, but the marathon dash down the stairs was so unvaried and so lengthy and so boring that in the middle of all the terror around her, Mia fell sound asleep.
Her sleep abruptly came to an end when she was thrown to the ground with someone shouting, “Wakey, wakey!” at her. This time the surface she landed on wasn’t dirt or even cement. It was littered with stones that crunched like rough cinders, and there was a strong smell of sulphur and kerosene all around. Mia cried out in pain as a claw deeply scratched along her collarbone and then up the side of her neck, drawing blood as the black bag was pulled off her head. She blinked, trying to focus on the surroundings, but looking around at the landscape didn’t help identify where she was. The scene was so strange, so unfamiliar that she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. She was in the middle of a darkened expanse with scorching heat that visually was a jumble of black, purple, and orange, with the acrid smell of brimstone. It didn’t feel like they were inside a building, but it didn’t feel like they were outdoors either.
The beast sitting next to her, that she could comprehend (in a sci-fi/fantasy sense), his head looming above her, so close she could smell his cabbage-y breath. The giant beast was licking her blood off of his index finger claw with a long gray tongue that was as thick as it was wide. Now with an unobstructed view, Mia could see that her earlier impressions were correct — this giant was eleven feet tall with a head like a bull, chest like a man but with gray scaly skin, arms and legs with black fur like a goat, six digits per paw with long yellowed claws, and huge bat-like wings. In the middle of his face, in the center of the bull’s snout a little lower than his eyes, there were six large pink-rimmed slits that opened and closed. She assumed it was some kind of nose, because the beast had picked up a strand of her long blonde hair and held it near the slits, making a snuffling sound. And then the beast licked her hair. Tossing her head (being tied up, her hands weren’t available to use), she jerked it out of his paw, hoping the part now covered in mucus wouldn’t touch her face.
A voice boomed out, “Welcome to my home away from home, Mia!”
Not saying anything, she stared at the giant beast.
“Oh, come now, Mia. Don’t you recognize me now that I’ve slipped into something more comfortable? Comfortable for me anyway.” He leaned over so his snout was above her head. “I can smell that you are extremely UNcomfortable with my appearance. How utterly lovely.”
Shaking her head, she refused to add anything to his making fun of her justifiable fear. She asked, “Chase, where are we? I don’t recognize anything, and it’s so hot and dark here.”
“Ah, you are quick, aren’t you — for a clay-brained human. So limited in thinking and cognitive skills, humans are.” He stood and did a spokes-model hand gesture to highlight the landscape of this part of the infernal Underworld. Given his current app
earance, he was an appropriate representative to show it off. “Take a look around. We’re now in one of the less desirable regions of the Unseen Realm. Housing values here in Itimah Kittsum are quite depressed, but I quite like it even so. An acquired taste, you see. Very few see the beauty — or advantages — in it. There’s no interference here, you see. Well — not too much anyway, here at the center of the Earth, on the porch so to speak of Tartarus, the basement crypt of Hell. Darkness our dwelling place, we long for rest but find it not. Our hope is in the scepter of our kingdom and in our glory. This is a fearful place, chaotic and horrible, a spectacle in pain.”
Mia looked around, and realized she hadn’t truly believed they had left the natural world behind (governed by testable laws of physics) until that very second. In a flash, she had a sudden epiphany, an insight that ripped open her concept of the cosmos. Her kidnappers hadn’t taken her to the other side of the galaxy — they had transported her to a supernatural location in the Unseen Realm. Suddenly she could see how naive her ideas about the regions belonging to Heaven and Hell had been, how she assumed nothing really happened there.
She thought, “This place has nothing to do with Earth or the people who live there. No way is this a part of the universe I was born in.” Everything was so — alien. Even a far distant planet in another galaxy would have seemed more familiar to her. This place did not fit into any category of science she could think of, and science would never be able to explain the things she saw here. Startling as the idea was, here she was in the supernatural realm, kidnapped and hauled to the center of the Earth. Even though that was impossible. And yet — that’s where she was. She had never doubted the existence of Hell, but somehow in her thinking, Tartarus had never seemed like a physical, geographical location filled with cinders, fire, and fumes that stung your eyes. It had never dawned on her that there was a place like this, filled with evil residents who were making plans to harm her world. All happening while she was blissfully unaware of the plots they developed, deaf to the shots fired at targets unknown, blind to multiplied battlefields filled with opponents struggling to prevail in the war against God. Unknown to her, plans and counter-plans were being made and revised in these unseen places, a cosmic chess match being played out, each side actively working to achieve their goals through attempts made to outmaneuver the other side.
In her mind, the supernatural world had always seemed like the waiting area in an airport terminal — a blank empty space where God and maybe a few angels waited on one side (only rarely sent on assignment to Earth) with the Devil and demons seated on benches on their side, all inert and lazing the time away, nothing happening except for some patient clock watching, killing time until the history of the ages to unwind and the course of time to run out. Only then would they get up and take action, completing (at long last) the end time plans for Earth.
Stretching, Archangel Gabriel stood up and asked, “Is it time yet?”
God replied, “No, not yet.”
“Okay. I’ll go back to waiting then.” And he sat back down.
But that idea was wrong. Completely wrong. Here in this place, it was obvious — visibly apparent — that her unexamined assumption was entirely mistaken. She was wrong to think that the supernatural realm was an inactive and passive place, with angels stretched out on puffy clouds, lazing eternity away while watching God’s already written script of history tick along on its pre-determined, set-in-stone pathway toward the end of days. Instead, the Unseen Realm was an actual place she could travel to. Had traveled to. Part of a vaster universe with multiple realms she had never dreamed existed, hidden out of sight, but connected by gateways, bridges, and portals to the natural world she was familiar with. And running up and down those steps were divine beings completing various missions to either thwart or accomplish God’s will. Changes happening minute by minute, no idle waiting for history to tick-tock along and fulfill destiny. No floating down a lazy river carried along like a log on the current of God’s pre-ordained days. The action was every bit as intense as a saber duel and just as quick-moving.
This shift in her thinking was as great as if she had suddenly realized that the sun, and not the earth, was the center of the solar system, that the earth was a round ball circling through space around its bright star, while both sped through the galaxy. It was like entering an old myth where you might actually meet a decent man morphing into a wolf at the rising of the moon, where quests lasted for a year and a day, where giants could live in a castle in the clouds, where harps called out for help, and magic spells and powers were embedded into an ordinary object like a ring. She truly was in one of the ancient stories where people encountered magical situations and mortal danger from evil entities. Mia thought, “This place is not a reminder of those stories. This is one of the places where those stories took place. The ancient tales are true.”
Mia took a closer look around. The surface of the ground in Itimah Kittsum was broken and uneven, but basically flat, stretching out in every direction to a distance that ended in rock walls. On the floor of this dark and stoney box, little rivers of lava ran randomly across the floor of this cavern everywhere, and that hot orange fire helped define the depth and topography of this hellish place. How far away these walls were, she wasn’t sure. It was difficult to judge, no familiar reference point to use to make an estimate. Inside the center of the earth, there was no horizon, no view of the sky (which was countless miles overhead), no distant suns or galaxies to gaze on. Unsettling enough, but that was not the greatest oddity this strange place had to offer.
Stretching up and up, there were the hundreds of stationary columns of fire dotting the landscape, maybe a thousand or more feet high. These columns of fire seemed to be the primary source of light in this dark place, giving an orange cast to everything. Mia had once had a dream when she was young where she was standing in the middle of open farmland with dozens of stationary tornadoes surrounding a farm house. These columns of fire gave Mia the same feeling of an imminent, towering danger. Above the columns of fire, there was a covering that was maybe two hundred feet higher, a ceiling over this area. Firmament was a good term for the distant ceiling here, since the roof to this place was literally rock solid. She began to feel the weight of the miles of stone above her head, pressing in on her, creating an oppressive, claustrophobic sense of being smothered with no air to breathe.
Partially obscuring this stony firmament above, Mia could see a layer of smoke in constant motion like the surface of a lake, only the movement was more violent, like it was boiling or blown by a hard wind. But the air at her level was perfectly calm and stifling, no hint of a breeze anywhere. She wondered if the columns of fire heated the sky somehow, if that is what made the insane swirling motion in the smoke. But maybe that explanation was too scientific. She thought, “Who knows? Maybe there are thousands of sky snakes roiling the smoke overhead.” The atmosphere immediately below the smoky firmament was a deep purple color that faded to black at the horizon.
About one hundred yards away she guessed, there was a large gash in the ground where clouds of smoke or a sulphur-y fume would occasionally rise. The bright orange light that glowed above the chasm led Mia to believe there was a lava stream or fire of some sort below. Off to the left, between the spot they were now and the glowing chasm, there was an immense stone portal, a doorway made out of two standing monoliths of stone maybe forty-foot tall, topped by a flat rock. Mia thought, “That must be the portal where we’re headed next.”
While she was still focused on making sense of the geography in the Itimah Kittsum, Chase gave her a strong, painful kick in the ribs. “Stay here and don’t cause any trouble.”
“Frack! That hurt!” Mia groaned and thought, “And where would I go? I’m still trussed up hand and foot!”
He joined the three remaining reptilian guards standing a short distance away. At eleven feet tall, he towered over their seven foot height (and four foo
t width). Chase was a giant, whether in beast or human form. She could hear they were having a heated discussion about something, Chase saying, “Ati me, peta babkamah tumubi manku. Babkamu peta —. Babtama —. Anuta babuba peta kamalu.” It was hard to tell with the face he had now, but Chase seemed to be confused. Had he forgotten the incantation to open the portal and was trying out alternate phrases? The three guard-goyles were shouting, not in English, probably offering suggestions to help figure out the password. Or calling each other stupid. Or both. Which is why they didn’t immediately see what she saw — an immensely huge creature climbing up out of the chasm. A gargantuan black monster (at least double the height that Chase was now) with glowing blue eyes, in appearance the mix of predator beast and human form with giant arms, legs, and wings, gigantic clawed feet, a mouth full of sharp teeth, carrying a huge trident, and a furnace burning inside.
Mia thought, “The Sarrabu Guardian! No wonder Raggis was terrified of it!”
The Guardian made a beeline for her. Mia was so overwhelmed by its appearance — and swift approach — that she didn’t even think to scream or make a sound of any kind. Hypnotized in extreme terror, she sat watching the black monster get closer and closer, unable to move or react in any way. Within seconds, it was standing over her, bellowing, the heat from the furnace inside its belly scorching her face. “Who is this who has intruded into my realm? Do you wish me to escort you below, Maria Marwitz, even though you have arrived before your appointed time?”
Paralyzed in terror by the approaching monster, Mia stared into its eyes, unable to move even if her feet and hands had been free. Speech and even thought were absolutely an impossibility.
No Geek Rapture for Me_I'm Old School Page 29
