But while listening to the echoes, I heard movement other than my own. I blinked and strained my eyes, picking out a circle of faint radiance in the deep. Alistair’s flashlight? It moved in jerks and bumps as if Alistair were trying to carry it while clambering over obstacles. Or down stairs.
I swept my hands along the floor, feeling all the way to the edge of the wall on one side where it ended at the wall of the pit. Exploring in the other direction, though, brought me to a stair. I probed with my hands and with my cane until I had measured its width as roughly a meter—about the same as one of the outer doors of the tomb—its length about half that, and the depth of the treads better suited to someone whose stride was roughly twice as long as mine.
I called out for Alistair to stop, to wait, but the echoes came back clear as trumpets, and I froze, afraid the sound would wake something I would rather not disturb.
Alistair had no such compunction. “Go back,” the echoes called to me.
Curse him for his monomania. My cane would be more nuisance than help, so I laid it well back from the edge of the pit and started down after him. The air smelled rank, and the stone treads began to feel cold and slippery. I rubbed the wetness between my fingers, then wiped them on my jeans, revolted by the greasy feel. Further down into the black, my hands fell frequently into pools of the same slippery stuff. I had to go more carefully.
The echo of Alistair's movements still bounced up from below, and now I heard something else, a monumental writhing in the dark. The sound seemed to come from both above and below, and I couldn't distinguish the original from the echo.
The air became warmer, rising past my face in a slowly-circulating current and began to smell of old, sour manure and decaying corpses, indicating the creature below was at least organic in nature. I drew the knife from my pocket and clenched it in my fist. I called out to Alistair again, but got no answer until, a sound assaulted me, a writhing, dragging, clittering noise, the sound of some great mass dragging against stone, the sound of a thousand, no a million insectile mouths all snapping their mandibles at once, then out of the dark, Alistair’s cry.
“Henry, Henry, she’s beautiful. She’s glorious. She’s…” His voice ended on a choke.
Then followed a scream so clotted with horror, I froze on the stairs.
I tried to call out to Alistair, but I couldn't force my throat to utter any sound. Another scream came up from the dark, this one more wild, more frantic, less human. I jerked into motion, half-sliding down the stairs, letting the liquescence congealing on the stone lubricate my descent.
The coil and clitter grew louder and Alistair’s screams weaker with every breath as his throat shredded with the force of his horror. I croaked his name, but not even the echoes heard me over Alistair’s despair.
His light had stopped moving. I had at least a chance to reach him and drag him up the stairs behind me.
Then the gun went off once, a pop at this distance. The light swerved back toward the stairs, bumped up a step and another. I caught a flash of Alistair’s white face in the beam—eyes wide, mouth slack. I slid faster, descending in a rush.
He clawed at the slippery stairs, the gun still in one hand, light in the other, and scrabbled to climb at half the speed he could have made if he had kept his head. I reached him, braced one foot on the stair, grabbed the collar of his father’s old jacket and hauled him up. He dropped the light, leaving it to rock back and forth at his feet, throwing weird shadows against the wall. Gripping my coat in both hands, indifferent to the gun he still held, he clambered up me like monkey climbing a tree. He kicked me in the neck and dug one heel into my wounded shoulder as he made the step above me.
I got behind him and shoved him up the next riser and the next, though he seemed unaware of me except as a ladder under his flailing legs.
The dragging and clittering grow louder, as if the source were pulling itself up the walls of the pit. I looked over the side of the stairs into dead black.
Then a circle of light appeared deep in the center of the pit, and its sick glow illuminated a pulpous mass. The vast eye blinked. The sickly luminescence flickered with it, and I saw that the light came from the eye itself. A bullet from Alistair’s popgun wouldn’t be so much as a pinprick to a creature of that size.
I bolted up the stairs, finding sudden strength in my legs, getting ahead of Alistair.
“Faster,” I gasped. I seized his arm and dragged him along behind me. Up a few more stairs, and something caught Alistair from below. He jerked from my grasp. Slipping back, he grabbed for my leg, trying to dig fingers into my jeans, but I had cut off both legs for bandages. His nails raked my skin, caught on the denim strips holding the cotton shirtsleeve over the wound. I lunged for him, grabbed his sleeve and tried to haul him back up, but something had him by one leg. I dropped down a step, let him claw my neck and shoulder, but his grip slipped, and he slid down again until the only link between us was his grip on my coat sleeve and mine on his.
His white face turned toward me in the dim glow of the flashlight rocking on a step below us. A hint of sanity had returned to his expression. His eyes met mine. His mouth opened. “Run,” he whispered. Then, with his free arm, he turned the muzzle of the tiny gun to his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The gun clapped. His head jerked back and rolled loose on his neck. Dead eyes stared into darkness. His fingers relaxed on my sleeve, and his body jerked and disappeared into the dark, the gun spinning away into the pit.
Alistair was dead, and I was stranded on a dead world. Something pale and rubbery writhed up the wall, a glistering arm, faintly luminescent, with too many elbows, each bending a different direction, and at the end a palm bigger than my torso and a dozen spidery fingers, multi-jointed and bending as freely as tentacles. It bent over me, reaching like a child about to seize a pet hamster.
The hand snatched at me. I ducked under its swing and slashed at it with my stone knife. The hand swept past my face, all but a single fingertip, which flicked across my scarred cheek.
My face burst into flame. I screamed, slapping at sizzling, boiling skin and feeling my right hand ignite, but the flame gave no light. A moment later, writhing in agony, I realized that, pawing at my face, I felt no heat, only the scarred and rippled skin of healed burns. My right hand burned, but when I clutched it with my left, I felt only my own fingers. My nerves screamed at me to roll and beat at the fire that crept down my ribs, following the older scars. My sane mind remembered the pit and the edge of the stairs and the thing below.
Then the arm rose again from below, and the hand, fingers splayed, plunged down. Forgetting my sizzling flesh, I lunged up the next step and the one after. The hand snatched at bare rock and pounced again at my legs as I jumped to the next step. I lashed with my knife, but the stone shard barely pricked a sweeping finger, and the hand snapped shut in the air where I had been a moment before.
Up more steps, forgetting pain in terror. The hand kept missing me because the thing in the pit, Slethyrl, couldn’t see me from her vantage below. So long as I stayed on the stairs above it, the eye couldn’t find me. The hand would be reaching blind. I lunged and scrambled, pulling myself up the giants’ staircase as fast as my strength allowed. I had to follow the spiral stairs around the edges of the cavern while the monster could climb straight up, but if that eye had been proportionate, she was bigger than Blackwood House. She couldn’t climb quickly. More many-jointed arms groped along the wall and probed the stairs behind me.
Adrenaline kept me moving, giving me a new burst of strength. I made the top of the stairs ahead of the monster, snatched up my cane and scrambled blind down the long corridor and out into the valley where shadows flowed through the bottom of the canyon, and even that dark seemed almost bright after the lightlessness of Slethyrl’s tomb.
I dropped to hands and knees on the broad road, fighting the urge to roll on the ground to extinguish non-existent flames. The invisible fire had spread to my hip and leg, but it no longer felt so
much like remembered fire. This might be no more than the pain of a brand.
I listened for the weighty drag of the monster’s limbs on stone, or the clitter of her thousand feet, but I heard only the wind gasping down the valley.
I staggered back from the tumbling rocks, stunned with relief. Alistair’s demon hadn’t escaped.
My face and arm no longer burned. My ribs were stinging. My hip and thigh had begun to cool. Only my leg and foot remained aflame, but I had already examined my hand and arm in the deep twilight, and seen they were both intact, so I resisted the desperate need to yank off my boot and free my foot.
I dropped to the ground with my back to a boulder in the wide road between the temples and rocked from side to side until the last of the flames died down to the heat of a bad sunburn. I desperately needed sleep, but I forced my eyes open, sat up and bent over the leg Alistair had shot. He had scratched me deeply while climbing over me in his last burst of terror and pulled the pressure bandage loose from the bindings. Blood, black in the bad light, streaked my leg and filled the cuff of my boot.
I cut another section from my shirt, using it to replace the bandage and retying the denim strips around it. The other wounds were bleeding more freely now, and I used the last of my shirt to double the bandages. Then I forced myself up on my feet. I couldn’t stay in the valley. I sighted on the temple of Thoth and got moving.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I found the climbing trail and labored half delirious with pain and fatigue until I came out at last on the plain with the flat stars overhead and the dead mountains on the horizon. I knelt on the lip of the chasm, and when rest had revived me a little, I pushed back to my feet, leaning on my cane and looking around me at the plain and the line of the river far to my left.
I needed water before anything else. I couldn’t expect to find food in this world, but the black river Yespin flowed, according to Alistair, down to the dead sea called Kek. I forced my back straight and turned toward the bland starlight reflected off flat water.
I passed more time-shrunken carcasses of gigantic insects and animals, their bodies broken to dust by dry air and endless wind. Unless I found some piece of luck, I would eventually be one of them, my skin cracking, drying and peeling away from withered muscle and sinew, my bones themselves eventually stripped bare by wind and sand.
I could wander the plain in search of an interstice, but with no idea what might be on the other side, that might as well be another form of suicide, and even if I found a compatible world on the other side, it would bring me no closer to getting home, which was my second objective after escaping this world and getting as far from Alistair’s awakened monster as I could.
I focused on my immediate needs. Coming to the river, I knelt at its flank and smelled nothing, no algae, no fish, no life at all. I extended my cupped hands and saw my right hand and arm for the first time in the drab starlight. I held the back of my right hand before my face, half-sure I was hallucinating.
I knew the shape of the scars that warped my fingers, but something else wound and braided through the webbed tissue. I rubbed the back of my hand with my thumb, but the black threads didn’t smudge or fade. Where the touch of Alistair’s goddess had set fire to my old wounds, these marks had stitched themselves around and through the original scars. I worked my fingers, watching the threads draw and ripple down my forearm.
I pulled my coat off my shoulder and examined my arm, my ribs, my waist. Wherever the flame and shrapnel of the IED had marked me, the threads had followed, winding down my body. I leaned over the water, trying to see my reflection, but the flat stars didn’t cast enough light. I knew the marks would be there. Alistair’s monster had flicked her finger across my cheek and written something on me.
I could do nothing about it any more than I could wish myself out of this world, so I dismissed it from my mind for the moment and cupped a sip of water in my hand. It tasted like nothing. I swallowed, and it wet my throat, but it didn’t relieve my thirst even when my stomach sloshed with it.
I gave up and lay back on the dry earth. The whining wind drowned the monotone note of the river, and I probed my memory for anything Mora or Alistair had ever said that might offer me a chance to get home.
A prickle ran down my right side, and in my mind’s ear, a low, sweet voice crooned, Wake up, Hal darling.
I struggled to a sitting position and scanned the plain. The stars had neither moved nor faded. There would be no dawn over the Valley of Shadow.
No sound stirred the air but the wind and the river, yet the voice came again. Come back, Hal darling, it cooed like thunder. Why did you run away?
My skin drew tight as if a cosmic seamstress had pulled her threads to pucker me into a purse. I raised my hand. If I looked only with my left eye, the lines were inanimate as a tattoo, but when I brought my right eye, my occult eye, to bear, I could swear the threads writhed.
Don’t leave me alone, Hal darling.
Now the threads no longer merely tightened around my skin, they pulled. Something dragged my hand through the air. I clenched my fist and leaned against the pull as somewhere, a puppeteer twisted me around to face back the way I had come, toward the valley and the crypt of something foul and wakeful. I set all my weight against the leash, but my feet skidded on the crack-dust earth. I dropped my cane, caught my prisoned wrist in my other hand, but my arm remained lodged in the air.
Oh, my darling Hal, the voice crooned in my brain. I’m so lonely, so alone, so hungry, she concluded on a growl.
My head swam, a nauseating wobble as if the world had come loose of its fastenings and hung on the lip of an abyss. The winding threads squeezed my head. Black threads crossed my iris, whipping around my eyeball until they wrapped it in solid black
I twisted in the grip of my puppeteer, leaning back and dropping my hips to lower my center of gravity, but I might as well have wrestled a mastodon. Slethyrl dragged me back toward the valley and her tomb. I clawed at the ground for a rock, a crack, anything to arrest my progress.
Why resist, Hal darling? my tormentor cried. You will be mine—eternal and exquisite torture, lasting aeons, leaving nothing but a fading whimper in the void.
I stared, half blind, around the plain for something to anchor me while, in the corrupted window of my blind eye appeared a wan luminescence, pale as opal. The cold light grew without illuminating, and in the center, the black pinprick of a pupil dilated. I shut my lids and turned my head aside, but wherever I turned, the eye hung before me. The pupil irised wide, and through it, I saw a universe of blackened husks, the shells of stars sucked dry.
Why deprive me, my beloved morsel, when we could be one eternal torment to the end of time?
Then a new touch brushed my scarred arm, a feather sweeping aside the strings binding me to the goddess in the valley. The vast eye blinked and fell away.
I blinked as well. My right eye remained blind, but with the clear one, I saw my scarred arm still lodged in the air by the pull of the goddess. The fresh tickle ran down my arm from wrist to elbow like a fingertip barely touching skin. My heels slipped a little more in the dust, but I flexed my hand and felt the threads give as if I had loosened the root of a persistent weed.
The ethereal fingertip traced my cheek. I wrenched my head, and invisible threads snapped. In the back of my head, the goddess laughed, feeling the pull of my resistance give way and, unaware her prey had slipped the trap, supposed I had given in. Yes, come back, come back, my sweet, my darling.
The new touch turned to a tug, the weight of a delicate insect on a finger, pulling me in a new direction. Mora had touched me like that once. The pressure around my right eye unraveled, leaving my vision clear. I scanned the plain between me and the mountains and saw the endlessly unfolding angles of a door out of the world, faint and flickering, but in my eyes as bright and beautiful as a sunburst.
I found my cane and did my best imitation of a run toward the portal between this universe and whatever world came next. As I
closed the distance, I saw the door more clearly. Instead of unfolding in endless Escherian angles, the portal expanded in jerks, then fell in on itself like a dying candle flame, only to unfold again as if something or someone were forcing it open from the other side. I could think of only one thing, one person, who could possibly do that. Mora.
With every step toward the door, the threads sewn through my scarred body seemed to snap free of the monster’s control. I managed to cross half the distance over the plain before Alistair’s unspeakable entity discovered it no longer had me on its hook.
She screamed in my head. No! Cheat, betrayal. Unfaithful Hal.
She re-cast her net. Threads twisted around my limbs, and I fell to one knee with one power dragging me back toward the valley and the temple and the other, much weaker, tugging at me to go forward.
Come back, Hal darling, delicious dearest.
I lay flat, digging fingers and toes into the rocky ground like a climber on a cliff face. I crawled like that, dragging my entangled limbs as best I could. At first, the monster toyed with me like an angler playing a trout, letting me scrabble a few yards, then pulling tighter, letting me think for a moment that I might escape, then tormenting me with despair as she dragged me back a few yards, scraping my fingers raw on the hard ground. But all the time, a feather touch teased me—a touch here, a breath there, giving me the strength to fight the puppeteer at my strings.
The gate grew nearer, collapsing nearly shut one moment, then forcing itself open again. Just as I thought I really had a chance to reach it, the demon back in the valley tightened her grip. No. Come back. I starve. I die.
She pulled, dragging me back across the biting stones by inches, but the familiar thread, my anchor, twined around my fingers. I fought and gained a few inches toward the door.
Rage surged up through my bindings into my brain, the churning, malicious fury of the goddess at the escape of her prey, her toy, her food. She will not have you. She would waste my precious drop, my sweetest morsel, such a tiny misery to feed my hunger.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 14
