Amygdala

by Harper J. Cole

  The worst-case scenarios played out merrily in her head as they had so often done before, a private screening of dreads she had no choice but to watch and endure. And lying in the background were emotions of the most negative cast: anger at Rivers for criticising her, embarrassment at her cowardice, fear at the prospect of death that hung all about them like a shroud.

  Shut it out, shut it out! Be strong for your friends!

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

  Gypsy pressed her fingers to her temples, wrestling for control as she pressed on through the darkness.

  * * *

  The little group soon reached the fork in the path. After taking a few brief moments to refocus their minds, they took the left-hand branch.

  Annie was prepared to assume her customary position near the front, but Rivers asked her to hold back and give someone else a turn. She complied, falling into step beside the professor. Her instincts told her that the other woman had something to discuss.

  They were correct. Speaking in a low voice so as not to be overheard, Rivers said, “We have a problem.”

  “You think? The scythe was kind of a giveaway.”

  “I was referring to young Ms. Cumberland. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

  “Hey, lay off her,” said Annie, with a vehemence that surprised both Rivers and herself. “She’s one of the good ones. We aren’t all blessed the same way. Yeah, so she’s a bit of a fraidy-cat. Fine. It’s not her fault. Life ain’t always fair.”

  “Indeed it is not, but I aspire to be. Is it fair that seven lives be imperilled for the sake of one?”

  “We stick together, you said it yourself.”

  “I did,” conceded Rivers, “but a good scientist should never be afraid to question her own judgement. Perhaps I should have taken up Alice’s offer.”

  “And let the two of them go wandering off by themselves? No way!”

  “Actually, I could have simply told them to remain where they were. Presumably they would have been released after we completed the Zakazashi. Safer for them and for us. It’s not too late to give that order, of course…”

  “What makes you think we can do this without them?”

  “Most journeys are easier without excess baggage.”

  Annie stopped dead, seizing the professor’s arm and spinning her around so that they were face to face. “That’s enough!” she hissed.

  “Control yourself, Grace.”

  “I am in control, but push me and you soon won’t be.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” There was an edge of anger in Rivers’ voice, but Annie was undeterred.

  “It means that you’re not the only one who can stage mutinies.”

  “I did nothing of the kind, if you’re referring to -”

  “If you try and pressure Gypsy and Alice into staying behind, I will challenge you. This isn’t a place to be splitting up. And we need them.”

  Rivers glared silently back at her, eyes glinting in the darkness. Then she inclined her head slightly to indicate the passageway ahead. “We appear to be falling behind the group. Do you mind?”

  Annie let her hand fall to her side, releasing the other woman. The two of them turned and started off after the rest of the party, walking briskly to catch up. Alice glanced back at them curiously, but no-one seemed to have heard their argument.

  Not like me to flip out like that. Stress can do some funny stuff. But she’s too darned cold. They’re people, not baggage or chain links. People.

  Good people.

  “I raised the matter with you,” said Rivers coolly, “because you’ve spent more time with the Cumberlands than anyone else and might be better placed to judge whether they’re an asset or a liability. You appear to have given me your answer.”

  “Like I said, we need them. Alice is a seriously tough cookie, and we wouldn’t even have beaten Exam 1 without Gypsy. Having a math wiz around makes a difference.”

  “I might have solved those sequences myself,” said Rivers, a touch defensively. Then she sighed. “On the other hand, I might not. In either event, you’ve made your case well, if a trifle overzealously. The team will stay together.”

  “Thanks.”

  The roof of the passage had been getting steadily lower as they walked. Now it was almost close enough to touch, if Annie took a running jump. The lighting, however, was becoming weaker and more spaced out. The temperature seemed to have dropped. The young technician shivered as a breeze rushed by from behind them. She would have hated this place even without all the dangers. It had the feel of an enchanted crypt, a place of necromancy and evil …

  Annie pinched herself. She mustn’t think that way.

  Snap out of it. Say something.

  “I wonder what would have happened if we had failed Examination 1? I mean, what if we’d run out of time? Would they have sent us home, and missed out on the fun of making us dance through their death traps?”

  Rivers shook her head. “I’m guessing that you haven’t studied the rules very closely. It’s impossible to lose the game during the first stage. By completing the tasks in time, we merely made the rest of the Zakazashi somewhat easier.”

  “Easier how?”

  “That varies. Perhaps some of the challenges are going to be simpler than they would otherwise have been, or we might be given some useful equipment.”

  “The torches, maybe?”

  “Possibly, though I’d hope for a little more assistance than that after our morning’s work. It seems likely…”

  She trailed off as Iris, currently acting as the vanguard of the group, raised a hand. Something different was up ahead. Annie and Rivers worked their way to the front to take a look.

  The sight which greeted them was none too dramatic. The passage came to an end in a smooth stone wall a dozen yards ahead. In its centre at roughly chest height was a circular metal hatch, dull bronze in colour and porthole-sized.

  “The next challenge,” said Hisano.

  “No doubt,” Rivers responded. “But what form it will take is unclear. I believe a certain caution when opening this hatch would be advisable.” She approached it warily and discovered a simple lock on the left-hand side, a metal bolt which slotted into a groove in the stone. “I’ll open it on the count of three. Move as close to the walls as you can and be ready for trouble.”

  The group hugged the walls while their leader gently eased back the bolt and, after a whispered three count, flipped it open. Rivers darted back as though expecting a cannonball to fly out of the newly uncovered aperture, but the reality was something of an anti-climax. The door groaned and squealed on its hinges, but still opened enough to reveal a simple tubular tunnel running straight forwards. Shining their torches down it, they saw no surprises lying in wait.

  “I think I can see a fork in the tunnel up ahead,” said Annie, poking her head through the entrance. “Perhaps it’s another maze.”

  “It’s no good packing all of us in there when we don’t know where we’re going.” Rivers decided. “We’ll send someone ahead to scout out a path through. I’ll need a volunteer. Preferably a thin one – I’ve a feeling it might get a little cramped in there.”

  “Um, I suppose I’m the thinnest,” offered Gypsy. “I think I could -”

  “No, no,” cut in Rivers. “Iris, did you raise your hand? You’ll be ideal. Take a torch with you and look out for traps.” She turned to Gypsy and added, seemingly as an afterthought, “Thanks for putting yourself forward, but Iris is younger.”

  The bespectacled doctor slipped off her backpack and shimmied up into the tunnel. There wasn’t room for her to stand up, so she proceeded on all fours, a motion made awkward by having to hold the torch at the same time.

  Once she reached the fork, she called back: “There are four paths. I’ll go through them one by one, starting from the left.”

  “Be careful!” cautioned Rivers.

  Without another word, Iris vanished
from sight. For a few seconds, they could see a faint glow from her torch, then that too was gone.

  It was a difficult wait for the seven left behind. Some paced, some sat and rested their legs. Sandra Rivers stood at the entrance to the tunnel, elbows propped on the edge, eyes staring into the blackness. Annie wondered whether the professor was questioning her own decision to send a single scout.

  Don’t think I’d ever want to be the leader. So many different ways to screw up.

  Her eyes turned to Gypsy, sitting with shoulders slumped and arms hugging her knees. Her bright yellow outfit looked garish and out of place in this subterranean setting.

  “Head up, Gypsy Moth. This looks a lot easier than the other way. You made the right decision.”

  The mathematician looked blankly up at her for a moment. Annie had seen that look before; she had a strong impression that Gypsy’s mind was elsewhere and was having to be forcibly wrenched back to the here and now. “It’s pure luck if we benefit from me, ah, doing what I did,” she said at last.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with a little luck. We’re surely due some. Been jinxed since we stumbled on Mata. Now, that was some serious good luck. Maybe the score’s gotta be balanced. Like karma, you know? Do you believe in that sort of stuff?”

  “I … try not to.”

  Funny answer, Annie thought. She was about to ask for more details when she felt her ears twitch. There had been a faint sound from down the passage.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Back there, the way we came. Anyone else?” There were head-shakes all round. “It was definitely there. Hey, Sandy, lend me your torch a second.”

  Rivers, eyebrows arching slightly, handed over the implement. “What did you hear? Describe it.”

  “It was a sort of clinking,” said Annie, sending torchlight in the direction of the mysterious noise. The passageway twisted and turned, but she could still see at least part of it up to a distance of a good fifty yards. Nothing was visible. “A clinking,” she repeated. “Kinda like a coupla metal spoons being knocked together.”

  “Spoons?” Hisano was incredulous. “Is someone eating dessert back there?”

  Annie frowned. “Not actually spoons, just that sort of sound. Look, I’m not kidding. There was something back there.”

  “You were right to report it,” said Rivers, stepping to Annie’s side and scanning the passage carefully. “It might be entirely harmless – I daresay there’s all manner of machinery behind the scenes – but then again it might be significant.”

  “Or dangerous.”

  “Also a possibility. We must each of us keep our ears, as well as our eyes, open.”

  So intent were the group on looking back the way they’d come, that they quite forgot to keep watch for Iris’ return. Several of them jumped when the young physician slid out of the tunnel with a scattering of tiny stones.

  “Iris!” Annie exclaimed. “Never heard you coming. With stealth skills like that, you shoulda been a ninja, not a doctor.”

  “There’s not much call for the former occupation these days.”

  “Did you find a way through?” asked Rivers impatiently.

  “Yes.” Iris brushed at her clothes, dusty from her excursion. ‘There are four junctions, each with four paths leading from them. Three of those end in sheer drops – deadly, but easy to spot with the torch on. The correct paths twist and turn a bit, but they’re quite safe. At the first junction, we take the leftmost path, at the next, the rightmost, then second from the left, then second from the right. On the other side there’s another hatch, and a passage just like this one. I didn’t investigate further.”

  Rivers nodded. “That sounds straightforward enough.”

  “It is. Claustrophobia is probably meant to be the main challenge here – it would be quite a tight fit for the average Matan. No such problems for us. The one thing I would suggest is some padding for our knees and our palms.” She held up her own hands, showing a number of scratches. “It’s a rough surface, and there’s a lot of little stones lying loose.”

  They improvised some padding by tearing strips from the bottoms of their trouser legs and were soon ready to go. Iris led the way, followed by Rivers, then Alice, Gypsy, Ferguson, Bala and Hisano.

  That left Annie to bring up the rear. She took a last check around to make sure that no-one had left anything behind, then placed her hands on the mouth of the tunnel and began to pull herself up.

  Click-click.

  Annie froze. No doubt about it this time, there’d been a noise, and it had come from inside the passage, not behind the walls – there was a slight echo. Turning and reaching into her backpack, she retrieved the torch she’d borrowed from Rivers earlier and directed its light down the twisting path.

  Nothing there.

  But the sound came again. Click-click.

  Definitely metallic, and they’d seen nothing capable of making such a noise on their way up here. Annie turned and called after her friends, but they’d already vanished from view, and there was no response.

  The idea of having to navigate the maze of tunnels by herself didn’t bother her – after all, she had the torch, and she could remember Iris’ instructions clearly enough – but her instincts were telling her that this was not a good place to linger alone. It was time to go, but she couldn’t resist taking a last look for the source of the noise.

  This time she found it.

  At the farthest point visible, just before the passage vanished around the corner, there was a patch of blackness that had not been there before. The surroundings were dingy enough that Annie probably wouldn’t have spotted it if she hadn’t been specifically looking for something out of place. Even now, she wasn’t sure that her eyes weren’t playing tricks. It looked like nothing so much as a dark smudge on the surroundings.

  Her torch chose that moment to go out. She shook it frantically, and had it working again just a few seconds later. But by the time she brought it to bear on the tunnel, the smudge was no longer where it had been.

  Annie felt a rush of relief.

  It was short lived.

  The dark shape still there, ten yards closer and drifting slowly towards her. Not a smudge, she now realised, a cloud, a moving pocket of inky blackness, occasionally disappearing behind a bend in the path, but always creeping back into view, drawing closer, closer …

  Then it halted. Deep within the darkness, two points of light appeared, eyes regarding her with cold appraisal. As she watched, they split apart, becoming twin whirlpools of rotating stars.

  The cloud resumed its advance. It couldn’t be more than thirty yards away now, and Annie could now clearly hear a series of clicks and scrapes emanating from deep within it. She wanted to scream, to run. But those spiralling lights held her transfixed, and she felt an irrational fear that if she turned from them for even an instant they would be upon her.

  “Move,” she urged herself, her voice little more than a squeak. “Please, move…”

  The creature – for creature it surely was – drew to within fifteen yards, and she could perceive pale metallic glints within the caliginous cloud, and the suggestion of spindly limbs in motion. It was at that point that she had a stroke of luck, the torch slipping through her sweat-soaked fingers and clattering to the ground.

  The sudden noise was the impetus Annie needed to break the spell. Moving at a speed with which she would scarce have credited herself, she turned and scrambled into the tunnel. She noticed a handle on the inside of the door and had the presence of mind to reach back and swing it shut behind her. Before it slammed to, she had a last, brief glimpse of the passageway behind, lit only by her torch where it lay flickering on the ground, giving a fleeting impression of the dark cloud rushing swiftly towards her. A rotten odour reached her nostrils. Then there was only blackness, and the sound of her own tortured breathing.

  Annie realised that there was no lock for the door on this s
ide. As soon as she let go of the handle, there’d be nothing to prevent the creature from pursuing her. But she couldn’t stay here forever, and she had no guarantee that she’d be strong enough to hold the door shut anyway, if whatever it was decided it wanted in.

  Let go. Now. The longer you wait, the harder it’ll be to find the nerve.

  Gritting her teeth, she wrenched herself away, scrambling down the tunnel until she came to the first junction. Leftmost path now, she reminded herself, feeling carefully in the dark to ensure she picked the right route. Before moving on, she took a glance the way she’d come. All was black, the door still closed. No pursuit.

  Then a terrible sound echoed down the tunnel, carried by the stone, pervading all the space about her. It was the ragged scraping of a sharp point being slowly run over the surface of a metal door.

  The next sound was less of an assault on the ears, but far more terrifying. The squeal of hinges as the same door was swung open.

  Annie bolted down the new tunnel. She was barely aware of the protective material she’d tied round her knees and hands slipping off, of sharp stones jabbing and cutting at her palms. It was all she could do to remember the right way to go at each junction; it hardly seemed to matter if she was going the wrong way, as long as she was moving away from that nightmare. Death by a sudden fall seemed a mercy when compared to the prospect of it catching her.

  There were times during her mad flight when Annie thought she heard noises of pursuit behind her, sometimes distant, sometimes close behind, but it may have merely been her mind playing tricks. She had a feeling that she’d be hearing those clicks and scrapes in her dreams for many years to come.

  If she lived to dream again.

  VII

  In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

  – Akira Kurosawa

  Miriam Hunter nursed her temples, trying to ease a headache she suspected was settling in for a long stay.