Krikili itself evidently terrified Buchu. Every time he recounted one of its appearances his voice would become tremulous and his hands would cup his face, as though to shut out the horrors he had witnessed.
“It is the incubus that dwells at the heart of our every nightmare,” he babbled. “The spectre in children’s eyes made flesh! It cannot be stopped, it will claim us all…”
Rivers was concerned to see that the Gataran’s fear appeared to be contagious. Several of her team were shifting uncomfortably, casting anxious glances down the tunnels that branched to left and right; even normally level-headed women like Abayomi and Ferguson were affected.
“Interesting,” she said in her most professional and clinical voice. This time she did switch to English, to ensure that her message was well understood by all. “Krikili is evidently the Matan equivalent of the bogeyman, a myth to frighten the young. It’s a wise choice on the part of the Zakazashi’s designers – patterns of thought laid down in childhood will often persist to the grave. I imagine most native contestants would find it hard to function rationally when confronted with this enemy.
“Note also that Krikili seems to have been a far more persistent menace for Buchu’s team than for than for us. Why? I have a theory: it may plausibly be a penalty for their failure to complete Examination 1 within the allotted time. Krikili’s programming must allow for different difficulty settings – they were bumped up to a higher level.
“Yes, programming. We’re dealing with a robot, I’m convinced of that. An automaton, disguised by theatrical tricks and special effects. Buchu has given us good information – the more we can learn about its behavioural patterns, the easier it will be to defeat.”
Looking from face to face, Rivers assessed the impact of her speech. Her team were nodding in agreement and standing a little taller; there was a small but perceptible increase in confidence levels. Not bad, but there was still a palpable tension.
Annie clapped her hands. “Yeah, who’s afraid of a fancy puppet in a cloud of smoke?’ She moved about the group, slapping backs and coaxing high-fives. ‘I hope this Krikili thing’s got an ass, cos we’re gonna kick it.”
The technician’s irreverence further lifted the mood – Rivers even noticed a smile or two.
She knows how to motivate. She’d make a good leader.
Better than me?
Rivers dismissed the thought; now was not the time. Crouching down so that she was on a level with Buchu, she addressed him again in his language, slowly and clearly.
“It’s time to go. Lead us to the exit gate. We’ve got enough people to operate it.”
For a moment, the Gataran’s eyes narrowed and his broad mouth tightened – a look of suspicion, she thought – then he hauled himself upright. He was a head taller than Rivers; she took an involuntary step back, but he showed no violent intent this time.
“Yes. Freedom or death. Follow me.” He started forward along the main passage. As Rivers stepped forward to join him, he seemed to notice her torch for the first time. “No lights. It will see…’
Rivers hesitated but briefly before extinguishing the illumination. Perhaps suspicion was just as contagious as fear; she found herself doubting Buchu’s sincerity. But what choice did they have? Searching for the exit themselves might take hours, and Krikili was unlikely to grant them such liberty. They’d already stayed put for longer than was safe.
“I’ll walk alongside you,” she said. “Don’t go too fast. We don’t want to lose anyone in the dark.”
And dark it was with the torch off. The only remaining light sources were pebble-sized fixtures in the ceiling, weak and widely spaced. The side passages were even darker, and she suspected they’d be ducking into one of those soon enough.
It was a definite relief when she sensed Bala Abayomi drawing up close behind her. Her fellow scientist had already proven herself a match for Buchu once.
She glanced across at their guide; a shaggy form in the gloom, indistinct. His every breath was a whisper in her ears, ragged and harsh.
What would he gain by betraying them? Nothing.
Providing, of course, that he had told them the truth.
* * *
Annie found herself at the back of the little group as it snaked its way forward. She fell into place behind Iris, laying a hand on the young doctor’s back. It wouldn’t do to take a wrong turning and lose her friends in the darkness.
The area proved to be something of a warren, albeit made of stone and not earth. Once their guide had led them away from the main path, they found themselves negotiating a tangle of narrow tunnels, some rising slowly, others dropping rapidly. Every now and then they’d come to a wider space, a node with up to half a dozen exits leading away from it. There was also a sprinkling of narrow shafts above them, and one or two below as well. To his credit, Buchu pointed these out, so no-one took a sudden fall.
We’d be hopelessly lost without this guy, thought Annie. Though we might be just as lost with him. Not the most stable fellah.
While she tried her hardest to maintain the cocky attitude she’d earlier shown for her friends’ benefit, Annie didn’t particularly like bringing up the rear. Krikili, after all, had twice approached them from that direction. She kept her ears pricked for the tell-tale scraping she’d heard before, but any noises of pursuit were being drowned out by the light press of tentative feet on the floor, and the swift pulsing of her heart. Every sudden gust of air that caressed her skin as they passed a side passage set her on edge.
At one point, in a particularly low and uneven little tunnel, Annie banged her knee on a rocky protrusion that jutted out from the left-hand wall. She stumbled into the opposite wall, dropping several steps behind the rest of the group. There was no illumination at all here; she lurched after them, feeling a brief surge of panic at the separation, and a greater wave of relief when her searching fingers found Iris’ waist.
The doctor reached down, briefly clasping Annie’s hand in her own. Her skin felt smooth and cool to the touch. Had it really been only this morning they’d woken in bed together? Annie had been worried, she remembered, that Iris might be growing deeper feelings for her, feelings which would be unrequited. Her day had begun like a soap opera but was in danger of ending in horror.
It wasn’t long afterwards when their stealthy advance was brought to a halt. Annie didn’t realise why at first. She heard hushed voices ahead of her – Rivers and Buchu, she thought – and the chain of people lurched unevenly to a halt. There was light ahead, but she couldn’t see what was going on through the jumble of silhouettes before her, and this was not the time to be loudly demanding answers. As it happened, though, they’d reached a node, and there was room for the whole party to edge inside.
Annie saw a roughly circular chamber, with five tunnels leading out, including the one they’d just entered by. The stone above them was crumbling and eroded, showing several gaps; set between two of these was a glowing patch of ceiling, brighter than most that they’d seen in this area, strong enough to illuminate most of the chamber and small portions of the various exits. There was nothing unusual in either the tunnels or the node itself, nothing to justify their sudden stop.
“What’s up?” she whispered to Rivers.
The professor indicated their guide, who stood hunched over with his head in his hands. “He says he can hear it approaching.”
“Krikili?” Annie strained her ears to no avail. She tried to remember whether Matans had better hearing than humans. About the same, she thought. Had any of her friends heard anything? She looked from face to face. No … there were plenty of worried expressions but none lighting up with recognition.
“He’s imagining it,” she said. “Get him moving.”
“Wait.” Iris had raised a hand. “Listen again.”
There was a moment of utter silence, as though the whole planet were holding its breath, not just this one group of frightened people.
Then they all heard it.
Click-click-click …
It was the tell-tale sound of metal on metal. Krikili was coming.
Buchu sank slowly to his knees, his brief veneer of confidence falling from him like a screen of dust. “Deceived!” he groaned. “Tricksters sent to me as harbingers of my final doom, the ray of sunshine that shimmers on the axe as it falls…”
“Hisano, find a way to shut him up,” hissed Rivers. “It might not know we’re here.”
Ferguson shook her head. “The sounds are getting louder. It’s coming – we gotta move.”
Clink-click, click-clink …
Rivers nodded. “Fine, but which way?”
“The opposite way from where it’s coming!”
“And where’s that?”
This was a good question, Annie realised. It was very hard to pin down the direction the sounds were actually originating from. She stepped cautiously up to one of the exit tunnels and trained her ears down it, tensed to run at the first sign of trouble.
“I think it’s louder this way,” she said. But when she moved onto the next tunnel, the clicking was louder still, and Ferguson reported a similar result from back the way they’d come.
“Too much echo,” said Rivers. “There’s no way to pin down the source.”
A particularly shrill scraping resonated throughout the node, an assault on their eardrums as painful as nails being drawn across a chalkboard.
“Sh-shouldn’t we just pick a tunnel and run?” blurted Gypsy.
Rivers shook her head sharply. “That’s the worst thing we could do, especially without a guide.” Buchu was still on his knees, babbling incoherently and paying little attention to the soft words Hisano spoke to him. He looked in no condition to move. “We’d be lost, scattered, hunted down one by one, just like his party.”
Scrape … scrape … scrape …
Annie wiped the sweat from her forehead. “If we’re not going to run, can we at least get ready to fight?”
“Yes. Form a circle. Eyes on the nearest tunnel, call out if you see any movement.” Rivers shepherded the team into a defensive ring, with Hisano and Buchu in the centre. Annie, spotting a loose rock by her feet, stooped to pick it up.
It was barely bigger than her fist; a poor weapon with which to face a Gataran demon, but it was better than nothing.
“Monsters often have a weak spot in Earth mythologies,” said Rivers. Annie had to admire the scientist’s poise – she was still theorising and analysing, even under this pressure. “Perhaps this one’s the same. Hisano, ask him.”
The Japanese technician spoke to Buchu again, appreciably more sharply this time. The change in approach was enough to coax a few coherent words out of the distressed Gataran. Annie fought the urge to glance back at him, keeping her focus on the pair of tunnels visible from her place in the defensive circle. She could see barely three feet into them; given the cloak of darkness the creature wore, how much warning would they have of its approach? And how quickly could it move? At least when they’d had to fight on Mahi Mata, they’d known what it was they were up against.
Clink-clink-clink …
The sounds of Krikili’s approach were definitely getting louder; maddening not to be able to pin a direction on them. Annie drew in a deep breath and tried to prepare for anything. She was aware of Iris to her left, silent and grim. Gypsy was at her right, teeth chattering again. Without giving it much thought, Annie took half a pace forward, ensuring that any attack from ahead would meet her before the mathematician.
Hisano rose to her feet. “He says Krikili can be wounded but never killed. Ripping its heart out is one way of buying some respite, but it always grows another one and comes back stronger. Burying it in earth or water slows it down as well.”
“Not too useful right now,” said Rivers tightly. “Fine. We’ll improvise.”
Abruptly, the metallic sounds of the monster’s approach ceased. A pungent, rotten odour reached Annie’s nostrils. She’d smelt it once before, the first time she’d encountered Krikili.
“It’s here,” she said.
She was right.
A billow of smoke shot down from a gap in the ceiling, directly above Hisano and Buchu. Before any of them could react, the Japanese technician had been enveloped in the blackness. Annie had the fleeting glimpse of spindly limbs wrapping about Hisano’s body, an impression of misshapen limbs poised to thrust upwards.
Bala dove headlong into the cloud, but her arms wrapped around nothing but smoke. Above them, a single scream rang out, already distant and receding fast.
Krikili had claimed its first victim.
IX
A good retreat is better than a bad stand.
– Irish proverb
A moment of stunned silence followed Hisano’s abduction. Annie was the first to break it. She impulsively tore the torch from Rivers’ limp fingers, activating the beam and sending it up through the hole into which Krikili and her crewmate had vanished. She saw a nearly vertical shaft, narrow and twisting; there was so little space up there she could scarce believe a human could have fit through, let alone the thing that had seized her.
“Hisano!”
It was a futile cry. Echoes were her only answer; bloodstains clinging to the lip of the hole the only trace remaining of her fellow technician. A single drop formed and fell, striking the stone floor with the tiniest of splashes and becoming a red smudge at Annie’s feet.
“Gone,” said Rivers, her voice little more than a whisper.
Annie rounded angrily on the scientist. “That all? How’re we gonna get her back?”
Rivers stared blankly for a moment, then summoned her clinical persona once again, her spine straightening while her voice took on its most clipped and business-like tones.
“We aren’t. Being dragged up that tunnel at such a speed may well have been fatal for her; if it hasn’t, then Krikili will have finished the job.”
“You don’t know that! We can’t give up on her … I say we send someone up there somehow, look around! It must have a lair or, or something, and we, we’ll find her and smash that thing into a thousand little bits! We can’t…”
Hearing the touch of hysteria in her own voice, Annie choked off her rage with an effort. She looked about her, scanning the faces of her friends – shock, fear and horror everywhere. Ferguson’s hands were pressed tightly to her mouth, as though frozen in place. Bala’s lips worked silently; as Annie watched, the muscular woman rapped herself sharply on the head with her knuckles. Blaming herself. The burden of strength – she thinks stopping disasters is her job.
Iris was staring up at the smear of blood dimly visible above them. Her teeth were bared; a hand trembled slightly as she reached up to push her spectacles to the bridge of her nose. Beyond the lightly reflective lenses, her eyes looked wild and feral. Annie wasn’t sure whether the doctor was terrified or enraged. Maybe both.
Alice Cumberland had both arms wrapped protectively about her daughter. She was speaking quiet words of comfort, but twin tears glistening upon her cheeks betrayed her distress. Gypsy herself stood with head bowed and eyes closed. Lost to the world.
Me panicking ain’t helping no-one, Annie chided herself. Get it together.
“Okay, you’re right. And maybe we’ve got a window to move.” She indicated Buchu. “Someone give this guy a boot up the ass.”
To her surprise, though, the Gataran was already getting to his feet. He seemed relatively calm again – Annie wondered whether emotional yo-yoing was common among Matans, or special to this individual.
“I knew aliens had reached our system,” he said, “but I didn’t truly believe it. Far easier to think that you were part of an elaborate trick, monstrous servants of Krikili.” His gaze met Annie’s, and she could see only empathy in his broad and shaggy features. “Now I see the truth. You’re prey, just as I am. You face the same grim fate as my companions. I won’t let it happen again. Come!”
He started for one of the exits, pausing when some of the women were slow
to respond. “We have a short time until the hunt begins again. Haste, friends!”
That got them moving. Rivers quickly organised the team into a chain, just as before. Annie went at the front with Buchu this time. Since speed seemed more important than stealth for the moment, she activated the torch to light their way.
Once again, their guide led them through the network of nodes and tunnels. They moved at a quicker pace this time, which was not without its drawbacks, and Annie collected several bruises and cuts from catching herself on outcroppings of rock or low ceilings.
She barely noticed. Her attention was soon focussed only on the path ahead; for a time, she strained her ears to catch a hint of the scraping which would herald the return of their pursuer, but the pounding of their feet on the floor meant that she likely wouldn’t hear it until it was right on top of them.
Perhaps that was just as well. She wasn’t sure there was much they could do to stop it, whether forewarned or not.
Abruptly, and sooner than she had expected, they reached their destination. The tunnel broadened sharply before ending in a sturdy brick wall. There was a rectangular section in the middle where the bricks were a lighter shade of grey, obviously the exit. It was easy enough to see how to open it, too – four square wooden buttons protruded from the wall at regular intervals.
“You see?” said Buchu, panting slightly. “Four people are required to press the buttons in union. It was impossible for me to get through alone.”
This seemed to be true enough at first glance, but when Annie paused to properly examine the area, she saw ropes and blocks of wood strewn on the floor to either side, and pulleys dangling overhead. It looked likely to her that one person could indeed open the door by themselves, if they rigged things up correctly.
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