In the Lair of the Mountain Beast

by James Moloney

  No moths appeared in the moonlight. Berrin waited with the net poised over the dark opening until his muscles ached. Dorian took over. Still no moths. The only consolation was that the mountain beast remained silent inside its lair. Hours passed.

  ‘Looks like the blast did kill them after all,’ said Dorian in despair.

  ‘Be patient,’ Berrin said, but he feared she was right. If so, then Malig Tumora had won and the pain such thoughts inflicted on his heart was darker than the night sky.

  ‘There, quickly!’ shouted Olanda.

  A moth had fluttered into the moonlight, but instead of flying out into the open air of the crater, it immediately turned tail and disappeared inside again.

  ‘At least we know some survived,’ Berrin said and their spirits lifted. Just as well, because they had to endure another hour of frustration before any more moths ventured from the cave. Two this time. Berrin swooped with the net, but again the moths seemed reluctant to break free of the cave and he missed them both.

  ‘Maybe the moths can tell the valley is dead,’ he said.

  ‘You mean they’ll never come out? They’ll die in the cave instead?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  Their hopes seemed as desolate as the landscape.

  ‘We’ll have to go into the cave,’ said Berrin. He turned to face his companions and found them wide-eyed with astonishment. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

  Dorian had to work hard to keep her voice at a whisper. ‘Oh, nothing much. Just that there’s a monster in that cave and if we go inside we’ll be eaten alive.’

  Somehow, this point had skipped Berrin’s mind. ‘Oh,’ he mumbled. But his determination wouldn’t die, even in the face of such a blatant difficulty. ‘The mountain beast might live well back in the cave,’ he said. ‘The moths are much closer, maybe just a few metres inside the entrance. They could be massing there right now, confused by the smell of ash and burning.’

  The girls looked at each other and shook their heads.

  ‘He’s crazy,’ Dorian said to Olanda, as though Berrin wasn’t there.

  ‘He’s always been a bit crazy,’ Olanda replied, with the same casual disregard for Berrin’s presence. ‘We go on about Quinn and what a madman he is in a Dodgem, but Berrin’s the one who takes the biggest risks.’

  ‘Are you two quite finished?’ Berrin asked, but their deliberate teasing had made him treat the dangers ahead with more respect. ‘All right, it won’t be easy.’

  ‘Won’t be easy!’ Dorian repeated. ‘Berrin, there’s hardly any light out here. Inside the cave, there’s none at all. Pitch black, do you understand? The mountain beast, or whatever lives in there, just has to open its mouth and let us walk in. Thanks very much. A tasty dinner.’

  Berrin was growing angry at the way Dorian and Olanda poked fun at his plans. ‘Aden died to save us, Dorian. He gave his life so that we could have one more crack at Malig Tumora. Yes, we might end up as food for the mountain beast, but I’d rather die than go back to Ferdinand and tell him we didn’t give it a go.’

  That was enough for Olanda. Once more she stood with Berrin, despite the reckless danger she was bringing on herself. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said boldly. ‘For Aden, and for all the Rats. I don’t want to go back to those tunnels empty-handed either.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Dorian immediately. ‘But even if the moths are near the entrance, how are you going to catch them if you can’t see them?’

  ‘I’ll swing the net back and forth a couple of times above my head and then check to see whether I’ve trapped any.’

  ‘Sounds like a crazy plan to me. Are you ready?’ said Dorian. She might be against this foolhardy mission, but if they were going to do it anyway, she would play her role as leader.

  Berrin followed her into the cave with Olanda behind him, the crossbow loaded and raised to her shoulder. The blackness around them became absolute. Berrin couldn’t see Dorian; he couldn’t see the net; he couldn’t see his own hand held a centimetre from his nose.

  ‘Be careful with that crossbow,’ he warned Olanda. ‘You’re just as likely to shoot one of us as the mountain beast.’

  ‘Right, that’s ten paces. Try the net,’ Dorian ordered.

  After a couple of blind passes, Berrin ran his hands along the pole to the net and, with his fingers, gently explored the mesh to detect any fluttering movement inside.

  ‘Nothing,’ he sighed and raised the net again to begin a second sweep of the blackness above his head. This proved no more successful.

  ‘I’m going a little deeper.’

  ‘No! I said ten paces and no more.’

  ‘But we’re so close.’ Berrin forced himself to go another five metres, then made three quick sweeps forwards and backwards before carefully feeling the net again. Still no luck.

  The darkness was unsettling and their growing fear combined with the oppressive warmth inside the cave to bring heavy perspiration to their skin.

  ‘What’s that? I heard a noise!’ Olanda cried.

  It wasn’t the deep roars and groans of last night, but Olanda was right. Berrin could hear strange sounds coming from close by. He’d hoped for the delicate fluttering of moths, but this was more a scampering, like mice, followed by a dull scrape of something heavy over rocks. The three children waited, completely still and silent, until another sound reached their ears. Breathing, and it wasn’t their own.

  Without a word, Olanda started to back up. Dorian was doing the same. Berrin was deeper into the cave than the other two and he sensed the danger was very close. He began to move too. But after three blind paces, he could go no further. Something had taken hold of his left ankle.

  Before he could react or even cry out, his right ankle was trapped as well. With a powerful yank, he was hauled off his feet and into the air. He dropped the pole and flailed his arms in terror but there was nothing he could do.

  ‘Run!’ he called to the girls. ‘Get out while you can.’

  He couldn’t see whether they had obeyed but he hadn’t heard any footsteps or mad scrambling over the rocks. He was about to warn them again, when his captor took the matter into its own hands. An ear-splitting roar burst through the cave, making the sides shake as though the entire mountain was trembling in fear.

  Where Berrin’s cry had failed, that roar worked all too well. The girls screamed and raced back towards the pale moonlight.

  Berrin was on the move too. Dangling its prize from an arm (or was it a leg — in the pitch black Berrin couldn’t tell) the unseen creature was receding into the depths of the cave. The scampering, sliding noises were louder now. Though he was more frightened than he’d ever been, Berrin realised they were the sounds of the creature’s body against the sides of the cave as it moved.

  How far were they going? The creature’s movement jerked and bounced Berrin until he would have vomited if there had been any food in his stomach to throw up. Not that he was eager for the journey to end. Once they stopped, the creature could turn all of its attention to its prey.

  After a few minutes of this stomach-churning progress, Berrin was stunned to realise he could see vague outlines around him. He turned his body as best he could to look at his captor and immediately wished he hadn’t. The mountain beast was more hideous than anything his fevered brain had imagined.

  His legs were held fast not by an arm or a leg, but a tentacle. Was the creature a giant octopus? He could only count seven legs. One kept him suspended just above the ground, two more felt the way ahead and the other four were used as legs. In fact, its movement was more like a spider’s. Each tentacle was lined with small circles. That explained the strange tracks they’d seen in the mud, but what kind of octopus or spider grew vicious claws at the end of each leg?

  The beast’s movement twisted Berrin until he was facing its body. It was huge and round and covered with thick black fur. As the light became stronger, he could make out a head, around which the fur grew even thicker. The black was tinged with caramel
brown and for a moment Berrin thought of a lion’s mane.

  Another jerk and twist and he was facing away again, into the tunnel. He tried to distract himself from the terror ahead and focused on the fact that he could see. The light must be coming from somewhere. The temperature was climbing too. When the mountain beast emerged from the lengthy cave into a much larger cavern, Berrin saw the reason for both the light and the heat. A hole in the floor of the cavern gave off a reddish glow and the closer the beast took him to that hole, the warmer the air became.

  Aden had told them about something called lava: molten rock, very hot and glowing orangey red. Somewhere, deep beneath that opening, lay a pit of lava that was kept boiling by the earth’s heat. Was that his destination? Would the mountain beast cast him down into that searing hell?

  But Berrin soon had more to worry about than the glowing pit. Now that he could see the beast more clearly, there was one detail that concerned him more than any other. A mouth had opened in the creature’s head. Berrin was raised higher and swung around, jiggling and swaying, until he hovered just above this gaping hole.

  Berrin knew he was going to die. In his final seconds, the weirdest thoughts became words on his lips. There was no begging for mercy, nor even the screams of horror that any other human being would have emitted. Instead, he shouted into the mouth that was about to devour him: ‘It can’t end like this. I have a destiny. I must defeat Malig Tumora.’

  The grip around his ankles suddenly tightened. The mouth closed and Berrin’s helpless body was brought closer to the massive head of the mountain beast. Suddenly the black skin parted and he found himself being inspected by an enormous eyeball, almost a metre across.

  Stranger things were yet to come.

  The hideous mouth opened again, but this time Berrin thought he could make out words through the gasping breath. Words he could understand.

  ‘Who are you?’

  FIFTEEN

  Food for a Monster

  SOMEHOW, THE THOUGHT OF WORDS struggling free from that repulsive mouth frightened Berrin just as much.

  ‘You … you can talk! But how? You’re a —’

  ‘Monster,’ said the breathless voice, using the very word that Berrin had been about to utter. ‘Speak again,’ the mountain beast demanded. ‘You said a man’s name.’

  Berrin thought back over what he’d said when death seemed just seconds away. Yes, he had cried out a man’s name. ‘Malig Tumora.’

  The gruesome mouth opened and a dreadful roar filled the cavern, making Berrin quiver and squirm in renewed terror.

  ‘Malig Tumora,’ hissed the creature when the echo had receded.

  ‘You know that name?’ Berrin asked.

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ said the beast with a rage barely kept under control.

  Berrin took heart from the creature’s anger. Anything that hated Malig Tumora might be a friend to him. ‘Then you should know this too,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to overthrow Malig Tumora. Back in the city there are more like me, all just as determined.’

  The powerful leg began to move and Berrin was lowered gently to the sandy floor of the cavern, close to the glowing pit where the light was strongest. The huge eye continued to examine him minutely. Berrin could see now that it was on one side of the beast’s head, yet where a second eye should have been, the black fur remained closed.

  ‘How do you know Malig Tumora?’ Berrin dared to ask.

  ‘How! Malig Tumora made me in his laboratories. I am a product of his evil mind. I know him like a child knows its father. Except there was no love in my creation. He gave me the mind of a human being and the body of … well, you have two eyes in that head of yours.’

  Berrin was moved by the misery of these words. He tried his best not to think of the creature before him as the mountain beast, but the description was too true. He did have eyes in his head and what he saw continued to terrify him.

  ‘If Malig Tumora made you, why didn’t you live in his menagerie?’

  The enormous spider-like body backed away to the other side of the cavern, leaving Berrin with some space at last. As it moved, Berrin heard the sounds that had so frightened him in the dark. The beast’s legs scuttled and clacked against the hard rock and its heavy body scraped noisily where it made contact with the cavern’s sides.

  ‘Malig Tumora created me to do a job. He gave me the strength and the claws and the roar of a lion, the agility of a spider and the long flexible limbs of an octopus. He wanted me to work with his Gadges, to police the city and keep the humans in line. But I saw how grotesque I was. Part of me was as human as the people he wanted to control. I guessed what he had done and I hated him for it. The first chance I got, I tried to kill him.’

  ‘Kill him!’ Berrin repeated in surprise.

  ‘Yes, I grabbed him as I took hold of you. All I had to do was dash his brains out against the ground, but Gadger Red was too quick for me. He brought me down with his gun before I could kill Malig Tumora. Even though I lay bleeding on the ground, I refused to let go. Gadger Red had to hack off my leg to free his master.’

  The mountain beast raised a stump where its eighth leg had once been.

  ‘Why didn’t he kill you in revenge?’

  ‘Oh, he took his revenge. He had my bleeding body dragged out to the countryside and sent the Gadges to hunt me down. One bullet had pierced my eye and others were lodged in my abdomen, but, despite the wounds, I kept ahead of them until I reached this mountain.’

  ‘The bullets though — how did you get them out?’

  ‘I didn’t. They are inside my body still, and every year that I survive here they give me more pain.’

  Berrin understood now why two so different cries had haunted the mountain slopes. The bone-chilling roar came from the beast’s anger, but the deep groan was the anguish of pain.

  ‘I have a story that might ease your suffering,’ he told the beast and, without waiting for permission, launched into the tale of how Malig Tumora had become the victim of his own creation.

  ‘Dead, you say? Malig Tumora is dead!’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Berrin. ‘But his evil work is still going on, thanks to the machine that has taken his name. That’s why we came here to this mountain. Our last hope to defeat that machine is the moth that lives in this cave.’

  ‘Moths!’

  ‘Yes, you must have seen them fluttering about. Look, there’s one now!’ Berrin pointed above his head as a tiny grey shape caught the glow then disappeared into the gloom of the cavern’s high vault.

  ‘Those moths. Yes, yes, of course I’ve seen them. Why are they so important?’

  Berrin had a second story to tell, of the purple flowers, the gas they produced that controlled the adult humans, and how the caterpillars of just one type of moth could destroy them. ‘My friends and I had captured a bagful but Malig Tumora was using us to find out where the last of these moths still lived. Once we led him to the volcano’s crater, he had the entire valley destroyed.’

  ‘I felt the heat blast through the cave,’ said the creature. ‘Everything was destroyed, you say?’

  ‘Yes, everything. You can see now why we have to catch the moths that are still alive. If they go out into the crater … well, there’s nothing, no grass, no leaves, not even a tree.’

  ‘Not a living thing?’ said the mountain beast, as bewildered as a child. ‘Just you and your companions.’

  It fell silent for a long time, leaving Berrin to pick out more details of the cavern. There didn’t seem to be any bones lying about. What did the monster eat, he wondered.

  His thoughts were interrupted when the creature said, ‘If this moth is the last chance to defeat Malig Tumora’s evil, then you must have it.’

  ‘You mean you’ll help me?’

  ‘Yes,’ the beast said simply. ‘And it seems to me that you certainly need my help. How do you propose to carry so many moths back to the city?’

  Berrin’s plan had been focused on capturing the moths. He hadn
’t thought of this additional problem. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘We had a bag made especially, but it was destroyed in the fire.’

  ‘Then I will make a bag for you,’ said the beast and, as it spoke, a fine thread began to appear from a hole in its abdomen. Using four of its legs like human hands, the beast quickly fashioned the silk into a delicate sack twice the size of Berrin’s head.

  The beast’s tentacle handed the bag to Berrin. Yuck, it was still sticky, yet what a marvel it was. Air could pass through, allowing the imprisoned moths to breathe.

  ‘There, you have a way to carry the moths. But tell me, how did you intend to catch them? With your bare hands?’

  ‘I had a net, on a long pole. I dropped it when —’

  ‘When I captured you. Well, I’m sure your net would catch one or two, but it will be quicker if you use mine.’

  Berrin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Your net?’

  ‘Yes. Look above your head.’

  Berrin did just that, but his eyes had adjusted to the strong light around the opening to the dying volcano. He had to move away from it and shield his eyes from the brightness until he could make out details in the half-dark of the cavern’s ceiling. He still couldn’t see anything at first. Then a welcome movement caught his eye — one of the precious grey moths fluttered in an erratic path through the gloom. Suddenly it stopped. Although its wings continued to beat furiously, the moth seemed stuck in one place.

  ‘It’s caught on something,’ Berrin whispered. The last word had barely left his lips when he sucked in a sudden breath. He had guessed why the moth couldn’t move. As his eyes continued to adapt, he saw more moths, some still beating their wings, others simply frozen in midair. ‘A web!’

  ‘Yes, my web,’ said the mountain beast. ‘The moths usually struggle for an hour or two before they die of exhaustion. If they are freed from the web quickly, they’ll survive. You should easily have enough to fill this sack I’ve made for you.’

  ‘But how will I collect them? It must be twenty metres up to that web.’