Myths & Magic: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection

by Kerry Adrienne

  “I don’t know. It’s almost like they have some kind of power to blend in. Like it’s magic or something.”

  “Magic.”

  I broke eye contact with him and looked back at the shadowling. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re aliens and have special abilities. Or maybe they are magic. I’ve never heard about creatures like this before. They could be part chameleon. I don’t know. Maybe not everything has a scientific explanation.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “We’ll have to get a better look if we see more of them. I don’t plan on making a study of them, though. It’s pretty clear that if we meet more, it’ll be us or them. I don’t really feel like being eaten by monsters today.”

  “Yeah, me either.”

  We left the bodies where they were. I entertained the thought—briefly—of hiding them, but didn’t want to waste the time trying to find some place to stash them, and the thought of picking up a dead and bloody creature didn’t appeal to me. At all. Instead, we checked the map and continued down the corridor we’d been traveling.

  Ten minutes later, the overhead lights went dark, plunging our entire world into black so deep it seemed like the world had ended.

  Images of creatures, shadowling and other more monstrous ones, came into my mind, swarming me, pulling me into even deeper blackness. My chest compressed, and I started trying harder to pull air into my lungs. I couldn’t do it. Was all the oxygen gone? Did the dark beasts do something to turn the air thicker? I heard the harsh sound as my lungs worked, and I tried with all my might to put air into them. The darkness pressed on me.

  A flash of light nearby made me gasp and jump, swinging my staff into a ready position.

  It was Sam’s headlamp, her face visible just below it.

  Of course. I reached up and switched my own light on, trying to slow my galloping heart. By the time everyone had their lights on, I had regained control, for the most part. My face was covered with a sheen of perspiration from the panic, but at least I could think again.

  “Malfunction?” I asked, looking at Zach. For better or worse, he had the most information about the mine because of his research for his school project.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t pay their bill.” His mouth twitched upward but didn’t quite make it to a full smile.

  Chapter 12

  It took more than another hour for us to get to the cavern where the most recent digging had occurred. Before getting there, I had an uncomfortable conversation with Emily on how to use the WAG bags for going to the bathroom. She went around a corner into another passageway to use it while I explained to the others and offered to let them have one of the bags I had brought. Awkward.

  We finally arrived to find that the tunnel was dominated by a drilling machine. It wasn’t one of the huge tunnelers I’d seen pictures of, the ones used to create railway tunnels or holes for roadways. This one looked like a huge battering ram on wheels. The main beam of the thing looked as if it telescoped, and the gigantic ball at the very front of the machine had curved rows of spikes made out of some different kind of metal than what the ball was made of. The conical spikes seemed removable so they could be replaced with new ones when they wore out. They reminded me of teeth in crooked rows in the mouth of some monster. I would have liked to have seen the machine in operation. Drilling through solid stone seemed like it would be exciting to watch.

  “They usually blast to make new tunnels,” Zach said. “Maybe they’re trying out this machine to see if it works better.”

  The tunnel the machine was pointing toward intersected another, rougher corridor that was at an angle to the one we were in. It must have been a surprise when it had broken through to the other cave. I’d never heard that there were other caves near.

  “That must be where the shadowling came from,” Jacob said, pointing at the ten foot section of wall that had been shattered by the drill. “It looks like a natural cave, not a mine shaft.”

  He was right. I’d been on cave tours before. There were several commercial caves in the area, including the Colossal Cave we had talked about earlier. The tunnel that had been breached looked like it had formed naturally, the floor uneven, no drill or chip marks on the wall, no abnormal voids from blasting. I shined my headlamp into the hole and noticed that the opening wasn’t even consistent. In the ten feet I could see with each swing of my lamp, the passageway narrowed in size and then widened out again. Would we even be able to get through it?

  “Will we even be able to get through the passage?” Sam asked. I smiled at her for mirroring my thoughts exactly and she smiled back at me, though her eyes showed confusion as to why we were smiling.

  “We don’t really have a choice,” Mom said. She had regained her composure since meeting the shadowling. “If that’s where they came from, that’s probably where they took their prisoners. We could spend a day or two wandering the mine trying to find them, but I’d say that the chances are better that they’ve been taken back into the caverns the creatures know best.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said, my mind trying to come up with any other idea, any reason not to go into the darkness.

  While we paused before heading into the natural caverns, Sam walked to the wall of the mine and put a big X and an arrow on it with her chalk. I raised my eyebrows at her and she shrugged.

  “I marked all the other intersections before, too,” she said. “I don’t want to get lost.” I nodded.

  I watched the interactions between the different pairs in our group as we hesitated. Jacob had a long-suffering look on his face as Madison prattled at him, no doubt complaining of something. Emily and Zach had their heads leaned in toward each other and were speaking softly. Mom was trying to explain something to Rick—I recognized the tightness around her mouth and eyes and knew they disagreed about it. Sam was putting her chalk back in one of her pockets. Tyler…well, Tyler was playing air guitar and humming something I didn’t recognize. Quite a group we had here.

  “Are you ready?” I said, taking my staff in my left hand. “We probably have some traveling to do. Hard traveling.” Weary nods were my only answer.

  I stepped through the hole into the natural cavern and quivered. Was it colder in here? It was so quiet. I’d thought it was silent before, but there had at least been the soft buzz of the lights and the background sound of the ventilation system. Now that we were in an area without these things—the cavern was even more soundless. Like a tomb. Not a pleasant thought.

  I breathed a little easier than when we first entered the mine, though I felt more like something was squeezing my chest in this strange new set of tunnels. I guess if something scares you or stresses you out but remains in front of you, all around you, your body’s alarms get tired and you get used to it. Yeah, right. As if I’d ever get used to being underground, in the dark. I clenched my staff tighter to keep my hand from shaking.

  “Are you all right?” Sam asked, just behind me as she had been for nearly the entire trip so far.

  “I’m…” I took a deep breath. “I’m not all that good with dark places, especially with monsters that want to eat me.”

  She chuckled weakly. “Is anyone?”

  That was a good question. The others all had tense looks on their faces, too, all had eyes that darted from shadow to shadow. I wasn’t the only one scared half to death. That was comforting, in a way. “I guess not. At least, not anyone sane. Not anyone I know.”

  Sam looked toward Tyler, nodding his head to some musical beat only he could hear. I got the hint. But even as oblivious as he seemed, his face had the cast of someone who would jump three feet if she said boo to him, his lips in a tight line and his eyes squinting.

  I headed to the right. That way sloped down, so it seemed it would have the best chance at being the correct way. The logic was flawed—the cavern could rise and fall many times in a short distance—but it gave us somewhere to start. We were off the map, after all. Sam drew a big arrow on the natural side of the wall, po
inting through the hole and back toward the surface.

  The surface. How long had we been underground, anyway? It seemed like days, but checking my watch, it had only been four and a half hours. It was not even quite noon yet. We had all been snacking as we walked, but we should probably stop and have lunch within a couple of hours. Our mission was going to take a while.

  We were lucky. The tunnel remained large enough for us to walk through, though it was anything but level and smooth. There were occasional shelves of rock we had to duck under and points where we had to squeeze through a narrow space for a few feet, but we didn’t have to crawl or turn around because things got too tight. That was good. What was bad was that we saw no sign of anyone ever having passed that way before. No footprints, no trash, nothing.

  The air was stale and had a wet, musty smell to it. Water dripped on us occasionally, creating damp spots on the floor. There was no sunlight, so moss wouldn’t grow there. I guess it was lucky. The last thing I needed was to slip on moss and crack my head on stone as I fell.

  “You know I’m not really religious,” Sam said as we picked our way through a cavern that had opened up from the tunnel. “My parents are Buddhist, but I see religions as more of an academic study than something to dictate my life.”

  “Yeah,” I said, stepping over what looked like the start of a stalagmite. I looked up and saw a fair-sized stalactite that may eventually meet with it. In a few thousand years.

  “But this whole Inferno thing has me thinking.”

  “Inferno? Oh, the book. Dante. Our English assignment. We’re facing monsters in the dark and you’re thinking of schoolwork?”

  She looked at me as if she didn’t know who I was. “I’m always thinking about schoolwork. You know that.”

  “Ah, right,” I said. “I guess I do.”

  “Anyway, the story is all about how the Catholic God handed out punishment for the sins people committed in their lives. As Dante traveled through hell, he saw how fitting the trials were for these souls. Gluttons could never get enough to eat, greedy people had nothing but their rags, all that stuff. It was all about justice and balance and people getting their due reward for their actions.”

  “Do we really have to talk about hell and schoolwork—which some would say are the same thing—right now?”

  “I was just thinking,” she said, ignoring my protests, “that maybe, in a way, these creatures are fitting punishment for our actions. Maybe we’re like the ones who couldn’t commit to either good or bad, endlessly chasing a banner with nothing on it.”

  I stopped and turned to look at her as she ran into me. She was looking to her left, scanning the edges of the headlamp light.

  “What are you talking about, Sam?” I said.

  “We kind of go in and violate the earth, strip mining on the surface and boring tunnels below ground to take part of the ground away. Maybe this is nature’s, or some god’s, way of telling us we’re not being nice.”

  “You think this is a punishment from God?” I asked. “That dark shadow monsters are taking children to teach us a lesson?”

  “No, not really, but it has me wondering if there is some kind of balance or justice in the universe.”

  “Sam,” I said, letting my irritation come through in my voice. “My little brother can be a pain, but he’s done nothing to deserve being eaten by monsters. There’s no justice in that.”

  “I know, Dani. Don’t take it like that. It’s just strange that we’re reading that book and this should happen at the same time. I’m only trying to understand it all. Forget I said anything. I’m sorry if I made you mad.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, expelling a breath. “I’m not mad, not really. It surprised me, that’s all.” I started walking again. I wouldn’t tell her I had been thinking about the book, too. It was a coincidence. Too strong a coincidence. Not everything in life had a reason, right? This was all random. I’d have to remind myself of that as we went along.

  I didn’t even have time to finish my thought. A shadow flitted across my headlamp beam and I heard a gasp from behind me. I stepped forward and snapped my staff into a guard position. We had company, and it was up to me to play the good hostess.

  Chapter 13

  The shadows around us seemed to come alive, wriggling and pulling themselves free of the walls and crevices in the tunnel. I froze for a moment as I flashed back to the familiar nightmare. I found myself panting.

  It wasn’t more than a second or two until my training took over. Without conscious thought, I closed the distance on one of the dark forms and struck at it. It moved like it truly was a shadow, twisting and sliding around my staff. It took two more swings before I actually made contact with a dull, satisfying thunk of the hardwood staff.

  It circled me, warier now that it had felt my weapon. As it did, I caught what was happening around me in my peripheral vision. Another shadowling was grabbing at Madison, trying to pull her away from the others. She screamed and slapped ineffectually at her assailant, but it hardly noticed. It was too busy dodging Jacob’s and Tyler’s weapons. The escrima sticks and crowbar were too slow to strike it, but maybe they’d get lucky and get a hit in by accident. I had my own concerns right now.

  My adversary lunged at me, swiping with its claws. It was a half-hearted attack, obviously not meant to actually cut me. I figured it was a feint, so I did what it probably didn’t expect. I slapped the claw aside with my staff and stepped forward. Toward the shadowling. Its nostrils flared, a gesture much too human for my comfort, but it was too late for it to do anything. I swung the end of the staff down so fast I heard it whistle in the air as it came down over its arms and contacted its head. The thud sounded like hitting an unripe melon with a hard rubber mallet.

  The creature swayed from the strike, took a single step backward to try to regain its balance. I moved toward it and spun the other side of the staff down hard, striking it in exactly the same place. The sound had more of a cracking sound this time. Before it could move, my staff came around again and I slammed it into the side of its head with enough force to throw it against the wall. It hit the stone, bounced a little, and crumpled to the ground.

  I wasn’t sure if I had killed it or not, but I didn’t have time to check. Instead, I turned to survey the scene. Tyler and Jacob were still swinging their weapons at the creature that had been trying to take Madison. It attempted to ward off the blows, swiping at the air in front of it to make them back off.

  My mom was fumbling at her waist, trying to take her gun out, while Rick slashed at another of the creatures with his sword. He actually looked like he knew how to use the weapon. They were okay for now.

  Emily and Zach faced another shadowling. They took turns swinging at it, Em with her cudgel of a walking stick and Zach with his baseball bat. They were doing even worse than Tyler and Jacob, though. As I watched, the creature snatched the stick from Emily’s hand and threw it away from them. Before it clattered to the ground, I was in motion, charging toward the trio.

  Emily screeched and backed from the monster stalking toward her. Zach was winding up to strike it with his bat, but he was swinging so slowly, the shadowling was hardly paying attention. Its eyes were fixed on the girl, and it was moving toward her, hands grasping the air in front of it as if to snatch her from ten feet away.

  I got there just as it reached out to grab her. I hadn’t even stopped fully when I slammed my staff down hard on its outstretched arm. It howled in pain and pulled its injured limb back. Then it turned to me, hatred in its dark, too-human eyes.

  That was the only distraction needed. Momentarily forgotten, Zach connected with the baseball bat. He had swung it like he was going for a grand slam home run. It caved in the back of the creature’s head, and it dropped to the ground, twitched a few times, and then lay still.

  A gunshot boomed and the shadowling that had been attacking my mother fell. Rick was already sprinting toward the last creature, which was still occupied with Tyler’s crowbar and Jaco
b’s sticks. While it was fending off their blows, Rick lunged in from the side and punched his sword into the creature’s abdomen. It screamed until Rick pulled the blade free, brought it around in a tight circle, and slashed horizontally at the creature’s neck. Its head rolled free, spraying Tyler with dark blood. The musician gasped, sputtered and spit, and started retching. Thankfully, he didn’t actually throw up.

  I swung my headlamp around the corridor, looking for more enemies. There didn’t seem to be any. I moved it more carefully, the beam illuminating each of my friends in turn so I could see if they were all right. None seemed to be injured. I let a long breath out. We had survived an assault from the shadowling. But how many more would we have to get through?

  I thought of the security force sent into the mines and how they disappeared without a trace. How had we beat the shadowling when men with guns didn’t? I had to chalk it up to not being ambushed by the creatures and the probability that there were many more of them attacking the security guards. I just hoped our luck held up.

  We continued on our way, leaving our fallen enemies behind.

  “Did you see?” Emily was saying to Zach. “That thing, it snaffled my cudgel. Right out of the air. Then it threw it away.”

  “I saw,” Zach said. “I guess it’s good it didn’t use the weapon. We can be thankful for that.”

  “I suppose,” Emily said.

  Zach had a point there. These things were hard enough to fight without them using weapons, too.

  “I’m tired,” Madison whined.

  “I know, Maddie,” Jacob said. “We’re all tired. We have to keep on going. Allison is still out there.”

  “I know, but can’t we just get these scrappy little people to go fetch her for us? My feet hurt, and there may be more of those monsters out there. They tried to kidnap me!”