Cloak Games: Truth Chain

by Jonathan Moeller

  It was a beetle the size of a dog, and not a little dog. The thing was the size of a St. Bernard. It was black and glistening, covered in translucent slime, and it moved forward with a jerking, skittering motion. It had a pair of enormous sword-like pincers in front of elaborate mouthparts.

  I didn’t want the thing to get anywhere near me. I don’t have any problems with insects, and I’m not afraid of spiders. That said, most insects on Earth aren’t the size of large dogs, and I was sure the bug would attack if it saw me.

  I waited, my heart pounding, sweat trickling down my face and back from the effort of holding the Cloak spell in place.

  At last, the beetle wandered off into the forest. I gritted my teeth, holding my Cloak spell until I had counted to ninety, but the beetle didn’t return. I dropped the spell with a sigh of relief, caught my breath, and walked back in the direction I had come. I wanted to make a circuit around the entire cathedral and look for another way inside. Didn’t cathedrals have fire doors or delivery doors or something?

  I walked around the base of a flying buttress and froze.

  Six of the huge beetles were heading towards me.

  The beetles stopped, and I felt them staring at me. Maybe they were more frightened of me than I was of them. I took a step back, and the beetles reared up on their hind legs, revealing their segmented underbellies.

  Then, as one, they spat at me.

  They spat globs of thick, vicious, black slime, and I really didn’t want it to hit me. I avoided four of the fist-sized globs. One of them hit my left thigh, and another landed on my right calf. There was a sizzling sound, wisps of chemical-stinking smoke, and my jeans caught fire.

  And then the acidic slime started eating into my legs.

  I screamed, frantically pushing at my jeans as I tried to get them off without touching the black slime. Nothing, nothing in the world hurts like a chemical burn, and the black ooze was eating into my flesh like vinegar dissolving baking soda. The agony overwhelmed me, and I stumbled and landed on my back, my burning jeans around my ankles, and smoke rising from my burned legs.

  The beetles charged towards me.

  Even through the agony, sheer panic let me sit up and focus enough to cast a spell. An ice spike speared one of the beetles, and I cast a pair of fire spheres that killed another two, burning through their heads.

  The surviving three beetles reached me. Frantic, I cast the spell for telekinetic gauntlets, and I punched. With the invisible force around my hands, my strike sent one of the beetles tumbling away, and I crushed the head of another, black ooze bursting from the impact.

  The final beetle reached me and snapped its pincers. The left side sank into my belly, and the right pincer plunged into my back. I think it destroyed one of my kidneys.

  I screamed again and hit the beetle, and the telekinesis-augmented blow killed it and sent it tumbling back. It also ripped the pincers from my belly and back, and that made a mess. Hot blood sheeted across my stomach and back, and it hurt as if I had been stabbed by burning skewers. Smoke rose from the chemical burns on my legs.

  I cast several more ice spikes, and I killed the remainder of the beetles. I tried to take stock of my injuries, and I almost threw up as I saw my legs. They looked like overcooked sausages, the skin charred and marked with livid red cracks. It hurt, but I strongly suspected the pain would hit me much worse once the adrenalin and the panic of the attack passed.

  Assuming the wounds in my stomach and back didn’t kill me first.

  I had to find a quiet place to cast the regeneration spell. The resultant unconsciousness would leave me motionless for hours, maybe even a couple of days, and I needed to find a place I could lock myself in. One of the houses, maybe?

  I tried to move and found that I couldn’t. My legs were in too much pain for me to stand. I tried to sort of scoot along, and agony erupted through my legs and torso every time I tried to move. I let out a whimpering sob and tried to catch my breath. My head was spinning, probably from blood loss, and if I didn’t stop the blood flow soon, I would pass out.

  Maybe that would be a mercy.

  A dark blur caught my eye, and I turned my head.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No, no, no. Not again, not again. Please, please, no…”

  A dozen wraithwolves ran towards me, their claws tearing at the ground.

  “Arvalaeon!” I screamed. “Arvalaeon! Please!”

  No one answered me.

  I summoned power and starting casting spells. I managed to kill three of the wraithwolves before they encircled me.

  It happened again. The wraithwolves tore me apart. I screamed and screamed and tried to fight until a wraithwolf’s jaws closed around my skull.

  I felt a horrible crushing pain in my head, and I died again.

  ###

  When I woke up this time, it took me a lot longer to calm down.

  I shrieked and surged to my feet, and I cast the telekinetic gauntlet spell, convinced that the wraithwolves were still on me, or that those damned beetles were about to spit caustic poison. I flung a few fire spheres, convinced that the wraithwolves were about to spring.

  The clanging noise caught my attention.

  I whirled and looked at the bronze clock. The dials spun and whirled, and the row of numbers shivered.

  Once more I heard the metallic clank, and the clock now read DAY 4.

  I was back in the parking lot between the grain silos and the gas station, the main street stretching away before me. One of my errant fire spheres had set one of the buildings on fire, but other than that, everything had been restored to just as it had been when I had first arrived. There was no sign of anyone, whether human, Elf, or twisted creature from the Shadowlands.

  I got my breathing under control, but my heart kept racing, and it was racing because I was terrified.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  I had twenty-six days left to figure out how to get out of this twisted place, and I didn’t know how. I was beginning to suspect that it didn’t matter how many times I was killed, that I would wake up back here until I found my way out.

  Of course, once twenty-six days passed, it wouldn’t matter.

  And I desperately did not want to die again. You would think that it didn’t matter since I always seemed to wake up whole and healthy again, but it did. In the last three days, I had endured more pain than I had suffered for the rest of my life. It was wearing at me, and I felt my mind quivering from the strain.

  Psychological torment, Arvalaeon had said. It was necessary to start the process. That was why he had me beaten and stripped naked and left in that cold room for hours. Was physical torment also essential for this process of his, dying in agony again and again?

  And how the hell was this supposed to make me ready to fight someone as strong as Castomyr?

  Okay. Think it through. There had to be a way to do this. Arvalaeon wouldn’t just throw me in here for his own amusement. There had to be a way out.

  I took deep breaths until I got myself calmed down, and then I set out, my skin crawling with fear.

  ###

  I died ten times in the next ten days.

  All my attempts to get into the cathedral failed.

  I tried getting onto the roof of the cathedral. I managed to do it with sequential levitation spells, moving from perch to perch, and once I reached the top of the cathedral I discovered a dozen cytospawn nesting there. Cytospawn are some of the most alien creatures I had seen in the Shadowlands, and they looked like giant flying jellyfish, with bodies resembling clusters of staring eyeballs the size of human heads and their tentacles like barbed whips.

  It turns out that a single touch of their tentacles causes instant paralysis. I think the cytospawn wanted to eat me, but when I was paralyzed, I lost my balance and fell from the top of the cathedral to land in the concrete square below.

  That was the quickest of my deaths.

  My next stratagem was to move from rooftop to rooftop through the town, jumpi
ng from house to house. I managed to do that with the improved telekinesis spell that Arvalaeon had taught me. I had thought to use it to push things telekinetically or to levitate them, but it turned out I could also use it to grip something with my mind. With that grip, I pull myself towards whatever I held in that telekinetic vice.

  With that spell and a running jump, I could leap from rooftop to rooftop.

  It worked well at first. I moved through most of the town without anything noticing, but when I reached the street with the wraithwolves, they turned to mist and flowed up the walls to get at me. I wound up fighting them on the rooftops, and I used the fire sphere spell, which was stupid because it set the house on fire. I was trapped on the burning house by the wraithwolves, and eventually, the roof collapsed beneath me.

  I burned to death. My clothes burned, and my hair burned, and my skin burned, and I screamed, which was just as well since I think smoke inhalation finished me off.

  It was a horrible way to die.

  But every way to die in Arvalaeon’s town was a bad way to die.

  After that, I spent the next several days trying to use cars to get into the cathedral. The first time I used the car that Arvalaeon had started, and I drove across town. The wraithwolves tried to stop me, but I ran them over, and I kept going.

  I hit the cathedral doors at about sixty miles an hour. I pushed them in a couple of feet, but the car came to a jarring halt against the doorpost, and the hood crumpled like a bedsheet. My head bounced off the steering wheel, and I felt something crack.

  I slumped against the wheel, woozy and incoherent, and I could not fight back against the anthrophages when they swarmed out to devour me.

  The next couple of times I tried with bigger vehicles. First an SUV, then a van, and then at a big pickup truck with jacked-up wheels and an engine that almost deafened me. The SUV and the van punched through the doors and into the narthex, but the SUV’s crash injured me enough that I couldn’t fight back against the anthrophages, and I was killed outright in the van crash.

  The truck did the trick. The big pickup smashed through the doors, through the narthex, and skidded to a halt in the vast empty nave. It also killed a half-dozen anthrophages in the process. I wrenched my shoulder painfully but compared to the torments I had endured over the past week it was nothing, so I shoved my way out of the wrecked truck and ran for the rose window.

  The anthrophages caught me first.

  There had been dozens of them in the narthex, and hundreds of them filled the nave. I fought them as best I could, casting as much magic as I could manage. I killed a dozen of the creatures, but they forced me back towards the wall beneath the stained-glass windows.

  They overwhelmed me and drove me to the floor.

  In that instant, before they started ripping me to bloody shreds, I saw something.

  A flight of stairs leading into the ground. Pointing away from the cathedral, deep enough that they would continue beyond its foundations.

  An underground tunnel?

  A secret way into the cathedral?

  Once I woke up below the clock and got through my screaming fit, I had a new plan in mind.

  It was Day 14.

  I started searching, moving from business to business on the main street. Every one of the buildings had a basement, some of them finished, others little more than cellars with dirt floors. In the ninth building I searched (the insurance office, as it happens) I found what I sought. The corner of the basement had a metal trapdoor. I opened it and saw a ladder descending into a concrete tunnel that stretched away into the darkness. My first thought was that it was a sewer, but a lot of towns this size didn’t have sewer lines, only septic tanks, and anyway it smelled like dust and damp instead of human waste. I peered down into the gloom and saw other tunnels opening off the main one.

  I realized two things.

  One, this was another feature Arvalaeon had added to his weird little proving ground. Small American towns did not have giant cathedrals, and nor did they usually have concrete mazes beneath them.

  Second, this explained the silhouettes I had seen in the windows.

  The anthrophages had been watching me the entire time.

  That made a lot of disturbing sense. These tunnels had to run beneath the entire town. No wonder I had never encountered any anthrophages outside of the cathedral. They didn’t need to hunt me. They knew I would come to them. Likely they sent scouts through the tunnels and up to the buildings to watch me, and then gathered before the cathedral doors when I approached, like a surprise party from hell.

  Did that mean there were only one or two anthrophages in the tunnels? If they only had a few scouts in the tunnels, maybe I could kill the scouts, creep into the cathedral, and get to the rose window before the anthrophages were the wiser.

  I decided to try it. Nothing else I had done had worked, and I had died in agony thirteen times. I didn’t want to enjoy a fourteenth time. I left the insurance office and went across the street to the general store. A short search turned up a big flashlight and some 12-volt batteries, and I clicked on the flashlight. It made a satisfyingly bright beam. I suppose it wasn’t a real flashlight, but a construction of magic, yet it worked nonetheless.

  The general store had an entrance to the tunnels below the town, and I decided to use that one. I climbed down the steel ladder and stepped into the tunnel, clicking on the flashlight. The tunnel was about twelve feet high and eight wide, built of finished concrete, a faint layer of dust on the floor. I didn’t see any tracks in the dust.

  I waited and listened, but I didn’t hear anything but the rasp of my breathing, and nothing moved in the darkness.

  At last, I started forward, sweeping the flashlight back and forth.

  This place was huge. The tunnels stretched in all directions, but after a moment I realized that the tunnels followed the pattern of the streets overhead. Wider tunnels went under the streets themselves, and smaller ones opened into dusty rooms beneath the buildings. Sub-basements, I supposed. I followed the tunnel beneath the main street, sweeping the flashlight beam back and forth.

  Nothing moved in the harsh light of the beam. My heart raced against my ribs. So far, this seemed easy, but my first walk towards the cathedral had seemed easy. At any moment, I expected something to attack me.

  So, when the crimson shape hurtled out of a side tunnel towards me, I was ready.

  I whirled, my hand coming up, and I cast a spell. The ice shard leaped from my fingers and speared into the crimson shape, which let out an agonized squeal. In the light of the flashlight beam, I saw that it was a rat the size of a hog, its fur red and wet and glistening as if it had been dipped in blood. Its eyes were like beady black pearls, and its massive teeth looked like thick yellow chisels.

  It was a bloodrat. Bloodrats could live almost forever, and bloodrats got larger the longer they lived. The really old ones could cast magic with a considerable degree of power. This one wasn’t old enough to use magic, but the younger bloodrats always hunted in packs.

  Which meant that the thrashing, squealing bloodrat would have friends nearby.

  I whirled, whipping the flashlight beam around, and saw a flood of red fur and beady black eyes rushing down the corridor towards me.

  As it turned out, the bloodrat had a lot of friends nearby.

  I took a quick step back and cast the ice wall spell. White mist swirled before me and solidified into a three-inch thick wall of glittering, granite-hard ice. Because of the confined space, I managed to make the wall higher, and it rose a good four feet off the ground. The bloodrats slammed into it, and I heard the rasping noise as they started to gnaw through the wall with those chisel-like teeth.

  The ice wall wouldn’t hold them for long, so I turned and ran, darting down a side passage, the flashlight bobbing in my hand. I wondered if the bloodrats would be smart enough to circle ahead of me. Maybe if I hurried, I could push on and get to the cathedral stairs before the bloodrats.

  I turned another c
orner and skidded to an alarmed halt.

  A huge, bloated, pale shape filled most of the corridor ahead of me. It was an anthrophage, but while the anthrophages tended to be gaunt, almost skeletal, this creature was heavy with fat. It was also paler than the normal anthrophages, and a faint layer of slime glistened on its leathery hide. It was an anthrophage elder, an anthrophage that had lived so long and eaten so many people that it had developed the ability to use magic. Despite its bulk, it was just as quick as the smaller anthrophages, and it was probably stronger.

  I turned to run in the other direction, but the anthrophage elder was already casting a spell. It thrust its clawed hand, and a lightning globe leaped from its fingers and hurtled towards me. I started to cast the spell to resist elemental magic, but I was too slow, and I abandoned the spell and tried to dodge.

  The lightning globe hit me in the right leg.

  Pain exploded through my body, every muscle clenching at once. I let out a choked shriek and fell on my back, thrashing, and the light bulb in my flashlight exploded, plunging the tunnel into darkness. I could still see a little since my right leg was on fire.

  And in the flickering gloom, I saw a dozen anthrophages rush towards me, and before I could recover, they were on me.

  I had suffered nightmares, repetitive nightmares, about being dragged into the darkness to be eaten alive by anthrophages.

  As it turned out, the experience was even more horrible than I had imagined.

  ###

  I kept trying to get to that rose window, and I kept failing, and as the days ground on, I became more and more desperate, fear for Russell and the Marneys and Riordan driving me forward.

  Sometimes I got eaten. Sometimes my plans didn’t work, and I got blown up or electrocuted when the building I was in exploded. Once more I got to the cathedral’s nave, only to be overwhelmed by the anthrophages before I could get to the rose window.

  I died again and again.

  I felt my mind starting to crack beneath the strain. There’s only so much pain you can take before you lose it, and I had been ripped apart, burned alive, eaten alive, and electrocuted. The nice thing about dying? Most people only have to do it once.