by Jon Evans
They walked on in silence. Their paws squished against the mire on the ground, and Patch guessed from the resulting echoes that this tunnel was remarkably spacious, big enough for a large dog. He had the feeling they were descending. They encountered and detoured around collapsed bricks, rotting coils of fallen tree-roots, piled rat skeletons, rusting hulks of twisted metal. It didn't take long to lose all sense of time; it was soon eerily easy to believe he and White had been stumbling blindly through this tunnel forever, that all his other memories were nothing more than soon-forgotten dreams.
The only good news was that everything here smelled old and long untouched. The rat guardians at the entrance must have come from outside. This ancient tunnel was entirely abandoned, not used as a highway by rats or anything else.
"It smells different here," White said eventually.
She was right. The wind they followed, the wind that curled up through the tunnel like a cold and rasping breath, was unchanged: but the stagnant air through which the wind moved had grown thick with moisture, and the muck beneath Pat's paws became damp and then wet. He began to skid as much as walk. Then the tunnel floor ended abruptly, and Patch's forepaw broke through a thick layer of congealed slime and into a pool of water as warm as blood.
It wasn't a puddle. It was a pit. White and Patch walked back and forth across the width of the tunnel - which could have fit a half-dozen squirrels nose to tail - and found no bridge across the stagnant water.
"We'll have to swim," Patch said.
White moaned softly. He couldn't blame her. The layer of sickening and malodorous scum that lay across the water was as thick as tree bark. But there was no other way forward. Patch took a deep breath and eased himself into the warm and stinking sludge. His battle-wounds burned with pain as the muck seeped into them, and he groaned and shuddered, but he swam resolutely across, carving a path through the scum that White then followed.
At least the pit wasn't wide. Patch crawled out of it covered with filth, onto a damp brick floor that continued gently downwards. White squelched behind him, murmuring miserably. The air here was different again. Patch smelled metal, and sensed a few very faint drafts from the sides of the tunnel. A little later he nearly fell into a hole in the ground.
This hole wasn't the source of the wind they were following, but he examined it carefully nonetheless. It was almost perfectly circular, and smelled strongly of rusted metal. He thought of what Silver had told him of her underworld journey, of metal tunnels like hollow branches. He had a sudden image of the Kingdom Beneath as a gigantic tree with this tunnel as the trunk, surrounded by a vast and interconnected tangle of hollow roots and branches that reached out to every corner of the island of the Center Kingdom. The notion that they were inside a kind of tree made him feel a little better.
They continued in silence for a time.
"What's that?" White whispered sharply.
"What?"
"That scent."
Patch stopped and sniffed. The air was a roiling mixture of strange and repulsive smells. White was right, there was something new here, something that made Patch shiver with instinctive revulsion: not just a smell but a scent, an animal scent, slimy and slippery and cold as winter ice, unlike any Patch had encountered before … or had he? Something tickled the dim recesses of Patch's memory; a faint recollection of the Kingdom of Madness.
He wanted to turn and run. Instead he forced himself to forge onwards. They walked deeper and deeper into the clinging darkness for what felt like a very long time.
2. Legless
There was a noise from up ahead. White gasped. Patch lurched out of his half-asleep daze, then froze stiffly into place. This wasn't one of the usual underground noises that they had almost gotten accustomed to - whispering drafts of air, the slow dripping of water, occasional distant rattling. This was a kind of soft clicking, and it was very close.
There came another click. And another. It didn't sound like any kind of motion, and that cold slippery scent that made Patch shiver, which had been growing ever stronger, still smelled old and distant. Patch swallowed and moved forward to investigate. When the tip of his nose suddenly encountered a smooth curving surface he almost cried out.
"What is it?" White asked.
He investigated carefully. It felt like a pebble worn smooth by water. There was more than one of them, there was a whole cluster, he couldn't tell how many in the darkness. Just stones? But that clicking sound - he thought it was coming from one of them. And they didn't feel like stones. They felt like -
"Eggs," he said.
"Eggs? That's madness," White objected. "There can't be any birds down here."
Patch didn't say anything. She was right … but maybe birds weren't the only animals who laid eggs. The clicking came again, louder, and again; and then there was a soft but distinct crack.
"What was that?" White asked.
There was something moving now, he heard a kind of sliding sound, and that terrifying icy smell had intensified. It smelled fresh, now. The egg had hatched.
"Let's keep going," Patch whispered. "Hurry."
They went around the egg-cluster and moved quickly on. But the sliding sound grew louder, and the icy scent intensified. Patch couldn't tell whether they came from in front or behind. He moved even faster. The cold scent was strong enough now that he could no longer fight the primal and unreasonable terror that erupted now in both him and White, a fear that grew fast and uncontrollably. They began to run blindly through the darkness, panting for breath, their exhaustion erased by growing panic, pursued by this terrifying scent that clawed at some instinctive fear-trigger.
Something smooth and warm brushed against Patch's side, something that was the source of the awful scent. He screamed and jumped away, but tripped and fell on something like a thick vine. But it was not a vine. It was alive. It was warm and scaly and squirming, and full of rippling muscles.
Patch scrabbled for balance, trying to get away; but before he could escape, the rope-thing began to curl itself around him, wrapping itself into a coil that encircled his left chest and his right shoulder. The noose of scaly flesh began to tighten with soft but deadly strength. Patch struggled but could not free himself. He felt a shivering in the air, like there was something flickering in it nearby.
"Patch!" White cried. The thing hesitated, as if surprised, and the coil loosened for a heartbeat. Patch squeezed himself backwards with a violent effort. First his head and then his right paw popped free of the squeezing thing. His scrabbling claws found purchase on the ground and propelled him away at maximum speed.
He knew what this alien monster was now. He had seen one before, from a great height, in the Kingdom of Madness: a long, legless, slithering thing with pebbled skin. He heard White running after him, close behind. They ran blindly through the utter darkness, panting with terror, and the legless thing chased them, somehow sliding across the tunnel floor with incredible speed despite its lack of limbs.
As Patch pelted up the tunnel he sensed the telltale drifting air of other, smaller passages. They could flee into one of those side branches - but the legless thing would have an even greater advantage in a smaller space. Maybe there was another water-pit, and maybe it couldn't swim. He hoped so. It seemed like his only hope. Behind him, the hissing of the legless thing grew louder as it slithered ever closer. White was pulling away, but Patch couldn't keep up with her. He was running as fast as he could, but he was tired and hurt. The slithering sounds grew louder and louder - and Patch realized with cold terror that there was more than one source of those horrible noises, there were several, and most were directly ahead. He and White were running straight into a whole nest of the legless monstrosities.
"There's more of them!" White gasped. "We have to -"
Then she screamed: a dwindling scream that was suddenly cut off by a thud and a diminishing series of rattling thumps.
"White!" Patch shouted, and sprinted after her. He barely smelled the hole in the ground in time,
and came to a shuddering halt right at its edge. Like the last hole, it was circular. Unlike the last one, it didn't smell of metal, and from the way the air here moved, and the way it was thick with a different kind of stench, Patch realized this was no hollow metal branch: this was simply a hole that dropped deep into the unknown darkness.
The circumstances made his decision remarkably easy. White had fallen in here, he was being pursued by at least three slithering horrors, and there was no other way out. Patch closed his useless eyes and leaped into the hole.
For a moment his stomach seemed to turn inside out. The only other clue that he was falling was the whistling air. Then pain exploded in his shoulder as he hit something metal - and before he could even cry out, Patch was tumbling down an near-vertical tunnel, slapping against its slippery insides, ricocheting back and forth against metal walls covered with mold and muck. His stomach went inside out again as he fell nosefirst through a space as tall as a small tree. His head hit something hard, and the world went away.
3. Fallen
Patch hurt. Worse: he itched. His whole body crawled with a horrible prickling sensation. But he couldn't move, not even to open his eyes. He was lying on some flat, rough surface. He felt fully awake, but his limbs and muscles would not respond to any of his commands. His head hurt, and he dimly remembered striking it on something, but it hardly stood out, really it was his whole body that hurt, but the hurt wasn't as bad as the maddening itching. And the itch was moving, as if he was covered by insects.
Patch lay there, senseless and helpless; and slowly began to realize that he really was covered by insects. They were crawling all over him, biting him, actually feeding on him, on his open wounds. And he couldn't move.
He heard a faint groan from somewhere. White. This wasn't a nightmare. This was real. He desperately commanded himself to move, to stand up, but nothing happened, nothing worked. The bugs kept moving on him, crawling and nibbling, they were all over him, he felt them prowling over his face, inside his ears.
He heard a faraway scrambling sound. Had White gotten up? No, it was something else - something growing louder, turning into a rumbling, and then a muffled grinding squeal of metal on metal that somehow sounded familiar.
There was a change in air pressure, and then there was light, he could sense it through his closed eyelids. There was a flash so bright his eyes squeezed reflexively shut, and the noise swelled into screeching howl that made him twitch - and with those instinctive reactions, Patch could suddenly move again, and he was immediately up on his paws and screaming as he shook loose the scores of cockroaches that covered him like a squirming cocoon.
The noise diminished, and the flickers of light grew less intense. The light came through a crack in a walls and lit the enclosure they had fallen into: a boxlike space with straight walls as high and wide as a small tree. This enclosure was full of rusted and half-destroyed human things, covered with mold and debris, and infested by countless cockroaches. There were so many insects they looked like a squirming, glistening carpet as they scurried en masse away from the light. There were so many on White they obscured almost all of her pale fur - but the sound and light had woken her too. She leaped to her feet and thrashed and scraped herself against the nearby wall until she too was free of cockroaches. By the time Patch joined her by the wall, the light had disappeared, the darkness was again absolute, and both squirrels were keening with terror and revulsion with every breath.
He could hear the soft motions of the cockroaches all around them, coming slowly closer. The squirrels hissed and growled and spat to keep the numberless insects away. It worked, but Patch didn't know how much longer they could hold out. He was weak and dizzy and sick; his body felt half made of flesh and half of pain.
"We have to get out of here," he moaned.
"How?"
"I don't know!"
"Wait," White said. "Listen."
Patch listened, and in the distance he heard that sound again, that faraway scrabbling. Again it grew into the grinding metallic shriek, and again it was accompanied by flickering light that shone, mostly dimly but with patches of purest incandescence, from the crack in the nearest wall. Patch recognized it this time. It was the sound of the linked metal cages that carried humans through the underground, of wheeled metal feet striking sparks against the metal rails on which they rode. He remembered Zelina had called these things trains. There were train rails on the other side of this wall.
As the light grew, the cockroaches retreated from the glowing crack in the wall like a wave falling away from a beach, and Patch took in the surroundings with something like a rational mind. The enclosure in which they found themselves had clearly been built by humans. It was almost entirely covered in damp mold that carpeted the floor, spread across every wall, and had even conquered ragged patches of the ceiling.
There were a few items on which the mold had failed to gain a foothold. Four sheets of glittering metal protruded perpendicularly from the opposite wall, and four shiny white things like giant mushrooms grew from the floor between those metal sheets. Water gleamed on a sheer cliff that jutted from the wall to Patch's left, trickling from somewhere above in a slow but eternal waterfall that had fed all this gray-green mold, all this rot and decay.
As the light and sound from behind them peaked, Patch noticed that there were animal skeletons scattered around the floor: mostly rats and mice, but also a few larger creatures Patch could not identify, and one of the Legless, nothing but a chain of bones attached to hideous jaws. Mold was growing on all these skeletons. Some had entirely turned that sickly gray-green. Patch shivered as he realized that if there was any way out of this room, or any way back up through the gaping hole in the ceiling, those animals would not have become food for cockroaches and superstructure for mold.
White reached the same conclusion at the same time. "There's no way out."
Again lights and noises of the train dissipated into nothing. Again the silence was filled by the soft scurrying of tens of thousands of swarming cockroaches.
4. Water
A long time later - they did not know how long, but Patch was sure at least a day had passed - Patch and White were no nearer to escape. Their surroundings had begun to feel like a cage. A huge cage, one so big that thirty humans could have stood in it shoulder to shoulder, but a cage nonetheless, and an inescapable one.
At least the trains kept passing and shedding their light. Sometimes they came frequently, sometimes there were long pauses between, but they never stopped. At least the cockroaches did not attempt to swarm the squirrels and eat them alive. But Patch knew if he and White did not find a way out, they would feed the insects soon enough; they would die of hunger. The curtain of water that dripped slowly down the sheer cliff was potable, if dirty and metallic, but both the mold and the cockroaches were sickeningly inedible, and there was nothing else here alive.
The walls were too slippery to climb; all they could do was tear useless streaks in the mold with their claws. Patch, thinking back to the horse that had carried him across the Center Kingdom, made a bizarre mental leap from that to the idea of building a hill of dead cockroaches up to the top of the sheer cliff, to the source of the water - but after he stomped and skewered a few dozen roaches dead, they all began to avoid him.
"They learn," White said wonderingly, as the cockroaches began to keep away from Patch instead of seeking him; a shifting island opened in their sea wherever he walked.
"They don't learn. They're insects."
"Then how do they know you're trying to kill them? They were talking, I saw it when you started killing them, they were waving their antennae at one another, it moved through them like a wave."
Patch looked at the cockroaches all around him, shimmering dimly as they retreated the light of a passing train, so tightly packed they looked like a single dark organism. The notion that they could actually think, that their squirming mass hid some kind of utterly unfathomable intelligence, unnerved him deeply. "No. It's j
ust scent. They can smell dead cockroaches on me, that's all. That wave was just the scent moving through the air."
"It didn't move like that," White said doubtfully.
"It doesn't matter. It won't work. We can't kill enough of them."
"There was never enough of them, Patch, don't you see how high that cliff is? It's taller than a bush!"
Patch sighed. He didn't really have any idea of how many roaches he would have had to kill, or how high he would have had to pile them, but he suspected White did, and that she was right. He gave up and retreated to the wall as the latest train disappeared into the distance.
"It's useless," he said quietly. "There's no way out. Silver is probably dead by now. And we'll die here. This is our time, our time and place."
"No!"
"Yes. It has to be yes. We've looked everywhere."
They were silent for a time.
Then White said, "What about those hollow mushroom-things?"
"We already looked. There's nothing in them but water and scum."
"Right. But what's under the water?"
"Under? It - they're just pools. They don't go anywhere."
"How do you know? They're right up against the wall."
He thought. "You're right. Let's go see."
The white, flat-topped mushroom-things were easily three times the height of a squirrel. Rusting metal branches protruded from their tops, bent like an arm, and disappeared into the walls. They were made of a slippery and bone-hard substance, and Patch wondered uneasily if they might actually be the bones of some gargantuan beast. Two were unbroken and mold-free; two others were laced with moldy cracks. These cracks made decent claw-holds, but it was still difficult to scramble up the overhanging curve to the top - especially since the top was merely a narrow rim around an deep elliptical basin. Patch could use his bushy tail as a counterbalance to his bodyweight, but White's half-severed tail wasn't near as effective, and she very nearly ended her climb by tumbling into the basin.
