The Night Market (4 page)

“Very well,” the cat said, tail waving gently as he
set off toward the locked door. “Then we should begin. It is a long walk and we
must pass through some places that are better traveled during the day, even in
these tunnels.”

Yael hoisted her bag on to her shoulder and nodded at
the cat, following him across the rickety metal catwalk.

A cat on a catwalk. Yael giggled to herself.

“What is it?” The cat looked back at her from in front
of the rusted door, tail wavering uncertainly. “What is so funny?”

“Nothing,” Yael assured the cat, glad the mask hid her
face. “Where does the door go, anyway?”

“To the Underworld,” the cat responded archly, pushing
the ancient metal door open with a nudge of his head.

“I thought that was where I was already.”

“No, child. You are underground. The Underworld is an
entirely different matter, I’m afraid.”

***

“Safe as she can be.”

There was a fire in the fireplace. Yael was eight years
old and playing with a kitten and a length of string that she would wind around
it, laughing at the kitten’s attempts to simultaneously free itself and pounce.

Through the window she watched the sky change colors,
and this frightened her.

At school, listening to the other girls whisper mean
things, things they meant for her to hear, but not so loud that the teacher
would notice. They loved her brother, she knew. Which for some reason meant that
they hated her.

Watching ripples in a cup of tea during the departure
of one the ships from the harbor, the foundations of their ancient home shaking
as though from an earthquake.

“And the cat?”

***

Violet moss covered the walls and the ceiling like luminescent carpet. Prefabricated
concrete gave way to rough hewn rock, nothing like the sandstone hills that
surrounded the harbor near her home. The deep grey stone was speckled with
vivid green occlusions which reflected her flashlight like water, abrasive and damp
with condensation. They walked along metal-wrapped bundles of utility cables
between the sulfur puddles cast by an occasional flickering light bulb.

Yael wasn’t certain when the air grew frigid. It
probably happened by degrees while the tunnel transformed into something more
like a cave. She didn’t notice until she was shivering as she walked. The wind
picked up, gusts of frigid air tearing through the tunnel with the sound of a
jet-engine, deafening her and whipping her jacket and hair about wildly. Yael
couldn’t hear anything besides the wind and the ghosts of the ancient voices it
carried; nonetheless, she couldn’t shake the impression that there was a haunting
melody embedded in the sound, emerging from unfathomable depths. She felt a self-destructive
urge to run ahead blindly, as if she could somehow escape the wind. Yael was
reminded of how she felt standing at the edge of a tall building or looking
over the side of a bridge, the perverse impulse to jump. She knew if she lost
her guide, if she let the darkness of the twisting tunnels swallow her, she
would never re-emerge. But fear tempted her to run headlong despite that.

Yael walked directly behind the cat, careful not to tread
on him. Proximity made her feel a little better, but she still had to fight the
impulse to pick up the cat and cuddle him to her chest.

The surface of the cave was far from even and Yael’s
flashlight had begun to dim. She found herself stumbling, scrambling on gravel
or over unexpected obstacles to stay on her feet, often earning a derisive
glare from the cat. The pebbles she kicked down the tunnel seemed to ricochet
and echo forever down the narrow caverns. Her mask was suffocating and hot, but
she wasn’t ready to show her face to the cat, not until she was sure of his
intentions.

When she stepped on the root, her first thought was to
avoid rolling her ankle. It would be absurd, Yael thought bitterly, to have her
quest derailed by a sprain. She didn’t notice that the root was moving until it
had constricted around her ankle, tight as a cuff.

Yael pulled frantically, tugging her leg with both
arms, while the root tightened, cutting off the flow of blood to her foot.

“Help!” Yael cried out, not caring that her voice sounded
panicked and childish. “Mister Kitty! Please help me!”

The root was not exactly a root. It was something
organic, like a tentacle with the surface texture of stone or of an ancient
shellfish. The segmented length grew up out of the ground like a plant, but
moved with the cunning and persistence of a reptile. Now that she was caught,
Yael could see others like it all around her, waving in the invisible air
currents like seaweed.

“Pulling won’t help,” the cat said grimly, while Yael
bent down and tried to peel the increasingly painful constriction from her leg.
“It will only get tighter. You need to relax.”

Relaxing did not seem like a practical option. Yael
opened her mouth to say as much, but instead yelped in pain as the root
tightened another notch with a mechanical click, the new segment winding
further up her leg, forcing her to bend at the knee.

“Help me! Please!”

“Not much for calming down, are we? There is a lesson
in this, child. No one can be stronger than everything. There is always
something, like the shoggoth here,” the cat lectured, nodding at the thing that
was crushing Yael’s leg, “that is stronger than you. But you can always be
smarter.
Get ready to run.”

The cat coiled his legs, then hopped on to the root
that held her leg, prancing along the curled length of it, digging his claws in.
For one awful moment, the root flexed and Yael cried out, certain that her leg
would be crushed by the tremendous pressure. Then the root released with such
violence that it whipped around her leg, bruising the flesh beneath the
impenetrable cloth of her tights. The root arced through the tunnel, scraping
the moss from the ceiling as it crashed down where the cat had been only
moments before. Now he sat on an adjoining root, licking one paw and looking
amused.

“Being faster, of course – ”

The cat leapt again, a shadow moving amongst shadows, a
moment before the place where he sat was obliterated by another of  roots,
sending up a puff of the glowing blue moss.

“ – is helpful as well. The point I wish to make, however
– ”

Three roots arched overhead and descended in sequence,
shattering the ground and sending splinters of stone flying, one piece glancing
off the side of Yael’s mask. The cat appeared to dart beneath them just before
they hit the ground and then settled casually atop another.

“ – is that you don’t want your enemy – ”

There was a confusion of roots and impacts, the tunnel
shuddering and filling with dust. One root after another collided with the
ground in attempts to crush the cat, each on top of the last. The cat was like
a whirlwind moving between them, jumping from one root to the other as if they
were holding still, as if he were leaping from branch to branch in a tree. By
the time he emerged from the scrum, wiping unhappily at the dust on his coat,
the roots were left tangled hopelessly into a flexing, creaking bundle.

“ – to decide the terms of battle for you. Not if you
expect to win. See what I mean?”

The cat sauntered off before Yael could make a reply.
She had to hurry after to avoid being left behind, careful to stay clear off
the dark roots that protruded from various odd corners of the tunnel.

The walls widened and the ceiling rose until they were
walking in an underground cavern rather than a tunnel. Yael was pleased by the
space, but she was starting to wonder if they would ever start climbing to the
surface.

“Say, um, Mister Kitty?”

“Yes, child?”

“I forgot to ask your name. That was very rude, as you
are doing me a huge favor by leading me out of these tunnels. My name is Yael Kaufman.
I am very pleased to meet you.”

The cat stopped to look back at her. She couldn’t read
a cat’s expression, so she had no idea what he was thinking. But Yael preferred
to err on the side of politeness, so she followed this up with a small curtsy,
the one her stepmother had instructed her to use with strangers whose social
status was unknown.

“Pleased to meet you, Yael. My name is Tobi.”

Again, the mask saved her. Though Tobi looked at her
with obvious suspicion, the gas mask’s constriction made her giggling sound
more like a cough fit than anything else.

“Is there a problem?” The question was innocent
enough, but the gleam in Tobi’s eyes was anything but. “Was there something you
found amusing, perhaps?”

“No, not at all,” Yael reassured the cat. “It gets
stuffy inside this mask, that’s all.”

“You won’t need it, soon,” Tobi said archly, leading
her on through the branching tunnels. “Perhaps what you found humorous was my
name? You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Only because...” Yael stumbled, searching for words.
“Because you are such a brave cat. I thought that a fierce warrior like you would
have a name that... well, you know.”

By chance, Yael said exactly the right thing. Tobi
warmed up immediately.

“Indeed I do. Other cats have often suggested as much
to me, that I take on a proper feline name that reflects my strengths. But I...
the cats of Ulthar, you see, come from all sort of places. Some of them were
born on those strange streets, and they learn to hunt when the moon is waning
and the Toads must return to their ships. Others are feral and come in from the
dying wild. Some, like myself, were originally part of a human family.”

The ground was rough and progress was difficult, but
they were slowly climbing upward, so Yael was encouraged. At the mention of Tobi’s
family, she pushed her tired legs a little harder, eager to hear the rest of his
story.

“I... I loved my family. There is no shame in
admitting that. I enjoyed my time with them. I was well cared for, and in turn
I looked after them as best I could. When I lost them all, even Sarah, as
little as she was, I thought that my heart would break. I went wandering,
desperate to forget, to find something to occupy my thoughts before grief
consumed them. That is how I found Ulthar and the Nameless City, and I found
myself again, too, in moonlight hunts, in stalking the most horrible prey. For
a time I considered changing my name. I don’t want to forget about my family, though,
or the time that I spent with them. I don’t want to forget the way it felt to
be petted, to fall asleep in a lap, to eat the scraps Sarah smuggled from the
dinner table. My name represents the things I wish to hold on to.”

Yael honestly thought she might cry.

“Mr. Kitty – I mean Tobi – could I pet you?”

The cat’s glare was furious.

“Of course not.”

“Ah.”

“Come on,” Tobi urged, hurrying ahead on its silent
feet. “We are near the Vale of P’nath, where these tunnels intersect with the
Underworld. This isn’t a safe place for either of us.”

Yael thought that perhaps Tobi was mad at her for
saying the wrong thing. He was deliberately staying one step ahead no matter
how she hurried. Then she kicked something with the toe of her rain boots,
something white and hollow that clattered into the darkness and Yael found that
she could go faster. The luminous moss had grown over everything here and the
air was thick with vibrant spores like static fireflies, hanging in the stale
air of the cavern. Yael was glad to have her mask on. She didn’t like the idea
of getting those in her lungs.

The path they followed was invisible to her. The walls
of the cavern had fallen away, out of sight in the darkness, further than her
feeble flashlight could illuminate. They walked along broken ground, volcanic
rocks, grotesque outcroppings of stone that reminded her of dreams from before
she learned to speak, dreams of things forgotten until that very moment.

They rounded one such stone monument, so ornate that
it was hard for Yael to say whether it was grotesquely carved or formed by
impossibly varied natural forces, then she stopped in her tracks unintentionally.
The pebbles beneath her feet rolled and she fell down on her tailbone without
warning.