The Wanderer's Tale (46 page)

As he progressed, more passages now opened out to either side of him. Excitedly he took whichever looked most promising, and never once paused to leave a marker. He just kept lurching onwards with head bent low, and persevered in this random exploration with what little wit still remained to him.

New passages came and went with increasing frequency. Nearly all he tried led to a dead end, either an abandoned pit face or a collapsed shaft. But this deterred the half-crazed youth little. Tunnels opened this way, turned that, branched off and twisted almost back around upon themselves. There was little logic or pattern to them, yet Gapp felt at home within their random chaos. None, however, led upwards.

Within an hour, Gapp was hopelessly lost in a labyrinth of tunnels. In one brief moment of lucidity, the boy realized just how lost he was; he had a brief vision of himself running like a rat down each new passage, wearing a grin of such stupidity and not appearing to have the slightest notion or care where he was going.

He halted straight away, and the old fears and the panic began to rise in him again like vomit. He was lost and nearing the point of total exhaustion. Never before had he felt so tired. Fighting against the despair that threatened to overwhelm him once more, he leant back against the wall and slid down to land heavily on his backside.

As he sat there in misery, tears welling up in his eyes, the dancing shadows began to return. He could hear their horrible little voices whispering malevolently, somewhere nearby. He looked up fearfully and, to his surprise and bewilderment, found he could see all the way back to the natural caverns! It was from there that they came, a swarm of weaving, leaping, dancing shapes that poured in through the broken barricade. As they swiftly drew nearer, the boy could only stare in horror, too paralysed by fear to make any move.

Within seconds they were all about him; they pounced towards him, flitted away, twisted and span, cavorted and writhed; and all the while they pointed their sharp little fingers in mockery and laughed in those disgusting, shrill little voices.

‘
GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!
’ Gapp cried in anguish.

Suddenly they were gone, vanished as though they had never existed. There was nothing to be heard but the sound of his own voice as it echoed away down the dark, labyrinthine passages.

Wearily he staggered to his feet and plodded on. Though the shadow figures were gone, he still saw faces now and then. They stared up at him from the ground in a silent scream of death, devoid of flesh and half-buried by loose scree and soil. They did not appear human, and he did not even know if they were really there at all, or existed only in his mind. But as long as he could not hear them, he did not particularly care. He did, however, allow himself the satisfaction of hearing those stony faces crunching into granules beneath his feet.

He did not know how long he went on for after that. But once he heard his voice wailing:

‘
Is anyone there? Please, let there be someone there! I’m so cold!
’

Suddenly he heard a sharp click. It was like the snapping of a catch, or something; and he was sure he could hear voices – shouting even. It sounded as if it came from . . .

. . . That passage there!

No. It was the voices in his head again, he knew. He pulled himself together again, and moved quickly on.

It was a pity, he reflected as he trudged on, because that was the only shaft that had actually led upwards. But no; that way led only to madness.

It was another two days before Gapp finally saw daylight.

Starvation and the mental strain of his entombment (to say nothing of his debilitating fever) had taken almost their full toll on him, and his mind had retracted into a world of darkness and disturbing half-dreams. But finally, as if rewarding his mindless perseverance, the palest hint of light far ahead began to dimly register in his withdrawn consciousness.

Had he been in a fit enough mental state to register such things, Gapp might have noticed that this part of the mines was much different from that of two days previously. Tunnelled by another race, it was far older, roomier, danker.

He squinted at the faint glimmer uncertainly. Yes, there was no doubt about it; that was
natural
light up ahead!

He lurched ahead shakily, and his cracked mouth opened in an attempt to cry out exuberantly. The pale shaft of light grew steadily brighter the closer he came to it. He even fancied he could smell fresh air!

Daylight!
his mind sang.

As he approached, he saw that the light came from around a turn in the passage.

Probably a side shaft
, he thought optimistically, already imagining himself striding proudly up the gently sloping tunnel towards the world of daylight above. But he could not still a nagging little voice at the back of his mind that warned him it might be a long vertical shaft with no way of scaling it.

Nevertheless, without further hesitation he stumbled around the corner – then skidded to a halt as he saw what lay before him.

There was a pool, a large, square pool that almost entirely filled the chamber he had arrived in. A narrow, crumbling and partly decayed ledge ran along one side of it, and continued on to an upward-leading shaft; it was from this that the daylight dimly filtered into the mine. Yet this was little source of joy for Gapp, as his attention became riveted upon the pool it illuminated.

It was like a vast and bubbling cauldron of poisonous, phosphorescent green acid. It churned around slowly and unnaturally in a whirlpool, and had every appearance of possessing a life of its own. There seemed to be things moving about just below its surface, and as the boy stared, he realized these were huge bubbles. They would swell below the glistening surface, then pop like a ripe pustule, releasing a foul vapour like the breath of a halitotic cadaver, and spit luminescent globules of viscous slime all over the hissing, melting walls. A noxious cloud arose from it in sickening waves, and the entire cavern reeked of plague and mutation.

It assaulted the boy’s every sense, and he gagged in nausea. Even the fresh, clean daylight that had the misfortune to fall into this den of disease was corrupted into something perverted and evil by these gases.

Then to Gapp’s horror and revulsion, he saw a huge, quivering tongue, glistening with blood and mucus, rise out of the eye of the whirlpool. He understood then that the entire pool was itself a creature.

As he stared through his fogged lenses at this unholy manifestation of utter grossness, he beheld great long tentacles break through the scummy surface to wave menacingly – searchingly – in the air. These extrusions were covered in hideously bristling filaments of virulent yellow and purple, and each terminated in what looked like . . .
no, it could not be! . . .
a living, man-like head!

Gapp’s gut heaved uncontrollably. Each head was comprised of lumps of festering matter which had begun to distort and run together until they loosely formed the image of a face. Some had distinctly human-like features, others were more like the other races that must have worked these mines over the long years. But each one bore an expression of such tormented agony that it was as if they were dissolving and reforming eternally in the very vats of hell.

The paralysed boy’s knees suddenly buckled, and he had to lean heavily against the wall to keep himself from collapsing forwards into the seething chamber.

My . . . final test
, he realized in a fog of hysteria,
the final obstacle in my path! . . . If I can get past this one, nothing else can stop me any longer. I’ll be free of these abysmal tunnels . . .

But he reckoned without the Stalker.

Gapp backed up a little and wrenched the tinderbox from his pouch; using one of the tattered old drapes of sacking that hung sadly in the entrance to the chamber, he wasted not a second in striking flames, and was surprised when it blazed up as though it had been steeped in oil. The venomous gases in this place did have a use after all. But as the cavern was suddenly illuminated by the flare, Gapp heard a terrible hiss from right behind him. He span around in shock – only to find himself face to face with the
real
final test.

In the sudden glare of the burning drape, the half-blinded Gapp now found himself facing a new atrocity, whose nodule-encrusted head split wide open in a grin of the most ghastly, hell-disgorged malevolence. To think that this must have been following him through the dark tunnels all along . . .

Instinct took action where his thoughts could not lead. He hurled the burning drape over the creature’s head, then kicked viciously deep into the yielding softness of its belly, before springing back into the pool cavern.

Instantly an ear-splitting howl of inhuman rage and agony followed him, but he hardly even noticed it. Along the crumbling ledge he scurried, oblivious to all but that shaft of daylight ahead of him. He did not even notice the seething mass of tentacles and filaments that erupted from the pool and surged towards him.

One of the pseudo-heads shot across like a lizard’s tongue and knocked him hard against the wall. But it neither slowed his determined progress nor dislodged him from the ledge. It only succeeded in leaving upon his tunic a squelchy scum that stank of putrefied oysters.

That beam of sunlight, so beautiful to Gapp’s eyes, was mere yards away when he suddenly felt the agony of ten long talons thrusting into his back. He shrieked loudly and pitched forward onto the rim of the ledge, only narrowly avoiding a fall into the living slime below.

With the full weight of the troglodyte horror now pinning him to the floor, Gapp was powerless to protect himself. Bony knees dug painfully into his back, and he heaved in desperation. Just above him the monster seethed in fury, and began trying to throttle its helpless victim. It was only the distraction of trying to spit away the last remaining tatters of burning cloth from its burnt lips that prevented the Stalker from bringing its teeth to bear. Even so, Gapp knew with awful certainty that it was only a matter of seconds before the life was squeezed out of him.

His vision clouded, and his mind began to slip away.

All of a sudden there was a horrible cry, and he was free of the weight that bore down on him. In dumbfounded shock he twisted round, looked up, and through a red haze saw what had befallen.

The Stalker had been lifted into the air where it screamed and flailed about helplessly, in the coils of numerous tentacles. Still writhing, it was dragged over and down towards the palpitating tongue in the middle of the pool.

Gapp’s instinct for escape resumed. He found himself flying further along the narrow ledge, spinning around a corner and haring as fast as he could up the shaft. He did not even slow down when he was blinded by the dazzling light of day. A thrashing rending and useless screeching echoed up the tunnel behind him.

Back within the mucus-chamber, there was a loud belching sound, a sinister bubbling, a protracted hiss, then silence. The mines were still once more.

I
N THIS WAY DID
Gapp Radnar finally deliver himself from the corridors of the Underworld, and emerge once again into the bedazzlement and warmth of the world above.

His native Aescalandian was entirely inadequate in giving voice to the medley of ecstatic emotions that surged through him during the next hour or so. The blessed sunlight upon his face was alone enough to make him weep, but the resinous perfume of the huge deodars – those colossal behemoths that spanned the gap between earth and heaven – and the spongy cushion of old needles and leaves beneath his feet, not to mention the exultant chorus of birdsong all around, nor the insane palette of living colour everywhere he looked, all simply made him want to sprint through the trees like a lunatic, leap high in the air and cavort for the sheer joy of being alive.

A tidal wave of relief steadily flooded through him. It felt as though he had fought his way out of the steely Keep of Hell and back into the Land of the Living above. Still not fully able to believe his sudden liberation, never before had he felt such exuberance tingling through every nerve from his toenails to his teeth. He simply ran and ran like a hunted deer, caring nothing for the direction he was headed in, just enjoying the gift of life to its fullest.

For the next hour, the forest rang with the echoing whoops of the lone madman as he crashed through the undergrowth and disappeared into the depths of Fron-Wudu.

Of course it did not take long before his hunger, fever and exhaustion finally caught up with him. One minute he was leaping over fallen tree trunks and bounding through the ferns, the next his legs simply gave way beneath him and he collapsed onto the ground. He had not eaten for three days, had drunk only what foul floor-lickings he could stomach, and in this severely debilitated state his fever had regained a firm hold over him. Within minutes he was unconscious, sprawled face down upon the leafy forest floor.

About an hour later, he awoke with an abrupt start, and found that he could not see a thing. His first thought was that he must have slept right through until nightfall. But he soon realized, with mounting confusion, that this could not be the case, for he could hear the song of a hundred birds in the trees above him and feel the warm sun on his face. It could only be early evening at the latest.