by John Hook
“Now, I’m thinking Roach Motel,” Izzy said absently.
“They check in and never check out.”
“Or, more to the point, they dangle something people want and once inside, boom, they disappear.”
“And there is a cover story about getting moved around.”
“In this place, where no human has any say, no one questions it.”
“Probably don’t want to question it. That’s the beauty of the plan.”
I stood up and dusted myself off.
“There’s something bothering me.”
“That’s unusual.” Izzy laughed and rolled his eyes.
“Okay, yes, everything in this place bothers me.” I sat back up. “However, the thing I’m talking about is that I’m getting the same feeling I got when I first arrived and I was hiding out with Rox.”
“And the demons were after you.”
“And I began to be bothered that they seemed to be making an awfully half-hearted effort.”
“It turned out that Rox was setting you up, although that wasn’t really her.”
“Except it sort of was her. She’s complicated. It’s okay, I kind of have a handle on it now. I love Rox and in fact I probably love bad Rox.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Izzy ginned.
“The point is, I’m getting the same feeling now. We are marching through new territory and everything just seems to go our way. The dark men. The big-ass Demon King. We even meet the Shade and end up in Haven.”
“But you haven’t found Philip.”
“No, but no one has pulled out any magical kung fu to stop me from doing so.”
“You don’t think you are just lucky?”
“Probably am. However, I can’t believe it is this easy to just go around poking my nose into things. Someone should have gotten annoyed at me by now.”
“As I recall, Roland found you pretty annoying.”
“Yeah, guess he did.” I laughed.
Blaise had been standing fairly still, facing the far wall. At first I thought he was zoning out. The he stepped over to the wall.
“Here.” Blaise spoke quietly. Izzy and I came over. In the wall were three holes, like a bowling ball, but in the dimness they were hard to see. Around them was a circular seam.
“That’s the key, I’m betting,” Blaise added.
“And you just happened to see this.”
“I’m good at scanning.”
“Makes sense. They came in and it didn’t take them long to get the door open and descend.”
“Unless it was triggered by someone else below,” Izzy suggested.
“Should we try it?”
“I can’t resist a good puzzle,” I said.
“Or sticking your nose where they don’t want it.”
“We don’t know what’s down there.” Blaise looked at both of us.
“I’m thinking it’s a trap.”
“Be my guess.” Blaise’s eyes sparkled.
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”
Blaise gripped the holes and pushed. The circular portion slid in and he turned it counterclockwise. There was a ‘thunk’ sound followed by the sound of scraping stone behind us. In the otherwise silent room it seemed jarringly loud and echoed. If there was anyone below us, we weren’t going to have the element of surprise.
We walked over to the opening. The cover had descended to just under the floor and was sliding back into a slot that had been made there. There were steps that descended further and yellowish light seeping up the stairs as soon as the hatch had cleared. Not knowing if the hatch was on a timer, we descended the steps quickly and emerged into a long passageway carved out of solid rock. It was lit, but not brightly, by clay pots with the burning substance I called lava but was actually who knows what . Blaise found a matching set of bowling ball holes at the base of the stairs and used it to close the hatch behind us. The hatch rested on wooden supports. Turning the lock dial activated a set of pulleys that coiled up to open the door and released to shut it. The opening and closing pulleys were yoked so that the movements of one created stored kinetic energy for the other.
“Nice,” Izzy commented, watching what he could view of the works.
“Looks like we made it into the secret clubhouse.” Blaise was scanning with immense curiosity.
“Guess we should have a look around.”
“Sure wish I had my arrows back,” Izzy whispered.
“Shhh!” Blaise said with a low voice. We could hear voices. They were getting closer.
There was a small, shadowy crawl space that ran under the gears. We immediately slid in together under there and hoped nothing swung down when the hatch opened. We couldn’t see much from under there; just enough to see five sets of legs clearly belonging to shirks. No doubt they were the same five we saw come down here. They also clearly didn’t have a human with them anymore. They didn’t seem to be talking about anything in particular. One of them activated the hatch and then we couldn’t hear anything. We just flattened ourselves on the ground and covered our ears. The hatch opened, they went up and the hatch closed. We waited a good bit to be sure we could hear clearly and there weren’t any other voices. Finally we crawled out and dusted ourselves off.
The passage ran in a straight line as far as we could see, which wasn’t far in the dim light. If my sense of direction was still working, there was only one place it could be going. It had to come out on the other side of the mountain behind Haven.
We moved down the hallway carefully. For a while, there was nothing really to see. It was a tunnel carved out of rock. There were no decorations, no doors, no chambers off the sides. Then we finally came to a larger chamber. There wasn’t much to it, but there was a small wooden table and some chairs indicating that someone might spend time there. The light was also a little brighter in that chamber due to more clay pots with lava. However, there wasn’t anything else more interesting in it. We kept going.
After the chamber, the tunnel narrowed again and the light grew dimmer. Then we entered another chamber. This one was not as large and was much darker than even the normal tunnels. There was an area off to the side that was recessed back, mostly away from the lights, and it was hard to tell what was there.
From somewhere far down the tunnel we heard a scream. It was hard to determine if it was male or female. In part because of the quiet that we had encountered so far, it was shocking. It also wasn’t the scream of someone getting scared suddenly. It was long and filled with pain. It froze us where we stood.
Just as the quiet reasserted itself and all that remained of the scream was either faint echoes or merely memory, a low gravelly sound came from the dark part of the chamber to our right. At first I thought it was a low growl, but then it morphed into a deep, rasping laugh, almost a cough, or maybe a bark. We looked and all we could make out were two yellow eyes glimmering out at us.
We cautiously moved forward to get a better look. Whatever it was, it wasn’t attacking us and while the laughter had no note of friendliness to it, it somehow didn’t seem threatening either. As we moved closer, there was just enough light from behind us to show there were cages on this side of the chamber. In one of them was a grizzled old man leaning with his head against the wooden bars, laughing bitterly. He was unkempt and unshaven. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a fixed grin that was far more ghastly than happy. His eyes had appeared yellow because they caught the faint glimmer of the distant light and he had faint white cataracts in his eyes. His skin was leathery and drawn. Everything about him seemed to convey madness. I reminded myself that this was someone’s glamour and a shiver ran through me.
“Haven’t seen anyone walking around here free.” He cackled almost uncontrollably. “Doesn’t matter.”
I studied the cage. It was constructed with large round branches running horizontally through very think pillars of an adobe-like substance. I tried to break one of branches but couldn’t budge it. It r
eminded me of manzanita, but very thick. Blaise also tried. There was no give.
The old man laughed, almost choking, and shook his head. “Don’t try to get me out of here. I don’t want to go nowhere. They let me stay here and be crazy to scare the new ‘uns. Like him.” The old man gestured with his thumb to the cage next to his. He laughed some more. “He’s the one you should be concerned about. He’s finally in Hell.”
I stepped up to the other cage. It was dark and hard to see, but I could just make out the man we had seen in the diner talking about seeing an angel. He was crumpled on the floor, his hands and legs bound and a cloth drawn over his mouth, tied behind his head. In fact all you could see were his eyes. They were large, bulging, tears running down into the cloth tied around his mouth. He was quivering. I don’t think I have ever seen quite that combination of fear and betrayal before. This young man (or at least his glamour was young) had thought he had landed in purgatory and was about to be saved. Now he was realizing the cruel truth.
The old man walked over to the bars between them, putting him very close to the young man, leaning his face into the bars, leering with his mad grimace.
“Look at him. He’s all-fired scared.” He laughed convulsively. “He hasn’t seen anything yet. Wait until he is sealed in the prep room. You heard the prep room just a bit ago.” And then he couldn’t speak because he was laughing so hard.
“Hey!” I kicked the bars hard. It didn’t do any good and my foot hurt, but it made a loud noise and the old man snapped his attention back to me. He studied me. I probably looked pretty angry. Then he just started laughing again, which just made me angrier.
“What is this place? What is going to happen to him?”
Between laughter he managed to get out. “This is the place of the angels.”
He was close enough, so I grabbed him by the throat and yanked him into the bars. He felt like a dead man to the touch. A cut opened up on his forehead and it started bleeding but that just made him laugh harder. I let go and sighed. He really was mad. What he had hinted at before was probably true. They kept him here as part of the sideshow to scare people on their way to—what?
Whatever it was, we weren’t going to learn much from this madman who had lost all of what once had been his human self. A sacrifice that meant he didn’t have to go and face what the others did. Something so horrible it made the sacrifice worth it.
The place of the angels.
Blaise and Izzy had been trying to see if there was any way into the young man’s cell. Exasperated, they were forced to give up. There was nothing to do but continue forward and hope we could find a way to come back for him. I knew full well that might never happen, but we had no choice.
We started to move back toward the passage. We could hear the muffled shrieks of panic from the young man who probably thought we were his last hope and now saw us abandoning him. Anger welled up in me. I wanted demons or shirks or angels to punish, but it really was the knowledge that we probably were abandoning him and there might not be anything we could do for him.
“Hey.” It was the whiskey gravel voice of the madman. We turned. For the first time he seemed sober. His expression was sharp, serious, although the madness still lurked at the edges. His eyes shone with a strange energy.
“You should head back. Maybe they won’t have noticed you gone. Might delay your seeing what’s down there. You’ll see it, all right, one day. No need to be in a hurry. No, not for that. Not for that.”
Then it was like the madness exploded in his face and he collapsed in riotous, howling laughter as he repeated over and over again: “No hurry for that! No hurry for that!”
We turned back and entered the passage with the howls echoing behind us.
The next segment of corridor was long and empty and the lighting remained dimmer due to clay lava lamps being more widely spaced. I had a sudden flashback to when I had been killed, wandering the dimly lit corridors of the basement in the tenement building in New York City and just hoped Janovic was really… well, gone, whatever that meant in this place.
Blaise stopped suddenly, squinting at the wall.
“What is it?”
“Look.”
I could barely see, but when I focused there were three holes on the wall in bowling ball formation. There was nothing on the wall or the floor that gave away what that control was intended for, if it was in fact a control like the two we had seen before.
“Guess we should see what it does.”
“Hard to resist, isn’t it?” Blaise grinned.
Izzy put his fingers in and turned. We jumped back at the sound of scraping stone, but it wasn’t the floor this time. A small piece of the wall turned inward, exposing a dark, unlit chamber inside. I went to the closest clay pot and, being careful not to come in contact with the lava, dislodged it from the wall. I suspected they were removable for easier filling. The strange property of the clay was that not only did it have an extremely high melting point when dry, but it also just plain didn’t get hot to the touch even with the lava inside it.
“Won’t they notice the missing lamp if they come by?” Izzy asked.
“Probably the open door I’m not planning on sealing behind us too.”
“Yeah, there is that.”
We entered the room. It was like a small utility room. There were two tables with shelves set end to end most of the length of the room. I set our light atop one of the shelves for maximal illumination of the room.
“Well, look what we have here.” Izzy smiled.
Along the inner wall were racks with long staffs of polished wood and smaller billy club-like pieces. There were also coiled lengths of cord made out of very tightly woven grasses along with some stronger material that was hard to identify. Izzy took a staff off the wall and held it, testing it in his hands for balance. He then made a couple of test swings and thrusts. When he swung it, it swooshed with a deep, resonant sound.
“Pretty solid,” Izzy noted approvingly
“Seems an odd place for a weapons locker.”
“May be keeping this stuff away from the prisoners.”
“Maybe it’s not a weapons locker.” I helped myself to a couple of the small clubs and tucked them into my pants.
“What are you thinking?”
“Look what we have here. Staffs, clubs and cords. Demons don’t use a lot of weapons. They already have all the offensive weapons they need, naturally.”
“Yeah, they are pretty offensive.” Izzy laughed.
“This looks like crowd control. Subdue and bind.”
“Quentin, take a look at this.”
Blaise was studying what was on the work tables. He held up what looked like a small clip and started to investigate it with the fingers of his other hand when he suddenly yanked that hand back and uttered a grunt of pain.
“What the hell?” Blaise was startled.
“What is it?” I asked.
He brought what he was looking at over closer to the light.
“It bit me.”
The clip Blaise was holding was designed to fit over a rounded surface. It was difficult to tell what material it was made out of. It could have been bone or ceramic. It had sharp, jagged projection points, but that’s not what had caused Blaise to cry out. Apparently the clip was hollow and projecting out of one edge were hair-like threads that looked like biological material. They were very tiny tubes with a sharp bone-like spur on the end. They only seemed to probe what was in front of them. They did not try to curl back toward the clip held by Blaise’s fingers.
“You have any idea what this is?” I asked.
“You’ve been here longer than me. I was hoping you would know.”
“They never tell me anything here.”
Blaise and I both watched the tiny strands as they undulated as if looking for something in front of them.
“Izzy. What are those things coming out of the clip? Are they some type of organism?”
Izzy shrugged. “They are definitely
organic.” He tapped them with the end of his staff and they withdrew. “They act like living things, but I have no idea. Maybe a parasite? I’d need a lab to figure it out and I’m not really a biologist to begin with.”
“Darn, I thought you knew everything.”
“Does this mean I’m fired as Science Officer?”
“No, but I’ll have to make a note on your performance review.”
Blaise was still examining his clip and ignoring the tomfoolery around him.
“Whatever these things are, there are baskets of them all down the benches here, all different shapes. It’s as if these are work benches for assembling them.”
Blaise threw the clip into a basket.
“These things are different from anything else I’ve seen in Hell,” I added. “They seem to be a type of technology. Except for the floating magic power sleds that pop up, I’ve seen nothing else here that you would call technology. It’s like an Amish vision of Hell.”
“The angel?” Izzy asked.
“Maybe. But what if there is more than one?”
“What is this stuff about angels?” Blaise asked.
“Not a lot to tell. I met this entity that looked like a fantasy illustrator’s romantic vision of an angel, like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio. Except she ripped Janovic in half and tried to suck out my soul or my magic—not really sure what was happening. Guido made her or it stop. Seems they had some kind of deal. I don’t know anything about this creature and Guido doesn’t seem in a hurry to illuminate me. However, the one thing I am sure of is that she is dangerous.”
“Angels in Hell. See, I told you. Things always interesting around you.”
“Well, I think we better move on before they get more interesting while we are trapped in this room.”
“What are they doing to the people of Haven?” Izzy asked to no one in particular.
“I don’t think we are going to like the answer.”
12.
Once again back in the long dim tunnel, I replaced the lamp. We listened carefully to make sure no one was approaching and then Blaise turned the holes in the wall and the doorway sealed noisily. We waited for the echoes to die down and then continued.