He had to hold on to the light in his heart, trying to block out the darkness threatening to encroach.
It’s not going to end… It’s never going to end… I’ll be stuck in this liquid blackness forever… This is it—the Shadows… I’m right in the middle of it…
The negative thoughts encroached, pushing out everything good he had ever experienced. The thoughts didn’t feel like his own. Something, or someone, was placing them in his head, trying to bring him to his knees.
Trying to make him give up.
Tom picked up his pace and broke into a run.
Like panic was a monster at his back, he ran faster and faster. All the fears of childhood came back to him in an instant, the monster under the bed waiting to grab his ankles and drag him under, the thing in the wardrobe, the stranger standing on the landing.
As abruptly as he’d entered the black void, Tom burst out the other side, gasping for breath.
He stopped short, teetering on the edge of a craggy rock face, his arms pin-wheeling to keep his balance. For a moment, he thought he’d plummet over the edge, but then he regained his equilibrium and looked up.
The scene before him took his breath away.
A sea of black, churning Shadows stretched as far as he could see. Huge tar bubbles popped on the surface. Waves crashed against each other with no rhyme or rhythm, like the ocean in a storm. Overhead, a whirlpool of angry green swirled, an electrical storm made up of the phosphorescence that had been so present since he had reached this level. It disappeared into the rock like an inverted vortex, bolts of lightning flashing in its centre. For the second time, Tom was reminded of a black hole in space, though he couldn’t even begin to imagine what was at this thing’s centre or where it would lead.
People were wrong when they imagined Hell as being filled with fire. Hell was this darkness, a sea of Shadows that swallowed souls. There was a monster before him—not the kind he’d seen in movies, not with claws and teeth and evil eyes—but a thing made out of darkness and night and everything that was evil in the world. Older than time itself, it had festered beneath the earth’s crust, only able to reach out far enough to snatch the souls of those unfortunate enough to find themselves down here.
The hiss of static whispers had returned, only now they were defined and Tom picked out individual words. With horror, he realised they spoke to him.
“Come… on… in… T.J. …The …water …issss… waaaaaaaaarrrrrrm…”
A different voice spoke each word—man, woman, and child. They were the voices of the ones who had already been taken, people who had been driven to madness, their souls submerged in the evil of this place.
A tendril of Shadow slipped out of the ocean, and up over the rock ledge, curling up his leg like a vine. Tom yelped and jumped back. The strand dissipated, falling into a thousand drops, each one rapidly slinking back across the rock and into the ocean.
The laughter of a thousand crazy souls filled his ears.
“Come... in... T.J. …
Come… on… iiiiiiiiiiiiin…”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” he yelled, putting his hands over his ears.
“Abandoned… your… family… T.J.… Left… them… to… die…”
Tom shook his head frantically, the voices overwhelming.
This was madness. He’d done everything Otto, Sky, and the others all told him to. He was totally out of his depth. How was he supposed to defeat this? This expanse of evil couldn’t be defeated. It couldn’t be changed. Attempting to do so would be like trying to change the sun or gravity.
Except Tom was wrong. This thing had a thought process. The Shadows liked to mess with people. It was getting pleasure out of playing with Tom, he could sense it.
Did it abide by laws or forces?
More tendrils slipped out of the water and climbed the rock towards him. Tom stood frozen in place as the liquid black, like strands of oil, crept across the rock towards his foot.
Move! He screamed in his head. Move!
But he suddenly found himself unable to budge and with nowhere to run. The Shadows slid closer and closer, until strands moved over his shoe and slowly wrapped around his leg.
Tom stared down at the black coils, his eyes wide.
Catching him by surprise, the tendrils tightened around his ankle and pulled. He flipped off balance and fell hard on his tailbone, pain spearing up through his spine. His fingers scrabbled in the rock, trying to get a finger hold, but the stuff started to drag him across the narrow ledge of rock.
Oh, God! He panicked. The Shadows would pull him into the black ocean, beneath the crashing waves, to join the rest of the tortured souls.
Then Tom realised he wasn’t moving. He wasn’t being dragged across the bare rock towards the churning ocean. It was the panic taking hold, the fear. The Shadows wrapped around his ankle were no more solid than its namesake. It had no physical exertion on him. The only thing Tom fought was himself.
The whole thing existed only in Tom’s mind.
It can’t hurt me!
With the revelation, his hold on reality slipped again, that strange sensation of falling back in time. He struggled to fight it, to stay where he was, terrified what happened to his body while his mind existed somewhere in the past. But he couldn’t fight and the present blurred before his eyes, replaced by another cold, dark tunnel...
* * *
HE IS CROUCHED in the tunnels with his mother cradled in his arms, her head rested in his small lap. He is a child again and fear fills every part of his soul. His mother’s skin is cold beneath his fingers and a strange smell fills his nostrils, but he sits, hunched over her, his face buried in her hair. He has lost track of time; in the total dark he doesn’t know if only hours have passed since he’s been sitting like this or if it’s closer to days. The weight of her head against his thighs is too heavy. The floor is frigid beneath him and his legs are stiff, tucked under his body, but he can’t bring himself to move.
He doesn’t want to believe his mother might be dead. He keeps thinking he feels her move or hears her take a breath, but it’s only her body releasing its last grip on the air that sustained it.
In his heart, he understands she’s dead and he’s filled with fear about being alone, about who is going to look after him now. He cries silently into her hair, his heart breaking at the thought of never having her gentle hand stroke his face again.
Suddenly, a cry echoes out of the darkness—the thin, high-pitched wailing of a newborn child. Instantly, Tom understands how his mother died. He remembers her screaming in pain, remembers the blood pouring from between her legs.
And then he remembers the words his mother had screamed as the blood flooded from her, the promises she made to something too dark and terrible to comprehend in the real world. Promises as she died.
But the baby is still alive. A girl. His sister.
“I was down there once, when I was a child. I was too young to remember... Too young...”
A series of memories flash through his mind, memories that haven’t even happened to his younger self yet...
“We’re more alike than you think...”
“She grew up down here. She’s practically feral.”
He forces himself to move, lifting his mother’s head from his lap and gently placing it on the floor. He reaches down and strokes her hair away from her face one last time, his way of saying goodbye.
The baby is still crying, an angry mewl. In the dark, he feels around. The stone floor is sticky with congealing blood. Then his fingers touch the baby’s soft skin. She is slippery and too cold. Quickly, he pulls off his own jacket, exposing his own skin to the cold of the tunnels, and places it over her.
He tries to lift the baby, but comes against resistance. She is still attached to his mother.
Light! He needs light.
His mother has a small bag of all their possessions. She has told him never to help himself to them, but he supposes the bag his now. Still filled with guilt,
despite his reasoning, he delves into the bag and finds a couple of worn-down candles and a lighter. His hands are shaking as his fingers flick the rough metal of the lighter—once, twice, three times—before the flint strikes the gas. With a trembling hand, he lights the candles. Their small, steady flames illuminate the tunnel. He tries his hardest not to look at his dead mother’s face, terrified her eyes will still be open, not wanting to remember her like this. He has a small knife, something his mother has always made him carry for his own protection.
The baby is still crying, her face screwed up, red and angry. For a moment, he thinks she doesn’t look human—this thing that killed his mother—but he pushes the hateful thought away, fresh guilt rushing through him. His mother had talked about the baby, this little being who is now his sister. He knows how much she already loved the baby she never got the chance to meet. For his mother’s sake, he could not let anything happen to her.
He puts the knife against the cord poking from the baby’s round belly and starts to cut. Suddenly, he realises more blood is in the cord. With panic, he snatches the knife away, terrified the baby may bleed to death like his mother. Remembering something he’d seen when one of the others had been hurt, he pulls his shoelace from his trainer and ties it around the cord and pulls tight. He hopes the knot will be enough, but he has no choice. If he leaves the baby to go and get help, he doesn’t doubt she will be dead by the time they get back.
He has to saw away at the cord. It is so much thicker and tougher than he thought, the process making his stomach churn and bile rush into his mouth. He swallows hard and clamps his teeth together, fighting the urge to be sick. Eventually, he manages to severe the cord and the baby is free.
He lifts the baby still wrapped in his jacket. She is longer than he expected—all legs and arms pushing against him.
He has a sister and he stares down into the child’s face. A shock of dark hair covers the top of her head in crazy spikes. For the moment, she has stopped crying and she looks back up at him with eyes the colour of the ocean, eyes he has seen before...
* * *
TOM BURST FROM the moment in his past, gasping in shock and realisation, his head reeling.
The sea of Shadows raged in front of him, waves crashing against each other. Above him, the green phosphorescence whirlpool had deepened and the lightning bolts came more frequently, cracking with broken energy.
“What did she do?” he yelled at the thing before him, the sound of the underground storm threatening to drown him out. “What did my mother do?”
“Made… a… deal…” the voices hissed, each one different from the next. “Her… own… children… saved… for... the… soul… of… her… son’s… firstborn…”
The Watchers had got it wrong. Tom hadn’t been the one who sent the Shadows back. It had been his mother. She’d made a deal with the Shadows during her final dying moments and used her own blood to bind the deal. The Watchers had only seen Tom come out of the Underlife cradling the baby and the Shadows disappeared back to this ancient place deep within the earth.
Damn them! Why hadn’t they told him about the baby? How could they not tell him about Sky?
He remembered everything now. He remembered carrying her out of the tunnels. He’d looked down and seen those eyes—Sky’s distinctive, almond-shaped blue eyes—and recognised her instantly.
Was that why she hated him so much—because he had gotten out and forgotten about her? The question was, did Sky know the truth?
Another thing made sense to him now. He understood the reason the Shadows had never been able to touch Sky or himself. It was because of a deal their mother had made all those years ago as she died to protect them.
She had offered up David as a sacrifice.
How could she do that, he thought, suddenly furious at his mother? What kind of woman offers up her future grandchild like that?
But then he realised he would do the same thing. If that was what it took to save David, he would gladly sacrifice a child who had not even been born yet.
Was the Shadows all-knowing? When it took his mother’s deal, had it somehow known one day he would have a son, only for David to get leukaemia and die? Had it known back then that David would be its way out of the darkness and into the light?
The thought frightened him. If the Shadows were omnipotent, David was going to die and nothing Tom could do would change that.
With sudden horror, Tom realised David was down here, that he had effectively delivered David right into its hands. The thought sent chills down his spine and his heart practically stopped in fear.
He’d left David alone.
It couldn’t sense him. It thought he was still in the hospital bed.
Tom took what little comfort he could in the thought.
The Shadows took the deal to get out of the Underlife. Before now, it had been trapped beneath ground. But David was not part of the Underlife—he’d never been part of the Underlife. By taking David, it would be released to the outside world.
Tom turned away from the sea of Shadows and the place filled with the screams of a thousand voices in fury.
And he ran.
Chapter 23
THE BLACK HOLE engulfed him once more.
Where previously the dark had been void of all sound, now the screams followed him.
Their screeches of rage—creatures that were once men, women and children—chased him back down the tunnel. He ran as though a thousand demons were on his tail. But he was trying to outrun something intangible, like a gust of wind.
They can’t hurt me, he told himself. The deal his mother made meant he couldn’t be harmed by either the Shadows or the poor souls taken before him. The Shadows might scare him, might confuse him, but couldn’t hurt him.
It can’t hurt me, can’t hurt me, can’t hurt me.
He repeated the mantra over and over again in his head, trying to keep the voices out of his head, trying to concentrate as he forced his arms and legs to pump up and down, propelling him forward.
The same fears he’d entertained coming through stayed with him now; he would try to get back only to find the dark void to be never ending. He only wanted to be with his son again and he prayed David would be waiting for him. He had something vitally important he needed to tell his son.
All of their survival depended upon it.
Still the screams followed, but now they started to fade. Tom wanted to sob with relief. After hearing his son might die, they were singularly the most terrifying thing he had ever heard and leaving them behind was like a cripple removing a leg brace.
His lungs burned. A stitch threatened to cramp his side and his legs trembled with exhaustion, but he forced himself to keep running. Tom didn’t have the luxury of time. Time had never been on his side, but now moving quickly was more critical than ever. He’d spent days down here and been through unimaginable madness. Now he needed to retrace his steps and go back to where he’d started.
The hospital.
The Shadows would be following him, doing everything in its power to stop him getting out. The last thirty years had amounted to this: If David died, the Shadows would be released above ground, spreading from person to person, populating until it had taken the human race to the point of extinction.
Tom burst out of the black.
David was sitting on the ground, his back propped up against the tunnel wall. He looked up in surprise.
“Dad!”
Tom bent over, his hands resting on his knees. He gasped in relatively clean air, feeling like the black he’d been inhaling must have poisoned his lungs like a toxic smoke.
David scrambled to his feet and ran to his father’s side.
“What happened, Dad?” he asked. “What happened down there?”
Tom finally got his breath back and was able to speak. “I was shown something. I’ve got a sister and I know her. Do you understand what that means? If she has the right blood group, then she could be a bone marrow donor for you. She cou
ld save your life.”
He didn’t want to give his son false hope, but he did want to give him hope. David needed to believe he had a chance because he needed to go back to the place he feared the most—his sick body.
“You have to go back to the hospital and fight it,” he told David. “We’re coming back to you.”
David’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t want to go back. It hurts so bad, everything hurts. I don’t want to feel like that again.”
Tom’s own eyes welled. Asking any more of David felt so wrong, the poor child had been through so much already. He couldn’t stand to think of his son in pain, but he had no choice. If David didn’t go back, eventually his body would die and the Shadows would have won.
“You can’t stay down here, Davey. However bad you feel, you can’t stay down here in the dark. What happens if you die? What if you end up being trapped down here on your own? It’s not right.”
David nodded, but a tear fell from his eye and ran down his cheek, plopping onto the back of his hand.
“You need to fight it, kiddo. Think about your mum, how much she loves you, how much she is hurting right now. I know you’re scared, but I also know how strong and brave you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
Tom thought back to everything his son had been through—the barrage of tests, the needles, the sickness. He thought of the times David had cried out with the pain, how he’d been so weak he’d been unable to move. Yet despite all of this, David always welcomed him with a smile. He’d not complained, asked “why me?", or thrown temper tantrums. Even when his parents had been doing exactly that, David handled what was happening to him with a quiet acceptance.
Tom reached out with his forefinger and lifted his son’s chin so their eyes met.
“You’re the bravest person I have ever met,” he said, “and I’m so proud that you’re my son.”
David’s lip trembled and he threw himself into his father’s arms, crying hard. Tom held him tight and waited for David’s sobs to subside into little hitching hiccups. He buried his face in David’s hair, relishing the softness against his skin, despite understanding this wasn’t really David’s body in his arms. Though David’s spirit or soul might be here, what he held was a physical manifestation of David’s consciousness. He didn’t know if it was because of David that he was able to see and touch him or if it was something he was conjuring up himself, but he didn’t care. Sky had told him the magic down here was bad, but this part—being able to hold his son again—was the greatest gift he’d ever been given.
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