Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  Chester hooked the lever straight back and released the firing mechanism. The stove gun bucked in his hand, the blast catching the monster in midair. Chester would have been hard-pressed to miss, as the beast was barely more than a few feet away from him. At such close range, its body was blown to smithereens, splattering Chester with blood.

  “Barf! I am so about to hurl,” Chester croaked, wiping his face and staring at the pieces of the dead creature scattered all over him. A couple of the limbs lay across him — and they were still moving. They looked like the spindly legs of a giant plucked chicken, but covered in dark callused skin and spotted here and there with coarse black bristles. Chester thought he was going to be sick as he pushed them off. Then he back-pedaled along the ground, trying to get away from the scene of the carnage. Babbling incoherently to himself, he was on the brink of paralysis, and in no shape to respond to Will’s muffled, frantic calls. The only thing that kept him there and in the present was the thought that he had to rescue Will and Elliott from the trap.

  Then he heard another plopping sound.

  He didn’t need to look to know what was waiting for him.

  “NO! NOT MORE!” he yelled. In an instant he was scrabbling around on the ground in a mad effort to locate the second stove gun. But with all the body fragments and the unevenness of the fungal floor, he couldn’t find it anywhere. He forced himself to look. The body of the creature was quivering slightly as it bobbed on its legs. It’s about to attack, Chester told himself.

  Then it leaped, coming straight for him.

  There was a hiss as something fiery struck the beast. With amazing speed, the whole creature was consumed by flames. It thrashed about, screeching at an intolerable pitch.

  Stunned, Chester got to his feet. He was staggering over to where Will and Elliott were caught in the net as yet another of the monsters appeared. The air seemed to sizzle as a second fiery projectile speared through it. It passed so close to Chester’s head, he thought he was its target and threw himself to the ground. But in the next moment he saw that a fourth spider had been hit and was instantly engulfed by fire, falling beside the still-twitching remains of the first one.

  Chester was so completely transfixed by the sight of the two burning, crackling animals that he couldn’t move.

  A shadowy form stepped through the smoke.

  “Styx?” Chester said simply, staring up at the figure before him. It was aiming what appeared to be a crossbow of some description, with another flaming bolt already in place. But this time, it was pointed straight at Chester.

  The figure moved toward him.

  “But … but you’re a mere boy,” came a woman’s gruff voice. She was wearing a long tattered coat, with a scarf of lighter material covering the lower half of her face.

  “Are you a Styx?” Chester got out.

  “What a dreadful thing to say,” came the sharp response.

  With a high laugh, the woman unwound the scarf. She blew out the burning tip of the bolt and lowered the crossbow to her side.

  Chester took in her wavy red hair and her full, generous face. It was a kindly face, her cheeks crinkled into a smile. Chester couldn’t tell how old she was, but put her somewhere in her forties. Apart from her clothes, she could have easily passed for one of his mother’s friends.

  “You’re lucky it was my day to check the traps, or you’d be spider-monkey fodder by now,” the woman said, extending a hand to Chester. “Up you get, love.”

  “You’re not Styx, then?” he asked hesitantly, looking into her eyes.

  Will’s mumbled cries came as she answered, “No, not Styx. Besides, I’m not the one who was trying to blast spider-monkeys with a Limiter rifle.” Her voice was a little croaky, as if it wasn’t used very often.

  “It isn’t mine … I mean …,” he stuttered as he tried to explain.

  “Don’t worry, dearie, I can see you’re not a White Neck.” She gazed back into his eyes. “Ah, you don’t know how good that is,” she said.

  “What is?” he asked, taking hold of her hand and allowing her to help him up.

  “To lay eyes on another person!” she replied, as if the answer to her question was obvious. She was still clasping his hand when Will shouted again.

  “Um … my friends need help,” Chester reminded her, tugging his hand away.

  As Chester continued to stare at her in dumb amazement, the woman slung the crossbow over her shoulder. Taking some sprigs of what appeared to be dried plants from the thick belt around her ample waist, she lobbed them on top of the heap of burning creatures. An intense but not unpleasant smell instantly permeated the air. “That’ll stop any more of these beggars coming,” she informed Chester as she bustled over to the tunnel where the net hung. Releasing a rope somewhere in the darkness, she lowered the twitching bundle of Will, Elliott, and the cat gently to the floor.

  “Don’t you worry — we’ll have you out of there in two shakes,” she said, pulling at the top of the net to loosen a tie.

  Bartleby was the first to emerge, growling and baring his teeth at the woman.

  “A Hunter,” she said, dropping the net and clapping her hands together in delight. “Well, I never thought I’d see a Hunter again!”

  Deciding she was no risk, Bartleby slunk past her, giving her a curious sniff on the way. He was much more interested in the spider-monkeys, as the woman had referred to them, and circled cautiously around their remains.

  With no help from the woman, Will had extricated himself from the net. He scrambled to his feet, then rubbed his thigh. “Stupid cat bit me! Chester, what happ—” He stopped short as his eyes alighted on the woman. “Who are you?”

  “Martha,” she answered. “But people call me Ma.”

  “Martha?” Will said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Ma?”

  “Yes, Ma. That’s what they used to call me,” she said as she studied Will. “Well, look at you. White hair and those lovely pale eyes. No question you were born under grass.”

  “What does that mean?” Chester asked, mystified.

  “It means that I was born in the Colony,” Will told him. “You know — under the grass — in the earth.”

  “Oh, right, I get it,” Chester said.

  Martha had noticed Elliott’s unmoving form in the net. “There’s another of you! What’s the matter with him?” she asked, her brow crinkling with concern. “I do hope he didn’t get hurt by my deadfall.”

  Will snapped out of his bewilderment and immediately bent to unravel the coarse netting from around Elliott. Then he lifted her out.

  “Why, it’s a young woman!” Martha exclaimed as she saw Elliott’s face. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Well, er, Mrs., er, Ma … Martha,” Will began, launching into an explanation of how they had been hunted by the Limiters and then blasted into the Pore by their artillery.

  Her arms crossed, she listened intently to him for a minute, and then raised one of her small hands to silence him.

  “I’m sorry, dearie, I have to tell you, I’m not taking any of this in,” she admitted, shaking her head. “Do you know when I last heard another voice?” She abruptly uncrossed her arms and, slipping her hand inside her coat, scratched vigorously at an armpit in a most unladylike manner.

  “A very long time ago?” Will said, watching askance as she finished scratching herself, then put her fingers into her mouth and sucked them.

  “You got that right, dearie,” she said. “You had all better come with me, but I’ve got to collect all this food first. Looks like we’re going to need every last bit. More mouths to feed now.”

  Will and Chester exchanged glances as she unhitched a sack from her belt, muttering something about not having any time to trim the meat off.

  “So are those yours?” Will asked, pointing in the direction of the gruesome butcher benches.

  But the woman didn’t answer him, instead inclining her head and beaming affectionately at Chester. “You’re a big, strapping lad. You remind me
ever so of my son.” She sighed deeply. “Would you mind holding this open for me, luvvy?” she asked as she passed Chester the sack. Then she set about gathering up all the pieces of smoldering spider-monkey and putting them inside it.

  Chester mouthed, “Food?” at Will, holding the sack at arm’s length and curling his lip as if he were going to be sick.

  But Will didn’t respond, his mounting curiosity evident as he ran his eyes over what was left of the creatures.

  “It’s odd. They seem to be insects or … or maybe arachnid, but are those shiny white objects teeth?”

  “Yes, fangs,” the coarse old woman replied as she continued to toddle about the place, picking up the grisly remains. “Along with that light they have on a stalk, they use them as lures for catching their prey.”

  “Fascinating,” Will muttered, sticking his head without any hesitation right over the sack that his friend was finding so repugnant.

  “Here we go again,” Chester grumbled to himself.

  6

  “THE DETAIL is in the dust…. The detail is in the dust,” Dr. Burrows repeated over and over to himself as he knelt before a half-buried human skeleton.

  He was peeling back the fungus and scooping away the silt to reveal more of the bones, but stopped as he heard a distant and very faint thud. He had no idea what could have caused it, but he got to his feet and shouted, “Hello! Hello! Anyone there?” at the top of his lungs. Although he had traveled many miles, he’d made sure that it was always downward so that he remained close to the Pore. The last thing he wanted to do was to lose his bearings.

  Then he’d struck gold. He’d spotted the skeleton and begun to excavate it.

  Now, as he listened for any further sounds, all was silent. He told himself he must have imagined the noise and, shrugging, he went back to his discovery. As he tugged more of the fungus away and blew the fine silt from around the old bones, his face lit up. “What’ve we got here?” he said as he came across an object in the skeleton’s hand. Carefully, by moving aside the phalanges — small bones that had once formed fingers — he lifted the object out.

  It was a piece of pottery not unlike a genie’s lantern, with a spout and a lid that seemed to be stuck in place. He picked at the end of the spout with his grimy fingernail. “The wick would have been here,” he said aloud. “So you Phoenicians, or whoever you were, you used oil lamps as your light source.”

  Putting the lamp carefully to one side, he set about clearing away more of the loose soil, his hands shaking with anticipation, and hunger. In the glow of his luminescent orb, Dr. Burrows cut a rather sad figure, hunched over the skeleton, whistling weakly to himself. His glasses were a little lopsided — they’d been knocked about during the fall down the Pore — and the parts of his face not covered by his patchy growth of beard were scraped and bruised. His shirt was ripped down the back, and one of its arms was almost torn off, hanging by a few threads. And although he’d always been of slight build, he’d lost more weight and was beginning to resemble the skeleton he was working on.

  “Bingo!” he exclaimed as he came across what appeared to be a wooden box. He yanked it out of the dirt a tad too enthusiastically and it fell apart. But in among the remnants were a series of small, flat stone tablets the size of playing cards, with rounded edges.

  “Slate, and obviously worked,” he observed, rubbing the uppermost tablet on his shirt to clean it. Then he began to examine it closely, finding there were some tiny letters carved into it, letters that he recognized. They were identical to the characters he’d come across in the Deeps, characters which, using his “Dr. Burrows Stone,” as he’d christened it, he’d been able to translate. Despite the fact that he’d lost his journal as he tumbled into the Pore, he reckoned he could remember just enough to give him a rudimentary understanding of what was on the small tablets.

  But, concentrate as he might, the tiny letters seemed to dance before his eyes, and it took him an age to identify even a few words. He removed his glasses to give them a wipe, careful not to dislodge the lenses from the twisted frame. But it didn’t seem to help him see any better, and he gave up after a while. “What’s wrong with me?” he grumbled as he inspected the other tablets, discovering minuscule diagrams etched into them in addition to the writing.

  “Directions … could these be … directions?” he said, turning the flat stones this way and that. “Oh, I don’t know,” he exhaled, frustrated in his efforts to make any sense of them. He wrapped the tablets in a handkerchief and put them carefully in his pocket, then resumed his excavation of the skeleton. Other than a pair of very rotten leather sandals, there was nothing else of note.

  Getting up, he continued on his way again. As his feet stumbled over alternating stretches of fungus, bare rock, and drifts of fine silt, he wondered if there were any other artifacts down there — perhaps he would find something that would tie into the map on the tablets, if indeed it was a map of this place. As he kept his eyes open for any landmarks, he realized that the fungus might be obscuring them. Depending on how much it had grown over the intervening millennia, it might be concealing all manner of things. And he wondered if perhaps the poor soul whose skeleton he’d found was there because he or she had landed at the wrong level in the Pore and become lost. If that was the case, then Dr. Burrows was also in the wrong place, and so the map would be useless.

  He pulled up sharply as he remembered his own experience of tumbling down the Pore; the complete and absolute terror as the darkness had opened before him and seemed to go on forever, until he’d belly flopped onto a fungal outcrop. He hadn’t been badly injured, but the worst thing was that he was so ill prepared for any further exploration: His rucksack with all his food and water, his equipment, and the journals he’d labored on for so long had all been left behind.

  He began to totter along the tunnel again, his stomach rumbling piteously. If it wasn’t for the lower gravity, he knew he might not have sufficient strength left even to propel himself along. He’d been drinking from streams flowing down the tunnel walls, but he needed to eat something, and soon.

  Coming upon a large fissure, he looked down into it with a feeling of dread. “Always down … always down,” he reminded himself, holding the luminescent orb before him in an attempt to see how deep it was. Having traveled this far into the earth, he wasn’t going to give up now; he’d die trying before he’d ever turn back. He was determined to search for more evidence of the ancient race, and if the skeleton was anything to go by, he might not be that far from what he sought. He did wonder at times if he’d eventually find a whole heap of skeletons, the final resting place of all the misguided souls who’d perished in their pursuit of the “Garden of the Second Sun” — the subterranean paradise he’d learned about in their crumbling temple.

  “Here’s to a soft landing,” he said, preparing to jump. He girded himself, then leaped into the center of the fissure, glimpsing tendrils of fungus on the walls and the different layers of rock on the way down. He landed with a splash in a small pool of water, bending his knees to absorb the impact and rolling onto his side.

  “Made it,” he said, although he didn’t sound particularly relieved.

  Now sopping wet, he pulled himself to his feet. It was then that he was beset by a wave of dizziness, and fell back again, unconscious.

  “Dad! Dad!” Dr. Burrows heard as someone dragged him from the pool. Whoever it was propped his head up and was making sure his glasses were seated properly.

  He opened his eyes and an image came into focus, then turned hazy again.

  “Rebecca,” he whispered feebly. “Dreaming … must be dreaming.”

  “No, you’re not, Dad. It’s me.”

  He forced his eyes to open fully, making the greatest effort to look at the person before him. “I must be delirious.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s me,” the Rebecca twin said again. She squeezed his hand hard. “There, see, I’m real.”

  “Rebecca? What … what are you doing here?
” he said, still not believing his eyes.

  “I heard you shouting,” she replied.

  Then Dr. Burrows took in what she was wearing. “Limiter … Styx clothes?” He rubbed his forehead in confusion.

  “Yes, Dad, I am a Styx,” she said without hesitation. “And you look like you could do with something to eat.” She snapped her fingers, and a figure stepped from the shadows.

  “A soldier?” Dr. Burrows croaked, shifting his focus.

  The man’s hollow-cheeked face was emotionless as his piercing eyes met with those of the befuddled Dr. Burrows. The Limiter passed something to Rebecca.

  “Here, have some of this meat. You don’t want to know where it came from, but at least it tastes reasonable when it’s cooked,” she said, tearing off a piece and stuffing it into Dr. Burrows’s mouth.

  He chewed on it gratefully, studying the Rebecca twin and the Limiter as he did so.

  The food was doing the trick, and he perked up immediately. “How did you —?”

  “More?” she asked, shoving another chunk of the spider-monkey flesh into his mouth before he could respond.

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing here. You should be at home,” he reprimanded her, although it lost most of its effect because his mouth was full. “Does your mother know where you are?” he demanded.

  The twin couldn’t suppress a giggle.

  Mrs. Burrows was sitting behind a microphone into which she’d been talking. Bright lights were shining in her eyes, and their heat was making her perspire. She never imagined it would be like this, her first time ever on the small screen. She was realizing a lifelong wish — she was actually appearing on television! More important, her case was finally receiving the attention it deserved.

  The public appeal for information on her missing family was the last item on the police program, and she was in a large studio with people clutching clipboards and wearing earpieces, all buzzing around chaotically as if none of them really knew where they were meant to be. Mrs. Burrows had spotted that a number of the policemen on the “Highfield Family Case,” as it was being called, were mulling around in the wings. When she met their eyes, they all gave her shifty looks. It was clear to her she was still the prime suspect in the disappearances, although there wasn’t a shred of evidence against her. But if they didn’t believe what she had told them, then why were they allowing her to make this public appeal, she asked herself. Were they hoping she’d be lulled into a false sense of security and give something away? She couldn’t understand why they would go to these lengths.