The Return of the Arinn

by Frank P. Ryan

  ‘Hey, you leadin’ me someplace?’ he called into the tunnel. He put his fingers in his mouth and blew an ear-shattering whistle.

  Owly caught on and returned to hover a few feet from Gully. He pointed at his open mouth and performed an eating action. Then he aped a drinking movement and made swallowing noises.

  ‘You get the idea? I could do wiv a bite to eat and a cuppa rosy lee?’

  Those raptor eyes beheld his own.

  He added: ‘In case you don’t get it, being some kind of a foreigner, that’s Cockney slang for “tea”.’

  Owly Gizmo performed another swivelling motion with her head, but this time she looked at Bad Day as if to question him. Then she fluttered upwards, beating heavily against the air, before coming to a rest on a protuberance jutting out of one of the giant pillars. Gully stared up at her, a good fifty or sixty feet overhead, those eyes now tiny in the distance, but still blinking down at him from a jumble of mechanical oddments, glistening with blue and green oily sheens.

  Was she expecting Gully to fly up there and join her?

  ‘No way, gel!’

  Owly Gizmo blinked.

  Gully reached out and touched the surface of the pillar. ‘Ouch!’ He retracted his hand with shock. The pillar wasn’t made out of steel at all, as he had imagined. It felt more fibrous, like the surface of a lump of coal. And there was a charge in it, like it was carrying perilous currents of energy.

  ‘Come back down ’ere!’ he shouted.

  Even as he was shaking his fist at the distant bot, Gully felt himself yanked off his feet and tossed into the metallic maw of the giant. He barely had time to slither across the rough iron floor and shove his back up against the wall before Bad Day lifted an arm up, took a grip of the pillar and hoisted himself upwards some thirty feet in a single pull.

  ‘Hey, you can’t haul your weight up there!’

  But the daemon bot wasn’t listening. Giant hand over giant hand, he began to hoist them up in a series of huge and jarring elevations.

  Pain lanced through Gully’s elbow as he rolled around in Bad Day’s head again. He didn’t dare to keep his eyes open – the distance down to the furnace chamber was already a hundred feet. Then, for some reason, they arrived at a halt. Wincing, Gully peered out of the open jaw to see a junction. The pillar they were ascending had joining up with a second, like a fork in the roots of a colossal tree. And the direction of ascent was changing. Instead of vertical, the angle was now distinctly off true.

  Realisation flooded Gully’s mind. These ain’t no pillars. These must be the roots of the Black Rose! The realisation terrified him.

  Owly Gizmo was somewhere nearby. Gully could hear the tinkling chime of her wings beating. Then, for some reason, Bad Day stopped climbing and lowered his jaw, as if in an invitation for Gully to emerge. He clambered out, cradling his injured elbow and staring around at a roomy place filled with grey opalescent light. He couldn’t make it out clearly because his glasses were caked with oily smudges.

  ‘Where are we?’

  Bad Day declined to answer.

  Gully took his glasses off, spat on the lenses, wiped them clean with a rag from his pocket, then shoved them back up the slope of his nose.

  Now he could see silky light flooding in from a giant cavern over to his right, and from a source below the level where he stood. A boulder, glowing with turquoise radiance, rose out of the depths immediately in front of him. A small tree sprouted from its apex, like them Chinese trees you saw on old Willow pattern plates. The trunk, branches, leaves and even the delicate blossom was pure white. It looked like it was made out of crystal. And now Gully looked harder, he could see that the background was a forest of gnarly roots with thorny projections, all writhing around one another even as they rose into the glimmering sky. Gully squinted – that couldn’t possibly be the sky; they was still deep underground. It had to be . . . what would Penny call it? An ’allucination? As he continued to look into the light and clouds, he saw figures flying through the air. They looked like very big birds with stretched out bodies and wings.

  The thought occurred to Gully: maybe they ain’t really birds at all?

  He thought about them monstrous things Penny had painted on the ceiling back at Our Place. These looked a lot like them – what Penny called free spirits of the wind. They wheeled and soared like angels come down out of heaven to take a gander at this subterranean world. And now he noticed them, Gully thought that maybe they had also noticed him. They was wheeling down in spirals. Gully had barely time to notice the huge stretches of diaphanous wings, the down-stretched feet, with raptor claws, the protruding mouths lined by fangs.

  ‘Quickly!’ he heard Bad Day’s urgent shout.

  The giant hand grabbed Gully and flung him back into the bucket mouth. Owly Gizmo followed him in, shrieking in outrage. Gully heard the squeal of joints as Bad Day shut his mouth, then they were bouncing all over the place. Even as Bad Day rocked back onto his feet and hurled himself into a new climb, the attack began.

  ‘Wot are they?’ Gully asked.

  ‘Daemon bots of another kind.’

  ‘Wot they want?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘They would possess your spirit, devour your soul.’

  Gully trembled with fright, hunkering down inside the mouth of Bad Day, holding on for dear life as the fliers overtook the ascending daemon bot and battered against the metal walls. The fury of the attack came from every direction. He heard their screams amid the gale of their malice.

  Interloper . . .

  Violator of the Sacred Skies . . .

  Open the gate, fellow daemon, and let us in . . .

  But Bad Day hauled them up, higher and higher, until the glittering dome of the false sky was all around them, flooding the chamber of the mouth with shafts of light.

  Come – open your mind to the wonders of the Master . . .

  Come join us and know the Mysteries . . .

  Outside the rising giant the winged daemons still hammered and whispered. They invaded Gully’s mind with sighs and moans. He caught glimpses of angular faces and pale eyes in which a horrible hunger danced and writhed.

  Throw-back!

  Puny earthling!

  Unwanted street urchin!

  The tips of their icy claws found their way into the cracks and fissures between Bad Day’s giant teeth. The metalwork inside of the mouth sprouted a spider’s web of frost. Gully heard the creak and squeal of tormented metal as they ripped and tugged at the hinges of the jaws, attempting to wrench them apart. With a screech, Owly Gizmo buried herself in Gully’s arms.

  Penny is calling you, Gully!

  Penny waits for you out here with us.

  Penny loves you.

  Penny lusts after you.

  Up and up, the giant daemon bot climbed against what was now a fearsome weight of icy bodies, their rage a thunder of hammer blows on every inch of Bad Day’s armour. The light dimmed as the daemons’ bodies covered Bad Day and his climb slowed. There were longer and longer delays in between each pull and the voices of the daemons came together in a single thunderous hiss.

  We would consume it.

  It will become one with us.

  Then, abruptly, their motion changed. Gully wondered if Bad Day had let go his grip on the root. Maybe they was approaching the surface? Maybe there was some kind of a ceiling at the top of the false daylight? A sudden, dizzying leap . . .

  Strewth!

  Was the daemon horde through? Was they falling into the abyss?

  Gully whimpered in fright.

  There was a tremendous bang. Gully climbed painfully to his feet and ran to a crack; Bad Day had punched a massive hole in a mouldy brick wall. Gully could see no evidence of the daemon horde.

  ‘Hooray – we done it! We escaped.’

 
The jaw clanked open. With a screech, Owly Gizmo was past him and through. Gully followed her lead, hopping off the teeth on the edge of the bucket to find himself in a pitch black space. He searched through his pockets – left middle – torch. His hands were shaking so badly he dropped it and he had to scramble around his feet to feel for its plastic shape. He switched it on.

  They were in some big room with a vaulted red brick ceiling. There were broken bricks and debris all around them, though that was mainly due to Bad Day breaking through. Something was gleaming – a pyramid shape against a wall that was black with damp. Gully turned his torch on aluminium kegs of beer. It looked like the cellar of some hotel or pub, under the streets of the City.

  ‘Yee-hah!’ Gully pumped the air with his fists.

  Then he winced. ‘Ow – ow, ow, ow!’ He had forgotten that sore elbow!

  But he explored here and there and confirmed it was a cellar; there was racks of wine bottles. It made him laugh like an idiot. If only there was people up there and a market hereabouts, he’d have set up a stall and made a packet.

  Bad Day was sitting on the stone-flagged floor. Even with his neck bent and his head in his hands, the top of his head was pressed against the arched ceiling.

  ‘I must apologise for that experience. We daemon bots pride ourselves on civility.’

  ‘Never mind! I’m still starvin’.’

  Gully heard the tinkle as Owly Gizmo took off and exited through a door that stood half ajar. Meanwhile, he brushed some of the dust off his jacket before taking a closer look at the things in the room. There was a tube running out of one of the kegs. He yanked at the tap on the end of the tube, but it was stuck solid. Bad Day yanked the tube out for him, exposing Gully to a cascade of beer.

  Gully sat on the wet floor and laughed, then downed enough beer to quench his thirst. He managed to wash the blood and other crud off his face and out of his hair with some bottles of gassy water. His swollen eye smarted, but at least it was open and working, and even though his head still ached and his elbow was stiff and painful, he was healing. He looked up to where the twin red beams of Bad Day’s eyes shone down in sad reflection.

  ‘Stop worrying about your stupid cousins. Fink about food. There’s got to be food somewhere ’ereabouts. I’m off to take a gander.’

  Gully soon discovered packets of crisps stuffed into crates. He crammed the entire contents of a packet of salt and vinegar flavour into his mouth and crunched on it as he dragged the cardboard box closer to the beer. Then he sat down in the mess and began to devour one packet after another.

  Owly Gizmo flapped back in through the open cellar door, landing beside Gully with a flutter of her wings. She dropped something bloody from her beak. It was a dead pigeon. Its feathers looked mangled as if from an effort to pluck them.

  Gully blinked. ‘Wot you finking about, Gizmo? I’m supposed to eat it raw?’

  ‘Forgive her! She has much to learn.’

  Gully looked again at Bad Day, squeezed between floor and ceiling in that extremely uncomfortable position. ‘You saved my life back there. Why’d you do it? Why’d you make Owly Gizmo for me?’

  ‘The Master wishes that I keep you contented.’

  ‘Why does he care about me?’

  ‘To keep his promise to Mistress Penny.’

  Gully’s heart leaped.

  Eternity

  Penny whispered: ‘I know you are here, Jeremiah – and I don’t like it.’

 

  ‘I don’t know what time of day it is – or even if it is day or night. I have lost all connection with time and place. I am . . . I am directionless.’

 

  ‘Demand it from whom – from what?’

  ‘From the world, the environment. If you will allow me to tutor you, from the very universe that surrounds you.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’

  Penny wracked her brains to try to understand the bizarre possibilities that were being presented to her. Could she demand to be returned to the real world? To real consciousness?

  She looked down at herself.

  She pressed her fingers against her thumbs. She closed her eyes and she opened them again. She sniffed, attempting to smell whatever might be in the air – if air truly surrounded her. She listened, though not for too long, for there was no sound whatsoever, other than the sound she made, stamping her feet a couple of times, clicking her fingers.

  She clasped her hands to her face.

  How was she ever going to understand this? Her life, her being had undergone such bewildering changes that it had become increasingly difficult to retain any sense of time and place. It was well nigh impossible to separate the worlds of her imagination from reality, so closely did imagination resemble and even merge with reality. If reality existed for her any more . . .

  ‘What have I become?’

  He spoke gently, calmly, without turning to face her:

  She felt something stirring, a faint vibration, as if a powerful machine were somewhere within the structure of the Rose. The vibration was coming to her through her bare feet. Penny hesitated, aware of veil after shimmering veil moving across her memories when she tried to focus on them. She couldn’t bear the thought that Jeremiah was controlling her mind, her thoughts. She wanted to scream.

  ‘You promised me free will. I will fight you if you try to control me.’

 

  ‘I don’t want the power of life and death over any other human being.’

 

  ‘I will oppose you if you try to force me to hurt people.’

 

  ‘I will not help you to make war on Earth.’

  Jeremiah manifested. He was looking at her reflection in what she now realised was the inner aspect of a petal of the Black Rose: in that same petal she saw reflected those twin orbs of darkness that were his eyes.

  If only she could return to rationality and rediscover how to take control of her own ordinary thoughts, experiences, memories. ‘You’ve tricked me – you’re still manipulating me.’

  He grew angry then and he turned to look at her. She felt the measure of those all black eyes focus on her, and the immense, unyielding force of his will brush against her mind.

  ‘You swore to serve me.’

  ‘I will not hurt people.’

  ‘Your precious conscience – would you have me remove that useless relic of illogic in you?’

  ‘No.’

  He held her gaze, eye-to-eye. ‘Have a care. There are limits to my magnanimity.’

  Her teeth were clenched. In that moment of angry obstinacy on her part, and observing his reaction to it, she looked anew at him – a darkness in the form of an old man, yet a power beyond anything she could possibly imagine – one that had no need to barter with her to make her do what he wished.

  She asked herself: how dangerous is he?

  The answer came back: immensely so. More dangerous, perhaps, than she could possibly imagine. She wanted to oppose him. She wished, from the depths of her heart, to prevent him using her, taking over her will to hurt people, to wage his terrible war against her Earth.

  ‘Penny Postlethwaite!’

  Her name spoken by him now so softly, made her feel extraordinarily important to him. She felt a
dmired, cherished, respected, something dangerously, desperately, close to what she had so longed for, moment by moment, minute by minute, year by year, from her father.

  He spoke quietly, in hushed tones that emphasized his words: ‘We are perilously close to a judgement in Dromenon.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that time is pressing. My world is threatened. Soon I shall call upon your service to assist me in my response to this threat. You must not disappoint me. You have much to learn in anticipation of such service. We must deepen your understanding with another lesson.’

  Penny wilted at the thought. ‘What lesson?’

  She found herself looking into a terrifying pit. Its walls were hundreds of feet high, lined by iron plates, and pistons and the pumping thunder of machines. The lining walls of the pit gleamed and gurgled with oily reflection, coming from lamps of lurid red and pallid blue. She saw an extraordinary head, made up of huge blocks and fragments of industrial and agricultural machinery, with eyes that pulsed with turquoise light. The giant was hammering against an anvil the size of a truck within what might constitute a blazing forge of sorts, and the resulting noise was bedlam.

  ‘Where is this? What’s happening?’

  ‘Look more carefully.’

  She saw a small figure, minuscule when compared to the hammering giant. She recognised the awry spectacles on the sweating nose, the mop of dark curly hair . . . His face was bruised. He looked like a refugee from a war zone. ‘Gully!’ she shrieked his name aloud. ‘Oh, Jeremiah – you promised you would not hurt him.’

  ‘I have not hurt your urchin friend, although he is eminently capable of putting himself into harm’s way all by himself. He suffered an accident while attempting to return to London. No doubt he was looking for you.’

  Penny squeezed her eyes shut. She could believe that. Gully was so pig-headed when a notion took hold of him. ‘Please don’t punish me through him.’

  ‘I sent my servant to save him from a perilous situation he had brought upon himself. I brought him here to safety.’