The Southwind Saga (Book 2): Slack Water

by Jase Kovacs

  "Here." I toss him my last chemlight. He catches it neatly with his off hand and bends it against the wall. The glass vial inside shatters, and it comes to life as gently as a sunrise. He shakes it, the glow lighting his face orange.

  "This is great," he mutters. "Goin' into a cave, and she gives me a night-light."

  "What was that?"

  "Oh, nothing!" he says innocently.

  I get my rifle up, tucking it into my shoulder and under my cheek. I adjust my forearm so I'm comfortable — this is how I'm going to go forward. "Okay. Alfred, when I get to the corner, you come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder so we can go at the same time."

  He moves up behind me, holding his torch up over my head. We move slowly forward. Every step, I expect a monster to jump around the corner like the world's worst jack-in-the box. I pause at the turn. Alfred presses up behind me. When he squeezes my shoulder, I turn the corner, trying to be as smooth as I can be, Alfred right behind me, the torch in his hand naturally flowing to where I look.

  The tunnel runs forward, as wide as my outstretched arms, and rises about fifty metres away, the floor lifting from the river. The river flows more quickly here, syphoned off to a passageway below. My feet are numb, the cold robbing me of sensation.

  Mark is right behind us, his mouth constantly going, "Green and gold, no secrets told, green and gold, the jade of old."

  "Mark," I say. "I need quiet from here."

  "I ain't saying nothing, man," he protests. "Call me the mad monk 'cause I got a vow of silence."

  The tunnel rises into a gallery, ascending at maybe ten degrees now.

  "Watch out up here," says Mark. "The first step is a doozy."

  The tunnel opens up into a cavern. Alfred shines the torch down so I can see that the ground disappears into a canyon. Below, I hear the river slapping and tumbling over boulders. Alfred shines the torch around. This is another collapsed cavern, where the floor of the space we're in fell down into the tunnel below. Above the noise of the waterfall is the urgent chittering. Alfred plays the torch across the walls and roof, and I see it is carpeted with a million little leather bags, tiny pinpoint red eyes shining angrily as we wake them early.

  "Christ. I hate bats," I mutter.

  "Is okay," says Alfred. "They won't fly into you."

  Alfred slowly paints the cavern with the light. The far wall is covered with a mass of roots that have found their way down through a fissure from the jungle above. They look like the thousand questing tentacles of a horde of octopi.

  "We can get down on the right." Mark sits on his ass, legs out straight in front of him, and slides down a boulder. "There's a way through here."

  "Hold up," I say. "Let me check there's no marys down here first."

  Mark stops and looks back. "Ma'am, this is a cave full of boulders. You're dreamin' if you think you can check any nook and cranny. But none of us are worried about it, are we?"

  He's right. I'm virtually certain we won't meet a mary in these tunnels. Why, I can't say. It's… I think I would feel their proximity. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of them. and they're close. But they're not coming.

  They wait up ahead.

  I become aware of another noise, a strange disquieting murmur that somehow reaches my ears over the rumbling waterfall and the annoyed bats. "Can you hear that?"

  Mark says, "That's just the wind."

  Alfred shines the torch on the far side of the cavern. The water falls into a dark hole. "No. It's coming from down there."

  "Mark, can you get across to the hole while I cover you?"

  "Yeah, but I'm tellin' you—" He interrupts himself by dropping off the far side of the boulder onto another about a metre below him. He moves into the torch's beam, throwing a vast shaggy shadow on the far wall, a looming Bigfoot. Then he drops off another boulder, and the shadow is gone. "Goddamn it!" he yells, loud enough to startle some bats into flight.

  "What is it?" I yell down, looking desperately to shoot whatever has got him. But he's dropped into dead ground where I can't see.

  "Fuckin' cold, man!" he shouts, his voice high pitched as cold water reaches bits of him I don't want to think about. He wades out into the middle of the waist-deep stream.

  "Keep it down!"

  He shakes his head, like he's sick of explaining something I just don't get. Instead, he turns to face the hole where the river drains. "I got this one," he says, tucking his rifle under his arm and levelling it down the passage.

  I follow him down, sliding from one boulder to the next. Forewarned, I take off my belt kit and put it over my shoulder. I stifle my gasp as I drop off the last boulder into bone-chilling water. Alfred follows me, doing a pretty good job of keeping the torch up on the tunnel as he slides down the boulders.

  We stand in the water for a minute. We can hear a rhythmic chant, very faint, mixed with the urgent burble of the river but clearly the calls of some kind of animal: a faint chuk chuk chuk chuk repeated like the ticking of a clock.

  "You can't tell me that's the wind," I say.

  We move over to the hole where the water falls into a long tunnel whose end is beyond the reach of our torches. Whereas the cave so far has been smooth and rounded, carved by millennia of water, this passage has the sheared edges of a cleft ripped in the rock by violent movement. The walls are veined with thick strands of green jade glittering in our torch light. Mark grabs Alfred's hand, guiding the torch so the whole wall sparkles. "See that, man, that's a million years of coral makin' limestone, and then what does Mother Earth do? Takes it down into her belly and bakes it into jade. Crazy, yeah? Little ocean bugs buildin' whole mountains, full of beauty, yeah?"

  "Yeah, cool. But we can leave the geology lessons until later?" The strange chant flowing up the tunnel reminds me of the call of hungry geckos. But it has a power, a bass note that could only come from the throat of a large animal.

  Correction: many large animals, acting as one.

  "This jade has power, man. For years, the locals traded it and used it to give their gods sight." He shrugs when he sees I don't care. "Knowledge is power."

  The chant suddenly changes, as abruptly as if someone had hit skip on a music player or a conductor had flicked his baton, sending the choir onto a new page. The CHUK CHUK CHUK chorus changes to a new verse, one I know all too well. My hackles rise as their voices sing a chant I last heard on Black Harvest.

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH.

  "Fuuuuuuuuuck," breathes Mark. "Can you feel that?"

  Alfred nods for the both of us. Our bodies are pulled towards the sound — no, they're pulled by the sound, as if the chant itself is a river carrying us down into the cave. It has that insidious draw that I felt on Black Harvest, that bewitched us when we went to Kulumadau, that is the thumbprint, the signature, of the alpha.

  The chant goes on, cycling over and over two or three times before it suddenly changes back to the CHUK CHUK CHUK. It is a hundred voices all acting at once, in perfect harmony and creepy synchronicity.

  "Well, it's the way we wanted to go anyway," I say.

  "The way you want to go." Mark's grin is rueful and a little sad. "All things being equal, I'd rather be surfing in Malibu."

  I wade slowly down the tunnel, my rifle ready to take down anything that lunges. Throughout this whole escapade, I've managed to keep my mind on target, not slipping back to regret the mistakes that brought me here or the images that will haunt me: the resolute set of Mrs. Aloysius's jaw as she leapt to her feet, the hate permanently etched in the teenager's remaining eye.

  But now my mind starts to leap about like a startled rabbit. One second the CHUK CHUK CHUK call fills me with fear, each note the drip from a tap leaking terror, then the next I'm imagining something brushing underwater against my leg — a long, sinuous eel perhaps, slipping silently through this cave river, a pale fleshy eyeless thing that has never known the sun. Then I'm wondering about Blong — how will he grow up? Will he be a good man? Will the demons that sha
ped his childhood torment him in future? Will he seek relief from the nightmares in booze like so many others —

  Random, random, random, like I'm tossed in the mental waves of a subconscious sea.

  Something about the tunnel ahead bothers me. Something strange about the ambience that I can't quite put my finger on. Then I get it. "Alfred, turn off the torch."

  He does, and darkness is as abrupt as if someone dropped a hood over my head. But after a few seconds, I can faintly discern the walls of the passage. "There's light here."

  "My chemlight," says Mark. He's wrong, though. His chemlight is orange, and this light has a faint green hue. There is definitely light leaking down the passageway.

  "Keep the torch off," I say. "I don't want to tip them off."

  "Ma'am," says Mark, his tone bizarrely formal, "they know we're coming."

  "It's not ma'am. It's Matty," I say as I go forward.

  My mind steadies, but it steadies on two equally unpleasant thoughts. One is that this tunnel is a rift: a fissure in the ground torn by an earthquake. If it once opened, it could close. Any second, the earth could heave and slam this tunnel shut, squashing me as flat as a pancake. Sure, it's unlikely to happen right in the moment. But that's my rationality trying to convince the ancient lizard parts of my brain that can feel the millions of tons of rock pressing down on my soft flesh from all directions.

  The second is that the chant is pulling us forward, as firmly as a rope tied around our waists. It is calling us, and we're following. As if to underscore this, the tune changes again, a hundred individual voices speaking as one.

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH.

  Once only before settling back into CHUK CHUK CHUK.

  The passageway twists abruptly at its end, where the fissure jags to the right. The light that comes around this corner is a sinister, unpleasant green. It makes me think of sickness and plague. The chant grows in volume. Whatever speaks is just around this corner.

  I've been preparing myself for this moment. Silently girding myself with courage as we advance one step at a time. I wonder if this is what soldiers of the Great Wars felt as they advanced up a sheltered rise to a hilltop raked with machine gun fire. And then, reaching the top and seeing the battle spread out before them, everything becoming real. What was worse — the long anticipation of the coming storm or the immediate horror of first contact?

  Time to find out.

  The cavern is filled with a sickly pale-green light, as if it's the undead mirror of the vibrant jungle above. The space is long and narrow, a big brother of the earthquake fissure we just traversed. There are a thousand details I take in at the first instant of seeing: the black walls slick with condensation that rise to an incredibly high ceiling, the faint light at the far end that leaks through a curtain of vegetation, the fact there is a yacht bobbing in the narrow river, its masts only a metre from the stalactites on the ceiling.

  But the immediate, most overwhelming fact is that this room is full of marys. They stand on every flat surface: boulders, the river bank, rock ledges. They sway back and forth, like kelp in the ocean swell, staring at the yacht, weaving their shoulders as if keeping their balance on a ship heaving in the swell.

  The closest is barely a metre away from me, its back to me. His clothes have long rotted away, and the disease has consumed every ounce of fat on his body and started to eat into his muscles, so his bones tent his blotched skin, his shoulders and spine rising like the ridges of a crocodile. The farthest is right up against the yacht, which I see now is actually moored with long springers as if on a stone jetty.

  I've got my palm out, back up the tunnel, to stop Mark and Alfred. The marys seem unaware of us. They're in a trance, swaying and chanting CHUK CHUK CHUK — which I realise now isn't a chant at all. It's the noise of a hundred creatures all snapping their jaws closed at the same moment.

  They haven't noticed me at all. Instead, they are transfixed, staring desperately, hungrily, at the yacht, which is the source of the green light. It's covered with shards of green stone, looking like a fish scaled in jade, and the shards scatter the faint sunlight across the room like a mirror ball. These shards of green light shift and flicker as the yacht strains against its moorings, the river and tide keeping it constantly in motion.

  One of these green shards drifts over the face of a nearby mary. Its cheeks and most of its throat are open to the air, but it stiffens as if it had been zapped with electricity. Its mouth splits wide, and it leads the chant:

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH.

  The light moves on, and the creature slumps. All of the marys slip back into their waiting CHUK CHUK CHUK, clacking their horrific rows of teeth together as if they are just waiting for meat to fall into their mouths.

  The one nearest to me has cocked its head, as if listening. I have my rifle on it; I'm still in the passage, so I could shoot it down easily if it came — and probably the next twenty or thirty until I ran out of ammunition. Of course, that would only leave… I don't know, maybe a hundred to tear me to pieces.

  It slowly turns its head to look at me. Unlike its fellows, it cannot join in the CHUK — it has no jaw. I see its horrible open mess of a mouth, with atrophying muscles that contract compulsively in time with the other marys' mouths. The fiery glow in its eyes is muted, as if the red hate that fills these creatures is dulled by the green shimmers. It looks at me, seemingly wondering whether I have an invite to their little party. Its expression is conflicted — or as conflicted as a jawless walking corpse can look. I have the bizarre sensation that I have walked into a church where the service is already under way, my late entrance noted disapprovingly by the nearest worshipper. Then it twitches, a shudder passing through its body like poison at work, and turns away from me to gaze reverently at the yacht.

  I have never had this level of interaction with a mary. Usually they charge at you as soon as they sense you, their infection driving them to feed. They're beings with all the complexity of a piranha fish. It was only on Black Harvest that I found any subtlety to their behaviour, when then were being manipulated by the Pale King. Only in the presence of an alpha is a mary anything but a shark.

  But even then, they were the weapons of the Pale King, missiles he used to destroy my boat and counter my actions. This swaying, the chanting akin to some pagan religious festival, the adoration of the green light — this is all very new to me. And being new, it's dangerous.

  Prudence would order a hasty retreat before whatever spell binds these creatures evaporates. But prudence has just caught the last bus out of town, because I see what hangs on the back deck of the yacht.

  The yacht has two masts; it's a schooner. There is a small pilot cabin abaft the second mast, and behind that are davits and an arch that once held solar panels, wind generators, and other gadgets. These have all been stripped off, and the arch is festooned with pieces of jade. But all that is window dressing, because hanging from that arch is a hammock, and in that hammock is Blong. He doesn't move; the hammock binds him as if he's a spider's dinner wrapped up in silk, waiting for the monster to come home.

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH.

  I see the mary leading this verse of the chant on the far side of the cave. Its eyes gleam with the reflected shard, as if receiving divine guidance. Then the light moves on, and they finish their chant and go back to their waiting, their mouths clacking closed every second.

  I slide back into the tunnel. Mark's and Alfred's eyes are like glowing dials in the orange chemlight. "Okay. They're in a trance. We can walk right through them."

  Alfred and Mark look at each other. Like: ha-ha, no way. "They're in a trance," I repeat. "The green schooner is down in the cave. Blong's on it. The schooner is covered in bits of jade, and the reflected light is hypnotising them."

  "How does that work?" asks Mark. "These things should burn up—"

  "It's not bright enough. Ambient light. Anyway, how it works doesn't matter. What m
atters is that it's working. I'm guessing when the sun goes down, the lights go out, and they wake up. Whatever it is, this is the hand we've been dealt."

  "You want me to walk into a room of vamps? No way, man. Cash me out, 'cause I fold."

  I nod as if I'm accepting this before turning to Alfred. "And you? Are you too scared?"

  Alfred smiles tightly. "Not scared. You say we can go, we can go."

  "Good man. Okay, Mark, you can go back. You remember the way out, yeah?"

  He groans, shoulders slumping in acceptance. "Oh, man, that's a dirty trick. Okay, fine. Let's go all in."

  "Attaboy. Leave the chemlight here and keep the torch off. Move quiet and slow. Stick close to me."

  I go back into the room, approaching the first mary like I would a sleeping mad dog. It glances at me again, but I keep my gaze down and move slowly. I place my feet carefully, avoiding kicking any rocks. We'll be right, so long as we don't break the spell. I keep that thought in my mind. Alfred and Mark are right behind me, almost tripping me up.

  The mary so close, its eyes clouded with red mist. It smells of old dried leather. I bend away from it, to avoid its sway, and step around. Then it is behind me. My breath in my throat. Two more in front now. Snapping at the air. Chuk chuk chuk you bastards. Jesus Christ.

  I look back at Mark and Alfred. Mark's face running wet with sweat, eyes blinking about ten times a second. Alfred tense, his shoulders tight like he's facing off a charging wild pig with nothing more than a spear. Be cool, I mouth.

  I step up to the next two. They don't even turn. Just keep snapping their jaws. I need to time my move so I get between them while they sway. I'm working off instinctively known rules. Can't touch them, can't make sudden movements or loud noises. Like I'm walking through a cavern full of sleeping snakes. Like I'm swimming with a school of sharks, serene for now, a feeding frenzy one drop of blood away.

  Then a shaft of green light hits one, and they're off to the races. They freeze still, every muscle tensing as the virus gets zapped with the green light and they chant.

  NAW EM SHAB —