by Lynn Red
“What is it?” I asked her when she shook her head and looked back in my direction. “Where are they?”
Instead of answering with words, she simply tilted her head toward the distance.
“What’s that smell?” I asked, desperate to keep her talking because at least if there was someone speaking, the world seemed a little more normal. “It’s so...so brutal.”
“That’s the scent they leave,” she whispered. “They have glands in their...well, they have glands that leave the smell. They mark so the others can find them, and so things other than panthers will be less interested in following.”
I winced at the burning in my nostrils. It was like I’d taken a big whiff of gasoline and chased it by sticking a tube of mentholatum up my nose. A wave of nausea hit me, and then when it calmed down enough that I didn’t feel like retching, Nana Singer was right beside me, though I hadn’t seen her move. She threw part of her shawl around my shoulders and followed with a comforting arm around my shoulders. Even though she was mummy-thin and her skin looked like a sheet of paper stretched over bones, her warmth penetrated me. I shivered with the warmth this time instead of cold, or nausea. “What’s wrong with me? I feel like something’s, I don’t know, wrong. Something’s going on in my head and this smell is making me feel in a way I can’t say I like at all.”
Nana Singer chuckled softly as she led me along a path that, until just then, I didn’t realize we were following. “You’re changing, you know,” she whispered in a way that reminded me of a sneaky wizard with something to hide from a pulpy fantasy novel. “You notice things more, you’ve seen that. You sense them more clearly, yes? You can feel emotions before you can see the person?”
I was stunned. My feet just stopped moving even though I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I stared into the dead darkness swirling in front of us with a deadly, inky quality. It looked so thick, so foreboding, that considering it almost turned my stomach. “There’s someone in there,” I whispered. “I...I can feel it.”
“How many?” she asked. “And what’s in there?”
Ale and Jasper sat back, Ale with a look of moderate concern on his face, and Jasper with his bleary eyes both stared into the cave, but had nothing to say.
“There have to be tons of them in there,” I whispered, my stomach creeping up my chest. “What are gonna—”
Ale shook his head. “Taken care of. Answer her.”
His gruffness surprised me, and then I remembered that I was supposed to somehow sense how many of those things were lurking in the cave.
“How am I supposed to—” I fell off as just such a thought occurred to me. I took a deep breath through my nose, reeling at the acrid, Aspirin-like taste that filled my sinuses. “He’s in there. That one Ale was talking about. Exile? I can’t remember exactly.”
Nana Singer’s face drew taught. Her lips, always thin, were almost invisible lines below her ancient, crooked nose. “Then here we are,” she returned the whisper, trailing off with a series of clicks of her tongue against her teeth. “I hope you’re ready.”
Without another word, she started spinning. Her tongue kept clicking, and after a moment, the old woman dressed in the colorful, billowing, shapeless gown I’d never seen her without began the low hum that had once before driven the panthers completely insane. The gown whipped around her hollowed-out frame, and the ululations from deep in her throat were haunting, even to me who’d heard them before.
The innards of the cave stirred. There was nothing major happening just yet, there was no sound except for what I could only figure were the sounds of panther feet shuffling along the floor of their awful-smelling cave. “What is that?” I whispered.
“Answer her,” Ale growled.
That time, the gruffness in his voice gave me a little trill of excitement, though I can’t explain why, as we were sitting there facing down God-knows-what in a gaping hole in the earth, but what the hell, right? May as well be honest, right? “Okay, okay,” I said, growing slightly irritated with his continued demands, even though I’d been asked about four times, I still hadn’t had anyone tell me what I was supposed to be doing.
Nana Singer kept right on spinning, and humming, although this time I heard something more to her ghostly moaning. “Con...cen...trate.”
I cocked a sidelong glance at her and she repeated the chant once more. “Oh, right,” I whispered. “If that’s all I have to do.” She smiled ever so briefly.
I sat down heavily in the dirt and rocks. For as long as I can remember, that’s the first step to my version of concentration, as horrible as I am at sitting in one place for more than two minutes, this always worked.
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. A shudder gripped me all the way through. It felt like my heart was freezing mid-beat, but I kept my eyes shut tight and took a breath so deep that the air seemed to force the coldness from my body. Heat replaced it, and then waves of hot and cold fevered and chilled me to the bone.
I shuddered again, but this time it wasn’t with a shift in body temperature, it was in realization.
“Our seer doin’ all that shiverin’ don’t make me feel too good about all this bidness, you know, Ale?” I heard Jasper’s voice, but his words were distant and more of a feeling than a sense of hearing. In the back of my mind, the word ‘seer’ wouldn’t stop throbbing, but this wasn’t any time for questions.
“Don’t worry,” Ale said in that same distant, echoing way. The words bounced around my skull, but my concentration was absolute which was, for me, something novel and new. “Plan’s coming together. Your boys on the way?”
“You know dey always gon’ do what you tell ‘em ta do, Ale,” Jasper answered. “Dey whine, dey bitch, but ain’t gonna do nothin’ against your word.”
I sensed Ale smiling, and I don’t mean in one of those “he made a noise so I knew he was smiling” ways. No, I actually sensed, with whatever it was that had awakened in my brain, that he was smiling even though I couldn’t get anywhere near seeing him. Darkness clouded my mind vision. Whatever it was swirling around in that cavern was either extremely massive, or extremely numerous. I wasn’t sure which one was worse, or which one I wanted to deal with less.
Either way, they needed to know.
“Whatever’s in there,” I started to say before I noticed my voice throbbed in my brain instead of sounding distant. It was almost like my voice was deep in my head and everyone else’s was on a different planet.
“Tell us,” Ale growled. “We have to know.”
I swallowed, hard. I didn’t want to say anything but I knew I had to spill it. “It’s huge,” I whispered. “Either that, or there’s a shit ton of them. I don’t know which is worse.”
For a moment, there was silence. “How much does a ton of shit weigh?” Ale asked with a chuckle. That was one thing that always made my heart sing. No matter how ridiculously horrible the situation, he could say something.
“A ton, dumbass,” Jasper said. For a moment, they both laughed, and then I heard the growling, I sensed the growing rage.
In a deeper, brutal, ferocious voice Ale growled. “A lot of them? A giant one?” Once again, I sensed that smile. “How about both?”
Wind whispered through the woods, and the world seemed still; at peace. It reminded me of the middle of Christmas night when I was a kid. Everyone had stayed up half the night before—my parents putting presents under the tree, my dad making a thousand late night trips to some never-shut convenience store for random candy and junk to stuff into stockings—my two brothers and I always tried to stay up all night too. At first we wanted to “catch” Santa. Later on when we got wise, we ended up talking until the wee hours about how we longed for those days. I have no idea why, but in those moments, the only thing I could think about was the past.
Past...the past...what about my past?
What about their past? Who are they?
My thoughts echoed around the inside of my skull just like the increasing scratching, snuffli
ng sounds from inside the cave that opened in front of my closed eyes, though I could somehow see it. I could see light blossoming inside the cavern, lighting the whole thing. What I thought was a cave was no such thing at all.
“This thing is enormous,” I breathed, so quietly I wasn’t sure they could hear. But then, I felt Ale near me, his breath sweetly caressing the skin on the back of my neck that prickled to life. The hairs on the back of my neck stood as well. He lay his massive paw against my shoulder. It stretched from the tip of my shoulder blade to just on the other side of my backbone, and halfway down to my waist.
Next, he sat heavily down with a deep grunt. I leaned over, and nuzzled against his massive arm. Even covered in fur, he smelled like himself. That same scent of leather and sweat and pure, hard, man filled my nose. And, the familiar way his skin radiated heat all through me warmed me straight to the core and refused to let me go cold. When I was with him, I thought, it just couldn’t happen. There’s no way a chill could grip me or fear could take me when he had me in his arms. Or, apparently, leaning against his shoulder.
“I know,” he whispered after a long pause, his voice far in the distance. “Like I said, there’s a ton of the regular ones, and one—”
“No, that isn’t what I mean,” I said sitting up stiffly with my eyes still closed. In my mind, the whole place was still lighting up with those glowing green globes that moved through the labyrinth and dropped a clone of itself every ten feet or so. “No, no, I can see the panthers. I can see some of them that are slightly, uh, lumpy and overgrown, but that isn’t what I mean.”
Ale grunted next to me in a way that seemed like a question.
“What I mean is, this place is enormous. This isn’t just a cave. Not by a longshot. It isn’t just some nasty, smelly lair.”
Another grunt came, followed by a whiff of whiskey breath. Now, normally that sort of thing really bothers me, but I guess Jasper was just so lovably that I couldn’t hate the stink. “Whatchyoo mean, girl?” he asked. His grammar, his word choice, and his pronunciation all reminded me of my uncle, Earl. They also have the stink in common, I guess, but Earl’s a lot less lovable than Jasper. “I can see right with my own two old ass eyes that right there’s a damn cave, so whatchyoo mean it ain’t?”
I shook my head. Trying to explain what I was seeing seemed impossible, except for one thing I could draw a comparison to was...
“It’s an anthill. A labyrinth.”
I sensed a whole lot of raised eyebrows. Four of them. Nana Singer went right on spinning, and the longer she did, her ululating voice grew higher and higher in volume. The tone warbled back and forth between highs and lows and moderately-pitched hums that she held for longer than any human should be able to hold a note.
“What you see right there? That’s just the entrance. Beneath it, behind it, whatever you want to say, it’s got a million tunnels going off in every direction.”
“Er,” Jasper cut in, “what’s a labbernth?”
I had to laugh softly. “Gigantic maze. I have no idea how far it goes, how many tunnels there actually are, but I can tell you this—I don’t think even the panthers know. It just goes on and on forever.”
Swallowing hard, I had to take a few breaths to steady my nerves, even though I was right next to Ale. Not even he could calm my frayed, electric, buzzing consciousness. It felt for a moment like I was losing my connection with the universe or whatever strange radio signal it was that I’d picked up, but then the images and the sounds came back.
I stuck out a hand and grabbed Ale by the wrist. My fingers went about halfway around. “Ale,” I whispered, “there’s something else. How far away is whatever help you’ve got coming?”
This time I let my eyes open to stare into his. There wasn’t anything else I needed to read, nothing else I needed to see to tell me exactly how much trouble we were in. Nana Singer just kept spinning and whirring and humming and singing. The panthers in the cave’s entryway were audible now. Their growls and scratches and mewling plain to hear, but so many had gathered that the sound was a wall of cat noises.
“They’re coming,” he said. “Soon.” He turned his enormous, shaggy head back to the woods in the direction we’d come. The look in his gold-flecked eyes was almost nervous. Almost. “Soon,” he repeated, more to himself to anyone else. “Real soon.”
“Good,” I whispered, “because they’re coming.”
No sooner had my lips drawn shut than the first pair of slitted, yellow eyes appeared at the mouth of the cave, drawn out by Nana Singer’s voice like a catfish drawn to a rotten hotdog.
“They’re not coming,” Ale said. “They’re here. Jasper! We gotta hold ‘em off! Nowhere to run! They’ll chase us to hell and back. Go!”
13
I wasn’t, as it turns out, ready for what happened.
Ale and Jasper, hulking and wild, drew closer to the mouth of the cave in a slow, patient creep toward destiny. The panthers poured out of the opening, spurred on by Nana Singer’s constant humming, whirling, twirling madness. The more she spun and sang, the crazier they got. Eventually it was to the point where the panthers didn’t even seem to be in control of their own minds. A handful of them—four or five—stumbled out of the entrance to the cave and drunkenly weaved toward the pair of bears.
This was the point where I really started hoping that whatever cavalry Jasper and Ale called were going to show up at some point sooner than later. The smell of leather and blood filled my nose before I knew what was happening, and then a half second later, the growls and the screeches came.
I’d lost track of Jasper and Ale since the panthers started flooding out of the caves. I don’t know what the smell was that wafted out of the cave, exactly, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of fires from camping trips I went on as a kid. There were always people throwing things into the fire and making all kinds of weird scents waft up out of the heat. Then again, there was a certain comfort to it. Sorta like how when I pump gas into my car, it isn’t like I actually enjoy the smell of gasoline, but the scent brings back some memories that bring me some level of comfort.
I guess what reminds me of home is whatever takes me back and makes me smile. I guess it’s the mixture of nostalgia and whatever is happening at the current time that slips me back in time. Or, maybe, I’m just trying to come up with something to explain why in the moments before a battle that could kill Ale and maybe even me, I’m calm. It’s certainly not that I’m normally serene and peaceful. That isn’t it at all.
What held me still, I’ll probably never know. Whatever did it though I’m grateful for, because if I’d panicked we’d all be dead, no question.
The swirl of black was a tornado of teeth and claws and blood and death. Every few seconds I caught a glimpse of Jasper or Ale, but not for long enough to get a sense of what was going on.
Well that is, until Ale cut his way through the horde in my direction. I had my pistol in my hand but I wasn’t about to shoot into the crowd for fear of hitting Jasper. Ale had cuts across his face, and a gash on one of his paws that sent a shiver through me as soon as I saw them. He shook his giant head and grunted. When I didn’t take the clue, he did it again, this time with a shout to it.
As I pointed my pistol at a panther who was about to rip Jasper’s head off, Nana Singer’s whirling song shot up in pitch and volume until it filled my head, and apparently, the panthers too, because a handful of them fell to the ground writhing in pain. I wondered what she was doing, but I didn’t have time. Jasper tumbled and ended up in a wrestling match with the enormous panther he’d been battling. The thing got his jaws around Jasper’s neck and I took my shot.
The blast knocked my hand into the air and with a yowl of pain, the panther rocketed off him, slammed into a tree and fell to the dirt with a crunch. “Thanks, kid!” Jasper shouted in his raspy, ursine voice a moment before he turned and swiped another panther out of the air. Ale let out a warning roar and I spun on my heel and instinctua
lly fired at a panther that had somehow got around behind us.
“Over there!” Ale shouted. A panther was approaching Nana Singer, who was fully in her trance and seemed blind to the world around her. “Jasper! Help her!”
Before the old bear could manage, an enormous creature shot out of the cave and lifted him off his feet by the neck. It looked like a half-shifted, gigantic panther, but with a mouth that just hung agape and never seemed to move, even when the thing roared and shook Jasper. I heard Ale crash into the threat to Nana Singer and then I took a shot at the horrible thing holding Jasper. The creature just shrugged it off. Another shot hit the thing square in its dumbfounded-looking, gaping mouth. The thing didn’t react in any sort of physical way.
Moments later, Jasper dropped heavily to the ground in a cloud of leaves, and then the monster just toppled over backwards. Ale, Jasper and I just stared at the thing on the ground that lay dead.
“I didn’t think I could make that shot,” I said, during a lull in the action. The panthers were as stunned as we were.
Ale chuckled in a gruff bear voice. “I didn’t think those things could die. Figured they were too stupid to know they were supposed to.”
“Oh, they’ll die,” a rumbling voice erupted from the darkness of the cave. “But I won’t.”
“Exile.” Ale’s voice was dangerously low. I’d never heard him speak with such rage. Nana Singer began whirling wildly and I finally understood why. The faster she went, the louder she got, the more enraged the panthers became. The angrier they got, the easier it was for Jasper to pick them off one by one.
And fall they did.
Jasper delivered a horrific looking clothesline shot to the nearest panther, sending the creature flying backwards onto the corpse of the giant thing I had killed.
Ale and Exile charged each other, both roaring so loudly it made me jump. The second they clashed, I knew neither one of them would come out the other side the same. Ale swiped a nasty gash in Exile’s sleek, black side and for his trouble, got a claw to the face. A quick twist and Ale snatched the panther around the neck with his teeth, and for a moment I thought he was about to bite down.