by David McAfee
When I calmed down, I realized I had my eyes squeezed shut, and I opened them, expecting to find myself drenched in impenetrable darkness like the night before. Instead I saw a stone hallway lit on both sides by torches spaced roughly ten feet apart. The torches were only lit for about thirty feet down, and beyond that, the hallway disappeared into shadow. It looked the way I had always pictured a dungeon to look. Stone walls on either side, torchlight, and somewhere in the distance, the sound of dripping water. That slightly earthy smell, reminiscent of mold on wet leaves, hung in the air, along with the sharp, acrid smell of burning lamp oil. It reminded me of the moist summers spent digging for worms as a kid, dad’s tiki torches lighting the backyard. I tried to figure it out, but I couldn’t make sense of it, so I didn’t try hard.
With nothing else to do, I started walking down the hallway. I was just thinking perhaps I should grab a torch when the two farthest behind me went out. In the same instant, two more flared to life ahead. Neat. Easy to see how this worked. I would have light the whole way. Excellent. I tried to figure out how the designer had done it – pressure plates in the floor, maybe – but decided I didn’t really care. I just wanted to get out of there.
Since I couldn’t go back, I went forward. The torches continued to light as I approached, and to extinguish themselves as I passed. I spent a few seconds speculating about the change in the hallway. More specifically, why I could see my way this time when I hadn’t been able to see anything the night before. What had changed about the hallway in that short amount of time? When it came, the answer stopped me in my tracks.
The hallway hasn’t changed, I thought with a shudder. I have.
I can’t say how much time I spent wandering those empty halls, but it couldn’t have been as long as it felt. The initial corridor went on for quite a long way. Too long, in fact, to have fit inside the building I saw from the alley. I couldn’t explain it, but then, there were a lot of things going on that I couldn’t explain. I was starting to get used to not knowing the answers.
At least it isn’t dark. The torches continued to flare to life when I got within twenty feet of them, showing the rough hewn stone of the tunnel walls in an ever shifting, dull orange glow. Granted, that left a pretty limited field of vision, no more than thirty or forty feet in front of me or behind me. But it was light enough to see, and that was good enough.
The excitement of being trapped in an alley faced with certain death had worn off, and the exhaustion I’d felt earlier returned with a vengeance. Just putting one foot in front of the other grew harder with every step, and sooner or later exhaustion would pull me to the floor. Then what? I would probably pass out right where I lay, just waiting for someone to come and find me. No good. I wanted to avoid being found if possible. Lately everyone I met wanted to grant me a slow and painful death. Stealth was the order of the day.
Of course, my exhausted body and mind made stealth a difficult trick. I walked with that same barely-there shuffle made famous by George Romero. I probably looked like one of the Living Dead, too. Filthy, shaky, and smelly, having taken refuge behind a dumpster and slipping in trash. I could smell myself, and figured if anyone got within twenty feet of me they would smell me, too. Hopefully I wouldn’t run into anyone, a housecat could have beaten me up in my weakened condition.
When the first of the turns came, I stood in the middle of the hallway and looked at my options with a bleary gaze. I decided – for no particular reason – to take the passage on the right. Before long I came to another intersection, and this time I went straight. More and more often I came to forks in the path, always picking a direction at random. I had no idea how to get where I was going, but since I had no idea where that was, then it didn’t matter which way I went. Just call me the fucking Cheshire Cat.
After a myriad of twists and turns so complex it would have befuddled the Minotaur, exhaustion finally won out over stubbornness. I tripped over a thin cord about 6 inches off the ground that stretched across the width of the hallway. I saw it beforehand, but the circuits between my brain and the rest of my body had all but shut down, and I just couldn’t make myself stop. Instead I watched helplessly as my foot caught on the wire and I tripped, falling face first onto the stone floor. I did manage to get my hands out in front of me to help break my fall, but just barely.
No sooner had my foot touched the cord but a huge steel cage dropped from the ceiling with a crash, sending loud echoes of metal against stone up and down the halls and trapping me inside. Even from my prone position I knew the cage was solid, and I wouldn’t have had much chance of moving it even if I had the energy to try. The floor had shaken when the bars hit the ground, raising a cloud of dust that choked me up and made my eyes water.
“Good,” I said to no one in particular, “Now I can sleep.”
And I did.
Chapter Eleven:
The Council Of Thirteen
I awoke to discover myself lying flat on my back on something hard and cold. Actually, it wasn’t so much of an awakening as it was a slow, steady drift back to consciousness, and I lay there for a while with my eyes closed wondering where I was. After perhaps a minute of trying to piece things together, I remembered the alley, and Kagan, and the door. I remembered walking down a stone passageway, and the cage crashing down. Was I still in it? I didn’t know, but for a while I didn’t want to open my eyes and find out. I considered lying there until sleep took me again, and the thought was so soothing and comforting that for a time I did just that.
Sleep would not return to me, however, and before long I realized the harder I tried to get back to sleep, the more awake I became. Part of it was because I had slept all I needed to sleep, and my body simply refused to do it any longer. Another part was the growing fear that came with the realization that I’d been trapped like a lobster in a cage, with no way out and nothing to do but wait to have my claws banded and be thrown into the pot. But that’s not all. There was one other thing that kept me from going back to sleep.
Hunger.
It started as a small thing, barely noticeable. But as I lay there with my eyes closed trying not to think about anything, it grew more prominent. You know how it is when you’re hungry; the more you try to ignore it, the more insistent it becomes, until sooner or later it forces you out of bed to get a snack. But this was much worse than any hunger I’d ever felt before. Primal and all consuming. Instinctive and raw. Painful, even. Like my insides were being tied into knots and set on fire.
Finally I couldn’t stand the hunger or not knowing where I was any longer, and I opened my eyes to the dancing light of another flickering torch. The light would have been considered dim by the standards of most, but to me it was a welder’s arc. I held up a hand between the torch and my eyes to give them a chance to get to know each other better, and watched as the undulating shadows played their endless game of chase on the stone floor.
When I could see without squinting, I put my hand down and took in my surroundings. Instead of the steel cage, I was in a cell. Underneath me was a small slab of stone, which I’d been sleeping on, and that was the only thing in the room. The single torch – a luxury in a cell if ever there was one – was set into a bracket on the far wall. The other three walls were bare stone. There was no toilet or bucket, not even a hole in the floor. What would I do if nature called? Hopefully I wouldn’t be there long enough to find out.
The thick wooden door had a small barred window near the top, through which I noted more shifting light, probably from torches just like mine. It looked solid, very much like the doors in all those Hollywood dungeons. Someone had come upon me as I slept in my cage and carried me here. I wondered that they hadn’t woken me up to question me first. Then again, maybe they tried. I was so exhausted when the cage fell they couldn’t have awakened me with anything short of torture. I took it as a good sign that my captors, whoever they were, had not resorted to that.
Yet.
Then I noticed the smell. Blood. Blood and flesh.
It sprang at me from the dim light and almost sent me to the floor as my hunger, forgotten with the realization of my imprisonment, slammed back into me like a tractor trailer at eighty miles an hour. Eyes watering from the pain, I looked around the room to see a plate of raw meat on the floor. In that instant I was no longer Vincent Walker, freelance cartoonist and all around nice guy. I was something different; a beast with no remorse. Powerful and hungry. Dangerous. Less human than animal, and less animal than monster.
I leapt off the bed and scrambled across the floor to the rough clay plate. Once there, I shoved the raw flesh into my mouth as fast as I could. Watery blood dribbled down my chin and dripped onto my chest in the frenzied ecstasy of my meal. It didn’t feel like a cell anymore. In my mind I saw myself in savage colors, running with deadly purpose through a forest bathed in moonlight, the green of the leafy canopy dulled to a dark gray by the absence of the sun. I could see my prey, sense it, taste it in the air. I saw myself leaping, biting, killing…
All too soon the plate was empty I picked it up to lick away the last remaining drops of blood. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me my fangs were back; I could feel them. I ran my tongue over them, licking the last of the blood from the sharp points, shivering with remembered desire and power. I was the ultimate predator. The apex of all living things, the creature all other creatures feared. The undisputed master of the moonlight hunters. I ached to be free of my cell so I could run headlong into the night, heedless of the dangers that might wait. What could be more dangerous than me?
It wasn’t just the desire to feed that made me yearn for the outdoors, but the need to hunt. To find and chase down my prey. To kill it myself. To trade another creature’s death for my life and participate in the timeless struggle of predator versus prey. I wanted to be the victor in that struggle. To run with the wolves as they chased down a deer in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, or the lions as they pursued a zebra across the scraggly plains of the Serengeti. More than anything, I wanted out of this cell so I could feast.
“Aye. Ye feel it, don’t ye?” came a rusty voice from outside the cell door. I looked to the tiny barred window, no bigger than a paperback novel, and saw a pair of beady, black eyes surrounded by a mass of crow’s feet and leathery skin. I couldn’t see the rest of his face; even his nose was invisible in the tiny window.
“Yer wantin’ t’run, ain’t ye?” he continued, cackling laughter. “It’s writ all over yer face, so it is.”
I just stared at him, having no idea what to say.
“Been bitten, ye have,” he continued “But not finished, I’d wager, or no amount o’ plain flesh would sate ye, n’matter how raw an’ bloody it be.”
I grumbled something back that might have been “Shut your hole,” but I can’t say for certain.
“Want ter make me, do ye?” He chuckled, and I heard the jingling of keys. “A change o’ heart would do ye well, I say. Think on it.”
I heard him insert the key into the lock as he talked, and I tried to discern if he had others with him or if he was alone. I hadn’t heard any other voices accompanying him in the hallway, but that didn’t mean anything in itself. He could simply have quiet companions. After all, hadn’t a three hundred-or-so pound Joel Kagan been running after me at breakneck speed in complete silence? I had no reason to doubt this newcomer could do the same. With luck, he was alone. I might be able to take down one simple guard who sounded like a refugee from the thirteenth century. I was feeling much better after having slept and eaten. I felt strong again.
“N’matter,” he said. “Yer t’see the Council, y’know, and they’ll fix ye.” Again the soft cackling laughter, “One way’r ‘nother, they’ll fix ye.”
I failed to see the humor in his words, but I kept it to myself. I stood in the center of the cell as he opened the door, praying he would be alone, and for a short time it seemed I was going to get my wish. As the door opened I only saw one man, dressed in rough brown robes with a rope for a belt. He looked like a monk, all he lacked was a hood to cover his bald pate. Add a book of the Gospel-According-To-Whoever and the outfit would have been complete. Attached to the rope was a set of keys, presumably one of which he’d used to unlock my cell.
My first impression of him was that he looked soft. He was plump around the middle, with a round, pockmarked face. The top of his head was bare, but black, stringy hair fell from above and behind his ears to well below his shoulders. His dark eyes reflected the shifting torchlight from beneath bushy black eyebrows, which themselves jutted like furry shelves from a forehead that was partially hidden by a wide leather headband. In the center of the headband was the tooled image of a wolf’s head. He smelled like old blood.
His cheeks were round and full, his mouth a straight line between them. I could see no evidence that he possessed a pair of fangs like mine, but I thought he might, just the same. I got the feeling that, although he may look weak, he would be more than willing to teach someone otherwise should they try to test him. I still thought I could take him, and was planning on doing just that. The way I saw it, things just couldn’t be any worse than they already were. This ‘Council’ he spoke of wanted to see me, so I didn’t think he would kill me. They wanted something from me, otherwise I’d be dead already. Even if I failed in my attempt to escape, the worst he might do would be to knock me unconscious and drag me before this Council of his so they could ask me whatever questions they wanted to ask me.
Most likely, they want to ask me where Raine is. It sure seemed like the million dollar question. Where is Raine? Where is she hiding? They were going to be disappointed when they realized I didn’t know the answer.
After opening the door, my guard turned his back on the cell, and on me.
“Let’s go, then. They be waitin’ on ye,” he said, as he shuffled out of the doorway and turned to the left down the hall. I prepared myself to jump him, hoping to take him out fast before he could raise an alarm. I stepped out into the hallway behind him, making no more noise than a shadow. It must have been my lucky day. He was indeed alone, and seemed to be oblivious to the fact that I was creeping up right behind him. I smiled. This would be easy, after all. Even my hunger was back. I felt my teeth growing in my mouth. How would the monk taste?
Just another few seconds was all I needed to get ready, for my fangs – my best weapons – to come fully to the fore, and then it would be all over for the Renaissance Fair monk with the jangling keys and the limping stride. Five seconds, ten at the most.
I never got them.
Just as I was about to spring, I felt a touch on my shoulder. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! I’d forgotten to look behind me. How dumb could I get? Of course the guy wasn’t alone. Who in their right mind would send one man to fetch a prisoner? In my blind need for both escape and blood I’d ignored the obvious. Now it was at least two against one.
I tried to turn around but found my muscles wouldn’t obey my commands anymore. My arms felt sluggish and chilled, and my legs wobbled like jelly. From the hand on my shoulder came a great, sweeping cold that pierced the skin like a needle and slid underneath. From there it oozed through my entire body like frozen blood. I could feel my temperature drop as the cold wound its sluggish way through the veins in my arm and down the right side of my chest. As it spread I began to hear voices in the back of my head. They sounded hollow, as though coming to me from a great distance. I listened closely and realized I could make out words in the general din. Some of the voices screamed for justice, others begged for mercy. Some did both. I recognized them without knowing how. They were the tortured cries of the Damned.
When I looked around, I had left the stone hallway and now stood in the middle of a blazing lake of molten rock. My body shivered, and I wondered how I could feel cold with so much fire around me. Burning hot gasses bubbled noisily to the surface only to burst into flame when they reached the air, filling the area around me with the pungent smells of sulphur and burning flesh. All around me thousands of wretched, haggard fac
es screamed in pain and terror, their mouths opened impossibly wide as they sank lower and lower into the burning lake. Their howls only ended when their faces finally sank beneath the glowing surface. One man about twenty feet away from me screamed just before he went under. As I watched with a kind of fascinated horror, his hair caught fire and his skin crackled and turned black. His eyes simply melted, running like tears from empty sockets to bubble and sizzle atop the molten stone until they evaporated. A tiny wisp of smoke rose as the last bit of his hair burned. The only evidence anyone had been there at all. Then it, too, was gone.
What is this place? I wrapped my arms around my chest in an effort to defeat the illogical cold. My teeth began to chatter, and my whole body trembled; yet all around me the fires continued to burn and the people continued to sink. I looked down to see my own feet disappearing into the magma, and realized with growing terror that I was one of those people. I was sinking slowly into the molten lake. In another minute I’d be a puff of smoke, just like the millions of others floating toward the unseen ceiling somewhere above, lost in clouds of gas and steam. This is how it ends for me? Drowning in a lake of fire? I watched as my shins sank under the surface, then my hips. Despite the fire, I still felt no heat, only the soul-numbing cold that crawled ever deeper into my body.
The cold began to tingle, and the screams of those souls around me increased in both volume and number until I couldn’t distinguish individual voices anymore. Instead the cries of the dying became a single deafening roar. It was as if all those who had ever suffered a gruesome and painful demise had awakened as one to pour out their anger and frustration into my head, and all I could do was listen as I waited to join them.