He finally spat out the torch onto the stone surface ahead of him, and lay panting in great, shuddering gasps.
‘Too close,’ he blurted into the darkness. ‘That was far too close!’
Gapp was a nervous wreck by now, after two close shaves in less than three minutes, and he could feel his whole body quivering like jelly. The torch was flickering with only a faint blue glow now, so as he lay on his belly, he occupied himself for the next few minutes with fastening on a little more bachame, and relighting it.
Here the ledge was only a foot or so below the tunnel roof, so Gapp was forced to proceed by crawling on his elbows. This was the closest he had ever come to understanding what it felt like to be an earthworm. On occasions he had to squeeze through gaps of no more than a few inches leeway, where he could feel the rock scraping him both at front and back.
Long minutes passed in such torturous progress.
At length he came to a wider section of the tunnel, and there he beheld something rather interesting. Just visible in the light of the flame was a fall of tiny droplets of water, sprinkling in a fine, blood-red haze from a hole in the middle of the tunnel roof. Gapp peered up at it in wonderment. The hole was fairly large, but without much water coming through. Could it be that there was another stream up there somewhere?
A trickle that size did not necessarily mean that there was a tunnel large enough for him to crawl through. It might be tiny, just a crack in the rock. And if he became stuck there . . .
He peered at the ledge ahead of him, and thought about the narrow gaps already that had nearly been the death of him. Gap the Gapp-Slayer. Ha! That was not funny . . . Again he glanced up at this new hole, which, now he came to think about it, might be just big enough to haul himself up through. It then occurred to him that if he were to continue following the stream along its course ahead of him, it was bound at some time to lead him down. No, what he needed was to find a way up.
On an impulse he leapt for the hole. He grabbed the edge of it, and panicked when he felt how slick it was. But he held on doggedly and hung dangling above the lethal current. He braced himself for a second, then heaved himself up through the hole – and scrambled onto the floor of the new cavern he was in.
He had succeeded in leaving the tunnel behind him.
He hardly dared to hope as he looked about himself at his new surroundings. After adding a little more pitch-gel to his torch, Gapp held it up and stared around at this subterranean wonderland he had come to.
To his utter bewilderment, he found that he could see quite far. The feeble flames of his little knife-torch were reflected back by a million points of glittering light, all of them the most marvellous and varied colours, that reached back a dizzying distance that hurt his eyes and confused his brain. From the near-lightless wormhole he had just emerged from, he was now in a cavern so vast the range of his sight seemed to simply fall away, and beyond that he could feel by the air that a vast space waited for him out there in the darkness. This cavern was absolutely huge.
His still unsteady senses caused him to lurch suddenly, and he had to close his eyes to regain his balance. Deeply he breathed in the fresher air. In contrast to the tunnel below, it now felt as if he was out in the open once more.
It was also, he noticed, so quiet in here. Below, he had grown used to the constant roar of water, but it was just a dull rumour now, more like the echo of a bad dream that was gradually fading in his head. Then, as his ears adjusted to the welcome stillness of the cavern, he began to hear the gentle, musical ringing of a hundred tiny trickles of water dripping into deep pools.
Gapp wiped the steam from his spectacles and gazed spellbound at the weird and wonderful rock formations that protruded from all directions. He had never in his life seen anything like these stalagmites, stalactites and other strange shapes, nor even heard tell of their like before, not even in the wildest and most fanciful boastings of the bards. He marvelled at what they might actually be, whether they were plant, animal, or some other life-form unique to this world he had entered. He even wondered if the cavern had been created by some mad troglodyte artist or wizard.
Some outcrops were a pure, brilliant white, while others were orange, gold, blue, purple, green or deep red. Some undulated smoothly, bumpily or curvaceously, others stuck out sharply in a bouquet of crystalline, needle-like spines.
Other tunnels he could now make out, branching off in all directions, leading out of the main cavern. Some were filled with clusters of rainbow-hued limestone icicles, and resembled gaping, fang-filled mouths. The floor and the roof rose and plummeted to a score of different levels. The whole place had a chaotic randomness to it that defied both reason and gravity.
Gapp exhaled as a sudden spasm of shivering overtook him, and watched with fascination as his breath turned to sparkling motes of ice. It was freezing in here, but it was a cold that seemed to Gapp somehow pristine and wholesome. Soft currents of air wafted in from the various tunnels and brushed past his face like tendrils of dew-spangled cobweb.
This cavern had an air of undefiled sanctity about it, and Gapp felt like an intruder. He was seeing things that men from the world above were not meant to see – probably never had seen. Perhaps he was the first human to witness it. His heart accelerated at the thought.
Tentatively, he began exploring.
The next few hours saw the young Aescal going from one cave to another. Each tunnel, each cave, each tiny hole he found himself crawling through, provided a new wonder. He now wore most of the bachame wrapped round him under his shirt, partly because of the cold but also to dry it with the heat of his body. This provided a constant supply of material for his torch, so he was never deprived of the sight of this underworld’s alien beauty.
He was surprised to find that he was still able to appreciate such things, considering that he was hopelessly lost hundreds or even thousands of feet underground, unlikely to ever see daylight again. Despite his mad struggle for life when caught in the stream, despite channelling every last fibre of his mind, body and spirit into the struggle to survive, a certain resignation to his fate had settled into him now. He was ready to take every minute as it came, and not concern himself too much with what might happen next. Something in him kept nagging at him, to admit that he was in all probability lost beyond redemption, that his supply of bachame would not last very long, and that soon he would be blundering around this cold, sharp, alien world in total dark, and eventually, after long miserable days of starvation, he would simply wink out of existence as if he had never been.
But his ordeal in the tunnel had brought out something in him that would not go away now, something as hard and icy as the stalagmites he wandered among. And so he continued, and was calm.
Hour after hour, still the boy journeyed on – ever exploring, forging ahead, eager to see what lay around the next corner. Gapp grew weak with hunger, but that only seemed to drive him on ever further.
In any case, there really was not anything else for him to do.
Time dragged by, measured only by the tightening coils of pain that gripped his empty stomach and by the dwindling supply of his bachame. He slept only once, curling up in a ball of shivering misery beneath a shelf of overhanging rock. The constant dripping of limestone from above disturbed his slumber, and filled it with troubled dreams. When he awoke and ignited a fresh pitch-smeared rag, he was horrified to see that this ‘stone-bleeding’ had deposited upon him a thin, crystalline coating that made him believe at first that the rocks themselves were trying to turn him into one of themselves, and draw him eternally into their world.
Could it be that they resented his movement, his warmth, his light?
Strange things began appearing around him now. He was not sure what they were, and to begin with he did not care, but as time went by they became more apparent. At first just vague images on the periphery of his vision, it was possible they were shadows cast by the uncertain flickering of his burning knife-hilt, but before long they began darting
about in front of him, criss-crossing his path, sometimes even stopping as if to stare at him before fleeing back into the shadows. But whenever he strained his bleary eyes for a closer look – for they remained always just beyond the halo of his torchlight – he would see nothing at all.
He dimly wondered whether he was hallucinating through hunger, or illness. But eventually they did come fleetingly within the range of his light, just long enough to see that they were definitely figures.
Figures of short, misshapen people, with long skinny arms, big ears and twitching claws. They emerged from the walls, appearing out of solid rock, dancing and cackling in tiny, shrill voices, then disappearing again, through either wall, roof or floor. They seemed two-dimensional like shadows, and as lacking in substance as air. But they were there nevertheless.
Gapp half-ran, half-staggered onwards in a cloudy haze of fear. He was still hoping that this was a dream, but they gathered around him more closely now, seeming to feed off his draining life-force. They hissed like spiders, snatched at his clothing as he blundered past them, growled, spat acid, and glared at him hatefully with their huge, luminous eyes.
Gapp glanced behind him, and saw with horror that the whole tunnel was now filled with them. He spun away and plunged on ahead. But now his legs no longer seemed to move; it was like a dream of running, of escaping, in which each step seems to last forever. His whole body felt weighed down like lead.
Suddenly his mind exploded with blinding colour as he smashed his head into a wooden crossbeam. At once full consciousness returned to him in a searing flash of pain, and immediately the apparitions vanished. Fragments of old, rotting wood went flying, and he realized that he had crashed through some sort of barricade. He fell flat on his face and his torch went out.
Reality had returned.
Groggily, the lost traveller picked himself up off the ground.
Kinayda! he wondered in utter perplexity. Where am i now?
Man-made barricades in a natural cave network did little to sort out his confusion. Nevertheless, he could not restrain the sudden surge of excitement at finding himself possibly in the realms of real people again. For a short while, hope rekindled itself in his heart. And with the return of hope came the ending of his sense of resignation, and inevitably the recommencement of his anxiety.
Fear stole over him again, and he fumbled in the dark for his fire-making equipment. Those horrible little imps had chilled him to the marrow, and he knew he had only minutes before the pitch darkness finally drove him completely out of his mind. This time he did not bother to take off his bachame under-shirt – what was left of it – but instead simply tore at the fraying material in panic while he still wore it, until a clump of it came off in his hand. Hurriedly he smeared the last of his pitch-gel over it and set about striking sparks.
Eventually he had kindled a new flame and held the burning rag up to see around.
Hope leapt up anew; the unmistakable sight of neatly excavated rock walls was the first thing to greet his eyes. He was now in a tunnel that had been fashioned by people. There on the ground lay the broken knife-hilt he had been using as a torch, but more importantly, scattered about were several lengths of wood. Probably from the barricade. On closer inspection, they were satisfactorily dry.
Within minutes, Gapp brandished aloft a two-foot length of brightly burning timber. Compared with the measly tufts of bachame cloth he had been using, this new faggot blazed like a beacon in the darkness. His fear subsided, and he almost sobbed with relief.
‘Now,’ he said to himself grimly, ‘let’s get this over with.’
His illness and hunger now forgotten, Gapp wasted no time in further surveying his surroundings. He shielded his eyes from the glare of his new torch, and peered down the dilapidated passage that stretched ahead of him. It was littered with collapsed pit-props and other debris, and so cramped he had to stoop low to avoid cracking his head.
Whoever mined these tunnels must have been small indeed, he considered. Haugers, he guessed at first, but reminded himself that the Haugrim rarely resorted to mining. Still, that scarcely mattered now, and without further tarry, he plunged on up the shaft.
Long minutes passed, and still the passage continued. So far he had not seen any other shafts or side-passages. Soon he found it becoming difficult to breathe properly, and he longed to stand up straight and stretch his backbone.
Eventually however, he did come to a side-passage. He took it without the slightest hesitation, and pressed on eagerly. So eagerly, in fact, he did not think to mark the turning.
As he progressed, more passages now opened out to either side of him. Excitedly he took whichever looked most promising, and never once paused to leave a marker. He just kept lurching onwards with head bent low, and persevered in this random exploration with what little wit still remained to him.
New passages came and went with increasing frequency. Nearly all he tried led to a dead end, either an abandoned pit face or a collapsed shaft. But this deterred the half-crazed youth little. Tunnels opened this way, turned that, branched off and twisted almost back around upon themselves. There was little logic or pattern to them, yet Gapp felt at home within their random chaos. None, however, led upwards.
Within an hour, Gapp was hopelessly lost in a labyrinth of tunnels. In one brief moment of lucidity, the boy realized just how lost he was; he had a brief vision of himself running like a rat down each new passage, wearing a grin of such stupidity and not appearing to have the slightest notion or care where he was going.
He halted straight away, and the old fears and the panic began to rise in him again like vomit. He was lost and nearing the point of total exhaustion. Never before had he felt so tired. Fighting against the despair that threatened to overwhelm him once more, he leant back against the wall and slid down to land heavily on his backside.
As he sat there in misery, tears welling up in his eyes, the dancing shadows began to return. He could hear their horrible little voices whispering malevolently, somewhere nearby. He looked up fearfully and, to his surprise and bewilderment, found he could see all the way back to the natural caverns! It was from there that they came, a swarm of weaving, leaping, dancing shapes that poured in through the broken barricade. As they swiftly drew nearer, the boy could only stare in horror, too paralysed by fear to make any move.
Within seconds they were all about him; they pounced towards him, flitted away, twisted and span, cavorted and writhed; and all the while they pointed their sharp little fingers in mockery and laughed in those disgusting, shrill little voices.
‘GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!’ Gapp cried in anguish.
Suddenly they were gone, vanished as though they had never existed. There was nothing to be heard but the sound of his own voice as it echoed away down the dark, labyrinthine passages.
Wearily he staggered to his feet and plodded on. Though the shadow figures were gone, he still saw faces now and then. They stared up at him from the ground in a silent scream of death, devoid of flesh and half-buried by loose scree and soil. They did not appear human, and he did not even know if they were really there at all, or existed only in his mind. But as long as he could not hear them, he did not particularly care. He did, however, allow himself the satisfaction of hearing those stony faces crunching into granules beneath his feet.
He did not know how long he went on for after that. But once he heard his voice wailing:
‘Is anyone there? Please, let there be someone there! I’m so cold!’
Suddenly he heard a sharp click. It was like the snapping of a catch, or something; and he was sure he could hear voices – shouting even. It sounded as if it came from . . .
. . . That passage there!
No. It was the voices in his head again, he knew. He pulled himself together again, and moved quickly on.
It was a pity, he reflected as he trudged on, because that was the only shaft that had actually led upwards. But no; that way led only to madness.
It was another
two days before Gapp finally saw daylight.
Starvation and the mental strain of his entombment (to say nothing of his debilitating fever) had taken almost their full toll on him, and his mind had retracted into a world of darkness and disturbing half-dreams. But finally, as if rewarding his mindless perseverance, the palest hint of light far ahead began to dimly register in his withdrawn consciousness.
Had he been in a fit enough mental state to register such things, Gapp might have noticed that this part of the mines was much different from that of two days previously. Tunnelled by another race, it was far older, roomier, danker.
He squinted at the faint glimmer uncertainly. Yes, there was no doubt about it; that was natural light up ahead!
He lurched ahead shakily, and his cracked mouth opened in an attempt to cry out exuberantly. The pale shaft of light grew steadily brighter the closer he came to it. He even fancied he could smell fresh air!
Daylight! his mind sang.
As he approached, he saw that the light came from around a turn in the passage.
Probably a side shaft, he thought optimistically, already imagining himself striding proudly up the gently sloping tunnel towards the world of daylight above. But he could not still a nagging little voice at the back of his mind that warned him it might be a long vertical shaft with no way of scaling it.
Nevertheless, without further hesitation he stumbled around the corner – then skidded to a halt as he saw what lay before him.
There was a pool, a large, square pool that almost entirely filled the chamber he had arrived in. A narrow, crumbling and partly decayed ledge ran along one side of it, and continued on to an upward-leading shaft; it was from this that the daylight dimly filtered into the mine. Yet this was little source of joy for Gapp, as his attention became riveted upon the pool it illuminated.
It was like a vast and bubbling cauldron of poisonous, phosphorescent green acid. It churned around slowly and unnaturally in a whirlpool, and had every appearance of possessing a life of its own. There seemed to be things moving about just below its surface, and as the boy stared, he realized these were huge bubbles. They would swell below the glistening surface, then pop like a ripe pustule, releasing a foul vapour like the breath of a halitotic cadaver, and spit luminescent globules of viscous slime all over the hissing, melting walls. A noxious cloud arose from it in sickening waves, and the entire cavern reeked of plague and mutation.
The Wanderer's Tale Page 34