by L. J. Smith
Shoulders hunched, Jenny turned her head slowly, trying to locate the sound. And there, in the darkness, she saw eyes.
They glowed with their own light, like foxfire. They were cold, ravenous. She recognized them from her grandfather's closet.
The Shadow Men. The Shadow Men were here with her.
Their eyes seemed to stare out of the wall itself.
They were in the rock, somehow. Jenny felt the hairs on her arms erect, felt a prickling that ran from her little fingers to her palms and all the way up to her elbows. A primitive reaction to what she saw in front of her.
Everyone, everywhere, knew about the eyes, she thought. Underneath, everybody really knew, even though people tried to suppress the knowledge in the daytime. At night sometimes the knowledge burst out-the sense of watching eyes that shared the world with humans. Eyes that were ancient and infinitely malevolent and that had no more concept of pity than a wasp or a T.Rex.
Except that they were gifted with intelligence- maybe more intelligence than humans. Which made them doubly terrifying.
And they want you terrified, Jenny. So just keep your head. They're here to scare you, but they won't do anything to you. But they're whispering. . . . Such a juvenile thing. They were whispering gibberish-and it frightened her sick. Distorted, unnatural sounds. Like records played backward, at low speed.
She couldn't help listening and trying to make sense of it-even while she was terrified of doing just that. She didn't want the gibberish to make sense.
Then, to her surprise and vast relief, the eyes went out.
They didn't fade away as much as seem to recede across some great distance. The voices lingered for a moment and then died.
Thank you, Jenny thought fervently, leaning her bent head on her knees. Oh, thank you. The silence seemed almost welcome now.
Then she heard another sound, a liquid rippling that the hissing voices had obscured. She turned the dying flashlight toward the wall with the steps, where the eyes had been. Then she jumped up with a gasp and brought it closer.
The steps-were moving. No. As she brought the flashlight right up to the wall she felt a splash of wetness against her hand. The steps weren't moving, they were just covered with water.
Water was flowing down the rock staircase, smooth as glass. Just like the waterfalls in the mine ride.
Only faster. It was pouring in a steady sheet all along the width of the crack-maybe three or four feet. It was flooding out like a hotel fountain.
Strangely, it seemed just an inconvenience at first, and not nearly as scary as the eyes had been.
Jenny didn't recognize it as a danger until her feet were soaked.
It's not flowing out through the boulders, she realized slowly. Weird. They must be really packed to be sealed. Or maybe there's just a blank wall behind them and only the ceiling was open when I fell through. But now even the ceiling's blocked up.
And that water's still coming. ...
It was coming, and faster every minute, and icy cold. Her feet were actually numb inside her hiking boots. Too bad I lost the fanny pack-I had those Baggies for wading, she thought, and then she realized that she was going to die.
This was a sealed cavern. Sealed. Smaller than her bedroom and filling up faster than her dad's swimming pool. The water was going to come in and in- -and where will the air go? she wondered, stumped for a moment by this problem in physics. For a moment she thought she was saved. If the air couldn't get out, no more water could get in.
But there was probably room for the air to go out the ceiling, beyond the boulders somewhere. Up in some place Jenny couldn't find because the flashlight was completely dead now. She was standing in darkness, with water rising around her calves, and if she tried to climb those boulders blindly and pull at them, they would crush her. And if she didn't, she would eventually be left with her mouth up against the ceiling, gasping for the last tiny breath of air before the water took her.
She wasn't hysterical, but thoughts were rushing through her mind with dizzying speed. She was remembering the flooded-cavern scene in the mine ride above, and the clawed hand reaching above the boulders. And she thought she knew what some of the whispering voices had been saying.
"Die . . . die . . ."
So that had been the meaning of Julian's little smile. . . .
The oddest thing of all was that, even as the water rose higher and higher, she couldn't seem to bring herself to believe it.
Julian wanted her dead? Oh, it shouldn't be surprising-he was evil, wasn't he? Completely evil.
And he'd been in a fury when he left.
But-dead?
The water was around her thighs now. It was cold-painfully cold. What a waste it had been to dry her jeans off earlier.
Without consciously knowing how she'd gotten there, she found herself kneeling on one of the waterfall's steps, pressing her hands against the crack, trying to stuff a rock inside. It did no good at all; she could feel the water gushing out in the dark, chilling her hands.
Maybe Julian just wanted to humiliate her-to frighten her until she begged for help. But, no, that didn't make sense. Julian knew she wouldn't beg. She wouldn't give in to him. He'd found that out when he'd set the bees on her in the first Game. Jenny had been willing to die then rather than surrender to him.
And so he must know she would be now, and so he must want her dead, really dead.
Unless-
Jenny wouldn't have thought it possible for her to become more frightened than she already was.
She'd have thought there would be some limit, that her mind would go numb. But although her body was numbing with cold, her mind was suddenly reeling with a new idea that made sheer black horror sweep through her.
What if Julian didn't know? What if he weren't the one doing this?
Julian had stormed off in a rage-and then they had come. What if this water was their doing?
She'd be dead before he found out.
The thought resounded in her mind with a queer certainty. Julian had been at odds with the other Shadow Men once before-when five-year-old Jenny had first opened her grandfather's closet. The other Shadow Men had wanted to kill her, their lawful prey. But Julian had objected. He'd wanted her, wanted her alive.
And she'd stayed alive, because her grandfather had given himself up to them. But now . . .
Now, she thought, they're finishing the job. And Julian doesn't know.
It was odd, but she was suddenly sure of that. Julian might be evil, but the other Shadow Men were worse. More twisted, more malign. In the paper house, Julian had controlled everything-but she wasn't in the paper house now. She was in the Shadow World itself, and all the Shadow Men were masters.
The water was up to her neck. So cold, Jenny thought-and then the idea came.
What if it got more cold-ice cold? Julian had conjured up a torch with the torch rune, Kenaz. So, maybe-She was so numb she hardly knew whether she was crawling or floating, but she found the top step and she found the rock she'd tried to stuff in the crack. She was blind, but she could feel the wall, and the rune she wanted was the simplest shape imaginable.
Just one stroke, up and down. A capital without any bars. The ice rune, Isa.
She scratched it directly over the crack, directly in the flow of water. And then, blind and almost paralyzed, she waited.
It was too cold for her to tell at first if it worked.
But then she felt jagged sharpness instead of the smooth numbing gusher.
The flow over the rune Isa had become a frozen waterfall. Although the water around Jenny remained liquid, it had stopped rising.
I did it! I stopped the water! It's ice, beautiful ice!
She sucked in deep breaths of air excitedly, not afraid to use it up any longer. Oh, God, it was good to breathe. And the rune, the rune had worked for her. She couldn't control the Shadow World with her mind, but the runes worked for anyone.
It was only after a few minutes that she realized she was going to d
ie anyway.
Not by drowning-or at least not entirely, although that would come at the end. She was going to freeze to death.
It was too cold-had been too cold even before she had frozen the waterfall. Being here was like floating in the ocean the night the Titanic had sunk. She was going to die of hypothermia-lose consciousness and sink. And then drown.
And there was nothing at all she could do about it.
She was already too weak when her stupefied mind stumbled upon the idea of the torch rune.
Kenaz. If she could remember it-if she could find her rock- or move her fingers . . .
But the rock was gone and her fingers were too anesthetized and her brain was fogging up.
Blanking out gently, almost like the beginning of sleep. Kenaz ... she waved the frozen lumps of flesh that were her hands vaguely under the water, but of course no torch appeared. Water could be frozen into ice, but not kindled into fire. She couldn't change the rules of the elements at her whim.
Disconnected scraps of thought drifted through her mind. It didn't hurt much anymore. Not so bad. And nothing seemed so urgent-whatever had been bothering her moments earlier wasn't as important now.
Help. She had a vague feeling that she might call for help. But it seemed-it seemed there was some reason not to.
Wouldn't hear me. That's it. Was that it? He wouldn't hear me anyway. Too far away.
It didn't matter now. Nothing mattered.
Gebo, she thought, one flash of coherence, of memory, just before her head slid under the water.Gebo, the rune of sacrifice.
CHAPTER 7
Oh, Tom.
Dying was painless-but sad. It hurt to think of the people she was leaving behind.
She kept picturing her parents, imagining what they would say when Dee and the others got home and told them. If Dee and the others got home and told them.
Her thoughts were very scattered, like dandelion fluff blowing erratically on the wind.
Mr. and Mrs. Parker-Pearson-Summer's parents -had been so hurt when they lost Summer. Jenny hated to think of her parents hurt that way.
And Tom . . . what would happen to Tom? Maybe Julian would let him go. No point in keeping him after Jenny was gone. But that didn't seem likely. Julian was a Shadow Man, he belonged to a race that didn't have gentle emotions. They weren't capable of pity.
Julian might take out his anger on Tom instead.
Please, no, Jenny thought... but it didn't seem to matter that much anymore. Even her sadness was fading now-breaking up and floating away. She was dead, and she couldn't change anything.
Strange, though, that a dead person could suddenly feel pain-physical pain. A burning. The frigid water had stopped hurting a long time ago, and since then she'd had no sense of her own body.
Trapped in absolute darkness and utter silence, too numb to feel any sensation, she didn't seem to have a body. She was just a drifting collection of thoughts.
But now-this burning had started. At first it seemed very distant and easy to ignore. But it didn't stop. It got worse. She felt heat: a tingling, prickling heat that demanded her attention. And with the heat she began to have a body again.
Hands. She could feel her hands now. And feet, she had feet. She had a face, defined by thousands of tiny red-hot needles. And she was aware of a vague, fuzzy glow.
Open your eyes, she told herself.
She couldn't. They were too heavy, and everything hurt so much. She wanted to go back into the darkness where there wasn't any pain. She willed the light to go away.
"Jenny! Jenny!"
Her name, called in tones of love and desperation. Poor Tom, she thought dimly. Tom needed her-and he must be frantic with worry. She should go to Tom.
But it hurt.
"Jenny. Please, Jenny, come back-"
Oh, no. No, don't cry. It'll be all right.
There was only one way to make it all right, and that was to come back. Forget how much it hurt.
All right, do it, then. Jenny concentrated on the fuzzy glow, trying to make it come closer. Pulling herself toward it. The pain was terrible-her lungs hurt. But if she had lungs, she could breathe.
Breathe, girl!
It hurt like hell, and darkness sucked at her, trying to drag her down again. ' "That's it, Jenny.
Keep fighting Oh, Jenny . . ."
With a tremendous effort she opened her eyes. Golden light dazzled her. Someone was rubbing her hands.
I did it for you, Tom.
But it wasn't Tom. It was Julian.
Julian was the one rubbing her hands, calling out to her. Golden light danced on his hair, his face.
It was a fire, Jenny realized slowly, and she was in another cavern, slightly bigger than the last.
She was dry, somehow, and lying in a sort of nest of white fur, very soft, very comfortable. The heat of the fire was bringing her back to life.
The pain wasn't so bad now, although there was still an unyielding knot of ice in her middle. And she felt weak-too weak and exhausted to think properly. It was Julian, not Tom-but she couldn't really take that in.
It didn't even look like Julian . . . because Jenny had never seen Julian look afraid. But now the blue eyes were dark with fear and as wide as a child's- the pupils huge and dilated with emotion.
Julian's face, which had always seemed molded for arrogance and mockery, was white even in the firelight-and thinner somehow, as if the skin were drawn tight over bones. As for the dangerously beautiful smile that usually curved Julian's lips . . . there wasn't a trace of it.
Strangest of all, Julian seemed to be shaking. The hands that held Jenny's had stopped their rubbing, but a fine, continuous tremor ran through them. And Jenny could see how quickly he was breathing by the way his chest rose and fell.
"I thought you were dead," he said in a muted voice.
So did I. Jenny tried to say it, but only got as far as a hitching breath.
"Here. Drink this, it should help." And the next moment he was supporting her head, holding a steaming cup to her lips. The liquid was hot and sweet, and it sent warmth coursing into the cold, hard knot inside her, loosening it and chasing away the last of the pain. Jenny felt herself relaxing, lying still to absorb the fire's heat. A feeling of well-being crept through her as Julian laid her back down.
Gently. Julian was being gentle . . . but Julian was never gentle. He belonged to a race that didn't have gentle emotions. They didn't feel tenderness, weren't capable of pity.
She probably shouldn't even accept help from him-but he looked so haunted, like someone who had been through a terrible fright.
"I thought I'd lost you," he said.
"Then you didn't send the water?"
He just looked at her.
It didn't seem to be the time for recriminations. Oh, she probably ought to say something-maybe list the kind of things he'd done to her in the past. He'd hunted her in every way imaginable.
But here, now, in this little cavern surrounded by rock, with no one present but the two of them, and no sound but the soft roar and crackle of the fire ... all that seemed very far away. Part of a past life. Julian didn't seem like a Shadow Man, didn't seem like a hunter. After all, if he were a predator, he had his quarry right here, exhausted and helpless. He'd never have a better chance.
If he wanted her, she wouldn't even be able to put up a fight.
Instead, he was looking at her with those queer dazed eyes, still black with emotion.
"You would have cared if I died," she said slowly.
The eyes searched hers a moment, then looked away.
"You really don't know, do you?" he said in an odd voice.
Jenny said nothing. She pulled herself up a little in the white nest, so she was sitting.
"I've told you how I feel about you."
"Yes. But ..." Julian had always said that he was in love with her-but Jenny had never sensed much tenderness in the emotion. She might have said this, but for some reason it seemed-inappropriate-to say it to s
omeone who looked so lost. Like a child waiting for a blow. "But I've never understood why."
"Haven't you." It wasn't even a question.
"We're so different." Madness to be talking about this. But they were both looking at each other, now, quietly, as they had never sat and looked before. Eyes unwavering-but without challenge. It meant something to look into someone's eyes this long, Jenny thought. She shouldn't be doing it.
But of course she had wondered, she had wondered from the beginning what he could possibly see in her. How he could want her-so much. Enough to watch over her since she was five years old, to pierce the veil between the worlds to come after her, to hunt her and stalk her as if he thought about nothing else.
"Why, Julian?" she said softly.
"Would you like a list?" His face was completely blank, his voice clipped and emotionless.
"A-what?"
"Hair like liquid amber, eyes green as the Nile," he said, seeming utterly dispassionate about it. He could have been reading a page of homework assignments. "But it's not the color, really, it's the expression. The way they go so deep and soft when you're thinking."
Jenny opened her mouth, but he was going on.
"Skin that glows, especially when you're excited. A golden sheen all over you."
"But-"
"But there are lots of beautiful girls. Of course. You're different. There's something inside you that makes you different, a certain kind of spirit. You're -innocent. Sweet, even after everything that's been thrown at you. Gentle, but with a spirit like flame."
"I'm not," Jenny said, almost frightened. "Audrey sometimes says I'm too simple--"
"Simple as light and air-things people take for granted but that they'd die without. People really should think more about that."
Jenny did feel frightened now. This new Julian was dangerous-made her feel weak and dizzy.
"When I first saw you, you were like a flood of sunshine. All the others wanted to kill you. They thought I was crazy. They laughed. . . ."
He means the other Shadow Men, Jenny thought.
"But I knew, and I watched you. You grew up and got more beautiful. You were so different from anything in my world. The others just watched, but I wanted you. Not to kill or to use up the way-the way they do with humans sometimes here. I needed you."