The Shadow People
Page 5
After a while I saw figures silhouetted against the clouds. They were scaled to fit the enormous caverns, with legs as thick as columns, and they had shepherd's crooks in their hands. I wondered what animals they could be herding: in a moment my internal magic lantern provided a glimpse of thick-haired mammoths moving docilely among the giants' legs.
This illusion, which had been rather dim and dull-colored, gave place to another, more vivid one. It took a little while for the replacement; the mammoths thinned out and the light brightened. Then I saw rows of slaves with big wooden collars tending beds of red-spurred grain. They moved creakily, dipping from the hip and rising all in one piece, like wall beams.
Behind them the grain effloresced into big, fluffy scarlet clusters. Pollen blew from the clusters. Soon the air was full of reddish haze. I knew I was seeing the origin of the saucers of reddish meal. The tempting saucers of reddish, forbidden meal.
My next hallucination was much more grim. I walked through another cave where the Silent People had been feasting. The floor was littered with partially unfleshed bones. As I advanced, the bones rolled together and joined themselves, and after a moment one of the Underearth people stood up, grimacing at me with his foolish eyebrows.
He was unstable. When he tried to take a step toward me, his bones fell apart and rolled about on the rock floor again. They went through another period of attempted recombination, making unions and then crumbling, before they stood up once more, this time unmistakably a man. A man? Yes, and I thought I knew him. This raw being, with bones gaping through his destroyed skin—surely he was myself.
This illusion gave me an insight I was to retain. Up until that point, I hadn't known what I thought the inhabitants of Underearth were—malicious troglodytes, I suppose, with supernatural attributes and abilities. Now, even in my abnormal state of consciousness, I knew what the exile had meant when he had said that men and elves were all the same. However much we might have diverged, we had a common origin with them. Their blood was our blood. We came from the same root.
The realization woke a drowsy horror in me. I felt that I ought to feel more, that my sleepy acceptance of a common ancestry ought to be replaced by vivid, anguished abhorrence of the fact. But the complacence persisted, though it became mixed with a certain somnolent guilt.
Not only ought I to have felt more emotion, but it seemed, somehow, that I was responsible for my ancestry, as if I had chosen to be of that descent. Then even the guilt was eroded away, and the flux of visions continued unimpeded. And yet, all this time, through hallucination, emotion and illusion, I was moving steadily onward, at as quick a pace as was possible, with the sword held ready in my hand.
My last hallucination was a pretty thing. I saw a great golden torrent, molten living gold, pouring down from a high cliff into a rock basin beneath. Golden drops splashed out from the basin, transformed themselves in the air into fluttering little fishes, and lay in heaving pools of gold on the rock floor. The air was full of the flash and rush of gold.
The waterfall pleased me. It seemed to fill the passage from side to side; I would have to go under it in order to go forward at all, and I found the idea agreeable. I stepped forward confidently.
The next instant I was foundering in water up to my waist, drenched, chilled and buffeted in one of the typical icy, roaring Otherworld streams. My hallucination, like one or two earlier, had been secreted around a kernel of the actual; there really was a waterfall, though it was not much like the golden torrent I had fantasied.
The cold water brought me to my senses. I realized I had been hallucinating for a considerable period. I scrambled out of the basin the fall had dug for itself—it was about eight feet across—and stood on the other side panting for breath and shivering.
Once more, my first concern was for the sword. There wasn't a thread on me that was dry enough to serve as a towel, but I shook the loose moisture from the sword blade and tried to get it a little drier by drawing it between my thumb and forefinger. It wasn't much use: water ran down the blade from my soaked clothing faster than I could wipe it off. At last, I gave up. I decided I'd better have some food, before I started to have hallucinations again.
I ate as I walked along. The food tasted good, but unfamiliar. The water from the waterfall flowed noisily along the rock floor beside me. After a few hundred yards, it found another gap in the floor and plunged roaring into it, as abruptly as it had appeared from above on the level where I walked. I hardly noticed its disappearance. I had begun to think about Carol again.
The exile had taunted me with her death. I felt pretty sure he had been lying. But earlier, before his malice had become plain, he had made a much more disturbing statement: he had said, "Nobody ever goes back." And when I had pressed him for a reason, he had said, "If you'd eaten the atter-corn, you'd know." Fay had warned me not to eat or drink what I found in Otherworld. If Carol had eaten, would she—want to go back?
I'd find her, and find out. Fay wouldn't have sent me on a probably impossible quest. I wouldn't worry—If Carol—I—
The sword thrilled strongly in my hand.
It was neither a warning vibration nor an approving humming, but an announcement, unmistakable in character. I turned back a few steps, as if I had received a verbal admonition. There was an inconspicuous rift in the rock on the left of the passage. I entered it. It opened out after a yard or two. And there, chained with wooden chains facing the wall, was Carol. Her captors had put chunks and slabs of fox fire around her. Her silhouette was outlined by them.
She sat flaccid and motionless, as if life had withdrawn from her body and still clung only to a part of her skull. The hopelessness that came from her had a paralyzing quality. I felt that if I looked at her very long, I would lose my own wish to live.
There was a bowl of water and a saucer of the meal on the floor by her side.
Now that the moment had come, I couldn't speak. I touched her shoulder; it felt heavy and plastic, like modeling clay. She didn't move at all. For a moment, I wondered foolishly whether she really was a statue, an image, that the inhabitants of Otherworld had made and chained up in this place.
I touched her again. This time she spoke, in a voice without inflection, almost a whisper: "Go away."
I didn't know what to do. "Carol—I'm here," I said finally. I got in front of her. Her eyes were open, but she didn't seem to see me. If her body seemed like Plasticine, her eyeballs might have been wood.
Or was she dreaming with her eyes open? Again, I didn't know what to do. "It's me, Dick," I said.
"You can't be. I dreamed of you over and over, dreamed you'd come for me. Those dreams were so real. And I always woke up to being chained to the rock. Go away. I don't want to dream about you again. I hate those dreams. It hurts so much to wake up from them. Go away." Her voice had strengthened a little, and I felt this was a good sign.
"I'm real," I said. I began to rub my hands over her face, slowly and delicately, trying to rouse her. Her face felt flaccid and unnatural, like her shoulder, and it was icy cold.
She shook her head very slightly. "Not real. How can this be real? How could you have come here? Nobody knew I was taken. Nobody even knows about this place.
"When they brought me here, I thought I'd gone mad. They burst in through the matting in the basement. I fought them, my throat was so tight I couldn't even scream. You can't have come here."
"I have come, though," I said. "Fay helped me on the way. I'm really here. I've come to take you back."
"Back?"
"Yes. Back to the daylight. To Upper Earth."
Her face contracted under my fingers, as if she were weeping, but no tears came. "I can't go back," she said. There it was, what I had dreaded. "Why not?"
"I ate some of the corn."
I must have started involuntarily, for she said, with a touch of defensiveness, "I got so cold. I used to cry, and the tears froze on my cheeks. Now I can't cry. And I never feel cold. The corn made the difference."
"Bitter. But after a while, it hasn't any taste at all. It's like water in my mouth now.
"How long have I been here?"
"I don't know exactly. About a week, I guess."
"I thought it had been a long time, six months or a year. They're going to kill me, Dick. They brought me down here because they want to eat my flesh. This is a jail—where they eat the prisoners."
"No, they're not going to kill you," I said stoutly. "I'm going to take you back to the Bright World."
"I can't go."
"Why not?" I thought of the exile. "Do you like it here?"
"No. No. You can't imagine how I hate it. But when I ate the corn, I—took this place into myself. Now it's a part of me. I can't go back."
Her hopelessness seemed more psychological than a matter of a physical addiction. At least, that was what I would believe until it proved wrong.
I knelt in front of her, took her manacled hands—they had the same inert, clayey quality as the rest of her body—and put her palms against my face. "I'm Dick Aldridge," I said. "I used to be your lover. I still love you. I'm really here, no matter how unlikely it seems. And I'm going to take you back with me." I pressed her hands down hard against my cheeks.
"Your face is warm," she said, as if surprised. "But how can you take me back? You'd never be able to find your way out of here. And I'm in chains."
She was growing more animated, even though it was in maintaining the hopelessness of her rescue. "Your chains are wood," I said. "Watch."
I picked up the sword—I had been kneeling with the flat of the blade under me, for safety—and cut down against the bight of the chain that held Carol's wrists together. There was an instant's resistance, and then the wooden links parted as if they had been butter.
With equal ease I cut the length that held Carol to the rock. The fetters around her wrists and feet gave me a little more trouble—I had to saw at them—but I managed it "You see," I said. "I cut the chains. You're free."
She was rubbing her wrists. After a moment, she looked at me—really looked at me—and smiled. I suppose it was the first time anyone had ever smiled in Underearth. "Yes, you cut the chains," she said. "But how can you find our way up? There are passages and passages. And everything is dark."
"We'll get back the same way I got down," I said. "You saw what the sword can do. Come on."
I tried to put my hands in her armpits and help her to her feet, but she pushed me away. "Don't," she said. "I'm dirty. I wish I could have a bath."
This feminine concern for her person struck me as the most hopeful thing yet. "There's plenty of water ahead for you to bathe in," I said, "if you don't mind its being cold."
"Is there?" She scrambled to her feet and took a step toward me. "Dick, it—I—I can hardly believe it. It's a miracle. But I'll try to go back. Oh, Dick! You came for me. You followed me into this dreadful place." She was smiling, a tremulous, dazzling smile.
I felt so happy it made me dizzy. I'd have liked to kiss her, but I respected her prohibition. "Come on," I said. I started to walk out of the rift.
She followed me, and then halted. "I'm hungry," she said, like a child. Before I could stop her, she had picked up the saucer of meal and was lapping up some of the corn between her lips and her tongue. "Don't eat that," I said.
She put it down after a moment. "Why not? I've eaten it before."
She was right, but the incident made me uneasy. Nonetheless, I felt optimistic as I took her hand and led her out into the main passage. We had begun the long way back.
Chapter Seven
I was afraid she would be taken from me again. It seemed unlikely that the beings who had kidnapped Carol would relinquish her to the Bright World without a struggle. So I stood watch over her with the sword when she slept or rested, and stationed myself in front of her, with the sword over my knees, when I myself had to rest.
Our progress was slow. Carol was weak and lethargic, like somebody convalescing from a bad illness, and she could only move slowly. Also, her vision in the darkness of Underearth was astonishingly bad. When she was away from the infrequent patches of fox fire, she was completely blind. It struck me as odd that her vision was so much worse than mine, and I blamed it on the atter-corn she had been eating. But whatever the cause, we had to walk hand in hand for safety most of the time, and that slowed us down still more.
Yet we did advance. The attacks I expected were at first nothing but brief skirmishes with an isolated elf or two; when Carol and I reached the cavern of the feast without having been seriously threatened, I felt that a milestone had been reached.
We entered the cavern. The chunks of fox fire were still in place around the walls, and bones—I hoped Carol would not notice them—still littered the floor, but the cavern seemed otherwise empty. Our assailants were, in fact, lurking in the cover provided by the fringe of stalactite-stalagmite formations.
The sword gave warning an instant before they attacked, but, since they came from two directions at once, the warning wasn't much help. Even without Carol to protect, I should have been in a bad position.
I was holding her by the wrist. I ran for the cavern wall, towing her after me and hoping none of the attackers would make a grab at her. When I reached the wall, I shoved her up against it and stood in front of her, covering her with my body. She knew as well as I did what the situation was, but she hadn't uttered a sound.
There were about thirty of them, an astonishingly large number for beings as solitary as the Silent People are. They were armed with wooden cudgels and clubs. They obviously feared and loathed the sword—it appeared to affect them very much as a flamethrower would—but I couldn't engage all of them at once with it. They surrounded me in a semicircle, and while I was stabbing out at an assailant on one side, another would be launching a cautious blow at me from the opposite rim. I knew that sooner or later one of the blows was going to connect and I would be knocked unconscious. And Carol would be captured again.
We were saved by an unlikely accident. One of the attackers on my right took a swipe at me just as I thrust with the sword at the elf standing next to him. The one I thrust at winced aside from the intolerable metal and jostled the other, so that the blow meant for me actually landed on the temple of a club bearer several feet away from him.
It was only a glancing blow, but it threw them into momentary confusion. I made successful slashes at two of them, both on exposed parts of their bodies, and blood began to flow freely. The circle around me wavered, and then broke up entirely.
For an instant, I didn't understand what was happening. Then I saw that they were attacking each other, by twos and threes, sometimes with clubs and sometimes with their bare hands. Their faces were puckered with fury. The sight and smell of their own blood had intoxicated them.
I suppose this propensity to be made furious by one another is the reason that the Silent People are so rarely found in groups of more than three. Apparently their savagery is much increased by their presence in numbers. At the moment, I didn't speculate about it. I grabbed Carol by the wrist and ran for the exit from the cavern.
They didn't pay any attention to our going. By now the air was heavy with the smell of their blood, heavy and musky, like the smell of certain reptiles. For the first time, I observed that it had a faint blue phosphorescence.
After the episode in the cavern, Carol was constantly anxious. We both knew how close an escape we had had, but that didn't seem to be what was bothering her. It was a generalized apprehension, as if, in trying to escape, we were doing something so impossible that it was morally wrong.
She was still eating atter-corn—she always seemed to be able to find the dishes of it, despite her blindness—and I thought it might be the cause of her anxiety. But when I got her to try one of my chocolate bars instead, she didn't seem any less anxious. In the end, I decided what had happened to her before I
found her was enough to account for any amount of anxiety.
We didn't talk much. There was no point in drawing attention to ourselves. But as time passed and we went forward, her hand became more and more alive in mine. It was wonderful to feel it change from Plasticine to flesh. However anxious she was, her bodily resilience was returning. Holding her hand, I understood what Browning had meant when he said, "Your hand's a perfect woman in itself."
There were other attacks on us, mere skirmishes, nothing half so bad as the one in the cave. I knew we were on the last lap of our journey back to the light. Carol knew it, too, and I felt her growing more instead of less anxious. It made me a little impatient with her.
We entered the final cavern before the water barrier that separates the Bright World from Underearth, the cavern where I had first seen one of the Underearth folk beckoning to me. It was lighter than I remembered it; I realized how much darkness Carol and I had been struggling through.
We had gone only a few steps when Carl Hood appeared, stepping, apparently, out of the solid rock. He was wearing the green parka he usually wore, with the hood lying back on his shoulders, and he looked perfectly composed. There was a faint smile on his face.
Carol saw him almost as soon as I did. Her fingers jerked in my hand. Well, I knew she was keyed-up. She put her lips to my ear and spoke softly. "Kill him," she said.
"What?" I was really surprised.
"Kill him," she repeated. "You know how he always brings trouble with him. What's he doing down here? How did he get here? Kill him, Dick, while you still can."
"Why should I kill him?" I said. "He tried to put me on your trail. Besides, he's older than I am, and he's unarmed."
"How do you know he's unarmed? I don't trust him."
"I know you don't. But I can't kill him because you don't like him. It's not reason enough." Privately, I felt that Carol's suffering was still affecting her judgment. Hood's presence here was odd, certainly, but he had given me the first hint of what had become of her.