by Lee Isserow
“Don't get fresh,” he scoffed, recalling her reaction at the Lodge. She shot a swift, sharp fist to his kidneys and continued, putting her hands on top of his, and reaching around behind him, and tracing out a sigil over the back of their right hands. Taking a breath, she lifted their palms three inches into the air.
Their bodies moved with their hands, feet lifting up off the ground in time with their palms leaving the earth. They rose back to their feet, both standing three inches off the ground, no longer making contact with the cracking and snapping twigs below.
Balancing above the uneven blanket of discarded plant matter was no easy feat, but the two of them found their centre of gravity and walked silently towards the dead bushes. Rafe craned his neck to look beyond them, and smiled. His tracking had been accurate.
With a sharp tug at the foliage, it rolled to the side to reveal a dark and dingy entrance to a cave. There was an unnerving silence inside, broken only ever so briefly by a drop of water falling from the stalactites above.
He held his arm out, indicating for Ana to enter ahead of him. She raised an eyebrow, staring incredulously. As much as he had the best of intentions, she did not consider it chivalrous to send a young woman in front of him into a terrifying, dark chasm.
Rafe sighed and took the lead, with the first steps into the wet, muddy opening of the cave. As soon as he did so, he found his feet slipping on the air beneath him. The enchantment to his shoes kept them three inches from the surface of the ground below, but the transition from solid ground to mud was making him unsteady. He threw his arms out to balance, then took another step, looking to Ana like a clumsy tightrope walker disappearing into the centre of the earth. She followed him in, and found herself shooting out her arms for balance as well. Ana grimaced to herself, regretting her silent mockery of him.
As they got deeper into the cave, their eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the mud beneath their hovering feet gave way to solid rock that was slick with water dripping down from above. The cavern in no way felt safe, and the further in they got, the more Ana was wondering if they were traversing deep into the heart of a mountain that could collapse on them at any given moment.
Her fingers traced along the texture of the walls, eroded smooth by millennia of water running down it. A shriek sounded out, echoing around them. Ana's fingers left the wall to cast, readying to blow the damn thing into a thousand pieces.
But there was no creature, not yet. Just a glare from Rafe, wide eyes glancing over his shoulder, followed by the realisation that the shrill tone was not the scream of a mystical entity, but the old rotary ringtone of her phone.
She scrambled to grab it from her pocket and killed the call, knocking it onto silent before slipping it away again. She mouthed “Sorry!” to Rafe, but he had already returned to trekking deeper into the darkness.
The passage opened out ahead, splitting into three directions. Ana shot him a shrug, and began pointing at them in turn, counting out a silent game of eenie meenie. Rafe slapped her finger down playfully, and put his hand to his ear, in a gesture for her to listen.
A faint sound was coming from the tunnel to the far left. High pitched, broken up every twenty to thirty seconds, then continuing for another twenty to thirty.
The closer they got to the source of the sound, the more it appeared neither to be shrieking or screaming, but laughter. The breaks between the giggles seemed to be breaths or gasps, as the child recovered, only to start laughing all over again.
“She sounds too happy to be a monster's snack,” Ana whispered.
“Not a monster.”
“What would you call a scary thing that kidnaps children and makes them laugh?”
“Old.”
“How old?”
“Older than us,” Rafe sighed, watching his footing as the tunnel became narrower. “Older than man, or at least this iteration of man. . .”
“And it's been here all this time?”
“Only needs to come out once every couple of years to chow down.”
The cave continued to narrow, the two of them having to twist sideways to shimmy through it. The laughter ahead pervaded, getting louder. It was now clearly giggling, as if the child was highly entertained to some degree―but there was also an undercurrent of panic in the titters. The girl was terrified, but finding something hilarious amidst all the terror.
“Is it some kind of stand up comedian beast?”
“Remember how I lent you all those books?”
“You keep asking that. . . Are those the musty old paper things that make my house smell like mildew?”
“Your house smells like mildew all by itself. . . Did you just flip through the pictures going 'eww', or did you try reading them?”
“That's awfully judgemental of you to assume―” She caught Rafe's eye, and cut herself off, changing tack. “A picture tells a thousand words.”
“Not about leshi. . .”
Ana huffed. The name was familiar, she had seen it written somewhere, in one of the dumb old books that Rafe had forced upon her. She brought the image of the page to her mind's eye, and made an audible, hushed “Eww!”
The leshi, as with most creatures they encountered, was not attractive. It was a tall, gangly bearded thing, looked vaguely human, but was monstrous enough to clearly be otherworldly. The etching on the page had wood-like skin, giant yellowy-green eyes, eight long fingers with what look like claws―but as Ana studied the picture in her memory, they definitely weren't claws. The fingers didn't have sharp tips, they were rounded, like the eraser on the top of a pencil.
“Pokey finger man!” she whispered, proud of herself for remembering the ugly thing.
“And it uses those fingers to. . .”
Her mental picture shifted over to the description of the beast. It was full of long and boring words, descriptions written in an archaic tongue, by someone who didn't seem to hold brevity as a virtue.
It wasn't just the one page, she recalled flipping through pages upon pages of its origin, 'offshoot of the first men blahblahblah sentient beard blahblahblah gains strength and vigour from laughter blahblahblah tickles its victims to death,' and so on, and so on.
Coming to a light at the end of the literal tunnel, the thin chasm they were sidestepping through opened out ahead into a large cavern. The creature was silhouetted in the ambient glow of light that appeared to be coming in through cracks in the rock high above, which made his tall, gangly frame seem all the more menacing.
As they slipped out into the beast's lair, the laughter came into full effect. Its eight long, bony fingers were arcing out over the child's body, each over a foot long, moving back and forth through the sleeves of the girl's shirt, tickling frantically. Its beard was wrapped around the body, jaw above wide, inhaling, sucking a phosphorescent light from the child as the giggling continued
Ana's fingers whipped through the air as she made to cast―but Rafe held her back. She acquiesced, silently agreeing that he was right. Caution was the best move. . . It wasn't time to cast, not while the creature still had the girl in its clutches.
Clutches was relative. As Ana stared at the fiend, she became certain that it was not holding her in its hands, but with its scraggly white beard, wrapped around her like a snake, holding her in place between his thin, bony bent white legs, that looked to be five or six feet long when fully stretched.
Rafe reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny bell, that was barely three inches long. He held the clapper between his fingers as he pulled it out, so as not to let it sound until he was well and truly ready.
They manoeuvred away from the entrance to the cave as silently as possible, crouched behind a rock, and he let the clapper in the bell loose, ringing it vigorously.
The instrument made the most dainty tring-a-ling Ana had ever heard, and she tried to keep the laughter in as the creature's ears pricked up. It looked this way and that, desperately searching the echoes of the cavern for the source of the sound. In an instant its beard wh
ipped from around the child's body, and it tore across the cave in the blink of an eye, rushing over to the tunnel, then stretching up to the ceiling, down to the floor, leaping across to one wall, then the next, as if it were an idiotic puppy in search of its own tail.
Rafe gestured for her to go and get the girl. As she slipped away, he reached back into his pocket, withdrawing a hand axe. It was small, only a foot long with a five inch square iron blade at the head, but it was more than enough to do the job.
He threw the bell with all his might. It bounced off the rock above, hit one wall of a cave at an angle, and ricocheted against another wall, clanging and clattering across the floor. The leshi whipped through the air after it, lunging this way and that, its beard trailing behind him, tracing his path across the cave as if he were a gigantic, ugly-as-hell rhythm gymnast.
As it caught up to the bell's resting place, the creature leaned its long, spindly body down, bending at the waist, revealing that its arms were longer than its legs. It reached towards the gleaming silver instrument, delicately picking it up with two of its elongated fingers. As it raised the bell, the clapper rang against the side, another tring-a-ling sounding out, sending the creature into a tizzy, letting go of the bell, circling it, standing up tall, then dropping to its knees, eyeing it suspiciously, as if waiting to see if it would make the sound again.
As it was distracted, Rafe crept up behind the dumb creature, his footsteps still three inches from the rock, perfectly silent as he raised the axe above his head.
The leshi froze, its wide, bulging eyes inspecting the shadows of his domain. There was one in the lair it had not seen before―not just a shadow, but a glimmer too, light dancing around the space in an unfamiliar manner, as it came in through cracks in the rock above and reflected off the dull metal of the axe head.
Rafe knew the creature's lack of movement meant it was suspicious of something―but he didn't have time to change his assault. The axe hurtled down towards the back of the leshi's head―but it did not make contact.
The beard shot through the air like lightning, before the beast even turned its head, would all the way up Rafe's body, and twisted both his hands in directions they were not meant to bend. The weapon fell from his grasp, and clattered on the wet rocks below.
Ana watched in silence, wanting to act, to help, but knowing that she dare not do so whilst the fiend was so close to Rafe. He could take care of himself, or at least he claimed to be able to take care of himself. It was more important for her to get the girl out, get her safe, then she could worry about him.
The leshi lifted him clear off the ground, thrashing him against one wall, then another, as it rose from its crouched position above the bell.
Its skin stretched, bones cracked, the beast's muscle mass seemed to ripple across its body, expatiating, and it rose to what appeared to be its full height, head craning down so as not to hit the ceiling, stalactites hanging over its shoulders.
Rafe found himself being turned around, held hard and fast by the coarse hair of the beard. The leshi pulled him close, bringing him to its eye level. At that proximity, Rafe realised just how old and big the damn thing was. Its head was about the size of his own chest, with very little hair―but it was not bald. Its scalp was covered in twigs and dried vines, that looked as though they were burrowing from under its skin. Elemental, he reminded himself, probably as much plant as it was man.
The thing's skin was pale white like chalk, dry and dessicated, and looked as though it might well be dusty to the touch. Its mouth was wide and full of brown and amber teeth, cracked like bark, but solid like bone. The eyes glowed with a swirling vortex that washed back and forth between yellow and green. They were like light bulbs that bulged out of its head. The green was brighter than the eyes of any magickal human Rafe had ever encountered. This thing was full to the brim with magick, he could feel it, almost vibrating off the creature's skin, more magick than not only any single human, but more than he had sensed in any one thing ever.
As it began to crush the life from him with its long, living beard, he felt its fingers slip through the gaps in his shirt, destined for his chest and armpits.
And soon, Rafe was laughing himself to death.
Chapter 16
Deficit
Mallory hit the call button again. But by that point, two coffees and six calls in, she wasn't holding her breath. Ana had killed the first call, and hadn't answered any of her follow-ups.
As soon as she heard the beep of the voicemail service, Mallory killed the call, and slammed her phone on the table a little louder than intended. She knocked back her coffee, flicked the phone off the table into her bag and rose to leave.
A heavy feeling hung in her heart. Nobody had ever stood her up before. Well, maybe the odd drunken date, that she was certainly better off without―but never her best friend. Supposed best friend, she reminded herself. Ana was proving herself less than best in recent times.
Reluctantly, before she decided to head for the door, she rummaged around in her bag and found her phone, hitting call one last time. Five rings and she hung up, not even waiting for the beep of the voicemail robot.
She threw a five point note on the table to cover the coffee, and headed for the door. In better times, she'd be more frugal, but at that moment, Mallory couldn't give a damn about the change. She was feeling abandoned, alone, a massive deficit in her life where love and friendship should have been.
Chapter 17
Far from the clutches
Ana took the girl back through the cave, not all the way to the entrance, that would take too long, just deep enough to get far from the clutches of the leshi. With every step she took further from the thing's lair, she tried to convince herself that Rafe could look after himself―but by now, she knew better.
“Stay here!” she instructed.
The girl said something in a language that Ana wasn't familiar with, which is to say she spoke anything other than English.
Ana took a breath, touched her finger to her ear, drew out a sigil, and sealed it at her lips, exhaling as it was completed.
“You'll be safe here,” she said. The words left her lips in English, but seemed to twist and turn as they travelled to the girl. The child cocked her head, surprised at being able to understand her.
“No! I don't want to be alone!” the girl said.
“You're safe now.” She dropped down to her knees, tried to look the girl in the eye, but no matter how long she crouched, she found herself three inches off the ground. With a quick casting, her feet fell to the floor with a soft splash of cave water. “Just stay here, I'll be back for you.”
The little girl's eyes were thick with terrified tears just waiting to fall, but she nodded, agreeing silently.
Ana smiled at her, tried to radiate a calm confidence, but as she turned back towards the cavern, that all shed.
She was almost certain that in her absence, Rafe was going to have got himself in trouble. . .
Chapter 18
Kill the damn thing
Rafe was laughing against his will, louder and harder than he could ever remember laughing. It wasn't just the tickling from the giant that was sending uncontrollable blasts of guffaws from his lips. He could feel its magicks running through him, the creature using an innate supernatural gift, as if the tips of the old thing's fingers commanded laughter to be drawn forth.
The leshi was looming over him, its gigantic, elongated body seemed even larger now, as if the damn thing had grown in size to even greater proportions since having him in its clutches. It was bent over in the cave, its waist almost touching the ceiling now, wearing a belt of stalactites. The laughter was feeding it, and it used the strength garnered from the adult prey to make itself all the more bigger than his meal. Rafe couldn't remember if that was a leshi trait, and a part of him was wondering if he was just starting to become delusional from the barrage of tickling that had been set upon him.
He felt a rib crack, the breath knocked from his
chest, as a large black fist pummelled the leshi in the back. The creature turned, growled, glared its swirling emerald and amber gaze in the direction of the casting.
The fingers left Rafe's skin momentarily, and he gasped for breath, trying desperately to turn around and get his bearings. Twisting his head as far as it would go, he saw her, Ana. She stood at the mouth of the tunnel, arms by her side, fingers stretched out wide, shadows that had been made flesh were wisping around her hands like Catherine wheels. A smile came to his lips, and pride filled his heart.
After their paths crossed with a shadow adept, she had been experimenting with the other adepts under his tutelage, learning magicks beyond the basics and her innate talent with mirrors. But this was the first time she had been in a place so full of shadows that it was easy for her to grab hold of them and manipulate them to do her bidding.
The leshi did not move, it growled, slimy saliva dripping from its lips, eyes changing to a pure yellow hue as it studied her, as if planning its attack and priming the ancient magick in its blood for the assault.
She took advantage of the moment of calm, reached her fingers out and grabbed at the air. Shadows tore themselves from the walls, solidifying as they flew across the room, cracking the leshi across the face from the left. The jaw of the massive beast hung loose, swinging back and forth as if it had been dislocated, but still the creature did not attack. It was not ready to attack, not yet. Allowing itself to be assaulted, as it observed this new prey, working out how she ticked.
Another barrage of shadows whipped across from the other side, a loud crack echoed once again across the cavern. The leshi seemed to scoff, gnashed its teeth, having regained control of its jaw. Ana had inadvertently fixed the damage she did with the previous attack.
The leshi straightened its back, its legs seemed to shrink, body no longer bent over Rafe. Ana stared the gigantic beast down, but caught sight of something in her periphery, movement amongst the thick, coarse hairs of the creature's white beard. A hand.