by Jon Evans
"What was that?" he asked.
"A fungus. It grows in the corners. I don't think it's poisonous."
White brought him some more. After devouring this second chunk of fungus Patch tried to stand up. He swayed but succeeded.
"I feel better," he said.
"So do I," Silver said softly, in the darkness.
Patch's eyes widened and his whole body stiffened with wonder and delight. "Silver! You're alive!"
"I'm alive. Only because you came to the underworld to save me," his mother said, as if she did not quite believe it. "From the very jaws of the King Beneath."
Patch wanted to run to her, but - "We're not safe yet. Is there any way out of here?"
"No," White said. "Only where we came from. That … thing … is still up there."
"We can just wait for it to leave," Silver suggested.
White hesitated. "I don't know. All these bones … this chamber, the floor is brick, but the walls are old wood, rotted, and one of the long walls is full of little holes. The holes … they don't smell right. I think something lives in them. Something bad."
The three of them were silent. Patch heard something thumping and snuffling around the chamber above. The little monster. It made hissing, rasping grunts as it moved. They didn't sound like random exhalations. They sounded like a kind of language. In fact, the more Patch listened to them, the more they sounded almost like Bird. It sounded almost like how Karmerruk might speak, if the hawk suffered some terrible damage to his throat. Patch listened more carefully. He twitched with surprise when a phrase emerged that was guttural but clearly understandable: "Come and be eaten."
"I don't think so!" he exclaimed in Bird, almost without thinking.
The noises above ceased for a moment.
"What are you?" Patch demanded. "Why do you speak Bird?"
"Bird?" A series of rattling moans emerged from the darkness. It took a moment for Patch to realize they were laughter. "Not Bird, fur-thing. Reptile. What am I? I am daughter-King. I am caiman."
"But we're speaking Bird," Patch said, beginning to wonder if he was dreaming or delirious.
"Birds our ancient cousins. My father's stories. Birds come to his father in the jungle." That word meant nothing to Patch. "Birds live in his jaws, clean his teeth, keep them sharp. Birds serve. Crows will serve. Creatures of night, like caiman. Black wings, black blood. My father, my King, will conquer, rule, kill, devour. All will be Kingdom Beneath. Come and be eaten, fur-thing."
"You can't be serious."
"Come and be eaten, stay and be eaten," the caiman hissed. "Many years rat and snake run from us into chamber of bones. Crawling things come and eat. Come and die quick in my jaws, fur-thing. Stay and die slow, eaten alive."
Patch switched back to Squirrel and said, "We have to get out of here."
"How?" White asked.
Patch didn't know. He began to rummage around the chamber. It was long and narrow, and difficult to navigate, thanks to the shifting field of bones that covered its floor. Not all of the skeletons were rats. He stumbled across a long limbless chain of vertebrae with a fanged skull on the end. One of the Legless. Maybe what the caiman had called "snake." The chamber walls, as White had said, were ancient human-carved wood, cracked and soft, covered with fungus… and one long wall was full of holes not quite big enough for Patch's paws, holes that led deep into the dirt beyond the rotting wood, holes that smelled acidly wrong.
That wrong smell seemed to be intensifying. And there was no way out except the narrow metal tunnel that led up to the caiman's waiting jaws.
"Crawling things come," hissed the reptilian daughter of the King Beneath. "Stay and die slow."
12. Crawling Things
"Something's going to come out of those holes," Patch said, his voice rising. "We have to get out!"
He felt more panicked than he had at any time since entering the underworld. He had faced many dangers since then, but this was the first time since the room full of cockroaches he had been hounded into a corner with no apparent escape; and he was grimly sure that whatever lurked behind those holes was far more dangerous than cockroaches.
"There's no way," Silver said. "We'll have to try to fight them."
Patch felt too weak to fight, and he was sure his mother did too, but he tried to breathe deeply and gather his strength. The acid smell from the holes in the far wall was growing stronger. And did he hear a kind of soft and distant scuttling noise?
"Wait," White said. "Where are we?"
Patch turned and stared with disbelief through the darkness towards White's voice. Had she gone mad?
"We're in the Kingdom Beneath," Silver said gently, "in an ancient human tunnel."
"That's not what I mean," White said exasperated. "I mean, how far is it from here to the Croton Road?"
Patch said, "Not far, but she - it - we can't go up there." He could hear the rough breaths of the daughter-King as she waited for them in the chamber above.
"That's not what I mean either. I mean, how far the other way?"
"The other way?" Patch asked, astonished. "But - but there's -"
"How far?" White demanded.
Patch, taken aback by her anger, tried to calculate the answer. He had run from the King Beneath down the first tunnel that led directly away from the Croton Road; after a short distance, he had taken the right-hand fork, which had bent until it ran approximately parallel with the road, before entering the chamber where the daughter-King now waited; then taken the little tunnel down and to the right, back towards the Croton Road, to this long and narrow wooden chamber. And from the end of this chamber to the bricks of the Croton Road was …
"Maybe not very far at all," he said doubtfully. "I'm not sure. We might just be a squirrel's length away and a squirrel's length below. But it doesn't matter. There's a wall."
Silver caught her breath as if she had just realized something. "Hardly a wall at all. It's soft and rotten."
"But there's still … "
"Dirt," White said. "That's all that's behind the walls here. We can dig."
Patch gasped as he understood. She was right, they could dig through this dirt, not to bury a nut, but to open a passage back to the Croton Road.
"There's a brick wall on the other end," he warned them.
"We might not make it," White agreed. "But we can't stay here. You said that yourself."
The acid smell had swelled during this brief conversation, and Patch was now beginning to fervently hope he was just imagining not just the soft scuttling sounds but a kind of faint clicking.
"You're right," he said. "Let's dig."
White led the digging. Her claws tore through the rotting wood even easier than the thick, claylike dirt beyond, but she had excavated no more than a rat's-length worth of tunnel when the crawling things began to pour out of the long wooden wall to their left and into the chamber of bones.
The caiman laughed as a cacophony of soft scurrying and rustling noises swelled towards where the three squirrels huddled at the end of the chamber. The acid smell was rank and biting.
"Hurry!" Patch gasped.
Then the first crawling thing touched him, a soft clinging touch like a spiderweb, a touch that quickly turned into a horrible crawling sensation. Patch convulsed violently and the thing withdrew from his leg - only to be replaced by what felt like a half-dozen more, there were tiny insectile legs crawling all over Patch, it was like being covered by cockroaches again, except these things were bigger and heavier. Patch shook like a soaked dog ridding itself of water, and beside him Silver did the same, and the many-legged things fell away from them; but soon they were back, their numbers redoubled. This time they began to bite. And their bites were like fire.
Patch clawed and bit back. His paws and fangs sank into long, squishy bodies like worms, each one propelled by a hundred little legs. They were centipedes, the squirrels were being attacked by a numberless army of poisonous centipedes, each as big as a finger of a full-grown human. Their b
ites hurt like acid. No one or even ten or even hundred of those bites would be fatal - but soon enough, the relentless wave of centipedes would cover all three squirrels, kill them with poison, and devour every fragment of their flesh and fur, leave nothing but three more skeletons to litter the floor of the Chamber of Bones.
"Into the tunnel!" White gasped. "Hurry!"
Silver followed White into the tunnel she had dug, and Patch backed in behind her. There wasn't enough room for all of him, and the bites on his head and forelegs continued to mount as he scraped himself against the tunnel walls as best he could, and crushing to death the centipedes who clung to his back and sides, moaning but not slowing each time he stubbed his severed tail.
Dirt began to pile up behind Patch, and he swept it clumsily forward with his paws; and as White dug at the tunnel wall, and Silver propelled the dirt farther back, and Patch swept it into the chamber of bones, he found himself able to back a little further into the tunnel, and a little further, and a little further, until his nose was fully in the tunnel and he was no longer afflicted by biting centipedes. The army of centipedes flowed down the chamber and into the new and narrow tunnel like water trying to leave a bottle - but Patch began to stopper the tunnel end with fresh dirt, building a wall between their excavation and the chamber of bones, until the tunnel was sealed on both ends. They had buried themselves alive. But at least they were safe from the crawling centipedes, and still alive.
"Up," Patch said, his voice so weak from the his many wounds, and the blackblood recurrence, and the centipede poison, that Silver could scarcely hear him. "We want to go up, to the ledge, to the Croton Road."
Silver passed the idea on to White, who began to angle the tunnel upwards as best she could. Patch hoped she had a good sense of direction. It was easy to imagine them trying to tunnel in circles until they died. This wasn't so much a tunnel as a moving bubble, and its air was already beginning to feel thick and lifeless. If they made any mistake they would suffocate and die. And even if they didn't -
"There's something here!" White said, half-triumphant, half-nervous. A few scrabbling breaths later. "A brick! This is it, the Croton Road!"
"A brick?" Silver asked. "Oh, no. We have to go through a brick wall? How -"
"It's very old," White said. "The stuff between the bricks, it's crumbling already."
She worked for a long time. All Patch heard was a rhythmic scratching. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe as slowly and shallowly as possible, and tried to ignore his multifarious pains. The scratching seemed to go on forever as White bit and claw at the ancient mortar around the brick. The thick air was making Patch sleepy. He tried to stay awake, but his eyelids felt so heavy -
"That's it," White said, exhausted. "That's as far as I can reach."
"Is it free?" Silver asked.
A moment passed. "No!" White exclaimed with despair. "It trembles a little, but it's not free. It won't move! We can't get out!"
"Don't give up hope," Silver said, calmly but sternly. "We must work together. Patch will push against me, I against you, and you against the brick. We must all push as hard as we can. Ready?"
At his mother's command Patch roused himself one final time and squeezed himself backwards, pressing himself as hard against her as he could. The pain in his tail was immense, and he moaned a little with every breath.
"Breathe in, then push as we breathe out," Silver commanded. "One, two - now!"
Patch strained with all his might as he breathed out. Nothing happened. He sagged, dejected.
"Again," Silver ordered.
"It's not going to work," Patch said hopelessly.
"Again."
He gritted his teeth against the pain, took a deep breath, breathed out, strained -
- and there was a loud clunk as the brick broke free and fell, and as light and lifegiving air from the Croton Road flooded the tunnel. White scrambled out. She had to descend only three bricks to the ledge that ran above the water. Silver followed her, and then Patch backed awkwardly out. He fell onto his tail and groaned loudly.
"Quiet," Silver whispered. "I'm sorry, Patch. But the King Beneath is somewhere in this water. I know you're weak. So am I. We have to run."
"I know," he said, struggling to his feet. "Which way?"
They looked up and down the dimly lit Croton Road.
"This way," Silver said, and she led the way into the unknown.
13. Endless Escape
The Croton Road seemed to go on forever, an unbroken highway of brick stretching endlessly through the underworld in a perfectly straight line. In some places daylight peered through cracks in its ceiling; in others, no luminescent fungus lined its walls, and the road was as dark as a wild and moonless night. Sometimes it widened into circular chambers like that where they had encountered the King Beneath, although only a very few of those boasted a stone bridge across the waters. The walls of the road were riddled with countless tunnels, some too small for any squirrel, others big enough for a human to walk without stooping, but the squirrels avoided them. All these side tunnels stank of Rat.
Despite their omnipresent scent, there were almost no rats to be found along the Croton Road. On the two occasions they did hear rats squeaking and scurrying in the distance, the squirrels were able to backtrack to where roots hung thickly from the ceiling, cross the water on those sky-roads, and hide tense and breathless in the dark mouths of side-tunnels until the rat-sounds were gone.
At first Patch was grateful for this paucity of rats; but it occurred to him, the first time they stopped in a dead-end side-tunnel to sleep, that it had to be because rats deliberately avoided the Croton Road. Perhaps because they found its spaciousness unnerving, too much like being aboveground. Or perhaps it was because they knew that hunters lurked along the road. Snakes, or caiman, or centipedes … or something unimaginably worse. Patch slept poorly that night, if it was night.
Whenever they saw rippling movement in the water, they fled for a side tunnel, but they never found what swam in that darkness, and never encountered either the King Beneath or the daughter-King caiman. They smelled snake, several times, and promptly crossed the water by root-road if they could, or sprinted as if pursued if not. They encountered any number of other underworld scents that they could not name at all. A few smelled warm and welcoming. Most made their fur stand on end and their teeth shiver.
There were several places where the ledges ramped down into dark pools, and they had to swim across. On one paw, this was welcome, as the only other sources of water were the damp and fungal bricks; on the other, the water was cold and terrifying, and they twice had to swim into utter darkness without knowing what if anything waited for them on the other side, or if this might be an underwater sea in which they would freeze and drown. Both times, fortunately, they discovered ramps that led back to the road.
There was almost no food. There was no edible fungus here as there had been in the chamber of bones. They tried to nibble at a dead frog they found on the road, but its flesh tasted sour and poisonous, and they gave up. What saved them was that some of the roots hanging from the ceiling were edible, if bitter and chalky. Patch had to be careful when he climbed to eat; he had to relearn his whole sense of balance, now that half his tail was missing.
At one point, after their second sleep, the entire Croton Road turned into a gigantic metal tunnel. They splashed their way along its corrugated length, and then the previous architecture resumed, and they climbed up onto the ledges and continued beneath the arched brick ceiling. It was at this point Patch gave up hope of ever seeing the outside world again. He saw no reason that the Croton Road should not continue forever. He kept moving in a daze, only vaguely aware of his weary paws and legs, and of the countless wounds turning to scars throughout his body. He hardly spoke. Nor did White or Silver. Conversation consumed valuable energy. They needed their strength to keep moving.
It was well after the third sleep - indeed, Patch was on the verge of suggesting a fourth - when they re
ached the thick metal grate that walled off the entirety of the Croton Road. The squirrels halted before this discontinuity. The grate did not stop or even slow their journey - the gaps between its rusting bars were easily big enough for them - but beyond it, the arching roof of the Croton Road descended suddenly towards the water. On this side of the grate, a human could have walked on the road; on the other, they might barely have crawled.
Patch became aware that there was no glowing fungus on the walls here. They had been travelling through total darkness for some time now, but here it had diminished, lit by a dim and distant light far away on the other side of that grate. And the air - it wasn't full of the usual wet and fungal smells of the Croton Road. It smelled, however faintly, of oak trees, and grasses, and the north wind.
They did not dare breathe a word of hope. Instead they moved silently on, slipping through the grate, along this low room - and towards a glowing square of open light in the distance. But they did not reach that glowing square. They did not have to. A tree's-length before, a side tunnel full of water led off from the Croton Road. This was not unusual. What was unusual was the fresh air that burst from that side tunnel like a flower in bloom.
Silver was in the lead. She looked back at White and Patch, and smiled. Then she leaped down into the water, and swam down the side tunnel. White followed, and then Patch. The tunnel led to and through an arch that seemed full of white light. Patch's eyes were so accustomed to the underworld that this light was as blinding as utter darkness, he could see nothing at all. He felt dry stones under his paws, and scrabbled up a dry gully. It took a good dozen breaths before his eyes began to adjust, and he realized that the light was the sun, and the blue canopy above him was a cloudless sky, and they stood outside a ruined, crumbling human building in the midst of otherwise high and dense forest. They had escaped the Kingdom Beneath.