Sink: Once Upon A Time

by Perrin Briar

  Lady Maltese remembered the night.

  It had felt colder than usual, the dark full of more fear than she was used to. The darkness had moved and the Cursed One presented himself. He had come to call in the favor she owed him. Lady Maltese had braced herself, ready for it to be something she did not want to give.

  Then he surprised her.

  “I want a submersible built,” he’d said. “Twenty-five to be exact. They will travel underwater at great depth. They will be fitted with a weapon capable of anti-grav capacity.”

  Lady Maltese took a moment to comport herself. It had been a while since she had needed to use the creative part of her brain.

  “Although the submersible could be built, the weapon would be impossible,” she’d said. “Anti-gravity technology will not have reached that level of sophistication yet, and I would never be able to reproduce it.”

  The Cursed One’s face was covered, but Lady Maltese could hear the smile in his voice.

  “All necessary materials will be provided,” he’d said. “You need only design the craft blueprints and build the weapons once we have provided you with the requisite material.”

  Lady Maltese agreed, and got to work designing the pods immediately. She drafted and redrafted until they were perfect. Once she was done, she went over them again until she could not see a single flaw with them. She did not want to fail the Cursed One.

  The Cursed One was evidently in no great hurry. It was then Lady Maltese realized she had been given no deadline to create the design. It made no difference. She always worked on designs immediately. Always had done. It was her process. Then she realized with mounting dread that perhaps that was the reason for why the Cursed One had left her alone. He knew how she worked.

  One day, perhaps six months after the Cursed One had made his demands, he returned. He came with a material he described as ‘Gravitas’. He left her with it and took the designs away with him. He left her to experiment with the material by herself.

  It was extraordinary.

  Lady Maltese had placed the material on a table and watched as every other object in the room rolled toward it, gaining in speed until they attached themselves to the rock. Lady Maltese was flabbergasted.

  This was not possible, and yet here it was before her, working. She had never encountered a material like this her whole life, had never even dreamed such a thing might exist. But yet here it was.

  Shaping it had been simple. It was rock, and any mason could have done it. Lady Maltese had the best mason in their world work on it under the pretense it was for her husband’s fortieth birthday.

  The real difficulty came with controlling the power, either by enhancing it, or reducing it when required. She stumbled upon the rock’s greatest ability by accident, almost knocking her unconscious in the process.

  She had managed to reverse the polarization. Not only could she use the rock to draw objects toward herself, but also repel objects away. It was a breakthrough that would help control the pods the weapons were attached to.

  In a single stroke, it would not only operate as a weapon, but as a defence too—by repelling and pushing away any objects or weapons hurled at it. It would allow the driver to operate the pod more efficiently and with greater control.

  What the Cursed One wanted these pods for, Lady Maltese didn’t know. She refused to even speculate. She kept her head down and focused on the job in hand. She couldn’t wait for their dealings to be over. The Cursed One gave Lady Maltese goosebumps.

  The second part of their deal was for her to store the pods in the caves while she attached the weapons.

  “We had an agreement,” the Cursed One said.

  “I have carried out my side of the bargain to the best of my abilities,” Lady Maltese said.

  “Then you have not carried them out adequately,” the Cursed One said. “You were to store the pods for safe keeping until we needed them. And for your failure to comply, you must be punished.”

  Lady Maltese lashed out with the knife. It was a fast and vicious blow. The Cursed One clutched his throat, blood pulsing out over his black gloves.

  Lady Maltese was panting, not with exertion, but shock and surprise. She had never thought she could vanquish the Cursed One so easily. She smiled, a mad maniacal grin that stretched from one ear to the other. She had won! She had killed him! She let out a girlish squeal of glee and wrapped her hands around her mouth.

  The Cursed One was not as unassailable as she had thought. He was just a man. And all the nightmares she had had about him over the years, him as a dark and evil spirit—clearly some of their world and its superstitions had rubbed off on her—had all been for nought. He was just a man. Nothing but a piddling nothing of a man.

  Lady Maltese gasped, a sharp intake of breath. She reached behind herself, for what she felt—a painful pinch just under her ribs. She’d backed herself right onto it, whatever it was.

  She found something was protruding from her body, something alien that did not belong there. She reached back and pulled it out. She felt the pain and ejection of her warm blood. She let out a cry and raised the blade to her face.

  It was her own blade.

  No, she thought. It can’t be. I dropped it. I dropped it right there…

  She looked at the floor, at the spot her blade should have been and found… nothing. Nothing protruded from the shadows on the floor. Her blade had been taken and then held at her back so she might impale herself onto it. Which meant someone must have held it for her to impale herself on in the first place.

  She spun, her hands coming around to form fists. She screamed when she saw the one who had stabbed her. It was the Cursed One.

  “No,” Lady Maltese said. “You’re dead. I slashed open your throat. Your drops of blood are still on the flagstone floor.”

  “You cannot kill what is everlasting,” the Cursed One said. “When we carry weapons to protect ourselves, we are actually carrying the very tools that condemn us.”

  Lady Maltese dropped her dagger. The Cursed One moved fast, like a striking snake, caught the knife before it hit the ground, and tossed it at Lady Maltese. But it was a bad throw, and it missed her.

  Lady Maltese took a moment to comport herself. If the Cursed One could make mistakes, perhaps there was a way out of this for her.

  “We can make a new agreement,” Lady Maltese said. “One of mutual benefit to us both.”

  “We do not renegotiate,” the Cursed One said.

  He stepped into the light. Lady Maltese instinctively stepped back, matching his forward momentum. She flinched again. This time she did not need to look back at what she had walked into.

  She stepped forward and spun around, and in doing so, the knife—her knife—that had punctured her body on the other side, was removed. It dripped dark red with her blood.

  Another figure stepped from the shadows, another Cursed One. Identical to the first two.

  “You cannot kill what does not exist in a single body,” the third Cursed One said.

  Lady Maltese was beginning to feel weak with loss of blood. She was bleeding badly from the two wounds to her person. Her dress was becoming heavy. She turned to run for the door. Anything was better than where she was and what was going to happen to her if she didn’t escape.

  She caught sight of a glint of light off her blade as it spun through the air and disappeared into the shadow in front of her. She skidded to a halt, but not fast enough, as her own blade was caught and protruded from the darkness. Her body slid slowly and painfully onto it, like a hot knife into butter.

  Another Cursed One stepped forward.

  “You cannot kill what cannot be killed,” he said.

  It was over. She was not going to survive.

  “This is impossible,” Lady Maltese said.

  “Everything is impossible until you know how to make it possible,” the Cursed One said.

  The Cursed One took the blade and sliced it across the palm of his hand. His blood mingled with hers o
n the edge of the knife.

  “As you have taken one of our number from us, I’m afraid you must take his place,” the Cursed One said. “A pity—for you. You could have avoided this with death. Instead, you will become one of us.”

  He sliced open one of Lady Maltese’s cheeks. The wound burned red raw. At first the pain went unnoticed by Lady Maltese in comparison with her other wounds, but as she lay there, and the seconds ticked by, the wound festered and turned her skin black. It raced across her skin like a flood across a great plain.

  “What… did you do… to me?” Lady Maltese said. “What did… you do?”

  Her skin turned coal black and reached her lips. She could no longer speak. Her eyes rolled back, her vision turning dark. All was black.

  63.

  AFTER BURYING the dead, it took the whole town five days to search every tunnel of the cave. Their search found nothing, besides the weird twisted machine the dragon had used to skin his victims, a device the butchers of the town found very useful to prepare their own meat products.

  Everything else, if there had been anything else, was gone. Even the pods that had stood in a long row were gone. Most important of all, despite searching every inch of the caves, there was no Passage to be found.

  Roland, after taking up his father’s mantle, promised to search them again once they had rebuilt the town. Bryan suspected it was going to be a waste of time, but he didn’t say anything.

  Lord Maltese never fully recovered from the shock of his wife’s misdemeanors. He was a shell of the man he had been, mumbling under his breath and constantly lost in a daze.

  The metal of Lady Maltese’s other machines was repurposed and reforged into a giant muzzle that kept the T-Rex’s jaws restrained. Bryan was able to build a new antennae and remote control device. The T-Rex became more sedate after that. The locals still needed to be persuaded the dragon wasn’t some kind of mystical being.

  There was one discovery the family did not overlook.

  “Oh my God,” Zoe said. “Bryan. Look at this. It’s the same figure.”

  Bryan looked with the air of someone who didn’t believe what he was hearing, his eyes drooping at the corners. When he laid eyes on the image, a visible shiver went through him.

  “I think I just peed a little,” Bryan said.

  “Someone—or something—has been visiting all these worlds,” Zoe said. “A black cowled figure. What could it mean?”

  “Who could it be?” Cassie said.

  “I’m sure I have no idea,” Zoe said. “But he must have been coming here for quite some time if it is the same guy.”

  They all peered at the black cowled figure scrawled on the cave wall, a million and one possibilities going through their minds. None of them could prepare them for the truth.

  ROSETTA and the family spent several days searching the rolling farmland for the Passage until Aaron finally hit upon the solution.

  “Lady Maltese had parachutes made, and the dinosaur could fly, so why couldn’t the Passage be on the roof?”

  It was crazy, mad, impossible, and yet they found no argument to be made for it not to be so. It turned out to be in the first place they looked: in the center of the world’s roof, like an upside down sink, the hole in the middle.

  “Thar she is,” Bryan said.

  “The only question is, how do we get up there?” Zoe said.

  “Fly, of course,” Cassie said.

  It took Bryan two days to teach Roland how to use the remote control device. Bryan had shaped it into a PlayStation controller, assuming it would be more intuitive for him to learn. He turned out to be wrong.

  Rosetta and the family climbed aboard the T-Rex dressed in comfortable clothes, armed with a backpack each, full of the finest food from the town. The locals’ way of apologizing for their behavior of late.

  The T-Rex growled and threw back its head when it caught sight of the family. The meal that had gotten away. Roland tapped at the controls like a pro. The T-Rex shook its head and turned away.

  A set of low chairs had been installed on the T-Rex’s back. It looked pretty flimsy to Bryan. Each chair was set behind a vertebrate.

  Roland pressed a button, and the T-Rex coiled up its powerful legs and leapt into the air. They ascended into the sky with a few flaps of the dinosaur’s wings, up to the ceiling. The T-Rex floated on a powerful updraft just below the Passage.

  Rosetta and the family each shook Roland and Abigail’s hand and took turns to ascend into the Passage. They were old hands at it by now.

  “I wouldn’t send anyone through this Passage just yet,” Bryan said.

  “Why not?” Roland said. “It would be good for us to explore.”

  “Trust me,” Bryan said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Give it another couple hundred years. Minimum.”

  Bryan passed into the Passage. They were gone.

  ROLAND pressed at the controls and lowered the T-Rex back to the field beside the town. The T-Rex would be of great use to the people. It could carry heavy weights and aid them in their rebuilding efforts.

  Roland mounted his horse and trotted back to the town at a leisurely pace. He thought about the family and everything that had happened in such a short space of time. It shouldn’t be forgotten, he decided. But how to ensure the people never forgot?

  They could build a statue to the occasion. He shook his head. Statues were too easily destroyed, as they had seen. It would need to be a song. He would get the minstrels to work on one. But no, not everyone could sing well. He wanted everyone to recall this story.

  Story.

  That was what it would be. A tale. A thrilling adventure about a family, a monster, and an evil ruler.

  But how to begin such a tome?

  He smiled. That was easy. The story would begin the same way so many of the most unforgettable stories began.

  Once upon a time…

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  ALSO BY PERRIN BRIAR

  Have you read them all?

  Series

  Sink

  Skip

  Z-Minus

  Blood Memory

  Swiss Family RobinZOM

  One-Off Novels

  Square

  Keeping Mum

  In the Sink series (will be 6 books)

  Old Man’s Tale

  It’s just another day for unscrupulous developer Graham Turner when he breaks into an old man’s home to steal his property deeds. But when he’s sucked through a sinkhole into a forgotten world deep beneath the earth’s surface, Graham and the old man must rely on each other if they are to survive and escape this dangerous new world and return to the surface.

  Read it free: Old Man’s Tale

  Buy it: US UK CA AU


  The Lost World

  A sinkhole is a natural phenomenon. It can happen anywhere, anytime. It drinks lakes dry, consumes jungles, and even demolishes entire mountains. You may have seen one in your street. But these things aren’t lost. They’ve simply been moved. Things are forgotten on the surface all the time. Beneath the crust, they’re always remembered.

  SINK. A forgotten world. A lost world. But not for long.

  Buy it: US UK CA AU

  What Lies Beneath

  Blood thirsty pirates with a hidden treasure. A long lost prince in plain view. A deadly monster with a terrible secret. Everyone has something to hide. It's what lies beneath.

  Buy it: US UK CA AU

  Books 4, 5 and 6 are currently being written!

  In the Skip series (3 books)

  Book One

  The clock tower is the center of the town of Time. It counts down the hours, minutes and seconds of every passing day. But unbeknownst to the local inhabitants, it is at the center of a great deal more than that. It is the center of the universe and controls time itself. But it is old and beginning to break, sending the world’s inhabitants skipping forward and back through time.

  Can two teenagers on the run collect all three replacement clock pieces scattered across the world before the clock tower, and time, breaks for good?

  Read it free: Skip: Book One

  Buy it: US UK CA AU

  Book Two

  Elian and Jera head to the Rumble Jungle, the Haunted Forest and Land’s End for the replacement clock pieces. Each has been entrusted to ancient and powerful guardians less than willing to hand them over. Can Elian and Jera pass their tests and save the world?