No one remembered how much time had passed when they woke—but Warren was the first to emerge back into consciousness. Stunned like a sleepwalker waking mid step, Warren found himself in the middle of an action of which he had no recollection: scrubbing. Memory came to life and he glanced at the sliding glass door beneath him. Everything within his reach nearly sparkled with clarity. He gazed below; a river raged with foaming white crescents beneath the glass—a new revelation to him. When he looked at his friends, still mechanistically scrubbing away at the writing and still tinted a disconcerting purple hue, the words on the door came back to him.
But the last few words were missing, having been blotted out by his sponge, which he subsequently inspected. It still dripped when he lifted it. He also noted that his hands were the right color. He held his sponge and stood, stretching his arms and twisting his back—as if warding off the kinks and pains he knew were coming. Then with a moment of decision, he stepped to Sofi’s side, knelt beside her, and started scrubbing where she wasn’t.
His sweeps had an immediate and remarkable effect on the glass—and within seconds, it shone with a fantastic gleam, even for the low-light of the cavernous room. After he had cleared as much as he could reach in front of Sofi, she paused in her motions. Warren sighed and waited, searching her face for signs of consciousness. Her eyes seemed fixed on a distant point, far beyond the giant lamps or the room walls.
Then she blinked, and Warren dared to speak. “Sofi? Can you hear me?” he probed. She dropped an eyebrow and blinked again—but slowly. Her lips parted briefly, then came back together. “I know you’re in there, my love,” Warren prodded. This time, he noticed a flush of color rush to her cheeks—then her hands. She closed her eyes, shook her hair, and ran her hand through it. When she inhaled deeply, Warren knew she was back, and asked her, “Are you alright?”
Sofi nodded. “I think so.” Then she noticed the others, compelled to finish their impossible task. “Are they?”
“I think I have to clean it for them. They’re trying, just like the prisoners before them, but are incapable of doing any good.”
“How was it that your sponge worked?”
“I understood the mystery.”
“The mystery of what?”
“The mystery of the door; how to get in. You remember reading what had been written?”
“Yeah, it didn’t make any sense at all.”
“And then you were powerless to understand…you just did things, trying to scrub it clean. But now.”
“I still don’t understand,” she clarified.
“It said, ‘only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean this door.’ Except parts of the sentence itself were backwards.”
“How did you figure that out? All I remember is collapsing and falling asleep.”
“It was the power I received. Without it, I would have been done for,” Warren noted.
“And with that power’s aid, you figured it out and…”
“And I got this sponge. That’s all I remember before I drifted off.”
“Hmmm.”
“So then I cleaned your portion for you, and you came back to life…ish when you realized it had been cleaned.”
Sofi nodded and raised her eyebrows. I see. “And is that a river I see down there?”
“Yeah, I think so. Let me wake up the others,” Warren said and scurried to Old Fred’s side. Within a minute, Warren had the whole of the door cleaned and the others, in their own turn, began to stir and lose their shadowed skin color.
And just as quickly, Warren was explaining how their freedom had come about. Livingstone seemed the most curious. “I wonder,” he said when Warren had come to a conclusion, “what happened to those whose places we took.” Warren and Old Fred raised an eyebrow at each other and shrugged simultaneously. Sofi paced around the door, as if she wanted to say something, but didn’t quite have it all worked out yet. Livingstone waited, watching her movements like a cat, with hands folded across his chest.
“What if…” Sofi began, hesitating for a moment. “What if we opened it?”
“You don’t mean going down there, do you?” Old Fred inquired.
“What if this were a one-way door, locked from this side by the writing?”
“What are you saying, Sofi?”
“I’m saying that this may be a waypoint—but a sealed waypoint. Imagine it like an iron fence between paths, and we just made a gate in what was supposed to be fixed. What was it that the demon told you, Warren?”
Warren’s mind put the pieces together. “That Sylvara had been exiled here.”
“Right. And that this pathway was largely devoid of intellect,” Sofi continued. Warren nodded and furrowed his eyebrows.
“And in that case, it would only make sense for a riddle to bar the way out, but guarded on the pretense of an ancient trap—of physical detriment” she concluded—Livingstone was smiling already.
“Exactly. Also, we know from the demon’s statements through Ali that the Mar know our past location, too,” he added. “They will likely be waiting for us back there, if not actively pursuing us, already. If we can change pathways again without their knowledge, we should give ourselves a decent advantage.”
“Well,” Old Fred declared, “I love rivers. Let’s get wet!” He bent over and slid the glass door open a bit.
“But let’s not be too hasty,” Livingstone cautioned, with a hand on Old Fred’s shoulder. “We have little idea of what lies beyond that door. We may find ourselves on a pathway without many exits—and there’s no telling what sort of dangers we might face.”
Sofi fidgeted with her hair. “I think the Mar poses the greatest threat to us at the moment, and if this will lend us any sort of benefit against them, I say we take it,” she said in a simple risk evaluation.
Warren felt like his opinion would mean little to these two—and yet he also felt he was somewhat entitled to enter the discussion which Sofi and Livingstone dominated. Trent was strangely silent as well, Warren noticed, and wondered why he hadn’t voiced his thoughts. The man stood curiously still, hardly the confident, enthusiastic type he had seemed to Warren a day earlier. His eyes seemed to stare past them, concentrating on the ceiling, or some other far-off space.
“Trent, what do you think?” Warren ventured, but received no immediate answer. Trent raised his cheeks a bit and squinted, cocked his head to one side. Livingstone interpreted his body language and drew his weapon, spinning to find a golden-winged harpy swooping down to them.
Warren could plainly see it was Sylvara—Sofi and Old Fred mimicked Livingstone in firing at the wind-witch as she landed. But the creature hid behind the shield of her ironfeathers and shrieked, “Peace! Peace! Strangers, listen to me!”
The red room fell silent as the last echoes of the gunshots faded to nothing. Sylvara peeked from the refuge of her wings. “Warren, I congratulate you,” she said, morphing again into his poorly-clothed mother. She feigned applause. “You passed my last test without my introduction to it! You are something else, my wonderful Warren.”
Sofi frowned at that final statement. “Leave us, witch, we have no more quarrel with you. Let us be on our way, and we’ll let you keep your breath,” Sofi threatened.
“Oh, so fiery! Listen young ones, I have no desire to injure you anymore…no, I had but a wisp of hope that you might be my liberators. Which is why I had to take you in, before your pursuers fell upon you and carried you away from me. And this special one, oh Warren! Aha! You delight me, truly you do. For look, you have mastered the door. How many years have I glared at that writing, how many nights have I been haunted by its message; incapable of doing or thinking what was required?”
Sylvara’s wings burst forth and she took a flapping lunge towards Warren. Guns bristled from his companions, but she ignored them and stroked Warren’s hair. “You have given me a great gift, Warren Spicks,” she said, producing a vial from her rags. “And now I shall give you a gift.” With that, she popped open the small glass container and dripped a drop of shimmering liquid on the glass door. At the touch of the drop, the glass slid back immediately, and the square door folded back and rotated mechanically into a circular opening.
“How is this a gift? We already had it opened,” Warren asked.
The harpy grinned. “Oh no, this is your gift to me…my gift—well—she waits for you in that small box over there,” she said, pointing back across the room. “I hope it’s the last time you lose one you love, Warren.”
The realization sickened him; he had forgotten about Ali. When and where he had lost her, he wasn’t sure. He scrambled for the box and Sylvara hopped up to the rim of the opening. “I hope you won’t forget me, Warren, for I will certainly remember you. Goodbye, dear one,” she concluded and disappeared through the opening.
Warren, however, wasn’t listening. Instead he was sprinting across the pillows at top speed, with an arm in front of his face to ward off the returning butterflies. When he arrived at the box, an old cardboard thing which Ali could probably chew through in but a few chomps, he tore it open and found himself gazing into those glittering black eyes he had so shamefully forgotten. Ali squeaked and stood on her rear legs, scratching at the edge of the box.
She hopped onto Warren’s hands and scrambled up his right arm to his shoulder. “Attagirl,” he soothed and turned back to Sofi and the others. “I guess we’re all present and accounted for…” he started. Sofi nodded lightly and with a long blink.
“Shall we get out of this blasted butterfly storm?” Old Fred suggested after a moment’s silence.
“Then, I suppose we are all in agreement that our best option is to follow the harpy into the next pathway,” Sofi asked. Warren and Old Fred nodded. Trent stared without anything that seemed like a spark of life, but mouthed the word, yes. Livingstone stood, arms crossed and facing away from the others. He gazed down through the glass door transformed hatch at the waters below.
“I don’t think…” he began, but lowered himself to the ground, gripped the side, and swung his head through. Warren wandered closer in curiosity. “Nevermind,” he heard Livingstone echo from the hole. “Let’s go,” he said and let his body swing over and through the opening. Then his hands, all that Warren could see of him, released and disappeared through the hatch. He looked to Sofi who just bit her lip and shook her head.
Old Fred laughed. “That’s the impossibility you come to love with Oscar.” He winked at Warren. “Let’s get wet!” The old man searched down the hole, then yelled down to Livingstone. “Hey Oscar, how deep is it?”
“No, don’t…jump…” came Livingstone’s muffled reply, tinged with irritation, as if Fredric’s question was wholly absurd. Sofi grabbed Old Fred’s shoulder to keep him from doing anything rash, as she sensed Livingstone had a plan of sorts. “Catch!” Livingstone’s voice echoed up to them, followed by a rope tied to an old piece of pipe. Old Fred trapped it against the edge of the hatch and pulled it up through.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he yelled back down, and tugging on the rope.
“Tie it…” Livingstone began, but faded into concentration. Sofi raised her eyebrows expectantly. “To this,” he grunted, and a bigger metal pipe came at the opening from an angle. Old Fred handed Warren the rope and bent over to grab the pipe. Warren at first couldn’t figure out what Livingstone was up to, until the pipe came through the opening and Old Fred clanged it across the hatch. He secured the rope around the middle of the pipe and tossed the rope through the hole.
“Will it hold us?” Warren asked.
“I bet so,” Old Fred affirmed. Then he glanced to Sofi with a sly grin. “Ladies first!”
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
Chapter 19
Well, I see haven’t achieved my goal. If you look quickly, you might catch her exiting through the doors just up the street. Yes, there. Ah, there goes our sweet Sofi in a rush. But her poker face, the very one Livingstone taught her, masks her expression. Could you tell if that phone conversation delivered good news or ill? She has become such an enigma to me; I doubt I should ever unravel all of her secrets. Oh, and now she’s in a cab. Look away; don’t stare as she goes past. Let her go. She has endured far too much to stay.
I, however…I have no pressing duty, so I shall continue the tale, if you wish. Order another drink, perhaps? Shall I call the waiter? But what am I saying? You’re a competent customer—oh, I’ll cover the bill, don’t you worry—order whatever you’d like. Now. Where was I?
Oh yes. Well, the first thing I said to Sofi when Old Fred and Trent had split off to secure the far end of the cavern was to question the condition of Livingstone. Sofi answered in a positive, hopeful tone, “That man can sense trouble better than any alive. I’d be honored to meet the death that finds him. And I can guarantee you that it won’t be by the talons and beaks of the harpies. They have no idea what kind of force they’re dealing with by pursuing Oscar. It will take much more than an exiled demon to bring him down. He’ll be perfectly fine.”
“How did they capture him in the first place?” Warren asked, “Or any of you, for that matter?”
“Surprise. They found us without our most important weapon,” Sofi stated.
“What’s that?”
“Knowledge. And still without it Oscar alone killed more than twenty of the ambushers before they overwhelmed us with the tranquilizers. He was still fighting when I went under. God knows how many he destroyed…”
Warren stared off into space, trying to visualize this hobo as an elite soldier. He had glimpsed it in the past few days of travel, here and there. But to find Livingstone backed into a corner, giving his enemies absolute hell before the end—that he would like to see. Maybe not witness firsthand. But see.
A butterfly landed on his cheek and Warren brushed it away, peering at the giant ovular containers that glowed like the lava lamp his brother had received one Christmas several years ago. It didn’t have the same globular inner motion as that little lamp did, but rather a bubbling or fizzy quality to it. It was almost as if the contents were under high pressure—like a Henry Weinhart’s root beer that you accidentally drop before opening.
Sofi inspected the glass more closely while Warren found a comfortable seat, stretching out a bit on the plush pillows and keeping the butterflies from landing on his face. “This doesn’t seem like demon architecture,” she mused. Warren’s eyebrows shot up.
“That’s good news…right?” he ventured. Sofi nodded. “Does that mean we’re beyond the harpies’ domain?”
“No, not necessarily. They’re cannibals, really, they only…” Sofi began to explain, but a crash above them stole their attention. Warren watched in awe as a figure, shrouded with an aura of broken glass shards, fell backwards from the curved ceiling—bright gunshots flashed from his hand, punctuating a screeching roar which issued from the hole behind him. Feathery forms flapped and fell from the opening, as the figure crashed to the ground, rolled to a stop, and rose to a one-knee stance, still firing at the broken window from whence he had fallen. Warren had covered his head to protect himself from the falling glass, and when the splinters stopped tinkling on the floor, he looked first to Sofi, who now had her weapon drawn and was firing at the ceiling, then to the figure with a glinting sword in one hand and a blazing gun in the other now striding back towards the opening. It could be none other than Livingstone.
In the soft light, he saw a multitude of feathery shadows, but he heard a whole chorus of crazed, dying shrieks. Then he remembered his own powers, though dwindled by the effects of time, but nonetheless there—he felt it coursing through his blood. He touched a writhing harpy and it smoldered into ashes. And so the trio worked, Livingstone and Sofi firing at the stream of feathers pouring from the hole, and Warren sending each struggling, downed bird from her loosening grip on life.
Other voices joined the circle; bigger blasts echoed through the cavernous room. Warren glanced and there stood Old Fred, sending bursts of feathers to mix with the butterflies in what seemed a blizzard of dim color. And after what only seemed a few seconds, the room fell quiet.
Livingstone rubbed his neck, grimacing at the harpies as Warren cleared the last of them. “Don’t,” Livingstone began, as if futilely addressing a disobedient child, “Don’t use…ahh forget it.” He sighed when Warren looked up at him. “We’re already screwed as it is,” he lamented with his other hand massaging his forehead.
“How do you mean that, Oscar?” Old Fred questioned, brushing a butterfly from his eyes.
“Well the only stairway out of here was back up there,” Livingstone said, glancing to the place from which he had fallen.
“How do you know that?” Trent questioned him sharply.
Livingstone scratched at his head idly. “Demons squeal, too, you know, when you apply the right pressure. What’s with the butterflies down here? It’s like you shot at a hornet’s nest…except with bubble guns or something and got butterflies instead of angry wasps.”
“This is a strange place—strange forces at work here,” Sofi answered.
“Like?” Livingstone inquired. Sofi nodded towards the wilting and blooming figures in the center. He squinted and started walking.
“They’re chained,” Warren volunteered, stepping alongside Livingstone “and imprisoned until they finish a task, I would guess.”
“Hmm,” was all Livingstone said while he inspected the figures. He began walking around them clockwise while the others filled in around the scrubbing prisoners.
“Five of them here,” Warren stated, “all mesmerized in trying to clean this door.” He looked back to Livingstone in the dim light. “Can you read it?” he asked the hobo.
“I’m not sure I…” Livingstone began, but then epiphany lit his eyes. “Get away!” he shouted and tried to step backwards. His exclamation made Warren jump, but his feet felt sluggish. Then a chilling numbness crept up from his toes. He glanced to his friends. Old Fred was and to stand as erect as she possibly could. But Warren felt his leg muscles weakening. Then a couple shots rang out—Livingstone fired indiscriminately at the five washerwomen. But his bullets had no effect, seemingly being absorbed by the figures. Sofi quivered momentarily, then collapsed entirely. Warren tried to lift his feet—it was like they were glued to the floor. When the numbness reached his knees, he fell. Livingstone had fallen forwards, into a push-up position and Warren could see the muscles quivering in his arms as he resisted the strange, sticky gravitation.
“Whash gungon?” Old Fred slurred. He kneeled, sitting back on his feet, head lolling to his right side. Warren heard Livingstone finally collapse in a heap, then get to his knees, like the others, including himself, already had. They seemed to be moving inward, slowly, each heading towards one of the five imprisoned women.
A purple gas began to issue from around the door, circling outwards. Old Fred blew at it, but to no effect. When it touched his knee, the mist seemed to seep into him. Suddenly Old Fred turned the same, off-dark color as the washerwomen. Warren gasped and looked around him. Trent and Livingstone had been simultaneously affected. He looked at Sofi who tiredly tried to stretch away from the swirling gas—Warren watched in horror as she was consumed, unable to do a thing. All his muscles were relaxed and he had no command over them.
When the mist touched his own leg, a gasp of wind rushed through the room from the center, blowing back the butterflies and dispelling the dark mist—and the previous prisoners. It was only the five of them, huddled around the glass door. Warren’s four companions all imitated the motions of their predecessors, the lax stretching, then slapping at the glass with dry sponges. He felt paralyzed, but noticed he wasn’t in the same motion as the others. He tried speech.
“Sofi, can you hear me?” he said, and surprisingly well. She didn’t answer him, however. He glanced down at his hands—they were still the pinkish yellow of the Caucasian skin. Immediately he wondered if his sight was deceiving him and he were just as futilely trapped as the others. He grabbed lazily at a pillow and found he could still feel it. He brushed it closer to his side. Perhaps it was the demon’s power. Perhaps he had been spared—had it taken the brunt of the attack? But he was still fairly paralyzed and definitely rooted to the spot.
The good part, he reasoned somewhere in the recesses of his mind, was that he could now take a good look at the writing once every ten seconds or so, since he himself wasn’t part of the obscuring rhythm. So he focused himself entirely on this task—if he could understand what it said, perhaps he could figure out how to break its binding spell, or whatever it was, and get out of this place.
So he focused on the far side of the glass from him, after Old Fred had raised himself back up. Sofi plummeted to the surface, but didn’t cover what he was looking at. Warren squinted. “roodsih” seemed to be the first word scrawled. Whoever wrote this didn’t seem to know how to use spaces, Warren thought. All the lines just looped together. Perhaps it was just rood. He remembered one of his English professers talking about rood. It was an old word for a cross. Perhaps that was it. But what about a cross? Or crosses, plural? Roods?
Warren tried to move on, after Old Fred had tried to scrub roods from the door, and failing, stretched again weepingly. “ihtnealce?” He knew a Neal from high school. Was this a proper name? Maybe it was supposed to read, “Iht Neal” Crosses it Neal? Warren lamented his situation. This was going to be impossible. But he kept reading. “Cotel baeb.” Maybe this meant a Babylonian prison? Or a hotel with cots for infants? Warren felt this was getting a little too strange. So he read on to the only part that made sense to him: “will forwards and backwards.”
His friends were swaying forwards and backwards. Did their movement have something to do with solving this riddle? Warren tried to blink the heaviness from his eyelids. “Will forwards and backwards.” Maybe that was just part of the curse placed on them. He read on.
“egaug nal” he figured before Livingstone had fallen face first on the line. “Gauge,” maybe? That was almost spelled correctly, it only had a letter forwards. And “lan” might have been spelled backwards. Then epiphany sent a shiver down his spine. “lan-gauge…language.” Perhaps all the words he couldn’t understand were backwards, while the ones he could understand were forwards. He looked at the final words, written in front of him. “swon kohwen oylno.”
He tilted his head, trying to place the letters in reverse order in his mind without mental spaces. “Onlyonewhoknows” Yes, that was it. It said, “Only one who knows language will forwards and backwards…” he stopped. It had made sense until he had joined the two phrases. Perhaps he had to reverse it. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will…” Perfect, he thought and squinted to see the first part again. “Roodsihtnealcotelbaeb,” he determined after several tries. He closed his eyes, trying to see it backwards. “Beableto,” was all he could pry out without looking. At least it made some sense. He sighed and took a deep breath afterward and held it, willing himself to think. The numbness held his head in a fog. He shook it lightly and looked back to the sliding glass door that wouldn’t slide, but was giving up its mystery bit by bit.
“Cleanthis,” he finally determined. Clean. That was a good word. Then rood. Cross. What did a cross have to do with cleaning a door? He couldn’t figure it out, his eyelids were so heavy.
Did he have to cross himself to break this spell? He tried it the catholic way, right then left, and waited. The numbness throbbed in his head. Then he crossed himself like the greeks, left, then right. Again nothing happened. He blinked for an extended second, head lilting to the right. Back to the beginning. What was it? he asked himself. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean crosses.” That didn’t make any sense with the writing being on a sliding glass door and not a cross. Wasn’t that what Sofi and Livingstone and whoever else was close by were trying to do? Wash a cross? Or a door? Yeah, a door, he told himself. He looked back to the far end.
The letters down there didn’t spell cross. Backwards or forwards. Why had he been thinking about crosses. Oh yes, he remembered, it was the rood. That old English poem. Or middle English. Something. Rood. But that didn’t. That wasn’t. Warren narrowed his eyebrows, toying on the edge of epiphany. Rood. Rood. Backwards and forwards. Rood forwards was rood. Rood backwards was…was…what was it? he asked himself. He shook his head again. The strain of thinking was so much. He looked to his right. Rood. Backwards.
Sofi stretched backwards, mourning her dry sponge. What would she say rood backwards was? Would he care? She was beautiful, and caring. He couldn’t care about anything less than that. He looked back to the glass with the writing on it. Such a mystery. He gathered himself and ran it through his mind one final time. “Only one who knows language,” he remembered easily, “will forwards and backwards,” he read, then remembered that was wrong and flipped it, “backwards and forwards will be able to clean…” he remembered clean. That was what they were trying to do, right? Warren squinted at the far side again. “roodsiht.” That started with a t, then. Then an h. “Th” he imagined. “This,” was what it said then. “This rood.” No backwards. “This,” then a d. Epiphany clicked. “This door.” Door. Not a cross, he sighed. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean this door,” was its message. He memorized it. Or thought that he should. Then he wondered if he should say it aloud.Warren licked his lips with a thick tongue. “Only one who knows…language…backwards and forwards will…be able…to clean this door,” he finally spat out.
He waited, expecting the fog to lift. The only thing he heard, however, was a liquid plop at his side. With a flimsy neck, he rolled his head to the left and found a sponge at his side. But it was wet. He grabbed at it a couple times—failing to grasp it. Instead, he gave up and set his hand on it. But it wasn’t his hand. It was more purple than he remembered. He had never had purple hands before. Not ever. And with that thought, he lost consciousness and drifted off into dreamless space.
I, however…I have no pressing duty, so I shall continue the tale, if you wish. Order another drink, perhaps? Shall I call the waiter? But what am I saying? You’re a competent customer—oh, I’ll cover the bill, don’t you worry—order whatever you’d like. Now. Where was I?
Oh yes. Well, the first thing I said to Sofi when Old Fred and Trent had split off to secure the far end of the cavern was to question the condition of Livingstone. Sofi answered in a positive, hopeful tone, “That man can sense trouble better than any alive. I’d be honored to meet the death that finds him. And I can guarantee you that it won’t be by the talons and beaks of the harpies. They have no idea what kind of force they’re dealing with by pursuing Oscar. It will take much more than an exiled demon to bring him down. He’ll be perfectly fine.”
“How did they capture him in the first place?” Warren asked, “Or any of you, for that matter?”
“Surprise. They found us without our most important weapon,” Sofi stated.
“What’s that?”
“Knowledge. And still without it Oscar alone killed more than twenty of the ambushers before they overwhelmed us with the tranquilizers. He was still fighting when I went under. God knows how many he destroyed…”
Warren stared off into space, trying to visualize this hobo as an elite soldier. He had glimpsed it in the past few days of travel, here and there. But to find Livingstone backed into a corner, giving his enemies absolute hell before the end—that he would like to see. Maybe not witness firsthand. But see.
A butterfly landed on his cheek and Warren brushed it away, peering at the giant ovular containers that glowed like the lava lamp his brother had received one Christmas several years ago. It didn’t have the same globular inner motion as that little lamp did, but rather a bubbling or fizzy quality to it. It was almost as if the contents were under high pressure—like a Henry Weinhart’s root beer that you accidentally drop before opening.
Sofi inspected the glass more closely while Warren found a comfortable seat, stretching out a bit on the plush pillows and keeping the butterflies from landing on his face. “This doesn’t seem like demon architecture,” she mused. Warren’s eyebrows shot up.
“That’s good news…right?” he ventured. Sofi nodded. “Does that mean we’re beyond the harpies’ domain?”
“No, not necessarily. They’re cannibals, really, they only…” Sofi began to explain, but a crash above them stole their attention. Warren watched in awe as a figure, shrouded with an aura of broken glass shards, fell backwards from the curved ceiling—bright gunshots flashed from his hand, punctuating a screeching roar which issued from the hole behind him. Feathery forms flapped and fell from the opening, as the figure crashed to the ground, rolled to a stop, and rose to a one-knee stance, still firing at the broken window from whence he had fallen. Warren had covered his head to protect himself from the falling glass, and when the splinters stopped tinkling on the floor, he looked first to Sofi, who now had her weapon drawn and was firing at the ceiling, then to the figure with a glinting sword in one hand and a blazing gun in the other now striding back towards the opening. It could be none other than Livingstone.
In the soft light, he saw a multitude of feathery shadows, but he heard a whole chorus of crazed, dying shrieks. Then he remembered his own powers, though dwindled by the effects of time, but nonetheless there—he felt it coursing through his blood. He touched a writhing harpy and it smoldered into ashes. And so the trio worked, Livingstone and Sofi firing at the stream of feathers pouring from the hole, and Warren sending each struggling, downed bird from her loosening grip on life.
Other voices joined the circle; bigger blasts echoed through the cavernous room. Warren glanced and there stood Old Fred, sending bursts of feathers to mix with the butterflies in what seemed a blizzard of dim color. And after what only seemed a few seconds, the room fell quiet.
Livingstone rubbed his neck, grimacing at the harpies as Warren cleared the last of them. “Don’t,” Livingstone began, as if futilely addressing a disobedient child, “Don’t use…ahh forget it.” He sighed when Warren looked up at him. “We’re already screwed as it is,” he lamented with his other hand massaging his forehead.
“How do you mean that, Oscar?” Old Fred questioned, brushing a butterfly from his eyes.
“Well the only stairway out of here was back up there,” Livingstone said, glancing to the place from which he had fallen.
“How do you know that?” Trent questioned him sharply.
Livingstone scratched at his head idly. “Demons squeal, too, you know, when you apply the right pressure. What’s with the butterflies down here? It’s like you shot at a hornet’s nest…except with bubble guns or something and got butterflies instead of angry wasps.”
“This is a strange place—strange forces at work here,” Sofi answered.
“Like?” Livingstone inquired. Sofi nodded towards the wilting and blooming figures in the center. He squinted and started walking.
“They’re chained,” Warren volunteered, stepping alongside Livingstone “and imprisoned until they finish a task, I would guess.”
“Hmm,” was all Livingstone said while he inspected the figures. He began walking around them clockwise while the others filled in around the scrubbing prisoners.
“Five of them here,” Warren stated, “all mesmerized in trying to clean this door.” He looked back to Livingstone in the dim light. “Can you read it?” he asked the hobo.
“I’m not sure I…” Livingstone began, but then epiphany lit his eyes. “Get away!” he shouted and tried to step backwards. His exclamation made Warren jump, but his feet felt sluggish. Then a chilling numbness crept up from his toes. He glanced to his friends. Old Fred was and to stand as erect as she possibly could. But Warren felt his leg muscles weakening. Then a couple shots rang out—Livingstone fired indiscriminately at the five washerwomen. But his bullets had no effect, seemingly being absorbed by the figures. Sofi quivered momentarily, then collapsed entirely. Warren tried to lift his feet—it was like they were glued to the floor. When the numbness reached his knees, he fell. Livingstone had fallen forwards, into a push-up position and Warren could see the muscles quivering in his arms as he resisted the strange, sticky gravitation.
“Whash gungon?” Old Fred slurred. He kneeled, sitting back on his feet, head lolling to his right side. Warren heard Livingstone finally collapse in a heap, then get to his knees, like the others, including himself, already had. They seemed to be moving inward, slowly, each heading towards one of the five imprisoned women.
A purple gas began to issue from around the door, circling outwards. Old Fred blew at it, but to no effect. When it touched his knee, the mist seemed to seep into him. Suddenly Old Fred turned the same, off-dark color as the washerwomen. Warren gasped and looked around him. Trent and Livingstone had been simultaneously affected. He looked at Sofi who tiredly tried to stretch away from the swirling gas—Warren watched in horror as she was consumed, unable to do a thing. All his muscles were relaxed and he had no command over them.
When the mist touched his own leg, a gasp of wind rushed through the room from the center, blowing back the butterflies and dispelling the dark mist—and the previous prisoners. It was only the five of them, huddled around the glass door. Warren’s four companions all imitated the motions of their predecessors, the lax stretching, then slapping at the glass with dry sponges. He felt paralyzed, but noticed he wasn’t in the same motion as the others. He tried speech.
“Sofi, can you hear me?” he said, and surprisingly well. She didn’t answer him, however. He glanced down at his hands—they were still the pinkish yellow of the Caucasian skin. Immediately he wondered if his sight was deceiving him and he were just as futilely trapped as the others. He grabbed lazily at a pillow and found he could still feel it. He brushed it closer to his side. Perhaps it was the demon’s power. Perhaps he had been spared—had it taken the brunt of the attack? But he was still fairly paralyzed and definitely rooted to the spot.
The good part, he reasoned somewhere in the recesses of his mind, was that he could now take a good look at the writing once every ten seconds or so, since he himself wasn’t part of the obscuring rhythm. So he focused himself entirely on this task—if he could understand what it said, perhaps he could figure out how to break its binding spell, or whatever it was, and get out of this place.
So he focused on the far side of the glass from him, after Old Fred had raised himself back up. Sofi plummeted to the surface, but didn’t cover what he was looking at. Warren squinted. “roodsih” seemed to be the first word scrawled. Whoever wrote this didn’t seem to know how to use spaces, Warren thought. All the lines just looped together. Perhaps it was just rood. He remembered one of his English professers talking about rood. It was an old word for a cross. Perhaps that was it. But what about a cross? Or crosses, plural? Roods?
Warren tried to move on, after Old Fred had tried to scrub roods from the door, and failing, stretched again weepingly. “ihtnealce?” He knew a Neal from high school. Was this a proper name? Maybe it was supposed to read, “Iht Neal” Crosses it Neal? Warren lamented his situation. This was going to be impossible. But he kept reading. “Cotel baeb.” Maybe this meant a Babylonian prison? Or a hotel with cots for infants? Warren felt this was getting a little too strange. So he read on to the only part that made sense to him: “will forwards and backwards.”
His friends were swaying forwards and backwards. Did their movement have something to do with solving this riddle? Warren tried to blink the heaviness from his eyelids. “Will forwards and backwards.” Maybe that was just part of the curse placed on them. He read on.
“egaug nal” he figured before Livingstone had fallen face first on the line. “Gauge,” maybe? That was almost spelled correctly, it only had a letter forwards. And “lan” might have been spelled backwards. Then epiphany sent a shiver down his spine. “lan-gauge…language.” Perhaps all the words he couldn’t understand were backwards, while the ones he could understand were forwards. He looked at the final words, written in front of him. “swon kohwen oylno.”
He tilted his head, trying to place the letters in reverse order in his mind without mental spaces. “Onlyonewhoknows” Yes, that was it. It said, “Only one who knows language will forwards and backwards…” he stopped. It had made sense until he had joined the two phrases. Perhaps he had to reverse it. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will…” Perfect, he thought and squinted to see the first part again. “Roodsihtnealcotelbaeb,” he determined after several tries. He closed his eyes, trying to see it backwards. “Beableto,” was all he could pry out without looking. At least it made some sense. He sighed and took a deep breath afterward and held it, willing himself to think. The numbness held his head in a fog. He shook it lightly and looked back to the sliding glass door that wouldn’t slide, but was giving up its mystery bit by bit.
“Cleanthis,” he finally determined. Clean. That was a good word. Then rood. Cross. What did a cross have to do with cleaning a door? He couldn’t figure it out, his eyelids were so heavy.
Did he have to cross himself to break this spell? He tried it the catholic way, right then left, and waited. The numbness throbbed in his head. Then he crossed himself like the greeks, left, then right. Again nothing happened. He blinked for an extended second, head lilting to the right. Back to the beginning. What was it? he asked himself. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean crosses.” That didn’t make any sense with the writing being on a sliding glass door and not a cross. Wasn’t that what Sofi and Livingstone and whoever else was close by were trying to do? Wash a cross? Or a door? Yeah, a door, he told himself. He looked back to the far end.
The letters down there didn’t spell cross. Backwards or forwards. Why had he been thinking about crosses. Oh yes, he remembered, it was the rood. That old English poem. Or middle English. Something. Rood. But that didn’t. That wasn’t. Warren narrowed his eyebrows, toying on the edge of epiphany. Rood. Rood. Backwards and forwards. Rood forwards was rood. Rood backwards was…was…what was it? he asked himself. He shook his head again. The strain of thinking was so much. He looked to his right. Rood. Backwards.
Sofi stretched backwards, mourning her dry sponge. What would she say rood backwards was? Would he care? She was beautiful, and caring. He couldn’t care about anything less than that. He looked back to the glass with the writing on it. Such a mystery. He gathered himself and ran it through his mind one final time. “Only one who knows language,” he remembered easily, “will forwards and backwards,” he read, then remembered that was wrong and flipped it, “backwards and forwards will be able to clean…” he remembered clean. That was what they were trying to do, right? Warren squinted at the far side again. “roodsiht.” That started with a t, then. Then an h. “Th” he imagined. “This,” was what it said then. “This rood.” No backwards. “This,” then a d. Epiphany clicked. “This door.” Door. Not a cross, he sighed. “Only one who knows language backwards and forwards will be able to clean this door,” was its message. He memorized it. Or thought that he should. Then he wondered if he should say it aloud.Warren licked his lips with a thick tongue. “Only one who knows…language…backwards and forwards will…be able…to clean this door,” he finally spat out.
He waited, expecting the fog to lift. The only thing he heard, however, was a liquid plop at his side. With a flimsy neck, he rolled his head to the left and found a sponge at his side. But it was wet. He grabbed at it a couple times—failing to grasp it. Instead, he gave up and set his hand on it. But it wasn’t his hand. It was more purple than he remembered. He had never had purple hands before. Not ever. And with that thought, he lost consciousness and drifted off into dreamless space.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Chapter 18
Now glance a moment at Sofi across the way. She’s conversing with someone on her phone. And I wonder who it could be. I doubt this is any random hello from a friend—look at how her eyes are suddenly fixated on her wineglass. She must be hearing something important, some valuable jewel of information. And look! What a surprise to her ears—she has not heard this before; her lips open and close in indecision. Perhaps a breath of hope has entered her soul? Perhaps the final dagger of regret has plunged into her depths—either way, she won’t last long there at her table. I must continue my tale before she leaves and plummets into despair.
All you need to note is the sheer opposition a few years have made in Sofi’s story. She’s now a wisping, smoking candlestick in danger of growing forever cold—just a remnant of the brightly burning flame in her soul that hour in the depths of the harpy’s den. But how lovely she was to look upon there in Warren’s arm. Not to take anything from our hero. His heart had been shattered and his love burst forth in what could have been tangible rays of warm, overflowing light. And so the two stood and cradled the other in a slow, rocking waltz to the music of love—which both heard so clearly in the relative silence.
Between the reverent pauses for love, they whispered to each other of the day’s immediate events. Sofi revealed that the only members she knew were alive were Livingstone and Old Fred and Warren told her of his abduction—she of course inspected his wounded shoulder. Warren melted at her tender touch.
But all too suddenly, the echoing flaps of the harpy’s wings caught their ears and she was upon them. Warren jumped when he saw her—her feathered body had his mother’s face. The harpy landed and folded her wings, a sly grin on her lips. “Are you ready for your next task, Warren?”
He nodded and bit his lip, hoping he could pull another miracle out of his pocket like he had with Sofi. The harpy shook the feathers from herself and became Warren’s mother completely, beckoning him to a faint outline in the cliff wall with splayed fingers. Warren followed obediently, Sofi clutching his waist. The harpy pressed on the stone and a door slid upward, vanishing into the rock. Warren’s eyebrows shot up with it and followed her through the doorway.
The hallway was a pristine, white passage with several tinted windows lining both sides. Sylvara strode down the hall with a fascinating pace, and the tangled pair of Warren and Sofi fell behind. But the harpy turned to her left just a few yards ahead of them and opened another door. She turned and extended her right hand. “Please, in here.”
The room was empty—no big surprise for Warren, who had scarcely seen an inhabited or even furnished room since his rescue from his own home by Livingstone. But Sylvara pointed to the far end of the room, where Warren saw a recessed, glass cage. He approached it slowly at first, but recognized the inhabitant of the cage, Ali. She stretched her paws as high on the glass as she could, sniffing for any kind of exit.
Warren dropped to his knees to level himself with the cage. “Are you okay, Ali?” he asked, hands planted on the glass. She squeaked and clawed at the glass.
“We purged the demonic essence from her system—so she won’t answer you,” Sylvara stated, winking at Warren. “At least not in your own language,” she thought to add. “However, your test for Ali’s life is simple: you must retrieve her key from my nest.” Warren dropped a questioning eyebrow. “It’s in plain sight,” she laughed, “an my nest is the biggest one in the middle.” But as Warren turned to go, she cautioned him. “But! You will not be going as yourself; and remember, if you die, the rat dies. If you come back empty-handed, the rat dies. If you succeed, she will live,” she warned him, all the time stepping closer to him. “Now be off!” she said and seized Warren by the neck. He struggled to pry her hands from him for a moment, but then she released him and stepped backwards.
Sofi gasped and turned. In just a few moments, Warren had fallen to the ground, sprouted hair and claws and whiskers. Sylvara smiled at the transformation when all that remained of Warren was a squeaking, terrified rat on the white tiled floor. She opened another door and pulled two collapsible chairs from the closet. “We shall wait here for him, dear Sofi.”
Once Warren had registered the change brought upon him, he had to adjust himself to the drastic changes—mostly in the world of his senses. Smells hung in the air like levitating streams; a barrage of sounds overpowered him at first. But bit by bit, Warren accustomed himself to this new manner of perception and gathered his wits. He had to find the nest, the key—for Ali’s rescue, for her freedom, for her life.
He scurried out of the room and back down the hallway they had come, through the doorway and into the cavernous abyss beyond it. A whole host of streaming smells accosted his nose. But the one belonging to Sylvara was quite keen.
It didn’t take Warren long to find a scrambling path up the cavern wall to the largest of the myriad of woven nests constructed with a motley blend of sticks, plastics, and mud. He scurried into the nest and gave it a quick look over—checking for anything that might resemble a key. But the place was a veritable treasure chest of miscellaneous items. A violet rubber ball, an oval mirror, several loosely rolled wool blankets, a golden pocket watch, a conglomeration of pens, a jar of paper-clips, a spatula, a decorated teapot without a lid, several lighters, a metallic toy plane, two pairs of sunglasses, and a whole host of other items he didn’t recognize.
What he did recognize when it happened was the sound of flapping wings. Warren’s rat eyes searched the thick cavern air momentarily—a winged terror dove towards him, talons outstretched. His instincts took over and he found himself scampering for cover. He found a slight opening between the nest and the cavern wall into which he ran quickly—and just in time, as the harpy slammed against the rock and started to scratch and dig after him.
Warren squeezed himself down through the tangled mess, his heart pumping as the talons tore after him. Then shrieks seemed to multiply around him and the commotion above him increased exponentially. Yet further inward he burrowed, where he found a small cavity. He couldn’t control his shivering and shaking, or the rapid beat of his heart. Sounds of ravenous harpies clawing at the nest moved around him. He searched around frantically for any route of escape—each passage only carried reverberations of doom through it.
Then a soft yellow form caught his attention, creeping through the maze of sticks. It was a moth with restless, fluttering wings. Warren stared at it for a moment while it crawled up to his twitching nose. Then, apart from all the sounds of the world, a thin, fine voice curled itself around his mind. “You will die,” it stated affectionately. Warren recoiled. “Yes, the harpies will find you and dismantle you. Sylvara is a cruel being, exiled to this bottomless pathway of guttural moods and fierce passions. She suffers the torments of her mind, her conscience in this bleak, dying history.”
Warren crouched and thought, “Who are you?”
The moth twitched a furry antenna. “How does my appearance deceive you? Have you so quickly forgotten?”
“What is your name?”
“Unimportant. But if you must have one, I will give you one: call me Thandris. Now, little one, listen to me before hope is lost. Sylvara has been condemned among the living and the dead, the pure and the corrupt. Pay her no heed, for she will delight in your ecstasy and your pain alike—give her no reason to indulge in either.”
“What should I do?”
“Accept my power—I have little to give you now and it will wane with time. But find her key and return to her quickly. She will sense my presence and agree to any demands you make of her—especially if you make an example of one of her minions.”
Warren spun in a circle and looked at his rat-paws, “How?”
“Allow me,” said the moth, which climbed onto Warren’s back. A jolt of energy entered his spine—and Warren felt himself growing, he squinted as light surrounded him and seemed to blow the nest away, like the breeze would a plume of desert dust. Wingbeats surrounded him, but the intensity of the light around him kept the harpies hidden. When the light began to fade, Warren found himself standing on a small ledge of the nest, a strange, blue-steel colored object at his feet: the key. He picked it up with human hands.
At last the light was gone and a hundred glowering harpies flapped in obvious irritation around him. Warren’s confidence soared and he stepped lightly off the nest onto the air. He strode towards one burnt-orange winged fright and without a thought stretched out his hand. The creature struggled with powerful strokes to get away, but had been shackled in place by the air itself. When Warren’s outstretched finger touched the frenzied being, it exploded into a thousand drifting embers.
An echoing storm of shrieks erupted immediately and the creatures fled to the depths of their nests. Warren ran now on the cavern winds, cursing himself for having left Sofi with that monster in the first place. Back down the brilliant hallway and through the door he stormed, the energy of the demon coursing through him.
At first glance, Sylvara screamed and cowered in the corner. Warren stared her down as he walked to Ali’s cage and freed her. The rat delighted in Warren’s smell, his touch, and raced up his arm to his shoulder. Warren smiled and stroked Ali on the head. “You’re safe again now, girl.” Then he turned to Sofi, whose face showed relief, but whose shoulders demonstrated anxiety. “Are you okay?” She nodded.
Halfway satisfied, Warren turned his attention to Sylvara, who gulped and scrambled to the corner, hiding herself with her wings. “Where are the others?” he demanded of her.
“I will kill them if you touch me,” she warned.
“Where are they?” Warren commanded, stepping closer.
“Keep away from me, demon, and I will tell you,” Sylvara hissed. Warren stopped and she glanced at him from behind a veil of feathers. “Next door on the right,” she said, grinning a wretched smile.
Warren followed Sofi, who was already out the door. Sofi struggled with the door, then turned to Warren. “Locked,” she said. He grasped the handle and the lock split open. Warren smiled; the harpy hadn’t lied. There, in shackles, lay Livingstone, Trent, and Old Fred. Sofi bounded in behind him and sighed. “Get up guys, time to go,” she said and gave Warren a little push from behind to free them.
He came first to Livingstone and touched his chains, which fell from his wrists and ankles like liquid. With such simplicity, he freed the other two, who patted him on the shoulder and thanked him. “Where are the rest?” Sofi asked. Old Fred shook his head with downcast eyes. Warren shivered at the fates of those poor soldiers. Livingstone’s poker face, however, hadn’t changed a bit. Warren knew he wanted the story behind his powers. But Sofi was not in the mood for discussion and urged them out of the room, like a mother hen escorting her chicks.
As they sprinted down the hallway, Trent pointed to a red door ahead of them. “I remember seeing them store our weapons there—before the drugs took complete effect.” Warren nodded, slid to a stop, and opened the door. Old Fred went in and started handing out the goodies. Warren couldn’t help but envision him as a jolly but dirty Saint Nick passing out presents. But not only were their armaments piled in there, but those of other victims as well. Perhaps expeditionary teams into what the demon had told Warren was an asylum for exiles. Old Fred grinned when he picked up an ancient, but powerful shotgun and slung it over his shoulder. Livingstone rolled his eyes and grabbed a sheathed katana. “Oh is that right, Samurai Jack?”
A smile almost crossed Livingstone’s lips, “Yes, indeed. And you’ll thank me when you run out of shells.” He winked and Old Fred shook his head. When the group had re-armed themselves, they pressed forward again, searching for an escape from the tunnels. Trent led the party, looking at his watch as he jogged ahead.
“I think there should be a passage to the surface just on the other side of this wall up here. If we could…” he began, but a spine-tingling screech echoed down the corridor, effectively silencing him. Four of the five slowed and turned to check behind them, readying their weapons.
Only Livingstone kept moving, yelling back to them, “I wouldn’t stop there if I were…” But before he could finish, the floor fell out from under the four. They plummeted down a short shaft and landed on an incline, spiraling downwards. A small, circular outlet door opened and spat them out into a warm room, lavished with soft red carpet, pink suede pillows strewn about the room like autumn leaves, and what seemed to be giant lava lamps populating the perimeter of the circular room. But far more curious to the four was the thousands of butterflies flitting about the room, dazzling the air with swirling color.
Sofi was the first to stand, followed by Trent, while Warren and Old Fred only propped themselves up on their elbows to gaze at the spectacle. “My God,” Fredric stammered. “What is this?”
Warren laughed to himself in the irony that Livingstone wasn’t present to point out the stupidity of asking such a question. But if anyone were to ask it, it would have to be Old Fred. But as he looked through the haze of butterflies, he saw silhouettes—figures bending, stretching, squirming. “Do you see those…?” he began and Sofi nodded, squinting beside him. Now Warren stood and helped the old man to his feet.
Trent was already several paces away, heading towards the shadowed people with his pistol drawn. Warren reached for Sofi’s hand—whether for his or her comfort, he couldn’t say—and followed him. Old Fred hobbled after them, a hand on his back, the other clutching his shotgun, which he employed as a walking stick.
Across the pillowed, carpeted floor, through the butterflies and the soft crimson glow, the oddly-moving figures huddled—perhaps five or six of them—and every now and again, one would flail its arms backwards, splayed out like a kitten stretching for a piece of string just out of its reach. When Trent was within twenty yards or so of these blossoming figures, he called out to them.
“Hey there!”
Warren watched as they paid not the slightest heed to Trent’s greeting, and kept undulating from their knees. They were women—or at least had the feminine figure, Warren clarified in his own thoughts. He imagined they were trapped in a ritual of some sort—he began to discern chains around their waists and wrists. Through the clouds of butterflies, he also found a distinct, pale sort of mist rising from their midst.
“Are you okay?” he heard Trent ask again, his handgun still leveled at them, but irritated at their ignorance of his questions. “Are you slaves of the harpy?” He stopped a couple feet from them and Warren and Sofi joined him at his side. The girls wore paper-thin purple garments, which hung on them like moss an old withered tree branch. They were chained to the floor in a semi-circle, but seemed unaware of their bindings—each focused on the space between them, each had a dark, glazed pot of liquid and a sponge in each hand. In a waving sort of dance, they stretched skyward with their sponges collapsed down to the floor, eyes and noses only inches from the surface, then they would twist sideways and soak both sponges in the pots and repeat the process—but never at the same time; they alternated with an inconsistent rhythm.
Warren craned his neck to see what they bent over to scrub while Trent kept the torrent of questions raining on these unresponsive beings. Old Fred, however, simply walked up to one, cupped her chin in his hands and twisted her face towards him. Dark blank eyes stared at him, as if she couldn’t quite pinpoint why the rhythm of her life had been interrupted. Then she squirmed from his hands and fell back over to the floor. That’s when Old Fred gasped and motioned for Warren and Sofi to step closer.
There, resting in the floor, was a sliding glass door, with a luminescent glow—so out of place with the rest of the room—like a lemon among cherries. Warren also noted that the butterflies seemed to gravitate away from the radiance of the door. But as he inspected the glass, he saw, in a brilliant lime-color, a loopy handwriting scrawled across its surface. It reminded him of Sylvara’s note. He dropped to a knee, next to one of the slaves, squinted, and tried to read the writing. But the interference of the sponging girls made it almost impossible. He looked up to the others.
Trent was walking from each to each, looking for the spark of intellect in any pair of eyes—and evidently failing to locate it. “Hello? Can you hear me?” he yelled in obvious frustration, yanking on their arms or hair. “Anyone in there?” Still he tried, and still they stretched, searched, flopped, and scrubbed. “It’s like they’re zombies or something,” he stated, “only instead of the crazed, bloodlusting frenzy they’re just on a cleaning binge.”
“Perhaps we have to figure out what’s written on the glass, first,” Warren volunteered.
“Let’s make sure the room is secure first,” Old Fred suggested. “We don’t want to get jumped by that harpy and her minions again.”
Sofi nodded, but added quietly, “I think Oscar might be a preoccupation to them right now.” Trent shook his head and placed his hands behind his neck.
“After all,” Warren suggested, “We can’t assume that Sylvara has complete control. She might just be a force who has no choice but to make her home in this dangerous pathway. The ‘demon,’” he made quotation marks with his fingers, “told me she had been exiled here. Who knows what other forces are at work here besides the harpy?”
“Right,” Sofi decided, “Trent and Fredric, sweep the far side of the cavern, Warren, you and I will check back that way. We’ll meet back in the center. Good enough for a start?” Everyone nodded and left the imprisoned girls to their impossible task in the middle.
All you need to note is the sheer opposition a few years have made in Sofi’s story. She’s now a wisping, smoking candlestick in danger of growing forever cold—just a remnant of the brightly burning flame in her soul that hour in the depths of the harpy’s den. But how lovely she was to look upon there in Warren’s arm. Not to take anything from our hero. His heart had been shattered and his love burst forth in what could have been tangible rays of warm, overflowing light. And so the two stood and cradled the other in a slow, rocking waltz to the music of love—which both heard so clearly in the relative silence.
Between the reverent pauses for love, they whispered to each other of the day’s immediate events. Sofi revealed that the only members she knew were alive were Livingstone and Old Fred and Warren told her of his abduction—she of course inspected his wounded shoulder. Warren melted at her tender touch.
But all too suddenly, the echoing flaps of the harpy’s wings caught their ears and she was upon them. Warren jumped when he saw her—her feathered body had his mother’s face. The harpy landed and folded her wings, a sly grin on her lips. “Are you ready for your next task, Warren?”
He nodded and bit his lip, hoping he could pull another miracle out of his pocket like he had with Sofi. The harpy shook the feathers from herself and became Warren’s mother completely, beckoning him to a faint outline in the cliff wall with splayed fingers. Warren followed obediently, Sofi clutching his waist. The harpy pressed on the stone and a door slid upward, vanishing into the rock. Warren’s eyebrows shot up with it and followed her through the doorway.
The hallway was a pristine, white passage with several tinted windows lining both sides. Sylvara strode down the hall with a fascinating pace, and the tangled pair of Warren and Sofi fell behind. But the harpy turned to her left just a few yards ahead of them and opened another door. She turned and extended her right hand. “Please, in here.”
The room was empty—no big surprise for Warren, who had scarcely seen an inhabited or even furnished room since his rescue from his own home by Livingstone. But Sylvara pointed to the far end of the room, where Warren saw a recessed, glass cage. He approached it slowly at first, but recognized the inhabitant of the cage, Ali. She stretched her paws as high on the glass as she could, sniffing for any kind of exit.
Warren dropped to his knees to level himself with the cage. “Are you okay, Ali?” he asked, hands planted on the glass. She squeaked and clawed at the glass.
“We purged the demonic essence from her system—so she won’t answer you,” Sylvara stated, winking at Warren. “At least not in your own language,” she thought to add. “However, your test for Ali’s life is simple: you must retrieve her key from my nest.” Warren dropped a questioning eyebrow. “It’s in plain sight,” she laughed, “an my nest is the biggest one in the middle.” But as Warren turned to go, she cautioned him. “But! You will not be going as yourself; and remember, if you die, the rat dies. If you come back empty-handed, the rat dies. If you succeed, she will live,” she warned him, all the time stepping closer to him. “Now be off!” she said and seized Warren by the neck. He struggled to pry her hands from him for a moment, but then she released him and stepped backwards.
Sofi gasped and turned. In just a few moments, Warren had fallen to the ground, sprouted hair and claws and whiskers. Sylvara smiled at the transformation when all that remained of Warren was a squeaking, terrified rat on the white tiled floor. She opened another door and pulled two collapsible chairs from the closet. “We shall wait here for him, dear Sofi.”
Once Warren had registered the change brought upon him, he had to adjust himself to the drastic changes—mostly in the world of his senses. Smells hung in the air like levitating streams; a barrage of sounds overpowered him at first. But bit by bit, Warren accustomed himself to this new manner of perception and gathered his wits. He had to find the nest, the key—for Ali’s rescue, for her freedom, for her life.
He scurried out of the room and back down the hallway they had come, through the doorway and into the cavernous abyss beyond it. A whole host of streaming smells accosted his nose. But the one belonging to Sylvara was quite keen.
It didn’t take Warren long to find a scrambling path up the cavern wall to the largest of the myriad of woven nests constructed with a motley blend of sticks, plastics, and mud. He scurried into the nest and gave it a quick look over—checking for anything that might resemble a key. But the place was a veritable treasure chest of miscellaneous items. A violet rubber ball, an oval mirror, several loosely rolled wool blankets, a golden pocket watch, a conglomeration of pens, a jar of paper-clips, a spatula, a decorated teapot without a lid, several lighters, a metallic toy plane, two pairs of sunglasses, and a whole host of other items he didn’t recognize.
What he did recognize when it happened was the sound of flapping wings. Warren’s rat eyes searched the thick cavern air momentarily—a winged terror dove towards him, talons outstretched. His instincts took over and he found himself scampering for cover. He found a slight opening between the nest and the cavern wall into which he ran quickly—and just in time, as the harpy slammed against the rock and started to scratch and dig after him.
Warren squeezed himself down through the tangled mess, his heart pumping as the talons tore after him. Then shrieks seemed to multiply around him and the commotion above him increased exponentially. Yet further inward he burrowed, where he found a small cavity. He couldn’t control his shivering and shaking, or the rapid beat of his heart. Sounds of ravenous harpies clawing at the nest moved around him. He searched around frantically for any route of escape—each passage only carried reverberations of doom through it.
Then a soft yellow form caught his attention, creeping through the maze of sticks. It was a moth with restless, fluttering wings. Warren stared at it for a moment while it crawled up to his twitching nose. Then, apart from all the sounds of the world, a thin, fine voice curled itself around his mind. “You will die,” it stated affectionately. Warren recoiled. “Yes, the harpies will find you and dismantle you. Sylvara is a cruel being, exiled to this bottomless pathway of guttural moods and fierce passions. She suffers the torments of her mind, her conscience in this bleak, dying history.”
Warren crouched and thought, “Who are you?”
The moth twitched a furry antenna. “How does my appearance deceive you? Have you so quickly forgotten?”
“What is your name?”
“Unimportant. But if you must have one, I will give you one: call me Thandris. Now, little one, listen to me before hope is lost. Sylvara has been condemned among the living and the dead, the pure and the corrupt. Pay her no heed, for she will delight in your ecstasy and your pain alike—give her no reason to indulge in either.”
“What should I do?”
“Accept my power—I have little to give you now and it will wane with time. But find her key and return to her quickly. She will sense my presence and agree to any demands you make of her—especially if you make an example of one of her minions.”
Warren spun in a circle and looked at his rat-paws, “How?”
“Allow me,” said the moth, which climbed onto Warren’s back. A jolt of energy entered his spine—and Warren felt himself growing, he squinted as light surrounded him and seemed to blow the nest away, like the breeze would a plume of desert dust. Wingbeats surrounded him, but the intensity of the light around him kept the harpies hidden. When the light began to fade, Warren found himself standing on a small ledge of the nest, a strange, blue-steel colored object at his feet: the key. He picked it up with human hands.
At last the light was gone and a hundred glowering harpies flapped in obvious irritation around him. Warren’s confidence soared and he stepped lightly off the nest onto the air. He strode towards one burnt-orange winged fright and without a thought stretched out his hand. The creature struggled with powerful strokes to get away, but had been shackled in place by the air itself. When Warren’s outstretched finger touched the frenzied being, it exploded into a thousand drifting embers.
An echoing storm of shrieks erupted immediately and the creatures fled to the depths of their nests. Warren ran now on the cavern winds, cursing himself for having left Sofi with that monster in the first place. Back down the brilliant hallway and through the door he stormed, the energy of the demon coursing through him.
At first glance, Sylvara screamed and cowered in the corner. Warren stared her down as he walked to Ali’s cage and freed her. The rat delighted in Warren’s smell, his touch, and raced up his arm to his shoulder. Warren smiled and stroked Ali on the head. “You’re safe again now, girl.” Then he turned to Sofi, whose face showed relief, but whose shoulders demonstrated anxiety. “Are you okay?” She nodded.
Halfway satisfied, Warren turned his attention to Sylvara, who gulped and scrambled to the corner, hiding herself with her wings. “Where are the others?” he demanded of her.
“I will kill them if you touch me,” she warned.
“Where are they?” Warren commanded, stepping closer.
“Keep away from me, demon, and I will tell you,” Sylvara hissed. Warren stopped and she glanced at him from behind a veil of feathers. “Next door on the right,” she said, grinning a wretched smile.
Warren followed Sofi, who was already out the door. Sofi struggled with the door, then turned to Warren. “Locked,” she said. He grasped the handle and the lock split open. Warren smiled; the harpy hadn’t lied. There, in shackles, lay Livingstone, Trent, and Old Fred. Sofi bounded in behind him and sighed. “Get up guys, time to go,” she said and gave Warren a little push from behind to free them.
He came first to Livingstone and touched his chains, which fell from his wrists and ankles like liquid. With such simplicity, he freed the other two, who patted him on the shoulder and thanked him. “Where are the rest?” Sofi asked. Old Fred shook his head with downcast eyes. Warren shivered at the fates of those poor soldiers. Livingstone’s poker face, however, hadn’t changed a bit. Warren knew he wanted the story behind his powers. But Sofi was not in the mood for discussion and urged them out of the room, like a mother hen escorting her chicks.
As they sprinted down the hallway, Trent pointed to a red door ahead of them. “I remember seeing them store our weapons there—before the drugs took complete effect.” Warren nodded, slid to a stop, and opened the door. Old Fred went in and started handing out the goodies. Warren couldn’t help but envision him as a jolly but dirty Saint Nick passing out presents. But not only were their armaments piled in there, but those of other victims as well. Perhaps expeditionary teams into what the demon had told Warren was an asylum for exiles. Old Fred grinned when he picked up an ancient, but powerful shotgun and slung it over his shoulder. Livingstone rolled his eyes and grabbed a sheathed katana. “Oh is that right, Samurai Jack?”
A smile almost crossed Livingstone’s lips, “Yes, indeed. And you’ll thank me when you run out of shells.” He winked and Old Fred shook his head. When the group had re-armed themselves, they pressed forward again, searching for an escape from the tunnels. Trent led the party, looking at his watch as he jogged ahead.
“I think there should be a passage to the surface just on the other side of this wall up here. If we could…” he began, but a spine-tingling screech echoed down the corridor, effectively silencing him. Four of the five slowed and turned to check behind them, readying their weapons.
Only Livingstone kept moving, yelling back to them, “I wouldn’t stop there if I were…” But before he could finish, the floor fell out from under the four. They plummeted down a short shaft and landed on an incline, spiraling downwards. A small, circular outlet door opened and spat them out into a warm room, lavished with soft red carpet, pink suede pillows strewn about the room like autumn leaves, and what seemed to be giant lava lamps populating the perimeter of the circular room. But far more curious to the four was the thousands of butterflies flitting about the room, dazzling the air with swirling color.
Sofi was the first to stand, followed by Trent, while Warren and Old Fred only propped themselves up on their elbows to gaze at the spectacle. “My God,” Fredric stammered. “What is this?”
Warren laughed to himself in the irony that Livingstone wasn’t present to point out the stupidity of asking such a question. But if anyone were to ask it, it would have to be Old Fred. But as he looked through the haze of butterflies, he saw silhouettes—figures bending, stretching, squirming. “Do you see those…?” he began and Sofi nodded, squinting beside him. Now Warren stood and helped the old man to his feet.
Trent was already several paces away, heading towards the shadowed people with his pistol drawn. Warren reached for Sofi’s hand—whether for his or her comfort, he couldn’t say—and followed him. Old Fred hobbled after them, a hand on his back, the other clutching his shotgun, which he employed as a walking stick.
Across the pillowed, carpeted floor, through the butterflies and the soft crimson glow, the oddly-moving figures huddled—perhaps five or six of them—and every now and again, one would flail its arms backwards, splayed out like a kitten stretching for a piece of string just out of its reach. When Trent was within twenty yards or so of these blossoming figures, he called out to them.
“Hey there!”
Warren watched as they paid not the slightest heed to Trent’s greeting, and kept undulating from their knees. They were women—or at least had the feminine figure, Warren clarified in his own thoughts. He imagined they were trapped in a ritual of some sort—he began to discern chains around their waists and wrists. Through the clouds of butterflies, he also found a distinct, pale sort of mist rising from their midst.
“Are you okay?” he heard Trent ask again, his handgun still leveled at them, but irritated at their ignorance of his questions. “Are you slaves of the harpy?” He stopped a couple feet from them and Warren and Sofi joined him at his side. The girls wore paper-thin purple garments, which hung on them like moss an old withered tree branch. They were chained to the floor in a semi-circle, but seemed unaware of their bindings—each focused on the space between them, each had a dark, glazed pot of liquid and a sponge in each hand. In a waving sort of dance, they stretched skyward with their sponges collapsed down to the floor, eyes and noses only inches from the surface, then they would twist sideways and soak both sponges in the pots and repeat the process—but never at the same time; they alternated with an inconsistent rhythm.
Warren craned his neck to see what they bent over to scrub while Trent kept the torrent of questions raining on these unresponsive beings. Old Fred, however, simply walked up to one, cupped her chin in his hands and twisted her face towards him. Dark blank eyes stared at him, as if she couldn’t quite pinpoint why the rhythm of her life had been interrupted. Then she squirmed from his hands and fell back over to the floor. That’s when Old Fred gasped and motioned for Warren and Sofi to step closer.
There, resting in the floor, was a sliding glass door, with a luminescent glow—so out of place with the rest of the room—like a lemon among cherries. Warren also noted that the butterflies seemed to gravitate away from the radiance of the door. But as he inspected the glass, he saw, in a brilliant lime-color, a loopy handwriting scrawled across its surface. It reminded him of Sylvara’s note. He dropped to a knee, next to one of the slaves, squinted, and tried to read the writing. But the interference of the sponging girls made it almost impossible. He looked up to the others.
Trent was walking from each to each, looking for the spark of intellect in any pair of eyes—and evidently failing to locate it. “Hello? Can you hear me?” he yelled in obvious frustration, yanking on their arms or hair. “Anyone in there?” Still he tried, and still they stretched, searched, flopped, and scrubbed. “It’s like they’re zombies or something,” he stated, “only instead of the crazed, bloodlusting frenzy they’re just on a cleaning binge.”
“Perhaps we have to figure out what’s written on the glass, first,” Warren volunteered.
“Let’s make sure the room is secure first,” Old Fred suggested. “We don’t want to get jumped by that harpy and her minions again.”
Sofi nodded, but added quietly, “I think Oscar might be a preoccupation to them right now.” Trent shook his head and placed his hands behind his neck.
“After all,” Warren suggested, “We can’t assume that Sylvara has complete control. She might just be a force who has no choice but to make her home in this dangerous pathway. The ‘demon,’” he made quotation marks with his fingers, “told me she had been exiled here. Who knows what other forces are at work here besides the harpy?”
“Right,” Sofi decided, “Trent and Fredric, sweep the far side of the cavern, Warren, you and I will check back that way. We’ll meet back in the center. Good enough for a start?” Everyone nodded and left the imprisoned girls to their impossible task in the middle.
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