I screamed as what appeared to be every horse on the planet thundered at us out of nowhere. They should have been silent, but the echoes of my own voice pounded against us so hard that they almost had tangible weight. For a moment, it actually felt like we were being trampled under a thousand flailing hooves.
And then they cut out, disappearing like the ghosts they weren’t. Leaving me panting on all fours with my arms over my head. And gazing into blackness so deep it boiled at the corners of my vision, while my heartbeat sounded in my ears like another charge.
Billy pulled himself off the floor, crawled over beside one of the “walls,” and just sat there, shivering and staring at me. “Is that . . . going to keep . . . happening?”
I don’t know, I mouthed.
“Well, that’s not very helpful, is it?” he snapped.
I crawled over beside him. “I think it’s just the last few synapses flaring,” I said softly. Synapses, synapSes, synapSES. “The longer we’re here,” here, hERe, here, “the fewer there should be.” Be, BE, be.
“That does not make me want to stick around,” Billy snarled.
“Me, neither.” NEIther, neiTHer, neither.
“Oh, for the love of—let’s get this crap over with!”
I couldn’t agree more.
We headed for the little light again, which I eventually figured out wasn’t flickering. It was passing behind the strange shapes that clogged the darkness here, misshapen pillars and half walls, and sudden dips or rises that left us scrambling across a landscape filled with pitfalls. But Billy’s light helped, once we figured out how to direct it, and we slowly started gaining.
Ghostly images continued to be a problem, although we learned to ignore them. The echoes became eerie background noises, but they weren’t really an issue, either, because we weren’t chasing whatever was ahead of us by sound. And the weird protrusions and undulating floor got easier to navigate after a while.
Until the latter dropped out from under me a moment later, like I’d hit a fun house slide.
I didn’t scream that time; I was learning.
But I did bounce around, hitting walls, or something like them, while scrabbling for purchase with hands and feet and not finding any. And then having the floor completely disappear for a second, leaving me with the horrible sensation of falling through open air. Before I hit a hard surface, what felt like stories below where we’d started, with a whummp.
I just lay there for a moment, dizzy and freaked-out and very, very, quiet.
And not just because the echoes of my landing were shivering the air all around me, sounding like a thousand lumberjacks chopping a thousand trees.
But because there was something else down here.
I didn’t know how I knew. There was no sound, once the echoes faded, except for Billy’s cursing, somewhere up above. He seemed to have avoided whatever pitfall had caught me, and was calling my name, sounding increasingly worried.
I didn’t call back.
For a long moment, I just stayed where I was, not moving, barely even breathing. Just staring into utter darkness, because I didn’t have Billy’s light anymore. And the strange illumination we’d been following was no longer in sight, either.
That left me with taste, smell, touch, and sound, none of which were helping. All my senses felt like they’d gone hyperacute, yet all of them told me the same thing: there was nothing here. I was imagining things. Everything was fine.
Everything was not fine.
And maybe Caedmon, the asshole, had had a point after all, I thought, because deprivation of the other senses seemed to have opened up a new one. One that I decided to call weight, although it wasn’t really related to touch. The air just seemed heavier in some places, more meaningful, like gravity bending around a star.
Only it wasn’t a star that was huddled in a corner, under a jutting shelf of the cave material.
And, once I identified it, it was impossible to miss. Something small, something weak, something frightened. Especially when it realized that I could detect it.
It let out a small noise that sounded thunderous to my straining ears, and took off—to the left. I knew because I could track it. Not with my eyes, but with the sense of weight that pulled at me, like I was holding a wildly careening kite caught in a gale.
I scrambled to my feet and followed the crazed little thing, which was bouncing off walls and breathing heavily in rapid little puffs. I was frightening it, even though I wasn’t trying to. I wanted to call out, to reassure it, but the scary echoes might make things worse instead of better. I didn’t know what to do, and I was getting farther away from anywhere Billy might look for me.
I should turn back, I thought.
But if I did, that was it. I wouldn’t know anything more than I already did, and I didn’t know anything! Not what this thing was, why it was inhabiting a dead brain, or—