Their eyes met in the gloom. Two metres away, the dark angel appeared, flexing its claws. Ismael gave a nod. Irene took his hand and they jumped into the void. Hurling itself after them, the angel tumbled through the hole into the Cave of Bats.
To Ismael and Irene, the fall through the dark seemed endless, and when their bodies finally plunged into the sea, they felt the cold water biting into every pore. As they floated up to the surface, the tide propelled them towards the sharp rocky walls.
‘Where is it?’ asked Irene, struggling to control her shivering.
For a few seconds, they embraced without saying a word, expecting the hellish apparition to emerge from the sea at any moment and end their lives in the darkness of the cave. But that moment never came. Ismael was the first to notice.
The angel’s scarlet eyes shone up from the depths; the creature’s enormous weight prevented it from floating to the surface. A roar of anger reached them through the water. Whatever was manipulating the angel was twisting about furiously, conscious that its puppet had fallen into a trap that rendered it useless. The huge mass of metal would never reach the surface and was condemned to remain at the bottom of the cave until the sea turned it into a pile of rusty scrap.
The two friends remained there, watching the glow of those eyes fade then disappear beneath the water for ever. Ismael let out a sigh of relief. Irene quietly wept.
‘It’s over,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘It’s over.’
‘No,’ replied Ismael. ‘That was only a machine: it had no life or will of its own. Something was making it move and that something tried to kill us . . .’
‘But what is it?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
As they spoke, there was a sudden explosion at the bottom of the cave. A cloud of black bubbles rose to the surface, then morphed into a dark spectre that scaled the rock towards the roof of the cave. The shadow stopped and observed them from its perch.
‘Is it leaving?’ whispered Irene, terror-stricken.
Cruel laughter filled the grotto. Ismael shook his head.
‘It’s leaving us here . . .’ said the boy. ‘The tide will do the rest . . .’
The shadow vanished through the entrance hole in the roof.
Ismael led Irene to a small rock that jutted out above the water’s surface. There was just enough space for the two of them. He put his arms around her. They were wounded and shivering with cold, but for a few moments they just lay on the rock and took deep breaths, without saying a word. At some point, Ismael noticed that the sea seemed to be touching his feet again and realised that the tide was rising. It wasn’t the creature pursuing them that had fallen into a trap, but themselves.
The shadow had abandoned them to the mercy of a slow and terrible death.
10
TRAPPED
The sea roared as it crashed against the mouth of the cave. The entrance hole above them was far away and unattainable, like the eye of a dome. In just a few minutes the sea level had already risen several centimetres. It wasn’t long before Irene noticed that the area of the rock they were sitting on, like castaways, was getting smaller.
‘The tide is rising,’ she said in a hushed voice.
All Ismael could do was nod dejectedly.
‘What will happen t
o us?’ She had already guessed the answer, but was hoping that Ismael, who seemed to possess an endless supply of surprises, might have something else up his sleeve.
He turned his eyes towards her gloomily. Irene’s hopes vanished in an instant.
‘As the tide rises, it blocks the main entrance to the cave,’ Ismael explained. ‘Then there’s no other exit except through that hole in the ceiling.’
He paused and buried his head in his hands.
The thought of waiting until they slowly drowned like rats in the rising tide made Irene’s blood run cold.
‘There has to be some other way of getting out of here,’ she said.
‘There isn’t.’