Jacent no longer believed the reverberations they had heard were really echoes. Had he ever believed they were echoes? Well, if he had, now he didn’t. They were voices, real voices, growling ominous threats and accusations from some not far distant room. Not far distant enough, at any rate.
“What was this place?” he asked, almost in a whisper.
“The army barracks,” Kermac said very softly. “From settlement times.”
“Why should an old barracks be … be like this?” Jacent wondered, still whispering. “I mean, it was just Frickians, wasn’t it? You’d expect a place like this in … oh, Derbeck, maybe. Or Molock. Or what’s that place in Enarae, the Swale?”
“I’ve monitored the Swale,” said Metty. “It’s a little, you know, depraved, but this is really spooky!” “But why?” Jacent persisted.
“It’s worse the farther down you go,” murmured one of the girls from over their shoulders. “You notice that? The more stairs we go down, the worse it gets.”
“Oh, you and your farther down,” said Jum defiantly. His face was white and drawn. There was fear in his eyes, but his determination to fight the fear made him reckless. Jacent saw that. Jum was doing the same thing he, Jacent, did, when he wakened from those damned nightmares! Moved by both sympathy and fear at what Jum might do, Jacent put out his hands—too late. Jum darted away from them to face the empty distance, the vacant corridors, the lurking dark.
“You don’t scare me!” he cried. “I can laugh at you!” And he did, screaming laughter into the brooding quiet. “Ha ha, ha ha ha,” forced hammer blows of mocking laughter.
On the tail of his laughter the sound came back, without an instant’s delay, and they went down before it like grain before a scythe. The laughter was a drum roll of thunder, an earthquake of sound. Somewhere a chorus of monsters was enjoying a terrible joke. The adventurers rolled on the floor, their hands over their ears, trembling in a frenzy of horror while the demonic sounds abated.
An expectant silence drew in about them as though awaiting the next jest.
From afar off came a liquid swallowing.
One of the youths whispered, “This was a rotten idea. This is a nightmare.”
“I have nightmares,” Jacent murmured into his hands. “All the time.” He looked up to find a circle of eyes fixed on him. “Don’t you?”
There were flushes and nods of assent as they rose, brushing the dust from their knees.
“Why?” he whispered.
“I don’t think this is the place,” Metty murmured from her position beside Jum, still crouched, still covering his ears. “Not the place to talk about it, Jacent.”
It was not the place. They agreed wordlessly to that. Jum struggled to his feet, and the group turned as one toward the door through which they had come. Kermac led them back, all of them on tiptoe in a straggling line, everyone trying to be quiet, wanting no noise at all. Jum shook his head at Metty when she tried to help him, waving her away. She came to walk beside Jacent once more.
“He’s frightened. It makes him angry,” she whispered.
Jacent nodded. Being scared half to death always made him angry too. Later on. When he thought about it.
They caught themselves glancing toward the walls, all of them now seeing what Jacent had seen on the way in, the movement of things that weren’t there. Right-angled corners shifted into unaccustomed configurations. The line where walls and ceilings met wriggled like serpents, along with the tops of the doors, the edges of stairs.
Shadows, Jacent told himself firmly, ignoring the fact that the light was shadowless, and if there had been shadows, what would have made them move?
At last they came to the door they had left ajar, the door they had unsealed and wished now they had left alone. They wriggled through it one by one. When they had pushed it shut, Kermac set about renewing the seals while the others stood together, saying very little, not sure what to say.
“Where’s Jum?” asked Metty suddenly. “Where’s my brother?”
“He was right behind me,” said someone. “He was bringing up the rear.”
“We have to go back and get him,” cried Metty. No one moved.
“I’ll go alone!” she cried. “I have to find him! Kermac, give me the hansl.”
Kermac swallowed. “I already wiped the trip record. As soon as we got to the door. I didn’t want it in there….”
“You didn’t!” she screamed. “You couldn’t have.”
He shouted at her. “I borrowed it from the supplies room. I didn’t want anybody to know….”
She ran down the empty corridor toward the Great Rotunda, her feet clattering, the sharp, clean echoes coming back at them like slaps. “I’ll get help,” she cried. “Help.”
The others stared at one another guilt-faced, then went after her, slowly, shamefully slowly, far too slowly to catch up with her. At the first intersection, one of them turned off, and another at the next. Soon Jacent found himself alone in the main corridor near the monitor section. The rest of them had gone away, here and there. They were not going to get involved if they could help it, so much was clear.
So what should Jacent do? He couldn’t simply abandon Metty. She was his friend! After a moment’s thought, he went into the monitor section and sought out a Files access, one which was not only vacant at the moment but also set in a corner that hid it from any human or mechanical observer. When he asked for the plans of the Frickian barracks, he used the general work code for the current shift, not his personal code. The plans materialized before him, and he flicked back and forth through them, locating the door by which they had entered, retracing the way they had
