Yet another wave of triumphant roars battered the stones with enthusiastic vociferousness.
‘We are the Antidote! We have yet to lose a battle! We have taken control of territories formerly held by ruthless armies of murderers, thieves and rapists, and we have not only held these gains against counter-attack, we have expanded them and sent the monsters running with their tails between their legs, or buried them forever beneath the soil, where their poison can no longer be spread. We have won these victories, yes … but let us not rest on our laurels, no, for these victories are only the beginning of the greatest campaign the world will ever have seen, my friends … my companions … my family!’
Margaret staggered back from the peephole, her skin cold and clammy, and her extremities tingling with pins and needles as she reeled with a debilitating sense of dread and panic.
‘He’s even more of a maniac than I could ever have imagined,’ she gasped. ‘He’s insane, he’s a complete psychopath! I have to get out of this nightmare, I have to, I have to, I have to!’
With her heart thumping madly within her ribcage, forcing fear-quickened blood through every vein and artery in her body, she hurried back along the passage, praying that nobody had come to check on her. She did not want to end up chained to the floor in that hall with the General as her judge, jury and executioner.
After a time that felt a lot longer than it actually was, and a fearful journey through the pitch black involving many bumps, stumbles and near-falls, she finally caught sight of light, spilling out into the darkness from the door that opened into her room. Her heart was still fluttering with a frantic terror, but she breathed out a sigh of relief when she realised that she had almost made it back.
When she reached the light, she allowed her eyes ample time to readjust, and once she felt comfortable with its glow she stepped back into her room. Her limbs were still shaking and her mouth was dry. She was about to fall back onto her bed, exhausted from the traumatic journey and the washes of fear, when a spike of panic drove its steel through her core with the shock of an unexpected tack piercing a bare foot.
The door!
The door to the secret passage was not only still wide open, it was stuck open. Margaret scrambled over to the lever and started pulling and pushing on it with all her might, but it seemed that no amount of effort on her part would make it budge. A new and crippling fear snaked its way around her, encircling her body with the menacing fluidity of a python closing in for a kill.
She fell back, sweating the icy perspiration of unabated panic and gulping in short, sharp breaths in heaving gasps.
‘Shit, shit, shit, come on Margaret, think,’ she muttered, trying to force some sort of will through the suffocating reptile coils of terror, ‘come on, come on, there is a way to shut this thing, there must be, you just haven’t found it yet! It was closed when you found it, and unless the designer of this mechanism was a complete fool – which I’m sure he or she wasn’t – there has to be a way to close it again. Shit, come on, shit, shit!’
With quivering, almost-numb hands she groped and probed all around the basin; if this particular lever was only for opening the door, then there had to be another one for closing it. But where was it?
Then, through the swell of panic the answer came to her: it wasn’t here, it was inside the tunnel. It had to be. With this revelation screaming its desperate hope in her mind she scrambled up onto her feet and hurried over to the passage. She began pawing at the stones of the inside walls, and then after a minute or two of seeking she finally found it: the lever that would surely close the door. Holding her breath with suspense, she pulled down on it, and immediately the sound of a heavy mechanism at work started to rumble through the walls. She dashed out of the tunnel as the door started to close and watched with bated breath until the noise finally ceased and the stones realigned. After this she relaxed her tension-taut muscles and released a long, slow sigh, noting that the outline of the door had become all but indistinguishable from the wall that surrounded it.
‘Thank God,’ she muttered. ‘Thank God. Oh Ting, you almost lost me! I’m coming back to you though, I’m coming back. Mark my words Ting, I’m coming back.’
41
MARGARET
A knock on the door yanked Margaret through the wall of sleep and hurled her into the confusion of the present, and for a few panic-stricken moments she stared with bleary eyes at the unfamiliar walls that surrounded her.
‘Dr Green?’
The voice was muffled but familiar: Sergeant Tesla. This caused the scary confusion to subside somewhat, and Margaret breathed out a sigh of relief.
‘Are you awake yet, Dr Green? I’ve brought you some breakfast.’
‘Just a minute,’ she called out. ‘Gimme a sec to get outta bed, Tesla.’
Despite the constant worry and fear that dogged her every thought in this place, Margaret had somehow managed to get a decent night’s sleep, and once
