There are black stone ovens, and great rusting kettles and pans and cauldrons and spits to turn meat – thick with webs and greasy, ancient dust.
And tables and cupboards and benches and broken bowls and enormous spoons and ladles.
Abandoned.
The smell is overpowering in parts. Of rotted vegetables and cold fats that are perhaps twenty years old. (More?)
A sorrowful, sooty place.
I’ve even found an old book of recipes, some in other languages, some in mine, some oddly spelled.
‘How to make a cinnamon toad’ –!? Ugh!
I wandered for ages. Water dripped down, and the pipes and vats above made noises. (And also sometimes dripped sticky slimes, so I’ll never be able to eat anything from here again. If ever I get the chance.)
It’s eerie too. Because of the light and dark, the sounds. Easy to imagine there’s something else here with you.
I must find a way out.
So far I haven’t found a way out.
I’ve gone round in circles. I know I passed that big barrel before, oh, about two hours ago.
They don’t seem to move, the kitchens. Perhaps they’re not allowed to, for fear of disarranging the cooking pipes. Or they do it on the sly, to confuse people trapped here.
I dozed off in this corner. (It’s hot, damp and airless.) When I woke, I heard something moving about.
It’s an echo, of course. Or mice. Rats even. Rats are all right. There’s lots of spilled stuff for them to eat.
It didn’t sound like a rat or mice.
My imagination.
Something is down here. With me.
Help.
What I’m going to do is find somewhere to hole up until day-break. Some light will come in here from the high windows. I think that may be safer than this false light, which whatever is down here obviously doesn’t mind.
I just definitely heard it.
What is it?
A sort of fluttering soft rush – and then – almost skittering—
The rush was like wings. Big.
So I wo—
That was where I got up and ran, dragging this book and the bag and everything with me.
I plunged down a corridor and through some more kitchen rooms I may have gone round already. Then I was in a long room more like a very wide passage, with great basins against the walls, and a lot of water was on the floor, splashing up as I ran.
The bad-vegetable smell came strong and repulsive. No lights worked (thick shadows), only a dim glow filtered through cracks and holes from other places. Things lit up strangely. I kept seeing eyes. Perhaps, I thought, they were—
And then I realized I wasn’t fighting my way through old dishrags or torn curtains.
Plants grew there, in the half-dark, tall, slender stems and drooping flags of leaves – some of which broke as I pushed by. There were spongy mosses too, I kept treading on them, and huge funguses like dissolving statues – and some of these were luminous.
Despite this, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw next.
I’d burst into a wood.
That really is what it was. An indoor forest.
There are trees, twenty or thirty feet high, their tops crushed against the high ceilings and then spreading and looping over. In places too they’ve cracked the stone and forced their way through to higher kitchen rooms above. As in the jungle beyond the Rise, creepers rope these trees. There are shrubs that thrust up from the paving. And the funguses, which seemed tall, were now taller, trees themselves, like oaks made of yellowish candlewax. The rest of the vegetation is a pale swimmy green, or oily black …
The smell was thicker – yet less horrible. It was more natural, I suppose, earthier.
‘Fruits’ and ‘flowers’ grow here too, none very recognizable or tempting. (Fruit like long-fingered gloves, flowers like white spiders – yum.)
Lots of water, spilled from old taps and cisterns, or dripped through by rain.
The food pipes twisted about through all this. I think their leaks have caused these things to grow, plus, too, ancient left-overs, maybe from centuries before – cheeses that have become quaint moulds, or apple cores mixed with other stuff, which may have bred those things like umbrellas with fruit like frogs.
I stood there in the middle of it, uneasy and not liking it, yet impressed. It reminded me of the vegetable forest on the way to Peshamba – where we’d seen the monster—
Then I glanced up and saw, hanging from one of the food pipes, a heavy long thing, some vast knot of creeper or fungus. It had ears. Eyes. The eyes, cool and slitted, were looking at me, still and thoughtful.
Now I could see, it hung upside down from a long hairless tail, which was curled over and over the pipe – the way a bat hangs, though a bat doesn’t hang by its tail … How big was it? About my size. Bigger …
It will just uncurl its tail and spring.
But it didn’t. The eyes closed up.
And then I heard that rush-flutter sound, it went directly over my head, and a raw compost-heap-smelling wind fanned me.
Another of them – and it was flying.
Not wings. Its stunted little arms were held out and broad flaps of skin stretched between them and its hairy body, carrying it in a long glide, downwards.
They were flying rats.
The flying rat landed near me. It stared at me from grey eyes that didn’t reflect enough light to go red. Then it lowered its snout and drank from a pool of rain-water.
I turned my head so slowly I felt my neck creak.
They were all around me. Fumbling about, searching over the mosses for parts they liked to eat. They made the skittery noises when their hair scratched through leaves and fronds.
They must live here, but also, they’re all through the kitchens. I’d passed by them. Shadows, smells, eyes. Not known.
Why hadn’t they attacked me? When would they decide to?
Oh, now, probably. Two or three were edging
