they would have him.
And he ran.
The silence was the worst thing. His ears told him there was nothing there, seductively teasing him to stop, but the primal part of him sensed them, responded to them as his ancestors would have done. He had reached the foot of the hill, crossed the first two miles of a flat plain that reached to the horizon. But he was starting to tire. The constant pounding on the hard rock sent spikes of pain from his knees into his groin and a knot had formed in his gut. Fire was creeping out in a web across his lungs.
He slowed, almost imperceptibly, but it was enough. Some fluttering thing brushed the back of his jacket. He propelled himself forward to escape it, but he didn't have the energy to maintain the spurt. When he slowed this time, the touch on his jacket was as sharp as a knife. He pressed forward again. Stars burst across his vision. Winding down, nearly over. A pinching sensation seared his shoulder like red hot pokers. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling from nearly contact.
He would never give up. Death or glory.
The rock fell away beneath his feet. For one frightening moment he was pedalling thin air, and then he reconnected with the ground hard, skidding on his heels down a pebbled scree slope, windmilling his arms to maintain his balance. Dark walls rushed up around him and shadows clustered far below. A fissure of some kind, invisible until he was upon it.
Gravity dragged him faster, barely able to keep his balance. A boulder leapt out of nowhere, but he had no control of his momentum to avoid it. He clipped it and did a forward roll in the air, crashing down on to the stones and shale, twenty knives in his back, ripping his flesh. Faster and faster, the shadows looming up, impossible to tell what dangers they hid. His head slammed against the rocks and he lost consciousness for the briefest instant. He awakened to realise the sucking shadows were close at hand. The force propelled him over a rock ledge into the heart of them.
He awoke in so much pain he was convinced something bad was broken. Blood slicked his clothes from a deep gash on his head and numerous other cuts across his body. He wiped a puddle from his eye and loosed the splatter with a flick of his wrist. Cautiously, he tested his limbs. Apart from a searing pain in his ribs, he appeared in one piece; he guessed that was probably bad bruising rather than a break.
After the initial stupefaction, he came to awareness sharply, jumping to his feet to flee his pursuers. He was alone on a flat stone floor. High overhead he could see a sliver of grey sky and, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the shapes of the dead moving down the walls of the fissure towards him.
Exhausted and brittle from the pain, he headed along the floor of the fissure into the dark.
It continued much further than he imagined. At the far end he found stone that had definitely been worked into blocks. It formed a doorway around a black hole leading into the ground. With the relentless grey shapes drawing in on him, he had no choice: he dived in.
Inside he was surprised to find more worked stone lining the walls, floor and ceiling. He had no idea who was responsible-surely not the dead-but it gave him hope it might lead to a way out. Fumbling for the matches he always carried in his pocket, he struck one and saw the walls were covered with primitive paintings, inexplicable in design but which resonated uneasily with him. The match also illuminated a dead torch. It was dry as a bone and lit quickly.
Glancing back, he could just make out hints of movement at the other end of the fissure. There was no time to proceed with caution. His footsteps bounced off the walls of the tunnel as he ran.
After five minutes the tunnel led into an enormous room that must have been carved from the bedrock and then lined with stone blocks. The ceiling was lost in the shadows far beyond the reach of his torch. The effort that must have gone into its construction stunned him: the wall paintings were now the size of three men, and there were carved effigies all around, squat, misshapen figures with no human characteristics, and tall, spindly forms that loomed over him like grotesque children's doodles. He couldn't help slowing to a walk to mask the echoes of his feet; suddenly he didn't want to make any sound that would bring attention to him. The scale of the place suggested no human sensibilities, nor did the jarring lines of the alien and unsettling architecture. It reminded him of a temple. Did the dead have their own gods? Did they pray for relief from the bitterness of their grey reality?
The grey shapes were again visible where he had entered the cavernous chamber. He hurried on, hoping he hadn't taken himself into a cul-de-sac.
But the more he progressed into that place, the more he felt an oppressive dread, even worse than the feeling when he had first entered the Grim Lands. Something was out there, lurking in the shadows, perhaps, or even further afield: just beyond the spiderweb veil that separated the worlds. Close enough to reach out and swallow him whole.
Do the dead have their own gods?
He couldn't shake the question from his head.
Before he could consider skirting the perimeter in search of an exit, he found himself at a slightly raised area. At the centre of it was a short column on which stood a foot-high egg, its surface swirling with shades of sapphire and emerald. The moment he laid eyes on it, a part of him told him to avoid it, keep moving by. But there was something hypnotic about the thing that sapped his natural caution. He took a step on to the dais and realised obliquely it was even more than that: the egg was actively blanketing his fears to draw him in; he could feel it tinkering on the edge of his consciousness. The time when he could have ignored it had already past, and so he found himself approaching the column with trepidation.
Three feet from the egg he passed through some invisible boundary. The air wavered briefly and then he was inside a bubble where everything was greentinged, the chamber beyond unreal, all sounds muffled. The egg was pulsing slightly, although it was certainly not alive in any true meaning of that word.
Tentatively, he reached out. The air itself gathered a charge, humming like an electricity pylon. A second later he felt a dull jolt and the bubble transformed. He was in the centre of a three-dimensional view, so real he might as well have been amongst the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the banks of Loch Ness, looking down at himself being charged by the Questing Beast. The detail left no doubt that it was a true view, across time and space. Had it been plucked from his mind, he wondered? And if so, why that moment? He had a vague answer to that: it was the moment when he felt he had really, truly failed, not only everyone else, but also himself.
The repercussions of what he was seeing began to worm its way through his mind. On a hunch, he thought of Ruth and what she was doing at that moment. The 3-D view shifted and he was on the rolling deck of a boat in the middle of a nighttime storm. The rain was flying horizontally, the sails flapping so wildly it was almost deafening. A figure crept in the shadow of the raised cover to the hold, its long hair flattened to its head and back. As he watched, Ruth looked around, her face grimly determined. The first thing Veitch noticed was how much her features had changed in the short time they had been apart. A hardness made her appear, if not a little older, then certainly more mature; some of the innocence that softened her features had gone.
Seeing her brought a damp wave of emotion inside him, but in an odd way it invigorated him too; here was all the motivation he needed. Focusing his mind, he pushed Ruth out of it and thought of Shavi.
There was only the briefest period of transition before the image around him showed a strange, hopeless landscape of yellowing grass and twisted, leafless trees. Shavi sat on a stone box of some kind, staring deeply towards the horizon. Witch couldn't tell if there was anything wrong with him or if he was simply lost in thought.
'That's a start,' he muttered. 'Now show me how I get to him.'
He was now looking down on himself standing at the egg, only the shadows all around had cleared to reveal several tunnels leading off. The angle of his view highlighted one directly ahead.
Cautiously he walked backwards until he stepped out of the bubble with a faint pop. Away from the magical cocoon, he felt suddenly exposed and hurried towards the tunnel, pausing at the threshold to look back. Curiously, the dead did not appear to have pursued him; he would have expected some of them to have arrived by that time. Something else was in the chamber, though far away. He could hear the dim echoes of the movement of an enormous shape. With an involuntary shudder, he hurried along the tunnel.
Laura lit a small fire in the corner of the warehouse while the Bone Inspector foraged for food. The last time he came back with cans for just the one meal. She berated him enough that he wouldn't make the mistake again, stressing that a choice between meatballs resembling glutinous chunks of mud and fatty steak pie filling was really no choice at all.
