Solitary (6 page)

«Don't... don't you send them there?»

Grace relaxed a bit. «No. You?»

Amanda shook her head. «Maybe we should start again.»

«Good idea.»

«Why are you here?»

«You first.»

«Fine». Amanda didn't see any good reason to stretch that further, it didn't really matter who explained the situation first, as long as it was made clear. «I met some people... they were all coming this way, it looked as if they were... charmed. I wanted to find out what was going on, so I followed them». It wasn't exactly the whole truth, but it could suffice. She didn't think it was good to start talking about dreams and cats, especially because the cat itself was nowhere to be seen at the moment.

Grace nodded as she spoke. She hadn't really cared about the attitude of the people coming in, so Amanda's description was as good as any other as far as she was concerned. They really weren't acting too normally, now that she thought of it.

«Yes, I saw them», she remarked.

«And they went downstairs.»

Grace nodded without emphasis. She didn't think it was any of her business. At present she was mostly interested in not being sued, and it didn't seem that woman was going to sue her, or that she even could.

«Didn't you think of going and check what was happening?»

«Actually I thought I should go as far as possible from here.»

«But those people might be in danger.»

«That's the point. Do I look like a paladin in a shiny armor? Or even just a police officer?»

«No. And I think you are not in the conditions to call one, are you?»

Grace sent her a gaze of intense loathing for a second, without replying. Then she changed subject. «Anyway who told you they are in danger? It might be the meeting of some sect, or a private party, not our business anyway.»

«No, I know some of those people and they weren't behaving like going at a party... or like they were doing anything in their right mind. I told you that something brought them here... they're controlled.»

«They're controlled». Grace turned that sentence in her head, realizing that maybe that was the answer she had been looking for. Was there any more logical way to steal her patients than controlling them through magic or using some weird mental power? All things considered, investigating further on the matter might not be that bad an idea.

«Amanda... I can call you Amanda, can't I?» The other woman shrugged. That was the least of her worries at the moment. «You know, Amanda, I think you're right, we should go and see what's happening».

«Quite a sudden change of heart», she replied. Grace ignored her.

«Let's go», she said, going down the stairs after recovering her crystal from the floor.

Amanda followed. She still didn't like that woman. Maybe she would have preferred that she had gone as she had said she wanted to, but it was too late to complain.

They went down two flights of stairs and finally reached a large, ancient-looking room, which seemed to constitute the whole of the basement.

Curtains embellished the walls, and a large, heavy-looking, stone disc was propped against one of them. Apparently its natural collocation was in the middle of the floor, where an empty space of exactly the same size and shape could be seen, so that it was like a large missing tile.

There wasn't anyone there.

The glow that Grace first and then Amanda had been able to see, came from a milky-white disc vertically suspended in mid-air, right in the middle of the room.

«What's that?» Grace asked as she was trying to understand why the place was deserted.

«It's a portal», Amanda answered. In the meantime, she had knelt at the border of the empty space in the floor and was looking at the symbols carved around the glowing halo.

«I see it's a portal, but what is a portal doing in the basement of a clinic? Why should anyone build one here?»

Amanda was about to ask for an explanation about that mention of a clinic, since so far she had had no idea of what that building was, but she chose to answer the question instead.

«I don't think they built it here, I think it was already there. It looks like one of the ancient portals.»

«Let me see!» Grace said, getting closer, suddenly interested. «I believed there weren't any left».

«So did I. It seems we were wrong». She stood, climbed down the small step and walked toward the center of the space.

«What are you doing?»

«I'm going to see what's on the other side.»

«Do you have a life insurance?»

«No. What does it matter now?»

«It you always act like this, I can see why you don't. I can't imagine someone who would accept to give one to you.»

Amanda chose to let the conversation drop. She wasn't interested in arguing with that woman.

She shrugged and went into the light.

Left alone, Grace looked around, as if the answer to her questions could be somewhere on the walls. Then she exploded, «Oh, damn it!» and she went through the portal herself.

Amanda rematerialized in a damp and dark place, and for a second she couldn't see anything. The light of the portal wasn't enough to allow her to look around, it only allowed to catch undefined glimpses of what was there.

Soon after, Grace joined her, bringing her light crystal along, and allowing her to see the walls of a cave, covered in mold and lichens.

«What kind of place is this?» the newcomer asked, whispering without wanting to.

Amanda didn't answer. What kind of place it was seemed much too obvious, and about what place it actually was, it was as obvious that she couldn't know it any better than Grace.

Aside from the halo of the portal, there was nothing else than rock everywhere they could look. The ceiling wasn't too high, and examining the cave carefully it was clear that it was a kind of niche in the wall of a corridor going into two opposite directions. Noises came from one of the branches, too distorted by the echoes to identify them clearly.

Amanda started moving carefully in that direction, followed by her less than happy companion.

They advanced in the corridor for maybe a hundred meters, then stopped when they noticed that it reached a quite larger room, lighted by a large number of big crystals. The floor sloped down until it disappeared completely into a large and deep well, surrounded by pulleys mounted on solid supports, and by people using them to bring up some buckets full of dirt, stone shards and debris, as if they were digging to unearth something.

Amanda's blood chilled in her veins when she was able to see what barely peeked out from the middle of the well: a smooth and dark pyramidal shape that could only be the obelisk of her dream. It wasn't really emerging from the rock, at least not on its own accord, but it couldn't be denied that all those people were actively working to bring it to the light.

Grace, whose attention hadn't been caught at all by the black stone, which meant nothing for her, was instead watching with some interest the surroundings of the well. There was a large number of people working around it, still it was a much lesser number than that of those she had seen entering the clinic, which meant that most of them must be digging underground. Aside from the ones alive, there were dead bodies scattered here and there. Not the kind of animated dead related to her profession. Actual dead, plain and simple corpses that must have been the victims of some unfortunate accident on the job and that no one had bothered to bury, or even just move from the place in which they had fallen. As far as she could see from that distance, most were recent dead. Here and there, however, there were also mummified bodies and some heaps of bones that would barely be enough to assemble a full skeleton.

Everyone there, except the two of them obviously, was working in the uttermost silence, exchanging no remarks, letting go no sound that wasn't caused by their tools. They worked like mindless automatons.

Someone else in her place could have said they acted like zombies, but she knew real zombies all too well, and they had nothing to do with that.

Then she noticed that, on the opposite side of the cave, at the brim of the well, there was someone who was quite different in his attitude from the rest of the people. His gaze wasn't fixed at a random spot in front of him, his movements weren't mechanical and repetitive, and most of all he wasn't working. Rather he seemed to be surveying the work of the others, like some kind of job director.

He wasn't someone she had ever seen before, or at least she couldn't remember him, and looked like a completely ordinary man, the kind of person you didn't give a second glance to when you met them in a store or along the street. He was wearing a tracksuit, not unlike hers, a sleeveless padded jacket, in which pockets his hand were buried deep, and a miner helmet on his head. He was the only one wearing an helmet, as well as the one who most unlikely needed one.

He was watching him intently when she realized that something had changed, even though she wouldn't have been able to tell what. As if he had been able to feel her gaze, the man turned in her direction and squinted his eyes to gaze into the partial darkness of the corridor.

Instinctively, Grace backed inside, trying to hide in the dark. Doing that probably worsened her situation, because immediately she heard someone shout, «Down there! Intruders, get them!» and there weren't many doubts about who was talking and who the intruders he was talking about were.

The shout echoed in the cave, shaking Amanda from her torpor and allowing her to focus her gaze on the people who had, suddenly and carelessly, abandoned their job to mechanically move toward them. Loads of stones that had been halfway through the well were abruptly let loose and fell on the bottom. Judging by the noises they made, they didn't just hit the rock below, but even if anyone inside the well had been hurt – or worse – no one seemed to care.

«We must go!» Amanda grabbed Grace from an arm and started going back quickly along the corridor. The necromancer didn't move.

«Leave this to me, don't worry», she said right before starting to chant some unintelligible words, moving her hands in the general direction of the cave.

Some of the corpses laying on the ground shook suddenly, as if they had been hit by an electric charge, then stood up and started to walk, though stiffly and awkwardly. Grace was quite amazed and really disappointed by that. She couldn't understand why the rest of the cadavers was still lifeless, and none of the skeletons had even tried to move.

Her disappointment got much worse when the first of her zombies got close to the well and suddenly seemed to shut off, as if someone had taken away the fake life she had just infused them. Their flesh shivered, then at once it dried and turned to dust, as their bones fell on the ground in crumpled heaps.

«OK, let's go», she said in a tone which was anything but calm. She didn't have the time to take a step before a hand tried to grab her, barely missing her harm and clenching the sleeve of her suit. The assailant was an aged woman wearing a dirty dressing gown and with an enormous quantity of curlers held on her head by a hairnet. Looking at it from the outside, that scene should have been quite funny.

Amanda turned swiftly and kicked the woman in the face. She let go of Grace and stumbled back. Amanda was sorry for having been so violent with someone who clearly was not in charge of her actions, but she hadn't had much choice.

She grabbed Grace in turn and puller her along, as fast as she could, towards the portal.

Their pursuers didn't seem able to run, they rather walked at a fast pace, and this could have allowed them to reach the passage and run through it before they could reach them.

They came out of the tunnel, almost falling into the room rather than entering it, and stood still for a second, looking at the empty space where the disc of light which would have brought her back to the clinic should have been. The portal had been closed.

«That way!» Grace shouted. There was a quick change of parts when she started running toward the other branch of the corridor, grabbing Amanda by one of her wrists and forcing her along.

They ran for less than ten meters before coming to a halt in front of a heap of rocks, where part of the ceiling had collapsed a long time ago.

From the topmost part of the wall, from a hole not larger than a human fist, a rivulet of water quietly flowed down, with a soft gurgle that seemed to make fun of them, as if to stress the fact that it could go freely, but they wouldn't.

Trying to cast the rocks aside was unthinkable. They were trapped.

Amanda turned her back to the wall, while Grace seemingly wanted to keep examining it for the rest of her life, which was probably going to be a ridiculously short time considering the situation. Several people had already started to come out from the passage they had taken, and soon they were all over them.

Amanda regretted the lack of her wand, even thought it would probably have been of little to no use against that number of opponents. She did her best to keep them at bay using whatever she could: kicks, fists, bag... She kicked, she scratched, she shrieked, she wriggled, in the end everything was useless and she succumbed to the sheer number of her assailants, who soon surrounded and immobilized her. Someone hit her on the head with something hard, and she slipped into darkness.