The Future's Mine (17 page)

‘Onwards we go,’ I said, gesturing to Grimmy to lead the way. He grumbled and I watched him take exasperated steps into the gloom.

 I began to hum a tune that was supposed to be chirpy but in the depressing surroundings, it sounded strained, manic, like a crazy person. I stopped when Matthias turned round to give me a disparaging glare. As I was smaller than he was, my fire torch lit up his face from underneath, casting a horribly devilish mask of shadows and light that highlighted circles under his eyes, elongated his nose and made his mouth thin and cruel. I looked away quickly, not wanting to see him looking so unfamiliarly wicked.

A hoarse scream punctuated the air.

Bahhh!

‘What the hell was that?!’ cried Grimmy, skittering across the passage to put his cowardly back against the wall. It had come from in front of us, from the passage which led to the water.

Again the strange cry happened again –
bah!
– only this time it was followed by a long drawn-out moan of uneven cadences.

‘Animal?’ I asked Matthias.

He looked astounded and shook his head. ‘… Human.’

We stared in horror at each other.
No, no, no, this wasn’t right
; there could be no humans here, we were supposed to be alone. Noah steeled himself and was the first to move.

‘They sound in pain, let’s go,’ he said, striding forward purposefully.

Grimmy, Matthias and I hung back, shiftily looking at our feet, the resolve that had carried me onwards so far momentarily turning to jelly.

Noah turned to face us and said imploringly, ‘They could be hurt, come on.’

It was a testament to my terror that I actually reached in my bag and pulled out the tiny golden gun that I had previously decided not to use. Well … needs must. I held it firmly in my right hand, my left holding out the fire torch like a weapon and gave Noah a nod. Matthias gritted his teeth and pulled out a short but wide knife from his belt. Noah raised an eyebrow at the sudden appearance of the concealed weapon.

‘Not for whoever’s in there, but for
him
.’ He nodded towards Grimmy and then put the knife at Grimmy’s back. ‘Walk,’ he commanded.

Grimmy started to protest but Matthias jabbed the knife harder into his back.

‘OK, ok!’ cried Grimmy and then continued forward, muttering a fluent stream of obscenities under his breath. I made out the words ‘bloody giant’ and ‘fat-headed cow’.

The whimpering and moaning got louder as we rounded a corner and I knew we were in striking distance of stumbling upon the source of the sound. The light from our torches lit up the centre of the passageway but left shady corners and dark crevices – potential hiding places. There was a creepy, spidery, skittering sound, like someone rushing across the floor, coming closer to us. I held my breath. The sound came closer.

This it was.
We were about to see who –
or what
– was making the noise. My heart felt ready to burst from my chest. A sudden horror-thought struck me –
was the gun even loaded?
Realising I had only seconds to act, I quickly dropped my torch to the ground and fumbled with the barrel, before realising that I had no idea how to actually load the damn thing.
Had the Duchess put a bullet in it before we left? Please, please, please let there be a bullet in it.

Before I had time to even think, my question had been answered. The bullet left the gun with a head-shattering blast and buried itself into the chest of the foamy-mouthed creature that had leapt from the shadows with such ferocity that I had to act instinctively to defend myself. I shot him. I screamed. The creature fell backwards.

He grabbed at his chest as if to claw out the bullet with his bare hands but that didn’t deter him for long. He scrambled to his feet and came at us again, his arms jerking and flapping, eyes rolling back into his skull. Matthias lashed out at him with his torch, forcing him to collapse back on the floor. This seemed to drain all the fight out of him and he lay back, jolting and shuddering as blood and breath seeped out of him.

‘Who are you?!’ cried Noah.

The man didn’t even seem to register that there were people around him; he was muttering unintelligible words that were little more than disjointed sounds.

‘What happened to you?’ persisted Noah, in a trembling voice that was overcome with shock and revulsion at the man’s haggard appearance. Once again, there was no response. Noah took his jacket off and looked as though he was intending to try to stem the blood flow, to try to ease the man’s pain somehow but realising that it was essentially hopeless, fell to floor next to the man and began to mutter soothing sounds as the man slipped away. We stood there, horror-struck, as the man took his last breaths. It was the first time I had ever killed a person.

Chapter Eighteen

After Matthias had managed to chase down and haul Grimmy back, who had fled in terror after the man had jumped out at us, we set about assessing the situation. I leant in to inspect the dead man. He had a slight foamy ring of saliva about his mouth and some of his teeth were broken jaggedly, as though he had been chewing rocks. His limbs were set at odd angles and his mouth had curled back to expose his sharp teeth. His crazy eyes were still open. I didn’t want to touch him to close them even though I knew it was disrespectful to leave his eyes open and goggling; but he looked infected somehow, like he had a contagious disease that colonised healthy bodies and turned them into wasted skeletons. I moved away to the far side of the passageway, skirting his body with a wide berth. The smell came off him in waves that were almost tangible and he looked like he hadn’t seen a drop of water or a sliver of soap in weeks. In his madness, washing was probably the least of his priorities.

Noah bravely took a deep breath and leant in to the body to try to see if there was some clue as to explain who the man was, where he had come from and how on earth he had survived here. However, he quickly jerked back and gagged, ‘I’m sorry … the smell … I just can’t.’

My mouth had become suddenly excruciatingly parched, as though it had been replaced by sandpaper. I hadn’t drunk since the morning and my screams of the past few minutes had left my throat scratchy and dry. I felt increasingly, hysterically, in need of a drink.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Matthias.

‘We go on, of course!’ I snapped.

Noah, Grimmy, and Matthias turned to look at me with wide eyes. Matthias’s eyebrows had practically disappeared into his hairline; he was the master of the derisive eyebrow raise and he used it often and generously, employing it to demonstrate to me when he was less than impressed with my behaviour.

‘Pull your eyebrows down, Matt, I’m serious. Let’s go on.’

‘Maida … you just killed a man. His body is lying there. See? A body with a bullet hole in it. That was you.’

‘No really? That was me? Gosh, I was completely unaware that I just shot him, how silly of me, mustn’t have been paying attention.’

Matthias gave me a warning look of such severity that I dropped the veil of sarcasm straight away. I decided that it was probably better to not test Matthias’s patience just at that moment. I could see the large vein in his neck start to bulge – it always made an appearance when he was angry and it had appeared so often recently that I was starting to think of it as an old friend.

 ‘Matthias, what else can we do? We have no water. It’ll be completely dark outside now, there’s no way we’re sailing tonight. It might be days before we see another island big enough to have water on it. We’ve no choice.’

‘Maida’s right,’ said Noah.

‘And what about the maniac who just tried to kill us? What if there’s more of them?’ piped up Grimmy.

‘I don’t think there will be any more. I think the most logical explanation is that this man has somehow been abandoned here and went mad from hunger or thirst. Look at him, he can’t have eaten for days, he’s like a skeleton. Maybe he had a disease and his island brought him here to die so he wouldn’t infect others. You know how badly Brigadus has been suffering from weird waterborne diseases since the Flood. Maybe his island isolated him. Maybe what he was suffering from was some sort of incurable plague and he went mad through hunger, or loneliness, or thirst.’

‘Well it can’t have been the latter as we can hear the running water …’ I said.

We all listened intently. The trickling sound was musical and lovely, calling to us with the temptation of cool, clear, fresh water. This beautiful noise seemed to convince Grimmy and Matthias that there was no other way but onwards.

Matthias sighed but began walking forwards. As we walked, my mind wandered. What could have caused the man to go mad like that? If Noah was right and he had somehow been abandoned here, what sort of cruel people could leave a man to die a terrible and undignified death in such lonely circumstances? I battled to keep the image of his bared teeth and goggling eyes out of my head but it was difficult. It made me wonder what sort of alien people we would encounter on this trip. The people of Brigadus were considered coarse savages but even we looked humane compared to the barbarians who could have left that poor man to die here.

Noah caught up with me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders, giving me a slight squeeze which I think was meant to be reassuring. ‘You did what you had to do,’ he whispered kindly. ‘Try not to think of it. From how thin and pale he was, he was probably on the verge of dying anyway.’

I nodded but didn’t dare open my mouth for fear that a sob might slip out. I think he understood why I kept silent and didn’t push me for a response. That’s what I was beginning to like most about him. He didn’t push me into uncomfortable confessions or seem too eager to assess things over and over and over again like Matthias. It was nice. He just let me be myself.

The texture of the light in the passageway subtly began to change. As we walked into another larger pocket of cave, the shadowy palate of red, orange, and black from the fire torches was starting to be outshone by an almost supernatural green-white glow which rained from above. Thin strands of luminescent pearls were strung from the ceiling, dangling like beaded drops of dew on spiders’ webs.

‘Glow worms,’ whispered Noah in a hushed, almost reverential voice.

The ceiling was studded with constellations of the little creatures, all providing the light to light up their own worlds, all joined together by thin ribbons of interconnected silk.

‘Wow,’ I breathed, coming to a standstill to better stare at the microcosmic universe of twinkling stars and suns. Even Grimmy stopped his huffing and puffing to gaze up in awe at the wonder before us. I’d never seen anything so eerily beautiful before; even the stars that beautified the night sky above Brigadus paled in comparison. For some reason, the sight filled me with hope. Hope that there could be light where there was darkness. It was as though those small creatures were emitting a warming glow that I let wash over me. I basked in it, closing my eyes but still feeling the purity from the light shine on my skin.

‘Maida,’ said Matthias in a harsh rasp, breaking my reverie.

‘In a minute, Matt.’

‘Maida,’ he persisted.

‘
One minute.
’

‘Maida,
please
, turn around.’

I stamped my foot in frustration and spun around, an insult right on the tip of my tongue but the sight that met me made me forget it.

A  gaunt giant of a woman had grasped Matthias’s hair, yanked back his head to expose his neck and was holding a sharp-as-steel spear to it. ‘Come with us,’ she said. 

Chapter Nineteen

Our captors led us by the wrists with sharp flints at our throats, winding through the passageways of the cave network until we could hear the rushing of a waterfall. My captor was a man of middle-age, tall but incredibly pale and thin. All our captors were papery skinned and had large, watery eyes accustomed to darkness. They were moth-like; thin and fluttery but with an ethereal quality which made me wonder if they were real or spirits of the underworld. But for all their frightening demeanour, it appeared that they were actually scared of
us.
How funny.

I looked down at my clothes and looked across at Noah and Matthias. Sure, they were tall and powerfully built but not really anything to be afraid of. Grimmy’s lack of hygiene was most definitely off-putting but nothing to be frightened of. A sudden image popped into my head of one of those old priests holding out a cross and throwing holy water on Grimmy, not to exorcise him, but to hold back the stench. I sniggered loudly and felt my captor jump away, leaping backwards as though I had just revealed to him that I was wearing a bomb. He was
terrified
of me.

He recovered his composure and approached me again, but with caution. His hands were shaking as he gripped my wrists. I could have easily broken his grip but something about him made me feel sorry for him. Any unexpected move I made caused him to catapult himself backwards in terror, only to visibly shake when I held my hands out for him to restrain me again. We went through this little charade for another ten minutes as we walked in the direction of the pounding water. God forbid that I would have actually tried to escape or put up a fight; I think he would have died of a heart attack right there on the cave floor.

A
whoosh
of air and cool spray hit me as we were led around a corner and into a pocket of the cave as large as an amphitheatre. We were right inside the mountain. From high above, in the topmost corner of the cave, there was an opening from which a huge and magnificent waterfall tumbled. It crashed down to the floor where it gathered and swirled in a deep rounded pool and flowed into a river which split the cave in two. There were two rickety wooden bridges which connected either side of the river to the other.

Dotted on both river banks were groupings of fires … no, not fires;
hearths.
I could see the boundaries of each hearth lined out with stone rings which enclosed the fires and the mats for sleeping, as well as the children who were helping their mothers skin grizzly little creatures for dinner. There were fifty or so fires which I took to indicate about fifty families living down here, locked away like subterranean hermits. Probably about two hundred people in all but it was surprisingly spacious and well-ordered. Embedded into the wall next to where the waterfall fell, there was a stone platform. A large stone chair was carved right into the rock and the biggest fire of the entire dwelling was next to it.

Looking upwards, I noticed that the entire ceiling was peppered with glow-worms.  When the fires were extinguished, it would be as though these underground people were sleeping under the stars. A small consolation for having to be trapped down here.

My captor jabbed me in the back with his knee, obviously wanting as little physical contact with me as possible.

‘All right, all right, keep your hair on, I’ll walk. But you know, it would be much easier to move if you hadn’t got my hands tied like a trussed-up chicken.’

A jolt of shock registered on his face and he staggered backwards once again.

‘Oh, what is it now?’ I sighed in frustration, wondering what I could have possibly said that was so shocking; I was beginning to tire of this game.

‘Chicken …’ he repeated shakily in a thick, burry accent.  ‘I haven’t seen one of those since … since before the reckoning.’

The way he said ‘the reckoning’ was as though it was capitalised: ‘The Reckoning’.

‘Well, you should come to Brigadus, those little buggers just strut about the place as though they rule the roost – literally. Ate all my maize seeds last autumn. Can’t kill them though, they belong to the Mayor and killing them is treason. Wild partridge is fair game if you can find it though … 
get it?
Fair
game
?’ I chuckled at my own lame joke but he just stared at me.

‘Well … remind me never to tell that one again. Not one for puns, hmm? Well, if you want clever jokes you’ll have to go to Matthias for those; I only specialise in the obvious and the cheap.’

Not even a hint of a smile. I tried another stab at conversation. ‘So … what’s that you said earlier? About ‘The Reckoning’? What’s that then?’

The man suddenly dropped his grip and backed off. The tall, graceful woman who had been leading our train of captives wheeled around and yelled in a hoarse voice, ‘What is it, Coburn? Grab her, don’t let her go!’

 He didn’t answer so I decided to answer for him. ‘It’s OK, I’m not going anywhere. I think he’s frightened. I’ve said something that upset him.’

Coburn was trembling. ‘She … she asked what The Reckoning is.’

The woman was young, probably in her early twenties but she carried herself with a confidence that made her seem older and more authoritative. She was dark haired, dark eyed, and very pale skinned, like a study in monochrome, but all the more striking for it. She had an air of spidery gothic beauty that was unsettling and intense – thin face, wispy hair, and long fingers. She carried it with a gaunt, cool elegance. Her clothes were little more than rags – they probably only had the clothes on their back when they were trapped here after the Flood.

Despite the poor state of her clothes, the woman still looked magnificent and imposing. She had jewellery made from pieces of fragile bone (from which animal I couldn’t tell) draped around her thin ankles, wrists, and neck which jangled ghoulishly with her every move. I couldn’t help but notice that Matthias occasionally flicked his gaze towards her and looked for just a fraction too long. She looked at me; her stare was searching and made me feel like I’d done something wrong.

‘You ask about The Reckoning?’ she said in a cool voice that sounded measured on the surface but she was breathing more heavily and her eyes had widened. ‘You mean to tell me that you don’t know about The Reckoning?’

‘Well … I suppose I can take a good guess. Do you mean the Flood? When the ice caps melted?’

 ‘What is she talking about, Rhian?’ asked a man by her side, looking panicked.

‘Stop talking,’ said Rhian smoothly, and the man obeyed without question, closing his half-opened mouth with a snap. ‘We’ll take them to Elgar and Sophia.’

She turned to Matthias, who was being restrained by another man. Her skeleton fingers lightly brushed his cheek. ‘Who are you, stranger?’ she asked.

Before Matthias could answer, she stalked away leaving him looking spellbound.

‘Finished staring?’ I asked him.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped.

I had only meant to tease him, the same way that he teased me about Noah but his response was gruff and harsh. It surprised me that he was so defensive.

 ‘Matt, I was only joking! What’s got into you?’ I asked.

‘I’m just sick of your constant jibes.’

‘No, it’s more than that. You never usually let that get to you … What is it? Why are you so angry? … Oh …’ Something clicked into place in my brain and I knew the answer.  ‘Bit close to the bone, was it? You
really
do
like her, don’t you?’

It wasn’t a question; I didn’t need an answer because I knew it was true. He stared at the floor and struggled for words to say; ‘Absurd … barely know her,’ he mumbled, unconvincingly.

‘Oh, Matt,’ I said, more in pity than anger.

For all his gruffness, Matthias could be strangely emotional at times although it took a great deal of prompting for him to reveal it. I often wondered whether it was his lack of family that caused him to become quickly attached to certain people, like the way he was with me. I felt suddenly ashamed and wondered if my friendship with Noah was upsetting him. 

‘Barely know her …’ he repeated.

‘Protesting a wee bit too hard now,’ I said.

A deep male voice rang out through the cave: ‘Bring them forward.’

I looked for the source of the voice and saw a man, dressed in black and decorated with the same type of jewellery as Rhian; tiny bird-like bones, strung together on a piece of sinew – legs, claws, skulls all jumbled together like he had riffled through a graveyard. He was on the jutting platform of rock next to the waterfall. He stood in front of the throne carved into the rock face and beside him stood Rhian and an older woman who greatly resembled her. Our captors led us across one of the wooden bridges that branched from one riverbank to the other. As we walked past the numerous hearths dotted along the bank, mothers hid their children’s eyes and men stared in an openly hostile way which only thinly disguised their anxiety.

The crowd that surrounded us was fraught with anxiety – it couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted a closer look or whether it wanted to run away, and therefore it ebbed and flowed, giving us a wide berth as we passed but closing in to fill the gaps behind us.  It followed us towards the rock platform with a morbidly feverish interest.

We skirted around the pool at the bottom of the waterfall and scrabbled up the stone steps that had been hewn into the rock face until we reached the platform where Rhian and her parents stood. The steps continued above the platform, alongside the waterfall, to the mouth of the falls, tens of metres above the cave floor. We were arranged into a line, facing outwards towards the crowd with our hands pulled behind our backs by our captors. It almost felt as though we were lined up for a public execution; my stomach gave a little lurch of nervous energy. Matthias was closest to Rhian and I flicked my eyes towards him to see that he was staring determinedly ahead as though to show ‘
I couldn’t care about her in the slightest – see? I’m not even looking at her.
’

‘Friends,’ began Rhian’s mother, addressing the crowd of people below, humming with interest and fear. ‘Do not be afraid. These wanderers have been sent to us from the Light, of this I am sure. I have been consulting the elements for many days now. We all know Deddern was taken by the Dark recently and I wondered if it was a sign, as I’m sure many of you did, too. But let me assure you, I see no Darkness in these strangers. The elements have revealed nothing to me.’

A murmur of dissent rippled through the crowd. Some had armed themselves with sticks or flints and were holding them menacingly, pointed upwards, towards us. This was the first time that I felt genuinely afraid. The sea of angry faces blurred before me and I suddenly realised how high up we were. The pounding of the waterfall next to us was throwing spray and air sideways at me and I felt as though it might sweep me away.

‘Friends,’ said the woman soothingly in an effort to calm the crowd. ‘We do not know who these strangers are or how they have survived The Reckoning but believe me when I say, I as the channel for the Spirit, the Mother of the Light, the Dark, the Earth and the Water, know these people come from the Light and are of the Earth and the Water. They are not from the Dark.’

A voice called out from the crowd, ‘But what about Deddern? Wasn’t he just taken by the Dark?  He couldn’t drink the Water! That is an omen! A warning!’

My mind flicked back to the madman who I had killed in the passageway not half an hour ago.

He couldn’t drink the water?

Deddern had indeed looked as though he had not seen a drop of water in weeks – lips and eyes shrunken, dry skin, foaming mouth. Perhaps thirst had caused his madness. But why hadn’t he been able to drink from the waterfall here?

‘You think you know the elements better than I do? I, who has been chosen since The Reckoning to be the diviner of the elements, the channel for the Spirit? I, who has never led you wrong in the past?’ Her eyebrow curled into a pointed arch that seemed to suggest that any challenge to her authority was not tolerated.

‘Ridiculous,’ spat Rhian contemptuously.

The challenger bowed his head and apologised, ‘Of course not, Sophia. Only you have the knowledge and I was a fool to question you. If you believe these strangers are not from the Dark then I will believe you … However it does seem strange that so many of our people have been taken by the Dark recently … Deddern, Guther, Vanharn … all gone …’ He trailed off, leaving his last words hanging ominously.

‘I do not believe that their being taken has anything to do with these strangers and that is final. Our people have been taken by the Dark as punishment for their sins against the Spirit. We know for a fact that Guther had been going to the surface and taking from the Garden despite knowing that this was a sin. He was well aware that this has been forbidden since The Reckoning in penitence for our gluttony in the past. He was rightfully taken by the Dark when I challenged him about it. We cannot have sinners in our midst. We cannot allow another Reckoning to happen and therefore he had to go. The Spirit has been forgiving enough to spare us so far but she will not tolerate a slide back into the Darkness. As for the others, they must have committed sins we are not aware of. But their punishment is proof of their avarice and they have been rightfully claimed by the Dark. Good riddance; we should rejoice.’

 A groan hatched in my throat as I understood what was happening there. They believed that the Flood was a punishment for sins against the Earth and now they were living in fear, underground, and killing their own people for imagined sins in order to prevent another Flood. Oh God, this was worse than I thought.

I knew from speaking to drunks at Nora’s that ever since the Flood, people in Brigadus had become more superstitious, hodge-podging together different threads from religion, witchcraft, paganism, and made-up, Brigadus-style voodoo in order to protect themselves from harm and disease. There was an old crone who sat in a corner of Nora’s who peddled a number of amulets from a kaleidoscope of religions. I once saw a man who had lost his young son to a waterborne disease depart from her simultaneously wearing crosses, a braided corn necklace, the Star of David and a pentagram. I often saw her crouching in the dirt, using a bowl to ‘divine’ the future from a rag-and-bone man’s hoard – chicken bones, conkers, shrapnel from disintegrated tin cans, bits of old plastic. I scoffed loudly when I witnessed seemingly sane people go to her for advice, but still they went and they seemed to place a lot of faith in her.