Chapter 5
A cold draft rushed through the darkness like a torrent of water rolling down an open dam into a tiny channel and onwards towards a small insignificant sleeping town below.
It hit hard and its force knocked them back slightly but its volume and its chill stopped them from continuing on their path and had them low to the ground, pinning their ears and pressing their bodies against each other to feed on the passing of a minute’s warmth from body to body like the whispering of a blatant lie from mouth to mouth and believing it, only as long as it fell from your tongue and tickled your ear but always having to keep the lie moving to maintain that friction; the patronage of being busy; skin against skin, lie after lie.
“I am warm, I am warm, I am warm,” the lie says.
When the torrent of air lessened and eventually silenced, the three maintained their huddle but tuned their failing sight and their frozen stinging ears to their immediate abounds.
Everything was pitch black; even Ruff was of little use in this environment. Whatever stood in the darker dark would be able to see them slowly creeping along the ground, painfully making their way into their waiting snare.
Eve listened through the stillness, not with her ears or eyes, but with her heart. To see, she was just like any man. In the light of day, in the midst of a clear sky, swimming in clean air her sense of sight was arguably suitable, but it was nothing to the eagle soaring above, high up in the darker blue of the sky watching from the incline of its descent at its lunch scurrying about in sensory ignorance, content in the limitations of its own senses as being the probable extensions of its fear, unknowing that its self was magnified in the spectrum of a prey; idly counting the passing of time.
Eve wasn’t stupid.
She knew she was the mouse. She couldn’t see the eagle’s eyes peering down from the heavens and she couldn’t hear the flapping of its wings as it beat on the cool air flowing under its body like salmon skimming above the rush of a passing current.
But unlike the mouse to the eagle or the fly unto the cat; she could feel eyes dressing her; rubbing against her, warming its hunger against the fine hairs of her skin. She could sense something further out in the dark, but a far that was further from their reaching; something watching them.
She could feel its heavy breath in the tiny shifts of air that passed over them as they huddled on the ground, feeling the shift in the volume of air like feeling waves of tiny ripples of water lapping against her body; hearing no sound as if someone or something in the distance were dropping a thousand grains of sand; one by one into a pond and in the middle she sat; blind, but feeling every single grain slap against the water’s surface before sinking to the earth below and though seemingly insignificant; the dance of molecular entanglement sounded as the echo of a beating drum, falling slowly more silent but none so loud as the reverberation in one’s conscious mind, knowing that a drum had been beaten, knowing that something had entered the water and knowing that something that was not them was breathing the same air and occupying the same dark space that now confounded them.
“There is a human ahead of us. It is a child, like yourself. He has been running. Its breath is rapid but not profound. Its lungs are overcome with fright. It’s watching us. Move slowly against the skin of the wall. Don’t break your momentum. We are the threat; think that in your mind. Be the threat” said Eve, whispering profoundly into Donal’s ears.
The boy, as much as he hated The Nest, referred to their teaching repeating in his mind; “Be one, be war, be a fist, be the threat.”
His mind attained focus.
The folds in his veins seemed to straighten out like a gust of air filling a long balloon as his blood warmed and primed with the fuel of confidence; an acceptable state of being.
Ruff held close to Donal, always being one hair away from winding up under his feet and sending the two tumbling over to the wet floor.
They moved along the edge of the wall where the ground was firm; staying off the metal tracks and wooden beams that layered one after the other like the neck of a guitar that forever stretched out into eternity, never reaching zero; fractals of music, dividing the oscillation of existence into one billionth of eternity.
They stayed off the piles of rocks that covered the tracks and flowed out the sides. No secret would dance with them on such a stirring floor.
They crept forward with Eve at the front, feeling the shift in the wind against the fine hairs on her arms as her brain communicated the distance of the grains falling into the water.
They edged step after step, inch after inch; their shoes shuffling over the concrete, Donal’s toes pushing against her heels, his hands tied to her hips and the tiny matted dog; constantly putting himself under the boy’s falling foot, being pushed and stepped on and prodded but wanting to be nowhere else as they moved along the wall, guided by the untrustworthy girl’s keen sense.
Then suddenly…
They stopped in a flash as a red circle lit up the dark and all three dived to the floor clinging to the wall trying to keep out of sight.
“Help me please” a small voice cried out as the silence was tapped by the crunching of rocks as tiny feet leapt out from their solace and pounded against the ground.
One foot after the other, the spirit of self-preservation drove the boy’s feet into the loose rocks and thrust him upwards so his knees pulled high against his body while his hands clenched as fists as he ran through the red light and came crashing to the floor; his feet catching on something small and coming out from under the weight of his moving body.
Ruff tumbled about under the twist of the boy’s legs. He didn’t yelp. His instinct still held him to dumbness fairing to bombard his subconscious state with aboding fear and urgency than to invite the hounds to his immediacy. He rolled on his back; swinging back and forth trying to get onto his belly so as to scurry back between the legs of Donal.
The boy fell to the floor and quickly pulled his knees back to his chest and then slid the soles of his feet back onto the cold concrete, ready to continue his flight. In the distance they could hear snorting and roaring; horrible breathing like a devil with a head cold and the stampeding of hooves against shifting rock and solid concrete.
The boy grabbed onto Donal.
“You have to run. They’ll get you. The queen; she makes a bath of everyone. You have to run. Run. Please run with me. I don’t want them to drain me too” he cried, dropping his hands from Donal’s shirt.
He turned into the red light and ran, one foot after the other; ignoring the physical pain that would on any given day, revert one to a stance of tears in desperation of wanted consolation. He ignored the sharp stabbing sensations in his limbs and he ran as only a child who had seen the reflection of death would run; very, very fast.
His brain pumped an intoxicating mix of endorphin and nor adrenalin; one to dull the pain, the other to fuel his necessary drive, pushing his legs one after the other, helping him lift his bloodied knees high against his body. The lift and drive guided him further and faster away from the snorting and stampeding that sounded heavier than a grain of sand falling into a pond; this was like an avalanche rushing into a bathtub.
The wave of air rushing past Eve’s senses pulled her to the floor, grabbing Donal and the matted dog and pulling them both close to her breast. She folded her body over theirs, exposing only the crux of her spine to the open air and the stampeding that; from the darkness; broke its way into the red light.
Eve kept her head low bracing for an impact. In her mind she thought; “I am a mountain, I am unmovable. My form is unbreakable and what is at my core cannot be touched.”
The atoms and particles at the core of her molecules and in the threads of her skin, listened, felt the order and changed their complexion. Her body looked the same, but it hardened; it moulded around the trembling boy and dog at her centre and it fixed to the earth; entrenched, magnetized, permanent.
“Please god” screamed the young boy as he looked only to his
front, knowing too well what played in his shadow.
From the dark and now stampeding through the red light; a sounder of boars; all drooling in delight as they rounded the bend in the tunnel and fed by the stretching red light, hounded on the boy’s scent and the sound of his feet, crushing against the rocks. Gravel spat through the still air as the sounder’s hooves tore through the cement like a child through the colourful wrapping of a birthday present.
Through the middle of the sounder came a lone boar, his razor-like tusks cutting the peace in the air as the want in its belly perforated through its deep snort as it knocked over the sows and young males, its mammoth body heaving through the air, breaking the sounder in two. Its hooves smacked against the rocks and drove towards the boy who screamed as he tripped over his misdirected step, rolling over himself onto the floor; cutting his skin against rocks. The giant boar gnashed at his body, digging its tusks under his stomach and thrusting upwards, tossing the boy like a wet rag through the air, his body crashing down on the earth so that his head smacked against the wooden frets lining the tracks.
The sounder continued running through the red light. Their stampeding was deafening in Donal’s ears, but he felt nothing as their bodies pounded into and bounced away from Eve’s molecular compound.
She maintained her focus; “I am a mountain” she kept saying to herself calmly, and the atoms and particles dancing about her quantum string; agreed.
The massive boar prodded the boy’s body; toying with it, tenderizing its supper. It dug its tusks into the boy’s flesh; the meat at his exposed belly and it thrust his limp body up into the air again while gravity brought the boy back down onto the boar’s sharp tusks, piercing his back and severing his spine.
The boy was now conscious but unable to move. He couldn’t shift his legs to run and he couldn’t twist a finger to cover his eyes. He lay in a crumpled mess at the boar’s hooves, blinking, not at the beast, but at something through the break in the sounder; someone or something in the glow of red. The sound of wheels turning filled the air and almost drowned out the thirsted breath of the beastly boar, salivating on the young boy’s milky skin.
“He did get far, didn’t he? Very good indeed. Just wonderful. I do love a good hunt. I especially love when the game embraces the spirit of chase. Bring him back to the temple. We’ll have his bones for supper. Guards, bring me the two humans who hide by the shadows and the whiny mutt who dares enter my kingdom unannounced. Take me back to my throne.”
The servant dogs pulling her sled turned back towards the darkness and took their queen back into the heart of their kingdom. Eve held onto Donal tightly. She heard loud barking but nothing else. She could feel the breath of a hundred dogs surrounding her and she lifted her stare and was no longer a mountain; she was a scared human.
In front of them stood an army of pit-bull; led a single Doberman who stared down the two humans; Donal and Eve and looked pitifully at Ruff, the small matted dog, cowering by the boy’s feet.
“Arrest them. As for the hunt, take the wounded back to the surgeon. The queen must have her bath” said the Doberman Guard.
The boar dug its tusks under the boy’s limp body and carried the game back through the length of the tunnel where the hunt had come to an end; so much further than any game had ever gotten before.
The pit-bulls surrounded the three hiding in the shadows and urged them onwards, through the tunnel, past the play of red light, into the stretching darkness and onwards towards The Kingdom of the Hound as they; suffocating under the weight of their fear, were now prisoners of The Bitch Queen.