Published at the Treasures of Thundera Group March 24, 2002
:taken from my original author's notes:
Anyway, get this, this is a fic about WileyKat and WileyKit and there's no sex, no innuendo, no nothing, just plain horror. Warning for those afraid of spiders, although we don't see the 8-legged pests often, they're everywhere.
"No, WileyKit!" by RD Rivero (2002-03-24)
It was noon when the last motion sensor was assembled. Wire antenna and compact electronics, the hardware was coated by a plastic shield, artfully shaped and colored to match the character of new, low-hung branches. The device - one of a hundred that took the whole of a week to setup, that formed the basis of a complex, web-like array of a gigantic, mechanical eye - was planted in the cool shade of an elm overlooking the gorge separating the Treetop Kingdom from the putrid, sterile wastelands the Mutants had annexed. And there, amidst the vines and green leaves, the Thunderian handiwork was safe and secure.
With any luck, the alarms would need no repairs or adjustments for two years. The ones on the trees were always susceptible to damage from the weather, from the animals and birds and even from the arbor's own growth cycles. The ones bored in the rocks or buried deep in the ground lasted for five years on average. But that was a job for Panthro and Tygra - for despite their near-adult age, WileyKat and WileyKit were inexperienced at such things.
"Cat's Lair, do you read me?" he asked, speaking into the receiver. Only static followed so he tried again. "WileyKat to Cat's Lair, do you read me?"
"Cheetara here," the woman answered.
He adjusted the dials to balance the hiss.
"We seeded the last of the eyes," he said in the code of the day. The Thundercats had learned the hard way that their broadcasts were always monitored. "Sending the chromosomes."
He put down the receiver and fed the readouts from the sensor, through the radio, to the home base.
"Chromosomes?" his sister asked in a whisper.
"Xs and Ys," he answered, "its position."
WileyKit picked up the transmitter - it had clicked to alert of an in-coming message.
"Readings from the eye are positive," Cheetara said, "good work, you guys."
"Thanks."
"You can come home now," the female Thundercat continued. The chatter in the background suggested that she was not alone in the control room. Liono was probably with her - he had answered the calls earlier that day. "There'll be a feast when you two get back. The Berbils had an early harvest this year."
He smacked his lips. Berbilfest meant only one thing: candy fruit. Candy fruit in all of its culinary forms. After seven days of rations he thought it was manna from heaven.
"We'll get there as soon as possible," she said, seeing the ravenous excitement that overcame her brother. "Over and out."
The twins repacked the gear. Since all of the devices had been positioned at their pre-defined locations, the supplies were now leaner and lightweight. The equipment consisted of two backpack's worth of radios, clothes and night blankets, food and water.
"So what, then?" WileyKat asked. He and his sister sat on a large, flat rock, staring at maps. "It'll take three days to reach the lair?"
"I didn't think it would take so long," WileyKit replied, following a marked route with her finger, "now that we don't have to carry those things with us."
"Yeah," he sighed and stared off to the sky, the air turning breezy, chilly at that moment. Autumn was approaching and the sun was climbing, crawling ever so higher north each shorter day. It would be night in only four hours - he said to himself as he thought of home. Although he enjoyed the outdoors as much as she did, at times like those he wanted, needed a warm bed.
And candy fruit...
"Let's get started."
She agreed with a quick nod.
WileyKit's natural, if not impetuous knack for leadership let her assume the lead role of the expedition home. She did not rely on the map - though she kept an unfolded copy of it in her pocket - it was her innate sense of direction, keenly honed over the years that guided her. She remembered the details of her moments and her environment. The makeup of rocks and stones and their placements, the contours of meandering rivers, the alignments of mossy logs, all of it helped her feel her bearings at any instant.
On the other hand, WileyKat never lost his childhood fears and anxieties. Despite how hard he tried, he could not completely repress his overly cautious urges. Sunset was near and he knew they would have to find shelter soon. He followed their movements on the map, the silk fabric open in his hands. He wanted them to be safe and take as few risks as possible, so he search to see if he could find any Amazon village close by, so that they could benefit from the protection.
Just above the sharp peaks of the distant pines were the obscured and indistinct hints of a solid, gray object. She was the first to notice it - with her head in the clouds she was bound to spot it before her brother. Certainly before him. She wondered, if with his nose in the map, had he even seen it?
She put her hand over her pocket but did not retrieve the map from it. Rather, she asked: "Kat, are there any villages near here?"
He mulled around the collapsing parchment - he had been gazing at the other half of the chart at the time, committing it to memory. "No, we're about five miles away from any village."
"Oh," she said a bit unsurprised. "So there's nothing around here?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all."
She wanted to stop for a moment to study her discovery a little longer, but she realized it would only alarm her brother. Yet her curiosity remained and so she eked out a subtle, course-correction. Closer and closer she hiked toward it and as the throng of trees between it and her party was steadily thinning, she perceived more and more of its details, its structure. It was a tower, like many the Thundercats had already seen, scattered about Third Earth, withered and rundown, ailing in various state of decay and disrepair.
An inquisitive cat was hard to stop and she, for one, could not resist. The spire of stone and mortar was not that far off the path they were supposed to follow. If anything, she convinced herself, it would be a scenic detour, something fun to explore for a little while, now that they were not at work. Besides, she thought, sun down was almost upon and they needed a place to spend the night.
WileyKit smiled - she had devised the perfect excuse, one that even her brother could not refute.
"Are we going the right way, Kit?" he asked, rushing up to her side.
"We're on a small, tangent," she explained, pointing to the distance across the trail.
The path, that cut through an orchard of fruitless trees, was wide enough that the base of the tower was clearly visible - if unfocused - from half a mile away.
"Oh, WileyKit," he protested, "we don't have time for this!" He held her arm and stopped her.
"Come on! Where's your sense of adventure?" she teased. "It'll be dark and we'll need somewhere to sleep, anyway and it looks pretty abandoned."
He shook his head. The very sight of the ancient monolith was ominous and foreboding. A large crack spiraled partway down its length. "I don't know. It doesn't look right."
She grasped his shoulder and led him onward. "Just to spend the night."
"The night," he said, trying to feign authority, "and that's that. I mean it, Kit; you're going to get us killed one day with all of these adventures."
She sighed.
At the rate that they hiked through the wilderness, they arrived at the site in an hour. She turned to the map and showed him that they were only a quarter of a mile from the main route. He seemed satisfied but displayed none of her excitement. By then the sun had sunk to a level below the treetops and though the skies were still bright, a veil of murky doom, a fog of gray melancholy had settled upon the land. The air had accrued a tang of cold chill and its work on his short fur convinced him at last that she was right, that her tower would provide a respite from the elements.
And yet its appearance was totally unnerving. As tall as the Tower of Omens, but not as well kept as their outpost, it was topped with a crown of broken battlements, shattered to reveal an inner view of abject darkness. Recessed windows dotted parts of its height, crossed by that wide gash. Vines and ivies had once grown on its sides, but the roots withered and the plants died long ago - only their dry skeletons and pockmarks, carved by the weather into the façade, gave away their past abundance. Craters and shallow pits dug out from below were the scars that testified to the wars fought in that immense clearing near and around the abandoned tower.
"Look, an opening!" she had spotted a fissure at one end of a long ditch. The mouth-like slit was high enough to let a man crawl through it on his knees.
"No, WileyKit!" he tried to restrain her, but he was too slow to act. She had rushed past his grasp, reaching the hole. She turned to wave her hand, signaling to follow. He rolled his eyes, hesitant as she crawled into the gash and vanished. "Why, Jagga, why?"
He had to go on, if only to keep her safe from herself.
"Kit?" he called, his voice echoing in the dark, sooty chamber. He had made it through the fissure on all fours and found himself in the rubble of a cavernous dungeon. He sneezed, his eyes itching. Dust, inches thick, coated the floor like a rug - his sister's footprints pressed into the chocking substance. The smell of chalk permeated the scene - and he understood, almost by instinct that it was coming from the rocks, the stones and mortar of the outpost's framework that through its great age was crumbling.
"Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh!" he screamed and darted to the side, colliding with a wall. He had felt a weight on the top of his mane, crawling down to his brow. Quiet and still, he noticed it had not moved. Nervously, he reached up to his head and grabbed it, shocked with a bit of surprise once it was firmly in his hand - it was a shredded spider web.
He laughed and let the clump of that dust-ridden mass fall to the floor.
"WileyKat?"
"Kit!" he said, ears perched.
"Over here!"
He traced her echo, passing rows of arched, barred windows, curtained by spider webs, speeding under bowed ceilings carpeted - if such was the word - by more spider webs, crossing through once-barricaded doorways now blocked by the sticky tethers of stringy spider webs. It was as if the forgotten tower itself was kept together by those treads of arachnid secretion.
"What are you doing?" he found his sister kneeling amidst the ruins of a fallen pillar. She was struggling with an object seemingly embedded in the wall, several inches above the floor. "What is that?"
"A door," she said, holding and turning its rusty knob, "seems to be stuck."
WileyKat doffed off his knapsack and set it by the rubble - the crumbled stone was dust-free and strung together in a net of cobwebs. On his knees next to her, he inspected the portal. Three feet high and five feet wide, it was wooden with metal hinges. The knob, in particular, was thoroughly corroded - its rough, tooth-like surface had the texture of sandpaper.
"Why can't you just leave well enough alone?"
He looked at his hands - a wash of orange rays seeped through the cracks of the door and its frame - his palms were marred with flaky, greasy oxides. He noticed, too, that hers were worse.
"Oh, hush."
The hybrid cats kicked the sturdy gate until its lock snapped. They stopped and held their breath. They heard not a sound, not a sign that they had disturbed anyone or anything in the yet unexplored recesses of the spire.
Tiny bits of gravel rained on both sides of the doorway. One speck of black fell with a vibrant ring that in the rarefied silence echoed like a clasp of thunder. It was a ball of serrated onyx with long, thin tendrils, large enough to cast a shadow across from the void of that new, uncovered chamber to the twin's booted feet. It moved, the needle-like legs fluttered. Suddenly it righted itself and just as swiftly it scampered into the safety of shadows.
"Spider," said WileyKit, "wonder what's -" she removed her own backpack and poked her head into the hole, much to her brother's dismay. She reported: "It's empty - not too big but empty. There's a lot of light." She pulled herself all of the way through the low archway.
WileyKat followed with a shrug.
The antechamber was circular in construction. Its domed ceiling had collapsed onto the floor that itself had, through time, cracked and shattered. Boulders in the center clogged the opening of a deep, well-like structure. Straw and petrified webs on the litter adorned the scene. Orange sunlight poured in from a gash across the wall of the room above - the very same spiral fissure the two had seen outside.
The aural hue was reddening, darkening. The sun was sinking, dying.
WileyKit sighted a set of steps at the other side of the stopped well. To get to it she had to walk around the hole and the rubbish that covered it. The mass of stone masonry appeared to be stable, but she had not taken all of the dangers into account. She took one step and the mortar under her foot gave way - at once the pile of decayed stones rumbled and fell apart into the pit, at once the room was engulfed with smog of chalky dust.
"WileyKit!" he yelled and lunged across the ground, grabbing his sister by the scruff of her neck. Reaching through the darkness of the well, he found her shoulder - an arm and a hand came next in quick succession. "I've got you, I've got you!" he stuttered, panting for breath.
It took the boulders half a minute to hit the bottom of the abyss - rather, it took the sounds of their crashing to reach cat's ears.
She was perched at the edge of the hole, her legs dangling. A nook in the slope of dirt provided a steady footing and with the leverage of her brother's support, she lumbered up out of the brink of fatal obscurity, onto the aged and withered concrete basin of the chamber's flooring.
"No, no, no," he held her back.
Despite her brush with death, she had tried to continue her almost mindless trek to the steps.
"But we can walk around the hole." She pointed to the fact that most of the floor was still intact.
"No!" he said, sternly. Kneeling before the doorway: "No more crazy exploring, we have to prepare for the night."
"Argh!" More distraught than she cared to let on, she complied with token resistance. She followed WileyKat out of the circular room, noticing intermittently the sounds of an eerie his echoing up from the well. "Are you even alive, Kat?" she asked, standing on the pillar in the dungeon.
He hugged her almost tearing: "You stupid cat, I could have lost you."
She petted his mane and broke from his embrace.
It was a moot point, they agreed to leave the tower as soon as morn had arrived - and without another word they shut the small door. The twins picked a cell to spend the night in and with the traction of their boots they swept its floor clear of dust and grime. Satisfied that it was clean enough for their lungs, they set the gear down under the view of a barred window.
WileyKit radioed the lair and dropped Liono a short report of their progress. Her brother was looking up through the window, sipping a can of water.
Night blanketed the earth with a cloak of shadow. Stars twinkled - the eternal sparks of fire gazed, like eyes, at the half-world below them. Eight pinpoints were bright enough to shine through the shroud of spider webs that obscured the view of the cake-like window.
The air was cool and damp and they shivered, tucking themselves into their sleeping bags.
WileyKat took one last look at the map. The details printed on the fabric glowed in the dark until refolded, a neat precaution that amused him a few nights ago. His sister angled her head to the door - she could still hear that resonant hiss.
It was the sound of churning stones that aroused him from sleepy, groggy oblivion. He rubbed his eyes - dust, or worse, had accumulated on his lids. Searching from side to side, he scanned the chamber. Moonlight that seeped through the cracks illuminated the cell, but it was dim and dull.
A stupor of spent and wasted vitality, he saw that his sister's pillow and blanket were unoccupied. She was not beside him, she was - his body resisted his attempt to get up - she was kneeling before the short, stout portal. He caught a glimpse of her turning to him, but...
But it was a dream and no more.
He dropped his head on his pillow and was immediately enthralled in a vision - a ghostly trance, accompanied by a static hiss, a low breathing. He was trapped in a dark corridor right out of MummRa's pyramid. Chains dangled and swayed. Water drops trickled. A smoky mass evolved from one end of the passage to the other.
"Ahhh!" but it was not his scream. He had heard it in his dream, but it was not his own. Yet it set him off running, anyway, fleeing through the midnight blackness. Creeping shadows and whispering voices assaulting his senses.
It was not an unusual nightmare. Even before he had come to Third Earth he was haunted by it. Frightened by its stark reality. Terrified by the thought of the idea of what he was trying to avoid. Only the particulars - the sounds and images here and there - changed from time to time.
He awoke suddenly with the sensation that someone or something was crawling on his blanket. It was a peculiar feeling, complete with the sustained pressure of the cloths around him. But when he opened his eyes, he saw nothing.
"WileyKit, you asleep?" He looked to the side, to where he had last seen his sister but she was gone, her sleeping bag was empty. The shock of it made him sit up at once.
Already sunrise, he tried to tell himself that nothing was wrong. Perhaps she had awoken earlier; perhaps she was still in the dungeon, but that he just could not see her. It was like a replay of the fragmented visions he remembered from that night and the implications worried him.
"WileyKit!" he shouted, tearing himself out of his blanket. "WileyKit!" but he heard no answer.
He rushed to the edge of the cell - to where her footsteps were fresh in the thick dust, the prints leading, leading, winding from where they had spent the night to the open gateway along the back wall.
"No, WileyKit!"
His hands shook, his heart pounded - she had gone in and he had to get her out. But he did not want to do it, he did not want to go in, through the doorway, to that dreaded place, only to find that she had fallen into another hole and that nothing but her broken body was left behind. He did not want to see that because he knew if such was her fate, he, too, would have to follow it to his doom. For the idea of life without her was not only unbearable, it was physically impossible.
Impossible.
"WileyKit?" he asked, his voice trembling. "WileyKit?"
He lowered his head, his body, to the level of the bizarre door - his teeth chattered. He could see little of the room's interior, despite the fact that it was day. For the sun was still beneath the tops of the trees, at the opposite side of the tower.
"By Jagga!" His eyes blinked, his blurry vision coming into focus - he had to know, he had to go in.
Crawling on all fours, he entered the macabre chamber and there, there over its spotless floor, he remained. Silent, his mind reeling from one horrible thought to another, each dreadful idea dredging through the terrible possibilities. It had not occurred to him until that moment that of all of the places in that tower, that room, that little room, was clean and dust-free. Why?
"No," he stared, disbelieving, standing, his eyes thoroughly acclimated to the environs - what little light there was, was a deep, eclectic blue that lent the scene a bone-chilling, other-worldly character. The hole, the well his sister had inadvertently uncovered, had been re-clogged. The boulders had been taken up from the deep pit to its edge and re-constituted. He was left breathless - he gulped, his knees weak - even that spot his sister had stepped on was there again, broken in pieces, glued together with fresh webbings.
"Wa - wa - WileyKit?" That time his voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
The edge of the circular room - he remembered it had remained steady. He could walk around it to the steps. Yes - he said aloud - his sister must have done that, too.
Pressing his body against the wall, firmly against it, he started the dangerous trek to reach the stairs. His hands dripped wet with sweat, the moisture on the substance of the masonry glimmering. He hoped the ledge would not give way, because he knew that he had no grip - he could not make a grip with his nervous, almost arthritic fingers. He knew, too, or at least he had convinced himself he knew that she was still alive, so he could not afford to die.
A creak and he stopped, shutting his eyes, carefully avoiding that look down into the blackness of the pit. Calmly, gently, he slid his boot from the burgeoning crack and continued - eyes still closed. The wall came to a sharp, right turn and because he was so hard-pressed upon it, he slumped backward, landing on the makeshift stairwell. He opened his eyes, realizing where he was and that he had made it, he laughed at his turn of good luck - and yet he shuddered. He had to go further; he had to go up the steps.
Up.
"WileyKit? WileyKit, where are you? A - answer me," he stopped his voice though his lips continued to move, quiver.
The details of the upper level were very much like those of the lower chambers in terms of size and composition. Columns in the central portions revealed the nature of tower's support structure. Mounds of rubble provided the only evidence that there had ever been interior walls and furniture. And dust - her footprints, fresh in the dust - he laughed again.
She was alive; she had survived the precarious danger of the pit, the well and had gone up the stairs. Re-invigorated, he followed the trail recklessly from one end of the place to the other, sneezing and coughing for his quick stride sent the acrid, bitter substance into the air.
"WileyKit, I'll find you. If you're in trouble, I'll get to you!"
Her tracks led to another stairwell, one that spiraled to the top of the outpost. Without windows it was as dark as the pit - a formless oblivion of absolute nothingness.
He took a deep breath and ascended. Spiders crawled about his boots; he climbed steadily, though each rung was a labor. Not because the act was a strain, but because each move took him one step closer, one step deeper into the mess his sister had made of herself. But he was determined to save her despite it all.
The air was warm and humid and he stopped to catch his breath. Next to him was the gash, the fissure, horizontal and wide enough to let him look out of it. Already he could see the tops of the trees, the blue skies of the morning. He thought he was nearly a hundred feet above the ground. Downward, the world faded in a monotonous black. Upward, the stairs terminated in a slant of light - the spire's crown was within reach. It was such a climb left to get to that utmost level and he had come such a long way.
"WileyKit!" he cried into his dusty hands - why isn't she answering? "I'm not mad at you - just let me know you're there." He wiped his face. No matter what, he had no choice, he had to go on.
Sometimes he felt like a spider, caught in the web of his spineless timidity. Sometimes, but not that time.
Emerging from the head of the spiral stairway to the center of the tower's apex, he shivered and cowered in the shadows. Scanning the tile and marble chamber, his heart pounded, his pulse throbbed. He feared that at any moment, any little thing, no matter how slight or imagined, would send him dashing off in a daze of mad fury.
He walked slowly and rigidly, despite the nervous looseness of his joints and inspected the lonely scene, the decrepit den. The floor was covered not by dust, but by a concentration of webbing that had the appearance of cotton candy. Shriveled, rotten objects were sprinkled in the yarn-like threats: bones and limbs, putrefied corpses, horrified expressions permanently engraved as if chiseled out of stone. The walls were decorated with mosaics whose bright colors shone through the fungal grime. Was it art? What is a warning?
WileyKat inched forward, feeling for a moment a glance brushing past the hairs of his neck.
It was upsetting how unreal, how absolutely unreal the chamber was. His breaths echoed like a jackhammer in the precarious stillness. He staggered across the knotted mass of threads and bobbed up and down as though he walked on air. The eerie effects made him want to run down the stairs and get out of there.
The flutter of wings and the screech of a bird caught his immediate attention.
A part of the left wall and ceiling had collapsed to reveal an unobstructed view of the heavens. Three vultures were perched on the jagged edge of the opening, expressing distress and agitation. It seemed that they were interested in something up, toward the ceiling. He looked - and gasped. Several feet below the domed roof hung a spider web and on its edge was a bird - the fourth member of the roost. The avian had been caught by the mesh of thick strands but was still alive, still trying to break free.
And next to the flapping bird, the only other thing in the trap was a longer, thinner cocooned mass - its white, glimmering threads fresh and new. On the floor beneath it, amidst the rubbish, was a tattered piece of cloth, a familiar cloth. He knelt down to pick it up - it could not stay in place in his grip for he knew what it was...
That sensation returned with a hiss - more poignant, more irritable than before. He reached back to scratch his fur - his fingers, his hands bumped not his skin but the cold, wet fangs of the master spinner.
reviewed by Bast at Treasures of Thundera:
Haven't replied to fics or done much of anything around here for quite some time, but I must admit to liking this one. I've always been fond of the suspenseful type of story rather than the gory one where horror was concerned.
Nice build up and and effective atmospherics...especially where the dust and spiderwebs were concerned. - Bast