Waltz
By Alekto
Chapter 7: Out, damned spot; out, I say.
"All you have to do is survive . . ."
As she said the words I turned to study her face. The flatness of her voice belied the ghost of a frown that rippled across her forehead, as if she were trying to remember something long forgotten. For the merest instant I felt a glimmer of hope and a rush of admiration - whatever this Kekszakallu had done, Marguerite was still there and still fighting him. I wondered wryly if he had realised how wilful Marguerite was when he'd picked her.
"Let me talk to her!" I demanded, pleaded.
After an interminable silence, he offered a slight nod in return. For her part, Marguerite blinked suddenly and looked around, her expression equally bemused and annoyed. I braced myself for an explosion that was sure to come.
Then her gaze landed on me. The explosion never came. "Roxton?" she murmured uncertainly. "Is this real?"
It was something I wasn't entirely sure of myself, but in the end I shrugged. "I think so." To see her so off balance would under other circumstances been worthy of note, but then and there all I wanted to do was try to offer solace and a safe resolution that I knew I couldn't even begin to engineer.
She glanced briefly around the room. "Oh God, I'd hoped it was all a nightmare."
I sighed wearily. "You and me both."
We stood awhile without speaking and she looked me up and down, studying me more carefully in the dim light from the braziers. "You look like hell," she pointed out with a hint of her frequent dry if black humour, but I was sure I could hear an undercurrent of compassion in her tone.
"It's been a long few days," I admitted, before adding privately: and not over yet, not by a long shot. "I don't suppose you know of any other way out of here, do you? Apart from . . ." I nodded vaguely in the direction of the archway.
I guessed she had a better idea about what lay beyond than I did when I saw a haunted, appalled expression cross her face and she turned on Kekszakallu, her eyes ablaze with anger. "That's what you were going to do, wasn't it? Send him to his death? You see, I remember now! I remember what's down there and I promise you: neither of us are going to play your twisted games! Do you hear me? Do y--"
Kekszakallu said nothing, merely fixed his gaze on the irate Marguerite. Her tirade cut off abruptly and she reeled away from him, every line of her body taut, her eyes wild as if she were seeing a horror only she could see.
I made to leap at her tormentor, but was grabbed and held firm in the inescapable clutch of an apeman of towering stature. "NO!" I cried out, helpless to intervene, my own scream of denial echoing Marguerite's anguished cries.
Finally she fell to lie crumpled and unmoving on the floor. Kekszakallu's gaze turned to me, and he gestured again at the archway. Marguerite's earlier words, the twisted reflection of his own taunts came back to me. 'What would you do to save her?'
"Okay, I'll do it," I muttered grimly. "I'll play your little game, if that's what it takes. But if you hurt her . . ."
The threat left him singularly unmoved. With a languorous gesture he ordered me released and the apeman immediately complied. I picked up my scant gear and took one last look at Marguerite, then I walked through the archway.
*********
In the tunnel the air was thick and heavy, like a pea-souper fog back in London with the same foul yellowish tinge except this fog stank of some sickly-sweet incense. My eyes started streaming almost immediately, each breath left an acrid, metallic taste at the back of the throat and before long I was feeling distinctly woozy. For a brief moment my memory flashed back to the trenches, the cries of alarm and fear and then pain, the fumbling to put on gas masks and the sight of gas roiling across the mud. I took out my handkerchief and wrapped it around my nose and mouth in a vain attempt to block out the fumes so I could breathe more easily. As solutions went, it was more than a little lacking.
The fog was everywhere, blurring everything. I couldn't see walls or floor or ceiling. I couldn't see the hand I had stretched out in front of me as I felt my way. The ground underfoot was rough, covered with loose stones, but always inclining downward. Stumbling, seemingly every second step, I rued my decision to leave the spear outside when it could have been so useful to check the ground in front of me.
I staggered down the tunnel for what felt like an age. The fog obliterated any sense of distance travelled, and given how light-headed I was feeling, I had the suspicion that the intoxicatingly heady incense was playing hell with my perceptions. It wasn't a reassuring thought.
Then, inevitably on such terrain, I completely lost my footing and went crashing to the ground. Rough-edged stones cut into the hands and elbows with which I'd tried to break my fall, and I bit back the instinctual gasp of pain. As quickly as I could I scrambled back to my feet and peered myopically through the fog at the thin rivulets of blood dribbling down both arms. The cuts weren't too bad: shallow, painful, inconvenient - certainly, but I wouldn't bleed to death. I took the handkerchief from my face, tore it into strips and bound the worst of the cuts.
With another couple of paces more the fog suddenly melted away, as if moved aside by an unseen, unfelt hand and I found myself in a vast, uncomfortably familiar room: a room with seven doors.
I stepped forward, still light-headed from the effect of the fog. What had seemed from a distance to be doors of human proportions were now far more: high and wide enough that I could have driven a car or carriage through them. There was nothing to distinguish one from another, and set in each at eye level was a keyhole that looked of a size to match the key I had been given.
I stood awhile, considering my options. Apart from the hellish tunnel I entered by, there appeared to be no other exit except - perhaps - through one of the doors. I shrugged and walking to the nearest of the doors, I reached up, slotted the key into place and began to turn. The ancient mechanism creaked and moaned with almost human anguish. Fresh blood dripped down my arm from cuts set to bleeding again from the effort it took to turn it. Like all medieval locks of such a scale I knew it would take several full turns to release. After a final turn, I heard a resounding 'thunk' and the door swung open.
Initially the room beyond was in darkness and I could see nothing. A few seconds later I could see patches of dark red, like burning embers which flared into life as I watched.
From my place by the door I surveyed the room, and wished it had remained in darkness. From all around arose a harsh whisper, a sound that was almost physical in its presence and I had the sudden mental image of rats scurrying, of the feel of tiny paws on skin. "Ez a kinzokamra!"
Unable to tear my gaze away I looked on in horror at a torture chamber. Not here the cleaned, arranged tools of historical display, this room still reeked with the blood and pain and terror of its nameless, numberless victims. Crusting dried blood still stained manacles, cages and other implements, some I which I could not begin to imagine a use for.
The sound of a dull rattle made me start and I turned to see a chain tumbling to the floor, no doubt shifted from its place of rest by my presence. From a brazier nearby that was nothing more than ashes, I was sure I could feel a wash of heat and the sweat springing out on my forehead in response. All the while that indefinable sixth sense that had saved my neck more than once was screaming warning.
Taking the hint I backed out of the room - right into a blow from behind that sent me sprawling. Desperate to put some distance between me and whatever had struck me I continued to roll away, and was just able to make out the pursuing bulk of an apeman.
"Where the hell did that thing come from," I muttered bitterly as I struggled to my feet, my head still ringing from the force of the creature's attack.
It leapt towards me, unthinking in its rage, straight onto the machete that I held out in an attempt to fend it off. I ducked quickly aside as the machete struck home and dying beast's own momentum carried it past me. As it fell to the ground, my machete still embedded in its chest, there was an audible 'crack' and I had the horrible suspicion I knew what had caused it. With some effort I rolled it onto its back to reveal, just as I'd feared, the broken off hilt of the machete - the blade still sunken in the creature's chest. "Oh that's just bloody marvellous! I'm stuck in a bloody great hole in the ground, and my only bloody weapon . . ." My unaccustomed bout of profanity trailed off into wordless irritation. I picked up the machete's hilt which had less than an inch of blade sticking out of it, and studied it for a moment before finally throwing it away.
A glance around the room revealing nothing else I could use as a weapon, and if I was being honest with myself, I had absolutely no intention of going back into the torture chamber. There was something indefinably *wrong* about that room.
I took a couple of minutes to catch my breath before approaching the next door. It did little to combat the light-headedness. At the back of my throat I could still taste the foul, acrid fog and I wondered if that had anything to do with how disjoined everything seemed. Wondering about it, however, was getting me nowhere so I walked over to the next door along, put in the key and began to turn.
It was as hard work as the other was to turn, but was soon unlocked. I was about to push the huge door open when I heard low growls from behind me. Crouched, readying to attack were at least half-a-dozen trogs - a people who like the apemen had no reason to like me. I stood there, back against the door, painfully conscious of how little chance I would have in a fight. Even had I been armed and rested the result couldn't have been guaranteed, but unarmed, exhausted and wounded as I was, I knew realistically that I stood little chance. The best I could hope for was to take a couple of them with me, and hope that anger, adrenaline and desperation would be enough to make a good showing in what promised to be my last fight. My only regret was that I hadn't been able to save Marguerite.
I braced myself for their first charge, but fate, luck or *something* intervened. The heavy door behind me swung wide open with scarcely a touch and I fell backwards, knocking over what felt like a table that crashed to the floor with a metallic clatter. The same whispering voice as before washed over me. "Ez a fegyvereshaz." As with the other room light appeared gradually and I saw what I'd tripped over: a weapons rack. The rest of the room was much the same - a sprawling medieval arsenal. I think I must have laughed in relief as I picked up a heavy bladed sword and turned to face the onrushing trogs, the odds somewhat more even.
There's an exhilaration to fighting: terror, excitement and sometimes rage all mixed together in a heady cocktail. I'd known too many people - especially just after the war - who had become addicted to the sheer thrill of it and sought out danger. I had never considered myself one of them, but as I stood ready in the moments before they reached me I felt at last the same exhilaration that before then they had only been able to describe to me. The sword balanced lightly in my hands, I screamed a wordless battle cry and leapt into the fray. In that underground room, laying into my enemies with the sword my own aches and weariness were forgotten in the unthinking, atavistic joy of battle and the intoxicating, appalling sense of power it brought.
I don't know how long the fight lasted. When at last sanity and reason returned I was standing in the midst of slaughter. "Oh God!" I whispered as I looked around. The whole length of the sword, blade and hilt both, was streaked with blood. As it drooped in my grasp I was aware once more of the immense weight of it and tried to reconcile that with the images I had of swinging that sword as if it were no more than a stick. "Oh dear God," I muttered brokenly, "what have I done . . ?" The devastation all around bore mute witness to the sword's work and I dimly heard the clatter as it dropped from nerveless fingers.
*His* words mocked me now. "Will you kill for her?" he'd asked. I looked down at hands and arms which were running with blood not my own and my clothes now spattered with their blood. The floor where I stood was almost awash. Some of the trog's corpses had been all but dismembered by the force of the blows that the sword-- that *I* had struck. I reeled away from the centre of the carnage, fighting the sudden impulse to retch. I grabbed the wall for support and just slid down into a heap leaning against it, unable to tear my eyes from the mindless slaughter I had wrought.
"Will you kill for her?" he had asked me, and my memory taunted me with the immediacy, the utter certainty of the reply I'd given him: "yes," I'd said to him, unhesitating.
"Is this what you wanted?" I cried out, my voice cracking with anguish. "Is it? How many deaths is it going to take until you're finally satisfied?"
There was no answer, but then I'd hardly expected one.
I just sat against the wall, futilely attempting to wipe the blood from my hands.
To be continued . . .
By Alekto
Chapter 7: Out, damned spot; out, I say.
"All you have to do is survive . . ."
As she said the words I turned to study her face. The flatness of her voice belied the ghost of a frown that rippled across her forehead, as if she were trying to remember something long forgotten. For the merest instant I felt a glimmer of hope and a rush of admiration - whatever this Kekszakallu had done, Marguerite was still there and still fighting him. I wondered wryly if he had realised how wilful Marguerite was when he'd picked her.
"Let me talk to her!" I demanded, pleaded.
After an interminable silence, he offered a slight nod in return. For her part, Marguerite blinked suddenly and looked around, her expression equally bemused and annoyed. I braced myself for an explosion that was sure to come.
Then her gaze landed on me. The explosion never came. "Roxton?" she murmured uncertainly. "Is this real?"
It was something I wasn't entirely sure of myself, but in the end I shrugged. "I think so." To see her so off balance would under other circumstances been worthy of note, but then and there all I wanted to do was try to offer solace and a safe resolution that I knew I couldn't even begin to engineer.
She glanced briefly around the room. "Oh God, I'd hoped it was all a nightmare."
I sighed wearily. "You and me both."
We stood awhile without speaking and she looked me up and down, studying me more carefully in the dim light from the braziers. "You look like hell," she pointed out with a hint of her frequent dry if black humour, but I was sure I could hear an undercurrent of compassion in her tone.
"It's been a long few days," I admitted, before adding privately: and not over yet, not by a long shot. "I don't suppose you know of any other way out of here, do you? Apart from . . ." I nodded vaguely in the direction of the archway.
I guessed she had a better idea about what lay beyond than I did when I saw a haunted, appalled expression cross her face and she turned on Kekszakallu, her eyes ablaze with anger. "That's what you were going to do, wasn't it? Send him to his death? You see, I remember now! I remember what's down there and I promise you: neither of us are going to play your twisted games! Do you hear me? Do y--"
Kekszakallu said nothing, merely fixed his gaze on the irate Marguerite. Her tirade cut off abruptly and she reeled away from him, every line of her body taut, her eyes wild as if she were seeing a horror only she could see.
I made to leap at her tormentor, but was grabbed and held firm in the inescapable clutch of an apeman of towering stature. "NO!" I cried out, helpless to intervene, my own scream of denial echoing Marguerite's anguished cries.
Finally she fell to lie crumpled and unmoving on the floor. Kekszakallu's gaze turned to me, and he gestured again at the archway. Marguerite's earlier words, the twisted reflection of his own taunts came back to me. 'What would you do to save her?'
"Okay, I'll do it," I muttered grimly. "I'll play your little game, if that's what it takes. But if you hurt her . . ."
The threat left him singularly unmoved. With a languorous gesture he ordered me released and the apeman immediately complied. I picked up my scant gear and took one last look at Marguerite, then I walked through the archway.
*********
In the tunnel the air was thick and heavy, like a pea-souper fog back in London with the same foul yellowish tinge except this fog stank of some sickly-sweet incense. My eyes started streaming almost immediately, each breath left an acrid, metallic taste at the back of the throat and before long I was feeling distinctly woozy. For a brief moment my memory flashed back to the trenches, the cries of alarm and fear and then pain, the fumbling to put on gas masks and the sight of gas roiling across the mud. I took out my handkerchief and wrapped it around my nose and mouth in a vain attempt to block out the fumes so I could breathe more easily. As solutions went, it was more than a little lacking.
The fog was everywhere, blurring everything. I couldn't see walls or floor or ceiling. I couldn't see the hand I had stretched out in front of me as I felt my way. The ground underfoot was rough, covered with loose stones, but always inclining downward. Stumbling, seemingly every second step, I rued my decision to leave the spear outside when it could have been so useful to check the ground in front of me.
I staggered down the tunnel for what felt like an age. The fog obliterated any sense of distance travelled, and given how light-headed I was feeling, I had the suspicion that the intoxicatingly heady incense was playing hell with my perceptions. It wasn't a reassuring thought.
Then, inevitably on such terrain, I completely lost my footing and went crashing to the ground. Rough-edged stones cut into the hands and elbows with which I'd tried to break my fall, and I bit back the instinctual gasp of pain. As quickly as I could I scrambled back to my feet and peered myopically through the fog at the thin rivulets of blood dribbling down both arms. The cuts weren't too bad: shallow, painful, inconvenient - certainly, but I wouldn't bleed to death. I took the handkerchief from my face, tore it into strips and bound the worst of the cuts.
With another couple of paces more the fog suddenly melted away, as if moved aside by an unseen, unfelt hand and I found myself in a vast, uncomfortably familiar room: a room with seven doors.
I stepped forward, still light-headed from the effect of the fog. What had seemed from a distance to be doors of human proportions were now far more: high and wide enough that I could have driven a car or carriage through them. There was nothing to distinguish one from another, and set in each at eye level was a keyhole that looked of a size to match the key I had been given.
I stood awhile, considering my options. Apart from the hellish tunnel I entered by, there appeared to be no other exit except - perhaps - through one of the doors. I shrugged and walking to the nearest of the doors, I reached up, slotted the key into place and began to turn. The ancient mechanism creaked and moaned with almost human anguish. Fresh blood dripped down my arm from cuts set to bleeding again from the effort it took to turn it. Like all medieval locks of such a scale I knew it would take several full turns to release. After a final turn, I heard a resounding 'thunk' and the door swung open.
Initially the room beyond was in darkness and I could see nothing. A few seconds later I could see patches of dark red, like burning embers which flared into life as I watched.
From my place by the door I surveyed the room, and wished it had remained in darkness. From all around arose a harsh whisper, a sound that was almost physical in its presence and I had the sudden mental image of rats scurrying, of the feel of tiny paws on skin. "Ez a kinzokamra!"
Unable to tear my gaze away I looked on in horror at a torture chamber. Not here the cleaned, arranged tools of historical display, this room still reeked with the blood and pain and terror of its nameless, numberless victims. Crusting dried blood still stained manacles, cages and other implements, some I which I could not begin to imagine a use for.
The sound of a dull rattle made me start and I turned to see a chain tumbling to the floor, no doubt shifted from its place of rest by my presence. From a brazier nearby that was nothing more than ashes, I was sure I could feel a wash of heat and the sweat springing out on my forehead in response. All the while that indefinable sixth sense that had saved my neck more than once was screaming warning.
Taking the hint I backed out of the room - right into a blow from behind that sent me sprawling. Desperate to put some distance between me and whatever had struck me I continued to roll away, and was just able to make out the pursuing bulk of an apeman.
"Where the hell did that thing come from," I muttered bitterly as I struggled to my feet, my head still ringing from the force of the creature's attack.
It leapt towards me, unthinking in its rage, straight onto the machete that I held out in an attempt to fend it off. I ducked quickly aside as the machete struck home and dying beast's own momentum carried it past me. As it fell to the ground, my machete still embedded in its chest, there was an audible 'crack' and I had the horrible suspicion I knew what had caused it. With some effort I rolled it onto its back to reveal, just as I'd feared, the broken off hilt of the machete - the blade still sunken in the creature's chest. "Oh that's just bloody marvellous! I'm stuck in a bloody great hole in the ground, and my only bloody weapon . . ." My unaccustomed bout of profanity trailed off into wordless irritation. I picked up the machete's hilt which had less than an inch of blade sticking out of it, and studied it for a moment before finally throwing it away.
A glance around the room revealing nothing else I could use as a weapon, and if I was being honest with myself, I had absolutely no intention of going back into the torture chamber. There was something indefinably *wrong* about that room.
I took a couple of minutes to catch my breath before approaching the next door. It did little to combat the light-headedness. At the back of my throat I could still taste the foul, acrid fog and I wondered if that had anything to do with how disjoined everything seemed. Wondering about it, however, was getting me nowhere so I walked over to the next door along, put in the key and began to turn.
It was as hard work as the other was to turn, but was soon unlocked. I was about to push the huge door open when I heard low growls from behind me. Crouched, readying to attack were at least half-a-dozen trogs - a people who like the apemen had no reason to like me. I stood there, back against the door, painfully conscious of how little chance I would have in a fight. Even had I been armed and rested the result couldn't have been guaranteed, but unarmed, exhausted and wounded as I was, I knew realistically that I stood little chance. The best I could hope for was to take a couple of them with me, and hope that anger, adrenaline and desperation would be enough to make a good showing in what promised to be my last fight. My only regret was that I hadn't been able to save Marguerite.
I braced myself for their first charge, but fate, luck or *something* intervened. The heavy door behind me swung wide open with scarcely a touch and I fell backwards, knocking over what felt like a table that crashed to the floor with a metallic clatter. The same whispering voice as before washed over me. "Ez a fegyvereshaz." As with the other room light appeared gradually and I saw what I'd tripped over: a weapons rack. The rest of the room was much the same - a sprawling medieval arsenal. I think I must have laughed in relief as I picked up a heavy bladed sword and turned to face the onrushing trogs, the odds somewhat more even.
There's an exhilaration to fighting: terror, excitement and sometimes rage all mixed together in a heady cocktail. I'd known too many people - especially just after the war - who had become addicted to the sheer thrill of it and sought out danger. I had never considered myself one of them, but as I stood ready in the moments before they reached me I felt at last the same exhilaration that before then they had only been able to describe to me. The sword balanced lightly in my hands, I screamed a wordless battle cry and leapt into the fray. In that underground room, laying into my enemies with the sword my own aches and weariness were forgotten in the unthinking, atavistic joy of battle and the intoxicating, appalling sense of power it brought.
I don't know how long the fight lasted. When at last sanity and reason returned I was standing in the midst of slaughter. "Oh God!" I whispered as I looked around. The whole length of the sword, blade and hilt both, was streaked with blood. As it drooped in my grasp I was aware once more of the immense weight of it and tried to reconcile that with the images I had of swinging that sword as if it were no more than a stick. "Oh dear God," I muttered brokenly, "what have I done . . ?" The devastation all around bore mute witness to the sword's work and I dimly heard the clatter as it dropped from nerveless fingers.
*His* words mocked me now. "Will you kill for her?" he'd asked. I looked down at hands and arms which were running with blood not my own and my clothes now spattered with their blood. The floor where I stood was almost awash. Some of the trog's corpses had been all but dismembered by the force of the blows that the sword-- that *I* had struck. I reeled away from the centre of the carnage, fighting the sudden impulse to retch. I grabbed the wall for support and just slid down into a heap leaning against it, unable to tear my eyes from the mindless slaughter I had wrought.
"Will you kill for her?" he had asked me, and my memory taunted me with the immediacy, the utter certainty of the reply I'd given him: "yes," I'd said to him, unhesitating.
"Is this what you wanted?" I cried out, my voice cracking with anguish. "Is it? How many deaths is it going to take until you're finally satisfied?"
There was no answer, but then I'd hardly expected one.
I just sat against the wall, futilely attempting to wipe the blood from my hands.
To be continued . . .