61
Wandering
"Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished perceptibly, and he realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by one. The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run…" – H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Hikari and the others hadn't seen another living thing since leaving the gang of Hanumon behind. The underground halls were empty, and they had yet to find one which would lead them to their friends. They really had no idea of where they were going, and all of the passages and rooms were beginning to look the same when all at once they turned a corner and found a long flight of stairs, the first they had seen in the base, going down to some still lower level. Down the center of the stairs ran several black pipes or tubes which disappeared under a heavy door of dark wood.
"This could be something important, Daisuke," said V-mon.
"Yes," Tailmon said, taking in the sight. "This place seems different."
She meant that in more than one sense. Architecturally the place stood out from the other parts of the base that they had seen, but there was something else odd about it. It was colder.
"V-mon and I will go first," she added as an afterthought.
The Digimon started down the stairs, and their partners followed behind them. Unconsciously all four stayed to the sides of the stairs, never setting their foot down on one of the sunken pipes. Hikari had made it part of the way down when she stopped, watching Tailmon and V-mon continue their descent. Daisuke stopped too, and glanced at her, hoping she would say something, but her thoughts were elsewhere.
Because something was wrong. There was an unpleasant sensation in the back of her consciousness. It was something familiar, and it was little use to tell herself that it was just her nerves and imagination. She didn't like the feel of this staircase, or the look of the black pipes in the floor, or the door that they led to.
V-mon and Tailmon paused at the foot of the staircase, but if they were expecting anything to happen they were disappointed.
"Alright," V-mon said, shaking off a shiver, "I'll get it open."
Hikari said nothing as V-mon prepared to launch himself forward. She wanted to tell him to stop, that this was a door they shouldn't open with just the four of them, but something kept her from speaking. She knew there was something frightening behind that door, but even so it drew her. It… called to her. Her eyes went wide with realization and she opened her mouth, but too late.
"V-mon Head!"
Daisuke's partner struck the door and jumped back as it swung open under the impact. Beyond it the room was one of polished black stone, and the dark-colored pipes all but vanished as they met it. From her vantage point Hikari couldn't see what else the room might contain, but seeing wasn't necessary. There was a sound she heard with her mind, the vast rolling of midnight tides.
"Let's go back, Daisuke-kun!"
"Why?" he asked, surprised. He had watched her expression change but didn't know the reason for it.
"It's… it's not safe."
"There's something weird in here, Daisuke!" V-mon called up, looking into the room. Tailmon stood beside him, her head twisted round so that she could see her partner.
"It's okay," Daisuke said to Hikari. "I'm here."
"Daisuke!"
V-mon was growing agitated. That room and its black well gave him the creeps. Tailmon felt the same unease – her fur was near to standing on end – but at the moment she was more concerned for Hikari.
"Just a second!" Daisuke yelled to V-mon. "What's the matter, Hikari-chan?"
"I can't go in there," she said, though she knew that in a moment of weakness she might be unable to resist. The darkness called to her, insistent, relentless, urging her to be drawn out of the world of light and submerged, consumed.
"But… it's just a room," Daisuke said. It was as he said it that he caught the first hint of what the others already felt, and he turned his head a little to look down at the open door. "…isn't it?"
For a moment he faltered, but he immediately realized it and snapped his gaze back to Hikari. How was he going to reassure her if he didn't believe what he was saying?
"Don't you trust me?"
"We should go back," she said, not looking at him, her eyes fixed on the doorway and the blackness beyond. "We need to find Takeru and the others."
"Why!?" Daisuke blurted out, catching Takeru's name. Then he realized how stupid and selfish that must sound, and his anger died. He wanted to find the others too, and make sure they were okay, but Hikari-chan was here now, and couldn't she feel confident in him, just a little bit? "Hikari-chan… I…"
"Hikari's right," Tailmon said. "We should find the others. If we need to we can come back to this place later."
"Yeah," Daisuke said quietly, face downcast. "Yeah, alright."
V-mon watched his partner sadly, but wasn't about to make any objection to following Tailmon up the stairs and out of that darker, colder place to the upper basement.
Hikari turned and started up the stairs again, trying to keep her pace measured as her friends followed. She hadn't gone far when a sudden impression came to her. She didn't hear anything, but she felt something whisper her name. She stopped for a moment, bringing her hands up to hold her head.
"No," she whispered, low enough that none of the others heard her. "Leave me alone." She lost her self-control then, and ran up the rest of the stairs as fast as she could manage. Below her Daisuke picked up his own pace, and he could hear their partners do the same. His expression was pained, irritated. No battle had been fought, no enemy grappled with. But seeing her run up those stairs, away from him, Daisuke felt as if here he had been defeated.
The tunnels in this part of the complex were somewhere between dark and pitch-black. Ken didn't expect that he, Wormmon, Miyako, and Hawkmon were in much danger of running into the enemy here – the combination of the darkness and the thick dust on the floor suggested that the tunnels had not been in use for some time, whatever they had originally been created for. But what they lacked in physical peril they made up for in eeriness. He knew that they were walking through a lair of some monstrous evil, built for an unknown but sinister purpose, hiding beneath the beauty of the upper world like an ancient corpse in a brilliant sarcophagus. He felt that even if he didn't know all of that for a fact, it would still have been possible to intuitively sense it.
Ken peered into the darkness ahead of him. Was each passage darker than the last? He couldn't trust his vision in this place; it kept playing tricks on him. Once it seemed like there were eyes hanging in the black air in front of him, huge, unblinking, but it must have been an illusion. None of the others gave any indication that they had seen anything, and the impression faded as Ken steeled himself and continued forward.
When Ken and Miyako had first emerged from the entrance tunnel into the lighted part of the base, they'd noticed that they were still holding hands, and released them, suddenly embarrassed. But they had still been standing together when the Hanumon attacked, and they had managed to wind up together in the confusion without being separated from their Digimon. Wormmon's silk-based attacks had slowed down the Hanumon, but certainly did not stop them, and coming into another room wider than the hallways Ken had stopped and stood his ground, his D-3 allowing Wormmon to Armor Evolve to Pucchiemon.
Heartener Beam had arced across the room, stopping the ape Digimon in their tracks as it removed their will to fight. The Chosen hadn't stayed around to see whether the effects would wear off, but instead followed one of the tunnels out of the room hoping that it would help them to reunite quickly with the others. It hadn't.
"This isn't getting us anywhere," Ken said, his frustration evident in his whispered words.
"Then… should we go back?" Miyako asked.
"If we could even find our way back in this darkness," Hawkmon said.
"Well – well we have to get out of here somehow, right?" Miyako said, the first traces of panic starting to enter her voice.
"Please, be more quiet, Miyako-san," Hawkmon urged. "We don't want the enemy to find us."
"Well it's better than being lost isn't it? I don't want to be left here to rot!"
Lost, Ken thought. We're lost. I'm lost again in darkness. Is there a way out? Could that be the point of all this? To draw us into something we can't walk out of? He gritted his teeth and pounded a fist against the wall. The sound wasn't loud, but it startled those he was with, and there was a moment of silence. No. Now was not the time to be morbid. He knew they needed to calm down, stop jumping to conclusions, and think. He took a deep breath.
"We'll look for light," he said. "We'll start back and take the halls that seem brighter, and that have been used recently. We can't keep going at random."
"Alright, Ken-chan," Wormmon said. He had faith in his partner, and also knew instinctively that at the moment it was critical to support Ken's judgments.
As it turned out, the return to well-lit spaces wasn't as long a time coming as they feared it would be. Before they had backtracked very far they began to come across corridors that seemed less neglected, and following them in what they thought was the general direction from which they had come the Chosen were rewarded with the blackness of the netherworld giving way to a sort of diffuse subterranean twilight.
"We're going to be okay," Miyako whispered. Ken smiled at her and nodded. It had been another lesson in hope; to remind him that after all he had been through he should have more faith.
Immediately their good feelings faded as an unknown sound came to them from down a lateral hall, a loud, mechanical whooshing sound. Hawkmon's wings went up to take hold of the feather he used as a weapon. No Hanumon had made that sound, but that didn't mean it wasn't dangerous. Given the great variety of enemies the masters of the place had thrown at them since the appearance of the Dark Tower in Arkham, they had no way of judging just what soldiers the base might conceal.
When nothing followed the sound, the four of them cautiously moved to the intersection of the tunnels and peered around the corner, careful not to expose too much of themselves. At the end of the new hallway was what seemed to be a large room filled with mysterious machinery. For the moment there was no sign of any hostile Digimon, so slowly the group approached the room's entrance.
They were just barely able to stifle exclamations of surprise when a doorway slid open in one of the machines and some man-shaped creature rushed out of it. The thing didn't see them, but ran at full speed beyond the range of their vision, apparently heading for some other exit. Recovering, Ken and Miyako took hold of their Digivices and stepped to the doorway.
Up close they could see that the primary machine in the room was huge, fed by black tubing that ran along the floor from the direction that the unknown being had gone. There were a number of doors in it, and above each was a monitor. Several of the screens displayed what they recognized as the Crest of Courage, while the Crest of Love was shown on the others.
"What's going on here?" Ken wondered, aloud but under his breath.
"I feel the power of a Digimental," Hawkmon said.
"Could it be…" Miyako wondered, "…like Setmon and Coatlmon? But where are they going in such a hurry?"
Ken was beginning to grasp the situation. It was here that the artificial Digimon copied from the data of the Digimentals were being made. And he had a feeling that he knew exactly who the manufactured Digimon were running toward.