81

The Basements

"Nothing was found – in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited – but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the interior." – H. P. Lovecraft, "The Horror at Red Hook"

Space didn't return to normal all at once. The light generated by that last attack burned open rifts in Lilithmon's created space, revealing a number of rooms in the building she had turned into a maze. The rifts let in the dim lighting of the subbasement, and the temperature slowly rose from the cold of the void to the coolness of the building's air conditioning. As the widening tears in the blackness began to meet, the location of one would supersede the location of the other, so that by the time the abyss had vanished entirely the humans and Digimon were left in a single large room, at one end of which was the doorway that WarGreymon had demolished at the beginning of the battle.

The Chosen Children and their partners settled slowly to the hardwood floor. Lilithmon was already on it, collapsed. Her Nazar Nail had been shattered, and other parts of her body were beginning to dissolve into effervescent darkness. She was still alive – though that would not last long – and her eyes still roved from one person to the next, incredulous at what had happened.

"Alright, Lilithmon," Taichi said, breaking the silence. "No more games. Where are they?"

"What are you talking about?" she said. Her eyes narrowed and her expression turned bitter. She looked at her enemies with a hatred that she no longer had the power to act upon. It was a look that had no interest in games. It was the look of a hungry predator behind the bars of a zoo.

"Where are they?" Taichi angrily repeated. "Hikari, Daisuke, Takeru, and the others."

"How should I know?" she spat. "They were supposed to be here." She scraped her cracked golden claws across the floor, lowering her eyes to watch their progress in morbid fascination. "Look what you've done…"

Yamato hadn't spoken yet because up until that moment he had forgotten his conversation with Lilithmon in the restroom. Her burning whispers and the battle that followed them had driven it from his mind. But now he remembered.

"They…aren't here," he said.

"What?" Taichi turned towards him. "What do you mean they're not here?"

"She told me," Yamato said. "She doesn't know where Takeru and the rest are either."

"We can't trust her!" Taichi exploded, his anger a mask for the fear that came pouring back into him.

"He may be right, Taichi-san," Koshiro said. "Lilithmon never indicated that she was holding Hikari-san and the others."

"And BlackTailmon didn't know either, remember?" Yamato said.

"They – they've got to be here," Taichi said. "Where else could they be?" He looked wildly about the room, as if ready to tear it apart to look for them.

"Is this building the enemy base?" Jou asked. "Maybe they're on a different floor or something."

"They aren't," Lilithmon said. "I would have felt them. Oh, I would have felt them…" She was looking up at the Chosen Children again now, and a hint of her old smug smile played about her face. "And if you can't find them, He must have them. And if He has them…you'll never get them back."

"Who?" Sora asked.

"The Dark One," Lilithmon answered. "The one whose power is beyond even mine. The one who will put an end to all you Chosen Children at last, one way or another." Her body's rate of disintegration was growing more rapid – as much of her was gone now as had been missing from MetalGarurumon before a miracle saved him from her spell. And yet she chuckled. "At least I can go back into the dark knowing that your time draws near."

"Who is he?" asked Sora, persisting, with irritation in her voice. "Why have you done all this to us?"

"By the time you find out, it will be far too late," Lilithmon said. She was fading away fast. Soon she would be irrevocably dead. Anubimon, had he been there, would have known immediately where he should send her data, but this was the human world, where there was no decision to be made.

"Tell us now!" Taichi said.

"I won't tell you anything," Lilithmon snapped back at him. In an instant her mocking calm disappeared, swept away in a fresh burst of rage and hatred. "You bastards! You killed me! You killed me! I hope they make you suffer! I know they will! You can't stop him, and all the others like me!"

As always, her anger gave her strength – what was left of her rose grotesquely from the floor, jerking and twisting like a sea creature reaching for air-breathing prey. As one, the Chosen Children took an involuntary step backward, away from the monster that looked like a woman.

"You killed MEEEE!" she screeched – it was the only death she had ever mourned – and then the rest of her was gone, leaving only a gray oiliness in the air that dispersed in another moment. It was as if she had never been…and for that the Chosen Children were thankful.

WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon devolved, returning to Agumon and Gabumon. They did so out of necessity, not out of choice – whatever power had invested them with the energy to destroy Lilithmon, it had exhausted itself. Which was worrisome, because none of the Chosen had any idea of where they were, or whether there were other hostile forces present, or how they could get out of this showcase of horrors.

And then there was the question of their abducted friends.

"Damn it…" Taichi breathed. "Damn it!"

"At least Lilithmon is destroyed," Yamato said. There was no one gladder than he that Lilithmon's vile influence was gone. It had wormed its way deepest into him, and it would be a long time before he could wash away the scum it had left on his soul. But it was the other Chosen Children who mattered now. "There's still a chance that Takeru and the others are here somewhere."

"You're right," Taichi said. "Let's get looking for them."

Koshiro wasn't feeling optimistic, but he didn't voice his doubts. All he said was, "We still have to be careful."

"That's right," Mimi said. "Didn't she say that there were other Digimon in this world?"

"But," Jou pointed out, "Nobody came to help her during the fight. Maybe she was just bluffing."

"It doesn't matter," Taichi said. "Are you coming or not?"

They followed him, each human with their partner Digimon at their side. Piyomon, Tentomon, Palmon, and Gomamon felt fine now, and didn't stop to think about why. Questions about what exactly had saved the group would have to wait until they could put this place well behind them.

The search began. Knowing approximately where they were, it became a matter of systematically checking the places that they had not already explored. The pockets of cold blackness had vanished completely with Lilithmon's deletion, and there was little worry of getting lost. Almost immediately they found a staircase leading upwards, which was not surprising. Wherever they were, it seemed to be a basement of some kind, since there were no windows anywhere. The place was smaller than they expected; it seemed that collectively they had seen about all of it.

There was only one grisly exhibit left for them to find, but the horror of it paled that of the others. Taichi opened the door to a darkened room – a natural darkness, not one of Lilithmon's artificial planes. In other rooms they had encountered the smell of death, but in this one the stench was so intense that they nearly choked on it, and fell back from the door.

"Let's leave it," Mimi groaned, her words muffled through her hands, clasped over her mouth and nose.

"We can't," Taichi said reluctantly. "There may be another door inside that we've missed."

Still, he made no move forward. There was something else the room might possibly contain, but the thought was too terrible to form into words. All of his recent nightmares went creeping through his head, none more vivid than the dream of the hallway, and the murdered bodies of the six people now missing. His eyes met Yamato's, he could see that his friend had had the same thought. For a moment they stared at each other helplessly, unable to retreat, unable to move forward.

"Here," said Jou at last. "Let me see if I can get the lights on." He stepped to the open doorway. He didn't want to see what was in there any more than the others did, but he was on his way to becoming a doctor – he would need to get used to horrors. Sora, Koshiro, and Mimi had to look away, but Taichi and Yamato could not. Jou's hand groped along the inner wall, looking for a light switch, shaking as he thought about what else he might encounter in the dark. But he found what he was looking for, and flipped the switch.

The scene in the illuminated room was not carefully arranged as the others had been. There were three bodies, lying in random positions on the floor. No other exit to the room, and no sign of anyone the Chosen Children knew. So the light was turned off again, and the door was shut.

"All these people," Jou said quietly, and the three who hadn't looked didn't need to ask what the room contained. "We can't just leave them here. The police should be called, at least."

"If we can determine the address of this building," Koshiro said, looking up, "We'll let them know. But first we need to find a way out, and make sure that there are no other Digimon left in the building. Earlier the police attempted to fight SkullSatamon, and failed."

"You don't think there are any more, do you?" Jou asked.

"I can't say," Koshiro said. "But we know that there are at least two other enemy Digimon somewhere in Tokyo: that black Tailmon, and whatever it was that attacked Chiho-san and the others."

"Come on," Taichi said, recovered from the scare of the darkened room and fired up at the mention of the enemy. "We aren't doing any good just standing here."

They backtracked to the staircase, the only way out. The Digimon took the lead as the group ascended, but their partners were close behind. Empty of threats though the subbasement was, they felt intensely the presence of the dead in the dim, silent rooms beneath them.

The next level up was not much different from the one they had left – still devoid of windows. There were no bodies there, though they could see disturbing evidence that there had been. It appeared that the demons' victims had been killed here before being redistributed in preparation for the Chosen Children's arrival. There was still no sign of their missing friends, but they did find what appeared to be two exits. One was the door to a staircase like the one they had come up, and it was locked. The other was a door to an underground parking garage, and it was open.

There were a number of vehicles parked in the echoing concrete space, but no other signs of life. At the far end they could see where the concrete sloped upwards beyond a parking gate – a way out.

They had been standing there without speaking, feeling the relative freshness of the air, when there was a loud click behind them. Taichi whirled around – they had forgotten to hold open the door to the building itself. He tried the handle, but it had locked automatically. Beside the door was a card reader of some kind, waiting for a key they didn't have.

"Damn it!" Taichi said, not caring how loudly his voice echoed in the garage.

"We're out…" Mimi said, confused at his anger.

"But we aren't done in there!" Yamato said. "Regardless of what Lilithmon said, the others might still be in that building!"

"Alright," Taichi said. "We'll just have to break the door down."

"Wait, Taichi-san," said Koshiro. "We don't know what the building is used for. It would be better to bring the police. We can't search the whole place by ourselves."

"I can try," Taichi said, his voice soft and intense.

Koshiro looked at the others, hoping for support.

"I…think Koshiro-kun is right," Sora said. Taichi and Yamato looked at her, suddenly unsure of what to say. She had been reluctant to contradict them – she knew what they were suffering on account of their siblings. But then, she was worried about the others too. She had a right to speak up. And Koshiro was right; they couldn't tear an entire building apart without running into problems with the people using it – people who, after all, couldn't all be aware of the horrors that the structure concealed.

"And our parents will be worried too," she continued. In her mind's eye she saw her mother's pale face, staring at a clock, perhaps, and wondering when her little girl would be home. "We're going to need help with this."

Taichi and Yamato looked at her together for a few seconds of silence. She dropped her eyes, but caught herself and immediately looked back up again. She hoped they could read everything in her expression, the interplay of sympathy and conviction.

"Alright," Yamato said at last. "We need to find a phone."