Chapter 11: The Fear
The room was just as I had remembered from the last time I was there. It was a small room, cold and dark. The walls were made of concrete just like the sewer we had just come from. A dim light bulb tried to light up the room, but it didn't really make a difference. Dark, metal bars ran parallel to the back wall where I saw the shadow of a figure heaped on the floor. Thalia glanced over to me in apprehension. We started walking over to the back of the room. Our footsteps echoed loudly against the walls with each step we took.
I had been dreading this moment ever since I found out that Annabeth was being held captive. I was dreading finding out if she would be ok or not, or if she would even be alive. I was dreading being with her again, fearing that she would find out my feelings towards Thalia. And even though we had been mercilessly attacked at pretty much every turn, I was dreading not having all this alone time with Thalia.
I wondered what Thalia was thinking. I'm sure her feelings were just as conflicted, if not more conflicted than my own. I felt like Thalia was more of a friend to Annabeth than I was her boyfriend. If I felt this awful and conflicted about betraying Annabeth like this, I could only imagine how awful Thalia felt. The thought came to my mind that the next few days with the three of us together will be harder than the past few days fighting monsters or being locked up in a cell. I quickly batted that thought away as we cautiously reached the end of the room.
"Annabeth are you ok?" I gently asked. I bent down to the floor and put my arm on Annabeth's shoulder. She was lying down on her side with her back to the door. Her blonde hair looked to be grey in the dim light, though I knew that was impossible. Her hair was still frizzy and all over the place. The cuts and bruises were still on her arms but there seemed to be even more now. She was curled up in a ball and was taking very shallow breaths. She didn't react at all when I touched her.
"Are you really here, or is this just another trick?" She asked slowly and quietly.
"We're both here." Thalia responded warmly.
Annabeth gradually uncurled herself and sat up facing us. She looked completely exhausted. As she looked at us helplessly she struggled to maintain herself sitting up without falling over. I reached for her hand through the bars, and she looked deep into my eyes when our hands intertwined. "You really are here." She said as she looked wistfully into my eyes.
"Of course I am. I couldn't just sit around while I knew you were here. How do we get you out?"
"I have no idea, Percy." She was leaning her forehead against the bars.
"I got it." Thalia said as she moved me out of the way of the lock on the gate. Her tone of voice was hinting to me she wasn't a fan of the cheesiness that was going on between Annabeth and me. She found the lock on the door and pulled out something from her pocket that I couldn't see.
"Why do you carry a lockpick around?" I asked. "Never mind, I don't want to know." I quickly added. Thalia fiddled with the lock for a few moments. She grunted with frustration a couple times and complained about the dim lighting. A fateful click echoed across the dark empty walls. The gate slowly opened with a creaking sound that reminded me of fingernails against chalkboard.
Annabeth cautiously came out of the cell and ran into my arms. She dug her head deep into my shoulder. She gave a huge sigh of relief. Even though we were at the bottom of some cursed sewer, I couldn't help but feel happy and hopeful. Annabeth turned and gave Thalia a huge hug. While Annabeth's head was buried in Thalia's should the two of us made eye contact. Her face was essentially expressionless. I'm sure there was a lot of emotions going on in her mind, but I couldn't figure out which ones. I quickly looked away and then down, trying to get the image of Thalia's empty face out of my mind.
"Thank you so much for getting me out of here."
"We're not out yet." Thalia reminded her. "But you're welcome." She smiled.
"You're right," I said "We need to get our of here. There's no point continuing our reunion here. Whatever is in the corridor outside of this door is going to try and disorient us."
"How far away is the exit from here?" Annabeth asked. As she sipped on some water that Thalia had given her from her backpack.
"Honestly I'm not too sure. When we were trying to find your door it felt like forever. It could be really close or really far."
"Very helpful." Thalia commented.
"It's not like you know how far away the exit is!"
A smile crept up on Annabeth's face. "It's good to be back together." I couldn't begin to think how relieved Annabeth must have felt to be in the presence of her friends instead of scary sounds and hundreds of spiders. How she was able to even get a little smile out was beyond me.
"Do you at least know where to go from here?" Annabeth asked.
"Left." I responded.
"Right." Thalia responded too at the exact time.
"You're kidding." Annabeth put her fingers on her temples.
"I vividly remember entering the door turning right, not left, which means that the exit is on our left. You're wrong!"
"No, you're wrong seaweed brain, we came down the sewer and we entered the door from the left, which means right is the way we need to go."
I tried to replay the events back in my head. I knew that the door was on the right side of the sewer from when I was before going in. I thought I had lost Thalia, so I turned around and tried to find her. She was behind me when I found her, which only meant that we had come from the left side of the door. I tried explaining that to Thalia, but she wouldn't budge.
We argued back and forth for a few moments, the name calling got progressively worse as each exchange happened.
"– that you can't even remember simple directions and orientations is beyond me, water boy!"
I was about to let another clever name fly when that awful whispering crept its way into our ears and perhaps into our very souls. We all froze. I looked around and saw Thalia's and Annabeth's eyes wide open with fear. My eyes were as wide as theirs. My heart started beating faster.
"Go." Annabeth said. "Go, go, go!" We started scrambling around. Thalia and I raced each other to the door. We were both thinking that the first one out would lead the rest of us to the exit. I lunged for the handle and flung open the door. We were all outside the door and into the concrete sewer tunnel. Thalia saw that I was about ready to start booking it to the left. She was done with name calling and insults to try to change my mind.
"Do you trust me?" She asked.
We stood there facing each other. In the dim light I couldn't make out her facial expressions. Was she angry? Scared? Desperate? My mind flashed back to just a day ago we were being chased by Python and I had faintly heard what I thought was a river.
"Do you trust me?" I responded without thinking.
Our eyes locked. It only took Thalia a second to respond.
"Yes." She said. "With my life." She added. Oof. I thought. That was the same response she had given me while we were running for our lives. Despite her stubbornness, I knew Thalia would decide to follow me, even if she knew I was completely wrong and that I would be going the wrong direction. My ADHD was begging me to stick to my plan and start booking it left down the sewer. But if Thalia would follow me even if she knew I was wrong, maybe I should do the same.
"I'll follow you, Thalia."
Signs of relief rushed through her face and a little smile came in to replace her troubled expressions.
"We need to move." Was all she said. The three of us began running on the narrow walkway. Thalia led thew way, followed by me and Annabeth. "Careful of the drop!" Thalia shouted to Annabeth so she wouldn't fall into the center of the tunnel. Our footsteps echoed loudly throughout the sewer tunnel. We were too afraid to talk. Too afraid to think of anything other than getting out of this cursed place. So afraid that we were only focused on how afraid we were and ignored everything else. I felt as if I had forgotten how to run. My legs were jelly. And I had to consciously tell my body to move my right leg and then my left. Right! Left! Now right! And left again! It felt as if I wasn't going anywhere, as if I was moving slower than I should have been moving. After a while it felt like I was in a dream where I had to run, but no matter how hard I tried my legs were unable to propel me forward. I lost focus of Thalia in front of me, I couldn't look back to check on Annabeth or I would be unable to continue running. For what seemed like forever the only things I heard was gradual pounding of my feet on the cold concrete floor, the pounding of my heart, and the malevolent whispers.
The angry whispering hadn't gone away since we had rushed out the door. The voice had always felt angry, but it now felt real. Waves of fear beat upon me as if I were on a tiny rowboat in the middle of an ocean storm. I knew whatever it was, it was now behind me. I called out for Thalia to stop and spun around, pulling out Riptide in the process.
The first thing I noticed is that Annabeth wasn't there. No! I cried. After all I had gone through to get her back, I lost her within moments of finding her. My heart sank. Feelings of hopelessness filled my body. Riptide fell to the ground followed by a defeated clank as the sword rested indifferently on the ground. I didn't know how much more I could take. A dark, resounding laughter filled the sewer tunnel. My blood turned to ice. My legs wouldn't move. The tunnel seemed darker than it was a few seconds ago. I just wanted to curl up in a ball and hide forever. I forced myself to look behind me, hoping to see Thalia right there with me. I felt like the two of us together could come out of this on top. But she wasn't there. Just darkness. Either she hadn't heard me and had kept on running, or the whispering voice did the same thing to her as it had done to Annabeth.
I was all alone in this dimly lit sewer tunnel, stuck with an angry voice that had separated me from the people I cared most about. I shouldn't be here; I should be at Camp Half-Blood. I thought. None of this should be happening. These thoughts stirred my emotions. I wanted revenge at this thing for what it had done to me. A jolt of anger rushed through my body; and I used that anger to muster all the remaining courage I had left to give myself the only advantage I could think of. "Show yourself you coward!"
The whispering stopped abruptly as if its power cord had been pulled from the socket. The silence pierced the tunnel. I was expecting to be able to hear Annabeth's or Thalia's echoes if they were further down the tunnel because we were in such a confined space, but I could hear absolutely nothing.
"Annabeth!" I shouted. "Thalia?!" My voice bounced off the rounded roof. My voice echoed countless times in rapid succession. I had never been creeped out by my own voice until now. I was answered by an ominous sound that came from the direction we had been running from. I heard it again. And again. It was footsteps. But the sounds were few and far between one another. Whatever had been tormenting Annabeth and had been scaring me and Thalia was physically coming closer. I knew that if I were to stay standing in place, just waiting for the thing to come closer, I would die. I reached into my pocket where Riptide had already reappeared. I pulled out the pen and uncapped it. The sounds of the footsteps were getting louder every second.
The whispering stared back up. This time it felt as if they were coming from inside my mind. I couldn't make out what they were saying but I knew that it was awful, terrible things. They began growing louder and louder into a whirlwind of voices as if they were a powerful summer storm during the peak of monsoon season. It got to the point where I couldn't even discern my own thoughts from the slew of angry voices within my head.
Panic flooded over me, and it took every ounce of bravery to not drop my sword again. From the poorly lit tunnel I could see a figure slowly emerge from the darkness. At first I barely made it out as a shadow. With each step towards me it never got any brighter. The figure was humanoid, tall, and slender. He was wearing loose robes as black as night and as worn as a used burlap sack. He had a hood on that fell over his face which made it impossible to point out any facial features. As he got closer I saw that the robes went down to his wrists, and that his hands were the color of an awful mix between white and yellow. They were thin and boney. His fingernails were yellow, uncut, and decayed. Before I could realize it, he was already within a couple dozen feet from me.
I was petrified. He probably knew this better than myself. The whispers in my head started laughing. The man wasn't even doing anything but standing there, but yet I felt like it was all over, that there wasn't anything I could do. But I needed to do something, anything.
"Who… are… are you?" I managed to get out in a voice so quiet I wasn't sure if I even said them.
The whispers inside my head had stopped, but they were replaced with something that made them sound like children's laugher at a playground: his voice. "Isn't it obvious, Percy?" It was deeper than any voice I had ever heard. It sounded like it came from all directions and my name echoed throughout my whole body. The voice sounded like nail on chalkboard but at the lowest tone possible. He talked slow and deliberately. I wanted him to shut up and never say another word again. I couldn't respond. He knew this and let loose a loud, sinister laugh causing me to tremble. He reached for his hood and took it off, revealing his hideous face. It was the same yellowish white color as his hands. He had no hair, and his cheeks were sunken in. His lips were almost black. And his eyes, they were black. His entire eyeballs were black. I looked into them for only a fraction of a second but that was enough. Fear coursed through me. Fear had taken control of me.
Fear. I thought.
As if my life depended on it, my impulse-drive brain began racing trying to make the connections that were surfacing. Aphrodite had taken Annabeth. Aphrodite wanted Annabeth away from me. She wanted her hidden and locked up. Other gods didn't like what Aphrodite did. She had to conceal what she was doing and distance herself from Annabeth. Otherwise, the other gods would have noticed. She must have needed help. Other important gods that were friends with Aphrodite couldn't have helped directly. They would be discovered too. But someone else. Like a lesser god could. Ares would surely want to help Aphrodite, but wouldn't get involved directly. But his son…
"Phobos." I trembled. "The god of fear."
He gave me a crooked, wicked smile. "I thought it would be more obvious."
Being able to identify who this person was helped me calm my nerves down a little. A little as in like taking a couple drops out of the metaphorical ocean of fear. But it was a start. And fear is conquered a little at a time. I told to myself, giving me some false confidence.
"Where's Thalia and Annabeth?" I was able to get out.
He let out a malignant, evil laugh, causing me to instinctively stumble a few steps back. He advanced a few steps forward. "Interesting that you asked about Thalia first." He paused with a wicked smile and continued to approach me slowly. "Lets just say… they're facing their own fears. Just like you."
"I'm not afraid of you!" I cried out, even though everything I was doing was saying the contrary. I was deathly afraid. I couldn't do it by myself. Fighting other gods was different. They didn't emit this aurora of terror. It took everything in me just to shout out that blatant lie. All the while my mind was racing Phobos never stopped advancing. He walked as if he knew I couldn't escape and that I was at his complete mercy. His black, soulless eyes peered into me in some sort of twisted amusement. It was no use for me to keep on backing away. He would get to me. It was only a matter of time.
"We can take him, Percy!" It was Thalia. She appeared next to me with her spear drawn and her shield out. She looked confident. She looked straight at Phobos. "I'm sick of this you boney creep! Are you ready to fight me like a real god?"
Phobos hissed and stretched forth his hand. A large, black scythe appeared in his hands. A black skull was mounted at the top of the scythe right before the blade began. With his giant weapon in hand, Phobos made the grim reaper look like a child dressing up for Halloween. I couldn't comprehend how Thalia wasn't running away. She was doing the exact opposite, approaching the god of fear with courage stronger than fear. Her confidence inspired me. If she could trash talk this god, what couldn't I do? I gripped Riptide with determination and advanced with Thalia. I grew uneasy when Phobos gave a sinister smile, bearing his long, yellow, sharp teeth. I switched my attention back to Thalia, who was just a few paces in front of me on my right. The walkway was just wide enough for the two of us to walk side by side, but it wouldn't be practical for fighting because we'd run out of space if we were side by side. We'd also risk stumbling or tripping each other into the drop-off where the sewer water would normally be.
"I'll make this quick." Phobos snarled as Thalia started running towards him. Thalia was now within striking distance of the god of fear. Now that we were closer, I gulped as I looked up in dread. He was at least seven feet tall and towered over the two of us. His scythe was about that height as well. Thalia went in to jab her spear into his side. But Phobos easily sidestepped the attack and lifted up his scythe to counter. Thalia had to dive back towards where I was standing to avoid a crushing blow. The scythe smashed into the concrete walkway at a speed I couldn't even comprehend. The attack was so powerful the scythe had embedded itself into the concrete like a twisted version of King Author's sword. Phobos casually pulled the blade from out of the concrete. I looked in horror as I noticed the midnight-black blade was at least two feet long. One hit from that and it would be the end of Thalia. Despite my dip in the river Styx, I didn't feel too confident myself.
Thalia had backed herself next to me as Phobos readied his scythe for another swing. He was just a couple yards away now. Thalia's eyes were wide, and her pupils tried to make them look like Phobos's with how dilated they were. She knew just as well as I did that there was a good chance this would be our last fight. We were at a huge disadvantage. We had restricted mobility and low lighting. Not falling down the drop-off next to the walkway was going to be another problem.
I'm sure both of us had the idea of making a run for it towards the exit, but after all we had been through we weren't going to leave Annabeth. She was still in the sewer on the other side of Phobos. The need to get to Annabeth fueled my body with energy and fortitude to rush towards Phobos with my sword drawn. He looked down on me, amused that I would even dare approach him in battle. He readied his scythe and prepared to swing at me like a I was a little baseball.
I was within striking distance when I lifted my sword up, ready to swing down with all my might upon the god of fear. But it was no use. Before I could even raise my sword all the way up he closed the distance between us. Within half a second he had knocked me back at least 20 yards with the back end of his scythe. I flew backwards as all the air rushed out of my body. I tossed and tumbled across the ground until I finally rested on my back. I struggled for breath. I couldn't move, in part because my body was filled with pain, and in part because my mind was filled with fear. So much fear. Contact with his weapon, even just the back part, must have allowed Phobos to channel all of his power and allow it to run rampant into those who come in contact with it. I couldn't think straight. Horrors that I had never thought possible danced around my mind. I knew I was being driven crazy from fear. I wanted to die.
Thalia had seen me get knocked back and had rushed towards Phobos with her spear and shield ready. She was able to get a couple of jabs in, but the narrow sewer tunnel where we were fighting made it impossible for Thalia to obtain any advantage through her agility. She had to face the god of fear head on. I couldn't do anything but watch. Phobos had literally paralyzed me with fear. I watched helplessly as Thalia dodged massive strikes from the giant scythe. Each swing was so powerful that it sent a gust of wind down the tunnel. Each impact against the cold, hard concrete was so powerful that it shook the ground. Thalia was backing up at a rapid pace and would soon be right next to me. She was dodging Phobos's attacks left and right. He was approaching with a deathly determination to kill both of us. When she would spin to doge the attacks I saw her eyes were wide like a cornered animal. I felt like she wouldn't last much longer.
Phobos swung his scythe in a sweeping motion and Thalia instinctively ducked just in time to keep her head from getting chopped off. The scythe made a thundering sound against the side of the tunnel, and the wind from the swing staggered Thalia into a daze. Phobos pulled the scythe back at lightning speed and swung again, hitting Thalia with the back end. Unlike how I went flying backwards, Thalia was launched directly into the side of the tunnel. Her impact against the wall was almost as loud as when Phobos's scythe had impacted it just a second before. She landed not five yards from me.
Thalia slumped down against the wall. Her mouth was wide open gasping for air. Her eyes had lost focus, and she was staring at the distance not focused on anything. Thalia's arm was twisted in a way that sent shudders down my already terror-filled body. Her blood started pooling around her. I knew that scenes of incomprehensible horror were flooding her mind. I knew that if that impact didn't kill her, Phobos would; and then he would kill me.
Phobos walked directly in front of me. I tried looking up, but could only stare at the bottom of his black robes. I heard his voice from above, as if it were Hades himself. I could feel Phobos's eyes pierce my soul.
"So, Percy," Phobos mused as he turned towards Thalia. "This, is what you fear?" He lifted his scythe and lowered it with frightening speed towards Thalia's dying body.
I'm back again :) I will finish this story even if it takes the rest of my life! Thank you so much for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments. I also have some really neat things planned for this story so make sure to follow it!