House of Scales

Chapter 13: Torpor

The light from the flashlight moved back and forth as she ran. Her footsteps echoed through the tunnel. She pointed the light to the ground to try to keep her feet out of any nooks and crannies and to fall as the darkness crept up behind her.

"God damn it," she whined as tears streamed down her cheeks. "Robert..."

She could only stop when, for a tenth of a second, fear made her turn to see if those yellow eyes that had caused so much terror in her heart were following her. Her calves burned from the effort, and she felt a shooting pain under her ribs that made it difficult to breathe. Every few minutes, she needed to lean against a wall to catch her breath, which came cold at her throat, running down it like small blades that left her mouth dry and her lips with small cuts. She glanced back to see that the hisses weren't approaching and turned back the way the person she trusted most had indicated.

"Robert, please, where are you?"

She was worried that her partner hadn't come back for her. Just minutes ago, he had pushed her down one of the alleys and left for another, claiming that the one she was taking was the right one. In those moments of indecision, overwhelmed and uneasy, she could only wonder if everything he had shouted before they parted in the middle of the chase was right. What if he hadn't sacrificed himself? What if he had only pretended to escape while she remained at the mercy of the creatures that were chasing them? She didn't want to doubt him, but in that situation, she could do nothing else. It was true that, as promised, the hisses hadn't been prolonged in her direction. It seemed that, by keeping his word, he had succeeded in separating her from those monsters. For how long? She couldn't know. Death could still be around the corner, that terrified her enough to give in to the fatigue in her legs and stand there at the mercy of the horror in the maze below.

"I can't stop here," she grunted to herself, forced to continue the march.

She believed that the path Robert had shown her was safe. However, she couldn't be sure of anything and soon realised that the direction she had chosen might lead her more to her downfall than to the much-desired salvation.

"What's that?" she asked when, after turning right into a hallway, the surface under her feet changed abruptly.

She no longer noticed the rock she had become accustomed to, and as she braked, her feet slipped slightly. She looked down with a flashlight to see that what surrounded her was some sort of viscous liquid mixed with blood. She had to suppress nausea and retreated a few steps backwards to escape from it. Then a small stumble with one of the rocks made her fall to the ground. Undamaged, she looked up to see what the lantern, now on the ground, showed.

"It can't be," she mumbled. "What the hell is this?"

The light was reflected iridescently on dozens of curved structures that were irregularly positioned throughout the large room. There were too many similar shapes piled up against the wall to be able to count them, but if they all contained the same interior as the one at her feet, she didn't think there was any possible way she could be saved.

"I am lost," she thought without daring to breathe.

Any false move could put her life at risk. She was aware of this, and so she carefully picked up the flashlight, lifting it off the ground careful that the beam of light didn't move too quickly. She sat up quietly and began to count the steps backwards. She had been immensely lucky that her fall hadn't awakened any of the sleeping beasts. If any sound betrayed her, it would be the end.

"You almost got it," she said to herself, praying that even her tears as they fell wouldn't echo in an ominous way across the vast hall.

So worried was she that none of her movements betrayed her that she didn't notice how the beam of light, which was slowly moving along the wall, began to make the end of the underground room glow. The reflection from the back of the room didn't go unnoticed, and from the darkness, a golden light returned her gaze. She drowned out a cry of shock when she saw the vast, crystalline golden surface staring back at her from the black, grooved epicentre.

"No, damn it, no!" she shrieked, turning desperately and running down the path she had come from.

She didn't wait for the other eye to open. It was enough that it was three times as big as those who had chased her and her boyfriend into the darkness of the tunnels. However, she didn't need her eyesight to realise that the gargantuan beast was following her. She heard the heavy body hit the ground violently and, before the glow blinded her completely; she listened to the gurgling of the beast's throat and the sound of combustion starting. The sound of ignition at the monster's roar disconcerted her, and she fell to the ground. The fiery flame passed over her without even damaging her. What she didn't count on was that the blood, which now ran through the various cuts on her legs, would attract hisses that she hadn't heard for a long time.

"Please..." she begged as she got up and left behind the flashlight which had broken from the blow and was now blinking in the depths of the maze.

The steps she took followed the little cracks that the tails of the new-born beasts made from one side to the other. Their claws scratched the ground, getting closer, and followed her to what she wished was the outside.

"Robert..."

Her whisper was lost in the terrible shaking that the movement of the beast caused. The sound of falling rocks preceded her flight as the whistles of the creatures accompanied her into a darkness in which, guided only by the instinct of survival, she prayed to God for escape. Her tears mingled with her blood as her delicate flesh received the first of the jagged teeth in the calve. Her cries were lost in the distance of the labyrinth as she continued to escape, incessantly, to an area where the moonlight announced her future survival.