Sharp teeth

Isabella pointed straight ahead.  “We go that way,” she said.  “Don’t stop unless I tell you to.  We’re looking for a way out of here now, before there are too many of the teddybears.”

To her immense relief David did as he was told, moving swiftly at last, his head swinging from side-to-side as he tried to keep any potential threats in view.  She followed behind him, her head barely moving at all and the Kris out, probing into the air.  The last thing she wanted to do was do through into pitch blackness, but right now that would be better than being caught by the Teddybears.  She wanted to get the Sukhev Da out too, the Teddybear-killing knife, but she knew that since her stroke she couldn’t handle a knife in both hands.  If the Teddybear’s started closing in she’d switch knives and pray that she could get them out of this.

David moaned softly; Isabella caught the flash of movement at the corner of her eye.  They were fast, low to the ground, and were getting better camouflaged now that colour was returning to the landscape.  She estimated that there were four of them out there at the moment, still wary of approaching when their prey was still together and obviously healthy.  He flinched, throwing an arm up, and then veered slightly left.

“Stay on course!” she said, and he looked back, saw her, and corrected himself.  Nothing came at them, and she assumed that he’d just imagined another streak of colour through the air.  His breath sounded ragged, as though he were panting.

The blade of the knive caught on something and she swiftly twisted and opened, peering through.  A narrow rock ledge was a step away, high above a black drop and there was the sound of running water.  There was no sign of any way off the ledge except by falling, so she closed it up again and looked about her.  David had gained about eight feet on her, so she hurried a little, but the Teddybears still weren’t revealing themselves.

“Crap!”  David fell, clutching at his ankle, and she almost groaned out loud.  She stood over him and reached down a hand.

“Stand,” she commanded.  “I don’t care if it hurts, it’ll hurt more if they catch you.”

“I can’t,” said David.  He rolled a little and ignored her hand.  “I think it’s broken.”

“Get up!”  Isabella stared at him, and her other hand automatically put the Kris away and freed the Da from its sheath instead.  “Get up, David!”

There was a sudden blur of motion and then a Teddybear was stood next to both of them.  It opened its mouth revealing three rows of teeth, triangular and pointed like a shark’s, and then sank them into David’s knee.

He screamed and kicked at it with his other foot, which seemed to pass straight through it.  Then the Da plunged down, Isabella’s aim straight and true, and as it reached the Teddybear it seemed as though for a moment there were a hundred Teddybears stretching off to both the left and right, and a hundred Das striking at their heads.  Someone in the hundred one Teddybear connected with the Da and started to scream, and then the images all closed up and the Teddybear fell backwards, the Da pulling out of its flesh with a sucking sound, and brown ichor rising out of the wound.  It bubbled as it met the air and seemed to thicken, and moments later the entire Teddybear stiffened and stopped moving.

Isabella glared at David, and then scanned around her.

“Get up,” she demanded.  “Get up if you want to live.”

Noises in the walls

“What is this place?”  David looked around himself for the first time properly, and his face showed plenty of signs of puzzlement.  Isabella watched him carefully, aware that she was taking a risk by not watching the room, but curious to see what genuine emotion in the man looked like.  Her research on him had identified him as a lordling; his father had made money in steel and cobalt and had pushed his son into the next higher social circle by picking out his schools, his holiday locations, and generally staying out of his life except where money was needed to lubricate things.  To her admittedly jaded outlook it seemed as though David’s real job was to have children who’d been accepted in his social circle and make his father happy, but David wasn’t doing very well at that. In fact, she’d had trouble finding anything David was good at; even as a dilettante he wasn’t much of a social gadfly, wasn’t particularly handsome, wasn’t very clever or especially interesting.  He was – and she’d finally allowed herself to think this – very much a disposable second son.  The kicker was, of course, that he was an only child.

“This is the other side,” said Isabella.  Unless she missed her guess one of David’s eyes had been lazy in his childhood, and it seemed to drift a little now from time to time.  He was currently looking at where the door had been, but his left eye was starting to look at the mantlepiece instead.

“The other side of what?  And where did the door go?  We just came through it, I know it was there!”  He pushed past her, unsteadying her slightly and catching her by surprise.  She put her hand out, and steadied herself on the armchair, raising a puff of dust into the air.

“Just the other side,” said Isabella, stepping away from the dust before she could breathe any in.  “That’s just what this place is called.  I suppose it probably has other names too, but I’ve not heard any of them.”

“Where’s the door?” David ran large, spatulate hands over the cracked plaster of the wall, digging his fingernails into the cracks and trying to lever them, as though the door were some peculiar shape on this side and not the other.

“Not there,” said Isabella.  “It’s moved by now.”

“What?”

“Look,” she said, sighing.  “This isn’t easy for me either.  This place is not safe, but the caves on the other side are less safe, and I know – mostly – what dangers there are on this side.  So I’m taking a chance coming here, because it’s less risky than staying there.  You shouldn’t even be here with me, this is definitely not what I thought you’d be coming along for.  I don’t think you’re ready for any of this, and I’m going to drop you outside at the first chance I get.  You’re to go back to the airport, find a hotel, and wait for me there.”

“There are no doors in this room at all,” said David, slowly turning around on one heel.  His shoes made a faint squeaking sound as it ground against the carpet.  “This is some kind of trap.”

“Listen to me,” said Isabella.  The immobile right-hand side of her face made her look grim and menacing.  “You have to get out of here when I tell you to go.  Do you understand that?”

“I don’t want to,” said David.  “And don’t try telling me there’s spiders ahead, I know you’re going to.”

“I –“ began Isabella, annoyed that her next gambit had just been stolen from her.  Behind her, the blank patch on the wall suddenly darkened and a huge portrait appeared.  She turned, guessing something had happened from David’s reaction, and saw the portrait swing outward from the wall like a door, and then a teddy-bear stepped through.

*

For a moment she did nothing, and the teddy-bear stood there, looking slightly stunned.  Behind it, the portrait-door closed, and then the portrait faded away as though it had never been there.  Then the teddy-bear threw its paws up over its head and started mewling like a week-old kitten.

“What the –“ breathed David, his eyes bulging from his face and his mouth hanging open.  Fine strings of spittle linked his top teeth with his tongue.

“It’s a teddy-bear,” said Isabella.  “I told you you wouldn’t believe me if I tried to tell you the truth, and you still won’t, so for now just pretend it’s a child in a costume.”

“It’s a child?”

“Yes, in a costume.”

“In a costume.  Why’s it making that noise?”

“Because it thinks we’re going to kill it.”

The other side

Where the kris sliced through the air it seemed like a thin line began to shine.  The light was too bright to look directly at, but if you shifted your gaze slightly to the side the lines hung in the air, impossibly, in strict geometric configurations.  Isabella worked quickly, letting the knife find its own way through and trying hard not to push it.  The doors opened best when you followed their natural contours, for all that they sometimes seemed counterintuitive to her.  And if you just pushed and cut of your own accord, well sometimes that opened things that should have remained closed.

There was a soft intake of breath from behind her as she finished, and the lines suddenly winked out.  Where she’d sliced the air into polygonal confusion there was now a door, an actual, physical door made of – she tapped it with a fingernail, curiously, to make sure – plastic.  The plastic was grey and cloudy though the clouds looked as though they might be very slowly shifting, and the grey varied across the door in polygons that looked like the ones she’d carved in the first place.

“Where did that come from?” asked David.  His voice had a note of respect in it for the first time, and she had to look back at him and study his face carefully.  She was sure that he was even more interested in acquiring the kris for himself now.

“It was always here,” said Isabella.  “There are, I think, millions of them.  I don’t know… I don’t think I know who created them, or why there are so many, but if you know how to find them they’re there.  They’re not always unlocked though, and like I said to you earlier, what’s on the other side really, really isn’t safe.  It’s just that it’s less dangerous that what’s on this side now, I think.”

“Is this one locked?  I can’t see a lock.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” said Isabella.  She laid her hand on the door and gently pushed.  It moved inwards, and where it became ajar a thin line of yellowish light spilled out into the cave.  “No, it’s not locked.  Let’s go.  Stay close to me.”  She stared David directly in the eyes when she said this, and she saw his eyes contract slightly, a hint of annoyance that he was being told what to do.  “There are spiders on the other side,” she said.  She knew she would have to stop using this weakness against him, but she didn’t much fancy trying to explain his disappearance if he got himself killed, or worse.

“Seems like there’s lots of spiders around here,” said David, sounding sulky.

“Yes,” said Isabella.  “These are caves and… other places.  Spiders naturally live in these places.  There are things in here that they like to eat.”  She pushed the door open; it was light in its frame and swung back easily, and looked through the door.

“What do they eat?” said David suddenly.  “I thought they ate flies, but that’s only little ones.  What do the big ones eat?”

“Depends how big they get,” said Isabella.  She was looking through the door at a sepia-toned sitting room that looked like it belonged back in the 1930’s.  There was an armchair, rubbed bare in places along the arm, that looked as though it was stuffed with horsehair.  The upholstery was tan and there were dark brown stains on both the seat cushion and the back of the chair.  There was a cast-iron fireplace with a grate before it and the embers of a fire smouldering away.  A wisp of grey smoke curled up from it into a chimney.  There was a mantlepiece with little ceramic picture-holders neatly set out, and they looked like they might have pictures of people in them.  There was a carpet on the floor, something brown and scuffed, and a small rug on top of it before the chair.  The rug was canary yellow and looked as though something had chewed it at the edges.  On the wall behind the chair was a lighter patch as though something big had been taken down and removed.

“How big do they get?”

“Surface area to volume ratio controls it mostly,” said Isabella.  “I’ve seen them about as big as a face, bigger I suppose if you spread their legs out flat.  No bigger.  Come on, this doesn’t look good.  I don’t want to hang around in here or in there.”

David scuttled to the door, his eyes darting around the cave.  “How big were the spiders at the top of the rope?”

“I didn’t pay that much attention,” said Isabella.  “Probably small though, they were climbing down the rope.”

David barely looked relieved at all, but he stepped through the door, and then stopped, looking around him at the room for the first time.  Isabella pushed him forward, stepped through herself, and let the door fall back.  As it closed, it faded from the wall it was in, leaving behind dusty, cracked, yellowing plaster.

An unusual knife

Isabella backed David up to the top of the stairs and into the shadows there, but he refused to go back round the corner, and with a mental kick she remembered telling him about the spiders to get him down the rope.  She controlled a sigh and, not for the first time, told herself that she ought to have a clause in her treasure-hunting contracts that explicitly prohibited the person commissioning her from coming along for a jolly.  David stood in front of her so that he could peer at the corner and get first glimpse of any spiders chasing them, and she allowed him to, reasoning that if she got shot he was definitely going to die, whereas if he got shot she still had a fighting chance.

“We’re not going back up that rope, Izzy,” said David.  He was managing to keep his voice low now, and she was grateful for that.  “There’s a spider’s nest at the top.  It’s certain death.”

“They’re only spiders,” she said.  She saw immediately that it was the wrong thing to say.  David’s face paled and his eyes widened, even though his pupils shrank down to a pinpoint.  He gripped her arm urgently, and she noticed that it hurt, something she’d very much doubted he was capable of.

“They’re not!” he hissed, staring at her.  She noticed that his hair was so heavily gelled that it still looked as though he’d only done it up a few minutes ago.  It was slicked back against his scalp and down the back of his neck in a thoroughly unfashionable mullet.  He reminded her strongly of football players in the seventies.  “They’re not!”

She thought before answering this time, mostly of what she’d like to do to him for lying on the application form about his phobias.  

“Damn.  So you know too?” she said.  David’s gaze became very slightly less terrifying and his grip slackened a little.  He nodded.  “Well, then you know I’m not going to try and go back up the rope,” said Isabella, who’d been intending to do exactly that.  “But there’s a very real danger down here too, David.  Bigger even than the spiders.”  His gaze intensified again and she wondered if she’d judged it wrong and he was about to flip out.  Then he let go of her arm, though he didn’t drop his gaze.

“So what do we do?” he asked.  “It seems like we’re cut off front and back.”

“We don’t know that, we only know that there’s dangers here that we don’t know about,” she said.  “They’re known-unknowns in the matrix formualation: we know that there are things we don’t know enough about to address, but knowing that we know this allows us to prepare to address them.  It’s very meta.”

David nodded as though he were taking her seriously.  “And the unknown-unknowns?” he said.  Isabella felt her jaw drop, but she started speaking quickly to cover it up.

“Are always a problem,” she said.  “And by their very nature they can’t be anticipated or planned for.  Specifically, that is, there are general precautions we can take.  And it helps if we have some unknown-unknowns of our own.”

“Like what?  We’ve not brought much equipment.”

And whose fault is that? thought Isabella immediately.  David had first refused to carry anything that looked heavy, then he’d moaned about carrying anything at all, and eventually she’d been forced to leave quite a lot of things she’d have liked to have with her.  Most of them were geo-tagged for later collection, but it was still vexing.

“We have some,” she said.  “And in fact I’m intending to use one of them now.”  She slipped her fingers beneath her blouse and located the slender leather holster she wore against her skin.  Her fingers tingled as she touched it, the action of a neurotoxin whose antidote she ingested every morning without fail.  Undoing it with a soft clicking sound, she slid a knife out and out of her blouse.  Its handle was the length of her palm and wrapped with a fibrous plant material that gave it good grip in wet or sweaty hands, and its blade was about wavy, half as long again, and made of a metal that looked like steel.  It glittered even in the poor light of the cave.

“That’s a knife, Issy,” said David.  “That won’t stop a bullet.”

“It’s a kris,” she said.  “It’s made of some odd alloys that are quite hard to find.  It’s proper name is a Brinchev kris and there are supposedly only five of them in the world.”

“It’s valuable then?”  David’s voice took on a note of greed which made her feel slightly sad.  The man had more money than he knew how to spend and was bored enough to hire her for a treasure hunt and then insist on coming along, yet show him an expensive rarity and he wanted it.

“In a way,” said Isabella.  She held the knife out in front of her, laying on her open palm, and slowly turned in a circle.  About two thirds of the way round the knife quivered, but she completed the full circle before returning to that point.  “They’re used for a very specific purpose usually, so if you don’t have that purpose they’re not all that useful.”  She took a step forward, watching the knife tremble.

“What purpose?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said.  “The propaganda is very good.”  She took another step and was gratified to see a bar of light suddenly shoot down the length of the blade and strike the floor, where it vanished.

“What was that?”

“The location of the door,” said Isabella.  “There are doors everywhere, David, but what’s on the other side is generally not safe.  And I really, really mean not safe.  The only reason I’m doing this is because I know what’s on the other side, and I don’t know what’s going on in that cave.  So we trade a known danger for an unknown one, and hope that it’s all worthwhile in the end.”

“I don’t think I understand you.”   His voice was small and his head drooped.  His eyes focused on his feet, but she refused to feel sorry for him.

“I know that,” she said.  “But you’ll have your chance soon enough.”  She gripped the Brinchev kris firmly, pushed into empty air, and began to cut.

Opening the way

Police tape stretched across the end of Holbein Street, closing it off to traffic and pedestrians alike. The street turned a corner half-way along stopping Grimmerie from seeing if the other end were similarly closed, but he expected it would be. There was a smell of rain to come in the air, and the breeze had stiffened in the last few minutes into an adolescent wind; going around now, up past the clock-tower meant that he might get caught in it all. He sighed, and looked about for the police officer who would be manning the tape to stop people from just slipping under it, and saw none. He paused, wondering what the real danger was, and then decided to walk round anyway, just in case.

He'd just drawn level with the clock-tower, a wedding-cake ornament of a building commissioned by the council in a fit of civic pride, when the first fat drops of rain starting splashing down around him. Cursing furiously under his breath he stepped into the porch of the tower for shelter, hoping that this was just a passing squall.

While he waited he looked around. The tower was steel and glass like so many modern buildings, but the porch here at the bottom was brick, and old-looking brick at that. He tried to remember if he knew what had been here before the site was cleared but his memory was dragging its heels again -- it seemed to do that more and more these days -- and he couldn't quite think of what it was. The door at the back of the porch appeared wooden but when he touched it it was freezing cold. He tapped on it lightly with his fingernails, wondering what metal it was. It sounded slightly hollow, but then someone on the other side tapped back.

Grimmerie tapped again, wondering if he hadn't just heard an echo. Someone tapped back in a different cadence, and then the thunder roared overhead and the rain started hammering down. Water splashed back up when it hit the street and there was a film of running water covering it in just thirty seconds. The sky lightened briefly, and two seconds later the thunder crashed again, echoing around the shops and houses. Grimmerie stared out at it, mesmerised by the ferocity of the weather, until the wind started driving the rain into his face in sporadic gusts. Then he pulled his coat collar up, and turned back to the door to see if it would open.

As he placed his hand against it and pushed he felt a familiar warmth against his chest. The amulet that permitted him access to the ways, to the places where he hunted teddy bears in their natural habitat, had activated. A ghost of the door swung inwards under the weight of his hand, and he stepped through it. For a long moment he was stood both in a ghostly clock-tower and at a meeting point of the ways, staring at a familiar middle-aged woman who was staring back at him. He noted almost idly that the ghost of the clock-tower looked almost exactly like the real clock-tower, and less idly that this was the woman who'd come into his shop to take an amulet from him. Then one world faded and the myriad paths of the ways opened up before him.

He loosened the Brinchev Kris in its little sheathe inside his jacket. He didn't have far to go, but a careless hunter quickly became a dead hunter. Sure that he was prepared, he picked a path he knew, and headed home.

Behind him, trapped inside the clock-tower, the woman who'd seen a ghostly Grimmerie walk through a locked door and then disappear listened to the rage of the storm and wondered how much more there was that she didn't know about the ways.

A visit to the toystore

Little bones clacked together as the woman lifted the skeletal teddy bear down from the shelf. Grimmerie, the toy-maker, smiled and nodded.
"Ah yes," he said, "that's the remains of a teddy-bear. Suitable for a lost childhood, or perhaps just a child with a morbid disposition. If they wear black too much, like to play in the graveyard, and recite lists of demons instead of nursery rhymes, then that's the toy for them."
The woman jiggled the teddy bear, listening to the bones clack against each other, watching the yellowed skull loll indolently. "It's got a odd kind of attraction to it," she said at last, one hand slipping towards her handbag. "How do you make it? The bones are quite convincing."
Grimmerie laughed, a melancholic sound with an odd reverberation. "They're plaster of Paris," he muttered, sounding embarrassed and ducking his head.
"They're not." The woman sounded pleasant but her eyes were hard and her mouth was a thin blue-lipped line in her alabaster face. Grimmerie started.
"I can assure you--" he started.
"I am a forensic pathologist, and I am very certain that these are real bones. They are the wrong weight for plaster of Paris, they have the wrong sound when they jiggle together, and they have tiny imperfections where tendons and muscles have attached in the past. These are real bones, but they are not the bones of any human or creature that I recognise. I want to know how you achieve this."
Grimmerie was silent for a long time, so long that the woman finally slipped her hand into her handbag and started to draw something from it.
"That's a knife, isn't it," said Grimmerie softly, his eyes glistening with unshed tears.
She nodded.
"It's a Brinchev Kris, I suppose?" he said.
"Of course not. I have done my research, toy-maker. It is a Sukhev Da."
"I see. Then I have no choice do I? The bones are real because they are real. I trap and kill teddy-bears in their natural habitat. Then I skin them and stuff the skins and sell them as high-quality collector's bears, and occasionally I wire up a skeleton and sell it as a curio."
"And how do I find their natural habitat?"
"I have amulets that will open doors. I assume you'll be wanting one?"
"Naturally." She smiled, showing some pointed teeth. "And where are the doors?"
"The amulet will find them. You'll see them change when you look at them."
"Then give me an amulet."
Grimmerie opened a drawer and removed a seven pointed star carved from chalcedony and suspended on a brass chain. He placed it silently, reverently, on the counter and nodded towards it. She took it, weighing it thoughtfully in her hand for a moment, and then slipping it over her head. She tucked it inside her blouse.
"Thank-you," she said.
"I'd find yourself a Brinchev Kris if you're going after what I think you're going after," said Grimmerie. "Brinchev was trusted by many factions, most of whom survived to regret it."
She looked at him with an expression he couldn't puzzle out, and left, taking the amulet and skeletal teddy bear with her.