In ve Iglé

 I walked towards the sound of the water noticing that the sand beneath my feet seemed firmer in this direction; after maybe only twenty seconds the sand became sparser and I could see red rock beneath.  The water turned out to be a small spring, leaping from a crack in the rock  and puddling in a shallow pool before running along a channel the width of two fingers and disappearing into the ground some distance away.  The water was cold and refreshing and once again I found myself regretting that I’d set out so ill-prepared; this would have been an excellent place to refill a water bottle from.

As I looked around, splashing a palmful of water onto my face I saw stones piled up here and there in what might have been roughly rectangular shapes, and wider paths past them that might have been streets.  I rubbed my eyes with more water, and then splashed some onto my shirt, figuring that it being damp might help with the heat, and looked around again.

The buildings seemed intact all of a sudden; I could see a squat red block with an empty doorway and a mustard-yellow awning shading it.  Two windows loomed blackly above, the shadows inside impossible to penetrate from where I was standing.  A wooden frame held trays of what looked like watermelons, though I had no idea where you’d grow watermelons in a desert.  Alongside the building ran a street, paved for the most part but with gaps in the surface where I could imagine someone slipping and twisting an ankle.  Some kind of wiry yellow-green grass grew up against the side of the building, little tufts of it sprouting here and there.  It looked like it was probably torn up when it was noticed.  Overhead the sun shone but it seemed weaker, or least less hot, and I noticed that I wasn’t sweating any more.

I rubbed my head and looked down at the spring, which wasn’t there.  Without thinking I knelt and patted the ground, unable to conceive that the water could just vanish, and instead, as I touched the cool liquid, the water reappeared and the building and the street faded away instead.

A mirage?  It seemed too unlike anything out here for that; too much detail, and the sun’s strength changing wasn’t something a mirage could do.  I pondered, letting the water run over my hand, and then, gradually, the memory of my one-time mentor and no-longer friend Isabella Bonfontaine, came to me.

Iglay is a strange place, she was saying.  I could remember her standing in the courtyard of a bar in Covent Garden, a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other.  It tries to fill you with its memories.  You can’t stand there for any length of time without being made to remember something that never happened to you.  Someone in the chairs, hunched over and trying not to listen turned to face her at that point, and shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’  That’s my point, Isabella had said, sloshing her drink out of its glass as she waved it around.  It just keeps on, pressuring you, trying to force you to leave by never shutting up about its past.

Why was I remembering her?  Was this place like Iglay, a city overfull with memories, looking to pass some off to vistors and passers-by, to take the pressure off itself.  I considered it odd that there should be two cities with the same problem though.

And then my mind started working; I’m going to blame the heat and the sun for me not seeing it sooner, and thank the water for its cooling.  What I had transliterated as Inveigle wasn’t… it was, in fact, in ve Iglé.  In, despite the impossibility of seeing it as anything other than the English word for me, wasn’t even a preposition; it was… a number, I thought after nearly thirty seconds struggling to recall it.  I couldn’t remember which one though.  Ve, however, was a preposition, but it also escaped me.  And Iglé was also spelled Iglay and Iggely if you believed some of the medieval manuscripts.  Number, preposition, Iglay.  I had no idea what that could mean.

Our Lady of the Rocks II

“So what’s the problem?”  Matson didn’t bother to conceal his yawn.  “I did silence the plane, although it’s technically against regulations, but I still can’t sleep properly in those seats.  I want my bed, boy.”

Leonard was reasonably certain that, despite appearances, he was nearly ten years older than Professor Matson, and the boy bridled a little, but he was beginning to appreciate that perhaps he’d never appreciated Professor Matson before.  “You silenced a whole plane?  How many people was that?”

“About two hundred.  I’ve had bigger audiences for lectures, so it’s not a big deal.  Now what’s the problem?  Spit it out, I’m leaving in two minutes.”

“I need a letter of referral from you,” said Leonard, getting straight to the point.

“For who, for what reason, to where?”

“For a man who has no eyes, and no obvious reason for having lost them,” said Leonard.  “To a place I’m told is a hospital of some kind, called Our Lady of the Rocks, and because there are people there who might be the only people who can help him now.”

Professor Matson sat in silence for a moment, and Leonard suddenly realised that he had mismatched eyes; one was green and one was blue.  Matson steepled his fingers together and leaned back in the chair, resting his chin and nose on his fingers.  When he spoke his fingers jerked as his mouth moved, and it looked rather odd.

“Belladonna is Our Lady of the Rocks,” he said.  “She’s kind of the opposite of a goddess for drowning sailors; instead of beseeching her to save them, or bring them driftwood, or wash them ashore, they pray to her that the ocean take them instead.  She’s rather darkly aspected most of the time.  You won’t have come across her much in the standard literature, she’s pretty much only discussed on stone tablets and temple inscriptions, and there are many scholars who think that she’s immoral and shouldn’t be discussed anyway.”

“Can people call themselves scholars if they think that?”

“Certainly.  Especially when their tradition of scholarship is deeply intertwined with their religion and their holy book explicitly deals in morality and ethics.”

“She’s not European then?”

“Hard to say.  But she is Our Lady of the Rocks, and the building with that name is more of hospice than a hospital, as you might now have guessed.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A hospital seeks to cure you, a hospice seeks to make you comfortable while you die.  It’s an oversimplification of course, but I’m tired and want my bed.  There are six beds and one nurse at this hospice, and I believe only three of the beds are filled, so there will be space for your patient.  How did he come to lose his eyesight?”

“Not his eyesight, his eyes.  We don’t know.  He is lucid, but when we ask him about it he gets a bit hysterical.  There seems to have been some woman he approached, or who approached him; it’s not clear from what he’s saying.  Either way, he seems to have spent an evening drinking with her, and then left with her in a taxi.  And at some point during that journey she removed his eyes and left him.  The taxi driver seems to have panicked and dumped him at the side of the road and driven off.  The police were called by some students passing by who’d been out clubbing, and then he made his way to us through the usual channels.”

“Ah.”  Professor Matson unsteepled his fingers and suddenly looked very tired indeed.  “I’ll write you your letter now, if you have pen and paper?”  Leonard passed them across the table.  “You have a bigger worry, I think, Leonard.  The people in the hospice are academics; they’re people who research… well, the kinds of things that we then un-research if you like.  They are all people who’ve studied a device called the Silver Carillon that was returned from an expedition that may or may not have ventured on to the Plains of Leng.  This device appears to steal senses from people who learn how to use it; sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.  After that it steals something else that leaves them a semi-comatose husk.  However, it doesn’t take their eyes or their ears or their nose.  But there are creatures that do, and they are called the Ilmatu.  And they are normally confined to the far north of the world, as they are creatures of ice and cold.  If you have one on the loose down here now, that will be a serious problem, and it will have to be contained.  I suggest you contact an old friend of the department’s and talk to her.  Because you will need her help.   There you go.”  He pushed the letter across the table and stood up.

“What’s her name?” asked Leonard, reading the letter.  It seemed all in order.

“Isabella Bonfontaine.”

Our Lady of the Rocks I

There was a thump as someone tried to open the door to Leonard’s office, clearly expecting it to be unlocked.  Leonard jumped, then smiled.  He sat down in his chair and pressed the intercom button, which buzzed for a moment.

“Sir, there’s a man here,” said a frantic sounding male voice before the intercom cut off.  Leonard pushed the speak button this time.  “It’s fine, it’ll be Professor Matson,” he said.  “The door is open.”  He pushed the door unlock button next, and a few seconds later the door opened, more cautiously as though the opener were expecting a practical joke to be played.  When the door was clearly opening it sped up, and bounced off the door-stop that protected the wall.  In the doorway was a frail-looking elderly man who surely couldn’t have pushed the door open like that, or caused the original thump.

“Professor Matson,” said Leonard standing up and offering his hand.  Matson glared at him, and walked briskly across the room, his speed and gait completely at odds with his delicate appearance.  He sat down in the visitor’s chair ignoring Leonard’s outstretched hand.  Leonard maintained his smile, dropped his hand, and sat back down as well.

“I’m sorry about the door,” he said.  “Apparently there’s a degree of extra security comes with promotion; none of the offices in this building can be entered without a keycard or someone inside the office unlocking the door first.  The first week I was in here I forgot my keycard twice and ended up spending the day sat with my PA outside my own office like some kind of naughty schoolboy!”

“It seems disrespectful to me,” said Professor Matson.

“Oh surely not,” said Leonard quickly.  “You do have to be quite senior to get one of these offices.”

“No, I mean it seems to be disrespecting me,” said Matson.  “Why should I have to knock on anyone’s door?  It’s not like I come here unless you’ve specifically asked for my help, Leonard, is it?”

Leonard paused for a moment, wondering how Matson managed to turn the conversation around so easily, and then recovered.  “I did ask for your help three days ago, Professor.”

“And would you door have been magically unlocked for me then?”

Leonard shuffled in his seat.  There had to be a trick to the way that Matson did it, but he’d still not figured out what it was, other than deeply irritating.

“Never mind the door, can you help me?  I was definitely hoping that you’d appreciate the urgency of the message and come a little sooner.”

“I got your message this morning and came straight over, to walk into your locked door.  As you must have known, if it was that urgent, I was in San Francisco until last night.  Three hours ago I was still on a plane.”

“Ah, I didn’t think to check…,” Leonard paused again.  Hadn’t he checked?  He was almost sure that he had, but Matson didn’t lie about these things.  And with this promotion he was finally aware of a lot more of what the department did and he did know what had been going on in San Francisco.  The biggest shock to him had been when he realised what Professor Matson’s job actually was; it explained all of his sudden and awkward absences, his complete lack of a life outside of the office, and some of his more worrying mannerisms.  And his utter immunity to censure.

“Never mind, Leonard.  Tell me what the problem is and I’ll tell you what I know.  I gather you’ve got the appropriate security clearance these days?”

Leonard pulled a small plastic card from his pocket and silently offered it across the table.  Professor Matson rested his hand on his for a moment and then nodded.

“They don’t make them like they used to,” he said.  He pulled a lucky rabbit’s foot from his own pocket and set it on the desk.  “That’s mine, forty years old I think,” he said.

Leonard reached over and rested his fingers on it, expecting this to be a practical joke.  To his shock the foot twitched, and then kicked.  He pulled his fingers back, but the rest of the rabbit still appeared, traced in the air by a tiny glowing dot, and it turned to look at him.  Something deep in the rabbit’s eyes seemed to explode, and Leonard instantly knew what Matson’s clearance was, and it was terrifying.

“Shit,” he said, as the rabbit faded away.

Back in the cave

The landscape gave way after another hour to soft hills, and they quickly flattened out again and a forest began to grow up around Isabella.  She paused briefly on the hills to check the other side, but there was still just an empty darkness with a chill draught.  She listened for a while, just in case, but there were no screams or sighs.  There was white noise on the edge of hearing that might have been water running in the distance, but even if was water it didn’t help her.  It did remind her that she was hungry and thirsty though, but she preferred not to eat in the TeddyBear world.  The food didn’t seem quite right somehow.

When the trees were making it hard to know which direction she was moving in she opened the ways between the worlds again and looked, and was slightly surprised to find that there was a washed-out grey light through the portal, and that the ground was about a foot lower than where she was at the moment.  The floor looked like it was the rocky stone of Leszátor’s Cave, and there was a sharp, clean smell to the air like the way the air smelled after rain.  She made her mind up quickly, and stepped through.

As the portal closed behind her she looked around.  The cave was small and nearly spherical, like a bubble in the rock.  She thought for a moment that she was going to have to reopen the portal and go back, but then she spotted a tall shadow that proved to be a passageway leading out and she relaxed again.  She might still have to go back to the TeddyBear world if she couldn’t find her way through these caves, but she was in familiar territory here without having to worry about the Teddy Bears.  She’d been caving for twelve years now, and was certain she could handle herself.

The corridor out of the cave was narrow and shrank down until the ceiling was only just above her head.  She slowed her pace to make sure that she didn’t suddenly run into a jutting piece of stone on the ceiling and knock herself out.  She kept her left hand trailing against the wall, to check for any side passages that she might not see, and she never put her weight on her front foot until she was sure that there was floor beneath it.  It made for slow progress overall, but it was safe progess, and alone underground that mattered more than anything.

“…wa–… eaten!”  Fragments of a conversation caught her ears, and she probed around in the semi-darkness, trying to work out where it was coming from.  After a bit of standing still and listening to triangulate the sound, she found a narrow rock chimney, about the width of her arm, that fell down through the floor.  The speakers seemed to be in a cave below her.

“…care.  You were told to bring her here.”  This voice was feminine but harsh, and slightly growly as though its owner smoked heavily.

“What bit of being eaten didn’t you get?”  This voice was familiar though, that was David Brackendell.  She was sure that she’d never forget his whingeing tone, though she knew she’d like to.

“Was she threatening to eat you?”

“I’m sure she would have done if she’d thought of it!  She threatened me with spiders, and I hate spiders.”

“I’d threaten you with spiders myself if it meant you would do your job.  Why were you found rolling around in the mine?  You were almost run over.”

“Your driver must have seen me!  He made no effort to get out of the way!”

“The mine machines are automated and do not have drivers.  You are an idiot.  I do not understand why we are expected to work with you.”

“Because I can get you Isabella Bonfontaine!”

“Which you have failed to do.”

There was a retort, which Isabella assumed was gunshot.  It echoed around the cave she was in, dazing her slightly.  When it finally stopped, her ears were ringing and she couldn’t hear anything from the chimney anymore.  She sat down on the rock floor and massaged her ears carefully.  It did nothing for the ringing, but it made her feel better to be trying.  So David had been trying to deliver her like a package and had managed to screw that up as well.  She thought he was a complete waste of space, but shooting him seemed unnecessary.  And now she knew that there probably wasn’t anything of interest down here for her, and that her life was in danger if she stayed.  It seemed like there was only one prudent course of action.

The Ilmatu

“And who the bloody hell are you?” asked Dolores.  She sniffed her drink, and then smiled at Arthur.  “Sipsmith’s?” she said.  “The landlord is stocking much better these days.”

“Isabella Bonfontaine,” said the woman in the doorway.  She came in, closing the door behind her.  “If you would all be seated, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll get straight to the point and then you may decide what you want to do.  If that should be leave then there’s nothing I can do to stop you.  But I hope to convince you to stay a little while.”

“Bloody peculiar timeshare presentation,” said Phillip, not moving.  “How did you get in here?  I don’t recognise you, and this is a very private club.”

“It’s not a timeshare,” said Isabella.  “I’m not asking for money.  What I’m asking for is, technically, much more valuable, but equally far easier for you give and will, relatively speaking, cost you personally nothing.”  She crossed the room while she was speaking to the AV-unit.  “Again, if I might ask you to sit down, things will be far easier to present.”

“You didn’t say how you got in here,” said Jaana.  “Phillip makes a very good point; you shouldn’t even have known that this room existed.  Did you invite us?  How did you know how to reach us?”

Isabella sighed, her finger resting on the ON button.  “I think you all know Lady Wednesday,” she said.  “Or rather, you all know who is meant by Lady Wednesday, which is more than I do.  She, if she is a she, provided me with this location, a card to gain entry, and the assurance that the right people would be here when I arrived.”

Dolores harrumphed immediately, but then she sat down in the nearest chair and continued to sip her drink.  Arthur stared at his feet for a few seconds, and then walked around the table to sit next to Dolores.  Phillip frowned.  “That’s all well and good,” he said.  “You’ve got a pass for the evening only, I suppose.  But how do you know Lady Wednesday?  I don’t like this very much.”

“How do any of us know Lady Wednesday?” asked Jaana.  “I don’t think that’s a question any of us would be willing to answer, so I don’t think we can ask it of Isabella.  Unless, of course, she would like to tell us?”  He looked over, and Isabella shook her head firmly.  “I see.  Then I will listen, but I can tell you now that when you are done, I will be leaving.  Lady Wednesday or not, I feel that I have been brought here under false pretences, and I do not like that.”

He and Phillip sat, near the top of the table, but on opposite sides.

“Thank-you,” said Isabella, pressing the button.  The screen at the far end of the room descended, and a projection lowered from the ceiling, coming to live as it did.  A countdown appeared on the screen as the projector warmed up, and a keyboard slid out of the AV unit.  Isabella tapped the enter key.  While she was aware that no-one in this room was under sixty, she was sure that they all had to sit through PowerPoint presentations regularly for the various board positions they held and companies they ran, so nothing she was about to show them should be unusual.  Except, perhaps, the actual content.

The screen flickered, and the first slide came up: black except for her name in white letters.

“My name is Isabella Bonfontaine,” she said.  “I find things for people.  Usually things that have a degree of difficulty associated with them, and in some cases are broadly considered to either not exist, or no longer exist.  This is not always true.  The thing that I have been tasked to find this time is the reason I am here.  I am informed, by Lady Wednesday, that you have all encountered these before.”

The slide moved on, and the next screen was a picture of a long, spindly humanoid creature.  Its arms and legs were thin and about three times as long as a human’s, and all four limbs ended in a hoof-like structure that could split apart into two segments.  The body was vaguely female in shape, with thin, small breasts and visible rib-cage.  The head was bald and faceless, and the whole thing looked like a daddy-long-legs badly crossed with a human being.  The slide animated, and the thing turned and skittered up a wall, vertically, covering thirty feet in a second, and then it paused, hanging near the ceiling.

“The Ilmatu,” said Isabella.  The reactions around the table told her that her audience had definitely seen these things before.

A drawing room

The Dog and Duck, Public House, had a large downstairs bar that was currently mostly filled with young drinkers.  They were attracted by the craft beers and its retro-chic – which was more accreditable to the landlord’s refusal to redecorate, renovate, or in any other way update the pub from it’s 70s look and feel.  That this was now bringing in an astonishing number of customers, and consequently cash, was rather delighting him.  The noise and hubbub was at levels that were enough to annoy the neighbours, who were used to the pub’s previous, more sedate days, and the bar staff, newly boosted to seven for the weekend trade, were sweating, laughing, and constantly rushing downstairs to the cellar to change the barrels over.  In one corner a couple of bearded, studenty-looking men were assembling a small stage on which a local band would be playing later.

Up the stairs, a nice flight of Axminster-carpeted steps that turned two corners to reach the first floor, were two smaller lounges, both of which had their own smaller bars and were also packed.  The landlord allowed them to be rented out for a very small charge to parties and groups, the charge having only appeared when he found that renting it for free was resulting in a lot of competition for the rooms.  Even now, with a charge of ten pounds for the room, there was still a lot of groups where everyone paid fifty pence and enjoyed a private bar for the evening.

At the first turn of the stairs was a door that led into the staff-only parts of the pub: the cleaning cupboards, a tiny smoking room for the bar staff to sit down in for fifteen minute breaks, and the kitchens.  The landlord’s bedroom and a tiny sitting room were also back here, with an en-suite bathroom and a couple of bookcases.

At the second turn of the stairs was another door marked Private, but behind here was a long corridor that eventually left the pub’s building altogether and terminated in a door at the adjacent building.  There was a tiny private bar in this room, that was stocked by the landlord with bottled drinks and bar-snacks but never bar-tended.  A conference-room table took up most of the room, surrounded by eight leather chairs, and in the corner next to the bar was a sophisticated audio-visual presentation unit that the landlord had neither installed nor knew how to use.  At the other end of the room was an automatically-descending projection screen, a mat for people to leave their shoes on, and a window that looked out onto the street below, though the glass was tinted so that the street below couldn’t look back.  Incongruously, there were two small pillars against the long wall without the door, on each of which was a glass display case containing an animal skull.

At eight o’clock a distinguished-looking older man walked into the pub with a look of distaste on his face.  As he surveyed the people drinking, laughing and enjoying being in the bar, a sneer curled on his face.

“Oh come on, Arthur,” said a voice behind him.  He half-turned, enough to see who was speaking out of the corner of his eye, and recognised Jaana Finnuuken, a man he’d gone to school with.  “Let them have their fun, they’re not hurting anyone.”

“I remember when a man could come in here and no-one would look up because there was no-one here to look up,” said Arthur.  The pair of them made for the stairs.

“Yes Arthur, but then you also remember when the dinosaurs used to come here when their watering hole ran dry,” said Jaana.  His English was as impeccable and upper-class-sounding as Arthur’s.

They reached the second turn of the stairs and Arthur produced a key-card from an inside pocket and passed it over a patch of wallpaper.  There was a tiny beep and a click as the door unlocked.

“I hope the landlord got my note about the wine,” said Arthur as they passed through.  “The last bottle I had here was nearly execrable.  It hadn’t been aged for even five years!”

“Not all wines have to be left to rot,” said Jaana.  “Some of them are even very drinkable shortly after they’re bottled.”

“Pah!” said Arthur.

Four minutes after Arthur and Jaana had reached the room and starting arguing over the merits of the wines, the door to the meeting room opened again and Dolores Mudney came in.  She paused in the doorway for a moment, her gaze meeting Jaana’s.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you,” she said, her tone a shade warmer than icy.  “I wonder if this is such a good idea?”

“I wasn’t told who else would be coming,” said Jaana, “so I think you have the advantage of me in every way, dear lady.”  Despite his casual words, his tone was also reserved and unfriendly.

“Well of course not,” she sniffed.  She looked at Arthur.  “Since I’m here I shall stay.  For now.  Be a gentlemen and get me a gin, Arthur.”

“And I’ll have an Archers!”  Dolores stepped into the room, her face looking now like she’d stepped in something deplorable, as behind her a rotund man with sunburn all across his face came in.  “Good lord, what an odd squad we have here!  And… by the Lord Harry, it’s true!  They’ve not redecorated in here either!  My god, the landlord must be allergic to the smell of clean carpets and fresh paint.”  Jaana smiled, and greeted the newcomer, while Arthur busied himself with Dolores’s drink and tried not to look revolted as he picked out the Archers’s bottle.

“Phillip,” said Jaana, not moving any closer because that would take him closer to Dolores.  “You’re here as well!  This is quite the little get-together isn’t it?”

“Top stuff,” said Philip, grinning.  “So, who’s brought us all here then?”

Arthur handed round the drinks and frowned.  “Not me,” he said.  “I rather thought Dolores–“

“Not me, either!” she said sharply.  “I did think it must have been you, Arthur, but then you’d have a more plausible guest list.”

All four people looked at one another in confusion for a few moments, until a voice in the doorway said, “I invited you all.”

If you want to live...

“I can’t!”  David’s voice was emphatic and pathetic simultaneously.  He pointed at his knee, where little droplets of blood welled through the cream fabric of his chinos.  “My ankle and my knee have gone!  I can’t walk like this.”

“You have no choice,” said Isabella, looking around her.  Little blurs of motion raced by at the corners of her eye no matter where she looked, and she knew that the Teddybears were closing in in earnest now.  She reckoned that she had maybe a minute to get David up and moving again.  “Do you think that when I had my stroke I just sat down and waited to die?”

David’s mouth set in an obstinate line and he said nothing.  She looked at his face, and was astonished: here was a man so determined to sulk that he’d risk death rather than do anything to help himself.  And she was well aware that staying here and waiting for the pack to pounce was certain death.  She also knew that she wasn’t willing to die trying to save someone as selfish and utterly useless as David.

She put the Da back in its sheath, and saw his eyes widen.  His lips thinned further though, whitening as the pressure increased.

“Fine,” she said.  She pulled the Kris free from its sheath again, and leaned forward.  “You leave me no choice.”

He flung his arm up in front of his face and throat, and at the same moment a teddybear lunged from somewhere behind her and sank its teeth into his thigh.  He started to scream as the triangular mouth bit down and the sharp teeth broke through his pants and skin.  Then she’d sliced through the air, twisted the knife, and pushed him through the gap that opened.  She closed it almost before he’d finished falling through, and as he vanished, half of the teddybear that had been chewing on him plopped to the ground, thick brown ichor oozing from the cut surface and bubbling as though it had been dropped onto a hot skillet.  His scream cut off as abruptly, and for a moment the world around her was silent.

She dropped to a knee and swapped the knives over again, wishing (not for the first time since her stroke) that she could still use both hands with confidence, and waited.  There was a long pause, and she felt sweat trickling in a cold trail down the back of her neck.  Then something blurred, and she thrust her arm out.  There was a shock like hitting the foot of the stairs you’re descending in the dark: unexpected, startling, harder than you think.  The blur coalesced, and there was a teddybear impaled on the Da, the blade punched cleanly through its forehead and out the other side again.  She reached out and pulled it off the blade, wiping the brown ichor off on the ground below.

With a whistling sound like the wind in tall grass the blurs suddenly faded, and she knew that the teddybears had retreated.  With the weak prey gone and the strong prey having now killed three of them, they had decided to find something easier to attack.

She stayed waiting, tensed and nervous, for a further five minutes, her head turning slowly to keep the landscape in view, her ears straining for any noises, and the muscles burning slowly like a banked fire.  Only when the stillness had persisted did she finally stand up, stretch, and loosen her legs and the knots in her muscles.

She considered just moving on by herself, but a sense of duty, and the knowledge that it would annoy her to have lost David if she could reclaim him, made her swap knives yet again, and reopen the way between worlds.  A chill darkness lay on the other side of the door, and even shining torchlight into it didn’t show anything up.  She closed the portal slowly, wondering what David had dropped into, and if it was any better than the teddybears.  Ultimately, she decided, yes.  He might have fallen into an uncertain death, but that was better by far than a certain death, than by being eaten by the teddybears.  And it was uncertain, he might not be dead.  He might be lying, bleeding to death on a rocky surface, or be entombed in an exitless cave somewhere.  She shrugged.  Her stepping through without knowing what was there wasn’t going to help.  She still needed to get back to her own world, and the teddybears might have retreated for now, but they’d still be shadowing her, waiting for her to grow tired or show weakness.

She looked around, and decided to carry on in the direction she’d been heading.  With David gone she’d make better time anyway.

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.”

Teddybear pack

“Where are we going to go though?”  David’s words were, Isabella thought, the most intelligent thing he’d said since they’d rappelled down the rope into Lezsátor’s Cave.  It was just a shame that she really didn’t have an answer to that just yet.  She looked around; beyond the stand of trees the fields were still in black and white, and there seemed to be nothing between them and the horizon.  At least that meant that there were no teddybear packs in front of them close enough to have to worry about for the moment, but equally she wasn’t happy about being effectively trapped in a desaturated zone either.  She wondered briefly about going back and returning to the cave where they’d entered this whole mess, but she knew that she’d have the devil’s own time of getting David to climb the rope with his fear of spiders, and, having seen the guards back on the human side, she wasn’t sure that they just hadn’t been lucky to get in as far as they had without being seen.  She looked at the horizon and then back at the trees.

“That way,” she said.  “Keep the trees at our back so we don’t start wandering off into circles.  If you see anything, tell me.  Don’t assume that I’ve seen it too.”

David scanned the horizon as well now.  “You make it sound scary,” he said.  “I saw the dead… body too, you know.  Don’t you think I’m taking this seriously?”

“I’m not making any assumptions,” said Isabella.  “And I’m telling you not to make any either.”

They walked on in silence, with Isabella walking as fast as she dared and David lagging behind her a little.  When she looked back once, to check that the trees were still behind her and that David was keeping up he looked as though he was going to say something, but then he looked at her face – grim, determined – and appeared to change his mind.

Every five minutes, which was sooner than she knew she should be doing this, but she found it too hard to not know, she would take the Kris from its sheath and see if there were any doors nearby.  Most of the time there weren’t, but then the blade caught on something and twisted slightly, and she cut deeper and peered through.  Absolute darkness greeted her on the other side and she wasted no time in closing it up again.  Whether it was a natural cave in the rock with no outlets or a guarded cave in the Leszátor’s cave complex, it wasn’t what she wanted right now.

They’d walked nearly another five minutes when David suddenly pointed off to their left and called out.

“Colour!”  Isabella squinted, trying to decide if he was right or not, and after a few seconds thought that it did indeed look like green was creeping back into the world.  She nodded and turned slightly so that their way forward would take them into the colour zone.  Just as the grass genuinely became green again under their black-and-white feet she heard a whooping noise in the distance.  She froze, and David stumbled as he tried to avoid colliding with her.  She put an arm out to help him, and he waved it away.

“Listen,” she said.  “That’s the hunt.”

“What hunt?”

“Teddybears hunt in packs, and that the noise they use to tell other packs where they are.  It might tell them where they’re going too, it’s not like anyone’s studied it much.”

“So there’s a pack nearby?”

“At least one,” said Isabella.  “There might be two and one’s just warning the other one off.”

“How do we tell?”

“I really hope we don’t.”

“Too late.”  David pointed.  As she turned there was a streak of colour and a sudden movement, and she saw a teddy-bear about eighty metres away racing across the field to a hillock that would provide it with cover.

“Oh holy crap,” she said, looking around them.  Now that colour was returning the landscape was losing its flatness as well, but the trees were still in the distance, and now the lumps and bumps were just many places that could be concealing a teddybear.

“Can we go back through to the other side?”  David sounded hopeful.

“I doubt it,” said Isabella, “I really do.”

Everything in black and white

“How far are we walking?”  David was finally following her, though definitely slowing her down.  Isabella was used to moving quickly through the Teddybear land, wary and watchful because of the very real danger that a pack would appear and move in for the kill.  It was possible that with two of them together the Teddybears might hold off, but if they were a large enough pack she rather doubted that.

“Far enough,” she said.  “I don’t know, David, until we find a door that will let us back into our own world safely.  Almost certainly back to the cave system though, I doubt we’ll be lucky enough to find a door to anywhere outside it.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“Keep up, David, please.”  Isabella noticed that he’d stopped again, and she looked back over her shoulder without slowing down.  “It is at least as dangerous here as back in that cave.  Possibly more so, as the people in that cave might worry about someone knowing that we were in there.”

“You said we back when you came out of the house.  Who are ‘we’?  Are there lots of you coming here?”  He had started moving again, but he was only walking.  Sighing to herself, Isabella slipped the knife from her belt and passed it through the air in front of her, feeling for the catch of a nearby doorway.

“Not lots, no.  You can only get here if you own a Brinchev Kris or are with someone who owns one, and Brinchev, to date, has made seven of them.  So there’s on the order of seven of us that come here.  Why, David?”  She thought she caught something for a moment, but whatever it might have been, it was gone when she moved the blade back again.  She moved on, holding the knife in front of her.

“Oh.  I just thought… you killed that Teddybear back there, didn’t you?  The one that was all slumped over.”

“The only one we’ve seen so far?  Yes, David, I killed it.  I’m sorry you found out.”

“But you’re not sorry you killed it?”

“No.  I know what they’re like, and I know what it would have done.  You have no clue, and no idea, and I really hope, for your sake, that you never find out either.”

“And if I don’t believe you?”

“That’s your choice, David.  Damn it, why are there no doors here?”  She kept moving, noting that the fields seemed darker here, as though there was less light.  She began to suspect that she was moving adjacent now to solid rock inside the mountain that housed Leszátor’s Cave, and stopped to scan the horizon.

“What?  Are you looking for something else to murder?”  David stumbled over the dried, rough ground of the field as he caught her up.

“Why would I need to when I have you here?”  She looked at him, not smiling, and was pleased to see a look of shock on his face.  “Where does it look lightest to you?”

“Would you really kill me?”

“Try me.  Where does it look lightest to you?”  She put the knife back in her belt, but his eyes watched her the whole time.

He looked around, and then looked around again, more carefully.  Then he pointed.  “Over there, where those trees are.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  Damn.  Can you run?”

“Of course!”  He was offended.

“Good, because you’re walking far too slowly.  Come on, we need to get to those trees and quickly.”

They ran across the field, Isabella leading the way and David going slowly at first and then speeding up as he found an old furrow about as wide as his feet that he could run in.  Above them the white clouds drifted aimlessly across the grey sky, and little black shapes wheeled here and there, birds too high up to see clearly.  The grass, mostly blacks and greys, swayed as they passed, and now and then there was a chirrup of a cricket.  Otherwise, the field was oddly silent.

As they reached the trees Isabella slowed, and then stopped altogether.  When David caught her up she was looking at something on the ground in front of her, and he looked over her shoulder.  Then he turned away and threw up.

“This is bad,” said Isabella.  “This is very bad.”  She pulled the knife back from her belt, and swept the air in front of her.  The blade caught on something almost immediately, and she hissed breath through her teeth.  Then, very carefully, she delicately cut through the air and peered into what was beyond.

There was a cave, some kind of grotto she thought.  There were large white and grey crystals on the walls, splashed with red, and the rock around it was brown with old blood.  Bodies were scattered on the floor, throats cut, wrists and ankles slashed.  There was an opening in one wall, and a woman in a uniform standing there holding a gun.  She looked like a guard, though Isabella couldn’t see anything that she might be guarding.  She let the rip in the fabric of space close.

At her feet was one of those bodies; a young girl, barefoot and baresleeved, her wrists and ankles slashed.  Her throat might have been cut too, but the teddybears had clearly got to her already and the flesh from her skull had been eaten away – she could see the tooth-marks on the bones – leaving just the hair on the head behind.  She didn’t need to pick the skull up to know that it would have been broken into underneath to get at the soft tissues inside.

“We need to keep moving,” she said.  David was squatting down still, retching into the grass.  A thin string of spittle ran from one corner of his mouth.  “I don’t know how they got this body through, but it’s been found already.  They may be watching to see if anymore… food comes through, and we’d definitely fit the bill.”

“Of fare,” said David with a bitter little laugh.  “How do you know she wasn’t put through like this?”

Isabella paused.  “I don’t,” she admitted.  “But I have seen the results of teddybear eating before and it looked like this.  It’s a reasonable assumption.”

“Oh you’re just full of answers, aren’t you?  Except you haven’t got me to where you promised me you would, have you?”

“Stand up, and come on,” she ordered, trying to ignore his words.  “We still need to get out of here.”

The point of the knife

“Just go through,” said Isabella, pushing him in the small of the back.  David opened the door further and stepped through, holding the door open behind with one hand.  He stared around him, trying to reconcile this new place with the old-fashioned sitting room that they’d just come through from.  There was grass underfoot and some trees growing off in the distance.  There was a paling fence about twenty-feet away, with a black-latched gate in the middle of it.  Flowers grew in a flower bed off to his left, and after that was a freshly-dug patch of ground, and then another paling fence.  A bird twittered overhead and he looked up to see the sky, dotted with fluffy clouds.

And everything was either black, white or shades of grey.

“I’m back,” said Isabella behind him, her hand prising his fingers off the door.  He turned to look at her, his eyes glazed over and his whole face slightly vacant.  “Have you touched anything?”  She closed the door, and with a tiny click it was gone; behind them both was just a field stretching off into the slightly-grey distance.

“No,” he said.  “It’s… this is like a black and white photograph.  Only… it’s not a photograph.  Is it?”

“It’s not a photograph,” said Isabella.  “It’s just desaturated.”

“Huh?”

“All the colours bled out,” she said.  “It happens, but we don’t know why.  It’s not the only place like this, and they don’t seem to be dangerous, although the longer you stay the longer it takes you to return to normal when you leave.”

“Whuh?”

“Really David, sometimes I don’t think you think at all.  When we leave this area and go back to a saturated zone where there’s colours again it’ll take a minute or two for us to return to colour.  We’ll be black and white temporarily.”

David looked down at his hands and turned them over and back, looking at them like they belonged to someone else.  While he stared, Isabella looked around.  She recognised the area in general; it was still part of the Teddybear land, but there were no buildings to provide a proper landmark.  She checked the position of the sun in the sky and turned to face south.  The flower bed and the dug-over ground was there, and she walked over to take a closer look.

The flowers were large blooms on thick, fleshy stems.  They were shaped like a cross between snap-dragons and tulips, and she picked a single stem, curious as to what colour it would be when she took back somewhere saturated.  The flower-bed looked tended, and recently at that.  As she looked over it she spotted a small weeding trowel and a similar sized fork half-hidden by the base of the leafier flowers.  She looked around her again then, taking more time and scanning the horizon for signs of any more teddy-bears.

“David!”  She watched until he looked up, his eyes still wide and slightly-scared looking.  For a moment she considered just cutting open a new door and leaving him here.  She hadn’t told him quite the truth about the dangers of the unsaturated regions: stay here long enough and you’d fade away until you just disappeared on a gust of strong wind one day.  “Come on!  We’re out in the open here, and I’d rather like to find a way back to our world before anyone else in this world finds us.”  She skirted the flower-bed and fresh diggings – probably a vegetable patch, she decided – and stepped neatly over the paling fence.  Then she looked back; he’d not moved.  “David!”

“What happened to the teddy-bear back there, Issy?” His voice was low but it carried in the quiet air.

“It lived happily ever after,” she said.  “Just like in the fairy-tales.  Come on, David.  This isn’t a game, remember?”

“It looked all slumped over,” he said.  “When I turned out when you came out, I saw it.  It looked –“

“Asleep,” said Isabella.  “They’re small mammals, think of them as being a bit like cats.  They sleep a lot, and they eat when they’re not sleeping.  And if they find us, and there’s a pack of them, they’ll eat us.  So come on, David.”

“Asleep,” he repeated.  “I suppose….”

The teddybear

“Can I touch it?”

“It bites, and it’s got claws that are usually filthy.”

“But if I’m careful –“

“Then it’ll be that much easier for it to bite and scratch you.  I have no antibiotics with me, and I doubt very much that there are any down here in these caves.  You might well die from whatever it’s got living under its claws, David.”

David pulled back the hand that was starting to reach out to the mewling teddy bear and looked nervous.  Isabella didn’t think he looked anywhere near nervous enough considering how lethal she knew the teddy-bears to be, but was fairly certain that the only way he’d learn was to be attacked by one.  She looked around the room again; teddy-bears rarely travelled on their own, preferring packs.  They were only little – teddy-bear sized, suitable for children – but enough of them could bring an adult down.

“Can you tell it that we’re not going to kill it?  It keeps crying.”

“No.”

“Izzy!”

“Don’t Izzy! me, David.  I’m not telling it that because we might just have to kill it yet. There are probably more of them on their way, and we can’t just walk out of this side of things because we don’t know what’s back on our side.  We need to find out and fast.  If this one tries to leave, tell me.  If any more turn up, tell me.”

“What are you going to be doing?”  David turned round to look at her, and Isabella, who’d been waiting for this, glared at him.  “Look at the damn bear, David!”

“I just wish you’d tell me what you’re doing instead of being so secretive all the time!”  He turned back to the bear though, which retracted its claws and started mewling again.

“I’m looking for a doorway to look through,” said Isabella.  “And when I find the right one, we’re going back through it.”  She took the Brinchev Kris in her hand, and slowly waved it through the air, feeling how it seemed to catch here and there as the sensitive blade identified the thin points where the two sides were closest together.  There was a small group of them in the direction of the mantlepiece, and she stepped that way, passing the knife in front of her constantly, feeling the pressure changes and adjusting her step accordingly.  As she reached the fireplace the sensations thickened and she turned the knife slightly, letting the blade grip.  As she sliced down a fire sprang to life in the fireplace, and she knelt and peered into the flames.

For a moment there was just the yellowish-orange of the flames and then there was a second image superimposed on top, of the side of a cave.  There was a path visible leading into the mouth of a tunnel, and as she watched an electric car like a golf-buggy motored out of the mouth of the tunnel.  There were three people in the car, all wearing grey uniforms with little red-and-yellow insignia at the collars.  She cursed softly and stepped back; the fire went out as she moved out of range.

“What was that?” asked David, this time not letting his gaze move from the teddy-bear.  It peered at him between its fingers, but didn’t stop mewling.

“Trouble,” said Isabella.  “I think we did the right think coming over to this side when we did, but I think we did the wrong thing coming here at all.”  She passed the knife around her slowly, feeling for the next opening.  The knife didn’t respond.  “Oh damn, this is locally solid.”

“What?”

“We need another room,” said Isabella.  “This is locally solid; it’s probably not going to move relative to our side for a few hours.  And we probably haven’t got them, given that this thing is here.”

“What does that mean though?” David sounded plaintive.

“We go on to the next room,” said Isabella.  “How did this one get here? Portrait?”

“Yes, but it’s gone now,” said David.  “Which doesn’t happen of course, so I think it was probably just a revolving section of wall with the portrait on the other side.”

“Right,” said Isabella, her voice heavy with sarcasm.  OK, let’s check over here then….”

The knife sliced into the plaster of the wall like it was wet and fresh rather than its real old-and-dusty state, and the wall seemed to flicker for a moment.  Then a door appeared, white-painted with drips still visible, and Isabella cracked it open a little and peered round the edge.

“Ok,” she said.  “You go through.  I’ll be with you in a moment.”

“What are you going to do?” asked David, turning away from the teddy-bear to look at her.

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.

Leszátor's Cave

Isabella Bonfontaine tapped her foot.  Somewhere in the gloom above her, clinging to a rope, was the aristocratic, whiny, and unathletic Lord David Brackendell.  Around her were the rock walls of the natural chimney, and slightly to her left was an opening that looked man-made.  She’d already turned her head-lamp off and seen that there was a glow of  yellowish light coming through the opening, but David had started yelling and complaining so she’d had to turn the light back on.  She was seriously contemplating telling him that the floor was soft and just to let go.

“Izzy?  Are you still there Izzy?”  David’s voice echoed in the chimney and the words at the bottom blurred quickly into a seascape of sound.

“Yes!”  Her voice was crisp and clear and the echoes died away almost as soon as they’d arisen because she was speaking straight up, giving the sound least chance to spill from the cave.

“I think I’m stuck, Izzy.”

“It’s a rope, David.  You’re not stuck, you’re just scared.”

“I can’t move!”

“Well I think you should try and fix that,” she said.  “There was a spider’s nest at the top of the chimney, you probably saw it as you came over the ledge.  My experience with spiders tells me that they’re probably climbing the rope as well by now, seeing it as a welcome addition to their ecosystem.  They can’t be too far above you.”

There was a few seconds silence, and the rope jerked a little as though someone had started climbing down again.

“Izzy?”  Izzy, how much experience have you had with spiders?  Like, just garden spiders, house spiders, that kind of thing?”

“Well, last year in Australia there were Black Widows,” said Isabella thinking back.  There were no spiders at the top of the rope but she knew David was scared of them, and she had encountered a lot over the years.  “Earlier this year there were the corpse spiders, I never did find out the proper name for them.  That was Roumania I think, but I was over in Hungary as well in March, and that was where we found the giant spiders the size of a horse’s hoof.  And I mean a carthorse here, not one of those piddling little ponies you ride around your estate.”

There was a sudden rushing noise and then a thump as David landed heavily on the rock.  Isabella was pleased to see that he was still wearing his leather driving gloves; listening to him complain about rope burns for the next three days would quite possibly have driven her to stuffing his socks in his mouth and taping them there.

“I got unstuck,” he said, a little unsteadily.  Even the in the head-lamp – a small LED torch attached to a velcroed strip of cotton wrapped around her head – she could see that he was sweating.  Here underground, surrounded by rock and dripping water, it was too cool for that to be anything other than fear.

“That’s great,” she said.  “This way.”

“How do you know where you’re going, Izzy?  I thought this was all new to you too?”  There it was in his voice again, a little whine, a hint of entitlement that she’d been hoping he’d grow out of before they got this far.

“There’s two ways out, David,” she said patiently.  “This way, and back up the rope.”

“The rope with spiders on?  Are we leaving it here?”

She turned back and stared at him in amazement.  In the light of his torch he could clearly see that only three-quarters of her face seemed to work; a stroke some years earlier had paralysed the muscles from the corner of her mouth to the corner of her eye, so some of her expressions had become quite sinister as a result.  “It’s tied at the top,” she said at last.  “If you want to climb up, untie it, and then jump back down with it….”  She turned away.

“Then what?”

“Then you’ll break at least both your legs and I’ll leave you here,” she said.

“Oh.”

He was silent as she led the way to the corner, and then turned her lamp off again.  Stepping carefully around the rock, she found herself standing at the top of a rough-cut stone stairway.  Large sloping terraces of stone gradually descended the side of a vast cave until they reached a rough scree that covered most of the floor of the cave.  However, from this height it was clear that a path had been cleared through the scree, and – no, actually it looked more like a road, she thought.  It was too wide for a man to need or be bothered with, and the turns were fairly gradual, more suited to something wheeled than things with feet.  She followed it with her eyes, and realised that the yellowish glow was strongest where the road disappeared from sight.  She looked up next, the ceiling was hung with stalactites, some in full growth and others flattened and truncated.  It looked like at least some of the scree came from them breaking off and falling down.  All around was the continual trickle of water, punctuated by the occasional splash of a drop falling into a shaded pool.

“Come on,” she said, her voice low but firm.  “We need to get a little lower I think.”

“Where are we, Izzy?”  David appeared round the corner and she had to push him back and make him turn his lamp off too.  “I won’t be able to see where I’m going!”

“Follow me, and walk slowly,” she said.  “I will be, there’s a lot of loose rock in here.  But there is light in here, too, David, and that means other people.  Who might be very interested to know what you’ve hired me to find.”

“Would you tell them, Izzy?”  David felt for her hand and took it, and though she was tempted to shake him loose she decided that this might be easier than listening to him panic the whole way down.  She started down the steps, each step nestling between the loose rocks until she was sure she was stable.

“Perhaps,” she said.  “Some of them enjoy a little torture, others just want you dead before you can see anything really interesting.  The clever ones do.”

“But you’re not dead, Izzy.”  David sounded like he was trying to reassure himself, and Isabella wondered for a moment if she should tell him about her time in Roumania hunting for a woman who definitely had been dead several times and kept coming back for another try.

“There’s a first time for everything, David,” she said.  Then she stopped; she’d come far enough forward now to see the source of the light.  Round the corner of the rock, far down on the cave floor, she could see the entrance to a tunnel leading downwards whose walls were lined with electric lights and whose floor was set with rails.  The tunnel turned shortly after it started so she couldn’t see any further in, but it was now clear that this wasn’t a casual operation.

“Let’s go back,” she said.  “Turn round, David.”

“But there might be spiders!”

“And there might be guns here if we go further without a plan.  Now turn round!”