Blackteeth Page 15

  Slithering through tunnels and bends felt peculiar at first. Hesper had done this once. Running hadn’t been her first choice, of course. Hiding was always the first choice. Hiding had worked for her more times than she could count.

  In the beginning Hesper had come through the water with the Blackteeth holding her tightly with its clawed hands, and she’d screamed until her voice gave out. It had plunged through the darkness with its talons embedded in her arms, dragging her feet on the rough floor. It had stripped her clothing from her and then dragged her some more. After an eternity, it had dropped her into a hole and then she’d listened because she didn’t have anything else to do.

  Escape had been on her mind in the beginning.

  It had never really left her mind and that certainly hadn’t changed.

  After several minutes she halted, and Moss stopped right behind her. She put her hand over his mouth before he had a chance to speak.

  Hesper thought about the way this world was set up. Miles and miles of tunnels connected rooms. The doorways were taller than the average doorway in a human world. She’d measured a doorway in the Portland house once. Eighty inches seemed to be a standard, although the Old Portland-style might have originally had smaller doorways to begin with. The doors here were two or three feet above that. It made sense because the Blackteeth looked to be two to three feet taller than the average human, but she already knew that the Blackteeth hadn’t built this place.

  This realm was silent and dark. It was as if no one lived there; no life existed there except what crept through the shadows. Hesper knew it was just a matter of time before the screams began, and she wiped the sweat from her forehead. She pulled her hand back and felt the beads of sweat between her thumb and forefinger. She’d thought that they could speed their way through the tunnels and exit the place before the Blackteeth knew they were there, but she couldn’t assume that would happen.

  Bluish lights began to illuminate the area. Hesper looked longingly at the lengthiest tunnel and then jerked a thumb toward a doorway to the left. She slipped through the darkness and Moss followed her. She threaded her way through a cave or an excavation that had multiple rooms of which she didn’t understand the purpose of. Her slowness allowed the lights to come on as they went. She stepped lightly and avoided debris that would cause a cut through the thin flip flops or her to twist an ankle. If either of those things happened, she would be in trouble. After a few minutes she realized the flip flops were making too much noise as they flapped up and down during her steps. She slid the shoes off her feet and motioned for Moss to put them into his pack.

  Hesper waited for a moment and then everything flowed back into her being. She was back, and it was as if she had never left. The darkness wasn’t complete, but it was there all the same. Bleak and unforgiving, the gloom waited for her to make a mistake.

  She went down a short hall and then took a left into a small room waiting for a moment for the lights to come on. Then she touched the wall near a juncture and a rock panel lurched loudly. She saw out of the corner of her eye that Moss recoiled and stepped backward.

  Hesper waited for the rock to grind open and then stepped into the hole it presented. She gestured at Moss, and when he stepped in beside her, she felt for another part of the wall. She touched it and it protested a moment before the wall lumbered shut behind them, leaving them in complete darkness. She reached for Moss’s arm and touched his elbow. She said softly, “The walls will start to glow in a few minutes. Then we can sit for a while and figure things out.”

  Moss didn’t respond. Hesper took a deep breath and tried to center herself as her dojang masters had taught her. Focusing one’s chi was all important in some martial arts studies. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. She concentrated on bringing energy from her abdomen up through her body. For a single moment she forgot where she was and why she was there.

  Then it came roaring back, and Hesper wanted to shriek with rage. I escaped. I beat them. I beat them! I had a damn good plan, too. And now this. It’s unfair. It’s so unfair. She looked at Moss. It would be easy to blame him. It would be easier to treat him like he had first treated her; he was contemptible and had little regard for anything except his own desires. It shouldn’t have mattered that he was trying to find his missing sister, but, of course, it did.

  However, all Hesper now felt for Moss was pity. He was getting answers, and he probably wasn’t liking them. He thought they would find Olivia’s remains in a shallow grave, a victim of a creepy serial killer, and they would bury her so that the family could move on. It would be difficult, but it would have been something they could have learned to accept. She understood that. She also understood that all of this was not so acceptable.

  Hesper finally saw the glow in the walls begin to generate. “The lights react to warmth,” she said quietly. “It’s automatic. It’ll be dark until something warm is in the area. Then it lights up and stays lit until you’re gone for about five minutes. The downside is that it also leaves a trail.”

  That was something else. They were leaving a trail. Hesper could have kicked herself. They should have doubled back and erased their prints from the dust in the tunnels. They would rest for a bit, and she would do exactly that. The Blackteeth might not be onto them yet, but they would be, and it wouldn’t be long.

  “We need to conceal our scents,” Hesper said. She knelt down and sat next to a wall. After a moment, Moss did the same.

  “How do we do that?” he asked.

  “Mud, dirt, sewage,” she said. “It won’t smell great, but it’s better than the alternative.”

  Moss slowly looked around. “It looks like a closet.”

  It was true that the small room had places for things to be hung, but Hesper had never seen one of the rooms with anything in it but dust and debris that was unrecognizable. She couldn’t read the numbering or the language. She had no frame of reference.

  “The Blackteeth built this place?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Hesper said. “I think it was here for a long time before the Blackteeth came across it. You’d need an archeologist to learn more. There are literally thousands of these rooms and miles of tunnels. You could get lost so easily it’s not funny. That’s why you need to stick to me.”

  “You were here, for the ten years you were missing? Here?”

  Hesper nearly laughed at the tone of his question. “What, did you think I was sitting in a grassy meadow playing with dolls and drinking pretend tea from porcelain cups?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Darkness and night are mothers of thought.

  – Dutch proverb

  “This place,” Moss began then stopped and slowly scanned the room, evidently searching for the right words. He started again, “This place is some kind of city, a civilization.”

  Hesper considered the wall beyond Moss’s shoulder. The aging façade of the structure showed veins of the black ivy that crept in every corner in the darkness of the abandoned location. “It’s very old,” she said. “There’s nothing left like clothing or organic material or bones. I think it must have been ancient when the age of modern people was just beginning. I think the Blackteeth just moved in and took over, using what was left over to do what they like to do best.”

  “You used this city to beat them,” Moss stated.

  “I did. So will we.”

  Moss studied her in the dim light. His gaze was intent, and she could see the burning rage in his eyes. It wasn’t directed at her, but she still felt the heat. “What do they do with the children?”

  Hesper looked away. It was a question that he was bound to have asked sooner or later. It was a question that she didn’t want to answer. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the answer; it was that it had a gruesome answer.

  “Humans are…game to them,” she whispered. Not a game. Game.

  Moss took that in. “And you said they only take children or something like they prefer children.”

/>   “As far as I know, they never brought an adult back for their illicit purposes,” Hesper said slowly. She willed her mind to blank on the subject. She’d heard too many screams over the years to make her thoughts dwell on what happened to all the others she’d known. She said something under her breath and Moss said, “What was that? Chinese?”

  “Mandarin. Something I learned while I was here before,” Hesper said. “You think that all the children who were taken all speak English? I’ve heard a dozen languages here, and I know words in most of them. My Korean is better. Some places are obviously easier pickings than others. Disappearances in third world countries are attributed to wild animals or natural disasters or because they wandered out into the jungle.”

  “So, you weren’t always alone,” Moss stated. “You learned Korean from one of them.”

  “Of course, I wasn’t always alone,” she said. “Once I escaped from them, I helped others escape. I tried to get as many free as I could. But we didn’t know how to make our way back to our world.” She clicked her tongue and corrected herself. “I didn’t know then.”

  Moss shut his mouth, and Hesper was grateful for the silence. Being back in this place was like standing under a giant waterfall of emotions. It crushed down upon her with a vengeance and didn’t let up. It pounded her with all of the accusations that she’d rained down upon herself endlessly. It had never helped after she’d escaped, that others voiced some of the same accusations that she had against herself.

  “You could have proved it,” Moss said. “You could have brought someone to running water with the key. You could have showed them.”

  Hesper dipped her head. Just when she thought Moss had a brain, that he was thinking about what was happening, he revealed he was like all the rest in the real world. He was thinking as if he had choices left to him. His golden rule was if one persevered, then one would be triumphant, and it simply didn’t work that way in the reality she’d known.

  “You’re not thinking it through,” she said wearily. “Once I got out, I was so terrified that they would get me again. I was so frightened that I would be snatched again. I didn’t go near any kind of water for a full year. It only took me a month to get the courage up to take a bridge across a river on my bicycle. It never really got easier. Even if someone did believe me, and that’s unlikely, you really think that it would have been just a snap”— she snapped her fingers— “to do that?”

  Moss leaned his head back against the wall. “I reckon I’m not being fair. I can’t see that someone would have followed you to a stream and watched while you did that. Or maybe one of those things would have been waiting for you and snatched you in. I’m guessing they would have rationalized that, too. Some kind of weird gator in Alabama, I suppose. Even if you could have gotten someone to go with you. You could have filmed it with a cellphone. You could have gotten a news reporter to do that.” The last two sentences were almost questions to himself as if he was posing a point.

  “I was supposed to put myself at risk to prove the truth?” she asked. “I was supposed to sacrifice myself in order for the truth to come out? Jesus, you’re selfish. And you’re not really thinking about it the right way.”

  Moss shook his head. Maybe he would get it, but more likely he would die before they could escape. He would probably get her killed, too. They couldn’t have stayed in Oregon, but this wasn’t much better. Still a slight chance of survival was better than no chance at all.

  “They put me in a mental institution, you know, when I told the truth,” she said. “You know about that.”

  He nodded. “It’s easier to think of a lone man snatching children up and then burying them deep in the woods where no one would think to look.” He sighed heavily, visibly not enjoying the topic of conversation. He looked around again. “What do we do for water? For food?”

  Hesper gestured at the far wall. “You see that little bump in the wall, there? It’s a knob that time has worn the stone smooth.”

  Moss shifted and nodded.

  “Press it with your hand.”

  Moss leaned forward and put two fingers on the bump. Immediately a slow welling of water came out from underneath it. It trickled out and spilled to the ground where it washed away into a drain hole that had been covered with the dirt of time. “Huh,” he said.

  “If you know where to look, you can find those.” Hesper crossed her arms over her chest, feeling a little chilled in damp clothing. It was also a good thing that the temperature stayed constant in this place. “This is like an apartment, I guess, and this design is repeated over and over as if there were thousands of beings living here. There are four rooms. There are two places for water. One in here. One in the front room nearest to the halls. I’ll show you just in case we get separated. As long as you can get into these places, you can have water.”

  “I’m sticking to you like glue on your ass,” Moss said firmly.

  “Food is another story,” Hesper said. “Let’s hope we’re not here long enough to need it.”

  “What about outside?” Moss asked. “This is a big underground system. There’s got to be some way out of here besides the pools.”

  “I never found a way out of this place and I looked. I looked hard. Every exit seemed blocked or caved in. I never found a place where I could see what was outside. It feels like a cave, and the temp stays about the same. Maybe sixty degrees? It’s not like I had a thermometer to check.”

  “Pools of water are…what, entries? Gateways? They only work if you have a key.” He gestured at her neck. “Do you have to do anything special to get it to work?”

  “No. The pools on this side seem to take you to one specific place. There are hundreds of them, if not thousands.”

  Moss frowned. “You came back to Huntsville, along the Tennessee River. How did you know which one to use?”

  “Process of elimination and a little bit of luck. To be truthful, I would have been happy if I’d materialized in the Yangtze River in Asia or any other place other than here.”

  “You figured it out.” Moss’s tone was almost admiring. “You spied on the Blackteeth.”

  “Just as much as I could get away with.”

  “How did you know the pool near the lodge would work for us?”

  “I didn’t. I suspected from the way they took children that they came in one way and took another way out. Something about running water. It’s possible we could have just taken a dip and been soaking wet when the cops found us.”

  Moss stared at her, digesting her answer. “Did they know you’d escaped the first time?”

  “In the beginning, I think they might not have,” Hesper said reflectively. “Later, when I started killing them, they were a lot more interested in my whereabouts. They also didn’t like it when I started helping other children escape.”

  Moss took that in. “Did you help Olivia?”

  Hesper’s lips flattened into a grim line. There was another question that he was bound to have asked. “I don’t know what happened to your sister,” she said carefully. “I helped as many as I could, but…the Blackteeth were…relentless. There were many that I couldn’t get to. I couldn’t help them all.”

  Moss didn’t like that. Wasn’t it obvious that she was implying all the ones she’d helped were likely dead? “Is there a way we can go and look?”

  Hesper didn’t want to go and look. If she’d had a choice, she didn’t want to get anywhere near a Blackteeth again. She didn’t want to drag herself through that morass again. She closed her eyes and tried to find her center. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth until her heartbeat began to slow down again. “Yes, we can look,” she said bleakly. “Though, I don’t think you’ll like what you see.”

  “The most dangerous part of being here is when we exit one of these places,” Hesper said a while later. They had both drank their fill, and she had shown him another part of the place that was clearly a toilet. She’d used dirt and grime mixed with water to smear across th
eir flesh, and she thought he looked like a muddy ragamuffin wandering through a forbidden zone.

  “The creaking of the door,” Moss said.

  “Right,” she agreed. “No WD-40 around here, and I never found something I could use as oil. If they’re onto us, then they know where we came out. If that’s the case, then one or more of them is waiting for us to come into the longest passageway, what I call the grand hallway.”

  From years of experience Hesper knew that the Blackteeth wouldn’t come into the apartments anymore. She’d set too many traps for them to be that gullible again. When they had started actively hunting her, she’d used it to her advantage. All those summers spent with her grandfather in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains hadn’t been wasted. He believed that everyone should be skilled in survival, and it was him she had to thank for hers. Making traps for the Blackteeth was no different than making a trap for a squirrel. The Blackteeth were simply a larger, meaner type of rodent.

  Hesper handed Moss the machete while she kept the bush axe. “I’d suggest using the Taser, but since you only have the two cartridges, I would also suggest saving it for a time when our butts are in a tight corner.”

  Moss swung the machete experimentally. He had a wider range more in line with the long arms of the Blackteeth. He was also a hundred pounds heavier than Hesper, and it looked like he used weights regularly. He would give them a good fight.

  “And when we leave this place, I stop talking completely because we need to be quiet so that we can hear them coming,” she said with a feeling like an icy fist gripping her heart at the thought of wandering the black hallways. “If it’s not me who comes for you, start swinging with that machete,” she added in careful words. “No one will be looking for you here who isn’t an enemy. If it’s not me, you need to kill it. Do you understand?”