Saturday, October 19, 2024

The Case of Ambrose Abernathy (Part Four)

 


He hadn't gone three steps when he became aware that his feet were sopping in cold water. Apparently the rains from outside were trickling into the passage. He instinctively turned back to get his boots and found the way back had indeed vanished. A rough featureless stone wall blocked his retreat. He reached out in panic and touched its immovable surface, then pounded on it to no effect.

          He looked forward again. The pale light continued to withdraw, growing ever fainter.  In despair of any alternative, he hurried after it.

          He put his hand out to the uneven sides of the tunnel to steady himself then pulled back in disgust. The passageway must have been habitually damp, because the walls were coated with a spongy wet mass that sank under his touch, and oozed a light amber mucus where it was pressed. He almost wiped it on his coat, but then tried to simply shake it off. He never paused, but followed the dimming light.

          The tunnel debauched into a wider cave. Abernathy examined it for an instant in the fading iridescence. It seemed to be paved in huge cobblestones, domed like eggs covering the cavern floor. He stepped onto them, trying to tread as lightly as possible from step to step so as not to slip, and had made it halfway through when one crumbled under his foot, throwing him headlong onto the floor with a cracking fall.

          He raised himself up on his palms and looked down. He was not laying on stones, but on a crushed and collapsing bed of skulls. Bony eye-sockets glared up at him angrily. In the fading light, they seemed somehow strange, even to his untrained eye. He reached out tremulously and picked one up that was more or less intact to examine it. The dome was smaller than a typical man's, the teeth pointier. With a shudder he threw it aside and scrambled to his feet, bone fragments flying as he stood, and ran after the fleeing phosphorescence with crackling steps.

          As he stumbled along, he gave some thought to his lost case, of the candles in it that could be lighting his way, of the rum he could be swigging against the chilly cavern air, of the variety of weapons that could be snuggling comfortably in his hand as he plunged into the unknown depths of the earth. But mostly he thought of his bruised and now bleeding feet as he slapped along the damp passage, and how he should have gone to sleep in his boots.

          He figured he had passed through about three more caverns, largely unseen, but each somehow feeling smaller than the last, before the light passed completely from his sight. Whether it had fled beyond him into the depths or simply faded out, he could not tell. Dark red and purple dazzles played against the blackness of his gaze. He staggered on, heedlessly chasing the vanished light, until suddenly he staggered over a soft mound and fell headlong, barking the heels of his palms and jostling his jaws into the wet floor. His teeth rattled together in his head. He only had a second to register the pain, however, as the mound scrabbled out from under him, tumbling him onto his back, and a sudden voice in the darkness growled out "Here! Who you?"

          Abernathy sat in a stunned silence, the wind knocked out of him, body ringing with pain. There was a sharp crack, and a light flared up from a blue crystal, held in a clawed hand. For a moment its light seared across the agent's eyeballs, and he squinted hard, trying to make out the hunched figure behind it. Then either the gleam settled down or his sight adjusted, and he rather wished it hadn't.

          "Who you? Who you?" the figure asked, bringing its slobbering face closer, almost right into Abernathy's, and smelling hard and urgently with a wet, snuffling nose.

          The agent gazed at the creature, stunned. It was shorter even than he, but powerfully built, standing on crooked bandy legs. It reached out and gripped Abernathy's shoulder with a hand tipped with blunt black claws.

          "You lost?" it queried, looking at him quizzically.

          Abernathy simply stared, mouth agape. The bejowled mouth, walleyes, and under-slung teeth made a face that didn't seem fit to produce human speech. The sloping skull certainly didn't argue for complicated thought, and the creature's brow creased as it seemed to work on what seemed an unprecedented circumstance in its existence.

          Abernathy had almost gathered his wits enough to say something when the creature's face broke into a smile, as if it had suddenly remembered a solution.

          "Okay," it grinned happily. "I take Momma. Momma fix. Come with, this way. Come with."

          It began pulling the little agent forward into the dark, its glowing shard held high. Abernathy stumbled after him and got another shock when he put his hand on the creature to steady himself. What he had thought was pale skin turned out to be rough cream-colored fur.

          He was pulled along for yards of tunnels, kinking ever downward. After a bit he noticed that the phosphorescence was getting brighter, and then the strange gangrel creature had tossed its glowing chip away. In the growing light it looked at Abernathy with sidelong admiration.

          "You got nice clothes," it snaffled. "Like Poppa. Poppa give you clothes? Poppa got clothes. Poppa give nobody nuttin'." It looked downhearted and cringed a bit. "Poppa give me nuttin', bonk on head."

          "I'm sorry," Abernathy said, and he really was. The creature, for all its unnatural looks, seemed good-natured enough, and being just slightly smaller than he, not too alarming. "Have you a name?" he queried as they walked along.

          At the sound of the agent's voice the creature had flinched, as if hearing unfamiliar harmonics. It looked up into Abernathy's face with wincing, darting eyes, but seeing encouragement there, it suddenly broke out in a smile that seemed to split its face.

          "Trey Honore Goodboy," it said, tongue slurping around the syllables. "The Third. Poppa gimme name. Yup. That one thing Poppa gimme."

          "It is nice to meet you, Trey," he said, in the most assuring manner he could, though his voice quavered a little. "My name is Ambrose Abernathy."

          "Am... Amber...Natty," the other gobbled, trying to get the name past his floppy cheeks. Abernathy noticed with some apprehension his pointed, canine teeth. He smiled back nervously at him.

          "Tell me, er, Trey, where did you say we were going?"

          "We gonna see Momma. Momma help you, Momma knows everyt'ing. She help you, brudder. Lost brudder Natty. But we got to be quiet, see?" The creature's voice dropped down low, conspiratorially. "We go through Poppa's room, don' wake him up mebbe. Or he bonk us on the head, bonk bonk!"

          "Oh, yes, yes, shhh!" said the agent. "We don't want any trouble!" He wondered what sort of dread beast this Poppa might be. Visions of some kind of demogorgon danced in his brain, making him tread ever softer and shrink into himself as he followed the goblin figure deeper into the subterranean maze.

          He gasped, startled, when they entered a chamber and came upon a bulky lump of breathing flesh, puddled into one corner of the room. Three snorting, snoring heads protruded from the pile, limbs that were more or less legs and arms were curled under oozing layers of fat.

          His gasp must have been louder than he had hoped, because all the eyes sprang open, and the legs began to scramble under the heaving mass. Then he saw it break apart and squirm, and it stood revealed as three more of the gangrel creatures, each subtly different but all obviously of the same kin.

          "Who dis? Who dis?" said the largest of the three, sticking its long, quivering nose into Abernathy's face. It was taller than the little agent, but its limbs were thin and stick-like. Its splayed legs looked like they could barely hold it up.

          "Dis lost brudder Natty," said Trey earnestly. "Him gonna see Momma."

          This set the others huffing "Momma, Momma," enthusiastically. It was quite a while before they settled down. Another squat grey one, that looked like it could have been Trey's cousin, asked "We go with?"

          "Sure, sure," said Trey. "But sh, sh, sh! Don' wake Poppa, 'kay?"

          "Nope, nope, nope," the others yelped, and Abernathy soon found himself scuttling along in the center of an enthusiastic pack, drawing new members as more of the things joined as they scuttled along, which, for all their constant admonitions to each other of sh, sh, sh, seemed to the agent to be making an ungodly amount of noise.

          There must have been about fifty of the creatures around him, jostling through the tunnels, when Abernathy began noticing a change in their behavior. From a jovial, milling pack they started to grow subdued, not really quieter, but more worried. At last, after many winding ways, they reached a low, well-worn cave entrance.

Notes

"Bonk bonk, on the head!" might well qualify as a bit of Babelese, extracted from the Star Trek episode, "Miri." On re-reading I note a bit of analogous situation, with Abernathy and Trey somewhat echoing Bilbo and Gollum in the caves. The above is a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini.

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