|
Page 31.
 Olympia House was flooding rapidly.
Jared looked at the walls in this sector.
“Corridor level has been going faintly downhill,” Stella said.
The ancient Olympia house walls had many deep-gouged holes. The walls had once been white perhaps, but now they were corroded by urine and furrowed by huge claws, and had merged into an overall tone of blackish desiccation-film. The stone surfaces were coated with a hardened black sludge like dried oil, stinking, out of which grew mosses and lichens, even tiny ferns among which colonies of fireflies drifted.
She touched a spot. Her finger, she showed him, came away glittering wet. “Fresh water.”
Clear water ran down the walls, onto the floor, and the rotten black glistened with motion. Jared looked closer. It was water, struggling with impurities, moving slow, but seeming to increase slowly in speed.
The gouge marks spoke of many struggles, marks old as antiquity. Perhaps some small scratch might attest to the fact that once had lived a Jared Fallon, and died here in small struggle against the onrushing waters.
Somewhere, water had broken loose and was fighting its way through the dead burrows of the Olympia house.
Maybe someone had broken a huge feed pipe above. Or bombs had destroyed a section of the complex.
In the uncountable cells and halls and arenas underneath Olympia House, an ocean circulated. An ocean was circulating in the death house. There must be this much water, gathered in rain pools and cisterns to sustain fighters and animals. The water was held apart by pipes centuries old but the end promised to be a final, fatal brackish unity drowning everything.
Jared pictured him and Stella being tiny dots, insects, helpless atoms, sixty floors below the surface of the earth, among the beasts and gladiators, as the waters closed over him, this soupy sea.
They’d be dead even as their eyes slipped shut while the tide crushed them in its dark arms against studded walls.
The sea would tear to pieces the age-old horror that had made a galaxy shudder…
Somewhere sounded a dull, thunderous POO**OO**MM as a billion tons of stone shifted weight by a fraction of an inch. The monster was buckling.
Now the ceiling was sweating thin drops. Mother of the City! No time for caution now!
Jared and Stella, holding hands, ran for their lives.
“This way,” she said, pointing to a slight up-slope in a wide side corridor.
The cosmic mourning song, the death dirge of dying monsters, crooned on and on.
A door crashed down nearby.
Thousands of bestial screams echoed through the stone corridors.
GO! GO! Jared’s mind screamed.
Now far down the hall, standing on splintered wood and piled stone, hulked something out of a nightmare, momentarily looking the other way, outlined in a steam of body heat.
GO GO GO.
Jared pulled Stella in a different direction, in this maze of corridors. He was dismayed by the loud slapping of their shoes on slimy cobbles.
Stella fell once, slithered into a rough wall, but he pulled her gently up with both hands and they ran on.
Images pursued him: Terror images of water and fear and beasts and even brought a cry from his throat. But he forced himself to the stairs and clambered up on his hands and knees until the savage battle ceased and he stood up. Stella swept silently along behind him. He put his hand to the wall to steady himself, but felt a sharp sting and drew his hand away. It was bloody. The wall was studded with glass blades. How cruel this Olympia House was!
A few feet away something bellowed thunderously as they just barely made it past a set of long blackish horn claws reaching out in fear and hunger.
Jared and Stella ran on and on, never pausing, never looking back.
Many little corridors led off to the sides, foul and black, with hell alone knew what hideous creatures might be wallowing in their filth…maybe there was no way out? Panic…
Many false hopes kept them going. Once the ground changed, became cry, sloping up.
“Watch for dead ends and blind passages,” she said, sounding winded.
“We have no other choice but to keep going.”
So they continued on, still holding hands.
They hurried up the dry slope, around corners, until they came to steps. These led them another two flights up. There he faced a dead end.
Sorrowful at the loss of hope and precious moments, they retraced their path.
“Some of these are illusions,” she said in a burst of sudden insight.
“What do you mean?”
“They made a house of mirrors to fool escaping prisoners and animals.”
What fiendish planners! He realized that in some places the walls looked strange, like digital constructs with poorly, vaguely planned fibers and pixels. Some areas that looked like walls were actually empty air with illusions painted in, and mixed up with phosphor fungi and biolume colonies of tiny things that looked as if they were floating in underwater currents.
Is there such a thing as underair?
How deep are we here anyway?
“Got to keep moving,” he said. Their hands slipped apart as they grew weary. “Stay by me.”
“I stay by you,” she said in that strange, lilting tropical Samba tone.
Pleasing to the end… like a song…
He fell to his knees and for a moment lost hope.
Stella helped him stagger back up, and they moved on, slower now.
How dry… The air was flat and dead. Pressure hammered at Jared’s temples, trying to drive him back. But he held his to his temples and stumbled forward.
Amid mounting vertigo, Jared saw open cage doors in a corridor.
Oily slowness paralyzed him, almost a death wish. Get it over with. Surrender…
Once again, Stella put her hands on his waist, his hips, as if lifting him along.
They passed cages with long ago missing gratings that had fallen outward. In the cages, they glimpsed mounds of dry, unbleached bones, tufted with hair and bits of leathery skin, on strewings of bone-hard manure and blackened straw.
Too dry! Such a stench and heat and pressure amid that endless howling, echoing, crooning of dying creatures slipping into dark sea water to swim home among the stars…
Death song of the universe…
Jared held out his hand. “Come, Stella, meet our nice new friends.”
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
