Chapter Ten: Eyes in the Dark

“This is a place with a curse on it!”

-Reepicheep, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

            Hendricks’s feet landed in shallow water. Even through his shoes he could tell it was filthy.

            “Okay,” he called. “Come on down!”

            Helen lowered herself into the shaft. Hendricks reached up and helped her down.

            “Which way?” she asked, splashing down into the muck.

            “No idea,” Hendricks said, pulling out his club and feeling the walls. There was only a small pool of light right below the opening. Outside of this, it was utterly dark in either direction. “Er, you still have that coin?”

            “Yes, because that worked so well last time,” she said. She looked up and down the tunnel. “Let’s just pick one. I mean, the important thing is that we find a way up. We’ve…kind of taken a step backwards in that regard.”  

            Hendricks looked up and down the tunnel.

            “Okay…” he said. “Eenie, meenie, minie…”

            “This way,” she said, sounding exasperated and amused at the same time and pointing in the direction the water was flowing. 

            They went slowly, Hendricks in front, feeling along with his bar. The tunnel was low and very narrow, so that he had to slouch to fit through. Helen, who was shorter, only just fit. They went for about fifty feet before it forked. Hendricks didn’t bother asking which way they should go and just turned left. They had no idea where they were going anyway, so what was the point in asking?

            It wasn’t long before they began to feel the same sense of unease, almost of watchfulness that had plagued them in the corridor above. Only down here it quickly became ten times as intense, so that they could almost feel it, like the throbbing of a motor against their eardrums. At first they tried to ignore it, dismissing it in their minds as nothing but the result of the dark and the uncertainty of their position, but the more they tried to dismiss it, the more convinced they were that they were not alone. 

            Helen glanced over her shoulder, but all was black. And yet…was it just the echoes? Or did she hear footsteps in the water behind them? She tried very hard not to think about it. Of course it was the echoes. They had quite enough to worry about without silly fears of phantom pursuers.

            Yet, as the tunnel kept going on with no sign either of light or ending, the ‘silly fears’ seemed less and less silly. And her explanation that it was just the echoes seemed less and less sound. The sense of a presence in the tunnel with them kept growing stronger, and Helen couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder every now and again. Once or twice, she even thought she head whispering.

            Quite suddenly, Hendricks hissed for her to stop and held out a hand to arrest her movement. There was no doubt about it. After they had stopped, another set of footsteps had splashed on for a second – only a second – and then been still.

            “Who’s there?” Hendricks hissed down the tunnel. He had meant to shout it, but his voice had stuck and that was the best he could do.

            There was no answer. There wasn’t the slightest sound.

            “Do you…see anything?” Hendricks whispered.

            “No,” Helen answered, so quietly he could barely hear her, even in that silence. “But I can feel something. Something that’s watching us right now…”

            They stood there for what felt like a very long time peering into the darkness, listening, hating the silence, but dreading what they might hear if it were broken.

            As they stood there, Helen’s hand found Hendricks’s and gripped it tightly.

            “Come on,” he whispered after a very long time. “Let’s…let’s just go…find a way up…”

            They started moving forward again, still holding hands. The feeling of being followed had now grown into a certainty, and it wasn’t long before they again heard the footsteps coming along behind them.

            They quickened their pace so that they were now almost running along the tunnel. Of course, though, with that they were splashing so much that they couldn’t hear if the Thing was still following them. They couldn’t see anything or hear anything over the splashing water; they could only smell and taste the putrid stench of sewage. Neither knew how much longer they could stand this, but they didn’t dare stop. 

            Helen looked over her shoulder, and what she saw turned her blood to ice.

            She only saw them for a second, so that she couldn’t be sure whether she had really seen them or only imagined it. But when she looked back she had just had the briefest glimpse of a pair of red eyes behind them. 

            Either it was because she had tripped or because the sight of those eyes had sent a blow reverberating through her whole being which sapped her strength, Helen suddenly found herself pitching forward into the filthy water, pulling Hendricks down with her in her panic.

            They splashed about, almost fighting with one another to get free. But then, all at once, they stopped. The eyes had returned, and this time they didn’t vanish. Even worse, another pair of those same red eyes appeared in the other direction. The eyes didn’t move, and no sound came from them, but they just stared unblinking at Helen and Hendricks.

            They were trapped. The Things glared at them from either side, and the disturbance of their souls was so profound that they couldn’t think or move or feel anything but sheer horror. They felt as though they must run or die, but if they ran they would go straight into the Things, and so death was far preferable!

            Through her terror, the thought of the White Dog seemed to flicker before Helen’s mind.

            Dog, Helen thought with a terrible effort. Whoever, whatever you are, if you can help us, please...

            For a fraction of a second, she actually felt a very little better. Then, as if the Things were making a fresh assault, another wave of terror swept it all away. Of course; the Dog was only a dream. He couldn’t help them now. No one could…

            Suddenly, the eyes vanished. Something seemed to snap back into place in their hearts and they breathed again (they weren’t sure whether they had been actually holding their breaths or not, but it certainly felt like it).

            Helen wasn’t sure, but she thought she had heard a faint booming sound, like the dim echo of a deep bark.  

            It was maybe a full minute before they regained the use of their limbs, and when they did they scrambled to their feet and ran. They didn’t know where they were going; they just knew they needed to get out of there as soon as they could.

            Before they had gone more than a few feet, however, they skidded to a halt. Both of them had caught sight, out of the corner of their eyes, of something luminous and white darting off at the end of a side passage. It was so bright that, for a brief moment, it illuminated the whole tunnel like lightning before it vanished. They turned and followed it at once, neither doubting it was a good guide.

            At the end of the side passage there was another flash of light and the briefest glimpse of something darting down another tunnel. Again they followed it, and as they turned the corner again, they saw, with exclamations of thanks, the lighted circle of an opening above.

            When they arrived under it they looked up, blinking in the light which seemed so bright after their time in the absolute dark. It was only then that it occurred to them that they had no means of climbing up or of undoing the grate.

            “Now what?” Helen gasped.

            “Here,” he said. “See if you can pry it loose or something.”

            “What are you…”

            Her question ended in a startled yelp as Hendricks grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up as high as he could. From here she could reach the grate easily, and found to her amazement that it was loose. She pushed it aside, grabbed the edges, and hoisted herself up. She tried to pull Hendricks up after her, but he was too heavy.

            “Look around,” he called up to her. “See anything that might help?”

            Helen looked around at the room she had emerged into for the first time. It was a kind of tool shop which still had some rusting and cobweb-covered objects lying around on the shelves and desk. Among these was a spool of thick wire, which she snatched up and began to unwind. She secured one end (the one still attached to the spool) to the heavy workbench and the other she threw down to Hendricks.

            “Here, try to get up with that,” she called.

            It took him some doing (his upper body strength wasn’t what it ought to have been), but at last he managed to scramble over the rim of the drain and slam the grate back on top of it.

            “What,” he said after a few moments of trying to get his breath back. “The hell were those?”

            Helen shook her head.

            “Nothing that Prosser made, I can tell you that,” she said. “God! Do you think he even knows that he’s living on top of those things?” she buried her face in her hands. “I mean, I always knew there was something strange about this island. I could feel it. And now it turns out to be worse than I ever thought! Oh, God! Why did I ever come here?”

            “Hey,” said Hendricks, patting her on the back in what he meant as a comforting fashion. ”It’s alright, you couldn’t have known.  Besides, we’re still alive, right?”

            Helen lifted her head and nodded.

            “Er, by the way,” he said. “Do you happen to know what that white thing might have been? I mean, the thing that led us out.”

            She gave him a small smile.

            “That,” she said. “Was the Dog from my dreams.”

            Hendricks stared at her.

            “Are you sure?”

            “Positive,” she said.

            “But I thought, you know, he was part of your dreams?”

            “I told you, he’s not just a dream,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve seen him in real-life once before. When you washed up on shore, he was the one who led me to you.”

            Hendricks felt a chill run through his whole body as he remembered what he had half dismissed as a dream or hallucination.

            “In that case,” he said slowly. “I think I might have seen him before too.”

            Helen’s jaw dropped.

            “What? When?”

            “When I was in the ocean during the storm,” he said. “I thought I saw something white and glowing that guided me to the beach. Of course, I thought at the time I was just going nuts, but now…well, it’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

            “Why didn’t you tell me?”

            “Because I didn’t want you to think I was nuts!”

            “What, even after you started thinking that I was?”

            “I…guess I just didn’t make the connection,” he admitted. “I’m not a very cop, remember?”

             Helen managed a small laugh.

            “But wait,” he said. “Don’t you realize what this means? It means that we’ve actually got someone on our side! We don’t have to do this on our own!”

            “Yeah, I know,” she said. “That’s about the only reason I haven’t given up yet.”

            “Well, it puts a little wind in my sails,” said Hendricks. “I mean, it’s good to know we’re not completely dependent on my, uh, skill as a policeman.”

            Helen agreed with this, but caught herself before saying so.

            Before they left the room, Hendricks looked around to see if there was anything there they might use. The spool of wire they thought might come in handy, and Hendricks decided to throw away the bent piece of metal he had been carrying in favor of a rusty old crowbar. They also found a flashlight which, miraculously enough, was still working.

            The hallway outside was much the same as the ones they had been in previously; bare concrete lit by the few lights that were still working. This one was in rather poorer shape than the earlier ones, however; the walls and floor were badly cracked, and in places chunks of the ceiling had fallen in (though never enough that they could see up into the floor above).

            They walked along this hall for some time, taking corners at random and checking each room they passed that they could open. They didn’t find anything except for a lot of cobwebs and a few broken and empty boxes.

            It was utterly quiet, save for their own footsteps and the occasional buzzing of an electric light. For the first time since they had awoken in the elevator, Hendricks found himself wondering what was happening in the rest of the facility. Had Prosser gotten his monsters under control? Had he maybe been killed already by them? And what about Ralph, and Hogan, and the others? Had they escaped, or been killed, or were they still captives? Oughtn’t he and Helen try to free them if they were?

            He tried to shove these thoughts out of his mind. Wherever the others were, he and Helen couldn’t help them now, and they had quite enough to worry about without wondering what had become of them.

            And so they went on for what seemed like hours. The intense terror of the journey in the dark had long since faded away, leaving them feeling sleepy and muddle-headed. They were also very hungry and each wondered how long ago their dinner with Prosser had been. Hendricks was just about to suggest they stop to rest when they finally found what they had been looking for.

            A small, very dark room was almost completely caved in, enough that the light from the room above shone down through the whole. Not only that, but the debris was piled up so that there was almost a crude staircase leading up to the floor above.

            Hendricks and Helen didn’t wait to consult one another. They just started climbing. Their hands scrapped painfully against the rough concrete, and they both cut themselves on the bits of jagged metal that stuck out from the ruins, but neither cared much. It was a relief just to feel like they were finally moving up towards their destination.

            The room they were climbing into was much the same as the one they had left, only larger and brighter (since all the lights in the previous room had been smashed by the collapsed ceiling). It seemed almost cheerful compared to where they had just left.

            “Do you want to take a break?” Helen asked. But she didn’t wait for his answer before flopping down on the floor.

            “Good idea,” he said, flopping down next to her.

            “So,” he said after a few moments of silence. “Any idea where we go from here?”

            “Are you kidding?” she said. “I don’t know where ‘here’ is.”

            “Well, you’re the one with the, you know, magic dreams,” he pointed out. “Maybe if you just went to sleep or something…”

            Helen shook her head.

            “Honestly,” she said. “I’m so sore and hungry and scared I don’t think I could sleep. I don’t suppose you have any ideas what we’ll do for food?”

            “None whatsoever,” he sighed, his stomach rumbling. “Though I suppose we’ll survive for a few days, as long as we have water.”

            “Do you know where we’ll find water fit to drink?”

            “Nope.”

            Helen gave a weak chuckle. 

            “I suppose it could be worse,” she said.

            Hendricks considered this.

            “How?” he asked.

            “It’s just an expression,” she sighed.            

            At that moment, the ground shook slightly underneath them, and a second later a very low, heavy ‘boom’ reached their ears.

            “What was that?” Helen asked.

            “Sounded like an explosion,” said Hendricks. “And a big one.”

            There was another, more violent tremor, followed by a correspondingly louder boom. The lights flickered, and a bit of the floor at the edge of the hole they had climbed up through fell in. The sight made them realize that this might not be the safest place to rest.

            “What do you know?” said Helen. “I was right; it just got worse.”

            “Come on,” said Hendricks. “We should move on…”

Next Week:

 Chapter Eleven: Three Narrow Escapes