A Big Shiny Blue Marble Ch. 55

He'd taken up fencing a few years before that, and found it too tame for his taste. But with a little research and a lot of asking around, Darji had found a place where he could actually learn to fight with swords in several styles and it wasn't anything much like fencing. He'd liked it far better that way. It gave his shpulders and arms a needed push in their development.

He'd liked the men that he'd met there far better as well.

He remembered walking into the house that afternoon and noticing right away how strangely quiet it was. As he'd walked through it, he hadn't seen one member of the usual summer staff in evidence. Finally, he'd walked into his mother's office, the sanctum sanctorum from which she'd unleashed so many best-sellers.

The place was a mess, with his mother's things, books, and manuscripts, everything looking as though it had been thrown around -- as though someone had been looking for something. When he'd turned around to look at the other side of the room, what he'd seen had stopped his heart.

The body of his father was there -- more or less, and beyond that there was the first of the membranes that he'd ever seen, stretched vertically over the entrance to his mother's extensive library. He could see through it to some degree, though that seemed to vary somewhat. On the other side of it he could see his mother.

She was nude and she looked to be asleep. He hoped that was what it was and that there was still life there as he looked from her to the remains of his father and back. He supposed that he ought to feel a bit more for his father, but he found it difficult for some reason. He'd been so much closer to his mother all of his life. They'd always been able to talk frankly with each other. That was the way that she'd raised him.

She opened her eyes then and he supposed that she saw him, though she also seemed to be almost torpid compared to her usual liveliness. She raised her head and looked around herself carefully before crawling toward him very slowly and beckoning him to come closer. When he did, she began to whisper.

"I'm sorry that you had to see this," she said softly, "It's been so long since your father and I have had anything physical between us. He's always had his little flings and ... well I guess I've never minded it so much, since they kept him from pestering me at all. I wanted to have a child so that I could tell myself that I was complete as a woman."

Darji shook his head, "What happened here, Mom? Are you alright? You're babbling a little."

She sighed tiredly, "For the moment, I guess that I'm ok. They bring me things to eat every now and then. I was trying to read up on the little statuette and as I did, I found that I felt a little more um, ... hornier, I guess. I mean even more than I usually am. I found that there is an incantation on the bottom of the statue. I worked out the translation and practised reading it out loud. One time, as I said the last word, there was a flash and this hazy thing was here, stretched over the doorway. As I got up to look at it, three things came running through. They grabbed me and, ... well, ... you might say that they gave me my wish, though it scared the hell out of me at first. Your father came to try to pull me out and they ... they just killed him and dragged me back in here with them again. They all take turns with me and they come back about twice a day for more. It's been going on for a few days now."

"Grab my hand, Mom. I'll get you out of there." Darji had said in a determined way, since that was how he felt, but she shook her head emphatically.

"No you won't," she told him, "They'll come back and kill you as well. I want you to get as far away from here as you can and never come back. I won't lose you to them the way that I lost your father. If you did manage to pull me through, they'd just come after you then. They own me now -- or that's the way that they feel about it. If I wasn't so well-screwed, I might be a little angry with that witch Esma. As it is, I suppose that I ought to thank her if I could."

She smiled with an expression which was a mixture of both a little shame and a lot of admission. "Besides," she said, "It's not like they're exactly hurting me, is it? And to tell you the truth, each one of them is a lot better in the sack than any man that I've ever had -- and I can say that I've had a good few, so I know what I'm talking about. But still, I think I can even count my blessings here. Now go on and leave, Darji. You can't pull me through without them noticing. That's what your father did and it only made them mad. You can't save me and the truth be told, I like it in here with them. So go now. Maybe we'll meet up again, but I don't want to risk losing you to a foolish male thought. You're no match for one of them and they come in threes, now go, please, before they come back."

He hadn't wanted to leave her there, but her pleas just became more emphatic that he leave her there. Darji left then, very reluctant and confused about it all and he came back the next day armed to the teeth and even more determined to pull his mother out of there, but it did neither of them any good.

The body of his father was gone by then, dragged back in through the membrane. His mother didn't look so happy now, either. They were eating her dead husband right in front of her, and just as Darji thought that he could stomach it all long enough to start shooting, three more of the things appeared in there and all hell broke loose.

Darji couldn't make any sense of it at the time, he'd just watched dumfounded as the three newcomers -- who were all female - began to beat the crap out of the ones who'd been there when he'd come. That done, they all turned on his mother and tore her apart in an instant before beginning to pound on the first three all over again. Darji didn't even have time to react.

It all took less than a minute, but the females barked and yelled and drove the males away and then left after them. Not one of them had noticed hin there on his knees. Darji blinked through his tears as he looked at the body of his mother. He was about to run through the membrane, but as he hefted his pump-action shotgun, the membrane quivered and snapped into nothingness.

It was gone, pure and simple, and in its wake there stood his mother's library. The office looked like a tornado had been through it, but the library nook was just as it had always been and nothing had been disturbed. Darji picked up the 'fertility statue', grabbed a very few articles of clothing from his rooms and he took his favorite curved fighting blades and he left. Two days later, he bought a Chevy Avalanche with his father's Amex card and headed south, stopping to gather more supplies as he went.

It was stupid, he'd thought to himself as he drove. The things on the other side of that pale layer of ether looked as though they were demons or something. Whatever they'd been, he was sure that there was nothing like them on this side which occurred naturally. It took him days of meandering travel, staying off the major routes in case the local cops thought that he'd had anything to do with the mess back at home, but after a time, he figured out what it had been that he'd seen.

Whatever those things had been, they all belonged in some way to a female of the same kind. Those females were a little smaller than the males, but once they'd figured out that their males were all off fucking somebody else -- his mother -- they'd come loaded for bear.

Well, he thought, he was on his way to Tula now and if nothing else, he was going to settle with this Esma witch, if that was what she was.

It had happened just about that way, too. He'd found Esma after she'd led him a merry chase deep inside one of the tombs and after cornering her and hearing that she had no real explanation and shown no remorse when he'd informed her that his mother had died because of her 'gift', he'd pushed her back against a wall and it was then that he'd heard it.

Esma was angry about being jilted. Furious that she'd given her heart to the lovely woman who had come to study and research -- and then left, Esma had corked something and sent it on for her vengeance. She railed and Darji had stood with tears in his eyes as he listened to her tortured keening and self-pitying cries. He admitted to himself that he could feel her pain and loss.

But he also felt his own.

He blew her away then and walked out.

But it had led him to find more of whatever sort of witch that she'd been and he almost set up a for-hire witch-slaying business there for a little while.

But there was only one of him and there were any number of women there who dabbled at least a little in the flavor of witchcraft which was practised there and had been since the ruins were new. It wasn't long before they began to talk to one another about him and the next thing was to lead him on a chase deep inside of one of the pyramids there.

Like a fool, he'd gone after them too and when they'd left him lost and alone down there, he thought about it and after a few days spent making sure that he couldn't find his way out no matter what he did, he retraced as many of his movements as he could in his mind and he found that there had been one direction in which they HADN'T lead him for any distance. So that was the way that he set off.

He'd been hopeful that it would lead him out of there, but instead it led to more tunnels which went on and on. A day turned into a week and a week turned into a month where he just went farther and farther, on and on, thinking that just a little after he'd run out of supplies, that would be the end of him.

There sure seemed to be no shortage of others down there, though. He ran across corpses every now and then. Judging by what was left of their apparel, a lot of seekers had come down here since forever, give or take a week. After a while he looked at them with a little selfish hope that they still might have been carrying something useful or edible that was packed in hermetically-sealed containers and in most cases, they had been, so it was like finding free food near a dusty dead thing.

Two things became apparent after a while. It was amazing to him just how many of these 'explorers' -- if that was what they'd been, had armed themselves with twelve-guage shotguns, not that he minded the free ammunition, but it alarmed him that after passing through three of the membranes, he'd found no more of the bodies.

One day -- or he supposed that it had been one day, though he wasn't really sure anymore by then, he discovered a main tunnel. Compared to the others, it was a massive thing like a thoroughfare is when compared to a trail through the woods. It just went forever with the barest changes in direction or elevation for miles. Every so often, he'd find an alcove or two and that was where he'd hole up if he needed to rest for a while. Now and then, he saw creatures running or flying along the great corridor, but each time so far, he'd been near enough to one of the alcoves to hide in time. He wondered about it but they hardly ever bothered to look into the alcoves.

The only ones who did seemed to be the cave rats. He had no idea if they were rats or not, but that was the word that their appearance evoked in him. Some of them were closer to the size of large dogs and could be difficult to kill, but on the whole they left him alone unless he surprised them, and when he was low on food, they didn't taste all that bad if you cooked them well over a fire. There were other, much harder to kill creatures down here and given the chance, he tried to leave them alone and slink away undetected if he could.

In point of fact, that was how he came to be here in the first place. He'd almost bumped into a herd of some nasty-looking things and as he'd backed away, he'd found an alcove which hadn't just dead-ended a few yards in. He'd followed it for about a mile, he guessed before it fell in behind him. Now, here he was, looking at another one of these membranes.

He knew that they had something to do with the statue which he still carried but he had no idea what the relationship might be. He just knew that whenever he'd tried to get through one, the results were never all that pleasant. The one time that he'd tried to set the figurine down and walk away, he'd found his way barred by a membrane. As soon as he'd picked up the statue again and put it in his pack, the membrane had snapped out of existence.

He moved his hair out of his eyes as he thought about it. Then his mind came back to his hair. It marked the passage of time in the outside world in a way. The average rate of hair growth for most human beings is about one thirty-second of an inch per day, or about an inch per month. When he'd seen the mess in his mother's room, he'd just gotten a military cut, 'down to the wood', as the saying went. Stupid short everywhere but for the patch on top.

Now it hung down his neck a little and got in his eyes. How much time had passed, he wasn't at all sure, but he guessed that it must have been at least eight or maybe ten months since that day. He sighed, maybe it had been a year. He could reach around the back of his head and bring forward hair long enough for him to look at.

Darji thought of his mother again and wiped a few tears from his eyes then. He'd once heard it said that a boy's best friend is his mother. Well that had certainly been true. They'd travelled the world together and they'd shared adventures of the sort that he very much doubted could be matched by very many people. She'd been his best friend in so many ways and while she'd been proud of him, she'd never made the important things easy for him. He'd always been just as proud of her too and he wondered if he'd ever get over the lightning-fast way that she'd been taken from him. He doubted that even more.

The first time that he'd seen his path blocked by one of the membranes, he'd backed away and taken a different route, but one day there had been no alternative -- just like today. That time, he'd looked at the thing for hours and then sat down to eat. Finally, he'd grown frustrated and put on his pack, grabbed his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He picked up his shotgun in one hand, a torch in the other and walked toward it.

He hadn't seen the little root growing out of the floor, but it tripped him all the same and he pitched forward, holding out his hands to stop himself.

But he'd fallen right through and landed on his face. He'd cracked his head against the stone floor and that was all she wrote for a while. When he awoke, the membrane was gone. Looking forward, the hallway looked the same as he'd seen when he'd peered through, but looking back the tunnel looked more like a ruin that was on the verge of collapse.

So he'd moved on. Now he was faced with another potentially disastrous passage.

"Oh fuck it," he said to himself a little angrily, "there's no other choice, is there?" Stepping forward, he saw the flash as he passed through. He stood stone still for a moment, just checking things out. He seemed to be alright and other than the brilliant surge of the brief pain of his passing through, nothing much seemed to have changed. When he looked back, the membrane was gone and so was the hallway where he'd been only seconds before. What was left now was a root-covered wall of rubble. He asked himself how that could have happened. He'd have noticed the cave-in, wouldn't he? He'd have choked on the dust and debris. And where had the roots come from? He stepped back and saw that this cave-in appeared as though it had happened a very long time ago.

What was worse was that there was also no way forward. There was rubble from the floor to the ceiling just ahead of him. Fighting off the urge to panic, he looked around and as the ringing in his ears faded away, he heard voices.

At first they seemed to come from everywhere, but after a few seconds, he had the direction and walked cautiously toward one wall. He wanted to call out, since he was certain that he was hearing words of some kind, but then he threw that idea away. Peering carefully, he could see light coming around the edges of a few of the stones and he brought his face forward against the wall to try for a look.

As he peered through a few cracks, he wondered if the solitude of his recent life had finally begun to cause his mind to unravel. He saw three ... people of a sort fighting off a half dozen of the demonic-looking creatures who had appeared in his house and killed his parents. Just as he began to wonder if there was some way that he could help and if he ought to try to do that, he saw a shadow growing over his little peephole as one of the beasts backed up against the wall that he was looking through.

He heard the thing scream and then it fell backwards against the wall. Darji had just enough time to step back and out of the way as the wall crashed apart and the thing was lying at his feet clutching at an arrow in its chest. In a flash, his knives were in his hands and he severed the carotid arteries, starting a spray of blood from the thing's throat. It twitched twice and lay still.

Darji looked up and across a large chamber, straight into the eyes of one of the outnumbered ones in this fight that he now found himself in. He was looking at a horned head with odd-looking ears which hung at a strange angle -- as in, they stuck out sideways. What struck him right away was the broad forehead and the way that the eyes seemed to look out as though from under a bit of an overhang -- shielded a little as they were by edges which came from the structure of the forehead .The nose was long, but it didn't come forward beyond the front edge of -- again, that forehead.

He suddenly realized why. The front of that head carried a thick skull -- far thicker he guessed than a human one. The reasons for that were numerous and they came to him in an instant. The creature was bipedal, but there was fur in various lengths, depending on where one was looking at the moment. There were two wide horns stemming out of that slightly wide head and they went out to the sides and back a little before curling around and down. The upper lip was split a little and overall, it made him think of a goat. If this creature was patterned that way, Darji reasoned, then it was no great stretch to see that a thick skull could prove useful. The cheekbones were high and a little pronounced, and then there was the mouth and chin which looked fairly human-like.

The mouth dropped open in surprise and then the moment was past and the being swung a bow to point toward another of the large creatures. The arrow was loosed and there was a scream from the other side of the room. Darji stepped through the opening and sheathed his knives largely by feel so that he could reach over his right shoulder for his shotgun.

The way that he looked at it, the three in here were talking and shouting warnings to each other while the other, larger things in the room were hulking, slavering beasts. He decided to side with the ones who could talk as a safe bet right out of the gate.

He jacked a round in and seeing that his presence had been noted by the others, he waded in and shot all five rounds into two of the things and then he set the pump gun down to reach for his rifle. One of the smaller things -- who looked to have some human features - was almost a blur, armed with a sword and a long knife. That one seemed fearless -- or desperate- and slashed and spun, jumping up to ram a blade deep into one of the beasts and then seeming almost to disappear into the attack on the next foe. One of the other ones -- the ones with the horns and the ears -- was unbelievably quick with a bow in the cramped quarters here. He drew back the cocking handle on his semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 and got to work.