“Retirement?”
The little brown man smoothed down his fine little jacket, fluttered his fingers over the fabric that went down to his bony wrists and then finally hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders and bowed them out proudly. “Earned this I did, long work, hard labor. Hampen stampen, was paid in fair coin, and now I labor no more.”
“Oh,” said Maya. She wanted to ask more, but didn’t dare. Instead she rose to her feet. The cottage was nice, a welcome relief from the dreary world outside it, but she couldn’t think of staying there for very much longer. She’d go mad. “Well, I’d like to get back to my world. The real world. I don’t just want to go back outside. Or maybe find Guillaume?”
Tim Tom Tot worried his jaw from side to side as he stared up at her. “Don’t know ought of tricksy Mr. Fox’s location. But I can send you to your city, if that be your desire.”
“Yes,” said Maya. “That would be great.” Chang and Senora Mercedes and all the rest of them seemed positively tame compared with Tommy Rawhead and his ilk.
“Ach, so will it be, then. Come along.” He stood up from his stool, stomped over to the far side of the room, and energetically rolled back the carpet, revealing large flagstones beneath. Without hesitating, he gripped the edge of a broad, flat stone, and hauled it up, much like a trapdoor. A dark hole yawned beneath it, leading down.
“There you go, girl. Down and down, mind your elbows. If you’ve a need of me, call me again and I’ll come a hopping, leastwise unless I’ve some honey to eat.”
Maya turned and picked up her purse. Leaned over the hole, and saw that roots extended in loops from its side, lending themselves to handholds. “Down?”
Tim Tom Tot stamped his foot, “Ach, questions questions questions! You make less sense than a stoat! How else could you go down a hole but down? Up? Left? Hampen stampen!”
Maya suppressed a smile, butterflies beginning to frolic in her stomach, and sat down so that her legs hung into the hole. A dry, stale smell wafted up. Turning around, she grabbed the first root, then the second, and began to descend into the darkness. “Thank you,” she said, when looking up. “Thank you for everything.”
“Ach, don’t be thanking me! Never thank less you ruin the gift!” And with that, he slammed the stone shut, closing her in the reverberating darkness.
Disorientation was okay. Things had stopped making logical, empirical sense some time ago, and thus Maribel followed the phooka into an impossible tunnel without qualm or question. Through the portal, she had pulled Isobel into the darkness beyond which gave way to a poorly lit passageway. The bricks that lined the walls were even older than those from the alley, crumbled and crushed, and everything seemed breathless and laden with antiquity. The sourceless light served to emphasize shadow more than anything else, the kind of light one might see honeyed within amber, passing slowly around a trapped insect from ages past. The phooka moved ahead like a dream, drifting down the length of the tunnel, his horns high like a crown and barely brushing the curved ceiling above.
Isobel trailed after, a hand outstretched to the rough wall to her left, fingertips almost brushing them but never quite making contact. The gate had fallen behind, consumed by darkness, and they seemed to walk through an interminable stretch of tunnel, with no end or beginning, beguiling and disorienting both.
“Where are we?” asked Isobel. Her voice was a whisper, a harsh grating upon the stillness.
“I don’t know,” said Maribel. Confidence buoyed her on, lifted her, secured her. She didn’t care. All that mattered was that they were moving. Each step drew her closer.
“Maribel,” said Isobel, her voice more urgent. “Maribel, what is this place? We should have passed out onto the next avenue by now.”
Maribel smiled, felt the urge to laugh bubble up in her throat. She looked over her shoulder, and refrained only because of the strained look on her friend’s face. She slowed, reached out with one hand and took Isobel’s once more. Pulled her so that she walked alongside.
“Isobel, we don’t have to understand it. It doesn’t matter.” She spoke gently, trying to help her understand. “This is all beyond us. Kubu, this tunnel. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
Isobel nodded, and tightened her grip on Maribel’s fingers, her eyes searching Maribel’s face for the confidence she felt none of. “I know—but—okay.” She forced herself to take a breath, the stale air passing audibly into her mouth. “It’s just that I’ve always been at the edges of all this. Never really stepped off into the deep end. Flashes and insights, things I couldn’t.” They were walking side by side, both looking ahead now. “But this. This is more, this is so much more. How am I going to ever go back to just finding lost poodles?” Her smile was all the braver for the fear it sought to hide.
Maribel smiled once more and pulled her along. A sense of inevitability had descended upon her, a mantle of tranquility. She had no idea what she would do once confronted with Kubu, that hovering mass of black ink and that gaunt, skeletal face, had no idea how she would compel him, but she didn’t care. Her desire, her need, was irrefutable. Nothing could deny her. With the phooka before and the psychic by her side she would meet what wonders this place would throw at her, and emerge with her child in her arms.
Sofia
. The name was a talisman, a summons, a need that transcended anything she had ever felt. It went deeper than hunger, consumed her more than any love she had felt for another. Through Sofia she would align her life, find herself, recreate herself. Her child, her girl, her baby. Moving, walking, she pressed her hand to her flat stomach. To the hollow that filled her now. But not for long.
The phooka had stopped. His gaunt, hirsute form was waiting for them, sloping shoulders, hands hanging by his thighs. Eyes milky white even in this amber light, watching them approach. Horns great and spiraled beyond all possibility. Isobel still couldn’t see him, so Maribel pulled her to a stop, and waited.
“We approach a Guardian,” he said, his voice sepulchral in the tunnel. He lifted his arm, and pointed with a long nailed finger into the gloom beyond. “It will try to stop you.”
“Maribel--who said that?” asked Isobel, turning to her. “A voice—I heard—“
“A guardian?” asked Maribel, impatiently cutting off her friend. “What kind of guardian?”
The phooka canted its head to one side, and a saturnine smile twisted its broad, goatish mouth. “Most often a hound, but sometimes a bull, or a man dressed in the fur of a bear. The passage to where Kubu… dwells is never open. Not to you or your friend, not while you yet breath, while your blood still runs warm.
“All right,” said Maribel. “Lead on.”
The phooka bowed its head, and turned to stride on, bare feet on the dirt floor.
“What were you speaking with?” asked Isobel. “What’s leading us?”
“We have a guide, kind of,” said Maribel, making a decision. “It’s warned us of something up ahead.”
“A guide? A ghost?” Isobel’s face was all fierce focus. She released Maribel’s hand and extended her arm into the darkness, fingers splayed as if she were to unleash a bolt of power into the dark. She closed her eyes, frowned, and held her breath as she focused.
The phooka paused, stopped. Turned its great head to look over one shoulder at the psychic. Its smile was amused, malicious.
Isobel snatched her hand back as if burned. Eyes snapped open, “What is that? What is it?”
“Did you sense it?” asked Maribel, curious despite her need to go on.
“Yes. Not human.” She rubbed both hands on her jeans, and then lowered her chin and gripped Maribel by the shoulders. Stared her in the eyes, “What. Are we. Following?”
“A phooka, or at least, that’s what it calls itself. A man with the head of a goat. It’s what showed me the alley that led us here. It’s opening the way to Kubu.”
“To Kubu,” said Isobel. “A man with a goat’s head. Maribel, let’s go back. Come on. This is not right, this is going to only get worse and worse. Please.”
Maribel smiled. Reached up, took Isobel’s hands in her own. Nothing seemed able to stop her. Nothing could. Her confidence was a bronze shield, her certainty irrefutable. Before it, Isobel’s fear was inconsequential. “Come on,” she said, and began to walk. Isobel, however, stood firm.
“No. I can’t. I can’t just follow you into this.”
“If you don’t, I’ll continue alone. And without you I will become lost down here.”
Isobel looked back, and then at Maribel. “You would, wouldn’t you. Just walk ahead into this nightmare by yourself.” Isobel shook her head. “You’re mad. And I am mad for helping you. God help us both.” She walked forward, and reached out for Maribel’s hand. Took it, and then focused and stepped past her, deeper into the tunnel, leading her on.
The phooka, who had been watching, also turned and continued to walk.
Minutes passed. No more questions from Isobel. The tunnel had begun to slope down, at first unnoticeably, and then with a definite gradient, always seeming to level out just ahead, but never quite doing so. Side tunnels branched off, but all of them were shrouded in gloom. No noise came from their depths, and the smell was at all times a musty staleness, the air still, dead, inert.
And then the phooka was gone. Slipped ahead into the shadows, and in its place a low growl reverberated, rumbling deep and powerfully and felt in the cavity of the chest rather than heard with the ears. It was a primordial sound, bypassing the mind and cutting straight to the instincts, the kind of sound that humans had been running from ever since they descended from the trees. It echoed and reechoed down the shadowed length of the tunnel, and then, reluctantly died away.
“What,” asked Isobel, voice rigid, “the fuck. Was that?”
“The guardian,” said Maribel, peering ahead. Despite herself she felt suddenly nervous. It was one thing to feel complacently confident in an empty tunnel. Another to continue to feel so after that sound. The darkness seemed suddenly to constrict about them. The walls of the tunnel seemed narrower, the weight of the ceiling making her want to lower her head.
“A bear? A… what. Some kind of mythical monster? A tiger shark?”
“Tiger shark?” asked Maribel, turning to stare at Isobel. Who stared right back, eyes wide, surprised at her own words.
“I… I don’t know why I said that. OK, I guess the odds of that being a tiger shark are pretty low.”
“A tiger shark,” repeated Maribel, feeling some of the darkness lift, unable to keep herself from smiling.
“Look, whatever, okay, probably not a shark, but still. What the hell?”
The growl again. All humor drained away. It was as if white, freezing water, luminous with electricity and panic had washed over them, an invisible tide of fear. The two women immediately stepped closer together. It was getting louder.
“A dog, I think,” said Maribel. “The phooka said it could be a dog.”
And then they saw it, the floating specks of crimson light. Moving toward them from up ahead, glowing like two gobs of lava cooling into stone, as if two small light bulbs of incredible potency had been dropped into a pool of blood from whose depth they glowed with malignant luminescence.
Isobel took a step back, then a second. Maribel raised her chin. Her heart was a fluttering thing, a wounded bird beating against her ribs. Where was the phooka? Had it not promised to open the ways for her? Why was it not commanding this guardian to one side?
The Guardian stepped forward, its form coalescing from the darkness into view. Broad enough that its shoulders brushed each side of the tunnel, furred so thickly and blackly that it was only distinguishable from the shadows around it by the blue tints that flickered over its pelt as it approached. It plugged the tunnel before them like a cork does a wine bottle, and approached with a negligent slowness.
“Oh god,” said Isobel.
Maribel’s breaths were coming in faint shivers, seeming unable to fully escape her mouth or make their way down her throat. The Guardian was neither dog nor hound nor wolf nor any other canine she had ever seen. It seemed prehistoric, dredged up from ages past to kill them in a manner not seen or heard of for millennia. Jaws large enough to bite then them in half, its breath filling the tunnel with its fetid rankness.
There was no logic to its presence down here, no logic to its existence, to its residing in a tunnel beneath the streets of Manhattan. Had it been down here before she and Isobel had ventured below? Had it been summoned by their presence? Were they in some place that was intelligible, real? Maribel brushed all thoughts aside.
The Guardian moved closer. The sound of its thick fur brushing against the brick walls filled the air. The harshness of its breath, the gentle, understated pad of its feet, married to the clicking of its talons on the ground.
Death
, thought Maribel.
Death
.
And then the phooka was there, standing beyond it, one hand raised, long fingers splayed, staring intently at the Guardian. “Walk,” he said. “The hound can only bar your way if you allow it.”
Maribel blinked, and before she could think it through, began to move forward. It was like stepping off a ledge, emerging from behind the barricades into full view of an enemy, casting aside doubt or reason. Isobel was calling her, but the sounds made no sense. She didn’t listen. Looked instead into the red eyes. Each as large as a clenched fist, slitted by a pupil in whose center her own reflection gleamed. She moved forward, step by step, and the Guardian stopped, raising its great head to sight down the length of its muzzle at her.
If this was to be her death, then so be it. If this was the end, then she would die. But she couldn’t turn, couldn’t run. Fear sluiced away from her. What was her life that she should covet it, defend it, run to hide and treasure it,
alone
?
Closer she walked, until it loomed before her. Watching and still. Heavy furred brows lowered over its eyes. Black lips curled back from mottled gums as it snarled, the sound seeming to kindle like the thunderous approach of heat lightning out over the Mediterranean. Fangs gleamed slick with saliva, an ivory latticework of blades.