Blackteeth, page 21
She already knew she’d been too complacent in her time in Portland and silently cursed her overconfidence. Still, there was hope to be had. She could lead them away from the children, and the children could escape. She deliberately dragged one foot to make noise. Her toes hit a rock that ricocheted against a wall, and it sounded as if she was ringing a dinner bell. Every bit of territory she enticed them away from the group was a good thing.
Hesper had learned things in her ten years in the abyss, and she would use every one of her tricks to outwit the monsters. It had been two years, but she still knew her way around the builders’ world. She had spent months, if not years, mapping out the place in her mind, as well as learning the locations of the pools based on the builders’ symbols left on the walls. However, she’d never before been in a footrace with the Blackteeth, and she was almost curious how she would do.
Hesper glanced back once and saw the lights following her. She lit up another path for the Blackteeth, and before she looked forward again, she saw murky shapes moving swiftly behind her. Three of the deadly creatures moved abreast in the grand hallway, each eager to reach their prey before the others.
Hesper nearly tripped as she once again became the target of a pursuit. She wasn’t used to having so many chasing her at once. Understanding that there weren’t merely three but more than she cared to count at the moment, was paramount. She’d dragged their attention onto herself, and she would have to shake them before she safely hid. She put her head down and charged forth, urging speed in her limbs. She was glad for every day that she had made herself run in Portland, grateful for every moment that wind sprints had been the exercise of the day, and thankful that she’d been given an opportunity to make amends for unintentionally leaving children behind.
Hesper glanced back again and saw that she was making headway. The closest Blackteeth were dropping back. It was convenient because she knew that she’d almost reached her first destination.
A minute later, she recognized the marks on the nearest building and knew exactly where she was. A piece of black cloth had been tucked into the edge of the adjacent doorway. It fluttered in the breeze that Hesper had created, and no one or no “thing” might have noticed its significance. Turning a corner, Hesper scrambled up onto the roof, using hands and feet to propel herself as quickly as she could. She ripped her shirt on the bottom and bound the cut she’d made with the bush axe.
Looking back over the long gallery, she could see the lights still headed for her. The lines didn’t waver as they proceeded along at a lively pace, evidently keen to catch the one that had so long eluded them. She counted over a dozen paths, not including the nearest three that were closing on her.
Hesper smiled grimly and took deep breaths to control the noise she was making. She worked at regulating her breathing. She took air in through her nose and out through her mouth until her heartbeat slowed considerably.
She moved across the rooftop and made it just to the edge of the next one before the three Blackteeth caught up to her position. She heard them clicking and breathing harshly. They approached the base of the building she’d climbed, having seen her turn the corner. Were they hesitant because they knew what she was capable of doing? Had they seen the heads of the two Blackteeth she’d encountered before? Or perhaps the heads of the many others she’d managed to kill before she’d escaped? It could be one thing, or it could be all of the things.
Hesper reached out to the short wall between the buildings and purposely scratched it with the bush axe. The noise was louder than she anticipated, and she jerked in response as if something had jumped at her.
The Blackteeth were immediately silent.
Hesper moved further, inching around the edge of the building, using the curve of the cave’s roof above her as a guide. She tapped the roof with the axe ever so lightly so as not to be too obvious. Tap. Tap. Tap. Here I am! Come and get me, monsters! Come and play!
After a few seconds, the Blackteeth couldn’t fight the temptation, and the sounds of them scrabbling up the walls after her were almost deafening.
The lights from behind and below them showed them silhouetted in all their freaky glory. Tall, skinny shapes with long, twisting black hair loomed over the edge of the building as they rose to a vertical but slightly bent position as though they intended to charge her at any second. They were the epitome of creepiness, and the sight caused goosebumps to break out along Hesper’s arms.
The only thing lacking in presenting a complete picture of horror was that they were backlit, and Hesper couldn’t see their dark eyes and their pitch-colored, shark-like teeth. She forgot about that detail immediately as they moved as a group toward her. She had an idea that they obviously savored their contemplation of the entrapped victim.
Hesper took a step back and swung the bush axe warningly, knowing they could see her better than she could see them. “Hey, bitches,” she said. “Long time no see. I learned a few things while I was gone. The difference between cappuccino, latte, and espresso, for one.”
The Blackteeth hesitated and one snarled menacingly. The prey wasn’t acting exactly how prey typically acted. Hesper frowned because there wasn’t time to play games. She adjusted her shoulders so that she cowered just as she should before such a tremendous threat. She needed to act like prey. She needed to act as if she was truly frightened, and the truth was that she was truly frightened, but she was also angry and spoiling for a fight.
“But it wasn’t like I didn’t teach myself a few things before I left, either,” she muttered. She took another step back and felt for the edge of the wall with her bare foot.
Hesper studied the Blackteeth even while they studied her with shadow-filled faces. She could see beyond them that the others were closing in and knew her hourglass was quickly running out of sand.
“Screw you and your shitty black teeth!” she yelled and spun, sprinting for the next roof. She jumped and landed on her feet, not hesitating as she went.
Hesper didn’t hear the Blackteeth moving, but she knew they wouldn’t be able to resist chasing the animal who ran from them. The massive crashing that followed her movement caused her to look over her shoulder once again as she halted precipitously, ready to dash away again if necessary. The same lights from the ground revealed that no more Blackteeth followed her. She couldn’t see the hole squarely in the middle of the roof, but she knew it was there all the same. She’d spent days setting it up, working away at the construction so that it wouldn’t bear any weight on its roof. She’d worked carefully and quietly, chipping away at its loadbearing walls so that anything that walked over its middle section would be too much weight. But luckily, she’d found enough sharpened stones and pieces of metal from various places in the builders’ world to place in the floor underneath the weakened construction. She’d even made a rough form of concrete with sand and water and rocks to set the makeshift stakes in place. Any one or any thing that collapsed the roof would fall directly onto a hundred honed and roughly improvised spears, impaling them in a truly horrid way. Lastly, she’d marked the door with the black cloth, so she would be able to use it again one day. She’d even warned Mun-Hee about not using the roofs of any building with cloths marking the doors, and there were more than a few of them. After all, she’d had years to set her traps.
Hesper didn’t even need to look down in the hole to know that all three Blackteeth had succumbed to the snare she’d made well before she’d escaped this world. One of the creatures was left shrieking with pain as it bumped around the deadly weapons that pierced it while the other two groaned with obvious agony.
Only five seconds more and the lights from the interior slowly blinked on, and the hole was revealed from the bottom up. Almost all of the roof had crumpled with the weight of the monsters. The hole was massive, and Hesper could see one of the Blackteeth thrashing and wriggling on the floor as it tried to get loose of the rigged weapons that had likely mortally wounded it.
Looking past the roof again, Hesper could see the lines of lights coming closer. She worked her way across the roof and across two dozen more before she slipped into one of the side tunnels that was out of the sight of the imminent Blackteeth. Let them fret about the demise of their brethren, she thought. The Blackteeth did mourn their dead; Hesper had seen it more than a few times. Deaths of their own kind also infuriated them, but she had another adage for them that her mamaw often used when the children had fussed about being teased in return for teasing someone else: If you’re going to stir a pot of shit, then be prepared to lick the spoon.
Of course, Mamaw hadn’t used profanity, but Hesper also knew her grandmother would think that the change in wording was seemly.
There were always times that Hesper wished she had a working watch. It had been easier to use her cellphone as a clock in the world she’d left behind. The dip in the water probably would have killed any watch she’d been wearing. Two dips, that was. The first when she confronted Moss and the second when she’d taken them through the pool.
Alice through the looking glass, Hesper thought. It must have been hours later. She’d probably killed three of the Blackteeth, and the others were hunting her frantically. From a cliff high above the long gallery, she could see the paths of the lights going back and forth as they searched in a rough circle around where the roof had collapsed. She could also tell that they carefully searched the roofs and that they were checking the buildings.
Hesper had a moment of satisfaction as one of her older boobytraps was sprung. The door of a building was opened, and the long length of metal she’d bent backward snapped forward with the release of its pressure switch. Her grandfather had used that one on a trail that raccoons frequented. The raccoons were breaking into her grandfather’s hen house and killing the chickens. He found a common path for the animals and set it up with several spring traps. The raccoon would trip the wire which would launch the thin wood spear with several nails driven through the end. It hadn’t seemed particularly fair to a very young and innocent Hesper, but then she hadn’t yet met the Blackteeth.
The Blackteeth screamed as they freed their brethren from the trap. The shrieks echoed through the long gallery and reverberated off the cave’s walls. Hesper could see slow progress of ones helping the wounded one. The trap had injured the leg of the creature, and they dragged it down the grand hallway toward where they kept their foul nest. It would be fortunate for Hesper if the creature bled out and died.
Hesper watched from her perch. She’d found this place years before. She’d even showed it to Mun-Hee, but he must have forgotten it or judged it not to be safe enough for the children he was helping to escape because it was clear that no one had been there in a long time. It was a natural outcropping of rock that the builders had left intact. Climbing the walls from below entailed using the black ivy that grew in unyielding clumps. Once she was on the outcropping, she could see all the lights being triggered by the very active Blackteeth.
They searched for some time; meandering patterns of light spoke of their confusion and urgent desire to find their prey.
It occurred to Hesper that it would be the best time to free the three in the holes but getting there past all of the hunting Blackteeth would be problematic at best.
And it was her turn to stir a pot of shit, hopefully without having to lick the same spoon.
Every child who had been taken by the Blackteeth came with whatever they had. In her possession Hesper had had a Hello Kitty bracelet and ring. She’d also had a length of string in her pocket for making a string version of Jacob’s ladder and kitten’s whiskers. When the Blackteeth had stripped her, it had also taken the bracelet, ring, and string. Unfortunately, this was their way of ensuring their prey had no defenses, even puny ones.
On the opposite side of that coin was that Hesper had piles of clothing to look through for items that could help her. Years before she’d found a slingshot that some poor child had stuck in his or her back pocket. It folded out into the shape of a large U and had a nice rubber cord with a leather projectile pocket in which to place one’s ammunition. Furthermore, it didn’t make a lot of noise when it was used. Initially Hesper thought she would pop Blackteeth in the head with it and perhaps kill them, too, but that had been a childish daydream that was ineffectual at best. Still, it hadn’t taken long for Hesper to realize the slingshot was much more useful in another way.
Hesper unfolded the slingshot, pushing the metal handles into place until there was a very soft click as its premade form settled into position. She reached for the pile of walnut-sized rocks she’d placed beside the slingshot and selected one of the appropriate heft. She carefully placed it in the projectile pocket. The rubber creaked just a little as she pulled it back as far as her arm could manage. She aimed and let the rock fly.
She counted in her head until she heard a loud crack on the opposite side of the grand hallway. The lights froze in place for a minute and then several lines started moving toward where the rock had hit.
It would have been better if she could have nailed one of the creatures in the middle of their awful foreheads, but the act of discombobulating them was almost as satisfying. She waited minutes and did it again, adjusting her target for a place a hundred feet away from where she’d aimed the first one.
Pausing to watch the fallout, Hesper counted her in mind. After awhile she could tell by the rambling, disorganized pace of the Blackteeth that the things were becoming frustrated and angry. They kept to this side of the long gallery and away from the direction that Tam and Mun-Hee had taken the children. Certainly, it had been at least two hours, and if they had made it, then they had gone while Hesper had distracted the monsters.
Hesper had a little shining ray of hope that they had made it. She might not ever really know if they had or hadn’t, but she could choose to believe that they had. Furthermore, it could motivate her to move forward with what she had to do.
Hesper had to think about her needs. She needed a little sleep. She needed some water. She needed to make certain Luke and Nash had made it out with the girl with no name and the boy named Bullet. She needed to free the other three children who could be slaughtered at any time by the Blackteeth. And finally, she needed to figure out how to get another key so that she could take those children back to the other side.
Just a few small things, she thought. Wait. Am I being sarcastic? Why yes, I am.
Chapter Twenty
He who chases after a deer will take
no notice of hares. – Korean proverb
Hesper dozed haltingly on the outcropping, keeping one ear open. She opened her eyes occasionally and looked over the long gallery, seeing the lights going in circles and then in lines and then stopping for a time. After an extended period of time, she saw no more lights and knew that the Blackteeth had likely gone back to their lair to nosh on hors d’oeuvres and cocktails with froufrou umbrellas. Maybe they sat around filing their pitch-colored teeth and practicing their grr faces. They sell Tupperware or Mary Kay to each other?
Hesper managed to drop into a deeper sleep and there was that nasty Blackteeth again that popped unwanted into her head. The scarred face studied her with the deep well-like eyes burrowing into Hesper’s soul.
When it spoke, it was like listening to nails scraping down a chalkboard. “You take so many of us,” it said.
The Blackteeth sat on a nearby rock, like in the dream she’d had before. Hesper sat on the ground and made her legs go crisscross applesauce like an elementary school-aged child. Again, she was not afraid but merely wary as though something was trying to distract her from what she needed to do. An itch burned in the back of her mind, prodding her unsuccessfully to recognize something she should know, but the recognition eluded her.
“Tit for tat,” Hesper said.
“I don’t understand that.”
“You kill us. I kill you. Perhaps you should find a less vexing prey. Sheep. Goats. Chickens even. You might like chicken. They say everything tastes like chicken. It’s win-win for you, although you wouldn’t be able to hunt them like children.” Hesper bared her teeth at the Blackteeth in a way that humans in a coffee shop would have mistaken for a smile. “Perhaps you should do so before I do something that can never be taken back.”
“What will you do, small human?” the Blackteeth asked interestedly. “You were gone. Now you’re back. You don’t have the support of the others who’ve escaped us. You can only kill us until we kill you.” There was a small pause and then it offered, “If you come to us now, I will finish your suffering. I will bring you to death so quickly that only a smidge of time will pass before you cease to be. We will absorb your essence. You will become one of us.”
“So, I should give myself up, and you’ll be merciful?”
“Yes.”
Hesper was reminded of a movie she’d seen. It was one of many she’d missed while she’d been gone. In any case, one of the characters was literal to an extreme. The Blackteeth in her dream was like that character. It couldn’t understand sarcasm, and it didn’t appreciate her sense of humor.
“Not going to happen,” she said. “How about you give yourself up to me, and I’ll make it fast.” Hesper imitated slicing a blade across her throat indicating that she would take its head quickly.
“No.”
Hesper made a face. “I had to try.”
