Blackteeth, page 26
Yes, they’re afraid, she answered herself conclusively.
“The humans are coming for you,” Hesper said instead of replying to the proposition. “They’ll bring weapons far worse than anything that I’ve conceived. They’ll exterminate you. Or worse. They’ll let a few of you live in a zoo like animals. You’ll be in quarters like those holes you’ve put us into. If you’re lucky, they’ll toss down a pumpkin for you to play with at Halloween. Children, the same children you formerly stole and then slaughtered, will stare at you through bars and laugh at you.”
The Blackteeth frowned at Hesper. It plainly didn’t understand all of her references.
“It’s like a house of cards coming down with a slight breeze,” Hesper said. She sighed and proceeded to explain, “Playing cards are a game that humans use for entertainment. One way is to take the thin pieces of cardboard, I guess you would call it, and stack them against each other to make a brace. Then you do the same on the other side and slowly build upward until you have a bigger structure. It’s called a house of cards. But it’s fragile, and its foundation is shaky. It doesn’t take much to blow it down.”
“Why build it at all?” the Blackteeth asked.
“For fun? For something to do?” Hesper asked sarcastically. “Because it’s a challenge? Any of those. It’s like that other saying I told you about sleeping in the bed you’ve made. It was a game and now it’s a saying. You’ve built a house of cards here, and it won’t take much to take it all down. It’s crumbling even while we’re having this conversation. This conversation. Right here. Right now.”
Hesper suddenly had a light-bulb moment of understanding. She grinned at the Blackteeth, and the creature was clearly taken aback by the expression on her would-be victim’s face. The Blackteeth snarled then thought better of it and settled back into place.
“This is how you talk to humans,” Hesper said. “This isn’t exactly a real dream. This is how you tell people like Thomas Madrid to do your bidding. And all the others you’ve…contracted with. Some of them are like Madrid who want something in return. Some of them probably only want their children back, like Luna’s father. Although I guess if he was really a good person, he wouldn’t have shot that woman at the lodge.”
If the Blackteeth could have shrugged, it probably would have. It simply looked away as if it didn’t feel like acknowledging Hesper’s perspicuity.
“When are these…humans coming?” it asked her.
Hesper’s smile grew wider. “You’ll know when you start dying. I won’t give you a damn thing.”
“Look before us,” the Blackteeth said. It waved a clawed hand, and the blue lights came on all around them. The lights revealed a large area that the builders had cleared an eternity before. Hesper had seen one of these rooms before. There was a counterpart on the far ends of the grand hallway that she’d once explored. She called it the amphitheater because it resembled the ones she’d seen as a child. It was a place where the builders might gather, and the tiered benches would allow them to look upon a platform in the middle. Two statues of the builders sat on each side of the stand, long hands spread out as if entreating their watchers to pay attention to them and their fellow creatures. But the Blackteeth had made it a place where they ruled supreme. They burned piles of the black ivy on each side of something that Hesper would have called a grand podium. They waited in a silent and still group surrounding this area and looked expectantly upon Hesper and the scarred Blackteeth.
“Wow,” Hesper said. “You’ve made fire. Very impressive.”
The Blackteeth glanced at her. “We’ll come for you soon. We’ll take you to this place. We will carve the heart from your chest while you’re still breathing. You’ll watch your own death. Your eyes will only go dim after I hold your bloody heart in my hands and puncture it with my claws. I will squeeze it until it crumbles within my fist. Then I will drink from the liquid it produces and share my bounty with my brethren.”
Hesper had to admit that the Blackteeth painted a horribly gruesome picture. Maybe the creatures had once been inspired by the Aztecs, or possibly it had been the other way around.
“I will not offer my proposal again,” the Blackteeth warned her.
“Maybe that works with other humans,” Hesper said. She looked around and saw what she had called the control room of the power plant. She’d been there before, but she hadn’t known what to do in it. Lights flickered, and she glanced at the pendant in her hand. She looked up at the Blackteeth who was also looking around interestedly.
“You’ve got nothing but death to frighten me,” Hesper told it, and the Blackteeth turned its dark gaze upon her, “and I’ve walked this road before. You might kill me, but the others are coming now. Your time as the boogeyman who comes from the river for our children is nearing its end, and there’s nothing you can do but die screaming when it happens.”
“Hesper,” someone said.
Hesper blinked and the dream shifted.
Hesper opened her eyes. Someone said her name again. She blinked in real time and then rubbed her eyes, immediately feeling the pull and stretch of skin over bruised flesh and muscles. Her back and head throbbed in concert. Luna leaned over her and urgently repeated her name.
“Luna, what is it?” Hesper asked even while she thought, But everything hurts, and I’m ready to crawl back into bed, if only I had a bed. Even a wadded-up shirt sounds good now. She sat up, using her arms to propel herself into a sitting position, and everything hurt just a little more.
“Noises out there,” the girl said quickly, quietly, pointing toward the door. “Loud noises. Everyone is hiding at the back of the room. They couldn’t get you to wake up so they left you.”
Oh, and you couldn’t because you’ve got no one else to protect you. They probably kicked you to the proverbial curb. Hesper would have groaned, but she suspected that would hurt. She must have been asleep for a while because her mouth was dry like a wasteland. She reached for the McDonald’s cup and drank from it again. Someone had refilled it with the spring water that flowed from the builders’ walls and left it near her.
It reminded Hesper of something.
The builders. The solitary one holding the pendants in the air like a prize. Symmetry and balance. Everything was set up a certain way even as they mined an area for resources that Hesper didn’t understand the point of mining.
Hesper had been tired, in pain, and afraid, and her thinking had been curtailed. Now she was just aching like she’d been tossed over a cliff, hauled back to the top, and then tossed over a second time. The Advil had helped for certain, but it wasn’t going to take everything away like a magic potion.
Forcing all her ailments to the back of her brain, she tilted her head to listen, and there were sounds from outside the room.
Boom. Boom. Boomboomboom.
It sounded like gun shots. Distant and muffled, they still stood out in the land of all that was quiet. They weren’t close, but they weren’t all that far away, either.
Hesper said, “Well, crap. I guess I wasn’t just yanking its chain after all.” Who is it? Who’s come?
Then it occurred to Hesper that the Blackteeth wouldn’t be happy at all about the intrusion into their world. It brought more questions to her mind. What would a vindictive creature with little remorse do? Why they might go get their captives so they could use them a little more. They might threaten to kill the captives. They might even kill one to show the intruders that the Blackteeth meant business.
“I need a light,” she said abruptly. Luna jumped to her feet and looked around frantically.
“I need a light!” Hesper said louder so that the children in the back of the room hidden in cubbies and niches could hear her. “One of your phones maybe. Right now. I mean, right the fuck now!”
Hesper scrambled to her feet and silently berated the black dots that popped up along the sides of her vision. She teetered for a moment and then the dots dissipated. Her head cleared. She leaned against a wall for support while everything else found a way to equalize. Her kidney on the right side beat a bongo drumbeat full of pain that seemed to cut through the middle of her back. It felt like someone had their hands on her organ and was wringing it out like a rag full of water.
Kostya appeared on her right side holding out a cellphone. Hesper recognized the apple on the back and knew it was an iPhone. She motioned at him, saying, “Turn the flashlight on.”
He quickly operated the device, and the flashlight feature clicked on. Hesper grabbed the phone from him, pointed the light toward the walls, and began walking the perimeter of the room, stumbling once as she did. She hadn’t seen this particular chamber before. If the builders were consistent…and they had been consistent, inhumanly consistent…then this room was right off the memorial on the opposite side from the shape of the I. The power plant was placed accordingly off to the other direction. On the parallel side, there was a place where a power plant would be positioned if the builders had wanted one there, which apparently, they had not. They had machinery there that still blinked with low blue lights, but there wasn’t easy comprehension for Hesper, and she hadn’t wasted a lot of time thinking about it.
“Are those gunshots?” Kostya asked. “That means someone’s come for us, da?”
“Maybe they’ve just come to kill the Blackteeth,” Hesper said. “If they don’t know where we are, then there is a shit-ton of area for them to search. That’s assuming that the Blackteeth don’t come prancing in here to kill us first.” Also a strong possibility, but I won’t emphasize that unless I have to.
Kostya shrank back.
“Get whatever you can to use as a weapon,” Hesper said. “Tie rocks in a t-shirt and use it like a club. Pile up rocks from the walls to throw. If you’ve got keys put them between your fingers. Whatever you’ve got. If we can keep them off us, whoever’s come in with guns might have enough time to find us.”
Silently, Hesper didn’t think much of their odds. The Blackteeth would be flowing through the door en masse and quickly. The children were their bargaining chips, and they wouldn’t hesitate to use them. And as for killing one, that would probably be Hesper’s job du jour. They hated her most of all, and they wouldn’t get another chance to kill her if they used her to trade for their lives. Certainly, the Blackteeth understood that. Death first and foremost to Hesper Whitehead, who had thrown a monkey wrench into their mighty works. Many monkey wrenches.
The other children began to gather behind Kostya. Two of them were whimpering. One was sobbing. All were frightened.
Hesper followed the perimeter of the wall, using the cellphone’s light to show the lines of the builders’ long-ago carving marks. She imagined they had machinery and not chisels. They used equipment to make their rooms and to make their homes. They liked to be equal where they could. They told a story about how they had come undone. Perhaps many of them had fled to the aboveground, wherever that was, or perhaps they had fled to her world. All things being the same, they were somewhat predictable.
Boom. Boom. Boomboom. Boomboomboom. It came from somewhere distant and Hesper didn’t pause to listen.
Kostya was directing children to find things to protect them. Rocks were the most common. Some of the walls had come undone in the centuries since they had been built. They had extra clothing from other children that had left them, and Hesper didn’t want to think about why that was the case.
Many of the children cringed back against the walls farthest away from where the Blackteeth entered, and more of them disappeared into the shadows, maybe hoping to escape being seen by the monsters who’d captured them.
All of the larger rooms had something in common. Symmetry. Parallelism. Mirror imaging in some cases. Corresponding places. Parity. And there was something else that Hesper had noticed many years ago. Every room, with the exception of the places that they lived in as homes, had two entries/exits. One typically sat precisely in front of a given room, although the doors sometimes had blended in with the onslaught of ivy and time. And there was also a second door.
Always.
Hesper had forgotten that all important part in her pain and agony. What she remembered was more important; she wasn’t yet dead, and she might still have a fighting chance to save some of these children.
Hesper suddenly felt like Velma in the Scooby-Doo cartoons, rapping on the walls for hollow spots and pulling out books from the shelves to find the secret door. Or had that been Freddie?
She touched the walls and ran her finger along the rough surface. She rounded one niche, and two children scuttled off like cockroaches in a room where a light has just been turned on.
“What are you looking for?” Luna asked.
“A way out,” Hesper said. She kept at her task. It was a large room, and the lights showed all its shadows. The phone’s light didn’t reach all the way back, and so she couldn’t get a better grasp of the size. She stepped to the middle and panned the light all the way around. It caught several of the children gawking at her anxiously.
Kostya, the Russian boy, stared at her as if she had grown horns.
Daisy, the American, gaped.
John, the British boy, started to open his mouth and then shut it again.
“We’ve looked everywhere here,” Kostya said. “There’s only one way out.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the door the Blackteeth had used.
“Yeah, well, that isn’t true,” Hesper said. “I just hurt too damn much to think of it before.”
She methodically surveyed the wall that was the farthest away from the entrance. It was covered with black ivy and several rockfalls were piled along the floor where the ceiling had started to disintegrate. She panned left and then right, stopping as she judged where the builders would have put the second door. There. No place else but there.
Hesper threw herself at the wall. She put the phone down so that the light would show what she was doing. She yanked at the ivy in earnest, pulling it away in great swaths of dark organic material. After a full minute, Kostya began to help her.
After another minute several of the children started to assist, even Luna tugged at the ivy, barely moving it with her small body.
The back wall was inundated with it. It had filled in the gaps and promoted the cracking of the material like some insidious snake wriggling into every nook and cranny. If someone had casually glanced at it, they would have seen a completely black surface, and that had been the rub. The surface was gradually revealed and then John said, “Oi, here’s a big, honking crack that looks straight. Bloody straight. It’s like it’s the edge of something.”
Hesper immediately went to him and began clearing the rock away from where he indicated. Not five minutes later it was obvious. There was the second door.
“That was there the whole time?” Kostya asked. “Vot eto pizdets!”
Hesper heard more gunshots and what sounded like the Blackteeth shrieking their outrage. The creatures were likely distracted, but it wouldn’t be for long.
She felt for the mechanism that would make the door move and found it, letting out a brief cry of joy. The door engaged and the grinding noise that would have normally made her wince, made her heart jump. Then it stopped with a dying grumble.
In mute frustration Hesper thumped the door. She looked down and found more rubble blocking the doorway. The rocks were blocking it and had been forced under the door. The door took a moment and then rumbled shut again. She’d seen this before. If they didn’t open all the way, then they automatically shut. She knelt before it and began to pry the offending pieces of rock away. Kostya, John, and Luna dropped to their knees to help. One used a plastic fork to pry at the rock.
Then there was another rumbling noise that filled the chamber, and Hesper glanced over her shoulder. The other entrance, the main entrance was opening. “Keep working at it,” she said, directing Kostya to the nearly concealed square she’d pressed before. “Then press this. Avoid the Blackteeth because they will harm you. Run until you find humans, not the man in the football jersey, but others, especially the ones shooting at the Blackteeth now, and they should help you.”
Kostya glanced at her as he pried at the rock at the bottom of the door. He hurriedly glanced over his shoulder at the door. “What are you going to do?” he asked. He threw some rock away from him and grabbed the cellphone with the light still on.
“I’m going to give you some time,” Hesper said. “It seems to be my thing lately.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
A charred place smells a
long time. – Russian proverb
It wasn’t a Blackteeth that slithered in. Instead, it was Thomas Madrid. Hesper had seen him once in court. His defense attorney had tried to get her to testify that it wasn’t his client who’d kidnapped her and kept her for ten years. She certainly had never said that it was him. She’d been fairly consistent in her answers. “I don’t remember,” “I don’t know,” and “It’s blurry,” had all been all mainstays of her testimony. Of course, she’d lied, but she hadn’t lied about Madrid because she hadn’t ever seen him.
Hesper’s mother had ushered her into the courtroom and then out again after her fleeting testimony. Even the defense attorney initially looked a little taken aback by Hesper’s appearance. At the time, she’d been severely underweight and pasty white from years of lightlessness. There hadn’t been enough makeup in the world to cover the dark circles under her eyes. Her hair had been shorn close to her head because it had been so gnarled it was irreparable. One of the newspapers had compared her appearance to that of a survivor from a concentration camp, and Hesper hadn’t cared for the analogy at all.
