Shadow - Monsters, Machines and Mad Scientists!: Episode CXIII

The great brass-plated doors of the research station were sealed shut – welded, in fact. Frostfire paced back and forth through the snow in front of them, making a trench. Sarah and Dimsun sat nearby beneath the shade of a gigantic pine tree, watching over Sergeant Jansen and trying to keep him, and themselves, warm. They had been there for at least an hour.

“This is pointless,” Sarah could rein in her temper no longer, “you’re going to have us all freeze to death here Frostfire!” It was difficult to shout through chattering teeth, but somehow she managed it. “We should head back to Blizzardale. It was positively tropical compared to this!”

Frostfire paused in his pacing for just a moment, his cold eyes turning towards Sarah, then back to his path and his feet started to move once more. Sarah nearly screamed, but instead she looked down at weak, pale Jansen and wondered how they were going to survive this.

It was so frustrating! All that stood between them and shelter was a pair of stupid doors, but the Stoneskins had already tried forcing them and they would not budge. It made her so angry that they had travelled all this way, risked their lives on numerous occasions, only to be defeated by a bit of heavy duty welding. It was ridiculous!

But of course, her whole situation was ridiculous. Less than a week ago by her reckoning she had been preparing to spend Christmas with her mother, she had been planning what to do about her relationship with Thomas and she had been considering all that she had learned about the Christian faith from that Advent Explored course. All that was literally another world away now. Here she was surrounded by monsters and schemes, everything was strange and new and she had somehow come upon strange powers which made her into some kind of superhero. There were times in the past few days, though she would hardly have admitted it even to herself, when she had hoped that it was all some horrid nightmare; that she’d wake up in her bed with her mother looking over her and telling her that it was all a dream, that there were no such things as monsters.

But Sarah was, above all other things, a pragmatist. She hadn’t questioned the world of Shadow long because what good would that have done her? She had allowed herself to be taken on this quest by a creature who had first greeted her with threats of violence and yet whom she now saw as something more noble, though she still did not understand his intentions.

She worried that Frostfire wanted revenge on Ellis and for much of the journey had hoped that sticking with him would see her reunited with her former boyfriend – the one whom Shadowsmoke and the Slatewings called ‘The Construct’, and artificial being…

There was no doubt about it, her life was crazier right now than she could have ever imagined it being. She had no idea what her future held, but if they didn’t open those doors she would have no future at all. And the first of them to go would be Jansen.

She looked down at the pale officer once more, wondering what she could do for him. She thought of her new friends back in Larksborough, of Rupert and Jen and most of all beautiful Thomas. They would have sat her down and suggested they pray about it. Was that what she should do? Was this one of those times when prayer could help? She closed her eyes.

I still don’t know if you’re there, God, and I guess if you are then there’s not really any reason for you to listen to me even so, but… please help us out of this situation. I don’t want to freeze to death. I don’t want to watch Jansen slip away into the cold only to follow him a short time later. I don’t want this quest, whatever it is, to have been in vain. Please, God, help us.

She kept her eyes closed a little longer, listening to the silence in her own head. After a few moments she tried again.

Thomas believes in you, God, and I trust him, but you’ve never given me any reason to believe. If that means anything it’s that I have never asked you for anything, but I’m asking now. Help us, God. If Thomas is right then not only are you in charge of everything but you care about us. How is letting us die in the cold caring?

Again there was only silence in her mind. She opened her eyes and looked up to a patch of grey sky just visible through the forest canopy.

“Is that it then?” she called out through her half frozen lips, “Is that the great revelation of your divinity? Leaving us to freeze to death? Some God you are! I should never have got involved in that church, never listened to their delusions. If I hadn’t done that then… then maybe I wouldn’t even be here! I hate you! I hate the nothing that you are! The lie that tempts people to believe in better things only to find themselves falling into the abyss just like everyone else. My mother was right about you!”

“Uh, Sarah,” Dimsun said softly, breaking her flow of vitriol and making her blush despite the cold, “you’re glowing, so, uh, whatever god that is you’re shouting at, you might want to give me his address.”

She glanced down at her arms, saw the strange greenish glow that indicated the return of her whedonesque superpowers.

“But first,” Dimsun continued, “you might want to blast open those doors!”

Sarah felt shame through her anger, but she knew now that she needed to hold onto it. Until she had better control over these new powers it seemed to be strong emotion which brought them on. As she picked herself up and marched towards the welded-shut entrance to the research station she wondered, is that how prayers get answered sometimes? Was that a yes, all along? Would Thomas’ God have let me rail at him like that just to save us? She thought of the story of the crucifixion, as they had taught it at the last Advent Explored session and realised that, yes, sometimes that was how this God was supposed to work and her sense of shame grew even as the glow from her skin increased.

“Ah,” Frostfire said as she approached, pausing in his pacing for only the second time since they had arrived, “she finally gets it.”

“You could have just asked,” she retorted, feeling guilty even as she did so.

“And you perform on demand, now, do you?”

She gave him a glare, then focussed her attention on the doors. They looked so insignificant really, despite their grand brass plating and ostentatious embossed eagle motif, but she remembered watching Frostfire and Dimsun try to force them and knew that she would need to put a lot of effort into her attack.

She took a deep breath, felt the mysterious energies within her gather and swell, then charged the welded gap between the two doors with a furious shoulder ram. She felt the force passing through her and into the door, but nothing happened, the door didn’t even shake from the impact.

“Disappointing,” Frostfire said and looked like he was about to start pacing again.

“I’m not finished yet,” Sarah replied and prepared for another charge. This time she waited longer, gathering even more energy until he skin was glowing brighter than ever before. She felt ridiculous. She felt powerful. She charged again.

She had expected the door to rattle this time, to budge a little backwards, ready to be beaten in on the next attempt, or the one after that. In this regard at least, she was disappointed.

The strip of welding between the doors crumbled to dust at her impact, almost vaporising as it vanished into the darkness beyond and the doors it had held swung open to send Sarah tumbling into a dusty unlit entrance hall. Brass caryatids stared at her from alcoves in the gloom and, somewhere above, a snow-covered glass dome let in no light at all.

“Well done,” Frostfire said as he marched past her into the chamber. Dimsun followed shortly after, just as she was getting to her feet. He carried Sergeant Jansen over his shoulder until he reached a low table at the far end of the hall where he could lay the militiaman down, then he started lighting some of the gas lamps which lined the chamber. Sarah closed the doors to keep out the cold.

“It wasn’t like this before,” Frostfire said cryptically, staring around the empty hall with his icy eyes.

“They obviously abandoned it,” Dimsun said, lighting the last gaslamp before returning to Jansen. Sarah joined him by the officer’s side.

“Will he be okay?” she asked, the glow from her skin fading and with it all her energy and strength.

“If we can find some kind of infirmary in here, then yes, I should be able to revive him.”

“Then we’d best start looking.”

“But why seal it up?” Frostfire asked, as if the conversation hadn’t just shifted.

Dimsun sighed. “I don’t know. Perhaps because they didn’t want anyone else to access their research? Perhaps just to keep the snow out? There could be any number of reasons.”

It was Sarah who first spotted the glowing eyes in the far corner of the room, near an open doorway into darkness. She almost missed, them, her eyes gliding across them as she worried about Jansen, but then she did a double take and there they were, staring at her.

“Perhaps it was to keep something in,” she suggested, backing away slowly and drawing the eyes of the Stoneskins, ironically, towards her.

And then the creature launched its first attack.