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

"Hurry, this way!"

They ran through red brick streets turned bloody with rain. Endless torrents poured from a living sky of thunder, lightning and the twisting shadows of a god at once very new to this world and very, very old.

"They can't follow us through here!"

Feet splashed in puddles, skidded over little streams, kicked off walls when the corners seemed a little too tight. They followed one after the other, four mostly Human, four wholly Stoneskin.

- Me

"There's a back way into the castle grounds just through here."

Crumbling tenements hemmed them in, showered slate on their heads, watched them with the terrified eyes of small children, peering out from hollow darkness. Red had never seemed so chill before, so empty and so callous.

"Hurry! We don't have long!"

Hands grasped at crevices and loose mortar, feet scrambled against rain-slick, crumbling brick, talons gouged and tore and dug in and the blood of the wall was washed away into the gutters. Up, up, up and over into greenery, into trees and shrubs and long forgotten flower borders; into lawn turned meadow; into paving infested with weeds.

Whispered now, "They never check this part anymore and there's a way into the basement from the well." Misshapen hands pointed and gesticulated, turning a plan into something visible, something memorable. "Follow me!"

And follow they did, through overgrown undergrowth and brambles turned to razor wire, to a covered well, its winch rusted still, its hinges turning to dust. Three heaves and the cover was gone, then darkness, darkness, darkness, descended by rope and blind faith until up to the waist in cold, stagnant water. Then silence, catching of breath, listening. Two sets of eyes burned just bright enough to see by.

"Did you pull the cover back over?" A glance upwards would have confirmed it, but paranoia asks poor questions.

"Yes. It's tight."

"Then I think we're safe."

Echoing breath steadied and grew quiet, pounding hearts began to slow, racing minds to still. The chase was over, the hunt began.

"Are we ready?" asked the defacto leader of this small group of insurgents, her eyes glowing green in the darkness, just like they had when Sarah had first met her in the research station in Frostfeather, three months previously.

As Sarah and the two Stoneskins, taciturn Frostfire and the encyclopaedic Dimsun, nodded their replies, Diana Barkham drew her knife, held it, blade down, ready to strike, then pushed against the secret entrance to the basement levels of Skullbridge Castle; the ones she had played in as a child when her mother was too busy buried in books or laboratory experiments to care.

“This way,” she whispered and once again they followed.

Damp, mouldy tunnels threaded through bedrock towards flickering torchlight. Footsteps echoed, betrayed the position of guards best avoided. Diana’s knife glinted once, silver, once again, ruby red, and the one guard they couldn’t slip past fell dead. They hid his body in an alcove and Sarah tried not to feel sick. They had done this before, but it had never gotten any easier.

Up stairs and up again, detouring around guard patrols, through servant passages, all the places the young lady of the house was never supposed to see; past a complicit skullery maid, finger to her lips, eyes excited by the rebellion. Breaking through silently into an upper level, past more rooms than any house needed, all empty and covered in dust sheets, to the door of the upstairs study, the one room they knew to look in, the only room that mattered.

Diana stood by the door, ear pressed against the wood. She listened for a moment, then turned back to the others. “There is someone in there,” she said and readied her knife once more. Sarah prepared herself, followed the ritual she had developed to unlock her Slayer powers, no longer surprised that it started with a prayer to the God she was actually starting to believe in.

“Are you ready?” Diana whispered once more and as everyone nodded she reached for the door handle. Seconds seemed to pass with no movement, then the door burst open so suddenly even Sarah was surprised.

The study was enormous. A fire scaled up to match roared its heat into the room from one side and a large balcony window lay opposite the door. All the other walls were covered in bookshelves. In the centre of the room there sat an armchair , angled away from the door towards both window and flames. A woman sat within, her dark hair turning grey at the roots.

“Mother,” Diana whispered.

Sarah watched in silence as the younger Barkham advanced across the room, still moving like the huntress, her deformed body defying its appearance with grace. Her footsteps were silent and the only sound in the room seemed to come from the fireplace. The heat was incredible.

Diana approached the back of the chair, reached out towards the woman seated silently within and –

A wooden hand grabbed her arm, reaching over the back of the chair at an angle impossible for a human. The head turned, revealing a carved face frozen in a snarl of sculpted fangs.

“Your mother is not here,” the creation rasped, the sound coming through a small slit in the unmoving features of its face, “but she has been expecting you.”

The bookshelves in the walls seemed to explode. Each one swung out like a door, showering the room in books, as from alcoves behind them more wooden creatures burst forth carrying blades and guns in their many arms.

But the intruders were ready. Diana had her knife and was already slashing at the face of her mother’s wooden stand-in. Frostfire and Dimsun had their talons at the ready and were soon parrying metal and tearing into wooden carcasses. And Sarah had her Slayer powers. She had been ready before they even entered the room, the glow hidden just within her skin. At the moment the wooden creatures appeared she let it burn full strength and was soon charging into the fray, punching mannequin bodies and dummy faces, shattering them into splinters.

Within minutes there was little left of the welcoming party, but the noise had woken up the house and they knew they had to leave.

Back down the corridors, down stairs, through clumps of guards who fell more easily than grass, through the main hall where the Countess’ own barrowhounds bayed for their blood. Out into the raining night, through lightning lit gardens and along the avenue towards the gate. They leapt and climbed and dropped and ran, down streets awash with the blood of baked clay, to the Skullbridge itself. Crossing in the sight of a thousand unseeing eyes, hearing the crack of bone beneath their feet, they never looked back. Losing guards and dogs in the backstreets beyond, splitting up and reuniting at the rendezvous planned days before.

“Where next?” Frostfire asked when they had caught their breath.

“Fracture,” was Diana’s only reply.