Authors: Anne Nesbet
“
Cats
, not
rats
!” said one of the men outside. “Hoo, what a spitfire! Weird looking, isn’t it? Come here, you wildcat. . . .”
This was the moment when the ground vanished from under Linny’s feet. Since she was more or less lying on her stomach in that tunnel, she didn’t fall right away. She waved her legs about, feeling for the slope of the tunnel, and she felt around with her hands for outjutting rocks to hold on to while her legs looked for solid ground to rely on.
But a half second later, when the Half-Cat came plunging back into the tunnel and unsettled Linny’s arms, which should have been holding on to those rocks for dear life, she started slipping backward like nobody’s business, and the ground gave way under all of her, and there was the loudish noise earth gives when something heavy is sliding down it, and she was actually falling now, into some deep hole in the ground—and she fell and fell until she hit ground again, with a thumping wallop,
and then, for a thin slice of time, she knew nothing at all.
Nothing.
Time started again. She opened her eyes and saw . . . more nothing.
That was perhaps the worst moment of her life so far, to be buried in darkness that way. She had never liked being stuck in dark places, not places where you couldn’t see the lay of the land or figure out where you were. Panic surged through her. She flailed her arms around and immediately discovered one or two important things:
—She was on her side, resting in what seemed like a tunnel with an earthen floor.
—There was enough room around her for her to flail her arms around in. That immediately took the screaming edge off her fear. She was not
buried
in earth. She was simply in some unknown underground space. (She told herself these things with as much conviction as she could possibly muster.) She was still, after all, able to breathe. And (she kicked her legs out a little) her bones were not broken, despite the fall she had just had.
But there was a third important thing, and that thing was now purring and pushing its soft and furry back under her hand and licking her cheek with a very rough tongue: the Half-Cat was here with her.
Thank goodness.
“Thank goodness,” she said again, right out loud. She felt so shaky in her relief that the words wobbled
all around. And then she understood from the way the out-loud words wobbled that there was more space here than she had thought. She reached a hand straight up, as high as it could go, and ran into nothing but air.
Aha!
She pulled herself into a sitting position, and instantly felt much better; panic backs off a little when your head is above the rest of you. Now she knew where up and down were. That was a good first step. But she kept one hand on the reassuringly warm fur of the Half-Cat all the time.
She blinked her eyes and squinted, but the dark stayed dark.
“Ugh!” she said aloud. “What I need is a candle! I need light.”
And that was when the Half-Cat
turned on one of its eyes
.
The sudden beam of light was so shockingly bright in that unimaginably dark place that Linny squawked in surprise and covered her own eyes with her hands. But only for a second, and then she peeked, amazed, at the transformed darkness, at the tunnel walls now appearing around her, at the Half-Cat with its impossible, glaring, brilliant eye.
It was its silver-side eye that had turned into a spotlight; Linny could just make out the faint glimmer of the golden eye beside it.
How could a cat cast a beam of light with its eye?
It was not the sort of light a creature in the wrinkled hills would have anything to do with, either. Linny had seen mushrooms glow red or orange in the middle of the night, in the woods around Lourka. She had caught glimpses of night birds with flaming chests sailing like jewels across the sky. She had certainly watched lantern fish swim figure eights in the creek in summer. But there was nothing wrinkled about this light. It was harder and cooler than anything you’d find up in the hills. It was more like the light in some of those rooms in the Surveyors’ Court.
“Is that one of the things he tinkered with, the man in the Bridge House?” Linny said to the cat, and touched its head shyly, with one outstretched finger. The Half-Cat did not flinch.
Linny was waking up again, finally. She looked around at the tunnel she was in—so much larger than the rathole she had first hidden in. This tunnel looked like something people had made, and it went along into the dark in two directions. Above her head was the hole in the ceiling she must have tumbled out of, a few minutes earlier, and right there on the ground near her was the poor lourka, still cocooned in its bag. She picked it up quickly and took a look. There were some little scratches on its sides, but considering the tumble it had just experienced,
the lourka seemed to have come through even better than its maker. So that made her happy. She twanged a couple of strings, to encourage herself, and then slung the bag over her back, heaved a sigh, and started looking around that dark place, assessing the situation she was in.
At first glance, that situation was not so great. Linny could see no way to climb back up the way she had come falling down, for instance. Even if she stood right up, her head would be a little lower than the opening of that hole. She was going to have to try the tunnel she was in, in one direction or another. Linny stood there for a moment, looking first down one direction of that tunnel, then down the other, and let her body and brain tell her which way she was looking: one direction ran back under the little hill; the other went toward the steep slope that led, eventually, down to the fairgrounds.
Linny crouched down and went that way.
All too soon, there was another choice to make. The tunnel she was in bent sharply to the left, skirting an inky-dark hole in the ground. When the Half-Cat poked its head helpfully over the edge for a moment, Linny caught a glimpse of metal bars running down the side of that hole—a ladder of sorts, she guessed. Linny looked down the tunnel to the left and looked down the tunnel with the ladder, and although the top several layers of her mind wondered why anyone would ever go
farther
underground, given the choice, there was something about how the air smelled in the tunnel to the left that she didn’t care for. The slightest whiff of something moist and decayed came from that direction. Air that had never heard of the sun.
Whereas, kneeling by the hole in the tunnel floor, she thought she sensed a liveliness in the air, as if it were coming from somewhere in particular. Maybe even the outside? Could her mind be playing tricks on her?
It took more courage than she really felt, but Linny turned right around and reached with her leg for the first rung of the ladder.
This was maybe the way through this nightmare, and she needed to get through, because Sayra was still waiting for the medicines to save her, somewhere far away.
Sayra!
The Half-Cat gave a little yowl and leaped down onto Linny’s shoulders.
Oof!
It was pretty miraculous she didn’t just fall down into darkness again right then.
She steadied herself and started climbing down that ladder, being very careful never to put all her weight on any one of those rungs, because who could say how old they must be? And down she went, with the cat making her shoulders ache and the bag with the wrapped-up lourka in it bouncing along on her back.
Down and down and down. The first few minutes were frightening but tolerable. After five minutes, though, she
began to get nervous. How far down could this ladder go? Another ten minutes, and her hands were trembling, not to mention her brain rebelling some. She was quite sure she must be below the level of the plain she and Elias had looked out at from the balustrade edging the park. She had a moment of horror, imagining this climb never ever ending, her hands and feet reaching for new rungs in this ladder forever and ever.
But as she paused to shake out her tired hands and feet (one at a time), she took a few breaths and again got that sense of fresh air somewhere far ahead, and again thought she must be going the right way. And then her foot could not find another rung, and when she looked past her feet, she saw the vertical chute was ending, and it was time to drop down to the floor of another tunnel.
“Here we go,” she said to the Half-Cat, and the cat jumped off her shoulders and down to the tunnel floor with a solid
thump
.
Linny dangled for a moment and then followed suit.
It was nowhere as long a fall as her first tumble had been, and again immediately there was another choice, right or left (Linny sniffed the air and decided left, because the air there smelled a little bit more like the outdoors, like a river), and after that a whole series of choices, as more and more tunnels opened out from the main one.
Only once Linny did not use that inner sense of hers
to decide which way to go. She overruled it and turned to the right, because the tunnel looked smoother, somehow, or maybe just to be foolish. But as she crouched and crawled down that tunnel, the Half-Cat following her, the darkness outside the Half-Cat’s one beaming eye grew darker and heavier with each of her steps, and panic began to rise up in her—and, strange to think now, all this time since the very first terrible moment after her fall, she had not felt fear like this, despite being so far underground and in the dark. She forced herself to keep going a few more steps, but the feeling grew more and more oppressive, until she stopped and fell to her knees, panting while her fingers scraped at the ground in front of her.
Which was not a good idea, because there was a puddle in the ground.
Water, greasy.
No, not just water—something foul and slimy. Something her hand sprang back from automatically in disgust.
That was enough for her. She turned around and made her way blindly back to the main tunnel, trying not to let her panic show, because it seemed to her the darkness behind her might at any moment become so thick it took on a life of its own, and if that darkness came to life and came after her, she was pretty sure it would have sharp
claws and dull, grinding teeth.
Once she got back to the tunnel she’d come from, she had to crouch very small and let herself tremble for a while. She had had no idea how close she had been to horror, all this time, and now fear had gotten its fingers into her.
The Half-Cat pushed its nose into her hand, and that helped clear her mind.
“We need to get out of here now,” she said to the cat, trying to get her courage back. “No more nonsense.”
After that, every time Linny found herself at an intersection, she let her body tell her which way faced the river, so that she knew where she was, and then she tested the air in each of the choices, to see which smelled best. If it was really “smelling,” what she was doing.
All she knew was that each time some of the choices smelled bad. They filled her with horror. Even when the Half-Cat turned its shining eye down those tunnels, they felt dark to her, darker than dark.
The roof of the tunnels was getting lower again, though. She was on hands and knees now, trying not to feel the weight of the earth above her, trying not to think about what would happen to her if there was no end to this journey, if she were really buried underground.
Another one of those intersections came, and this time for a horrible moment she had no idea which way to go.
Maybe a dozen tunnels came together here: tunnels, tunnels, all around, and at first none of them smelled right. It was the thoughts getting stirred up in her head that were distracting her, Linny figured. She made herself stay very still and quiet, counting to one hundred under her breath and then holding on even longer, not counting. Finally she found it: the thinnest possible thread of freshness, coming from an opening so small that her mind had tried to skitter right by it.
The air coming from that narrow gash of a tunnel smelled just the tiniest bit like a river, or rather, like the banks of a river. She crouched by the entrance for a while, testing the air and weighing her courage. It was so dark and so small!
A few moments later, a puff of air came through that hole that actually lifted Linny’s grimy hair from around her forehead.
All right,
she decided.
This must be the way.
It was an awful thing, though, entering that tunnel.
She had to slither on her belly, if she didn’t want the poor lourka on her back scratched or damaged. Already she was so grimy from tunnel dirt that a little extra mud could hardly cause any trouble.
But it was still hard to lie down and scrabble her way forward. Human beings are not earthworms, and Linny was even more not an earthworm than most human beings: she liked being outside, perched in some tall tree,
looking across the bright green world. . . .
She sighed. The world was still out there. She just had to be brave and keep moving and not think about the undergroundness of everything.
“Come on, cat,” she said. “Here we go.”
She had a brief but terrible moment, as she flattened herself out against the muddy ground, of imagining the cat turning around and walking off, as cats will do, taking its warmth and its tinkered eye away, leaving her forever in the dark.
But the Half-Cat purred and followed her into that low and narrow place as if there were no more natural place to be, for a girl and a cat, than in a tiny, damp, gloomy, earthy, miserable, horrible tunnel underground.
T
he only way Linny managed to push her way into that dank tunnel was by stopping thinking altogether, just at least until she was well into it and moving along, propelled by muddy elbows and toes. The Half-Cat purred at her side, and its radiant search-beam eye made the way ahead brighter than the darkness behind, and that was another thing that kept Linny moving. That, and the air, which there seemed to be more of, the farther Linny crawled. That was really the secret to being able to crawl ahead in the dark at all. She kept gulping in great dollops of that air, testing it. If the air began to feel scarce, she just knew the panic would burst out of the tight corner in her chest where she was keeping it all locked up. That would be it for her. She wouldn’t be able to go forward or crawl backward or do anything but hide in the dark mud and—