Six
I felt, rather than sensed, that I had breached into a massive cavern.
To prove my theory, I impulsively punched the air to my right. If I was still in the claustrophobic cave, my hand would surely be shattered on the wall. As I expected, I hit nothing but the stagnant air of the cave. The flares provided nothing more than a dim glow. I looked at it in horror as the glow faded slowly. The fading light represented my last defence against the virulent darkness of the cave (or Cave, as I felt it should be called) and its sole inhabitant.
The inhabitant some called the Jackal.
The light faded completely.
I was alone.
The moment I was, I heard the voice. It was flat and terrible and loud. It reverberated around me, seemingly without a source or direction. I spun in the darkness – the cloying, constricting darkness – and felt my heart in my throat. I knew that if I walked backwards, I would no longer find the passageway that had led me to the lair of the Jackal. Once you entered this central cavern, there was no leaving it. Just like the carvings promised, I thought.
“THIS IS MY CAVE,” it bellowed.
I screamed and ran.
It was a futile gesture. The voice boomed around me, terrifying in its alienness and its flat, expressionless quality. The Jackal was not human, nor was it even some revenant or ghost of a forgotten culture. It was something that had no place in this universe and something that I wished never to see. My heart thundered in my chest and my eyes vibrated – I could no longer even control my own body. I’m a prisoner in my own body.
“THE OTHER ONE SCREAMED BEFORE I TOOK HIM,” boomed the Jackal, interrupting my thoughts.
“Fuck you!” I screamed hysterically into the darkness around me. It was a petty rebellion – I doubted the Jackal even knew what it meant – but I felt better for it, all the same. Around me, the darkness coalesced. It’s alive, I thought. I tried to stifle a scream as an image popped into my head-
thousands of millions of bugs crawling over me in the darkness biting scratching and running
-and was banished moments later by the Jackal’s next terrible oration:
“YOU WILL REMAIN HERE FOREVER,” it howled.
I know that voice, I thought vaguely.
After the voice came the footsteps.
I sensed – I could both feel the tremors and hear the steps – hundreds of them around me, pounding the floor in a rapid and terrifying rhythm. Rolling thunder, I thought crazily, and laughed. What little sanity I possessed was rapidly being eroded away by-
the darkness millions of bugs rolling thunder
-the Jackal and its influence over the Cave and, consequently, those inside it. I doubted if Ashley was still alive, that Samantha and Alex had escaped. I didn’t even think that Karen, Vincent and Jason had escaped alive. Even as I considered this, the Jackal howled again, the flat voice echoing throughout my dark prison.
“THEY ALL DIED. AS WILL YOU,” the Jackal roared in its expressionless tone, creating a queer wavering effect that hurt my ears. My throat burned from the lack of moisture. A headache pounded in my head and my ears throbbed, strangely in time with the footsteps. I’m just rolling thunder, I thought, and laughed crazily. Then, as I considered what the Jackal had said:
It can read my thoughts.
It was not such a fantastical idea. The Jackal had only ever spoken after I had had a thought. A coincidence? I think not, pardon the pun. I considered the mental connection an idea began to form. I stopped running and emptied my thoughts, banishing the sensory manipulations the Jackal used on me. The footsteps around me intensified but I heard none of it as I shut down my senses and opened my mind.
Then, exposed without the cloak of my previous panicked thoughts, I felt it.
The Jackal’s mind. It was a colossal, alien thing, like a structure too gargantuan for the human mind to comprehend. It would dwarf me, swallow my mind whole and leave me a gibbering wreck if I considered it for too long. It wasn’t even natural, let alone human. Thoughts and ideas seemed to be constructed in a fashion that was incomprehensible to the human mind.
In a word, the Jackal’s presence was dark.
As I felt its presence wash over me, I steeled myself and sprung the trap. Instantly, before the beast could retreat, I thought of light. A blinding supernova, more light than any human had ever witnessed. A bright inferno of light. I let the mental image expand in my mind – and over onto the Jackal’s colossal presence. I guessed that such a creature had never seen light, or if it had, it had spent so long underground, bathed in the darkness which it controlled, such light – even as an image – would do tremendous harm to it, considering that the Jackal’s mental abilities far outclassed my own.
I was right.
The instant the supernova-image touched the Jackal’s presence, a tremendous shriek filled the chamber, immediately overtaking all the phantom footsteps that had so tormented me. I grinned savagely despite the pain the high-pitched squeal caused my ears. That, at least, sounded vaguely human. It felt empowering to know that I had hurt the Jackal, probably badly. I heard rushing noises around me and opened my eyes.
Impossibly, the virulent darkness was retracting around me.
I spun wildly, in the grip of the receding darkness. As I moved, I glanced around me. I was in a huge chamber, one that extended far into the distance. I saw columns and pillars and carvings, and realised that this really was the Jackal’s-
feeding ground
-lair that had been the subject of the ominous cave paintings. I had no time to consider that, however, as the final darkness receded. The cave that was lit by light that had no source – my mental light, I thought – exposed its only occupant and that occupant’s slave.
Just like that, I saw them.
Ashley.
The Jackal.
By: Archfeared/Ethan I.
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