Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

After two more steps, his feet landed on packed earth and he glanced upward at the moon one more time before turning away from the ladder. It was hopeless. Only a yard from where he stood, there was nothing to be made out with the naked eye. There were no shadows or shapes. The channel of moonlight ended at a wall of black.

Again he fumbled in the bag, this time to retrieve the motorcycle tire iron he’d brought to lift up the concrete. It was a small weapon that could have little effect against the power he’d seen evidenced on his morgue slab. But it was something to hold on to, like a stick to a blind person: a cattle prod between himself and the unseen.

He walked forward. The walls curved over and above him to become a ceiling just above his head. A man of average height would have had to stoop through this narrow passage, but Siri could stand to his full height. He dragged his left hand along one wall and could tap the opposite wall with the iron: such was the width.

After ten slow, cautious paces, the tunnel curved to the left and any evidence of light from the outside was erased. Behind him now lay the same tarry blackness as ahead. He was blind. It was at this point that an anxiety of sorts began to infect him. It arose from his foolishness in abandoning logic and safety. He could make neither head nor tail of what he was doing. In the jungle, he wouldn’t have survived if he had showed such flagrant disregard for common sense.

He walked on. His dragging hand picked up a load of passengers that bit him and crawled up into his sleeve: probably red ants defending a nest. He slapped them off quietly against his side but didn’t slow his pace. The air was becoming staler. The dry earth and musty root smells mixed with other less natural, less healthy scents. He had no doubt that something had died down there in those tunnels, and he hoped beyond hope it was an animal.

On he went, slowly, nervously.

The tip of the iron struck only air. Siri stopped and felt the far wall with his hand. A second tunnel. It cut to the right. How far had he already veered left? Which route would take him in the direction of the river? He waited for a sign. Surely with all the bodies he’d put in the ground, one grateful spirit could come along and prod him in the right direction. But there was just him, and the blackness, and silence. Nothing more.

He went right, increasing his pace as his instincts warned him about time. He knew he had to get to the river. He was no longer careful about what his hand might touch or what might lie under his feet. He visualized a long, well-lit passage and marched along it, barely tapping with his iron.

When it hit him, it was so sudden and overwhelming that he panicked. It had quickly wrapped itself around him, covered his face. He flailed around, hit out with the iron bar, and fell back against the wall, kicking into space.

He clawed at the cold, thick accumulation around his mouth and neck and cleared space enough for an unrestricted breath. Still he swung his iron back and forth like a child in an imaginary sword fight, but he hit nothing, heard nothing, and soon understood that he was expending all his energy against himself.

He held up a hand and stepped forward. He had come to a thick barrier of spiderwebs that blocked the tunnel ahead.

If this was a test, it was a failed one. He waited for his breath and his heartbeat to cease their rantings, and de-webbed himself. He wondered whether he’d made too much noise fighting off his fictitious attacker-whether he’d been heard. He couldn’t be sure.

He quickly retraced his path to the main tunnel, turned right and proceeded somewhat more cautiously into it. Time hadn’t allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness, so he knew there was absolutely no light filtering into the tunnels. He had completely lost his sense of direction. In a straight line, a brisk walk from the compound to the river would take no more than five minutes. To an old man in a pitch-black tunnel, a minute can stretch to a significant portion of the remainder of your life. The tunnel seemed endless.

Suddenly, the ground wasn’t there anymore. Siri stepped into empty space, and only his guiding left hand against the wall prevented him falling arse over apex. He pulled himself back, got to his knees and reached down into the void with his iron. It was no bottomless chasm, just a deep step. The metal clunked against something solid but not heavy, then once more. The smells around him were overly familiar, but he had no choice but to step down into whatever was there.

He waded ankle-deep through a well of what he was sure were bones. They crunched beneath his feet, so they were small and not all fresh. Yet with every step he dreaded treading on a larger corpse. Because of this threat, he trod respectfully, with his breath held.

When he finally arrived at something solid, it proved to be no more than the step on the far side. He remembered the geography of the Viet Cong cave networks and wondered whether this was a pivot room. If it were, there would be tunnels leading off in each direction. Matters would become even more confusing if he had too many alternatives, so he didn’t bother to find out. He continued going straight. He climbed the far step and set off again into the tunnel. But things soon went horribly wrong.

Late the previous year, after rescuing his neighbors from their ruined house, Siri had been hospitalized until the masonry dust could be cleared from his lungs. Although the dust was eventually flushed out, the air didn’t ever return with the same enthusiasm. Consequently, the doctor started to find himself short of breath at the worst possible times. But none of those times had been as inopportune as now.

The further he moved from the only obvious source of oxygen, the deeper he had to trawl for air. He knew he had to concentrate on his breathing. The attack of the spiderweb had taken a lot out of him and he was now in danger of blacking out. If he lost consciousness, this whole horrible ordeal would have been a waste of time.

He stopped, lay down on the ground where the richer air would still be, and gently meditated himself into a more relaxed state. He ignored the slithering and crawling around his head, and concentrated on replenishing his energy.

This was when he began to hear, or believed he could hear, sounds. They were muffled, far off, and could, for all he knew, have been coming from above the tunnels rather than within them. But this was late at night in Vientiane. There wouldn’t be much activity in the streets. He listened intently.

At first he didn’t recognize it. The noise was sporadic and muted like a bee in a tin can. He wasn’t able to identify it as either natural or man-made. But the longer he listened, the more obvious it became to him that the sound was getting louder. If it was in the tunnels, it could mean only one thing. It was coming toward him.

He told himself not to panic, reminded himself he had the element of surprise. But surprise on whom or on what? Some surprise it would be, with him flat out in the middle of a narrow passage. And what if there were no connection between this noisemaker and Dtui’s disappearance? Was he really considering laying into some stranger with an iron bar just because he was scared out of his wits?

Yes.

“Don’t panic,” he told himself. He breathed. He lay still. He thought calm thoughts, and the sounds got louder-not a buzz now, but a growl. Now and again the growl would rise to a howl, a human-animal high-pitched roar, and it came to him:

This was the sound from his dream in Luang Prabang. This was the unseen danger that approached through the jungle, the sound that he was to listen for in the future, to avoid, to flee with every iota of strength he possessed. He shuddered, and his nerve endings tingled the length of his body.