Martyn Vaughan - The Cave of Shadows

‘Jon!’ she gasped, joy flooding her features.

‘Do you remember anything?’ asked the woman, whose name she had informed him earlier was “Shana”, ‘you must remember something!’

Jon placed his chin on the backs of his thumbs and stared moodily at the floor. She gazed at him with an odd mixture of worry and impatience. Finally he said: ‘There was a hill.’

A broad smile lit up her features. ‘Yes, Jon a hill! But there’s much more! What about the hill?’

He waved at her to leave him alone and stood up angrily. ‘A hill, a hill! What more is there to remember! And I’m hungry. How can I be expected to remember things if I’m hungry!’

Shana’s smile vanished abruptly. Jon was right – she was hungry too, terribly, terribly hungry.

Jon glared at her. ‘Maybe I could eat you. You seem to have plenty of spare flesh that’s not doing anything.’

Shana was tempted for a moment to cover her breasts but thought better of it. She was what she was and this man had his own physical excrescences that appeared to be functionless.

It was then that their impasse was shattered as a directionless voice suddenly boomed out: ‘Shana12! Jon21! Proceed at once to the cleansing station!’

They both looked at each other in amazement. They were not alone! There was somebody else awake in this building!

Even as those thoughts flashed through their minds there was a metallic grinding noise behind them as if something that had not moved for a very long time was finally trying to do so. They spun around to see a section of the wall slowly and jerkily begin to slide open, gradually revealing a brilliantly lit corridor. Twice it stopped, making an angry whirring noise, before moving again to complete its journey.

They stared at each other for several moments before Jon said; ‘Come on – if we stay here we die slowly, so nothing out there can be worse.’

They stepped out in the corridor. It was very cold with a thin film of frost clinging to the curved walls. The frost was slowly subliming, with the resultant water vapour being sucked away into vents in the wall. The temperature was rising rapidly, leading to the suspicion that not long previously the corridor had been cold: very, very cold. They stood watching the little curls of vapour vanish, not at all sure what to do. But then on the wall a glowing arrow appeared, pointing straight down the corridor before them and at its tip were the words CLEANSING ROOM. After one more glance at each other they obeyed the implicit instruction of the sign.

As they walked the temperature continued to climb until it was warm enough for their shivering to stop. After many twists and turns through the damp, grey corridors they reached a section where there were glowing words on the wall, stating: CLEANSING ROOM. They stood before it and watched with growing impatience as another section attempted to slide open, whirring and clunking as it did so. This took quite a while longer than the original door but eventually it was wide enough for them to enter.

Inside were cubicles with many vents in their walls and fronted with transparent doors. These opened as they approached and the same commanding voice told them to enter. No sooner had they done so when the doors swung shut. Suspecting a trap, Jon had just begun to raise his fists to try and batter his way out when he was hit simultaneously by thin jets of extremely hot water which swiftly covered him in a bubbling white lather. He was rapidly covered from head to toe in the clinging foam which, in turn, was blown away by blasts of warm air. The door then opened, fortunately without any whirring or clanking, and he stepped back into the main room, feeling remarkably fresh and invigorated.

He turned just in time so see Shana step out and was pleasantly surprised by the transformation she had undergone. The globules of mucus-like liquid had vanished from her skin, which now gleamed with a rich, almost luminous, sheen, reminiscent of rosewood. And her hair had gone from a streaked, greasy cap to a tumbling, cloud-like mass of amber-gold glory.

Jon thought of saying that she looked “Good enough to eat” but decided that would be distinctly unwise under the circumstances. Instead he merely commented, ‘You look better.’

She looked him up and down. ‘And so do you.’

Their mutual admiration was interrupted by the directionless voice which commanded: ‘Now get dressed. Clothing is on the shelves to your left.’

They found one-piece garments of a soft grey cloth that fitted them perfectly, hiding those useless excrescences. They were puzzled by two pairs of small objects with large holes on the tops before Shana realised that they were intended to go over the feet.

Now fully dressed, they looked around to see if there was anything to eat but to their great disappointment the room held a large number of cleansing cubicles and shelves but nothing edible.

‘Jon we can’t go on like this,’ Shana said in growing desperation. ‘my body is tearing itself apart!’

‘I know, I know,’ Jon replied, ‘but this place isn’t trying to hurt us. There must be some food somewhere. We’ve just got to hold out! And’ he added, giving her a severe stare, ‘no more talk about hills and remembering things until we’ve found it!’

After another futile search of the Cleansing Room, the pair returned to examining the corridor to see if it led them to somewhere more useful than a washroom.

‘Jon, I can’t go on much longer,’ Shana whispered, ‘it’s not just food, my mouth is so dry I can hardly speak.’

‘Then don’t,’ was Jon’s snapped reply.

Suddenly they came upon a fork in the corridor; one passage was dark and quiet but from the other there came a buzzing noise coupled with occasional flashes of vivid blue light.

‘People?’ hazarded Shana.

‘Let’s find out,’ and with that Jon began to stride down the noisy branch, towards the flashes of light.

They came around a corner and stopped in shock. Ahead of them, on the floor and on the wall, were things that looked like spiders, spiders somewhat bigger than Jon’s outstretched hand and seemingly made of a flexible metal. The ones on the wall had removed a section of it and were clustered around and inside the resulting cavity. The cavity contained many pipes and cables, which were being periodically sent into high relief by the flashes, which in turn were emanating from the front legs of those spiders which were actually inside it. The spider-things on the floor were holding a curved piece of metal which could only be the missing section of the wall.

‘And what are these?’ Shana queried, as her shock subsided.

‘They appear to be small machines that are repairing a larger machine,’ observed Jon, feeling that another piece of knowledge was slowly coming into focus.

Machines. He knew about machines.

‘Then we’re inside a machine,’ Shana concluded, ‘Could we be inside some kind of vessel?’

Jon stood still and listened to his environment, both externally and proprioceptively.

There were the fierce crackles of the discharges emitted by the spider-things; the soft sound of air moving past them propelled by some distant force and coming up through his feet, his thighs, a very faint humming, a very faint rhythmic shuddering.

That was all.

He turned to Shana. ‘Do you have any sense of motion?’

She considered for a moment. ‘No.’

‘Then we can’t be moving. We must be in some very large metal building and these things are an automatic repair system.’

Her brow wrinkled for a moment, then: ‘Yes. Automatic. I remember automatic .’

They skirted the group of toiling arachnoids which completely ignored them and went on. Their desperation was now at a pitch that they could not conceive of becoming greater.