Robin Jarvis - Fighting Pax

“Human nature really is so depressing,” he replied. “I could almost wish you would.”

“Gerald!” Maggie exclaimed anxiously. “Don’t say that.”

The old man gave her a gentle smile. “And then,” he said, “I remember that there are people like my dear friend Maggie here. Lovely, joyous souls with open hearts, brimming with kindness and affection, and I know we’re not so bad after all. But then you wouldn’t understand that, would you, Miss Chung? I don’t suppose your life has been a particularly happy one.”

Without taking her eyes off the Westerners, Eun-mi leaned back, into the corridor. It was deathly quiet. Scowling with impatience, she called for her sister. Where was Nabi?

“Of course,” Gerald continued fearlessly, “what you loathe most of all is yourself, isn’t it?”

Eun-mi’s face didn’t betray the fact that his remark hit home. If he was trying to provoke her, to get her to release them, it wasn’t going to work. Her self-control was impervious to his clumsy psychology. She prided herself on her detachment.

“I shoot,” she repeated implacably.

“That won’t make your father love you,” he told her. “The great General Chung – just what is it makes him so… indifferent towards you? You might as well be part of the furniture as far as he’s concerned.”

“No more talk.”

“Why is he so cold to you, but lights up whenever he’s with little Nabi? Why does he cherish and adore her, but treats you like something he’s trodden in? What did you do?”

Eun-mi pulled the trigger.

The air exploded. The teenagers shrieked and covered their ears. Most of them dived to the floor. The gunshot seemed to shake the room and Eun-mi’s nostrils flared with exhilaration as she kept the pistol level.

Gerald let out a staggering breath. For all his bravado, that had shocked and frightened him. Looking at the solemn-faced girl with the gun, he knew she had missed deliberately.

“Next time I kill,” she said coldly, the ghost of a smile pulling the corners of her mouth. “Next time you dead.”

Overhead the refectory lights crackled. Everyone glanced upwards. The fluorescent strips were flickering. Out in the corridor it was the same. The lights there were dying. A fizzle of sparks ran along the cables like a firework. Then the passage was engulfed in the supreme darkness that is only found underground.

The refugees murmured dismally and Eun-mi looked annoyed. She believed the generators were breaking down again. Too much of the machinery and equipment here was out of date. Too many elements had been repaired and jury-rigged far too often. It was infuriating that the power should fail at this critical moment.

Suddenly there was a snap of electricity from the wiring above their heads and the refectory was tipped into darkness too. The only light was an infernal orange-red glow from the grill of the wood-burning stove. It threw ominous black shadows around the room, leaping up the walls like tormented souls.

“I don’t like this,” one of the younger girls whimpered.

“Don’t be scared,” Maggie reassured her, trying to sound as if they weren’t being held at gunpoint, deep inside a mountain in North Korea, where the lights had gone out. “It’s just a glitch. They’ve probably not paid their leccy bill.”

“Be silent!” Eun-mi commanded. “People’s Army engineers will fix.”

“That wasn’t a surge or a blown fuse,” Gerald told her. “Something else is happening here, can’t you feel it?”

“It’s getting colder,” Nicholas said, huddling up to Esther.

“Nobody move!” Eun-mi demanded. Then she too shivered and the gun trembled in her hands.

A blast of freezing air had squalled in from the corridor. They heard a door slam, followed by echoing footsteps.

“It’s just the door to the terrace,” Maggie said, although it sounded nothing like that door.

Even Eun-mi held her breath as they waited and the steady, measured footfalls drew closer. There was a predatory menace to those steps.

“Who’s out there?” Sally asked fretfully.

Eun-mi wanted to twist round and look, but she felt the threat of that approach and the hairs on the back of her neck lifted as gooseflesh spread up her spine. For the first time since the death of her mother, she felt afraid and didn’t know what to do.

Then, very softly, in the corridor, a voice began to chant. It was a young child’s voice, slowly reciting the first two words of an English nursery rhyme.

“Itsy bitsy…” it repeated over and over. “Itsy bitsy…”

“Nabi!” her sister declared with overwhelming relief. “Nabi!”

Taking her eyes off the refugees, she stepped back through the doorway and looked along the corridor. Maggie and the others watched a furrow form across Eun-mi’s forehead. Something was wrong.

“Itsy bitsy…” the voice continued.

Eun-mi saw the six-year-old walking slowly from the prohibited area. Before her, she carried a silver wand as though it was a standard. Her face was lit by the pale golden light radiating from its amber star. When she passed the door to Lee’s room, she halted. Her large eyes were glinting but glassy – and so were those of the creature that sat upon her head.

Eun-mi caught her breath. It was a large, spider-like shape, its fang-filled mouth resting on Nabi’s brow.

“Itsy bitsy…” the little girl intoned.

At first Eun-mi thought it was alive, and she nearly sprang forward to tear it away. But then she saw its spindly legs dangling limply around Nabi’s shoulders and knew it was dead. That made it worse somehow. Nabi had placed it there willingly. It was macabre and repulsive. Before Eun-mi could think of what to say, other figures emerged from the darkness at the end of the corridor.

It was Doctor Choe, her two technicians, the guards, and the female who had been stationed on the terrace. Behind them came something else.

Eun-mi’s lips parted and she cried out in horror and disbelief.

“Nabi!” she called urgently. “Come here, hurry! Get away from that!”

Within the refectory, the Westerners had no idea what she was seeing. They had never known her react to anything like this before. It alarmed and unnerved them more than staring at the barrel of her gun.

“What is it?” Gerald asked. “What’s out there?”

She did not hear him and a new sound prevented him asking again. It was the clip-clopping of hooves on concrete. Eun-mi swung the pistol round and aimed it down the corridor.

“Nabi!” she cried again. “Move away! Come to me.”

“Chung Eun-mi,” a female voice called to her. “Put away your gun. There is naught to be afraid of.”

The refugees recognised it immediately.

“Doctor Choe,” Maggie whispered.

“Yes,” Gerald breathed. “But listen. She doesn’t have an accent any more. Her English is perfect.”

Eun-mi stared at the doctor incredulously.

“What is that?” she demanded, shaking her head in confusion at the shape that walked beside her. “What is it?”

“A wondrous beast from the true Realm,” the doctor answered. “It has come to guide you, to guide us all there. This is but a dream and we have tarried here too long. Nabi has seen the blessed truth, now you shall also.”

The doctor began reading the familiar opening paragraph of Dancing Jax .

“Oh, God,” Maggie uttered. “DJ’s here. It’s got her.”

“Don’t let her read to you!” Gerald shouted to the girl in the doorway. “Stop her!”

“Put book down!” Eun-mi ordered fiercely. “Down or I fire!”

The doctor ignored her and the guards and technicians joined in, their voices filling the corridor. Little Nabi added to the intoning chorus.