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211 lines
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<h1>30</h1>
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<p>A loud scream came echoing out from the cleft in the rock..</p>
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<p>It froze me to the spot, but Colin was quick to recover. He was ten steps ahead of me, holding his spear ahead of him, by the time I started to move. I followed him, my heart wrenched by the naked terror in Paddy's scream.</p>
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<p>The fumarole twisted right and left, like a hole made by a monster earthworm. In the dim light, we slithered and stumbled, but kept on, getting deeper and deeper under Ardmhor. The scream had stopped very suddenly, and that scared me badly. It sounded as if something had
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<em>cut</em> it off.</p>
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<p>Visions flashed in my mind, visions worse than the dreams that had woken me on the bad nights, worse than the crawling roots and those impossible, moving, rotting corpses. I could live with their images seared into my brain.</p>
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<p>But I couldn't live with the knowledge that Paddy had suffered from my carelessness. She'd been in my care and my job was to protect her from whatever might come.</p>
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<p>Some instinct also told me that she was very crucial in this whole nightmare.</p>
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<p>Most of all I knew that if she were killed, I would never be able to live with myself.</p>
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<p>I kept up with Colin, driven by the adrenalin surge,</p>
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<p>Suddenly the passage widened and we stumbled into a chamber that was even vaster than the one before. In the wan light, I saw great stalactites come down to meet the teeth of stalagmites. Sharp tumbled rocks littered the floor.</p>
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<p>The scream came again, piercing in its intensity. It came from the centre of the huge cavern.</p>
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<p>I remember letting out a gasp that was a mixture of anguish and relief. At least she was still alive.</p>
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<p>But what absolute terror was encompassed in that scream.</p>
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<p>Colin and I came top a halt in the centre of the chamber. This was where the sound had come from, right where we were standing. We swung right and left, searching for any sign.</p>
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<p>The scream came a third time. From right beside us. I turned fast.</p>
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<p>Paddy stood there, behind a stalagmite, her face white and her mouth agape.</p>
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<p>I leapt towards her and all of a sudden, I felt as if I was running in glue. The air around her had thickened, just like the first entrance to the cave, where time itself seemed distorted and slowed. I pushed my way towards her, agonisingly slow.</p>
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<p>She screamed again, and I felt the sound inside my head, as if she was reaching out with her mind.</p>
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<p>I pushed against the invisible barrier. It took a long, slow, age. The closer I got to her, the thicker seemed the warp that held us both. All around, I sensed flickering motion and heard sounds inside my skull. Paddy was stock still, with that unfinished scream distorting her features, as if frozen in time.</p>
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<p>It seemed I got no nearer, though she had only been yards away when I'd started towards her. Everything slowed to a crawl.</p>
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<p>I reached a hand, watching it recede from me, elongating into the distance.</p>
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<p>Then it touched her fingers.</p>
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<p>There was a loud, snapping sound as the world gave a jolt and Paddy and I were tumbling through the air in slow motion, getting faster and faster as we fell towards the ground. I hit with a hard thump. Paddy landed on top of me, and the scream in her mind now exploded from her throat.</p>
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<p>She landed on top of me and all her breath gushed out in a whoosh. The scream stopped instantly. But she held me so tightly round my neck, I thought I would choke.</p>
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<p>Colin called from the centre. 'Nicky. Come here. Quick.'</p>
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<p>I got to my feet, allowing Paddy to keep her grip, using my walking stick for balance.</p>
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<p>'Look at that.' Colin pointed his spear at the wall.</p>
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<p>A man stood in a patch of shadow.</p>
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<p>Colin went into a crouch, swinging the spear back, ready to stab. I held Paddy to the side, keeping between her and the figure in the gloom and I wished Donald had been here with his rifle.</p>
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<p>The man did not move. It just stood in silence. Colin edged towards me. Paddy stiffened and I turned. Another figure stood against the wall. Close by, I made out a third and scanned all round. The whole place was ringed with standing, silent men.</p>
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<p>We were surrounded.</p>
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<p>Colin eased forward. I did too until we could see.</p>
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<p>It was a soldier in full armour. His breastplate glinted in the dim light. A crested helmet came down to his brow and he held a short, straight sword in his hand. The free hand was up at his head and I could see the nails were dug right into the skin. I peered closer and saw the fingers had pierced the eyeballs, and there was an expression of such agony on his face that it made my blood run cold.</p>
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<p>Beside him, a second soldier looked as if he'd frozen in the act of turning. He held a staff topped with an eagle carved in wood over roman numerals. IX. His left hand was half-way to his face, fingers clawing like talons.</p>
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<p>Something jarred in me. A memory from the past. This was something I knew about.</p>
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<p>Then it came to me.</p>
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<p>It's the eagle of the ninth legion,' I whispered. 'The lost legion.'</p>
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<p>
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'Who?' Colin sounded horror struck, but still puzzled.</p>
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<p>'Romans. The ones who disappeared.'</p>
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<p>I'd read the story as a boy. The ninth legion sent north from Old Kilpatrick to quell the Picts. They'd marched out, past Levenford and Kirkland and were never heard of again.</p>
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<p>They hadn't found the Picts.</p>
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<p>The thing on Ardmhor had found them.</p>
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<p>Dead men stood all round the chamber. And not only Roman soldiers. There were warriors in leather and plaid. There were men in skins. There was a man with monk's robes.</p>
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<p>And, god help me, there were children, all frozen, as if in blocks of ice, and they all looked as if they were witnessing all the horrors of hell.</p>
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<p>Some of the silent figures had torn at their faces, their eyes, and their mouths were agape in frozen screams that told of the horrors they had seen on the point of death.</p>
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<p>Some were crumpled heaps of skin, as if they had been sucked dry. Others were bare shadows on the stone. They looked very, very old.</p>
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<p>As I looked around, my mind made one of those intuitive leaps again, and I suddenly realised what this place was. With it came the realisation that these were not corpses. I had seen these things before, a long, long time ago, and had not known why they were here.</p>
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<p>But now I knew. This was a <em>storeroom.</em></p>
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<p>And somehow, in their dreadful stasis, these agonised men were not quite dead, not in the way we know death. They were trapped in the unending pain and horror of the kind of time-snare that had caught Paddy. Like the tunnel under Strowan's Bridge where the air had thickened and time stretched out, this was how the beast kept what he fed on. This was its larder.</p>
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<p>And it had been feeding off their suffering for <em>thousands</em> of years.</p>
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<p>With that sudden realisation came the knowledge that it could have been Paddy or myself. Caught in frozen time and seeing what the monster chose to show us, feeding off the ecstasy of our fear.</p>
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<p>Beside me, Colin stared in fascinated revulsion, the way the soldiers in the old newsreels did when they reached Auschwitz. Every face trapped in those timeless warps was suffering agony, agony that would keep going forever as long as this obscenity under Ardmhor remained on this earth.</p>
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<p>As we stood there, the cocoons of darkness that shrouded the figures began to fuzz at the edges, dissipating into the shadows, and as it did, the victims faces became clearer.</p>
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<p>Then, without warning, and with a displacement in the air that caused my ears to pop, whatever force that held those prisons intact let go and first one, then another of the damned souls slumped against the bare rock.</p>
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<p>That was when the screaming started. The soldier with his fingers gouged into his eyes, a motion that had started maybe two thousand years ago, completed it in one jarring thrust that sent blood pulsing out. Paddy jerked against me.</p>
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<p>Another man, a big red-headed soldier. Fell to his knees, dazed. Then he brought his head forward in a fast strike and smashed it straight on to an edge of rock. There was a wet snack and a dark pool streamed out while his body twitched in final death.</p>
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<p>All the time, the wails and screams of the tormented souls, the screams they had been silently crying for eons, rent the air all round us.</p>
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<p>The victims jerked and twisted in their agonies. It seemed to go on forever, but it could only have been minutes.</p>
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<p>Then the sound suddenly stopped. The echoes faded in the distance until an eerie silence settled in the chamber.</p>
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<p>And we watched in horrified fascination as those faces all turned to stare at us. Even the eyeless Roman swivelled in our direction.</p>
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<p>Almost as one, they began towards us, tottering, as if they had little control, but still they came. I could feel Paddy's heartbeat and she hugged me tight.</p>
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<p>I gripped my stick and sensed Colin bracing himself.</p>
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<p>Implacably, the stumbling prisoners of Cu Saeng tightened the circle around us, closer and closer until I could have touched them with the stick.</p>
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<p>Eyes stared, wide and agonised. And in their depths, I saw pity, and sadness, and pleading, and maybe that was the worst of it.</p>
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<p>Almost as one, they stopped moving, maybe a hundred or more. Romans, clansmen, tribesmen and the suffering little ones, all silent and staring it us in mute supplication.</p>
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<p>I caught a movement and turned. One of the soldiers had raised his sword. Slowly, as if fighting a force trying to prevent him, he managed to raise the hilt and then, with intense effort, and still with the most profound horror etched on his face, he turned it until the blade pointed at his chest. He braced his legs and thrust.</p>
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<p>The sword went through him with a ripping sound and he sank to the ground. More blood drenched the stone, but I could see the awful agony ebb from his face. It was as clear as anything could demonstrate. Death was bliss by comparison to Cu Saeng's grip.</p>
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<p>Something else moved, on the face closest to me, an old man whose face was scared and pitted. As he stared at me, the lines in his leathery face began to crack and split. The same thing was happening to the tribesman next to him. Their skin crinkled and distorted.</p>
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<p>It was as if they had been taken out of preservation and begun to rot in the air.</p>
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<p>All around us, bodies began to shrivel and sag. One of the Romans fell in a clatter of armour. A child slumped to a heap. All of them were twisting and writhing as whatever strange life had kept them preserved all this time simply flowed out of them, until the cave floor was littered with the finally dead.</p>
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<p>The bodies were dried out husks, sucked dry in their moment of release from Cu Saeng's power.</p>
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<p>That was better for them, surely, I thought.</p>
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<p>I hugged Paddy right and turned to Colin and said....</p>
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<p>Summer, 1991.</p>
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<p>'Come on. It's Babs.' He spun on his heel and followed me down the crack in the wall where the scream had come echoing to us.</p>
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<p>We ran through the tunnel, down deeper and deeper in that long slant into the bowels of the earth under Ardmhor Rock.</p>
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<p>It took an age, so it seemed, but I knew where I was going. The compass inside my head had locked on to her scream, so I ignored the side tunnels and fissures. I just plunged on, slipping and sliding on wet rock.</p>
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<p>Then we reached the big chamber, almost falling flat. Another shriek made me real back. Colin raised both hands to his ears. We could
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<em>feel</em> her fear and pain. It came to us - and through us - in waves.</p>
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<p>'Over there,' I bawled. 'That's where she is.'</p>
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<p>He paused a few seconds, to string the bow he'd carried all the way from our gang hut and followed me past the stalagmites.</p>
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<p>Another scream, even more shattering, tore the air, and then I saw Barbara on a clear piece of ground near the centre. She squirmed and twisted as if some invisible hands held her, and above her head, a heavy darkness expanded, oozing down to where she lay.</p>
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<p>'What is it?' Colin yelled. 'What's doing that?'</p>
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<p>'Just get her away,' I bawled, staggering through the force of Barbara's pain towards her.</p>
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<p>Her pain was my pain, and it was Colin's too. We had to fight it to get to her, but it felt like acid in every nerve in my body. But there was some power between us that was greater than the pain, some binding, wonderful force that gave us the strength. My eyes were streaming and my throat burning. Colin reached where she was squirming against the unseen hands.</p>
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<p>Above her the dark shadow pulsed and swelled, expanding now towards both of them. Colin snatched one hand and I got there in time to grab the other and as we did so there was a searing flash of light that scoured the vast cavern into sharp relief, just before the black cloud closed down on all of us.</p>
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<p>Barbara was hugging us both.</p>
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<p>'Oh Colin. Nicky. I was <em>hurting</em>.'</p>
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<p>'Yeah. I know,' Colin said. 'But we've got you now.'</p>
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<p>She started sobbing then, from relief perhaps, or it could have just been shock.</p>
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<p>And then she did something she'd never done before, <em>ever.</em></p>
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<p>She pulled Colin towards her and kissed him hard and desperately and then she turned and kissed me too, forcing her lips on me so powerfully I could feel the wet tears on her cheek.</p>
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<p>'I love you,' she said. 'I love you both. And I'll love you forever.'</p>
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<p>Colin and I just stood there, with Barbara between us, in the middle of the big cave, holding on to each other as if we could never let go.</p>
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<p>Gradually the after-images of that searing light faded.</p>
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<p>And that's when Colin first saw the soldiers.</p>
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<p>The hairs on the back of my neck went marching again.</p>
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