Volumes 5 and 6 - Blood Beast/Demon Apocalypse. Darren Shan
reaches over, jams my finger down hard and jerks it backwards, quenching the light.
My heart races. My breath stops. The walls seem to grind shut around me. In a panic I try to turn the torch on, but my finger’s numb from where Loch pressed down on it. I can’t find the switch! I can’t turn the light on! The shapes are coming! In a second or two they’ll be upon us, all claws, sharp teeth and…
Bill-E switches one of his torches on. He’s chuckling weakly. “That was cool.”
I look around—nothing. The cave looks exactly the same as it did before. I was imagining the danger. I force a short laugh and switch my torch on, then press ahead with Bill-E and Loch. We continue exploring.
→After half an hour I don’t feel too hot. It’s nothing to do with the temperature of the cave – it’s warmer down here than it was on the surface – but with the time. I check my watch to confirm what I already know—it’s night. High above, hidden from sight by the layers of rock and earth, the moon’s rising, and tonight it’s as full as it’s ever going to be.
I get the same sick feeling as last night and the night before, only stronger, relentless. In horror movies, people sometimes don’t change into werewolves unless they sight the moon—if it’s hidden by clouds, or they’re locked away, it doesn’t affect them. But that’s rot. The moon’s a powerful mistress. She can reach through any wall or covering and work her wicked charms.
Bill-E and Loch are bickering about the treasure and whether or not it’s here. Loch doesn’t think it is – we’ve been around the cave a few times and found nothing – but Bill-E still insists it could be.
“You don’t think Lord Sheftree would have left it lying on the floor for anyone to stumble across and walk off with, do you?” he argues. “He’d have thought about somebody finding the cave, either by digging down like we have, or maybe through some other entrance he didn’t know about. He’d have hidden the treasure, stuck it out of sight, so that even if a stranger wandered in by accident, they wouldn’t find it, not unless they actively searched for it.”
“So where do you think it is, geniass?” Loch sneers. “We’ve looked everywhere. Unless it’s invisible treasure, I don’t think –”
“We’ve looked nowhere,” Bill-E shouts, and his voice echoes tinnily back at us. “Some of the larger stalagmites might be hollow,” he says, quieter this time. “The treasure might be buried in one of them.”
“There’s an awful lot of stalagmites,” Loch says dubiously.
“We have time,” Bill-E smiles. “And maybe it’s not down here at all.” He points up at the walls. “There are ledges, holes and tunnels, maybe smaller caves—or, for all we know, bigger caves. This could be nothing more than the entrance to a system of huge, interlinked caverns. We’ve lots of exploring still to do. We’ve only scratched the surface.”
“Let’s do it another time,” I mutter, head pounding, feeling as though I’m surrounded by a layer of fire. “It’s night. Time to go home.”
“Not yet,” Loch snaps. “I don’t have to be home for a few more hours.”
“Bill-E…” I groan.
“Well, Gran and Grandad will be expecting me back soon,” he says. “But it’s not like I’ve never been late before. I’ll tell them I was with you, that we lost track of time—which isn’t a total lie.”
I want to scream at them. The fools! Can’t they feel it? Even through my sickness, with a brain that’s being hammered to a pulp by a searing headache, I can sense danger. The throbbing’s back, stronger than ever. We need to get out now, quick, before…
Or am I imagining the danger, like I imagined the monsters in the dark? Maybe it’s just my sickness that we have to fear and this is only a beautiful, eerie cave.
Even so, if I turn into a werewolf here, that’s more than enough for any pair of humans to worry about. Trapped underground with a supernaturally strong wolfen beast, Bill-E and Loch wouldn’t last five minutes.
“Look,” I snap, “we have to go. We’ll come back tomorrow and explore fully. But it’s dark up top—it’s night. We said we’d go when the moon rose.” I stop, gather my thoughts and try a different approach. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. If we come home late, caked in mud and dirt, what will everyone think? If they start asking questions…”
“He’s got a point,” Bill-E concedes. “Gran and Grandad put Sherlock Holmes and Watson to shame. We should play it safe, act normally, especially if we’re going to be coming here a lot.”
“OK,” Loch sighs. “But one more search before we leave.” He points to the top of the waterfall, where it comes gushing out of the sheer rock wall fifteen metres above the cave floor. “Up there, those large holes. We can climb up pretty easily. I want to have a peek at them. Then we can go.”
“I dunno,” Bill-E says. “They’re fairly high and that wall’s steeper than the one we climbed down.”
“What’s a wall to three hardy explorers like us?” Loch laughs. “It won’t take long. And if the treasure’s there, we can go home on a total, triumphant high.”
“Grubbs?” Bill-E asks.
I shake my head violently. I think I’m going to throw up. I’m trembling helplessly. Climbing’s the last thing on my mind.
“Are you all right?” Bill-E asks, training his twin lights on me.
“Some kind of bug,” I gasp. “I’ve had it for the last few days.”
“Maybe we should get him home,” Bill-E says.
“Sure,” Loch grunts. “Right after we’ve explored above the waterfall.” He slaps Bill-E hard on the back. “Come on, Spleenario—last one up’s an asswipe!”
The ploy works. Bill-E forgets about me. They race to the wall and climb. Loch’s laughing, teasing Bill-E, roughly urging him on. I turn my back on the pair, leaving my torch pointing in their direction, to provide some extra light for them. I stumble away and sink to my knees. Lean my head against one of the smaller stalagmites and groan softly. I feel like a corpse that’s been stuck in a microwave to defrost—half frozen, half on fire. I try to control my breathing, to think calm thoughts, but my head’s full of wild, animalistic images—running, chasing, ripping, fangs, blood.
I stare at my fingers—they’re curling inwards. I can’t straighten them, no matter how hard I try. I search within for magical warmth, the energy I’ve drawn upon over the last forty-eight hours, but it doesn’t seem to be there for me now. Maybe the cave’s got something to do with that. Or maybe I’m just out of fighting spirit. Out of resistance. Plumb out of luck.
“Not… going… to… turn,” I snarl. Thinking of Loch and Bill-E, what I could do to them. Cursing myself for being so slack, not going to Dervish when I had the chance, allowing this to happen. I see now that it was fear, plain and simple. It didn’t matter what state Dervish was in—I should have told him the minute he got back. I kept the news to myself because I was scared of what he’d do. I was hoping the charms of the moon would pass, that I was just ill, imagining the inner struggle. The same fear which kept me from learning the ways of magic stopped me telling my secret to Dervish. Grubbs Grady—coward of the county. And now Bill-E and Loch are set to pay the price for my cowardice.
I try yelling a warning, telling them to stay up high where I can’t reach them. But my throat won’t work. The vocal cords are constricting, thickening, cutting off my air supply. I guess since wolves can’t talk they don’t need all the throat muscles that humans do.
I pull my head back from the stalagmite, meaning to run, get to the surface if I can, before I change. Put space between myself and my friends. Lots of space.
But then I see the face again. It’s in front of me. Bulging out of the stalagmite,