Among You Secret Children Read online

  Among You Secret Children

  Copyright © 2015 Jeff Kamen

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved

  Published by Jeff Kamen at Smashwords

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people without risk of sanctions governed by international treaties and laws. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Part One – Lands Above, Lands Below

  Chapter 01 — The Disk

  Chapter 02 — Five Years Later

  Chapter 03 — Struggle With Sentries

  Chapter 04 — Escape

  Chapter 05 — Injection

  Chapter 06 — Advice From A Friend

  Chapter 07 — Talking With The Versteckts

  Chapter 08 — Figure Of Dread

  Chapter 09 — Uncertain Teacher

  Chapter 10 — Return To The City

  Chapter 11 — Sandor

  Chapter 12 — A Sighting

  Chapter 13 — Anya

  Chapter 14 — The Pod

  Chapter 15 — Harvest Balloons

  Chapter 16 — Missing

  Chapter 17 — In Fever

  Chapter 18 — Interrogation

  Chapter 19 — Unease

  Chapter 20 — GRIP

  Chapter 21 — Inside The Shaft

  Chapter 22 — Woodland Visitor

  Part Two – Fires and Exodus

  Chapter 23 — The Revolution Begins

  Chapter 24 — Frescoes

  Chapter 25 — At The Maga Camp

  Chapter 26 — Room Of Instruments

  Chapter 27 — Anniversary

  Chapter 28 — Revolution Underway

  Chapter 29 — Death And Spices

  Chapter 30 — Oxtranox

  Chapter 31 — The Cavern

  Chapter 32 — Funeral

  Chapter 33 — Colossi

  Chapter 34 — In Blackness

  Chapter 35 — Fire Over The Tarn

  Chapter 36 — Exodus

  Chapter 37 — Smoke Searching

  Chapter 38 — Predators

  Part Three – Transformations

  Chapter 39 — A Desert Find

  Chapter 40 — Vadraskar Rising

  Chapter 41 — The Bleak Wilds

  Chapter 42 — Ravine

  Chapter 43 — The Gorge

  Chapter 44 — The Vehicle

  Chapter 45 — Discovering Caves And Bridge

  Chapter 46 — Preparing For Battle

  Chapter 47 — The House

  Chapter 48 — Gljiva

  Chapter 49 — Attack Force

  Chapter 50 — The Tracks

  Chapter 51 — Cora

  Chapter 52 — Among The Chains

  Chapter 53 — Pit Slave

  Chapter 54 — Go To Her

  Chapter 55 — The Guard

  Chapter 56 — Aftermath

  Chapter 57 — A Doomed Race

  Chapter 58 — As One

  Chapter 59 — Deep In The Flickerings

  Chapter 60 — Overland Winter, Spring

  Chapter 61 — Leaving The Bubble

  Part Four – Destiny

  Chapter 62 — The Past Stirs

  Chapter 63 — Farewells

  Chapter 64 — Istran Port

  Chapter 65 — Flying South

  Chapter 66 — Illyrian Roads

  Chapter 67 — At Karoly’s

  Chapter 68 — A Storm

  Chapter 69 — Mona

  Chapter 70 — Clifftop Grave

  Chapter 71 — A Secret Told

  Chapter 72 — Travels And Strangers

  Chapter 73 — Rings

  Chapter 74 — Entering Durs

  Chapter 75 — The Merchants

  Chapter 76 — Assembling A Plan

  Chapter 77 — Long Ago In Flames

  Chapter 78 — Dance Lessons

  Chapter 79 — The Ceremony

  Chapter 80 — To The Brute Interior

  Chapter 81 — Life At Sea

  Chapter 82 — Desert Homeland

  Chapter 83 — Unleashed

  Chapter 84 — Eaten

  Chapter 85 — On The Hill

  Acknowledgements

  What shall hand-moulded clay reply?

  What counsel shall it understand?

  Dead Sea Scrolls

  He who fears death fears either the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation.

  But if you shall have no sensation, neither will you feel any harm;

  and if you will acquire another kind of sensation, you will be a different kind of living being

  and you will not cease to live

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  Ghosts are, so they say, bits and pieces of other worlds,

  the beginnings of them

  Fydor Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Mark Sellen

  Part One – Lands Above, Lands Below

  Chapter 1 — The Disk

  The City. Municipal Tower 7.

  ‘Everyone, look at little Marty... see? See that?’ his pretty mother will forever laugh, lifting him proudly up to the camera while he squints and kicks his tiny legs about. ‘Always going to the light, aren’t you? Just like a little —’

  He hits pause. The blinds are still up. Putting down his carton, Moth goes to the window and tugs the cord. The underworld sky carved from living rock disappears, the grid of streets and buildings along with it. He returns to his seat in the little apartment he has stayed in since the family home was seized, and he hits play again and the images run on.

  Golden moments of childhood spooled in there, time spent with long-gone friends and relatives, the good and gracious among them, the boldest thinkers and artists and scientists of their generation. All a part of that constant stream of visitors back then. Happier times, with all the innocence of yesteryear, the jokes and laughter resounding even among so many plans, so much discussion. Scenes he will never forget: his father sprawled on a sofa with his overalls unzipped to the waist; his mother with her hair cut provocatively short, lifting a drink to the lens. Both so young and optimistic.

  All he has left of them now, the tape and his memories. The figures gesture and talk and it is with a painful combination of boredom and pride that he perseveres through some of the longer technical discussions they’d recorded as graduate students, holding debates with members of their circle in a variety of settings: labs, offices, libraries, lecture halls. As ever at this point, vexed and distracted, he wonders why they’d included such material in what was supposed to be a family record; then the footage cuts out with a snap.

  In the room’s long silence he pulls down his goggles and rubs his eyes, cursing, deciding to get the repairs done before he grows too tired, makes a mess of it. He kneels at the console and ejects the tape, shaking his head at the snapped ends hanging withered from the rollers. He removes the face with a pocket screwdriver, thinking first to untangle the drive cogs, and almost drops it on discovering something lodged inside.

  A small silver disk. He extracts it with trembling fingertips, his breath clouding the surface. Around the
inner ring a message in his father’s writing: For M. I hope you understand.

  With a terrible sense of foreboding, he inserts the disk into the console’s upper tray and sets it running.

  ~O~

  A simple black frame emerges, housing a wash of static. There is no sound, just a low background hiss. Then a faint image appears.

  The first thing he sees is a murky area lit by lanterns. Some up on hooks, others burning on the floor. He explores the pocked and recessed walls of what appears to be a cave. In the foreground the dim forms of half a dozen people wearing thickly textured clothing the colour of mud. They have their backs to the lens, are deep in discussion. To one side is a wooden bench piled with books and papers. On the floor a stack of bowls, a few blackened pots and pans. Smoke drifts through the enclosure and when someone moves he notices part of a bed. Narrow, like a raised cot in some primal nursery, draped in sheets. He sees an elderly woman lying under them, her long black hair streaked with grey.

  He grins, imagining it to be a joke, an extract lifted from a showvid his parents had stashed away to surprise him. Then, as members of the group show their faces, his grin falters. No make-up could do that to people. Nothing could.

  They look so ancient to him — no, are ancient, unmistakeably — their features weathered and deeply lined; nutlike, stained orange in the gloom. In growing alarm he realises that the recording is authentic — primitive and poor quality, perhaps, with the camera kept in one position on auto-focus, the figures blurring a little as they move around — but a recording nevertheless. A recording from the surface; made illicitly, it seems.

  He sits with his knuckles at his chin, watching the figures conferring. Questions are roaring in his head but it seems there are no answers in this earthen drama, just a suggestion that some kind of ceremony is imminent, for as the group breaks up, they look to the bed in attitudes of reverence or prayer. The mood is grave, portentous, frightening.

  They pass back and forth in the smoke, bringing cloths and jugs, carrying steaming wooden buckets. As they continue, he notices a young redheaded woman directing them from the bedside, a petite figure who weeps as she takes the old woman’s hand. Then the body moves. A second hand, clawlike and shrivelled, lifts from the covers. He sits rigidly, finding himself drawn in deeper. An attendant leans aside and within a host of moving shadows he sees the face of a woman who had once been beautiful and who now lies ravaged by the years. Her skin swarthy and twisted, hanging on one side like a pouch of leather, as if the muscles in her jaw have been cut. Scars pucker her neck and face. She stirs again and her eyes turn restlessly in their sockets. Glittering; black ice.

  Eyes which turn directly towards him. Fix him with their glare.

  In rising horror, he has the feeling she knows that he is watching her. That she can see him — see him through the screen. That she recognises him.

  He starts wheezing, his heart racing in his chest. It can’t be, but it is, it’s true, she knows he’s there, she knows it, knows it, and all he wants to do is to get to the console and shut it down, kick the switch or something, but he cannot move, is paralysed. She locks her eyes into his own, her lips breaking into a thin downcurving smile, and the wish he makes that moment he makes on his life — to be anywhere but there, be anything other than the person watching her. Her eyes dart like a bird’s and narrow a little, as if in acknowledgement of this; then up comes the withered arm, revealing burnmarks all the way to the fingers. She seems to be mouthing something. He tries to look away, tear his eyes from her, but instead has to watch her crooked lips mash round. A moan breaks from his throat as she burns herself into him, and he forces himself up so he can reach the monitor and hurl it out the window if necessary — and then she turns, her eyes swinging away as a tall bearded figure appears.

  He cries aloud, but it is not from fear that he is yelling, but from recognition. For the man is his father, clad in long loose furs; breathing the surface air without a mask.

  The old woman’s face is changing. Already she seems different, no longer fiercely controlling, but a frail old woman in pain. Her palsied hand gestures, and as people attend to her she is cloaked from view.

  He sinks down again, struggling to take it in. Watching his father as he crouches over a medical bag and opens the clasp. Those familiar, assured movements as he selects his implements before rising again, discretely motioning to the redhead. The old woman is on her back, the hooked lips working in a manner indicative of increasing discomfort. After a few words with the redhead, his father draws back the covers and stands over the old woman with a stethoscope, placing it at several points upon her upper body, then a little further down. He appears to be on familiar terms with her, and smiles with warm affection as he talks, arranging the sheets as if determined to preserve her dignity.

  The taut mound of a pregnant belly is exposed to the light. His father places the metal ear upon the flesh and listens for some time, feeling around with his fingertips. Then he readjusts the sheets, addressing the woman calmly, yet also with concern. He lifts her good arm to feel for a vein, regarding his watch as he counts the pulse, and then he issues brisk instructions to those in attendance. One of the nurses takes a swab and stains the belly with a dark fluid while he returns to his bag and picks out some instruments. He places them before him on the covers, arranging them methodically.

  Moth sees glints of steel, small glass bottles. A pair of callipers and gloves.

  From this point on, events move quickly. The old woman starts shaking in spasms, her shrivelled hand flinging about wildly until it falls with a jerk and remains still. All this time the young redhead has been at her side, calming her, stroking her face. The others turn to his father, and with sombre determination he places a scalpel on the belly, then makes a clean incision across it as if using a pen. A black grin appears, leaking. Something inside the woman moves spasmodically, then falls still. When it moves again, the skin opens like a flap. Whatever is inside her is struggling to get out. The sheets cloud with blood.

  Attendants crowd in at all angles, straining to look, to help if possible, and it is from a chaos of reaching hands that his father lifts a child into the world, red raw and screaming.

  A child unlike any Moth has ever seen, with an adult’s head growing from an infant’s body. Staring helplessly, he watches the nurses swaddle the child in cloth while his father bunches the cord and severs it with one cut. The child is writhing, pulling at the thick black hair she’s been born with, her expression that of a conscious creature born in dreadful turmoil. The nurses dab at her face, picking at the membranous film which covers her, unplugging the mouth and nose; then with another wipe, they lay her gently at the mother’s sunken chest. Weeping, the redhead helps the old woman look down at this slimy and marvellous creation.

  It seems the last thing she will ever do is take sight of her offspring. With tremors racking her body, she clasps hold of the child, gazing down so very tenderly, her eyes like darkening suns. Then she drops back, still and lifeless.

  The child screams once more and he sits hugging himself, rocking on his seat, imagining her agony, her plunging disorientation. The scene continues behind a scrum of bodies. He waits in terror, catching only brief glimpses of his father until the people finally clear, to find him stitching up the belly’s slack wound.

  The old woman lies motionless. No more will she gaze through the screen at him, nor any other screen. His father regards her solemnly as the child is taken away. He is wiping what looks like jelly from a small round object in his palm. He studies it a moment, then wraps it in a cloth and hands it across to the redhead. As if enacting a courtesy, tidying up the appropriate loose ends. After that, he peels off his gloves, his work apparently over.

  Then he turns towards the camera. Approaching it slowly, with heavy-lidded, grieving eyes.

  A sight Moth will never forget, will replay endlessly in the future.

  Forever his father will raise a hand to the lens, then lift his gaze a momen
t. The screen cuts to darkness.

  ~O~

  Moth alone in the unlit room. Alone in crushing silence. Two years his parents have been gone, two years he has lived in misery. Isolated. Frightened. And now this.

  For M. I hope you understand.

  Suddenly he looks up. As might someone on hearing an unexpected noise.

  Yes, he does. He does understand. The disk has brought a message to him: his father has told him he is still alive. Somehow, he can breathe up there. And if he can breathe, then he must still be on the surface, up where he’d first come in contact with the mountain-dwellers.

  He has to get to him, head north by any means possible.

  He applies for a transfer the following day.

  Chapter 2 — Five Years Later

  The years that follow pass quickly. Moth the technician, going from lab to engine room at Van Hagens base, building up knowledge of his surroundings, the people and work routines that bind the place together.

  Moth alone in the canteen, scribbling furtive notes as he watches how his colleagues interact; as he sits listening, eavesdropping on guards and careless talkers in charge of useful access doors, encryption keys. Moth receiving his promotion to join the fourth floor Observation Bay crew, the new comradeship feeling like a skin he wears over tortured worry and deception.

  Time a friend to him at first, until he begins to appreciate the difficulty of getting outside. He sees that the risks involved are of a different order to those he’d first contemplated: there is no handy door to sneak out of, no pipe or conduit to wriggle through and emerge from unseen. His plan must never be shared with another person; trust cannot exist.

  Time gliding by and his fear that his father might have left the mountain, left and forsaken him, grows like a disease. Then he thinks he has it. By the time his plan is ready it is the month of the eighth moon, night of his mother’s birthday.