Dreams and Shadows - By C. Robert Cargill Page 0,103
head above the water and took a deep a breath, an hour’s worth of air. There, he thought. Now I’m ready.
He swam down to the bottom of the lake, paddling quickly but quietly, to the nixies’ hidden lair, careful not to disturb the silt surrounding it. Swimming through the atrium, he entered a cave decorated as a sitting room. Three waterlogged couches sat positioned as if they were meant to host company. Sitting atop one of them—chained down so as to not float away—was the slowly deteriorating, bloated corpse of the nixies’ most recent victim.
Colby tried not to look as he swam past it into the dining room.
As he passed through the doorway—nothing more than a large hole connecting one cave to the next—he saw one of the nixie sisters dining on a stew of things culled from the lake bottom. She looked up at him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked sweetly.
Colby grew nervous. If he spoke to explain himself, she would see through the deception; if he didn’t, there was no telling what she might do.
She smiled. “Aren’t you a cute little one? Don’t spend too much time down here. My sisters are asleep, and if you wake them, they’ll make a soup out of you.” She waved him off with a flutter of her hand. “Off you go then.”
Colby continued, hoping now not to see the other sisters. He passed into another cave, long and slender like a hallway. Along it adjoined several other chambers, four in all, each clearly bedrooms. At the end was the single largest cavern in the underwater den. It was huge, some sixty feet across, the floor covered with a thick layer of silt and sand.
The room was overflowing with jars, nearly 150 in all, each upturned—their necks buried six inches in the sand—upon them carved the names of the suitors they possessed. These nixies had been claiming victims here for decades. Colby eyed the names in the dark, eager to knock over the jar he was here for and be done with it. But there were so many, and he dared not loose them all; there was no telling what might happen then.
He read name after name, each carved messily into the clay with a small knife, until finally he found it: JARED THATCHER.
He nudged the pot with his turtle head, but it would not budge; he was too small and weak to knock it over. The only way he was going to overturn it was to return to normal, leaving him only a minute or so more of air to swim out. Though that left little room for error, he had no other choice. Colby closed his eyes and worked one final incantation, using the last lingering remnants of ambient dreamstuff to revert.
The water was frigid this deep down—a fact he hadn’t noticed until his protective turtle flesh was gone—and the water flooded his ears, the pressure pushing in on his eardrums. He reached down with his arms, dug both feet into the sand, and tugged at the pot. It budged ever so slightly. He tugged again and gained another inch. Straining, he put every last bit of energy into pulling up the pot, finally freeing it from its moorings. A ghostly blue light slipped out from beneath, taking the form of a young man, only slightly older than Colby.
The man gazed upon him with horror, reaching out a single extended hand, his spirit drifting away in the current. “Why?” he gasped. “Why did you do this?”
Colby felt a strange sensation creeping in—a cold, dark, ominous feeling like a distant void peeking through, grasping hold of the spirit in front of him.
“Why?” Jared asked one last time, his eyes full of fear. Then Hell itself reached out from the void and dragged the spirit into nothingness.
What have I done?
Colby’s lungs began to ache for air, the early stages of panic setting in. He needed to get to the surface; he needed to get to the surface now. Colby swam furiously, careless now of how much noise he made. Air. No matter how hard he thrashed, he just couldn’t move swiftly enough against the current. Need air. Without thinking, he grabbed the wall, pulling himself along, casting himself haphazardly through the caves.
He entered the dining room and scanned for the nixie who had spoken to him. She was nowhere to be found.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
He reached the threshold of the atrium, his lungs ready to burst. Then he heard them.