Becoming P.T. Lyfantod - 54
A serial fantasy novel
What follows is Part 54 of Becoming P.T. Lyfantod
If you missed Part 1, start there:
I looked down at my torch, but it was just as dead as ever. A round of startled gasps drew my gaze upwards as my friends were revealed, scattered around a roughly circular chamber with angular walls. There were two doors: the one we’d come in, and one directly opposite. But the doors were hardly worth mentioning. For the entire room was ringed with ferocious beasts.
No two were alike, but they were uniformly terrifying. All claws and fangs and snouts and scales. Snarling mouths and leering eyes. And not one under eight feet tall, towering over us, heads near the ceiling. They’d been roughly hewn from lifeless stone—perhaps by the same hand that’d carved the doors and windows—but they were lifelike enough that for a moment I was sure I was about to be eaten. Each stood, or crouched, or sat on a low pedestal, lit from below by a sourceless, cool white light that cast their faces in grotesque relief.
“Bloody hell…” was the general sentiment expressed when we’d recovered enough to speak. And “Who turned the lights on?” It’d happened the precise moment I’d set both feet on the floor.
“What are these things?” wondered Stuart.
“And what have they got to do with Lightfoot?” I said.
“They’re cool.” Merry ran her hand over an upraised paw the size of a tennis racket.
Stuart watched her uneasily. “Are you sure we should be… touching them?”
“Afraid it’s going to come to life and eat you?” Tom rapped his knuckles against the stone feathers of an impossibly enormous bird.
“Aren’t you—?”
“There’s writing on the bases,” Iain said, kneeling. “I can’t read it…”
None of us could.
“Wonder what happened to this one,” Tom had crossed the room and was standing with his hands on his hips before one of the statues; what appeared to be a big cat, with nothing but air between its massive shoulders and the ceiling. Its pumpkin-sized head lay sideways on the ground in front of it. Tom crouched and picked up a small fragment—a tooth, perhaps—and turned it over in his hand before slipping it into his pocket.
But I—I was on the other side of the room, far enough away that I could see what was resting on the headless beast’s cloven neck. “Not what,” I corrected. “Who.”
Tom frowned at me over his shoulder. “Who?”
“Godwyn,” Iain breathed, seeing what I had. A crooked candle.
“How are we supposed to get up there?” asked Merry, who’d followed our gazes and backed up for a better look.
“Godwyn?” Tom repeated. He and Stuart had joined us peering up at the unlit hunk of wax.
“How’ll we light it?” said Stuart. “There’s no fire this time.”
“Didn’t we talk about bringing a lighter?” said Tom. “I’m sure we did…”
“I haven’t got one,” said Merry. Neither had anyone else.
"Well thats bloody fantastic, isn't it? What did we come here for if you lot weren't going to be prepared? I guess we should just go home and try another day, hum?”
“Oh shut up, Tom. Go talk about sport if you’re so fed up.”
Stuart’s eyes darted between Tom and Merry. “Maybe there’s something we’re missing.” He bent to peer into the shadows behind one of the beasts. “If—”
“Like a lighter?” Tom snarked.
“Let him finish!” Merry snapped. The tension in the room ratcheted upwards.
“—if we look around,” Stuart swallowed, “maybe we'll find something.”
“We’re not going to find anything,” Tom searched sarcastically, making a show of looking under, around, and behind the nearest statue. “Might as well look for sticks to rub together…”
"Maybe it’s just a candle,” Merry picked the statue farthest from Tom and started a grumbling hunt of her own. “It’s not like we’ve hit a dead end.” She waved a hand. “There's a door right there…”
“I don’t even know why we stopped in this bloody room,” Tom complained. “Just because someone turned the lights on…”
Stuart, Iain and I exchanged a look. At least they weren’t arguing. In fact, when it came to thinking the search was pointless, they actually seemed to agree. “Nothing here either,” muttered Merry, at the same time as Tom, his head lost somewhere in a monstrous armpit, said, “What a surprise. Nothing back here.”
Stuart was trying not to take it personally.
“Nothing here, or here—”
They were going to run into each other any moment. Boiling oil, meet water.
“—here, or here, or here—”
They scowled at one another from either side of the final statue: rearing ram, with not two, but four imposing horns, covered in shaggy fur. “Nothing here,” they announced in unison from the shadows between the figure and the wall. “Nothing h—”
Merry stared in horror at her hand. Or rather, where it should have been. For just above her wrist, it had disappeared right into the mass of stone fur. She yanked her arm back, fully expecting, I think, to find it permanently truncated. She let out a wail of relief at the reappearance of her fingers, and waggled them in wonder.
On the other side of the towering buck, Tom was gazing wide-eyed and open-mouthed at his own fingers, drawing them in and out of the impossible statue again and again. “There’s nothing here,” he murmured. “I mean—nothing there. It’s like…”
“An illusion,” I said. Iain, Stuart and I came closer.
“What’s it feel like?” asked Iain.
“Like nothing,” Merry shook her head.
“My mam got me a Mirage mirascope when I was younger,” Stuart said. “Two curved mirrors shaped like bowls, stacked rim to rim facing one another, with a hole in the middle of the top one. If you put something inside—like a coin—it looks like it’s floating on top of the hole.”
“I don’t think this is being done with mirrors, Stu,” Iain said.
“Stick your head in,” said Merry. “It must be hiding something.”
Tom looked at her, appalled. “Me? You do it!”
“No no. You found it. You deserve the honor.”
Tom shook his head. “If you want to know what’s in there, you look.”
“I’ll do it,” I said. They stared at me. “What? I’m curious. And besides, I’m sure it’s fine…” Tom and Merry made room as I stepped forward. I wasn’t actually sure it was fine. But I was more curious than afraid. I tested the surface with my hand. Not so much as a tingle. Why should my face be any different? Right. No big deal. As long as it didn’t suddenly become solid… or scramble my brain, or…
Forehead first. Slowly, slowly. “Am I in? I can’t feel anything.”
“A little, keep going!”
Stone grooves and ridges and curlicues filled my vision, too close to focus my eyes, and still I felt nothing.
“Hurry up!”
“I’m going!” I lost the tip of my nose… This is too weird. I squeezed my eyes shut, my brain telling me I was about to run into something and I ought to do something about it.
“Well, what's inside?”
“I… don’t know. My eyes are closed.”
“Bloody open them, then!”
“Give me a minute! I’m working up to it, aren’t I?”
“Jesus Christ…”
I tried to ignore them. It’ll be fine. Just take your time. I cracked an eyelid. And what I found was… light. Pale and featureless and iridescent. Bright, but not blinding. “Whoa.”
“What is it?”
“I…” I withdrew my head and was greeted with an eyeful of illusory stone. Back in. It was like sticking your head underwater, without the physical sensation. Out, in again. “It’s pretty.”
“Pretty?”
“P.T., what’s 36 times 37?”
I pulled my head out to frown at Stuart. “What?”
“I want to determine if there’s some field in there scrambling your mind.”
“And you thought complex maths was the way to do it? Give me a calculator.”
“Seems normal to me,” Iain smirked.
“Oh. This is, err…” Tom had vanished up to his shoulders into the statue.
“Pretty…” Now Merry was in as well.
“I want to see,” said Stuart. I moved aside so he and Iain could get a look. Standing back, watching them all, it was just about as strange a scene as I’d ever encountered. As if all my friends had got caught up in a freak accident involving the construction of concrete statuary.
Tom was practically swimming in it now, waving his harms about like a blind man. Thump—“Ow!” He’d swung a glancing blow at Stuart’s head. Suddenly he stiffened.
“Tom? What are you doing?”
“There’s something here. Arms… h—hands…”
“Hands?” The others jerked backwards wearing expressions of alarm, but Tom stayed where he was.
“Another statue, feels like. It’s holding—” Metal scraped on stone, and Tom reemerged.
“Is that a gong?”
He held a little brass gong the size of a dinner plate, hanging from a bit of string. And in the other hand a small wooden mallet.
“Weirder and weirder,” Iain shook his head.
“Wonder what happens if I…”
“Tom wait! You don’t know what—” But Merry was too late.
The mallet struck home with a quavering note. Darkness fell like a velvet cloak, and I found myself in a tangle of flailing limbs. Someone conked me in the side of the head. “Hey—!” I threw my arms up in defense. Beside me, someone grunted as though they’d been punched in the stomach.
“Will you stop?!” Merry shouted, though at whom I couldn’t rightly say. Then, from between the cracks between my arms, I discovered I could see. A flickering blue-green light shone somewhere overhead. Cautiously, I lowered my hands and peered upwards, soon discovering the source of the sickly glow. It was the candle, atop the broken statue. As I watched, it floated into the air, supported by a familiar, ugly head.
Godwyn scowled and muttered to himself as he flowed up out of solid rock. “Who—what do you want?” He shook his head, blinking, then looked around. He groaned. “Ungh. I was having the most wonderful dream…”
