Those Who Fear by John Parke Davis

Michael

Those Who Fear
by John Parke Davis

Fire danced across the broken plain, issuing up through great red vents like bleeding gashes in its charred black skin. The lava field stretched emptily in all directions, save towards the city. Charber felt certain that he was actually standing on a thin crust over an endless sea of burning liquid death, and that made him uneasy.

"I’m really not so sure we should have come here," he said as a nearby vent burped great gouts of magma into the sky.

Torg the Barbarian grunted. "We’re adventurers. This is an adventure."

"Y’know, I’m not really an adventurer," Charber protested. "I really got into this all very accidentally, and I’m thinking maybe it’s time I retire. I’ve got chickens, you know, they need feeding, and while I’m sure the neighbors are looking after them and all, they miss their Pappy something fierce when I’m away..."

Torg was already striding towards a great gate that hove out of the otherwise empty plain. Far behind it, the city of Vyce loomed ominously, its twisted metal towers and barbed-wire walls casting great clawed shadows in the dim light of the magma spurts. Charber wheedled alongside the big man, pleading incessantly as the gate grew nearer.

It was ten feet taller than the top of Torg’s head, which was a head over Charber’s own, and made of solid black rock with thin veins of red laced in wicked spirals throughout it. Above the portal, in arching text, someone had scrawled THE PATHWAYS OF PANIC in large capital letters. And embossed in what looked like polished bone just below that were the words THOSE WHO FEAR ARE LOST.

Charber felt his face start to sweat as he read the words. They clearly weren’t made by the same person; the top part was just written in chalk or something. What kind of person puts chalk on an abyssal gate? he wondered. And why "The Pathways of Panic?" Did they really need a place name? It’s not like there were a ton of gates with cryptic caveats carved in human-ivory on them, and one might wander into the wrong one if it were not properly labeled. And the whole point that a person might lose his cool within came across loud and clear in the embossed message, thank you.

Those who fear are lost. What the hell did that mean? Was it the act of fearing that made one lost? Or was "those who fear" a general category of people predetermined to be lost? Because one could fear in general and not fear specifically at this moment. And moreover, what qualified as fear? Charber was more of a worrier than an out-rightly fearful type. Did worrying count? If so, that was worrisome. He didn’t even want to think about what "lost" meant.

"And ‘are’! Do they mean it in the traditional sense? Like, are those who fear already lost, and the sign’s just stating a philosophical position? Or does it mean that those who fear will be lost? Because I can deal with the former, it’s all a matter of perspective there..." Torg the Barbarian rolled his eyes and kept walking.

Torg dressed rather dapper for a barbarian. His bulging pecs, generally well-oiled and glistening with the might of heroism in every barbarian story Charber had ever heard, were actually tastefully concealed beneath a well-pressed cotton shirt that buttoned diagonally up to his left shoulder. Likewise his breeches, which were a nice doeskin and tucked gently into a sharp pair of black leather boots. Even his wild, flowing mane was more of a gentle, tame ponytail. He didn’t look much like a barbarian at all, Charber thought.

"Being a barbarian is a state of mind," Torg once told him. "Just because I’m a barbarian doesn’t mean I have to be uncivilized."

The wild warrior placed his velvet-gloved hands on either side of the gate and strained with all his might. The gate didn’t budge.

"Maybe it’s a ‘pull’?" Charber suggested.

"No, no, there’s a keyword or something," Torg said. He began rifling through his pockets determinedly. A thin gold ring fell out of one and rolled into a nearby lava vent, where it vanished with a bright blue flame and a short howl. "Oh s***, needed that," said Torg.

"Maybe that Gatekeeper guy has another one." The heat from the vents made Charber lightheaded. His mouth was dry, and all he could think about was the old man who had sent them here and the crystal spring running through the bottom of his cavernous home. "You know, he did say something about a keyword, I think. I could just trot back and ask him..."

"Ah, here we are!" Torg produced a corner scrap of parchment from his pocket, and squinted at it. "Let’s see, b—r—umle, brumle ... ummm ... that looks like a ‘k’..."

"Oh, for heaven’s sakes!" The little man grabbed the paper from between the barbarian’s hammy fingers, then looked around quickly to make sure nothing in their current plain of existence took offense at the invocation of its opposite. "Sorry," he whispered to no one. "Okay, it says ‘brundleskin.’"

As soon as the word left his mouth, the great gate creaked and a line of red appeared down its middle. There was a banging like the God Himself had dropped all his books at once, and then a slow ratcheting sound as the gate swung open towards them.

"Ah, so it was a pull," Charber said. Torg shrugged, then set off into whatever lay beyond.

A narrow passage stretched out from the portal, turning abruptly to both left and right a dozen yards or so away. Charber could see just enough to know that it extended beyond the sides of the gate, but when he tried to look around the portal, there was nothing, just a lava flow between them and the city. Back through the gate, Vyce loomed over the featureless stone walls of the Pathways of Panic, its jagged metal façade daring the adventurers onwards. Charber declined that dare, but Torg’s hand on the back of his neck quickly changed his attitude, and he slunk into the Pathways with his head hanging low.

The passages turned and twisted, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes in curves and even spirals that seemed like they must terminate in dead-ends but inexplicably didn’t. Few magma vents broke through inside the maze, and they were forced to light torches to see their way. At first, Charber attempted to draw a map of the place to track their progress, but he soon found that they were crossing through passages they had already been down but where there had been no intersection. There were times, even, when they should have exited the gate again or crossed the magma flow, but they found nothing more than dark walls. After six hours or so of wandering, his throat began to grow tight and his palms clammy, and he wondered if the nervous were merely misdirected, or if they would get lumped in with the fearful and be out-and-out lost.

"You know," Torg said, stopping to survey their most recent passage, "I expected a little more in the way of the panic-inducing. We’ve been here for quite some time, and I for one cannot say that I’m anywhere near panic. I’m concerned, sure, but panicked? Nope. You?"

Charber smiled weakly and mopped the sweat off his brow. The barbarian nodded, satisfied, and strode off again. More hours passed, and more miles of passages, without event. Suddenly, they rounded a corner, and Torg let out a mighty holler.

"I see it!" he bellowed. "The light! An exit!" At first, Charber saw nothing, but then, pulling the torch away, he saw it too. It was not an exit. Instead, the long narrow hallway ahead of them ended directly in the huge magma flow, with no obvious way across.

"Wrong way! Wrong way!" he screamed, but the barbarian had already taken off running, galloping as fast as his tree-trunk legs could carry him towards the magma. Charber raced after him, but the big man outpaced him by a distance of two steps for every one of his own, and was soon beyond reach.

"We did it, Charber! We did it!" Torg yelled back over his shoulder, flying headfirst into the red light.

"Look out!" the little man screamed, but it was too late. A great plume of flame marked Torg’s passage, a shriek and a rush of heat that nearly singed Charber’s eyebrows. He put his hand to his mouth and stared at the place his companion had just been. Now, there was nothing but a thin flame over the sultry glow of magma. He was alone.

Charber tried to think of other things than the increasingly-claustrophobic walls, but they pushed in on his thoughts from all directions. He tried not to focus on Torg, but that intruded, too. Torg drunk at the Laughing Camel, making friends with Charber because the little man was too scared to wander off. Torg striding bravely through the Caverns of Kniss, Charber tiptoeing behind him, holding the torch so he could see to cleave whatever might need cleaving. Torg eagerly agreeing to enter the underworld and destroy the Demon-Prince of Vyce, while Charber frantically made ‘stop’ signals with his hands. And now Torg was gone. If the barbarian had given in to panic, what hope did he have?

He had not gone very far when the walls started sloping around in the now-familiar shape of a spiral. Charber gnawed at the fingernails of his left hand. Would this spiral end? Would there be a wall this time that he could slide down and huddle against in the fetal position? Or would this damned maze go on for eternity, until finally he died of starvation or dehydration, or went crazy and drank magma, which would really, really hurt? At last, he let himself admit that he was afraid. Hell, he had always been afraid. Before, he was just too afraid of being afraid to admit it.

The spiral neared its end, and the dank stone of the passage grew inexplicably softer. Soon he found regular dirt beneath his feet, and not much farther from that, grass grew. The passage had grown wider, as well. When he reached what must have been the terminal twist of the spiral, trees were growing just inside the wall.

Charber’s jaw dropped loosely. His torch fell to the ground, and it took him a second to grab it before the grass caught fire. Not that that was a problem, because moisture pressed in from the no-longer-hot, pleasantly-warm air. Before him, the walls yawned widely to reveal a large, lightly forested clearing. In the middle of it, exact to the detail, sat his house. Complete with chickens.

At first he thought they were dire chickens, lethal poultry lying in wait for just the right moment to peck his ankles off, rupture his ear-drums with their unholy clucking and lay their eggs in his soul. He sat outside the house for a day and a half watching them until he ran out of food and ultimately decided to try and eat one. Sure enough, they tasted like chicken. Moreover, they tasted like his chicken!

It took another half-day before he finally satisfied himself that there wasn’t something horrid waiting in the house and allowed himself to move in. A little brook ran behind the house, and it yielded remarkably fresh water. And his garden had been planted, too! Tomatoes were in season! It was a miracle.

Charber didn’t trust miracles; they made him uneasy. A miracle giveth, a miracle taketh away, and then it might kill you for good measure; who knows what miracles think? Too unpredictable for his tastes. Every morning from then on out, he cautiously patrolled the borders of the clearing, being careful not to stray back into the Pathways of Panic, but also setting alarm traps to make sure nothing strayed out of them. He even made himself a little staff out of an ironwood, just in case. Charber knew better than to relax; that was when they got you. Whoever they were.

But with every day that passed, he felt himself growing more and more comfortable with life. Sure, he lived on a quiet isolated little farm in Hell, but it was pleasant, and very peaceful, and the chickens were good company. Each morning, he checked the traps with a little less worry, each day he tended the garden with a touch less hesitation, until one morning he woke up and found that he wasn’t scared at all. Not even a little bit.

It was then that a mighty clatter echoed from the front of the clearing. An alarm trap! Charber grabbed his staff and raced towards the noise. A new feeling gripped him—something like determination. A large figure loped into the clearing, but Charber stood up tall, no longer cowering. He raised up the staff and charged the demon-spawn with a scream, raining down blows with all his might.

"Ah, bloody-hell, what are you doing?" the demon asked. Its cotton shirt was rent in tatters, and its doeskin breeches were positively filthy.

"T-Torg?" Charber asked.

"Ah, there you are," the barbarian said. "Came back to get you. Glad to see you survived all this time." From his belt, the ghastly severed head of the Demon-Prince leered up at Charber.

"It’s been years!" the little man gasped.

"Oh yeah, tell you all about it some other time. Come on, let’s go."

"But you were dead!"

The barbarian nodded his head with a self-satisfied smile. "It’s a really good story," he said.

Charber shook his head. "Wait, now, wait ... I don’t know if I want to leave. I’ve been living here quite comfortably for some time now..."

"Here?" Torg interjected. Charber looked around him. The trees were gone. The cabin was gone. Even the damn chickens were gone. No clearing surrounded them, just another bleak passageway.

"Oh, hell," he said.

"So you’ve been lost here all this time?" Torg asked as they made their way back toward the gate.

"I liked being lost," Charber murmured.

The End

Story Copyright © by John Park Davis. All rights reserved.

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