When All is Null and Void

Chapter Five

Seeming to have decided there was nothing to be worried of, the two started to walk the perimeter of the cave. Carter rubbed his bloodied and battered fingers along the cave wall with gentle, probing strokes. He stopped every once in a while to rub at a particular place in the wall only to give up moments later. The girl did nothing but walk behind Carter and babble wildly about almost nothing. Something seemed slightly off about her, a sort of insanity Caleb couldn't quite place.

"Alia," Carter said when his right hand very suddenly plunged through the wall. "I found it." Caleb wasn't all too sure what it was Carter had found. He was inextricably forced to follow the two teens through the wall in the cave, which seemed a horrible idea to him. Not that he could control what they were doing. He couldn't even touch them, let alone communicate to them. Was this all in his head?

Caleb heard Alia's gasp before he saw anything. When he did, though, it wasn't a gasp that came out of him, but a tiny squeak of horror. A fluttering flame filled the chamber behind the wall with a stark, grotesque shadowing. What was underneath would have been enough to send anyone else running. Caleb might have tried if he hadn't been linked to the two teenagers. Neither moved.

Underneath the sconce of flame, bodies littered the floor. A reeking, pungent scent of rotting flesh and wet decay filled the cavern. Every one of the bodies lay somewhere in the process of decay, but it was the trail they made that horrified Caleb most: Each had fallen somewhere along a pathway to what Caleb could only imagine to be a shrine. To what, though? He couldn't bring himself to look directly at whatever stood at the top of those sharp rocks arranged like some prehistoric altar. Every fiber of Caleb's being told him to walk away, to turn around and to leave. But he couldn't do that.

Carter and Alia walked closer and closer, and Caleb's instinct to run grew stronger and stronger, but he couldn't stop himself from landing at their side and seeing what they saw. A stone statue shaped as a spider-like beast with long, spindly hair falling from a nearly human face. Evil was written upon its features, and though it was made of stone, something about it seemed all too real. All too ready to maim, kill, destroy.

"We have to raise her now, Carter." Alia's face had gone slack, and her eyelids fluttered as if she'd been placed in a trance, her voice had flat lined.

"I know, Alia." Carter didn't seem particularly enthused to go through with whatever it was, and Caleb was suddenly sure he and Carter could be friends. "I don't want to do this." His face crumpled slightly, a tear slid down his cheek.

"Don't you want to get out?" Alia's voice was flat.

"Of course I want to get out. But Alia, she's..." he shivered violently. The temperature hadn't changed in the chamber, but Caleb knew with intimacy the fear that gripped Carter. Caleb wasn't even sure why he should be terrified. Only that he was, and some quiet feeling in his gut told him only death would come from this.

Taking a long, centering breath, Carter picked up a knife--far too long to be called that, but too short to be a sword--from beside the altar. Caleb shouldn't have been able to feel the hilt was cold, striking through his invisible arm, yet he did. Carter swapped the blade into his left hand and, without any warning to Alia, sliced sharply into the other. If Caleb hated needles, he despisedknives, and now Carter had sliced through tendon to draw a wellspring of blood. Carter didn't even try to hold back his whimper of pain, and Caleb silently retched as tears filled his own eyes. Alia simply stared, under some spell at the sight of Carter's glistening blood. A gleam of longing entered her eyes.

Though Carter had cut deeply, the blood stopped flowing almost instantly. The flesh sealed itself with an odd puff of dark smoke. One moment a pool of crimson filled his palm, the next, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a drop had spilled onto the shrine or floor. Repeating the same gut shattering process, Carter sliced into his hand again.