Chitter

Get up, pet. We have work for you. Kiran heard the words, quietly commanding in the back of her mind. Shaking with revulsion and fear, Kiran lifted her arm and noticed that she could see perfectly in the deep gloom of the cavern. Broken iron chains lay next to her on the stone dais. What have they done to me?



Kiran slowly pushed herself from her perch. She moved shakily toward the opening and hesitated on the threshold. What am I? Outside the cavern, the night continued on, black and silent. She noticed a small puff of smoke, hanging like dim cotton candy in the air above the opening, and remembered.

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She jerked. The lawn chair that she found herself sprawled in still shook from the loud, low rumble that had brought her back to consciousness. She scrunched up her face, pushing thick bangs out of the way, and blinked. Despite her best efforts, her eyes remained bleary as she turned them on the half finished--and now warm-- glass of sour cherry Pucker in her hand. The smell, wafting up on a sudden breeze made her take a sharp breath against the nausea that threatened to engulf her. She set the glass down in the grass and noticed, as her vision improved, that the rumbling was now causing a disturbance in the surface of the alcohol. The world dipped as she pulled herself upright.



She had been sitting in this spot since stumbling out of the party in tears. She guessed by the temperature of her drink and the full darkness around her—there were no moon and no stars to be seen—that she had been passed out a while. Damn them.  No one had come out to check on her, let alone followed her out. She could still hear them inside, noisily drinking and pressing together. Kiran shuddered. Oh well, what good are any of them anyway?  She started to haul herself out of the chair to go find her keys and stopped. The low rumbling, like a dozen avalanches at once, began again and helped her out of the chair.



The shockwave kept her prone for a few seconds. Her cerebellum executed violent pirouettes and she waited for it to grow tired of that sport. She blearily pulled her petite frame upright, and noticed the chill in the air. What an idiot, Kiran thought. It’s November, what am I doing without a coat? Of course. We couldn’t let his view of my boobs be obstructed by anything as useless as a coat, could we?  She adjusted the borrowed black halter, trying to stuff the offending appendages back in. This is her fault. I don’t even like these people. They don’t even know me. 



She silently cursed Trisha, a girl she knew from classes, for talking her into this party. Trisha was one of those girls you see walking through campus every day—thin, athletic, and tanned with blonde hair dyed six other shades and straightened into submission. They had a communications class together. There was no other reason for a physical therapy major to meet a linguistics major.  The wonders of compulsory classes. Trisha had decided that Kiran was her new best friend, or probably more accurately, her new project. Whatever the reason for the friendship, Kiran barely tolerated the girl and only agreed to the party because she was, for lack of better words, bored. You can only stare at a pet hamster for so long before you’ve seen it all. Scratch, run, eat, poop, climb. Rinse. Repeat.



She hugged herself, trying to hold in the heat swiftly escaping from her bare skin, and looked up at the sky, trying to see her favorite constellation, Orion. She always found the “knife-belt” first, but she thought it looked more like another appendage that Greek men seemed so fond of showing off back then. He always made her smile. Too many clouds to find him, but as she searched, she noticed a lighter patch in the sky, hanging in the still air over a spot a few streets off in the distance. What the hell is that from?  It looked like the phantom puff of smoke left over from a big shell firework. The shell for this one would have had to be the size of a Buick.



Kiran looked back at the college slum she had left, its once-white siding glowing in the light from the windows. She contemplated retrieving her keys once again, and quickly decided that she was more interested in the origin of the smoke cloud. Coward.  Her arms wrapped around her chest against the cold and imagined staring eyes, she began to lurch over the curb and into the empty side-street.  Eyes to the sky, as they say.



Two streets over, after a winding walk that had her tripping over and falling into seemingly every obstacle, she nearly stumbled directly into the source of the smoke. Somehow, she managed to save herself from a head-first sprawl into the gaping black hole that had opened in someone’s backyard. The house was brick and manicured was too weak a word for the lawn. She wished she had a ruler to check the dizzying symmetry of the grass, and calipers for the bushes. These people don’t have kids. Just as well…



The hole had to be twice as wide as she was tall. Still swaying a little from the half fifth of Pucker, she got down to her knees to inspect the hole. She had finally got her uncoordinated legs folded underneath herself when she heard a strange noise emitting from the hole. It was a bizarre chittering noise-- all clicks and hard, high pitched consonants with whining vowel sounds.  All caution gone, she leaned forward, her ears prickling at the sound, trying to hear it more clearly. Although the chittering continued, the sounds became words that surfaced inside her head like alphabet noodles and resolved themselves into sentences.



“We knew you’d be here, Kiran. We have escaped our wicked imprisonment, we are finally free,” said a voice that lost none of its eerie sound with intelligibility. The stilted language made her wrinkle her nose, but she gave a drunken answer anyway.



“Who imprisoned you? Who are you?”



“We are the K’Ombren. The shadow people. We are of the earth and were imprisoned by those who wish us harm.” By this time her eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the hole enough that she could see a dark shape moving below. It moved erratically, jerking from place to place.



“O-kay. Shadow people. But who are ‘those who wish us harm?’ Why would they want you confined underground? And how long have you been down there anyway? You sound like something out of Shelley,” Kiran asked, trying to keep her tone light, the way you do when you’re talking to a growling dog. Right before it tears out your throat. Her heart thudded in her chest and her muscles tightened as the shape in the hole began to move closer to the steep walls.  Her heart skipped with each twitchy step.



“That is not important,” it said.  “They are our adversaries, and they are evil,” it stopped its advance, lingering on the last word, “Come down, I will explain.”



She started to heave herself off the wet grass, scooting herself backward. Electric thrills screamed up and down her spine and her legs wouldn’t unlock. The thing screeched and shot out of the hole. There was no time to untangle her uncoordinated legs before the thing was on her. She screamed and felt icy fingers close on her shoulders as the thing pulled her down with it into the dark puncture in the earth.



She found herself staring out from behind rusted black iron bars set into solid, dark stone. What she was staring at defied even her impressive internal lexis to describe. There were beings on the other side of the bars. They were like living shadows—shadows given free will. The chittering noise that the first K’Ombren had used to communicate with her was amplified and multiplied and it bombarded her ears as she watched like firecrackers on Chinese New Year, but none of it resolved into intelligibility. She shrank back from the bars, clutching her ears and trying to disappear into the rough walls of her prison.



She lost track of time watching them, finally drawing the conclusion that the noise must be their speech; she hesitated to call that cacophony language. The chittering was beginning to set her nerves on edge. Fear’s fingers clawed at her mind, ripping desolate thoughts from the tissue. I’ll never get out of here. Chalk yet another brilliant idea up for Kiran tonight. What the hell was I thinking going to that party? Why would they want me? Oh Bernard, my beautiful, runty hamster, who will feed you?



On that thought, one of the creatures turned its head toward her, and she felt a slimy, raking push against her mind. “Fun, my pet,” it chittered, “We want to have our fun with you. I don’t think you’ll enjoy it much, though…” she got the impression of a malevolent smile before it turned away, although she couldn’t be sure considering their indistinct, shadowy heads.



Alarmed, with a sick, garbage-esque taste in her mouth from the thought of that mind touching hers, Kiran sat down. Tears built in her eyes at the futility of her situation. She cried quietly, but kept her eyes pinned to the shadow people jerking about in the cavern. Indeterminate time passed and she fell into edgy sleep.



“The one I promised you is come!”Kiran jolted awake at the creature’s bark.



“She is the vehicle that will take us into the upper world once more!” Kiran tried to look up but found herself bound to cold stone in a dark cavern. Take them where? Her mind was thick again, like the alcohol back with a vengeance. The wet-garbage taste lingered in her mouth and she gagged. The thick iron chains that held her were freezing, she could feel her skin numbing where it contacted to metal. Honestly, two inch chains to hold me down? 



She squinted into the darkness, trying to see the speaker, who continued to exhort its companions about their eventual redemption and dominion of the upper world. Kiran couldn’t pay attention. Slowly her eyes found the movement of dark on dark that had to be one of the K’Ombren. Had she been able to sit up and look, she would have seen that the cavern was full of them—standing room only. As it was, she could hear the mass of them breathing harshly and chittering in excitement. The speaker’s voice howled to a new pitch, but not in words that Kiran could understand. As it shouted, the horde around her grew silent, and she could feel expectation emanating from all sides. Her skin began to itch and her eyes burned.  Her mind hovered, detached, over her inert body. She noticed that the agonizing feeling intensified when the speaker paused in his oration. Her eyes became hard to close. My eyes must look like hot coals. Burning right through my eyelids. That metaphor never meant anything to me before.



The speaker’s voice climbed to new volume and intensity, almost beyond her range of hearing, and as it shrieked, Kiran thought that her eyes might burst from her head. The horde around her chittered louder, in what sounded like triumph.



Silence.



“It is done,” the speaker croaked quietly into the waiting gloom.



Searing pain in her eyes continued to grip Kiran as she twisted in her bonds. An unearthly, inhuman wail issued from her mouth. Light filled the cavern as she opened her burning eyes. Through the pain and sudden brightness, she could see dark shapes rushing toward her. The K’Ombren converged on Kiran, and as they entered the white light pouring from her tortured eyes, they were sucked into it. Numb, Kiran was soon alone in the cavern. 

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Do not trouble yourself with these thoughts. Now go, there is much to be done. The cold voice in her head was accompanied this time by a chorus of eager chittering. Kiran walked out of the cavern.