Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(84)
“The wall appeared intact, Priestess, solid as stone and capable of withstanding any attempts to breach it. But the air flowed through it all the same, as from a crack the size of a valley.” The mouse’s whiskers tickled my ear. “We sent the juniormost priest to see what was on the other side, and she stepped through the stone, and was gone. When she returned, she reported a great, wide hall, lit with these same bulbs, filled with these same shadows.”
“Was the false wall still there for her after she came back through? I mean, could she still see it when she looked?”
“The false wall never rippled or changed, Priestess. It was like smoke—visible to the eye, but invisible to the nose or paw.”
The mouse was describing hidebehind work. It had to be. They were experts at hanging an illusion on the smallest available hook, spinning scenes like spiders spun their webs. It was part of what kept them so well hidden. In a world where even the most secretive cryptids were being dragged, one by one, out into the light, most cryptozoologists had never actually seen a hidebehind. So far as I was aware, there were no pictures of them, only paintings and sketches done from rare eyewitness accounts. I’d spoken to the hidebehinds of Portland at great length—had even served as an impromptu marriage counselor for a couple who used to live under the supermarket downtown—and I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d ever seen one. They were that good at what they did, and what they did was disappear.
That left me with one big concern. “Will you be able to find your way back to the false wall when we get there?”
The mouse’s whiskers tickled my ear again, this time in quick, staccato bursts: it was laughing. “It can be easy to forget, Priestess, that you are in some ways less attuned to the world around you than we are, for you do not need to be: in your divinity, you may face all challenges without flinching, without need to be prepared to scurry and hide. The air passes through the wall, and will ruffle my fur and carry the scent of such dangers as might await us beyond the veil that is no veil. I will lead you true, Priestess. You will be Proud of Me.”
“You’re riding my shoulder into the dark below a theater, where no one can hear us scream. Trust me, mouse, I’m already proud of you.”
I couldn’t see the mouse on my shoulder, but I could feel it puffing out its fur with satisfaction and delight. Sometimes it was easy to keep the Aeslin happy.
Sometimes it was incredibly hard.
My foot hit the bottom of the stairs as I passed outside the sphere of the last of the overhead lights. Darkness fell, surprisingly profound, especially considering how close I was to the stairway. Glancing upward, I could see the naked bulbs glittering like beckoning stars, offering an escape from the certain death that waited up ahead. That, too, was hidebehind work. They were good at all sorts of illusion, from visual to emotional, and they never missed a trick.
“Now where?”
“Walk forward, Priestess, and do not be afraid; the wall will not harm you.”
Being afraid of a wall was only common sense, considering I was walking blindly into the dark. The mice were good about not steering us wrong. I took a deep breath and kept going, taking three long steps into the black—
—and into the light. One second I was in the dark underground hall, and the next I was in another, much brighter hall. The overhead lights were equipped with small button shades that distributed their illumination smoothly over the entire area, putting the mold-speckled walls and linoleum floor on full display. It was clear no one had done any cleaning down here in quite some time.
It was equally clear that people had lived here, once. The linoleum was the sort usually installed in low-rent apartment buildings and public kitchens, places where mud might be tracked in from the outside, where children played and messes were made. It didn’t look industrial or cold. It looked like the front hall of a community center, one that had been inexplicably abandoned by its residents.
Or maybe not so inexplicably. The entry was hidebehind construction, and the hidebehinds had been a part of the original community. They must have left with the rest, either because they no longer felt safe, or because they couldn’t bring in the supplies they needed without passing through the human-controlled parts of the building. I looked up, following the exposed wiring between the lampshades. It vanished into the corner of the hall. I was willing to bet that this hallway, and any others like it, had been illicitly wired into the city power grid, providing a low drain so constant that no one had ever noticed it.
“This is where you left the other group, right?” I asked.
“Yes, Priestess,” squeaked the mouse. “They were to continue searching the rooms until their shift passed, or one came seeking them.”
“Okay, that’s good. That means we’re not totally alone down here.” I started walking forward. Either the hidebehinds hadn’t made any effort to conceal the doors on the other side of their clever gate, or there were more rooms down here than made sense, strictly speaking. It seemed like I passed a room every five or six feet. Most of the doors were closed, but the space between them and the floor was enough for a determined Aeslin mouse to squeeze through.
“Shall I call them for you, Priestess?”
“Yes, why don’t you d—” I stopped mid-word. “Wait.”
There were footsteps coming down the hall, sharp and quick and unmistakably bipedal. They were coming toward us from around a corner up ahead.