Chapter Forty-Eight They Looked Like Children
Chapter Forty-eight
They Looked like Children
The soft giggling of children echoed around him. Keishin crawled blindly on his hands and knees, coughing out mud. He rubbed the dirt from his eyes and blinked. The most he could make out from the shadows was that he was in some kind of tunnel or cave. Dark figures came into focus as he pushed himself to his feet. “Where am I?” He squinted at the blurry shapes. “Who are you?”
The echo of his voice answered him back. Laughter followedit.
“What do you want with me?” Keishin said.
“Play with us,” a chorus of children’s voices replied. “We want to play.”
“Play?” Keishin’s sight cleared. A group of young children circled him, the light from their faintly glowing lanterns swallowed by their completely black, sunken eyes. Long wisps of thinning dark hair that barely covered their scalps clung to their ashen cheeks. Keishin staggered back.
The children raised their lanterns higher, illuminating their mud-covered, clawlike nails. “We want to play.”
A scream pierced the dark.
“Hana!” Keishin twisted around.
“Kei?” Hana’s voice rang through the tunnel.
Keishin rushed to follow her voice. The children dug into Keishin’s arm with their nails and held him back, their icy fingers draining the warmth from his own. Keishin flinched. The only time he had ever touched a corpse was when he’d held his father’s hand to say goodbye. These children felt colder, stripped of the smallest residue of life. They tugged at his arm. “Play with us.”
“I…I will,” Keishin said, trying to ignore the chill seeping into his bones. “But I need to find my friend first. Both of us will play with you. We’ll have more fun.”
The children looked at one another and then back at Keishin. “We’ll have more fun,” they said, mimicking Keishin’s tone.
“We will. I promise. Just take me to Hana.”
“Hana! Hana!” The children laughed as they said her name in unison.
“Hana!” Other children giggled in the tunnel’s shadows. “Hana!”
A group of children emerged from the dark, dragging Hana between them.
Keishin wrestled free from the children, slicing his arm on their sharp nails, and nearly reopening his stitched wound. He ran to Hana. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“I…I’m just a little dizzy.” She rubbed her forehead. “I hit my head when I fell.”
“Play with us,” the children said. “You promised.”
“We will,” Keishin said. “But Hana can’t play now. She needs to rest. And water. She needs water.”
“Water!” The children giggled. “We will play in the water. Come. You promised. Come.”
“No,” Keishin said. “Hana’s hurt. She—”
“We should go with them,” Hana said, her left heel sinking into the mud. “Any place has to be better than here.”
—
Keishin lost track of how long they walked through the tunnel, but he felt their continuous descent in his ears. He swallowed hard to clear them.
Hana walked alongside him. “You should not have let go of my hand.”
“And you should have run when you had the chance,” Keishin said. “I think we’ve established by now that we’re both too stubborn for our own good. Can we agree that arguing about this is pointless?”
“I was not going to argue with you. I was going to thank you for looking out for me,” Hana said. “But you need to stop. I told you. Nothing here is as it seems. Not even me.”
“You keep saying that like I’m supposed to understand what you mean. If you’re not who you say you are, then please, for god’s sake, tell me the truth. You owe me that much. I’m a scientist, Hana. I believe what I can see and what I can prove. All you’ve shown me is a woman who is selfless, strong, brave, and devoted to the people she loves. Until you show me evidence to the contrary, what you’re saying remains a hypothesis. A bad one.”
Light, where there should have been darkness, poured through the end of the tunnel.
Hana shielded her eyes. “Is that the sun?”
—
The children ran out of the tunnel and into a seemingly endless rock garden. Pruned trees, sculpted bushes, and water fountains dotted the pebbled landscape. A wide, fast-moving stream snaked through the garden, rushing under arched bridges and gurgling over rocks. Above the garden, the sun lit a clear blue sky.
“How is this possible?” Keishin gaped at the sky. “We were descending the whole time. How did we get to the surface?”
Hana watched clouds drift over them. “We did not,” she said, pointing to a cloud. “Look.”
The cloud moved, revealing a patch where the sky thinned. The cavern’s rock ceiling showed through it.
“We are still underground,” Hana said.
“We’re still trapped,” Keishin said, his voice hollow.
“Or we are exactly where we should be. We were searching for the children, and now we found them. My parents have to be here.”
“Play with us.” A child tugged on Keishin’s arm, squeezing his wrist with its talons. “In the water. You promised.”
“Yes, I did.” Keishin walked over to a tree and plucked a leaf from it. “We will have a boat race.”
“A race!” the chorus of children chimed.
“A race with rules. You may each choose only one leaf as your boat,” Keishin said. “And you must run after it as it flows down the stream. It must never, ever leave your sight. If it does, you lose the race. Do you understand?”
“Rules. Leaves.” The children scattered through the garden gathering leaves from trees.
“I think I know what you have in mind,” Hana said, lowering her voice.
“I hope it works.”
The children returned with their leaves. Keishin crouched by the stream and set his leaf boat on the water. He held on to it, waiting for all the children to take their places along the stream. “Ready?”
The children nodded.
“Go!” Keishin dropped his leaf into the water.
The children let go of their leaves and chased after them as the stream carried them away.
“Now, Hana,” Keishin whispered. “Run.”