E.C. EDWARDS - The Mighty Antimagic Spell

Elizabeth understood what this meant, as for Johnny, his face looked as if he needed explanation.

So Johnny was helped by a hard sleeve pull to take another route and follow the other two.

Noises that only in the depths of the Earth could be heard, scared the three kids. And that awful feeling that anyone would have thinking that mountains could collapse over them at any moment, gave them even more thrills. As for the air ... every breath of them was a real struggle.

At one point the three children turned right onto a narrower corridor, which was derived from the main aisle. After a few dozen steps, they saw this aisle was much safer than the main one, because it was supported by strong roots.

"Dry poplar ..." Johnny told them, looking at those roots that were as thick as marble columns from an ancient temple, but these columns were wooden... made of woody roots.

"We've come down quite a bit, but I don't think we'll find a sprout here," Alexander said.

“And what are we doing?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe we can get even deeper.”

But the girl started digging into the ground there with her fingers. She discovered very thin strands, which came out of the thick root of dry poplar, looking like vine sprouts, green and fresh.

“Are…?”

“I think so. They’re similar to the ones I saw in the book of magic herbs botany,” the girl replied.

The girl tried to snatch some of those strands, but failed. Johnny also dug at another root and tried to help, but with all his man-to-be strength, he couldn't even get one sprout. Alexander, the same.

“What was heard?” Elizabeth asked, rising to her feet.

"The columns are crackling," Alexander said more calmly.

But something wasn't right. And this time it wasn't about the air that was difficult to breathe.

Elizabeth, who was a little further away from the two and closer to the darkness in that hallway, felt something different. Before, there was a colder breeze down the dark corridor, and now it felt warm.

"I think there's something out there breathing heavily," the girl said, scared.

Alexander also got to his feet, while Johnny looked at Elizabeth, scared too. There was indeed something behind her, for a growl and a kind of huge gear noise began to be heard, which seemed to go off after many years when they were no longer used. As if something enormous would gnash of huge, metallic teeth. And the "gear" now had a lot of red dots shining frightening in that deep darkness.

“Videntur esse videtur!” Johnny said.

“What magic is that?” Elizabeth asked Johnny, scared.

"A magic that helps me see what's hidden ... unseen," said the boy.

“There's nothing hidden here, smarty. It’s just in the dark ... and we only need a little light to see what's out there.”

Scared to death, Johnny began to think more clearly. While curiosity, not courage, prompted Alexander to go ahead and go past the girl with that little flame from the candle lighting his way up to a distance of one cubit, Johnny remembered that he had a small penknife on him which he used to cut some of those strands. He quickly put them in an icy bottle taken out of his pocket, and then he got to his feet too.

Alexander also felt there was something in front of him, just before he went past the girl. He got closer to that something, because its breath was getting warmer and the flame of the candle kept flickering almost going off.

Elizabeth didn't have the courage to turn around to see what it was, she was just stuck.

When he got to a very small distance from that "something", the boy reached out with his candle and noticed a horrible creature. A creature that resembled a mole, an elephant with multiple trunks, robust like a huge badger that almost didn't fit in that corridor filling it to the brim, appeared only for a moment at the light of that candle. Because as it felt the heat of the flame near the nostrils, the eyes or what those holes might be, the creature screamed so terribly that not only did it blow out the flame leaving them in total darkness, but it also began to get restless causing parts of the ceiling and walls to collapse.

“Run!” Alexander shouted, turning around in a fraction of a second, right when the breathing of that creature became faster and louder. He started with the speed of a bullet, panicked towards that entrance through which they got in the Lost Lane, terrified by the deafening noise of the roots of dry poplar cracking under the force of that beast.

“Lumina!” Alexander shouted and a flame came out of his wand so that the little corridor became lit in front of them.

He saw Johnny and Elizabeth running in front of him at the speed of thought, or anything like that, so they no longer waited for his urge but ran without having the curiosity to see what that creature looked like.

Lucky him for he was faster than the other two, so slowly, slowly Alexander managed to reach them.

But that mole-elephant-badger didn’t give up, because those crackling sounds similar to old bones crushed, but which actually came from the thick roots of dry poplar, were heard closer and closer and didn’t foresee anything good. The noise that was getting louder and closer similar to the noise where someone easily breaks some toothpicks, that terrifying grit of teeth, couldn't let the three pluck up the courage to see what chased them.

Elizabeth, who was a little ahead, noticed the chances of the beast would immediately increase, because at less than fifty cubits was that ... wall. Only this time there was no torch support that could open that wall-entrance.

“Alexander, the wall!”

Desperate and terrified, Johnny tried all sorts of magic, maybe, maybe he could manage to open or break that wall-door.

But everything was in vain. Everything Johnny did was pointless, increasing his fear:

“We'll die! I don't want to die ... I'm too young!”

Instead, Alexander had an ace up his sleeve. Not in vain did some of his friends call him the Door Opener.

“You have three moments to enter this portal, after which it closes and you’ll stay here, with everything behind us!” shouted Alexander and threw a small sphere into that wall.

No matter how long the three moments lasted, the children went through the portal in the blink of an eye. Then that portal closed, leaving total darkness and a huge bang behind, as if a mountain hit that wall.

Surely, on the other side, a dreadful roar was then heard, as if an animal crashed with all its might into the wall and either it hurt so hard, or it was very angry that it missed its evening meal. But where the little wizards were, nothing was heard anymore.

Elizabeth and Alexander gasped in relief, while Johnny had a face as if he saw not a ghost, since this was normal in the wizards’ world, but something much worse considering how pale and silent he was.

But he recovered for a moment, because the silence was disturbed by a thick and trembling voice:

“I had to figure it out,” said Tzurtzurk, the stone elf responsible for stopping unauthorized visits to the crypt. “Nonetheless ... to face such recklessly the terror in the ‘Lost Lane’? You should have been told at school about the dangers in here. What creatures escaped from the depths of the Earth, banished from the flames of hell, live there ... But no, who pays attention to Tzurtzurk?”