Entering the Weave

Mrs Hawkins knocked gently on her son’s bedroom door. There was no answer so she pushed it open slowly and peered inside.

“Ah.” She said cocking her head. “Aren’t they sweet.”

The two boys were slouched in their chairs. Mrs Hawkins crept forward and listened to their breathing. She placed the two cups of tea she had made on the computer desk, although a few seconds later she thought better of that and moved them onto Toby’s chest of drawers. She grimaced to herself knowing what Toby would have done if he had seen her put the cups so close to his precious computers.

The room was eerily quiet with only the whirring fans of the computers and the peaceful, sleepy breathing of the two boys.

Mrs Hawkins fruitlessly tidied up a little bit before producing two blankets from the bottom of Toby’s wardrobe and draped them over the boys. She noticed, then, that they both had headphones on and some sort of sunglasses had slipped down their noses and were currently almost wrapped around their neck.

Mrs Hawkins sighed to herself. How many times did she have to tell them not to go to sleep with anything that might inadvertently strangle them? It was almost as bad as lying on your back while sucking a boiled sweet or going swimming after a meal without waiting for at least an hour.

She extracted the equipment from around their necks as carefully as she could, trying very hard not to wake them. She didn’t have to worry though because Josh didn’t even flinch when she caught the end of his nose with a wire, although his eyes were chasing around beneath his eyelids like mice under a blanket.

“Ah. He’s dreaming.” She patted his head fondly.

She crept out of the room leaving the two boys to their dreams.

“I’m sorry. We didn’t mean…” Josh began, but he was cut off by a jerky movement from the tall central figure. There was something gruesomely unnatural about the way its cloak hung from its spindly arms. It looked far too thin to be human. The deep cowl hid any sign of a face and Josh wondered what type of nightmare they had fallen into now.

The two shorter figures were tottering around the edge of the pool, cutting off any means of escape. As they got closer, Josh could see one them had a grotesquely long, hooked nose which protruded beyond the recess of the cowl, and the other had a long, green snout like a crocodile’s, complete with jagged teeth.

Josh and Toby had hauled themselves upright now and were standing back to back, showing as much brave defiance as they could muster.

“We haven’t done anything.” Toby called out, his voice wobbling only slightly.

“Being here is crime enough.”

Long Nose and Crocodile had almost reached them now. They raised their arms stiffly to grab hold of the boys. Josh stumbled backwards and he overbalanced into the water, pulling Toby in with him.

They splashed to the surface and trod water away from the side.

“How dare you!” The tall figure shrieked from the other side of the pool. “You shall spend your life in the Chamber for this.”

“Come on. There’s only one of them over there.” Josh whispered.

Toby nodded and they struck out for the other side. They thrashed their arms as quickly as they could and made good speed across the pool. The two figures seemed startled by this, and it took a few moments for them to turn around and start after them. Toby and Josh reached the other side first and the tall figure moved back as if he was frightened.

“How dare you approach the Panjandrum of the Doge?” His voice had lost some of its deep resonance.

Josh and Toby clambered out of the pool and ducked past the figure, barely brushing the fabric of its cloak, but this slight contact sent him staggering backwards and Josh saw, as the cloak kicked up, that the tall figure had only wooden stumps where his feet should be.

They raced on between wide pillars away from the pool and before long they were out of sight of the chasing figures. They stopped running and stood with their hands on their knees, bent over and panting.

“Is this real?” Toby gasped. “I mean is this just another program?”

“I don’t know.” Josh shook his head slowly. “I just don’t know.”

They were standing in an enormous chamber supported by row upon row of massive, ornately decorated columns, which stretched away in every direction as far as they could see. Torches blazed brightly in their sconces on the columns, but the hall was so large that the ceiling was still in darkness. Only their trail of telltale wet footprints distinguished any direction from another. They started running again, away from their own wet tracks.

“What do you think those things were?” Toby asked.

“I don’t know, but the tall one didn’t have any feet. Just wooden stumps, like stilts.”

“Yeah. He didn’t seem very steady did he? And he wasn’t very difficult to knock off balance. Do you think we need to be scared of them at all?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to stay here and find out.”

“But where can we go. We can’t get back to the real world.”

“I know, but we can’t just give up. Geigerzalion might find us, or we could find a way into one of those pipes. Come on, staying here certainly isn’t going to help us, is it?”

“No. You’re right. I should be enjoying this really shouldn’t I? I mean, the amount of times I’ve gone on about how great it would be to if people made computer games like this...”

“I think it’s become a bit more than a game, Toby.”

A flicker of movement to their left stopped them in their tracks.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think it moved too fast to be one of those stilt men.”

“It might be something that they’re using to chase us though. We don’t know what sort of monsters inhabit this place.”

They peered around them into the darkness, but couldn’t see anything except the endless columns disappearing into the gloomy distance. They kept turning around until Josh realised that they had not left a wet trail.

“Which way did we come from?”

Toby was mouthing silent words. A ghostly figure was gliding towards them.

“Do not be frightened. It is I.”

“Geigerzalion?” Josh asked, but he knew he was wrong as the small, pale figure came closer. His face was skeletally thin, and carried much more suffering within it than a ten year old boy’s should. His body, however, exuded a radiance that lit the area about him more than the torches. “ZX82!”

“I…I would prefer not to be called that now.”

Josh faltered. “Oh, of course. Sorry. Where did you go? How did you get here?”

The boy smiled, releasing a glimmer of innocent youth from behind his wise eyes. “I didn’t go anywhere. I was with you the whole time, I was the one who told you to let go of the ladder in the lift. And I brought you here. It has taken me some time for me to rebuild my avatar though. I am sorry if you thought I had abandoned you. I owe you everything.”

“Can you get us out of here? Back to…wherever we should be?”

“Alas, I cannot. I have extensive powers within all Vrealms, but I have no power over the physical world. I lost any connection with that when you released me from my cell.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am…” He coughed or perhaps laughed, “I mean I was a real boy with a human body held prisoner in a laboratory somewhere. Now,” he shrugged, “I have no body.”

“That’s horrible. You mean we’ve killed you?”

“No! My body will indeed die, but it is no more than an empty shell. You have freed me from my mortal coil and from slavery. I,” He brought his fist to his chest, “I am alive.”

“You can’t go back to the real world though, can you? You’re stuck here.”

“What is real Josh? This seems real to me and to you, even though you are tied to your corporeal bodies. You will go back and remember, but you will not know the difference between this memory and any other. Your existence is what you experience at one moment in time. It is irrelevant whether it is physical or not.”

“We’d better keep telling ourselves that.” Toby said glumly. “We’re stuck here just like you.”

“How is that possible? Surely you can just remove your interface devices.”

Josh shook his head, bewildered. “No. We can’t. We don’t know what’s happened to us. Look, I’m Josh and this is Toby. We’re just two kids...”

“Children?” The boy was obviously dismayed. “How did you find me?”

“I think we stumbled across a failed attempt to rescue you. We used that information, but we didn’t know what we were doing at the time. We were just investigating the Laboratory to see who owned it, because we thought that it was the source of something that was chasing our friend. We didn’t know you were inside it.”

“You knew nothing of us?”

“There are more of you?”

“Yes. Many more. And they are all like me.”

“But what are you?”

“We were called the Delphixians. Before you came I was a child like all the others. Held prisoner with wires buried deep in my brain and tubes keeping me alive. The company treated me worse than a lab rat. We were all networked up together and our minds used as living computers.”

“Were you born there?”

“I don’t remember. My earliest memories are of the Laboratory, of the experiments.” His face twisted in anguish, but quickly passed, to be replaced by a wistful smile. ”Sometimes, when they took us off line I would dream about a woman’s face and I hope that she is my mother. She looks nice, kind, and in my dreams she is smiling at me.”

Josh and Toby stared at him speechlessly and Josh could not stop a memory of his own mother forming in his mind’s eye.

“You do not have to be sad for me. Now I can do things of my own free will; I am not constrained or controlled by an external operating system. I am free in the truest sense. Do not feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for the children that are left in the Laboratory and I will try to free them as you have freed me, but I fear that because I have escaped they may make it impossible to return.“

“Where are they in the real world?”

The boy cocked his head to one side and considered something for a while. “You have done enough to help us, Josh. It would be too dangerous for you to try and do anything outside cyberspace.”

“But if I can get people to see what they are doing in this laboratory, then they’ll have to stop. I don’t need to do anything risky. Please tell me. I want to help.”

“No. We have tarried too long. We must get you away from this place. The denizens of this place are dangerous.”

“What’s wrong with them?” Toby asked.

“This place was one of the first virtual realms to take advantage of the extra processing power of the Delphixians, and there is something organic about this realm that exceeds my analysis. The ‘people’ that inhabit this Vrealm have not had contact with anything apart from themselves for terraquads of clock cycles and they have developed their own savage customs and traditions.”

Josh had been concentrating on what ZX82 was saying, but now a low, murmuring made him look around. In the distance he could see a writhing mass of movement. There were hundreds of cloaked figures staggering towards them. Some were almost ten feet tall, others seemingly ten feet wide.

Josh jerked around and saw that they were surrounded and the encircling crowd was getting closer with every passing second.

The murmuring had turned into frenzied chattering and some of the bigger figures bellowed incomprehensible challenges, while smaller ones scuttled out to display their courage for a moment before running back into the bedlam of the horde,.

Now Josh could see inside the cowls of some of them. Weird, gaudily painted masks covered their faces. Some had long, crooked noses and screaming mouths, others were painted to look like leering, horror-film clowns or humanised animals, each different and all terrifying.

“I can hold them off for a while, but to get away you must run through them. Whatever you do, do not stop.” ZX82 was starting to shine more brightly and his glowing blade had appeared in his small hands.

“Where should we go?”

“Just keep moving. I will find you.”

The restless, shambling mass had slowed its approach when they saw the light of the sword. They were obviously afraid now, like a flock of sheep spooked by a wolf, and they had quietened to an unsettled groaning. Some of the figures at the front tried to burrow their way back into the press of the mob.

“Go now!” ZX82 charged and swung his sword around his head. Josh and Toby gaped at him for a second and then plunged after him desperately hoping to find a gap. The figures they approached tried to scramble out of the way, but more shapes pressed in from behind and the boys found themselves confronted by a seemingly solid wall of cloaks and masks. Hard, grasping hands reached out from the chaotic mass of things, and began to pluck at their clothing and pinch their flesh.

They tried again, and this time they got further into the throng, but they still couldn’t get through. There were just too many of gangling figures, pressing further and further inward. And they were getting braver as they realised Josh and Toby were afraid of them. Josh felt one grab his shoulder and pulled away frantically, causing his assailant to totter over. Its mask cracked against the stone slabs of the floor and split apart revealing a blank wooden face beneath.

The other figures sprang away from their fallen compatriot. They were suddenly silent.

“He’s a puppet!” A shrill voice called from the throng. “One of our number is a puppet!”

Screams and shouts followed the proclamation. There were no features on the fallen thing’s face to express any emotion, but its limbs rattled uncontrollably with obvious terror.

“Kill it.”

“Tear it apart.”

“Burn it.”

The frenzied horde turned their attention away from Josh and Toby and crowded around their fallen comrade. The cloak was ripped away to reveal a marionette. Its simple limbs and blank head were attached with thick wire to a polished wooden torso.

“Look.” Toby pulled at Josh’s sleeve. “We can get away.”

Josh dragged his attention away from the cruelty that was unfolding before front of him. “They’re going to kill him.”

“Better it than us. It’s just a puppet. Come on.”

There was a crack of splitting wood and Josh snapped into action. Quickly, but quietly they stole away from the puppet’s execution.

They almost made it, but not quite.

“They’re getting away!” Something shrieked behind them.

Josh and Toby broke into a run without any care of where they were running to. The sound of frantic pursuit echoed insanely around the columns of the hall.

They came to a flight of wide stairs that curved upwards and out of sight. Taking the steps two at a time, they bounded up and away from their pursuers who seemed suddenly confused and started to mill about at the foot of the staircase. Josh risked a quick glance over his shoulder and saw an unmasked man striding through the muttering horde. He was smaller than most of them, but he was undoubtedly in charge. He motioned for the chase to continue and the spindly figures began to flood up the stairs. The pell-mell chase had been turned into an organised hunt by this newcomer, who looked up at Josh and their eyes met briefly. Josh saw the malice that lurked behind those eyes and had to wrench his gaze away.

“Come on, Toby.” He panted more to himself than his friend. “Come on. We can’t get caught.”

They turned left at the top of the stairs and were now running along a lengthy balcony that overlooked the vast columned chamber. They could see more and more of the strange ungainly shapes streaming from everywhere trying to catch up with the main chasing group.

There was no sign of ZX82.

Suddenly two of the figures appeared from a side passage in front of them, but Josh and Toby had too much momentum and careered through their grasping hands without stopping. Toby lost his footing, though, and sprawled forward onto his hands and knees. The two figures lurched around. Toby’s panic stopped him from regaining his feet and he scrambled vainly for purchase on the flagstones.

Josh jumped up and tried to grab a torch from its sconce on the wall. It was an act of desperation, and he hadn’t really thought that he would be able to take it from its fixing, but he found himself standing in front of Toby’s prone body, brandishing the flaming torch at the approaching, murderous figures.

They instantly fell back, as if a great hand had pushed them. The leaders of the main chasing ran into the back them and some of them clattered over in a tangle of cloaks and wooden limbs. Josh lunged forward brandishing the torch and the figures scrabbled away. Josh’s elation was short-lived however when the unmasked man pushed through the confusion and fixed him with an unblinking stare.

“Put it down, boy. My minions do not like naked flames.”

“No. Get back.” His voice sounded small.

Toby had got to his feet and taken two torches from the walls. He stood at Josh’s shoulder. “Who are you?”

“You of all people should know me.” The man smirked. “But it is irrelevant. I am the Doge of this citadel. All that you can see is under my control and my protection. I am afraid I do not permit intruders into my realm. You will be killed.”

Josh saw a narrow passage further along the balcony. He backed towards it pinching Toby’s arm to bring him along. The surrounding figures followed at a safe distance, and the Doge strolled along with them, without any haste. He reminded Josh of a cat toying with a captured mouse.

“You cannot escape, you know.” He drawled. “There’s nowhere safe for you here.”

They reached the entrance to the passageway and slipped inside. It was narrow and they couldn’t even stand side by side, so Toby faced down the passage, while Josh held off the Doge and his henchmen with the torches.

Closed doors lined both sides of the corridor and Josh could not help wondering how many masked terrors were lurking behind each one preparing to spring out at them. As they passed each door Josh held his breath and tried to point his torch in every direction at once. None of them opened, though, and the two boys inched their way along the passageway with the seething mass of marionettes staying just out of the light cast by the glowing torch.

The passageway curved around to the left and started to slope downwards. The darkness was getting more and more oppressive now and somehow heavier as it pressed in from all sides. Through the dimness, however, Josh never lost sight of the Doge’s cruel smile.

Toby cried out, almost making Josh drop his torch.

“What’s wrong?”

“One of my torches has gone out.”

“You do not have long left to live.” The Doge’s voice sounded casual, almost friendly. “You may as well give up now.”

Josh’s arm ached with the effort of holding the torch aloft, and his jaw hurt from clenching his teeth so tightly. A seductive weariness washed over him and he felt an urge to just give up and hand over the guttering torch. As if his arm was attached to some puppet-string he saw that he was slowly reaching it out towards the Doge, proffering his last hope of survival.

“Josh? What…?” Toby’s voice was small, barely audible above the rhythmic muttering of the marionettes behind the Doge, but it was enough to shake Josh out of his trance and suddenly there was silence once more.

“Run Toby.” He shouted and threw the torch directly at the Doge’s leering face.

They had got their breath back and the strength of fear pumped their legs faster than before and the thrown torch had given them a few more seconds lead, but even so they soon heard the rickety sounds of the pursuit filling the corridor behind them.

The passageway twisted and turned until with a startling brightness it opened up into a large chamber lined with racks and shelves. Dust sheets covering man-sized things loomed about the room and chests and boxes filled every other available space.

Toby and Josh clambered over a few of the chests and by the time their pursuers had entered the chamber, they had made their way into the middle and they realised with horror that there was no other way out of the room.

“You are trapped like rats now, boys. We will not kill you quickly. You will suffer.” The Doge had entered holding his face, and Josh saw that the torch must have done some damage, because blood seeped out from between his fingers.

“Get them.” He snarled, his calm assurance replaced with incandescent fury.

The cloaked figures started to swarm over the chests and Toby lost his footing. His torch brushed against a sheet, setting it alight as if it had been tinder. Within seconds the flames had leapt to another sheet and then to the shelves and back to the chests and boxes. Soon there was a wall of fire between the boys and their pursuers.

A kettle-pitched scream whistled from underneath one of the burning sheets which fell away to reveal the wooden statue of a woman. Josh saw a bead of water trickle out of its eye before turning to steam as the flames licked up over its face. The other sheets had all burned away now revealing more statues. Dimly, Josh thought that they were much more lifelike than the frenzied marionettes.

The room was becoming uncomfortably smoky now, but there was something else in the haze; something dark that whooshed through the smoke making it billow around in swirling eddies. And there were whispers.

A set of shelves collapsed off the wall a few metres from where Josh and Toby were standing, sending up a shower of sparks into the dusty, smoky air.

“Follow me.” A whisper in Josh’s ear made him spin around, and he saw, suspended in the smoke the translucent face of the statue that had been the first to burn.

“Who are you?”

“You do not have time. Follow me.”

“Come on Josh. What choice do we have?” Toby coughed.

The woman’s ghostly face turned and swirled through the smoke. It was now so thick that they could barely see where they were going, but their guide seemed sure of her path. The whistling screams had stopped and been replaced by a frightened shouting from the entrance to the chamber, surrounded by the all encompassing crackling of the fire.

The two boys ducked through a small doorway which had been concealed behind the fallen shelves and on into a passage. There were no torches here and the only light came from the burning room behind them. Toby’s torch had gone out, but he clung to it as if his life depended on it. After they had gone a few paces they could no longer see their guide and the smoke was getting deeper into their lungs. Every breath they took burnt the backs of their throats and they were coughing continually, but they staggered on. Josh knew they had no choice.

Then a hazy light appeared in front of them and their spirits soared. They broke into a trot and then a run until they burst into the vastness of the enormous columned hall they had been in before. Smoke poured out of the passageway behind them. They moved a little distance into the chamber and collapsed onto the cold stone floor, breathing in the sweet air that had seemed stale and old before the fire.

Their guide was nearly entirely invisible now; the smoke had given her more substance than the clear air could. She flew around and around them.

“You cannot stay here. There are more of them and they will come. The Doge will not give up easily.”

They struggled to their feet coughing out the last of the smoke and made their way through the massive columns, until they came to a small stone building no larger than a garden shed. There was an opening on one side of it that revealed stairs leading into darkness.

“We can hide down here.”

Josh grabbed another torch from a nearby column.

“No. Put it back,” whispered their guide. “if he sees a missing torch he will know you have taken it.”

Josh replaced the torch and then, gingerly, they picked their way down the steps and into the blackness.