“I recognize your sweet scent, you’re the mutt who’s been slinking around my territory, aren’t you?” the jester said to Freyja. “How very vexing.”
The jester crouched, claws thrown out wide to either side of him. Cuppy forced himself to sit up, shoving his broken puppet off his chest and grasping for his fishing pole in a panic.
“Get out of there, Freyja, he’s gonna kill you!” Cuppy shrieked.
Freyja could feel the ill intent wafting from the jester like a wave of pressure. She pictured it must be the kind of feeling one gets standing within the area of a massive propeller that’s spinning very quickly, displacing wind with the force of a small localized hurricane. There was almost a dark tint, flecked with purple, to the air around the costumed man’s slinking, claw-brandishing body. She felt like she had hard, jagged chips of ice in her guts, and that sinking feeling brought her mind racing back to her ventures around Station Bay all through her time investigating with Cuppy, and how the grounds above the major sewer junctures had all given her the same atrocious vibe. Something dark and vile stained this man, and it practically dripped like venom from the tips of his merciless claws.
Freyja’s good arm reflexively twitched, fist curling into a tight ball that scratched the skin of her palm a little as her fingernails partially shifted into the curved claws of a wolf. Her other shoulder was still on the mend, but with luck and focus, maybe she could only half-shift into her wolfen form like she had before when she subdued the bunyip. A solid bite with canine jaws around the ratty figure’s scrawny neck should do the trick just fine, and if she took a swipe or two to her densely-muscled and fur-armored lupine torso, Cuppy was at least already right there to tend to her wounds.
She couldn’t very well fight with one arm in her human state either way, not against this guy. So, she grit her teeth and tensed up, feeling her muscles begin to shift and rearrange themselves, strands of coarse hair beginning to bristle from her skin and weave together into whole tufts of jet-black fur that wove together into a dense thicket and softened to match her head of human hair in texture and luster. That fall of ebony hair began to merge to the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades as her neck elongated and thickened, her shoulders themselves distorting sharply and rising up to meet the corded neck they had to support. Her entire upper half began to hunch over as her still-human legs were overwhelmed by her increasing weight and bulk, forcing them into a deep crouch that foreshadowed her back feet’s metamorphosis into powerful paws. Large, vicious fangs and canines began to bulge from her gum line as the yellow rings around her blue eyes circled and flashed.
Then something went wrong. As with the otherworldly fog before, Freyja’s wolf traits were reacting adversely to something in the air tonight. No, they weren’t adverse, they were volatile. She felt like she were being crushed under a gigantic weight akin to the tread of a mammoth stepping down on her back. Old wounds along the fractured highway of her spine were opening up again, and the line of the lunar phases tattooing an elegant camouflage over the scars that remained there was hissing, protesting the conditions of their environment along with Freyja’s wolfen body and instincts.
The malevolent atmosphere Freyja felt around the jester while in her human state was magnified a hundredfold in her wolf form, and escalating the more she shifted into her complete lupine state. Now it felt like she was being squeezed, head-first through an aperture that was far too small, stretching her body out and pulverizing it as she was sucked in. Her human form was on one side of the tube, and her wolf form - and the power it wielded, the power she needed - was on the other.
It was out of her reach. The enhanced intuition of the wolf had enough experience to be cowed and bow before the might of the superior predator before it. Freyja, not fully conscious of slipping back into her human form, was forced onto her knees by the ghost of that instinct, sweat dripping from every pore as her body remembered what it was like to be in the grip of absolute terror.
“That little bit of hostility you felt from me was just a small trickle. Next comes the full blast.” the jester scrapped his claws together again.
Then he ran at Freyja.
“Frey, run!” Cuppy shouted.
Freyja looked up in slowed time to see the jester sprinting at her, claws trailing in the wind at his back as the man flailed his arms behind him. He was bent forward unnaturally far, chin and chest low to the ground so that his knees were almost pistoning up and striking his jaw with each bound. His head, conical cap ends blowing backward too, was leading the way like a human missile locked onto its target. There was wild, murderous glee in the eyes behind that plaster mask.
Freyja knew she couldn’t outrun the madman on foot as a human, and she also knew that the instant she changed into a wolf, she would be paralyzed by the pressure exerted by the man’s single minded will to kill. So, she did what she did last time, and settled for a partial transformation, concentrating her shapeshifting prowess into her legs, and only into her legs. They were covered over with thickets of black fur, and a dewclaw blossomed on the back of either calf. Black dog talons curled into the soft dirt below Freyja’s suddenly bare feet, her leggings and shoes dissolved into the transitional magic of her shift.
I’ve got to get to high ground. Freyja thought.
She tensed those canine legs, and sprung straight up from the ground, scattering dirt and little pebbles in her wake. It seemed that as she began to relearn more and more about her shapeshifting ability, the more its intricacies were coming back to her, just like riding a bicycle again for the first time in years. No longer was the addition of muscle power from her wolfen state linear, now, more and more it began to seem that transforming into an animal gave Freyja the strength of that animal multiplied by her own human base potential. In other words, she could grow far stronger than any mere wolf - or average person - could ever hope to, with time and effort.
But this revelation came at a high cost as Freyja flew straight up through the air to evade the razor edge of that maniacal jester’s reach. Feeling as though she had bounced up from a tremendous plunge into a giant trampoline, Freyja’s wolfen feet landed smoothly on the surface of a large, sturdy branch casting shadow over where she had stood just moments prior.
Not the trees! Cuppy panicked.
Time was no longer slowed from Freyja’s perspective. She felt the rough bark of the branch she stood on painlessly dulled by the soft pads of her feet, noticed the slight vibrations of the branch, the trunk, and the leaves in the wind. Time crashed back into its natural course, and Freyja’s now unassisted eyes could not accurately track the movement of the jester as he sprinted, blindingly, straight up the tree trunk after her. Cuppy could gauge the time between the man’s first foot on the base of the tree to his summiting it at the top, claws wound back to slash Freyja, in the time it took to twitch an eyelash.
The jester was standing on the end of the branch, standing in front of Freyja, both arms stretched back over his right hip, claws turned inward so that their hooks gleamed silver winks at Freyja. Her instinct was to lift her left arm to help shield her face and chest from the coming attack, but it was still bound in a sling after being pulled out of its socket during the encounter with the aquatic Feral.
Instead, Freyja thrust out the open palm of her opposite hand, thoughts racing back over the campfire she had shared with Cuppy when they were first properly acquainted. A flickering ember from that fire of memory landed in her palm, and grew like a muzzle to make way for a coming torrent of raging flames. Orange fire spewed forth from Freyja’s hand, wide like a fluid column of heat and light, washing over the jester. Freyja’s eye reticles circled and narrowed on the enemy as she concentrated the dragon’s breath in her hand over his center of mass.
But her flames lacked weight and punch.
The curtain of fire was swept away by the double stroke of the jester’s claws swinging at Freyja. Her shoulder sling strap was cut loose, and a spray of her hot blood broke into mist on the cold windy night.
-
In that exact moment, Richie clutched his chest, feeling as though he had been gashed by four long claws.
Leon broke to a halt, turning back at the stunned teenager. “What are you doing? We have to go!”
All around them, burning embers drifted and bloody scraps of ripped clothing were carried away in the wind. The waters of the bay all around Tide Town were churning uneasily now, great big splashes that reminded Richie of plopping down too quickly in an overfilled bathtub leaping up and beating the sides and corners of the docks and harbor walkways. A sign dangling from chains on a post somewhere advertising a combination inn and tavern service was making a racket that carried a ways down the row as it was knocked to and fro in the intensifying winds. A few boats came detached from their moorings variously around the town, drifting into open ocean water and crashing into each other to capsize and sink. A restless whirlpool was beginning to deepen some half mile out, under the baleful gaze of a circle of pulsating purple clouds. In the distance, lightning streaked the dark watercolor sky. The wind was howling now, and it was impossible to distinguish its screech from the howling of the shades popping out of the woodwork and the darkness itself everywhere around them.
Phantom hands grabbed at Richie’s feet from between the planks he stood upon, tugging at his shoes and jean legs. He could only stand there and hunch, hand pressed to his chest where he had felt the invisible swords cut him, but came away with no blood trail when Leon roughly wrenched Richie’s hand away and yanked him off his feet.
“Damn you, we don’t have time for you to start spacing out, Richie!” Leon shook him.
“She’s hurt.” Richie mumbled.
“Who’s hurt? It’s another illusion, Richie, they’re trying to snag you again! It’s not real!” Leon shouted.
“Yes she is!” Richie shouted back, grinding his teeth like a seething beast as he shoved Leon back from him.
Then, as quickly as it had come over him, the fleeting feeling left Richie’s body, and he was left sore and fatigued again as his muscles untensed all at once. Blood was gushing from his pierced kneecap again, spilling into Richie’s shoe and stickying the rim of his sock.
“Right, the tower, I-” Richie began to repeat what Leon had said earlier, and was tersely cut off by a blinding stab of pain at his back.
Behind him, a conjured dagger formed of darkness had lodged itself under Richie’s right shoulder blade, cooked up by a shade whom Leon could surmise had either copied an old seadog playing five finger fillet in passing, or had integrated the memory directly by consuming the poor bastard and his soul. Either way, the incorporeal dagger dispersed into fading shadow, leaving only the open wound upon Richie, hotly spilling more fresh blood.
Leon hated it when the shades could actually aim.
But why had the blade even dealt damage to Richie where before a stretched out hand of claws from another shade impaling his waist had drawn not so much as a speck of blood? Leon didn’t want to think about it right now, but it was likely that Richie’s brief disconnect from the emergency of his situation had moved his presence from the game board on which the shades could play. The abominable things usually locked up in the netherworld of mankind’s darkest subconscious imaginings and the cold void of the space between realms were usually - and thankfully - deprived of physical bodies with which to act upon the physical world. Nights like the eclipse Leon and the whole of Tide Town had been preparing for opened the valve to those sealed places, and let the shades in like a flood of nightmare incarnate. But Richie’s lack of awareness, however brief and dangerous under any other situation regarding real foes, had undermined at least that particular shade’s ability to manifest real appendages, and inflict real harm.
Was it because Richie had been coming down from the high of a berserker rage that had overtaken him, when his attempts at silent stoicism and emotional repression had been pushed too far and broken?
It didn’t matter. That attack hadn’t hurt Richie, and this one did. Now was what mattered.
“Get it in gear, kid!” Leon cracked his whip just to the side of Richie.
Richie snapped awake again, and forced his arms into another guard position, anticipating the arrival of another wave of gibbering, frothing shades gnashing at their heels before they could break for the tower again. No pursuers materialized into view from the direction the shadow dagger had been expertly tossed into Richie’s back. From above, a disconnected toilet - the one that had vanished from the holding cell back in the Station Bay Police Department - fell out of the sky, and shattered to pieces on the deck between Richie and Leon. Both stumbled back out of the way of the flying shrapnel, and Richie heard a soft murmur at his ear. Whipping around in the direction the sound had come from, Richie saw flames, like the fires of a molten lake of Hell, twist together and rise up from the bay around a stretch of dock he now faced. The fire writhed and slithered over the walkway, then swiftly circled around him, stranding him in its center, the flickering walls rising high and spitting their floating embers up toward the heavens.
Richie growled dangerously toward the curtain of flame obscuring his path to the tower. Then, that wall opened up, and Richie could see a graceful feminine figure standing at the far end of the dock. The backdrop of the tower, and the rest of Tide Town itself was absent from this vista, giving the impression that only the long wooden walkway Richie and this woman stood on opposite ends of remained, adrift on the now-gentle current of Tide Town’s sea. A gray filter came down like a haze over the scene, and the orange glow of the flames, and their baking heat, both subsided, warping mellowly like a psychedelic background design to ripped music playing on a computer media app.
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Walking down the dock toward Richie was a ginger-haired woman, looking of roughly late college age and with a fair complexion about her soft skin. She was a bit taller than average, and dressed all in baggy clothes with long sleeves, notably a pair of grey sweat pants and a scarf matching Richie’s own wrapped about her neck. The faint hint of athletic muscles peaked out from the edge of her biceps before her shirt sleeves cut off further glimpses to her physique. Spilling from her left sleeve’s edge, an azure dragon tattoo stretched snake-like across her arm, head resting atop her wrist.
“Mom…” Richie said quietly, awestruck and rooted to the spot in thick, sluggish shock.
Ella smiled softly at her son as she closed the distance more and more between them. The bright red fuzzy scarf Richie had inherited from her, and kissed when he fled from the cultists as Ella stayed behind to soak up gunfire, was still coiled over her shoulders as though it had never left her frame. Richie realized this even as his fingers clutched the comforting warm fabric of that same scarf now trailing from his own neck. It smelled of her, and reminded him of a thousand nights she had sat on the side of his bed and read bedtime stories and fairytales to him. He smelled lotion, and scented candles and air fresheners, and felt the autumn breeze that wafted into the parlor room when the door was propped open with only the screen closed to let in the smells and atmosphere of the fall season. He remembered the numerous times he had been sick with a cold or the flu, and she had taken his temperature with a fretful, but reassuring look on her kind face. He remembered ginger ale and saltine crackers, and stacks of comic books on the nightstand beside him. He remembered her gentle touch when she pat his head and felt the red hair he had inherited from her.
It was her. It was Richie’s mother, exactly as she had been when her spirit appeared before him to cheer him on to victory against the deadly phantom pain. Her eyes were soft and the curious color of the interior of ripe limes as they had always been. She stretched her arms out in a gesture that bade Richie to embrace her in a long-overdue hug.
“Come here, Richie.” she said calmingly.
Richie could see the remnant of a bad burn scar tastefully concealed under the colored-in head of the seiryuu dragon where she had scalded herself with a kettle of boiling water when Richie was only six years old. He had rushed into the kitchen to show his mother a turkey he had drawn on a field of grass amidst the fall trees, weeping their orange, brown, and red dead leaves. In his haste, he had slipped on the newly mopped tile, and accidentally skated on his socks, careening into the kitchen cabinet at the side of the stove. A flailing hand knocked over a broom propped up against the doors, and the handle struck the grip of the kettle as it fell, pushing the vessel off-kilter and tipping it over the edge. Richie hadn’t noticed the close call until after it was all over, because he had been bawling about smacking his head on the edge of the cabinet, only to look up through his drying tears and see that his mother had thrown herself between the burning rain and her son. Her left arm was red and steaming like a boiled lobster, and the rolled-up cuff of her sleeve was still soaked in the hot water, continually burning her, but she paid it no mind.
Ella only dropped to her knees at Richie’s side, pushing him out of the way of the spreading pool of superheated liquid that her own knees were now bent upon, the kettle rolled away toward the middle of the kitchen, empty and forgotten. Ella was hugging the young Richie to her chest then, clutching at the back of his head and petting his soft hair with her unblemished hand which had escaped the scalding. She peppered the top of his head with protective kisses, and grabbed either side of his face once she had composed herself, tilting his head up to look into her frightened lime eyes. Richie could feel a slight discomfort from the heat of the hand she had burned wetting his cheek and feeling stifling and itchy already.
“Richie, are you ok? Did it get you anywhere? Are you burned?” she asked him rapidly, tears at the edges of her eyes.
Richie only slowly shook his head, eyes wide and alarmed, like a startled deer freezing up under the carnivorous gaze of oncoming car lights. Had he done something wrong? What was mom so worked up about?
“No… I’m ok…” Richie said.
Then Ella hugged her son to her chest again, crying a bit before managing to restrain herself. Richie felt her chest heave during the duration of those heavy sobs.
“Thank goodness, I’m so glad you’re not hurt.” she said, hugging her child.
She paid no mind to the way the flesh of her knees was beginning to bubble up from the heat of the puddle beneath them.
Every time Richie saw that fibrous burn scar on his mother’s arm, which had faded a lot but was still noticeable until it was covered up by a touch-up of her tattoo and even then had trailing fingers that creeped along her forearm and elbow from beneath the blue ink, he felt a deep ache of guilt. He knew it wasn’t logical, that he had only been a dumb kid who got into an accident that could have ended a lot worse, and that his mother would throw herself in harm’s way to prevent that boiling water dousing her precious baby boy a thousand times again without a second thought. But he still felt terrible whenever he glimpsed it. He half-wondered if his mother started doubling down on bundling up under heavy sweaters and sleeves after this, to hide the damage.
She hadn’t cared one iota about her injuries. They were, by far, distant secondary thoughts. And the look Richie had seen in her green eyes was that of unconditional love, pure and simple. A mother’s love.
That same gaze was staring at Richie now, here in the burning haze of Tide Town.
Richie held out his arms, awkwardly and without practice, to receive his mother’s embrace. Ella’s soft arms folded around Richie, and he smelled her lotion scent as he rested his head on her chest and felt the tickle of her red scarf brush his nose. It was the same scarf she had given to him before urging Richie out the window, moments before their door was broken down and both their lives were destroyed in equal and opposite ways. The hug was nice. Soft, and warm; comforting. It was the comfort Richie had tried to pretend he didn’t need for so long. A few wet tears leaked from his eyes and splotched his mother’s scarf.
Then, sharp and overwhelming, the smell of the sewers and of necrotic flesh oozed up from beneath the clean, comforting smell of Richie’s mother. The new smells were seeping from her sweater, and Richie’s hands felt clammy with gunk like on the backs of toxic frogs. He looked up, and saw that ‘Ella’s eyes were no longer green, but a burning, angry orange with slit pupils.
Richie was suddenly in pitch black, as if clouded by the darkness of his own mind locking him into himself. In that void, he saw the symbolic image of a pair of disembodied white jaws, framed by two sets of vampiric fangs - top and bottom - open wide over and around him. Then those jaws chomped shut, and Richie felt a bite taken out of his belly.
The vivid imagery of Richie’s memories with his sweet mother and their quaint home lost its luster and its profundity, swept away into the nauseating breath of the shade, drawing air inward, down into its stinking gullet. The sunny glimmer of nostalgia and the feeling of stretching out in the morning and feeling muscles relieved and relaxed were ripped out of Richie, along with the air in his lungs. His stomach lurched, and he felt the vitality of his red blood cells deplete along with a dozen vital nutrients and vitamins leeched straight from his body. A sensation like his future and potential was a standing monolith that loomed, idol-like over a younger Richie, came over him, followed by the feeling that a chunk of that statue had been chipped off with a hammer and chisel, and tumbled into a dark chasm - lost.
Leon hadn’t seen Ella. He had only seen a tall shade grab Richie. Then, it was like all of the muscle tone and pigmentation had drained instantly out of the boy’s form. He collapsed, limp in the shade’s embrace, head draped over its silken black shoulder. The thing’s long, waxy fingers were curled and embedded in the skin of Richie’s back, probing him, looking damnably like the gentle touch of someone stroking a kitten.
Leon’s whip sailed out in a great arc, blowing flames away with the gale it churned up as the thorned tip struck the deceiving shade in the face. Its loathsome head split open lengthwise, as though its jaws had been ripped apart with great brute force, like a gorilla had pried the mouth open. The blow sent the shade flying backward into the flames in that same strike of the whip. Richie’s flaccid body fell face-down into the wood, laying on the dock like a lifeless cadaver.
Leon rushed to Richie’s side, turning him over and putting a finger to his neck, then putting his ear to the boy’s chest. Richie still had a pulse and a heartbeat, but they were slow and weak. Ripping the boy’s jacket and shirt free of his torso, Leon saw angry red rashes branded into Richie’s stomach in the shape of a deep bite, like that of a great white shark. The wound did not bleed, and seemed emblematic to Leon of a direct spiritual attack. A bite had been taken out of Richie’s aura, rather than his physical body, and the boy’s biology had mimed symptoms of the injury his mind could interpret accordingly. His mind made it real.
"Just great." Leon clicked.
He wound his whip around his fist, there and ready when the next shade attacked them, and grabbed the unconscious Richie under the arms. Leon began dragging Richie down a pier, in the direction of the Sniper Tower. Leon grunted, his face turning purple as sweat poured down his features and from his slick blond hair under the weight of lugging Richie's form. The boy had somehow become much heavier rather than lighter, as though the weight of his mental and psychological baggage literally was weight, given legitimacy by the chunk that was torn from Richie's unguarded soul. Leon could still hear wailing shades finding their way through the maze of flame, drawn to the smells of blood and despair.
Leon grit his teeth and turned Richie over, draping an arm over his shoulder. He crouched low, quads engaged.
“This is nothing, I wrestle with Sparta all the time. We’re going for a ride!” Leon psyched himself up, then shot up straight, standing tall with the full enhanced weight of Richie blanketed over his back.
Leon gave a scream of exertion, thick cords popping out on his neck, eyes almost rolled backward as he roared, sounding like the very lions he tamed. He was a proud circus performer from a long lineage of entertainers - acrobat, beast handler, and strongman all in one. He sprinted for the gate of the Sniper Tower.
Richie flickered in and out of consciousness as they flew down the pier, eyes fluttering open to see the cloaked forms of sheet-like shades flying through the haze after them, skeletal black arms stretched out unnaturally long and reaching. In the space between blinks, those hooded shades were closer and closer, like snapshots flashing through in quick succession. Right as those clammy, fleshless fingers tried to grasp Richie by his wind-mussed hair, a massive wall of light washed over them, Richie, and Leon alike. The shine was blinding, like high-power floodlights concentrated in great, column-like convergent beams. The shades shrieked and hissed, hands flying up to shield their hooded, wraith-like faces as they shrank back and steamed under the artificial UV rays.
Richie could barely squint through the blinding light when he turned himself over on Leon’s shoulder to see that they had come to the edge of the pier, where a large square raft was docked. Fifty feet beyond the moored craft, an immense castle-like drawbridge stood, raised by thick iron chains that drew it closed to the base of the imposing Sniper Tower, forming its only entrance and exit. There was only a meager circle of wooden planks nailed into the sides of the tower, on which uniformed naval guardsmen stood, armed with long rifles that stylistically resembled the muskets of centuries passed. The planks were just wide enough to accommodate them, and provide access to hefty light cannons that were affixed to bright orange floatation devices tethered to either side of the gate. Only the breadth of the drawbridge itself was not encircled by those planks, leaving one guard on each side of it responsible for the immensely powerful projected lanterns.
Up this close, the steel cables that netted themselves to the stabilizing rings of the tower looked as thick and sturdy as those of a massive suspension bridge, like the Golden Gate. The tower and its cables cast long, heavy dark shadows on the sea, made darker by contrast to the hail of potent light. The shades that dared push through the luminous assault dove into the bridge of shadows formed by the edge of the pier and the outlines of the cables cast on the sea. As they moved, in the weightless, shapeless form of flattened shadow circles, they ultimately had to emerge at the base of the tower, from out of the shadow’s edge. The cables were spaced in a calculated fashion that forced the shades to try to step out from the darkness onto the planks facing shallow crevices into the tower’s body. From these thin slots, massive guillotine-like blades laid on their sides jetted out with the speed of bullet trains, chopping the perched, disoriented shades in half mercilessly. The severed halves fell over the planks and dispersed into vanishing black smoke before they could break the surface of the bay.
At Richie’s back, the shades that had not tried to jump the gun to attack the tower itself were mowed down in a volley of precise, expert marksman shots from the riflemen positioned at the gate facing the dock. Richie heard sounds like ripping fabric and squelching muck as the darkness abominations were punched through by ball bearing-like bullets, their firing announced only by the crack of gunpowder as the muzzle flash was completely hidden, woven into the all-consuming light of the UV cannons.
Richie felt Leon jump down off the dock, astride the transport raft, and roughly drop him onto his side upon the wooden planks. Leon himself fell to one knee, panting unevenly from the sustained exertion, and he squeezed his palm tightly around the thorns of his whip to wake himself and restore his clarity and focus. Richie could somehow hear the soft tapping of a few lone blood drops plinking from Leon’s stuck hand. Richie looked up at the pier they had dropped from, and found that it was moving farther away, disappearing like a fading mirage disintegrated in the golden aura of the sun. He heard sloshing water, and smelled crisp sea salt, and vacantly put together that the raft was moving toward the tower.
“Raft, hold!” a guard called out, and the vessel stopped halfway to the tower at his command.
Richie could figure that the rope rigging that attached the raft to the tower was concealed beneath the waves, looped through the underside of the platform. He thought of the artificial river rapid rides one could expect to find at amusement parks, and how they made clanking noises as the innertube-shaped vehicles were drawn up the guiding chains that ran like conveyer belts along the inclined slopes when the ride lifted out of water, preparing for a big drop back down into the river.
As the water churned uneasily around the stationary raft, an order was given to lower the drawbridge. Richie felt most vulnerable as the shadow of the bridge’s underside moved in relation to the raft, warped by the floodlights when the heavy object gradually lowered on its running chains. But the cusp of the bridge’s undershadow was just a few feet out of reach, and Leon was staring stoically into the sea marked by the shadow, wound tight and ready to spring a cleaving attack at a moment’s notice should any hidden shades try to launch one final sneak attack.
That moment never came, and Richie felt a series of ripples pass under the sea-slicked transport raft as immense amounts of water were displaced by the drawbridge landing and partially-sinking into the bay, floating there like a half-ship.
“Come on, on your feet.” Leon shook Richie, and the younger boy begrudgingly stood on legs that felt as thick and sluggish as an elephant’s.
Richie just wanted to take a long nap. He didn’t want to get up early in the morning for school today, he just wanted to bake cookies with mom instead. He wasn’t a morning person.
They crossed the length of the lowered drawbridge, Richie distantly hearing the volleyed orders and updates of the guardsmen, and then he saw that the interior of the tower was completely hollow, and bottomless. A circle of deep baywater greeted them at the inner edge of the gate, upon which floated another raft, this time a yellow, angular one like the liferafts adorning the sides of big cruise ships. It floated there, seesawing back and forth in the turbulent waters, as though Richie were looking at a pool built into a boat that had begun to tilt and shake in the grip of a powerful storm. Every ten feet of the cylindrical interior of the tower going up toward the underside of the actual Sniper Room - the “top floor” - was lined with a circle of six smaller floodlights, illuminating the entirety of the tower’s vertical chamber to ensure no shades could congregate and breed within the shadows harbored by the tower itself.
They mounted the raft, which had standing water at the bottom of it, slipping and sliding beneath the bench-like seats, and the drawbridge was raised and closed behind them, making a clenching sound like the tower had been sealed up airtight. Huge torrents of water began to flood into the aquatic chamber the raft rested upon from chutes carved out into the circle of stone Richie now saw fortified the interior of the tower’s base. The water level rose rapidly, carrying them upon the stagnant life raft like a sea-powered elevator. The roar of the rising waters sounded like being under the curtain of Niagara Falls. Outside, Richie could still hear the howling of the shades, desperately seeking a way to claw into the shelter of their retreating prey.