Dark by M.A.Batten

Author:M.A.Batten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mr Chicken

CHAPTER XXI: CROSSROADS

It was not the darkness that made him struggle to see as he staggered through Myrr Wood. It was the tears.

Dark had never cried before. During his entire life in that hole in the ground he had felt sad, been melancholy, angered, and even despairing, but never had all four feelings battered him simultaneously. A giant fist was reaching inside his chest, wrenching whatever was dying inside his cage of bones.

He didn’t know why his eyes rained.

And he couldn’t stop them.

In his blurry haze, he bounced off trees, stumbled over rocks, tripped on logs, and blundered through thickets. Until he fell.

The ground suddenly disappeared beneath him and Dark tumbled down into a hole. At the bottom, he tried to rise but surrendered and collapsed into the moist soil. His fingers gingerly pushed into the dirt and felt rocks, small tree roots, but mostly broken earth. No grass or ferns or moss.

There was a squeak in his ear. Get up!

‘No,’ he whimpered.

We have to keep going, said the squeak.

‘This is where we belong.’ His face pressed into the dirt, muffling his voice. ‘In a hole in the ground.’

Rat crawled from his hair and scampered across his cheek. I do not belong in a hole, it squeaked. And neither do you.

When the boy refused to move, Rat did the only thing he knew he could do in such a situation.

He bit him.

‘Ouch!’ Dark flipped himself over in a flurry of arms and legs. ‘What did you do that for?’

He could see the rat sitting on the ground before him, raised up on his back legs, staring back. The animal didn’t say anything.

Looking down at himself, Dark realised he was still in the clothes Starr had given him. In a fit of rage, he started tearing at them. He kicked off the ridiculous leather shoes that cramped his toes and tossed them high out of the hole. The shirt was already torn so it gave way easily, ripped into shreds as he clawed it off. Next, the pants were reduced to tatters as he bit through the knees and ripped off the lower half of the legs, leaving the top half to cover his waist. After all, he did not want to be naked.

Balling up clods of wet earth, he smeared them over his face, up both cheeks around his brows and back down either side of his nose. Then he wiped his fingers across his chest in outward strokes. When he was done, it gave the impression of a painted skeleton with muddy ribs and a skull of sod from which his white eyes pierced the darkness.

Feel better? asked Rat.

‘No,’ he sneered. ‘But at least I don’t feel human.’

Dark flopped back onto the cool earth and stared out of the hole at the starry sky above. This pit was not as deep as the one in which he had been born, and the walls were not stone bricks. But it felt comfortable to be back in a hole.

The world outside of holes, he decided, was mean and vicious.

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