The crunch is what really makes Yoshi wince. It’s a soul-jarring sound that reminds him what he’s treading on with every step he takes. His twin torch beams pick out pig bones from head to trotter as he makes his way along the riverbed. Bleached white, and knitted at random, they sink and crackle with every footfall.
“Don’t look down,” he breathes, as if walking a perilous precipice. “It has to be here somewhere.”
He trains his lights upon the tunnel roof instead, and wills himself to keep listening to the orchestra. Despite the many flies buzzing around, the music grounds him somehow. It serves to remind him of city life on the surface, and the reason why he’s here.
For this is the location for the seventh waypoint. A place so fearful, according to Julius, that nobody had dared to venture here. Way back at the broken tunnel mouth, on the same level now, Yoshi can still hear a lone voice cooing in a bid to coax a pig into its clutches, but that’s all behind him. It could’ve been worse, he tells himself. After the old man had explained how a band of butchers and their women had gone to ground to escape the Great Fire, he expected to find the place seething with an entire generation of savages. What’s more, the tunnel appears to be punctured with bolt-holes like the one he had just crept through. With a sweep of his torch beams, he notes they’re all around him. Even if this was once a hive of activity, he observes, it looks to be history now. He lengthens his stride, still scanning the roof in search of the keystone, but has to remind himself not to whistle. Even if there were just one or two wretches remaining down here, it wouldn’t do to attract their attention. After a lifetime of subterranean solitude, the boy thinks to himself, discovering a visitor would scare them to death!
Yoshi smiles briefly at the thought, and then grins outright when his torch lights find what he’s come this far to find. A jagged star with seven points, etched into a brick. He draws up underneath and brushes at it with his fingertips. What falls away isn’t grit, however, but a shower of luminous atoms. As he has witnessed before, at other waypoints in the ring, these flecks tinkle like wind chimes, and appear to fall out of step with gravity. Yoshi watches them settle upon the bed of bones, reverting on contact to grime, and prepares to fire up the ring.
“Think positive,” he tells himself, mindful of the old man’s advice. This time, he places his palm squarely over the etching and closes his eyes. The first thing to flash into his mind is Livia. He pictures her with the others, waiting anxiously on the other side of the divide. Seeing how concerned she seems makes him feel warm on the inside, which is just the buzz he needs right now to complete the task at hand. They’re huddled behind a rock, and it’s then that Yoshi realises he’s not imagining this but viewing them remotely. A moment later he sees Livia look around as if an invisible presence has just tapped her on the shoulder.
“It’s me!” he whispers now, and is delighted to see her aura brighten.
“Yoshi! I can hear your voice in my head. I know it’s you! What’s happening? As soon as that . . . that thing appeared at the tunnel mouth, we thought it was all over for you.”
“Can you see it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What does it look like?”
“It isn’t pretty,” is all she says. “But have you found the waypoint? It’s high time we got as far away from this godforsaken place as we can.”
“I’m activating it right now,” he tells her. “You should see something happen at any moment.”
“Then focus on that waypoint, Yoshi. We can’t have you wasting energy talking to me.”
He sees her pretending to scold him, and allows the image to fade away. Even so, her parting comment sends a tingle through his spine.
Unfortunately, on opening his eyes after a moment, Yoshi finds it’s the only reaction that seems to have occurred. The boy tries one more time, focusing entirely on the keystone this time, but again with no effect.
“It must be faulty,” he decides, and thumps the brick in frustration. He had expected a spark at the very least. Some signal that he had tapped into the earth energies in constant circulation around the ring. Previously, he had unleashed a torrent of water, while Livia and the twins had demonstrated similar abilities by doing exactly as he had done here. “Why won’t it work?”
For a moment Yoshi just stands there, lost in thought. He wonders how Julius might react if he returns to the abyss and calls across that he’s failed. Then he considers how he’s going to get himself back to the other side, and a sense of panic sets in. It serves to wake him up to his surroundings once again. Orchestral music continues to whisper through the tunnel, as does the ghastly muttering from the broken tunnel mouth. What’s different, he realises with a start, is that something else can be heard: a sound like children at play, and it’s coming out of the dark behind him.
Without waiting to see what it is, he retreats by several steps, only to think twice when the figure at the mouth appears to pick up on all the activity. The muttering and cooing stop, replaced by grunts of suspicion. Yoshi freezes, trapped now from both sides. It leaves him no chance but to sidestep to the tunnel wall, and inch into the nearest bolthole. The children don’t sound like ordinary kids. More like excitable chimps with a mastery of basic English.
“Do it again, Jenks Junior. Heh-heh! Show me how it’s done!”
Cautiously, Yoshi dares to peer deeper into the tunnel. What he sees almost causes him to cry out. At first he thinks the two little loping figures are part of a freak show troupe. The way they keep dropping down to move using their hands in the same way as their feet is extraordinary. But these are no apes. Far from it. They’re wearing filthy aprons over their rags, with arching ears, snout-like noses, and wiry red hair pulled into curly tails. And yet it isn’t even their sightless, milky eyes that cause Yoshi to start. It’s the fact that he doesn’t even need the head torch to see them. For an eerie light is radiating from one of these ghostly-looking creatures, just like the glow that shines from Livia’s shoulders.
“Show me, Jenksy, show me now!” urges the one without the aura, and draws breath through his nose with a snort. “Touch the magic brick.”
“Shhhh!” replies his little friend. “Jenks Junior wants no more trouble from the elders. I don’t want it to go bang like last time! I only tried it the other night because it was got so noisy in the world above with all their celebrations and feasting. I couldn’t sleep, and was curious about what would happen. Now I wish I’d left it well alone.”
“So be swift about it, then.”
At this, the creature calling himself Jenks Junior reaches up as Yoshi had. On account of his short stature, however, he has to jump and strain in a bid to reach it. From his hiding place, Yoshi leans out for a better look. He sees Jenks make the connection with his hand, but has to shield his eyes and wheel around when a starburst of light gleams from the waypoint. It blasts across Yoshi’s back, rushing through his hair, and then an even stranger thing occurs. Right before his eyes, Yoshi sees a ghost of himself take off towards the tunnel mouth. It’s as if a transparent replica has just peeled away from his flesh and bones, an image which glows as it gathers speed. Nor is he the only one to witness it. For the presence at the tunnel mouth is lit up by the racing entity, and Yoshi doesn’t like the look of him one bit. As Yoshi’s ghostly image sprints right through the figure, the creature up there wheels around enraged. He shares the same startling features as the pair under the waypoint, from the white, sightless eyes to the apron and the upturned snout, but he’s larger, thicker-set and much older. Indeed, he seems so steamed up that his ears have pinned right back.
“Jenks?” it bellows between each squealing intake of breath. “Jenks Junior? Heavens, child, you’ll give away our existence in no time! I swear I’ll fillet your liver if I catch you!”
Yoshi hears the kid gasp, upon which the light from the waypoint recedes as fast as it appeared.
“The elder! Oh no! We’re for it now!”
“You said everyone was sleeping,” the one called Jenks Junior hisses to his friend, looking like a ghost wraith with his aura shining brightly. “Now we’re in great trouble!”
“You touched it, Jenksy!” the other creature responds, and begins to retreat into the darkness. “Everyone knows that you alone can do it. No wonder everyone calls you a freak!”
Yoshi witnesses the entire exchange, feeling strangely sorry for poor Jenks Junior, but only for a moment. For not only is this so-called elder still cursing the kid’s name. He can also be heard loping from the tunnel mouth now. Once again, the boy with a gift for remote viewing folds himself into the crevice, and wills his third eye to open.
This time, the flash that goes off occurs only inside Yoshi’s mind. When it clears, there is Livia, with Mikhail and Julius. They’re no longer hiding, however, but standing on the bank beside the waterfall looking thoroughly shaken.
“That was more than just an aftershock,” says Julius. Mikhail is close beside him, with both hands clasped over his red-spiked head.
“It was a far-out trick!” he exclaims, as the old man rolls his eyes. “And at last I think I’ve worked out how it’s done.”
“I doubt that very much,” says Livia under her breath.
“Hologram projectors!” the young Russian declares, and snaps his fingers in the air triumphantly with a whip of the wrist. “When that beam of light shot across the abyss, we all know that wasn’t Yoshi racing along inside it. Yoshi would’ve dropped into the ravine like a stone, after all. And the hologram that chased him into the tunnel behind us was wild! It was like something out of a carnival, wasn’t it? Still, full marks for a most impressive light show. I think the pigs work best, though. This looked a bit over the top.”
As Julius tries to explain what really happened, Livia’s attention is drawn away. She certainly can’t see Yoshi, tucked out of sight in the tunnel on the far side, but she has just picked up on the fact that he’s here on the psychic wavelength they share.
“Were you behind that?” she whispers, anxious not to trouble Mikhail further.
“Not exactly,” he replies from the crevice, seeing her clearly in his mind’s eye. “But I can confirm that it wasn’t an aftershock.”
“Are you in trouble?” she asks, sensing something is wrong.
“You could say that,” he admits, aware that the creature from the tunnel mouth can be heard advancing across the bed of bones towards him. And then, as his remote view begins to fade, Yoshi sees Livia turn with a start, and face the tunnel on her side of the abyss. She backs against the rock, tugging at the old man’s patchwork coat. Julius looks around along with Mikhail, and both share the same look of shock and astonishment.
“Whatever’s going on with you,” is the last thing Livia tells Yoshi, “things just got twice as bad on this side.”