The Night Market Read Online Free Page B

darkness of the twisting tunnels swallow her, she
would never re-emerge. But fear tempted her to run headlong despite that.
    Yael walked directly behind the cat, careful not to tread
on him. Proximity made her feel a little better, but she still had to fight the
impulse to pick up the cat and cuddle him to her chest.
    The surface of the cave was far from even and Yael’s
flashlight had begun to dim. She found herself stumbling, scrambling on gravel
or over unexpected obstacles to stay on her feet, often earning a derisive
glare from the cat. The pebbles she kicked down the tunnel seemed to ricochet
and echo forever down the narrow caverns. Her mask was suffocating and hot, but
she wasn’t ready to show her face to the cat, not until she was sure of his
intentions.
    When she stepped on the root, her first thought was to
avoid rolling her ankle. It would be absurd, Yael thought bitterly, to have her
quest derailed by a sprain. She didn’t notice that the root was moving until it
had constricted around her ankle, tight as a cuff.
    Yael pulled frantically, tugging her leg with both
arms, while the root tightened, cutting off the flow of blood to her foot.
    “Help!” Yael cried out, not caring that her voice sounded
panicked and childish. “Mister Kitty! Please help me!”
    The root was not exactly a root. It was something
organic, like a tentacle with the surface texture of stone or of an ancient
shellfish. The segmented length grew up out of the ground like a plant, but
moved with the cunning and persistence of a reptile. Now that she was caught,
Yael could see others like it all around her, waving in the invisible air
currents like seaweed.
    “Pulling won’t help,” the cat said grimly, while Yael
bent down and tried to peel the increasingly painful constriction from her leg.
“It will only get tighter. You need to relax.”
    Relaxing did not seem like a practical option. Yael
opened her mouth to say as much, but instead yelped in pain as the root
tightened another notch with a mechanical click, the new segment winding
further up her leg, forcing her to bend at the knee.
    “Help me! Please!”
    “Not much for calming down, are we? There is a lesson
in this, child. No one can be stronger than everything. There is always
something, like the shoggoth here,” the cat lectured, nodding at the thing that
was crushing Yael’s leg, “that is stronger than you. But you can always be smarter. Get ready to run.”
    The cat coiled his legs, then hopped on to the root
that held her leg, prancing along the curled length of it, digging his claws in.
For one awful moment, the root flexed and Yael cried out, certain that her leg
would be crushed by the tremendous pressure. Then the root released with such
violence that it whipped around her leg, bruising the flesh beneath the
impenetrable cloth of her tights. The root arced through the tunnel, scraping
the moss from the ceiling as it crashed down where the cat had been only
moments before. Now he sat on an adjoining root, licking one paw and looking
amused.
    “Being faster, of course – ”
    The cat leapt again, a shadow moving amongst shadows, a
moment before the place where he sat was obliterated by another of  roots,
sending up a puff of the glowing blue moss.
    “ – is helpful as well. The point I wish to make, however
– ”
    Three roots arched overhead and descended in sequence,
shattering the ground and sending splinters of stone flying, one piece glancing
off the side of Yael’s mask. The cat appeared to dart beneath them just before
they hit the ground and then settled casually atop another.
    “ – is that you don’t want your enemy – ”
    There was a confusion of roots and impacts, the tunnel
shuddering and filling with dust. One root after another collided with the
ground in attempts to crush the cat, each on top of the last. The cat was like
a whirlwind moving between them, jumping from one root to the other as if they
were holding still, as if he were