Page 100 of A Shade Too Far
My attempt to lighten the mood was met with silence.
Finally, I broke through the mucous membrane into a tunnel made of the same pink fleshy material. But where the entrance had the drop-of-a-hat wetness of a young woman, this section was dry, its folds withered. Avoiding a telltale glance at my own perimenopausal lady parts, I raked slime out of my hair, wiping it on a tunnel wall that was tepid to the touch. Every inhale was like breathing in a sauna, the air a sharp burn in my lungs.
Naveen held his staff aloft, providing a warm glow of light to navigate by. “It’s perfectly pleasant once you get inside.”
I fell in step behind him. “If this isn’t the demon realm,” I said, “where are we?”
“A lair or a burrow,” Naveen said. “Certain demons carve them out to stay in when they come to earth.”
We hit a dead end and turned around, retracing our footsteps.
“Too cheap to stay in a hotel, huh?” I licked my lips, which were drying out in the heat. “And this lair isn’t warded?”
“Demons would never lower themselves to bother with wards,” Naveen said. “Might as well put out a neon sign saying, ‘Come and get me, I’m easy prey.’”
“But it’s a hidden space?” My foot caught in a crack and I stumbled, narrowly catching myself before I fell. “Like Ohrists build?”
“It’s hidden, but you’ve got it backward.” Naveen raised the staff high at a junction, peering into the gloom before choosing the right-hand branch. “We got the idea from demons.”
It was slow going with all the twists, turns, and dead ends, the lair made creepier by the occasional reflective surfaces in the same slit shape as the portal entrance, which Naveen forbade me from looking at on pain of death.
I kept my eyes on the uneven ground. “Why can’t I look?”
“Same reason Jews cover mirrors when they sit shiva,” he said.
“So, we don’t check our hair while in a period of mourning?”
“No.” His voice was laced with forced patience. “Demons and evil spirits are attracted to grief, to an emptiness in the soul. We don’t want them coming in and tormenting us when we’re so raw and vulnerable.”
If mourning was emptiness, then what was this emotion filling me up to the point of bursting, this hurt that I was choking on? “I’m not grieving.”
“Of course not.”
My shoulders crept higher and higher. It was hard not to read these reflective ovals as dozens of eyes about to snap to life, and that once seen, we would forever be on their radar. Whoever “they” were.
A growling noise poured out of one such surface, startling me, and I jerked my head toward it, but before I could make eye contact, Naveen shoved me toward the opposite wall. I sucked in a breath, clipping my elbow on the tunnel wall.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, shaking out my arm.
“Don’t be that way.”
“What way?”
“Mopey.” He poked my shoulder. “Buck up or I’ll feed you to the demon.”
I made a snarky face.
Just around the next corner, we found ourselves in the middle of a high conical chamber dotted with stalactites.
“We’re here.” Naveen flipped his light staff to his other shoulder.
At the very back sat a giant gray slug demon with chubby rolls for arms and a bump of a head that looked like an afterthought drawn on by a child. The demon shoved a human arm dripping with slime into its gaping maw—the only feature on its face—convulsing as it swallowed it whole.
Hundreds of yellow blobby maggots excreted from the slug’s rubbery skin, plopping to the floor in wriggling heaps that immediately rippled out across the cavern ground.
“It can’t digest human fat,” Naveen explained. “So it converts that into sentient scouts looking for more food.”
My stomach lurched and I skittered back.
