The Call - Michael Grant [39]
Still, the view from the top was stunning. The sun was split by the horizon and sent out crazy streamers of brilliant red and yellow across a boundless sky.
“Nice, eh?” Jarrah asked. “Come on, then, better to reach the shaft while we still have light.”
Uluru was about three miles long, a sloping table-top, pitted and sliced, but overall it looked fairly flat. The shaft was not far away, easily spotted because it was topped by a frame with a winch and a motor.
Mack stepped cautiously to the edge of the shaft. It went straight down, a nearly round hole with no light coming from inside.
Mack could feel his inner fear sensor begin to ring urgently. Already his breathing was constricted, his throat closing up, his heart pounding in some not-quite-rhythmic way.
“When we get down, we’ll turn on the lights,” Karri said.
“Get down?” Mack asked in a shrill voice. “Wait a minute. You think we’re going down there? Down there? Down a black hole in a massive rock where I’ll be totally surrounded by billions of pounds of rock and it will be all around me like I’m buried alive?”
“We have a sort of basket on a winch. You climb in, hold on to the grip, and down you go. Nothing to it, really,” Jarrah said.
“Ah-ha-ha no. No, no, no, no,” Mack said. “No. No, nonononono.”
Karri and Jarrah both stared at him, puzzled.
“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” Karri asked.
“I’m not?” Mack shrilled. “Yes. Yes, of course I am. I have, like, a really strong dislike for the idea of being buried alive under some giant mystical rock in Australia!”
Jarrah shrugged. “I thought you’d want to see what Mum found.”
“Me? No. Pictures will be fine. Or even just a description,” Mack said. “Because there is no way, no, no, no, no way. No. Way.
“No.
“No way.
“My point is: no.”
“Well then, this whole trip is a bit of a waste then,” Jarrah said, clearly disappointed. “I mean, I could have shown you pictures back in Sydney.”
“Yes. Well. No one mentioned we were going to drop down a shaft into the bowels of the earth,” Mack pointed out.
“Fair enough,” Jarrah admitted. “I don’t suppose you could—”
“No. Whatever you’re going to say, the answer is no,” Mack said.
“How about—”
“No.”
“But if we—”
“No.”
“What are those?” Stefan asked.
“What are what?” Mack asked. But even as he asked, he saw what Stefan meant. Which did not mean he could answer the question.
Because what he saw, he had never seen before.
They were outlined against the setting sun, perhaps two dozen of them in all. They seemed small, maybe no taller than Mack himself. You might almost think they were children, but their shape was wrong.
And the way they moved was wrong.
Karri pulled a flashlight from one of her many pockets. She aimed the beam. It illuminated a triangular face dominated by the oversized eyes of a night creature. The nose was a slit. The ears were pointed—Vulcan ears, but swept forward at the points.
The mouth grinned in a sort of tight V shape. The V grin was lined with teeth that stuck out beyond the lips. Not like buck teeth, but curved, like overgrown fingernails—like talons, but talons that were teeth.
There would be time later (Mack hoped) to figure out just how to describe those teeth.
The flashlight beam shook as Karri played it down the creature’s body to highlight a strangely quaint little outfit: red leather shorts held up with green suspenders over a sort of spangled vest.
They had overly long arms that dragged their long, delicate fingers on the ground as they walked.
The legs were bare, and that was unfortunate because they looked a great deal like goat legs, with curly tan-colored hair similar to that which spilled from under the creatures’ jaunty green caps.
“Who are you? And what are you doing here?” Karri asked.
“You don’t speak; we speak.”
They had surprisingly deep voices, for child-sized freaks