Page 42 of The Goblin and The Dancer
“Can’t we just wait until the tide’s going and let it carry us out?” Rosanna asked, shooting Grik a sympathetic look to show that she shared his impatience.
Grik smiled faintly at her, cheered and distracted by the nudge of her hand.
Paul shook his head. “No, then we’d be sucked straight out to sea. We only have one narrow window, in between tides—it’s called slack tide—that’s when we swim out. It lasts about twenty to thirty minutes.”
That sounded a little oversimplified to Grik, but he didn’t know anything about tides. And, as usual, Paul sounded so certain that it seemed pointless to challenge him. He suspected that Paul didn’t know much about tides either, but when he considered bringing it up, he quailed at the thought. He wanted Paul to be right. He wanted this to be easy.
“When the tide is ready,” Paul continued, still sounding eminently confident, “we’ll walk as close as we can to the cave mouth and then swim out.” He pointed to the ledge at their feet that formed a half-ring of slippery black rock all around the circumference of the cavern. They wouldn’t have to swim across the entire breadth of the cavern, at least—they would only have to walk carefully around the edge of the cavern until they reached a closer proximity to the cave mouth.
“We should rest while we can,” Paul finished. The soldier steadied Rosanna as the dancer sank wearily to the rock and tugged Grik down as he settled himself awkwardly into a sitting position, his bad leg stretched out before him. “I don’t suppose,” he asked Grik, “that you could use that keen nose of yours to find anything to eat or drink down here?”
Grik stopped biting his nails and obliged the soldier by taking a good sniff of their surroundings, half-realizing that Paul didn’t really entertain such hopes but was merely trying to distract Grik. He felt a flicker of gratitude towards the soldier and closed his eyes to concentrate. He was able to make a fairly accurate guess that there wasn’t any fresh water nearby, but he wasn’t familiar enough with coastal smells to detect anything edible.
“I don’t think I smell anything, except . . .”
Paul turned his head. “What is it?”
Grik had sensed something . . . some change in the air and scents around him and a feeling of motion, as if the water in the pool was gathering itself, releasing a heavy stench from the bowels of the cavern.
He rose slowly to his feet, his nose twitching.
“Grik?” Rosanna questioned. “What is it?”
“I don’t . . . know.” His words died in his throat in a loud gulp as movement caught at the corner of his vision.
One of the spires of rock in the middle of the pool had moved.
Grik whipped his head around to stare at it, his heart in his throat. He felt foolish as he reassured himself that it had merely been a trick of the light. It was just a rock.
But then it moved again.
As Grik stared, open-mouthed, the spire began to sink down towards the water, fluid and sinuous and sending the water rippling in a series of dark rings.
It wasn’t rock. It was a tentacle.
The water shifted. It looked like a bit of black fabric that had been seized by the ends and shaken until it quivered.
Grik stepped back with that horrible feeling of a reoccurring dream. He had lived through this before, but this time, before it even began, he somehow knew that it would be much worse.He stood frozen, but everything was happening with the blinding speed of his own thundering heart.
The pool turned into a boiling cauldron. Cascading waves of black water rushed towards the edges of the cavern and struck the walls in cold and savage slaps. One wave shot over the feet of the three travelers, swallowed their ankles, and swept over their knees as a shape rose out of the pool, up and up and up, until it towered above them.
It was a kraken—the most monstrous creature known to goblin or elf. Grik and Paul had only seen the creature’s tentacles earlier that day, not its whole body—not its head. A look at its tentacles was bad enough; this was like something out of a nightmare. Blue-grey scales covered a massive and monstrous form. The part of the creature that showed above the roiling water was easily forty feet high, with tentacles as big around as tree branches.The huge, fleshy head turned this way and that, until two bulbous yellow eyes fixed themselves upon the three travelers.
Grik would have given anything to escape their horrible stare, but there was nowhere to hide. Even if there were, he was too terrified to run.
“Move!” Paul shouted in his ear, shoving him to one side with a force that sent Grik’s breath racing through his body again and his mind scrambling frantically for a way out of here.
He looked around and saw Rosanna with her face pressed against the cave wall, clinging with her fingers to the slippery finger holds, screaming helplessly into the rock as the water seethed and long tentacles began to unwind. One of the tentacles reached for Rosanna, and the dancer stumbled to the side, crying out in disgust.
Grik threw himself at the tentacle, kicking, biting, clawing, and shouting—using every ounce of strength he possessed to wrench it away from Rosanna.
The end of the tentacle twisted around, and one of the disgusting, sucker-like cups seized Grik’s stomach in a sticky grip that made him shout in terror.
A sword sliced through the tentacle clutching Grik, and he tumbled free. Someone pulled him upright, and he looked up into Paul’s face.
“In there!” Paul bellowed, grabbing Grik by the arm and swinging him around.
It took a moment for Grik’s terrified brain to grasp what Paul was pointing to. The soldier had spotted a slit in the sleek black wall behind them. At any other time, it would have looked like something from a bad dream—a thin, jagged mouth waiting in the shadows to snatch at them. But as Grik’s panicked eyes fell on it now, it looked like the safest place in the world.
