Eighth Circle

Tom crouched in a corner and tried not to breathe deeply. The stench from the shattered jars was overwhelming. The doctor had gone berserk. Not content with killing the immortals, he had gone around bludgeoning the corpses with an iron bar. The sound of his rampage had finally ceased. Tom guessed the man had been overcome by the noxious fumes and had died.

He was pleased to see the last of him. The doctor had sold his soul to the guardians and deserved to die with them. The big danger now was that he would suffer the same fate. The security doors of the Forbidden zone had slammed shut and he was trapped inside.

He hadn't worried at first. Crispin had shown him a loose panel that led through to the seed bank. But, when he got there, he found it was jammed shut. No amount of force would open it and cutting a hole with his ray gun wasn't an option because the gun wouldn't work in the Forbidden Zone.

Once again, fate had been unkind. Tom fumed at his misfortune. His mission was almost over. All that remained was to free the sirens and take the surviving guardians out to sea in a leaking boat and drown them. That should qualify him for an honourable passage back to the Sixth Realm.

Father had talked about a Saviour's Passage. Tom didn't like the term. It conjured up images of saintly individuals, in white robes, who went around telling people to be kind to one another. But, names didn't matter. The idiots who controlled the sacred pathways could call it what they liked so long as they let him through.

All the signs were there. The cliff above the whirlpools was bathed in the same crimson glow he had seen when he made his passage from the Seventh Realm. The time was right but he couldn't go anywhere while he was trapped in a stinking hole surrounded by monstrous corpses in jars ...

'Professor ... are you there?'

A voice disturbed his thoughts.

Tom peered at the panel.

'Is that you, Crispin?'

'Yes, Professor. People are worried about you.'

Tom tried to control his anger.

'They have every right to be worried about me, Crispin. I've done their dirty work for them. I've killed all the immortals. Now I'm trapped in this awful place because some idiot has wedged the panel shut.'

'I told you about the wedges, Professor.'

'I don't recall that, Crispin.'

'You should, Professor.' Crispin's voice remained calm. 'They are there to stop the death trolls finding out about us. If you had followed the correct procedures you would have gone round to the back and removed them first. Then there wouldn't have been this problem.'