Time slowed to a crawl, and although the six Tharians were almost literally flying through the air, their own momentum carrying them on and requiring only the occasional course correction whenever they touched the floor or a wall, it still seemed to take forever to reach and pass every landmark they picked out to mark their progress.

     Shaun selected a large frond of fern reaching out four feet from the right hand wall, which he estimated was about halfway to the airlock, so that when he passed it he’d know that he was halfway there, but although hours seemed to pass between his glances up ahead, it never seemed to be any nearer. He had the insane notion that the tunnel was getting longer, and that he would spend the rest of his life swimming through it until he went mad. But then, miraculously, he was past it and he snapped it off with a triumphant swipe of his hand as he sped past. Then he looked ahead again and gave a cry of despair. The airlock still seemed as far away as ever!

     Impossible! he sobbed, gasping in desperation. I’m halfway there! It should be twice as close! Why is it still so far away? He swam forward with even greater effort while, behind them, the fattest part of the creature finally squeezed through the hole and its long tail slithered through with virtually no resistance. The hiss of escaping air, which had temporarily stopped, now returned and grew louder with terrifying speed. Air began to move in the tunnel again, now moving against the Tharians and pulling them back the way they’d come, and a cloud of rubbish and detritus, dead leaves and beetles, began flying through the air, getting in their clothes and tangling in their hair.

     There was only one foot or so of the creature’s tail left in the hole, and it was able to touch the floor when it was temporarily stopped by the suction of vacuum behind it. No longer able to push its way forward by waves of muscle movement against the tunnel walls, the method by which it had been moving until now, it was forced to raise its head up to the ceiling so that it looked like a giant upside down looping caterpillar. It then try to straighten itself, pulling its tail with all the strength in its body. Its tail finally came out with a loud sucking pop, at exactly the same moment that Shaun’s outstretched hand grabbed the ring of the airlock’s open door, and then there was a hurricane in the tunnel.

     The Tharians’ forward momentum was rapidly slowed and stopped by the roaring, buffeting wind, and they grabbed desperately at whatever leaves and fronds were within reach to avoid being swept back. Shaun hung grimly onto the airlock door with one hand, grabbed Diana’s wrist with the other and pulled her up until she could hold on by herself. Behind them, the others clawed their way slowly along the walls and floor, pulling their way towards the airlock inch by painful inch as their arms screamed in protest at the load they were being asked to take. Thomas was clinging in terror to a clump of crabgrass as he struggled to reach a small clubmoss that was just an inch or two out of reach in front of him. He had almost reached it when the crabgrass came loose with a sickening, tearing sound. The screaming wizard was left flying loose through the air, swept back towards the monster and the gaping, empty hole through which the air was escaping, but then his hand was grabbed by Matthew, who was risking his own already precarious hold in so doing. The woodsman swung him back down to where he could get a new hold onto the tunnel’s vegetation.

     Shaun and Diana managed to pull themselves inside the airlock, and they lay gasping against the wall for a moment before turning and carefully reaching out through the open door to help the others in. Jerry was nearest, and Shaun stretched to his very limit in an attempt to reach the tiny nome’s outstretched fingers, but as he was shifting position to allow him to reach an inch or two further a movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. When he turned his head to see what it was he was horrified to see that the airlock door was closing.

     Some spring mechanism in the door, he thought in near panic, and he stared in horrified fascination as it swung slowly on its hinges. It’s responding to the drop in air pressure. A safety mechanism to seal off the breached section of corridor! He tried to stop it, but the spring mechanism or whatever it was was much too strong and he couldn’t slow it by even the slightest amount. The others outside had noticed it as well, and he heard a cry of horror from Thomas above the howl of the wind as the gap between door and doorframe narrowed from three feet to two, to eighteen inches. Shaun could do nothing to stop it, and a single thought was running through his mind over and over again. They’re going to die! They’re all going to die!

     “Do something!” screamed Diana, but the soldier was paralysed with horror, unable to do a single thing to stop the tragedy from happening. Seeing this, the cleric gave a cry of anger, pulled his sword from its scabbard and jammed it between the door and its frame on the hinge side. The steel blade screamed and bent as the door closed on it, and for a moment Shaun thought it was going to snap. An ordinary sword probably would have snapped, sealing the fates of everyone on the door’s other side, but the magically strengthened blade held and a second later the door came to a shuddering stop, leaving a gap of less than twelve inches between it and the doorframe. Meanwhile, behind them, the airlock’s other door closed and locked itself with a small click.

     Most of the wind stopped, and Jerry, Lirenna and Matthew were able to squeeze through into the airlock with very little effort, gasping for breath in the thin air. Thomas was the last one in, gasping as he fought for every breath, and he collapsed against the side of the airlock, looking barely conscious.

     There was an awful pressure in Shaun's eyeballs, as if they were blowing up like balloons, and everything seemed to go grey as oxygen starvation began to affect his brain. Air continued to leak out through the open door, but its initial fury was now gone and all the sounds were becoming strange, the precursor to the total silence that accompanied hard vacuum. Shaun knew they’d never hear that silence, though, because they’d all be dead.

     He groped around to find the hilt of his sword, his vision now almost useless as his eyeballs bulged with their internal pressure. He pulled, but the blade was held fast between the door and frame and he felt himself slipping dangerously close to blind panic as he tugged and twisted to no effect. He bent the blade, trying to snap off the tip, but the magic strengthening it was too strong and he knew that all the men in the Beltharan army pulling together wouldn’t have been able to break it. He began to despair, and wondered whether anyone would ever find them, as they’d found the massed corpses in the ruined park cavern.

     The others, dazed and weak though they were by the air loss, saw his difficulty, and Thomas and Matthew pushed the door, trying to open it wider against the force of the spring mechanism trying to close it, while Jerry added his strength to Shaun’s in trying to pull the sword out. Shaun was reminded of the legend of Arathar pulling the magic sword Justice from the silver anvil, thereby proving himself the rightful king of Albarna, and he laughed hysterically as blood foamed around his nose and mouth. He braced his feet against the wall and gathered all his remaining strength for one last supreme effort. He pulled, the sword came free at last and they flew backwards against the other wall as the door closed with a hollow sounding snick.

     Silence fell, broken only by the painful, laboured breathing of the Tharians, sounding as though it were coming from a million miles away. Shaun lay limply against the wall as if stunned, blood running freely from his nose and ears, while Jerry bent over Lirenna, staring in horror as the demi shae coughed up pink foam. Shaun felt himself growing weaker still as his oxygen starved brain struggled to hold onto consciousness, and he looked up at the airlock’s other door and the red flag half raised in its window. Air on the other side of the door, he thought groggily. Got to open the door.

     He pushed himself over to it, grabbing hold of the wheel to stop himself drifting away again, and then had to pause while he tried to remember why he was there and what he was doing. Oh yes, he realised after a moment. Got to open the door. He tried to turn the wheel, but it was stuck and refused to move as he swore and cursed, pulling it first one way and then the other in case, for some reason, it turned the other way from every other wheel they’d come across so far. “Drass!” he wept, tears of bubbling blood floating around his head. “To be killed by a drassing stuck wheel!”

     “Air pressure!” gasped Lirenna, coughing out clouds of pink foam into what was left of the air. “Equalise air pressure! Other wheel!”

     Shaun cursed himself for a fool. Of course, the door wouldn’t open so long as the air pressure was different on either side. He groped around for the other wheel as his eyesight failed again, found it and turned it, and the airlock was filled with the beautiful, blessed sound of air hissing in.

     Gradually their breathing became easier, and the burning in their lungs faded to a dull ache. Lirenna continued to cough up pink foam, but stopped when Diana prayed over her, infusing her with the healing power of the Goddess Caroli. The cleric then went around doing the same for the others.

     “By the Gods!” gasped Shaun as he pulled himself upright again. “I really thought we’d had it that time! I really did!”

     “Yeah,” agreed Thomas whole heartedly. “When that monster showed up...”

     A look of pure horror suddenly appeared on his face and he dashed back to the first door, looking through the window past the red flag, now fully raised. The others heard him shriek with terror and they looked at each other with renewed fear, all of them knowing exactly what he was seeing.

     On the other side of the door, no more than thirty yards away, the creature was making its slow, unhurried way towards them, confident that there was no escape for its prey. Its main body was over ten feet long, pink and grey with mottled patches of blue and a tracery of bright crimson blood vessels, pulsing and rippling beneath its soft, transparent hide. A cluster of long, thin tentacles extended greedily from its head; lumpy and repulsive and reminding the wizard of lengths of sheep’s intestine. It had no eyes, nor any other sense organs that the wizard could see, but it seemed to know exactly where it was going and didn’t seem bothered at all by the fact that it was now in hard vacuum.

     “It’s coming!” he whispered, his face pale with terror. “It’s still coming!”

     “Will the door stop it?” asked Matthew.

     “Are you kidding?” replied Thomas, giggling hysterically. “You saw how it went through solid rock! It’ll go through this door like it’s made of damp cardboard!”

     He went to the other door and looked through its window. The tunnel ran for over two hundred yards and then turned a corner. There was no telling how far away the next airlock was. Too far away, that was certain. Far too far away. There was no escape.