Chapter VIII: A Web of Darkness

Aragorn's struggle to breathe was no longer exclusively the product of fear. His chest ached with the effort of gleaning useable air from the miasma that seemed almost to have replaced the darkness. What putrescence had given rise to this suffocating stench he could not fathom and did not dare to imagine. With the will that had led men to find victory where they saw only defeat, he banished all speculation and focused on the next laborious breath and the next long, shuffling step. He groped onward, his right hand creeping along the clammy rock wall whilst his left grasped the neck of his cloak, pulling it as far down his chest as he could in a vain attempt to relieve some of the pressure in his throat.

Ever onward he walked. The walls were clammy but smooth, and here and there he found a shallow alcove, such as those used that might house braziers or sconces. No such instruments of light were present here, however, and he moved on blindly through the blackness and the vile smell of decay and unthinkable foulness. The darkness filled his lungs and permeated his body and seemed to numb his mind. He tried to focus, to fix his will on his unsteady breathing, but his senses were dulled and his thoughts grew detached and disjointed. He could scarcely hear his own footfalls in the thick, stagnant air, and as the rise and fall of his chest grew more laborious even his awareness of the dreadful reek seemed to dull and grow less tangible.

His head was swimming. Dimly he knew that he had little time left in which to find cleaner air. He tried to quicken his pace, but his limbs would not obey. His feet maintained their steady rise and fall and his hand fumbled forward. Alone of all his senses his touch seemed heightened, enhanced, amplified almost to the point where the feel of the cold stone beneath his fingertips brought pain. He could feel the slightest imperfection in the wall beneath his hand, and his left could almost pick out the individual fibres of the cloth it gripped.

The fear that had plagued him in the caverns behind seemed now a very distant thing. Conscious thought was muddled, and he could not remember why the darkness troubled him. It was all that he had ever known. Light, colour, clean open air and the dancing firmament of stars... all these were less than memory, vague concepts that grew more intangible with each moment that passed. What were they but the indistinct imaginings of a fevered mind? Only the darkness was real; the darkness and the curious smell of filth and evil that hovered on the edge of his flagging awareness.

He might have lost himself entirely, save that the slow shuffling of his feet made no allowance for a change in the grade of the floor. When his toes struck the front of a low stair, he stumbled and fell forward onto his knees. He caught himself with his hands, but the impact concussed up arms and legs into his hips and his shoulders and chest. A heavy exhalation of surprise drove the fumes briefly from his lungs and for a moment his mind was cleared of its fog. In that moment he realized with a thrill of horror that he was in very real danger of losing himself entirely to the gloom around him.

Though he had to draw breath, and with the return of the poisons his reason was clouded once more, Aragorn now struggled to fix his mind upon the world he had left behind. He thought of the cold waters of Poros and the glimmer of moonlight – what was moonlight? The glimmer of silver moonlight on the autumn leaves. He thought of golden grasses bowing and rippling before the wind, and of bright wildflowers clustered in ditches far to the North. He thought of tall oak trees adorned in rich woodland green, and red squirrels leaping from branch to branch, scolding one another as they scurried to and fro. He thought of little villages where happy children played, their garments dyed in bright, cheap shades of yellow and green and blue. He thought of the Hall of Fire: of orange flames dancing and the rich colours of fine Elven garments and the rainbow of wools woven into tapestries depicting the storied history of the Noldor. He thought of a maiden, as fair as the twilight itself, clad in soft grey raiment with gems in her shadowy hair, of quicksilver eyes that pierced his very soul, and a gentle, patient smile that pledged him her love and promised all the world...

How disappointed she would be if his labours ended here, cringing on the floor of some foul passage upon the marches of Mordor. Resolutely Aragorn struggled to his feet and climbed the five steps to a place where the passage broadened.

Unsettled by the change he groped around. Not only was the way wider here, but the walls were no longer squared. They curved, meeting the floor seamlessly, and they were coated with a thin, slimy layer that Aragorn hoped was no more than a sweat of condensation from the filthy air. Yet the walls, he noted with some unease, were still smooth; either carved with tools and ground to uniformity, or worn away by some unknown force over the long centuries. He was unsure which prospect should be the more alarming.

Now the passageway branched often; to the left, to the right. Without light Aragorn could not choose his way with any clarity of judgement, and so he did what he deemed simplest and kept a course as nearly straight as he could manage. Presently the incline of the floor altered, and he became aware that he was stumbling up a slope, at times standing upright and at times scrambling with his hands like a beast. Still the darkness clawed at his mind, but he fought it, drawing upon his deep reserves of will to find the memory of living things, colourful things, in a land of light far away.

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As he moved ever farther through the vile caves, and his struggle for self-awareness grew more and more desperate, Aragorn grew gradually aware that he was not alone in the darkness. There were living things here, hidden somewhere in the dark. He could hear them down the next passage, or somewhere behind the walls, or beneath the floor: the scrape and rustle of motion. At times he thought it was only the wild imaginings of a brain poisoned by the noxious fumes, but the next moment he would find himself certain that somewhere in this hive of tunnels something malicious was lurking, waiting for the moment when it might strike.

He wanted to draw his knife, but if he should chance to stumble and drop it he might never find it again. Instead he loosed the blade in its sheath so that it might be swiftly drawn, and fumbled in the pouch at his belt for one of the slender throwing-daggers that he had taken from the fallen orc. With cold steel in his overly-sensitive hand he felt less helpless. The irrationality of this thought concerned him only a little. He was far beyond the borders of rationality now.

An absurd urge to laugh seized him as he wondered what Gandalf would have made of his present plight. Wandering without aim high within the Ephel Dûath, armed with a blade less in length than his hand, most likely lost within this maze of corridors, and growing ever more convinced that there was something in the next passage that intended to slay him if it could – what a thoroughly unwise predicament he had created for himself! If Gollum was here, he would never find him. If Gollum had once been here, he would never find a trace of him. It would be a marvel to rival the great miracles of old if he found his own way out into the open air once more. Aragorn son of Arathorn, the great adventurer, the far-wanderer, the mighty huntsman, had followed his prey too far at last.

There it was again! A clicking noise in the darkness. Aragorn whirled around as though he could cast his keen gaze into the blackness behind. If there was anything there, he could not see it. He stood motionless, not even daring to breathe as he listened for something more that might give him a clue as to whence the sound had come or what had made it. It was a vaguely familiar noise, like and yet unlike something he had heard long ago and far away, but his dulled faculties were not equal to the task of placing it and he could hear nothing more that might help him.

He turned again and continued on his way, brushing past passage after branching passage. His fear had returned, and with it the wariness that long years of unrelenting vigilance had honed into the keenest of instincts. The muting power of the noxious dark had less grip over him now, and he was acutely aware of every sound, every movement of air.

Thus it was that he realized that the next gap in the wall he passed led not to another tunnel but into a large, open space. Hesitating only a moment, he took three steps backward and pressed his shoulder to the wall. Slowly he inched around the edge of the opening, careful lest he should expose his back to attack. As his left hand guided him forward he became aware that the walls in this place were coated with some vile secretion, at once sticky and slippery. The stink was stronger here than it had been at any other point in his blind journey through this pit of vileness.

Despite the danger he flung himself away from the wall and took several unsteady steps into the open expanse of the cavern, frantically quelling the urge to retch. Something brushed against his brow and he raised a frantic hand to brush it away, but when his fingers reached his forehead they found nothing.

Disoriented, he stumbled in the darkness. Loathe though he was to touch the slime once more he knew he had to reach the wall, or he would never find his way out of this hollow place. As he took a staggering step forward his boot struck something that creaked and rasped against the floor of the cave. Aragorn's empty left hand thrust outward and touched... something.

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For a moment he did not dare to move, nor to explore further what his fingers had found. The surface was coarse and bristled, as if covered in short, scratchy hairs. He waited without breath for the thing beneath his hand to move, to rise up, to smite him.

When it did not he began to shift his hand. Hairs indeed: a thick coat of rough hairs upon a hard, scaly base, and interspersed among them were great wiry protrusions like spines of steel. With mounting horror Aragorn reached with his other hand, thumb and forefinger holding the knife against his palm while the other fingers searched. It was a cylindrical thing, covered all over with these horrible hairs, as thick as the bole of a young ash. Searching along its length, which slanted upwards to his right at about fifty degrees, his hands came to a place where the hairs were fewer and the girth of the thing swelled to a great knobbed mass, gnarled and firm but hinged. A joint. A leg.

Aragorn recoiled. As he scrambled backward he tripped and fell, landing hard with a force that jarred his spine. He could not breathe, so complete was his horror. Unable to move, unable to think, he remained motionless upon the foul floor of the cavern, waiting for whatever creature he had disturbed to rise up and smite him. Waiting for death.

It did not come. The slow time passed, but there was no sound. Each excruciating second that slipped by brought further proof that he had not yet forfeited his life. At first Aragorn could not comprehend how he yet lived, but then he realized that it must mean that the beast, whatever it was, was dead or otherwise incapacitated. If dead, he might fly from this place before its kindred came seeking vengeance. If slumbering or wounded, he had to be sure it could not later rise up and follow him, smiting him down in some tight place in the maze of lightless tunnels. Yet he could not very well go groping about the body of an unseen and unknown enemy that might rise up at any time. To make a proper assessment he would have to hazard a light, assuming he could ignite one in this heavy atmosphere.

Remembering the failure of his candle far below at the door, Aragorn instead wrested his last torch from his back. His flint sparked ineffectually, but he persisted. With a crackling sound the pitch caught fire at last, and Aragorn swiftly raised the torch as it flamed up to blind him. For a minute he could see nothing, his eyes overwhelmed by the sudden brilliance. Then his vision returned and the glow of the torch was reduced to a pitiful aura of uncertain red light. The brand was too old to burn brightly, and the pervasive darkness seemed to dim it further as it smoked and sputtered. Yet it provided some illumination at least, and Aragorn climbed to his feet, stepping towards the looming form before him.

At the sight of the thing he had unwittingly touched, his courage all but forsook him. There, upon its side on the floor of the cavern, lay a hideous creature born of nightmares. The leg he had felt was one of eight massive, hairy limbs, each one tipped with a curling claw as long as his forearm. A great, bulbous body lay upon its side, the legs outstretched before it like the fingers of some grotesque hand. It was black, marred with livid blotches, and the belly between the great legs was pale. Upon the bloated head were great horns, and fangs marked with poison glinted in the tremulous torchlight. From where he stood Aragorn could not see the spinnerets, but he knew they were there, behind the cluster of legs.

He had seen monstrous spiders before, far away in the shadows of Mirkwood, but such a creature as this was beyond even his most tortured imaginings. Its size outstripped its smaller kindred by tenfold or more, and the body exuded such a reek that Aragorn now understood some part of the foulness of these caverns. Unmoving he stared, stricken with horror.

Yet surely it was dead, for neither his touch nor the light had roused it, nor did any living spider lie with its legs thus clustered beside it, like loosely bundled branches. He forced himself to look at the great faceted eyes, and saw naught but a milky yellowish film, like glass frosted in a furnace in which brimstone had burned. One eye was cracked, and within Aragorn saw only darkness.

Reason penetrated his horror. That was not right: even a dead spider had fluid in its eyes. He shuffled to his right, edging around the massive body for he was unwilling to draw any nearer. Then he saw it. The back of the bloated body was riven in twain, and within the vile shell was a cavern of black. It was not a spider at all, neither dead nor alive, but the skin of such a beast, shed as its owner grew. There was the cradle of foul spider-silk where the thing had lain whilst its fresh hide hardened. There were the scratchings of new claws upon the stone. There was the trail of the massive monster where it had left the cavern, abandoning its cast-off shell as it sought, ravening, for food to satiate its appetites after the long labour of discarding its old skin.

Aragorn's mind raced. A freshly-molted spider was a fragile creature, weakened from the effort of forsaking the old skeleton and all but defenceless until the new one grew hard. But this shell was dry, the edges of the rift already crumbling. He knew too little of spider-lore to say how long it had been since its owner had abandoned it, but he knew that if the beast was gone from its sanctuary it was strong enough to hunt. Strong enough to kill. And after such an ordeal it would be hungry.

He had no hope against a creature of that size. Neither his knife, nor his strength, nor his agility, nor all his wits would avail him against such a foe. Yet perhaps all was not lost. Where might and wisdom could not aid him there was still haste – and luck. He was coming from the wrong direction: the creature would not look for prey in the heart of her dank bower, but in the pass below. For he knew now where he was. In the land of Mordor this place was both feared and revered, and when last he had walked these lands he had heard dark rumours of its cruel mistress, the guardian of the path that led to the old watchtower erected by the men of Gondor in the years after the last great war. Somewhere ahead, the tunnels ended and he might find the open air – if he did not find the great beast first.

He turned and hastened back towards the path. At the threshold of the cavern he cast back one brief look into the darkness where the shed spider-skin lay mouldering. A cold shiver coursed through his body, but he steeled his resolve and refused to submit. He could afford no fear now, not in this place nor at this time. Dim though it was, his one hope for life hinged upon a clear head and a fleet foot.

He could not risk a light any longer. He cast away the torch and ran unsteadily into the darkness. He was around the next corner even before the flames were swallowed by the putrescence on the floor. Sightless and struggling against the insistent terror that threatened to devour him, Aragorn stumbled on – he hoped towards his goal. In some recess of his mind he had to acknowledge the wry understatement of whatever mapmaker of ancient Gondor had named the place he now sought to reach. What scribe had so idly named it thus, and had they fully understood what lurked here? Here, above the Pass of the Spider, in a place still more terrible.

Torech Ungol.