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"Slow down, guys!"
"Come on, second brother."
"Either hurry up or take a shower, pig, I don't care which."
***
"I had to drag the mule along, alright?" Bajie sulked as he wrung out his rain-soaked sleeves, his voice echoing slightly in the cave they had taken shelter in. "You guys had nothing dragging back at you, biting and digging its hooves into the path. I don't know why a drizzle makes the blasted creature nuts."
"He can sense if the water is from the West." Wukong shrugged. "He's homesick, maybe."
"Homesick…" the Pig's mutters carried as he trudged into the depths of the cave, in search of a good place for sleeping. They would not be leaving for the night, judging by how it poured outside.
***
Wukong was tending a camp fire when the scream sounded. A drawn out, high pitch squeal peaked and subsided, swirling to the mouth of the cave from the darkness.
"Was that -" said Sand, noticeably unnerved. The sound had been the pig's voice, feral and desperate.
The monkey stood, eyes narrowed and aglow in the dim light, staring into the cave but making no move.
"Wukong." said the master.
Wukong merely flicked his tail. He remained frozen with a tension that Sand realized in retrospect may have been fear.
At the time, Sand had assumed the elder brother sensed danger for the master, and so rushed into the cave.
He had just rounded a bend; as the last silver of twilight from outside was lost from sight, it happened. The pain fell on him like a thousand tons of murky river water, drowning him, squeezing and pummelling him until he forgot who and what and where he was, until he was nothing but monstrous desperation and… and the child was screaming and gurgling, its bright foetal blood spilling like the juice of a torn, ripe, grape…
The roaring swelled and drowned out its screams and dragged it to the murky depths…
***
Not a few moments after Sand ran after Bajie when his roar boomed from the darkness, one long, unbroken explosion of agony.
"Wukong!" Tang shouted
Wukong stared, eyes wide.
Tang dragged a stick from the fire and ran past the monkey, staggering into the cave towards the screams of his two disciples.
When he rounded the last stalagmite, a maniac scene met his eyes, flickering grotesquely in the light of his torch. Sand stood and bellowed, his eyes bulging, one hand over an ear and the other stretched upwards at the roof of the cave; a few paces further in, the pig kneeled and trembled on the floor, his fingers twisting and tearing at his own ear-flaps. His choked squeals and Sand's wild shouting intermingled and echoed in a horrible duet.
And, there was something else... somewhere, but not there - far away perhaps - a faint, high-pitched ringing that faded in and out...
A thump, barely audible in the chaos, sounded behind Tang. He turned to see Wukong, only a few steps behind him, unmoving, sprawled on the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
Tang did not hesitate a moment longer; he ran towards the pig, half guiding, half dragging him, gibbering, towards the mouth of the cave.
***
Six hours later, the rain had stopped, and Tang's disciples still slept. Wukong laid next to where Tang sat. The other two were slumped where they had dropped the moment Tang helped them clear of the effects of the inner cave, too heavy for the monk to move.
He murmured prayers as he watched dawn slowly break.
***
It was another hour later before Bajie and Sand began to stir, groaning and rubbing their temples. Tang tended to them, then returned to his eldest disciple.
He was gone.
Tang stared wildly around the spacious cave, then briefly ran out of it, peering around the lightening meadow outside, before certainty struck him and he dashed back into the cave, and kept on running.
In the gloom, well inside the range of the strange effects of the cave, Wukong sat, stiffly, cross-legged, not moving a hair on his tail.
As Tang approached his still form with dread, Wukong suddenly sighed, his whole frame relaxing, his head tilting back and releasing a cloud of breath that caught the dim light.
"Wukong?" Tang whispered, staring in awe at the back of the monkey's head. "What do you hear?"
When Wukong turned, his yellow eyes were glassy.
"Nothing." he replied, "Not anymore."
Then his eyes rolled up and he slumped.
***
A few moments later, all three monks were crowded around the monkey as he laid again at the mouth of the cave, perfectly still, face utterly expressionless. As the minutes passed Tang found himself recalling the scriptures he recited during times of self-doubt.
Then the monkey's eyelids flickered.
"I had a nightmare," he muttered. Tang smiled faintly as he handed him a bowl of rain water.
Outside, the horse frolicked in the early morning dew, the only one unaware of the occurrences of the night.
***
When they set off after a brief breakfast, all was back to normal, if a little subdued.
Tang and Wukong were the only ones to glance back at the cave as they walked away - the other two kept their gaze a little too resolutely on the road ahead.
The cave remained as they had seen it the night before, unmarked, nameless, a plain black stone crevice in a mess of green moss and foliage. It became hidden to the eyes as one draws away, until it was visible at first glance only to the superior vision of the monkey, who had spotted it first last night, as always.
Tang did not question his disciples any further about their ordeal: all three had the air of taking whatever they had seen or heard to their graves. He had never been one to force others, and found himself content with their acknowledgement of their well-being.