A Hole in the World Read Online Free PDF

surrounding walls and follow the same path as her. 
    The second cave is how she remembers it: five tunnels leading out like spokes from a wheel. There are doorways, each at least twenty feet high, with flaming torches burning between each and every one.
    She steps in a little and shrugs off her coat. It’s warm inside, unlike outside, so she drops it in the doorway from which she came as a marker. She knows better than to risk getting lost in catacombs and vaguely wishes she had thought to pick up a ball of wool or some chalk.
    She steps carefully towards the opposite tunnel and quietly enters the large doorway, which leads into a more man-made corridor.
    The corridor in question is dark, lit only by flaming torches on the walls, one of which Bianca pulls from its holder as she walks, observing her surroundings with mounting caution.
    The ceiling is twenty feet above her and made of the same stone as the walls. The walkway is loose beneath her feet, and crumbles beneath her with every step. Before she’s even reached the end of the passageway she’s decided she’s no longer in her world.
    She follows the winding passageway for a few long minutes, not worried about getting lost due to there being no options except to keep walking straight ahead or turn and go back. Somehow, she feels the latter is no longer an option.
    She rounds the final corner and is assaulted by a blast of heat and light. For a moment, she flinches backwards, covering her eyes and retreating a few paces back into the tunnel behind her. Once her eyes have adjusted to the change, she steps back out and looks, for the first time, at what she can only describe as Hell.
    The inside of the chamber she’s in is made of dark stone. There are fires in small pits scattered around the room and the floor is cracked and broken in many places, a river of lava two foot wide flowing through the room. The remaining floor makes up islands and on each island is a cage.
    The first few cages she sees have skeletons and she inches backwards, slightly, starting to realise how much danger she’s really in. The second couple contain creatures she couldn’t name if you paid her (one with long, pointy ears and maroon skin, the other with a large head and no discernable body). Some of the cages are too far away for her to see without binoculars, but the last one she looks at is the nearest.
    Six metres away, the cage is sitting on a large island in the lava. It’s approximately four feet in each direction, made of iron and contains, she realises with horror, a young girl around her age, chained to the cage.
    ‘Oh, my god!’
    She doesn’t stop to think, instead drops her torch and makes off at a run as soon as she sees her, plucking a bobby pin from her hair as she goes. She leaps across the river of lava, realising what she did only after she lands, and drops to her knees in front of the padlocked door of the cage.
    ‘Are you okay?!’ she exclaims, already inserting the pin into the lock. Oh, the things you learn from junior arsonists and their jailbird-in-training friends!
    The girl, who is probably only a year or so older than Bianca, turns to look at her as soon as she starts picking the lock and, for the first time, as their eyes meet, Bianca takes in her appearance. The girl is blonde, her hair wavy and flowing freely down her back, seeming to glow slightly in the light from the fire and very, very obviously completely natural in colour. She’s dressed in a horrifically poufy pink ball gown, with overly puffed sleeves and a disgusting flower pattern lacing the square-shaped neck, sleeves and waist. It’s the kind of thing that Bianca would have to be dead to wear, and even then you’d have to catch her rotting corpse on the run, first.
    But even as these thoughts float through her head, the thing that causes Bianca to pause is the three-foot-high, pink conical hat perched precariously upon the blonde girl’s head.
    ‘Who are you?’ the girl asks, staring down