Beneath a Winter Moon

by Shawson M Hebert

  “Uh oh.”

  “What is it?” Delmar asked, and then saw what caused his friend to worry. The tunnel split. There was almost a perfect ‘Y’ shape in front of Thomas and Jack…the tunnels were roughly the same size but the one to their left seemed to slant upward at a sharper angle than the one to their front.

  “Cold air is coming from both,” Thomas said.

  “Shit, how can you tell?”

  “It’s easy up front. I can feel the same breeze pulling toward us.”

  “Should we take the one going up?”

  “Maybe…looks like the water is coming from there. It pretty much stops up ahead, so the flow comes down from that other tunnel.”

  “And up is good, right?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “We can’t flip a coin.”

  “Okay…then let’s go up.”

  They heard the howl again. Still distant, but the faint echo scared Thomas into believing the beast had entered the tunnel.

  “Shit—go!”

  They picked up the pace, ignoring the pain and before long they found themselves staring into a wall. There was a hole the size of a bowling ball spitting water into the tunnel. It was a dead end.

  “You can see where it used to go on,” Thomas said. “Looks like it caved in about a gazillion years ago.”

  “Fuck it, I’m turning—let’s get back to the other one.” Delmar was in no mood to discuss geology. He feared the werewolf more than Thomas because he knew that he had no self-control when near the animal. He cursed as he maneuvered himself around in the small tunnel. Thomas did the same.

  It was easier now that they moved on a downward slope, and soon they were back at the intersection.

  “Left,” Thomas said.

  Delmar almost burst out in laughter. “You think I don’t know which direction that bastard is coming from? Trust me—I know which way is the other way.”

  Thirty more minutes went by. The men tried to keep quiet but their knees were scraped and bruised, bring out an occasional groan or grunt. With the werewolf in pursuit once more, Thomas’s head reeled with questions…and possible outcomes to their vacation of horror. He wondered whether Delmar would change, turn, and devour him. He wondered how quickly the change into the werewolf could occur. He thought about an old werewolf movie he had seen when he was just a kid. It was dubbed in English…and looking back he now thought it might have been Spanish because it had the look of the old ‘Spaghetti Westerns.’

  A small boy (a shepherd) shot a werewolf in the head, and it seemed to kill the beast. But, the werewolf in that movie did not change back into a human after it was shot. So, it rose from the grave to terrorize the entire village, finally killed by being trapped in a burning barn by the villagers. Thomas wondered whether Alastair would change when he was finally killed…back into a man. It happened in the movies, leaving the audience sad that the poor human was dead and that it had not been his fault….after all, the man was cursed. That is not the case with Alastair, Thomas thought. No one will mourn that bastard when he is gone. Or would they? Thomas wondered if the man had ever dared to have a family of his own. A wife? Children? If so, were they monsters as well? Cursed, like their father? Infected?

  Silver bullets, stakes through the heart….hell…maybe vampires are real, too. The thought almost made him laugh. Almost. What had Delmar said? ‘The thing under your bed and in your closet is a monster after all? The night will never be the same again?’ Something sparked in the back of Thomas’s mind. He could not put a finger on it…he’d missed something…something important—and he knew it. What was it? What brought the feeling to the surface? Silver bullets. Silver….yes…silver! He stopped crawling and whispered for Delmar to hold up a moment. He dug in his left cargo pocket and pulled out the sheathed dagger. He had replaced his K-bar with the dagger when they worked on enlarging the tunnel entrance. He dared a moment with his flashlight on. The damned knife blade is pure silver.

  “It’s silver, Delmar. No wonder the bastard freaked over the knife. The blade is pure silver!” He smiled. He had a defense after all…maybe even an offense.

  “Great, let’s keep moving,” Delmar grumbled, but a moment later he slipped, his hand finding nothing in the blackness where there should have been tunnel floor. He muttered a curse under his breath. “I need the flashlight.”

  Thomas marveled at what he saw as he looked over the big man’s back and shoulders. The tunnel halted, opening up into a cavern five times the size of those they’d seen so far in these mountains. It was amazing. The cavern was oval-shaped and at least a hundred meters across to the opposite wall from where they sat at the end of their tunnel. Pools of crystal clear water lay all around the floor of the cavern, so still and pure that they looked like mirrors.

  “We’ve got to see if this is it or if there is another tunnel. By God’s grace there will be another—but if there is, will we be able to fit inside it? That will be the question.”

  “Why?” Delmar asked, incredulously.

  “Why, what?”

  “Why does their have to be another tunnel?”

  “Water made these. So, it had to flow both in, and out. Somewhere in here is another tunnel.” Thomas was not sure of that, but he wanted to sound positive.

  “We will have to jump down…looks like about eight feet.”

  “Let’s go. I will hand Jack to you.” It was not so easy to hand a seventy pound dog to a man standing at the bottom of an eight foot drop, but Thomas managed, and soon all three were standing safely in the cavern. Thomas and Delmar drank their only canteen of water and refilled from the crystal clear pools.

  They heard another howl. Closer.

  “We’ve got to go or we’ve got to set up a defense,” Delmar groaned. “We don’t have much time. I can feel him again.”

  “Maybe he will go the wrong way, like we did,” Thomas offered.

  “Maybe he just did, and that’s why he’s howling…because he’s pissed.”

  Thomas scrambled along the walls, shining his flashlight. On the opposite end of the tunnel, where he and Delmar met from opposite directions, they found what they were looking for. Only they found two tunnels again, and not just one.

  “Damn,” Thomas said as they stared at the tunnels. One was about six feet off the ground, up on the cavern wall, and the other was at ground level. “Which do we choose?”

  “We don’t have time to make the wrong choice,” Delmar said. “We can’t afford to waste a single minute.”

  “You go into the upper tunnel and I will check out the lower. Thirty seconds. We turn around and make the decision.”

  Delmar shook his head, but felt the idea was sound, so he agreed. “At least these are big enough for us to stand in.”

  The tunnels were three times the size of the one they had been in. Even Delmar could stand up without stooping. Thomas and Jack disappeared in their ground tunnel after boosting Delmar up into the higher one.

  Thomas ran through the tunnel, splashing through trickling water. He knew it must be sloping up, as the water entered the cavern from this tunnel, but he could not feel an incline. He slowly counted to thirty. Nothing changed. He turned around, commanded Jack to lead on, and ran back for the cavern.

  Delmar was scrambling down from the tunnel as Thomas made it back into the cavern.

  “It slopes up,” Delmar said, panting. “No change…keeps going.”

  “Damn,” Thomas cursed, “Mine too.”

  It was Delmar who broke the short silence. “Look, it’s a coin toss…but think about that bastard who is coming for us. He’s a monster, now…not a free-thinking person. He’ll dive into the first tunnel he finds if our scent is inside.”

  Thomas nodded. “He’ll head into the one here at ground level.”

  “Right—so we go in the high one. Besides, we came here in one that was high off the ground…maybe this used to join it…like you said…a gazillion years ago.”

  “You’ve sold the idea, Hero
. Jack and I lead.”

  Delmar nodded.

  By the time they heard the next howl, which thankfully did not seem any closer than the previous one, they were up inside the tunnel and moving. Thomas led into the pure darkness of the tunnel. They could not afford to shine the flashlights any longer. Though they had already traveled in the pitch-black, Thomas was stunned at first and a little out of sorts when they turned their lights off. They had traveled so slow in the other, smaller tunnel that the roominess of this one took getting used to. Soon, though, Thomas was leading almost at a run. He kept one arm out in front and the other along the wall’s edge. He pushed back the fear of stepping off into a bottomless hole, dragging poor Jack along with him. Even so, he decided to travel as close to the tunnel wall as he could.

  Delmar had tied a small piece of parachute cord to Thomas’s belt loop and held it in his hand as he followed. Like Thomas, he’d never been in or known such utter darkness. The next howl told them that their pursuer had made it into the cavern and had taken the wrong tunnel. Their were many howls now, and all were of pure fury.

  The beast huffed for their scent. He did not understand why they were not there when their scent stopped. Only when he had turned and come back from the large tunnel had he come to some semblance of understanding. There was more than one human, but he’d followed the scent of just one and the small animal that was with him. It wasn’t a wolf, but the beast knew it was something like him. A predator. Small and puny, but like him in many ways.

  The beast was uneasy with the complete darkness. He was a hunter of the night and usually his eyes gathered the particles of light from all around, using them to ‘see.’ But not now. For the first time, he was almost blind—almost. His masterful ability to smell out prey, and his other innate senses gave him an advantage no matter how dark—and so he still moved with confidence, rarely stumbling or running into anything. He simply knew the obstacles were there in time to stop or change directions.

  But the scent had stopped abruptly and there were no more signs of the humans or their little pet. He was furious. He found their scent all over the cavern, but he could not find them. His mind could not comprehend the possibility that the humans might have tricked him somehow—he simply did not have the ability to understand all the possibilities. What he did have was the urgent need to hunt them down—an ever-growing need to kill. He was without doubt, the most horrific killer man had ever known—but his instincts were not always enough.

  He howled in frustration, now. The beast had circled every inch of the cavern. He had stumbled, splashed through pools of water, slammed into stalactites and stalagmites…and he could not find them. He stood all the way up, now, raising his head high, and howled in fury—then whimpered in disappointment after the howl was complete.

  There was something—something when he held his head high. He stood again, as high as he could, held his face skyward and sniffed deeply. A cool breeze touched his face. There is was. He had found the scent again. The werewolf sniffed, raised his arms out as if sleepwalking, and slowly followed the breeze and the scent. His hands hit the wall, hard, and the beast growled. He kept his face pointed skyward, and reached up, feeling along the wall—and found the ledge. The beast didn’t know how to smile, but something akin to that crossed his face as he sighed and bared his teeth. In an instant, he was in the tunnel, huffing for their scent. It was everywhere—and it was strong.

  Delmar froze and yanked on the string hooked to Thomas’s belt.

  “What’s wrong,” Thomas whispered after coming to halt.

  “I feel him again.”

  “Like at the fire?”

  “No. Not a need to be with him—I just feel his presence.”

  They had heard the howls of anger and frustration followed by eerie silence and Thomas’s gut, supported by Delmar’s ‘feeling’ was all that was necessary. “We’ve got to move.”

  “Run!”

  The two men ran, Thomas leading in the pitch black with Jack at his side. Thomas closed his eyes. It helped. He could see nothing at all in the pitch black, and closing his eyes allowed his senses to relax and accept his surroundings. He was no longer running in the dark—he was simply running by way of his senses. Their feet splashed through the trickling water on the floor of the tunnel as they ran. They breathed in the chilled breeze and hoped the tunnel would lead them to a way out. The two friends did their best—and refused to give in to fear and despair. Ten minutes past, twenty.

  Thomas slowed to a walk. “The ground is changing,” he whispered to Delmar as he gasped for breath. The big man almost fell in an effort stop himself from plowing into his friend.

  “Shit—give me some notice next time,” he panted.

  “The ground is weird,” Thomas said. “There’s no water and it’s getting rough. There are rocks—like loose gravel.”

  “I noticed it too…the moment we stopped puddle-splashing.”

  “I think the tunnel is changing. We have to go slow.”

  “Use the flashlight?’

  “No.”

  Delmar felt around until he found Thomas’s shoulder. “Alastair—the monster knows we are here. He is on our trail….”

  “And a bright light would just make him move all the faster.”

  “I doubt he could see it the way the tunnel has curved and turned.”

  “Maybe not, but I am not taking that chance until we have no other choice. We just have to walk for now.”

  “Okay.”

  Thomas started forward again, moving fast but walking. His instincts had served him well, as the tunnel slowly narrowed in height and width. Soon Delmar was stooping over, followed shortly by Thomas, who groaned as he moved cautiously forward, bent at the waist.

  They were crawling again. The raw flesh of their knees had begun numb, and now they burned with a new intensity as the gravel pushed into the scrapes and cuts. Thomas gave in to the pain, stopping and removing his pack so that he could find the rest of the ace bandages from the first aid kit. Six rolls. They used them all, wrapping the elastic cloth over their wounds and around their knees. Thomas was the first to notice the change.

  “It’s colder.”

  Their bodies had slowly adjusted from their running, and now they were stopped for the first time in hours…and the colder air became more evident.

  “Colder and stronger. Feel that current?”

  Thomas nodded, then realized his friend could not see him. “Yes…I think we’re getting close to an opening.” They whispered, fearing that the werewolf had to be close by now. As if in answer to their fears, a low, distant howl echoed through the tunnel. Jack growled. The Husky had behaved perfectly since the attacks at the cabin, never disobeying—never trying to free himself from his harness or the leash that attached him to Thomas. Jack’s master felt a sting of regret as he chastised the dog for the growl.

  “He is not as close as I thought he would be,” Delmar said.

  ‘Yeah…I’m surprised.”

  “I guess he has as much trouble as we do when it comes to these damned tunnels.”

  “Let’s keep moving. It’s all we can do now.”

  Half an hour passed—and the tunnel slowly closed in on the two men, especially Delmar. Soon, the big man was down on his stomach. “I can’t take much more of this,” Delmar said. “I’ll be low crawling in a minute—and what if it gets even smaller?”

  It did. Thomas ignored his friend’s rhetorical question but found himself completely wedged now, with just enough room to move. Jack whimpered as he struggled behind Thomas.

  “We have to turn around and make a stand,” Delmar pleaded. “We did our best—but it’s over now. This is where we have to turn and fight.”

  “Like you fought at the cabin? Like you fought when it was burning down and the werewolf was only a few meters away? Like that?” Thomas had not meant to take out his frustrations on Delmar, but he didn’t exactly regret the words. Delmar had to realize that there was no way of knowing whether the were
wolf would bring with it the same hypnotic control over his friend—or whether he would be able to resist and fight back.

  Delmar didn’t reply.

  “We don’t stop until we can’t move. You cannot feel the air flow the way I do up front. We have to be close to an exit point.”

  “Won’t do us any good if we can’t fit through it,” Delmar grumbled.

  “Then that is where we turn back, set up as best we can, and fight the bastard.”

  They kept moving forward. Soon, Thomas felt the tunnel’s upper surface touching his shoulders, and he knew that it must have been that way for Delmar for several minutes. His friend had shoulder’s twice his size. He was about to give up when his right hand hit loose gravel and clay when he tried to move forward. At first he believed this was really it. They had failed…but his hand pushed through the clay, which was wet and soft, and he felt air flowing freely. He clawed frantically now, using both hands to push and pull huge chunks of clay and dirt away. He whooped softly when he was able to hang his head and shoulder’s through the opening. He backed up and pulled his flashlight free from his cargo pocket. Delmar was asking him questions but Thomas didn’t answer. Not yet.

  He crammed his shoulders through the makeshift entrance and turned on the light. He was relieved to see another cavern. This one was small, perhaps fifty feet across and ranging from around eight feet to fifteen feet in height. He shined the light around and then he saw it. A small pack of snow on the floor near what looked like an opening. Boulders, roots, and dirt were piled waist high, but in several places snow had gathered.

  “We’ve done it.” He whispered loud enough for Delmar to hear. “We have made it.” He turned the light off and let his head hand down and relax on the soft, wet clay which he had pushed through while tearing at the hole. He breathed heavily. “We are going to get out of here.”