by Peter Nealen
We were getting closer to the mysterious ridge, which was starting to become occasionally visible through the trees ahead, but it also meant that the terrain was getting steeper and more difficult as we went. Our finger was starting to turn into a series of rocky stair-steps, punctuated by gnarled trees clinging to the crest with knobby, twisted roots. We often had to painstakingly climb near-vertical boulder faces and scramble on all fours up short fields of scree.
It was on the way up one of those near-vertical rock scrambles that our unseen enemy tried something new. Apparently, it had decided that falling branches and dead trees just weren’t doing the trick.
With a deep rumble that I felt through the ground as much as heard, a boulder came bounding down the slope, careening off of tree trunks with showers of bark and splinters as it came. The thing looked like it was the size of a Volkswagen.
I almost panicked. Not only were we essentially rock climbing at that point, but the crest of the finger had narrowed to almost a knife edge. There was nowhere to go. I flattened myself against the rock face and ducked my head, waiting to get smashed to paste.
The boulder hit the rock above me with a crunch and sailed overhead, passing so close that I could feel the wind of it as it went, even as I was showered with grit from its impact. How it missed both of us, I’ll never know. Even as we clung to the rock and panted with the reaction, it kept bouncing and crashing down the slope until it was diverted by another tree to fall with more crashing and booming into the draw below.
“I don’t know about you,” Dan said, a little breathlessly, “but I’m starting to get tired of this game.” He had ducked downhill a few feet and flattened himself against the rocky slope.
“You and me both,” I replied with a grunt, as I hoisted myself the rest of the way up, hoping that I wasn’t going to climb up over the rock just to catch a second boulder in the face. I got on top of the rock and pulled myself the rest of the way up, rolling onto my side so that I could quickly unsling my Winchester and search for our adversary. As I rather expected by that point, there was no sign of it.
I reached down to help Dan up over the last rocky lip, and then we struggled to our feet. Looking up through the increasingly stunted, thinning trees, I could see that we were nearly to the ridge itself. It loomed above us, rocky and barren, covered with scree. There didn’t seem to be anyplace up there to hide, at least from my limited view, but it was still our best bet, given what Steve had told us, not to mention all the effort that the mysterious, malevolent creature was going to in order to keep us away.
It had gone quiet and still again. There was no movement but the increasingly slight rustle and sway of the trees in the wind, no sound but the faint whisper of that same breeze. I fully expected the thing to resume muttering and running circles around us, not to mention throwing rocks, as soon as we recommenced climbing. If it had been a normal animal or human predator, I might wonder how it was dashing around on that terrain with such alacrity, but since it was pretty obviously something from the Otherworld, I didn’t question it. Weird and unexplainable kind of went with the territory.
Strange, how that mental adjustment had happened. A year before, I’d been poking around in places angels might fear to tread, knowing that there was something weird going on in the world, but not what. I still would have found the whole concept of the Otherworld more than a little disturbing, and it was. But after a year of fighting various monsters and sorcerous constructs, not to mention encountering an actual, no-kidding Fallen Angel, I could contemplate these things without getting too much of a case of the screaming willies.
After all, keeping a level head and remembering that God is on our side is the only thing that keeps most of us in the Order semi-sane and gives us a fighting chance against the awful things that lurk in the dark places of the world. It’s still no guarantee, but it helps.
I waited for Dan to catch his breath before moving on. Dan wasn’t an old man; he only had maybe a decade on me, but he had been living a hard life in the course of his career with the Order. The life of a Witch Hunter tended to take as much of a toll on a man as an infantry life did, and I knew that he was feeling every one of those ten years.
Once I saw that Dan was ready to push on, I stepped off again. The finger had leveled out a little, widening as it blended into the ridge ahead. The trees were growing in short, wind-swept clumps now, with short, dry grass and rocks covering the ground around them. The slope leading up to the crest of the ridge lay maybe a hundred yards ahead now, not quite sheer but still pretty steep.
I was expecting renewed attention from our shadowy nuisance, but as I moved forward, nothing happened. No flying rocks came at our heads, no noises whispered and pattered in our ears. Everything was still, as if we were completely alone up on the mountain. I was suspicious, but I couldn’t even feel the vague, hair-raising sensation of being watched, a feeling that I had become intimately familiar with over the last year.
I frowned as I looked back at Dan. He had a similarly pensive look on his face; he’d noticed the same thing. After trying so hard to kill us or force us to turn back, why had this thing suddenly stopped harassing us?
I took another step. Still no response. Another. I was in the last clump of low, twisted pines now.
When I stepped out onto the open, rocky slope, all of a sudden nothing looked familiar.
The ridge should have risen ahead of us, but instead I was looking at a towering, rocky butte that didn’t belong there. Twisted, scraggly pines and junipers clung to the rock in places, but for the most part it was a barren chunk of basalt, bereft of life.
Looking back, I could see the trees I had just stepped out of, but they blocked any view of the slope we’d climbed. I hadn’t thought the finger had been that steep.
It had happened so abruptly that I half expected Dan to have vanished, but he was standing there just behind me, stock still, mid-stride, looking around with just his eyes. The look on his face was not comforting.
“Oh, this ain’t good,” he said.
“I’ll say,” I replied. “What just happened?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Dan said. “I’ve heard of something like this, but I’ve never seen it, and the old timer who told me about it sure didn’t know what had happened. He said he was poking around the No Man’s Mesa country in Utah a few years back. He was way out in the backcountry, away from the trails and the hikers. He said he was doing fine one minute; knew exactly where he was and where he was going. He took a step, and all of a sudden nothing looked right and he was completely lost.”
I had turned back to scan the butte that loomed above us. We had come out on a shoulder of the bigger mountain, rather than onto the ridgeline that we had expected. A few dozen yards in front of us was a canyon, a great crack in the side of the butte that looked like it went deep into the rock, at least a few hundred yards. It was impossible to say for sure, because it was dark as pitch inside.
“What did the old guy do?” I asked.
“He froze where he was and didn’t move until the country looked normal again,” Dan replied. “Funny thing was, he said he had thought that it only took a few minutes, but when he checked his watch, he’d been standing there for three hours.”
Somehow that bothered me even more than suddenly stepping through the trees into country that shouldn’t have been there. “So are we in another dimension, or what?” I asked. I had my Winchester half raised to point generally toward the crack in the side of the butte. Something about that canyon gave me the willies.
“No idea,” Dan replied. “I know that some creatures of the Otherworld are bound to particular places. Some people think that that influence in a place can twist it, thin the fabric of reality. Maybe that’s what’s going on. Maybe it’s an illusion. I don’t know.”
“So what do you want to do?” I asked. “I don’t know if we walked through a gateway or not, but if we did, I’m not all that keen on wandering around and maybe not finding it again.”
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“What do I want to do?” Dan replied. “I want to turn around and head right back down this mountain as fast as my old legs can carry me. But that’s not really an option, not if that little girl’s up here.”
He sighed. I took a deep breath. He was right. We had to keep moving on. Even if it was all for naught, and we never found our way back, we couldn’t just save our own skins and forget about our chance of saving that little girl. I don’t think either of us had any more doubts that the thing that had been trying to kill us since we’d gotten halfway up the mountain was the same thing that had taken the girl. It was too coincidental.
This was the hardest part of the job. Being a Witch Hunter doesn’t just mean getting used to the sleepless nights, the poverty, or even the weirdness. It means facing horror that will impress itself on your memory for the rest of your life. It means facing the very real possibility of becoming utterly lost in the darkness beyond the world, and willingly moving forward.
So we stepped uphill, toward the ominous crack in the rock, not knowing what we were getting into, but knowing that we had to do it, and that if God willed it, He would bring us through.
Cold air was running out of that sheer-walled canyon, along with a barren, dusty smell that still carried a faint hint of something else, something vaguely rotten. As if that wasn’t warning enough, there were pictograms scrawled on the rocks, crawling up the sides of the butte, flanking the canyon. They didn’t look like any local Indian pictograms I’d ever seen; they were jagged and twisted, the faces that were worked into them obviously demonic, sprouting horns and fangs, stylized as they were. If they were put there to warn interlopers away, they were well-designed. I suspected there was something darker to them, something more actively evil. They made my eyes itch. Several of the faces actually seemed to be watching us with malevolent attention, though when I looked directly at them, they were just paint on rock.
Lifting my Winchester to my shoulder, I stepped past the leering, snarling faces and into the cold darkness of the canyon.
As soon as I passed the entrance to the great crack in the rock I was enveloped in shadow. It wasn’t like simply stepping into the shade, though. There was something almost tangible about the darkness in that canyon. It was like a suffocating blanket, wrapping us up and trying to smother us in blackness. If I hadn’t looked up and seen the sky above us, still blue and scattered with clouds, I might have thought I’d been struck blind.
For a long moment, I just stood still, trying to let my eyes adjust to the dark. Dan didn’t push; I could only assume he was doing the same.
Slowly, too slowly, the rocky walls began to resolve themselves as ever so slightly lighter gray shapes to either side, with pitch darkness ahead. The canyon might widen further on, but it was hard to say.
With a grumble, Dan started fumbling in his pockets. I suddenly un-froze my brain long enough to realize what he was doing, and, mentally berating myself for a mental midget, I dug in my own jacket pocket for my flashlight.
Dan got his lit first, though I was pretty close behind. Unfortunately, they didn’t actually do very much.
Two wan, yellow circles of light played against the rocks. Both of us had fairly new, high-powered lights, but right at that moment they looked like they were putting out as much light as the old plastic flashlights I’d grown up with, with the D-cells going bad.
Still, it was better than no light at all. With my light clamped between my hand and the forearm of my rifle, I started forward.
The canyon narrowed sharply over the next few paces, until I was having to turn sideways to get between the rock walls. It meant I had to take my rifle muzzle off line, and I wasn’t happy about that, but there simply was no way to go through that tiny crack while keeping the gun up and ready to engage. So I shimmied through as fast as I could, trying to get to more open ground as quickly as possible, expecting something to try to rip my head off at any moment as I went.
It didn’t come after me, though. It came after Dan.
I didn’t see it. I only heard a scrape, like claws on rock, and then Dan had whirled and opened fire, the heavy booms of that big .50 of his painfully loud in the confined space of the rock walls. I was facing the wrong way, and twisted my head too fast, knocking the back of my skull against the rock. I grunted a little as pain exploded in my head, but by the time I uncrossed my eyes, whatever it was had disappeared.
“Did you get it?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” Dan replied. “I’m pretty sure I hit it, but it didn’t seem to slow it down any.” He was still looking back the way we’d come. “It’s not fast, but I could have sworn it popped right up out of the ground.”
Considering that the ground where we were standing was pretty much solid rock, that didn’t make me feel any better.
I hurried to get the rest of the way through the crack. I felt even more vulnerable after Dan’s little close encounter, and I wanted enough room around me to point my rifle, at the very least. I was also remembering the rocks that this thing had tossed at us, and was imagining that crack filling up with rubble heaved down from above.
A few more agonizing, shuffling steps and I was free, snapping my rifle up to my shoulder and shining my light around, looking for a target. But all that the weak circle of light showed me was more barren rocks. There might have been more of the disturbing rock paintings scrawled on them, but the light was too bad to tell for sure.
What slowly started to dawn on me, as I scanned the dimness ahead of me while Dan worked his way through the narrow slot in the rock, was that I wasn’t looking at a single canyon. The deeper this crack went back in the rock, the more it split and spiderwebbed out, forming a maze of passages going deep into the rock of the butte.
It was a nightmare. There could be a dozen box canyons back in there, or more. We would have to search every one for the girl, and with that thing hunting us as much as we were hunting it the entire time.
I waited for Dan, the dread building the entire time, as I watched the passages ahead, swinging light and rifle from one to the next, waiting for the next attack. It was bound to come, sooner or later. It was only a matter of when.
Only after Dan stepped up beside me did I start to move, angling toward the rightmost black crack in the walls. We were going to have to search all of them anyway, I thought, so we may as well be systematic about it. Dan must have clued in on my thought process, because he didn’t say anything. He just followed, shining his own wan light around the other canyons, covering my back.
We had only gone a few paces into the next passage when I heard something like a whisper of movement. I couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from, but I looked around, then up, just in time to see a pair of luminous green eyes come falling toward my head from a ledge six feet above.
I jumped out of the way, or tried to. My shoulder caught a jutting stone, a numbing shock running down my arm with the impact, which spun me halfway around at the same time a loose rock turned under my boot. My foot went out from under me and I fell hard, even as the thing landed soundlessly between us.
I caught a glimpse of it, through the haze of pain, in the weak light of Dan’s flashlight.
It was man-shaped, at least from the neck down. While I couldn’t see much aside from the silhouette, it looked like it might have been wearing some kind of tunic or shirt. But where it got really weird was above its shoulders.
The horns were the first thing I noticed. They looked like buffalo horns, only bigger, or maybe they just looked that way because its head wasn’t the size of a buffalo’s. The snout beneath its bulging, green, glowing eyes was too long and full of too many teeth.
I didn’t dare take a shot at it; it was between me and Dan, and I would have risked hitting Dan. He was better placed, since I had fallen, and pumped two more big .50 caliber bullets into it.
They didn’t even seem to faze it. It jerked back at the impacts, but there was no blood, and no sign that it was even really hurt. It hit Dan with a close
d fist and knocked him back into the rock. He hit hard, and crumpled with a grunt of pain.
That actually gave me my opening, and I was able to roll onto my back and bring my big Winchester to bear. There wasn’t much light to see the gold bead on the front sight since Dan’s flashlight had fallen, but I had gotten good enough with the big lever gun to be able to just point shoot by then, especially at that range.
I only got one shot off. The .45-70 boomed and flame stabbed, and the thing’s head jerked back as the 400 grain bullet smacked it in the skull from about five feet away.
It just turned and leered at me for a split second before vanishing into the dark.
Dan was levering himself painfully to his feet. “Ow,” he said. “That thing packs a wallop.”
“What are we going to do now?” I asked, my voice admittedly a little strained as I tried to keep my rifle up and ready while I got my feet under me. I hurt bad. I’d badly bruised my shoulder and side, and judging by the pain in my side when I breathed in, I might have even cracked a rib. Falling on solid rock hurts. “Shooting it doesn’t seem to do anything.”
“I don’t know,” he replied heavily. “We’ll think of something. At the very least, we might be able to get the girl out.”
“If we can find her in here, and if we can get out without getting killed,” I pointed out. “The usual rules don’t seem to apply very well up here.”
“There’s one rule that’s still going to apply,” Dan said grimly, touching the silver cross hanging around his neck. “Nothing natural stands up to bullets like that. And if it ain’t natural, it definitely falls into the category of critter that doesn’t like the sight of holy things very much.”
“Can’t stab a monster with a little cross like this,” I said.
“You’re thinking too narrowly, Jed,” Dan told me, though apparently he didn’t feel like elaborating at that point. “Let’s go.”