by Peter Nealen
I limped over to help as best I could, but Dan got her out and held her close as she sobbed hysterically into his shoulder.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe now. We’ve got you. We’ll get you home.”
I looked around. “We’ve got to get out of here first,” I said quietly. “Personally, I was hoping that this place might get a little lighter and less confusing once that thing bit it.” We were still surrounded by darkness, and I still distrusted my sense of direction a little. It felt like I was always facing the wrong way, whatever I was trying to look at.
“We’ll be all right,” Dan said. “We found our way in here, we can find our way out.”
In spite of Dan’s assurances, we still had a hell of a time getting out of that labyrinth. We must have gone down half a dozen blind passages before we finally found the narrow crack we’d come in through, and even once we found it, I wasn’t sure that it was the right one. The only way to be sure, however, was to go through it, so I did, as painful as it was to hold my stomach in so I could fit through some of the really narrow parts. Only when I got to the other side and found myself facing the open air was I somewhat reassured, though I still wasn’t sure where we were. There were trees, but somehow it still didn’t look right. It certainly didn’t look like the mountain we’d climbed to get there in the first place.
Dan frowned when he came through the crack behind me with the little girl just ahead of him. He didn’t say anything, though, and neither did I. Neither one of us wanted to panic the kid. She’d just managed to calm down enough to stop crying hysterically.
Whatever was going on, as soon as I stepped into the trees, all of a sudden everything made sense again. When I looked back, the ridgeline we’d been trying to reach was there, stark against the sky.
The unnerving part was that the sun was in the wrong place. It had been mid-afternoon when we’d gone in there. Judging by where it stood in the sky, it was now mid-morning.
I could have sworn we hadn’t spent more than a couple of hours in that canyon.
Still, there weren’t any weird, pattering footsteps running around us, no rocks or falling trees, and no sense of watchful malice surrounding us anymore. We had a long hike down the mountain ahead of us, but we’d made it.
I crouched down in front of the little girl when she and Dan came through the trees. “You’re going to be fine, Amanda,” I told her. “We’re going to get you home.”
It was a much shorter trip down the mountain than it had been on the way up, even in spite of our injuries. My side felt like fire with every step, but the fact that it appeared that we weren’t being hunted anymore lent some further speed to our descent. We didn’t have to be quite as wary as we had been on the climb toward that thing’s den and all its attendant weirdness.
“You know,” I said, after a while, “I’m starting to wonder what kind of reception we’re going to get back down there. After all, I don’t know how long we were up there, but it’s definitely been a day or more since anybody saw us.”
Dan chuckled dryly. “I imagine that they’ve started looking for us, too. The only question is whether they’re looking for us to rescue us or arrest us.”
“Probably depends on how pissed off Leahy is about it,” I said. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I stepped off a root and jarred myself, prompting a wince of pain. I had to stop for a second.
I thought I heard something, even as I tried to bite back the searing agony of my cracked rib. I straightened carefully, holding up a hand for quiet, and listened. Dan froze. Amanda hadn’t said more than one or two words since we’d pulled her out of the creature’s lair. She’d stopped crying, but now was just walking where she was guided like a zombie, staring vacantly at the ground in front of her. I was a little concerned that that wasn’t an improvement.
Sure enough, after a few moments of silence, I heard it again. There were definitely people downhill from us, and they were definitely searching for somebody. I couldn’t make out words, but there was a decided lack of urgency in the voices. It sounded like this search and rescue operation had turned into a recovery operation. If it hadn’t, it was getting awfully close to that point.
I might have called out to them, but it hurt to draw enough breath to yell, so I settled for looking for a good route down toward the voices.
We weren’t exactly trying to be quiet, and I think we were both so battered and hurting by then that we would have been hard pressed if we had been. We were breaking fallen branches, catching ourselves on trees, and grunting and groaning as missteps and steep drops took their toll on our injuries. If they were listening, they’d figure out that we were coming pretty quickly.
“Hey, I think there’s somebody up there!” a voice called from below. I didn’t recognize it, but then, I had barely had time to get to know any of the rest of the searchers, aside from Steve.
I sank down to sit against a tree, cradling my cracked rib. They knew we were here, so I figured it was safe to let them come to us. Especially if Leahy decided to be put out about our disappearance enough to try to slap us in the clink for being some kind of accessories or something. I’d seen weirder stuff in the last year.
It didn’t take the searchers long to find us. There were four of them, all younger folks I hadn’t seen before, though they were all well dressed for the wilderness and had an air of competence that I hadn’t detected with the yuppie volunteers that had joined Steve’s team. These boys and girl knew their business in the woods.
“Hey,” the young, bearded guy in the lead yelled downhill as he saw us, “I think we found them!”
In moments, the rest were hustling up the slope to surround us. One of them shook out a Mylar blanket to wrap around little Amanda, who still looked kind of shell-shocked. The others started to check Dan and me, while Steve came huffing up the hill, talking into his radio.
He finished talking and slowly, laboriously, walked the rest of the way up until he was standing over me, looking back and forth between the two of us, frowning.
“Where the hell have you been?” he asked, once he got his breathing under control. Steve wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, and climbing that hill had apparently worn him out a bit. “I thought you were going up to investigate that ridge, not disappear for two days!”
I just glanced at Dan, who simply raised an eyebrow. “That’s where we went,” he said. “The going got a little rough.”
Steve frowned. “We searched that whole ridgeline yesterday,” he said accusingly. “There was no sign of anyone there.” Even as he said it, though, I could see the gears turning in his mind. He was only half looking at me, and for all his bluster, there was something distant and frightened in both his voice and his eyes. He was putting the pieces together and comparing them to his theories, and it was adding up to something that scared him deeply. It was one thing to rant and rave about people ignoring the weird stuff. It was something else altogether to be faced with overwhelming evidence that the weird stuff was very real.
He was also taking in our battered condition. I knew we both looked like we’d been through the wars. Something had certainly happened, and I could see his imagination starting to run wild.
I was in too much pain right then to indulge his curiosity, and Dan’s advice had always been to say as little as possible after an incident. A lot of people don’t like to believe that such things as the Otherworld exist, never mind the Abyss, and they tend to react rather strongly when you tell them a story about something like a horned creature that stole children and could apparently pop up out of the ground behind you and influence your mind. Some of the ones who don’t react that way, but instead run wild with their own theories are just as bad.
The rest of the rescuers were starting to converge on us by then, so Steve kept his mouth shut. Irascible he might be, but even he had to have gotten rather tired of being mocked for his theories. But there was that look in his eye whenever he glanced at either of us that
portended many, many questions to come.
It didn’t take much longer to get back to Leahy’s little headquarters that he’d set up by his truck. We had actually made it a good way down the mountain before the search party had found us. Neither of us was moving all that fast, but we only had about another mile to go.
Leahy was waiting by the hood of his truck, along with the Hoyts, who immediately ran to their daughter, with the EMS personnel not far behind. I soon found myself the subject of a cute blond EMS technician’s attention, something that I didn’t complain about. Besides, even if she’d looked like a hag, I was hurting too bad to complain much at that point.
Leahy came over to where the two of us were getting checked over next to one of the three ambulances on the scene. He was frowning, and while I didn’t know the man, I could easily read that frown as the expression of a man with a great many troubling questions; perhaps more troubling questions than Steve’s.
He waited while the EMS tech checked me over. She wasn’t doing much to patch me up; her job was to make sure I was stable enough to get to the hospital where they could patch me up. “Well, you don’t seem to have a concussion,” she told me, “or if you do, it’s a very mild one. We’ll have to keep an eye on that. You’ve got at least one cracked rib and a lot of contusions, but nothing life-threatening.” She straightened up and pulled off her gloves. “You need to get those ribs taped up, but other than that, it’s just going to take some time to heal.”
“Thanks,” I told her, trying a smile. It didn’t work too well; I’d straightened a little too quickly and pulled on that cracked rib, turning the smile into a grimace of pain.
Leahy waited until the EMT had moved away. Even then, he still just stood there and stared at us, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Get it off your chest, Sheriff,” I said.
He rubbed his beard. “Well, it seems that the very day a little girl goes missing, two out-of-towners volunteer to help find her, then go missing themselves. They told their Search team leader where they were going, but there’s no sign of them there. Some people say they heard gunshots, but that it sounded like they were a long, long way away. I have to expand the search to include the two idiot rescuers who got themselves lost.
“Just as I’m about to make the call that our search and rescue operation has become a recovery operation for the little girl’s body—I really don’t give enough of a crap for the two jackasses who wandered off into the woods at this point—what happens but those same two lost outsiders show up, with the little girl in tow, looking like they’ve been in a hell of a fight.”
He put his fists on his hips. “Now, you’ve got to admit that with my background and profession, that kind of thing is going to get my hackles up. But I’m a fair man. Just make sure the story’s a good one.”
I squinted up at him. Dan was still getting checked out, and I couldn’t help but suspect that Leahy had deliberately made sure he talked to us separately. It was only prudent when asking questions about a suspicious set of events.
“You said yourself it was a weird one, Sheriff,” I said, picking my words carefully. “And I can’t say otherwise. If I told you everything that happened, you probably wouldn’t believe me, though you’d probably find out that it matched up pretty well with the wild story that Amanda’s going to tell you.” I took a careful breath. It still tugged at that cracked rib, but I was able to keep the wince to a minimum. “I’ll just say that we ended up going a lot farther than we expected, and we did find a predator had taken her. It’s dead. She’s back. Take the win for what it is.”
He just eyed me narrowly for a moment. I could almost see the thoughts going through his mind. Did he take my word for it, accept the win, and leave it at that? Or did he start digging, and quite possibly find something that he didn’t really want to find?
“You said a predator had taken her,” he said. “What kind of predator?”
I shrugged. “Never seen one like it before,” I said honestly.
“Where’s the body?”
“It fell down a hole,” I said, also technically honestly. “We couldn’t reach it.” Not that we would have tried, even if it hadn’t exploded.
He still looked skeptical. He knew I wasn’t telling him the whole story; I’d already said that I wasn’t going to. But at the same time, I could tell that he wanted to just let it go. The girl was safe and there was no proof that we’d done anything untoward. His natural suspicion, honed by years in law enforcement, however, wasn’t going to just accept that we were innocent, not with so many unanswered questions still left hanging.
“Wait here,” he told me, and headed over toward where the Hoyts were fussing over their daughter.
I waited, leaning my head back against the side of the ambulance and looking at the sky, offering a brief prayer of thanks that the worst was over. Whatever Leahy decided, a stint in the county jail on suspicion couldn’t be any worse than that canyon in the sky, or wherever it had been.
Dan came and joined me, his nose somewhat straighter and most of the blood cleaned off his face.
“They did a decent job on the nose,” I said as he sat down on the bumper next to me. “You’re never going to be pretty, but it’s probably easier to breathe through.”
He just grunted as he leaned back against the side of the ambulance. Dan had never been much of a man for banter.
We stayed like that for a few minutes, until Leahy, with Bellefleur in tow, came over to the ambulance again. Bellefleur looked archly skeptical. Leahy, though, looked thoughtful.
He stopped and looked at us in silence for a moment. Neither one of us broke the silence, letting him get to that in his own time.
“Oh, come on,” Bellefleur suddenly blurted. “You can’t tell me that you’re taking that story seriously?”
“I’m not sure what to think,” Leahy said. “It is weird, and she’s young enough that she might have made all sorts of things up to deal with trauma. But for the life of me, I can’t think of any rational explanation for what I’m looking at, either. The one thing that I can take seriously is that she was adamant that you two rescued her. However much of the rest might have been made up, that seems to be the important thing.”
He sighed heavily. “The fact is, however much I might want to get to the bottom of this, I don’t have anything to hold you on, especially when Amanda will testify that you’re the good guys. There’s no body, and nothing to actually suggest anything other than your absence and injuries. So you’re free to go.”
Dan nodded and stood up. “Thank you, Sheriff,” he said, holding out his hand. “We’re just glad we could help.”
“Just so we’re clear,” Leahy said, letting a little frost creep into his voice as he shook Dan’s hand, “if you hadn’t brought the girl back, I’d have you in the slammer so fast that your heads would spin. There’s still something off about this.”
Dan just nodded. I kept my mouth shut.
We retrieved our weapons from the deputies and headed back to where we’d parked our trucks. They were covered with fallen pine needles from sitting there for a couple days.
Before we could get in, though, Steve stepped out from behind a tree. “I’d like a word with you boys,” he said.
“You were right, Steve,” Dan said. “There was something up there, and it’s been taking the kids. We took care of it, though.”
There was a light in the older man’s eyes, the light of a man suddenly looking at vindication. “What did the Sheriff say?” he asked.
“We didn’t tell him all the details,” I said. “Why complicate matters? The thing’s gone.”
“One last bit of advice, though,” Dan said seriously. “Don’t go up there looking for signs of it. It might be gone, but it’s still dangerous up there. Just stay away.”
Steve nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t really listening anymore. He had visions of bringing back evidence that he wasn’t a crank, evidence to wave in the face of everyone who had rolled their e
yes and laughed at him. He waved vaguely and wandered off, already muttering to himself.
“Think he’ll listen?” I asked, watching his receding back.
“Nah,” Dan replied. “He’s too invested. He’ll go wandering up there, poking around. If he’s lucky, he’ll miss whatever gateway it was that we went through. If he’s not…well. That will probably be the last anybody sees of old Steve.”
“Where do you think we were?” I asked. I hadn’t exactly had a chance to ask before. And alternate dimensions or whatever were not among my experiences as a Witch Hunter so far.
“I think we were still on that ridgeline,” Dan said as he climbed into his truck. “Some places are just strange, twisted ever so slightly out of our world, places where the Otherworld is actually made manifest. I think that ridgeline is one of those places. Odds are that thing didn’t even make it that way; it probably just took up residence.”
That wasn’t an encouraging thought. “Could something else come and take up residence later?” I asked.
“It’s entirely possible,” he replied. “And if it does, we or somebody like us will have to go back up there and try to take care of it again.” He shut the door. “Nature of the job.”
I just went to my own truck and slowly, painfully, climbed behind the wheel. I was learning quickly that this wasn’t a war that could be won in a single human lifetime. It wasn’t a war that we could win by ourselves at all. It was going to rage until the end of time.
Oh, well. I was in it for the long haul, anyway. I’d decided that when I’d taken the oath a year before. I started up my old Ford and followed Dan down the mountain.