A muffled screech passed through the shrinking crack and faded away. The room fell quiet again, and Joey climbed down off the pulley system. Each of them caught their breath.
“What just happened?” Joey’s eyes were wide as he ran his fingers through his hair.
“We killed the bad guy,” Michael answered.
30
Michael gathered up the items from his backpack that had been dumped onto the ground. The black splatter still oozed down the side, and he wiped some of it away, but there was no point in trying to stay clean down there. No amount of washing would ever remove those stains or the smell. Michael dug out his water and consumed half a bottle in record time.
“How are we going to explain this to anybody?” Joey asked. “We killed Pastor John.”
“He tried to kill us first, Joey.” Michael gathered up some of his belongings that had rolled over against the wall.
“This is a big deal,” Rebecca said. “He was the leader of the temple.”
“My dad’s going to strangle me. Literally. I’m not kidding.” Joey stood next to the pulley system, his flashlight aimed at the pit, and lighting up the crushed remains scattered on the ground. A chunk of meat slurped down the side of the pit like black jelly.
“They’re not going to believe us,” Rebecca said.
“Well, they won’t find his body, anyway. Nobody can prove that we did it,” said Michael.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Rebecca said.
“We didn’t have a choice.”
“Rebecca’s right,” Joey said, “this is terrible.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “He was trying to kill us. That thing got him anyway, not us.”
Rebecca put her hand on her forehead. “How did this happen? The temple will feed us to the demons for sure. I only wanted to find my mom.”
“Remember what he did to Finn?” Michael said. “He murdered him and he would have done the same to us if he’d had the chance. No one will find the body, anyway.”
“My dad will kill me way before the temple does,” Joey said.
Rebecca groaned and sat on the floor. Joey crouched down next to her and put his hand on her shoulder.
Michael stood at the wall of the temple and studied the inscriptions. The graphics and language were a combination of pictures and words like ancient artwork. Some pictures showed humanoid figures, and near the center of the wall was a monster with a massive head and several arms that stuck out along the side of it like an insect. Humanoid guards surrounded it as if they had captured it. Or maybe they were worshipping it. The guards had giant heads like some kind of sea monster. Below the drawing were indecipherable symbols. The drawings were arranged vertically and depicted a new scene, like a story from a comic book. Michael interpreted it as ‘We captured this demonic beast, and it became our pet until it ate everyone.’ The last scene showed the creature with no humanoid figures. Below each scene was writing like a mix between Egyptian hieroglyphics and English letters. One scene showed a dark oval above the creature like the opening to a well, but it was upside-down and a humanoid figure curled backward in the air as if falling through the hole down onto the creature.
“Guys look at this,” Michael said.
Rebecca and Joey groaned as they stood up and went to his side.
“Do you think there’s more of them down here?” Rebecca asked. “I mean, different kinds?”
“I don’t want to meet that big one in the middle,” Joey said.
“Did Pastor John talk about different demons?” Michael asked.
Rebecca nodded. “I wonder if that’s the Leviathan he talked about.”
“What’s that?” Michael asked.
“It’s like the queen of the demons. Yeah, he talked about a few different ones.”
“I wonder where those things came from?” Michael asked.
“Hell,” Joey said.
“So what are we going to do now?” Rebecca turned around and slid to the ground with her back against the wall. “We don’t have the medallion to fight off those demons.”
“Or the black water,” Michael said. Losing the water cut him deep. The goal was to rescue his grandfather, but the black water had been important too. He had caused Rebecca and Joey to suffer so much to retrieve it. He had almost gotten them all killed for it. Now it was gone and there was nothing he could do about it. He saw his grandmother’s face in his mind as she had looked in the bed. He would do anything to save her, but he had failed again. Maybe by some chance of luck he’d find more on his way to rescuing his grandfather. A small spark of hope to get something right. “We’ll just have to use our machetes, and we still have the map and the pistols.”
“Where do we go now?” Joey asked.
Michael pointed to the rotating door. “Back out there and down the stairs to the right.”
“I don’t think we should have killed him,” Rebecca said.
“What other choice did we have?” Michael said. “You guys don’t have to stay down here with me. You can go up those stairs and go home.” Michael gestured to the door at the end of the temple that led up into the church basement.
“Stop it, Michael,” Rebecca said. “You know I’m not leaving here without my mom.”
“I’m not leaving without you guys.” Joey moved in closer to them.
They each took a flashlight and a machete and followed Michael over to the revolving door where they had entered. They removed the jam that blocked the door from turning and stepped out into the hallway again. Without the medallion, Michael’s confidence drained away.
They pushed on the rotating door and it glided open, but jammed up again at the halfway point. Michael prepared to slash at any creatures on the other side with his machete, but discovered a shoe from one of Pastor John’s guards had gotten wedged beneath the door. A pool of blood had collected at the bottom of the stairs forming a winding trail streaking down the steps from the darkness. Several chunks of the creature’s flesh mixed in with the human blood. Near the fourth step, a battered chunk of mangled meat about the size of a human arm lay limp and stretched out as if torn off by hand.
Around them was silence and stillness, but Michael kept his machete up and ready. How long before another nightmare latched onto his leg? Michael led the way down the stairs. Without the full canteen of black water to weigh down his backpack, he took larger strides, but his muscles still ached with every step. At the bottom of the stairs, the tunnel went on for several yards before turning right down another set of stairs. It would be an excruciating climb back up to the top. Before they arrived at the bottom, strange noises echoed like the booming acoustics in an indoor swimming pool. He doubted they would find any swimmers, not alive anyway.
The map directed them to follow the stairs down and cross through a large room. On the opposite side of the room, they’d go up some stairs and then down another long tunnel. At the end of that tunnel was where Finn said they’d find his grandfather and Rebecca’s mom. If Finn was wrong, they’d have to go back to where they’d heard the voices earlier. He’d smash down the wall with his bare fists if he had to.
“Do you think the monsters from the temple wall drawings are down there?” Joey asked.
Michael shrugged, but it was a good question.
“I feel like I’m being watched,” Rebecca said.
Michael looked back. “We are.”
31
Just beyond the reach of the flashlights, the darkness shifted and twisted in warping shades of black like a den of snakes stalking them from the edge of the walls. A beak punched into the pale light and let out a low ominous hiss before merging again with the blackness. At any moment the creatures could have lashed out at them and taken them down one by one, but instead they stalked them all the way to the bottom of the stairs. Ahead of them, a chorus of hisses reverberated like a dozen broken steam pipes. The commotion intensified as they approached the entrance to a large room.
The last steps of the stairs were hidden below a pi
le of bone fragments, skulls and debris connected with a larger horror spread out in front of them. Their flashlights lit up a different section of the enormous nightmare before them. Michael’s heart raced.
“What is this place?” Joey asked.
Rebecca turned her face away and squealed behind clenched lips.
Sprawled across the room were stacks of remnant corpses, the shredded carcasses of animals, and rotting clothing as if a giant from a children’s fairy tale had feasted on a thousand villagers, sucking every bit of flesh from their skeletons. It was much like the room they had passed through after first entering the tunnels, except exponentially larger. If that first room had been a breakfast tray, then this room was the dinner table. The mix included cows, horses, dogs, cats, deer, and humans. Twisting sets of rib cages of all sizes stuck out among the field of endless decay, and clumps of hair filled in the gaps between the gore. Their flashlights lit up remains as far as their light could reach.
At the far side of the room ahead of them, a section of the wall had collapsed, revealing a void like a sewer drain opening in the street that swallowed the light and reflected only pure black. The surrounding stone walls were the same color and style of those they had seen in the temple above. The room echoed their every breath like a high school gymnasium, and the chamber could have enclosed his grandfather’s house with plenty of room to spare. Faded drawings covered the walls similar to those from the temple, and some of the blue and red colors hadn’t faded yet.
A low soulful moan bellowed above them, and Michael shuddered. A man’s voice groaned like a wayward ghost. They spotted the source. A dark cigar-shaped object hung above them moments before it plummeted from a hole in the ceiling. The object crashed into the sea of death near them, kicking up bones and clumps of dead animals into the air that had scattered out across the pile like the debris from a meteor impact. The object stuck in the pile like a dart in a dartboard. Two bare human feet stuck out at the top end of the object, and they shivered. The object resembled a black cocoon made from strips of what appeared to be the flesh of a bessie. The wrapping pulsed and squirmed as the man struggled. The man’s voice had stopped at the point of impact, but after a moment he moaned again.
Michael took a step back, his eyes wide, and gripped his machete tighter. The debris around the cocoon swirled and rumbled as if a giant blender deep below the surface had switched on. The cocoon shifted in the mix and sank halfway before the torso of a massive monster rose beneath it like a whale surfacing in the ocean. Bones clattered and flowed from its pitch-dark surface, leaving only the cocoon perched atop its mid-section. Several limbs with insect-like pincers extended upward on either side of it and cradled the victim, rotating it in its claws like a child examining a new toy. The limbs were like sticks, long and slender, made up of three joints and an elongated claw reminding him of a praying mantis. The claws at the end of the limbs split into three sections and fanned out like fingers. Michael gasped.
A freakish arachnid-like head surfaced next. Six black eyes the size of basketballs occupied half of its face. Two more eyes, twice the size of the six, sat where the ears should be. The glossy half-marble eyes reflected the shine from their flashlights. It glared at them a moment, but then focused on its meal.
A circular mouth opened like a giant fish puckering without teeth as it lifted the cocooned victim over its face. The cocoon dangled facedown as the mouth stretched wider. With a convulsion, its lips shot forward and latched onto the bottom of the cocoon near the victim’s head. The victim wobbled and groaned as the lips strained and sucked. A low wail rose up, and the victim stopped moving. The feet that stuck up from the top shriveled and sank within the cocoon. Red blood and a clear fluid, like a thick drool, slobbered from the creature’s mouth and oozed down its head, pooling on its torso. The cocoon itself fell apart and melted within the creature’s jaws. It sucked the flesh from each body part as it churned within its cheeks. Each discarded bone exited through the corner of its mouth and slid off into the pile to join its predecessors.
Within a few minutes, the meal was finished, and the monster sank again below the surface. A whirlpool of bones and debris rattled and ground to a halt as it settled again into silence.
“What the hell just happened?” Joey whispered.
“The Leviathan,” Rebecca said. “Remember the drawings in the temple?”
Michael felt light-headed. “I don’t believe it.”
“I hope that wasn’t anyone I know,” Joey said.
“Queen of the demons, just like Pastor John said.” Rebecca shined her flashlight at the hole above them. “That hole is right where I saw my mom. That’s where the room must be.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t Grandpa,” Michael said. Those had been the feet of a younger man. And the man’s voice had sounded different. His grandfather’s voice was a lower pitch. In his heart, he wasn’t so sure. Fear paralyzed him, and his chest ached. Maybe he should have jumped in the pile and rescued the man. He glanced at the machete in his hands. It would be a miracle if they survived down here much longer anyway.
Michael scoured the ceiling and pinpointed the bottom of the circular pit leading up to the temple. Black arms slinked back into the shadows as he swayed his flashlight from wall to wall. Below the pit in the center of the room was a stack of decomposing bodies and ragged clothes piling up toward the opening above like a small volcano of corpses. At the side of the stack lay a body clothed in a military uniform impaled on what looked like deer antlers. The face was turned away, but his heart sank. It was Finn. Michael turned his flashlight away from the sight.
“It’s Finn,” he said.
“Where?” Rebecca scanned the room. “Are you sure?”
He pointed toward the stack of bodies, and she located the same uniform. “Oh, God.” She grasped Michael’s arm.
He opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it again. His body went weak, and he lowered his flashlight. Maybe his grandfather had met the same fate as the man in the cocoon. Maybe all of this was for nothing. Rebecca hadn’t seen his grandfather through the hole, she’d only seen her mother. The room darkened until he raised his flashlight again. He wouldn’t leave the tunnels until he knew for sure.
Michael located a doorway across from them. A staircase ascended beyond the doorway in a mirror of the staircase they had just descended.
“We need to get across.” He gestured to the opposite side of the room.
“That’ll be interesting,” Joey said.
Michael stepped out first onto the carcass of a deer, and its skeleton crunched under his shoe. He shifted his weight forward, balancing himself as he held out his hands, and studied the area ahead of him before he crashed down into the deer’s chest up to his knees. His foot came to a rest on a squishy surface like soft grass.
Rebecca stepped out behind him, staying within arm’s length, and helped light the way for each step they took. A cow’s skull poked up beside some smaller animals, dogs and cats. With each step, the skeletons snapped and crunched below them. If the creatures attacked at that moment, they would have nowhere to run. The shadows crept around them as he struggled to lift his feet. The cracked edges of bone scraped against his pants, digging into the skin between his shoes and his pants leg. He winced in pain and jerked his right foot to the side when something sharp, like the edge of a razor, grazed his bare ankle.
“You okay?” Rebecca asked.
“Yeah.” He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath.
“I don’t see Pastor John’s body,” Rebecca said. “He must be here, so where is he?”
Michael stopped moving forward and lit up the area around Finn’s body. The stack of bodies eclipsed the corpses behind it, and he maneuvered his flashlight, but most of it remained in darkness. “Behind there?” He took a step to the side toward Finn’s body.
“Where are you going?” Rebecca asked.
“To see what’s back there.”
He crawled across the carcass of a c
ow. Gases from its stomach blew into his face, and he gagged. His shoe caught on a dog’s spine and loosened as he pulled it away. A human skull stared up at him from between a pile of clothes.
Michael made his way across the surface. He slipped and smashed his hand through the teeth of a skull that looked like a dog, scraping the edge of his thumb along its teeth. He stepped on the larger carcasses, cows or larger dogs, to support his weight. Smaller skeletons crunched and collapsed. Many pieces had broken apart from their original corpses and filled in the cracks between the larger chunks of leathery skin and boney frameworks. Most bodies were devoid of all flesh, yet the monster had left some of them untouched to rot away as if it had decided not to feast that day.
“Bessie’s are coming in behind us,” Joey said.
Michael kept his eyes forward toward Finn’s body, as if reaching it would somehow provide him with a bit of closure. Finn had fallen to his death in what was a two-story fall. The fall would have been survivable, most likely, but not if landing in a sea of bones acting as knives.
Michael’s flashlight slipped from his hand and cracked down against the tattered remains of a suit coat and a rib cage. The flashlight glimmered off a corner of a metallic object below the bare rib cage. He recognized the leather strap of a belt and its buckle as he picked up the flashlight and moved forward again.
He moved closer to Finn’s body. Blood covered the hair on the back of Finn’s head and something had torn the side of his neck open, revealing severed muscles like raw meat packaged in a grocery store. The shadows behind Finn’s body shifted as Michael’s flashlight knocked from side to side. A longing to reach out and touch Finn’s uniform passed through him, as if by doing so he could rescue him. What would he do when he reached him?
Rebecca sniffled behind him. He touched Finn’s shoulder and tugged, but the body remained in place.
“Finn.” He moved himself closer to Finn’s body and stood up with one foot sinking into a rotting pig. He lit up Finn’s face, but only for a moment. His eyes were open, and his mouth was open wide as if gasping for one last breath.
Shadows Rising Page 22