“This makes no sense whatsoever,” Dr. Tatum uttered out loud, and the reverend nodded in agreement as he waited for some further explanation from her. He would not have to wait much longer, because as he turned to gaze at the church, he found that the building had vanished and that Wolf’s Mountain towered eerily over the darkening sky. The sound of werewolves howling garnered their attention, and suddenly they were in the midst of a very strange battle between a man in a tree and a pack of anxious werewolves. Dr. Tatum recognized the man in the tree immediately, and she called out to him in response.
“Pound!” she cried out to him. This vocal act of recognition proved to have poor timing when, with a sudden turn of slobbering werewolf faces, she and the reverend were left out in the open, exposed with no protection.
Without hesitation, four of the lycanthropes turned their attention to the easy victims that had just ventured into their territory. Bounding across the open space, one werewolf lunged at Reverend Scott and grabbed and twisted the wrist that the preacher held across his midsection in defense of the looming attack. Another werewolf dove for Dr. Tatum’s ankles in an attempt to tackle her to the ground, sweeping her off of her feet. Two others closed in tight and watched from close proximity as their comrades were entangled in battle with the defenseless humans.
Up in the small but sturdy tree, Pound took the opportunity of limited numbers to affect the change of battle in his favor. Commanding the dogwood to snatch a werewolf, Pound caused the hardened wooden soldier to lift one of the lupine foes with its outer branches and then to throw the seized werewolf headlong into one of its companions, wounding both of them and knocking them to the earth with a thud. Just that quickly, the battle seemed to be going Pound’s way as the dogwood lifted yet another werewolf from the safety of the ground and held the snarling beast in its clutches. He was hardly ready for what was about to take place.
As the battle with the werewolves raged on, Seth, who lay winded and unattended on the gravels, was shocked to see the hairy legs of the giant wolf spider slowly creeping out of the nearby hole in the ground. Before he could make a movement to get to safety, the arachnid bolted out of the round fissure, latched onto his ankles with its mandibles, and dragged him helplessly into its snare. With the pocketknife still in hand he slashed at the creature’s fangs, but the blade only seemed to scratch the hardened surface of the tusk-like protrusions. The spider’s body then dropped down low suddenly as it started down the hole, and Seth fell forward with the downward momentum. Most unfortunately, the knife slipped from his hands and clanked against the rock walls of the cavern into the darkness below.
Only Pound took notice of Seth’s abduction, and he was so busy defending Dr. Tatum, the reverend, and himself from the ferocious attack of the werewolves that he could do nothing to prevent it. Frustrated at the helplessness that he felt, Pound leaped down from the security of the tree, ran across the gravel lot to the pit, and jumped downward into the hole.
In the meantime, the dogwood warrior continued bashing the werewolves, swinging and swaying to and fro in an exasperating dance rarely seen from a tree, even during a hurricane. Swiftly the dogwood collected Dr. Tatum and separated an attacking werewolf, using its branches like fingers to peel off the frothing animal as it held onto her legs. Then Reverend Scott made his own escape from the werewolves by striking one with a silver cross and then kicking another in the groin with the silver tip of his cowboy boot.
“Stay down, boy!” Reverend Scott barked at the incapacitated halfling. Bolting for the dogwood, Reverend Scott scaled the thin sturdy limbs for cover, and the remaining werewolves let no time pass before surrounding the humans trapped in the tree. “I’ve got more where that came from, fellows!” he shouted down to the hairy antagonists with his cross in hand.
To say that Dr. Tatum was surprised by the reverend’s nerve would be an understatement, but the fact that she had missed the obvious silver items as weapons was her biggest gaffe. She had a new found admiration for Reverend Scott that she would never have dreamed possible given the recent set of circumstances surrounding Sherry Lance’s disappearance. With her mouth still hanging open, she found herself oddly considering him for the open position in the DAM that remained after Phil’s death. “But why would a pastor even consider the offer,” she thought to herself as she gritted her teeth and placed a well-aimed kick to the jaw of the last of the leaping werewolves. All eight of the dog soldiers had been defeated and lay sprawled out unconscious and bloodied on the ground. In the distance a bell rang, almost the sound that one would expect to hear just before the start of a church service, and the dogwood strode over toward the spider hole as the bell rang out louder again only seconds later. “Do you hear that?”
“How could I miss it, Dr. Tatum?” Reverend Scott replied as he leaped down from the upper branches of the tree to the ground. “Can you come down? It’s safe, at least for the moment,” he continued and held his hand up high into the limbs for her to grab. She latched onto a lower limb with one hand and held his in the other as she scaled down the thin tree and placed her feet back firmly onto the earth. “That’s better. Now, those sounds that we heard, the bells, they are coming from that hole,” he said as he knelt down at the edge and looked inside. Another bell tolled, and the sound echoed through the dark, hollow chamber, confirming his suspicions.
“I have heard of canaries in a mine, used as harbingers of danger, but never a bell in a hole,” Dr. Tatum thought out loud. Through the earlier commotion with the werewolves, they had missed seeing Seth’s capture by the spider and were unaware of the danger that the hole held inside. To add to their obliviousness, they had both witnessed Pound’s heroic leap into the hole, and given their current state, they would either have to stay above ground with the eight injured werewolves or attempt to follow Pound’s trail into the fissure. Since the dogwood seemed to still be in Pound’s control, Dr. Tatum surmised that Pound was still alive and conscious, wherever he was.
“There are enough roots and protruding rocks to climb down quite a distance,” Reverend Scott deduced from the dim daylight that was still available. “Shall we?”
“After you,” Dr. Tatum replied, and they began the long climb down the wolf spider’s hole as another toll of the bell resonated through the tunnel.
**********
Pound landed on his feet at the bottom of the deep well, and the only light that he could see was coming from straight up where the clouds of the darkening sky passed across the circular opening. Pulling out a lighter, Pound flicked the top off and struck the flint with his thumb as a blue and orange flame licked out into the darkness. There was a narrow cave that jutted out from the landing, and Pound was getting the reflection of the flame returning from several precise points deep into the cavern. Then the points began to move very quickly toward him where he stood, and he braced himself the best that he could for what was about to come next. As rigid as a statue, he stood alone in the dark and waited for the inevitable as the lights grew larger. Looking down, he caught the reflection of something metal that lay in the dirt, and he quickly bent down to grasp the pocketknife that Seth had unwillingly dropped down the hole. When Pound looked back up, the round moving lights were upon him, and the fangs of the giant spider were dripping with the venom of years of hunger as they hovered menacingly over his head. The spider caught sight of the miniature blade in Pound’s grip, and hesitating only momentarily, the beast grudgingly allowed an open opportunity for Pound to strike out in defense. With the strength and speed of a hero, Pound sunk the small but keen blade into the soft area of one of the mandibles that loomed over his head and severed the attached fang from the spider. Juice discharged from the cut and ran out all over the floor of the cavern, soaking the ground and seeping beneath Pound’s shoes in the process. Losing his balance on the bloody ooze that poured out of the beast’s tusk, Pound slipped and fell onto his backside with a thud. The spider screamed in agony with the amputation
and soundly thumped Pound with its legs, pinning him to the wall as more ooze discharged from the open wound. Then it wrapped him in a web as it held him in place, and for the first time, the wolf spider spoke.
“For that, I’ll have you last, and you can watch as your friends are consumed by my hatred,” the spider shouted at him as strings of saliva covered him in the web. Then the spider dragged him off into the hollow of the cave, leaving the fang and the blade behind on the ground in the dark.
**********
Reverend Scott reached the bottom of the well first, followed shortly thereafter by Dr. Tatum. Helping her down the last few feet, he caught her in his arms and then set her down beside him. Dr. Tatum quickly retrieved a cellphone from her pocket and used the flash from the camera to light up the area, and to her astonishment, a giant hairy spider fang laid on the ground at her feet. She leaned down to examine it and also noticed a pocketknife lying on the ground, covered in some dark sticky fluid that she could only guess to be blood.
“Yech!” she said as she dropped the filthy knife back to the ground. “I don’t like this place at all, Scott.” The reverend reached down to pick up the knife, and his hand was also covered in the gooey mess.
“We might need this,” he said as he cleaned the blade off with his hand and flicked the sticky fluid against the wall. A drop flew out and struck Dr. Tatum’s forehead, and she grimaced in horror. “Sorry about that,” he continued and used his sleeve to wipe the messy fluid from her face. When he brought his hand away, she still had a grim expression that he could do nothing to remove.
“This place is disgusting!” Dr. Tatum whined as she took in a deep breath to calm her nerves. A few breaths later, she was calm and rational once again, and she flicked the light of her cellphone back on again to help them to see their way in the dark. “There’s only one way to go here, so forward it is,” she reasoned, and they started down the tunnel to find Pound.
“Do you see that? There are lights ahead,” Reverend Scott remarked and pointed ahead to several glowing points of light.
“They seem to move as I move the phone, though,” said Dr. Tatum as she angled the phone from one side to the other, and the lights did indeed seem to follow her movements. Then she covered the light on her chest, and the lights disappeared. “It’s some kind of reflection.”
“I don’t like it,” said the reverend, and with the knife in one hand, he brought out his silver cross in the other. The lights stayed where they were however, and the deeper into the tunnel they went, the larger the reflections became. As they stumbled along the dark, they came upon a rather large web-like cocoon sprawled out across the dirt floor, and Reverend Scott knelt down to pull back the webbing from its contents. To his horror, he found a pale and sickly man with cat ears trapped within the thin but sturdy webbing.
“Crush?!” Dr. Tatum screamed in fear at the sight, and Crush’s eyes travelled to meet hers. “He’s alive!” she added and stooped down to pull back more webbing from his face as he whispered some faint words to her. Putting her ear to his lips, the words came out stronger this time. “Corporal Dan? What does that mean?” That was when she saw the first of the giant hairy stilt-like legs reach over to nudge her backward off of its prey and onto her backside. From her spot on the floor, Dr. Tatum could now make out the edges of the many legs of the creature that stood before her, and she froze as the eight-legged creature reared back to show the span of its longest limbs. In doing so, the beast also displayed the soft underside of its abdomen which was obscenely tattooed in white with what appeared to be the outstretched body of a human male. Then she saw two more cocoons behind the creature, and she knew that she had found all of her field agents. Unable to develop a scream, Dr. Tatum simply sat on the floor and watched as Reverend Scott held his cellphone straight out at the creature and flashed the camera once in an effort to blind the creature. What he did not realize was that the monster’s eyes were not located on the underside, and his efforts though nimble were lost in futility as the spider brought its body down on him. Falling to the cave floor and dropping the pocketknife into the cocoon that held Crush, Reverend Scott scrambled to get out from under the weight of the beast in the dark, but the spider quickly wrapped both he and Dr. Tatum in a cocoon together. With a broken fang, it now lacked the ability to effectively inject its paralyzing venom into its prey.
“No matter,” the creature slobbered out the words as it hovered over Crush’s pale face. “We’ve been waiting for you. What took you so long to get here?” it drooled with a wicked laugh. The scrambling of many feet came from the well and then traveled down the cavern, and Crush heard the eight servants return to their master. “Come, join me, my elders,” the spider commanded as the werewolves mounted its back.
“Crush. You could have been one of their kind, serving me as they do. But oh, I would have missed that delicious meal. You will be a feast like I had fifty years ago, one that has nourished me quite well until now. The hunger in me has grown, and my elders sent out the invitation to one that not only could fill me with nourishment, but could fill me with POWER!” the spider groaned out in a howl of excitement. “And you brought others with you. How thoughtful of you. Corporal Dan is here with us as well, though only in spirit,” the arachnid revealed. “And the spirit is in me as you soon will be. I look forward to adding your tattoo to my chest,” the spider laughed.
While the murderous creature prattled on about its evil deeds, Crush fought to overcome the paralysis that the venom had triggered, and he found that his fingers could indeed move, though feebly. Moving his wrist, he reached up to grab the handle of the pocketknife through the webbing, and when he had the blade in his grip, he held it tightly in his fist. The wolf spider straddled his prone body, and when the abdomen touched his chest, he lifted the sharp blade upward into the soft underbelly and held it firmly as the spider backed up into biting position. The knife shredded a gash in the spider’s vital organs, and ooze covered Crush’s body as the spider bled out over his legs and lower body. With a scream of agony, pain, and anger, the eight legged monster leapt from his body and crawled in a circle around the tiny den, dragging its internal organs along the ground. The werewolves dismounted and held their hands to their ears to block out the horrible screeching, and the spider cursed Crush’s name in rage as it dragged itself in another circle, stumbling once over a metal object that no one had noticed before. The rounded object lost balance and fell over, making a loud clanging sound and answering the question of where the church bell had gone. Beneath the bell lay a soft, web-covered sack.
“You’ll pay for this, half-man!” the enormous creature spit out in resentment to Crush, and then the spider burrowed down through the earth and disappeared into a new and deeper hole. Perhaps to perish, perhaps to find rest, if indeed creatures of such malevolence can find peace. It may never be known though, for the opening to the hole in which the spider crawled collapsed and sealed itself from the prying eyes of the DAM. With the wounding and retreat of the evil beast, the werewolves instantly began to revert into human form, changing back into the eight elders of the Church on Wolf’s Mountain.
**********
“My side is killing me!” Crush moaned as the net that held his weakened body bounced from one side of the well to the other on its way up.
“Careful,” Seth instructed the eight elders as they tugged on the rope to raise the injured field agent out of the deep, dark hole to the earth’s surface. “He’ll be okay, but when he’s hurting, he can be pretty nasty,” he added with a smile. “I’m just grateful that he’s alive,” he then thought to himself as he pulled backward on the rope with them. Pound was still covered with ragtag remnants of webbing that refused to let go of his skin, but he was otherwise fine. Dr. Tatum and Seth stood next to Reverend Scott watching the delivery of the last person from the wolf spider’s lair. The church, the parking lot, and the vehicles had all returned to their proper places, and it turne
d out that the pit was in an old grave in the cemetery next to the church. The markings on the stone were so old that they had faded with the weather, and according to Reverend Scott, there was no record of who the grave belonged to.
When Crush’s weakened and webbed body reached the opening, the elders worked together to extract him from the tomb, and in his arms he held the bell that had been buried in the bottom for so many years.
“Found your bell, Rev,” he said as he dropped the heavy item to the ground. In his other hand he held the web-covered sack, and when Dr. Tatum reached down to touch it, Crush tightened his grip. “I’ll show this to you later, Doc,” he simply replied to her as he cradled the sack between his forearm and chest.
“You’ll have to let it go before the hospital will admit you,” she replied with a smile. “But I promise to keep it safe for you.” Reluctantly, Crush released his grip on the sack and let the field manager gently hold onto it in her arms. When Crush was certain of Dr. Tatum’s promise, he closed his eyes and fell abruptly into a long dream.
**********
Three weeks later, Crush was released from the hospital, and Dr. Tatum met him at the front desk to bring him home.
“Thanks for taking care of me, Doc,” he said as he signed the last of the paperwork at the front desk. “I can’t remember being that close to death before. It’s a wonder I’m still here.”
“It’s good to have you back,” she said as she placed her arm in his and walked him out into the beautiful but chilly autumn day. “We truly have something to be thankful for this holiday season,” she added as she hugged him.
“Careful, now. My sides are still sore,” he said as he grabbed his ribs instinctively to protect them. She let go of him and snickered quietly to herself as they walked out into the parking lot.
“I won’t tell the guys you flinched,” Dr. Tatum noted with a wink, and Crush returned the smile.
Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound Annual 2 Page 4