Core of Stone

by King, R. L.

  “Let’s do this,” he said. “And for fuck’s sake, stay close. It ain’t safe down here for a greenie even without the monster. You go runnin’ off on yer own, and we’re both in a fuckload of trouble.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Even with the light, Stone found the dank tunnels unsettling.

  Luke walked beside him, lantern in one hand, shotgun in the other. His watchful gaze constantly scanned the area up ahead, and occasionally he stopped to shine the lantern back the way they’d come. The sounds of their footsteps and the far-off drip-drip-drip of water echoed weirdly around the rounded tunnels, making it nearly impossible to tell where any given sound originated. They heard no indication of the two Forgotten who presumably were following them.

  “How dangerous is it down here?” Stone asked. “I mean, before the so-called monster?”

  Luke shrugged. “You get used to it after a while. It’s like anywhere—there’s good people an’ assholes. Eventually everybody kinda feels out how far they can go with everybody else, an’ we mostly don’t have problems.”

  “The Evil don’t come down here at all?”

  “Sometimes they do. But they don’t last long. They don’t get along too good, y’know? So sometimes a little group’ll come down here with guns an’ stuff and try to take us out, but they don’t know nothin’ about what it’s like down here. We teach ’em fast.”

  “You kill them?” Stone asked. He shined the lantern up ahead, picking out the odd colorful graffiti sprayed on the curved concrete walls. Down here, the strange symbols the Forgotten used to communicate with each other were plentiful, though he noticed fewer of the familiar “good place” ones than he expected to see.

  “When we can,” Luke said. His craggy face was grim. “Sometimes they run away. That’s okay—they go back and tell others not to come. But if they try to take us…” He held up the gun. “Where you think we get some o’ these?”

  Stone nodded, trying to envision what it must be like to spend most of one’s life underground, constantly on the watch for threats, making mostly vain efforts to hold off the stench and squalor that seemed to encroach everywhere down here. “What do you do when the rains come? This whole system is flooded then, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Depends on how bad it is. We got places we can get our stuff up pretty far off the ground if we need to. It ain’t fun, and we gotta get pretty fuckin’ cozy, but usually it’s okay. If it’s bad, we go topside and hope the Evil ain’t around to pick us off.” Luke glanced sideways at him. “How come you do it?”

  “Do what?” Stone thought he saw something moving up ahead, and held up the lantern. The light reflected off the tiny, gleaming eyes of a large rat, which reared up on its hind legs, glared at him and Luke, and skittered off into a hidden hole.

  “This.” Luke spread his hands to indicate the tunnel. “Why get involved at all? ’Specially now, if you ain’t got your mojo? Malcolm almost had you out, back to the street. You coulda called your cab and gone back to your fancy hotel and your fancy life—why come back? It ain’t like you love it down here or nothin’.”

  “No,” he admitted. “I don’t love it down here. Quite the contrary, in fact. But—Malcolm and the others did save my life. Regardless of whether I wanted them to.”

  “Whatcha mean?” Luke stepped over a large drift of garbage. He took a left at the next intersection, which took them into an even narrower tunnel. The Forgotten symbols were sparser here.

  “Never mind,” Stone said.

  “I ain’t gonna never mind,” Luke said, and glanced at him again. “You tellin’ me you didn’t want to be saved? You wanted the Evil to get you?”

  “No,” Stone said quickly. He shuddered a little. “Gods, no.” A quick death to silence his pain would be one thing; eventual death by slow torture was something else entirely.

  “What, then?”

  Stone braced himself against the wall and carefully edged around a tangle of organic matter best left unexamined. “You never told me, Luke: what’s your Forgotten ability?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I’m good at trackin’,” he said. “Sneakin’ in the dark. When I trust myself that nobody’s gonna see me, they usually don’t.”

  Stone nodded. “That’s kept you alive a good number of times, I’d imagine.”

  “Yeah. It don’t always work, but usually it does.”

  Stone nodded again, looking the big man up and down. He was tall enough that he usually didn’t feel short around anyone, but Luke’s towering bulk did the job. “I’d bet you’re decent in a fight, too. Strong.”

  Luke’s thin lips turned up in a feral smile. “Yeah, no shit. Ain’t nobody fucks with me. I could take anybody down here, one on one. They all know it.”

  “No doubt.” Stone walked in silence for a while, then said, “So how would you feel if that were gone?”

  “Huh?”

  “If you woke up one day and you were paralyzed, say. Or if your Forgotten ability left you.”

  Luke pondered. “It’d suck,” he said at last. “Suck big time.”

  Stone started to say something, but Luke wasn’t finished. “But I guess the others’d help me out.”

  Stone blinked. That wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. He had the Forgotten leader pegged as a man with a lot of pride, and a lot invested in his ability to not only take care of himself, but also of the little brood of lost souls he’d gathered around himself. “Indeed?”

  Luke snorted. “Yeah, sure. Everybody’s fucked up down here. We wouldn’t be here if we wasn’t. Ain’t fuckin’ nobody topside who’s gonna give us a damn thing, so we do what we can with what we got. Everybody got somethin’ they can do to help, even if it ain’t much.”

  “So you’re saying that if you couldn’t fight anymore—if you couldn’t take care of yourself physically—you’d be all right with that?”

  “Hell no.” Luke barked a laugh. “No way. I’d be pissed as hell. But what can ya do, y’know? Life sucks, but that’s what ya do. Ya deal with it and get on with livin’.” He stopped, and something flashed across his dark eyes. “That’s what you was doin’, wasn’t it?”

  Stone didn’t answer, just kept walking.

  “That’s why you were at that bar. Gettin’ shitfaced and walkin’ around like some kinda idiot on the streets. You wanted somebody to take you out, didn’t you?”

  Still, Stone didn’t answer.

  Luke grabbed his arm. “Man, that’s fucked up. Everything you got, and you wanna throw it all away?” His grip tightened. “You know how much any fuckin’ one of us down here would give to have what you got?”

  “This isn’t productive,” Stone said tightly, without looking at him. He wrenched his arm free and held up his lantern a little higher. “We’re supposed to be looking for a monster, not discussing relative life advantages.”

  Luke sighed loudly. “Damn, you are a piece o’ work, man. That’s all I gotta say. And you better not be out to kill yerself now, ‘cause I ain’t gonna save you if I think y’are. I got people I need to get back to. People who do wanna stay alive, even in this shithole. They’re countin’ on me.”

  Stone bowed his head. “Don’t worry,” he said softly. “I want to find this thing as much as you do.”

  They trudged along in silence for several more minutes, switching directions a few times, the lights from their lanterns bobbing along in the darkness. Occasionally more light filtered in from drains overhead, but Stone didn’t spot any light sources big enough that they might provide an exit in an emergency.

  The further they went, the less frequent these light sources became. On the walls, the graffiti was as common as ever, but the Forgotten symbols dwindled to almost none. Stone had been trying to keep a mental map of where they were relative to the Forgotten base, but with the frequent twists, turns, and echoin
g sounds, he’d lost track long ago.

  “This is close to where Griff was scavengin’,” Luke said under his breath. “If it got him and he wasn’t goin’ somewhere he wasn’t s’posed to be, it’d be around here.”

  Stone nodded, put a finger to his lips, and leaned back against one of the walls. After a moment, Luke backed off to the other one.

  Stone listened, closing his eyes to try to filter out extraneous stimuli. If the monster was an illusion and the caster was skilled, it would have an auditory component as well—possibly even an olfactory one. But all he could hear was the incessant dripping, and the occasional far-off bang of metal on metal that was probably pipes settling. No human voices, no animal cries, no new stenches overpowering the ambient odors he was beginning to get used to.

  They waited like that for several minutes, but nothing changed. “Nothin’ here,” Luke said at last. “Let’s keep going.”

  Stone nodded, but didn’t move yet. “Remember,” he said, “if we do see it—it’s almost certainly not real. If you don’t believe it exists, it can’t hurt you. It’s vital you remember that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Luke said. “I ain’t gettin’ fooled by nothin’ down here, don’t worry.” He held up the shotgun. “I’ll blow its head off, or whatever’s makin’ it appear.”

  “Don’t assume it will be so easy,” Stone cautioned. “Illusions—good ones, anyway—are nothing to take for granted. They can appear frighteningly real. Just keep your wits about you.”

  “Got it covered, man. Let’s go. I wanna do this and get back to the others.”

  They started off again. “Are we leaving your territory now?” Stone asked. He couldn’t see any Forgotten symbols on the walls anymore.

  “Yeah. We’re into Boxcar’s group’s area. It’s cool—they know us. We’re way out on the edge, so we shouldn’t run into any of ’em. If we do, just lemme do the talkin’, and don’t do anything threatening.”

  “What would I do?” Stone asked. “Wave my lantern at them?”

  They kept walking. The tunnel began gradually sloping downward, and twice more Luke changed directions, pausing more often to study the graffiti.

  “What are you looking for?” Stone asked.

  “There’s a room ’round here somewhere,” he said. “Like a storeroom. We’ll go that far, then we gotta turn back and try another direction.”

  “How long are we doing this?”

  “How long you want to?”

  “Until we find it,” Stone said grimly.

  “Good. Then we’re agreed.”

  They’d been walking as they talked, and now Luke held his lantern up again. “I think that’s it,” he said, pointing.

  Up ahead stood a gray door, featureless except for some stenciled writing so faded it was impossible to read. It was set into the concrete wall that marked the end of the tunnel they’d just come down. Two more tunnels stretched out on either side of it. Luke moved carefully forward, peering right and left. “Left one’s blocked,” he said, hooking a thumb in that direction. He took another step forward and tried the handle on the door. “Locked. I—”

  A piercing sound, half-howl, half-roar, filled the air, echoing and bouncing around, amplifying until it was physically painful to hear.

  Luke spun around to face the right side of the tunnel. From where he stood, Stone watched the Forgotten leader stagger backward, his eyes bugging out, flinging his hands up. “Holy shit!” he screamed.

  And than something impossibly huge was upon him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Luke screamed again, dropping his lantern but keeping hold of his shotgun and squeezing the trigger. The hallways echoed with its blasting report, but the thing kept coming.

  Stone, a few steps back, stared at it in horror. Whatever the thing was, he’d never seen anything like it before. So enormous it nearly filled the tunnel, it had a vast, gaping mouth brimming with pointed teeth, small, beady eyes, and some kind of slick-looking scales. A fetid stench like the depths of a dead swamp hovered around it, so strong it was almost visible in the air. It looked like a cross between some kind of mutant reptile and a massive, hairless apelike creature, with writhing, squirming tentacles whipping around the bottom part of its face. It roared again, clamping its jaws down on Luke’s shoulder. The Forgotten leader screamed louder, blood spraying from where its teeth sunk in.

  For a moment, Stone almost believed it was real. He darted his gaze around, trying to find a weapon, trying to find some way to get Luke out of there before the thing tore him to pieces. The sheer physicality of the thing—the sight, the sound, the smell, the presence of it—it had to be real! No illusion could be that solid. What if some new supernatural creature had taken up residence down in the Underground, and—

  No.

  No, damn you! Think!

  He focused. He pulled in a deep, shuddering breath and fought to center himself, to clear his mind, to drive off the lies this thing’s summoner was trying to get past him. It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. It’s not real.

  His magic might have been gone, but his mind was strong as ever. This was what he had been trained for, by a master who valued strength of mind over almost everything else.

  Luke screamed again. More blood spurted, splattering the gray door.

  Not real! It’s an illusion!

  And then, suddenly, with a shift of perception, he saw past it. It was still there, still huge and menacing, still hunched over Luke’s kneeling form. But now it was just a little bit transparent. Stone could see the wall past it, and the door covered in half-transparent, illusionary blood.

  “Luke!” he screamed. “It’s not real! It’s an illusion! I’m certain of it! Remember what I said? Don’t believe it’s real and it can’t hurt you!”

  Where the hell was their backup? Despite the screams, there was no sign of Tembo and Kyle.

  “Run!” Luke yelled as the thing sunk its teeth into his flailing arm. He dropped the shotgun. “Run! Get out! Get away!”

  Stone darted forward and snatched the shotgun. If he was wrong, he’d be putting himself right in its line of attack.

  But he wasn’t wrong. He was sure of it. Once he’d pierced the illusion, it remained semitransparent, still horrific but no longer able to trick his mind into believing it was solid. He grabbed Luke’s arm and tried to drag him free, but the Forgotten leader was nearly hysterical with terror now. Stone slapped him. “Luke! Listen to me! It’s not real! If you trust me, believe me!”

  And then he heard something else, further down the corridor past the monster. “Fuck! He’s seein’ through it! Get the skinny guy!”

  Before he could move, Luke screamed once more, a high-pitched yowl of agony, his arms spread wide, his hands grasping at something that Stone could see was not there.

  And then he was gone.

  His scream cut off, he simply ceased to be there.

  For a second Stone stood, shocked and confused, his brain trying to process this new input while simultaneously remembering that the monster wasn’t real. Then he looked down at the floor, holding the lantern out in front of him, and a chill gripped him.

  Luke’s leather jacket, jeans, and heavy boots lay in a heap on the trash-strewn ground where the Forgotten leader had stood only a second ago. Mixed in with them was a drift of grayish ash, already darkening as it soaked up the stinking water.

  Oh, no—

  “Get ’im!”

  The words spurred Stone to action. He ran back down the tunnel he and Luke had just come from as footsteps echoed in the passageway behind him. He had no time to wait for backup—if it was even coming.

  Something slammed into the wall where he’d been only a second earlier, and something hit him hard in the back. He staggered forward, dropping the shotgun, then caught himself and ducked low as he ran. He saw a tunnel off to his right and took it, running as
fast as he dared, leaping over piles of trash and detritus. Still the footsteps sounded behind him, but the echoes made it impossible to tell how close they were, or how many.

  His lantern flickered. Was it just him, or was it not putting out as much light as before? If it went out, he was lost.

  But if the mage—or more than one—managed to catch up with him, he might be lost anyway.

  Still the footsteps pounded nearby, mixing with the weird, echoing calls of his pursuers. He couldn’t tell how many there were. Two? More? Another tunnel, to the left. He flung himself around the corner and kept going. He couldn’t stop to catch his breath now, even though a stitch in his side lanced pain through his ribs.

  He took a quick look around. The tunnel didn’t look familiar. The graffiti was different, the pipes hanging down from the ceiling in crazy patterns instead of attached to it. Had he taken a wrong turn? Which way was he going? Even if he got away from the mage (mages?), he remembered what the Forgotten had said: he’d never find his way back if he got lost. That was why Luke had gone with him in the first place.

  Luke…

  Anger, despair, and shame sliced at him. The leader of this Forgotten group, the one who’d kept them going, kept them safe in a town where literally anyone they didn’t know might be out to kill them—was dead, and it was his fault.

  No, it’s not, a stern, rational voice in his head said. You didn’t get him killed. He knew what he was in for. You tried to warn him. You tried to help him. You did everything you could.

  Could have done a hell of a lot more if I weren’t bloody useless.

  Stop moaning, you prat. You stop thinking, and you’re dead. Now get going. You owe it to them to get back and warn them.

  The voice was right. Right now, he didn’t give a damn if he lived or died—except that it wasn’t just himself in the equation this time. The Forgotten group had to know Luke was dead, had to know that the “monster” was just a sophisticated illusion. A damned sophisticated illusion. Whoever the unknown mage was, he had to be either a practitioner at or near Stone’s level, or else one of the odd “wild talents” floating around, the ones with little training but some singular ability they could manifest at heightened levels. He remembered Zack, the weaselly little punk who’d been working for Trin, and his ability to bypass the most powerful of wards despite being so magically weak he couldn’t manage a simple shield spell. They happened, and precisely because they were untrained, they could be very dangerous.