Despite Doc’s protestations, they left one of the lanterns with him. Spates, being unarmed, carried the other.
“Take these,” Spates said, removing a pair of glass ampoules, one from each coat pocket. They were the same sort of small vials they had found in the little crate on the skinned man’s saddle, only these were intact and contained a greenish liquid.
“More of Sheardown’s work?” the Rider asked, holding the ampoule up to the light skimming through the trees. The light did not penetrate the stuff, which was as thick as buttermilk.
“Yes. Be very careful, these are all we have. Once exposed to the air, it releases an acidic cloud that will dissolve any flesh it comes into contact with.”
Mather and the Rider looked at him.
“So that’s what happened to Bullshit,” said Mather.
“I’ve no doubt,” said Spates. “After I demonstrated the stuff on a squirrel, he must have got it in his head to take the whole lot and sell it off somewhere. A mercenary bunch through and through.”
“But what’s it for?” Mather asked.
“If the thing has invisible skin, and we remove the skin, we may be able to see it,” the Rider reasoned aloud.
“Quite right,” said Spates.
“Protect my investments!” Doc called to them from the shack as they left.
“I’m surprised he didn’t come with to do so himself,” the Rider mentioned.
“We can’t go anywhere without the horses. He’s playing it smart,” Mather said.
The Rider raised a hand to him as he left, and the last sight he had of the man was of him lighting a cigarillo on the red globe of the lantern.
* * * *
It was not far through the woods to the cave mouth. A deep wound in the rocky earth, it was cluttered with the dusty and weatherworn remains of the excavation. Shovels, picks, and broken, empty dynamite crates and stacks of shoring timbers, lay about like the instruments of a surgeon who abandoned hope of his case and left the tools of his trade behind in frustration.
One of the lanterns had been set outside. It was lit.
They stood outside, considering it a moment.
“Did they leave it here to keep it out or keep it in?” Mather wondered.
“Our plan was to herd the thing with the lanterns, but I don’t think they had enough time,” Spates whispered. “I should think that if they went inside, they’re still inside.”
“Waiting to bushwhack us,” Mather agreed.
Spates knelt beside the lit lantern and rapped on the base with his knuckle.
“Still half full,” he announced, straightening. “Best to conserve this, then,” he said, twisting the lantern he held off.
“Pretty dark in there though,” Mather said, staring at the black cave mouth.
The Rider took out his borrowed pistol. He still wasn’t entirely sure what the nature of this creature was. Would normal bullets even hurt it? He had encountered things in the past that could shrug off lead. There had to be some sort of spell about it rendering it invisible. Something by Lilith or one of her servants perhaps? Something he couldn’t detect or counter because of her power over him. The cave made him nervous. It was dark. He felt as he’d felt before a battle during the war, seeing the cloudy bursts of shot and the rising smoke far up the line as he walked in cadence. Knowing there was danger, even the possibility of death, and marching in anyway. There was an absurdity to it.
He looked at Mather. The marshal was a hard man, wearing a badge yet straddling the law, yet he was afraid too. Either two skulking killers or an invisible horror waited within and by his eyes, Mather couldn’t decide which was worse. Neither could the Rider. There was an air about Mather. He lived up to his moniker, ‘Mysterious Dave.’ The Elder Sign tattoo on his arm and his allusions to strange experiences at sea were certainly intriguing, both to the Rider’s simple curiosity about the man and his understanding of the alien knowledge related in Sheardown’s book. Perhaps the ravings of the text could not be so easily dismissed. If a simple sailor was familiar with it, then it was more widespread a phenomenon than he suspected. How had he gone all his life and never encountered these things in his own esoteric studies?
Spates flashed them a ‘here goes nothing’ smile and crept into the cave abruptly, dispersing their own hesitation. The man did not seem acquainted with fear. He had the sort of scholarly enthusiasm that the Rider had seen once in his time at the yeshiva, in a bright, eager young student who leapt into the Yenne Velt without taking the time to make the proper preparations, and wound up with his soul half-dislodged in his body. That boy wound up in an asylum, dead to the world, yet still breathing.
They followed Spates in, down the dark tunnel. When they passed out of the range of the light seeping into the entrance, they stopped, bumping into each other.
“You’re right, it’s quite dark,” Spates whispered.
The sound carried quite a long way in the subterranean stillness, and in the black, they heard an answering scrabble that could have been the shifting of stone, or a boot scraping the rock floor, or a varmint that had taken up residence, or something else entirely.
A match struck in the dark, and Mather appeared. He held the match to a wrinkled pocket handkerchief and then wound it around the barrel of one of his forty-fives, where it hung blazing. His face was tense, underlit eyes shifting in the orange glow. He was a target now for anything lurking in the shadows, but they just couldn’t see a thing.
“You hear that?” Mather whispered.
The Rider looked all about, training his own gun wherever his eyes went. There were a pair of side passages on either side of the main tunnel. All three sloped down into the mountain.
He had heard, but the sound had been fleeting.
“We could split up,” Spates suggested.
In answer, Mather walked down the main tunnel, and the Rider gripped Spates by the sleeve and pulled him along after.
After several minutes walking, all three of them leapt bodily as a voice called out from the dark;
“Oh God! Over here! Help!”
Spates started to make for the sound, but the Rider caught him. It could still be a trap. Probably was. At least they knew it was Dodgy and Crazy Horse Bob in here and not the thing.
Mather pointed with his flaming gun barrel.
Far down the tunnel was a pinprick of red light. Mather drew his other pistol and kept the flaming one far away from his body.
They made for the light. It was several more minutes stumbling in the dark before the pinhole became a ball, and then they could make out the lantern and Crazy Horse Bob lying next to it, his back to a strangely flat rock wall. The light was low and weak. The lantern was almost burned out. Behind him there was a very much man-made niche, empty. There were primitive etchings surrounding the small alcove, but the red light was dim and growing dimmer. They were impossible to make out.
It was cool down here. They were quite deep in the earth.
“That you Mather? Doc?” the Indian called.
“It’s Mather,” the marshal called back, crouching in the tunnel.
“You didn’t bring a lantern?” he asked in a trembling voice. He looked to be clutching his side, and the Rider saw there was dark blood on his shirt.
“Where’s Dodgy?” Mather asked.
“That greedy son of a bitch! He left me here. Took the stone. Shoulda known not to trust no white man—let alone a Dutchman. You didn’t pass him?”
The Rider looked back over his shoulder. It was useless. The black was impenetrable. The German might’ve waited in one of the side tunnels while they passed. That sound might’ve been him. He might even now be sneaking up behind them. He quietly pushed Spates to one side of the tunnel, while he slid to the other. Had he heard something? A huff of breath from somewhere in the dark? A scrape on the stone?
“Throw out your gun, Crazy,” Mather ordered.
“I ain’t got it. Dodgy slipped a knife in me. He took it. Listen—ain’t you brought a
red lantern with you? Mine’s almost out! That thing is in here! It’s in here somewhere! We heard it!”
“Oh God,” whispered Spates, and the Rider heard him fumbling with his lantern.
“Look!” the Indian screamed.
He cast a hand up to the blank wall behind him. A huge shadow had fallen across him, amorphous, lumbering. The Rider could barely make out the movement of limbs.
It was in the tunnel with them.
Mather turned and fired down the tunnel, his blazing taper erupting into burning fragments that spewed in every direction. The sound was tremendous.
Spates and the Rider rushed past him to leap into the glow of Crazy Horse Bob’s lantern, but a jutting rock from the floor tripped up the professor and he fell flailing. The lantern tipped and there was a smash. The wick touched the fuel, or perhaps it was a piece of Mather’s burning handkerchief. Liquid fire splashed everywhere, across Spates’ legs, and up the Indian’s arm.
Mather grunted in the dark, and the Rider heard his body strike the side of the cave wall. There was a snuffling sound, powerful, like the breath of an excited bull. The Rider smelled a heavy animal musk.
Spates and Crazy Horse Bob screamed together. Spates rolled away, trying to beat out the fire on his legs. The Indian leapt to his feet, waving his flaming arm like a brand. His wild flailing batted the Rider’s arm as he fired down the tunnel, and two shots when whinging into the rock ceiling.
In the light of the fire, the Rider saw the dust and debris that tumbled down fell in strange directions, as if cascading down an obstacle that wasn’t there. A single stone hung in the air for a moment, turned, and slipped to the floor, like it had tumbled off a great shoulder.
Dimly he saw Mather lying on his side. He was blinking away the blood flowing in his eyes from his torn scalp, crawling down the tunnel back into the dark, where one of his pistols glistened.
Then Crazy Horse Bob leapt into the air—and hung there. Though nothing tethered him to the cave ceiling, the top of his head brushed against it and he grimaced and growled as if being strangled. He gripped at whatever had seized him, clawing madly and wrestling with the unseen limbs that grasped him. His one burning arm elicited an unearthly hooting howl from whatever stood in the tunnel, and suddenly the offending arm straightened as if jolted. The Indian gave a strangled scream, there was a sickly wet tearing and popping sound, and the blazing arm burst from his shoulder and flopped to the ground. Blood erupted from the torn socket and shreds of sinew and torn muscle waved like party streamers.
The Rider fired again, but he had no target, and he was trying not to hit Crazy Horse Bob. The bullet screamed off down the tunnel, the thunder crashing in his already ringing ears.
The Indian’s screaming was pinched off, and the Rider saw the skin on either side of his neck sink inward and then tear open. Dark holes opened in his throat and blood trickled down his shoulders, and over his curling lips. He began to sag in the thing’s grip, kicking wearily like a hanged man. The blood spilling from the holes in his neck streamed down invisible arms, giving them a hint of form. Then his whole body traveled swiftly up and struck the cave ceiling, mashing the top of his skull flat.
The Rider fired wildly, not caring what he hit now, so long as he hit something. Bullets drove through the Indian’s back and clipped his elbow. The Rider tried to fire around the dangling corpse, but it seemed to move to intercept his bullets, jerking right and left like sickly a rag doll suspended in space. The thing was using the corpse as a shield. It was intelligent.
The Rider clicked on an empty chamber. He jerked open the loading gate and tried to push a bullet in. It was only then that he noticed Bullshit’s revolver was chambered for .44-40 cartridges, and he only had Dirty Dave’s belt of .45’s.
Crazy Horse Bob’s bloody body fell to the floor. Almost. It seemed to sit halfway up, its shoulders slumped, but its bloody neck erect, those its head drooped, like a kitten held by the scruff of its neck. Slowly, it began to drag down the tunnel towards them.
The Rider yanked out his cold iron Bowie knife. It was all he had.
Then Spates gave a warning yell and something small went end over end in the air and crashed into glittering fragments as it struck the floor.
A green cloud blossomed into being.
The Rider threw himself back against the tunnel wall, shielding his face with his sleeve.
The weird hoot-howling from before sounded deafening through the tunnel once again. Two black, glistening stumps seemed to sprout from the floor as the cloud rose. They were as big around as oak trunks, and from their base extended four evenly spaced tendril-like roots from the front, back, and sides. The trunks grew before him, bent and slanted ever upwards, joining into an apex and forming a greater, thicker branch that rippled with interlaced roots.
Then, the Rider watched in sick fascination as the flesh like bubbling molten wax from Crazy Horse Bob’s corpse. It spilled down the cheeks revealing the muscle limned skull and bulging eyes, the black tongue hanging from the drooping skeletal jaw. The viscous, liquid epidermis pooled and ran over the stones.
It was not something growing in the center of the tunnel, it was the cloud eating away at the thing’s invisible hide, revealing its strange, midnight black anatomy.
Then the thing stood revealed, trembling and screeching in agony. It was a towering, vaguely simian figure, hunched in the passage, its massive shoulders nearly spanning from wall to wall. The legs that rose above its splayed, four toed feet were somewhat canine haunches, the knees at the back, but they did not taper, did not look fragile. They were thick as a young elephant’s and bristling with ropes of oily black musculature knotted over hard, greenish bone, almost vegetable in appearance.
Its face was horrendous, long and protruding like a horse’s, but with a close-set maw of even, wickedly serrated triangular, shark-like black teeth that nestled in thick, distended gums, mottled yellow in color. Its huge all-white eyes were situated on opposite sides of is head and bulged like gigantic poached eggs, without any vein or facet, somewhat like a housefly’s in proportion to its head.
Crazy Horse Bob’s skinless corpse plopped to the ground as the thing released it.
It hoisted up its powerful arms, which ended in flipper-like hands, each sprouting three twisted jags of sharp green bone and a strange, pulsing barbed growth that extended four inches from each ‘palm.’ It staggered toward the Rider and Spates, seeking to sweep them up in a quivering embrace, to demand of them the reason for its sudden agony, to repay it with splintering skeletons and ripping flesh and screams of their own.
The Rider lashed out at the questing limbs. At first his knife glanced off the thick talons, strong as blades themselves, but then they found the fleshy root, and sent two of the thing’s claws spinning off, trailing blackish ichor, and bit a wedge in the flipper-appendage.
It recoiled only a little, the overall pain of its skinning overwhelming anything the Rider could inflict upon it. Redoubling its effort, it lunged at the source of this new pain, and the Rider found himself gathered up clumsily in the pit of one rippling elbow. He turned the knife point down in his fist, nearly dropping it, so slick was the oily tissue covering the arm he clung to. As the thing drew him closer to its jutting maw, the Rider stabbed at its chest as rapidly as he could, again and again, the blade punching noxious smelling holes that gushed fonts of thick, burbling black grease, spattering his face, blinding him to what happened next.
Its hot reeking breath on his face nearly caused him to retch. The smell was like vomit and rotten flesh. He struck blindly and wild, felt the blade glance off something hard, heard its keening hoot-howl.
Then he heard gunfire. More, he felt the shock of each report shuddering in the arm that gripped him. He felt himself released, landed hard, bloodying his ear on stone, filling his head with a skull shaking ring and his eyes with smashing stars. He struggled to push himself up, but his arms and legs wobbled, and he contented himself with wiping his eyes against his own sh
oulder to clear them of the black slime.
When the clamor and the blindness subsided, he felt human hands on him, helping him to sit up. There was a diminishing hiss and that foul smell, but nothing more than the heat and crackle of the fire on the walls.
“We’ve got to go,” Spates said in his ear. “But you’ve got to help me. I don’t think I can stand.”
The Rider wasn’t sure he could himself until he lurched up on wobbling legs and pulled the limping professor up with him.
The thing lay on its side. The hissing was its death rattle, and they could see its great chest subsiding as the last breath of air escaped its hideous face.
Across the carcass, Mather stood with pistols smoking. He appeared to have emptied both cylinders into the thing.
“Let’s go,” he said.
As they stepped around it, they had to be careful not to slip in the thick blood pooling on the floor.
They fled up the throat of the flaming cave as if from hell, choking on the stench of smoke and then the reek that followed as the fire found the creature and began to cook it.
When they staggered out of the mine mouth, the Rider was surprised to see the daylight.
“What was it?” the Rider asked, when he had drunk in enough of the spotless mountain air.
“Well, I do believe I shall have the honor of naming it,” Spates said beside him. How does iuguolus absconditus sound?”
“I like ‘damned dingus’ better,” Mather said.
* * * *
They limped back through the trees. The Rider dwelled heavily on the thing he had seen. Spates went on at first about the creature and how he regretted not observing it or saving its remains. He further wondered about the creatures origins, whether this was its natural range, or whether perhaps it migrated here from some remote location, or perhaps been transplanted by whomever had first carved the tunnel. He speculated about its feeding habits, but when it became apparent to him that Mather and the Rider did not care overly to hear or even think about this or any other aspect of the thing they left dead and immolating at the back of the mine, Spates turned his frustration to Dodgy’s escape with the jewel.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 13