by Peter Nealen
Chapter 13
His words seemed to hang in the air like a pall of smoke above the wreckage of a bombed-out city. The horror that had passed had been bad. The horror Magnus’ pronouncement portended would be far, far worse.
“We’ll have to go after it,” Ray said without preamble. He was as weary as the rest of us, but he had guarded this place for years. Knowing Ray as I did, his duty would bind him to do anything and everything to stop anyone from waking the chthonic thing under the mine. “We don’t have any choice.”
“Look at us, Ray,” Kolya said. “We are not in shape to hunt vampire.”
“We don’t have any choice,” Ray reiterated, biting out every word. For the first time, the calm, easygoing mountain man was gone, and there was a fire in Ray’s eyes that I’d never seen before. “You don’t understand what will happen if that thing down there gets loose. I do; at least as much as any mortal man can understand.” He straightened, and the big man seemed to get even bigger, looming nearly to the ceiling. “Even if none of you come, I have to go.”
“Hold on, Ray,” I said. “No one’s going to let you go alone. I was ready to charge out there and try to help Magnus a moment ago. We’ll need a few moments to re-jock, and then we’ll go.”
“What about us?” Miller asked. He was now standing in the door from the hallway, supporting Trudeau. She was standing, apparently mostly under her own power, but her head was bowed, staring at the floor.
“How is she?” Eryn asked.
He shook his head. “She still won’t speak,” he said, “but she looked at me, and she got up on her own.”
“Magnus? Is it safe to try to send them away?” Father Ignacio asked.
But the Fae shook his head. “The Renfields went with the vampire,” he said, “but the woods are swarming with hobgoblins, and perhaps other things even worse. It would not be safe for them, not alone. And my knights and I are sworn to your cause. We will pursue the vampire.”
“We can’t leave them here,” Frank said.
“We cannot take them with us, either,” Kolya replied. “Not in her present condition.”
“What other choice do we have?” Frank countered. “If we take them with us, we can protect them. Otherwise we’d have to leave someone here with them, and that would mean one less to take on the vampire.” He suddenly shook his head. “Man, add that to the list of ‘things I never would have thought of saying a year ago.’”
“And there are few enough of us as it is,” I said grimly, ignoring his comment. “You, Eryn, Kolya, Ray, Charlie…” I suddenly realized that Charlie hadn’t said a word, and I looked around for him.
I didn’t spot him at first. He was in the shadows, sitting against the wall, his rifle on the floor next to him, his head between his knees. While different, his posture immediately reminded me of Trudeau’s, just a few minutes before.
“Charlie?” I called. Frank looked over, a frown creasing his dark face. I started toward Charlie, and after a moment’s hesitation, Frank followed.
I reached down and shook the other Hunter’s shoulder. “Charlie? You okay?”
He slowly lifted his head and looked at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and haunted, and his lips were pressed tightly together. For a brief, awful moment, I was afraid that Charlie, wounded as he was, had somehow become the demon’s next victim, while we’d been focused on Trudeau.
But he didn’t scream, didn’t start spitting blood or bile, or otherwise betray any signs of demonic influence. He just shook his head, tears welling in his eyes.
He swallowed twice before he found his voice. “I…” he began, and choked. “I don’t know if I can go, Jed,” he whispered.
I gripped his upper arm. “You’ve got to, Charlie,” I told him. “We need you.”
The tears were flowing freely down his stubbled cheeks now. “You need a Hunter,” he said. “I’m afraid that I’m not one, not anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” Frank demanded.
Charlie turned his miserable gaze on the big former deputy, and spread his shaking hands helplessly. “I almost lost it, just now,” he said. “With every scream, every curse, every noise…I felt my knees weakening, my stomach turning. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t stand. I could feel the darkness, and not just out there.” He tapped his temple with a quivering finger. “In here,” he whispered. “Don’t you see? The Walker did something to me, and now I can’t keep the monsters out!”
Father Ignacio knelt suddenly at Charlie’s feet. “You never could, Charlie,” he said urgently. “None of us could. That’s the point. That’s why we pray, that’s why we hold up the Cross. Without it, without Him, we’d be nothing but meat for these things. You can’t do it by yourself, of course not. But there’s help if you only call on Him, and those things are trying to use the trauma you went through to make you forget that! You’re not alone, don’t you ever believe that you’re alone.”
For a moment, Charlie just stared at him and shook. Then, slowly, hesitantly, he nodded. Then Frank grabbed him by the other arm.
“I remember the Hunter you were, Charlie,” he said, his voice low. “You were a pain in the butt, and I wanted to smack you a few times. Don’t make me start feeling sorry for you now.”
Coupled with Father Ignacio’s admonition, that got through. For a brief second, through the tears, the horror, the fear, and the pain, I saw a brief spark of the old Charlie in his eyes. The old bravado. A faint, lopsided shadow of the old grin crossed his face as he looked up at Frank. When he looked back at me, he seemed a little steadier.
“Okay,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said again. “I’ll gut it out. Somebody’s got to look after the New Guy here.”
Frank punched him in the arm and stood. I just nodded, though I was still worried. Charlie was hurting, and that made him vulnerable. We’d have to keep a close eye on him, as well as on Trudeau.
It took a few minutes to assemble what we’d need. Ropes, lights, carabiners, hatchets, machetes, more holy water, more ammunition. Father had dismissed the suggestion Kolya had made of bringing stakes and mallets; beheading was the only sure way to kill a vampire, he said. A stake would only annoy it. Contact with one of our silver crucifixes, however, might well paralyze it. At the very least, it would hurt it, as its accursed flesh recoiled from the sacred.
Miller, though uncertain, loaded up on gear. He asked about a machete, but then changed his mind. He didn’t say it in so many words, but he seemed reticent to put himself up against the monsters. He was in over his head, and he knew it.
Trudeau didn’t say a word, though she looked around a bit. She watched our preparations, though occasionally her eyes would go unfocused, drifting, as if she was listening to something.
The fact that none of us could hear anything was not comforting.
Finally, we were ready. “You know where the mine is, Ray,” I said. “Lead on.”
“There are skinnies gathered outside, waiting for you to come out,” a voice said. It wasn’t any of the other Hunters, nor was it the Fae, that I could tell. Or maybe it was one of Magnus’ knights. I still didn’t know for sure what all the Fae were capable of. I don’t think anyone does.
But when I looked at them, none of them were looking at me. I had the distinct impression that none of them had spoken, physically or otherwise.
Briefly, I closed my eyes. Sam?
Don’t acknowledge it, don’t listen to it, the hoary, familiar voice replied instantly. He was staying close. I didn’t know how much he’d already shielded us from, but I also imagined that I probably didn’t really want to know.
I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. So, the demons weren’t finished yet. Unless that was the vampire, but that didn’t make much sense. Subtle little critters, ain’t they?
They are, Sam’s voice echoed in my head. They always have been. Keep the Faith, Jed.
That was all he said. It was all he needed to say. I knew as well as he did what was happening.
>
The demons thrive on corrupting humans. And they are better tacticians and strategists than any mortal man ever born, save One. They will change tactics in a heartbeat. And that seemed to be what was happening. Having battered us with frontal assaults for three nights, these things were now going to try to make us complacent, win our trust by contrast, to make us think that they weren’t the exact same things that had been terrorizing us before.
Frank started suddenly, and stared around at the rest of us, frowning. “Did one of you say that?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Our opponents aren’t done yet,” I said. “If you hear voices, ignore them.” I had a thought. There were any number of tricks these things could use, including mimicking our own voices. “If you need to talk to someone, for now, make sure that you face them so that they can see your lips moving. I wouldn’t put it past these things to try to use our voices to lure the others into a trap.”
“That is awfully paranoid,” the sourceless voice said. “I’m only trying to help. The skinnies are out there. You’ll see.”
By way of reply, I only crossed myself, and whispered the Prayer of St. Michael as I lifted my Winchester, opened the door and glided out into the darkness behind the rifle.
That prayer takes on a bit more significance when you’ve personally interacted with The Captain. Twice.
The yard was empty, the skies clear. There was no moon, but that far out in the boonies, there was plenty of starlight to see by, at least in the open. Back under the trees was going to be another matter; the darkness back there was impenetrable.
Mostly impenetrable. They disappeared when I looked directly at them, but I was sure I’d seen glowing eyes back there in the black.
After I had cleared the porch and the yard, Ray led out, his Gibbs-Summit in one hand and a lantern in the other. It didn’t shed quite as much light as the high-luminosity flashlights that the rest of us had, but it was Ray’s way.
The voice had desisted, for the moment, and the skinnies, if they were out there, weren’t howling and hooting anymore, but the night was anything but still. Whispers and hisses slid through the darkness, though sometimes it was hard to tell that they weren’t just jangled nerves hearing voices in the wind sighing through the treetops.
We crossed the meadow quickly, and plunged into the stygian woods.
Our flashlight beams stabbed out under the trees, white cones slashed by the dark trunks of the pines and firs. We searched for movement, but saw only the trees and the undergrowth, what little there was of it. At least at first.
I saw a glimmer out of the corner of my eye, and snapped my flashlight, which I presently had clamped to the forearm of my ’86 with my off hand, toward it. There was nothing there, but a tree branch was moving, and not with the wind.
A few dozen yards farther on, Ray stopped suddenly, peering into the darkness ahead of him. I was a few paces behind and to the right of him, and turned from watching our flank to see a pair of glowing, red eyes hanging in the dark, only yards ahead of him. Either whatever they belonged to was extremely tall, or it was up in a tree.
My flashlight, along with Kolya’s, swung to pin the thing. The eyes disappeared. There was nothing there.
And there were no tree branches that a skinny could have been perched on close enough to account for the eyes’ height above the ground.
I honestly didn’t know if the sounds were skinnies and other monsters, or demonic manifestations meant to get in our heads. It ultimately didn’t matter. If the skinnies jumped us, they’d get shot. If a demonic manifestation got bad enough, we’d deal with it. We had to get to that mine shaft.
We were slowly starting to climb up the side of the mountain behind the house. The ground was getting steeper, the footing more uncertain. The rocks were getting bigger, and the tree roots seemed to be reaching up to trip us. Fortunately, everyone along for the ride had good trigger discipline. I was admittedly a little worried about the two FBI agents; my own experience with law enforcement and firearms had been hit or miss, at best. But Miller had been a soldier before he’d been a cop, and he wasn’t trusting Trudeau with a weapon in her current state.
As we got higher, we suddenly came upon what seemed to be an old trail. It was remarkably flat and level, and I wondered at it for a moment, though Ray didn’t comment on it, but just turned up the slope and started following it. That was when I realized what it must have been; the tracks for the mine carts coming down the mountain must have been here, ties and rails long since torn up and taken elsewhere after the mine was abandoned.
The disturbances were getting stronger and stranger as we went up. The eyes weren’t the only things in the darkness of the forest that appeared just out of the corner of the eye. I started catching glimpses of what looked like faint, green, wavering candle flames, back in the trees. Like the eyes, they vanished as soon as you looked straight at them.
We didn’t come under attack, though, at least not directly. It was small comfort. Slowly, the closer we got to the mine shaft, the more everyone seemed hunched, tensed up, as if expecting a blow. The eeriness of the woods, with such eldritch things gliding through them and whispering in the dark, was enough to put everyone on edge. The sense of dread only increased, the higher we climbed.
Finally, the trees ahead thinned, and we could suddenly see the mine chute looming against the night sky above us. It was still a good hundred yards away, but it stood like a broken, haunted tower, black against the stars. It was easy enough, with everything else going on around us, to imagine it to be akin to Dracula’s castle, the lair of an unspeakably ancient evil, brooding in the dark.
Ray slowed as we got closer, holding up his lantern, his rifle tucked against his hip, the muzzle facing forward. He wouldn’t be able to make any long shots with any accuracy like that, but if a skinny suddenly tried to jump him, he could more than likely blow it away easily enough. The rest of us fanned out a little, rifle and shotgun muzzles following the white cones of flashlight beams.
If the chute had been painted, the paint had long since worn away. Several of its planks and timbers had splintered and rotted away, though it still looked structurally sound enough. The wood was stark gray in the light of our flashlights, the handful of openings deep dark holes, reminiscent of the empty eye sockets of a skull. Piles of tailings were heaped around the base of the tower, their shadows shifting and blurring strangely as we shone our lights around.
We held our ground a little distance from the chute, watching and listening. A few of the glowing eyes appeared in the trees around us, but whatever they belonged to didn’t expose themselves. The only sounds, aside from the incessant, susurrating voices, was the wind whistling faintly through the openings in the tower. It moaned softly, sounding like the sighs of the damned.
Then the first of the skinnies leaped to the top of a mound of tailings.
Pale, big-eyed, and scrawny, it pointed with one overly-long arm, opened its maw of sharp teeth, and shrieked. A moment later, Kolya and I blasted it off its feet with a pair of well-aimed shots, the rifles booming across the mountainside, seeming to awaken a host of strange echoes that reverberated through the structure of the mine chute.
Maybe we were just on edge from all the weirdness and horror that had already come before, but everything seemed to be slightly scarier on that mountainside that night.
No sooner had the skinny fallen with a single croak of pain and surprise than a dozen more came boiling out of the shadows beyond, scrabbling on all fours to get close to us.
I worked the lever on my rifle, shifted the gold bead, which was barely visible in the dark, but silhouetted nicely against the white circle of illumination from my light, onto the next one, and fired again. This time, everyone with a long gun had opened fire at once, and a ragged, thunderous fusillade of fire roared out into the night, big bullets and heavy slugs smashing the evil little things off their feet with splashes of dark, putrid gore. The mine chute was momentarily lit more brightly by the tongues o
f flame stabbing from gun barrels.
The entire mob of skinnies had vanished under that volley of fire. Without targets, we held our fire and waited, though Miller, who was suddenly standing to my right with his pistol in his hand, looked like he might start shooting blindly, just trying to suppress the skinnies or something. I contemplated telling him that most Otherworlders didn’t suppress well, and skinnies were generally too stupid and vicious to get the idea in the first place, but I held my tongue. He wasn’t shooting, so it could wait.
We waited for a long time, watching and listening, the echoes of our shots having long since faded away. The faint voices or suggestion of voices continued around us, occasionally maliciously gleeful, more often threatening or menacing, sometimes sounding vaguely wheedling, but always just below the threshold of hearing, in that weird place where you can hear the voice, but can’t make out the words. Maybe there were no words. Maybe the voices, as demonic as they had to be, were simply trying to toy with us, to weaken our minds and wills with the sheer, awful noise of the whispering.
Finally, Ray began to advance again, and we followed, starting up the tailing pile where the first skinny had appeared.
To my complete lack of surprise, there was no sign of the creature itself. Otherworlders don’t tend to leave corpses behind; they’re not entirely tied to the world of flesh the way we are. Which is why a lot of people have searched for Sasquatch remains for a long time and never found anything. Sasquatches aren’t entirely of this world.
We continued to pick our way over the piles of rock and debris, the tower of the chute looming menacingly overhead. I kept shining my light up there, alongside my rifle, just in case. I’d seen skinnies, and worse, drop out of places where no human could have fit, and wouldn’t have thought to look in. But the structure remained stark, motionless, and empty; silent except for that eerie sighing of the wind.