by Peter Nealen
When we paused at another narrow spot, I could have sworn that the shadow of a peculiarly humped stalagmite continued to move even after everyone had stopped, and all the flashlights were focused on the opening ahead.
We had gone maybe another hundred yards when we came to a fork in the cave, with two passages leading down, though the right-hand one seemed to angle back up after a few dozen feet when we peered into it with flashlights. Charlie didn’t say anything that time; he just pointed down the left passage. His face was drawn, and he seemed to be in some pain, his lips pressed tightly together and the tendons in his neck twitching from time to time.
We continued down the left-hand passage without comment. Charlie, suffering as he was, was our guide now.
The air was getting colder, and it was damp. The horrible, dusty dryness of the mine shaft was giving way to a deathly, damp chill. The air was no easier to breathe; it smelled of minerals and seemed thin, as if there wasn’t quite enough oxygen in it. I’d heard of plenty of mines that had turned toxic, but never a limestone cavern. I wondered how much of it had to do with the presence of the evil creatures that we were pursuing.
Or the ones that were shadowing us.
There was no doubt that our invisible tormenters were still with us. The whispers still had not ceased. And there was more.
After we’d been climbing down the passage for a while, Kolya suddenly stopped, stifling a startled yell, and whipped around to look around him.
“What is it?” Eryn asked.
“I do not know,” Kolya replied, his eyes darting around the stalagmites and stone curtains around us. “Something cold just grabbed back of my neck.”
“Cold spots?” Ray asked, from farther up.
“No,” Kolya said over his shoulder. “It was hand, or claw, or something. I felt it. It was solid, and clammy.”
But look as we might, we saw nothing that could have grabbed him. “There’s nothing here, Kolya,” Frank said.
“Nothing now,” Kolya said darkly, and pushed onward. The rest of us kept looking around, perhaps a little more intently. No one wanted to be touched or grabbed by something that they couldn’t see.
Trudeau looked as distant as ever. Mercifully, she held her peace, though a brief smirk crossed her features, just for a moment. I was sure that at least on some level, she was convinced that Kolya had either freaked himself out, or was faking. Miller kept his face carefully neutral.
Ray led the way out into another large chamber, this one easily a hundred yards across and fifty yards high. Massive, grotesque rock formations threw our weak flashlight beams back at us, casting weird shadows that still seemed to move wrong, as if they had a life of their own. Somewhere, I could hear the faint drip, drip, drip of water coming off a stalactite.
The trail got rather less obvious, and we had to thread our way through huge, humped piles of flowing limestone, around rippled columns that looked like hollowed-out bones, and over collapsed formations that would otherwise block any progress. It was slow, painstaking work, and by the time we were halfway across, I found that I was sweating a little, despite the chill in the lifeless air.
I was just climbing over another formation, a gigantic hill of flowstone that had formed over the end of a collapsed stalactite, when a deafening, wordless shout echoed through the chamber.
There was no mistaking that for any of our voices. There was a weird distortion in it, almost like it was coming over a radio, but none of us had a radio, and I doubted that the vampire or its minions had brought one down with them. It wasn’t a scream; not quite. It was a shout, a wordless blast of hate that echoed back and forth across the chamber, nearly hammering us all to our knees with its sheer volume.
I half expected a cave-in in the aftermath of that horrific noise, but the cavern held, even as some of the columns of rock seemed to vibrate with the force of that unearthly shout.
For a long moment, we stayed where we were, frozen in place, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whatever had made that sound, it obviously didn’t mean us any goodwill.
But the only sound was a thin, papery laughter, that might or might not have even been there. I might have imagined it. But I didn’t think that I had.
“Something’s trying to slow us down,” Ray muttered.
“Just by yelling at us?” Miller asked. When Ray turned back to stare at him, he raised his hands placatingly. “I’m legitimately asking. It seems like they’ve done all sorts of nasty things, like shooting at us and grabbing us. Why just make noises now?”
“I don’t know,” Ray confessed. “Maybe the vampire’s in a hurry. Maybe there’s something else at play here. We’ll have to see.”
“If they want to just keep making noises, I’m fine with that,” Frank put in. “Noises I can deal with.”
Miller gave him an odd look, but just nodded pensively.
We moved out of the chamber and into another narrow passage, one that got really, really small after about thirty or forty feet. We had to get down on our hands and knees to get through, then finally start slithering on our bellies.
Let me tell you, you are never quite so conscious of just how much rock is right above you than when you’re worming your way through a passage barely big enough to fit your shoulders through. It is not a comforting experience, even without demonic entities causing trouble.
I had moved up to about the middle of the group, and as I crawled ahead, I heard Trudeau, behind me, start to breathe faster. The whispers seemed to be getting louder, though they were mostly still unintelligible. Trudeau starting to freak out might just be claustrophobia. Or it might be something worse.
Suddenly, Trudeau was shrieking and hitting the backs of my legs. I couldn’t twist around to deal with her; there simply wasn’t enough room. I tried to speed up, to get away from her, but Eryn was right ahead of me, blocking the way, and she didn’t sound like she was doing that great, herself.
Trudeau was clawing at my ankles, and I kicked out a little, trying to discourage her. I connected with something, and then I felt her bite the back of my calf.
I confess I yelled a little. “Ow! Calm down!” I barked, twisting my head to try to shout past my own body. “Knock it off!”
Trudeau wasn’t listening, but I heard a scrabbling sound, and then she was dragged backwards. She clawed at my leg again, but then was pulled away.
Eryn had gotten a few more feet ahead of me, and I crawled quickly to catch up with her and put some distance between me and the crazy FBI agent, banging my head and my elbows a few times in the process. I hoped that this little tight spot opened up again soon. I wanted room to maneuver if I was going to have to fight off a lunatic underground.
I could hear more struggling going on behind me. There were grunts, Trudeau’s continuing shrieks, and then Miller cursed, loudly. It sounded like he’d hurt himself on the rock around us. “Karen!” I heard him snarl. “Quit it! I said STOP!”
The fight went on, though I could tell I was getting farther away. Miller had her halted, at least, back there in the tunnel. Unfortunately, that meant that Kolya, who was taking up the rear, was trapped behind them.
The passage ahead widened, and Eryn scrambled more quickly to get out and stand up. I followed as quickly as I could. I am rather wider in the shoulders than Eryn, so it made for slightly more difficult movement for me.
Eryn was shaking when I finally came out next to her, in a larger, but still low-ceilinged chamber at the end of the tiny tunnel. I could just make out the drawn, haunted look on her face, and see that her chest was heaving as she panted for breath. Before I turned back toward the narrow spot, where Miller was still struggling with Trudeau, I touched her arm.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
She shook her head. “I don’t like that. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go back out through there.”
I squeezed her arm. “Unless there’s another passage out, we’re going to have to,” I said.
“I know,” she said mis
erably. “But it’s…” she shuddered. “It’s so tight. I started to have a panic attack in there.”
I hadn’t known that Eryn was claustrophobic. “I’ve never felt like that before,” she confessed. Apparently, she hadn’t known it, either.
“We’ll get past that when we come back out,” I finally said. “We’ve got other worries right now.” I hated to dismiss her fears, but we were stuck deep in the earth, surrounded by things that wanted to shred our minds, souls, and bodies.
And Eryn knew it. She didn’t like it, but she was a Witch Hunter, and she was tough. She bit her lip a little, but she took a deep breath and nodded. She still looked scared, but she would hold on until we could deal with it.
That would be rough. I knew from experience. Eryn’s tough, but she’s got to let it out eventually, and there’s not much I can do when that happens but hold her and ride out the storm.
I turned back to the narrow passage. The noises from Miller and Trudeau had quieted down, and after a few moments, I saw movement as Trudeau started to crawl out. I backed up, keeping a wary eye on her, never quite covering her with my rifle, but not completely keeping it away from her, either. I didn’t know what to expect, after that little display in the dark.
Her face was blank, though her fingernails were bloodied, and there was a bruise developing on her cheek. Her blond hair was disheveled, much of it having escaped her severe ponytail. On any other woman, that would have been a strangely attractive look, but on Trudeau, somehow, it just made her look slightly psychotic.
She slowly stood up, not looking at any of us, her hands tightly held to her sides. Miller scrambled out behind her. He was developing a good little black eye of his own.
“What the hell was that all about?” he snapped. I might have sensed a sudden shift in the air, the faintest smell of sulfur, when he said, “hell.” Or maybe it was my imagination. It was hard to say. But with the things we had for company, I couldn’t help but imagine that using that word was even more unwise than usual, down there.
“I don’t know,” Trudeau said flatly, her voice low and dead. “I got claustrophobic. I guess I freaked out a little.”
My eyes narrowed as I studied her. A sideways glance at Eryn showed me that she was watching Trudeau with equal suspicion. There was something about the way she was acting, and the way that she’d said that, that suggested she was lying.
But what were we going to do about it? I’d gotten to know enough about Special Agent Trudeau over the last few days that I didn’t expect that she’d own up to it if we pressed her. Nor, even if she admitted to it, would she honestly explain.
“See that it doesn’t happen again,” I said. “We’ve got enough to worry about down here without one of us losing their mind and getting someone else hurt or killed in a freak-out.”
There wasn’t much more I could say. “You two go ahead,” I told her and Miller. I didn’t want to be right behind Trudeau if she “freaked out” again.
Grudgingly, the two of them slid past us in the passage, and followed Frank, Ray, and Father Ignacio deeper into the cave.
The cavern passage continued to meander along, twisting and turning as it went, occasionally widening out into larger chambers. Thankfully, it never got quite as narrow as it had back there where Trudeau had had her meltdown. I wasn’t especially looking forward to going back through that worm-hole myself.
Ahead, Ray stopped, and the rest of us had to come to a halt behind him. We stood there for long enough that I was about to ask what was going on when we started to move forward again.
Ray had stepped aside, and was standing there, staring, as we came out of the passage. And I didn’t have to ask what he was staring at.
The cavern was huge. I’d never even heard of an underground chamber that big, not in real life. The ceiling disappeared into the darkness above us, and the walls spread out to vanish into the shadows on either side. The only estimate I could manage of the sheer size of the place was probably understating things, just from what I could see.
And there were lights in the cave.
They were either very small bits of bioluminescence, or they were very, very far away. Down there in the dark, with little enough in the way of visual cues to judge by, it was impossible to say for certain. But I suspected that we were looking at good-sized lamps at least, a long way away. They burned with a curious, cold green luminescence, like burning copper. And unless my perception was screwing with me, they were at the bottom of a very long slope.
Ray, Frank, and I all turned to Charlie at the same time. It gave me a bit of a pang, knowing the pain that the man was going through, but if he really did have a sense for where the Thing was, we had to use it. “Is it down there, Charlie?” Ray asked softly.
Charlie winced, rubbing his temples as if he had a particularly vicious headache. Then he nodded, pointing just to the left of the greenish lights. “That way,” he said, “I’m pretty sure.”
In that gigantic, open expanse beneath the earth, I was glad for the lights. They might well be lit by something particularly nasty, but they also provided a navigation marker that we could use. Sometimes even evil things present us with certain practical advantages.
That didn’t mean I wanted to get too close to those lights.
With Ray keeping his place in the lead, we started down the uneven, rocky slope.
There were still plenty of stalagmites, though the ceiling was so far overhead that I didn’t see any columns where stalactite had met stalagmite. The floor of the cavern was still an obstacle course, without much in the way of level ground or good footing. Water was trickling in places; we could hear it, though even the sound of running water wasn’t enough to drown out the demonic whispers that just wouldn’t stop.
They were faint, and the words were rarely decipherable, which was a small mercy. But they were always there, and by then it felt like they always had been there. It was like a low background hum, or ringing in your ears. But unlike natural sounds like those, you didn’t get used to it, or manage to tune it out. It just got worse. Like someone scraping their fingernails on a chalkboard, constantly, without stopping even to reset. The noise grated on every raw nerve.
The rocky growths also seemed to provide plenty of cover for…something. We hadn’t gone more than maybe a hundred yards before I started getting the distinct feeling that we were being watched. Not like before; there had been the uncomfortable and disturbing knowledge that we weren’t alone since before we’d left the house. This was different somehow. As if I had grown so sensitive that I could feel when something different had entered the arena.
I started carefully studying each stalagmite as we passed it. Several times, I could have sworn that I stared right into a pair of watchful, inhuman eyes, even though I couldn’t see anything in the shadows.
I moved up to Frank. “We’re not alone up here,” I whispered. “There’s something else in this cavern with us, pacing us.”
He just nodded, without looking back at me. “Yeah, I can feel it, too,” he said. “Have you seen anything?”
“No,” I answered. “Just felt it.”
“Me too,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s not more hobgoblins, or whatever they are.”
“Doesn’t feel like skinnies, somehow,” I said, though I had no idea how I knew that.
As I spoke, I glanced to one side, and could have sworn that I’d seen a pair of wide, lamp-like eyes watching from around a stalagmite. But as soon as I focused on it, I could see only dimly lit rock and stygian darkness.
I was starting to wonder if this wasn’t just another trick being played by our invisible tormenters, when a new sound echoed through the cavern.
It was a harsh, guttural croaking sound, but it wasn’t like any frog I’d ever heard. I didn’t think it was an animal, either. Leaving aside how deep we were, there had been words in that croak. Words that I knew, even without understanding them, were loaded with malice and vile imprecations.
Soon after that fir
st cry, the green lights ahead of us dimmed. Not as if they were being put out, but rather like a mist or a fog was obscuring them. I could smell something foul, just a whiff. It smelled like burnt tar and other, less wholesome things.
“Get ready,” I called out, my voice echoing weirdly across the cavern, my words returning distorted and strange from the far side. “I think something’s coming.”
The mist was getting closer. It was starting to drift through our already weakened flashlight beams, looking more like black smoke than fog.
Then a warbling, croaking yell went up all around us, and dim, hunched figures came boiling out of the murk, waving spears and strange, hooked swords.
Chapter 19
There had to be at least a hundred of the creatures. That was a rough estimate, arrived at as I pointed my rifle at the closest one, the gold bead barely visible in the dim light, and squeezed the trigger.
The thing had leaped straight at me like a weird cross between a pouncing cat and a jumping bullfrog, and it was barely six feet away when I slammed four hundred five grains of silver-jacketed lead into its chest. It crumpled with a sick, rasping wail, dead before its brain even knew it.
It was so close that I’d gotten a sudden snapshot view of it in the stabbing muzzle flash. It was humanoid, bigger than a skinny, its skin a sort of greenish-gray. It was powerfully muscled and slightly hunchbacked. Its face was a cruel mockery of a human face; as if a man had somehow mixed with a frog. Presuming a frog had teeth and elongated canines. Its eyes were the most disturbing part of it, big as golf balls and gleaming like a cat’s in the blast of flame from my muzzle.
I saw all that in an instant, as much as I might have wished that I hadn’t. I worked the lever, but a second creature was by then too close, stabbing at me with a flint-tipped spear. I knocked the spear aside with my rifle barrel, thumped it in the chest, and pulled the trigger even as the muzzle touched the thing’s hide. The rifle boomed again, blasting the creature backward with a gout of flame and the stench of powder-burned, rubbery flesh. To my horror, it staggered back, fell, then started to get up again, before I shot it once more in the head.