by Peter Nealen
“What lake?” Miller asked.
“There’s an underground lake at the bottom of the main cavern,” I said. “Don’t ask how I know; I just know, okay? The Thing is sleeping at the bottom of it.”
He didn’t question how I knew, but shuddered suddenly. “’That is not dead, that can eternal lie,’” he quoted.
“Trust me, this thing’s uglier than any of Lovecraft’s beasties,” I told him. “And just as scary.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Frank asked again. “We go into the middle of Worms of the Earth Town and have a showdown at high noon, or midnight, or whatever it is down here? Even if we don’t get swarmed by the creepy-crawlies, that thing’s not going to be easy to pin down. And if there are th...two of them?”
He’d almost said, “three of them.” Because, like me, he was afraid that Charlie had been bitten. And just as afraid that in his current mental state, the beleaguered Hunter might not be able to resist the deadly sleep and the allure of the vampire’s curse.
“Then Ray, Father Ignacio, and I take one, and the rest of you take the other one,” I said simply. “Bring it to its knees with holy water, hem it in with crosses, then cut off its head.”
Miller had been searching for his gun, and as he stood up with it in his hand he shuddered again. “I don’t know if I could do that to Karen,” he said softly.
I studied him a moment. He wasn’t looking at me; he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. I suddenly thought I realized why he’d put up with Trudeau’s attitude as much as he had.
He was in love with her. It might not have been requited; in fact, just from what I’d seen, I was almost certain that it hadn’t been. And he might even have been exasperated with himself that he had fallen so hard for a woman that…harsh. But he had. And now he was having to face the idea that he might have to kill her.
“Maybe we don’t have to,” Eryn ventured. She turned to Father Ignacio. “You said that the vampire wasn’t actually dead; that they are kept alive by their patron.”
“By unnatural means, yes,” Father Ignacio replied. “The demons offer to postpone the judgement in return for their service.”
“But the point is that they haven’t actually died,” Eryn pointed out. “They’re still alive, if only barely. Sure, they’re in league with a demon, but while there’s life, there’s hope, isn’t there? Isn’t there a chance that we can bring them back? Get them to renounce the deal they made?”
“It’s thin, but there is a chance, theoretically,” Father Ignacio conceded quietly, and slightly reluctantly. “They have not yet passed out of this life completely, and therefore still have time for redemption. But,” he continued, lifting a hand at the sudden look of hope that lit Miller’s eyes, “it will not be easy. They’re already pretty far gone, just given that they made a deal with the devil in the first place. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but it is highly, highly unlikely.”
“And it’s going to be fighting us the entire time, too,” Ray pointed out.
“But it’s a chance,” Eryn said, locking eyes with Miller. “And we can’t rule it out.”
I traded glances with Father Ignacio. He didn’t think it would work. Neither did I. The more grievous the sin, the harder it becomes to come back from it. And it doesn’t get much more grievous than selling your soul to the devil and willingly becoming a monster, just to put off the inevitable.
But at the same time, Eryn had a point. If there was the faintest hope that either Trudeau or the original vampire could be redeemed, we had to try. We wouldn’t slit our own throats trying, but we had to try.
Sometimes it’s tough being the good guy.
Chapter 22
The Worms kept retreating as we continued up the passageway. When we came back to the junction where we’d gotten sidetracked, they were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even start to think that they’d given up, but seeing a vampire flee in terror from us must have been pretty impactful. They were going to be a lot warier of us.
Strange, how that worked. We’d killed them in job lots and they’d just kept coming. But a single demonstration of a Power that wasn’t even ours had sent them screaming for cover. It said something about them, though nothing that we didn’t really know already.
They stayed away from us as we climbed toward where the passage finally met the main cavern. The voices, however, did not.
“That was really quite impressive back there,” the voice in the dark said in my ear. “Imagine what you could do! You can command a vampire, and it is compelled to obey! That is power! Serious power!”
I only crossed myself, for what felt like the hundredth time. While the owner of the voice was invisible, I got the sudden sense that it flinched. “You don’t have to do that, you know,” it said reasonably. “I’m only trying to help you.”
Without slowing, I slung my rifle and reached into my back pocket for my flask. “What are you doing?” the voice asked.
I unscrewed the cap and splashed a little of the holy water in the general direction that the voice seemed to be coming from. The voice hissed, then went silent.
I didn’t think that anything had necessarily been standing there. The voice was a manifestation of a spirit, after all. But it had worked. Only as I screwed the cap back on the flask and shoved it back in my pocket did I remember a story of St. Teresa of Avila doing something similar, when a demon wouldn’t leave her alone.
We came out into the main cavern. We were most of a mile away from where we’d first entered, at the end of the mine shaft, and where we’d first fled the attacking Worms of the Earth. I could see their greenish fires, much closer now, and reflected in faint glimmers on the still waters of the underground lake, not far away.
We were still wreathed in darkness, though it seemed to me that our lights weren’t quite as suppressed as they had been. They seemed brighter, and reached farther. Against the Worms, that might just be as much of a disadvantage as otherwise; they could see in the dark better than we could, and our lights had to be a blazing beacon, showing where we were. But we had no other choice, so far underground.
The ground was even more humped and uneven than it had been up higher, closer to the mine shaft. Cone-shaped stalagmites and humped, grotesque mounds of flowstone turned the floor of the cavern into a maze or an obstacle course. As we picked our way down the shallow slope leading from the tunnel’s mouth, several times I saw green bale-fires wink out as a rock formation loomed between us and the Worms’ settlement, or camp, or whatever it was.
For the first time, I found that I had a few spare moments to consider the Worms. I knew I’d heard the term before, and they were unmistakably physical, but I couldn’t remember any details.
“Ray?” I whispered. “What are the Worms of the Earth?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead he paused, in the shelter of a bulging stalagmite, peering around it for a glimpse of any of our adversaries. “Nobody really knows,” he said. “There are legends about them going back thousands of years. Some say that they were something like the skinnies, a different strain of hobgoblin, only stronger and meaner. Some say that they were human, once, but retreated underground when even the pagans couldn’t stand their depravities anymore, and that they became warped and twisted after that.” He shrugged, the gesture barely visible in the gloom. “Don’t know that we’ll ever know, really. I’m certainly not going to volunteer for an anthropological expedition to study ‘em.”
I wouldn’t, either. “Does anyone know if that’s normal?” I asked, pointing toward the sickly, greenish fires. “Do they usually congregate like that? Or was the vampire telling the truth when it said that they’d been drawn here by the Thing?”
“I expect it was,” he replied. “Like I said, nobody knows much about ‘em. They don’t appear on the surface very often, and even underground, stories about them are rare. I expect quite a few people think that they’re nothing more than a legend.” He snorted. “I thought they were a tall tale. Never see
n one before, much less suspected that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of ‘em, lurking right under my floor.”
“How will we do this?” Kolya asked, bringing the conversation back to the here and now. “As badly as we have hurt them, and as terrified as they are of Jed now, we are too few to mount frontal attack on camp or colony, or whatever. And there is little chance of avoiding notice.”
“Not to mention the fact that I’m fairly certain that both vampires are in there,” I said. “Or down by the lake.”
“I don’t want to try to take on two vampires at once,” Frank whispered.
“None of us do,” Father Ignacio replied. “One’s going to be hard enough. But how to separate them, especially when the old one can turn to smoke?”
It was a little disheartening, hearing the priest ask that. We’d gotten used to him knowing most of the answers.
I had a sudden idea, though I really, really didn’t like it. I glanced at Miller, who was standing a little behind the rest of us, staring at the green fires of the Worms.
“Trudeau took an immediate interest in Miller,” I pointed out, keeping my voice as quiet as possible. “As much as I hate the idea of using the guy as bait, if he calls out to her, she might come to retrieve him, and then we might corner her. Get her out here, away from the fires and the old vampire.”
What I could see of the others’ expressions looked dubious. “How can we be sure that the old vamp, or even Trudeau, for that matter, won’t still know we’re here waiting?” Ray asked.
“We don’t,” I admitted. “They’ll probably smell an ambush. But the old vamp is cocky. Maybe it’ll let her take a crack at it. Remember the Walker? It was pride that made it challenge us to meet it in Storr’s Hole. From what I’ve seen, this thing’s at least as arrogant.” I shrugged, probably invisible to most of the rest. “It’s a gamble. But it’s the only remotely workable plan I can think of.”
No one had a better idea. I sidled over to Miller.
“Miller,” I said, “I know you don’t like this. I don’t blame you. There’s not much to like. But we need you to call Trudeau. Ask her to come to you. Tell her you want to try to talk things out.”
He looked haunted. “You want me to call her in so that you can kill her,” he said.
“If we have to,” I admitted. “But Eryn’s set on trying to bring her around, get her to reject the deal she made with the demon that turned her into a vampire. So, saying that we want to talk things out is, in fact, the honest truth.” It was just leaving out the fact that we’d have hatchets and really big knives ready to chop her head off if it didn’t work.
But that alone wasn’t enough. “And if she does reject the deal?” Miller asked me, his eyes gleaming in the reflected light, almost feverishly. “If the demon is keeping her alive, doesn’t that mean that telling it to pound sand will kill her?”
Oh, boy. “Listen to me, Miller,” I said, low and urgent. “What she’s going through right now isn’t life, not a life worth living, anyway. She’s going to die. She was doomed as soon as that vampire put its poison in her veins.” I took a deep breath. “Now it’s only a matter of when she dies, and how. All of us do eventually, even those fallen souls that the demons convince that they can become immortal by accepting the vampire’s curse. Sure, she might last a lot longer. But that entire time, she’ll be piling up crime upon crime, deadly sin upon deadly sin, becoming more and more of a puppet to that thing that’s got its talons in her head right now. How much is going to be left by the time death eventually, inevitably claims her? How many people will she have murdered or worse, corrupted, by that time? What chance will she have of ever finding redemption then?”
I wasn’t getting through. I cursed whatever voices in the dark were whispering in Miller’s ear, and wished that I could throttle whoever had been responsible for his training in matters of the spirit early in life.
“I don’t know what to believe,” he groaned, putting his head in his hands. I had to sway back a little to avoid getting flagged by his pistol barrel as the weapon went to his temple. “I don’t even know if I believe in an afterlife! What if this really is all there is? Then, even if she’s a monster, some bit of Karen would survive, at least for a while!”
“That’s the darkness talking, Miller!” Father said from the other side. “Can you hear yourself? She’d have bitten you, drunk your blood, and poisoned you, if Jed hadn’t stopped her! That’s not the partner you thought you knew, and even what part of that thing is still Karen Trudeau is becoming more of a monster with every passing second. You’ve got to let go of this fantasy that she can live happily ever after and let us do what we have to do!”
He groaned again, sinking lower on his knees, until he was almost crouched in the fetal position on the cavern floor.
Finally, with a terrible sob of anguish, he rose, wavering, to his feet. His arms hung listlessly at his sides, his pistol dangling from nerveless fingers. “Karen!” he called out, his voice echoing across the cavern, reverberating back from the far stone walls. Aren…aren…aren! “Can you come out and talk about this? There’s got to be some way that we can fix this, get you back to normal!”
“Why would I want to be normal again, Simon?” she hissed from the darkness. The sound was still coming from the direction of the Worms’ watchfires. “This is more glorious, more liberating, than you can imagine! But I’ll come and talk. I can help you, you know. If you just keep that Horn character away from me for long enough, I can show you all the wonder and the terror of what I’ve become!”
“Horn’s not going to hurt you!” Miller called, his voice strengthening as he hardened to his purpose. “We only want to talk!”
“Of course you do,” she purred. Or at least she tried to. The actual effect was far more sinister than she perhaps intended. Less “sexy purr” and more “witch’s cackle.”
The sound of her voice was circling us now. She had moved more quickly than I’d expected, but that was par for the course with these things, just judging by what I’d seen so far. And she was relatively “young,” compared to the thing that had bitten her. That one was going to be a far, far worse problem.
She appeared suddenly, right in the middle of the small cup in the rock where we were gathered. She was staring at Miller, though I had no doubt that she knew where each one of us was, and would know as soon as we moved a muscle. “What did you want to talk about, Simon?” she asked. “I hope that you’ll join me, you know. The alternative…” her laugh was high and cold and simply evil. “Well, none of you are leaving this cave the same way you entered it.” She turned her head just a little too far around to stare at me with her blood-soaked eyes. “Even you, Horn. As much as I don’t like you, I could offer you eternal life as well.”
“Is that so?” I countered. “And what about your friend’s plan to sacrifice us to the Thing under the Mountain?”
She blinked. That had actually surprised her. She was so lost in the manipulative lies that her patron was whispering to her that she’d apparently forgotten about that part. Then she simpered. It was a truly ugly expression.
“Oh, that,” she whispered. “He never specified how much of your blood he needed. I’m sure he can spare enough to bring you along to join the family.”
While she was still somewhat out of her depth, still adjusting to her new un-life, I knew that the longer this went on, the more dangerous the entire situation became. The other vampire was out there, somewhere, doubtless stalking us, watching and waiting. And Trudeau might not know exactly what she was about, but the demon that was making her what she was certainly did. And that was where things got really dangerous.
As she started to turn back toward Miller, I moved suddenly. She snapped her head back around, baring her fangs. In that moment, Ray struck.
None of us were fast enough to try to grab her, and she was far too strong to hold by physical means. But Ray had his holy water flask in his hand, and as she turned toward me, he splashed several drops of
the sacred water on her, making a great Sign of the Cross with the flask as he did so.
The drops hissed like raindrops on a hot skillet as they struck her. She screamed deafeningly and staggered, falling to her knees as if weighed down by an immense stone. In that moment, Father Ignacio moved.
When she looked up, hate in her crimson eyes, he held that big silver crucifix mere inches from her face. She tried to scrabble backward, hissing and spitting, but ran right into me, and I had my own crucifix held up to her. She recoiled, but Father Ignacio had closed the distance by then, and pressed the silver body of the cross against her forehead.
She went rigid and motionless, even as a horrible, ripping shriek tore itself out of her throat. It went on and on, reverberating across the chamber and further brutalizing my already battered hearing.
“BE SILENT!” Father Ignacio boomed. “I command you, by the authority granted me by the Apostolic Church, as successor of those disciples whom Christ sent out to preach His Word and cast out demons. You shall not speak!” The shriek stopped as if a switch had been flipped.
But while the noise had stopped, the presence of the demonic thing that was keeping Trudeau alive suddenly got more oppressive. The cavern seemed to get darker, or at least the darkness seemed to become solid, somehow, tangible. The temperature began to rise, not unlike what we had experienced in the Bed and Breakfast in Spokane, accompanied by a choking sulfur smell. And I suddenly began to feel like my head was in a vise, being slowly but inexorably squeezed. The pressure mounted, a spike of pain going through my skull, and I felt a hot drop of what had to be blood suddenly run out of my nose.
“Cease!” Father Ignacio roared. “The Holy Name compels you! Our business is with the girl, not with you! Depart!” But while the temperature dropped an iota, and my headache eased somewhat, the demonic presence did not go away.
I silently prayed a Pater Noster. Just as I finished, there was suddenly another presence there. It was invisible, but the air seemed to suddenly crackle with power. It was like standing near an approaching thunderstorm. The heat, the stench, and the awful pressure vanished.