“So what are you expecting to find up here, besides Isaac?” Rich asked.
“I don’t know,” Sidney answered, stepping up onto a more solid ridge and reaching back to help Cody up. “Isaac appears to be drawn to the bad radio, whatever that is.”
“And you think it’s up here somewhere? In the caves?” Rich asked.
“Can you think of any better place to hide?”
“Do you seriously think that someone’s doing this on purpose?”
Sidney was already on the move again. “I don’t know what to think,” she said breathlessly.
“I could wrap my brain around this being some kind of disease, but that shit is just too much,” Rich said with a shake of his head.
“What I don’t get is why?” Cody asked. “If what you suspect is true . . . that there’s some kind of signal being broadcast to make animals go crazy . . . why? What’s the purpose?”
Sidney didn’t have an answer and didn’t even want to risk trying to come up with one. She was certain that a lot of people had died on the island during the last several hours, and if what had caused their deaths was something intentional . . .
Maybe it was as simple as that.
Maybe it was all about death.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
They found Isaac kneeling beside the chain-link fence that had been placed before one of the cave entrances. He was moaning, crying, and mumbling to himself, hands holding on to the fence, face pressed to the links, unable to go any farther.
“Isaac,” Sidney said as she carefully approached him. “We were worried about you, bud.”
Snowy ran over to the young man, sniffing at his face before giving him a kiss and covering his cheek with slobber. Isaac actually looked stunned, his red-rimmed eyes going wide with shock.
Sidney grabbed the dog and pulled her back, just in case.
“She kissed me,” Isaac said, the glazed look in his eyes slowly seeming to dissipate.
“She certainly did,” Sidney said, still holding on to the animal. “Are you okay, Isaac?”
He seemed to think about that for a minute before answering. “Yes. Right now I’m okay.” He turned his attention back to the cave opening beyond the fence. “But I don’t know for how long.”
“Is it in there?” Rich asked as he squatted beside Isaac and tried to see into the cave. “What’s causing the problems on the island, is it in there, Isaac?”
The young man seemed confused, his hand again fluttering around his ears. She could see the bloody scratches that he’d dug in the sides of his face.
“It’s quiet,” Isaac said. “Right now it’s quiet . . . but I . . . I can still feel it . . . close . . . so very, very close.” His voice had dropped to a whisper as he looked through the holes in the chain link.
“I’m not sure about this,” Rich said, standing up and backing away from the fence toward Sidney.
“Aren’t you the least bit curious?” Sidney asked, peering into the cave mouth.
“Yeah, but . . .”
“How do we get in?” Cody asked, walking closer to the fence to inspect it. It had been bolted to the rock on either side of the cave entrance, leaving only a small opening at the top. “I guess we could climb.”
He wrapped his fingers through the holes of the chain link and started to look for a foothold for his boot when Isaac lost it.
He jumped to his feet with something that sounded more like a roar than a scream, grabbed hold of the fence in both hands, and pulled. Cody leaped out of the way, and Sidney stumbled back, nearly tumbling from the ledge as her neighbor unleashed his fury upon the fence, actually managing to rip the obstruction from where it had been bolted and tossing it into the woods below.
They were all frozen, unsure of how to react—unsure of how Isaac was going to act.
He looked at Sidney, breathing heavily, before turning and plunging into the darkness of the cave.
She immediately began to follow, both Rich and Cody reaching out to stop her.
“You can’t be serious,” Rich said.
“Don’t you think we should have some sort of plan before—”
“How about we go in and bring Isaac out,” Sidney said, shrugging off their hands. “Anything else, we’ll just have to figure out as it happens.”
She didn’t say anything more, not wanting the courage that came with this latest adrenaline surge to pass before she was able to act.
The first thing that she noticed as she entered the cave was the temperature. Even after all this time—
It was as cold as she remembered.
* * *
The last place Sidney wanted to be was inside the pirate cave.
But something drew her forward.
She could hear breathing, the shuffling of feet upon rock, and the occasional whimper from the darkness somewhere ahead of her.
Her phone’s charge was low, but she had to see where she was and turned on the light to illuminate her surroundings.
The cave was just as she remembered it: cold and damp, showing signs that civilization had stopped by for a party or two. The phrase “Shit happens” was spray-painted on a nearby wall, and at the moment she couldn’t have agreed more. An empty vodka bottle and some rusting beer cans littered the floor along with some old candy wrappers. It didn’t appear that anyone—anything—had been inside the cave recently.
Rich and Cody were suddenly beside her, holding up their phones as well. Snowy sniffed the piles of trash, making soft mewling sounds that told Sidney she had caught wind of something that made her nervous. She reached out and ran her fingers across the dog’s white flank. Snowy leaned in to her, nuzzling her hand nervously.
“It’s all right, girl,” she said softly, wanting to reassure herself as much as her dog.
She wasn’t doing that great of a job.
“Are you sure about this?” Cody asked, shining the light from his phone to the back of the cave where it curved downward into darkness.
Her free hand slipped to her belt, where her fingers found the wooden handle of her knife. “Yeah, but let’s keep moving before I change my mind.”
“You know, it’s perfectly all right to change your mind,” Rich offered. “In fact, it says you’ve put a lot of thought into a particular topic and—”
“Shut up, Rich,” she and Cody said in unison. They looked at each other in the sickly glow from the phones and briefly smiled before turning away.
Not wanting to waste the battery, Sidney turned off her phone’s light. Cautiously she approached the back of the cave, practically pulled by the mystery of what she might find. To say that she wasn’t terrified would have been absolute crap; she doubted that she’d ever been so afraid, other than after learning of her dad’s stroke, but this was different. This fear had substance—it had teeth—and if she wasn’t careful, it would most definitely kill her.
She moved as close to the curving cave wall as she could, gradually following it around the corner, preparing for even thicker darkness as she moved away from the meager light of the cave’s entrance. But there was no need.
A soft light glowed from somewhere in the distance.
She stopped. She couldn’t remember if Isaac had a phone with him or not. She watched the light as it seemed to pulse, reminding her strangely of the beating of a heart.
“Where’s that coming from?” Cody asked very close to her ear, making her jump.
She shook her head to let him know that she had no idea.
Rich peered around them, swallowing nervously. Snowy stood beside him, gazing at the throbbing light as if hypnotized by it.
She felt Cody’s eyes on her, a silent question of whether or not they should go on. The answer was obvious, at least to her, and she headed down the tunnel passage, careful not to step on any of the loose stones that littered the descending floor. She sensed Snowy coming up alongside her and put her hand down to slow the dog’s progress. She did not want her getting anywhere before them.
They were dra
wn toward the pulse, the gradual curve of the tunnel passage promising revelation somewhere up ahead.
Sidney hadn’t known that the cave was so large and went so far back into the cliffs. No wonder town authorities wanted to keep people out. She could just imagine the danger of somebody getting lost or injured within the vast cave system.
The passage was becoming noticeably wider, and the greenish-tinged light brighter, signaling that they were close.
But to what she did not know.
The rocky floor of the passage dipped dramatically, leading into what appeared to be a cavern, and hopefully the answers to what had happened in Benediction.
And to the mystery of the bad radio.
She moved even quicker down the natural corridor, the intensity of her curiosity allowing her to shuck off the blanket of exhaustion and giving her a second wind.
The strands of cobwebs that stretched across the passage tickled her face, causing her to recoil in disgust. Sidney stepped back, bumping into Cody and Rich behind her as she wiped the gossamer threads from her hair and the front of her clothes.
Snowy started to bark crazily then.
Something quite large skittered across the ceiling toward them, lowering itself down on thick, silken strands to block their way.
“Oh God,” she heard Rich say behind her.
Her own voice had been stolen away by the shocking sight.
At first glance, in the shifting gloom and eerie pulsing light, she thought it was a cat, but then she noticed the number of legs was all wrong. It hissed at them, but she still couldn’t figure out what it was, even as it crawled closer across the rocks.
She took her phone out and lit up the corridor for a better look and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. It certainly had aspects of a tabby—the orange-striped fur, with large white paws—but also very noticeable characteristics of a spider. Long, spindly insect legs protruded from its side covered in thick black hairs. It also had multiple sets of green, bulging eyes, as well as a swollen, rounded abdomen from which the thick webbing that crisscrossed the cave corridor was emitted. The animal was like something out of the worst of nightmares, two completely different species crammed together to form something very unnatural.
The monster advanced on them, moving awkwardly as if it was still getting used to the horrible absurdity of its body. Sidney could do nothing but watch as it skittered over the rocks, screaming as razor-sharp pincers shot from its mouth.
Cody pushed Sidney aside and went for the hellish animal, pinning its cat-spider body to the floor of the corridor with his makeshift spear. The monster shrieked in pain, its multiple, spindly limbs clawing at the ground as it attempted to free itself. Snowy surged at the thing, her jaws snapping menacingly. The monster continued to yowl, its pincers dripping venom as they snapped, streams of liquid webbing covering the floor of the passage.
Sidney couldn’t stand the sounds of its cries and removed the knife from her belt loop. She stabbed down with the blade, catching the monstrous cat’s forehead and penetrating its skull. Its body trembled and thrashed all the harder, actually almost succeeding in freeing itself before it went still.
“What the hell is that thing?” Rich asked, his voice trembling with fear as Cody pulled his spear from the body with a horrible squelching sound. “That isn’t right . . . that isn’t right at all.”
A watchdog, Sidney immediately thought, having no idea where the bizarre idea had originated but feeling like it might be right.
“Y’know what?” Rich continued, his words spilling from his mouth like vomit. “I draw the line at monsters. I draw the freakin’ line at spider-cats or whatever the hell that is.”
Sidney’s mind was on fire, and she found herself wondering if this was somehow the next step. At first it was the individual life forms, and then those life forms merging to form one dangerous single organism, and now this—an amalgam of different kinds of animal life.
She squatted down next to the thing to examine it.
“Sid, I wouldn’t get too close,” Cody warned.
“It’s dead,” she said, checking out the twisted thing’s body. Yes, there was most certainly spider and cat there, but on closer inspection she saw signs of other life forms as well. It had a thick shell covering parts of its body and feathers growing the length of its spine.
“What could have caused something like this?” Cody asked.
She looked up from the corpse of the impossible animal and down the length of the tunnel that still glowed with the eerie, throbbing light.
“I think we’re going to find out,” she said.
“Great,” Rich said. “Just great.”
The strange light up ahead was thrumming faster as if attuned somehow to the beating of her heart, and she found herself again proceeding down the descending stone corridor. She was careful this time, eyes scanning the walls of the passage for signs of webbing or anything that might do her and her friends harm.
But there was nothing to hold them back, and she charged to the end of the natural stone passage into the chamber of the pulsating green light. She tightly clutched her knife as she found herself standing upon a ledge, looking down into the rounded sunken chamber.
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. Not even the events of the last hours. Her brain always searched for the rational, but what she saw now was in no way rational. What was below her on the cavern floor was totally, inexplicably . . .
Unnatural.
Every instinct, every primitive part of her, was screaming for her to run, to turn around, grab her friends, and run as fast and as far away as they could.
It rested within a nest of rock.
Sidney searched for the proper words as she looked at it, settling on something that was merely adequate, for there had never been anything, as far as she knew, like this before.
Its flesh was pale, translucent, pulsing with an eerie inner light.
She felt herself drawn closer, moving to the edge of the rock ledge to gaze down at the sight that filled her with such horror and, she hated to admit it, fascination.
It was practically screaming, Come look at me.
Perhaps it was the friends at her back that gave her this courage to confront the unknown, or perhaps it was just stupidity, but Sidney squatted at the edge of the cliff and peered down into what was nestled in the bowl of the cave.
It looked like some sort of enormous internal organ. Her thoughts immediately flashed back to the countless videos of surgeries she’d watched throughout the years at the clinic. Its gelatinous surface was covered in thick, hairlike tendrils. The long black appendages reached out, swaying in the air like the tendrils of some sort of undersea life form moved by the current, what looked to be flashes of electricity crackling from the tips of each of the hairs. Electrical flashes discharged into the ether.
“I . . . I think we should go,” whispered a voice that wrenched her from her current reality. She turned to look at a terrified Cody, wide eyed and sickly looking in the greenish glow emitted by the organism below. Rich furiously nodded in agreement. Snowy looked skittish as well, ready to bolt, the thick hair on the back of her neck and running along her spine standing on end.
Sidney knew they were right. This was far too much for them to comprehend, never mind deal with, but they needed to find their friend.
“We have to find Isaac,” she said, turning back for one last look, her eyes taking in the secrets of the underground chamber. Thick cords of flesh, like roots, spread out from beneath the organism across the rocky floor to flow up the sides of the damp stone walls. From this network of veins, large, fleshy sacks like strange clusters of perverted fruit dangled down from the ceiling.
The sacks moved, the skin languidly stretching taut as something shifted within.
“Sidney, please,” she heard Cody say. His voice was trembling. “I’m really, really scared and—”
Isaac’s scream cut through the silence of the
cave like a knife.
Sidney froze as her eyes searched for her friend. She found him at the far end of the cavern, wedged deeply into a corner, cowering and crying as something attacked him.
“We’ve got to do something,” she said, looking for a way down onto the chamber floor.
“Are you nuts?” Rich asked, already moving to go. “We need to get the hell out of here and tell somebody about—”
Isaac cried out again, and she was on the move.
“Sidney, no!” Cody hissed.
She climbed over the edge of the cliff, finding enough hand- and footholds in the rock to allow her to begin to descend to the cave floor without too much trouble.
Cody watched her with absolute panic.
“She’s going to get us killed—or worse,” she heard Rich say, and she couldn’t say that he was wrong, but she couldn’t leave her friend.
She wasn’t too far from the floor of the chamber when a section of the rock face crumbled away beneath her foot. She lost her hold and fell from the wall.
“Sidney!” Cody screamed.
Snowy had started to bark like crazy, the sound reverberating throughout the chamber.
So much for stealth, she thought just before landing on her back. She lay there stunned for a moment, looking up at the cave ceiling going in and out of focus, noticing the multiple fleshy sacks of varying sizes hanging above her, throbbing with life.
She managed to push herself up, rolling onto her side and crawling to her feet. Her spine felt bruised, but she didn’t think she was hurt in any other way as she started across to where she’d seen her friend.
Isaac had been wedged into a corner, and one of the thick, fleshy roots that emerged from beneath the organism had attached itself to his lower half, a viscous liquid flowing from the veined appendage to cover him. Taking in the disturbing sight, she believed she now understood the origins of the sacklike objects that hung around them and found herself wondering what the others contained.
Isaac had gone eerily silent, the liquid skin solidifying as it flowed onto his body, cocooning him.
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