by Wile E Young
Lights shined through the small copse of trees, shadows playing merry havoc with my old eyes. I held my breath, worried that whoever manned this backwoods armada would hear the slightest noise.
The lights disappeared, and Luc gripped my shoulder in a tight grip and reassuring smile that I could see even in the dark.
The engines still sounded close when they were cut; silence except for the splashing wake echoing over the water. Luc and I stood up slowly, careful not to readjust our weight in case the ancient blind groaned in protest.
Maybe seventy yards away the boats had come to a rest; there were four splashes as cheap forty-pound anchors were tossed over the sides, sinking into the depths. I couldn’t make out the occupants. I could hear a lot of voices, but with the wind and the still splashing wake I couldn’t make out any that I recognized.
I saw the silhouette of a man step to the edge of the spotlight; every single beam had been focused on one spot in the water. Something was said that I couldn’t make out, and then he raised something in his hand and hit it.
Clang… the toll of a bell deep and warbling echoed across the water… clang… again… clang… rhythmically over and over.
I had been to enough banks and restaurants to know a service bell when I saw one… just wasn’t prepared for the unsettling notes that warped over the waves.
“My Mom told me stories… but I just… I never thought I would be chosen!” The voice was excited, sultry, could have easily sold sins to saints.
Or served my pancakes to me most mornings.
My heart sank, and my old bones rattled as my knees shook. I gripped the bar tight as Luc whispered in my ear, “Steady, old man.”
I had known Vicky for a long time; she and Sammie Jo had been thick as thieves. The errant thought and suspicion creeped into my head; Luc said that my daughter had been led astray. Now I was sure that I had found the shepherd.
My grief flared, and my left hand sought my hunting rifle lying on the shelf in front of me. I was a decent marksman despite my years and it would be so easy. Little squeeze of the trigger, a temporary clap of thunder and a spray of blood sinking down into the muddy water.
Luc’s hand gripped mine and he shook his head slowly. “There will be another time,” he hissed. I tried to shrug him off and bring the weapon up to murder as many of these duplicitous stains as I could.
“Just wait, Grady… just wait.” The tension between my arm and his strained my muscles as he met my glare with his own. The fight went out of me with a sigh and I released the weapon.
The bell tones had faded and even the voices on the boats had waned into silence.
I had swam a lot when I was younger. When you’re a kid you aren’t too worried about the river; there is no fear of anything because you think you’re going to go on forever. Then you get older and you realize that feeling of something bigger brushing against the bottom of your foot might not be your imagination.
That’s the same feeling I had sitting in that old duck blind.
Luc seemed to have the same feeling as I saw his knuckles whiten on the rusty scaffolding. In the spotlight I saw something brown rise slowly out of the water, straightening until its full body was on display.
It hurt my eyes and I gritted my teeth trying to keep the bile in my throat from erupting. “Say your prayers, Grady Pope,” Luc whispered from beside me as he grasped the mojo bag and began muttering blessings and quoting psalms as he stared ahead. I mimicked the motion and immediately felt the bile drop in the back of my throat. That scratching against the white of my eyes faded; magic at its finest I suppose.
Hesitantly I glanced back out over the waters; my eyes didn’t feel like they would boil from my head as I received my first glance of the Deep Folk, their oldest and most terrible form.
It was tall, maybe ten feet or more. The muscles rippled beneath an armor of scales that were occasionally cracked, revealing an oozing interior, dripping diseased-looking pus back into the river. Its face was a near copy of the one from the book; it jutted out from a gilled neck with a bone-like hardness ending in a guillotine-like plate of teeth inside that nearly beaked mouth. More dinosaur than fish to my eyes, its chest was bare except for a small sling that kept a satchel close to its hip that looked like it had been woven from moss. A wickedly tipped spear made from rock and marsh bark was held in its right hand, its fused flesh wrapped tightly around the shaft of wood.
More of them appeared from the waves, fairly uniform in appearance but for the coloring of their scales and the condition of their bodies.
It seemed like the Deep Folk wanted to put their best first. Stunted arms, superfluous eyes, missing teeth, smaller size… traits that didn’t mesh with the powerful warriors that were illuminated in the spotlight.
“Now that’s interesting…” Luc whispered as he stared at the parade of monsters. “Never seen all the deformed ones.”
The ten-foot tall monstrosity that seemed to be their leader strode towards the pontoon barge, a small wake forming as his legs sloshed through the water.
The silhouette of a man knelt at the edge of the lights. “Great Vhi’octa, we praise you at the coming of the tide and the receding of the shore.”
The voice added a double punch to my gut; it was gruff and course and could have only belonged to Earl Ray. Should have known that a man I suspected of beating his wife would be part of this.
“As we have bargained since the Robichaudes fell, we bring you the twin sacrifices under the moon… a gift of food and a gift of flesh.”
A chorus of croaking warbles rent the air like the screeches of demonic warthogs, a frightening cacophony that definitely made folks turn over in their beds, moaning at unbidden nightmares.
The monsters were pleased.
There was a gasping grunt and then a pained scream. Another voice I recognized, but this one was afraid.
They dragged Gideon Whyte up from the back of the boat. Even from the distance and darkness I could tell that he was broken, dragged along by two men that I couldn’t make out. The young man weakly raised his head and recoiled at the sight of the thing.
“Don’t struggle, sugar. We serve the gods our bodies and are sacred to them.” Vicky leaned down and kissed Gideon’s head, causing him to struggle violently to get away from her lips. I thought I heard him try to say something only for it to come out in a mangled groan of pain.
Earl Ray stepped back into the bow as the two men dropped Gideon at the edge of the boat.
“I can’t do nothing!” I hissed, reaching for the gun again.
“You have to. There is more at stake than one man’s life… it’ll be quick for him.”
Fuck that.
I shrugged off his hand and grimly commanded him to get down to the boat. Then I started firing.
The first shot took the big one through the pectoral muscle, right over where a heart should be. There was a bright spray of silvery red blood and a rumbling groan of pain as the .308 tore through the loathsome thing’s flesh and stained the water with its blood.
Never had some well-deserved payback felt so good.
There was a cacophony of croaking howls along with shouts from the cultists, wondering where the shot had come from.
I fired again, making sure to aim at one of the people on the boats. He went down in a spray of blood tumbling off the barge into the water. A few of the stunted deformed Deep Folk dove towards the new corpse and greedily sucked him under the waves.
Luc flung himself into the 175 and began throwing off the thatch and cypress we had barely disguised it with.
“Get to Gideon; get him out of here!” I roared as I fired another shot at one of the stunted Deep Folk now barreling through the water towards us.
“You’re a brave fool, Grady Pope!” Luc shouted back as he keyed the engine and brought the boat motor to life.
I laughed merrily, I was going to die here and I knew it, but damn if my frustrations, my fear, everything that I had bottled through the past few day
s exploded in a fury of blood and scale.
Luc threw the boat in reverse just as one of the Deep Folk, a smaller one with a useless vestigial arm, reached the copse of trees. The Cajun threw a hand towards one of the trees and shouted something that I couldn’t hear over the inhuman cries and boat engines. There was a splitting crack as one of the limbs shattered and fell. The creature looked up, momentarily confused before the jagged edge of the shattered branch pierced its bulbous black eye in a shower of blood. The beast howled in agony as it clawed at its eye with its single stumpy arm, diving back into the water and leaving a black smudge on top of the dark water.
I picked up the shotgun; no use firing a rifle when they were practically on top of me.
Luc sped awaym angling wide and heading for the boats that were shouting encouragement to their fiendish masters; hopefully whatever juju he could muster was good enough protection since he hadn’t bothered to take a weapon.
The first of the croaking and howling monstrosities reached the bottom of the blind and met with a 20-gauge shot. Its body fell back twitching as its deformed brothers fell on him with glee. The smoking shell went rolling across the floor as I pumped another one into the chamber.
A massive hand came shattering through the thatch and cypress, shelves splintering in two. I screamed as it closed around my arm and tugged. The grip made me lose my balance and fall through the hole, barely missing the docking planks and hitting the water hard.
I floundered, trying to get my bearings. The shotgun was lost, ripped from hands as the stunted and deformed fish people swarmed me.
Death should have been instantaneous, but instead it was like they were dragging me down to the bottom. My chest was burning desperate for air. I thought it was the moon glowing up above me, visible even through the murk. Then a shadow passed over it and I lost consciousness.
Chapter Seventeen
I didn’t expect to wake up.
Nightmares filled my mind in that dark crevasse of sleep, images of malformed and disgusting Deep Folk bulging and discharging their filthy offspring. Lincoln strode among them, his head held high. His teeth had become pointed and his skin pulsing red scales. Part monster, but he still looked noticeably like a man; he would reach down and pluck one the squirming deformed infants from the pile of writhing newborns. Then he’d rip it open with those needle teeth, ignoring the plaintive mewling of the baby until it stopped squirming in his mouth.
A nightmare that played on repeat until I woke up in total blackness.
The earthen smell was almost overpowering. Something tickled my face and I recoiled, unable to see what it was. The texture in my trembling hand felt like roots.
I breathed out a sigh of relief and fell backward, feeling a hard mixture of dirt and stone. My clothes were wet. Couldn’t have been out of the water for very long judging by the dampness, but in the darkness I had no idea where I was.
It was cold and underground, that much I could tell. But that could have been a dozen places that I knew of and probably hundreds that I didn’t.
My memories came flooding back and I remembered what I had seen and what exactly had taken me into the water. I fumbled around in my pocket looking for anything: lose change, a .22 bullet I hadn’t bothered to remove, and my lighter…
It might has well have been fire from God. I pulled it out of my pocket and flicked it, trying to get it to light and barely making a few sparks that failed to ignite the butane.
Fumbling in the darkness, those years of scout training coming back, I felt the wall behind me until I found stone. Vigorously I began striking the flint wheel against the stone, attempting to dry it off. My hands began to go numb, and by the time I thought it could work I could barely feel my extremities. My joints ached as I worked my fingers to try to get the blood flowing through them again, only flicking the lighter when I was sure I could ignite the flame. Damn age, catching up hard.
The butane ignited, and I laughed in triumph, the small flame chasing away the darkness.
I let my eyes adjust. It looked like I was in a small room or cave. Ancient wooden planks formed a door on the far side of the room. Roots dangled from overhead, tiny rivulets of water running off their dangling tendrils and down the soggy earthen wall.
I tried to stand up, wincing. My legs were sore and I reached out to steady myself and recoiled as my hand sunk into the muddy wall. My hand was caked with clay so black that it looked more like worm guts than wet soil; I wiped the chunks on my pants and tried to walk towards the door.
The floor sucked at my boots each step, making a disgusting squishing sound that reminded me of stepping on food that had fallen off my dinner table. I tried to ignore it, making my way to the door and pushing myself out into the darkness.
Nearly toppled into the abyss if I hadn’t seen it drop off.
I was at the edge of a pit that ran as far as my meager light could see in both directions, a well-worn path full of loathsome foot prints, a heavy pattering like rainfall that I could barely make out from a tidal wave’s worth of dripping water falling from above.
Left or right? Both sides looked nearly identical, thought I could make out the makings of another door off to my right. Fear gripped my chest as I began hesitantly trotting the path. Pop… pop… pop… my struggling steps sounded like one of those old nature documentaries where they over exaggerate the octopus sucker sounds.
Over the edge of the path and down in that vast darkness I thought I heard something roar. I froze in place and waited to see if some monster was coming to feast.
Nothing came of it, but the thought remained: why wasn’t I dead?
It was a door that I had seen, a rotted slanted roof jutting out of the wall like the mud had swallowed it up. If there was anyone inside they should have been able to see the flickering glow of my lighter, but I looked inside nonetheless.
More of the wet, muddy floor, but there was a stone altar. I had spent enough time on my knees down at the front of the church to recognize what it was. Small humanlike idols and trinkets of gold adorned it, a crude carving of something I couldn’t rightly describe… all misshapen and wrong.
My eyes itched to look at it and I had to turn away. I reflexively grabbed for the mojo bag around my neck and discovered that it was missing. Not surprising; these things hadn’t seemed too keen on anything that Luc had peddled.
I took a step back, intending on continuing along the path when my foot slipped on a rock buried in the mud. Didn’t even have time to yelp in surprise before I was tumbling over the edge.
I kept a tight grip on my lighter as I hit the water below, submerged in blackness that cloyed at my mouth and nostrils as I swam up gasping for air.
I couldn’t see anything in the blackness, but I felt water splashing across my face like a rain shower. My feet weren’t touching bottom and I closed my eyes, treading water and trying to calm my nerves. There was nothing there, just had to find an edge… the wall hadn’t been that far away.
I swam to my right, reaching out for the wall and was rewarded when I felt my feet touch bottom. Relief flooded through me as I climbed out of the pool and laid on my side, trying to catch my breath. My heart felt like it was about to explode out of my chest.
It had just started thumping normally when I saw the blue glow. The light was coming from under the water in front of me. Twin points in the ever-present blackness. Didn’t like when things came in twos; old memories of alligator eyes reflected in my spotlight came back and I tried to scramble quickly to my feet.
I was hurting. Hadn’t had this much physical exertion in a long time, this alternative relief, fear, and adrenaline probably aging whatever years I had left out of me.
The thing came sloshing out of the water. It just kept coming, a ten-foot monstrosity that was hunched over and moved with a scraping limp. A gigantic wooden stick was held in its hand that it tapped against the mud.
This one wasn’t like the rest. It didn’t have scales as much as smooth skin. Its face was scarr
ed a pair of whiskers hanging down from its cheeks, though one had been torn in half. Reminded me of the catfish I had hauled up from time to time.
The eyes though. I stared in fascinated horror at the twin things growing from them. Two twin worms were growing straight from its near useless eyes, glowing an almost neon blue.
The mud sucked at my foot as I stepped further to the left.
The creature growled low and began looking around, craning its head back and forth.
It was blind.
I kept virtually still, not daring to question my good fortune as the monstrosity sniffed the air, sharp webbed fingers scratching around its eyes.
My eyes were watering; the pain had started low behind my eyes and had grown to fever pitch. It felt like someone was scraping the back of them with a thorn bush.
I didn’t blink, didn’t move, and tried not to think as I gritted my teeth against the pain and tried to keep my mind from spiraling off into insanity. The pain was almost unbearable.
The Deep Folk waited, probably wondering if I was going to make a move. Then it grunted and began moving off. I watched as long as I could until it ducked into a crevasse and disappeared.
I fell to the ground, mud splattering against my knees as I desperately began splashing water in my eyes, trying to alleviate the burning sensation.
Couldn’t let the light disappear…
I could still see the blue light shining but it was swiftly fading. I sprinted, barely making it to the rock entrance before the glowing light disappeared completely. My eyes were blurry, but I could still make out the shape of the revolting thing hunched and waddling down the passage.
I could feel warmth running down my cheeks and I dabbed at them, expecting to wipe away tears.
My vision may have been blurry and phosphorescent glow barely illuminating anything, but the dark smudges on my fingers weren’t tears, my own covered my hands, I was bleeding from my eyes.
I limped forward as quietly as I could, the sucking mud giving way to a pathway of stone.