by Otto Penzler
There was a curious emphasis on the last word. Ann twisted to him. “Living! Then there was . . .”
A veil dropped across the glitter of his eyes. His free hand made a curious gesture, as if he were pushing something away from him, something revolting. “Never mind that.” His lips seemed to move not at all. “It isn’t—important.” Then, “Mr. Travers was not there. But I don’t understand—you said you saw him in a flivver, saw someone taking him down to the old town?”
“Yes.” The monosyllable hissed from between Ann’s compressed lips, as she fought to expel a grisly speculation from the maelstrom of her mind. “I heard it, saw it. But it disappeared down there—as though it were—something unreal.” They had reached the barracks door. She twisted to Kane, fear of the crawlers forgotten in a greater fear. “But you must have seen it, too! It had to pass you.
“No.” A muscle twitched in his hollow cheek. “No. I saw nothing. Nothing passed me.” The response dripped dully into a crystal sphere of heatlessness that seemed suddenly to enclose the girl. “Nothing. No one.”
A shadow moved out in the desert, sand slithered. Kane’s pupils flickered to it. His hand darted to the doorknob—and the portal swung open effortlessly. But it had been locked—locked—minutes before!
He shouldered Ann through, came into the dark hallway himself and had the barrier shut in one smooth flow of movement. Red worms of fear crawled in his eyes.
“That’s better,” he breathed. A pale, eerie luminance sifted in through the window Ann had smashed, flowed over him, showed a toothy smile that was palpably forced on his narrow face. “Better. But where’s the lantern?”
Ann jerked a pointing hand to it, where it had guttered out. “I—dropped it.”
Kane flashed a curious glance at her, then at the lantern. From that to the smashed window. “Have to get that fixed,” he snapped. “At once.”
Then he was gone!
THE GIRL WAS startled. Then she realized that as she automatically had followed the direction of his glance he had soundlessly taken the one necessary step into the foreman’s office, had closed its door. She heard his footsteps moving about, heard the rasp of a pulled-out drawer, heard a dull thud as if something heavy had dropped. Then there was no sound in there, no sound at all. . . .
Minutes dragged past as Ann stared with widened eyes at the blank wood. Coils seemed to tighten about her, gelid coils of nameless dread. Certainty grew upon her that something had happened to Kane in there—something that all the time he had feared. It was her fault. Hers! In breaking the window to gain exit she had breached his defenses, had made a way for something to enter—something that had lurked in the darkness of that room. . . .
She backed, inch by slow inch, till she felt the outer door pressing against her. Her hand lifted behind her, her fingers found and closed about the knob. She turned it, pushed, her apprehensive gaze still fixed ahead.
A faint breath of air stirred in through the slitted opening she had made, and with it came a vague, hissing sound. The whispering voice of the desert? Or the sound of the crawlers, closing in? Panic scorched her breast, was a living flame in her brain. She pulled to the door, shot its bolt with shaking, bloodless fingers. Fearful, horribly fearful as she was of what might lie in the secret silence of the room from whose entrance her gaze had never wavered, she was more terrified still of the creeping things she knew prowled the sands. She dared not go out there again. She dared not stay here, not knowing with what peril she was housed.
Ann whimpered, far back in her throat. She could not remain forever rigid in the grip of an icy fear. She must—do something—or in minutes she would—go mad.
There was no sound in the darkly brooding barracks. No movement. There couldn’t be anything, living, in there. She must know what had happened to Kane. At all costs she must know. Or—give herself over to gibbering madness.
She forced unwilling limbs across the narrow corridor. Its nail-handle was hot to her frigid clutch. The door came creakingly open. Her body blocked light from the obscurity within, but something lumped on the floor ahead, a shapeless something that was fearfully still. Ann fought herself over that dread threshold, into the gloom. . . .
A shadow came alive, swooped down on her, engulfed her! Not a shadow, but cloth, black cloth enveloping her, smothering her, clamping her threshing arms, her flailing legs, clamping tight and holding her immobile. She was being lifted from her feet, was being carried off. And through the thick, blinding folds of the shrouding fabric a laugh sounded, a hollow mocking laugh, the laugh that she had heard while a battered flivver had chugged past with Bob, with her limp and broken husband.
CHAPTER FIVE
DESPAIR UNDERGROUND
Ann could fight no longer. Bruised, battered, her soft flesh torn, her brain a whirl of agony and terror, she sagged, strengthless, flaccid. Consciousness shrank to a minute spark in the vast, dark limbo of her fear. Terror piled on terror, fear on fear, had brought her at last to that ultimate point where her distracted mind must find refuge within an enclave of numbed, despairing acceptance of horror or be wholly shattered.
She was only dimly aware that the arms encircling the bundle they had made of her were so powerful that they handled her weight with utter ease. Only vaguely did she feel shambling, level progress. It did not matter now what became of her, now that Bob was dead. . . .
But she did not know that Bob was dead. Perhaps he was still alive. Perhaps she was being taken to him now, to the place where he had been taken. Hope stirred within her—a faint thread of pitiful hope that again she might be near him, might see his face, might for an instant press her lips to his dear mouth before she died. But was it to death she was being borne? To merciful death?
And once more she was awake to ineffable fear, to grueling terror. If that which was carrying her off, human or ghoul, desired only death of her, he could easily have killed her in the same unguarded moment that he had overcome her. He had not. Why?
Neither this searing, dreadful query nor the faint hope that preceded it was destined yet to be answered. Quite suddenly Ann felt herself deposited on some soft, high pallet. A slow chuckle came muted to her ears, and the shambling footfalls faded away. Then silence enfolded her once more, and helpless dread.
The girl lay lax, straining to catch some murmur of sound. She heard only the pud, pud of her own pulse. Had her captor gone off? Was whatever doom that lay in store for her postponed?
Ann chanced tentative movement, held her breath as she waited for its effect. Nothing happened. Strangely, this was more frightening than a heavy-handed rebuke, a threatening voice, would have been. She was alone. He had left her alone. How sure he must be of his power to have done that, of the impossibility of her rescue!
Rescue! Who was there to rescue her? Kane? Haldon Kane lay dead on the office floor. She had seen him, had seen in the gloom a mound of blacker black that must have been he, lying lifeless.
Even in her extremity of dread, Ann found time to regret her suspicions of the man, her certainty that it had been he who had vanished with Bob into the ghost town, that he was the master of the creepers. She realized now that the crawling fear she had felt in his presence had been the contagion of his fear. The man had been afraid, had been as terror-stricken as those who had careened in mad flight from this doomed hollow in the desert. But he had remained, faithful to his charge—had remained here to guard the mine for herself and Bob and had met the death he feared in doing so.
WHAT WAS THAT sound? During interminable minutes Ann had tossed, had struggled unavailingly to free herself of the muffling fabric which held her rigid, had twisted, jerked, fought until sheer exhaustion had forced her to quit. Then for an endless time she had lain quiescent, gathering strength to struggle again. . . .
It was close at hand—the slow slither of a heavy body through sand, the almost imperceptible hiss of labored breathing. It came closer, and Ann was quivering, the cold sweat of terror dewing her forehead, her breasts aching with i
ts agony. They had her at last, the crawlers, the belly-creeping, snaking Things with the form of humans and the dead eyes of the damned. At last they had come for her, and she was helpless to escape them.
A hand prodded her, fumbled along the fabric within which she was muffled. Ann drew in breath through the constricted cords of her throat. The sound it made was a screeching, sharp-edged squeal.
“Hush,” a muted voice hissed warningly. “Hush.”
Fever ran hotly through Ann’s veins, exploded within her skull. Good—Lord! Who was it that warned her to silence? Whose hands were they that groped down her flanks, that pulled, tugged at the lashings about her ankles? Bob’s? Oh, Merciful God! Could it be Bob, escaped somehow, come somehow to find her, to release her from terror? . . .
The bag pulled up over her ankles, her knees, stripped up over her torso, caught momentarily under her chin and then was entirely gone. Ann squirmed, twisted about, gasped. Closed her lips on the glad “Bob!” that had almost escaped them.
This wasn’t Bob’s face, this gaunt, long countenance silhouetted against dim moonglow in a broken-arched aperture across which a shattered beam sprawled. It—wasn’t—Bob’s. Hope seeped out of her, almost life itself.
“Oh!” she gulped. “I thought it was my husband.”
“Quiet,” Kane breathed. “Quiet, Mrs. Travers, or we may be heard.” His lips were paler, tighter, his eyes more narrowly slitted, more piercing. A curious excitement danced in them. “I’ve taken an awful chance tracing you here. We’re both in terrible danger and you must not make it worse.”
“What is it? Who is it that’s doing all this? What terrible things are happening here?” Pushing herself up, Ann whispered the questions. “I won’t move till I know.”
“For God’s sake!” he groaned, his pupils flicking into the darkness beyond her. “If it is known that I am still alive, that I have freed you . . .” His gesture finished the sentence. “We’ve got to get out of here.” His skin was fish-belly grey with—was it fear . . . ? “Come. Hurry.”
The urgency of his speech, his evident terror, got through to Ann. Once more he had risked his life to save her. She had no right to impede him now. And yet . . .
“Can you walk?” His left arm reached for her. Odd how long and slender his hand was, how it clawed vulture-like. Odd that his right should be concealed behind his back. What was it he hid from her?
Ann avoided his grasp. He had fought for her, sided with her. He was her only hope for safety. She must be mad indeed to shudder with revulsion from his touch as though he were something unclean.
“I can walk,” she muttered. “You needn’t help me.”
“Go ahead, then.” He turned toward the radiance-silvered opening, pointed with a preternaturally long, straight finger: “I’ll follow.”
A tocsin of alarm sounded deep within Ann at the thought of letting him get behind her. But she could not refuse. She slid by him, shrinking; she almost reached the light.
“Wait!” Kane spat. “Wait.”
Ann twisted. “What . . . ?” she gasped. “What is it?”
He was startlingly close, towered gauntly gigantic above her. “We may not get through.” His voice was a husked whisper. “If you have anything you wouldn’t want found, any—papers, for instance, give them to me. I’ll hide them here.”
“Papers!” the girl blurted. “I—” She bit off the words. Good Lord! Why should he ask that now? Her mouth was suddenly dry. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” How would he know that she carried any papers unless he had wrung the information from Bob? “What do you mean?”
THERE WAS A subtle change in Kane’s face. Through their slits his eyes were ablaze with a strange eagerness; the long lines from their corners to his strangely pointed chin had deepened. “Travers was bringing out the formulae for his new process. They weren’t in the luggage in your car, and—” He checked himself, tried again. “And . . .”
“And he didn’t have them on him!” Ann almost shrieked the accusation. “You’ve searched him! It was you that brought him in.” She leaped at him, her hooked fingers clawing at his saturnine eyes. “What have you done with him?”
Kane’s hidden hand leaped into view. In midspring Ann saw the whip in it, butt reversed. The wire-wound handle crashed across the side of her head, sent her down.
She sprawled, half-stunned, and Kane bent to her. His whip hand pinned her to the ground; the other was on her thighs, was scrabbling frantically over her body, was violating the privacy of her breasts. “Where are they?” he snarled. “Where are they?”
“Where you can’t get them,” Ann mouthed. “Murderer!”
His countenance now was utterly Satanic. “You’ve hidden them, damn you,” he spat. “You’ve hidden them.”
“Yes.” There was nothing left to her now but defiance. “Yes. I’ve hidden them where you’ll never find them.”
His hands gripped her shoulders, shook her, worried her as a terrier a rat. “Tell me where they are,” he snarled. “Where are they?”
“I’ll—never—tell,” Ann said as he shook her. “You can—kill me—and I won’t—tell.”
“You’ll tell!” Kane surged erect. The whip in his hand lashed up, swished above his head. “You’ll tell.” It whistled down, coiling, writhing like a thing alive.
Screaming, Ann rolled from under just as it pounded down on the spot where she had been. Dust spurted as the snapper at the lash’s end dug dirt. Kane snarled once more and jerked his terrible weapon up again.
Terror exploded in Ann, blasted her to her feet in a lightning-swift splurge of effort that had its impetus from something other than her will. The snakelike lash whipped around her legs, seared from her a shriek of purest agony. It jerked, swept her footing from under her. The girl crashed down. The whip jerked free and curled above Kane’s head for another blow. Savagely his arm arced down.
But the lash did not descend. It tautened, jerked the whip butt from Kane’s hand. The button-like snapper had caught in some inequality of the dark roof. A bestial snarl spat from Kane’s twisted mouth; he whirled savagely and snatched at the thong as it swung from some hidden fastening. It pendulumed, avoided his first rage-blinded grab. Ann writhed away into the darkness, pitched over the edge of a steep incline.
Somehow she was on her feet. An animal bellow from behind catapulted her into hurtling speed. Footsteps pounded behind her. The descent pitched steeply and now she was more falling than running. Her footing was no longer sliding sand. It was a flooring of small stones that rolled beneath her, that threw her suddenly sidewise.
One flailing arm struck a wall; she gathered herself for the crash of her body against it. That crash never came and she was really falling now. She pounded down on—on something alive that squealed, that slid out from under her and scuttered away in the darkness.
The rattling thump of pursuit pounded above her. Passed. Ann lay in pitch darkness, dazed by the shock of her fall, quivering from the stinging torment of the whip blows, shuddering with revulsion at the cold and clammy feel of that upon which she had thumped down, retching with terror at the prospect of Kane’s return. He must soon realize that she had avoided him by tumbling into some side passage off the lightless tunnel. He would come back to seek her. And he would find her there helpless to escape his fury. She was done, completely exhausted. She could flee no further.
But his pounding footsteps kept on, faded into distance, into silence. Slow, timorous hope began to grow in the dizzy turmoil of the girl’s mind, matured into certainty. Her blood ran a little more warmly; strength commenced to seep back, and the ability to think.
But thought brought despair blacker than the Stygian gloom in which she lay. Bob was dead, undoubtedly he was dead. Kane had only half lied when he had said he had found nothing alive at the wreck. He had left nothing alive! It was Bob’s corpse that had slumped over the side of his flivver, Bob’s corpse he had hidden somewhere here. Somewhere in this underground maze that must be th
e workings of the old mine. Somewhere . . .
A noise cut off thought. A tiny noise, sourceless, almost inaudible. A sensation of movement rather than of sound, of furtive movement paralyzingly near. There it was again! The flicker of a breath. A moan so low that only in the breathless hush of the underground could it have been heard.
The knowledge that she was not alone, that something alive was here in the dark with her, brought no fear to Ann. She was beyond fear. She was beyond emotion. With the conviction that her husband, her lover, was dead, she too seemed to have died. Only her body was left—her aching, torn body—and her senses. But something like a dull, dazed curiosity made her strain to locate that sound, made her wonder what it was that produced it.
The low moan came again, firmed into a word. A name! Her name! “Ann.” And then, “Oh, Ann. I’m so sick. So sick.”
“Bob!” The girl screamed into reverberating darkness. “Bob! Where are you? Oh, God! Where are you?”
CHAPTER SIX
THE CRAWLERS CLOSE IN
“Ann!” The voice was so weak, so terribly weak. “I thought—you would never—come back.” There was no longer delirium in Bob’s voice, but evidently he was unaware he was no longer beside the wreck in the desert.
Ann managed speech. “Where are you, Bob? It’s so dark I can’t see you.” Then he didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t know that anything was happening. “Keep on calling.”
Pangs of excruciating agony rewarded the girl’s effort to turn, to get going toward him.
“Ann. Here I am.” It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that Bob was alive, that Bob was restored to her. “I’m here, Ann.” She gritted her teeth, choked to silence a scream of anguish, twisted over on hands and knees. “Come to me, Ann.”
“I’m coming, dear. I’m coming as fast as I can.” There was nothing in her tone to betray the network of fiery pain that meshed her body. “But it’s so dark I can’t see you. Keep calling, Bob. . . .”