Catacombs of Terror!

by Stanley Donwood

  “Don’t know. It was the same last night though. It’s sulphur or something. Come on. We’re only about a quarter of the way down.” I turned the light off.

  The descent seemed to take an eternity. I got that feeling again, that there was nothing else in the universe than this hole, an endless tube through empty space. With two cold, wet humans in it. Both of them wishing they were somewhere—anywhere—else. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that the hole got narrower as we went down. It was about eight feet in diameter at the top, but if it got too narrow there wouldn’t be enough room for both of us to stand at the bottom. It was going to be pretty damn cosy as it was. The smell was getting stronger, but then it seemed to fade. It was maybe coming up from the bottom of the hole in waves. The climb went on and on. My mind began to wander. Not surprising, I guess. I started to think about death. Death. You start to die the moment you’re born. The whole of life is a series of close calls with death. Yeah, well. Whatever.

  Finally I reached the bottom. There was more room than I expected. Kafka was just behind me. I stepped away from the ladder. I tried to speak as quietly as I possibly could.

  “I’m going to turn the flashlight on. Close your eyes.” I pushed the switch. The light was searing, but I forced my eyes to get used to it. Fuck. Where in hell were we? I had been right about the flagstones and the three tunnels. They stretched off into impenetrable darkness like three hungry mouths. But I’d been way wrong about there not being much space down here. We were in a kind of dome. Like we were in a bell jar with an impossibly long neck, which was the hole we’d climbed down. Or a gigantic chimney. I was sure it hadn’t been like this the night before. I was certain. I remembered how I’d traced my hands around the walls, just by turning around pretty much on the spot. Now we were standing in a circular chamber maybe twenty feet in diameter. It was as if the beam from my flashlight had made the walls shrink away, or . . . it was crazy. Maybe we’d come down a different hole? Perhaps there were more than one, and I’d not noticed the night before? Or maybe KHS had dug out the base of the hole since last night?

  Even as I was thinking up these increasingly desperate explanations I knew they were bullshit. Something weird was going on. Possibly it needed a better word than ‘weird’ to describe it, but I didn’t have one to hand. And the smell was back, stronger than ever. It was horrible. Everything was so old it made my head hurt. I’d never been anywhere remotely like this before. It was old like—like a living thing could be old. Not like a place. I could almost feel its wheezing, impossibly aged breath sucking in and drooling out. There was mud and clay everywhere. The walls were made of it.

  Dirty water dripped onto us from the sloping roof, and mud was scattered around in clumps and splattered on the walls. Pools of brownish, greyish water collected in puddles on the flagstones. And it was cold. The rope from the winch hung down with a big bucket, a bucket big enough for a body or two on the end of it. I looked at Kafka. His face looked terrible. The yellowish light didn’t help, but he looked really bad. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Worse, probably. Yeah, well. I wasn’t aiming to make a good impression anywhere. Not for the foreseeable future. I asked him if he was okay, and he shook his head slowly. He drew his finger across his throat. I knew how he felt. I wanted a cigarette badly, but I thought that I’d better not. I pulled my half-bottle from my pocket and took a deep swallow. I passed it to Kafka. He had what looked like an even bigger swallow.

  I slowly swept the torch around the chamber, pausing the beam briefly at each tunnel entrance. There wasn’t a sound. Just a terrible, terrible silence. I never felt less like whistling a tune in my life. I had no idea which tunnel we might walk along. My sense of direction was back at the office. The sulphur smell came and went. Water dripped down on us.

  “Which tunnel?” I asked Kafka, not expecting him to have any firm thoughts on that one. He just stared at me. Okay. I pointed at random. “Let’s take that one,” I said flatly. I mean, for fuck’s sake, they all looked the same. Kafka looked hopelessly at me, pulled a tape recorder from his inside pocket, and pressed record. He slipped it into his bag. We started walking.

  The darkness of the tunnel closed in on us instantly. The beam from my flashlight struggled to penetrate the gloom. The dark in here was thicker, like it was treacle. I glanced back. The chamber was hardly visible, and we were only a few steps inside the tunnel. It was like walking into a coffin. The walls of the tunnel were the same as the chamber—semi-smooth mud or clay. There wasn’t any trace of spade or pick marks on it. Maybe some sort of machine had hollowed it out.

  “Let’s try another tunnel,” I muttered to Kafka. I don’t know if he heard me. We bumped into each other, but I think he got the idea. We turned back into the chamber. Horrible as it was, it was less unpleasant than the tunnel.

  “I’m having some second thoughts, and a hell of a lot of them,” said Kafka in a strangled sort of voice. I gave him more whiskey. And then some more. I might have had some, too.

  “Okay. That was horrible. I agree. Maybe the other tunnels won’t be as bad,” I said. I noticed that I didn’t sound too convincing. “Let’s have some Charlie and see how we feel after that.” I opened the second little wrap and dipped my finger in the powder. Kafka did the same, and we rubbed it into our gums. I put the empty wrap in my pocket, had another swig of whiskey for luck, or something, and started towards another tunnel. Five steps into it I got the same feeling. We turned around and went back into the chamber.

  “Right. Let’s try the last one,” I said.

  “Which one is that?” asked Kafka.

  I had no idea. We had been a few paces down two of the tunnels. One of them was right behind us. But which of the others we’d tried, I couldn’t say. My loss of direction was total.

  “Well, which do you think?” I whispered.

  “I haven’t got a fucking clue, and that in itself worries the hell out of me. That one? Or that one? What is this place?”

  I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t know. It was that simple, and that complicated.

  “That one,” I said decisively, and walked towards the gaping darkness. This time we weren’t turning back. This time we were going to find out what these tunnels were all about. This one was the same again—a ghastly, cloying, terrifying darkness of a sort I’d never known anywhere before. An intermittent dripping from the roof. I could feel the flagstones beneath my feet. My flashlight revealed nothing but the walls of the tunnel receding maybe ten feet or less before being devoured by the darkness. We walked slowly on. Nothing changed. Nothing at all. The silence got so fucking silent that it started to mess with my head. I stopped.

  “Did you hear anything?” I asked, with a very clear idea of the answer I’d like to have heard.

  “I don’t—think—so,” whispered back Kafka. Wrong answer. Not badly wrong, but wrong enough.

  “What d’you mean, you don’t think so?”

  “Well, did you hear anything?” hissed Kafka.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But I think it’s this place. The quiet. Playing tricks on me. And you, too, by the sound of it.” Yeah. Somewhere there was a rational, scientific explanation for this. But it wasn’t down here. It wasn’t where we needed it. We carried on, even more slowly. The smell came back again, nauseatingly strong. For a split second it reminded me of death, of putrefying corpses, animal and human, piled up and up and rotting, like some kind of infernal compost . . . .

  I tried to force the thought out of my head but it wouldn’t go. The fetid black liquid seeping from the crushed carcasses at the bottom of the pile, the writhing masses of larval flies, the sickening miasma emanating from it . . . . I stumbled against the wall and sank to the floor. I dropped the flashlight and clamped my wet hands to my face, I bowed my head and gritted my teeth, and I tried to force the horrendous vision from my mind. But it got worse. And I think I passed out, because the next thing that happened was Kafka slapping me in the face. I woke up and grabbed his hand be
fore he hit me again.

  “What the fuck . . . ?”

  “Shit, you just, you just collapsed. You dropped the torch and it went out and fucking hell it was so dark . . . . I found mine and turned it on and you were just, well, you were out. I mean I, I almost fucking lost it, I almost panicked and lost it, so I started slapping you . . . .”

  “Well, cheers for that. There was some stuff in my head that was far, far worse than being slapped. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  I was gasping. My gratitude was genuine.

  “No problem. I don’t mind saying I almost shat myself when your torch went out. Do the same if it happens to me. Bring me out of it, whatever it is. What happened?”

  “You do not, do not, want to know. Let’s just carry on. Where’s my flashlight?”

  “I dunno. I think it went over there somewhere.” Kafka gestured with his light. The beam raked the floor around us.

  “Maybe it rolled. There’s a sort of slope to this tunnel.”

  “Yeah, maybe it rolled. So, let’s see where it rolled to.”

  I felt almost better. I was pissed off at having lost it badly enough to pass out. If Kafka hadn’t been there I could have lain there for hours. Being an independent operator was one thing. Lying out cold in a hellhole God knows how far beneath the earth is another. I shook myself. Maybe I said, “Let’s go,” or something. But we were walking on, further down, into the dark.

  After a time, Kafka whispered, “Where’s your fucking torch?”

  We hadn’t found it. We’d walked a few hundred yards I guess. But no flashlight. It couldn’t have rolled this far.

  “Maybe we missed it. Maybe it got stuck in a niche or something. Rolled up against a rock. I don’t know.”

  “What was that?” Kafka said.

  “Sssh.”

  There was a sound. It was very quiet. But not as quiet as silence. Like a low, droning mechanical chant. An indistinct murmuring. It was coming from somewhere ahead of us, in the dark. Fighting every urge of self-preservation we walked towards it.

  “Turn off the light,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t say anything at all.”

  Colin killed the flashlight. The darkness was suffocating. The sound was still there, moaning from somewhere. I trailed my hand against the wall to keep some idea of where I was. The surface was wet and slick, and sort of ridged under my fingers. It was very cold. Like something dead.

  Nothing happened for a time. We were walking. The sound was droning, with slight variations in its tone. It didn’t seem to be getting any louder. Then the wall disappeared. My hand touched nothing. I pulled my hand away as if it had been burnt. I grabbed for Kafka, and he stopped.

  “Okay,” I said in a voice only one notch above silence and one degree from panic. “Point the light at the floor. Turn it on.”

  A couple of agonising seconds passed while Colin felt for the switch. Then a blurry circle of flagstones was illuminated. But faintly. As if the batteries were dying.

  “Right. Move the beam—slowly—so it points to the right of where I’m standing.”

  The illuminated circle travelled across the floor and up the wall, then forward along it. Where my hand had been was another tunnel, leading straight off to the right. The beam lit it only for three feet or so.

  “Shit,” I whispered. “Shine it at the other side.” The light moved back across the floor and up. There was an identical tunnel the other side. I let out a long, slow breath.

  “What are we going to do?” It was Kafka. His voice sounded controlled. Almost too controlled. “If this is some kind of maze . . . .”

  “Then we’re okay so long as we just keep straight on. If we don’t take any turnings then we’re . . . okay,” I ended, limply.

  “All right. We’ll walk straight on. For another ten minutes. Then we turn round. We get out,” he said firmly. “Ten minutes. Then we leave.” There wasn’t much room for argument in his tone. I didn’t feel like arguing anyway. We walked. The droning chant carried on at the same almost inaudible volume. Kafka kept the flashlight switched on, aimed at the ground. There were a lot of flagstones down here. Whoever had built this had been serious about it. I kept my hand trailing on the wall. After a while there was another absence. We stopped. Moved the light around a bit. There were another two tunnels off, one at each side. And the beam from the flashlight was definitely fading.

  “Right,” murmured Kafka. “That’s enough. Let’s go back.”

  It was then that we heard another noise. Squealing. Distant, but a lot of it. It was like, I don’t know, children. It sounded like children. A lot of children. But not human children. There was something unearthly about it. Like the squealing of hungry children, blind, hairless children who’d never seen the sun. Who knew they were getting fed soon. And it came from somewhere behind us.

  I seized Kafka’s arm and pulled him sideways, along the left-hand tunnel. And we ran. We just ran. The squealing seemed to be getting louder, and we just ran. The tunnel wasn’t straight, not like the one we’d walked down. It curved around all over the place, and we careened off the muddy walls every few feet. The floor was sloping upwards now, slightly, but enough to notice that the running was getting to be harder work. We came to a fork in the tunnel and for no reason took the right-hand turn. And after a couple of hundred feet the floor stopped and there were steps going upwards. We didn’t stop. I don’t know how far behind us the squealing was, and I didn’t care. We plunged up the steps, which wound in tighter and tighter circles until it was obvious we were running fast up a spiral stairway. I don’t know where I got my energy from. Terror, I guess. The steps went on and on, until I smacked my head on something hard. I fell back against Kafka, but somehow he caught me and we stumbled on the stone steps beneath what felt like wood.

  “It’s a trapdoor,” shrieked Kafka, “push against it! Push it!”

  I got my upper back under the wood and pushed as hard as I could. Kafka squeezed up next to me and added his strength. Suddenly, with an ancient sucking sound, the trapdoor flipped up and slammed over. We scrambled out, grabbed the door and swung it back over the hole. It shuddered tightly over the darkness and we sat splayed over it, heaving with exhaustion. I think Kafka puked on the floor. I didn’t feel too good myself.

  I sensed that we were in some kind of room. Nothing else registered for a while. We sat there, gasping, wheezing, puking. And then everything was still. We slowly got our breathing back into some semblance of normality. A lot of puffing and blowing, but nothing too bad. Eventually I thought I’d use some of mine to speak.

  “What, in the name of hell, was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Kafka managed to say, “and I don’t give a fuck. Where are we?”

  It was a good question.

  “Why didn’t you use that fucking gun?”

  Another good question. My answer, that I’d forgotten about it, was so stupid that I didn’t let it out of my mouth. But anyway, it wouldn’t have done any good. I didn’t know what to shoot at. I didn’t know where it, or they, were. Whether bullets would have worked. That place seemed beyond guns. The bullets would probably have slowed down, or fallen to the ground straight from the mouth of the barrel, or turned back at us. I didn’t know.

  “I don’t know. Have you still got your flashlight?”

  “Yeah. It must have got itself turned off.”

  “Well, turn it back on.” He did. I almost wished he hadn’t. We were in a room, okay. I’d been right about that. A room lined with incredibly dusty, cobwebbed coffins. Dust was everywhere. No one had been in here for a very, very long time. They hadn’t thought to employ a cleaner. The inhabitants wouldn’t have appreciated it anyhow. I noticed that the beam from the flashlight was bright. The batteries were fine.

  “This is nice,” I said. “Comparatively speaking. Quiet clientele. Peaceable.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” spat Kafka harshly. “We’re in a fucking crypt, fuck knows where, and you sit there making smart remarks. How
are we going to get out of here, you moron?”

  Much as I dislike being called a moron, especially by a reporter, I could see that he had a point. We were, as he had so helpfully pointed out, in a crypt. I had an idea that crypts were not good places to hang around in. We were going to have to do some more physical exertion. There was a door at the end of the room, which was a sort of coffin-lined corridor.

  “You’re right.” The phrase was getting easier for me. “We’ve got to bust out of that door. But first, maybe we should put something heavy over this trapdoor.”

  “Like what?”

  I just swept my eyes around the crypt.

  “You’re kidding me? Surely?”

  I shook my head. “Remember that noise?”

  Kafka nodded. He closed his eyes for about a minute. Then we manhandled a coffin off the shelves and placed it diagonally across the trapdoor. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but it didn’t rate too badly in the context of the last few hours.

  “Okay. Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said finally. I tried the door. It must have been bolted from the outside. Probably padlocked, too. I cast my eyes about, looking for something to try to lever it open with. No dice.

  “It’s going to have to be brute strength, Mister Kafka,” I said. So we took turns at ramming the door. Repeatedly. We’d got a little panicked about being trapped in a crypt with a lot of dead folks, and having just used one of their number’s final resting place as a kind of doorstop against unspeakable subterranean horrors, when I remembered about the two wraps of coke I still had left. So we dealt with those and finished the whiskey. It was all or nothing. We smashed against the door without a thought about how this might damage our shoulders. And eventually it started to give. We rammed into it harder until we shot out into fresh air and wet grass. And dawn light. And rain.