by Jeremy Bates
We went closer and discovered a cat hole.
The three of us crouched before the crevice, peered inside. It was a couple feet high and appeared manmade, perhaps carved with a pickaxe or some other crude tool. It stretched away into blackness.
“Rascal?” Rob called, though not as loudly or confidently as before. “We’re not coming in after you.”
No answer.
“Oh God,” Danièle whispered suddenly, grabbing my wrist so tightly I winced. “Look! There! Look!”
I looked. I had been so focused on the hole I hadn’t paid attention to the rock surrounding it.
“Is that…?” I started.
“Blood,” Rob finished.
“Maybe he tripped and hit his head and got disorientated?” I said.
“And crawled into a fucking hole?” Rob said skeptically.
“Then what happened to him?” Danièle demanded.
I bent close to examine the blood. “It’s fresh, and it looks like a handprint.” I turned, scanning the ground. “There—there’s more blood. And there.” We followed a string of small black splotches back to the entrance to the room.
“He must have hit his head here—”
“He didn’t hit his fucking head, Danny!” Rob said. “Someone surprised him, knocked him out cold, and dragged him off.”
“Zolan,” she hissed. “It has to be. He followed us down here.”
“There was no woman, no body,” I reminded her. “Why would he follow us? Why would he attack Pascal?”
“Because he is crazy.”
“What about the Painted Devil? He was pissed we scared him off. He lost face. This could be his revenge.”’
“But how did he get past us?” Rob said. “Whoever attacked Pascal was ahead of us.”
“Zolan knew we were going to the spot where the video camera was,” Danièle said. “Maybe he knew a different way to get here.”
“And arrived here ahead of us and waited?”
“Maybe…”
“Whatever,” I said, frustrated. “Guessing’s not helping any. We have to do something.”
Rob nodded. “We gotta go get Rascal—now. He’s injured.”
I looked at the cat hole. “You want to go in there?”
“We have to. We can’t just leave.”
“Yes,” Danièle said, swallowing. “We have to go after him.”
“What if it’s a trap?” I said.
“We don’t have a fucking choice!” Rob said.
He was right, I knew. We couldn’t abandon Pascal. Nor could we stand here discussing our options. His condition could be critical.
We returned to the wall. Rob dropped to his knees and peered inside the hole. It was large enough to enter with his backpack on. He glanced up at us, as if for confirmation that we were really doing this, then crawled inside and disappeared.
Chapter 35
ROB
This was insane, Rob thought as he snaked forward deeper into the tunnel. Total fucking insanity. Had someone really attacked Pascal?
He still wanted to believe it was all some elaborate joke, but Pascal wasn’t the practical joker type.
So who had gotten him?
What had gotten him?
Rob almost laughed at that, but didn’t, because scientists were discovering new species all the time. Just last week he read about this team of zoologists and filmmakers that descended into a never-before-explored caldera in Papa New Guinea and documented all this nature-gone-wrong kind of shit, like frogs with fangs and kangaroos that lived in trees and woolly rats that grew as large as dogs.
So what if something even more crazy—something with lobster-claw horns, or a tail that could shoot spikes, or three heads and translucent skin—lived down here? What if—
Rob stopped and sniffed. God, what was that smell? It had come from nowhere.
“Ugh,” Danièle muttered a moment later. “What is that?”
“Don’t know,” Rob said, peering ahead. The shaft continued straight for another ten feet before turning sharply to the left. “It’s coming from ahead though—”
The sentence died on his lips. A steel fist squeezed the air from his lungs.
“Back up, Danny,” he managed in little more than a breathless croak. “Back up right now.”
Chapter 36
Fear ballooned inside me when Rob began speaking in the soft, scared-stiff way of someone who’d just realized they were standing in the middle of a viper pit.
“What is it?” Danièle demanded. “What can you see?”
“Back…the fuck…up.” Then Rob’s voice rose several octaves. “Oh no… Oh shit oh shit—go back!”
Danièle started kicking me in the face as she attempted to reverse directions.
“What is it?” I shouted. “What’s happening?”
“Go, Will!” she shrieked. “Go!”
Rob began yelling now. Low grunts tinged with higher notes of hysteria. Then he screamed—in pain.
Danièle landed a heavy heel against my nose. Stars exploded across my vision. I tasted dirt and coppery blood.
“Will, go!” she wailed.
I elbowed my way backward, battling a frenzied terror.
What the fuck was happening—?
Something cold gripped my ankle. I tried to snap my head around to see what it was, but the shaft was too restrictive to do even that. A second something latched onto my other ankle.
Hands.
They tugged. I kicked wildly, freeing myself.
“Someone’s behind me!” I shouted. “Go forward!”
“It got Rob!” Danièle screeched feverishly. “He is gone! It took him! It just took him!”
I still couldn’t see past her, but I didn’t doubt that someone had indeed taken Rob; he was no longer yelling. Even so, forward was better than backward for me. I placed my hands squarely on Danièle’s rear and shoved.
“Go!”
With a soulful moan she lurched forward—just as the pair of hands grabbed my ankles again. Sharp nails—claws?—dug into my flesh.
I kicked and twisted and freed myself again and was right behind Danièle, urging her to move faster in a voice I scarcely recognized as my own, tearing the skin from my elbows in my manic flight.
Danièle jackknifed around a corner and put distance between us. I kept waiting for those terrible hands to clamp onto me once more, to drag me backward into the dark, but they never did.
Then, from a little ways ahead, Danièle cried out—and vanished.
I shot out of the shaft a few seconds after her, momentarily airborne, dropping several feet to the hard ground. I sprang to my feet and whirled toward the hole, peering inside. Nothing.
Then Danièle was beside me.
“Where is it?” she said. Her tone was oddly nonchalant, as if she was trying to be conversational, only she was screaming too. “It must have come back out this way. It had Rob, it…” She buried her face in her hands.
I examined the room we were in. It was made of stone and resembled all the others we had come across, though there were no bones here. An open doorway led to another room, and a doorway there to yet another room still.
“Who took Rob?” I asked her quietly. “Did you see him?”
“He…it…” She bit her lip to stop it from quivering. “It…”
“What do you mean ‘it?’ Jesus, Danièle, who did you see? The Painted Devil?”
“Its face…it was all… It was a monster.”
A ball of dread punched me in the chest. Then I got ahold of my imagination. “It wasn’t a fucking monster, Danièle! Who was it? The Painted Devil? Was it the Painted Devil?”
She shook he head and began to sob.
“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” I told her, pulling her hands away from her face so I could look her in the eyes. “You have to be quiet. Danièle? You have to be quiet.”
She nodded but continued to sob.
“Danièle!” I said, shaking her. “They could be coming back.”
He
r breath hitched. Her body went rigid.
She looked at me, pleading. “It took Rob. Where is he?”
“I don’t know—”
An unholy caterwauling exploded from the shaft, and for a moment I was numbed with superstitious terror.
“It is coming,” Danièle said monotonously. She no longer sounded afraid; she sounded accepting, which was somehow worse.
Run or fight? I thought. What had Danièle seen? A flesh-and-blood monster? There were no such things. She had to be confused. She was in shock. She was short-circuiting.
Run or fight?
I flicked off my helmet’s headlamp. Danièle stared at me blankly.
“Turn yours off too,” I told her quietly. “We’re easy targets with them on.”
She shook her head, looked like she was going to flee.
“There’s nowhere to go,” I said. “We have to take these guys out one by one. You stand on that side of the hole. I’m going to be right here, on this side. When whoever comes out of it, we attack him.” She started to shake her head again. I added steel and urgency to my voice: “Turn off your fucking headlamp, Danièle. Now.”
For a moment I was sure she would refuse. But she reached up, fumbled with the battery box at the back of her helmet, and flipped the toggle.
We were plunged into blackness.
My breathing seemed extra loud in the nothingness, and I tried to quiet it. There was no other noise. The seconds dragged. The air seemed thick and greasy.
Then I heard faint, careful movement inside the hole. Someone coming. Yet there was still no light. Had the person turned off his headlamp, expecting an ambush? Had I broken it when I kicked him?
The sound became louder, stopping, starting, stopping, starting.
Sniffing us out, I thought, and hated myself for thinking that.
My heart was pounding, adrenaline was burning through my veins like gasoline, but I was ready. I was going to take this motherfucker out, I was going to knock him up for answers, find out what was going on, where Pascal and Rob had gone—
I swallowed, gaging. That cloying stench was back, come from nowhere. It was almost a physical presence.
From the darkness nearby Danièle made a retching sound.
No, quiet, don’t—
She retched again.
A howl erupted from the hole, savage and close.
Danièle snapped on her headlamp. For a moment I was blinded by the light. Then I saw her staring at me, her eyes wide as saucers, as if she were seeing a ghost.
“Will!” she said with the woodsaw rasp of a crow, pointing a shaking finger at me.
No—behind me, I realized.
I started to turn, but something heavy cracked into the back of my helmet, knocking it off and sending me to the ground.
Head throbbing, I rolled over and caught a glimpse of a mutant face and a swinging bone a moment before everything exploded in excruciating pain and searing whiteness.
Chapter 37
DANIÈLE
Danièle couldn’t breathe, couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t think. The thing came for her, grinning hideously.
She ran.
Chapter 38
I saw her from across the room. Her blonde hair was pinned up in a ballerina-like bun on her head, accentuating her slender neck. I couldn’t tell the color of her eyes, the room was too dark, but they were large and expressive, her lashes long. Her nose was small, not much more than a comma. Her lips were painted bright red, and she was smiling—a quirky smile. It gave her face depth and personality.
She wore an effervescent green dress, strapless, revealing delicate shoulders and toned biceps. It tapered down her sides and clung to her curvy hips and ended above her knees.
I must have been watching her for only a few seconds when she glanced over at me. Maybe she felt my eyes on her, maybe it was coincidental. I looked away and went to get another drink. I mingled with some friends on the way, but the entire time I was thinking about the girl in the green dress. She had to be with Delta Kappa Delta; it was the only sorority we’d invited to the party tonight. But if she was, why hadn’t I seen her before? Rush had been in September, and we’d had several events with DKD since then.
I moved on to the kitchen. A few girls were crowded around the two-gallon Rubbermaid cooler filled with Kool-Aid and vodka. Some more of my friends were hanging out by the keg. I joined them, filled my red plastic cup with beer, and bantered a bit. Duane Davis, the chapter’s treasurer, was complaining about how DKD were becoming the ugly sorority, and I wasn’t sure the DKD girls at the Rubbermaid cooler couldn’t hear him.
I returned to the room where I had seen the girl in the green dress. She was no longer there. I went to basement and wandered the busy rooms. She wasn’t there either. On the porch outside, I described her to my friends smoking cigarettes and asked if they had seen her. No one had.
I was pissed off. I should have gone straight over and talked to her. Why had I decided to get a drink?
As a last resort I stepped over the police tape strung from newel post to newel post across the bottom of the staircase and climbed the steps. I didn’t believe she would be on the second floor. It was off limits to anyone who didn’t live in the townhouse.
I heard voices down the hall, coming from the last room on the left. I knocked and opened the door. Five of my friends sat on chairs arranged in a circle around a low glass table, which was littered with baggies of blow and rolled bills and credit cards. I asked them if they had seen the girl in the green dress. They hadn’t.
Halfway back down the hall, the bathroom door opened and there she was. I was so surprised all I could manage was, “Oh.”
“Hi,” she said, smiling. “Sorry. I know. I’m not supposed to be up here. But the bathroom downstairs was occupied.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I said. “I was actually looking for you.”
“For me?”
“I saw you in the living room. I wanted to talk.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No, I mean, just talk, talk.”
“Well, I like to talk talk.”
I cleared my throat. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
“I’m not with the sorority. My friend Suzy—Suzy Taylor?—she invited me. I’m not into the whole Greek thing. I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it. You’re a Pike?”
I nodded.
“How is it? Frat life?”
“Nothing special really.”
“I’ve never been in a frat house before.”
“This isn’t a frat house, not officially. We rent it.”
“But you guys live here?”
“Some of us do. My room’s right down there.”
“Can I see it?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I unlocked the door to my room with my key and followed her inside. The room was pretty bland. Some oak furniture that came with it. A life-size cardboard cutout of Mr. Bean I’d stolen from a fast-food chain during my initiation. Curling posters of AC/DC and Led Zepplin and other old school rock bands that I’d picked up at the poster sale on campus. A purple lava lamp I’d been meaning to toss out.
My laptop sat on my messy desk, the screensaver displaying a slideshow of scantily-clad women. I went to it and closed the lid.
“By the way,” I said, offering my hand, “I’m Will.”
“I’m Bridgette,” she said, squeezing.
“I like that name.”
“My parents were big bridge fans.”
“Huh?”
“Bridgette,” she said. “It’s a two-player bridge game. It also means ‘exalted one.’ Yes, I checked. I was bummed out when I learned I was named after a card game. What’s in there?” She indicated the door to the closet.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Can I see?”
“There’s nothing in there.”
“Why won’t you let me see?” Her voice had turned petulant, and it wasn’t Bridgette anymore. It was Danièle. She
was naked.
“There’s nothing in there.”
“Why are you never honest with me, Will?”
“I am.”
“I want to see.”
I had no idea what was in the closet, only that it was something that made me uneasy.
“No,” I told her.
“Will, stop it.” She pushed past me.
I seized her by the upper arms. “Danièle, don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Just don’t.”
She shook free and yanked the closet door open. Relief flooded me. There was nothing inside but my clothes neatly arranged on their hangers.
“See?” I said.
But she wasn’t listening. She stepped into the closet, slipped between the clothes, and disappeared.
“Danièle!” I shoved the clothes aside. She was gone. “Danièle! Come back!”
Her voice was different, scared. It came from beyond the wall.
“Will, where am I?”
I banged the plaster. “Danièle!”
“Will, help!”
“Danièle, come back!”
“I cannot!”
“Come back!”
“Will, look behind you—”
I was strapped to a gurney of some sort. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see. It wasn’t too dark; it was too bright. Then, gradually, the ceiling resolved into detail: chiseled stone affixed with a series of fluorescent lights. I turned my head to the right. Chipped wooden counters and cupboards, painted white. The cupboard doors featured glass windows through which I could see a variety of bottles and beakers like those found in a science classroom.
I tried to move. My arms were secured in leather cuffs.
From behind me a metal table on wheels rattled into my field of view. The surface was neatly lined with a dozen crude tools that would look equally at home in a dentist’s office or a fifteen-century torture chamber.
I jerked at the restraints. They held firm.
The person pushing the table appeared. It was Maxine. Her hair was wet and plastered to her skull, her cream dress soaked through.