by Nick Cutter
The thing chanted this riddle in Cort’s voice. She had always gotten an F in classes where deductive reasoning was taught. That stuff maddened her. When would she ever need to know What has four eyes but can’t see? or What has hands but can’t clap?
The thing licked its lips. Its corrugated black tongue slipped out, sopping up the drool that threatened to cascade down its chin. Its body trembled with tension, although its eyes remained dull and dead.
Far off: the sound of trees snapping.
“Please,” it said. “An answer.”
“Give me a few minutes. Isn’t that fair?”
“Fair has very little to do with it, Minny,” the thing said in Cort’s voice.
Minerva’s brain synapses burned up, smoke practically pouring out her ears. If it is pairs of letters you need, I have consecutively three. She pictured six envelopes, six stamps, six addresses, all in a neat row. If it is information you seek . . . The letters held important information, but she couldn’t open them. Each envelope was fastened shut. Goddamn it, open!
The tree-snap sounds grew louder. A new sound joined those snaps: a low rumble. The creature must have heard it, too.
“Tick-tock,” it said in its own voice.
Minerva squeezed her eyes shut. Information you seek . . . pairs of letters . . .
She laughed mirthlessly. “I never was any good at these.”
The thing chuckled. “Should have paid more attention in school, big sis.”
Minerva gave it a sunless smile. “Fuck off. Stop talking like that.”
“You have fire,” it said, no longer in Cort’s voice. “I like that. It will take time to extinguish.”
The rumble was unmistakable now. The sand trembled under Minerva. The creature unkinked its legs and stood. It towered over her, its limbs throwing shadows across her face.
The rumble became the metallic rattle of an engine. A pair of headlights burnt through the trees. The thing’s attention was diverted. She took that chance to skitter away.
Some kind of vehicle bore down on them. The driver blared the horn. The thing took a step back, its perplexity deepening. Was it some kind of . . . tank? A figure stood on its hood. A familiar English voice rose over the churn of the engine.
“Git aloooong, little dooooogies . . .”
The thing lifted one arm, a spindly finger pointing.
“Father—?” it said questioningly.
A concentrated stream of fire ripped through the night. It hit the thing square in the chest. Ebenezer’s face was lit by the glow off the igniting gasoline. The creature went up like a kindling effigy. Illuminated by the brilliant light, its face held an expression of puzzled wonderment. Then it began to scream. A high trilling shriek that ascended through several octaves before dropping to a searing howl. It gibbered in many voices, a few of them recognizable to Minerva.
Ebenezer let his finger off the flamethrower. The thing stood in a flickering column of orange, crackling and hissing. It craned its head toward Minerva; its eyes were unchanged, black as lumps of coal in the melting tapestry of its face. The fire had peeled its mouth even wider. It issued a mocking titter and began to jig in place, its legs kicking crazily, flinging gobbets of roasting skin from its shanks.
It took two steps toward Ebenezer. He let loose with another burst. The thing shrieked in what seemed to be true pain. Then it fled down the slope toward the forest. A mesmerizing sight: its fiery limbs carrying it swiftly through the night, twenty yards in a single stride. It reached the woods and monkeyed up the first tree, then began to leap from treetop to treetop. It left a point of flame at the tip of each fir; the trees began to burn, the fire spreading rapidly.
Minerva approached the machine. Eb remained on the hood, a nitrous blue finger dancing from the nozzle of the flamethrower. Ellen was driving. Nate was there, too.
“The cavalry has arrived,” Ebenezer said grandly.
Minerva grinned. She couldn’t help herself.
“Ah!” Eb said. “Finally, a smile! What was that god-awful thing?”
“That was what took the kids,” Ellen said to Eb.
“Ah-ha!” Ebenezer said, full of overadrenalized good cheer. “Mystery solved!”
Minerva pointed at the cleft. “They’re in there. The children are.”
“We better go find them,” said Ellen.
“Oh, I don’t think you want to do that,” Minerva whispered.
MICAH SHUGHRUE knew it wasn’t the Reverend. But the man’s face was familiar.
Even by the most charitable definition, this could not be considered a man anymore. He hung in the center of the box buried deep within the black rock. He was suspended on a network of red ropes resembling wet sinews; the ropes were attached to various points of the man’s anatomy but primarily his shoulders and head and neck, bearing him aloft. The ropes issued a faint thrum like high-tension power lines.
This man was grotesquely shriveled, and human only insofar as he had a pair of driftwood legs and arms that were no more than bones clad in the barest stretching of tissue. His chest was so withered that the skin had shrunk around every rib, his innards encased in a yellowish sack in the center of the rib cage. His head was a grinning, fleshless skull, nose a blade of cartilage. His legs were pulled up tight to his body, the kneecaps visible as saucers, the bones of his feet jutting like gruesome sticks. His posture was that of a sickening fetus curled up in its womb.
The flashlight beam hung on its terrible face for an instant. As wasted as it was, Micah had seen it before. But where? Something in the flinty slope of those cheeks, the jut of those calcified ears . . .
It finally registered. He’d seen this man’s portrait on a desk in the Preston School for Boys. It was Augustus Preston himself.
Preston’s appearance encouraged a gruesome fixation. Much as he wanted to, Micah could not look away. It was as if the man had been devoured from the inside out, the way termites remorselessly harvest an oak tree. If Micah were to touch him the wrong way, he was certain Preston’s innards would spill out—parched, desiccated, sawdusty: his lungs and liver and heart all pulverized and turned to powder. And still, the annihilations of the man’s soul seemed somehow worse, if less obvious, than the ruin of his body. There was nothing inside him anymore. This was Micah’s dread sense. Not even sawdust. Only a yellowing, howling emptiness that his soul had fled years ago. The essence of his humanity had been irretrievably lost, boiled away like steam off a hot pan.
How had Preston arrived at this place? How many years had he been hanging here? For nearly a century—was that in any way possible? What were those ropes? What was the purpose of this vault and—
Ssssslllllllllllluuuuuhhhh . . .
Micah swung the flashlight. The light bled beneath Preston’s suspended feet. He saw something, and followed it up to Preston’s body. Micah had somehow missed it on the initial sweep.
A tube ran out below Preston’s bottom rib. It was white and wrinkled, like the milky intestines of a gutted fish. The tube trailed down to the floor and wormed into the dark. It flexed and cramped the way a garden hose does when fed water from a tap; it swelled in places as if something larger, more solid, were passing through it.
Micah followed it without wanting to.
His blood ran cold. Micah had never been much for books, but he did enjoy a dime-store paperback from time to time. The Feasting Dead. That had been a pretty good one. The Body Snatchers, too. In such books, he had read that phrase a dozen times. His blood ran cold. He didn’t know much about writing, but he knew that was a lazy cliché, right up there with water through a sieve and a deer caught in headlights.
Yet this was his exact sensation. A paralyzing chill swept through him—it was as if his blood had been sucked out and stashed in a deep freeze and injected back into his veins. A coldness that made his lungs lock up and his bowels throb with the urge to be voided.
The tube ran out of Augustus Preston and into a small body. A boy’s body. Could that be Eli Rathbone—?
>
If it was Eli, there was precious little boyish about him anymore. Eli lay limp on the floor, eyes open in an expression of unending horror. The tube—the umbilicus, Micah thought; that is what it looks like, a huge elongated umbilical cord—expanded into a funnel, which was latched over the boy’s mouth. The cord rippled at its tip as if tiny insects were trundling under its surface; Eli’s body jerked helplessly as the cord cramped and flexed, as that awful slurping sound filled the air.
Not wanting to but unable to stop himself, Micah followed Eli’s body with the beam. Eli’s hand was linked with that of a small girl—Elsa Rasmussen? Who else could it be? Their hands were melted into a carbuncled knob. The girl was welded to the boy behind her in the same manner, and that boy to another boy, and him to another, and another, and perhaps ten more after that. Their bodies rag-dolled into the nether recesses of the vaulted box, chained together through some hideous alchemy. Eli looked the worst by far; Elsa was a bit better, and the two boys a bit better than her. It was as if something was feeding on them in turn: First Eli, who was almost used up. Then Elsa, then the two boys who looked like brothers. The most recent additions appeared relatively unmarked. Micah was looking at a food chain in the most literal sense.
The children behind the two boys were still clothed. Their eyes were open, too—their pupils constricted when the beam touched them—but they were unmoving and unspeaking, as if they had been injected with a paralysis toxin from a giant spider. Micah shone the beam to chart the upper reaches of the chamber, expecting to see a huge shaggy arachnid hanging from the ceiling, rappelling toward him eagerly on a skein of gossamer thick as a steel cable . . . but there were only those red ropes rising to knit with the rock.
Micah forced himself to approach Preston. It was only a few steps, but scaling Everest would have been easier. He had no idea how big the man had been before, but whatever process his body had been subject to had altered it horribly. Now that Micah was up close, he could see that Preston wasn’t just thin—he had shrunk, his arms and legs shortening, the bones dissolving or something, until he was nothing but a twisted effigy. He was no more than four feet tall, an emaciated dwarf.
The chamber was silent except for that suck-suck, and even that had quieted. He stopped a foot from Preston. The man’s body did not give off any sort of smell—not of age, or rot. He looked almost mummified: the topmost layer of his skin was crackly, the crust of a flaky pie. Micah was sure the faintest touch would cause it to crumble away entirely, exposing the bleached bone. Dear Auggie had been consumed by some relentless hungering force—and now, with Preston used up, that same force had reached out for other sustenance. The sweetest, youngest delicacies it could find.
Preston’s eyelids were shut. Micah wasn’t certain he would find eyes behind those lids; if anything, they might resemble putrefying grapes. He had no intention of finding out. The red ropes radiated a pleasant warmth. A vein of solid light shone inside each of them. He gingerly shifted around Preston, shining the flashlight to make sure nothing lurked out of sight. Then he trained the beam on the gruesome cord running out of Preston’s body to attach to Eli’s face. Micah’s free hand gripped the hilt of the bayonet he’d taken from the Preston School days before—
Watery voices drifted in from the tunnel. Minerva? He wanted to shout out to her—Stay away!—but he might need her help, and selfishly he did not want to face this alone.
His gaze fell on Preston’s spine. Preston’s right arm was tucked behind his back in a chicken wing that would have snapped his bones under normal circumstances; his forearm was shielding something on his lower back. Biting down on his revulsion, Micah used the flashlight to lever that arm up; it moved with the dry creak of ancient leather. There was a long slit across Preston’s spine, six inches above his buttocks. A full foot long, running from hip to hip. The lips of the wound were dry and hard as cured meat. The flesh inside those lips was bright pink. The wound looked somehow fresh.
The voices drew nearer. Micah barely heard them. He was fixated on the wound . . .
Without much thought, he unsheathed the bayonet. He touched the tip of it to one edge of the wound in Preston’s back. It split the gummy surface; clear fluid burped through. Now there was a smell coming from Preston, almost indescribable—the stink of pure putrefaction and death. He let the nausea pass. The lips of flesh opened and closed as if breathing. Mesmerized, disgusted, he reinserted the bayonet tip into the wound. The blade sank into ripe, squishy softness. Preston did not stir. Micah ran the blade through the wound lightly, slitting a translucent layer gluing the lips together. They pulled apart in a pink leer—
Micah could see something inside. Runneled and warty like a diseased brain.
It . . . Did it move?
The enormous umbilical cord jerked, spastically. Micah’s consuming urge was to step on it, crimp the line—would the pressure build until it ruptured, spewing . . . ?
Breathing shallowly, trying to inhale as little of the stench as possible—the air swam with the fumes wafting from the slit—Micah inserted the knife again. The blade dimpled the pink and carbuncled thing inside. It twitched hectically, somehow gleefully. The cord whipped and spasmed; the sucking intensified, and Micah could hear the children’s bodies shucking and jerking in the darkness.
The blade opened a one-inch secondary cut in the pink flesh inside the wound. Micah pulled the bayonet away. Whatever lay inside the smaller cut was black and shiny. It radiated a powerful sense of malice that Micah could feel physically—it felt as if burning ants were crawling over every inch of his flesh.
Oh Jesus, what is that what is that what IS that—
The pinkness closed over the black bulb momentarily before opening again. That blackness radiated an ageless festering rage.
With a thunderclap of understanding, Micah realized what it was.
An eye. Purest black. And that eye had just blinked. Or winked.
In the same instant, Augustus Preston’s head cranked around to face Micah. It should not be anatomically possible, as Preston had been hanging in the opposite direction—but it happened all the same, his neck making horrid snapping sounds as it twisted, the skin of his throat tearing like cheesecloth to display a papery tube that could have been his trachea. His eyelids flew open; Micah had been mistaken in thinking Preston’s eyes must have shriveled away; they stared at him now with a bright malignancy and a profound insanity—the look of someone whose brain had been utterly ruined. And yet there was hatred in that gaze, too, the loathing that can accrue only in the mind and heart of any creature that has had to exist in such a place for so long—a hatred for anything that has experienced love, humor, and the simple pleasure of sunlight on its face.
“Meeeeeeattttt . . . ” Augustus Preston whispered through his ruined vocal cords, his voice like a razor drawn down a strop. The children began to laugh.
Fear flocked into Micah’s brain on dark wings. The flashlight slipped from his grip and spun on the ground; he stumbled, bellowing in surprise, then reached up instinctively—
—his fingers closing around one of those trembling red ropes.
MINERVA HEARD SHUG BELLOW somewhere in the tunnel system. A short, powerful burst that quickly faded.
She and Ebenezer had already climbed down the rope ladder when she heard Micah hollering. Nate and Ellen were still at the top of the drop, where they had agreed to wait.
“Keep watch,” Minerva called up to them. “Do you have a flashlight?”
A grim nod from Ellen. Clearly she didn’t want the creature Ebenezer had set aflame and chased off to return with them all alone. None of them wanted that. Minerva turned to join Ebenezer at the tunnel mouth. Ebenezer shone his flashlight into it. Micah’s voice had come from wherever the tunnel led, deeper into the rock.
“There’s only enough room to go single file,” said Minerva.
“I’ll go first,” Eb said.
They crawled inside. The flashlight beam bobbed on the walls. It was studded with holes,
some shallow and small, others wide and deep. Minny got a chill when passing the larger ones—it seemed conceivable that some hungry thing with sightless eyes might dart out and snatch her. The smell she had noted at the mouth of the cleft intensified. She could not describe it, but it raised the short hairs on her neck.
Their breath filled the tunnel. The weight of the rock pressed down. They rounded a bend. Was the Reverend down here somewhere? Had Shug found him in this confounding warren? Or had the Reverend gotten the jump on Shug—was the bellowing they’d heard the result of Amos Flesher driving a knife into his heart? . . . It couldn’t be that. The Reverend was no match for Micah Shughrue; if Minerva was sure of one thing in life, it was that.
Still . . . it was so dark down here. Disorienting. The perfect element for a reptile like that crazy-ass preacher.
“There’s an opening ahead,” Eb said.
The tunnel emptied into a huge darkened space. As soon as Minerva stood up, she saw Micah’s boots lit by the glow of his flashlight. They were jittering madly, as if he was being electrocuted.
“Shug!” she cried.
WARMTH. That was Micah’s first sensation upon touching the living rope. Glorious, comforting warmth.
Harmony. That was the second sense. A feeling of satisfaction and well-being more profound than any he had ever known.
“Shug!”
He heard his name, but could not respond. He was bathed in this bliss. He didn’t want to respond. He wanted to stay this way forever, perfectly content.
Hands on his shoulders and arms. They pulled remorselessly. No, you bastards! No, no, stop, please sto—
He stumbled into the arms of Ebenezer and Minny. The beautiful fog lifted. He was back in the black box with Augustus Preston. He tore himself from their grip. He dropped to the floor, his muscles not wanting to cooperate with him.
“You all right?” Minny asked.
“Yes,” he said. He picked up the flashlight where it had slipped from his fingers and stood up again.