by Tim Curran
Jurgens asked no more about what Maki said. Boyd had a pretty good idea that he just didn’t want to know.
Then somewhere out in the darkness: click, click, click.
Boyd felt himself go stiff as board. Not again, Jesus, not again.
Maki made a pathetic sound under his breath that was part whimpering and part low, beaten laughter.
Jurgens had gone tense.
It came again, but louder: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
“It’s her,” Maki said.
They waited there, silent, motionless, each praying it would just go away. When Maki made to answer the sounds by tapping his knife, Jurgens grabbed his wrist and glared at him. Nobody made a move, a sound, anything. They waited there as stiffly as the petrified trees around them.
Then: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
Boyd was trembling. A cool and greasy sweat ran down his face. He felt something like a moan of utter despair building in his throat but he would not give it vent. He didn’t dare.
Whatever was out there, it seemed to be growing impatient. CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, it sounded. CLICKA, CLICKA, CLICKA-CLICK. When that brought no response, it began pounding on the boles of the trees with a hollow knocking noise as if it was hitting them with a shaft of wood. Bang, bang, bang. THUD-THUD-THUD.
“She’s getting mad,” Maki said, his voice breaking.
“You’re crazy,” Jurgens told him.
But then it came again, that hammering and pounding. It was frantic in its desperation, beating on the stone trees, desperate, absolutely desperate for an answer, for anything.
When it had ended, echoing away into nothingness, Jurgens wiped sweat from his face with a hankie.
“She doesn’t like to be ignored,” Boyd told him.
16
Breed felt McNair grab his arm. “Quiet,” he said.
“What?”
“Quiet.”
Breed listened. There was nothing for maybe five seconds, then a weird, distant droning sound rose up and died away. It sounded, if anything, like the continual buzzing of a summer locust.
“What the hell was that?”
“Quiet,” McNair said again.
Breed gently set down the wedge of rock that was in his hands. He had a neckerchief wrapped around his mouth because they were kicking up so much dust digging through the rubble. Clouds of it drifted like fog in the light of the lantern. McNair’s face was pale, his eyes huge and wet. His lower lip was trembling.
There was another noise now.
Something circling around them out there, moving over the rocks with a sort of ticking sound like a cat’s claws will make on linoleum when they’re not retracted. Tick, tick, tick, ticka-ticka-tick. Now the sounds stopped as if what had made them became aware that they were listening for it.
“What’s that smell?” Breed said, pulling down his neckerchief.
But McNair shushed him. Whatever it was, it was thick in the air, a smell of age and dryness like the hot, dead stink of attics and sealed trunks. They both stood there, listening. Breed felt the sweat on his brow began to run down his cheeks. He licked his lips. He did not know exactly where their visitor was, but he could feel its nearness, sense its presence along his spine. He expected that any moment it would leap out at him, snarling and gibbering, a furry and elfin form with gnashing yellow teeth.
But that didn’t happen.
It waited.
They waited.
He felt McNair’s grip on his arm tighten and he knew why: there was another sound, maybe one they’d been hearing for some time but not truly registering: a hollow sound of drawn-out respiration like wind sucked through a pipe.
It was the sound of breathing.
McNair moved very slowly, very carefully. He picked-up his long-handled flashlight from where it sat on a shelf of sandstone. He pointed it in the direction of the breathing. Dust was suspended in the beam like silt. He played it over the heaped rocks and pale green stalagmites rising up from the floor of the cavern like fangs. Shadows jumped and slid around them.
But there was nothing out there.
Nothing at all.
“Jurgens? Maki?” McNair called out and the fear in his voice was so thick, so tightly-wrapped, it was nearly strangling him. “If you’re out there, call out for the love of God…”
Breed stood there. He was shaking. Listening to the breathing that blended into the immense stark silence of the catacombs around them in a perfect unbroken weave. Dead air that seemed to scream in his ears. His flesh was actually crawling, his mouth dry, his belly pulled up into his chest.
And it was at that precise moment that he heard it.
That they both heard it.
A high, sweet singing that was scratching and tuneless, a repetitive sound of hysteria like a song of mourning sung by a madwoman over the graves of her children. It rose up in an unearthly shrill cadence then became the drone of a grasshopper in a summer field, growing louder and louder-then cut out completely, echoing off into the subterranean depths.
Breed nearly fell over. He was hot and cold, his limbs rubbery, white-hot fingers of absolute primal dread sliding through his chest…and then, whatever was out there, was moving in their direction. Tick, tick, ticka, ticka, ticka. The sounds a wolf spider would make as it stalked its prey if the human ear were sensitive enough to hear them.
Breed and McNair did not move.
They stood rooted to the spot, both sweating and trembling as it advanced on them. McNair’s hand was shaking on the flashlight. The beam jumped up and down, almost strobing. He had to put both fists on it to steady it and even then he was only partially successful. The beam cut into the darkness, slicing through the clouds of rock dust and that horrible dry stench became pungent and sickening in the air.
Breed could see something…an eldritch and terrible form given body by the swirling dust. He couldn’t be sure how much of it he saw and how much he imagined. It was roughly the size of man. A semi-visible hunched-over thing, a hazy apparition speckled with dust. It was creeping at them on a dozen spindly legs. He saw reaching arms, an elongated head of undulant tendrils like a nest of writhing, loathsome snakes…and a distorted face: something with clustered pods of eyes.
Then it leaped at them, howling with black hate.
It took McNair first.
It split him from crotch to throat and by the time Breed wiped the blood out of his eyes, he saw it in the glow of the lantern. It was crouched over McNair’s corpse which was bleeding out in a steaming red lagoon. It was spattered red, lapping up blood with juicy, slobbering sounds.
Then it raised its head.
Breed saw three puckering red mouths like blow holes open and shriek in his face with absolute elemental wrath.
Then he started screaming.
17
They heard it.
That same mournful, shrill piping echoing through the cavern. Right away, flashlights were in fists, beams of light searching and searching for the source of that terrible sound. But there was nothing but the honeycombed trunks and the hundreds of petrified trees rising up around them like the mineralized columns of some primal amphitheater. The lights threw a lot of long, narrow shadows around, but nothing else.
Nothing else at all.
“Ain’t nothing up there!” Maki said, his voice nearly delirious. “Not a goddamn thing! She’s there but she isn’t there!”
He was right, of course, and Boyd knew why. The thing making that sound was nowhere near them; it was with Breed and McNair now. As proof of that, they heard the first scream. It was high and wavering and fragmented and it was truly hard to say which of them made it. Only that it sounded out, a cry of absolute agony that was somehow animalistic and keening like an animal being tortured to death, then it was silenced with a wet, gurgling sound that echoed through the cavern.
Maki was crouched next to Boyd now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, making a low moaning sound in his throat. When his voice came, it was almost a girlish whisper: �
�It’s killing them, Boyd! It’s killing them now! Tearing them apart and then…then it’ll come for us.”
Jurgens was on his feet, completely overwhelmed by it all. He was the man in charge. He was a leader of men…but now all that was gone and he was completely empty with its passing. His decision-making skills had been squashed flat and he did not know what to do. He moved this way, then that, cursing under his breath and breathing very hard.
Out in the darkness, there was a chittering sound.
Jurgens wiped sweat from his face. He thumbed the walkie-talkie because he had to. “Breed…McNair,” he said into the mic, his voice very low and guarded. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Breed! Goddammit! Answer me! Answer me!”
But there was nothing but the futile sound of his own voice echoing away, submerging into the utter blackness of the cavern.
He looked at the other two men, shook his head, and started walking off. There was a look of absolute defeat on his face as if he’d played his best card and had still lost and there was no point in pretending now.
“Jurgens!” Boyd said. “You can’t go out there! For chrissake, whatever it is, it’s trying to draw us out!”
Jurgens wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I have to do something,” he said in a calm and controlled voice.
“Let him go, Boyd,” Maki said, enjoying all this now maybe a little too much. “Let the big man go! Let him run out there and then we can listen to him die, too!”
The chittering rose and fell in regular cycles like crickets enjoying a summer’s night. Only this sound was not crickets, it was too sharp, too piercing, too loud and completely unnatural to be anything as simple as an insect.
“Listen,” Boyd said. “Listen.”
Not the chittering now, but the sound of feet running. Running in their direction. Boyd didn’t know what was out there, but he was pretty sure it did not have feet as such.
Jurgens clicked on his flashlight, put the beam out there to meet whatever was coming. They all saw a vague shape darting and stumbling through a stand of petrified trees. A big shape. Had to be Breed. He was running, looking frantically about him, making a low grunting with the exertion.
“Breed!” Jurgens called out. “Over here, over here!”
That chittering rose up again, became that same strident, inhuman piping. It grew in volume, became almost unbearable like a thousand forks scraped over a thousand blackboards. Breed fought free of the trees and something took him. Took him very fast. One moment he was coming and the next something had him, yanking him up into the air faster than Jurgens’ flashlight beam could follow. He let out a wild, whooping scream and then there was a splattering sound like he’d been broken and squeezed out.
“Jesus,” Jurgens said.
His flashlight beam could find nothing out there. But the posts of those ancient trees were sprayed red and running with blood. You could hear it dripping, landing with a slow plopping sound.
Jurgens just lost it. He tossed his walkie-talkie and started shouting: “McNair! McNair! Breed! You answer me right goddamn now, do you hear me! YOU FUCKING BETTER ANSWER ME! BREED! MCNAIR!”
There was silence for maybe ten seconds while everyone held their breath, curled up into themselves, knowing that what was out there was not only weird and scary, but lethal and devastating.
And then another sound came: that same shrill screeching rising up louder and louder, sounding not only eerie and inhuman, but positively bleak and deranged. It rose and fell and then it did the worst possibly thing. It mocked Jurgens with a scratching, almost mewling sort of sound: “Breeeeeeed! Breeeeeed!” it squealed. “Meeeek-naaaaaar!”
“Oh my Christ,” Jurgens said, going right down on his ass.
That horrible sound echoed away and then there was nothing. Nothing but the darkness gathering around them, concealing nameless things and mutant horrors that cried out in mewling, insane voices.
But Boyd had heard the caliber of it again: female. Not the voice of an adult, but the squealing voice of a little girl.
They all huddled there together in the circle of light and not a one of them thought of moving.
Boyd was thinking of Linda at home, waiting there at the kitchen table with some big breakfast she had prepared to celebrate his first graveyard shift. The eggs would be long cold by now, the pancakes mired in rubbery syrup, the bacon congealed with grease. Alone, scared, she would be waiting by the phone, eight months pregnant and expecting the very worst.
And in his mind, he said: I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry. I had a bad feeling about this, but I didn’t get out while I could. And now…oh dear God…now you’re going to be alone and our baby will never know its father.
The tears filled his eyes, breaking hot and wet over his cheeks. His belly knotted up with frustration over it all, over the ugly, black death he was going to die down here in the womb of the earth itself. It was unfair. It was so goddamned unfair.
Maki uttered a low, desperate laugh. “I wonder who it’ll get first, cookie. Me or you. Maybe Jurgens.”
“Shut up.”
But Maki, being Maki, did not shut up and maybe by that point he didn’t even know how. “It’s got us where it wants us,” he breathed. “Whatever that thing is. Whatever we’ve woken up down here after a million, million years. It has us where it wants us and we’re just meat, nothing but meat now.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Boyd told him, because, by God, compound fracture or no, if that whiny, beaten, gutless little weasel did not shut his mouth and shut it soon, he was going to wrap his hands around his fucking neck and squeeze until his eyeballs popped out of his head.
“Sure, cookie. Hee, hee. I’m quiet as a mouse.”
Boyd laid there, breathless, terrified, waiting for that thing to come, knowing it had been down here all these many, many eons. A nightmare out of the Permian. Had it waited alone for 250 million years in the darkness? Was that even remotely possible? Or had it simply woken from cold dormancy when the air filled the dusty silence of the chamber and ended its 250 million year nap? He would never know and could not possibly conceive of an answer with his feverish mind. He only knew horror and absolute terror that was physical and crushing.
Just as he knew that what was out there was female.
And it was lonely.
That’s why it had killed Breed and McNair. They were trying to tunnel out, trying to leave it to the darkness again and it couldn’t have that. Not again. That’s why it had tried to communicate by tapping and knocking on the petrified trees. It wanted them to answer back, to acknowledge its presence. There was no way he could know these things, yet he was certain of them. This thing was a horror from the Permian age, something that left no fossilized prints or bones, no clue to its existence or identity for paleontologists to scratch their gray heads over. It was something from the cellar of evolution, a grotesque thing that lived in the shadows of a primeval age. Something that channeled out honeycombed warrens in the immense stumps of primordial trees.
Yes, Boyd knew these things.
Just as he knew they’d be safe if they did not try to leave her. If they stayed, they would be fine, but if they panicked and threatened to entomb her with the mummified relics of her age, she would kill them. He could not know what she was or by what insane circumstances she had survived. But she had. Again, he thought that somehow she must have woken when air rushed into the Permian underworld. Dormant, perhaps, locked in some unbelievable hibernation. That had to be it, unless she had actually been awake down here the entire time. Aware of the passage of millions of years, that awful dead train of time. What would that be like? Trapped in this place, alone in a world turned to stone, alone in the darkness while your mind went to a screaming stew of waste? If that were the case, she would be deranged beyond imagining.
No, I can’t conceive of that, Boyd told himself. Such a thing could not be possible. She must have wakened when the air broke the seal of her tomb. It has to be something like that. She wok
e down here in the darkness, alone, frightened, confused and probably quite mad.
If such a thing as her could know madness.
She probably wasn’t dangerous, really, as long as they didn’t threaten her with another eternity of solitude. Somehow, they had to communicate with her, give her the company she needed.
Jurgens stood up, shining his flashlight in every direction. “Keep away from us, you hear me? Whatever in the fuck you are, you better keep away from us! You come by us again and we’ll kill you! Do you understand? Do you fucking understand me?”
“Don’t,” Boyd told him. “Don’t do that…don’t threaten her.”
“Breeeeeeeeeeed!” came the wailing voice. “Meeeek-naaaaaar!”
Maki was sobbing under his breath. “It’s a ghost,” he was saying. “We’re trapped down here with a ghost.”
Boyd was going to tell him he was wrong, but maybe he wasn’t. There was no way you could catalog that thing. Maybe it was alive and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, Maki was right: she was a shadow, a wraith from antiquity.
The chittering rose up again and it was very close now.
Jurgens moved in a circle. “Get the fuck away from us!”
Maki was with him now, brandishing his flashlight like a weapon.
“Don’t,” Boyd said. “Dear Christ, don’t do that…”
What seemed mere feet away, she let out a whining, pathetic shriek of utter agony and desolation and loneliness. The sound terrified Boyd and mainly because he heard the desperation in her voice, the cold cawing of millions of years that had scraped her mind raw. But Jurgens and Maki did not understand that. She was just a monster and they planned to deal with her as men had always dealt with monsters.
They ran at the direction of her voice and it was the worse thing they could have done. Maybe she did not understand the hateful things they called out to her or the threats they made, not in words, but she understood the tone. She knew she was threatened and she responded accordingly.