The Ghoul King

by Guy Haley

  And then I touched down upon the shore. The pebbles and rubble of that beach shifted under my feet and I saw that many were animal bones, piles of them, some still with scraps of rancid flesh adhering to their whiteness, and my fear returned anew.

  Past the promontory I saw that at its far end the lake drained through a crooked hole, a maw whose thirst could never be slaked, endlessly consuming the waters. The rumble of that waterfall displaced the sounds of the first. A more hollow, sinister noise, the tumble of water redoubled by echo and distance as it vanished into the bowels of the earth. It was a sound redolent of despair, of purgatory, and I was glad we did not venture that way. We went instead down the other side of the promontory, toward another gaping cavern. Not until we were past its sagging entrance did I see that it had been a huge tunnel of oval section, lined with the miraculous concrete of the old knowledge. So huge, it was big enough to accommodate the new cathedral here in Newtown. A channel was cut into the floor. Black water intruded from the lake along it, rippled by the sudden flight of rats. The parallel lines of two rail tracks stood half an inch proud of its surface. I wondered for a time what had been brought that way and why, and why such a lofty passage was required, but my fear won out again, and I ceased to think, and became poised on the edge of flight myself.

  The mouth was broad, and through it daylight pushed its way into that subterranean world, but it could only penetrate so far. In the gathering dark Quinn stopped several times to consult Rachel’s device, the glow of it eerily lighting up his face. He did not offer it back to Rachel, and she did not ask for it, but looked nervously at him every time he paused. She was so close to her goal, tension silenced her. She had given herself completely over to the care of this vagabond knight and, by association, the rest of us also. We were helpless, wholly at his mercy. He headed on, always looking forward. Thomas, Fillip, and I held back, our guns ready, starting at every echoing drip of water or distant noise. But of the ghouls, there was no sign, no bones or rotted flesh, or piles of their dung. Quinn walked, his gun in his right hand, his longsword in his left. He needed no flashlight to show his way. His gaze pierced the dark until we hit a point where the roof had come down. Once we climbed the rubble to the other side, the last reflections of the distant day dwindled to nothing, and we found ourselves at the border of limitless black. Only then did he sheath his sword, and take out the flashlight we had given him, and press its switch. We had kept our own lights off, following his lead. With relief, I took his actions as permission to turn on my own, and so we all did, until the darkness was lanced with beams of cold white light. I played mine across the concrete, fascinated by the details it revealed. Mineral forms of rippled stone, faded signs in the Bible language. Flaking icons whose color’s brightness still lingered.

  “What kind of batteries are in these?” Quinn asked. “How long will they last?”

  “Wet batteries,” said Rachel. “We’ve struggled to make the dry kind. But they are well sealed, and won’t leak. They will work for half an hour at least. The bulbs are low-draw diodes. We have spare batteries.”

  Rachel would have been proud to speak of this work at any other time, but her body sang out her desire to get on.

  “Turn out all but two of them,” said Quinn. “This could take time. Keep your torches handy. If the flashlights give out, fall back on them. Try to save them if you can. If the ghouls come, fire will be your salvation. You all have matches or the like?”

  We nodded. I had some in my pack. Thomas patted a rattling pocket. Fillip held up a steel lighter, with flint wheel and turpentine within its reservoir.

  I shuddered. Reluctantly, I turned out my light. Thomas and Fillip followed suit. Rachel kept hers on.

  “Jaxon, come with me. Rachel and the others, stay close. We’ll go out front.”

  “Why me?” I said.

  He didn’t answer my question, but said, “You can be with me at the front, where you’ll see the ghouls coming, or you can go at the back, where your neck’ll be crawling imagining long fingers wrapping about it. Your choice.”

  I fell in beside him. After a few paces he stopped again and handed me the flashlight. “Good choice,” he said. “Now you carry that, unless you’d prefer to do the fighting while I light up the ghouls for you.”

  I shook my head.

  Past the cave-in the tunnel was in a sorry state. In many places the concrete lining was breached, revealing bare rock streaked with water, or the hollow, misshapen boxes of broken rooms opened up like a ruined dollhouse. Some two hundred yards, or so I reckon, past the first cave-in, we came to another. There the ground had slammed down, shutting the tunnel off completely. Quinn checked the map.

  “This way, there should be a stairwell.”

  “If there isn’t, Sir Quinn?” I said.

  “Then we go back.”

  The stair proved to be whole. Bare concrete steps wound down a square shaft, a railing of hollow steel red and rough with rust keeping us from the drop. I refrained from shining the flashlight down there, fearful of attracting the ghouls’ attentions. Quinn and I kept ahead, him silent as a cat stalking its prey, not even a jingle from his mail, me panting and scuffing and making enough noise to scare up the dead. The stairs went down so far I thought that soon we’d begin to get hot, for surely we were approaching the eternal fires of hell. The rational part of me, the part that’s read the old knowledge, that fought back, but all it could tell me was that there were no devils down there, only ghouls, and that was hardly comforting.

  Fillip fell. He tripped on something, let out a bitten-off yell, and slammed hard into my back. The two of us stumbled sideways, toward the drop. I dropped the flashlight and grabbed for the railing. It came clean off in my hand, leaving me and Fillip windmilling on the edge. Stupidly, I let go of the pole. I saw it fall lengthways down the shaft. Then there were hands on me, and I was being yanked back from the brink. Rachel, and Thomas.

  The pole fell, clanging off every flight of steps below us, down and down, bang, bang, bang, each impact booming up the shaft, Rachel and Thomas looking at me, eyes wider than saucers.

  “I’m sorry!” said Fillip. “I’m sorry!”

  With a final clatter, far, far away, the pole stopped. There was a splash. The noise was done. We stood in our little pool of stolen light, not daring to breathe, listening for the sounds of the ghouls.

  None came.

  Quinn stared hard at Fillip and me.

  “Have a care. Ghouls hear exceptionally well.”

  Rachel retrieved my flashlight. We were lucky that had not fallen also. She worked the switch a few times.

  “Broken,” she said, stowing it in her pack.

  “Never mind,” said Quinn. “We’re halfway there.”

  * * *

  We came off the stair a few levels down. The way out was closed by a steel door. Twenty years is plenty of time for steel to rust itself solid.

  “I could blast it,” said Fillip.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Quinn. “You’ll bring the place down around our ears, or the ghouls on us. Or both. We’re going to have to do this quietly.”

  It took half an hour to pry the door open far enough to get through. Me and Rachel kept watch up and down the stairs, Thomas, Fillip, and Quinn shoving and cursing, the muted noises of their exertions louder than firecrackers in that deathly silent place.

  I had my own torch out again. I was glad to be carrying just the one now, for they were heavy, blocky things, like bricks. I abandoned caution and shone the beam upward. The stairs went up further than the beam could go. Down below, black water glinted, the stair vanishing into it. The color of that water, so dark, reminded me of the night, and I thought on the day passing overhead, quick that time of year. It was already approaching noon. We were going to run out of time.

  The shriek of reluctant metal ended our watch.

  “Door’s open,” panted Fillip. He was streaked with rust and sweat.

  Quinn put his head and gun around the d
oor, then pushed his way through. A moment later his head reemerged.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  We took our packs off to get through the gap. A modest corridor opened on the other side. Again of concrete, bare of decoration aside from a yellow stripe of flaking paint running at hip height.

  “Medical section’s this way,” said Quinn.

  “No angel could live here, surely,” I said.

  Quinn shrugged without turning round. “Depends on your definition of an angel,” he said. Although I pressed him on his meaning, he would say no more.

  We passed half a dozen doors, all of steel. Most were shut but one was open, and from inside came steady wind carrying the smell of mold. Then the corridor ascended a short flight of steps, and we were on a landing ending before a gleaming cylinder door, all made of a metal I did not recognize. A glass panel not unlike Rachel’s device was set into the metal beside the door. The landing ended with a panel of metal too, but this was common steel, the diamond grip pattern still visible under scabs of rust.

  “Elevator platform,” said Quinn, stepping on it doubtfully. He thrust hard with a foot. “Stable enough. Watch yourselves.”

  “I need my device back,” said Rachel.

  Quinn looked at her.

  “I can’t open this door without it.”

  He handed it over. Rachel went forward to the door and we all came to stand by her on the platform. She held up the device to the panel in the door and her fingers danced on the surface. The panel flickered, displaying lines of broken light. The door let out a quiet chime and rotated inward to reveal a space big enough for two people to stand within, with a second door on the far side. She stepped inside the space. With a backward glance at Quinn, she knelt in front of the door and took the box from her belt. Then she opened it.

  Quinn took a step forward. “I think it’s time you showed me what is in there,” he said. She kept her back to him, attaching the leads and clips to the artifact.

  “What are you doing?” he said. He made to go into the cylinder.

  A voice emanated from the device, now attached to the artifact. “Stay back, Knight of Atlantis. You are needed, but not yet.”

  Rachel turned, holding the length of chromium spine gently in both hands, so that it nestled there like an obscene insect. Her usual shrewd expression was gone, a mix of reverence in its place.

  “Put it down!” shouted Quinn. He lunged for the device.

  Two things happened then. A green light ignited above the inner door, and it opened. At the same time, the elevator platform fell away from under our feet. Quinn went with it, as did Fillip and I. Thomas fell with a cry, somehow turning around and grabbing hold of the lip of the corridor as the floor plummeted beneath us. I caught a glimpse of him dangling, before the platform crashed against something and the wind was knocked from me, and I think I blacked out a moment.

  Flight in the Deeps

  QUINN WAS UP FIRST. His face was scraped raw down one side, but he hauled me up without displaying discomfort. The platform had come down at the bottom of its shaft, which was set back into the wall of another corridor running at right angles to the direction of the one we had come from.

  “God damn it!” said Quinn. “Why didn’t you tell me what was in the box?”

  “I . . . I . . . I don’t . . . It was a secret!” I said.

  Quinn pushed me against the wall. “Do you know what that is?”

  I shook my head dumbly.

  He pushed his forearm against my neck, a snarl on his face. I knew then that he wanted to kill me. I came very close to death. He slammed me and stepped back. “It tricked you all. She tricked you all. See to your friend.”

  I went to Fillip, who was clutching his side. He pushed me off as I tried to help him up.

  “Let me examine you,” I said.

  “Leave it,” he insisted, “I’m fine.” He was not. It was obvious. I gave Quinn a pleading look.

  “What do we do?”

  “We could climb,” gasped Fillip. “I’ve got more ropes in my pack, carabiners, hammers.”

  “Fillip, you’ve broken a rib, let me see,” I said. He was breathing hard, his hand still clawed at his side.

  “Let me be!” he said.

  Quinn looked up. The vestibule to the medical center was a square hole yards overhead. We could catch no sight of the others.

  “We could do it. Give me the—” His head snapped round. “Too late. Get him up,” he said to me. “Now!”

  Fillip and I heard the noise seconds after Quinn, a whooping, chittering noise, and the splash of many feet in shallow water.

  “Ghouls!” I said.

  Fillip staggered up, biting back his pain. I buckled under the weight of him, so Quinn half-hoisted him up and then we ran, as fast as we could, as that noise grew louder behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “One problem at a time,” said Quinn. “Light your torches!”

  Fillip couldn’t do it, but I carried two. I plucked both from my belt as we ran, discarding the waxed cloth protectors round the heads and pausing for terror-wracked seconds to fumble out my matches and strike them. The matches flared true, for there was no draft to disturb them, and the torches took instantly, then I was off again, flying through the underworld, the fires of the torches roaring flags behind me. Bent spikes of metal and jagged lumps of fractured concrete reached out to snag at my limbs. The floor was uneven, buckled by the upheavals of the earth. Water dribbled from every crack, and coldly puddled on the floor. My feet were numb from the touch of it, but we ran as if the demons of the lowest pits of hell were on our tails.

  Quinn skidded to a halt. I ran into him. He stayed me with his arm, preventing me from tumbling head over heels into a crevasse that broke the corridor right through, roof, floor, and ceiling. Fetid air, warm with the heat of the underworld, blew from its depths, and my torches flickered.

  “Can you jump it?” said Quinn.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I . . . can’t . . .” gasped Fillip. He sagged at the knees, and Quinn let him drop. The noise of our pursuers drew closer. Fillip slipped his pack off and held it out to Quinn with weakening hands. Then he undid his jacket, unbuckled his explosives belt, and pulled it out from under his clothes, arching his back painfully to get it off. He kept one stick of dynamite, already prepared with a fuse wire, and passed the remainder to Quinn. A look of understanding passed between the two.

  “Are you ready?” said Quinn to me. The noise of the ghouls grew louder. Savage voices and padding feet filled the corridor with their racket.

  “Wait!” I said. I ran away from the crevasse until I saw a dry patch of ground, then tossed the torches back. They whooshed as they spun through the air, landing close by one another. One splashed down, half in the water, and began to gutter.

  On the other side of the fire a wall of monsters came, a rush of gleaming eyes and flashing teeth. I stood, rooted to the spot. Had the torches not brought them to a crashing halt, they would have overrun me and torn me to pieces in moments. They fell over each other, shrieking in fear at the flame. Those at the fore were pushed close to the torches, their faces contorted in terror.

  Fillip struck a flame from his steel lighter and held it close to the fuse of his dynamite. The torches would not last long. The one in the water was hissing, a weak blue fire playing over the pitch-soaked cloth as water seeped into it. The other was consuming its fuel quickly, burning too high, too fast. The savage faces of the ghouls loomed in and out of sight, red eyes burning with a feral madness, teeth clashing, drool running. Their hands twitched over the fires then withdrew, as if the very light burned them as surely as the fire would.

  “You’ve . . . got . . . about . . . thirty seconds . . . once . . . I . . . light . . . this . . . fuse . . .” panted Fillip.

  “You must come,” I said, holding out my hand. I never liked Fillip, but he was a man in need. I cannot suffer to see my fellow creatures in pain. I took my gun
off my shoulder. “We can hold them off.”

  “There are too many. He’s finished. His lung’s collapsed. His chest is full of air,” said Quinn.

  “I can fix that!” I said. I looked back and forth between Fillip and our diabolical enemy. Fillip shook his head.

  “Can you . . . do it . . . before . . . they . . . come? Can . . . you . . . kill . . . them all?” he gasped. A feverish smile twisted his face. “Jump!”

  The ghouls were shrieking their grating cries, snapping their teeth. They shuffled closer and closer to the flickering fire, the dying torchlight dancing on their bone-white, filthy skin.

  “Now,” wheezed Fillip. And put the fuse in the flame. It fizzed into urgent life.

  “Run!” Quinn shouted.

  Bellowing incoherently, I broke into a sprint and leapt over the gash in the ground. Where that pit led I cannot guess, but my fear of falling into that chasm was greater than any other.

  A jolting impact announced my arrival on the other side. Quinn followed after, making the leap from a standing start and hauling me up. In horror I stared back over the gap.

  Excited by our movement, the ghouls leapt over the dying torches. They fell on Fillip in a frenzy of clawing hands and biting teeth. He screamed horribly. Blood fountained up the walls.

  Somehow, I convinced my legs to move against all their intention to freeze solid, crippled by fear of the blasphemy—for by now I was half-convinced it was such—we committed by entering into the ruins of the Dreaming City. We ran then. I had no flashlight, and no torches, but a feeble glow came from somewhere, lending just enough light to my eyes so that I could see the horrors that pursued us. I could not stop myself looking back over my shoulder. Ghouls bounded over the chasm, their pale bodies gray shadows in the murk, scrambling for purchase as they hit our side, some few falling to their deaths still screaming out their hatred as they fell.

  The ones that crossed hurtled afterward. Quinn and I flew headlong from them, deep into the twisting labyrinth of the deeper city where an unexpected light began to lift the dark.