Carnival of Stone: A Novella (The Soren Chase Series)

by Rob Blackwell

  Soren gave Glen an angry look, but his partner just smiled innocently, as if he didn’t know what was wrong.

  “She’s likely descended from one of the gorgons,” Soren said. “But she’s not one of the sisters.”

  “How do you know tha?” Lochlan asked.

  “Because the artist, Jackson Cleary, found an egg in the mine,” Soren said. “He hatched something from it. I assumed, wrongly, that it was just some beast that he controlled. But I don’t think so now. I think it was Emily.”

  “Gorgons lay eggs now?” Lochlan asked.

  “Why not?” Soren said. “Snakes do.”

  “If your theory is right, the legend is all wrong,” Glen said. “There aren’t just three women cursed by the gods. And gorgons can change into people. I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Yeah, but the myth has a hint of truth in it,” Soren said. “Before she gathered the snakes to her, Emily was a good-looking woman. You can see why someone who witnessed that change might get a few facts wrong in the retelling. Emily clearly wanted the change to happen, but that might not be so obvious in other cases.”

  “So Cleary found an egg and hatched himself quite a woman,” Glen said. “Supposedly, he had a pretty wife. Do you think it was Emily?”

  “Are ya saying somebody fooked tha thing?” Lochlan asked. “I haven’t had a woman in fifty years, but even I draw the line somewhere.”

  “She looked normal before the snakes arrived,” Glen said. “Do you think Cleary knew what she was?”

  “He must have,” Soren said. “He used her to make the statues and tried to get rich. And then it all went wrong. There was an explosion and a landslide. Maybe Cleary blew himself and his wife up when the police were closing in.”

  “Or maybe somebody else did it,” Glen said.

  Soren turned to him.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked. “It’s clear the police knew Cleary was behind the statues, but probably not that he had a legendary monster with him. Who else would even know?”

  Soren turned the flashlight app in Glen’s direction to see his response. But Glen didn’t meet his eyes. Instead, he stared ahead into the dark tunnel and made a noncommittal gesture.

  “Just a hunch,” he said.

  There was something about the way he looked that made Soren want to follow up, but Lochlan interrupted before he could say anything more.

  “All I want to know is how to finish it off,” Lochlan said. “It killed me brother and it’s gonna pay.”

  Soren turned his attention to the leprechaun.

  “Your brother isn’t dead,” Soren said. “At least not yet.”

  Lochlan grabbed Soren’s arm and pointed the assault rifle in Soren’s face.

  “C’mere, don’t play with me,” he said. “I saw him turned to stone.”

  Soren frowned and calmly pushed the gun away.

  “I think the people are trapped in stone, but not dead,” Soren said. “Some of the statues have been moving ever so slightly.”

  Lochlan looked at him with wide eyes.

  “Ya better not be lying,” he said.

  “It’s just another theory I have,” Soren said. “Not saying it’s right. I’ve been plenty wrong today already.”

  “Then how do we turn me brother back?”

  “I’m not sure,” Soren said. “But I think we start by killing the gorgon.”

  Lochlan grinned fiercely.

  “Now tha’s a plan I can get behind,” he said.

  “Let’s make a deal, then,” Soren said. “Temporarily, our interests are aligned. We stop the gorgon and we save everybody who’s been turned to stone, including Keevan.”

  “And after?” Lochlan asked. “What happens then?”

  Soren looked down into the leprechaun’s face. He hoped he could trust him. At this point, he didn’t see that he had much choice.

  “We figure it out then,” Soren said. “Look, the odds are that we’re all going to die anyway, so why waste time negotiating now?”

  The leprechaun eyed him for a moment and then finally nodded.

  “Sounds good,” he said. “We save me brother, and then we’ll talk.”

  They walked several more feet before the tunnel leveled off. Soren could still feel fresh air coming from somewhere inside the tunnel, making him hopeful that the mine would soon start to rise upward.

  Instead, as they walked along, Soren spotted a piece of modern equipment.

  Soren looked at what appeared to be a small backhoe, which had apparently been trying to clear a collapsed tunnel that jutted off to the right. Another tunnel went off to the left, but Soren couldn’t see far enough to know where it went.

  As the beam of light from the phone swept the nearby cavern, Soren saw a person standing just behind the machine. Lochlan spotted it too and began shouting. Soren tried to stop him before he fired the gun, but was too late. Glen and Soren ducked down as the shot went wild.

  “What is it?” Glen shouted. “Is she here?”

  “No,” Soren said.

  He aimed the beam at the person who stood motionless before them. The man was facing their direction, his eyes wide but apparently unseeing.

  “It’s just another statue,” Soren said, putting a hand on Lochlan’s shoulder. “Take it easy, Lochlan. Your bullet could have ricocheted and killed one of us.”

  The leprechaun angrily brushed Soren’s hand off and walked a few steps toward the statue. Soren didn’t know if it mattered, but Lochlan’s shot had missed. The statue looked unharmed.

  “That’s not just another statue,” Glen said.

  He walked toward it and touched its face.

  “That’s Jay,” he said. “That’s my friend.”

  Soren was unsure how Jay ended up here. After he left the voicemail, there had been so much screaming, Soren assumed the gorgon must have killed him or at least turned him to stone wherever he made the phone call. But instead he’d made it into the mine. He wondered why. Soren had only fled down here out of a lack of other options. Surely Jay hadn’t thought he would be safe in this place.

  He looked down to see what Jay was carrying in his hands and started chewing his bottom lip. It was a habit Sara used to mock him for when they were kids. It meant he was concentrating on something, still trying to work it out.

  “Take a look at this,” Soren said.

  He pointed at Jay’s arms, which carried a large package. Even though it was now stone, Soren could make out the writing on the side. “Warning: Explosives,” it read.

  “It’s blasting material,” Glen said. “He was trying to blow this place up.”

  Soren and Glen looked at each other in horror.

  “So he was on the run from a hideous monster, and instead of trying to flee, he came down here to blow up the mine,” Soren said. “Why?”

  “Maybe he thought he could take the gorgon with him,” Lochlan said. “Do the same thing tha happened decades ago all over again.”

  But Soren’s attention was no longer on the statue or what he carried. He was looking instead at the machine and where it was pointed. He swept the flashlight app on the tunnel directly in front of the machine. It had made considerable progress in excavating a wall directly ahead. The bottom was still blocked, but it had punched a small hole near the top. It looked like it connected to another cavern.

  Before Soren could approach it, Glen grabbed the phone back and walked over to the partially collapsed tunnel. He seemed agitated after finding Jay, and Soren couldn’t blame him. He knew what it was like when a friend of yours got hurt by something you used to think was just a myth.

  Glen held the phone up to the hole, looking through it.

  “I think I know what he was trying to blow up,” he said.

  Soren walked to the hole. Inside there was a large cavern, which looked like it used to be a room used for sifting through materials and packing them into carts for transport to the surface. But now it was filled with statues. Soren saw more than two dozen of t
hem pushed off to the right-hand side.

  “He wanted to blow up statues?” Soren said. “The professor was right. Some of Cleary’s handiwork was protected here.”

  “Look down, Sherlock,” Glen said.

  Soren did and let out an involuntary gasp. In a single moment, he understood why Emily had returned, and why she’d employed such an elaborate ruse to bring others here to help her dig out this cavern. He also knew why Jay had used his last remaining moments to try and blow the place up. It wasn’t because of the statues.

  The floor of the cavern was covered in eggs.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There were at least three dozen eggs, all of them roughly three feet tall, spread throughout the cavern. They glowed faintly, with vein-like lines that pulsed with a greenish light. Some kind of thick membrane covered them. Soren thought they looked like giant eggs encased in snot.

  He pulled his head back from the wall.

  “Okay, this is bad,” he said. “This is very, very bad.”

  “What? What is it?” Lochlan asked.

  Soren turned to tell him to take a look and realized the leprechaun was about two feet too short to see into the cavern. He didn’t fancy offering to hold him up, either.

  “Teleport in and look for yourself,” Soren said.

  Lochlan shook his head.

  “That’s me brother’s talent, not mine,” Lochlan said. “We can’t all do it. So just tell me what’s in the fooking mine.”

  Soren nodded, glad to see one assumption he’d made was actually right.

  “Eggs,” Soren said. “She’s laid a whole lot of offspring in there.”

  “Jaysus,” Lochlan said. “Just when this couldn’t get worse.”

  “Take it from me,” Soren said. “It can always get worse.”

  Soren thought he understood the basics of what had happened now. Emily had been Cleary’s wife in every sense of the word. The two had mated and produced the monstrosities inside the cavern. Somehow the eggs had survived down here for decades.

  The earthquake must have freed Emily, but she probably wasn’t with her eggs when the landslide that trapped her had occurred. So instead she’d spent the past few years organizing a way to get back and dig out her babies. She needed equipment and manpower to ensure she could get the eggs out safely without bringing the whole cavern down. So she’d hooked up with Jay and the professor, bringing everyone here.

  What Soren didn’t know was what had gone wrong. The cavern wasn’t fully excavated yet, but Emily had turned to stone everyone who could theoretically help her finish the job. There must have been some triggering event, something that made her attack the other students and the professor.

  Lochlan patted his vest and then swore under his breath.

  “Damn,” he said. “You took me only grenade. I’m with the statue over there. The world doesn’t need more of tha kind of monster. We should blow those ugly fookers to hell.”

  Soren looked into the cavern.

  “I agree in spirit, but it’s probably just as well you don’t have a grenade,” Soren said. “It could have brought down the whole mine on top of us. I’m honestly surprised the earlier explosion didn’t do that, but it looks like we got lucky.”

  Lochlan snorted and gave Soren an evil look. Soren just stared back at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Oh,” Lochlan said. “I thought ya were making a joke about leprechauns and how we’re supposed to be lucky.”

  Glen burst out laughing.

  “That’s pretty funny,” he said. “And isn’t the leprechaun that sells breakfast cereal actually named Lucky?”

  Lochlan jerked a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing at Glen.

  “Do you even like tha guy?” he asked. “Can I kill him, please?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Soren said.

  “Gee, thanks for the sterling defense,” Glen said.

  Soren nodded his head, pretending like Glen was being serious.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “Look, we can stand here chatting all day, but we need to get out of here. The gorgon wanted to kill us before, and now we’ve just put ourselves between her and the thing she’s literally been petrifying people to get at. She’s going to be coming for us.”

  “How?” Glen said. “This was the way in.”

  Soren swept the beam of light back up the tunnel. They were standing in what had been the main shaft, what the professor and his crew had clearly been using to get down into the mine. But there was another tunnel off to the right that Soren hadn’t explored.

  “Like I said earlier, there’s air down here,” Soren said. “There has to be another way out. We’ll try that way.”

  “What if it goes nowhere?” Glen asked.

  “Then eventually we’ll dehydrate and die,” Soren said. “But there are thousands of abandoned mining tunnels in Virginia, particularly this part of it. And many of them linked up with natural caves. The odds are that something else connects to here; it’s just a question of finding the right one.”

  “If there are that many, we’ll get lost,” Glen said.

  “My hope is that one of them will start going up,” Soren said. “That’s the direction we need to go.”

  “I might be able to help,” Lochlan said. “Me people used to live underground. It’s been a long time, but we still have an uncanny sense of direction. I’m not sayin’ it’s perfect.”

  Soren gestured toward the unexplored tunnel nearby.

  “It’s the best chance we’ve got,” Soren said. “Lead the way.”

  Lochlan started walking into the tunnel, with Soren just behind him, shining the light so he could see. But Glen stopped as they passed by Jay’s statue.

  “If you’re still in there, we’ll come back for you,” Glen said. “I promise. We think there may still be a way to save you. Just hold on.”

  Glen fell in line behind Soren and the three began walking. They hadn’t gone twenty yards before the tunnel split into two, with one headed down and to the left and the other down and to the right.

  “It’s official. We’re going to die down here,” Glen said.

  But Soren watched as Lochlan stopped moving and stood still for a moment. After a minute, he picked the tunnel to the left.

  “Soren, are you sure—” Glen started, but Soren cut him off with a wave of his hand.

  If he was being honest, Soren wasn’t sure. He didn’t know if the leprechaun had any better idea than he did about getting out of here, whatever he might say about having an uncanny sense of direction. Even if he did, Soren hated being dependent on a supernatural creature for anything. In his experience, you couldn’t trust anyone but humans, and you could only trust about 1% of those. He thought briefly of Sara and hoped she and Alex were okay. If they weren’t, he would never forgive himself. He almost laughed out loud. He already had a long list of things he’d never forgive himself for; what was one more?

  Yet if Soren couldn’t trust Lochlan, he also knew this: he sure as hell didn’t know the way out. In this circumstance, he had no choice but to rely on the leprechaun and just hope for the best. It was only a few more feet before they came to another break in the tunnels.

  “What the hell?” Glen asked. “How big is this thing?”

  “No idea, but it could be gigantic,” Soren said.

  “This just keeps getting better,” Glen said under his breath.

  They waited as Lochlan once again chose their path, this time moving them to the right. After that, there were a number of breaks in the tunnel, so many that Soren lost track of the way they’d come. Worse, there was no sense that any of the tunnels were headed up or out. But Lochlan strangely seemed to grow more confident the longer he walked, barely pausing when he came to a divided path.

  The tunnels were now far narrower than the mineshaft they’d come down. They hemmed the three of them in so they walked single-file with Lochlan in front. Both Soren and Glen had to duck slightly to avoid hitting their heads on th
e rocks above. The sheer number of tunnels and their small size suggested they were now in a network of naturally-made caves, and no longer in what was once the mine.

  “Is there anything else you can do?” Soren asked him.

  Lochlan didn’t stop to turn around but answered. His voice bounced off the walls around them.

  “All leprechauns are good trackers,” he said. “That’s why the boss uses us. I’m just reversing the process. Instead of trying to find a mark, I’m tracking the sun. Seems to be working. Or I’m getting us more lost than a sissy at a whorehouse.”

  “Charming,” Glen said.

  “But Keevan can also teleport; why can’t you?” Soren asked.

  The leprechaun shrugged.

  “We all got our talents in this world,” he said. “Leprechaun magic varies somewha for each of us. It’s mostly based on illusion. We can confuse people, make ‘em see and hear things. Teleportin’ is a more unusual ability; that’s why Keevan gets all the ladies. But I know some tricks tha have helped us out of a few jams.”

  “Like what?” Glen asked.

  Lochlan stopped walking and turned around to face him. The beam of the flashlight app illuminated his face, which in the light looked old but fierce. Glen took a step back.

  “I may still have to kill you, boyo,” Lochlan sneered. “And maybe ya’ll see some of my tricks then.”

  “See, this is why nobody likes leprechauns,” Glen replied. “You’re surly and mean.”

  Soren would say this for Glen—he recovered quickly. Lochlan practically growled at him.

  “Oh, people love us,” Lochlan said, his Irish accent sounding thicker than before. “We’re the veritable life of tha party.”

  Soren moved so that he blocked Glen and Lochlan’s view of each other.

  “Let’s move on, gentlemen,” Soren said. “We’re running out of time.”

  Lochlan turned and the three walked on, Soren still hoping the leprechaun knew where they were going. Soren had visions of them wandering for days, finally dying of dehydration and exhaustion without ever seeing the sun again.

  “Can I raise another question?” Glen asked from the back.