Nightcrawlers

by Tim Curran

  He screamed.

  He made a gurgling sound.

  Then he dropped the light. It was waterproof and floated in the rippling water, casting a weird glow over its surface that reflected up the walls. He swung and fought, but they kept clawing him until he was laid open in a dozen locations. Then they climbed him like starving rats, biting and tearing like they wanted to dig into him. He fired off one last round, tried to get off a second as he screamed with horror and pain but he couldn’t make it happen.

  In the glow of the light, he saw why.

  He couldn’t pull the trigger because his fingers were gone, chewed to nubs.

  Then he saw them. They were small, primeval things, naked, their flesh pallid and strangely mottled. They were albinos from living in the close darkness, spawning in it like cave rats. Their eyes were bulbous and white, set in bloodred sockets, mouths oval like those of sea lamprey, gums pink and set with crooked yellow teeth. Matted hair bleached of color hung from their scalps in twisting greasy braids like looping roundworms.

  They made piping sounds as they fell on him, more coming out of the walls of the tunnel like burrowing worms.

  He screamed as his blood turned the thrashing water pink around him.

  He stared into their cruel, subhuman faces as they made to strike. This was the last thing he saw before they took his eyes, ripping them out by the cords of his optic nerves.

  9

  Above, it was no better.

  Confusion became chaos and it was every man for himself.

  Troopers and deputies slammed into each other and handguns were discharged and voices were shouting, screaming. Flashlight beams were dancing around, aimed at the sky, the ground, the mist. Kenney tried to pull them together, but somebody slammed into him and pitched him into the ooze and he clawed his way back up, terrified of being pulled below like Kopecki.

  Something fast and blurry white took a state patrol trooper and yanked him right off his feet into the mist. Kenney could not even honestly say what it was, other than some subjective impression in his mind of a tall white ape and a shock of equally white hair that hid its face.

  “WATCH IT!” he heard Hyder cry out. “WATCH IT! THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”

  Kenney spun around with his 9mm and saw more anemic hands coming up out of the muck as the things from below pulled themselves up from the brown mud like corpse worms, white and maggoty.

  A deputy stumbled into him, screaming in his face.

  He saw why: his scalp had nearly been peeled free, his face a red, streaming mask like a child’s runny finger painting.

  Hyder was right: they were everywhere.

  Kenney saw a circle of white, blurred faces; leaping, vaulting forms. A deputy got dragged into the fog by a long-armed shadow. Two more got sucked down into the mud by pale, distorted, and raggedy things. Semihuman forms came up from the muck like nightcrawlers from their holes and disappeared just as fast.

  Weapons were discharged out of pure panic and it was an absolute wonder nobody was hit.

  One of the things vaulted in Kenney’s direction.

  He saw red nails streak at his face, and he pumped three rounds into it until it fell back and away.

  Another one clawed out of the darkness and a bony white hand—knitted with pulsing, flabby flesh—took Kenney by the arm. He shrieked and struck out at a grimacing, hideous face. He heard the butt of his 9mm Browning sink into that pulpy mess with such ease he thought there could be no bones beneath it. He pulled away and then grabbed it by its arm…and it yanked away, diving into the mud sea.

  And was gone.

  There was nothing to mark its passing but a sheet of white flesh in his hand, flesh that wriggled and squirmed like it was filled with insect larvae.

  He tossed it aside and began to run, fighting his way through the muck.

  A deputy nearly bowled him over and he soon saw why. Something was clinging to him, something which he at first took to be a wildcat, maybe a lynx or a bobcat or one huge tomcat. It clung to the deputy’s neck like a leech, claws firmly entrenched in his throat. Kenney reached out to yank it free, expecting to feel his hand grasp a pelt of dirty fur, but what it got instead was rutted, swollen flesh that came apart under his fingers like a wet newspaper. When he yanked his hand away, ribbons of it were tangled in his fingers.

  He heard a snarling among the confusion.

  He turned and there was…a thing standing there, only it was no thing but a child or something very much like one. It was small and rawboned. Long white hair was plastered to its face with mud and drainage. It reached out for him with hooked fingers, hissing at him with absolute wrath. Something in his head told him it was no child, at least not one of this world, but some horrible little hobgoblin that had come in the night to tear his bleeding heart out by the roots.

  He squeezed the trigger more out of shock than anything else.

  The round punched right through it and it made a weird, trilling sort of squealing sound and fell back into the mist

  Drenched, sprayed with mud, bleeding and sore and quite beyond any terror they had known before, the survivors bunched together in a defensive circle, back to back, and made ready for what might come next.

  And the night went on forever.

  10

  The state patrol trooper Kenney saw yanked off into the mist was named Carla Sherman. She was not a local, having been born and bred in White Plains, New York, and she had no idea what the hell was going on…other than the fact that it was sheer madness.

  She never saw what grabbed her.

  She only felt the hands that were impossibly strong. To Sherman’s credit, she didn’t go easily. She used every trick she knew to break free. And when that didn’t work, she pulled her Glock 17 and fired three rounds into the leg of her captor. She was thrown to the ground and abandoned. Whoever or whatever held her was simply gone.

  But the mist held. It was almost phosphorescent, charged with moonlight that lit up the dank, dripping world around her in subtle, wavering, and eerie light.

  She could hear commotion in the distance.

  She ran off in its direction and splashed right into a leaf-covered pond that swallowed her right up to the hips. She fought her way free and found herself staring at countless pairs of eyes watching her from the brush. She began edging away, skirting the pond and reaching for her radio. But by that point, she did not know why. There was no way in hell backup would get to her. They had their own problems.

  There was a rustling motion behind her.

  She pivoted, bringing her weapon to bear. She saw nothing. Movement off to the right. She pivoted again and again, there was nothing. She was being played and she knew it. Whatever these things were—and she had long dismissed the idea that they were people as such—they were trying to heighten her fear and uncertainty. They were trying to work her into hysteria so she would get confused and make mistakes. And they were doing a very good job of it. Beads of sweat rolled down her face. Her hands were shaking. A blossom of cold fear had opened in her belly, spreading its petals.

  “I’M ARMED!” she shouted. “I WILL SHOOT TO KILL!”

  Her voice echoed off into the mist and still she heard sounds from every side, furtive rustlings and stealthy footsteps, a sound of phlegmy breathing. She sensed clandestine motion everywhere, but could not pin it down. She was beyond ordinary fear at that point and she was using every bit of her training, experience and resolve to keep down the full-blown panic that was rising inside her like a column of hot air.

  She heard whispering.

  It was all around her.

  At first she could not be sure what was being said, but then it became clear to her. She was being mocked. Mocked by voices that were liquid and gurgling, barely human. “I’m armed,” they said. “I will shoot to kill.” As more and more of those whispering, clotted voices joined in it was almost too much. A scream trembled in her throat, her uniform shirt clung to her back with sweat. A cold chill went up her spine and every muscle
tensed. The whispering continued, low and evil and hissing. There were other sounds…a guttural grunting like that of a boar, then something that might have been a hollow chuckling, and then the unmistakable sound of chattering teeth.

  Something broke loose inside her and she began randomly firing into the mist. She put rounds out in front of her, to either side, and behind her with little control or thought until in her panic she realized she had emptied the Glock.

  Then she screamed, a long and shrill sound of absolute despair.

  And something hit her between the shoulder blades.

  It was enough to put her face-first into the wet leaves and stagnant puddles. She tried to move and there was a knot of pain at her back. It felt like she might have dislocated her shoulder. Goddammit, move! You have to move! If you don’t get out of here right now, then…then…

  She forced herself to her knees, banging her foot off what must have hit her: a rock. A big rock nearly the size of a basketball. She climbed to her feet, trying to pull her radio with trembling fingers and she heard a whooshing sound. Another stone. This time it collided with her face. She yelped and went back down to her knees. Her cheek was gashed open. A warm gout of blood splashed down her face.

  She turned and saw someone not three feet away.

  A woman…at least something like a woman. Her eyes were bulbous and blank white, dirty gray hair plastered to her head with water and leaves. Her face was a horror, like a deflated skin bag of ruts and pouches, a viscid sheet of protoplasm that was trying to crawl off the skull beneath.

  Carla tried to crawl away, very aware of the fact that she was whimpering now, dirty and defeated, tears running down her face, her breath catching in her throat. She did not feel so much like a big badass cop. No, now she was a little girl hysterical with terror. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, rocking back and forth as she pissed herself.

  The woman hopped closer to her on hands and knees, pendulous breasts swaying back and forth. She had a stick and she kept poking Carla with it. In the belly, the arms, the thighs. She was particularly interested in what was between her legs.

  Carla tried to scream, but all that came out was an airless wheezing.

  The others were moving in now.

  She could see their silvery, moonstruck eyes getting closer as they came out of the fog. And crawling through the grass and wet leaves were…children. Small, primordial-looking things that inched towards her like centipedes. They made high, piping sounds like spring peepers, dragging themselves forward on their bellies. Like the woman, they were naked, their flesh unbearably white and streaked with dirt, smeared with mud, leaves in their hair. One of them was dragging what looked like a scarf behind it, but it wasn’t a scarf. It was an undulant, parasitic worm attached to its throat.

  The woman swatted her again and again with the stick until it broke, leaving red stripes over Carla’s face and arms. Then the woman had her, forcing her down, straddling her. She brought her face in so close that Carla could see the mites jumping in her greasy hair. Her breath was hot and stank like an open grave. Drool fell from her lips, a ribbon of it breaking against Carla’s cheek.

  Carla lost it.

  She tossed her rider and almost scampered away, but hands seized her. What seemed dozens of hands. Her hair was grasped, head yanked back and the woman came in close again, muttering incomprehensible things in a clogged voice.

  Carla screamed for real this time.

  But not for long. The woman jammed her white, mucid hand into her mouth, silencing her. Carla gagged, then vomited, but she was held fast. The woman’s nails raked against her tongue and then the fingers went deeper and deeper.

  No, no, no! Carla heard a voice in her head say.

  The woman forced her hand down Carla’s throat, inch by terrible inch. Her jaws had to open wider and wider to admit it. The hand probed deeper as Carla shook with gag reflex, choking and trying to cough it out, but it was no good. An ordinary human hand would never have been capable of such a thing, but the woman and her hand were hardly normal by any means. Her flesh was like rolling wax, the tissues beneath nearly liquid. The hand narrowed and elongated like a snake working its way down a gopher hole and Carla was thankful when she began to lose consciousness.

  By then, the woman had her elbow in Carla’s mouth and the others could barely contain their excitement.

  Her last sensory experience was the distant feeling of that hand down in her belly, rooting around and clawing at things until it clutched something and tore it free, dragging its fleshy mass back up her throat to present to the others.

  11

  Later that night, an old woman, with the aid of her cane, left her farmhouse, sniffed the damp air and considered the dark sky. She knew, absolutely knew in her bones that trouble was coming, trouble like she hadn’t seen in ages.

  She stood on the back stoop of her house, nervous about going out after dark, as she had been her whole life. Something that had only gotten worse and more deeply entrenched as the years had flown by, like the yellowing leaves of an ancient book. Night was a bad time out on Bellac Road. A time when things that should not be, were, and those that should have crawled like graveworms walked tall like men.

  Earlier, she had heard the commotion and the shooting in the night, far distant in the outer reaches of the Ezren land where it butted up to the Pigeon River State Forest. She knew it was the police nosing about and making a fine mess of things, sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted and getting themselves in a fix at the same time. It was only a matter of time. When she had seen that big, dirty bulldozer cutting a path through Ezren lands and peeling up what lay below, she knew it was coming.

  They’re going to get everything stirred up, that’s what they’re going to do. We’re going to have bad days and terrible nights like we haven’t had since—

  Eh? Was that a sound? Sure it was. They were out there. She was only glad that the sky was overcast and there was no moon to brighten up the yard and the pasture beyond. The moonlight had a funny way of lighting up their eyes and she did not want to see them. She was three months shy of ninety-six and she could have happily spent what time was left and gone to her grave without ever seeing those eyes again. She had seen them first when she was a child shining like silver coins in the tall grasses, and ever since, they had come in her dreams, bright and forever watching.

  She stepped down off the stoop, dragging a hefty bag of scraps behind her, the kind of things they liked. She would put it out for them as her mother had and her mother’s mother and on down the line. If they were kept fed, less chance they would start causing trouble.

  The old woman paused, three feet from the stoop, just off the flagstone path in the grass. God, it was not so easy at her age. There had been a time when she dragged the leavings out for them and was back inside within a matter of minutes, doors locked and bolted, windows shut tight so she wouldn’t have to hear those perfectly awful sounds they made.

  Now it took time.

  She felt a slight spike of dread in her chest, but there was no real fear because she knew they would not harm her. They were dogs that would not bite the hand that feeds.

  As she paused there, listening to the crickets and the peepers calling out, the calls of herons and nighthawks, she thought, You’re too old for this and you know it, but like your mother, you’re too damn stubborn to admit it. Yes. Maybe. Possibly. But she had decided long ago that she was born here on this farm and she would die here just as her husband had some seventeen years previously after a life of hard, honest work.

  Not that her children were accepting of that decision.

  She had three of them. Only her daughter was left now. Her eldest son had passed of an embolism not three years before and his brother had died in the war. That left only her youngest and she was always at the old woman about going off to a retirement home.

  “You would want such a thing for me?” the old woman would say to her. “Your own mother? You want
me to sit around with those old farts, watching them drooling and pissing themselves, talking about days long gone while food runs down their chins and they shat themselves?” She always said “shat,” thinking that “shit” sounded undignified somehow. “Is that the life you want for me? Sitting around gossiping with the old hens until I just give up and don’t get out of bed anymore?”

  Betty would tell her that’s not what she wanted at all and tell her all the benefits of such a place—medical care, activities, companionship. There was a world of possibilities. But the old woman would have none of that because she had watched her own mother die in one of those places. The last two years of her life she spent in such a place until she finally lost the will to live and rolled over and died.

  “And when I die,” the old woman told Betty, “it will be of my own choosing, not because I’m locked in one of those prisons.”

  “But Mom…”

  “Don’t but me, young lady.”

  Which was kind of funny because Betty was sixty-seven on her last birthday but it did not matter to her mother because she was always going to be an unsure, coltish girl whose head was not screwed on quite right and didn’t have the common sense of a yard mouse. Not that she didn’t love her because she did, but her choices were not always the best ones for herself or for others.

  “You want me to go into a home? All right, I’ll do it on one condition and I think you know what that is, young lady.”

  At this point, Betty would always shake her head and silently mouth “no” because she didn’t want to know, she just didn’t want to know.

  But the old woman wouldn’t let her off that easy. “You move back here, back to your home. You get out of that city and tend to things.”

  “I don’t want to know about any of that.”

  “It’s necessary that food and scraps and meat that has turned be left out for them.”