Nightcrawlers

by Tim Curran

  “All right, son.”

  Hell, who could blame him? Who could blame anyone from getting their backs up in this awful place? Godfrey felt pretty much the same way himself. How could you not?

  He was terrified and sickened just like they were.

  Christ, it felt like his stomach had grown legs and was trying to walk up the back of his throat. But as nauseous as it all made him, as claustrophobic and uneasy, he was still fascinated by it all. All those stories that had made the rounds of Haymarket and the county for so damn many years…this was the epicenter of it. Down here in this stinking, misty blackness. This was the black beating heart of it, the core. How many locals had ever been down here and lived to tell the tale? And how many men or women, for that matter, had ever reached the fountainhead of a legend?

  Lots of ‘em have through history, you just don’t hear about ‘em because they never come back to tell the tale.

  He moved towards the far end of the room, the others falling back behind him. He stepped carefully, very carefully. As he passed the line of bodies, his wake made them move and drift and he thought he heard Beck whimper in his throat.

  Hang tight, son, he thought. This is going to get worse and you know it.

  There was a passage ahead and he entered it first, his light filling it, making shadows jump and cavort. He let out a little cry and fell backwards, almost tripping and going down in the water.

  Beck and Chipney were at his side immediately.

  “What is it?” Chipney asked.

  Beck was breathing too hard to ask anything.

  “A rat…I think it was a rat,” Godfrey lied. “A goddamn big one. It jumped out at me.”

  Beck shined his light down there. “Nothing now.”

  “No, we must have scared each other. Sorry to startle you, boys.”

  Godfrey stood up from the sloping wall where he’d been leaning. It had taken every bit of strength he possessed to conceal from them what he had looked upon. When he had first entered the passage, his light had picked out the shape of a man…something like a man. A hunched-over, ratlike form that was grotesque to the extreme. There had been something growing from its belly like sacs, sacs that looked oddly like baby doll heads, but hairless and white and mouthless.

  Then it had disappeared as if it never was.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Beck said. “This is getting too…too fucked-up for just a few men.”

  He was right, entirely, but Godfrey said, “We got missing cops. I’m not calling this off until I know what the hell happened to them. They’d do the same for me, I hope.”

  “Definitely,” Chipney said. “We move on.”

  Godfrey got on the radio. Down there with all the stone and brick walls, the reception was shit. He got Kenney, but it was mostly static. Hyder, above, came in a little better, but not much. Godfrey knew just as Beck and Chipney must have suspected that the farther they penetrated into the labyrinth, the worse the reception would be until there was no reception at all.

  His heart in his throat, he led them deeper into the passage.

  To what waited for them.

  30

  Now it was the eyes.

  Dear God, what next?

  Elena was still in her rocking chair by the window and it didn’t seem she would ever leave it now. This was her last sitting. She had been feeling poorly when she sat down there, wanting to be in her old favorite rocker by the window feeling the sun streaming onto her old skin, warm and golden. It had never truly occurred to her that she would never get up again, that this was the last time she would lower her frail old bones into her beloved chair.

  She had sat in it through so many years since George had made it for her just after World War II. She had rocked babies in it and tended to midnight feedings in it and watched through the window as she did now for George to come back out of the fields as evening set in. Yes, yes, yes, many years, all of them fluttering in her head now like the pages of a book, granting her a peek at their words, their memories, but not much more than that and she had to think that it was for the best, strictly for the best.

  She had been sitting there for many hours and her tired old body refused to budge an inch. Whenever she tried, her body ached and her muscles failed her, that pain digging deeper in her chest and her breath barely coming.

  Oh, the years, she thought, all the wonderful years and bad years and empty years.

  Her mind drifted in and out and she knew she should have called Betty while she had the chance. It would have been a comfort to speak to her one last time, to hear her voice. But it was not to be. It just was not to be.

  She focused her eyes.

  She needed her sight because she wanted to see what there was to see right at the end. She wanted to see who carted her away because she knew that one would, one she had not seen in many, many years and one she had never gotten to know.

  1916 was the year she was born and it made her smile when she thought of the gulf of time between then and now and all she had seen. The pages of her book flipped in her mind, one page after the other. Flip. It was 1947 and George and the neighboring farmers were raising the big barn out near the crick. It took many days and weeks and still more days to finish it and paint it. George had been very proud of his barn. Then in 1963, it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground along with most of their livestock. That had been a hard year. Flip. It was winter, 1939, and Auntie Keena had gone through the ice of the well-named Lake Hardship. They had a funeral for her and stood around an empty plank coffin. Her body would not be discovered until spring. Flip. It was 1924. Elena was eight years old and that summer was the summer when the man with the doll came to town. He was a drifter. He began luring girls off into the woods because he claimed that he had a doll that could smile. Elena and Bissy King had been walking down the road out near Five Mile Creek with jars of freshly picked blueberries and the man had come up to them. His clothes were ragged and his teeth were yellow like rat’s teeth. He bowed to them and said, “Ladies, you will not believe what it is my pleasure to possess.” He gave them the spiel about a doll that not only smiled, but laughed. Bissy went for it, but not Elena. Elena ran and Bissy called after her, “Where you going, ‘lena?” And Elena did not know, but she needed to get out of there fast because something about the drifter made her belly feel like it was filled with black ice. The drifter did something to Bissy in the woods and she was never the same after that. She became sullen and quiet, then mean in high school. She died just shy of her 21st birthday in Chicago with a needle hanging out of her arm. Flip. It was April of 1968 and there was a knock at the door. George was out in the fields. Elena answered it and a found a marine standing there. Franny had been killed in action. Flip. It was 1922. Elena was five years old going on six and her mother was set to deliver a younger brother or sister. Elena herself was excited, singing and skipping about. She was the only one. The other kids were worried and would not say why. The adults were grim as gravestones. The women from the surrounding farms had gathered as they always gathered when there a birthing. And late that afternoon, the midwife, Mrs. Stern, had come. Elena never liked her. She dressed in somber gray, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, her lips wrinkled and her eyes like chips of the blackest coal. She did not think it was her imagination that everyone—even the men—were uneasy around her. Towards suppertime, her mother began to cry out, screaming bloody murder, and it was within the hour that the child was born. No one was allowed to go upstairs and see it. Only a few of the farm women and the midwife herself. Elena heard it crying out more than once and she asked the other kids if babies always sounded like mewling cats. Flip. It was 1996 and they laid George to rest. And although Elena was sad, she did not cry like the others at the funeral. For some reason, she thought the very idea of crying for her husband after he’d lived a good long life of good deeds and productive years was near to blasphemy. So she did not cry. She knew he would be proud of her and the pride they felt in each other through years both
lean and fat meant a great deal to them. Flip. It was 1922 again. That baby was really mewling by eight that night and Elena found her father crying and asked him why, but he would not tell her. And when she asked if she could see the new baby, he just shook his head. “There are reasons you can’t see it. Very good reasons.” And it was near on to sunset that night, that Mrs. Stern finally left, carrying a small bundle close to her breast. Later, it was said she had taken it out to Ezren’s Field. Elena and the other children were told that the new baby died of crib death and wasn’t that just so sad? It was a boy and he had been named Edwin. They had a small, dignified funeral out at the county cemetery and everyone wept as a tiny, empty box was lowered into the ground.

  “Gah,” Elena said, coming to herself.

  Where had she been? Out visiting the years, traveling the long-lost roads of her life, all the darkening streets and narrowing county forks and long-forgotten footpaths that made up a life and its travels. Oh yes, oh yes. She was not long for this world and she knew it. The idea gave her pain but it also gave her a certain sense of freedom for the way had not always been easy and the trail was often stony. If the preachers were right, she would see George again and, oh God yes, Franny. He would be waiting there for her as she remembered him before the U.S. Marines had wasted him and made his death into something dirty and ugly.

  Her eyesight was dimming.

  Her heart was slow and weary in its cadence.

  Her lungs fought for each breath.

  She was exhausted beyond the limits of her frail old body and soon the darkness would come and sink her into timeless depths. And as she realized this, she thought, I was young once. I was clear of eye and my hair was like harvested wheat. The sun caught it and made it shimmer. The girls envied it and the boys desired it. I had many, many friends and we danced and sang and laughed and now I’m at my end just as once I was at my beginning and my mother held me tight in her arms against the world.

  31

  Kenney was thinking, almost casually: I’m going to die down here.

  And it should have terrified him or at the very least sent him scurrying like a rat through the darkness and back to the ladder, but it did not. Some twenty feet into this newest vaulted passage, he paused, the water cold and viscous around his waist, and thought about it all. He did not like what he was thinking. He saw the faces of his two ex-wives, his daughter, his mother and father now long dead. He could remember good times and sunny days and his childhood and how strange it was that it would end down here in this flooded crypt.

  And thinking these things, he paled, knowing something important and necessary in him had now given up.

  Don’t be a fool. You’ve got plenty of years left if you keep on fighting. If you want to give up, you might as well do it now.

  But he wasn’t about to do that. Hell, no.

  He turned to Iversen and St. Aubin, both of whom followed at a healthy distance as if they were waiting to see if anything happened to him before proceeding.

  “It could get bad,” he said to them, his bobbing flashlight creating unnatural, sliding shadows over the walls of the tunnel. “If you guys want to go back, do it. Don’t hesitate. You’re young, keep that in mind.”

  Behind those water-streaked polycarbonate face shields, they looked like boys, frightened little boys. They looked at each other, then at Kenney.

  Iversen said, “We’re going with you.”

  “Yeah,” St. Aubin said, a little more hesitantly.

  And Kenney just looked them over and knew they were scared because he was scared, but they could never admit it. Their youth had pride, macho pride. A man was like that before he saw fifty, before he saw the tunnel of his own life narrowing before him. These two puffed out their chests and inflated their balls and told themselves nothing could touch them because their youth would protect them. They would never admit to fear. Unlike Kenney, who readily admitted fear and knew he was seriously fucked here, but pushed on out of sheer curiosity now, morbid curiosity. If this place was intent on killing him, then he would know its secrets first, he would see things no man had and lived to tell the tale.

  It was odd, but there was comfort in that.

  He got on his handpack and checked in with Godfrey, knowing the units on the surface were monitoring everything.

  On they went.

  St. Aubin came up with the idea of duct-taping their flashlights to the riot guns and it was a smart idea. It worked real well. That way you could keep both hands on your rifle and still see everything there was to see.

  They moved on and the water got deeper and came up to their bellies and seemed to get blacker. Whatever it was they’d come to see, it was close now. More remains bobbed in the water, but there were worse things than the dead and they all knew it. Their lights reflected off the polluted waste they marched through and danced over the crumbling brick walls like spotlights. Their splashing sounds echoed through the passage.

  They saw more of the fungus, if that’s what it was. Good God, the passage walls were threaded with it like some elaborate vein networking. Whatever this was all about down here, the fungus was part and parcel of it and maybe everything they had seen and would yet see were but extensions of it.

  It was food for thought.

  “Listen,” Kenney said, freezing up. There had been a sound ahead, a big sound. But now it was gone. He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  But it wasn’t nothing because none of them were moving now. They waited, they tensed, they listened. It seemed that the water was filled with odd, half-glimpsed shapes now.

  Maybe it was their imagination.

  But probably not.

  The brickwork had mostly fallen away the farther they went and the walls were earthen, muddy, dropping away in chunks now. Water ran in streams from networks of reaching tree roots that dangled above. They began to bump into things in the murk, things lying beneath the surface. They had to move carefully.

  Kenney knew what those things were—long, wooden boxes, but he wasn’t saying and didn’t until dozens of them started sprouting from the water like tree stumps: coffins. Most were lidless, splintered, scathed with what could only be claw marks and wormholes. Their satin linings were hanging out like viscera, faded and speckled with mildew when they were evident at all. Most of them had been gutted and shredded. They found no remains in any of them.

  “A cemetery,” Iversen said in a high, whining voice. “That’s what this place is, a fucking cemetery.”

  And that’s exactly what this place was, Kenney knew.

  He could just imagine how the things of Clavitt Fields had tunneled through the darkness, coming up beneath that cemetery across the road from the farmhouse, pulling caskets down into their lair. It was appalling, really, but made perfect sense.

  The water was scummy with bits of human anatomy—rank tissue and decayed flesh like a skim of fat. More islands of fungus appeared. It seemed to be growing right out of the coffins. They splashed ahead, trudged awkwardly. The floor of the tunnel was uneven now, lumpy and twisting and heaved up, full of holes and things that felt like boulders and sticks beneath their boots but were not boulders and sticks at all.

  They had to go back. Kenney knew this now.

  Everyone was trembling at the edge of lunacy here. Go back and dynamite this entire mess, that was the thing to do.

  St. Aubin screamed.

  He spun in a wild circle and opened up with his riot gun. And then everyone was shooting and stumbling through the water and it took a moment for Kenney to see them—the things.

  The descendants of the original, depraved inhabitants of Clavitt Fields.

  They were coming up out of the water and attacking now. In the arcing, glancing illumination of the flashlights, he could see very little. Just hunched, emaciated figures knitted with a colorless, rolling flesh the color of bacon grease that hung in sheets from their frames like moldering, crawling blankets. He caught glimpses of faces riddled with innumerable holes and rents, others covered i
n cauls and braided excrescences that seemed to wriggle like flatworms.

  One of them rocketed out of the filth, its face twisted into a bubbling, fungal mask and Kenney pulled the trigger, blowing it in half. He kept shooting and so did the others, but it was hopeless. They were in a nest of them and there was no advance, no retreat. Four or five of them writhed up from the water like wriggling worms, boneless things with fungoid flesh and tumescent faces and eyeballs only a shade whiter than their mottled complexions and oily locks.

  Iversen screamed as they squirmed over him and dragged him down.

  St. Aubin was whimpering and crying and yelling. He stumbled into Kenney and Kenney shoved him aside and began firing again, repulsed at how the buckshot made those things literally spray apart.

  Then hands as cold as dry ice and covered with a chill, quivering flesh were at his throat. He brought the butt of the shotgun back and felt it smash into something that yelped and slid away in the water and another came up right in front of him. Its face was slack and rubbery, the nose collapsed into a skullish cavern, eye sockets huge and jutting, black and gray teeth chattering like they wanted badly to bite into something.

  It was all bad, of course, but what was even worse was a sluggish liquid flow of some pale yeasty material that came out of its eyes in gurgling clots and engulfed its face like it was trying to eat it.

  It hissed at him like a cockroach, the spawn of witches. Its lips were nearly fused together by tiny hairlike filaments of mold.

  Skeletal, knobby hands took hold of the riot gun…then it was yanked from his oily gloves and he was alone, only St. Aubin’s light behind him, bobbing and swaying as he splashed away into the distance.

  Kenney ran towards him, knocking three of them out of the way and then a fourth exploded into his path and he instinctively struck out at it. His fist sank through its belly, through tissue and organ, which had the spongy consistency of wet bread. It went right through the thing as if it was made of jelly. With a shrill, maddened cry, he pulled his hand back, felt it graze rubbery bones and then the thing fell away only to be replaced by another with a head like a nodding fleshy balloon.