by Tim Curran
He could hear them coming after him, but he kept running, stumbling through the water until he found St. Aubin pressed up against a wall, moaning and whimpering and gagging. He’d stripped away his mask and was sucking in lungfuls of that corrupt, dank air. His face was wet with sweat.
Kenney took hold of him and saw he was a wreck, that he was beyond words, so he took his gun from him and—
And fell backward, screaming into that carrion soup…because he saw what was behind the deputy. The walls were punched with a series of tunnels, small ones you would have had to crawl through on your belly. Like the honeycombs of a bumblebee’s nest.
And the scream barely left his lips when a tangle of white arms covered in some shivering gelatinous secretion reached from the hole behind St. Aubin and pulled him bodily into the opening. His screams faded into the distance.
And then Kenney was alone as they came from behind him and others began to slither from those holes with smooth, snakelike undulations.
32
Iversen broke free of a mutiny of clutching, clawing hands and surfaced, battering at the mutant things with his riot gun. He was out of shot but he brandished it like a club. One of them rose up before him and he smashed it in the face with the butt and it literally came apart, spraying over the surface of the water.
Go, go, go, get away, get away.
These were the words that echoed in his head and he did not try and reason or make sense of any of it. This was survival, fight or flight, and he had to get free of this awful place.
He stumbled blindly up passages, turning into others that looked safe until he found himself in a tunnel with slick, earthen walls, the filthy water up to his waist. In his panic, he was not sure where he had gone or where he was now.
With trembling fingers, he stripped his mask off. “KENNEY!” he shouted. “ST. AUBIN! JESUS CHRIST, SOMEBODY ANSWER ME!”
But all he heard was his own voice echoing out into the darkness.
Thank God his flashlight was still working. He stabbed his beam of light up the tunnel and down the way he had come. He saw nothing but dripping walls, clots of clay dropping into the water now and again. A stagnant mist rose from the soup in lacey tendrils. Without the mask on, the stink was horrendous. Not just rot and decay and stagnant water, but a sharp odor of methane and seeping gases.
He fumbled his handpack radio and tried to get a channel but it was ruined from being submerged. He tossed it aside. He had half a dozen shells in his bag. He fed them into the riot gun and tried to think calmly, reasonably, but the idea of that, of course, was simply out of the question.
In the distance, he thought he heard a muted splashing sound.
He waited, listening intently.
Nothing.
You have to think carefully now, a voice in the back of his head told him. It has never been so important as it is now. Think. Reason. Kenney and St. Aubin are probably fucking dead and maybe Godfrey and the others are, too. You have to proceed like they are. You have to backtrack and fight your way out of here.
Yes, that’s exactly what he needed to do, but the idea of moving, of making noise and drawing those things to him was unthinkable. There was no choice, though. He waited a few more minutes, listening not only for the things but a sound that would tell him he was not alone down there because that was the greatest horror of all: being trapped alone in this flooded tomb.
Move.
He started inching his way back down the passage. He came to where they split and tried to remember which one he had come from. Christ, it was hard to be sure. It must have been the left one, though. Yes, it had to be. If he followed that one down, it would lead into the main passage where he had been attacked. Or had there been another tunnel?
No, no, no! Jesus Christ, don’t second-guess yourself!
He started moving down the passage, only there was really no way to know if he was going in the right direction. Everything looked the same and in his panicked flight he had not taken the time to notice any details. He moved deeper into the passage. The farther he went, the more he became certain that it was not the right one at all. He didn’t remember the walls being so narrow. And the water was getting deeper, the mist more dense.
This wasn’t right at all.
The smell of dank rot was filling his head. He felt almost giddy.
The gases, you idiot. The gases.
He pulled the mask back on and his head cleared after a few moments. He was in the wrong passage. He would have to go back…yet, he wasn’t sure if that was the right course of action. His light showed him that the passage widened considerably just ahead. In his flashlight beam, he could see the mist was moving in that direction, which told him there might be an opening to the surface up there somewhere that was sucking the mist up and out.
He moved forward carefully.
The water went down gradually until it was slopping around his ankles. He came to another set of passages. There were three of them this time. His light showed him that one was basically a crawl space; the other sloped very low in the distance as if it might be caved in. He chose the third. The mist was being pulled into it. He would follow it for a bit and if he saw nothing promising, he would backtrack and take his chances in the main passage.
If you can find it, dummy. You keep taking different tunnels and you’ll be chasing your own tail in no time. Ten years from now someone will find your yellowed bones.
No, Iversen decided that was not going to happen.
He liked this new passage. It was essentially no different from the others—muddy walls and dripping ceiling and abundant foulness—save that the mist was moving faster now in his flashlight beam. He was getting close to the source and he could feel the sweet touch of freedom reaching out for him. Maybe it was all in his head, but he honestly did not think so.
He was going to fucking do this.
The passage widened and he ducked under some gnarled tree roots—and his feet went out from beneath him. The floor suddenly canted downward at a 45° angle like a kid’s slide and then he was on his ass sliding down a forking, nearly triangular tunnel with more twists and turns in it than the ductwork of an old building. He slid with gathering speed, bumping against walls and hydroplaning first on his back then his belly until he finally splashed into the mother of all mud puddles.
He came up with a cry, pawing clay from his face and spitting out mud.
The puddle was up to his waist, a turgid, slimy pool of drainage that bobbed with floating mats of fungi and bloated rats that were feverish with flies. The buzzing was so loud he could barely hear himself think. Slime dripped from the walls and water trickled from the ceiling in a ceaseless flow that sounded like a dozen men pissing simultaneously. The chamber reached as far as his light could see. After three or four abortive attempts at trying to crawl back up the passage, he resigned himself to the fact that he was seriously screwed here.
He was trapped.
His only hope was that rescue got to him before the things did.
Knowing this, watching his flashlight beam steadily dimming, Iversen began to sob deep in his throat as the darkness pressed in closer.
33
As Kenney and the others first encountered the inhabitants of the underworld, Sheriff Godfrey, Beck, and Chipney entered a flooded cavern.
The tunnel they followed had opened now into a huge, natural chamber where the water washed around their chests. It was about twenty feet wide, but less than seven in height. Had they been any taller, their heads would have brushed the muddy, rocky ceiling.
The sheriff knew it was getting too deep.
Just like he knew this was all pretty hopeless and that he should take these men up and out of there, come back with a properly equipped demo team and blow this place…but he couldn’t. He’d put a call into above said, yeah, everything was fine, fine, but it was a lie and he knew it. He’d seen so much now that had withered his soul, but he needed more. He needed to actually see them.
And then he
did.
A half dozen of them rose from the water gradually as if they were being lifted from below and he saw, he finally saw what had haunted Bellac Road for so very long.
And, Jesus, just like Pearl…or the thing pretending to be Pearl.
Leprous and blotched, pale as parchment, their distorted and sunless faces were cut by agonized grins and sunk with glistening, sightless eyes like graveyard pits. Their hair was long and white and threaded with filth, hanging over their features in greasy, wet braids. They had flesh like cooled, puddled candle wax. It barely covered the skeletons below—ribs burst forth and cheekbones thrust from faces and orbits jutted obscenely and everywhere, he could see their bones. And the flesh itself…more like rotting garments, it hung and pulsed and dangled in fearsome loops and strands. Veils of it trailed out around them, floating like grim bridle trains.
And then they surged forward and the deputies started shooting and gnarled hands were reaching out for them and someone was screaming and the water was boiling around them and the lights were flashing and jumping and on they came, those grisly faces coming out of the misting darkness like cloven spookshow skulls.
Godfrey and his deputies were stumbling away, shooting and shooting, except Chipney was gone and there was no hope of saving him or even knowing where he was. The lights bounced with each explosion of the riot guns and Godfrey caught a sight that turned his mind to sauce—dozens of them wriggling and crawling and creeping like maggots on roadkill.
And then they disappeared.
In no hurry, they sank below the surface and the water bubbled and went still, strands of sloughed skin drifting like confetti.
Godfrey and Beck charged through the chest-high swamp, but it was slow going and they knew they didn’t stand a chance. They fought through shivering nets of fungus that were warm and greasy. But they would not give in, not yet. And then, just ahead, a cavern mouth opened above the waterline and they pulled themselves up and in and it was dry in there. Rubble and debris covered the rocky floor and water stood in slimy puddles, but, Jesus, for all that it was dry, dry.
They had barely made it in there, wildly stripping off their masks, not caring about the smell anymore, when a profusion of clown-white hands erupted from the slimy water and began to drag themselves up.
They ran, stumbling in their waterlogged waders, and the cavern narrowed, widened, narrowed again. The sloping ceiling forced them down to their hands and knees and then spit them out in a grotto that was huge and wide and squeaking with countless rats. Before them was a wall. A wall easily thirty feet high and twice that wide. A wall built completely of bones. Skulls and femurs and tibias and scapulas all arranged with an exacting precision that was frightening. It was almost like some kind of shrine and Kenney wondered crazily what sort of minds could conceive of something like that.
But then he was at it, tearing and clawing and digging through the masonry of human bones that were pitted and yellowed and gray with age. They came apart in his fingers like ancient vases and desert-dried pottery and there was a rumble and a motion and a thunder and the entire wall collapsed like a house of cards and bones rained down on him.
And on the other side was a den of the things, all of them shrieking and squealing and flaking apart, all creeping in his direction on their hands and knees like a migration of human insects and he was buried alive in their blubbery, clawing bodies.
Beck hid beneath the wall of bones that had rained down on him, finding safety and camouflage in the depths of the ossuary, hiding and trembling like a hunted rodent. He did not move. He barely breathed. A twisted voice in his head told him he could wait there for as long as it took, that he would be safe and those things would never, ever find him.
But he was wrong.
As he listened, they began to dig their way towards him, whispering and grunting and chattering their teeth. Slowly, bone by bone, he was being unearthed, his secret lair exposed. It wasn’t until their fingers brushed over him that he began to scream.
34
Searching along the slick clay walls with his dying flashlight, Iversen nearly forgot about the extra D batteries tucked into the pockets of his tactical vest. He dug them out frantically and succeeded in dropping one of them into the muddy water. Shit! He groped blindly about for it and was almost certain that he would never find it because that’s how things worked in desperate, horrible, and nightmarish situations like this.
Irony.
Yes, that was the word. It was how Fate or God or Destiny took the wind out of your sails, how it leveled the playing field and showed you just how lucky you’d been in all things and how you would be lucky no more.
He nearly started laughing at one point because in some deranged, heartbreaking, purely fucked-up sort of way, it was funny. Then his fingers found the cylinder of the battery and wiped the muddy goo off it. He unzipped his tac vest, and used what dry spots he could find to get the last moisture off it.
Okay. Good.
Do what has to be done.
He fumbled out the used-up batteries in the pitch blackness and inserted the new ones. He did this as carefully as he could under the circumstances, not daring to drop any of them. He held them so tightly his fingertips practically left indentations in them.
He clicked on the light.
It was steady, but no brighter, which meant it wasn’t the batteries at all but the flashlight itself. It was supposed to be waterproof. In fact, it was guaranteed to be 100% waterproof. So it was either a manufacturing defect or it had been damaged somehow, maybe in his falling slide, and water had leaked in.
There was no time to consider it.
His face beaded with sweat, Iversen pulled the mask back so he could see better and started working his way around the walls of the chamber looking for an opening. The idea that he would find one seemed absurd even to him, but he did find a passage. Just the one. A low and narrow crawl space, but it was better than nothing. He took it.
He crawled along on his hands and knees through the sodden tunnel, his shoulders brushing the walls and the top of his mask scraping along the ceiling. He was not claustrophobic by nature, yet he could very much feel the walls closing in. Loose globs of runny clay dropped down on the back of his neck, water dripped down his face. The stink of subterranean decay was almost overpowering.
He paused more than once thinking he heard something, but it must have been his own sounds reverberating. The tunnel twisted and turned, but thankfully went no deeper into the earth. In fact, it seemed to be steadily ascending so he was going up to…something.
He stopped.
Listen.
His skin crawling in tight waves, he heard something. It was a low, distant murmuring coming up the tunnel from behind him. Try as he might, he could not be sure what it was. He began to crawl faster and faster until sweat stung his eyes and his breath scratched in his throat. Then the passage opened and he dropped into a flooded bowl with no egress. All that fucking work and he was at a dead end.
He wanted to laugh again.
But he didn’t dare.
He heard no more sounds and that was good because he had no choice: he had to go back. He forced himself back into the tunnel and the going was much easier because he was slowly moving downwards. After a time, he saw the opening and a voice in his mind said, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and he almost laughed at that…then there was a sharp, stabbing pain at the back of his neck.
A tree root?
No, there hadn’t been any, he was sure of it.
He started moving towards the opening and something brushed against his back. He squirmed, rolling over, nearly becoming wedged in the passage, getting a face full of wet clay in the process. He could not bring the flashlight back around, but he sensed rather than saw movement.
Gripped by a suffocating fright, he clawed his way out of the opening and dropped back into the chamber. It was big in there and that was its only saving grace. The brown water slopped back and forth in lazy waves, the sound of it
echoing and echoing.
The fear did not lessen, it increased.
There was something in the water with him.
He saw a humped form out of the corner of his eye and then another. Panic breaking in him, he started firing blindly at things real and things imagined and then he was out of shot. Something brushed his leg and something else brushed against his back. He let out a low, echoing cry. He swung the light around in every direction, creating echoing splashing sounds and slimy waves of muck that broke against him. The flashlight beam created immense, jumping shadows in every direction.
As he brought the light around again, he caught a glimpse of a distorted face rising from the murk.
Then it was gone.
He fell back into the water and yanked himself up and something latched onto the back of his neck. He reached back there and his fingers sank into something like cold jelly, living flesh with no more substance than the moist clay of the passages. Shrieking, he tore at it, strips of flesh coming apart in his fingers and a warm juice spraying over the back of his hands. Whatever it was, it leg go with a shrilling cry that sounded so much like that of a human infant that he nearly lost his mind.
Something hit him from the left.
He kicked out at it, spraying water against the wall…and something white like a pair of tiny doll hands grabbed the shotgun and yanked it from his sweaty fingers and pulled it under. The dark rushed in. Things moved around him. He could hear their clogged breathing.
The flares.
He grabbed one from his tac vest and twisted the cap. Flickering red-hued light filled the chamber, making everything seem to bob and weave. He saw the things in the water with him. They looked very much like some sort of fetuses from freakshow jars…bulbous-headed, limbs spindly and tiny fingers set with black claws. Their eyes were like blank white bubbles, their flesh the color and consistency of pork chop fat, but weirdly translucent and set with networks of purple and black veins, some of which were thick as worms.