by C.G. Banks
The sun shone down through the haze, hanging wet sheets of fog on everything. A light rain had peppered the ground the night before and the dawn teased the steam from the mud, first in little whispers from tiny bubbling holes and then in increasing folds that blanketed the air.
The fog hugged up against a dense lagoon. Creatures grazed and rolled in the mud along the grassy rim; scaly tails ran angel fans in the glutted mud; carnivorous eyes eagerly slit in wait. Dragonflies the size of crows hopped and jittered with a nervous agitation that would serve them well for millions of years to come, and the noises that riddled the air were guttural and indistinct: a wild endless droning cacophony only pierced periodically by a shrill, larking call or the belch of a water-logged vegetarian regulating itself.
Morning ended the half-truce of night, allowing some to creep forward and claim what they would as many of their nocturnal counterparts took their turn as bait. As the sun rolled higher, the lagoon blossomed with new thirsty arrivals.
Suddenly throaty wails and a chorus of answering returns broke out. All ears pricked to the sounds. The lagoon was the only source of water for miles; the sodden land around its thin banks quickly gave way to knottier ground, extending to a stretch of sand that drove toward the coastline of an area now submerged and lost in a mountain of salt water and fossilized coral.
To all gathered in the lush sanctuary, the chorus of trumpets could not be mistaken. A band of roving mastodons plodded their way forward to the watering hole. Heeding their monstrous warning, most of the smaller reptiles moved to the borders, unwilling to give up the watering hole completely, but preparing themselves for the gigantic beasts on the way. Soon the area would be destroyed, the foliage consumed, the water clotted with hair, the ground and moist bed foul with the ordure of shit. There were no predators sufficient to spoil this unplanned homecoming. Soon the herd was rolling and splashing, trumpeting, some rutting in the now ragged mouth of the lagoon. Their dominance complete, awesome…
As their pounding feet slid lower in the mire.
In fact, so extreme was their joy none took notice as the first thin rivulets of steam began hissing a few paces back from the perimeter. Steady increasing gouts of steam suddenly sprouted from some hole, or blew off the covering of a rotting frond. One next to another on a fixed curve, duplicated by its twin a few feet farther over until there was an unbroken circle of leaking smoke trailing a ghostly perimeter around the lagoon.
Only when the smell of decay became too strong to ignore did the herd pause in its revelry.
But by that time the story was almost done.
The bottom went out of the lagoon with a great sucking rent and the mass of the troupe was immediately taken. The few bank-dawdlers tried to beat a retreat, but the wall of red-hot steam blowing away now at full force steered them back to the torn crater in the earth. Pathetic, bubbling screams were soon suffocated in the avalanche of sand that funneled down from the wall of hot steam until the only thing left was a suicide decline to a hole no larger than a human skull.
Early morning, 18 July, 1797, Scottish moors
Jacob Seaton stood ankle-deep in the dawn-sprinkled peat bog. A flint-lock rested against his shoulder. At his feet, stiff in attention, stood two coal black deerhounds, snuffling out gusts of cold, morning air. Each waited as if corked, ready for the first sight or sound to pursue.
Suddenly Totem bolted a few paces to the left. After a quick, frantic glance at the other two, the female dog pawed at the ground and just as suddenly tore off through the loose underbrush, baying at the top of her lungs. In disbelief, Jacob watched helplessly as Bitter charged off on the trail of his bitch. Their escape was complete in mere seconds.
“Gaet da ‘ell back! Ya crazy, scalded ba’stads!” he yelled after the pair, but to no avail. They were out of sight; all he could hear was their howling. “Goddamn,” he muttered as he picked his way through the thorns and burrs, following the wild sounds. He’d have Bitter’s balls for this, he considered momentarily before the barking stopped. He pulled up sharply and scratched his head through the thick cap. All was silence. The skin crawled along the nape of his neck. He walked ten more yards and stopped.
Over to his left, scarcely visible in the thin morning light, a small hillock rose like a tombstone behind two squatting, sentinel oaks. Their scabby limbs stretched out ominously. In the hollow between them an indention sunk backward into the peat bog. The dogs were nowhere in sight. No sound of them either. He peered irresistibly back to the hollow. Coming on, he noticed the darkness low down between the trees was actually the entrance to a cavern of sorts. A wild, terror-filled yowl echoed suddenly from the hole.
Jacob plunged within, sparing no second. The gun would be a disadvantage in such confines but he knew his knife would serve up a bloody death just the same. His eyes danced about, fighting for focus in the gloom. To the right and left he could see tunnels leaking farther back. Another watery, strangled yelp from the closest sent him charging toward hell, damnation, or revenge. He leant no time to such philosophies.
Moments later he crashed face first into an earthen wall, breaking his nose and sending lightning streaks of pain blasting before his eyes. After stumbling backward and gradually regaining his senses, he found himself lost in utter blackness. Pressing up tight all around him. He attempted to back farther away but met a hitherto unknown obstacle at his back. With a cold sweat building, he reached behind and felt only cool earth. And then as if by magic, pressure closed against both shoulders, rending it impossible for him to raise his hands to his face.
The marred hillock outside squatted suddenly deeper into the soil. An earthen coffin sealed around the trapped man, carefully worming a hole from the cool outside air through the ground to a slight opening around his head. And even though the air supplied to this gasping, screaming soul buried somewhere below the surface was enough for a time, it could no more nourish his body than his mind.
He died alone, completely mad, amid the darkness and unfathomable silence that surrounded him.
Late evening, 3 March, 1942, south of Echo, Mississippi
Greg Toon steered the battered Ford slowly down the dusty gravel lane while Billy and the creepy fucker they called Duster bounced around uneasily in the bed. The family had been warned but they’d held fast. The cross-burning hadn’t been enough. Well, he thought, tonight would finish this shit. The white capes in the back pitched around in the wind as they got closer.
For five months now the family had refused to budge.
The three men in the Ford had no fear of retribution because Duster was a lawman. Or at least that’s what Billy had told Toon the day before. As it was he didn’t care if the motherfucker was Santa Claus. He just wanted to get this shit done.
A thin light peeked through the trees and he shut off the running lights and eased the truck to a stop. They wouldn’t have to worry about dogs, no sir. They’d hung up those two fuckers on the nigger’s fence less than a week before. The third warning. Toon cut the engine. Got out of the truck and joined the other two in the dusty roadway.
“Remember,” Duster said through his bandana. “No guns. Jus get the bitch and go!” His voice was slurred from the fifth of rot-gut they’d shared on the ride over but you worked with what you had. They began to creep down the lonely road and within minutes were standing within five feet of the back stoop.
And that’s when the shit went bad.
“DOAN MOVE YOU WHITE MUTHAFUCKAS!!” a voice came tearing over their shoulders and as they spun toward the sound Billy’s chest exploded in a spray of red, pitching him backward, punching him through the rotten stoop like a rag-doll. But Duster had always been good on the wing, regardless if the others knew it or not, and steady when it came to killing. He fired off a shot at the spot the flash had come from and saw a large shadow fly back and heard when it hit the ground. Then, in a steady advance of footsteps, he marched forward pumping round after round into the man lying there. Screams started from inside the shack.
Dus
ter turned from the dead man in one fluid motion and ran back to the door, stepping over Billy. Toon stood gape-mouthed and frozen in place. This no longer seemed such a good idea. But by that time Duster was inside. Gunshots blazing, rapidly one after the other, ripping through the house, silencing the screams, until they suddenly stopped. Dead silence. Toon finally managed the courage to step over Billy and pushed inside, finding the floor littered with bodies. One, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it, a child, plastered against the wall. Its eyes staring off blankly to some spot in eternity. Toon puked between his legs. Duster turned from the carnage and stared him down.
“Aww man… the kid, man. Look at this…what the fuck…” Toon managed.
Duster stepped closer. “Doan mean nothing,” he said. “Billy’s dead as a goddamn rock outside. Go get the fuckin truck.”
Minutes later they were throwing the last body into the truck bed. All wrapped up in the Klan sheets. “What about Billy?” Toon whispered, finding it hard to look the lawman in the eye. “Him too,” Duster said and they went over and manhandled his body to the Ford. Duster climbed in on the passenger side. Toon, moving slower and questioning what seemed so good about being here in the first place, got in behind the wheel.
They were alone in the silence like two doomed souls in hell. “Jus drive where I tell ya and everythin will be alright. No bodies, no murder,” Duster said and laughed.
After a bumping thirty minute nightmare, the lawman called them to a halt next to a small clump of trees hidden in a curve. Toon pulled over to the side. “What now?” he said, unable to mask his pleading. He wanted to go home; that was it. He’d only wanted to make a point, not…all this.
Duster bent low and sparked his lighter to flame. He talked through his teeth as he lit the cigarette. “There’s a big hole just over there,” the lawman said, pointing. “Deep as the devil’s asshole, ‘swhat I hear. That’s where they’re goin.”
The next little while proved to be rough work, mentally as well as physically, pulling and dragging the bodies through the tall grass and vines, humping them one by one to the hole. But after an eternity it was done. And as they tipped the last one over the rim, Toon stood and stared down into the pit and listened hard to nothing. Maybe it was as deep as the devil’s asshole.
They’d turned from the hole and begun walking back to the truck when Toon felt a hand on his shoulder. Duster turned him around in the next second. “Whoa, dere buddy,” he said, and Toon felt his balls draw up tight. “We ain’t finished.”
“What d’you mean, we ain’t finished?” Toon blustered. “They’re all in. Everymotherfuckinone of em. Billy too, just like you said. Let’s get the hell outta here.”
“No, that ain’t it,” Duster said. He raised the .45 and pointed it at Toon.
“No?!” Toon cried, taking a step back and slipping in the mud. He went down on one knee, hands up in the attempt to placate the lawman. But he saw no give in this figure. “Please, man, don’t do it,” he whispered and Duster pumped two precise rounds through his head.
Shortly thereafter, Duster climbed into the cab and fired up the old engine. It didn’t sound too great but then again he didn’t have to take it far. By the time he stumbled into his bedroom in the tiny hours of the morning he was far too tired and hung over to notice his wife shaking uncontrollably beside him in the bed for the better part of an hour, fighting back the panic her husband always brought home with him in the midnight hours. And there was good reason. She, of course, had taken many lessons from the man.
In the darkness, under a ragged moon cut by endless banks of fleeting clouds, the walls of the cave pulsed and dripped blood in its many wet corridors and recesses.
Interlude
In time the cave branched deeper and wider, acquiring particular tastes to accommodate its growing appetite. Missing children found their way into its embrace. Ill-fated expeditions also. It learned to bait as well as an experienced fisherman. And the animals who sought shelter inside its domain were all fodder for extensive experimentation, desire, development.
At certain points in its depths the moist earth seemed to breath, heaving in and out among the artifacts it had secured over the passage of millennia. Bones and thick matted hair clogged, blocked whole passages. Hideous stalagmitic shafts of bone gleaming with fine serration sprouted from the knotted floor. Not even insects and worms were permitted sanctuary within its confines. Sometimes they were saved up in great numbers for rupturous, squeezing explosions far beneath the surface, then left in liquid pools to decay and bubble in the formative darkness.
With its infantile learning spurred, it escalated its activities. Thought processes were slow and agonizing but time and experience inevitably produced them. Soon, hypnotic means of calling were in its grasp.
Dusk, 20 February, 1964, thirteen miles east of Interstate 86, outskirts of Pocatello, Idaho
The girl walked briskly, pulling her threadbare coat tight around her skinny body. Snow was predicted for the night (she didn’t need a weatherman to tell her this), and although she tried to pretend her scenario was not bleak, that was just wishful thinking. Either she found shelter or she’d probably be dead by morning. Frozen solid.
She stopped walking and put a hand into one of her almost empty pockets, pulled out the pack of Salem’s. She lit one and stared down the empty highway. Nothing; no headlights, nothing. The road stretched on endlessly into the twilight.
Sandra was eighteen with a long history of fuck-ups. An alcoholic father, a bucolic mother fat on sugar and daytime soaps, and of course, her, the rebellious only child. A tragedy of three characters in one act. She’d left home in Mininglott, Wyoming several weeks back with a hundred and sixty dollars in her pocket with the intention of whiling away the coming summer on the beaches of San Mateo, California. She’d figured on making it there hitch-hiking but her first ride had almost cost her life. The image of the two teenage boys who’d raped her still haunted her every hour, whether sleeping or awake.
In fact, the whole idea had gotten steadily worse. She’d stayed in a motel no more than forty miles from her home the second night and had easily calculated (as the lump of cash changed hands at the front desk) that this would be the end of such extravagance. The next night she’d slept in a deserted shed full of sluggish rats and a tomb-like cold. Reality began taking frightening bites.
But up until now Reality had not seemed deadly, even while the boys were taking their turns she’d known they wouldn’t kill her. She’d let them have what they wanted and be on her way. Then. Tonight looked to test the hypothesis.
She knew the dangers of hitchhiking, had firsthand knowledge of them as that went, but what else could she do? The few cars that had passed had found her seemingly invisible; only one car had taken any notice at all, in fact, pulling over far ahead of her outstretched thumb and then zooming off when she’d gotten close enough for a good laugh. And although she screamed and rained curses down on the rotten sonofabitches, the tail lights had continued to get smaller in the distance until they were lost entirely.
In the middle of these morose thoughts and the coming of full night, her mind was suddenly quieted by a sweet, lilting melody that came at her all at once. She stopped walking, mystified. Even the snow which had begun to fall faster seemed to fall around her rather than on her. She thought she heard actual music now, although it was so thin and ethereal it was impossible to tell its source. She stood and listened hard and when she turned slightly to the left she could have sworn it emanated from the snow-shrouded woods lining the roadway.
She walked to the forest boundary and saw the opening.
Shelter, she thought.
And as the gentle melody strengthened, she moved forward, paying no particular attention as the snow-shrouded foliage parted as she came. Forget California, she thought with an erratic, drugged dreaminess. This is where I need to be.
She stepped inside and the cave led her down with fleshless arms.
Interlude
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nbsp; It grew and refined itself on the essence of all it consumed, combining many traits and personalities, twisting any to suit a particular need. Power began to formulate meaning and yearning, stoking an opiate for more. It used old tricks and new-found wisdom until its hunting evolved to sentient brilliance.
It spread everywhere.
Jungles of Bolivia, 200 miles from Trinidad
It smelled the primitive band of Indians as they filed to the banks to bathe. Some were slow and enfeebled, left to come more slowly. Those were the lucky ones. Shortly, they would watch in horror as the lake boiled, frying the flesh that screamed and bloodied the rolling water.
One by one the cooked slid slowly beneath the surface as the survivors, standing aghast on the banks shielded their eyes from the massacre and prayed to whatever gods they deemed necessary to ward off this invisible evil.
3 March, 1998, trouble spot of the Metro, Paris
Jean Brilliot had worked in darkness for the better part of his adult life. Now, at thirty-six, it was as commonplace as coffee in the morning. Maintenance of his beloved Metro was his chosen profession, he would remind anyone who cared to ask. He had sought it out; it had not been forced upon him by anyone at any time. He took pride in his role as one of the many who kept the famous subway on schedule. He was not in charge of a crew as of yet (though his name had already come up twice), but he knew it was only a matter of time. Patience would pay in the end.
He made his way through the dark passageways, walking carefully along the thin catwalks that ran the length of every tunnel. The day before, a power outage in Section 14 had caused three trains to be delayed. The problem circuit board lay just ahead in the gloom, and as he made his way along, playing his flashlight beam off the rounded walls, he thought about his date with Claire set for that evening. He could not wait to get his hands around those big beautiful breasts.
A curious grinding, the sound of bricks scraping together, caused him to stop in his tracks.
From somewhere just ahead, around the next bend, and he went curiously. Even from ten meters away (amid the penetrating darkness enclosing everything outside his flashlight beam) he could see a ragged, yawning crack in the dirty tiles. “Pourquoi?” he muttered, stepping in closer to examine the black maw. He shined the flashlight beam inside, surprised to find the light swallowed up in the rift.
He squeezed through the crack in the wall for reasons undetermined. Perhaps the strange, coy lilting in his head drove him on; he didn’t know, didn’t take the time to ponder. It was suddenly hard to think clearly. Oppressive size and silence welcomed him within, and then he was moving forward fast, one foot in front of the next until the light inexplicably vanished, and fingered tentacles reached out and sped him toward oblivion.
Claire sat home alone that night.
Aberdeen, South Dakota-- (AP) News Release, 7 June 2011
Local residents report a sinkhole opened and took an entire house, located at 44367 Fairway View Ave early this morning. Eyewitness Doug Frecot was awakened by a noise just before sunrise. He reported looking out his bedroom window in time to see the house slide out of view. “By the time I got my clothes on and ran outside, all I could see was the roof.” EMS units were dispatched and even though the roof was found virtually intact fifteen feet below ground level, after cutting through the shingles and attic, the house was found unoccupied. The search continues for the missing family and the Aberdeen Sewage Department along with the State Police have been called in to conduct an investigation.
Michael Childress (Reporter)
Interlude
Over the centuries it became proliferate at reproduction. Raw energy cut passages and tunnels in sentient determination. Earth melted and evaporated before its fury, and at last, tiring of scouring the surface, it turned its attention downward, seeking out the greater power it could feel emanating from the center of the earth.
Toward the end, the cave had no need for the physical residue it had stuffed down deeply in its recesses for countless millennia. It began to purge itself of these burdens, cleaning out its hideous dungeons and feral pits. Large numbers of unaccountable bones began surfacing everywhere. In fields, yards, playgrounds, and alleyways. In 2028 paleontologists were amazed and puzzled as to how the almost complete skeleton of a large Anatosaurus came to surface in a burgeoning crack within the Chase Manhattan Bank’s vault complex in New York City. Fatalists and religious fanatics alike began stoking their sermons with warnings of Revelation, twenty-eight years late but here nonetheless. Collection plates filled to overflowing with the money from scared sinners attempting to buy redemption. A wild feeling of disaster grew more ominous with each passing day.
Even the television preachers, wrapped up neatly in their expensive Italian suits, did not know how right they were, having peddled themselves out for so long they wouldn’t have recognized the truth had it stared them in the face.
Finale, 23 June, 2057
The cave finally broke through to the inner core of the planet, unleashing hellish nuclear forces. A violent series of eruptions rocked eons of stability, causing a massive underground Armageddon. Oceans and streams reeked with poisonous suppurations; dark green mists oozed out of giant cracks along regions of the San Andres Fault and the Hawaiian volcanoes. Small and large sea atolls suddenly vanished beneath typhoon waves. Huge caustic cloudbanks, welling up from the diseased earth, blotted out the sun.
In the end the Biblical prediction of a thousand years of hell on earth proved to be vastly understated.
Eons later
A once lively planet, now barren and dead, sits still in a small corner of a dying solar system. Huge openings pock the surface. Nothing moves or breathes. The cave festers and waits as it has forever…waiting on another chance.
Its hunger grown insatiable.