Hellhole

by Jonathan Maberry

  “There are no words to express how sorry I am,” Randall says.

  Thompson lowers his head, snaps his teeth, and breaks into a sprint.

  Randall sights down the center of his old friend’s forehead and pulls the trigger, but the firing pin strikes an empty chamber.

  Click.

  Click-click-click.

  “How far?” he asks Omega as Thompson closes in on him.

  “A hundred and fifty feet, sir.”

  “Give it everything you’ve got, Omega!”

  Randall turns the empty rifle around and grabs it by the smoldering barrel. He grits his teeth and stares down the monster hurtling toward him. It lunges and he swings the weapon like a bat. Connects solidly with its head, but barely slows its momentum.

  It lands on top of him and sends him skidding across the ground under its weight. He shoves its snapping jaws away from his neck as the fruiting bodies adorning its crown burst with an explosion of spores, so many he can hardly see through his mask.

  “How far?”

  A crack races diagonally across his face shield. The creature claws at it in an attempt to break it open.

  “Two hundred feet, sir. I can only raise them so fast—”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  Randall unclips the incendiary grenade from his utility belt. Feels for the pin.

  Another creature strikes him from the side, knocking it from his grasp. His mask shatters and shards rain onto his face. Talon-like fingertips sink into his cheeks. Through them. Pierce his gums and bone alike, making it impossible to open his mouth to cry out.

  He frantically slides his palm across the ground until he finds the grenade. Slips his gloved finger through the pin.

  Teeth sink into his biceps and he nearly drops it again.

  The fingertips retract from his face, releasing his trapped scream.

  He pulls the pin and drops the grenade as the scientist whose warning he failed to heed bites his face and tears—

  A BLINDING LIGHT flashes below Rana. The earth lurches, then draws a deep breath, nearly wrenching her harness from its moorings.

  She closes her eyes as a column of fire races straight up the shaft, propelling her toward the surface on a superheated current of air. Screams as the flames singe her hair and blister her cheeks. The cries of the men below her are deafening, even over the roar of the blaze.

  Her head strikes one wall, then the other.

  She tastes blood in her sinuses, feels it trickling down the back of her throat.

  Sees darkness.

  Then stars.

  And, finally, nothing at all.

  OMEGA RUSHES TOWARD the hole. Picks his way down the rubble-lined slope to the edge of the well, where the cable has eroded a furrow into the concrete and produces a buzzing sound as it channels even deeper. He grabs the first of them by the harness. Drags the limp body onto solid ground and unlatches it from the cable. It’s a woman. She’s severely burned, but he recognizes Dr. Rana Ratogue from the picture in his file.

  Sirens wail in the distance, and beneath them, the thupping sound of the flight-for-life helicopter streaking across the sky.

  Smoke billows from the plains to the west, where the ground has collapsed in upon itself, releasing the fire that spreads through the grasslands.

  Omega drags Gamma from the hole next. Then Delta. Lines them up beside the seismologist. Their face shields are warped and black with soot, obscuring their features. He tears off their helmets to reveal faces covered with blood. Lowers his ear to Gamma’s lips and feels the subtle warmth of his breath. He’s still alive. As is Delta, whose eyes move beneath his closed lids.

  Rana shows no signs of life, though. He can’t feel her breath against his ear, nor can he detect her carotid pulse in the side of her neck. The burns on her cheeks begin to crack and suppurate. He peels back her eyelids in hopes of eliciting a pupillary response, but the vessels burst and a skein of blood floods the sclera.

  “Jesus,” he whispers.

  RANA’S OTHER EYE opens and she bares her teeth. Sinks them into the soft flesh of the soldier’s neck. And drags him, kicking and screaming, down into the well.

  PIT OF GHOSTS

  Kirsten Cross

  Knock knock...

  A tapping on the walls. Echoes through the tunnels.

  Knock knock...

  A place where light is life and darkness is death.

  Knock knock...

  Welcome to the underground world of the Coblynau, deep underneath the Welsh hills where coal and sometimes even gold was hewn from the rock face by bare-chested men and carted to the surface by blackened, soot-covered ponies. Where a canary could warn of lethal gas pockets with a last, haunting song before it dropped dead to the bottom of its cage. Where men’s lives were cheap, and the mine owners regarded dead children as an everyday nuisance. The cost of cave-ins was calculated in money, not lives.

  Eventually, the picks and drills fell silent. The mines closed, and the communities died.

  Still, if you pushed past the wrought-iron gates, the rusty padlocks and the “DANGER! DO NOT ENTER ‒ MINE UNSTABLE” red and white signs, you could hear the distant sounds of an abandoned world.

  The dripping of water.

  The sound of creaking timber supports.

  And occasionally, in the dead of night, ‘Knock, knock...’

  Morfa Colliery had a deeply unsettling history. With a series of disasters throughout the 19th century and hundreds of lives lost, it had earned itself the moniker, the Pit of Ghosts.

  Huh.

  Pit of Hell, more like.

  The sweat, the tears, the broken hearts and shattered bones—they were all still down there, caked in thick, choking dust. The Earth didn’t want these miners here, but She didn’t want to give up their bones, either. It was payment. A debt due for allowing men to scavenge black coal out of the dark and silent depths. Tap, tap, tapping away with their pathetic little sticks, blasting great gashes and fractures into the rock with explosives.

  Occasionally, the Earth fought back. It could happen at any second. The men knew that with every blow they could be unleashing a wall of death. The Earth was merciless. She took life after life, both underground and in the respiratory ward of the local hospital, where men gasped and choked their last breath, their lungs filled with cancer and black dust.

  Then, the Earth started to claim more lives—a higher and higher payment for the black and gold riches men ripped from the darkness. The Pit of Ghosts earned its grisly name time and time again. Four men killed in 1858. A further forty in 1863. Another twenty-nine souls consigned to the ever-dark hell in 1870. Then eighty-nine men killed in the explosion of 1890, despite warnings from the pit workers just days before. The mine wasn’t safe, damn it. The men weren’t safe. You need to get them out of there, now!

  Warnings were ignored. So the men died, the dust choking their lungs, the mountain’s intestines crushing their bones. Pockets of lethal gas ignited into roaring infernos that were over in a heartbeat and left nothing but scorched earth behind. The fire back-drafted down the tunnels and spewed up and out of the shafts, venting at the top of the winding pit. The flames enveloped the massive lifting wheel at the top, bringing it crashing down. Below ground, poor quality timbers used to shore up the roof crumbled like stale bread and brought thousands of tons of rocks crashing down on the remaining frail, terrified men. Their lives were snuffed out instantly, although those who found shelter from the rockfalls and pit-gas fire died slowly.

  There were even reports that the last few had resorted to eating the flesh of their dead comrades, before finally succumbing to the blackness of Morfa Mine...

  “THAT’S BULLSHIT. YOU made that last bit up, dude.”

  Alex Davis had paid good money for a ghost tour of the mines his ancestors used to toil in, but shit, cannibalism was taking things a bit far, even if this was the first tour and the guide wanted to ratchet up the atmosphere a notch to impress his boss. He glared at Joshua, the tour
guide who had recounted the grisly tale of Morfa Mine. “There’s absolutely no proof that anyone went around eating their mates, buddy. I mean, I get scaring a customer is part of the whole ‘obbly-woobly’ fuckin’ ghost tour experience BS, little man, but cannibalism? In Wales?” The American snorted.

  Joshua Llewellyn-Jones, Jay to his friends, fixed a smile on his face that went no further than the corners of his mouth. The customer’s always right, the customer’s always right... He was acutely aware of the penetrating gaze burning into the back of his neck from Adam Hughes, PR guru for the company that had taken over the old mine and now organized tours for the gullible. The people on this personal tour had paid a pretty hefty premium for the “small group” rate, so it was Jay’s job to make sure they got their money’s worth. Cannibalism seemed like a good idea at the time, so he fronted the American’s challenge.

  “I can assure you, sir, it’s not. Bones have been recovered from within the mine that had cut marks on them, cut marks that could only have been made as a starving miner hacked off the flesh with a knife...and ate it.” He grinned, knowing this was total bullshit.

  The American’s eyes widened. “Really? Well, shit...” Alex whipped out his camera, taking pictures of anything he could find.

  Adam Hughes, publicity executive for Grant Holdings, the new owners of the mine, sidled up to Jay and patted him on the shoulder. “Nice save, Josh. And how did you know about the bones?”

  Jay looked at Adam. “I didn’t. I genuinely made that bit up. Well, let’s be honest here, I’m making all of it up, right?”

  Adam patted his shoulder again, a strange look on his face not quite disguised by a smile. “Yeah. Whatever you say, fella...”

  “Um, guys? We’re getting some seriously weird readings up here.”

  Ahead, in the tunnel, a group of four people clustered around a hand-held device that was currently blinking like a set of mini-traffic lights. Bright green LEDs flashed like fireflies in the gloom.

  “Christ. What now?” Ewan Jones muttered under his breath. Six foot three, and with muscles that made him look like a prop forward rugby player, Jones was a blue-eyed, cynical ex-squaddie who was finding the adjustment to civvy life tough. Ghost hunters were pretty low down on his list of “people you should respect the fuck out of,” just below Taliban fighters and REME mechanics. The ex-soldier was only on the tour because Adam Hughes didn’t go anywhere without his own personal bodyguard. The company had received threats as soon as they’d taken over the mine to run their ghost tours, and people further up the food chain than Alex had decided to take the threats seriously. Ewan never thought he’d end up doing CPP duties to a PR prick on a haunted mine tour, but hey. Here he was. Anything to earn a living, right?

  The gaggle up ahead consisted of three men and one woman. Two of the men, David and Ifan, muttered to one another in Welsh. They were local lads who’d ticket-hopped because they were friends of Jay and the tour needed to make up the numbers.

  The final couple was Matt and Louise Williams, ghost hunters extraordinaire and kitted out with all the latest sensors, infrared cameras and sound recording equipment, all packed into two bulky camera bags.

  Louise flicked a lock of red hair out of her eyes as her fringe flopped forward. She thrust the flashing piece of equipment towards Jay and grinned. “Waddya think of that?”

  Jay shrugged. “Miss, I have no idea what I’m looking at. My guess would be that the bats have set your little flashy bleepy thing off, if I’m honest.”

  “Bats?”

  “Yeah. Bats. Or, ooh yeah, I didn’t think of that.”

  “What? Didn’t think of what? Dude, you’re supposed to be our damn guide down here. What are we looking at? Bats or something else?” Matt’s voice had a tinge of annoyance threading through.

  Jay looked down the tunnel and then back at the ghost hunters. “Well, it could be the flock of skeletal canaries that swoop through these tunnels.”

  Louise looked at Jay. “Canaries.”

  “Yep.”

  “Skeletal canaries?”

  “Yeah, ya know? Small yellow birds. About yay big.” He held out his hands palm to palm. “They go cheep-cheep a lot...”

  Louise bristled. “I know what canaries are, thanks. What would they be doing down here?”

  Jay mentally shifted through his tour notes stored in his brain and picked out the one marked Skeletal Canaries. “Miners used canaries to warn them of pockets of explosive gases in the tunnels. Now, they fly around the mine tunnels, forever warning the unwary of the dangers hidden in the darkness. They fear only fire, they feast on flesh. The legend goes, if you hear their warning cry then your blood will boil and burst from your veins.” He added a “Kaboom-splat” hand gesture for emphasis.

  “Boiling blood.” Louise pursed her lips.

  “Yep.”

  “Feasting on flesh.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You are so full of shit, you know that?” Louise glared at Jay. “We’re here to do a serious investigation of one of the most haunted places in Wales, and you’re feeding us bullshit flying skeletal canaries stories? What do you think we are, fucking amateurs?”

  “Easy, Lou. The guy’s just doing his job.” Matt laid a hand on Louise’s arm and shook his head. “Listen, fella, let’s keep the tourist ghost stories to a minimum and just focus on the evidence, okay?”

  Jay sighed and nodded. “Okay. I won’t bother telling you about the Knockers, then.”

  Matt stopped staring at his bleeping, flashing EMF reader and focused on Jay. “The what?”

  “The Knockers. The Coblynau. I guess you don’t want to hear about them, right?”

  “I would.” Alex flashed a friendly smile at Jay. “Don’t worry about the Scooby gang over there, buddy. Some of us are here to find out more about this place, and that includes its legends. My great great grand-pappy worked this mine.” He paused, and a dark look crossed his face. “Right up to the point that they canned him.”

  “Why’d they do that?”

  “Because he was a union man.” Alex straightened up a little. “He fought hard to try and get better conditions for the guys down here. So the company accused him of theft and he got deported to the US. Ended up working in the coal mines in Pennsylvania. Died in a cave-in.” Alex paused. “You see? This place is in my heritage, buddy. So you carry on with your stories because us Americans? Yeah, we love all that shit.” He slapped Jay on the shoulder and let out a laugh.

  “Our great great grand-pops were probably friends, Yank.” Ewan flashed a smile. “My ancestors worked this mine, too.”

  “No way! That’s awesome!” Alex grinned back at Ewan. “We’re probably related somewhere along the line, right?”

  “No doubt.” Ewan tried hard not to roll his eyes.

  “Well, it seems we all have some connection to this place, then. Jay, how about you lead the way in and we’ll see if we can find some of these...what did you call them?” Adam paused.

  “Coblynau,” Jay filled in the gap. “And believe me, sir, you wouldn’t want to find them. Unless you’re a miner.”

  Matt interrupted, “You still haven’t told us what they are, fella.”

  Jay stared hard at Matt. “Evil, mate. They’re pure evil.”

  THE WALK THROUGH the tunnels to the next point of interest kept the group busy for ten minutes. The oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere of the tunnel pressed in on them. The air was so thick and humid that you could almost chew it. Even Ewan, a man who’d spent six months rooting out Taliban insurgents in the caves and tunnels of the Tora Bora mountains, started to feel uncomfortable.

  The old timbers creaked as they passed under them. The constant drip-drip-drip of water became a torture that burrowed into the group’s consciousness and made the hairs on the backs of their necks stand on end. The darkness was dense. Impenetrable. It was...

  Shit. The darkness was moving. Straight towards them. Shit. SHIT!

  “Um, Jay?” David’s voice wave
red. “Jay? Is there another group in here? Because—”

  His words were cut off mid-sentence as the cloud of bats whooshed and swooped around the group. Matt let out a yell and Louise screamed as the fluttering forms streamed past them. The swarm circled and started chittering. Initially, the sound was barely within the range of human hearing. But then it got louder. Louder. Louder. Everyone covered their ears, trying to block out the sound. They tried to take shelter as the swarm, acting as one, bombarded them. Louise’s screams echoed through the tunnel as she was hit time and time again.

  Blood flowed down her cheeks as she flailed against her tiny attackers. She fell to the tunnel floor and curled into the fetal position, trying to defend herself against the bats, who poured down and covered her body.

  The shriek of an airhorn sent the swarm back into the air and chittering off into the darkness. Ifan stood with the canister in his hand, ready to give the horn a second blast if needed.

  “Where’d you find that?” Alex stared at the young Welsh lad.

  “Carry one in my pack, see?” Ifan grinned. “Always do. Bloody bats are a nuisance when they start all that. If they can’t find an escape route they just circle and circle and circ...”

  “Lou!” Matt dropped down next to his wife. She was still fetal.

  “Christ... ” Ewan turned to Ifan. “Got a medi kit in that pack of yours, fella?”

  “Boyo, I’m a potholer. We never go anywhere without a medi kit.” Ifan opened his pack and pulled out a green pouch.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Louise unfurled and sat up. Her face was covered in scratches, none of which were particularly deep, but there were enough to make her look like she’d gone face-first through a car windscreen.

  “We need to get you out of here, babes.” Matt fussed and started trying to clean the blood off her face and hands with a wipe from Ifan’s medi pouch.

  “No.” Louise shook her head. “There’s no way. This place is amazing. I can feel them, Matt. I can feel them!”