Night Creepers

by David Irons

  'We're just there, a few feet away, I'll keep my eye on you.'

  The girl meekly walked into the mist, looking back as Kristi nodded to her and stepped forward joining the conversation, immediately taking it over for her daughter's sake.

  'I say, half an hour straight forward then we go back. It makes sense. Let's try and figure the layout of this place.'

  Alex nodded. 'Yeah, let's do that,' he said, adding, 'Christ, that smell is foul.'

  Kelly, now out of their sight, squatted down into the mist, her immediate view a moving blanket of white mist.

  'Yeah, it's foul, so what? What hasn't been foul about this whole thing?' Matt said. He nodded to Alison and Jennifer. 'You two know what that smell is.'

  'What do you mean?' Alex said, perplexed.

  Kelly listened to the conversation, hoping that she could not be heard. She tried to urinate as quietly as possible, lowering her rear end close to the floor, trying to make no splashing sounds.

  Gross, she thought.

  Losing her balance slightly, she reached out with her right hand, sinking it into the soft, mushy mud wall next to her.

  Egh. Double gross.

  Matt continued. 'The same smell that was back in the mosaic room. Like rotten meat and cheap perfume: it’s death,' he simply stated. 'Dead bodies, rot from the grave. There's a lot of it down here.'

  Alex clenched his teeth and looked to the ground with a shiver.

  'He's right,' Jennifer said, as Alison nodded in agreement. 'We worked with it every day, that smell.' Her nose turned up.

  Kelly watched the mist shifting around her as she finished up, going to take her hand from the wall to pull her panties back up. She shuddered, what had happened, why couldn't she move? Her hand was stuck; sunk and embedded into the saturated earth. Trying to stand, to pop it free, she slightly staggered. Panicking, not wanting to draw any attention, she reached down with her left hand to try and free herself. Then something rippled over her skin, something more immediate and physical than the cold dewy mist. Holding her breath, stiffening like a mannequin — crawling along her hand was the biggest, spindliest spider she had seen in her ten years of existence. It teased the fine hairs on her arms with its thin, almost transparent legs.

  Her lip quivered, tears welled in her eyes; like most girls her age she hated all things that crawled and lived in dark places, a feeling only exacerbated by the crawling woman on the wall. Plucking up courage, she inhaled a giant breath, blowing it out with a huge puff so strong, that it took the eight-legged creature by surprise, and toppled it from her hand. Her lung’s rush of air caught the thin layer of mist that lay on the wall she was stuck in; blowing away its filter, it revealed not just damp earth, but a mass of wet mud riddled with worms, larvae, and more spiders. Insects, beetles and things that writhed and squirmed that she never even knew the name of infested the dank walls.

  'Well,' Matt said, 'Let's just hope wherever that smell is coming from...'

  Suddenly, their conversation was cut off by a piercing, deafening wail: a child's scream. Kristi jerked herself into a run, almost twisting an ankle. The others followed, hurtling behind her towards the girl's elongated yell. Their quick movements stirred the mists around her, revealing the squatting girl, her eyes filled with tears, the roof of her mouth joining her jaw with thick bars of spittle that vibrated with her wail like piano strings. Her wide-eyed gaze turned from them to the implanted hand in the wall, where it had become a new dry area for the moving insects to explore.

  Jennifer and Kristi reached for her at the same time. Pulling her up from the ground, their force popping her sunken hand out of the wall with a disgusting slurp. Jennifer wiped away the living mess from her cold flesh as Kristi reached for the girl's downed pants and hoisted them back up again.

  'They're everywhere!' Kelly wailed. 'They were all over me.' She threw her arms around her mother.

  'It’s nothing!' Jennifer yelled, 'Just night creepers, they won’t hurt you, they're just night creepers…'

  Alex and Matt fired their phone-flashlights on the walls around and above them where the glare of the wall-mounted neon didn't reach. The whole tunnel was a living, moving mass of insects, as the creeping legs of spiders slid over tubular, ribbed moist bodies of disgusting worms.

  'Jesus Christ, let's get out of this fucking place,' Kristi growled. 'If we can't find a way out, I'll get the gun and blow that coffin goddamn lid off myself,' Kristi yelled, grabbing her daughter, then pressing on forward into the tunnel. Kelly pulled her jacket over her head, shielding herself from the living walls, as everybody followed, not wanting to lose the feeling of safety in numbers.

  Kristi, now more determined than ever, strode down the centre of the corridor, her blood-stained wooden stake under one arm, as she softly reassured her daughter. Kristi had never been put in a situation like this before, not with Kelly. Above ground she had been the master of her own destiny, with nothing to lose and nothing to restrain her. Always acting how she wanted and doing how she pleased. Now, down here, she was playing by the rules of the endless tunnels, out of control of everything around her, marching to the beat dictated by the bizarre happenings of her surroundings. By that asshole, Blitzer she thought. Down here she had found herself doing something she had never really had to acknowledge before: caring, comforting and being what she actually was to the girl. Her mother.

  In fast robotic paces, they pushed along further, ignoring the time-stalling clocks. Then, suddenly, the florescent lights ended on either side, as a wall of hazy, flickering light-filled mist appeared in the darkness in front of them.

  They all froze, not knowing what to expect. Moving forward with trepidation the unknown aura slowly turned into what it actually was: light pouring through gapped, horizontal boards. It looked like the buried rib cage of a giant skeleton, acting like a primitive air vent as the thin white mist gently poured through like an escaping soul. They squinted, making out the shape of an old, wooden door hinged in the centre of the poorly constructed plank wall.

  The damp, underground air had turned the ancient planked structure into a sweaty, decaying relic. Hanging, aged cobwebs connected the silhouetted boards, all gently swaying with the cold breeze, as small-legged insects crawled and slithered between both, keeping any of the group from peeking through to the unseen room beyond.

  Moving closer to the door, Matt inspected it. Strangely the door and, more importantly, its rounded brass handle seemed insect free.

  He looked at the others, who braced themselves, raising each of their make shift weapons to a defence position, as he twisted the cold handle.

  With a long, drawn out whine, the door turned inwards. Matt peered around it, the gun cocked, expecting anything that may come; then moved forward, stepping through, pausing for a second before beckoning for them to follow him.

  One by one they stepped in, seeing the new room's small initial entrance matched the dimensions of the tunnel behind them, but like the mosaic room, it harshly cut off into a bigger space ten-feet further. Instead of being filled with clocks, from floor to ceiling, this room - a cavern - had florescent tubes embedded in the walls from floor to ceiling length wise, illuminating three ancient cobwebbed coffins that sat side by side. Beyond them the cavern grew to a size so big, the intense lights did little to share its dark innards.

  Slowly, an eerie wooden creak echoed out.

  CHAPTER 18

  Behind them, the door they came through swung shut. Quickly, something triggered in Jennifer's mind. Reaching down to the earth floor, she picked up the nearest oversized rock, then wedged it against the door making sure there was no chance of their experiences of phantom locks trapping them further into these claustrophobic catacombs again.

  Apprehensively, they walked around the coffins; Jennifer turned the projector on, firing its beam into the deep darkness beyond. Illumining a dirt path crossing a deep dark pit. Opposite them, fifty-feet away and embedded parallel in a wall was another wooden door.

  'Ther
e,' she said, squinting and pointing at it. The distant worn boards surrounding the door seeped with the hollow whistling white mist that seemed to emanate from further inside this rank underground place.

  Turning back to the coffins, Jennifer switched the projector off. 'Remember what it said in the book? We pulled one free from its box.' She nodded over to the left hand coffin, the one furthest away from them. There, turned on its side, its wooden panels smashed in, a dark ravaged hole that something had been dragged from.

  'Let's get out of here,' Alison shuddered, stepping backwards in retreat.

  Alex grabbed her arm. 'Back there? To what? Let's just go forward, we've come this far. That draft is getting in from somewhere, so let's just keep moving.'

  Kelly's wrenched hair still throbbed, aching from the grip of the monstrous woman on the wall. She tried not to look at the coffins but couldn't, her gaze drawn to them as she squeezed her hand into a ball, the place that only a few moments ago was a new environment for creeping things. She felt the sticky residue from crushed, bulbous back ends of spiders still sitting between her fingers. A cold jet of fear fired through her body: too much had happened, too much had touched her fear and overloaded her nerves. Her mother saw her look of a vacant trembling terror, something she had never seen in the face of the girl who was normally radiant with life.

  Kristi didn't say a word, but stayed hard faced with her own confident gaze. She drew her daughter's eyes away from the wooden tombs with her mother's magnetism, pointing them over to Matt who stood with his gun raised, as if the steel weapon was the saviour of all problems in this situation. Kelly had always seen and understood things in her own way, different to the adults around her; she found no confidence in the drawn and raised pistol: no confidence at all.

  Jennifer stepped over, putting a welcome hand of reassurance down on to Kelly's shoulder.

  'Night Creepers,' Kelly woefully whispered.

  Jennifer clasped her lids shut, wishing she had never infected another with that awful term.

  'We should just blow whatever's in there away now,' Kristi whispered, letting go of Kelly and marching over to Matt. Reaching for his shoulder, he turned to her domineering glare. 'Matt, we don't know what's in there and I don't want to find out. You saw those things back there; you know what it said in that book. Blast those things. Blast those goddamn things now.' There was a cold persuasiveness to her words.

  He looked around to the others, they all looked scared but said nothing.

  'That's obviously where they got that other one from, Jennifer knows that,' she pointed at the broken down coffin. 'So why take chances? Just hammer whatever's in there with that thing. Now.'

  'She's got a point,' Alex agreed. 'We outnumber them three to one, but I don't want to take my chances. You saw both those things back there. Let's just end it now.'

  Alison said nothing, only moved behind everyone else, trembling.

  Matt whipped back around to the coffins, pausing for a second, then made a decision. 'Alright,' he said simply,

  They backed up slightly, forming a semi-circle around the coffins with Matt centre stage. Breathing heavily, he clicked back the hammer on the gun. Raising it up with both hands, he took aim at the middle coffin's end panel, sighting the pistol's crosshairs directly into its centre. He hoped for a direct hit into the top of the cranium of the enclosed, unseen assailant. A bead of sweat broke on his brow, glistening in the rays of the neon tubes like a small reflective camera lens. He had no idea what was in the coffin, what he was about to fire at; in a way he didn't want to know either. Whether it was another of those over-sized bugs with the diseased bite, or its blood cousin the glowing-eyed, spider-hooker Kristi dispatched with a piece of splintered wood. He didn't want to know.

  He remembered the girl’s rank smell and the chill it gave him to see such a thing.

  In all his time on the streets, dealing with low lifes and dime store crooks; in tense situations where his ass might be on the line, had he ever felt a real twinge of fear?

  He always thought he could deal with any situation; he had in the past and knew he could in the future. But the creatures he had seen tonight had given him a bona fide case of the heebie-jeebies. Swallowing hard, he prepared himself for whatever luminous-eyed boogieman might pop out next.

  Jennifer, goggle-eyed and staring like the others, poised for the high calibre explosion from the pistol's barrel with her heart in her mouth. In that moment of suspense, she heard something on the breeze, something that caught her attention from the unlit chamber behind her. Not its slight whistle, but a sound like a thousand elongated sighs, all exhaling in unison. Turning around, peering into the dark behind her, writhing, slinking whispers peeled through the air. Reaching down, she turned on the projector's beam, firing back into the black chasm behind them.

  'Do it Matt…' Kristi whispered.

  Distracted by what was going to be revealed in the coffin, nobody took any notice of the cumbersome machine as she aimed its beam at the ceiling: up to a jagged, rocky, gored-out space, rising upwards to unseen heights plugged with a tight knit chandelier of stalactites. Huge long pointing sabres, almost like the fangs of the room, pointed straight down, covered in small living things, their webbing and slimy trails stretched out behind them.

  More clocks were scattered around the room. The bigger ones mounted on the wall, the smaller ones dangling from a webbed network of old brown twine that wound around the place, swaying like fly paper in the breeze. The death like stink now seemed ripened to intensity, winding around the place, never dissipating from the room, just forever folding over itself.

  Matt tensed.

  'Do it, Matt! Now!' Kristi murmured louder now.

  Jennifer lowered the projector’s beam; the air sucked from her lungs in a contorting gasp. There, in the pit below the walkway — in ever-spiralling circles like the rings inside a tree —were hundreds of tightly packed dilapidated coffins. With shaking panic, she reached the projector’s beam around the room; firing it up as high as possible again, looking deeper to the ceiling to reveal countless askew, earth-embedded caskets, half hanging from the rock faced walls.

  She thought of the ashtray outside of the back door of her parents' house where she would go for a late-night smoke: the build-up of butts in it, dubbed out dead cigarettes, as tightly packed as the coffins here now; their insides apparently more lethal than any inhaled cancer.

  'Do it!' Kristi cried.

  Jennifer's throat turned dry; she regurgitated her words in a pained whisper. 'Matt! No!'

  His finger, cocked and already applying pressure to the trigger stopped, hearing the drained terror in her voice. They all turned to see Jennifer kneeling down, seeing the hundreds of coffins that the beam reflected back in the projector’s beam. There was an eerie silence as they gazed at the collection of ancient wooden tombs. Kelly grasped her mother again, the fear she had felt facing one corpse now magnified by the hundreds that lay before her.

  Kristi wanted to say to her, 'Don't worry, they're dead, the dead won't hurt you.' But she couldn't. All rational forms of questions and answers had ceased with their experience in the mosaicked room.

  Matt clicked the gun's hammer off, any option of firing the weapon gone. He had thought that they outnumbered the threat, now he saw that the reverse was true.

  Jennifer broke the silence, her voice trembling. 'We need to get out of this place.'

  White and sweating, Alex went to speak but was cut off by a thunderous noise. An intermingled audible vortex of chimes and alarm bells that spewed down from the tunnel they had just come from. The engulfing sound reached and touched the spot they stood, as if it was some giant invisible thing that oozed past them, plugging their ears with its tendrils, filling their mindscapes with an overpowering aural attack of man-made mechanisms.

  The sound made them jump, hearts beating like machine gun fire as it echoed around the chamber. And as if by some domino effect, the clocks scattered in the walls around them followed suit,
another wave of clicks, clacks, bongs, and gongs reverberated and fluctuated into an aggressive acoustic boom.

  The insects on the walls with legs fast enough to carry them scuttled to unseen, dark places, the worms and larvae began to twitch with the clocks’ vibrations back into the dirt they called home. Now, with a clear unison, a rhythm formed in the overpowering sound.

  'BONG, BONG, BONG'

  Kelly grabbed Kristi, each droning reverberation, sinking dread in their hearts.

  'BONG, BONG, BONG'

  Alison staggered backwards, wandering into Alex. She turned to him as each chime sent a trembling ripple over the jowls of his face.

  'BONG, BONG, BONG'

  Jennifer kept the projector's beam on, spinning it around at the clock faces, highlighting them like howling, wall-mounted spectres. The beam found Matt's face, burning the harsh light into his face, over exposing it into a bug-eyed, fear-filled vacant stare. It was the first time she had seen him look anything less than cool, calm, and overly confident.

  'BONG, BONG, BONG'

  Then silence, as the clocks' loud outbursts echoed off into non-existence. Looking up, all of the clock faces said the same thing: twelve O'clock, the midnight hour — the witching hour. They looked at one another, silent, fearful. Then another sound was heard, a low, dry growl coming from one of the coffins in front of them. All attention was placed on it as one by one, in silent footsteps, the group backed away.

  'It was a wake up call,' Alex gurgled, his head whipping around everywhere. 'It was a goddamn wake up call!'

  More moans and cries were heard, each one inhuman, each one dry and rasping as indeed something had been woken up. Then the wood of the two coffins in front of them began to moan and creek with the unevenly distributed weight of something turning inside.

  'Let's go, NOW.' Kristi spat out in such immediate jagged sharpness, everyone turned and ran across the walkway, holding onto their pieces of splintered wood for protection. Each side leading to the pit below that had become a whining, wooden creek of ancient coffin lids.