by David Irons
Making it to the adjacent door, Matt grabbed hold of the handle, twisting and pulling it towards him. At first there was nothing, no movement, not a millimetre's worth of budge from the cold handle or the door attached. But then, with another wrenching pull, the door scraped along the floor with a high-pitched squeak, jarring itself in the dirt floor, enabling them to run into the dark unknown behind. Matt reached back for the door's handle, grabbing it and pulling it with all his might.
Half shutting, its bottom ground out on some rocks. Hands appeared around him as Alex, Jennifer and Kristi grabbed the door by its lip and pulled. Ancient hinges creaked. The door's sodden wood felt like it would bend and crumble beneath their grasp; but gradually, with a jerky lurching, it finally dragged shut. Its handle broke from the small screw that held it in place, as Matt pulled its long brass connecting rod out through the hole it had sat in for years. Throwing it to one side with a dull clatter on the floor, they each moved to the door to find a split board or knotted hole to stare through. They watched as slowly, all together with a mirrored wooden whine, every ancient, cobwebbed coffin began to open with a horrifying, quivering moan.
CHAPTER 19
Their hearts beat in panic, each of them peeking through the decrepit holed door into the room of rising, squeaking coffin lids. Morbid curiosity tangled between them waiting to see what Blitzer had found down here.
Wide-eyed, they watched as the middle coffin lid flew straight upwards, as if moved by high-speed hydraulic lifts. Lifts that were really eight monstrous arachnid limbs that placed the lid to one side, gently dropping it to the ground as its useless broken hinges rattled loosely like copper bells.
The lid of the coffin next to it slowly rose, pushed from within by a smooth, rounded gelatine lump that glistened with a slimy film. This lid kept its hinges intact as it slumped stop at a 90-degree angle. The quivering mass inside lifted itself upwards, unfurling from its confined space, revealing itself to be a wet, pulsating, almost translucent giant grub-like creature. Its head, unlike the rest of its grotesque form, was a perverted humanoid cranium. Its face stretched out like a latex Halloween mask, its deformed lips unable to purse, as its mouth drooled yellow bile. Blinking its eyes open they flickered to life like two glowing pearls embedded in its face.
The eight hydraulic limbs belonging to the resident of the neighbouring coffin rotated around with bone fracturing pops. Unseen joints ruptured under brown smooth skin, as its long thin lengths bowed down towards the floor in an arching swoop. They landed with a gentle thud, turning into what they were: long spindly, giant spider’s legs.
Straightening up, becoming tensed and poised, they raised its body from the wooden box it called home. A smooth, black, bulbous back end and midsection were revealed first, then it lifted its head, a grey smooth human dome with six eyes. Eyes that were not clustered together on its face, but ran in parallel lines three a side from the crown of its head to the sockets in its face, glowing from within with a ghostly luminosity.
Its face was smooth, no other defining features apart from its vertical mouth, a central split beneath the eyes to the chin, like wet, dripping, female genitalia. It sputtered the rancid air of the enclosed space in and out in foamy breaths.
They watched from behind the door in stark cold fright, stared at these obscene abominations as they stretched their elongated limbs, reaching to be free from their morbid confined coffins. The room filled with anthropomorphic oversized insects, each one stretching to the size of a VW Beetle. Sweaty cockroach-like creatures defied gravity, creeping the cavernous walls, climbing with thin insect arms and strangely grasping human-like hands. Giant bulbous larvae writhed, entwining anxiously around more spider-like beings, all moving and winding around each other with deep glowing cat’s eyes. It was a macabre orgy of oversized insects, worm things, grub things, pushing and sliding around each other in their own oozing jelly. Mutated bodies caressing and rubbing against one another, dry hairy rancid legs running over juicy worm fat.
Within a minute the chamber had become a moving throng of enormous, salivating, head lamped-eyed creatures, as if a huge rock had been lifted in a giant’s garden, revealing living nightmares beneath. They were the underside of nature, unwanted obscenities, which lived away from the light. Creatures, slithering and creeping around in shadow, creatures no different from anything dwelling in Jennifer's imagination, put to paper in the form of graphic novels or storyboards. Creatures that deserved to live in the imagination only; creatures that seemed to be spawned from the awful rhyme —Night Creepers — Night Creepers…
Their movements at first seeming sporadic, but it became clear what they were doing; each one picked the earth like primates picked each other's fur. Searching the dirt for smaller living organisms, plucking them out and devouring them up with rows of sharp glistening fangs.
'Th — They… They are what they eat,' Kelly moaned, transfixed in terror.
Jennifer began to itch all over, the thoughts of that old locker a pre-cursor to this, the rhyme echoing in her brain with childish glee: 'Night Creepers — Night Creepers, creeping up your nose, wriggling through your body; wriggling to your toes…
No spider or beetle seemed safe, as with low growls and whines, any life form not fast or stealthy enough were caught and mashed in the mutant mouths of the dominating, oversized beasts.
'They're feeding,' Jennifer whispered.
'Night Creepers — Night Creepers, creeping through your hair, are running down your body, running everywhere!'
'Th… They… They are what they eat. They are what they eat!' Kelly cried again with hyperventilating repetition. Jennifer whipped down to look at the young girl, someone earlier who had such warmth in her appearance, now wearing a mask of stark white with terror.
'What has Blitzer found down here?' Alex said with the disgust they all felt. No one could answer. Maybe the child's logic was right; maybe they did eat the vampires. Maybe, by doing this and devouring the underground insect life they had indeed become bizarre, hybrid, arthropod creatures. Sleeping in coffins by day, dining on living things by night, their menu strictly of the insectile variety.
'Night Creepers — Night Creepers, used to be a pest, now they're always with you, because you are their nest!'
The scuttling long-legged things moved around the ceiling in back-lit shadows, each of them becoming obscene silhouettes as they fed; a churning mass of repulsive chaos whose sheer volume turned into a smear of grotesque undulating movement. The sounds of slurping and sucking echoed out, the sound of gnashing teeth and grinding of jaws as they disgustingly devoured.
Suddenly, a giant spider thing being crept over the door they hid behind. Each member of the group taking in a lung full of rank air, held suspended in their lungs.
Up this close, taking in its bulk and length, Kelly's grasp of reality redlined, as before her the make believe was now the believable. Here was the giant spider the lion decapitated in The Wizard of OZ, a thing that should only live in-between the pages of a book. The thing before her was something from her worst nightmares, something that the breaking dawn should flush from existence with the sun's rays. But down here was the flip parallel world of the topside place she had always lived: no daylight, just a barren darkness that living nightmare seemed possible within.
The insectoid creature stepped from the wall to the floor, walked along the chasm they had run across. It sniffed at the air, sniffing and sensing the ground around it with its long flat pig-slit nose and thin pointed cocktail stick legs.
Its head thrashed from side to side, seemingly looking for some of the minuscule, insect portions of food its brethren picked from shadowy corners.
Then it stopped.
Freezing dead to the spot, tensing its exoskeleton with jolting sharpness, the entire creature rippled with an icy shiver.
The funeral attendants felt a united, dull sinking; they knew what the creature's body language signified. It turned, staring at the door, its human like mouth dripping.
Yellow liquid eyes ignited from deep within like kerosene lamps; their beam sprayed the door growing with intensity as if internally someone turned a dial up. Its entire body began to spasm, strings of mucus swinging from its gaping mouth.
'Oh Shit,' Jennifer hissed between gritted teeth, 'It knows we're here.'
The thing in front of them began jaggedly striding towards the door, its eyes becoming impossibly bigger with each stealthy movement. A slow low rumble escaped the tunnel of its throat, pushing out of its widening mouth in a rancid gust.
'It can sense us! It can sense us! It knows we're here!' Alex whined.
'Shut up!' Matt whispered.
Its twin beams darted around the door highlighting the watching human eyes peering from behind it. Then, a slow-building gas-like hiss escaped its mouth turning into a high-pitched cry that twisted in the air, a wanting, desperate scream.
'Let's get out of here. Now!' Kristi barked, pulling her daughter away from the old wooden door.
Behind it, pained animalistic growls strained in desperation. The creatures swarmed the door, detecting something different and more interesting to feed upon behind it. Gone was their hunger for meagre small insects, now something human and fleshy dwelled amongst them. Their grouped glowing eyes flashed through the door’s splintered holes and weathered knots, bleeding through like escaping strobe lights in a nightclub.
'They are what they eat, they are what they eat,' Kelly anxiously muttered. Kristi grabbed her arm tight, running into the dark corridor behind. The other creatures now replicated the high-pitched scream of the big spider, their cry turning into a loud piercing warning siren. With a unison of cold yearning, they seemed to screech in reply to Kelly in their own indecipherable monstrous tones, 'YOU ARE WHAT WE EAT. YOU ARE WHAT WE EAT!'
The door rattled in its frame, violently thumped by the hungry horde on the other side, cracking in its rotten frame. Everyone ran after the girl and her mother, deeper and deeper into the bowels of this hellish underground place, cold tears and warm sweat curdling on terrified faces, each gripping their weapon of choice like a buoy in a dark red sea of horror.
CHAPTER 20
Barrelling down the tunnel, the funeral spectators who had come to be the audience for the end of Gregory Blitzer now found themselves the ones being watched. The door behind them had become a living knotted shadowed form, one that stared with a multitude of menacing, nocturnal eyes.
They fled through the neon-lit passage; hoping and praying it would lead to their escape. A draft of the blue-hued mist sliced over their faces cooling down their sweat-drenched bodies as any fatigue was washed away with the adrenaline fear of the in-humanoid things behind them.
Objects appeared from the dark, laying on the floor and leaning against the walls. Hard hats, shovels, digging equipment: the remains of a work crew. Then out of the blackness another ancient wooden door appeared, mounted into the solid dirt in front of them. Kristi hit it with a thump, clambered for the handle, pulled it in jerking quick motion. The door stayed shut. It was then that she noticed a padlocked chain, tightly wound through the door and its frame. She screamed in frustration, roughly pulling it with all her worth, her brain clicking into survival mode. The mode where polished and filed Hollywood nails were finally given the irrelevance they deserved.
Matt and Jennifer slammed into the wall next to her. Jennifer knelt down and grabbed Kelly, bringing the girl face to face to face with her. Kelly's soft, frightened face broke with tears, looking into the strong eyes of the older red-haired girl.
'It's okay, Kelly, It's okay, were gonna get out of here.'
'Noooooo,' the girl cried.
'We are, I'm positive, I'm positive,' Jennifer reaffirmed.
'It's fucking locked tight!' Kristi screeched.
His brain running at two hundred miles an hour, Matt tried to yank on the door.
'They're piling up back there!' Alison yelled.
'Stand back, stand back!' Matt cried with enough gumption in his voice that everyone scattered like bowling pins to the walls around him. With a quick click of the gun's hammer, he pointed the weapon at the lock. Then, as he was about to pump the trigger, another sound let lose making them all jump. It was not the thunder crack of the weapon, but the echoing destruction of the wooden door that they had hoped would keep the creatures at bay. Now there was nothing between them and the mass of diabolical things. Wails and gurgling roars filled the tunnel, sounds of the bestial excitement at being a step closer to the new prey they had to pick apart.
Matt swallowed hard, cleared his head. The gun held six shots; six shots that couldn't be wasted. He repositioned himself aiming at the lock; a thing as deliberate as everything else that had trapped them down here. His mind, silent and calm as black shadows weaved towards them.
Then, lining up the cross hairs with the target, he pumped the trigger hard causing an explosion from its barrel; the monstrous silhouetted things were unfazed by the blast.
The lock snapped and obliterated with the penetration of the fired shell. Spitting hot pieces of metal flew back and burnt a hole straight through the leg of Matt's death suit. Unfazed, he threw all his weight against the door, the metal chain that bound it to the frame jangled free like a steel snake to the floor as it wrenched open.
'Get in!' he cried and with no hesitation, they did. Matt, the last to go through, grabbed some of the discarded long-handle shovels, throwing them back through the door as he went.
Everyone leaped around him, helping to push the door shut with a loud clump back into its jamb.
'Grab those shovels!' he shouted, taking off his jacket and throwing it in the corner of this small, new room. 'Alex grab that beam, prop it against this door now!' Alex dragged over an abandoned thick suspension beam and wedged it between the door and the floor. Everyone did what he said, following his lead as Matt took a shovel and started digging frantically at the wet walls around them, packing the falling earth tightly against the door.
The room was some kind of dug out workspace, a cut off piece of the tunnel; another door was mounted in an earth wall adjacent, no more than thirty feet away. Either side of them were rows of wooden workbenches; blood stained hard hats were strewn across the floor, and a small electric Icebox hummed, covered in dirty hand prints.
They dug faster and faster, the earth pile immediately rising used as a jamb around the doors bottom. Then with all the force of a car crashing, the door jolted forward with a hard, vibrating tremor.
They were here.
The ferocious cries of the beasts grew not in echo now, but in numbers through the cracks in the door’s boards.
Urged by these sounds they dug faster, tried to pile more earth between them and the creatures, going directly for the roof above them. The sharp bladed ends of the shovels easily cutting into the ceiling, bringing dirt down to the floor packing it tight against the pounding door. Jennifer and Alex forced their shovels into the door. A sinking sensation clawed through them as the shovel’s metal ends slowly descended into the decrepit, rot filled wood.
Then, with a lightning crack, a long thin split appeared down the door, one gaping enough for a foul brown, elongated spider leg to reach in; behind it the glow of eyes poured through, growing more intense with the scent of victory. Kristi, Alison and Matt all jumped back with a scream, as Alex and Jennifer continued pushing into the barricade with their shovels.
The leg swung around towards Jennifer then jaggedly reached for Alex. 'Christ's sake!' he squealed, almost falling to the floor to avoid its touch.
'Hold it! Hold it!' Matt yelled, stepping forward and swinging his shovel up high, slicing it through the air with a quick whistle, severing the oversized arachnid limb with a snapping crunch.
A loud anguished wail rang out, as a white geyser of pus erupted from the dismembered wound. It squirted like a missile through the air past Matt's shoulder, headed straight for Kristi who quickly ducked down, before it splashed straight in Alison's face with a quick, dull slap. The small bl
ack hat she wore flipped from her head as she let out a surprised shriek that turned to a deep heaving as the stench of the thick rank fluid entered her senses. Staggering sideways, she maddeningly cuffed the white curdling substance from her flesh in thick arching wipes, gagging at its touch.
With a devilish scream the gushing end of the spider leg withdrew back through the gap. Jennifer, dropping her shovel, reached to the floor and picked up one of the broken bits of pew. Bringing it back high over her head, she lunged forward, cutting through the air. Its sharp end shot through the crack in the door like greased lightning, stopping with a sloppy crack as it plunged into one of the creature’s leering bright eyes.
Another piercing cry, louder and more distressed bellowed out; scrambling, spasmodic movements and quick flashes of anger filled glowing eyes reeled past the door's gaps like speeding headlights.
Reaching up until they couldn't reach anymore, Matt and Kristi shovelled down the last remaining loose dirt until their shovels chinked against rock. The roof above now cut into like a divot-filled lawn.
Matt dropped his shovel and pointed his cocked gun at the door. The creatures slammed and banged violently, protesting their entrapment with guttural, phlegmy cries.
Kelly held her breath, standing behind both Jennifer and her mom, bringing her hands up to her ears; cutting off the sounds of the hidden nightmare monsters. Then the sound decreased to nothing. A distant padding and slithering as the creatures moved in a slow, defeated departure.
They were gone… for now.
CHAPTER 21
Matt ran down to the adjacent door and twisted its handle. It was unlocked. He pulled it open, ready to rock. Ready to plug one of the giant night crawlers. Pointing the gun inside only to face another empty florescent-lit tunnel.
They all breathed out deeply.
Silence.
Calm.
The immediate danger gone, a sense of relief filtered in the air, everyone having a moment to stop, to catch a breath, to soak in the surroundings of where they had fled. Each of their nerves jangling like a wind chime in a storm.