Nightcrawlers

28

Six of them went down.

Kenney, Godfrey, three deputies that volunteered—Iversen, Beck, St. Aubin—and Chipney. All willing to throw caution to the wind for a taste of something they’d never forget.

Kenney didn’t like Chipney going along because he was due to get married whenever and if ever this clusterfuck was wound up. He did everything he could to talk him out of it, but Chipney just said, “Now what kind of cop would I be if I turned tail now, Chief? How the hell would I be able to look at myself in a mirror if I didn’t go? Don’t leave me out of this one. I want to see same as you want to see. Shit, I have to see.”

There was no arguing with that, so Kenney didn’t bother.

He could have ordered him not to go, but Chipney was his friend. They’d caught more shit together than your average public toilet. Leaving him out would have been an insult, even though a voice in the back of his head kept saying, he’s going to die down there and it’ll be your fucking fault. You know that, don’t you?

And he did. God yes, but he did. If Chipney really didn’t make it, then he hoped he wouldn’t either. The idea of facing the kid’s fiancée took his breath away.

They took riot guns, their service revolvers, flashlights and extra batteries, handpack radios and emergency flares—though Godfrey warned them about lighting them with the gases down there. They wore waterproof chest waders and black rubber M17 military-issue gas masks. You never knew what sort of crap you might suck into your lungs in that charnel pit.

They lowered a thirty-foot collapsible ladder down the hole and it hit bottom with little to spare.

Godfrey went down first as the others pulled on their gas masks. When it was Kenney’s turn, he went down very slowly, wondering vaguely if he’d ever see the light of day again and refusing to think about it. The rungs were slippery with the waders on and he descended very carefully. They wore rubber gloves that came up to their elbows, but were snug enough in the fingers to make for easy manipulation of equipment. They were designed for handling toxic substances.

Near the bottom, Kenney paused.

He could hear a litany of squeaking and squealing, splashing and clawing. It rose up and then faded. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

“Rats,” Godfrey said, his voice oddly hollow coming through the voicemitter of his mask. “Gonna be a lot of ’em, I suspect.”

Rats, Kenney thought. A lair of fucking rats. Bone-pickers and carrion-eaters. Some that walk on four legs and some that walk on two.

Then he stepped into the water and it was thick and oily like some greasy soup of rot and decay. It gave off an oily reflection and was patched with floating mats of fungus. Flashlight beams played around through the haze and everyone could see they were in a room chipped from bedrock. A tunnel wound out from it like a gateway into hell. Kenney stepped forward, flashing his light about. Water was seeping from the roof, the walls. He could hear dripping sounds in the distance, little else.

“Shall we?” he said.

“You first,” Godfrey said.

Kenney moved forward and the others fell in behind him, the younger guys muttering among themselves. All Kenney could smell was the rubber seal of his silicone nosecup and was glad of it. A clump of earth fell and struck the top of his head and he jumped.

The others laughed.

The atmosphere was straight out of a tomb: stagnant, aged, and unpleasant.

There was a low, stealthy noise ahead. He paused, trying to identify it, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. Only the dripping of water like something heard in the depths of a cave, which was pretty appropriate, he supposed. Still, he was not convinced because he knew there had been something, a sound of stealthy movement. Whatever had made it, apparently it knew where they were but it wasn’t going to show itself until it was damn good and ready.

“This is pretty bad,” Beck said. “Can’t say I like it none.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Iversen said.

There was a bit of nervous laughter, but it didn’t last.

Godfrey turned to Beck. “Son, you want to head back? If you do, nobody here’s gonna think less of you. And I mean that.”

“Sure,” Chipney said.

The deputy shook his head, looking like a Martian invader in his gas mask. “No, I’ll be all right. I was just mentioning the fact.”

They moved forward again. The tunnel had angled off to the right now and they plodded on in absolute blackness. The seepage was up to their knees and seemed to be getting deeper, but gradually. Very gradually.

“Place is cut straight through the bedrock,” Godfrey said. “Imagine the time this took. I wonder if Ezren did this… Christ, the work involved, it would have taken a hundred men with drills.”

But Kenney shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think it was Ezren. This has been here since long before him I would guess.”

But he didn’t dare speculate as to who might have channeled it out.

The lights picked out the floating bodies of dead rats, leaves, twigs, and a few pink nameless masses no one had much interest in identifying. To Kenney it meant that there had to be an opening somewhere that led up into the light. Maybe in the ruins. He could see beady, luminous eyes that scattered whenever he shined the light in their direction.

“I think we’re getting close,” he finally said with a grim, gnawing apprehension.

The water was down around their calves now and things were jutting from it—a few skulls gone gray with sludge and mildew, the remains of a spinal column, the broomstick of a femur.

Nobody was surprised by any of that.

They expected bones and they expected things much worse than bones.

They pushed on and the floor began to dip and the water began to rise and their hearts were sinking lower into some bleak morass with every step. They heard something ahead—a quick, splashing sound—a sound that was certainly caused by no rat. They stood stock-still and listened. It was gone.

Kenney stood there, his throat gone dry. The riot gun and flashlight in his fists felt greasy like they wanted to slide from his fingers. He clutched them even tighter… the idea of being down there without a light or a weapon was absolutely frightening.

“We should keep moving,” Godfrey said as if it was the last thing he wanted.

The water was up to their thighs now. The tunnel arched away to the left and terminated with a door set into a stone frame. They approached it cautiously. It was incredibly old, fringed with mold, its planking rotting and staved in.

“Why would somebody put a door here?” Iversen asked.

But nobody had an answer. Kenney ran his gloved fingers along it, wondering how old it was. It was blackened and filthy, the latch long ago rusted and fallen away. You could see the hole where it had been set.

He tried to push through it, but it wouldn’t budge. Either it was too warped or something was pressed up against the other side. And he didn’t want to know what that might have been.

“Give a hand here,” Godfrey said.

A cluster of hands pressed up against it and it started to move. On the count of three they gave it one last heave. The wood was so soft it began to buckle, to disintegrate. Kenney put his hand right through one panel and snatched it back quickly, afraid maybe that something would grab it from the other side. Five or six beetles crawled over the palm of his glove. He flicked them away. They got the door open maybe two feet and squeezed themselves through the aperture.

Their lights discovered the room within. A rectangular structure with walls of mortared sandstone that had gone a dirty brown in color. They were patched with huge, spreading mildew stains that were black as oil. The stones jutted forth in a crazy, uneven patchwork. There was another doorway that led into yet another tunnel. The ceiling was low and dripping, but in the center of it, a passage like a chimney led up into the gloom. They flashed their lights up there, but all they could see was the filthy stonework and the narrowing throat of the passage, what looked like an ancient metal grating high above.

The entire place reminded them of some medieval dungeon and they couldn’t guess at its purpose. The water sluiced around their waists and they moved very carefully for fear they would step into a hole and get sucked into some nightmare abyss.

Godfrey touched the wall and it came apart under his fingers. The mortar had the consistency of wet cement, the stones they held dropped into the water. “Goddamn place is coming down around us.” He moved forward, examining the rough-hewn walls in some detail. “Imagine the time it must’ve taken to build something like this! Christ, years and years and years!”

“But it’s not going to last much longer,” St. Aubin said. “We’ll be lucky if we get out of here without this whole damn place coming down on our heads.”

“If you want to go back, you can,” Kenney told him.

“We should all go back and I think you know that.”

Godfrey pulled another stone out, pressed the barrel of his riot gun through the chasm. It met with no resistance. He crouched down, shining his light through there. “Christ, there’s another room in there… oh, holy shit.” He stood back up, sighing. “There’s skeletons in there…”

Kenney pushed through the knot of deputies, got his light and his face in the chasm. He saw a narrow room with a sloping ceiling. Some of it had caved in. Rubble was heaped everywhere, shelves of stone rising from the murk like the humps of a whale. He saw the skeletons. Ancient things, yellowed and blackened. They were leaning against the far wall and against one another, water slopping around their rib staves. Had to be twenty or thirty that Kenney could see. But nothing recent. Some of them were so old they had literally fallen into themselves. A few skulls were nowhere to be seen.

Beck kept shaking his head. “All those bodies up there and all this down here… skeletons… oh Christ, Sheriff what is this all about?”

But Godfrey just shook his head, his eyes wide and unblinking behind his face shield.

Kenney removed a few more stones, mortar fell away like clods of wet soil. He could see pretty good in there. He panned his light around, knowing full well if he lived through this nightmare, he would see that chamber and its occupants in his dreams for the rest of his life.

He was remembering what he’d seen in the fields that night, what he’d sensed in those spectral ruins, what Elena Blasden had said, and he thought: They raided Clavitt Fields, destroyed the town and what lived there. But they were wrong, horribly wrong. Because those people were scarcely human then and all they did was force them underground into this labyrinth. And that was nearly two hundred years ago. Almost two centuries of living and interbreeding in the damp, sunless darkness where they became something far less than human, a species unto themselves. And their progeny have survived to this day, mutating into things more like worms than people, creatures no longer equipped for open spaces and sunlight. Only at night do they come up and then only to hunt, to dig, to feed.

Jesus in heaven, what must they be like? What have they evolved into? Things like Genevieve Crossen’s adopted daughter… or worse?

And he could picture Charles Ezren and then later his son, Luke, bringing people down into the darkness for them. Bringing them food. He didn’t know that to be true, but from what he was seeing it was almost a foregone conclusion. All the remains they had found thus far pointed to the fact that what lived down here in this sunless labyrinth were ghouls, eaters of the dead.

“All right,” Godfrey said. “Let’s move here.”

They fell in behind him and he led them through the tunnel on the other side. But it was no tunnel, more like a crevice, a gap between two buildings. The walls were fashioned of squalid, crumbling brick, water seeping from them in slow, steady rivers like leaking faucets. They had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The water reached above their waists now, moving with turgidity more like gelatin than water. More dead rats washed by, other things they refused to look at.

“What the hell is that stuff?” Chipney said.

They’d all been wondering that because they had seen masses of the stuff floating about—some pinkish, pulpous material that almost looked like bread dough, save it was vaguely transparent. Only here it was not floating but growing right up the walls in fleshy seams.

“Some kind of fungus,” Kenney said.

St. Aubin went up to a vein of the stuff and touched it with his hand. Even through his glove he could feel it was warm. “It’s moving,” he said.

Kenney and the others put their lights on it.

“That’s crazy,” Iversen said.

“Fungi don’t move,” Godfrey pointed out.

But as Kenney got closer and investigated it for himself, he saw that St. Aubin was right: it was moving. It shuddered when he poked it with the barrel of his riot gun. It shivered. Despite his aversion to it, he touched it lightly with his fingertips. It was pulsating slightly with a gentle rhythm not unlike that of a newborn.

“We don’t have time for nature study,” he said, leading them on.

He got no argument. None of them wanted to know anything more about this subterranean world than they absolutely had to. And he couldn’t blame them on that count. They were here to search for missing cops. That was their job. It was the only thing that needed to concern them.

By that point, nobody was saying much of anything and Kenney knew they were scared shitless to a man.

They were hearing other sounds now and they weren’t just cavorting rats or the subterranean network flaking away, but a lunatic, congested whispering. He could remember it from the fields that fated night and down here, yes, down here it was much worse. A tenebrous choir in this spirit-riven pit. It grew louder, faded, rose up again and took on the resonation of a high, evil cackling and then fell away again. Echoing and echoing.

The crevice widened and they stumbled into another chamber. More of the fungi hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss. Kenney brushed against some of it and he could almost swear it was crawling.

The water was a black, surging pool in which countless shapes bobbed and drifted. In the glare of the lights, everyone saw bloated bodies and parts of them—limbs, trunks, a head or two stripped to bone—coming apart in the filthy water, leaving oily wakes on the surface as they putrefied.

One of the deputies started retching. Another was making low, moaning sounds within his mask. Yet another just trembled, his entire body shaking. Kenney and Godfrey looked at each other and kept looking. They were communicating something, but neither really wanted to know what that was.

Kenney stared down at the head of a woman that bumped into him. Her skullish jaws were sprung as if in a scream. A full main of greasy hair fell over her skinless face. He could see a gold cap on one of her molars. He began to shiver.

Three tunnels led away into the wall. One of them was caved in completely.

Kenney looked up at them and they beckoned to him, offering a long, unpleasant death. “Two roads diverged in the yellow wood,” he said and his voice was flat and empty and somehow alien even to him.

“What’s that?” Godfrey said, maybe a little more harshly than he’d intended.

But Kenney just shook his head. “We either turn back… or we split up and keep going. Your call, Sheriff.”

Godfrey gave him a near-psychotic look. It was no easy feat ordering men to their deaths. But he did it and hated himself for it.