Nightcrawlers

33

As Kenney and the others first encountered the inhabitants of the underworld, Sheriff Godfrey, Beck, and Chipney entered a flooded cavern.

The tunnel they followed had opened now into a huge, natural chamber where the water washed around their chests. It was about twenty feet wide, but less than seven in height. Had they been any taller, their heads would have brushed the muddy, rocky ceiling.

The sheriff knew it was getting too deep.

Just like he knew this was all pretty hopeless and that he should take these men up and out of there, come back with a properly equipped demo team and blow this place… but he couldn’t. He’d put a call into above said, yeah, everything was fine, fine, but it was a lie and he knew it. He’d seen so much now that had withered his soul, but he needed more. He needed to actually see them.

And then he did.

A half dozen of them rose from the water gradually as if they were being lifted from below and he saw, he finally saw what had haunted Bellac Road for so very long.

And, Jesus, just like Pearl… or the thing pretending to be Pearl.

Leprous and blotched, pale as parchment, their distorted and sunless faces were cut by agonized grins and sunk with glistening, sightless eyes like graveyard pits. Their hair was long and white and threaded with filth, hanging over their features in greasy, wet braids. They had flesh like cooled, puddled candle wax. It barely covered the skeletons below—ribs burst forth and cheekbones thrust from faces and orbits jutted obscenely and everywhere, he could see their bones. And the flesh itself… more like rotting garments, it hung and pulsed and dangled in fearsome loops and strands. Veils of it trailed out around them, floating like grim bridle trains.

And then they surged forward and the deputies started shooting and gnarled hands were reaching out for them and someone was screaming and the water was boiling around them and the lights were flashing and jumping and on they came, those grisly faces coming out of the misting darkness like cloven spookshow skulls.

Godfrey and his deputies were stumbling away, shooting and shooting, except Chipney was gone and there was no hope of saving him or even knowing where he was. The lights bounced with each explosion of the riot guns and Godfrey caught a sight that turned his mind to sauce—dozens of them wriggling and crawling and creeping like maggots on roadkill.

And then they disappeared.

In no hurry, they sank below the surface and the water bubbled and went still, strands of sloughed skin drifting like confetti.

Godfrey and Beck charged through the chest-high swamp, but it was slow going and they knew they didn’t stand a chance. They fought through shivering nets of fungus that were warm and greasy. But they would not give in, not yet. And then, just ahead, a cavern mouth opened above the waterline and they pulled themselves up and in and it was dry in there. Rubble and debris covered the rocky floor and water stood in slimy puddles, but, Jesus, for all that it was dry, dry.

They had barely made it in there, wildly stripping off their masks, not caring about the smell anymore, when a profusion of clown-white hands erupted from the slimy water and began to drag themselves up.

They ran, stumbling in their waterlogged waders, and the cavern narrowed, widened, narrowed again. The sloping ceiling forced them down to their hands and knees and then spit them out in a grotto that was huge and wide and squeaking with countless rats. Before them was a wall. A wall easily thirty feet high and twice that wide. A wall built completely of bones. Skulls and femurs and tibias and scapulas all arranged with an exacting precision that was frightening. It was almost like some kind of shrine and Kenney wondered crazily what sort of minds could conceive of something like that.

But then he was at it, tearing and clawing and digging through the masonry of human bones that were pitted and yellowed and gray with age. They came apart in his fingers like ancient vases and desert-dried pottery and there was a rumble and a motion and a thunder and the entire wall collapsed like a house of cards and bones rained down on him.

And on the other side was a den of the things, all of them shrieking and squealing and flaking apart, all creeping in his direction on their hands and knees like a migration of human insects and he was buried alive in their blubbery, clawing bodies.

Beck hid beneath the wall of bones that had rained down on him, finding safety and camouflage in the depths of the ossuary, hiding and trembling like a hunted rodent. He did not move. He barely breathed. A twisted voice in his head told him he could wait there for as long as it took, that he would be safe and those things would never, ever find him.

But he was wrong.

As he listened, they began to dig their way towards him, whispering and grunting and chattering their teeth. Slowly, bone by bone, he was being unearthed, his secret lair exposed. It wasn’t until their fingers brushed over him that he began to scream.