Nightcrawlers

46

They stood around the cistern staring down into the vaporous blackness.

They paced and muttered and swore and shook their heads.

Hyder stood there, staring, staring, watching the men around him out of the corners of his eyes, men who couldn’t seem to stand still or didn’t know what to do with their hands or where to focus their eyes.

Finally, he said, “It’s been four hours now. Somebody’s got to go down after them and I guess that somebody is us.”

“We shouldn’t have waited this long,” Snow said.

A few others grunted in agreement.

“The sheriff and I had an understanding,” Hyder explained. “No one went down until the four hours elapsed. That’s what he wanted. Those were his orders and I followed them.”

A few of them looked like they wanted to argue the fact, especially the state patrol cops—Kenney’s people—but they never got the chance.

The ground beneath them made a curious grumbling sort of sound.

Hyder thought it sounded like a hungry giant’s belly might when it growled for people. The thought passed through his mind with grim amusement that did not last very long.

The ground rumbled again and this time the old farmhouse moved.

They all felt it. Like something beneath it had stirred.

“Hell is that?” Snow said.

He was greeted by pale sweaty faces that had no answers at all.

The rumbling sound came again and was louder. This time it nearly knocked them off their feet like a subsurface seismic wave. The dirt floor of the cellar seemed to ripple. The cistern made a creaking sound and a few loose bricks fell down into the water below with muted splashes.

“Shit,” Hyder said. “I think we’re in a hell of a spot.”

Understatement… because the rumbling made the house move this time like it had been shoved a few inches on its foundation. Then things really got going. The house shook and trembled, invisible waves of force passing beneath their feet. The mortaring of the bricks in the cistern crumbled and the entire thing began to collapse. The ancient flagstone walls shuddered, then made loud grinding sounds, and visible cracks like exaggerated lighting bolts fanned through them and they began to flake away.

As dust and wood splinters fell from above, Hyder grabbed one of the deputies and shoved him at the staircase, which made a cracking sound loud as pistol shot. Two of the steps snapped in half.

“Go! Go! Go!” Hyder cried. “Get upstairs! Get the hell out of here! Whole goddamn place is coming apart!”

How right he was.

There was a pained groaning from the house above them and the rough-hewn planks of the ceiling began to buckle. One of the timbers split lengthwise. It was like some colossal beast had the farmhouse in its grip and was crushing it. The cistern completely collapsed into the hole below along with all of its bricks, taking a good section of the floor with it.

Hyder grabbed a state cop right before he would have gone tumbling down into the deep six below.

Then they were all climbing the rickety, shifting staircase, which was beginning to break loose from its moorings. Something very heavy fell upstairs. They heard glass breaking and it seemed like the house leaned to the side about three or four feet.

Hyder was the last one up.

He saw an entire section of flagstone wall crumble into rubble and part of the ceiling cave in. The stairway shattered into kindling seconds after he got to the main floor.

Upstairs, the walls were breaking apart. The ceiling coming down. The corridor to the kitchen and outside was lopsided, the walls cracking open, the air filled with clouds of rolling plaster dust.

Hyder and the others just barely made it outside.

They stumbled through the wet grasses in time to see the farmhouse fall into itself with a great groaning death cry of ancient beams and straw-dry joists. Then it began to sink, falling into some widening chasm as if the earth was hungry and the wreckage of the house was a snack.

But even out in the field, there was no safety.

Not really.

In the brightness of the rising full moon, Hyder could see the crowds out there on the road, some of them newsies from the papers and TV stations who wanted to know how they’d managed to lose so many cops out here, but most just curious locals and people from nearby towns who thought something like this was a tourist attraction.

They began to scramble. The earth tremor from below—or whatever the hell it was—had not subsided; it was still rolling and gaining momentum, if anything, like a wave preparing to crash onto a beach.

The ground was like a shaken rug and Hyder and the others kept falling on their asses and colliding with each other and getting tossed through the air. Out on the road there was shouting and horns beeping, cars smashing into one another and being backed right into the ditches. Pandemonium. And it seemed to be coming from every direction.

The other cops, all of them much younger than the undersheriff, were sprinting across the fields, falling, getting up, and running that much faster, leaving Hyder far behind. A shock wave came from below that threw him up in the air with such force he flipped over twice before he came down with an impact that knocked the wind right out of him.

By then, all he could hear was the pained rumbling from below and the screaming of dozens of people.

As he climbed almost drunkenly to his feet, swaying and dizzy, he saw a great section of the field collapse in the moonlight as if a mammoth sinkhole was opening up. Even in the distance where the woods began, he saw stands of trees drop down into the earth as it opened up.

Then—

He saw something come rushing up from below like a surging tide of pink jelly, gushing and foaming, filling the chasm and overflowing it. There was another roaring eruption and a good part of Bellac Road simply vanished, taking dozens of cars and countless screaming, hysterical people down into the widening crevice. More of that jelly surged out, flooding over those that tried to run from it.

On his ass on a spit of somewhat stable ground, Hyder saw the various chasms widen and connect into a gigantic pit that stretched far into the forest—or where it had been—and to the road and beyond for several hundred yards. The seething pink jelly was like blood from a gashed artery spilling out and then it subsided as something rose from its depths, not one thing but many and for the life of him it looked like—

Mushrooms. Fucking mushrooms.

Yes, mushrooms and toadstools, but gigantic things the size of garages and two-story houses, looming and rising, each of them painted in brilliant, vibrant oranges and yellows, greens and blues and electric purple. All phosphorescent, turning night to day. It almost made his eyes ache looking upon them. Some of the toadstools were narrow like morels and tall as oak trees, rising up like posts with distinctive and elaborately ridged caps. The mushrooms were smooth and saucer-shaped, bearing scarlet spots and swirling bands of brilliant color. Rising among them were immense domes like puffballs that seemed to be swelling like eggs ready to crack open. There were hundreds of them, tall and short, oval and bloated, massive buttons sprouting in tangles and clusters.

A forest of writhing pink tendrils connected them in a delicate filagree, spreading out in webs, each of them branching out into a dozen or more fibers. The assemblage of fungi grew and grew, the ground shook and more of it fell away as new growths emerged, all of them rising up to the sky above, it seemed.

As it moved, rolled and undulated upwards, Hyder could see jagged cracks in the pulsating pale membrane that was its foundation, glimpses of something shockingly pink and writhing that seemed to be trying to break through.

He would have run, but there was nowhere to run to.

He was marooned on an island in a sea of blossoming germination.

In all directions, it seemed, was a malignant expanse of fungi that felled the forest and covered the land as it continued to expand. It brought a wet heat with it that steamed and smoldered, casting a drifting pall of mist over the world. It carried a stink of submerged things and organic decay.

Hyder was still hearing an occasional scream or a desperate voice crying out, but mostly there was silence save for the occasional rumbling of the fungi and the rubbery sounds they made.

But everyone wasn’t dead.

Where the road had been, there was still a piece of it left with a van and half a dozen people standing around it. They were in the shadows of toadstools that rose up to three stories or more now. They were staring up at them in awe and wonder, tendrils of mist wrapping around them.

Hyder heard a squishing sound and a shape shambled out of the mist. It was a massive thing in the general shape of a man, but a man that had been bloated to obscene, impossible proportions, a man-like form that moved like a wave heading ashore. It was pulpy and distended and grotesque, a jellied mass of twitching, crawling things that hissed a yellow and venomous steam. A luminous shine came from it.

Hyder was not afraid.

He knew it was Kenney. He knew it was a friend.

He noticed then that every single cap was swelling now with nodules that were inflating like balloons until they must pop. Then they did like bubbles. But not exactly like bubbles. They exploded and cast vibrant clouds of yellow spores that spread out into a storm, a blizzard that was blown on the winds and settled back to the earth in a downy fall.

He stood up, raising his arms like a child greeting the first snowfall of winter and the spores settled over him, adhering to him. They were in his hair and covering his body. He tasted them on his tongue and breathed them in. Under their gentle caress, he settled back into the grass and dreamed beautiful, amazing things, his system overloaded with psychotropics that opened up febrile, impossible panoramas in every direction.