The Underdwelling

16

Breed felt McNair grab his arm. “Quiet,” he said.

“What?”

“Quiet.”

Breed listened. There was nothing for maybe five seconds, then a weird, distant droning sound rose up and died away. It sounded, if anything, like the continual buzzing of a summer locust.

“What the hell was that?”

“Quiet,” McNair said again.

Breed gently set down the wedge of rock that was in his hands. He had a neckerchief wrapped around his mouth because they were kicking up so much dust digging through the rubble. Clouds of it drifted like fog in the light of the lantern. McNair’s face was pale, his eyes huge and wet. His lower lip was trembling.

There was another noise now.

Something circling around them out there, moving over the rocks with a sort of ticking sound like a cat’s claws will make on linoleum when they’re not retracted. Tick, tick, tick, ticka-ticka-tick. Now the sounds stopped as if what had made them became aware that they were listening for it.

“What’s that smell?” Breed said, pulling down his neckerchief.

But McNair shushed him. Whatever it was, it was thick in the air, a smell of age and dryness like the hot, dead stink of attics and sealed trunks. They both stood there, listening. Breed felt the sweat on his brow began to run down his cheeks. He licked his lips. He did not know exactly where their visitor was, but he could feel its nearness, sense its presence along his spine. He expected that any moment it would leap out at him, snarling and gibbering, a furry and elfin form with gnashing yellow teeth.

But that didn’t happen.

It waited.

They waited.

He felt McNair’s grip on his arm tighten and he knew why: there was another sound, maybe one they’d been hearing for some time but not truly registering: a hollow sound of drawn-out respiration like wind sucked through a pipe.

It was the sound of breathing.

McNair moved very slowly, very carefully. He picked-up his long-handled flashlight from where it sat on a shelf of sandstone. He pointed it in the direction of the breathing. Dust was suspended in the beam like silt. He played it over the heaped rocks and pale green stalagmites rising up from the floor of the cavern like fangs. Shadows jumped and slid around them.

But there was nothing out there.

Nothing at all.

“Jurgens? Maki?” McNair called out and the fear in his voice was so thick, so tightly-wrapped, it was nearly strangling him. “If you’re out there, call out for the love of God…”

Breed stood there. He was shaking. Listening to the breathing that blended into the immense stark silence of the catacombs around them in a perfect unbroken weave. Dead air that seemed to scream in his ears. His flesh was actually crawling, his mouth dry, his belly pulled up into his chest.

And it was at that precise moment that he heard it.

That they both heard it.

A high, sweet singing that was scratching and tuneless, a repetitive sound of hysteria like a song of mourning sung by a madwoman over the graves of her children. It rose up in an unearthly shrill cadence then became the drone of a grasshopper in a summer field, growing louder and louder—then cut out completely, echoing off into the subterranean depths.

Breed nearly fell over. He was hot and cold, his limbs rubbery, white-hot fingers of absolute primal dread sliding through his chest… and then, whatever was out there, was moving in their direction. Tick, tick, ticka, ticka, ticka. The sounds a wolf spider would make as it stalked its prey if the human ear were sensitive enough to hear them.

Breed and McNair did not move.

They stood rooted to the spot, both sweating and trembling as it advanced on them. McNair’s hand was shaking on the flashlight. The beam jumped up and down, almost strobing. He had to put both fists on it to steady it and even then he was only partially successful. The beam cut into the darkness, slicing through the clouds of rock dust and that horrible dry stench became pungent and sickening in the air.

Breed could see something… an eldritch and terrible form given body by the swirling dust. He couldn’t be sure how much of it he saw and how much he imagined. It was roughly the size of man. A semi-visible hunched-over thing, a hazy apparition speckled with dust. It was creeping at them on a dozen spindly legs. He saw reaching arms, an elongated head of undulant tendrils like a nest of writhing, loathsome snakes… and a distorted face: something with clustered pods of eyes.

Then it leaped at them, howling with black hate.

It took McNair first.

It split him from crotch to throat and by the time Breed wiped the blood out of his eyes, he saw it in the glow of the lantern. It was crouched over McNair’s corpse which was bleeding out in a steaming red lagoon. It was spattered red, lapping up blood with juicy, slobbering sounds.

Then it raised its head.

Breed saw three puckering red mouths like blow holes open and shriek in his face with absolute elemental wrath.

Then he started screaming.