Nightcrawlers

29

Godfrey led Beck and Chipney down the passage, splashing forward in the dirty water. The passage gradually widened—like a birth canal, he thought—until they reached something like another room in which bloated things broke the surface like islands, only they weren’t islands.

“Bodies,” Beck said, as if that needed saying at all.

They studied them in their lights. It was appalling. Like a rumba line of floaters, all of them bloated and waterlogged, and each one seemingly a bit more decayed than the last. Flies lit from them in black, buzzing clouds. They wriggled with maggots. They were coming apart in the water, ribbons and sheets of flesh trailing from them in banners. The insane and disturbing part was that they did not seem to be individual cadavers, but parts of a greater whole.

As Beck and Chipney pulled back, Godfrey kept his stomach down where it belonged and moved slowly towards them, though it was honestly the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

When he got to the nearest one, he prodded it with the barrel of his riot gun. It shuddered in the water, sending out slow, torpid ripples. Flies rose and fell, maggots dug in deeper. All that was bad enough, but he noticed that the body—man, woman, who could say?—was connected to the others by rubbery strings of tissue. It not only connected the bodies like fish on the same stringer, but it grew up and over them, a morbid white material that looked soft and spongy.

More of the fungus.

God, it was everywhere down here… floating in little islands and glistening humps, growing up out of the water in threads and webs and knotted creepers. It made Godfrey’s skin crawl and he was damn glad he had that mask on. The last thing he wanted was for the younger boys to see how absolutely fucking terrified he was. The fungus was unnatural and he knew it. It had proliferated down here and seemed to be everywhere as if they were inside of it, inside of some mammoth fungi that owned the netherworld.

“It’s eating the remains,” Chipney said.

Godfrey’s gas mask shook back and forth. “Yeah, sort of breaking them down.”

Chipney shivered.

Godfrey moved away from the bodies towards the nearest wall. He studied it in the light bracketed to the barrel of his riot gun. The brick was dark and stained, moldering with some black slime that seemed to be eating away the mortar. He jabbed a finger of his glove into it and it was soft. Slime dripped from it. But none of that concerned him. He was more interested in the stratum of blubbery pink fungus that grew between the bricks, bulging from cracks and crevices like greasy dough.

I bet if a man were to stretch out and take a nap down here, he thought, he’d wake up netted in that shit. It would grow all over him.

He was no stranger to death.

He knew the most disgusting things happened to bodies that were underground, away from the air and sunlight. Things fed on them. Things grew from them. But he’d never seen anything quite like this.

His throat dry as sand, he moved over to a very large clot of the stuff that bulged out like a rubbery bubble on an inner tube. The shit looked like it was moving. It could have been his imagination, but he did not think so. It was pulsing slightly. He pulled a lock-blade knife from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and jabbed the blade into the bubble.

It moved.

A ripple passed through it like a clenching muscle.

The blade had slit into it easily enough and from the wound a few droplets of some scarlet juice leaked out.

Is it bleeding? Is that shit blood?

“Hell are you doing, Sheriff?” Beck asked.

“Nothing, just nosing around.”

Beck was clearly agitated. “Well, no disrespect, sir, but let’s just get this done. I’m sick to my stomach and my fucking skin’s crawling.”

“All right, son.”

Hell, who could blame him? Who could blame anyone from getting their backs up in this awful place? Godfrey felt pretty much the same way himself. How could you not?

He was terrified and sickened just like they were.

Christ, it felt like his stomach had grown legs and was trying to walk up the back of his throat. But as nauseous as it all made him, as claustrophobic and uneasy, he was still fascinated by it all. All those stories that had made the rounds of Haymarket and the county for so damn many years… this was the epicenter of it. Down here in this stinking, misty blackness. This was the black beating heart of it, the core. How many locals had ever been down here and lived to tell the tale? And how many men or women, for that matter, had ever reached the fountainhead of a legend?

Lots of ’em have through history, you just don’t hear about ’em because they never come back to tell the tale.

He moved towards the far end of the room, the others falling back behind him. He stepped carefully, very carefully. As he passed the line of bodies, his wake made them move and drift and he thought he heard Beck whimper in his throat.

Hang tight, son, he thought. This is going to get worse and you know it.

There was a passage ahead and he entered it first, his light filling it, making shadows jump and cavort. He let out a little cry and fell backwards, almost tripping and going down in the water.

Beck and Chipney were at his side immediately.

“What is it?” Chipney asked.

Beck was breathing too hard to ask anything.

“A rat… I think it was a rat,” Godfrey lied. “A goddamn big one. It jumped out at me.”

Beck shined his light down there. “Nothing now.”

“No, we must have scared each other. Sorry to startle you, boys.”

Godfrey stood up from the sloping wall where he’d been leaning. It had taken every bit of strength he possessed to conceal from them what he had looked upon. When he had first entered the passage, his light had picked out the shape of a man… something like a man. A hunched-over, ratlike form that was grotesque to the extreme. There had been something growing from its belly like sacs, sacs that looked oddly like baby doll heads, but hairless and white and mouthless.

Then it had disappeared as if it never was.

“Maybe we should go back,” Beck said. “This is getting too… too fucked-up for just a few men.”

He was right, entirely, but Godfrey said, “We got missing cops. I’m not calling this off until I know what the hell happened to them. They’d do the same for me, I hope.”

“Definitely,” Chipney said. “We move on.”

Godfrey got on the radio. Down there with all the stone and brick walls, the reception was shit. He got Kenney, but it was mostly static. Hyder, above, came in a little better, but not much. Godfrey knew just as Beck and Chipney must have suspected that the farther they penetrated into the labyrinth, the worse the reception would be until there was no reception at all.

His heart in his throat, he led them deeper into the passage.

To what waited for them.