Nightcrawlers

31

Kenney was thinking, almost casually: I’m going to die down here.

And it should have terrified him or at the very least sent him scurrying like a rat through the darkness and back to the ladder, but it did not. Some twenty feet into this newest vaulted passage, he paused, the water cold and viscous around his waist, and thought about it all. He did not like what he was thinking. He saw the faces of his two ex-wives, his daughter, his mother and father now long dead. He could remember good times and sunny days and his childhood and how strange it was that it would end down here in this flooded crypt.

And thinking these things, he paled, knowing something important and necessary in him had now given up.

Don’t be a fool. You’ve got plenty of years left if you keep on fighting. If you want to give up, you might as well do it now.

But he wasn’t about to do that. Hell, no.

He turned to Iversen and St. Aubin, both of whom followed at a healthy distance as if they were waiting to see if anything happened to him before proceeding.

“It could get bad,” he said to them, his bobbing flashlight creating unnatural, sliding shadows over the walls of the tunnel. “If you guys want to go back, do it. Don’t hesitate. You’re young, keep that in mind.”

Behind those water-streaked polycarbonate face shields, they looked like boys, frightened little boys. They looked at each other, then at Kenney.

Iversen said, “We’re going with you.”

“Yeah,” St. Aubin said, a little more hesitantly.

And Kenney just looked them over and knew they were scared because he was scared, but they could never admit it. Their youth had pride, macho pride. A man was like that before he saw fifty, before he saw the tunnel of his own life narrowing before him. These two puffed out their chests and inflated their balls and told themselves nothing could touch them because their youth would protect them. They would never admit to fear. Unlike Kenney, who readily admitted fear and knew he was seriously fucked here, but pushed on out of sheer curiosity now, morbid curiosity. If this place was intent on killing him, then he would know its secrets first, he would see things no man had and lived to tell the tale.

It was odd, but there was comfort in that.

He got on his handpack and checked in with Godfrey, knowing the units on the surface were monitoring everything.

On they went.

St. Aubin came up with the idea of duct-taping their flashlights to the riot guns and it was a smart idea. It worked real well. That way you could keep both hands on your rifle and still see everything there was to see.

They moved on and the water got deeper and came up to their bellies and seemed to get blacker. Whatever it was they’d come to see, it was close now. More remains bobbed in the water, but there were worse things than the dead and they all knew it. Their lights reflected off the polluted waste they marched through and danced over the crumbling brick walls like spotlights. Their splashing sounds echoed through the passage.

They saw more of the fungus, if that’s what it was. Good God, the passage walls were threaded with it like some elaborate vein networking. Whatever this was all about down here, the fungus was part and parcel of it and maybe everything they had seen and would yet see were but extensions of it.

It was food for thought.

“Listen,” Kenney said, freezing up. There had been a sound ahead, a big sound. But now it was gone. He shook his head. “Nothing.”

But it wasn’t nothing because none of them were moving now. They waited, they tensed, they listened. It seemed that the water was filled with odd, half-glimpsed shapes now.

Maybe it was their imagination.

But probably not.

The brickwork had mostly fallen away the farther they went and the walls were earthen, muddy, dropping away in chunks now. Water ran in streams from networks of reaching tree roots that dangled above. They began to bump into things in the murk, things lying beneath the surface. They had to move carefully.

Kenney knew what those things were—long, wooden boxes, but he wasn’t saying and didn’t until dozens of them started sprouting from the water like tree stumps: coffins. Most were lidless, splintered, scathed with what could only be claw marks and wormholes. Their satin linings were hanging out like viscera, faded and speckled with mildew when they were evident at all. Most of them had been gutted and shredded. They found no remains in any of them.

“A cemetery,” Iversen said in a high, whining voice. “That’s what this place is, a fucking cemetery.”

And that’s exactly what this place was, Kenney knew.

He could just imagine how the things of Clavitt Fields had tunneled through the darkness, coming up beneath that cemetery across the road from the farmhouse, pulling caskets down into their lair. It was appalling, really, but made perfect sense.

The water was scummy with bits of human anatomy—rank tissue and decayed flesh like a skim of fat. More islands of fungus appeared. It seemed to be growing right out of the coffins. They splashed ahead, trudged awkwardly. The floor of the tunnel was uneven now, lumpy and twisting and heaved up, full of holes and things that felt like boulders and sticks beneath their boots but were not boulders and sticks at all.

They had to go back. Kenney knew this now.

Everyone was trembling at the edge of lunacy here. Go back and dynamite this entire mess, that was the thing to do.

St. Aubin screamed.

He spun in a wild circle and opened up with his riot gun. And then everyone was shooting and stumbling through the water and it took a moment for Kenney to see them—the things.

The descendants of the original, depraved inhabitants of Clavitt Fields.

They were coming up out of the water and attacking now. In the arcing, glancing illumination of the flashlights, he could see very little. Just hunched, emaciated figures knitted with a colorless, rolling flesh the color of bacon grease that hung in sheets from their frames like moldering, crawling blankets. He caught glimpses of faces riddled with innumerable holes and rents, others covered in cauls and braided excrescences that seemed to wriggle like flatworms.

One of them rocketed out of the filth, its face twisted into a bubbling, fungal mask and Kenney pulled the trigger, blowing it in half. He kept shooting and so did the others, but it was hopeless. They were in a nest of them and there was no advance, no retreat. Four or five of them writhed up from the water like wriggling worms, boneless things with fungoid flesh and tumescent faces and eyeballs only a shade whiter than their mottled complexions and oily locks.

Iversen screamed as they squirmed over him and dragged him down.

St. Aubin was whimpering and crying and yelling. He stumbled into Kenney and Kenney shoved him aside and began firing again, repulsed at how the buckshot made those things literally spray apart.

Then hands as cold as dry ice and covered with a chill, quivering flesh were at his throat. He brought the butt of the shotgun back and felt it smash into something that yelped and slid away in the water and another came up right in front of him. Its face was slack and rubbery, the nose collapsed into a skullish cavern, eye sockets huge and jutting, black and gray teeth chattering like they wanted badly to bite into something.

It was all bad, of course, but what was even worse was a sluggish liquid flow of some pale yeasty material that came out of its eyes in gurgling clots and engulfed its face like it was trying to eat it.

It hissed at him like a cockroach, the spawn of witches. Its lips were nearly fused together by tiny hairlike filaments of mold.

Skeletal, knobby hands took hold of the riot gun… then it was yanked from his oily gloves and he was alone, only St. Aubin’s light behind him, bobbing and swaying as he splashed away into the distance.

Kenney ran towards him, knocking three of them out of the way and then a fourth exploded into his path and he instinctively struck out at it. His fist sank through its belly, through tissue and organ, which had the spongy consistency of wet bread. It went right through the thing as if it was made of jelly. With a shrill, maddened cry, he pulled his hand back, felt it graze rubbery bones and then the thing fell away only to be replaced by another with a head like a nodding fleshy balloon.

He could hear them coming after him, but he kept running, stumbling through the water until he found St. Aubin pressed up against a wall, moaning and whimpering and gagging. He’d stripped away his mask and was sucking in lungfuls of that corrupt, dank air. His face was wet with sweat.

Kenney took hold of him and saw he was a wreck, that he was beyond words, so he took his gun from him and—

And fell backward, screaming into that carrion soup… because he saw what was behind the deputy. The walls were punched with a series of tunnels, small ones you would have had to crawl through on your belly. Like the honeycombs of a bumblebee’s nest.

And the scream barely left his lips when a tangle of white arms covered in some shivering gelatinous secretion reached from the hole behind St. Aubin and pulled him bodily into the opening. His screams faded into the distance.

And then Kenney was alone as they came from behind him and others began to slither from those holes with smooth, snakelike undulations.