The Underdwelling

17

They heard it.

That same mournful, shrill piping echoing through the cavern. Right away, flashlights were in fists, beams of light searching and searching for the source of that terrible sound. But there was nothing but the honeycombed trunks and the hundreds of petrified trees rising up around them like the mineralized columns of some primal amphitheater. The lights threw a lot of long, narrow shadows around, but nothing else.

Nothing else at all.

“Ain’t nothing up there!” Maki said, his voice nearly delirious. “Not a goddamn thing! She’s there but she isn’t there!”

He was right, of course, and Boyd knew why. The thing making that sound was nowhere near them; it was with Breed and McNair now. As proof of that, they heard the first scream. It was high and wavering and fragmented and it was truly hard to say which of them made it. Only that it sounded out, a cry of absolute agony that was somehow animalistic and keening like an animal being tortured to death, then it was silenced with a wet, gurgling sound that echoed through the cavern.

Maki was crouched next to Boyd now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, making a low moaning sound in his throat. When his voice came, it was almost a girlish whisper: “It’s killing them, Boyd! It’s killing them now! Tearing them apart and then… then it’ll come for us.”

Jurgens was on his feet, completely overwhelmed by it all. He was the man in charge. He was a leader of men… but now all that was gone and he was completely empty with its passing. His decision-making skills had been squashed flat and he did not know what to do. He moved this way, then that, cursing under his breath and breathing very hard.

Out in the darkness, there was a chittering sound.

Jurgens wiped sweat from his face. He thumbed the walkie-talkie because he had to. “Breed… McNair,” he said into the mic, his voice very low and guarded. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Breed! Goddammit! Answer me! Answer me!”

But there was nothing but the futile sound of his own voice echoing away, submerging into the utter blackness of the cavern.

He looked at the other two men, shook his head, and started walking off. There was a look of absolute defeat on his face as if he’d played his best card and had still lost and there was no point in pretending now.

“Jurgens!” Boyd said. “You can’t go out there! For chrissake, whatever it is, it’s trying to draw us out!”

Jurgens wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I have to do something,” he said in a calm and controlled voice.

“Let him go, Boyd,” Maki said, enjoying all this now maybe a little too much. “Let the big man go! Let him run out there and then we can listen to him die, too!”

The chittering rose and fell in regular cycles like crickets enjoying a summer’s night. Only this sound was not crickets, it was too sharp, too piercing, too loud and completely unnatural to be anything as simple as an insect.

“Listen,” Boyd said. “Listen.”

Not the chittering now, but the sound of feet running. Running in their direction. Boyd didn’t know what was out there, but he was pretty sure it did not have feet as such.

Jurgens clicked on his flashlight, put the beam out there to meet whatever was coming. They all saw a vague shape darting and stumbling through a stand of petrified trees. A big shape. Had to be Breed. He was running, looking frantically about him, making a low grunting with the exertion.

“Breed!” Jurgens called out. “Over here, over here!”

That chittering rose up again, became that same strident, inhuman piping. It grew in volume, became almost unbearable like a thousand forks scraped over a thousand blackboards. Breed fought free of the trees and something took him. Took him very fast. One moment he was coming and the next something had him, yanking him up into the air faster than Jurgens’ flashlight beam could follow. He let out a wild, whooping scream and then there was a splattering sound like he’d been broken and squeezed out.

“Jesus,” Jurgens said.

His flashlight beam could find nothing out there. But the posts of those ancient trees were sprayed red and running with blood. You could hear it dripping, landing with a slow plopping sound.

Jurgens just lost it. He tossed his walkie-talkie and started shouting: “McNair! McNair! Breed! You answer me right goddamn now, do you hear me! YOU FUCKING BETTER ANSWER ME! BREED! MCNAIR!”

There was silence for maybe ten seconds while everyone held their breath, curled up into themselves, knowing that what was out there was not only weird and scary, but lethal and devastating.

And then another sound came: that same shrill screeching rising up louder and louder, sounding not only eerie and inhuman, but positively bleak and deranged. It rose and fell and then it did the worst possibly thing. It mocked Jurgens with a scratching, almost mewling sort of sound: “Breeeeeeed! Breeeeeed!” it squealed. “Meeeek—naaaaaar!”

“Oh my Christ,” Jurgens said, going right down on his ass.

That horrible sound echoed away and then there was nothing. Nothing but the darkness gathering around them, concealing nameless things and mutant horrors that cried out in mewling, insane voices.

But Boyd had heard the caliber of it again: female. Not the voice of an adult, but the squealing voice of a little girl.

They all huddled there together in the circle of light and not a one of them thought of moving.

Boyd was thinking of Linda at home, waiting there at the kitchen table with some big breakfast she had prepared to celebrate his first graveyard shift. The eggs would be long cold by now, the pancakes mired in rubbery syrup, the bacon congealed with grease. Alone, scared, she would be waiting by the phone, eight months pregnant and expecting the very worst.

And in his mind, he said: I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry. I had a bad feeling about this, but I didn’t get out while I could. And now… oh dear God… now you’re going to be alone and our baby will never know its father.

The tears filled his eyes, breaking hot and wet over his cheeks. His belly knotted up with frustration over it all, over the ugly, black death he was going to die down here in the womb of the earth itself. It was unfair. It was so goddamned unfair.

Maki uttered a low, desperate laugh. “I wonder who it’ll get first, cookie. Me or you. Maybe Jurgens.”

“Shut up.”

But Maki, being Maki, did not shut up and maybe by that point he didn’t even know how. “It’s got us where it wants us,” he breathed. “Whatever that thing is. Whatever we’ve woken up down here after a million, million years. It has us where it wants us and we’re just meat, nothing but meat now.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Boyd told him, because, by God, compound fracture or no, if that whiny, beaten, gutless little weasel did not shut his mouth and shut it soon, he was going to wrap his hands around his fucking neck and squeeze until his eyeballs popped out of his head.

“Sure, cookie. Hee, hee. I’m quiet as a mouse.”

Boyd laid there, breathless, terrified, waiting for that thing to come, knowing it had been down here all these many, many eons. A nightmare out of the Permian. Had it waited alone for 250 million years in the darkness? Was that even remotely possible? Or had it simply woken from cold dormancy when the air filled the dusty silence of the chamber and ended its 250 million year nap? He would never know and could not possibly conceive of an answer with his feverish mind. He only knew horror and absolute terror that was physical and crushing.

Just as he knew that what was out there was female.

And it was lonely.

That’s why it had killed Breed and McNair. They were trying to tunnel out, trying to leave it to the darkness again and it couldn’t have that. Not again. That’s why it had tried to communicate by tapping and knocking on the petrified trees. It wanted them to answer back, to acknowledge its presence. There was no way he could know these things, yet he was certain of them. This thing was a horror from the Permian age, something that left no fossilized prints or bones, no clue to its existence or identity for paleontologists to scratch their gray heads over. It was something from the cellar of evolution, a grotesque thing that lived in the shadows of a primeval age. Something that channeled out honeycombed warrens in the immense stumps of primordial trees.

Yes, Boyd knew these things.

Just as he knew they’d be safe if they did not try to leave her. If they stayed, they would be fine, but if they panicked and threatened to entomb her with the mummified relics of her age, she would kill them. He could not know what she was or by what insane circumstances she had survived. But she had. Again, he thought that somehow she must have woken when air rushed into the Permian underworld. Dormant, perhaps, locked in some unbelievable hibernation. That had to be it, unless she had actually been awake down here the entire time. Aware of the passage of millions of years, that awful dead train of time. What would that be like? Trapped in this place, alone in a world turned to stone, alone in the darkness while your mind went to a screaming stew of waste? If that were the case, she would be deranged beyond imagining.

No, I can’t conceive of that, Boyd told himself. Such a thing could not be possible. She must have wakened when the air broke the seal of her tomb. It has to be something like that. She woke down here in the darkness, alone, frightened, confused and probably quite mad.

If such a thing as her could know madness.

She probably wasn’t dangerous, really, as long as they didn’t threaten her with another eternity of solitude. Somehow, they had to communicate with her, give her the company she needed.

Jurgens stood up, shining his flashlight in every direction. “Keep away from us, you hear me? Whatever in the fuck you are, you better keep away from us! You come by us again and we’ll kill you! Do you understand? Do you fucking understand me?”

“Don’t,” Boyd told him. “Don’t do that… don’t threaten her.”

“BREEEEEEEEEEED!” came the wailing voice. “MEEEEK—NAAAAAAR!”

Maki was sobbing under his breath. “It’s a ghost,” he was saying. “We’re trapped down here with a ghost.”

Boyd was going to tell him he was wrong, but maybe he wasn’t. There was no way you could catalog that thing. Maybe it was alive and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, Maki was right: she was a shadow, a wraith from antiquity.

The chittering rose up again and it was very close now.

Jurgens moved in a circle. “Get the fuck away from us!”

Maki was with him now, brandishing his flashlight like a weapon.

“Don’t,” Boyd said. “Dear Christ, don’t do that…”

What seemed mere feet away, she let out a whining, pathetic shriek of utter agony and desolation and loneliness. The sound terrified Boyd and mainly because he heard the desperation in her voice, the cold cawing of millions of years that had scraped her mind raw. But Jurgens and Maki did not understand that. She was just a monster and they planned to deal with her as men had always dealt with monsters.

They ran at the direction of her voice and it was the worse thing they could have done. Maybe she did not understand the hateful things they called out to her or the threats they made, not in words, but she understood the tone. She knew she was threatened and she responded accordingly.

Boyd saw it happen and was powerless to stop it.

Something incredibly fast and unseen hit Jurgens. Hit him hard, tearing his throat out with a spray of meat and blood that splashed against the petrified trees and struck Boyd in the face, hot and steaming. Before Maki could utter so much as a cry of surprise, she took him, too. Boyd heard something thud into him and he was yanked high up into the air like a meat hook had caught him between the shoulder blades. Boyd heard him scream from the tops of those trees. A scream that was silenced by something wet shoved into his mouth. And then—

Boyd saw a blur of moment and Maki’s corpse landed not four feet from him, its face threaded with blood, eyes wide and staring, mouth yawning wide, unnaturally so, as if something had been forced in there that dislocated his jaws.

Boyd heard himself begin to sob.

Jurgen’s corpse was up there somewhere and Boyd could hear blood dripping earthward like a gentle rain. Plop, plop, plop. The light of the lantern illuminated the forest to about twenty feet up and he could see the glistening red drops rolling down the trunk of a petrified seed fern. He was hearing other sounds, too.

The sound of chewing.

And wet sucking sounds.

He felt his mind go. It vacated his brain with nary a scream or a mad peal of laughter. It just went and he was content with that.

He heard her coming down the trunk of a tree with the skittering sound of dozens of legs. She paused on the log that had broken his leg, not five feet away. He could hear her breathing.

But he could not see her.

In that same scraping, almost metallic squeal of a voice, she said, “Booooooyyyyyd?”

He was looking right through her, looking at something that cast no image, something invisible and ancient and lonely. She uttered a cooing sound that made his flesh crawl.

“It’s okay,” he said, cold sweat running down his face. “I won’t hurt you… I won’t leave you…”

She moved forward, cooing.

Yes, she was coming for him now.

And he knew she wasn’t going to kill him. She had responded to him right from the first and he knew it. He heard her crawl atop Maki’s corpse. She smelled ancient and dry, like hay stored in a closed-up barn. Maki’s head was lifted up and something stabbed into his throat. There was a sucking, slurping noise.

“Oh no,” Boyd whispered under his breath. “Oh Jesus…”

That slurping sound continued and he saw blood… a stream of blood being sucked from Maki’s throat with gulping sounds like a thirsty man downing a beer. The stream of blood was sucked into the air, probably into her mouth, then it diffused into several rivulets and filled several kidney-shaped sacs that must have been her stomachs… all three of them.

Boyd watched.

He heard her make smacking sounds as she finished up.

He was shaking, and moaning deep in his throat and that wasn’t from what he had just seen, but from what she was doing: stroking his arm with something like a spurred finger. And cooing in his ear.