The underdwelling

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.

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!”