The underdwelling

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.