Edge of Darkness: The Complete First Season (Paranormal Investigations Unlimited)

by Paige Tyler

  She had no choice. She was going to have to go find Logan. He’d told her to stay locked up in there, but she couldn’t wait until he came back. Father Benny could be dead by then.

  Presley took a deep breath and was about to start for the door when she heard a strange noise on the other side of the room. Common sense told her to stay where she was, but she found herself moving toward the sound anyway. When she reached the far wall, she stopped. Whatever it was, it was coming from the other side. No, actually it was coming from underneath her.

  All at once, the floor beneath her feet began to rumble and vibrate. Presley jumped back.

  Crap.

  That wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LOGAN WAITED UNTIL he heard Presley lock the door behind him before heading down the hall. For a minute, he thought she was going to insist on coming with him. He was relieved she hadn’t. He would have been so worried about protecting her that he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on doing his job. Ghouls might be small, but they were quick, not to mention dangerous as hell. Father Benny said he’d seen at least three of them, but there could be a lot more. Logan didn’t want to be some slimy little creature’s midnight snack. If he bought it, what would happen to Presley?

  He had to admit her concern for his welfare was kind of nice. It had been a long time since he had someone care about him. He hadn’t realized how much he missed it.

  Logan swore under his breath as he pushed open the door and stepped outside. Where the hell had that thought come from? He should be focusing on finding the ghouls, not daydreaming about Presley and her concern for him. The woman had completely invaded his head space.

  He tightened his grip on the shotgun and moved quickly across the cemetery, following the directions the priest had given him. As he suspected, he ended up in the oldest part of the graveyard, where the big, expensive looking mausoleums with important sounding family names were. Ghouls preferred bones that had been sitting high and dry out of the soil to ones that had been soaking in the wet earth for decades. His lip curled. Those creatures just plain grossed him out. They’d rather gnaw on an old decaying leg bone than a prime rib steak. What kind of sick monster did that?

  He worked his way up one row of mausoleums and down the next, performing a methodical search of the entire area in the location where the priest said the ghouls had attacked him. His gut told him the entrance to the pack den had to be somewhere nearby. It was the only thing that explained why the creatures had gone after the old man. They’d probably thought he was threatening their home.

  Logan clenched his jaw as he realized he was justifying the ghouls’ actions. In another minute, he’d be coming up with a plan to relocate the little bastards. Presley was wearing off on him.

  He didn’t bother to check the front entrances of the mausoleums as he passed. The ghouls were crafty enough to find a more secluded way in and out of their den, which would make the entrance that much more difficult to find. It didn’t help that weeds and thickets had grown up around all of the crypts. Father Benny needed to fire whoever was in charge of the landscaping.

  Poking and prodding around the base of the mausoleums was time consuming, especially since he had to keep one eye out for ghouls. He moved his shotgun back and forth as he went, just in case. At the same time, he also had to worry about getting attacked from above. Man, he could really have used Mav here to back him up. Hell, even Robert could have watched his back.

  To make matters worse, it was getting dark as hell out here. If he didn’t find the entrance to the den soon, he was going to have to either turn on the Maglite attached to the end of his shotgun or go back to the Hummer for his night vision goggles. Both options sucked. The flashlight would announce his presence like a freaking bell and the NVG’s would totally blow his depth perception, not something he wanted to do when he was trying to shoot a creature that moved faster than a scalded cat. It was almost too dark to see now, so he was going to have to choose one option or the other real soon.

  He decided to go with the flashlight. Announcing his presence might actually bring the ghouls out in the open. Besides, he was too damn lazy to go back to the truck. What could he say? He had his faults.

  Logan was about to flip the switch on the flashlight when he caught sight of a manhole-size opening down around knee level right near the front of the next mausoleum. He shook his head. Brazen little imps. They hadn’t even bothered to try and hide the entrance in the tangle of weeds covering the rear of the marble monstrosity. That kind of worried him. It could mean the pack was so large they didn’t fear an attack on their home den. On the other hand, maybe it meant they were just stupid.

  He crouched down and darted a quick look into the hole. It was too dark to see much, but he had no doubt it was a ghoul hole. The marble had been gouged as if by a diamond-tipped jack hammer and the opening had a faint smell of decay. He made a face as he caught a whiff. Damn, that was nasty.

  Logan flipped on the flashlight attached to the barrel of the shotgun, but then hesitated. Now, came the fun part. While the family crypt was a fairly big building, it wasn’t an apartment. If the ghouls were inside, they’d probably be close to the entrance. He had two choices. He could either try to ease into the hole slowly or dive in quickly. Both options had pros and cons. The slow approach would be quieter and therefore less likely to alert the creatures to his presence, but if they already knew he was there, poking his head in slowly would give them that much more time to rip it off.

  Being rather fond of his head, he chose an option halfway in between the two choices. He cracked a high-glow Chem Light and tossed that in first, then crawled through as quickly as he could without making too much noise. If the ghouls were waiting for him, he figured the glowstick would distract them and give him a chance to get in and defend himself. Obviously, the element of surprise would be a gone, but in the small space of the den, it was the best he could come up with on short notice. He remembered some line he’d read once about a good plan violently executed right now being better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow. He didn’t know if that was true, but he was about to find out

  It turned out that the opening was a lot smaller than it looked, so he didn’t get inside quite as gracefully as he’d hoped. He still managed to scramble through the opening without anything taking his head off. He got to his feet, one finger on the trigger, his left hand ready on the forestock of the pump-action shotgun. If he was right, he had about half a second or so before the ghouls descended on him.

  But as the light on the end of the gun chaotically danced around in the oppressive space of the mausoleum when he swung the barrel of the weapon back and forth, he saw that the place was empty. The ghouls had definitely been there at some point. They’d ripped open all the casket enclosures along the walls as well as the heavy, stone coffins in the center of the room, scattering bones and tattered remnants of clothing everywhere.

  Logan cautiously checked out the empty caskets and stone coffins, looking for ghouls, but apart from some leftover bones, they were all empty. He frowned, wondering if Father Benny had scared them off when he’d come out here last night. It seemed unlikely, but where else could they have gone?

  He played his flashlight around the inside of the crypt again and caught sight of a big, gaping hole in the bottom of the largest stone coffin. Moving closer, he pointed his flashlight directly in the hole and saw that it descended straight down about ten feet or so before it turned ninety degrees and headed off away from the mausoleum, parallel to the ground. Shit, the little buggers had a rabbit warren down here. They must have decided to tunnel their way into the next crypt, rather than tear into it from the outside.

  Still holding onto the shotgun, Logan climbed into the coffin and dropped down into the hole. Once inside, he quickly got the shotgun out in front of him. In the glow of the flashlight, he saw that the tunnel led off in a fairly straight line. It wasn’t perfectly round by any stretch of the imaginati
on, but it was damn wide. Either the ghouls had been there a lot longer than Father Benny thought or there were a whole hell of a lot of them. Wasn’t that a pleasant thought?

  As Logan made his way through the tunnel, he found himself wishing ghouls were a little taller. Even crouched down like he was, he could barely go for more than a few feet without the top of his head touching the ceiling. He had no choice but to come this way, though. There was no way he’d be able to find out where this tunnel led from up on the surface.

  He moved cautiously, sure the next turn in the tunnel would bring him face to face with a pack of pissed-off ghouls. Or at least a shaft leading up to another crypt. But the tunnel kept going and going. When he rounded the next turn he came to, he got a shock. A mangled-up corpse was shoved into a niche in the tunnel’s wall, and it was fresh.

  Shit.

  Logan knelt down and took a closer look. Judging from the decomp, the body had been down here for a few days at least, maybe a week. But it was so chewed up it was hard to figure out what part was what or even what sex the victim was. From the size, he thought it was most likely a man, though he couldn’t be sure. Then the embroidered label on the victim’s green shirt caught his attention. Serry’s Landscaping Service. So much for getting the lawn mowed anytime soon.

  Logan frowned as he suddenly realized something. Although the victim’s flesh had been chewed off, the bones were intact. That was odd. Ghouls always went for the bones.

  He shone his light around the floor of the tunnel. There was dried blood, which meant the ghouls had obviously chewed on the victim here. But if that was true, where was the flesh? Ghouls might sometimes ingest a little bit of meat on the way to the bones, but normally they tore it off and spit it out.

  Weird.

  Confused, Logan moved farther down the tunnel only to find another body in the same condition. This victim wore the same green landscaper uniform but looked like it had been down there a day or two longer than the first body he’d found. The flesh on this corpse was completely gone as well.

  That’s when it hit Logan. For some reason, this particular pack of ghouls had developed a taste for meat instead of bones. That attack on Father Benny hadn’t been a territorial display at all. The creatures had been looking to make him their next meal.

  Logan looked over his shoulder. The tunnel was too straight and too long to lead to another crypt. By his best guess, he’d already gone at least five-hundred feet, which meant he was already out of the cemetery and halfway to the church. There was only one reason for the ghouls to bother digging a tunnel all the way to the church. They were looking for more of their newfound form of food. Father Benny was on the menu. And Presley was with him.

  His gut clenched.

  Double shit.

  Logan took off moving as fast as he could, shoulders and head smashing dirt and rubble from the sides and top of the tunnel as he went. He prayed the ghouls were anywhere else rather than in the church already because if they were, Presley would have no chance against them.

  * * * * *

  Presley was still trying to figure out where all the noise and rumbling was coming from when the flagstone floor in front of her suddenly exploded beneath her feet. She cried out, instinctively throwing herself backward and covering her face with her hands as shards of slate and rock peppered her. She had just a fraction of a second to lift her head to check on the priest before she heard a low growl coming from the hole in the floor.

  The hair on her arms stood up at the inhuman sound. She didn’t have to see into the hole to know it was a ghoul. The storeroom might have been safe before but staying locked up in there now wasn’t an option.

  Heart pounding, she scrambled to her feet and ran over to the door. Unlocking it, she yanked it open, then rushed back to where Father Benny still lay unconscious on the floor. Keeping one eye on the hole the ghouls had made, she grabbed his arms around both wrists and dragged him toward the door.

  She didn’t get more than five feet with the old priest before she heard the sound of claws scrabbling against stone. Startled, she jerked her head up in time to see long, bony fingers with sharp, dirt-encrusted nails reach out of the hole and grasp the edge. A moment later, a ghoul jumped out of the pit to land a few feet from her.

  While the hideous creature resembled a monkey in size and shape, that was where the similarities ended. For one thing, it was hairless and its leathery skin was a mottled green color, at least the parts that weren’t covered in dirt and mud. For another, its powerfully muscled legs seemed to be locked in a permanent crouch so that it appeared hunched and bent over like an old man. Its arms were long and wiry, so long in fact that the creature’s knuckles rested on the floor as it stood there, making her think the monster spent most of its time moving around on all fours.

  But it was the creature’s face that held Presley’s attention. It had little more than a long gash of an opening that served as a mouth, a nose that was nothing more than two black slits, and small, close-set eyes that squinted at her curiously in the bright light of the storeroom. Suddenly, it opened its mouth and bared a set of sharp razor-like teeth as it let out another long, low growl.

  Presley stayed where she was, afraid if she moved, the ghoul might attack. But the creature seemed transfixed as it blinked up at her, as if it was more interested in trying to figure out what she was than in anything else. Hoping if she moved slowly enough, the ghoul would stay where it was, she slowly dragged the priest toward the door again.

  As soon as she did, another creature pushed its way up out of the hole to join the first. Another quickly followed.

  She held her breath, waiting for them to attack, but all three of them continued to stand there gazing at her as if they weren’t quite sure what to make of her. The way their eyes kept darting longingly toward Father Benny made her think they’d dug their way into the church because they expected him to be alone and unconscious by now. Maybe that was why they were looking at her so curiously. Maybe they were simply caught off guard by her presence.

  Well, she wasn’t going to look a gift ghoul in the mouth. If they didn’t want to chow down on her because she was still alive and kicking, that was fine with her. She didn’t think they’d pass up feasting on Father Benny. Not when they’d come all this way.

  She glanced down at the priest and saw that he was still out cold. If anything, he looked even paler than he had before. She knew that no matter what happened, she couldn’t let the ghouls get near the old man for even a second. He wouldn’t survive so much as another scratch.

  Darting a quick look at the ghouls, Presley slowly backed toward the door in what she hoped was a non-threatening manner. She was worried what she was doing would agitate the creatures and they would pounce, but they continued to eye her curiously, like they were wondering where she was going with their dinner.

  When she got to the hallway, the creatures started to follow. Presley hesitated for a moment, but then kept going, dragging the unconscious priest with her. He was fairly light for a man, but he was still heavier than she was and her arms were already getting tired. The recently healed stab wound in her chest was throbbing like crazy, too.

  It didn’t help that she had no idea where she was going. She knew there was no way she could make it all the way out to the Hummer. Even if by some miracle she did, what good would it do her? From the way the ghouls had torn through the slate floor, they’d have no problem getting into a vehicle.

  Presley was dragging Father Benny past the altar when a door off to the side caught her eye. The confessional. Could she hide the priest in there, then try and lead the ghouls away from him? If the creatures weren’t too intelligent, it might work. But then what was she going to do? Right at that moment, she wasn’t quite sure. She supposed she’d have to figure out that part later.

  Making a right turn, she slowly dragged Father Benny over to the confessional. Once she got there, she reached up with one hand and carefully opened the door. The three ghouls stopped to watch h
er but didn’t look like they were about to attack. Presley let out a sigh. So far, so good.

  Bending down, she grasped Father Benny underneath the arms so she could put him in the confessional booth. The ghouls must have figured out what she was trying to do because they started to growl and advance on her menacingly.

  Presley TENSED. OKAY, the time for slow and careful was obviously over. With a groan, she shoved Father Benny as far into the small room as she could, then slammed the door shut before he could topple out. She muttered a soft apology as she heard him thump against it, then spun around to face the ghouls.

  They were standing only a few feet away from her now and looking mighty pissed off she’d put away their snack before they were done with it. She didn’t have a lot of experience when it came to ghouls, but from the looks on their faces, she had the feeling they’d decided she was going to replace Father Benny on tonight’s menu.

  She suddenly had an almost overwhelming urge to laugh. She’d survived an attack by a serial killer, made it through hours of emergency surgery even though she had died on the operating table, then managed to live through another attack by the serial killer’s super-powered ghost. After all that, you’d think she could catch a break. Instead, she was about to get eaten by three knuckle-dragging monsters with overgrown teeth. Apparently, there was no cosmic justice.

  Well, she didn’t have to make it easy for them. Taking a deep breath, she edged along the wall toward the big, stone altar. If she could get it between her and the ghouls, she might buy herself some more time. Granted, it probably wouldn’t be much, but every second mattered to her now. If she could hold out long enough, Logan might come wandering back in. If he hadn’t gotten attacked himself, of course. She didn’t even want to think about that possibility.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t quite make it all the way to the altar before the first ghoul leaped at her.