by Peter Nealen
I led the way into the side passage that I’d previously picked to investigate first. It didn’t go far. We might have gone a hundred yards in before we found ourselves up against a blank rock wall. There was no way out except straight up or back the way we’d come. As I peered up at the sky, a bright blue crack in the darkness overhead, I remembered the creature dropping on our heads, and considered that straight up might actually be an option. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a direction we could follow. So we backtracked to try the next way.
If that thing had been messing with our heads before, it hadn’t stopped. Nothing looked quite the same going in the other direction, and the darkness didn’t help. It felt like it took twice as long to find the wider opening where it had ambushed us as it had taken to go down the box canyon in the first place.
It was quiet back in that canyon. Deathly quiet. It took me a little while to realize that not only could I hear our footfalls, but I could hear my clothes rustling as I moved, my breathing, even my heartbeat thumping in my ears. It should have been somewhat reassuring; we should be able to hear the creature coming. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t even close to reassuring. It was the quiet of the crypt. It was a quiet that spoke of nothing but death and oblivion.
Our footsteps crunched on the dusty ground as we stopped by the tiny crack we’d worked our way through and re-oriented ourselves. We were both rubbernecking like mad, trying to catch a glimpse of the thing before it jumped us again, but it hadn’t put in another appearance. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one.
I was silently saying the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Prayer to St. Michael over and over again. When I glanced at Dan, his lips were moving, presumably either with the same prayers or some advanced ones for Witch Hunters that I hadn’t learned yet. Didn’t matter. In the face of something like that, something that could stand up to really big bullets and keep coming, any prayer was going to help.
As I shone the flashlight around, I picked the next passage in line. Or was that the way we’d come? Looking up at the sky didn’t seem to provide any answers, and there was no light coming from any of the passages that might suggest that the open ground was beyond. I looked around, trying to get my sense of direction squared away, before we got thoroughly lost in that shadow-haunted labyrinth.
“You’re on the right track,” Dan said, as I stared at the dark crack in front of me with furrowed brow. I glanced back at him. “That’s the next one,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“I’m glad you are,” I replied. “Because I sure ain’t.” But I lifted my rifle again and stepped through.
That one ended more quickly than the dead end we’d just come out of. At least, the part we could navigate ended. While that little side canyon didn’t end in a blank wall of rock, it did narrow down to a crack that a squirrel would have a hard time getting through, if any self-respecting rodent were to ever find itself in that lifeless, forsaken place.
Leaning my rifle against the canyon wall, I drew my .45 and crouched down, shining my flashlight into the crack. Given some of the things I’d seen in the last year, I wouldn’t put it past that thing to somehow manage to hide in that crack, and if it decided to try to rip my face off as soon as I looked through, I wanted to be ready to shoot it, the apparent lack of effectiveness of bullets aside.
The light didn’t reach very far back into the crack. All it showed me was narrowing rock walls before the weak glow faded into blackness. There were no glowing green eyes watching malevolently from the dark, no taloned hand reaching for my eyes.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t noticed whether that thing had talons or not.
Holstering the pistol, I retrieved my rifle and turned away from the crack. Naturally, that was when an arm whipped out of it and tried to grab my boot.
I should have taken some comfort from the fact that it miscalculated. It grabbed my ankle just as I was pulling away, and it didn’t get a full purchase. It’s claws or fingernails or whatever they were scrabbled at the leather and I tripped, but it didn’t manage to drag me back to the crack. Under the circumstances, it might well have dragged me into the crack, as small as it was. Needless to say, I would not have survived that.
Dan was trying to get a shot at it, but the crack was too narrow and I was in the way. I rolled onto my back, trying to draw my pistol to shoot it, but the gun was stuck in the holster, half-pinned under my side. I reached for my rifle, but then the hand was gone, and there was nothing in the crack to shoot at.
I lay there shaking for a moment, having gotten my 1886 pointed at the crack far too late to have actually done anything useful with it. I kept it pointed at the crack, barely illuminated by my dropped flashlight.
That had been way too close. What I didn’t understand was what had made it let go and withdraw? Neither of us had been able to shoot at it. It had had me.
Dan stepped up beside me, or as close as he could get in the tight confines of the canyon. I couldn’t see much of his face in the dimness, but he was looking around as if he was asking the same questions I was.
His eyes, glinting faintly in the dim light, stopped at my chest. Looking down, I saw my silver crucifix lying on my chest, outside my jacket. From where it lay, it would have been clearly visible from the crack in the rock.
He smiled faintly as he reached down and helped me back to my feet. “I told you not to think too narrowly,” he reminded me. “This thing doesn’t like the sight of that.” He pointed at the crucifix on its leather thong. “In fact, it appears to dislike it enough that it turned tail and ran at the sight of it. Good. We can use that.”
“Not sure how, if we can’t kill it,” I said as he pulled me up. “We can drive it away, but that won’t stop it taking kids.”
“Again, don’t be so narrow-minded,” Dan chided. “There’s always a way. Shooting isn’t always the solution.”
He left it at that, and while I couldn’t say I blamed him, I was still a little irritated. Dan could be a little bit too good at playing the wise, cryptic old Master Hunter for my tastes sometimes.
“Let’s stick to the main passage as best we can for now,” Dan said, as we got out of the narrow cleft. “I think any of these little side ravines are more likely to be ambushes than the way to its nest.”
“Do you have any idea what it is?” I asked.
“Nasty,” he said. And he got annoyed at my comments about minions. “But other than that, no. No idea. Which means I haven’t got any particular tactics to use against it, either.”
“Great.”
The trick was figuring out which was the main passage. As the floor of the canyon climbed, the walls were riddled with little tributary ravines coming down from above. Some were almost as wide as the entrance had been. We guesstimated as best we could, though we still had to backtrack a couple of times. Whether it was because of the creature’s mental influence again, or just the dimness and the complexity of the maze of channels and passages, I didn’t know, but it was far too easy to get turned around.
I stopped suddenly. I’d stayed on point. Dan covered our six o’clock. Given that we’d already seen how that thing could seemingly pop up out of nowhere, there wasn’t a single direction that we dared leave uncovered, at least if we could avoid it.
“You see that?” I asked. “Or am I imagining it?”
“See what?” Dan asked as he turned halfway around. He’d been checking the rear again.
I pointed. I had thought I’d seen a glow ahead, kind of orange and flickering, but as soon as I tried to focus on it, it faded into darkness. “A light, up there.”
He squinted. “No…Hold it. Maybe.” There was a long silence, as I swept my eyes around the rocky walls and floor around us. It didn’t look like there were any hiding places close to us, but then, it hadn’t looked like there should have been room for anything to hide in that crack it had grabbed me from, either.
“There might be something up there,” he finally conceded. “Maybe a fire. It’s hard to tell, thoug
h; it’s really faint.”
“It’s more than we’ve had so far,” I pointed out.
“You’re right about that. Lead on.”
Of course we’d been staring at that faint glow for just barely too long.
There was a sudden snarl from behind us, and Dan was grabbed and thrown against the cliff. I spun around, bringing my Winchester up, my crucifix swinging on its thong in front of me.
I caught a quick glimpse of luminous green eyes suddenly narrowing, as if looking into a painfully bright spotlight, and then the thing was gone again.
Dan was holding a hand to his nose, and the lower half of his face was covered in blood. “I think that thing broke my nose,” he mumbled, his voice sounding strangely muffled.
“You all right?” I asked, still looking around for it.
“I’ll be fine.” He sounded like he had a bad cold, and was starting to let a little irritation into his voice because of it.
“Well, I think that definitely confirms your theory about its allergic reaction to the Cross,” I said, “though I’m still at a loss as to how we’re going to finish it off.”
Dan apparently didn’t feel the need to chide me about having faith again; either that, or he just didn’t want to talk while his nose was almost smashed flat.
I had to re-orient myself; I’d lost track of just where the glow was during the latest encounter. There was definitely something weird going on in that canyon. Every time I turned around, I had to figure out all over again where I was and what direction I was facing. My innate sense of direction was completely shot.
It took way too long to pick the glow out again; I couldn’t look straight at it or I’d lose it. But I finally found just the right angle and spotted it again. It was definitely uphill and around a corner. A shoulder of rock or a big boulder stood between us and whatever was making the light. Figuring that we’d have to either climb over it or go around it, I hefted my Winchester and started forward again.
Naturally, it wasn’t as simple as it looked. That stretch of the canyon was a lot longer than it appeared, and started moving significantly uphill. We were soon leaning forward, almost climbing on hands and knees up a steep rock pile. The flickering glow was now overhead and just as faint as ever, sometimes fading away altogether when I looked up at it.
I kept looking up as we climbed, though the rocks under my hands and feet were loose enough that if that thing decided to send a landslide down on our heads I’d have a hell of a time getting out of the way.
Almost as soon as I thought it, I heard the rattle of rocks above. I dared a look up and thought I caught a glimpse of sinister green eyes glimmering in the dimness above me. Then they were eclipsed by falling rocks and dust.
Flattening myself against the slope, I covered my head with my arms and prayed. There was nothing else to do.
The cascade of rocks pummeled me hard, battering my arms, back, and sides as I was almost half buried. For a long moment, as I was beaten by rocks and choked on dust, I was sure I was about to be crushed.
It felt like forever before the rockfall stopped. I just lay there, hurting, afraid to move. Not only was I afraid to find out that I couldn’t move, I was afraid to find out just how badly I’d been hurt. My entire body felt like one enormous bruise, and I wasn’t prepared to believe that none of those rocks had broken any bones.
I heard steps crunching through the rocks, and then Dan was digging me out. “You actually make a pretty good meat shield, Jed,” he said, his voice still sounding thick through his broken nose. “You took most of the brunt of the slide.”
I grunted in pain as he helped me pry myself out of the pile of rocks. I was throbbing from head to toe, but as I checked myself over, I didn’t seem to have broken anything new, though my side hurt worse than before. I was sure I had a cracked rib by then.
My Winchester had somehow ended up under my body when I tucked and covered, so it hadn’t taken too much of a beating. The action worked, anyway, and as near as I could tell in the dark, the barrel was clear. At least nothing but a little dust came out when I pointed the muzzle downhill and shook it. I hoped that there wasn’t a pebble lodged halfway down the barrel that would blow the gun up in my face as soon as I tried to shoot the creature again.
“Can you keep moving?” Dan asked after I finished checking myself for any more breaks. I nodded painfully. “Good. Let’s get going, before that thing finds a bigger boulder to roll down on our heads.”
More slowly than before, we resumed our climb. The slide had forced us some distance back probably a couple hundred yards, though it was impossible to judge distances accurately in the dark. Going back up was agonizing, as each ragged breath felt like it was stabbing a knife into my side. Dan had taken the lead, though he kept looking back to make sure I was keeping up.
The slope finally leveled off, and I dragged myself up to where I could get my feet under me, leaning against the rock wall to my left. I was simultaneously trying to gasp for breath while breathing as shallowly as possible, my chest twinging every time I filled my lungs.
I was so preoccupied with my injury that it took a moment to realize that we’d finally found the creature’s nest.
We stood at the entrance of a small box canyon that ended in a blank wall of soot-blackened rock. The canyon floor was littered with bones, most of them entirely too small. The flickering glow came from flames licking up out of a pit at the end of the canyon, a pit with a cooking spit over it.
In addition to the fire pit, there were several cocoons lining the walls of the canyon, not unlike the hag’s cocoons that I’d first seen only a few months before. Most of them were torn open and empty, but there was one that was still intact. The face of a little girl was protruding from the strands, her eyes wide, her face pale even in the ruddy light of the fire. Her mouth was covered by the sticky stuff the cocoon was woven from, otherwise I was pretty sure she’d be screaming.
The creature was standing next to the cocoon, leering at us.
Even as I painfully levered myself away from the rocky wall, my rifle in my hand, it started tearing the cocoon apart. The little girl was starting to thrash around. The muffled noises coming from the cocoon, even as the thing laughed and gurgled at her, were unmistakably screams.
Dan shouldered his .50 and shot it in the head. Like before, its head snapped back and it staggered, but then it just snarled at us and kept shredding the cocoon. It must have been planning to throw the little girl in the fire and make us watch.
I brought my own rifle to my shoulder as I advanced, and hammered three shots into it as fast as I could work the lever and get the sights back on target. The thunder of my shots blended with Dan’s as he kept shooting, his semi-auto only slightly faster than my lever gun. I’d gotten pretty good with that old Winchester.
We may as well have been spitting into the wind. We drove it back a few feet, and the thing jerked and snarled every time we hit it, but otherwise our bullets weren’t having any effect. We weren’t really hurting it, not permanently.
I was stumped. I was pretty sure this thing was some kind of Otherworldly monster instead of a demonic spirit. If it had been a demon, we might have exorcised it, though that usually required a priest. But this thing was demonstrably physical, even though it kept defying most physical laws. Most physical monsters we could shoot enough times to at least hurt them and pin them down. That wasn’t working here. It was steeling itself against the gunfire. It wasn’t stepping back anymore.
But then I remembered Dan’s emphasis on the effect of the cross, and had an idea. It might not work, but shooting this thing wasn’t working either.
So I slung my rifle and put my hand to the little silver crucifix hanging on my chest.
It cringed at that. It wasn’t a huge movement, but it was something. So I held up the crucifix and continued to advance. It might have been somewhat more impressive had I not had a hitch in my step as I flinched in pain every time I took a breath.
It was starting
to get frenzied as it reached out and tried to get at the cocoon again. I finally stepped close enough that it backed away, snarling, its green glowing eyes squinting their hate at me.
I took another step. It flinched and stepped back. Two more steps and I was between it and the little girl, who was still screaming at the top of her lungs from inside the partially shredded cocoon.
What it didn’t seem to notice was that I now had it between me and the fire pit.
I kept advancing, holding the little crucifix up, praying the Our Father over and over through gritted teeth. I hurt too badly to shout the prayer, but whether it could still hear me or whether the sight of the crucifix was enough, it was doing the trick. The big, bad monster that could stand up to sustained heavy-caliber rifle fire fell back in abject fear before a tiny silver image of the Crucified Lord.
It figured out what I was doing too late. It snarled at me and tried to attack, only to cringe back as it got its hand too close to the crucifix. It snatched the hand back as if it had been burned, and then it had nowhere left to go.
It shuffled its feet at the edge of the fire pit, scrabbling for some kind of purchase, but then a rock gave way under it and it fell into the flames, screaming. It gave a high-pitched shriek, that managed to somehow almost sound petulant before it was drowned out by the roar of flames as the thing went up like a tinderbox.
A roiling ball of fire rose up out of the pit and almost singed my eyebrows off. I stepped back quickly, but still felt the blast of heat sear my face a little. Then the flames sank down and the heat subsided.
When I turned away, Dan was already pulling at the cobwebby stuff that was wrapping up the little girl, murmuring reassuringly to her that everything was all right, and that we were there to rescue her. She didn’t seem all that reassured, but considering she’d been snatched out from under her parents’ noses, taken by some horned beastie into a place that didn’t make any sense, and wrapped in a cocoon for apparent later snacking, I couldn’t say I blamed her. The blood all over Dan’s face can’t have helped, either.
