Older and Fouler Things (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  I finally got through the crack, and almost fell to my death.

  There was a gaping hole in the floor, not five feet in front of where the narrow spot opened up. I stopped abruptly as I saw it, less than a foot from the edge. I accidentally kicked a pebble, which skittered over the edge and fell down the hole, bouncing off the rock walls with alarmingly loud pocks.

  Fortunately, the passage was wide enough that there was a way around the pit. I skirted around the edge, shining my light down into the hole. “There’s a drop-off right outside the narrow space, about five feet in,” I warned Frank, who was having a harder time getting through than I had; Frank was not a small man.

  “How deep?” he grunted.

  “Deep enough to kill you if you fell in it,” I answered.

  “Great,” he replied, grunting a little louder. “Crap. I think I’m stuck.”

  “Shh!” I hissed. I thought I’d heard something. And it hadn’t been Frank struggling to get through that crack.

  Fortunately, Frank was experienced enough to shut up and stop moving when I said that, without any questions. I heard a voice behind him, probably Eryn or Kolya asking why he’d stopped. The rest were piling into the tunnel behind us; no one wanted to be the stupid horror movie cliché about splitting up in the dark. Frank just hissed back at them to be quiet.

  I heard it again. Or, I thought I did. It was hard to pick out, with the earplugs in. Was I actually hearing something down that hole in the floor, or were the voices and whispers playing tricks on me? I shone my light down the hole, wishing that it was brighter.

  Something glimmered down there, and then vanished. I could have sworn I’d seen something pale, ever so briefly, in the wan illumination of my flashlight.

  I kept staring down the hole, listening hard. I decided to risk it, and reached up with my light hand to pull the earplug out of my ear.

  When I did, it seemed like the voices got worse. And not all of the muttering in the dark that I could hear was the sepulchral whispers of noncorporeal tormentors.

  There was definitely something down that hole. Quite a few somethings, if I was hearing right. They were trying to stay quiet, but there was enough rustling and padding that I could tell something was climbing the walls of the hole. And the muttering, while incoherent, didn’t sound like the whispering we’d already been hearing.

  It was more like what passed for the skinnies’ degraded language.

  “Frank! Get out here! We’ve got company!” I was already pointing my .45 down the hole, waiting for one of the little monsters to show itself.

  But there wasn’t just one. At least a dozen of them were suddenly boiling up the sides of the pit, clambering up the nearly sheer rock like spiders, their dark, bulging eyes glinting in the dim light my flashlight was pouring down the hole.

  I opened fire. I hadn’t had time to put the earplug back in, and my off ear immediately started to ring, sound going dead as the shock to the eardrum set in. I couldn’t afford to worry about it.

  The .45 barked in my hand, stabbing flame down into the pit. The first skinny took a silver-jacketed bullet to the face from about fifteen feet, and dropped like a stone, falling away into the darkness. The second one took a round through the collarbone. It sagged against the wall of the hole, then peeled away and fell.

  Frank had squirmed the rest of the way through the crack. He hadn’t drawn a pistol, but still had his AR in his hands. He’d been comfortable with that weapon for a long time, but I’d noticed earlier that it wasn’t the same .223 rifle that he’d carried on the pursuit of the Walker, at least as long as he’d still had ammo for it. The bore of this beast was a lot bigger, and his mags were stuffed with fat .458 SOCOM rounds.

  I confess I flinched aside a bit as Frank leveled that rifle down the pit and opened fire. The muzzle blast from that .458 in that confined space was brutal. But it did the trick. He dropped ten skinnies down the shaft as fast as he could pull the trigger. I shot two more, then we both shot the same one at the same time. It had nearly reached the lip of the pit when a .45 and a .458 took it in the dome, spattering what passed for its brains across the rock.

  Skinnies are ferocious, but not that smart. They weren’t retreating as we blasted them back down the hole they were climbing out of. They just kept snarling and climbing, trying to avoid the falling bodies of their fellows while they struggled to reach us so they could tear us to pieces.

  What the skinnies lack in brains, they make up for in sheer viciousness, which is what makes them useful to many of the more powerful Otherworld things, not to mention the occasional demon-summoning sorcerer, as minions and guard dogs.

  As I shot another skinny through the eye, my slide locking back on an empty magazine, yet another one slithered up beneath that one’s slumping corpse, reached out, and grabbed my boot with a taloned hand.

  Its claws hooked into the leather, and it jerked, almost pulling me off balance. I yanked my foot back as I dropped the empty magazine, but couldn’t get it free. And if I lifted my other foot to stomp on the skinny’s head or hand, it was going to drag me down into that pit.

  It was pulling itself up by my boot, its teeth gnashing as it reached for me with the other hand. Then Frank’s rifle boomed again, the skinny’s head exploded, and it slumped back down the hole.

  Jerking my boot free from the creature’s death grip, I slammed a spare magazine home in the pistol and let the slide fly forward.

  That had been the last one. At least for the moment. No one knew for sure how many skinnies there were running around the Otherworld, or if they even stayed dead once you killed them. They weren’t the subject of much study. They were a vicious nuisance, and that was about it. So the vampire could conceivably have thousands of them down there.

  Those were such cheerful thoughts to be having in the dark.

  They’d stopped coming not a moment too soon, too. Frank’s bolt was locked back, and he dragged a spare mag out, swapping it for the empty and cramming that mag into his back pocket.

  “You okay, Jed?” he asked, in the sudden quiet. His voice sounded muffled in my ringing ear.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Heart rate’s a little high, but I’m fine.” I whispered a brief prayer of thanks. That had been a little too close.

  I turned toward the unexplored part of the tunnel. We weren’t out of the woods yet. If there was one hole, there might be more. “Keep an eye on that sump,” I told Frank, “and make sure the others know about it as they come through. There might still be more.”

  I holstered my pistol as I spoke. I only had so many spare mags, and I was already down one. The bandolier across my chest had quite a few more rounds for the rifle, and it hit a lot harder. I swung the Winchester around and pointed it down the passage, clamping the flashlight to the forearm with my hand.

  The darkness was still as thick and unrelieved as ever. But I didn’t see anything moving in the yellowed beam of the flashlight. I kept going.

  The tunnel twisted and turned, curving first to the right, then to the left. It was a nightmare, every bend potentially an ambush site. At least it didn’t get as narrow as that crack again. But it wasn’t ending, either. I started to wonder how far from that angled shaft we’d gotten, and whether we were getting too sidetracked. We were in a race, after all.

  But I didn’t want to turn my back and get jumped by something unnatural. So I drove on, whispering the Pater Noster and Ave Maria under my breath the whole time, with the unspoken plea behind every word that we’d all make it out of that dry, dark hole in the ground to see the daylight again.

  I came around another bend, and my light shone dimly on the faint coruscation of an ore vein ahead. The passage dead-ended.

  At least, it dead ended on that level. I felt something strange, like a faint breath, and turned my light, my rifle, and my eyes up.

  There was a gaping hole in the ceiling, leading up into what looked like another chamber, and a big one, at that. And I could have sworn that I had seen movement
up there just as I turned my light into the hole.

  “Frank,” I called softly, “come here. I need you to give me a boost.”

  He came to my side and angled his own flashlight upward. “That’s a pretty high boost, Jed,” he whispered.

  “We can make it,” I insisted. I wasn’t all that keen on going in there, but if that stope was as big as I thought it was, we had to at least get light and a gun barrel on it. Otherwise, we could start back down the drift tunnel and get jumped from behind by even more skinnies. Or worse.

  Frank slung his AR by his side and put his back to the rock wall, bracing himself with his feet and cupping his hands between his knees, fingers interlaced. I slung my own rifle across my back, drew my pistol again, and put my boot in his cupped hands.

  But before I could heave myself up, something warned me to stop. I froze, gazing up into the blackness overhead.

  “You’ve got to clear it,” the voice in the dark murmured. “You know you’ve got to clear it.”

  But something held me back. I could feel Sam beside me, even though the passage was otherwise empty except for us. I didn’t climb.

  Frank felt it, too. He was looking up, and he slowly unlaced his fingers, letting my foot fall to the tunnel floor. “What’s up there?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, “but I think that climbing up there might be a very bad idea.”

  There was a hint of movement. Or was there? It was too dark to see up there, even with both of us shining our flashlights up through the gap in the ceiling. Aside from the rocky edges of the hole, our lights showed nothing but blackness. And yet…something had flitted across the opening. Something that I was sure I hadn’t been able to see, but had seen, all the same.

  The gooseflesh was standing up on my arms. Somehow, I knew that it wasn’t skinnies up there that we had to worry about.

  “Back away from the hole,” I whispered. “This isn’t the place to do this.”

  Frank didn’t argue. He’d pulled his AR back up as I’d backed away from him, and now had it pointed at the hole. I wanted to holster my pistol and bring my Winchester to bear, but I didn’t dare take my gun off that dark, irregular opening in the ceiling.

  “What is it?” Ray hissed, almost right in my ear.

  “We don’t know,” I answered. “But there’s something very, very wrong up there.”

  I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine his squint, as he studied what he could see of the hole over my shoulder.

  “Is there another way out of that chamber up there?” I asked Ray. If anyone would know the layout of the mine, it would be him. Or maybe Magnus.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t think anyone alive knows.”

  I glanced around the passage. We were crammed into a space about ten feet across, which was pretty wide for one of those tunnels. With Ray and Frank on either side of me, I took the risk and holstered my pistol, quickly swinging my Winchester around to my front. “If it’s up there, we might just corner it,” I said. “If it decided to hide up in the dark to ambush us, let’s make it the worst mistake it ever made.”

  Yet even as I said it, something was bothering me. The words sounded hollow in my own ears. This was a vampire, and, from what Magnus had said, an old one. It wouldn’t be so stupid as to corner itself in a hole with only one way in or out, would it? At the same time, I felt a sudden surge of hope. Maybe, just maybe, we could bring the thing to a fight right there, cut its head off, and be done.

  But even as I thought it, I knew it was a forlorn hope.

  The lights seemed to be getting dimmer, as if the batteries were dying. The circles of illumination centered on the hole were getting yellower, starting to shade toward a sickly orange. I knew we hadn’t been down there long enough to drain the batteries, but there it was. The lights were dying.

  That was when I was sure that I saw movement. As if something was crawling out of the hole, a vaguely human shape, like a man draped in a cape that did not fall toward the floor like it should. But it was indistinct, hazy, and seemed to vanish when one of the weak and wan lights was turned directly on it. Maybe there was something there, and maybe it was another demonic manifestation messing with our heads.

  There was a sudden rushing sound, and something like a pall of inky smoke slithered quickly across the ceiling. A rasping, papery laugh seemed to follow the cloud, and I felt something tug at my shirt, as if a skeletal hand that I could not see had plucked at it as the cloud passed. I felt an awful chill, and couldn’t suppress a shudder, as if someone had just walked over my grave.

  The laugh faded with the cloud, and then Kolya yelled.

  It wasn’t a battle cry; it was a sound of startled terror, quickly echoed by the hammering boom of that .35 rifle of his.

  That time, the laugh was unmistakable. It was a high, piercing sound, utterly inhuman and laden with a deep-seated, mocking malevolence. It was a sound that promised awful torment, and not only of the physical variety.

  With Ray still holding his rifle trained on the hole above, Frank and I shouldered our way past the rest to try to get to Kolya. He was standing at the rear, his rifle pointed back down the passage, toward the main shaft, and he was shaking. It took a lot to rattle the little Russian, but he was rattled.

  “It was here,” he breathed hoarsely. “It was arm’s length from me.”

  “The vampire?” Frank asked, peering into the gloom that led back toward the narrow crack that we’d barely negotiated.

  “Yes,” Kolya said. “It was suddenly just there, right in front of me, staring at me and licking its lips. Like it just rose up out of rock in front of me. There was nothing in passage one moment, then it was standing there.”

  “We heard you shoot at it,” I pointed out, searching carefully for any sign of the thing. But the dust on the floor had already been disturbed by eight pairs of feet, and there was no other sign that there had ever been anything there. But I thought I knew what that strange, fast-moving cloud of smoke had been.

  And apparently, I wasn’t the only one thinking in that direction, either. “How do we cut something’s head off that can turn to smoke?” Frank asked.

  How indeed? I couldn’t tell if the voice was speaking in the tunnel, or only in my head. But judging by the way both Frank and Kolya started, I wasn’t the only one who heard it. You little fools, it continued, in what sounded an awful lot like an archaic New England accent, did you really listen to those hopeless fairy tales that Stoker wrote? Did you really think that with your measly guns and crosses and hatchets, you could come down here, in the dark, and try to kill me? I am so far beyond you as to be utterly beyond your comprehension. You cannot hurt me. You cannot touch me. The darkness is my element. Your pathetic attempts to hunt me would have been amusing in the daytime. Down here, in the bowels of the earth, closer and closer to Hell, my power is far greater. You are lost.

  There was a faint rushing sound, and then it was there, not ten feet away.

  It was tall and pale, as one might expect. Dressed in a black frock coat and white trousers, with an elaborate cravat around its neck, it might have passed for a well-to-do gentleman in the 1860s. Except for the eyes, which were pools of blood, and the long, needle-sharp fangs that it revealed when it smiled. Its hair was silver, and slicked back to curl at the nape of its neck.

  It stood there for a bare instant, as if to let us see it, and then, as quickly as it appeared, it was barely two feet from me, though it didn’t seem to have taken a step. Quick as lightning, it reached out, battered my Winchester aside, and seized me by the throat.

  Its grip was like a vise, and my air was immediately cut off. Its bloody eyes were only inches away from mine, and they seemed to ripple like pools of gore as it leaned toward me, its smile widening as it opened its jaws.

  My vision was already starting to get darker around the edges. At least I thought so; it was hard to tell when it was already as dark as it was down there. But those terrible, iron-hard fingers felt
like they were going to nip my head off like shears if it didn’t bite me first.

  There was a sudden silvery flash, and it let go with a shriek, a high, angry scream that drove me to my knees, even as I gasped, sucking air painfully in through my bruised throat. When I looked up, it was gone.

  Oh, such clever, clever little creatures, it hissed in the darkness. Thought you’d call my bluff, did you? Well, we’ll see about that. I think you’ll soon be too busy to try to show me that disgusting symbol again. Come deeper, little fools. Catch me if you can!

  Eryn was suddenly at my side, rubbing my back with one hand, her other on my arm. “Jed, honey, are you okay?” she asked. I glanced over at her. Her silver crucifix was hanging down on her chest. She had come right up and touched the vampire with it, and driven it off. I owed her my life. Again.

  Good thing we had never started keeping score. We would be in each other’s debt for a century. Each.

  “So, that’s how it’s going to be,” Father Ignacio said grimly, from the other side of where I crouched, trying to drag air back through my battered windpipe. “Cat and mouse in the dark.”

  “Did you really expect anything else from a vampire?” Ray asked.

  Father Ignacio sighed. “No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “Stay close, and keep your crosses and holy water handy,” he said, raising his voice to address everyone in the passage. “That was only the first little dance. There will be more. And it won’t be quite so cocky, next time.”

  I looked around. Eryn was still watching me, worry in her eyes. Frank was looking a little floored, and a bit uncomfortable when he met my eyes. He’d been right next to me, but Eryn had saved me, not him. I didn’t blame him; he was still new at this, and the vamp had gotten too close, too quickly. He hadn’t had a chance to shoot it, not without risking shooting me.