by Peter Nealen
Besides, if Kolya’s encounter had been any indication, shooting it wouldn’t have done anything at all. I knew Kolya well enough to be sure that he hadn’t missed.
I reached down and made sure my own crucifix was outside of my shirt, kissed it, and let it hang on its thong. It had slipped under my jacket, which explained why that thing had gotten so close.
As I glanced back, I saw Trudeau. Miller was standing slightly ahead of her, his sidearm in both hands, protectively. But she was looking over his shoulder, not at us, but down the passage where the vampire had disappeared. And there was a curious, almost fascinated, look in her unfocused eyes.
“Let’s go,” Ray said, before I could decide what that look meant. “We’ve still got to catch up with that thing and stop it before it can awaken something infinitely worse.”
He shouldered past me and Frank, skirted around the hole in the floor, and led the way back out through the crack.
Chapter 16
We came out into the angled shaft and suddenly found ourselves taking fire.
A ragged fusillade of gunshots echoed up the shaft in the dark, and bullets smacked into the wooden ladder, spanged off the rails, and smacked dust and rock chips off the walls and ceiling. They weren’t the best aimed shots, but in those sorts of close quarters, they didn’t have to be.
Ray had been on the ladder already, and flattened himself against it, trying to get his bulk as flat to the floor of the shaft as possible. I had just stepped onto the rung just outside of the drift tunnel, and immediately snapped my rifle to my shoulder, blasting at the muzzle flashes I could see as fast as I could work the lever and shift my point of aim. A moment later, Frank leaned out of the tunnel above me, leveled his .458 down the shaft, and dumped a mag down the shaft. I almost said something about conserving ammo; he was only carrying so many mags. But that becomes a secondary consideration when you’re getting shot at.
At least, until you find yourself down to your last handful of rounds, wishing you’d been a bit more discriminatory with your fire earlier.
The shooting stopped. I still hadn’t put my earplug back in, and realized that I didn’t know where it had gone; I must have dropped it during the fight with the skinnies back at the hole. That ear was ringing something fierce, battered by the thunder of sound reverberating off the rock all around us.
I dashed across the inclined shaft as best I could, taking a long, leaping step to the tracks and wedging my foot on top of one of the ties, then throwing myself against the far wall, praying that I could wedge myself against the rough rock solidly enough to avoid sliding down the shaft toward whoever was shooting at us.
I struck the wall hard, almost knocking the wind out of myself, and scraping flesh off my forearm on the protruding rocks. My elbow hit with a numbing impact, and I had to take my shooting hand off and shake it, trying to speed up recovery from the shock to the nerves, all the while praying that the Renfields didn’t start shooting again before I could get my rifle back in action.
But they didn’t shoot. Nor did they show any lights, or climb up to attack us. They didn’t even make any noise. The only sound was my own harsh breathing in my ears, and a dry, papery laugh, floating up the shaft to us.
“Jed!” Frank hissed. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine!” I replied. “You see anything?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “What do you want to do?”
I scanned the rock around me before answering. The shaft floor was rough enough that my boots actually had decent enough purchase to hold me in place, but I wasn’t sure about trying to clamber down that way; there were certainly enough rock chips and dust that footing could get pretty hairy after a while. But at the same time, I didn’t particularly want to line us all up like ducks in a row on that ladder.
That was when I looked back at the tracks, and knew I was being an idiot.
“We’ll split into two elements,” I stage-whispered back. “You come to the tracks with me, and the rest stay on the ladder. The ties are as good as ladder rungs; we’ll bound down the shaft, with either the group on the ladder covering while we move, or vice versa. Sound like a plan?”
“Sure, let’s do it,” Frank replied. “Are you moving first?”
“Yeah.” I crossed myself again, then lunged for the cart track.
My first step was solid. The second was not.
As I’d feared, the grit and rock chips skidded away under my boot, and before I knew it, I was sliding out of control down the shaft like it was a sandpapery slip-n-slide.
I heard Eryn cry out, but it was quickly lost in the chaos of my accelerating descent. I held onto my Winchester with one hand, squeezing the rifle in a death grip, and scrabbled at the rock floor with the other, trying to find something to grab onto. My boots were scrabbling against the rock, but any time I thought that I might get some friction, more of the debris slid away, and I continued to accelerate downward, in a cloud of dust and rock fragments.
Increasingly desperate, choking on the dust, I flailed out with my free hand, and almost caught the edge of what had to be a rail tie. My fingertips brushed it bruisingly, it almost ripped a fingernail off, then it was gone. But I knew it was there, and I frantically grabbed again, blindly.
That time I caught more of it, but still lost my grip as splinters came off in my hand. But I’d slowed down a bit.
I suddenly threw myself over onto my stomach, grabbing with my free hand and trying to catch a foothold with my boot. I caught the end of a tie with my fingers, while my boot slid off another one.
With a bone-jarring wrench, I grabbed hold of that tie, momentarily halting my downward slide, and was able to get my foot onto another one, farther down. For a long moment I just hung there, my forehead against the rusted, dusty track, breathing in too much of the settling dust, thanking God in barely coherent whispers.
That whispering laugh sounded again, much closer.
I had lost my grip on my light; it was gone. I could see dim, yellowed lights bobbing up above me as the rest descended, calling out to me, asking in increasingly frantic tones if I was all right. I was alone, in the dark, several hundred feet below them, and for all I knew, that vampire was right there, clinging to the rock next to me, about to tear me apart.
Wide-eyed, straining to see through the dark, I searched the blackness around and below me. I couldn’t see anything; whether there was anything there or not.
I swung myself over until I was essentially lying on the tracks, my boots braced against one of the ties, my rifle still in one hand, the other, which felt sticky along with the dust and grit, telling me that I was probably bleeding, searched for my crucifix.
I found it, hard and cool, and held it up on the end of its thong. I could only see the faintest glimmer of reflected light from above on it; the dark was still just as cloying and thick as it had been before. But I knew it was there, and I held it out like a shield.
Oh, Lord, I prayed, Who already triumphed over this evil on the Cross, protect me now.
I thought for a moment that I heard a faint hiss in the dark, but it was quickly drowned out by the calls from above. Maybe there had been two faint, luminous red eyes only a few yards down the tracks, watching me. Maybe there hadn’t been.
“I’m all right!” I croaked, though I didn’t look up. “Just got a little farther down the shaft a little quicker than I planned.” I was trying to be a bit flippant about it, but the hoarse, shaky tone of my own voice in my ears gave the lie to my assurance.
I stayed where I was, vainly searching the darkness for any sign of our tormentor, until the rest of the group got there. Eryn was in the lead, having apparently shoved her way past Frank. She didn’t shine her light in my eyes, but she was definitely studying me, fear in her eyes, which glittered faintly in the reflected illumination of her light.
I let the crucifix hang on its thong on my chest, and reached out to her. “I’m fine, really,” I assured her quietly. “Just a little more banged up and scrap
ed up than I was.”
She gripped my hand tightly, saying nothing. She didn’t have to. She had been as terrified at my sudden slide as I would have been if it had been her who had suddenly fallen into that stygian abyss.
“Let’s keep going,” I said. “This thing isn’t going to hunt itself.”
“Are you sure?” Frank asked. “Do you need a breather?”
“I’ve had enough of a breather, lying here in the dark and listening to that thing laugh at us,” I replied. “Let’s move.”
“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Eryn asked, turning my hand over and shining her light on it. Sure enough, I was bleeding from several new scrapes and a few splinters.
“I’ll live,” I assured her. “we’ve got to get moving.”
She nodded, gave my hand another squeeze, and reluctantly let go. I took a deep breath and coughed on the dust already in my throat. The sound echoed strangely, reverberating up and down the shaft to create an eerie, unsettling chorus that only slowly died away. Almost too slowly; it wasn’t hard to imagine something else down there, something ancient and malevolent, adding its dry, croaking laughter to those weird echoes.
No one moved for a second as the sounds died down. That hadn’t helped nerves already stretched nearly to the breaking point.
Finally, Father Ignacio spoke. “We have to go.”
I nodded, unable to turn my eyes away from the darkness below us. It was disorienting, staring into utter, complete blackness. Past about twenty feet, everything simply disappeared. Where there had been rock walls, timbers, and rails, there was simply nothing.
But there was something lurking in that nothingness. Quite a few somethings, apparently. Twisted, evil, and malicious things. Things that wanted to see us cursed, fallen, and killed in slow torment.
It takes a certain kind of personality to become a Witch Hunter. Even so, even the most hardened of us, the most dedicated, come to points where it becomes a supreme effort to drive on. To continue to face the darkness, teeth gritted, sure that God would see us through, or, if we fell, that we would not fall in vain.
There in the dark, surrounded by whispers of evil, with thousands of tons of solid rock looming overhead, knowing the terrible things that were lurking below us, it was difficult to remember that grace that we all believed in, trusted in. Difficult to remember the light, the miraculous things that we had all seen, difficult to hold fast to the faith and fight off the temptation of despair, alongside the sheer, eye-watering fear that made your joints feel like they were about to collapse.
That was one of those moments. It took everything I had just to cross myself once again and start back down that tunnel, stepping carefully from tie to tie.
We went down, and down, and down. Ever couple of hundred feet, we found another drift tunnel, and had to carefully get out of the main shaft to clear it. And for a while, we encountered no resistance. The tunnels were deserted, without skinnies, Renfields, or the vampire.
That was not to say that they were entirely empty or free of hazards.
Stopes opened up overhead, ore chutes, packed with debris, ran down from higher passages. The floor fell away into deep shafts in several places. Some seemed to have been deliberately dug; one even still had a ladder in it. Others appeared to have been caused by cave-ins, with deep, empty holes under them.
At one bend in a side passage, Frank, who had taken point, stopped, shining his light overhead. It wasn’t hard to see the reason for his hesitation.
The shoring timbers across the ceiling were noticeably sagging, one of the nearest beginning to crack. Splinters longer than my hand were sticking down into what was left of the passage, as the ceiling bulged downward. That passage was going to collapse, sooner or later.
“It looks like the tunnel keeps going on the other side of this low spot,” Frank said quietly. “But I’m not keen on going under that.”
“There’s something back there,” the unknown voice murmured in my ear. “It’s waiting for you to turn your backs, and then it’s going to jump you.”
Once again, I ignored it. Whatever the price that strange voice was going to demand for its “advice,” it wasn’t worth it.
I squinted down the passage. As always, Frank’s light didn’t reach nearly far enough. I was beginning to wonder whether the vampire was doing something to get that effect, or if it had more to do with the demons we’d already been fighting, or even the Thing Under the Mountain itself.
I might never know. Right at that moment, I only knew that it was a deliberate hindrance, an obstacle thrown in our path to slow us down.
“I wouldn’t want to go through there, either,” I said. “Are there any side passages that anyone saw?”
There was a chorus of negative replies. None of the drift tunnels seemed to be connected that way; they were all on their own plane, despite higher or lower stopes that they opened up on, which also appeared to be isolated chambers. It was a pain, and meant that we could very well get trapped in one of them, if the Renfields or the skinnies came up behind us.
“Let’s head back,” I said. “If the vamp is back there, it’s trying to draw us in; I think it’s safe to say that our objective is down the shaft, deeper into the mine. We’re only checking these side tunnels to make sure that we don’t get jumped from behind. I think the risk of going in there and getting caught in a cave in is higher than leaving it.”
Ray, Father Ignacio, and Kolya murmured their assent. Eryn said nothing. Miller, when I glanced back to see him in the faint light of reflected flashlight beams, looked pensive but volunteered nothing. Trudeau still looked out of it.
Charlie was shaking like a leaf, his eyes fixed on the darkness of the tunnel past Frank’s shoulder.
“There’s something in there,” he whispered.
“How do you know?” Eryn asked him. “We can’t see anything. Did you hear something?”
He shook his head violently. “I don’t know how I know,” he said hollowly. “I just know.”
“Well, we’ll move back carefully,” Ray said, “and keep an eye on it. But I agree with Frank and Jed; it’s not worth the risk of going in there. The Thing is lower down, so the vampire is going to be heading lower down.”
“Kolya, you and Eryn go back and make sure we’re not about to get bushwhacked coming out onto the shaft again,” I said. “We’ll fall back from this spot carefully, and keep eyes and a gun on the passage until we get back to the shaft.” I looked at Charlie. “Fair enough?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He was still staring into the dark on the far side of the cracking beam.
“Charlie,” I called, more insistently. Ray reached out and shook him. He blinked, as if just realizing that he’d been frozen staring.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think that should work. I’m just scared of something coming after us as soon as we turn around, that’s all.”
The closeness of that statement to the warning from the voice in the dark was not lost on me, and it sent a chill up my spine. I studied Charlie carefully. But he didn’t seem possessed, or influenced.
Oppressed by his fears, his trauma, and the voices in the dark, definitely. But not yet possessed or under their sway. I didn’t think so, anyway. I whispered a brief prayer that I was right.
Kolya and Eryn, with Eryn casting a concerned glance back at Charlie, and another one at me, as if to ask me to be careful with him, disappeared back the way we’d come. Together, the rest of us started to pace backward, Frank and I doing our own sort of bounding overwatch, where one or another of us would have his rifle trained on the opening while the other moved. Fortunately, there were no holes in the floor that we had to worry about falling into. Especially since I had to make do with the reflected light from the others’ flashlights.
I had just stopped, right at the edge of where the light still illuminated the cracked timber, and whistled faintly to Frank that I was in place. He started to turn to head back past me, when I spotted movement back in the darkness
behind him.
I thought it was a skinny. If not, it was a cousin. Whatever it was, it was pale, and it moved quick.
“Frank!” I yelled, snapping my rifle up and aiming at the vague pale shape in the passage behind him. Frank whirled, bringing his own rifle up as he did so.
Whatever had moved back there didn’t show itself immediately, but had apparently retreated at my yell. But after a moment, it suddenly snarled and lunged at Frank.
I only got a brief impression of strangely human head, though tall and pointed in the back, triangular black teeth, and three dark eyes in a pale face. I was already aimed in, and I just had to stroke the trigger. Frank was a fraction of a second behind me.
Both rifles roared, the noise punishingly loud in that tiny space. Flame stabbed in the dark. The face vanished. I realized that I hadn’t seen a body behind it.
And then the cracked timber snapped, and the roof fell in.
Chapter 17
We had backed off far enough that the majority of the cave-in missed us altogether. We still got pelted with rocks, even as I grabbed at Frank and dove toward the tunnel’s entrance. Dust billowed out of the collapse behind us, momentarily blinding us both, as more baseball-sized rocks fell from the ceiling, and the shoring timber right overhead creaked warningly.
Coughing and choking, I hauled myself to my feet. Frank was already up, and had a hand under my arm, dragging me the rest of the way up and stumbling blindly toward the way out. I couldn’t see, and my mouth seemed to be full of a small desert, but I could feel Frank limping slightly. The falling rocks must have busted him up worse than me.
We got back to the front of the tunnel in time to find Father Ignacio holding Eryn back. She was straining against him, trying to head down the tunnel toward the cave-in. When she saw us, she went limp, crying quietly.
