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

by Peter Nealen

  I shook off Frank’s hand and went to her, ignoring Trudeau and Miller as I brushed past them. I took her in my arms and she collapsed against me, wrapping her arms around my neck and holding on tight. Her shotgun bumped painfully against my shoulder blade, but it was only one more bump in a regular barrage of them, so I didn’t mind it as much.

  “That’s twice now,” she sniffed, then sneezed as she got some of the dust off my clothes up her nose.

  I held her close. “I’m all right,” I told her. My throat hurt from the dust, and maybe a little from the sight of tears in her eyes. I’ve never been able to stand to see Eryn cry.

  “But I’m so scared,” she whispered. “And they know it.”

  I pulled back a little to try to look her in the eyes, but she was silhouetted by the lights behind her, and all I could see was the faint glint of her tears. “The voices?” I asked softly.

  She nodded, with another little sniffle. “They keep telling me that you’re going to die down here. That the mountain is going to be your grave.” She wiped at her nose with a filthy hand. “I’m doing my best to ignore them, but they just won’t stop.”

  I crushed her to me again. “I’m not going to die down here,” I whispered fiercely in her ear, “if only to show those things up as the liars they are.” Please let that be the truth, I prayed silently.

  She clung to me for a few more moments, until Father Ignacio laid a hand gently on my shoulder. “We have to keep moving,” he said.

  I nodded, straightening up and giving Eryn one last squeeze, before stepping back and brushing a lock of coppery hair away from her face. “Chin up, darlin’,” I told her. “Remember whose side we’re on. It’ll frustrate those things more than anything else.”

  She nodded and looked up at me. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re always trying to protect me, and when the darkness tries to get in my head, it does it by threatening you?”

  “That’s the way of it,” I said. “We’re married. We’re more worried about losing the other half of ourselves than we are of dying.”

  Side by side, we followed Ray and Kolya back out into the shaft.

  That was the last drift tunnel for a while. I wondered at what damage had been done higher up by that cave-in, but soon forgot about it as I concentrated on the here and now.

  We kept going down. The whispers were still there in the tunnel with us, though my voice in the dark had shut up for a while. Maybe it knew that it had pushed its luck a little too far; twice now its suggestions had been obvious traps. If it had been trying to convince me that it was a new sort of guardian angel, it wasn’t doing a very good job.

  The deeper we went, the more I started to suspect that there really hadn’t been much mining going on while the shaft was getting sunk. I had lost track of how deep we were, but there hadn’t been any side passages or any signs of actual ore extraction for a while. There was only the shaft, angling straight down into the dark.

  The cart tracks were still going down, but I suspected that they were going to end eventually. After I didn’t know how long without a drift tunnel on the sides, I had started to imagine that the miners, by then fully under the Thing’s spell, had just been digging for it, as straight and as fast as possible. Ray had mentioned a point where the miners had simply become obsessed with digging to the Thing. I thought that we’d probably gotten to that depth.

  Which raised a disturbing question, and I glanced around at the rest of our little party when I thought of it. If we were so deep that the miners had been swayed into digging a shaft without doing any actual mining, but just to reach that thing, why weren’t we being affected the same way?

  Or were we being affected, and just didn’t realize it?

  I had seen cases of demonic influence that had been so subtle that the victim had had no idea that their own thoughts were being manipulated until after the demon was banished and they were freed. Now, I didn’t know if a chthonic spirit wrapped in some weird, eldritch, Otherworldly body was going to have the same level of power as a demon, but under the circumstances, and given my own close encounter with a similar thing during my first few months as a Witch Hunter, I rather expected that it did.

  Why else would we be trying to keep it from waking up?

  The tracks ended abruptly. One rail was extended farther down than the other, and overhung the last ties by about six feet. The shaft just kept going.

  “This must have been where they gave up even the pretense of mining,” Ray whispered. “They’d lost their minds and just kept digging, like ants, with no idea why they were still excavating.”

  “Why are we still sane, then?” Miller whispered. “If the miners lost their minds this deep, why haven’t we?”

  I half expected the old Charlie to surface for a moment, with a flippant comment to the effect of, “How do you know we haven’t?” But Charlie was just clinging to the ladder, his head bowed, staring at the rungs in front of him and saying nothing.

  “I don’t know,” Ray confessed. “Something must be different this time.”

  I suddenly thought that I knew just what was different. The Captain had been there from the beginning of this little fracas. Was he keeping the Thing’s influence at bay?

  Maybe. I hoped so. It was comforting, thinking of The Captain staying close, pacing us on the way down into the ground.

  Then I thought of what we might have been confronted with if he hadn’t been with us. It prompted a shudder.

  “Keep going,” Father Ignacio called softly. “This is no place to stop.”

  It took a moment, getting Frank and me back over to the ladder. We couldn’t exactly keep using the rail ties as steps, and judging by my earlier mishap, trying to just walk down the passage was not going to go well. We got over without falling, though, and then, with Ray on point, we continued downward.

  I had no way of knowing just how long we’d been down there. Time seemed to stretch weirdly; after a while it felt like there had never been any daylight, never a world above. It became a matter of doubt that there really was anything but that endless tunnel, always going down.

  I recognized the thought for what it was. Even if the voices in the dark weren’t prompting such ideas, they were a dangerous sort of disconnect. No wonder the miners had gone insane. How many long days and weeks had they spent down there, only to have an eldritch abomination from the depths of time start messing with their heads?

  Maybe that was part of why we were still holding it together, I thought. We’d only just ventured down there. Maybe the miners had been more susceptible because they were already going a little nuts from being underground forever.

  “Hold it!” Ray’s hissed command floated up from the darkness below.

  I looked down, past my feet, but couldn’t see anything but Frank’s bulk and a little bit of Miller below him, both silhouetted in the shifting cones of flashlights. The lights seemed dimmer and yellower, but they were still serving their purpose, even though it was getting harder and harder to see more than about ten or fifteen feet.

  I could hear whispering coming up from below. Some of it was Ray passing the word up the ladder. The rest of it was evil, susurrating noise, bearing a sort of wordless malevolence and a cold amusement at the thought of our impending deaths.

  No, I don’t know how I could tell that from the whispers. And, frankly, I don’t really want to know.

  Finally, Frank looked up and told me, “Big drop off down below. Ray thinks it opens on a cavern or something, but the ladder ends. We’re going to have to do some climbing.”

  “Gotcha,” I answered. That was going to be fun. We had brought some rope, but depending on how deep the drop-off was, it might or might not be enough.

  It was an awkward, difficult job getting the short climbing ropes passed down and spliced together. I was wondering what we were going to attach it to; the ladder was flush with the rock, and there hadn’t exactly been a lot of pitons stuck in the walls, particularly the deeper we’d go
tten.

  But Ray found a way, and then he was going over the edge. I still couldn’t see him, but I could hear the scrabbling of his boots echoing in the rocky chamber.

  For a long time, we just hung there on the ladder, waiting. At least, it felt like a long time. Like I said, time had gotten weird down there. Then there was a faint call, and Kolya was starting down the rope. The rest of us shuffled farther down the ladder, toward that sheer lip.

  One by one, we climbed down, until I was the last.

  I’d had my rifle slung across my back for a while. It was just easier to climb with the pistol. Now I holstered it, made sure the rifle wasn’t going to swing around and clock me in the skull, grasped the rope, which Ray had apparently tied to a broken rung of the ladder, and slowly eased myself out over black, empty space.

  The edge of the rock was uneven, as if the tunnel had suddenly broken through into a naturally occurring cave, instead of being deliberately bored and widened. I couldn’t see much of my surroundings, and concentrated on keeping my boots in contact with the rock wall in front of me, and controlling my descent. That was more easily said than done; climbing down a knotted rope is a lot harder than rappelling. But without rappelling gear, this was what we had, and if I didn’t want to burn all the skin off my palms, I was going to have to stay slow and careful, and pay very close attention to what I was doing.

  A few inches at a time, I descended the rope. I looked down a few times, just to get my bearings. With most of the wan lights directed outward, I couldn’t see much, but I could see that I only had about forty feet to descend. After a while, the rock wall in front of me disappeared, as the cave widened out, and I had to shift to clamp my boots around the rope, descending it inch by inch, slowly turning in empty space.

  I finally reached the bottom. The base of the cliff was littered with rubble, presumably from when the miners had broken through with the shaft. It took a second to realize that it wasn’t just rock and rubble I was looking at.

  Scattered, broken, and smashed bones and skulls were strewn across the floor of the cave, fanned out from the pile of debris that I was presently sitting on.

  “It looks like miners fell when they broke through,” Kolya observed. His accent was noticeably thinner, as it tended to get when he was keeping himself under strict control. “And their comrades did not seek to bury or recover bodies.”

  “They were pretty long gone by this point, I think,” Ray said. He was studying the walls of the cave, holding his lantern up to see better. Strangely, while it was dim and flickering, it didn’t seem to have suffered the same leaching effect that the flashlights had. “At least, that’s what Magnus told me.”

  “Speaking of whom,” Frank put in, as I started down off the fan of debris, “there wasn’t time to ask up above, but why didn’t Magnus and his knights come down with us? He said they were afraid, but so am I. Didn’t they pledge to keep that thing from waking up?”

  Ray shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure. But I think that Magnus is afraid to come too close to it again, and probably for good reason. The vampire is one thing. But remember, Magnus and his people are still of the Otherworld, no matter how sincerely they’ve pledged themselves to our side.” He glanced at Charlie, carefully, as if calculating what effect his next words might have on the younger Hunter. But Charlie wasn’t looking around. He was crouched on the floor of the cave, his head bowed. “I think they have certain vulnerabilities to things like this, especially once they’ve been noticed. And I expect that Magnus was noticed when he came down here with Mason.”

  “That doesn’t help us very much,” Miller observed crossly.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Ray admitted. “But Magnus already fought tooth and nail to get us here. And it is what it is.”

  “What,” Miller said, a note of bitterness creeping into his voice, “it’s God’s will?”

  Ray turned and looked at him, and there was a dangerous glint in the older man’s eyes as they reflected the light from his lantern. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is,” he replied flatly. “And I’m somewhat surprised at you, Special Agent Miller, that after all you’ve witnessed in the last few days, that you’re still willing to risk uttering such a borderline blasphemy, especially while surrounded by the things in the dark that have been terrorizing us for the last three days and nights.”

  Trudeau then spoke for the first time in a while. Her voice was still flat and kind of distant, as if she was distracted even as she spoke. “I haven’t seen much in the way of ‘God’s Power’ lately,” she said. “Most of what I’ve seen has been demonstrations of other sorts of powers. Why doesn’t God just stop all of this, if He’s so powerful?”

  Ray eyed her narrowly, his eyes little more than flecks of reflected lantern light in a cascade of wrinkles above his forest of beard. But I interrupted before he could answer.

  “Because He’s not a puppet master who wills that everything must work out perfectly, not without our cooperation,” I said flatly. “He’s not going to spoil us, which is why you hear us praying so much. You’ve got to ask Him for help, and willingly submit yourself to His will, whatever happens. Because this is only a test; this isn’t the end of it, whatever happens.”

  She sneered a little, though she still didn’t look at me, or at anyone else, for that matter. It was a bit of a return to character. Maybe she was getting over the shock of what had happened so far. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  “That sounds like the usual religious cop-out,” she muttered, but Miller shushed her.

  “Look, I apologize,” he said to Ray. “Call it the stress talking. This is all taking some getting used to.”

  Ray just looked at him levelly. “You’re going to have to get used to it,” he said. “Those things aren’t going to be understanding. God might, but they will take advantage of any weakness, any opening that you give them. Keep that in mind.”

  “As if thinking for yourself is a weakness,” I heard Trudeau whisper. I closed my eyes momentarily in exasperation. Yes, she was definitely recovering. Which meant she was going to be a royal pain for the rest of the time. I could only imagine the glee with which the evil things in the blackness would be pouncing on the usual anti-religious clichés coming out of her mouth. They wouldn’t just concentrate on her, either; they’d be using her to pick away at the rest of us, too. As if the dark and the oppressive weight of the mountain over our heads weren’t already doing a good enough job of that.

  Unless…I studied her as carefully as I could without staring. She still had that sort of vague, distant look on her face. I felt a renewed chill, and resolved to keep one eye on her. This wasn’t entirely her old personality, as much as it seemed to match. She was still hearing something, and it was feeding her prejudices and her ignorance. Her self-righteous assurance of her own intellectual superiority was just the weakness she was insisting that it wasn’t.

  But she had subsided for the moment. Kolya glanced over at me, and I could see, even in the dimness, the concern in his eyes, particularly when he wordlessly turned them toward Trudeau and then back to me. He’d picked up on the danger there, too.

  When the debate seemed to be over, Ray turned and studied the two branches of the cave that we’d found ourselves in. I glanced over the rocky walls and ceiling, myself, finally having a chance to do so.

  We were in a roughly spherical chamber, with flowing curtains of stone along the walls and lumpy growths of glistening rock hanging from the ceiling and growing up from the floor. Apparently, some of the lower strata of the mountain was made up of limestone, and caverns had formed, caverns that the mine shaft had penetrated.

  Which meant that the Thing was probably down in those caverns, somewhere down the narrow, darkened passage that was barely visible below us, half-obscured by rippling, wet-looking rock formations.

  After a few moments of exploration, though, we found two more passages. One was considerably larger than the other two, though we could negotiate either of them. The qu
estion was which one to take.

  We were debating it when Charlie spoke up, his voice as firm and serious as I’d heard it since this entire nightmare had begun.

  “Down there,” he said, pointing to the far left passage, which was little more than a crack, at least at its entrance. “That’s the way we have to go.”

  Frank looked at him, his dark face creased with a frown. “How do you know?”

  Charlie looked at him, his face dead serious. “I just do,” he said. “I can feel the Thing. It’s getting worse, the closer we get to it, like it’s scratching at my brain. But it’s getting more…immediate, the closer we get.” He pointed to the crack in the rock again. “I’m telling you, it’s down there. I know it is.”

  Frank cast a worried glance at me, and I shrugged. Charlie had already told me that he was feeling the Thing’s mind pushing at his own. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that he could sense where it was, too.

  “Alright,” Ray said. “I believe you, Charlie. Hopefully we can end this, and you won’t feel that thing anymore.”

  “Right,” Charlie said hollowly. He didn’t believe that was going to happen. There was a note of resigned weariness, almost despair in his voice. “Yeah. Let’s finish this.”

  I realized, as Ray led the way down into that crack, that Charlie didn’t think he was going to come out of the caves alive. And as much as I hoped he was wrong, and prayed that he would survive, that all of us would survive, I couldn’t help but think that he might just be right about that.

  Chapter 18

  The passage continued downward, though not at nearly the extreme angle of the mine shaft. Footing was still tricky; it wasn’t as soggy as some limestone caverns I’d been in, but there was still a thin sheen of water over many of the rocks, water that had trickled down through millions of tons of rock and earth, finally leaving behind deposits of the minerals that it had leached out of the ground as fantastical and twisted formations. The stalactites and stalagmites cast strange, flickering shadows as we passed them, shadows that didn’t always seem to quite move in concert with the light.