Dead Five's Pass

by Colin F. Barnes

  With a slight jelly-feel to her legs, she fell backward out of the chopper and outcrop and eased her way down the line to where Marcel helped her to stand.

  Marcel took his two-way radio and spoke into the receiver. “We’re down here safe, Smith, we’re going in. We’ll leave the lines here. If we lose contact and we’re not back in thirty minutes, go for help, over.”

  “Roger that, Marc. You two take care. Radio ahead if you need a quick getaway, I need to conserve fuel. Over.”

  “I hear you, Smith. And thanks. I owe you a brandy.”

  Marcel placed the radio back into the external chest pocket of his thick jacket. Beads of sweat had broken out on his face, and his skin was a deathly shade of gray.

  “Are you hurt?” Carise asked.

  “Just a few bumps.”

  “You just look a bit ill, I was—”

  “This situation is messed up, Cari, it’s just shock, panic, adrenaline. Let’s get inside. I can see firelight from here.”

  Marcel unclipped Carise from their rope and led the way through the great boulders. They found the a great curved piece of rock with narrow access, just as it was described on the forum. From within, Carise could see the orange flickers of a fire; the smell of smoke and something cooking wafted out.

  “Hey, anyone in there? Hello?” she called out before entering, not knowing what might be waiting for them. No response. She took the flashlight from her belt and shined it into the gap. Sitting with his back to the cave entrance, a male figure sat hunched over the fire, his head slunk to his chest. His back rose and fell gently.

  “There’s someone in there,” Carise said.

  She squeezed through the gap, helped Marcel through until they both stood in the chamber. The man didn’t stir. Around him were four backpacks. On the fire was a crudely made spit. The juices of a chunk of meat dripped with a fizz into the fire.

  Carise approached him slowly, wondering if he was in some kind of shock. Quietly she said, “Hey there, are you hurt? Are you okay?”

  No response.

  This time it was Marcel. “Hey, kid, we’re here to help you, okay?”

  He stood up, his snow pants and jacket covered in dust and a dark liquid.

  Carise and Marcel moved to either side of him.

  He quickly turned on his heel, grabbed Carise by the throat. His eyes bulged wide, pale and sickly as if they were covered in a white-blue paste. She choked and spluttered under his grip as he crushed her windpipe. She kicked out at him to no effect. The kid was frothing at the mouth as his lips moved and contorted into hideous shapes. The voice that came from him was a deep gurgle, but she recognized it. He sounded like the girl back at the station.

  Her vision dimmed and her lungs burned as she struggled against the coming darkness.

  And then she was falling backward almost as if in slow motion. Her attacker no longer in front of her, his hands were no longer crushing her neck. She hit the ground with a thud and lost consciousness.

  * * *

  “Hey, Carise…talk to me. Are you okay?”

  It was Marcel’s voice. It sounded far off in the distance. Cloaked by a whistling sound. Her head throbbed and it felt like her brain was too large for her skull. She rolled onto her front and pushed herself up on to her knees.

  “You had me worried there,” Marcel said, his voice now more immediate. He grabbed her under the arms, and lifted her. “You were knocked out, but only for a bit. How’s the neck?”

  She coughed the dust from her throat and spoke despite the soreness. “It’s…all right. I think. What happened to…”

  Marcel stepped back, and lying beside him in a bloodied, crumpled mess was the boy.

  “Is he dead?” she said with a hint of panic in her voice.

  “I had to do something or he would have killed you. I couldn’t get him off you. I’ve never seen anyone so strong like that, it was all I could—”

  She reached out a hand and gripped his arm to quiet him. “It’s okay,” she said. But it wasn’t. Not really. None of it was. In the space of one night, two kids were dead, with three more missing, and Marcel was now a murderer—albeit to save her, but this madness, this craziness, whatever it was, was spreading. She didn’t even know if those hook-lined tentacles were real or just a figment of her imagination. What if the others were seeing something else entirely? And this kid and the girl, with their crazy eyes…it must be some kind of disease, she thought.

  “Perhaps we’re next,” she said. “Perhaps all this is some kind of virus. First the girl, then this boy, and what happened to the other body and the rest of his group? What if we’re infected too? What if we’re sick and deranged and imagining all kinds of stuff? What if we end up like—”

  Marcel hugged her close, and let her sob into his chest. “We’re not like them. I don’t have any answers, but we’re not insane. We just need to keep our cool and search for the others. There’s four packs here, so the other three must be around here somewhere.”

  “What if they’re dead too? What do we do then? What about that…thing…what do we do about that? We need to call someone. The army, the Mounties…someone, we’re not qualified for this kind of thing.”

  “But we are,” Marcel said, more forceful now. “We’re the best damn rescuers in the Rockies and it’ll be hours if not days before anyone else will turn up. Who’s to say they’re going to believe us anyway? You think the Mounties or the army would believe us if we told them there were tentacles attacking people on the mountain? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?”

  Carise held her breath and strained her hearing. There was a remnant of an echo of something, but she couldn’t make it out. “What is that?” she whispered.

  Marcel held up his finger to his lips and they both listened.

  Then she heard it: splashing and moving water, and then a faint gurgle as if someone was drowning.

  “There, I can hear someone,” Carise said.

  “Come on, they don’t sound far.”

  Both Carise and Marcel took out their lights and headed down the tunnel following the sound.

  “Holy crap, look at that,” Carise said, her eyes wide and her steps slow as she approached the five stones by the lake’s edge. She was staring up at the shifting symbols; their glossy surface reflected the red light coming from the lake. Its surface still moving as if it was recently disturbed. “Those are the same things that girl…painted in the room back at the station. But what is that glow? Could it be some natural fungi or something?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before…” Marcel said. “But those carvings, or whatever they are, they must be some kind of language.” He took a camera from his backpack and snapped a few shots. The markings appeared to shift under the flash.

  “What is this place?” Carise wondered aloud as she inspected the stones and noticed a dished surface and a grooved path that led to the lake. As she followed it, she noticed a shape floating just beneath the surface. She reached into the icy water and fished it out.

  “It’s another bone,” she said. “Shit, it’s totally malformed, twisted.” She held it up into the beam of her flashlight and Marcel looked closer.

  “There’s nothing inside. Something’s sucked the marrow out,” Marcel said with a slight shake to his voice. “It’s got to be the same thing that attacked us… What if this is—”

  “The other kids? I don’t know, but look: something was dragged from over there beyond the lake, and…what’s that…” She shined the flashlight to something glinting in the gloom to the side of the lake. She bent closer and picked up the smashed remnants of a cell phone. Its technology seemed completely out of place in the chamber with its ancient symbols and weird, unnatural geometry. She showed it to Marcel. “Could that be Nate’s? The boy you spoke to?”

  He nodded his head. “Or one of the others, but it’s a new model, couldn’t have been in here very long if it belonged to anyone else other than Nate’s group.”

  Carise hand
ed him the cell phone and continued to inspect the chamber, all the time avoiding looking at those damned hideous shapes on the domed wall and ceiling. It was like they were opening a dark part of her, reaching inside and stabbing at things best left hidden; things that should remain in the darkness. As she scoured the place trying to make a mental picture of the footprints and disturbance in the dust, she returned her attention to the lake. Something large, and dark, rose up to the surface.

  With a quiet splash, a fragment of a bright orange hiker’s jacket broke the surface and bobbled on the waves like a dead jellyfish. Followed by two others.

  Carise knelt at the water’s edge and reached out for them. A dark shape darted in the water, and before she could react, Marcel shouted.

  “Cari, don’t!”

  Like a shot of lightning, an eel-like limb wrapped around her wrist and dragged her into the water headfirst. She instinctively tensed as the freezing cold water surrounded her.

  She tugged at the meaty limb that gripped her. It had the same hooks on its underside as the ones out on the mountain, only smaller, but no less sharp.

  She thrashed her legs and made to scream but swallowed a mouthful of icy and metallic water before choking. All the while the thing dragged her deeper into the darkness.

  And in the gloom she saw what she had feared: three bodies, deformed, twisted and half-eaten, lying as if discarded, used up on the bed of the shallow lake.

  Their skulls looked up at her as if screaming.

  She pulled against the tentacle with her free hand, trying to unwrap it from her wrist, but it just circled tighter like a constricting snake. Her chest tightened under the cold and the force of holding her breath. Red spots danced in front of her eyes, but then a hand grabbed her ankle, then her leg, and against the pressure of the thing in the water, Marcel pulled her back out.

  Her head breached the surface and she coughed out the water before heaving in a lungful of air.

  “Carise!” Marcel shouted as reached out again for her. He missed but grabbed her pack and pulled her back close to the edge. The thing on her wrist uncurled and suddenly she was free…before it dug its hooks into her ankle, sending a belch of blood blooming into the already red-tainted water. And then she realized what she had tasted, what was in the water: blood. She began to retch.

  It yanked on her leg, making her scream with pain as each hook dug deeper into her flesh, and tearing chunks of skin and pant leg away. “Marc, help!”

  She spun onto her front, her chest now out of the water and hanging over the edge.

  She reached out, managed to grab hold of one of the square stones, and with Marcel gripping her under the arms, together they managed to drag her out of the lake completely.

  The hook-lined limb, however, still tightened around her leg, and she thought it would slice right through her ankle, when Marcel pulled the ice axe from his belt and hacked away at the rubbery appendage.

  It took nearly half a minute of frantic cutting before the thing gave up and let go; by then Marcel was almost all the way through the tough gristle, rubber, and interlocked muscle. When it finally let go, the lake shuddered and a terrible roar echoed up from the depths of the mountain and into the cavern, along with a foul, fetid stench of rotting meat.

  Carise collapsed into the fetal position on the dusty ground, one hand around her bleeding wound, the other covering her eyes as she sobbed with the pain.

  Marcel knelt by her and gently pried her hand away to look at the wound.

  “It’s just a flesh wound, you’re going to be fine,” he said, shrugging off his backpack. “We’ll get you fixed right up. You just hold on for a second, okay? Cari…just breathe. Be calm.”

  Marcel took the first-aid box from his backpack, spilling the contents on the floor.

  “I’m going to disinfect the wound and bandage it, okay? It might hurt a bit.”

  “It already hurts like hell, just do it.” Carise shut her eyes and clenched her teeth, holding back a scream as Marcel sprayed the wound with a disinfectant and painkilling spray. The whole of her ankle and shin became numb as he wound the bandage tightly around the cuts.

  “We need to get you into a change of clothes and warm you up. Let’s get you to the fire.”

  She took a glance at the damage and winced at the sight of the blood on the ground.

  “I…saw them,” she said after a while of shuffling in silence. “Three of them, down in the bottom of the lake; their skin had been removed and sections of their body had no flesh, it’s as if they were nothing more than food. But worse, I saw the thing…in my mind.”

  10

  Marcel helped Carise out of her wet clothes. He took the spare set he kept in his pack and helped her dry in front of the fire. She never looked as vulnerable as she did there. Even more so than in the hospital after the terrible news about their baby.

  She shivered and trembled as he dressed her, and she made no attempt at hiding her modesty. She was almost as catatonic as the kid he had… The thought stuck in his mind. He didn’t want to admit it, but it was true. He killed the kid. The only thing he could do was radio Smith and get them all back to the station. At least the kid’s family could have the body back for a proper burial—unlike those poor bastards in the lake.

  Almost as if she were in his mind, Carise said, “We’ll have to come back for them. The kids in the lake, I mean. We can’t just leave them there to rot.”

  He knew she was right, but he wanted to come back for another reason: the thing under the mountain.

  Janis’s cousin Derry ran a small mining operation nearby. He doubted the creature would stand up to high explosives. And enough people had died at its will already.

  “Time to get you back to the station and have you checked out,” Marcel said, taking the radio from his chest pocket. “Smith, this is Marcel. Are you there? Over.”

  “I’m here, Marc. You ready to go?”

  “Yeah, quick as you can. Carise is hurt and we have…a passenger.”

  “Firing up the engines now, come on up.”

  * * *

  Marcel strapped Carise in; she still seemed distant as she stared at the body of the boy they identified as Michael Fillion, a grad student and member of the climbing forum. They also took the rest of the backpacks and managed to identify each one of the students.

  At the very least, once they had figured out what was going on, they could alert the authorities and let the parents know.

  Sitting back against the bulkhead of the helicopter, Marcel closed his eyes and tried to make sense of it all. Which of course he couldn’t. It was like his brain was too slow or too numb to piece together the information and the experience. Breaking his thoughts, Carise spoke.

  “I think I understand,” she said. “After the attack, the symbols didn’t seem so alien anymore…so strange. It’s a language. And the multipointed star shapes within those symbols are actually stars. All that in the chamber: it’s a star chart…constellations.

  “Whatever’s living in that mountain came from the stars—millions of years ago, perhaps hundreds of millions. And those five stones by the lake? I think they’re sacrifice stones. With their dished surface and carved channels, I think they’re used to feed it blood. That pool…it’s a feeding tank. That’s why those kids were in the bottom in that state.”

  “But how did they get—” And then Marcel realized. Given the drag marks and the disturbance in the dusty floor, it was probably Michael. “But how would those images and symbols turn an ordinary kid, or kids if you’re considering the girl, too, into deranged murderers?”

  “It’s a madness. I feel a little bit of it in me too.”

  Marcel’s spirit sank even further. Her deadpan tone full of sincerity and seriousness. Perhaps it was the cut, or the overexposure to the symbols, first back at the station, and now at the cave. But then hadn’t he also looked upon that ancient script? Was he too harboring a madness?

  “It has to die,” Carise said. “Before it rises.�
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  Her eyes were glassy and staring. They twitched back and forth like rapid, waking REM.

  “I think I know a way,” Marcel said, wondering if she would end up like Michael, the girl, and the others. Wondered if he would have to… No, he wouldn’t go there.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  Frank and Marge rushed to the chopper the second it landed and helped Marcel and Carise out of the cabin. Frank and Marcel unlashed and carried Michael’s body into the station.

  “Dear lord, you okay, darlin’?” Marge said as she put a foil blanket around Carise and helped her into the station.

  “I’ve been better, Marge, but it’s not so bad…just a cut is all.” She realized then that the pain had almost completely gone and she could walk without much bother. The wound however had gone from freezing cold to a burning heat. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but when she inspected the wound once inside the station, the smell made her gag. The flesh around the cut had shriveled and blackened like a dying fungus.

  Frank and Marcel placed Michael’s body in the second examination room. Marge fetched a cup of coffee. Still the same rank stuff as before, but Carise was is no mood to turn it away. Despite the heat of the ankle wound, everything inside her felt cold.

  “Smith called in and said you and Marc were attacked on the mountain,” Marge said as she sat next to her on those uncomfortable reception chairs.

  “Something like that,” Carise said. She could tell Smith hadn’t told her the full story. She didn’t blame him. No one would believe it and it’d only lead to all-out panic.

  “Did you find that girl’s missing boyfriend?”

  “No, not really, it’s… I can’t explain it, Marge. This situation is messed up. But we’re going back up there shortly. We found the cave at least…but unfortunately Michael was already dead when we got there.”