Carnival of Stone: A Novella (The Soren Chase Series)

by Rob Blackwell

  It would have been the most impressive sculpture he’d ever seen if it had been made by human hands. The detail on the baby and the mother were incredible. He could even tell that the infant had a cold and his or her nose had been running. Frozen tears streamed down the mother’s face. All around Soren were men, women and children in similar conditions. An entire church of people had been turned to stone.

  Some had obviously come from work. There was a woman in a doctor’s coat with a stone stethoscope around her neck. As a statue, her skin looked as white as the coat she wore. Not far behind her were two men in suits, one of whom looked to be in the act of pulling off his tie.

  The most noticeable was a man in a butcher’s apron, who stood in the church’s center aisle with a large cleaver in his hand. He stared at the entrance with defiance in his eyes, apparently readying himself to attack whatever had come crashing through the front door.

  “Well, at least we know where they all went,” Glen said.

  Emily and Glen walked through the church in a daze, stopping to examine several of the statues. Suddenly, Emily cried out.

  “I knew her!” she said. “She was on the project with us. Her name was Karen. Oh, God. Did it get everybody?”

  Soren walked over, the gun still held tightly in his hand. He looked at the statue of a young woman with short hair and a tank top that left a black mark exposed at the top of her right arm. When he looked closer, he saw it was the tattoo of a snake. What made it odd was the rest of the statue was solid white, the same as the others in the church. But for some reason the tattoo had turned black, allowing Soren to still see it. He wondered if the tattoos on others in the town had done something similar or whether there was something unique about this design. Soren traced the outline of it with the tip of his finger.

  “What are you doing?” Emily asked.

  “The tattoo,” he said. “Have you seen it before?”

  Soren focused his gaze on Emily and she seemed to shrink underneath it. His instincts said she was hiding something; he just wasn’t sure how serious it was.

  “Yes,” she said after a moment. “A lot of us got them right before coming out here. Even the professor. Jay did too.”

  “Show me yours,” Soren said.

  Emily blushed bright scarlet.

  “I couldn’t go through with it,” she said. “I hate needles. And honestly? I hate snakes too.”

  “Why a snake?” Glen asked. “What’s that have to do with lost art?”

  “It was just some silly...” Emily said, and drifted off.

  Soren half-smiled at her. He’d seen this reaction time and again when someone encountered the supernatural. It all seemed ridiculous, until it wasn’t.

  “Start from the beginning,” he said. “I need to know more about the project.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “We need—”

  Soren put a hand on her arm.

  “It might make all the difference in the world,” Soren said. “I need to know what I’m facing and this could help.”

  Emily looked around them at the sea of stone faces. Slowly, she nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “You remember the earthquake a few years ago?”

  “Yes, though I don’t remember it being that serious,” Soren said. “It knocked over a few chairs in Loudoun; that was it.”

  “But it was actually a pretty big one that originated near Charlottesville,” Emily said. “It had a sizable impact, particularly underground. It uncovered the entrance to a mine near here and somehow our professor found out about it. The mine was right near something that used to be called the Carnival of Stone. It’s—”

  “We know what it is,” Glen said.

  “You do?” Emily asked. “Not many people have heard of it.”

  “When we got Jay’s message, we did some research,” Glen said.

  “Both Professor Peterson and Jay were obsessed by the Carnival. We’re part of a small archaeological program at UVA. There’s about 20 of us. The professor started talking about it as a field project. He dug up all these records of the original art exposition near here. He was convinced that some statues had survived the landslide that buried the Carnival of Stone.”

  “A landslide should have crushed everything, even a bunch of statues,” Soren replied.

  “He thought Jackson Cleary, the artist behind it, put some of his most prized statues away from main exposition,” she replied. “He found evidence that he was storing work inside a mine.”

  “How many mines are around here?” Glen asked.

  “Quite a lot,” Emily said. “They were pretty common a long time ago. A lot of the Virginia ones were exhausted by the 1930s and abandoned. We had to work to figure out which mine Cleary might have been using. Professor Peterson came to believe it was Hilltop Mine #3, which used to mine iron and copper. He found a letter from Cleary suggesting he’d put something ‘precious’ in the mine. The professor was convinced it was some of the original statues, maybe even some of his best work.”

  Soren looked over at Glen, thinking about what other “precious” item could have been hidden in the mine.

  “Still not sure what this has to do with a snake tattoo,” Glen said.

  Emily shook her head.

  “I told you, it was nothing,” she said. “In Cleary’s files, Professor Peterson came across a doodle the artist had done. It was of a hideous reptile-like woman with snakes in her hair, like Medusa.”

  “They’re called gorgons,” Soren said.

  “Anyway, Jay mocked the drawing, laughing that Cleary used one to make all the statues,” Emily said, smiling weakly. “I mean, here was an amazing sculptor and he’d drawn this ridiculous thing. We thought it was funny. And one night at the bar, someone suggested we get a tattoo of a big snake and it just caught on. It was just a big joke, but... is that what attacked us? Could it be real?”

  There was a look in Emily’s eyes that suggested she knew what Soren was going to answer.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “It’s real.”

  Emily looked back at the statue of Karen.

  “I liked her,” she said. “She sang in the a capella group. Why did this happen to us?”

  “Emily, I need you to tell me something, and I really need you to think about it,” Soren said. “Did everyone in your group think the gorgon was a joke? Was there anyone who took it seriously?”

  “Well, the professor...” Emily said and stopped. “I mean, he didn’t laugh about it, but I don’t think he took it seriously, exactly. I did notice some books on Greek myths in his office. I don’t think they’d been there before. And he got the tattoo, which kinda surprised me.”

  “What are you suggesting, Soren?” Glen asked. “That the professor knew what was up here?”

  Soren didn’t answer, but cast his eyes around the church, looking at the various people-turned-statues. It was certainly possible the UVA group had discovered the gorgon by mistake. That would be the logical conclusion, considering how the creature had decimated the group and the town. But something gnawed at him.

  “I don’t know,” Soren replied. “I’m not suggesting anything yet. Just keeping my mind open to other possibilities. You say you last saw Professor Peterson going into the mine? How long was it between that and the attack?”

  “Not sure,” Emily said. “Maybe an hour.”

  Soren didn’t like it. It all came back to Cleary. Soren had managed to do a little research on the artist before they’d left. Cleary was famous during his time, but now he was obscure at best. His moment in the sun had been fleeting and there were few who remembered him. Why would the professor go to all the trouble to dig up statues from an artist nobody knew and that probably weren’t worth much? Soren recognized intellectually that art had its own value but it seemed like a lot of effort for potentially little gain.

  Unless the art wasn’t the real reason the group was up here.

  Soren opened his mouth to ask another question when he heard a soft kn
ocking sound from the front of the church.

  All three of them turned to look, but only Soren started walking in that direction. The knocking stopped as quickly as it started but by then, Soren could hear something else—a hissing sound.

  Behind the altar were two doors on either side, presumably to let the choir in and out. Both were shut, but there was a soft hissing sound coming from the one on the left.

  Soren held the gun out and neared the door. There was a knocking again, with something obviously pushing on it from the other side but not quite opening it.

  Without hesitating, Soren reached over and threw open the door, raising the gun and shielding his eyes at the same time. He fired two rounds straight ahead, but didn’t open his eyes until he felt something slithering across his feet.

  There was no monster there, but instead a half dozen snakes which had burst out of the door and were rapidly moving down the center aisle.

  They were headed directly for Glen and Emily. Soren aimed his gun, and shot three of them in quick succession. They stopped moving immediately. But the other three were too close to Glen and Emily for Soren to have a clean shot.

  He watched as Glen tried stomping on one; it reared back and hissed. Soren sprinted up the aisle, and grabbed one by the tail. It whipped its head around and tried to strike him. The snake was the color of dead leaves with markings on its side in the shape of Hershey’s kisses. Soren recognized the species. It was a copperhead, one of Virginia’s few venomous snakes.

  He flung the thing in the air and aimed a shot at it. Soren didn’t consider himself a crack shot, but he got lucky. The bullet caught the copperhead in mid-air, and it fell to the ground.

  The other two snakes, meanwhile, slithered by Emily and Glen and went directly out the door. Glen looked stunned and Emily looked dismayed.

  “They bite you?” he asked.

  Both shook their heads. Soren dug a cartridge out of his jacket and reloaded his gun. He looked back at the front of the church. He wasn’t sure how the snakes had been trapped behind the door, but he worried there could be more somewhere in the building. He looked up at the rafters and wondered if any were lurking above them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said and strode back to the entrance of the church.

  “Where are we going?” Glen asked.

  Soren opened his mouth to respond but stopped dead in his tracks. He paused by the statue of the butcher and eyed him carefully. When he’d passed him earlier, he was sure the man had been staring at the entrance. But now his eyes were tilted to his right. He was looking directly at Soren.

  He stepped back for a moment and waved a hand in front of the statue’s face. Nothing happened. But he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The man was definitely staring in his direction now.

  “What?” Emily asked, causing Soren to jump.

  He’d been concentrating so much on the statue that he hadn’t heard her come up behind him. He didn’t want to tell her his theory yet. It was too soon to know if he was right.

  “Nothing,” he said, and moved on.

  It was probably his imagination, but he thought he felt the statue of the butcher watching him as he walked out of the church.

  “Mind telling us where we’re headed?” Glen asked when they emerged outside.

  Soren looked down the street, which was as still as a graveyard. There was no sign of the snakes but he watched a piece of litter get blown down the street and thought it might as well have been a tumbleweed. This was a ghost town.

  “The same place the snakes went, I imagine. To the only place that has any more answers,” Soren replied. “We’re going to the mine.”

  Chapter Nine

  They heard the hissing about a half mile from the mine.

  Soren couldn’t identify the sound at first. It was like a low rumbling and then the distant hum of thousands of buzzing bees. As they got closer, the sound became louder and more distinct.

  “It’s that thing,” Emily said in a whisper. “It’s back inside the mine. I told you it controls the snakes.”

  Soren held the gun in his hand and gestured to Glen.

  “You’ve got the mirror?” he asked.

  Glen held up one of the mirrors he’d brought from the car. Soren had his own version in his back pocket.

  “What am I supposed to do with it?” he asked.

  “If you see something coming at you, look away and hold it up,” Soren said. “And pray it isn’t as smart as I think it is.”

  “Oh, that’s encouraging,” Glen said. “You’re quite the strategist, you know that? ‘Here, take this and try not to die.’”

  “We should turn back,” Emily said. “It will turn us to stone. Or worse.”

  Soren waited for Glen to try and define “worse” again, but apparently he’d taken the earlier conversation to heart.

  “Why don’t we leave, Soren?” Glen asked. “My uncle doesn’t want us to die out here.”

  “We’re not leaving,” Soren said. “We have a job and I aim to finish it. You want to leave, you’re more than welcome to. That goes for both of you.”

  Neither made a move to depart. Glen looked scared but determined, while Emily just looked scared.

  The mine was at the end of a dirt road that began near the church in Hilltop. Walking down the road, Soren doubted it had been used much in the past few decades. From Emily’s account, the mine had been mostly forgotten. But “mostly” was the operative word. Someone had remembered it.

  The hissing grew louder as they approached. It eventually became hard to hear anything else. Both Glen and Emily looked terrified and though Soren was beginning to feel the same way, he tried not to show it. He straightened his sunglasses and kept walking.

  As they approached the mine, they could see the students’ camp. There were eight tents set up in a small patch of woods, with one noticeably bigger than the rest. Soren presumed that one belonged to the professor.

  For right now, he ignored the tents and kept walking down the road, anxious to get to the mine. After he crested a small hill, he finally saw it come into view. He thought there was some trick of the light, however, when he finally looked at it.

  The mine entrance was at the bottom of a steep hillside that jutted up toward the sky. It was little more than a big hole in the ground. There were newish-looking wooden beams in the entranceway, apparently holding it open so the students could enter. The afternoon sun was just behind the mine, shining directly into Soren’s face. It cast strange misshapen shadows on the mine entrance.

  At least that’s what Soren thought at first. Weirdly, the shadows around the mine entrance seemed to be moving, twitching as if they were living things. When Soren finally processed what he was really seeing, his mouth hung open.

  The shadows weren’t moving, but the things inside of the mine were. The entrance was covered in snakes.

  They were slithering over each other in a mass of tangled serpents. They crawled all over the rock face near the mine. They were on the ground near the entrance, and crawling around the wooden rafter beams that held it up. Soren thought that if he shone a flashlight inside the mine, the tunnel would be covered in snakes as well.

  “Oh,” Glen said. “This is so not good.”

  But Soren could barely hear him. The hissing noise originating here was so loud it drowned out everything else. It felt like it was echoing inside Soren’s skull.

  “Was it like this before?” Soren shouted to Emily.

  She shook her head and Soren turned back to look at the snakes. There were all different species there, only a few of which Soren knew by name. There was the common black garter snake, and several with dark bodies and an orange ring around their necks. Soren also spotted more copperheads.

  “Why are all the snakes by the mine?” Glen yelled.

  He didn’t know for sure, but Emily had mentioned that the creature that attacked the town apparently controlled the snakes. Which at least left him with a good idea where the monster was.r />
  “Because the gorgon is probably inside it,” Soren said.

  “What do we do?” Glen yelled.

  We give up and go home, Soren wanted to say. Looking at the thick knot of snakes before him, he realized he was in over his head. He was loath to admit defeat, but whatever creature could do this was something he was unlikely to survive, much less destroy.

  And yet this is what he always did. He threw himself into these situations, blindly getting into a jam and then crawling out of it. If he’d ever seen a shrink, he was sure they would have called it a death wish. And maybe it was. Maybe he was still so traumatized by what had happened seven years ago—what had kicked off his insane obsession with the supernatural—that he was trying to push the line so far that it killed him.

  Or maybe he just liked living on the edge, counting on the thrill of inspiration when his back was against the wall. The snakes were terrifying, but also exciting. He was facing something new, something awful. And he loved it.

  Soren pointed over to the tents. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find there, but he wanted to get away from the noise and the sight of all those snakes.

  Soren walked to the large tent and ducked inside it without waiting to see if Glen and Emily were following him. He nearly shouted when he came face to face with two people. But like the others in the town, these were both statues. It was a man and a woman, both roughly the same age as Emily and Glen. Both were standing facing the entrance to the tent, as if they’d just been interrupted by whatever came through it. Their expressions were frozen in horror and alarm.

  Glen shoved into him as he entered, followed immediately by Emily. Soren bumped into one of the statues, which fell over with a resounding thud. The statue didn’t break or appear damaged in any way.

  “Don’t get up on our account,” Glen said, and laughed.

  Soren thought he sounded half-crazy and gave Glen a searching look. He had no idea how his new partner was going to react under this kind of pressure. After a moment, Glen regained his composure.