They had walked for only a couple minutes before they heard the sobbing from somewhere on their left.
Ben paused and Jessie drew up beside him. “That sound like Professor Grant to you?” he asked.
She nodded. “Let me go first.”
Ben didn’t argue. That was good, but it also put her back in the lead. Exposed. The first line of defense against Gabriel. Against the beast.
Ever since she’d first heard Gabriel’s name uttered, she’d been trying to imagine what the beast might look like, but thus far she could only form vague intimations of its cruel features. The curling horns, the furry haunches. But the prospect of actually confronting it now sent cold shivers down her spine, made her every bit as fearful as the night her family had been slain.
Only this time you won’t be able to hide.
She clamped down on the thought. She’d already laid those demons to rest, dammit. Troy Castillo was dead. And when—not if, she reminded herself—she returned to California and after all this mess had been sorted out, she would find David Rasmussen and John Farrell and make sure they were charged with the crimes they’d committed thirteen years ago. The cases would be cold no longer. And even if something happened to her, she’d told Ben about Castillo’s terrible confession earlier.
It’s a good thing you told someone, because you’ll never make it back to California.
I will, she thought. I will make it back.
Professor Grant’s voice grew clearer. He was muttering to himself, pleading for someone to help him.
Jessie stopped. “Hold this a second,” she said to Elena, who was just behind Ben. Jessie handed her the flashlight. Then, switching the gun to her left hand, Jessie wiped her shooting hand on the hip of her shorts.
But it did little good. When she returned the gun to her shooting hand, her palm was almost as slick and muddy as it had been, and what was more, she’d been given a fresh reminder of just how scared the others were.
Elena had been holding Ben’s flashlight, and when she’d also taken Jessie’s for a moment, the medium’s hand had quivered like a frantic moth. Behind her, Christina Blackwood’s face was morose with terror, the heiress pale and moon-eyed and regarding Jessie with an unseeing stare reminiscent of a soldier with post-traumatic stress syndrome. But the real battle hadn’t even begun. They’d killed Marvin and his men, but their new foe was incalculably more dangerous. If what the others said was true…if the thing really was some sort of mythological beast…
“Jessie,” Ben said.
She glanced sharply at him, then realized she’d been stalling. Not consciously, of course, but somewhere deep in her psyche, the terror had cored down into her and was switching off the instincts that had thus far kept her alive.
“Sorry,” she muttered and set off again. This time, despite the chills plaiting down her spine in continual waves, she made sure she was doing it all correctly. Her weapon was ready, the flashlight’s beam keeping what lay ahead steadily illuminated. If the beast did attack, it wouldn’t catch her unawares.
A preternatural silence permeated the tunnel. Jessie’s heart stuttered in her chest, but she stayed focused, reminding herself to breathe, to see everything, to use every bit of sensory input she could to make decisions.
They were coming to another archway, and as they did Professor Grant’s voice came into sharper clarity: “Who is that? Oh please don’t hurt me anymore. Please. I’ve told you all I know. Now please leave me alone!”
Jessie hurried forward and entered a large, circular chamber with multiple archways and a ceiling she estimated was twelve feet high. In the center of the room lay Professor Grant, his arms and legs shackled to the dirt floor.
“Oh please help me,” he gibbered. His eyes were blinking and terror-stricken. “Please get me out of these chains.”
They knelt on either side of the professor, except for Ben, who was cradling his baby. Elena held one of the flashlights, and she was aiming it at one of Professor Grant’s wrists. Jessie could see how the manacle had caused his wrist to bleed. Jessie shined her light on his other wrist and found similar damage. Yet it didn’t look to Jessie like Grant had been physically tortured. At least no place where the damage was apparent.
The thought made her squirm.
As if reading her thoughts, Christina said, “Has the…thing been hurting you?”
Professor Grant gulped, nodded his head.
Christina surveyed the professor, a pained expression on her muddy face. “But what—”
“My mind,” he said, his voice hoarse. “He’s in my mind!” He shot a glance at Jessie. “I told you he was a god. I told you Robert Blackwood had meddled with forces far beyond imagining.”
Christina took his hand. “Peter, please don’t—”
“All my research has been duplicated,” Professor Grant hurried on. “If I don’t make it, find Mark Brown at Stanford. He’s my lead assistant. He’ll know what—”
“Enough,” Ben said. “How do we get you out of here?”
Grant glanced at his bonds. “I don’t know, can’t you…can’t you shoot the chains?”
Ben shook his head. “That’ll bring the beast.”
“What if he’s here already?” Christina said.
“I’ll shoot the chains,” Jessie said. “Ben, get everybody out of the way. I—”
A low growl reverberated through the chamber.
Grant’s eyes widened, his wet lips open and trembling.
Jessie glanced at Elena, but she was already doing a slow scan of the chamber, her flashlight probing each of the myriad archways. Jessie knew she should use her light to aid the search, but she had risen at Ben’s side and, like him, she was leveling the gun at wherever Elena’s light shone. Every time the beam shifted to the next archway, she expected the towering horned figure to be grinning back at them, but so far—
The beam splashed over a large, huddled shape.
“What is that?” Christina asked in a tight voice.
“Dunno,” Ben muttered. “I’ll check it out.”
“The hell you will,” Jessie said, edging past him. “You keep Julia safe. I’ll go.”
Ben started to protest, but Jessie hardly heard him. The archway was on the other side of the chamber and directly opposite from where they’d entered.
“That’s the way he brought me in,” Professor Grant said in a hushed voice. “See the breath mint?”
Jessie motioned for him to be quiet, but she needn’t have worried. The eerie silence had again taken hold of the chamber. Just inside the archway the tunnel turned, and it was near this veering that the huddled shape lay.
Jessie heard a cracking sound, froze and shined her light on the floor where she had just stepped. There, broken into three pieces, was what looked like a white-and-green breath mint.
She shook her head and returned her attention to the shape huddled before her. Jessie kept her index finger firmly on the trigger. The shape wasn’t moving, but if it did she would blast a hole in it before it could lunge at her. Jessie stepped closer, closer, was nearly to the tunnel entrance now. This close to it, no more than fifteen feet away, she could tell the shape was humanoid. She spotted hints of flesh. She moved under the archway. Keeping her light trained on the shape, which she could now see was dark-skinned but not all that hairy, Jessie inched closer. She held her breath, her finger trembling on the trigger. She distinguished dark hair…what looked like a shoulder…
Then all at once she knew who this was.
This was Chad Wayne.
Was he, after all, alive? Wayne wasn’t moving, but his muscular shoulders and his burly weightlifter’s neck did not seem damaged. She reached down, tugged on his shoulder. Wayne slumped sideways, his face swinging toward her. Jessie gagged, took an involuntary step backward. Where his face had been there was now a lurid red nest of blood and chewed flesh. Th
e meaty ruin was acrawl with tiny black spiders.
Behind her there came a wild, trilling scream. Jessie spun around, the flashlight beam strobing over Professor Grant, Ben Shadeland, Elena. When Jessie finally got control of herself she aimed it at the place where all three of them were staring. Something—holy God, it looked like a corpse that had been decomposing for many years—had Christina Blackwood pinned to the chamber floor. The thing was leering down at her, its black, wormy sockets somehow triumphant.
“I’m sorry, Rosa!” Christina was shrieking. “I never meant to hurt you.”
Jessie took aim, fired. Even from this distance she caught the corpse in the side of the face. The thing’s right cheek opened up and began vomiting some kind of black, syrupy discharge.
“Leave her alone!” Elena shouted at the thing.
Ben had his gun up but did not fire, perhaps because he had an infant against his chest. Jessie fired again, but though this shot nailed the corpse woman in the throat, the thing’s leer stretched wider, revealing long, tapered teeth. Something resembling a giant black leech plopped out of the corpse’s mouth and landed on Christina Blackwood’s chest.
Jessie shot the corpse a third time, but it did no good. It lowered its face toward Christina’s. Christina bucked to escape it, but her hands were pinioned hopelessly to her sides, the corpse’s grip unbreakable.
As they all looked on, horrified, the corpse woman bit down on Christina’s face. Christina’s shrieks degenerated into a horrible, caterwauling moan. Elena was screaming, but Ben was staring straight ahead. Not at Christina’s thrashing body, Jessie realized, but at something beyond it. Something above it.
Jessie followed Ben’s gaze and saw the beast emerging from the darkness.
Ben took a step backward. The beast’s eyes were fastened not on his, but on what Ben held against his chest.
On Julia.
The beast moved past Christina and the little, zombie-like woman who was feasting on her. The beast’s massive body trembled with boundless rage and virility.
Elena moved against Ben, and together they retreated toward the archway under which Jessie stood. The beast neared where Professor Grant wriggled in his bonds.
“Please don’t let this go on,” Grant begged the beast. “Please release me.”
Without looking down at the professor, the beast raised one massive cloven foot and stomped on his face. Peter Grant’s limbs went ramrod straight, then sank slowly to the ground. There were no death spasms, no twitches of feet and hands. Only a revolting soupy mess that had once been the professor’s head. To Ben it looked like a red pumpkin someone had smashed.
The creature’s face became a hateful rictus as its gaze fixed on Ben. The pupilless white eyes darted to Julia.
The beast uttered one word: “Mine.”
Ben raised the gun. Dammit, he didn’t want to fire it, not this close to his infant daughter’s ears. No matter how securely he tucked her head into the crook of his arm she would still be terrified by the blast, her hearing permanently damaged.
But Jessie shot the beast first.
The slug caught the beast between the horns and tore a patch of bloody scalp from its head. The beast hardly reacted. Ben continued to backpedal, and against his side he felt Elena tense.
“Ben…look.”
He scowled down at her. She was staring at something to their left. Ben followed Elena’s gaze and at once understood why she’d called it to his attention.
There were figures in the archways. In every archway. As Elena swished the light from arch to arch, Ben took in their zombie-like gazes. Some were familiar to him—Stephen Blackwood, Ryan Brady, even Teddy Brooks. Some he’d never seen. There was a woman who looked homeless and damn near skeletal. There were many ghosts, zombies, whatever the hell they were, clad in the garb of long ago, cravats and opulent jewels and three-piece suits and evening gowns. Out of an archway straight ahead of them came Lee Stanley, accompanied by an immense black dog. To their immediate right stepped Nicky Irvin. From the archway beside that one emerged Ray Rubio, the gangster so disfigured he was scarcely recognizable.
And from the one next to that appeared Eddie Blaze.
“Hey, old buddy,” Eddie croaked.
Eddie was attended by a tall blonde woman who was badly burned in several places. Eddie carried a baby, which was drowsily gnawing on the innards that spilled from Eddie’s mutilated abdomen. “Decided you wanna join us here? You and your half-breed daughter?”
Ben wanted to tell Eddie to go to hell, but he realized at once that Eddie was already there. And what was more, Ben didn’t think he could speak if he wanted to. It was all he could do not to faint from the mind-numbing terror that had enveloped him.
He and Elena had reached the placed where Jessie stood in the archway. As if they were connected via the same mental wavelength, all three turned to flee down the tunnel.
But Chad Wayne’s corpse was blocking their way, its enormous, spider-bitten arms stretching toward them.
Jessie raised her gun, but Ben shoved her arm aside, and careful to keep a secure hold on Julia, stepped sideways and aimed a ferocious kick at the corpse’s chest. He nailed the Wayne-thing in the sternum, and the corpse went staggering backward. Without pause they darted past it, and just when Ben was sure they were in the clear, Elena screamed. He tightened, glanced back and saw the Wayne-thing had hold of her ankle, was reeling her down toward its spider-infested maw. The spiders teemed over his arms, began clittering up Elena’s bare ankle. Ben stepped over, raised a big shoe and stomped down on Wayne’s forearm. There came a dull crack as the Wayne-thing’s ulna snapped. Sobbing, Elena stumbled away, and then they were racing into the darkness, Jessie and her flashlight in the lead, Ben pushing Elena ahead of him so she wouldn’t be attacked. He could hear the sounds of the dead things growling and chortling in the chamber, their abhorrent voices drawing inexorably closer.
Ahead of him he could hear Elena’s tortured breathing. Jessie muttered something, and before he knew it he was following the two women through a smaller chamber and then, hardly breaking step, through another archway. Ben discovered with grim humor that Professor Grant had indeed marked the way with a breath mint. On a whim Ben kicked it aside as he passed and hustled ahead, a terror of being left behind in this stygian gloom lending added speed to his steps. In moments he’d caught up to Elena, who was only five or six feet behind Jessie. Perhaps they really could shake the beast and the horde of animate corpses. Perhaps with the late professor’s help they really could find their way out of this labyrinth.
They came to a fork in the tunnel, and after a momentary scan of the ground, Jessie selected the tunnel to their right. They followed that into another chamber, studied the ground again, and almost immediately Elena picked out the tiny white-and-green disc with her beam. “There!” she called, and they all pelted under the archway.
They reached another room, this one nearly as wide as the one in which they’d found Professor Grant; Ben suspected they were getting close to the pit. Jessie found the correct archway, and they dashed through it. Even if the route they’d taken through these subterranean passages had been circuitous, he was certain they must be nearing their destination. Even more heartening was the fact he could no longer hear footfalls behind them. Absent of their own racing footsteps and labored breathing, the tunnel was silent.
And there was something else now, Ben realized, that suggested they were nearing their destination. He could smell the animal hair, the gamey musk that attended the beast and the unwholesome undercurrent of fecal matter it projected. Yes, it was the odor of the pit, only it was far more powerful here. Wherever they were, they were getting closer to—
“Look out!” Jessie shouted.
Elena uttered a frightened shriek. There was a commotion ahead of them, one of the lights going out. Though the remaining flashlight beam was swinging wildly around the
tunnel, Ben caught a glimpse of Jessie’s strained features, a pair of arms twining together. He reached the women and realized Jessie was grasping Elena, preventing her from falling into the hole yawning before them. Ben saw the chasm opened to a long decline before veering right and disappearing. It was from this downward-trending tunnel that the animal odor radiated the most powerfully.
“It’s where he lives, isn’t it?” Jessie muttered.
“I don’t care,” Ben answered. “You okay?” he asked Elena.
She nodded, seemed about to speak, but she froze, her eyes vast and starey.
“What the hell is that?” Jessie asked in a breathless little voice.
Before Ben could answer, he too heard the demonic muttering of the corpses. As Jessie aimed her light behind them, the tunnel wall began to shift, change color. Materializing, Ben understood at once, into a human figure. The solid earth seemed to bend and swirl, as if the wall had become malleable.
Nicky Irvin’s vicious, bleeding face leered at them from the wall. The body began to push through. From farther down the tunnel, they heard the rustle of many footsteps. The corpses were coming.
“Go,” Ben said.
They ran. Before long they came to another fork. They turned left without breaking stride and pounded down the corridor for half a minute before it opened into another chamber. Only this one, Ben realized with a flood of dread, contained no visible archways, no means of continuing their flight.
“We’re trapped,” Elena moaned.
“No we’re not,” Jessie said, painting the chamber walls with her flashlight beam. “We’ll find the way out if we can locate the lever.”
Elena whimpered. “I don’t—”
“Think,” Jessie snapped at her. “This whole place is riddled with secret passageways. We’ve just got to find the trigger.”
Ben moved over to the wall, began patting it, knowing how fruitless and haphazard a method it was but knowing also it was better than doing nothing. Against his body, Julia shifted restlessly, and though he knew it was because he’d awakened her with the constant jostling, he took any motion from her as a positive sign. God, she so badly needed food, water. Needed safety and warmth.
Castle of Sorrows Page 35
