by S. A. Sidor
“Doc, just tell me how to get to the Temple Underneath. I’ll do the rest.”
My laugh boomed in the tunnels. A madhouse bark, even to my own ears. It was an odd reaction, I admit, but I was jangly and on the brink of exhaustion.
“We have discovered the Temple Underneath,” I said. “We are in it. There is no chapel per se. This whole place is their temple, their underground church. The Temple Underneath is a labyrinth.”
“Laby-what?”
“Labyrinth, like the one Daedalus designed to hold the Minotaur.”
McTroy. Grim-lipped. A look of blankness, vaguely threatening.
“Never mind,” I said. “That’s not important. What is important is this. Judging by similarities to the tunnels I observed beneath the train wreck, and knowing that the worm himself is at this very moment squirming nearby, I might conclude that El Gusano dug all these confusing passages, but his contribution is only part of what we’re seeing. The oldest spaces are natural caverns formed millennia ago. Still others were put here for mysterious reasons by whoever built under the monastery in the first place. They are too angular, too constructed, to be geological or worm-made. However, what we have found today, or tonight – for I feel night has fallen by now, though my watch has run down and I have forgotten to wind it – this is a system, adding layers over time to an elaborate maze whose purpose is to confound the uninitiated, to imprison them. Strangers are not supposed to get out of here alive. The church is a giant trap! We could spend hours, days, or… forever fumbling in the dark without any hope of escape. To enter the Temple Underneath is to be instantly, utterly, and hopelessly… lost.”
“We’re neck deep in the sumbitch,” McTroy said. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Quite.”
We both heard the sound.
A rapid thumping of heavy footsteps.
We would have no time. That much was certain.
Something was running toward us from inside one of the tunnels.
31
Dead Folks
I never saw the first attacker coming out of the tunnel, and with good reason. He had disguised himself as a piece of the darkness. But he was capable of movement and wolfishly intent on killing. I would soon learn that along with his pack-mates he had been stalking us ever since the worm snatched Evangeline from the bridge. They watched us and let their excitement build. We passed them and they held their breath, biting their tongues and suppressing their evil giggles of delight, shutting their eyes so the whites wouldn’t reveal their hiding spots. It must’ve brought perverse joy to their blackened little hearts – this ritualized sport of stalking people of various sizes and stripes: Apaches and American businessmen, railroaders, gold miners, mothers with their children in tow, stagecoach passengers, traveling Mexican farmers lost in storms, cowboys, bounty hunters, and even an Egyptologist from the northern shores of Illinois.
Everyone who entered the mysterious monastery unknowingly sealed their doom. Some had their throats sliced in bed. Blood sacrificed. Flesh fed to ghouls. Others were put in the maze. Set loose inside a clockwork labyrinth with its secret doors and ever-shifting maze walls.
The monks liked hunting humans.
We were game.
Our terror fed their bizarre appetites.
McTroy saw him – the first attacker. That’s the important thing.
I don’t know how he did it. His eyesight was a marvel both at long distances and in exceptionally low light conditions like we had in the Temple Underneath. All I saw were shadows bunched on shadows. Rich velvety black – like a fog of India ink enveloping us – I peered blindly into it.
McTroy said, “There’s the bastard.” And he fired one of his Armys.
The report deafened my right ear.
I hurled my body to the left until I hit a wall.
I slid down into a crouch with the torch in one hand and my stick in the other.
My fear and my reaction were equally primal. Man-as-prey has never strayed far from his jungle roots no matter what level of civilization he imagines he has cultivated.
I saw a spear.
Dual prongs, a long-handled shaft made of twisted iron.
The points aimed for my chest.
A second flash. A second roar. The sharp scent of gunpowder. A gray tendril of smoke escaped from McTroy’s pistol.
A startled cry. The points lowering. Dropping.
The spear-fork clanged and fell, scraping along the floor between McTroy and me. A mad monk stumbled out of the gloom and fell through my torchiere. Sparks burst! His face smacked the ground hard between my knees and I heard his nose break. Yet he did not curse in pain. A greater wound became obvious – his head was blasted open. I could’ve stood a candle inside the cavity. Another hole was visible where McTroy’s first bullet exited between the man’s lower ribs.
I flipped the body.
The last bullet had entered his forehead. His eyes were crossed stupidly. But there was no comedy in the moment, only my disgust at the violence and quick death.
“My God,” I said.
“You’d have met Him if my shot pulled wide.”
The body was oddly colored. I had trouble distinguishing it from the surroundings even under my firebrand.
“What’s he got all over him?” I asked.
McTroy pinched at the dead monk’s hair and sniffed. He poked his skin.
“That’s tar gunk in his hair. His face has got charcoal smears, and it looks like he rubbed himself down in mud. All he’s wearing is this black loincloth. And them burlap bags on his feet quieted his steps and mussed any tracks. I’d say he was night-hunting.”
McTroy lifted the spear-fork. He touched one of the prongs and a bead of blood swelled up. He sucked his thumb. “Kept this sucker sharp as a rattler’s tooth.”
“Why did he charge at us, I wonder?”
“What do you mean, Doc?”
“It was not to his advantage.” I indicated the monk’s camouflage. “Concealment was clearly his strategy. With that long fork he might’ve skewered us from far enough away. We would’ve had no idea where to direct a counterattack. Why didn’t he simply knock the torch down and spear us at his leisure?”
McTroy thought about my question.
In the distance, we heard scuffling. Metal striking rock? Bodies in contact.
Something like pig grunts. Insistent. Hungry. Uncaring about the noise it made.
A shout of surprise. “No! Ayúdame!”
Then a regular tattoo of running feet. A scream pierced the dark. Cut off abruptly.
More footsteps. Another scream. Different.
This one sounded far away, or was it the echoes adding distortion, making it sound so? No, definitely farther off. I had time for analysis because the scream diminished like a wave flowing up a beach, thinner and thinner, until it was barely a hiss as the screamer ran out of air.
Silence. My heartbeat. McTroy’s steady inhale and exhale at my side.
A third scream went up like a fast, wet rip, and very close by.
Coming from inside the second tunnel.
Clearly, footfalls… pounding out an increasing tempo – someone in a mad dash headed right for us. A person was moving in our direction with speed.
McTroy backed up.
“Maybe he wasn’t charging,” he said. “Maybe that boy was running for his life.”
Another monk. This one was portly, built deep through the chest and swinging two arms a blacksmith would be proud of. He also had exchanged his natural light skin color for the night’s cloak. In his right fist he gripped a butcher’s cleaver. Strangely, he had a long-stemmed pipe he seemed to have forgotten in his left hand. His stout legs pumped. Sweat slashed runnels through his muddy layer of concealment, exposing flesh like raw dough. He brandished his cleaver at us to clear a path. As he passed, I tripped him with my stick. He flopped and immediately attempted to crawl away on his knees. The pipe crumbled. He chopped his cleaver at nothing at all in front of him – but
wait – after the last futile chop he regained his legs to continue his race, and a figure hopped out of the tunnel and secured itself to his buffalo-sized back.
A slender thing in loose garments rode the monk to the ground. The back rider reared its head and bit down on the fat monk’s throat. Red spurted through a screen of snow-white hair.
I stood to one side, aghast.
McTroy held his fire, saving bullets.
Or was he as stunned as I?
Like a blood well, the dying man was pumped dry.
Ga-lump, ga-lump, pshhhhhh.
This proved to take less time than I expected. Soon his limp head drooped, sagged dollishly forward as if his bones had suddenly melted. And the creature on his back maneuvered around him, pushing and pawing. An overzealous lover, he drank until drinking turned to suckling and suckling to licking and finally, lip-smacking. And after, he threw the man aside.
McTroy fired one shot into the back of the parasite.
To little effect, I noted.
He did not fire another round because a second parasite, shorter, sprightlier – a female, judging from her contours – emerged from the tunnel, bounding and conveying yet a third mud-smeared monk wearing a scrap over his staff of life. This unfortunate had lost his weapon along the journey and most of the meat around his collar to boot.
The two vampires ignored us as they drained their kills.
It offered an opportunity for closer observation.
Inhuman faces, or formerly human. Noses shortened and upturned, their flared nostrils constantly twitching. Not very like a bat, but much, much worse. Skin the color of vegetables left to rot weeks in the garden. Smells of coal dust and damp decay. Their indigo-dyed shirts and trousers were covered in soot and hung unfilled on their bony frames. Starving, I thought. I recalled that Wu said his parents hid at the bottom of the coal car. The other smell reminded me of poking under logs in the forest. Wild hair ensnarled. Eyes insensate, bleached as stone. So they are utterly blind. Mouths and chins dripping bloody bits. Jaws expanded to display the unspeakable teeth. Lips working, chalky tongues darted. Sniff, sniff. Tasting the air. They put their hands up (long, filthy, gummy maroon fingernails). They reached out for me.
Grasping, clutching my bare arm. I had felt this hand before. When it had saved me from El Gusano’s scorpion trap in the desert. I wondered if old times mattered now.
Cold.
The male’s hands were strong.
I froze in place.
“My lead don’t faze them one bit,” McTroy said. But he fired two times.
Vampires – like necrófagos, and come to think of it, mummies – do not bleed.
Fingers still dancing in the air. The female. She wanted to touch my neck.
Slowly, I raised my walking stick.
From inside the second tunnel a stream of Cantonese orders shouted out.
The icy grip unclamped. His thin arms retracted. The dancing fingers quieted, lowered to her sides. Both male and female dropped their heads in shame and huddled together. Sadness emanated from them, stronger than the smells of compost and stale train smoke. But no tears spilled. Quietness settled. Trembling shook their loose rags.
Yong Wu stepped out of the tunnel to stand by his parents.
He put himself between us and them; whom he was protecting I could not tell.
He looked past us into the passageway.
“Where is the lady?” he asked. “Have you found Miss Evangeline?”
“No,” I said. How did he know she was missing? Was their bond so strong he could simply sense her absence? I experienced again the acute physical ache of losing her, and the accompanying shame of not preventing it from happening.
McTroy slipped his weapons out of sight. “You made it through the sandstorm.”
“Jiangshi can smell… people… even in a sandstorm. We scared the horses outside the well. But I knew you had been there and we followed you to help.”
I bowed to them. I felt foolish. They could not see me. Wu bowed back to me, pleased that I had tried to acknowledge them even in this small way.
“You are alive! I’m very pleased to see you, Wu. We worried you were lost in the storm.”
“My mother found me,” he said.
“Are your parents… and I mean no insult by my question… are they capable of understanding what I’m saying?”
“No, they do not speak to or hear anyone who is not family. They cannot see either. But they follow with their noses. They helped me find you in the dark. There were others. Men with the hair on the top of their heads shaved. They were hiding. Even when the worm came, we were there. I wanted to talk to you… to warn you… but the men frightened me. Do you know the walls and floors move in this most unusual place?”
“We figured that out not long ago.”
“They wanted to play a game with you, I think, but you would not like this game. These men scared me. They were moon men.”
“Moon men?” McTroy asked.
“I think he means lunatics.”
Yong Wu nodded. “Yes, lunatics. Like mad dogs who stare and snap, their mouths hanging open, leaking thick strings of bubbles.” Yong Wu showed us what they looked like by using his own face as an example. Most disconcerting, we agreed.
“I think they might’ve been drugged,” I said. “Visions enhanced their ritual.”
“Goddamned Satan monks. Hang ’em all. Let the crows peck at their parts.”
Wu’s parents had fallen into a state similar to sleep. Their trembling had subsided and their unnerving blank eyes were shut. They leaned heavily into one another. I noticed, with a start, that they did not breathe. I think their calmness came from Wu. Telepathically is my best guess in retrospect. Quite a boy he was, even then. Wu pointed with his chin, a habit he borrowed from McTroy, though I am not sure either one was conscious of it. “These ‘goddamned Satan monks,’ as you say, were watching you. We were watching them! I told my father and my mother that they could take their blood. It would not be a bad thing.”
Wu seemed less sanguine about it now with bodies stacked at our feet.
McTroy patted him on the back. “We thank you kindly for that, Wu. At least them shit devils were good for something. Hope your folks took a long drink.”
“They did. But the thirst is always there.”
“I reckon it is.”
I remembered the whisky bottles in saddlebags and McTroy’s desire to seek out the wine casks. I believe he and Wu were talking about the same sort of thing.
A brilliant idea lit up my mind (if I may be immodest).
“Wu, how did you know we were looking for Evangeline?”
“As I said, we were there at the bridge when the worm–”
“You saw the Ka door? The one with the hieroglyphs painted on it that I broke apart?”
“Sir, I did.”
“Do you think your father and mother can lead us back to the door?”
“Oh, yes. That would be no problem.”
“Excellent. Can your parents tell you if they smell Evangeline’s perfume, and if so where she is? And if she is still alive?”
I saw the twinkle in Wu’s eyes brightened by the brimming of tears.
“Oh, yes, sir, they can!”
McTroy caught hold of the same idea that had turned my mood. “Hey!” He clapped both our shoulders and shook us. “His dead folks might help us out.”
“Help you again,” Wu said, more accurately.
“That’s right. You’re right.”
I shone the torch on the cursed loved ones of our young companion.
“I will have two favors to ask of them. And, if I am correct, for once we will have the upper hand on Amun Odji-Kek and his monstrous crew.”
The pair of Chinese vampires slumbered blindly in the firelight.
32
The Vapors of Time
I had never followed hopping vampires before, but it was not as difficult as one might imagine. McTroy passed our torch to them. Wu asked his paren
ts to proceed – hop, as it were, for hopping was their preferred mode of terrestrial ambulation – in a deliberate manner so that we might follow their beacon proximately, allowing neither walls nor slipsliding passages to come between us. If there were any smudgy, death-obsessed monks left to be had in the maze, they soon fled upwards to the moonlit desert floor that hunched over our heads with all the subtlety afforded several million pounds of rock and brick red soil.
We reached the Ka door in less time than it takes a fat man to eat a slice of pie.
That is: sooner than expected.
The Ka door lay in pieces on the floor, and the place where it had been framed on the wall remained as it was when we left it – stony, impregnable, and the definition of a dead end. Dead end, indeed, I thought. I knew that Kek and his entourage had traversed the chasm from our time to out-of-time. After all, the chants had never faltered. They were our background music. Their unwholesome notes and rhythms offered a constant thrum, flowing, energetic, and ceaseless as the rivers that carved Paleozoic limestone into miles of wandering canyons. Kek still taunted the timeless gods.
As I had told Wu, I had two favors to ask of his parents.
The first concerned the whereabouts and safety of our kidnapped lady.
I lifted the torch from Wu’s father’s cool fingers. He had no need for light, of course, and he seemed ready enough to give up the brand. I do not think he liked fire, as an element, for he shied from its source. I wondered if the heat reminded him of his own bodily coldness and what he had lost after being bitten in the night by a cursed thing.
“Thank you,” I said.
His face was a pale study in impassivity.
Then I remembered he could not hear me.
“My friend Wu, will you ask your parents to turn their unique senses in the direction of locating our missing Evangeline?”
Wu nodded and translated my request. I could not help but notice the deep redness of his mother’s lips as she answered him. The color came from blood, not her own, and my observation arrived with a dose of queasiness and a tingle of fear that until that moment I had kept at bay.
