Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

It is then that the owl swoops upward and they see the ceiling from which the bats dangle. Their eyes are closed, their bodies hanging tightly together like a cluster of stalactites. How many of them, it is impossible to tell, because the projection is already past them, heading out of the basement, toward the hallway, the light at the end of it where Lewis waits with his arm extended.

The air is dim and hot. The smell, puffing from the basement, tangy and fertile like marrow spooned from a split bone. A bare patch has spread across the floor here, where the hardwood drops off into the darkness, a rough circle a few feet across. He touches the splinters of it and imagines claws scraped across it night after night. A landing pad for them as they climb out and drop into their den. Lewis opens his silver tin and takes a dose of white powder up his nose and feels a little braver for it.

The house creaks in the heat. Flies buzz in and out of the doorway. Otherwise, there is no sound. They do not speak, not even to whisper, when they tie one end of the rope to a heat register and the other to a lantern with a low wick. This they drop into the darkness.

Gawea and the doctor will remain above, their weapons ready, while the rest of them descend. Reed goes first. He tries to slide off the ledge as quietly as he can, but he carries two holstered revolvers and they clunk and scrape the wood. Then York bellies into the darkness. Lewis is last. The doctor gives him an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder and he lays his hand over hers. “You bring her back to us,” she says, and he says, “I will.”

Then he scoots to the edge and takes the rope and allows his weight to pull him down. He dangles there a moment, and when a fly lands on his face, he slaps himself in his hurry to brush it away — and loses his grip.

It is fifteen feet to the floor, the surface of it strewn with the remains of the staircase. And guano. And bones. They lie scattered in piles still webbed together by ligature and papery skin. Lewis falls into the horrible mush. He is muddied with guano and cut along his hip. But somehow the bats remain unfazed by the noise of his descent.

He stands and wipes himself off as best as he can. Reed told them beforehand not to look at the lantern, and yet that’s exactly what Lewis does, his eyes drawn to the only light in the room. He immediately turns away, blinking hard, trying to restore his eyes.

Eventually the shape of the basement takes form, and he can see the two men creeping away from him. He yanks his gun from his holster and follows. Every step is uncertain, the ground pulpy from guano and brittle with bones. They cannot be as quiet as they hope to be. To get to the far side of the room, they must pass beneath the bats, many of them man-size. Their faces are snouted and deeply wrinkled. Their claws latch to the rafters and their wings surround them like a veined chrysalis. The ceiling is tall enough to leave three feet of space beneath them. Lewis ducks down to pass beneath them. He has never felt so vulnerable, with the bats hanging above them, as if they might spear his bent back.

By the time he gets past them, the others are already hunched over Clark. She is not moving except as they shake her. Her clothes are torn, her neck and wrists and thighs gashed. Where her skin isn’t bloody, it is alabaster pale. They do not know where to check for a pulse, with her neck and wrists opened, but Lewis leans his face into hers and detects a shallow breath. She lives. The bats have kept her to bleed until emptied.

They move as slowly as they can — Reed getting behind her, looping his arms beneath her shoulders — York gripping her by the knees. Lewis takes the lantern. Bones stir and snap. They pause at every noise, waiting for the bats to wake.

When they duck down — beneath maybe a dozen bats altogether, their hanging forms a mob of all different sizes — Reed and York steal forward in small steps, backs bent by the weight of Clark. Lewis follows in a hunch. He moves more slowly than they do. He toes aside a bone. He slides his boot through a pile of black guano. He can feel a breeze, their breath against his neck. He keeps the lantern low. In his hand it feels like a small sun, its light too bright, no matter how spare the wick.

Reed and York already have Clark at the base of the stairs. Lewis tries to concentrate on them. He tries not to look up. But then he senses some movement in his peripheral vision and cannot help himself. A bat hangs beside him and one of its ears is twitching. Maybe because it hears him. Or maybe because it tracks some prey through the night sky of its sleep, its ears spasming like the legs of a dreaming dog. Its mouth opens and closes with a damp sound. Its eyes shudder beneath wrinkled lids.

Ahead, he can see Clark dragged through the air, over the ledge, the rope cinched beneath her armpits. He can see the rope fall again and Reed hoisting himself up. York looks back and waves impatiently. Lewis wakes from his fearful daze and takes another step forward.

A bone shatters beneath his foot. In the silence of the basement, the sound is tremendous, as though the very darkness has cracked open. He looks down to see it was a femur. He looks up to see the bat’s eyes snap open. They are huge and white and gelatinous.

Then comes the chittering sound, at first only from its mouth, and then from the others waking all around him.

He hears his name. “Lewis?” Reed is calling for him and he is stumbling toward his voice. “Lewis?” The doorway hangs above, his body a black silhouette against the gray light of it. “Lewis!”

There is a rustling behind him, like a wind sweeping across a desk stacked with paper, and then a shotgun blast from York. The clap and crash of it fills his ears and seems to shake the very foundation of the house. He throws down the lantern and it shatters and he staggers and trips and catches the rope and uses it to right himself. York fires again and says, “Go, go, go, go!”

He clambers up, one hand over the other, the rope pinched between his thighs. In this way he inches toward the doorway. He is weak enough and slow enough that Reed knows to help, dragging him the rest of the way.

The splintery lip of the hardwood scrapes his belly raw. He is out, among their legs. He scrabbles forward, and in that moment, moving from darkness into light, he feels as he did as a child, returning from the toilet at night, leaping into bed, certain that a hand with sharp black fingernails would snatch hold of his ankle.

For a second he can’t help but stare at Clark. She lies in the hallway, as still as a corpse. The doctor kneels beside her and hauls her body toward the daylight.

Lewis is roused by the screaming above him — of Reed encouraging York to hurry, hurry goddammit — and the screaming below. Lewis rises from the floor. In the basement, the shotgun fires and he sees in its sunburst the bats crowding around York, and when it fires for the second time he sees a spray of blood. He sees tattered wings and cratered chests.

The rope goes taut. York is climbing. Reed fires his revolvers repeatedly into the darkness with a sound like storms crashing against each other, warring for the sky.

Lewis grabs hold of the rope and heaves and heaves again. First the boy’s hands, and then his face, appear at the bottom of the doorway. He is smiling. Blood speckles his face. His feet dangle in a cavernous dark. But he is alive and for this he can’t help but smile crookedly.

Just as he stands upright, the doorway behind him fills with the white blur of a bat, and before his smile can die, one of its wings curls around him. It draws him back — drawing him down into the dark — but his hand shoots out and catches the doorway and he holds fast there.

It is then that a voice calls out — a throaty, ash-edged voice none of them recognize — yelling, “No!”