Rick Yancey - The Monstrumologist

Warthrop took my elbow and urged me forward, saying quietly, “Watch your step, Will Henry.”

The chamber was smaller than I’d anticipated, perhaps only forty or fifty yards in circumference. Its walls, like the walls of the tiny landing over our heads, had been reinforced with wide wooden planks, the boards warped by humidity, bearing dents, gouges, and scratch marks. Remains crowded against the chamber’s base, a foot high in some spots, like flotsam washed up by a storm’s surge. Not all broke their legs in the fall, as Kearns had surmised. Some must have been ambulatory, and had scrambled to these walls in their frenzy to escape. I pictured them, the poor desperate, doomed creatures clawing and scratching at the impassive wood in the instant before the blow landed from out of the dark-and the teeth smashed their skull apart with the force of a two-ton truck.

I tried to avoid stepping on them-they had been like me once-but it was impossible; there were simply too many of them. The ground was soft, yielding to even my slight weight, and in spots water bubbled around my sole-water and a reddish-black sludge. Here, where no sun shone and no breeze stirred, their bodily fluids had soaked into the ground and been trapped there. I was walking in a literal swamp of blood.

We stopped at the far end of the chamber. There Kearns and Malachi waited by the mouth of a tunnel, the only other access to the pit that I could see besides the trapdoor. There was no door to this aperture, however: The tunnel’s open mouth yawned seven feet tall and six wide.

“At last: our scout,” said Kearns, beaming down at me, his lamp casting hard shadows across his soft features.

“The access tunnel has collapsed, Will Henry,” the doctor informed me.

“Or been made to,” suggested Kearns. “Dynamited would be my guess.”

“Follow me,” Warthrop instructed. About twenty yards in, a wall of jumbled earth and broken timbers confronted us, a confusion of dirt and rock and the shattered remnants of the huge joists that had once held the ceiling aloft. The doctor squatted at the base and drew my attention to a small opening in the rubble, supported by one of the fallen crosspieces.

“Too small for any of us to squeeze through,” he pointed out. “But it appears to go on for a little way at least, perhaps even all of it. What do you think, Will Henry? We must know how wide this wall is… if we can dig our way through it with reasonable alacrity or if we must attack the problem another way.”

“Dynamite!” exclaimed Kearns. “I knew I should have brought some.”

“Well?” the doctor asked me. “Are you up for it?”

Of course I would not say no. “Yes, sir.”

“Good boy! Here, take the lamp. And here, you might as well take my revolver, too. No, tuck it into your belt there; the safety’s on. Careful now, Will Henry. Careful, and not too quick. Come back at the least sign of trouble. There must be several hundred tons of earth above you.”

“And if you do make it to the other side, it would be helpful to the cause if you peeked around a bit,” put in Kearns.

“Peeked, sir?”

“Yes. Reconnoiter. Get a feel for the place. And, of course, scope out the enemy’s position if possible.”

The doctor was shaking his head. “No, Kearns. It’s too dangerous.”

“And scrambling into a hole with tons of rock over his head isn’t?”

“You know I would not ask you if there was another alternative, Will Henry,” Warthrop said to me.

“I have one,” said Kearns. “Dynamite.”

“Please,” Warthrop said, closing his eyes. “Just… shut up, Kearns. For once. Please.” He gave my shoulder a pat and a paternal squeeze. “Snap to, now, Will Henry. But slowly. Slowly.”

Holding the lamp before me, I crawled inside the cleft. It narrowed almost immediately; my back scraped against the top, and debris rained down and pooled between my hunched shoulders as I inched forward, the lamp offering little guidance in such close quarters. The pathway through the fall was a hazard of arm-size splinters and hard stone, and it continued to shrink as I progressed, until I was forced to lie flat and scoot forward, inch by claustrophobic inch. I could not judge how far I had traveled; pressed on all sides, I could not even turn my head to look behind me. Time crawled along as slowly as I, and the air grew colder; my breath congealed around my head and I lost feeling in the tip of my nose. Now my back rubbed continuously against the top, and I worried I might become hopelessly wedged inside this dread defile. And, if that should happen, how long would I have to remain stuck like a cork in a bottle, until they could dig me out?

My difficulties were compounded by the grade of the defile; it did not cut straight through, but zigged and zagged and rose generally upward, compelling me to force my body forward by pushing with the balls of my feet.

Then all at once I stopped. I laid my cheek against the dirt, trying to catch my ragged breath, struggling to contain my rising panic.

For it appeared I had come to the end of it. A foot before me was a wall of dirt and rock; the way was blocked. I might be a few inches from the other side or I might be several feet; there was no way of knowing.

Or might there be? I wiggled my left arm in front of me and scratched at the dirt gingerly with my fingernails. If I retreated now, I would have to back my way out, which would prove even more difficult, but a worse prospect by far was returning without the answer the doctor sought. I wanted to impress him; I wanted to confirm his judgment that I was indispensable.

Whether it was by my scratching and scraping against the soil or by my weight pressing down on a particularly unstable spot, the earth abruptly gave way beneath me, and I tumbled down in a torrent of soil and stone, losing the lamp in my helpless fall, rolling head over heels before coming to a jaw-jarring stop upon my bottom.

Fortunately, the lamp survived the fall as well; it lay on its side only a few feet away. I snatched it up and held it as high as my arm could stretch, but I saw no opening or even a hint of one; it had collapsed behind me, and the face of the blockage appeared despairingly uniform in its craggy appearance-I could not tell from whence I’d come.

I paced the length of the wall, anxiously scanning its earthy sides, and spied nothing that might give away the location. I was trapped.

For a moment I nearly swooned with dismay. My companions were far on the other side of the impassable traverse. There was no way to signal my distress, and rescue might not come for hours, if at all, for now I stood between this brooding wall and whatever lay on my side of it-and I knew what lay on my side.

Steady now, Will, I told myself. Steady! What would the doctor have you do? Think! You can’t go back. Even if you found where you fell through, you dropped a great deal down, and how will you get back up again? You have no choice; you’ll have to wait for them to rescue you.

What was that? Did I hear something sneaking up behind me? A scratching sound, a hiss or a huff? I whirled around, the lamp swinging crazily in my shaking hand while with the other I fumbled for the doctor’s revolver. A shadow jumped to my left, and I swung the gun toward it, jerking the trigger reflexively, wincing at the expected report that did not follow: I had forgotten to take the safety off. And then, to add to my chagrin, I realized the jumping shadow was my own, thrown by the lamp when I turned.

I took a deep breath and eased off the safety. To steady my jangled nerves I remembered my triumph beneath the platform-how I’d dispatched the young Anthropophagus with practically my bare hands-and I shuffled forward, squinting into the gloom.