Tim Curran - The underdwelling

Whatever was out there, it seemed to be growing impatient. CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, it sounded. CLICKA, CLICKA, CLICKA-CLICK. When that brought no response, it began pounding on the boles of the trees with a hollow knocking noise as if it was hitting them with a shaft of wood. Bang, bang, bang. THUD-THUD-THUD.

“She’s getting mad,” Maki said, his voice breaking.

“You’re crazy,” Jurgens told him.

But then it came again, that hammering and pounding. It was frantic in its desperation, beating on the stone trees, desperate, absolutely desperate for an answer, for anything.

When it had ended, echoing away into nothingness, Jurgens wiped sweat from his face with a hankie.

“She doesn’t like to be ignored,” Boyd told him.

Breed felt McNair grab his arm. “Quiet,” he said.

“What?”

“Quiet.”

Breed listened. There was nothing for maybe five seconds, then a weird, distant droning sound rose up and died away. It sounded, if anything, like the continual buzzing of a summer locust.

“What the hell was that?”

“Quiet,” McNair said again.

Breed gently set down the wedge of rock that was in his hands. He had a neckerchief wrapped around his mouth because they were kicking up so much dust digging through the rubble. Clouds of it drifted like fog in the light of the lantern. McNair’s face was pale, his eyes huge and wet. His lower lip was trembling.

There was another noise now.

Something circling around them out there, moving over the rocks with a sort of ticking sound like a cat’s claws will make on linoleum when they’re not retracted. Tick, tick, tick, ticka-ticka-tick. Now the sounds stopped as if what had made them became aware that they were listening for it.

“What’s that smell?” Breed said, pulling down his neckerchief.

But McNair shushed him. Whatever it was, it was thick in the air, a smell of age and dryness like the hot, dead stink of attics and sealed trunks. They both stood there, listening. Breed felt the sweat on his brow began to run down his cheeks. He licked his lips. He did not know exactly where their visitor was, but he could feel its nearness, sense its presence along his spine. He expected that any moment it would leap out at him, snarling and gibbering, a furry and elfin form with gnashing yellow teeth.

But that didn’t happen.

It waited.

They waited.

He felt McNair’s grip on his arm tighten and he knew why: there was another sound, maybe one they’d been hearing for some time but not truly registering: a hollow sound of drawn-out respiration like wind sucked through a pipe.

It was the sound of breathing.

McNair moved very slowly, very carefully. He picked-up his long-handled flashlight from where it sat on a shelf of sandstone. He pointed it in the direction of the breathing. Dust was suspended in the beam like silt. He played it over the heaped rocks and pale green stalagmites rising up from the floor of the cavern like fangs. Shadows jumped and slid around them.

But there was nothing out there.

Nothing at all.

“Jurgens? Maki?” McNair called out and the fear in his voice was so thick, so tightly-wrapped, it was nearly strangling him. “If you’re out there, call out for the love of God…”

Breed stood there. He was shaking. Listening to the breathing that blended into the immense stark silence of the catacombs around them in a perfect unbroken weave. Dead air that seemed to scream in his ears. His flesh was actually crawling, his mouth dry, his belly pulled up into his chest.

And it was at that precise moment that he heard it.

That they both heard it.

A high, sweet singing that was scratching and tuneless, a repetitive sound of hysteria like a song of mourning sung by a madwoman over the graves of her children. It rose up in an unearthly shrill cadence then became the drone of a grasshopper in a summer field, growing louder and louder-then cut out completely, echoing off into the subterranean depths.

Breed nearly fell over. He was hot and cold, his limbs rubbery, white-hot fingers of absolute primal dread sliding through his chest…and then, whatever was out there, was moving in their direction. Tick, tick, ticka, ticka, ticka. The sounds a wolf spider would make as it stalked its prey if the human ear were sensitive enough to hear them.

Breed and McNair did not move.

They stood rooted to the spot, both sweating and trembling as it advanced on them. McNair’s hand was shaking on the flashlight. The beam jumped up and down, almost strobing. He had to put both fists on it to steady it and even then he was only partially successful. The beam cut into the darkness, slicing through the clouds of rock dust and that horrible dry stench became pungent and sickening in the air.

Breed could see something…an eldritch and terrible form given body by the swirling dust. He couldn’t be sure how much of it he saw and how much he imagined. It was roughly the size of man. A semi-visible hunched-over thing, a hazy apparition speckled with dust. It was creeping at them on a dozen spindly legs. He saw reaching arms, an elongated head of undulant tendrils like a nest of writhing, loathsome snakes…and a distorted face: something with clustered pods of eyes.

Then it leaped at them, howling with black hate.

It took McNair first.

It split him from crotch to throat and by the time Breed wiped the blood out of his eyes, he saw it in the glow of the lantern. It was crouched over McNair’s corpse which was bleeding out in a steaming red lagoon. It was spattered red, lapping up blood with juicy, slobbering sounds.

Then it raised its head.

Breed saw three puckering red mouths like blow holes open and shriek in his face with absolute elemental wrath.

Then he started screaming.

They heard it.

That same mournful, shrill piping echoing through the cavern. Right away, flashlights were in fists, beams of light searching and searching for the source of that terrible sound. But there was nothing but the honeycombed trunks and the hundreds of petrified trees rising up around them like the mineralized columns of some primal amphitheater. The lights threw a lot of long, narrow shadows around, but nothing else.

Nothing else at all.

“Ain’t nothing up there!” Maki said, his voice nearly delirious. “Not a goddamn thing! She’s there but she isn’t there!”

He was right, of course, and Boyd knew why. The thing making that sound was nowhere near them; it was with Breed and McNair now. As proof of that, they heard the first scream. It was high and wavering and fragmented and it was truly hard to say which of them made it. Only that it sounded out, a cry of absolute agony that was somehow animalistic and keening like an animal being tortured to death, then it was silenced with a wet, gurgling sound that echoed through the cavern.

Maki was crouched next to Boyd now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, making a low moaning sound in his throat. When his voice came, it was almost a girlish whisper: “It’s killing them, Boyd! It’s killing them now! Tearing them apart and then…then it’ll come for us.”

Jurgens was on his feet, completely overwhelmed by it all. He was the man in charge. He was a leader of men…but now all that was gone and he was completely empty with its passing. His decision-making skills had been squashed flat and he did not know what to do. He moved this way, then that, cursing under his breath and breathing very hard.

Out in the darkness, there was a chittering sound.

Jurgens wiped sweat from his face. He thumbed the walkie-talkie because he had to. “Breed…McNair,” he said into the mic, his voice very low and guarded. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Breed! Goddammit! Answer me! Answer me!”