Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

Clow wasn’t liking it much. The idea of descending into that subterranean lair made his flesh creep and his guts roll over, but if Kierney was down there and not frightened… how bad could it be? He lit the lantern, tied a rope to the handle, and lowered it below. Then dropped down the pistols and rifles, the poisoned meat and fish. Then he went, shimmying down the rope like a monkey down a grapevine.

The stink was the first thing he became aware of as his feet struck the top of the coffin below. It was a mephitic stench like warm and gas-blown things dragged from rivers. It was the stink of death and corruption, of course, but beneath it there was something even worse… something monstrously alive.

“Oi, must be awful big, these fucking rats of yours, Sammy,” Kierney said, wedging one of the flintlock pistols through the belt that held up his pants. “Not thinking I wish to be here when they come home. Not at all, says I.”

Clow hopped down off the casket, took one of the pistols and then the lantern from Kierney. The bottom of the grave was about seven feet up, the stars and fresh air another six above that. The burrow they were in was nearly perfectly round and big enough to stand up in. Some work had gone into excavating it; there was no doubt of that. It ran off into the darkness behind them, splitting off into two separate tunnels that were considerably smaller. Ahead of them, just a single passage, the roof of which sloped downward.

Clow did not like this place.

It made him feel claustrophobic and dirty, his throat scratchy. Everything was close, pressing in, constricting. There was about a half-inch of slimy water on the floor. The musty reek of carrion and that high, sickening air itself made something in his brain flinch, filled his mind with writhing maggots. He believed that he knew what it must be like to be buried alive.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Kierney said.

“Aye, if yer a corpse worm or a graveyard rat.”

Clow stuffed the pistol through his belt as Kierney had done, took up the musket. “Well, should we do a wee bit of exploring, old friend?”

“Not to me liking, but if you say.” Kierney picked up the blunderbuss and the box of poisoned fish. “Let’s bait these bastards. Spread these fish about into the tunnel, leave the meat here.”

Clow nodded, leading them forward.

Within ten feet, the floor became increasingly muddy… soft and swampy. Their brogans sank right up to the ankles in spots. The roof sloped ever downward and the walls narrowed, clots of rank earth dropping all around them. They had to move at a crouch now, breathing hard, perspiring and shaking and expecting God only knew what. The walls of the passage were slimy and sweating black water that stank like the runoff of corpses. Colonies of bloated, fleshy mushrooms sprouted from crevices. It was like being in some stinking, elongated grave. The main passage kept branching off into arteries… much smaller, yet certainly large enough for a man.

“Listen,” Kierney said.

Clow heard it, all right: the skitter and squeaking of rats. Many, many rats. Now was the time to turn back, to leave the rest of this horror to the imagination. There would be plenty of nights and plenty of pints over which to fill in the blanks of what lay ahead. Yet… he did not honestly want to turn back. Going forward was sheer madness, but he wanted to. He wanted to see what this was all about. Sure, there were rats ahead and probably behind, too. But it was not possible for them to have carved out this labyrinth. Something else had.

And he wanted to see it.

They came to a large passage that led away down, down. It was big enough for a man, of course, but neither of them were going down there. Clow held the lantern in there. In the distance, he could make out something like a chamber or pit and what seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of greasy, plump furry bodies filling it up. Thousands of beady eyes were reflected pink and shining in the light.

“Rats,” Clow said. “A den of ’em.”

He took the box from Kierney and opened the lid, tossing the whole thing down the tunnel. It tumbled end over end, spilling dead fish. The rats scattered, swarming around, a few daring individuals moving stealthily up the tunnel.

“Aye, I’ve had me fill,” Kierney said. “Let’s get back up where we can breathe.”

Clow nodded. It was enough.

He was breathing very fast, he realized, like the air had gone bad and he was slowly suffocating. It was more than just the air, though, but the idea that if there were all these burrows, there might be burrows beneath them, too. That at any moment, the floor might give away and drop them below, from where there would be no escape.

“Ahead… what’s that?” Kierney said.

They moved forward and the tunnel opened up into something like a room. There were bones scattered everywhere, all of them nibbled and set with teeth marks. Some had been snapped right in half, as if by huge jaws.

Clow panned the light about.

He saw skulls and rib cages, shiny white femurs and ulnas. Mummified cadavers were tangled in rotting cerements. There were shattered caskets, too, some of them crushed to kindling, others broken open… mildewed satin linings hanging out like guts. A few skeletons were embedded right into the muddy walls as if they were trying to climb out.

Kierney kept trying to lick his lips. “Sammy… lookit this… this is where that Corpse King dumps its litter… all around us.”

Clow was holding the lantern up high, noticing that the roof went up and up until there was no roof. Just an oval passage that led right into a crypt. He could see arched beams and cement walls. Just like the vault they’d visited that awful night in Glasgow.

Yes, that’s right, Sammy. And you remember what was looking up at you as you looked down from above?

Kierney stepped among the decomposing bones and skulls threaded with fungi. He found the remains of fresher corpses… limbs and trunks, most badly worried. A complete cadaver was settled in the corner, a fine mesh of mildew growing over its face. Its head lolled at a sickening angle from the neck and its chest seemed to have been crushed. In fact, the entire body had been smashed with such pressure that viscera had been forced from its mouth. Beetles crawled all over it, tunneling into it.

“That… that face,” Kierney said. “I recognize it… it’s—”

“Keith Strand,” Clow said. “He disappeared a few weeks back, maybe a month.”

The stench of the chamber was roiling and hot and nauseating. Like sticking your face into the slit belly of a putrescent corpse… and inhaling. It was that revolting, that physically appalling.

And you stay here much longer, Clow told himself, and you’ll know worse. You’ll know something much, much worse.

He knew it to be true. For already the chamber and tunnel system was filling with a presence, a palpable sense of something immense and rancid and spiritually evil. It made his guts clench like a fist, bile squirt up the back of his throat.

Kierney said, “I think we’d best be getting on our way, Sammy.”

Clow was in complete agreement. The tunnel ahead sloped down and down, farther into the earth and maybe straight down into the bowels of hell, for all he knew. All he was certain of was that he honestly did not want to find out.

About then the chamber began to vibrate. The walls shook and clots of earth began to fall around them as if a cave-in was beginning. The mucky, slopping ground under their feet thrummed as if a train was approaching.

Yes, something was coming.

Clow froze up, feeling the musket in his fists and wondering if he’d have the steel to use it when the time came. For surely, that time was coming. There was about to be a dire intersection of fates—theirs and that of the thing that crawled beneath graveyards.