And Crawling Things Lurk

There on the pavement a few feet behind Sofia sat the cart that Erica said had such a squeaking wheel. With Jerry’s boat making so much noise, Muri had not heard it. Now Sofia was mere feet away and coming closer. Visions of belting out scream after scream entered Muri’s mind, but her lungs felt empty. After that initial gasp, breathing was like trying to inhale the turbid water down at the edge of the Hole instead of air.

“Muri, dear.” Sofia’s voice was soft and sweet, and it reminded Muri of honey in which a fly was just on the verge of becoming mired. “It’s so nice to see you again. My, you are a thin one, aren’t you? You really must come and have some of my sweet cake and elixir. It will do you a world of good – fatten you up nicely.”

“No! I don’t want to go with you.” She wheezed as she fought for breath, and subtlety was the last thing on her mind. “You leave me alone!”

She started to back up until she realized she was standing on the edge of the trestle with a twelve-foot drop at her back.

“Oh, now, dear, don’t be that way. We’ll have some nice tea. Won’t that be pleasant?” As Sofia moved forward she began to spread her arms to the sides, palms turned inward, and fingers spread to latch onto Muri no matter which way she might try to flee. “And you simply must have some of my cakes and elixir before...well, before other things. It will make such a difference.”

“Leave me alone!” Her voice had returned, and she filled her lungs. “Jackieee!”

“It will be such a pleasant afternoon.” Sofia’s voice maintained its grandmotherly tone, soft and sweet, unconcerned with Muri’s shouts. “Just the two of us. I’ve wanted to have you home for such a long time, you know.”

“Jackiee! Help!” Muri put as much wind behind her words as she could manage; expelling them with such force, she almost lost her balance. “Help me!”

When Sofia made her lunge and grab, all Muri could manage was a wordless scream. But Sofia’s grasp hadn’t been as tight as it should have been, and Muri spun away from it. When Sofia lunged and dipped to grab her before she darted past, Muri spun on the ball of her foot and darted back the other way. With the drop behind her, though, she was limited to only the two directions. As desperate as Muri was to escape, growing panic fueling her scrambling to ever-greater speed, Sofia was quicker, and her experience in handling darting, terrified children was considerable.

When the first scream penetrated Jackie’s fuzz-coated dream, he turned away from it and the discomfort it promised. But following its echo, others, ever more demanding, shattered the soft and soothing world in which he burrowed, opening its walls and floor in ever widening cracks. The rose-colored sky turned cold blue as another voice hammered through him.

“Wake up!” Josie insisted. “Jackie, wake up! Jackie!”

But it had not been her voice that first disturbed his slumber.

His eyes opened.

He lay on his back in his space facing the sky. Something moved just to the right of his line of vision and he turned his head that way. There, just a few feet before him at the top of the trestle, two figures fought. It was like watching Josie’s final battle all over again. The other one was so fast, so quick in its movement, that Josie’s desperate moves had seemed childlike. Here, now, was that same thing with its big teeth and dancing hands that had taken his Josie.

But it wasn’t Josie.

It was Muri!

Realization hit him like a bolt of lightning in its speed and violence. “No!” he roared as he erupted from his dirt recliner like a launched ICBM belching fire and destruction.

The figures on the trestle stopped their movements for an instant at the sound from below. Sofia recovered first and used the advantage to loop more strands about Muri. As she did, Muri, still screaming, tried to fling herself backward over the drop-off, but the strands held.

Jackie’s initial reaction of blazing outrage fizzled from lack of an uncorrupted guidance system, and he flopped back to the ground. With his eyes following every movement above, he tried to scramble to his feet, but his alcohol infused body rebelled. The foot he tried to set beneath him to drive upward again slid outward, and he fell back again. He rolled over to the side to use his hands to steady his uncoordinated body, but, in trying to keep his eyes on Muri and her attacker, he didn’t see where he was placing them and rammed one onto a jagged stone. His blisters ripped open with a gush of puss and blood, and the sharp pain dragged his attention away from the struggle atop the trestle long enough to bring him fully awake. Shaking his head to drive off the fuzziness still clinging, he threw back his head and peered upward.

In her own squirming together with Sofia’s spinning her as she wrapped her web, Muri’s face peered back over the edge of the trestle and into Jackie’s. Along with Sofia’s silky stands, terror stretched her features, making her eyes wider, her mouth wider, and her beautiful face twisted and hardly recognizable.

“Jackieeeee –”

Her final, long, screaming plea came to an abrupt stop when the heel of Sofia’s hand hammered the side of her head. She slumped, but only into Sofia’s waiting arms. The thing that looked like an old woman lifted Muri’s limp body like a gauze-wrapped doll and spun away from Jackie’s sight.

“Nooo!” His wail of anguish echoed across the Hole and beyond. Then, as rage consumed him, it thundered, “NOOOO!”

He thrust his bleeding, burning hands against the ground, then onto the crate, losing his grasp at first when the slick blood failed to allow a grip, then, finally to his feet, steadying himself as he held onto the board protruding from the shadows.

“Jackie, it has Muri!”

He didn’t need Josie to tell him that. He had seen the thing grab her. What he hadn’t seen, though, was the big teeth. It didn’t bite Muri like it did Josie. Maybe it wasn’t eating her yet. Maybe he still had a chance to stop it, to get Muri away from it, to kill it.

Yes, he could still kill it.

He had a spear.

He took a step, and then another one and the world about him began to tilt sideways. He pushed his foot out that way and planted it on the ground. Then, with the force of his will, he brought the world back straight, again. He felt his stomach churn as the thought came to him that, because he had succumbed to the lure of the bottle, he might fail. Because he had gotten stinko again, even knowing he had a deadly earnest task ahead, Muri might die.

Rage grew red before his eyes and he snatched the half-full bottle from the ground and hurled it into the stack of ancient railroad ties nearby. He turned back toward Josie’s space where his spear waited against the cart, squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and used it to flush crippling fuzz from his mind.

“I can do it,” he told himself in that same determined voice he had used when he insisted to Josie that he could make a spear. “I can do it. I can do it.”

He didn’t pause as he strode past the cart, just reached out for his spear and turned toward the bottom of the slope. With effort creasing his brow, he again forced away the fuzziness clouding his perceptions, his thoughts, his will. But it was not so easily dispelled.

He stumbled over his flailing feet and went down. His out-thrust arms sank into the water and the mud beneath it at the river’s edge. He lay there with his face mere inches above the muddy swirl and felt adrenalin course through his veins like rivers of fire.

When the disturbed water smoothed to again reveal his reflection, he looked into his own eyes, detesting the failed human being gazing back at him, and roared, “No more!”

He plunged his head into the water, and its chill further flushed the fuzziness from his brain. Grabbing up his dropped spear, he threw himself to his feet and, bellowing his rage, charged up the slope.

When he reached to top and looked up the street, and they were there.

But the thing that looked like an old woman moved fast. It pushed the cart at a dead run, scurrying like a many-legged thing rather than shuffling like an old woman. In the cart he could just make out a shape, a form, small and unmoving.

“No!” he roared and ran after them.

He hadn’t intended it, certainly hadn’t planned it that way, but his explosive voice had an effect. He must have sounded closer than he was, because the thing jerked its head around to look back at him without stopping. Those few moments it took its eyes off its course were enough. One of the front wheels dropped into a chuckhole and tipped the cart sideways. Its load spilled to the side, and the creature pushing it slammed into it and flew over the top. Her dark glasses flew off her head and broke apart when she landed on them.

“Yeah!” Jackie bellowed, ramming his fist holding the spear in the air above him to celebrate the minor victory, but he didn’t slow his pace.

With speed that surprised him even in his present state of battle rage, the thing scrambled back to its feet, up-righted the cart, and replaced the spilled cargo. Jackie had gained, but only by about fifty feet by the time it took off again. He was still a hundred feet behind them when the cart jerked around a parked car, bounded over the curb and rammed open the door of Vasov Shipping. After she went in, Sofia flung it closed behind her as she sped past. It couldn’t latch, though, and she didn’t take the time to block it.

When Jackie hit it seconds later, slamming it open against the wall, he stumbled forward and slammed into the counter, momentarily blinded by the unlit interior. He scrambled along to the opening at the end and drove through the archway. All he could do was charge ahead and hope that he remembered correctly that this first space was large and open. He forced himself to slow enough to listen, and in the near distance but going away from him he heard the familiar squeak of Erica’s cart.

“Muriiii!” he called out. He had to let her know he was there, that he was coming, that she was not abandoned. Then, when the realization sunk in that it was a patrol car parked outside and that Evans must be there in the building, he bellowed again. “Evaaans! It has Muriii!”

“Sure, there’s really no rush,” Carl responded to Don’s suggestion that they delay long enough to recover their sight. “We can take time to hang out here for a few minutes until we can actually –”

The air rang with the hollow echo of a bang somewhere in the building but not close. A moment later, before they could do more than jerk their heads around, the sound repeated itself.

“What was...?”

“Was that a door?”

Don peered into the dark as though he could penetrate the depths even beyond the walls before them. “Sure sounded like it. Who –?”

Before Don could ponder further, a third bang echoed followed by a howl that hung like dust in the air about them.

“Muriiii!”

“Oh, Jesus,” Don breathed. “That’s Jackie. What –?”

“...Evaaans! It’s got Muriii!”

Don’s flashlight stabbed into the darkness as he and Carl drove after it.

Probing ahead with the spear and an outstretched hand, Jackie found the entrance to that first, long hallway. By then his eyes were becoming adjusted to the minimal light seeping through the dust encrusted skylights, but when he peered into that man-made tunnel, it was like looking at the backs of his own eyelids. That thing could be standing there and waiting for him to walk a little closer before wrapping him in its web and sinking its teeth into him like it did to Josie. He should wait where he was until his eyes adjusted further, but if he did that, it might instead be taking Muri farther and farther away.

“It’s not waiting for you, Jackie,” Josie reasoned beside him. “Listen, you can still hear the cart. It’s still going.”

Probing with just his spear, he crept into that black pit.

“Muriiii!...”

The cry echoed through the air, through the walls and down from the ceiling, as multidirectional as swirling dust. Don caught himself from going past the front of a bank of offices or storerooms or who-knows-what and stopped. Carl stopped in time to avoid knocking him over, but only by grabbing Don’s upper arms and holding on.

“Back that way,” Don said, turning.

“No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure we came past these doors.”

“But it sounded like –”

“Easy, now. You’re going to be running in circles. You can’t rely on directions of sounds in places like this. It’s not much different than a cave, and I’ve been in a bunch of them.”

Don took a breath and nodded. “Okay, you lead.”

With Carl leading off, Don pulled the cell phone from his pocket and punched the speed dial for the dispatcher to call for back-up but then realized he had no signal. Before Carl got too far ahead, Don shoved the phone back into his pocket. He could keep checking for a signal, but if he ran fast enough to keep up with Carl, he’d probably run into a wall or something. It would be like trying to use the phone while careening down a winding, mountain road at night with just his parking lights on. And, most likely, he’d never get a good signal anyway.

Although, it was still only the brown light from the skylights, when Jackie stepped out of the other end of the hallway, it was like walking into a lighted room. Over on the left was where Josie had lain waiting for him and the world to discover the horror she had known. Straight ahead was the hallway, and something moved there.

Taking a step to his left put him where he could see into its depths where a shape scurried about. The cart sat at the wall at the end, and the thing that had taken Muri was moving about, reaching with both arms one after the other to places on the wall to the right. It was hard to see at first because the light in there was almost as black as the long hall had been, but then he realized the wall beyond the cart was getting even darker. It was moving, pulling back, turning away. The creature shoved the cart into the even darker space and followed it.

It was a door – and it was closing.

He started running. “No! Muriiii!”

The door moved slowly, but it would be closed before he even got to the outer end of the hallway. The thing would be in there with Muri, out of reach.

“Nooo!”

He hadn’t made the spear for throwing. He wanted to hold onto it when he thrust it through that thing’s heart, to feel it die. But the door was almost closed, and he was still too far away to stop it. Without losing stride, he drew back his arm and heaved the spear, not knowing where his target was in the dark but trusting in his loathing to guide it.

The shaft seemed to disappear as it flew past the mouth of the hallway where the darkness began and from where it got darker until the black beyond the door at the end was all. But it hit something. He heard it. And, although it had not hit the soft, killable target he had hoped, it made a solid ‘thunk’ into something. As he entered the hallway he realized the door was no longer closing. It was stopped with a space of several inches between it and the stop against which it would have latched. And there, just below the heavy hook of the latch and buried in the wood of the inner frame, was the honed head of his spear holding the two apart.

He rammed his shoulder against the door, and it swung open again. He worked the spear loose, turned and, in the dark, ran straight into the cart, empty and abandoned, at the top of a flight of steps. Just enough reflected, brown light got past him to see four or five steps going down, but it was just a black hole beyond that. He led with his spear as he took the steps too fast and lost his footing. He slipped and bounced, pitched forward and scraped the wall along the right side before slamming into the floor at the bottom.

It was pitch black, and he couldn’t even find the spear until he crawled about on his hands and knees. Then, with the stairs at his back and feeling for his position with his free hand, he probed ahead again with his spear. He thought he could hear shuffling footsteps ahead in the dark, but they were a distance away. He fought off the despair that threatened to drop him back to his knees – Muri might already be forever beyond his reach. With his teeth grinding, he stepped forward, probed again, and stepped again.

“Jackie, use your Zippo.” Without a trace of impatience, Josie’s urging encouraged him to ease back on his own impatience. Sometimes she got that way when he wasn’t thinking of things like he should, but not this time.

He fished it out of his pocket and gave it a flick, but in his haste, his thumb flipped it right out of his blood-slickened grasp. He heard it hit the floor near his feet, bounce and clatter, but he couldn’t tell which direction it had gone. He started to forge on without it, but stopped. It would be time well spent to find it. He went to his knees and methodically swept his hands back and forth, inching forward in the direction he hoped it lay with each sweep. He was afraid Josie would pipe up and tell him he was being foolish, that he should go on without it, but she remained silent. As his hands felt their way across the rough ground, he composed arguments for what he was doing. He’d tell Josie she was wrong if he had to, something he could never remember doing before.

“Slow and easy, hon. It’s there. Just go slow and easy.” Not what he expected. It felt good.

Two more sweeps of his hand, and he found it. He held it in one hand while he flicked the wheel with the other, and it flared up on the first try. With the tunnel suddenly flooded with light all about him, he snatched up his spear and sprang to his feet. Confirming his direction with the stairs at his back, he started off at a run, the Zippo flickering and flaring, but holding the flame.

Carl stopped as he charged into the open space at the end of a long, dark hallway. Don veered to the side enough to avoid a collision, and then he stopped, too.

They both glanced about, and at the same time pointed and said, “There!”

They ran to the tiled hallway entrance and stopped, surprised to find no end to it. With caution padding each step, they approached the secret door now standing open as Jackie had left it.

Probing the black interior with their flashlights revealed a bare dirt and rock wall and irregular ceiling, held in place by massive beams that could have been railroad ties. With the door pushed fully open, the other wall was the same, and the cart sat on a small landing at the top of a flight of steps.

Closer inspection ended as a rage and desperation-tinged voice echoed up out of the dark. “You leave her alone! I’m here, Muri! I’m coming!”