“Meeeeeeattttt…” Augustus Preston whispered through his ruined vocal cords, his voice like a razor drawn down a strop. The children began to laugh.
Fear flocked into Micah’s brain on dark wings. The flashlight slipped from his grip and spun on the ground; he stumbled, bellowing in surprise, then reached up instinctively—
—his fingers closing around one of those trembling red ropes.
MINERVA HEARD SHUG BELLOW somewhere in the tunnel system. A short, powerful burst that quickly faded.
She and Ebenezer had already climbed down the rope ladder when she heard Micah hollering. Nate and Ellen were still at the top of the drop, where they had agreed to wait.
“Keep watch,” Minerva called up to them. “Do you have a flashlight?”
A grim nod from Ellen. Clearly she didn’t want the creature Ebenezer had set aflame and chased off to return with them all alone. None of them wanted that. Minerva turned to join Ebenezer at the tunnel mouth. Ebenezer shone his flashlight into it. Micah’s voice had come from wherever the tunnel led, deeper into the rock.
“There’s only enough room to go single file,” said Minerva.
“I’ll go first,” Eb said.
They crawled inside. The flashlight beam bobbed on the walls. It was studded with holes, some shallow and small, others wide and deep. Minny got a chill when passing the larger ones—it seemed conceivable that some hungry thing with sightless eyes might dart out and snatch her. The smell she had noted at the mouth of the cleft intensified. She could not describe it, but it raised the short hairs on her neck.
Their breath filled the tunnel. The weight of the rock pressed down. They rounded a bend. Was the Reverend down here somewhere? Had Shug found him in this confounding warren? Or had the Reverend gotten the jump on Shug—was the bellowing they’d heard the result of Amos Flesher driving a knife into his heart?… It couldn’t be that. The Reverend was no match for Micah Shughrue; if Minerva was sure of one thing in life, it was that.
Still… it was so dark down here. Disorienting. The perfect element for a reptile like that crazy-ass preacher.
“There’s an opening ahead,” Eb said.
The tunnel emptied into a huge darkened space. As soon as Minerva stood up, she saw Micah’s boots lit by the glow of his flashlight. They were jittering madly, as if he was being electrocuted.
“Shug!” she cried.
WARMTH. That was Micah’s first sensation upon touching the living rope. Glorious, comforting warmth.
Harmony. That was the second sense. A feeling of satisfaction and well-being more profound than any he had ever known.
“Shug!”
He heard his name, but could not respond. He was bathed in this bliss. He didn’t want to respond. He wanted to stay this way forever, perfectly content.
Hands on his shoulders and arms. They pulled remorselessly. No, you bastards! No, no, stop, please sto—
He stumbled into the arms of Ebenezer and Minny. The beautiful fog lifted. He was back in the black box with Augustus Preston. He tore himself from their grip. He dropped to the floor, his muscles not wanting to cooperate with him.
“You all right?” Minny asked.
“Yes,” he said. He picked up the flashlight where it had slipped from his fingers and stood up again.
“What happened?”
“I do not know. But I am fine. Stand back,” he said, his voice a bit shaky.
“Shug, what—?”
“I said stand back.”
They did, all three training their flashlights on Preston’s body. It jerked roughly, as if a pair of huge invisible hands was jolting it. Then something began to push itself out of Preston’s back. His spinal cord ripped through the paper-thin flesh. The children writhed beyond the light, their bare feet whushing on the stone. Preston’s toothless mouth was open, withered eyes alight with horror.
“Faaaaather,” Preston breathed as he bucked like a giant revolting newborn in the girdle of red ropes. “Father, noooooooo…”
All of them watched, horrified, as a wriggling shape emerged from Preston’s squandered flesh. It perched for a moment on a flap of hardened skin before toppling gracelessly to land with a splat. The fibrous tendrils attached to its body snapped as it fell; those tendrils must have been mooring it to Preston at some unseen root.
That connection severed, Preston began to thrash even more animatedly. His mouth opened so wide that the skin split at its edges, stretching it into a gruesome bloodless slash. The red ropes anchoring him to the ceiling began to snap one by one; Preston jerked awkwardly, like a snarled parachutist getting cut down from a tree. When the second-to-last rope let go, Preston swung on the final cord, a gibbering pendulum. When that last one disconnected, Preston hit the stone with the unmistakable snap of bone.
Preston mewled as he tried to crawl toward whatever had pushed itself from his body. His arms were shattered, the sharp edges of bone shorn through his papery flesh. He issued a pitiable cry—not of pain, but of abandonment. The wail of a milksop boy left in the woods by his callous parents. It was terrible to gaze upon a body lacking a true animus, a soul—at least Micah prayed so, even for a man as horrible as Preston surely had been—as it squirmed and thrust on the cold stone floor of this inhospitable place. It was like watching a wooden marionette stir to ghastly life, its legs kicking in feeble paroxysms, its lifeless marble eyes rolling wildly in their beveled sockets—
“Faaaaaaather. Oh please, my faaaaaather…”
The gunshot was deafening. Preston’s head did not explode so much as crumple like a dry bird’s nest. The brain inside the blown-open skull case was arid and chalky as an old cow flop.
Ebenezer holstered his pistol. The three of them stared through the haze of smoke at the shape that had deposited itself on the stone.
16
WHEN THE GUNSHOT THUNDERED UP from the tunnel below, Ellen flinched. She exchanged a glance with Nate: What should we do?
She shone her flashlight over the ledge. The gunshot’s echo continued to ricochet through the cave system. Who had done it—and why? Was someone hurt?
“Wait here,” she told Nate. “I’m coming right back, okay?”
Nate’s face was pinched with worry. “Hurry.”
Ellen slid her flashlight into her pocket and climbed down the ladder. Nate peered over the ledge, watching the darkness swallow her. She reached the floor and crept to the tunnel.
“Ellen?”
“I’m okay,” she called up to Nate.
She crawled into the tunnel carefully, the rock smooth under her knees. The tunnel was pocked with holes. She shone the flashlight into one. The light turned grainy, giving no sense of its depth. She crawled on, ears straining for a human voice. All she could hear was a dull hum. She wondered where it could be coming fro—