“Rats,” Godfrey said, his voice oddly hollow coming through the voicemitter of his mask. “Gonna be a lot of ’em, I suspect.”
Rats, Kenney thought. A lair of fucking rats. Bone-pickers and carrion-eaters. Some that walk on four legs and some that walk on two.
Then he stepped into the water and it was thick and oily like some greasy soup of rot and decay. It gave off an oily reflection and was patched with floating mats of fungus. Flashlight beams played around through the haze and everyone could see they were in a room chipped from bedrock. A tunnel wound out from it like a gateway into hell. Kenney stepped forward, flashing his light about. Water was seeping from the roof, the walls. He could hear dripping sounds in the distance, little else.
“Shall we?” he said.
“You first,” Godfrey said.
Kenney moved forward and the others fell in behind him, the younger guys muttering among themselves. All Kenney could smell was the rubber seal of his silicone nosecup and was glad of it. A clump of earth fell and struck the top of his head and he jumped.
The others laughed.
The atmosphere was straight out of a tomb: stagnant, aged, and unpleasant.
There was a low, stealthy noise ahead. He paused, trying to identify it, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. Only the dripping of water like something heard in the depths of a cave, which was pretty appropriate, he supposed. Still, he was not convinced because he knew there had been something, a sound of stealthy movement. Whatever had made it, apparently it knew where they were but it wasn’t going to show itself until it was damn good and ready.
“This is pretty bad,” Beck said. “Can’t say I like it none.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Iversen said.
There was a bit of nervous laughter, but it didn’t last.
Godfrey turned to Beck. “Son, you want to head back? If you do, nobody here’s gonna think less of you. And I mean that.”
“Sure,” Chipney said.
The deputy shook his head, looking like a Martian invader in his gas mask. “No, I’ll be all right. I was just mentioning the fact.”
They moved forward again. The tunnel had angled off to the right now and they plodded on in absolute blackness. The seepage was up to their knees and seemed to be getting deeper, but gradually. Very gradually.
“Place is cut straight through the bedrock,” Godfrey said. “Imagine the time this took. I wonder if Ezren did this… Christ, the work involved, it would have taken a hundred men with drills.”
But Kenney shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think it was Ezren. This has been here since long before him I would guess.”
But he didn’t dare speculate as to who might have channeled it out.
The lights picked out the floating bodies of dead rats, leaves, twigs, and a few pink nameless masses no one had much interest in identifying. To Kenney it meant that there had to be an opening somewhere that led up into the light. Maybe in the ruins. He could see beady, luminous eyes that scattered whenever he shined the light in their direction.
“I think we’re getting close,” he finally said with a grim, gnawing apprehension.
The water was down around their calves now and things were jutting from it—a few skulls gone gray with sludge and mildew, the remains of a spinal column, the broomstick of a femur.
Nobody was surprised by any of that.
They expected bones and they expected things much worse than bones.
They pushed on and the floor began to dip and the water began to rise and their hearts were sinking lower into some bleak morass with every step. They heard something ahead—a quick, splashing sound—a sound that was certainly caused by no rat. They stood stock-still and listened. It was gone.
Kenney stood there, his throat gone dry. The riot gun and flashlight in his fists felt greasy like they wanted to slide from his fingers. He clutched them even tighter… the idea of being down there without a light or a weapon was absolutely frightening.
“We should keep moving,” Godfrey said as if it was the last thing he wanted.
The water was up to their thighs now. The tunnel arched away to the left and terminated with a door set into a stone frame. They approached it cautiously. It was incredibly old, fringed with mold, its planking rotting and staved in.
“Why would somebody put a door here?” Iversen asked.
But nobody had an answer. Kenney ran his gloved fingers along it, wondering how old it was. It was blackened and filthy, the latch long ago rusted and fallen away. You could see the hole where it had been set.
He tried to push through it, but it wouldn’t budge. Either it was too warped or something was pressed up against the other side. And he didn’t want to know what that might have been.
“Give a hand here,” Godfrey said.
A cluster of hands pressed up against it and it started to move. On the count of three they gave it one last heave. The wood was so soft it began to buckle, to disintegrate. Kenney put his hand right through one panel and snatched it back quickly, afraid maybe that something would grab it from the other side. Five or six beetles crawled over the palm of his glove. He flicked them away. They got the door open maybe two feet and squeezed themselves through the aperture.
Their lights discovered the room within. A rectangular structure with walls of mortared sandstone that had gone a dirty brown in color. They were patched with huge, spreading mildew stains that were black as oil. The stones jutted forth in a crazy, uneven patchwork. There was another doorway that led into yet another tunnel. The ceiling was low and dripping, but in the center of it, a passage like a chimney led up into the gloom. They flashed their lights up there, but all they could see was the filthy stonework and the narrowing throat of the passage, what looked like an ancient metal grating high above.
The entire place reminded them of some medieval dungeon and they couldn’t guess at its purpose. The water sluiced around their waists and they moved very carefully for fear they would step into a hole and get sucked into some nightmare abyss.
Godfrey touched the wall and it came apart under his fingers. The mortar had the consistency of wet cement, the stones they held dropped into the water. “Goddamn place is coming down around us.” He moved forward, examining the rough-hewn walls in some detail. “Imagine the time it must’ve taken to build something like this! Christ, years and years and years!”
“But it’s not going to last much longer,” St. Aubin said. “We’ll be lucky if we get out of here without this whole damn place coming down on our heads.”
“If you want to go back, you can,” Kenney told him.
“We should all go back and I think you know that.”
Godfrey pulled another stone out, pressed the barrel of his riot gun through the chasm. It met with no resistance. He crouched down, shining his light through there. “Christ, there’s another room in there… oh, holy shit.” He stood back up, sighing. “There’s skeletons in there…”
Kenney pushed through the knot of deputies, got his light and his face in the chasm. He saw a narrow room with a sloping ceiling. Some of it had caved in. Rubble was heaped everywhere, shelves of stone rising from the murk like the humps of a whale. He saw the skeletons. Ancient things, yellowed and blackened. They were leaning against the far wall and against one another, water slopping around their rib staves. Had to be twenty or thirty that Kenney could see. But nothing recent. Some of them were so old they had literally fallen into themselves. A few skulls were nowhere to be seen.
Beck kept shaking his head. “All those bodies up there and all this down here… skeletons… oh Christ, Sheriff what is this all about?”