But Godfrey just shook his head, his eyes wide and unblinking behind his face shield.
Kenney removed a few more stones, mortar fell away like clods of wet soil. He could see pretty good in there. He panned his light around, knowing full well if he lived through this nightmare, he would see that chamber and its occupants in his dreams for the rest of his life.
He was remembering what he’d seen in the fields that night, what he’d sensed in those spectral ruins, what Elena Blasden had said, and he thought: They raided Clavitt Fields, destroyed the town and what lived there. But they were wrong, horribly wrong. Because those people were scarcely human then and all they did was force them underground into this labyrinth. And that was nearly two hundred years ago. Almost two centuries of living and interbreeding in the damp, sunless darkness where they became something far less than human, a species unto themselves. And their progeny have survived to this day, mutating into things more like worms than people, creatures no longer equipped for open spaces and sunlight. Only at night do they come up and then only to hunt, to dig, to feed.
Jesus in heaven, what must they be like? What have they evolved into? Things like Genevieve Crossen’s adopted daughter… or worse?
And he could picture Charles Ezren and then later his son, Luke, bringing people down into the darkness for them. Bringing them food. He didn’t know that to be true, but from what he was seeing it was almost a foregone conclusion. All the remains they had found thus far pointed to the fact that what lived down here in this sunless labyrinth were ghouls, eaters of the dead.
“All right,” Godfrey said. “Let’s move here.”
They fell in behind him and he led them through the tunnel on the other side. But it was no tunnel, more like a crevice, a gap between two buildings. The walls were fashioned of squalid, crumbling brick, water seeping from them in slow, steady rivers like leaking faucets. They had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The water reached above their waists now, moving with turgidity more like gelatin than water. More dead rats washed by, other things they refused to look at.
“What the hell is that stuff?” Chipney said.
They’d all been wondering that because they had seen masses of the stuff floating about—some pinkish, pulpous material that almost looked like bread dough, save it was vaguely transparent. Only here it was not floating but growing right up the walls in fleshy seams.
“Some kind of fungus,” Kenney said.
St. Aubin went up to a vein of the stuff and touched it with his hand. Even through his glove he could feel it was warm. “It’s moving,” he said.
Kenney and the others put their lights on it.
“That’s crazy,” Iversen said.
“Fungi don’t move,” Godfrey pointed out.
But as Kenney got closer and investigated it for himself, he saw that St. Aubin was right: it was moving. It shuddered when he poked it with the barrel of his riot gun. It shivered. Despite his aversion to it, he touched it lightly with his fingertips. It was pulsating slightly with a gentle rhythm not unlike that of a newborn.
“We don’t have time for nature study,” he said, leading them on.
He got no argument. None of them wanted to know anything more about this subterranean world than they absolutely had to. And he couldn’t blame them on that count. They were here to search for missing cops. That was their job. It was the only thing that needed to concern them.
By that point, nobody was saying much of anything and Kenney knew they were scared shitless to a man.
They were hearing other sounds now and they weren’t just cavorting rats or the subterranean network flaking away, but a lunatic, congested whispering. He could remember it from the fields that fated night and down here, yes, down here it was much worse. A tenebrous choir in this spirit-riven pit. It grew louder, faded, rose up again and took on the resonation of a high, evil cackling and then fell away again. Echoing and echoing.
The crevice widened and they stumbled into another chamber. More of the fungi hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss. Kenney brushed against some of it and he could almost swear it was crawling.
The water was a black, surging pool in which countless shapes bobbed and drifted. In the glare of the lights, everyone saw bloated bodies and parts of them—limbs, trunks, a head or two stripped to bone—coming apart in the filthy water, leaving oily wakes on the surface as they putrefied.
One of the deputies started retching. Another was making low, moaning sounds within his mask. Yet another just trembled, his entire body shaking. Kenney and Godfrey looked at each other and kept looking. They were communicating something, but neither really wanted to know what that was.
Kenney stared down at the head of a woman that bumped into him. Her skullish jaws were sprung as if in a scream. A full main of greasy hair fell over her skinless face. He could see a gold cap on one of her molars. He began to shiver.
Three tunnels led away into the wall. One of them was caved in completely.
Kenney looked up at them and they beckoned to him, offering a long, unpleasant death. “Two roads diverged in the yellow wood,” he said and his voice was flat and empty and somehow alien even to him.
“What’s that?” Godfrey said, maybe a little more harshly than he’d intended.
But Kenney just shook his head. “We either turn back… or we split up and keep going. Your call, Sheriff.”
Godfrey gave him a near-psychotic look. It was no easy feat ordering men to their deaths. But he did it and hated himself for it.
29
Godfrey led Beck and Chipney down the passage, splashing forward in the dirty water. The passage gradually widened—like a birth canal, he thought—until they reached something like another room in which bloated things broke the surface like islands, only they weren’t islands.
“Bodies,” Beck said, as if that needed saying at all.
They studied them in their lights. It was appalling. Like a rumba line of floaters, all of them bloated and waterlogged, and each one seemingly a bit more decayed than the last. Flies lit from them in black, buzzing clouds. They wriggled with maggots. They were coming apart in the water, ribbons and sheets of flesh trailing from them in banners. The insane and disturbing part was that they did not seem to be individual cadavers, but parts of a greater whole.
As Beck and Chipney pulled back, Godfrey kept his stomach down where it belonged and moved slowly towards them, though it was honestly the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
When he got to the nearest one, he prodded it with the barrel of his riot gun. It shuddered in the water, sending out slow, torpid ripples. Flies rose and fell, maggots dug in deeper. All that was bad enough, but he noticed that the body—man, woman, who could say?—was connected to the others by rubbery strings of tissue. It not only connected the bodies like fish on the same stringer, but it grew up and over them, a morbid white material that looked soft and spongy.
More of the fungus.
God, it was everywhere down here… floating in little islands and glistening humps, growing up out of the water in threads and webs and knotted creepers. It made Godfrey’s skin crawl and he was damn glad he had that mask on. The last thing he wanted was for the younger boys to see how absolutely fucking terrified he was. The fungus was unnatural and he knew it. It had proliferated down here and seemed to be everywhere as if they were inside of it, inside of some mammoth fungi that owned the netherworld.
“It’s eating the remains,” Chipney said.
Godfrey’s gas mask shook back and forth. “Yeah, sort of breaking them down.”