Chipney shivered.
Godfrey moved away from the bodies towards the nearest wall. He studied it in the light bracketed to the barrel of his riot gun. The brick was dark and stained, moldering with some black slime that seemed to be eating away the mortar. He jabbed a finger of his glove into it and it was soft. Slime dripped from it. But none of that concerned him. He was more interested in the stratum of blubbery pink fungus that grew between the bricks, bulging from cracks and crevices like greasy dough.
I bet if a man were to stretch out and take a nap down here, he thought, he’d wake up netted in that shit. It would grow all over him.
He was no stranger to death.
He knew the most disgusting things happened to bodies that were underground, away from the air and sunlight. Things fed on them. Things grew from them. But he’d never seen anything quite like this.
His throat dry as sand, he moved over to a very large clot of the stuff that bulged out like a rubbery bubble on an inner tube. The shit looked like it was moving. It could have been his imagination, but he did not think so. It was pulsing slightly. He pulled a lock-blade knife from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and jabbed the blade into the bubble.
It moved.
A ripple passed through it like a clenching muscle.
The blade had slit into it easily enough and from the wound a few droplets of some scarlet juice leaked out.
Is it bleeding? Is that shit blood?
“Hell are you doing, Sheriff?” Beck asked.
“Nothing, just nosing around.”
Beck was clearly agitated. “Well, no disrespect, sir, but let’s just get this done. I’m sick to my stomach and my fucking skin’s crawling.”
“All right, son.”
Hell, who could blame him? Who could blame anyone from getting their backs up in this awful place? Godfrey felt pretty much the same way himself. How could you not?
He was terrified and sickened just like they were.
Christ, it felt like his stomach had grown legs and was trying to walk up the back of his throat. But as nauseous as it all made him, as claustrophobic and uneasy, he was still fascinated by it all. All those stories that had made the rounds of Haymarket and the county for so damn many years… this was the epicenter of it. Down here in this stinking, misty blackness. This was the black beating heart of it, the core. How many locals had ever been down here and lived to tell the tale? And how many men or women, for that matter, had ever reached the fountainhead of a legend?
Lots of ’em have through history, you just don’t hear about ’em because they never come back to tell the tale.
He moved towards the far end of the room, the others falling back behind him. He stepped carefully, very carefully. As he passed the line of bodies, his wake made them move and drift and he thought he heard Beck whimper in his throat.
Hang tight, son, he thought. This is going to get worse and you know it.
There was a passage ahead and he entered it first, his light filling it, making shadows jump and cavort. He let out a little cry and fell backwards, almost tripping and going down in the water.
Beck and Chipney were at his side immediately.
“What is it?” Chipney asked.
Beck was breathing too hard to ask anything.
“A rat… I think it was a rat,” Godfrey lied. “A goddamn big one. It jumped out at me.”
Beck shined his light down there. “Nothing now.”
“No, we must have scared each other. Sorry to startle you, boys.”
Godfrey stood up from the sloping wall where he’d been leaning. It had taken every bit of strength he possessed to conceal from them what he had looked upon. When he had first entered the passage, his light had picked out the shape of a man… something like a man. A hunched-over, ratlike form that was grotesque to the extreme. There had been something growing from its belly like sacs, sacs that looked oddly like baby doll heads, but hairless and white and mouthless.
Then it had disappeared as if it never was.
“Maybe we should go back,” Beck said. “This is getting too… too fucked-up for just a few men.”
He was right, entirely, but Godfrey said, “We got missing cops. I’m not calling this off until I know what the hell happened to them. They’d do the same for me, I hope.”
“Definitely,” Chipney said. “We move on.”
Godfrey got on the radio. Down there with all the stone and brick walls, the reception was shit. He got Kenney, but it was mostly static. Hyder, above, came in a little better, but not much. Godfrey knew just as Beck and Chipney must have suspected that the farther they penetrated into the labyrinth, the worse the reception would be until there was no reception at all.
His heart in his throat, he led them deeper into the passage.
To what waited for them.
30
Now it was the eyes.
Dear God, what next?
Elena was still in her rocking chair by the window and it didn’t seem she would ever leave it now. This was her last sitting. She had been feeling poorly when she sat down there, wanting to be in her old favorite rocker by the window feeling the sun streaming onto her old skin, warm and golden. It had never truly occurred to her that she would never get up again, that this was the last time she would lower her frail old bones into her beloved chair.
She had sat in it through so many years since George had made it for her just after World War II. She had rocked babies in it and tended to midnight feedings in it and watched through the window as she did now for George to come back out of the fields as evening set in. Yes, yes, yes, many years, all of them fluttering in her head now like the pages of a book, granting her a peek at their words, their memories, but not much more than that and she had to think that it was for the best, strictly for the best.
She had been sitting there for many hours and her tired old body refused to budge an inch. Whenever she tried, her body ached and her muscles failed her, that pain digging deeper in her chest and her breath barely coming.
Oh, the years, she thought, all the wonderful years and bad years and empty years.
Her mind drifted in and out and she knew she should have called Betty while she had the chance. It would have been a comfort to speak to her one last time, to hear her voice. But it was not to be. It just was not to be.
She focused her eyes.
She needed her sight because she wanted to see what there was to see right at the end. She wanted to see who carted her away because she knew that one would, one she had not seen in many, many years and one she had never gotten to know.
1916 was the year she was born and it made her smile when she thought of the gulf of time between then and now and all she had seen. The pages of her book flipped in her mind, one page after the other. Flip. It was 1947 and George and the neighboring farmers were raising the big barn out near the crick. It took many days and weeks and still more days to finish it and paint it. George had been very proud of his barn. Then in 1963, it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground along with most of their livestock. That had been a hard year. Flip. It was winter, 1939, and Auntie Keena had gone through the ice of the well-named Lake Hardship. They had a funeral for her and stood around an empty plank coffin. Her body would not be discovered until spring. Flip. It was 1924. Elena was eight years old and that summer was the summer when the man with the doll came to town. He was a drifter. He began luring girls off into the woods because he claimed that he had a doll that could smile. Elena and Bissy King had been walking down the road out near Five Mile Creek with jars of freshly picked blueberries and the man had come up to them. His clothes were ragged and his teeth were yellow like rat’s teeth. He bowed to them and said, “Ladies, you will not believe what it is my pleasure to possess.” He gave them the spiel about a doll that not only smiled, but laughed. Bissy went for it, but not Elena. Elena ran and Bissy called after her, “Where you going, ‘lena?” And Elena did not know, but she needed to get out of there fast because something about the drifter made her belly feel like it was filled with black ice. The drifter did something to Bissy in the woods and she was never the same after that. She became sullen and quiet, then mean in high school. She died just shy of her 21st birthday in Chicago with a needle hanging out of her arm. Flip. It was April of 1968 and there was a knock at the door. George was out in the fields. Elena answered it and a found a marine standing there. Franny had been killed in action. Flip. It was 1922. Elena was five years old going on six and her mother was set to deliver a younger brother or sister. Elena herself was excited, singing and skipping about. She was the only one. The other kids were worried and would not say why. The adults were grim as gravestones. The women from the surrounding farms had gathered as they always gathered when there a birthing. And late that afternoon, the midwife, Mrs. Stern, had come. Elena never liked her. She dressed in somber gray, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, her lips wrinkled and her eyes like chips of the blackest coal. She did not think it was her imagination that everyone—even the men—were uneasy around her. Towards suppertime, her mother began to cry out, screaming bloody murder, and it was within the hour that the child was born. No one was allowed to go upstairs and see it. Only a few of the farm women and the midwife herself. Elena heard it crying out more than once and she asked the other kids if babies always sounded like mewling cats. Flip. It was 1996 and they laid George to rest. And although Elena was sad, she did not cry like the others at the funeral. For some reason, she thought the very idea of crying for her husband after he’d lived a good long life of good deeds and productive years was near to blasphemy. So she did not cry. She knew he would be proud of her and the pride they felt in each other through years both lean and fat meant a great deal to them. Flip. It was 1922 again. That baby was really mewling by eight that night and Elena found her father crying and asked him why, but he would not tell her. And when she asked if she could see the new baby, he just shook his head. “There are reasons you can’t see it. Very good reasons.” And it was near on to sunset that night, that Mrs. Stern finally left, carrying a small bundle close to her breast. Later, it was said she had taken it out to Ezren’s Field. Elena and the other children were told that the new baby died of crib death and wasn’t that just so sad? It was a boy and he had been named Edwin. They had a small, dignified funeral out at the county cemetery and everyone wept as a tiny, empty box was lowered into the ground.