Whispering.
Not just one or two disembodied voices like before, but dozens, maybe hundreds of voices whispering and whispering, competing against one another. That wall of eerie sibilance rose and fell, echoing through the night. You could hear individual voices in there, but never identify what was being said.
Kenney and the others had frozen up tight now, unmoving. You could hear someone breathing, someone making a strangled sobbing sound, someone else chattering their teeth. Kenney himself felt like he’d been filled with concrete, allowed to set. He thought that any moment he would fall through the moist crust of the earth, plunge into some dark abyss like a sinking ocean liner.
The whispering faded as if maybe it was coming from some far-distant quarter and then came right back at them again like a boomerang, a malevolent and baneful noise of countless voices, whispering and whispering and whispering. So loud now, so in-their-face god-awful, it seemed it was being run through an amplifier.
“What the hell is this?” Chipney demanded.
The men started moving in circles, weapons drawn. Unsure, afraid, terrified maybe. They were muttering to themselves and one man was reciting the Rosary. Herd mentality. Discipline was unraveling like a ball of yarn and they were bumping into each other and stumbling through the sea of cold mud, trying to stay together, but wandering off.
Kenney was feeling it, too. It seemed the flesh at his balls was literally creeping, slinking, trying to draw itself flat so what it contained could not be found, could not be molested. Could not be ripped free.
“Stay together!” Hyder called out and his voice was weak and horrified. “We… we gotta stick together and march out in a line. Don’t you see? Anything comes at us, we shoot it, we shoot it down for chrissake—”
“Quiet!” Kenney snapped. “Shut your goddamn mouth!”
He heard it as he heard it before… or thought he had… a stealthy, sentient motion out there that stopped as they stopped, took advantage of the noise of the search party walking through the muck to get in closer, closer. But now it was no longer bothering to disguise itself. It was coming now, coming for them. It sounded like a hundred men in rubber boots moving through a swamp—a wet, slopping noise. And there was a ragged, hoarse breathing accompanying it, snatches of that tenebrous whispering.
The mud seemed to be getting deeper like quicksand now and the fog grew thicker. It swirled around them, covered them, moved in a phantasmal and cloistral mist, enclosing them in a shroud of dampness. The men stumbled through it, tried to find their bearings, but were gradually separating in their confusion.
And Kenney thought: Sure, you goddamn idiot! Why didn’t you see it coming? That’s exactly what’s happening here! Whatever’s stalking you wants you to scatter, to disperse. Like lions working a herd of gazelle, they’re looking for stragglers…
And he knew it, but seemed powerless to do anything about it.
He called out, trying to rally the men, but no voice could still that confusion and terror that ate away their unity. And that was the worst possible thing—no command, no discipline, no unit integrity, everything steadily going right to shit until there weren’t ten men out there in those saturated fields, but ten little boys, lost and scared and confused. Because at the core, he knew, every man is a boy and every woman is a little girl. And nothing brings it to the surface faster that cold, metallic fear. He had the most disturbing sense than whatever was out there knew this only too well.
It was what they wanted.
Just like they’d taken advantage of the night and fog and repetitive landscape to lead the search party out here into this yawning hollow where the mud was cool and misting and hungry to suck a man down into its belly…
Somebody screamed and Kenney saw one of the deputies—Kopecky, he thought—waist-deep in a sinkhole, struggling like a mastodon in a tar pit. He flailed and writhed and fought and that only fed him deeper into the throat of the hole. A few of the cops staggered away so they wouldn’t get drawn down, too, but the others tried to reach him and were soon up to their calves in the muck.
Kenney made a try himself, one leg sinking up to the knee in that swampy filth.
The sound of those footsteps moving at them through the mist was closer. A busy, quick sound. The sound of people or worse things perfectly adapted to this environment. They would strike now, he knew. Now that the searchers were mired in the mud, trapped and hobbled and most certainly stuck like struggling insects on flypaper.
Jesus, I can feel it. It’s about to happen.
The whisperings were all around them. Loathsome, hunched shapes flitted through the mist with amazing speed and agility. They made noises other than the breathing and whispering—gruntings and groanings, high squealing sounds that sounded too much like those of enraged boars.
Kopecky was up to his chest in that awful, hungry mire and his face was wet and spattered with grime. His eyes were huge and unblinking, his mouth howling and howling and… and as everyone watched, a pair of grotesque white hands came up from the oozing muck, the fingers bonelessly wrapping around his throat like the tentacles of some bathypelagic horror, and he was drawn down and was gone, a few turgid bubbles rising up. And it all happened so fast, no one could be sure if those spongy, bleached things were even hands at all.
And that was it.
Everyone lost it.
8
When Kopecky opened his eyes, he was alone in the mud and the darkness. He tried to think, tried to put it together. They were moving through that field and then… and then those shapes came out of the fog. Not human shapes at all. No, debased, degenerate, grotesque. Then he went down the hole.
You didn’t go down, you were pulled down.
That’s when panic hit.
He tried to scramble to his feet, but the mud was slippery like some semi-gelatin ooze. It smelled like corpse slime. Gagging, unbelievably gagging, a yellow and aged stench that crawled down his throat and settled in his gut. He managed to rise finally and immediately bumped his head on the earthen roof of the passage. A jutting root nearly tore his ear off.
He was in a tunnel.
A subterranean crawl space made for dwarves or troglodytes. Frantically, he felt at his belt. Yes, he still had his gun but his radio was gone. Not that it would have done him much good down in this stygian hole anyway. He fumbled around on his belt until he found his little penlight. He thanked God he carried it now. He also thanked God that he was not overly claustrophobic.
He got the light on.
It was practically blinding in the blackness.
Above, a little light like that would have illuminated five or six feet, but down there it was like a searchlight. Such was the quality of the darkness.
Yes, a tunnel with walls of earth. He saw no opening above, yet he must have gotten down here somewhere. He had figured he fell through a hole from above, but there was no sign of one.
Okay. Just think. Do not panic—think.
He panned the light over the muddy floor. He could see what looked like a drag mark fading into the distance. He must have been knocked unconscious when he fell. Yes, that had to have been it. Then he pulled himself this far by sheer instinct alone, not really awake, just scratching his way forward like a mole.
He would simply go back that way and get out.
That’s it.
That’s all there was to it.
He began moving back down the passage, trying real hard not to think of what the tunnel was for or who had dug it. It wasn’t a good idea to be thinking about things like that. The tunnel seemed to be arching steadily toward the right at a gentle angle. There was very little to see but tree roots spoking down, mud, and standing water that he splashed through or planed over like a belly-skimming kids. The stink was hot and gassy. It made his throat feel dry even though he was wet and filthy from head to toe, his uniform pants soaked, his boots full of sludge, his shirt smeared with drying clay.