“Why?”
“Just stand still!” Jones aimed his headtorch at the floor and nearly vomited on the spot. In the bright, white spotlight he could see the entire floor was slick and covered in slime. It had a marbled appearance, with swirls of darker patches in a larger expanse of paler fluids. He crouched and touched a gloved finger to the floor. As he brought his hand back up, a strand of jelly-like goo stuck to his glove, the viscosity the same as baby snot. He stood and flicked the disgusting stuff off his glove. He knew exactly what the slime was. And it wasn’t baby snot, that was for damn sure.
“Sarge…”
“Easy, Cox. Easy.” Jones could now hear genuine fear in Cox’s voice. Not so cocky now, are you, you smart-mouthed little shit? he thought viciously. But the newbie was under his protection, despite his earlier and deeply disturbing mental image of ripping the son of a bitch’s heart out of his chest. His job now was to get them out of here, and quickly.
Jones stood in the middle of the chamber, directly underneath the hole that led to the outside world — a world where the floor wasn’t coated with the rotting remains of decaying bodies. A world where the darkness didn’t press in on you like a vice. A world where horrific thoughts of disembowelling your fellow man could be dismissed as a sick by-product of PTSD, and talked through with a shrink over a nice cuppa and a biscuit. In here, in the womb of the earth and so close to the ritualistic carnage that had saturated this landscape in blood for centuries, the familiar form of an SA80 didn’t seem to be such a comfort.
Jones tried to quell the panic he felt was about to hit him like a tsunami. He scanned the chamber, and the spotlight of his torch revealed a stone-lined wall so well made you wouldn’t be able to get a blade between the unevenly shaped slabs, let alone your fingertips. As he did a three-sixty rotation, the torch beam landed on a much larger lump of stone and he stopped in his tracks. Carefully, in case the slime caused him to lose his footing, he made his way over to the massive stone.
“Sarge, for fuck’s sake, talk to me!” Cox’s panic was now clearly audible.
“Stop panicking, fella. We’re not dead yet. So calm down and breathe slowly. Preferably through your mouth. If you’re gonna throw up, do it in a corner. Somewhere I’m not going to step in it.” He ignored the sounds of Cox dashing to the side of the void and throwing his guts up, focusing only on the massive megalith in front of him. “We must be right next to the Henge. This looks like the arse-end of one of the Sarsen Stones.”
“How’s that possible?” Cox spat the last remnants of bile from his mouth and straightened, feeling slightly better for voiding ration pack number sixteen out of his twisted guts.
“What, you think the bloody things levitate, you daft sod? They’re buried into the ground, how do you think they stay up? There are legends about underground chambers beneath the Stones, but shit, I thought it was just a bunch of new age bollocks…”
Jones slowly reached out his hand and brushed his fingertips over the surface of the stone.
The jolt threw him backwards clear across the chamber.
He landed and slid through the slime on his arse, trying to stop himself from slamming into the opposite wall. His headtorch went spinning across the floor, the light dancing and contorting like a ballerina on acid. It smashed into the side of the chamber, then blinked out. Jones finally came to rest a few inches from the wall, feeling like he’d just been hit with the mother of all tasers. He gasped, unable to get a lungful of the putrid air. Jones felt Cox cradling his head and heard the panicked man’s voice at the edge of hearing, but couldn’t respond. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed full of cotton wool and a million ants were crawling all over his body. He shook violently, his muscles convulsing and twitching as he tried to focus on bringing his breathing under control.
“Sarge! Jesus Christ! Sarge!”
The shock sent Jones’ brain into shutdown mode. His oppo’s words became muffled and distant, as if Cox was shouting at him from the opposite side of a parade ground. He wanted to tell Cox that he was okay, but that was a bloody lie. He quite clearly wasn’t. And Cox’s obvious inability to function under extreme stress was starting to send the younger man spinning towards full-on hysteria. Well, tough titties, kiddo. Your sergeant’s down. It’s up to you, now. It’s called ‘teamwork’, fella…Jones started to embrace the unconsciousness that kept threatening to overwhelm him…
Cox cradled Jones’ head, instinctively pressing two fingers to his neck to check his pulse. He felt about a hair’s breadth away from total pissing your pants and crying for your mummy meltdown. He held Jones in his arms, trying to comprehend what had just happened and to shut out the crushing fear that was filling him. He was not normally that bothered by the dark or enclosed spaces — he’d always believed that they were phobias only pussies got. But right now those pussy phobias seemed to contain other, more threatening horrors. Where were the bodies that had produced the copious amount of corpse fluids that turned the floor into a slime-covered, foetid skating rink? Why had his sergeant just been thrown across the chamber after touching the foot of the Sarsen Stone?
And was his terrified imagination playing twisted tricks on him, or did a part of the blackness have a distinctly bipedal form?
He turned his headtorch towards the spot, expecting the beam to light up a human form; please God, perhaps one of the 22nd who’d yomped down the hole and was going to pull them to safety.
There was nothing there. The shadow form had slid sideways to just beyond the edge of the beam, away from the light. Still cradling the drooling, semi-conscious Jones in his arms, Cox swivelled his head, sending the torchlight scampering across the stones. No matter where he looked, that bipedal form was always just out of the path of the beam.
His headtorch flickered and dimmed. “Oh, no, no, No! Shit! C’mon, do not do this!” He batted the side of the torch, willing the beam to power up again, but the torch suddenly winked out. The chamber was plunged into darkness. But at last a shred of his training kicked in as Cox remembered his NVGs perched on his helmet. He flicked them down and suddenly looked out into an eerie, vivid green chamber.
Glancing down, he could see the prone body of Jones, still shaking and convulsing. “S’alright, Sarge, you’re gonna be fine. Take it easy.” Cox took a deep breath and tried to stop his own hands from shaking so violently, afraid he’d drop Jones’ head and shoulders back down into the slime that covered the floor. Cox shifted his weight and positioned his thigh underneath Jones’ shoulders, keeping the man’s head and neck clear of the ooze. “Easy, Sarge. Easy. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay?” Cox frantically scanned the chamber. It was huge — far bigger than the limited glow of the headtorches had revealed. The night vision goggles allowed him to see details, but still there was something just at the edge of his peripheral vision — something that seemed to be taunting him in a sick game of Marco Polo. Wherever he looked in the chamber he could sense it…
He looked down again at Jones. “Sarge, c’mon, stay with me!” He slapped Jones’ face gently, garnering a moan in response. “Sarge, hey, Sarge…” Cox looked up — straight into the wild, staring eyes of a massive figure. “Jesus Christ!”
He scuttled backwards, ignoring the crack as Jones’ head hit the hard stone floor and propelled himself away from the figure. Gun! Gun! Grab your gun! He swung the SA80 up, and then realised that it would probably be more effective as a club. This was not a live ammo exercise. It was a ‘shit and thunder’ romp across the Wiltshire countryside, with plenty of flash-bangs, noise and piss and not much else. The SA80’s magazine was full of blanks, which made it about as much use as chucking confetti at a seven-foot tall… what?