Dead Five's Pass (13 page)

Carise leapt across the chasm so she was standing at his back, and did as she was told, getting a firm grip of the shoulder straps before he could slip down into the void for good.

“I’m going to push myself back,” he said. “I want you to pull until I can get my legs up.”

She understood what he planned to do: wedge his back against one side while walking his legs up the other and thus up and out of the crevice. But already her strength was waning.

“On three. Ready?” he said.

“Not really, but we don’t have much choice.”

“Right. One… Two… Three… Pull!”

He pushed backward with his legs, and Carise held her breath and gritted her teeth as she took up the slack and pulled up and backward on the pack straps. His back hit the rock and his feet scrambled on the smooth surface opposite.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Marcel said, as he failed to gain any grip and he slipped farther down the split. Carise’s arms were shaking with effort now as she planted her feet firmly and wide on the solid surface and tried to hold his weight, but the straps were too narrow and hurt her hands. They began to slip against the burns caused by her fall earlier and she stifled a scream.

“Quick,” she whimpered, “I…can’t…”

The straps slipped loose from her hands and Marcel fell into the darkness.

15

She watched in horror as Marcel sunk down into the hole, his feet scrabbling for purchase on one side, and his backpack slipping down the rock on the other.

“Carise!” he called up, surprisingly calm. “Get a rope down here.”

She was already on it. Shrugging her pack off, she reached in and pulled out a nylon rope. She wrapped it around her body a number of times and secured it with a carabiner on her belt before throwing it down into the chasm. The rope hit Marcel; he reached out, grabbed it with gloved hands.

His falling weight dragged her across the surface until she fell on her ass, all the while she tried to grip the rope as best she could, given the burns and wounds in her palms.

It didn’t help. He continued to drop and she slid across, heading for the split in the rock.

“Hold on,” she shouted as her legs dangled over into the chasm, but as he dropped a few more centimeters, she managed to stop the descent by wedging her legs against the lip on the other side of the gap. The rope twanged taught and she felt it dig into her back as she took his weight.

“I can’t get a grip,” he said. “There’s no way you can lift me out.”

The rock shuddered again, and this time cracks appeared in the ceiling and walls of the tunnel. The voice she heard earlier boomed ever louder and she dreaded to think what was coming up from the depths. Hell, she knew what was coming up from the depths, and that scared her even more.

Frantically she considered her options. There were none that she liked: stay where she was and eventually drop Marcel and get crushed by falling rocks, or let him go and make a run for it. Either way she was doomed.

“How long’s the rope?” Marcel shouted up.

“Fifty meters,” she replied.

“I can see a light down here, I think it’s another chamber. Lower me down. It’s the only way.”

“But what if there’s nothing there? What if—”

“We have no other choice! Just do it.”

She let go of the rope and allowed her body to take the weight while she adjusted the carabiner on her belt that enabled her to feed the rope down a few meters at a time. With each drop the rope slid around her waist, cutting into her clothing and skin.

“There’s definitely a chamber down there,” Marcel said as he continued to stretch his legs across the void and walk himself down the rock with his weight supported by the rope.

Eventually the end of the rope fell from the backpack, and she gripped it and fed it slower.

“I’m nearly out,” she called down. He looked much smaller now. His hard hat and light a small dot among a void of darkness.

“Okay, I’m letting go, I can jump from here,” he said, his voice now small and swallowed by the rock.

Her guts felt like they crawled with eels as she fed the rope bit-by-bit until it unraveled from around her waist. She grabbed the end and it became slack. Marcel shuffled farther a few meters and then he simply fell, disappearing into the gloom.

She wanted to throw up, such was the dread that rose within her. She held her breath and waited, hoping he had made it. A long minute ticked by and still she heard nothing. Her fear that he had fallen to his death paralyzed her. She’d rather be buried beneath the rocks than risk leaving him.

The shuddering of the mountain continued, and, beyond the gap in the tunnel, the sound of clicking and chattering sliced through the low rumble. A shiver broke out as she realized what the sound was.

A slithering, tentacled limb slowly traversed through the tunnel ahead of her, its many rows of hard, chitinous hooks propelling it forward and giving it the look of a huge, clammy millipede. It swayed from one side to the next as it moved closer. It was as if it were tasting the ground, searching…hunting.

The thing was just about thirty meters away when she finally heard, faintly, Marcel’s voice call up.

“It’s okay, there’s a passage down here. Come down!”

He tugged on the rope a little to signal to her, and in her paralysis she nearly let it slip from her hands. She wanted to call down to him but didn’t want to draw the attention of the wormlike creature slithering towards her. She held her breath, willed herself not to make any noise, and hoped it couldn’t smell her.

Although it featured nothing that resembled eyes, its mottled black skin slithered and oscillated as if its surface was some kind of receiver.

And it shook suddenly, a wave running down its thick body before rearing up and swaying its pointed tip in the air.

Shit, shit, shit, it’s gonna find me
, Carise thought.

The ceiling splintered further and a heavy, sharp-edged boulder crashed beside her, making her yelp out loud. The worm-thing reacted instantly and slithered its great bulk on those thousands of hooks until it was no more than a couple of meters from her.

She scooted her butt forward and let her back slide down the side of the chasm, and just as the thing lurched towards her, she ducked and allowed her feet to drop below the lip so that she, like Marcel before her, wedged herself in the gap.

She let herself slide down the hole as the tentacle lashed out, barely missing her.

She fell the hundred meters in a matter of a seconds, her stomach lurching and her throat choked with barely held screams. A light glimmered from beneath, and she recognized it as the cold, sterile white light of Marcel’s helmet-mounted flashlight.

“Marcel!” she screamed as her skin burned and grazed during her frantic descent, and then she was free from the gap and falling freely towards the rocky floor.

* * *

Marcel sprinted to the exit of the chasm and got there just in time to help break Carise’s fall. She tumbled into him butt-first and they both hit the deck in a crumpled heap. Her backpack came down after, falling on top of them. His arms were around her waist, and for a few seconds they stayed that way, as if waiting would mean fewer wounds and less pain.

She swiveled round in his arms to face him.

“You’re always there to catch me, aren’t you?” A pained smile stretched across her dusty face.

“I try,” he said. “Are you hurt?”

“My back feels like it’s on fire. Would you take a look?”

They stood up and she turned, exposing the red and gashed flesh of her back. It looked like she’d been flogged by a slave master. He winced and said, “It’s not too bad,” to reassure her, and himself. He took the first-aid kit from his pack and gently removed the largest chips of rock and dust from the cuts. She shuddered each time.

“I’m going to spray some disinfectant on it, like I did with your ankle. It might feel a bit cold,” he said, knowing it’d hurt like hell for a few seconds. He popped the cap on the can and sprayed the open wounds.

“Motherfucker!” she hissed and arched her back.

“Just breathe,” he advised as he took a packet of adhesive gauze bandages and applied them over the wounds. He pulled her jacket carefully over her back.

“Okay?” he asked.

She wiped tears from her eyes onto her sleeve. “Yeah, just about. It’s going numb, thankfully. Thanks. I thought I lost you… What happened?”

He smiled then. “I know where that chanting is coming from. We should get moving; I found something interesting.”

Marcel had found and replaced his Tovex bandolier and took Carise’s backpack so that nothing would interfere with her wounds. He led her down yet another tunnel. This one was just above head height but much wider as if it had been squashed from all the weight above. A yellow light came from farther down and round the corner. He followed it earlier, tracking the hideous chants, and now he led Carise in the same direction. It was quiet now apart from that continuous rumble that felt like a controlled earthquake.

Turning the corner, he said with a whisper, “Down there about ten meters and to the left is a room…with an altar and…other stuff.”

“Other stuff?” Carise asked, raising her eyebrows.

“You have to see it, it explains a lot. But we’ll have to be quick just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case they come back and catch us.”

“They?”

16

Carise inhaled and whistled when Marcel led her into an antechamber cut into the rock off the tunnel.

“Looks like someone sleeps here,” she said, noticing four narrow cots covered in austere brown cloth. They were inset into nooks within the walls, two either side—one above the other—of the twenty-foot room. Robes made from the same rough fabric hung on stone protrusions next to the cots.

“They do more than just sleep here,” Marcel said, pointing to an ornate stone-carved lectern in the middle of the room. “Looks like some kind of worship,” he added.

“Or study,” Carise said. The lectern came up to her chest and featured carved faces resembling gargoyles upon its sides. She recognized the forms: they looked like those bat creatures, but not as evolved. These faces were brutal, antediluvian, primal. Their eyes were great featureless orbs and she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were looking at her, assessing her.

On the left-hand side of the room, and above the cots, was a leathery material upon which was drawn a set of glyphs, much like those she saw on the ceiling of the lake chamber. Beneath each symbol—which were arranged in a grid—was some kind of translation. Some of the shapes resembled roman alphabetic letters, but not close enough that she could make them out, and yet despite that, she felt her throat and mouth form unusual and inexplicable new forms.

She blinked and looked away, scared what might come out of her mouth next.

Marcel was rifling through the cots and robes, inspecting various artifacts held within niches and nooks.

“These aren’t right,” he said. “Could they be fake?” He held up a skull no larger than his fist. Its jaw distended and over-bit the face. The brain cavity was large and bulbous and like the carvings, its eye sockets were wide and tall.

Carise shuddered and wondered whether it was just some undiscovered species of monkey, but from everything she’d experienced, she thought it more likely some bizarre creature that dwelled in the darkness. Who knew what else was down here in the depths?

As if on cue, Marcel pulled a black jar from a nook and peered inside. He tipped the jar onto one of the cots and the skeleton that fell out made Carise’s skin crawl.

With its legs unfolded, it was bigger than a dinner plate. There were ten legs, long and thin, and on the end were obsidian-colored hooks. The creature didn’t have much of a body though. The legs attached to a central semi-sphere of bone like a tennis ball cut in half, and on that flat top rose a short spine that connected the body to a round skull with those familiarly large eye sockets—except this thing had four eyes, one on each side of its head, giving it a 360-degree field of vision. Its face extended out into a beaklike shape, and thin, sharp fangs lined the edges. Some were stunted and broken but they seemed no less sharp.

Marcel shook his head, screwed up his face in revulsion and placed the desiccated corpse back in the jar. “I’m taking it with us,” he said. “The bio guys at the university will have a field day with it.”

“Bad idea,” Carise said.

Next to a book on the lectern was a rather mundane pen. It had A
LBERTA
A
NTIQUARIAN
S
OCIETY
etched on its side. Carise soon found herself running her rope-burned hands across the pages of the book, which sat open, just inviting her to read it. The cover was surprisingly warm to the touch, and although the membranous pages were thin, they felt firm and leathery like dry…skin?
Could it really be skin
?