Primal Fear (26 page)

Harry froze, his gun still pointed toward the creature.  He didn’t want to alarm the thing, didn’t want to trigger an attack with any sudden movements.  And just before he clicked off the safety, the creature made its move.  It lunged up from its spot on the cavern floor, catching Harry in the middle of his chest, just below his outstretched gun hand.

Already, he could feel its claws tearing into him . . .

Chapter Twenty-Two

Harry tried to shove the thing off of him, repulsed by its touch, by the way his own fingers seemed to sink into its white, slick flesh.  Its skin writhed beneath his fingers, slick and wet like rotting meat, but he held on.  And slowly, very slowly, he began to pull the thing off.

It screeched in his grip, a high-pitched, unearthly squeal of rage, and it took every bit of Harry’s strength to finally push it away from him.  It hit the cavern floor beside him, lost its footing and stumbled for a moment, long enough for Harry to roll clear of it.

He scrambled to his feet, risking a glance toward the bodies of the children.  Three more of the creatures were emerging, one from each of the remaining children.  The awful process of birthing was a slow one, and Harry realized his only hope was to exploit that weakness.

He had to move fast, had to get back up into the hole in the ceiling before the other three creatures were free.  Sighting the first one as it turned towards him once again, Harry leveled his gun and squeezed the trigger.

The shot went wide, screaming off of a rock to the creature’s right, and the thing changed its strategy.  It charged Charlie instead, its body a sudden blur of motion, moving much too quickly for Harry to draw a bead on it.

“Charlie, watch out!”

But it was too late.  The creature leaped at his deputy, catching him by the throat and bringing him down hard in the middle of the chamber’s opening.  He struggled against it, screaming in panic, his legs flailing wildly on the cold stone floor.

Harry eyed the other three creatures, checking the progress of their birth.  Two of them were more than halfway out, the third just starting to free its bulbous head.  He weighed his chances, understanding that if he crossed the chamber to come to Charlie’s aid, then neither of them would make it back into the upper cavern to help John.

Holding his position, he dropped to one knee, aiming as carefully as he could, the gun held firmly in a two-handed grip.

“Get its head up!” he shouted.

Charlie tried to comply, his arms shaking with the strain of the creature’s strength.

Harry peered through the gloom, waiting for the moment when he could take the shot without the risk of hitting his deputy.

The struggle went on for another thirty seconds, and finally, rolling himself over onto his belly, Charlie gained the upper hand.  Trapped beneath him, the thing squealed in pain, digging its claws deeply into the soft flesh of Charlie’s hands, raking bloody furrows into his skin.

But Charlie never let up.  Holding the thing firmly by the throat, he picked up a chunk of rock with his free hand and brought it down with all his strength onto the creature’s head.  It screamed in agony, but its attack didn’t seem to slacken at all.

Charlie lifted the rock, brought it down again and again, until finally the creature wasn’t moving at all.  He struggled to his feet, dropping the rock onto the lifeless carcass.

And when he turned, holding his bloody hands out in front of him, his eyes grew wide again.  “They’re coming out, Harry,” he moaned.  “Oh shit, they’re almost out.”

Harry turned, his eyes sweeping over the children’s bodies, confirming Charlie’s warning.  The first two creatures were nearly free.  The third was halfway there already.  It would only be a matter of time before they attacked as well.

“Come on, Charlie.  Let’s go.  Up through the hole.”

“I can’t . . .”

“It’s our only chance.  If we can catch up with John, he’ll know what to do.”

“Harry, I can’t.”  Charlie retreated another three steps, his eyes wide, never leaving the circle of children.  He stepped on his gun and almost stumbled.  Recovering quickly, he bent to retrieve his weapon.  “I have to . . . have to get out of here.”

“I can’t go with you,” Harry told him, moving into position underneath the hole.  “You know that.”

“I know, I know.  I just . . . I can’t.”

“Then head back to the surface, fast as you can.  Stay in touch over the radio.  Get back in the Jeep to stay warm and keep trying to raise the station.  I have to find John.”  Harry threw one more glance at the creatures and then holstered his gun for the climb.

“What if—”

“Give us an hour,” Harry ordered.  “If we’re not back by then, get back to the station and fill them in.”

Charlie nodded, but Harry wasn’t sure if he’d heard everything.  Finally, with no time left to lose, Harry started to climb up into the hole, willing Charlie to just turn tail and run like hell.

He’d only been in the tunnel two minutes when another series of shots rang out from below.  He cursed, knowing he couldn’t go back, that he had to find John and try to put an end to this for good.   Still on the move, he was already reaching for his radio when Charlie’s voice came through in a sudden burst of static.

“Harry!  You there?  Harry, I—”

“I thought I told you to get back up to the surface.  What the hell are you doing?”

“Harry, listen, I got one.  I got another one of them.  Christ, they’re like . . . like ghosts.  Spirits or something, I don’t know.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  One minute, when they’re moving, they’re like smoke . . .  And then when they get hold of you, they’re like . . . oh, Jesus . . .  What are these things?”

“Charlie, slow down.  Listen to me.  You have to get—”

“They came out of the bodies, Harry.  I don’t know how they could, but—”

“Charlie, damn it, I’m telling you to listen to me.  Snap out of it.  Just get the hell out of there.  That’s an order.”

Ten seconds passed in silence.  And then Charlie spoke again, more quietly this time.  “I don’t know where those other two are gone to.  The way they move, they could be anywhere by—” 

He stopped, but the sudden fear in his voice had been unmistakable.

A moment later, Charlie’s voice came back over the speaker, muted and vigilant.  “I just saw the other ones.  They just climbed up through the hole.  I tried to stop them all for you, but I couldn’t.  I’m sorry . . . I’m heading back out now, and I’ll see you at my Jeep.  I’m sorry.  Shit, Harry, they’re headed your way.”

*     *     *     *     *

Dr. Morris lowered his head.  “That’s it,” he announced, stepping back from the old man’s bedside.  “I’m calling it, people: the patient expired at—”  He consulted the clock in the corner of the room.  “—nine-oh-nine AM.”

He stared at Mahuk’s still form, wishing there was something else he could have done, some final medical miracle he might have performed.  But there was nothing.  And now a man was dead, his body already beginning to cool no more than five feet away.

Morris turned away, pulling off his gloves with a sharp snap of latex.  He could hear the whine of the cardiac monitor, the ongoing electronic bleep that served as a warning that the patient had flat-lined.  It droned on, a high-pitched reminder that they’d lost the old man for good.  A final reminder of his own failure . . .

He turned to Nurse Pratcher, about to tell her to shut the damn thing off, that it was no longer necessary.  But she was no longer at the bedside.  She was backing slowly away from it, her eyes wide, her mouth hanging open in shock.

Morris followed her gaze and felt his own jaw drop open.

“No,” she stammered, “this isn’t . . .”

The old man’s arms had risen from his sides, his hands curling into the same elaborate patterns that he’d performed in his sleep throughout the week.  They moved smoothly now, as if the restraint of the old man’s living will couldn’t hinder them any longer.

The patterns came faster, the movements more complex.  And all the while the monitors beside the bed continued to broadcast the same clear message: the old man was dead.  No activity showed on any of the monitors, and a full three minutes had passed since Dr. Morris had officially pronounced the patient dead.

And yet his hands and arms continued to move, a contradiction to every law of nature and science that Morris had ever learned.

A long ten minutes passed before Harry caught up with John again.  When he finally found the young Aleut, John was standing at a fork in the tunnel, shining his flashlight along each path, obviously debating about which one to take.

He returned to John’s side as quickly as he could, moving through the darkness with new fear gnawing at his belly.

He could hear the things following along behind him, his ear detecting an odd scratching sound, like metal on stone.  Something else, too, something he couldn’t identify at first but then came to associate with the knocking of bones against one another.

“There’s something coming,” he whispered.  “I don’t know what they are, but they’re definitely coming this way.  They came out of the kids, and they’re vicious little bastards.”  Harry held up his hands, showing John the cuts and scratches he’d suffered during the creature’s attack.  “What the hell are we dealing with here?”

John shook his head.  “I don’t know.  I’d have to see them first.”

“You don’t want to see these guys, believe me.”

“Then let’s go,” John pressed.  “If we can stop Wyh-heah Qui Waq, we can stop whatever it is that’s coming for us.”

“How do you know that?”

“I think the demon managed to bring something through the gateway even before it could come back itself.  I don’t know how and I don’t know what, but I’m willing to bet it’s something designed to stop us.”

Harry peered carefully into the dark mouth of each tunnel.  “Which way?”

John pointed towards the left.  “I think it’s down this way.  Not much further.”

He started to move away, making his way along the cavern’s curving wall.  Harry followed him in silence, casting a nervous eye over his shoulder every few minutes in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the two creatures he knew were coming after them.

Twice he thought he saw something, a flash of movement or perhaps just a trick of the shadows.  But each time, as he swung the lantern in that direction, he found nothing.

So far, at least, they were still alone.

“Almost there,” John said.  “Oh, my God . . . can you feel it?”

Harry didn’t answer, didn’t have to.  Because there was something in the air here, something that set his nerves on fire, his teeth on edge.  He could feel the tiny hairs on his neck rising to attention.  But all of it was without meaning to him; it more than fear, of course, but still something well beyond identification.

And from behind them now, he could once again hear the dry rattle of bones, and the sound of what could only be claws raking across the stone floor of the cavern.

He turned in time to see a blur of white in the middle distance, a fleeting motion just at the edge of the lantern’s power.  In another second it was gone, but this time he was certain that what he’d glimpsed was quite real.

“It’s here,” he whispered, softly nudging John in the back.

John had come to a complete stop in front of him.  “I know,” he said.  His voice was filled with awe, and Harry knew instinctively that they were talking about two different things.

He turned, peering over John’s shoulder. 

John was staring downward, his flashlight trained on the edge of a jagged pit in the cavern’s floor.  It almost looked as if the ground had been split wide open here, as though it had allowed itself to collapse in the hope of someday swallowing some future adversary.

Harry stepped up to John’s side, his eyes following the beam of the flashlight as it carved a path through the darkness of the pit.  He felt his knees weaken, and his gaze wavered for a moment, his senses reeling as if he’d been punched square in the face.  His mind tried to retreat from what he was seeing, to shut out the vision of what logic dictated could not be possible.

But there it was.

And he couldn’t look away.

It lay in a crumpled heap, fifteen feet below them, stretched across the bottom of the pit.  It was the tupilaq’s body, just as John had told him.  Even at this distance, Harry could see that it was indeed fashioned from wood and bone, and just as had been the case with the artifact the night before, he could detect no sign of a seam between either material.  The wood melded perfectly into the bones, as if—as John had said—one had begun to transform into the other.

Harry let his eyes roam carefully over its form.  It was monstrous, its limbs long and thin, like the branches of some diseased tree, its body bent and twisted and black as pitch.  Its face was turned away, but Harry managed to get a clear look at the back and side of its huge, disfigured head.  It was horrible, easily three times the size of any normal man’s skull.

“Look,” John whispered, pointing to one of its hands, a giant, gnarled fist at the end of one long, spindly arm.

One of its fingers had been chopped off at a point just above the second joint.  This was where Mahuk’s ancestor, the legendary shaman Jha-Laman, had claimed his prize.  Whether driven by pride or by a fervent wish to prove his success in destroying the tupilaq, they would never know.  But there was no contradicting the truth that faced them, no turning away from what had once only been a myth, but was now clearly a part of history.