The Croning (34 page)

Barry Rourke said, “I
am
trying to help you. Alas, you married poorly. The Mocks are favorite pets of my masters. Your wife is the last of that line and I know
they
want to keep her happy and compliant. Only reason I can figure that Bronson Ford didn’t swallow you whole. Or drag you screaming into the dark. One of your ancestors made the mistake of crossing the Dark Ones. I get the feeling you’re being preserved for something quite hideous. The Children of Old Leech have long, long memories. But
you
aren’t important. You’re a flea on the belly of a mastodon.” He grasped Don’s arm and helped him stand, led him to a window.

The sun was an orange streak descending behind the summit of the mountain. As the man had said, night was coming fast. A handful of cumulus clouds scudded past, images in a frame traveling at 4X normal velocity. Don bit hard into the palm of his hand to stifle a giggle. Were he to laugh now there was no telling where it would end.

Rourke said, “Steady, steady. Give it a moment, let the wave roll on by. You’ve tasted the nectar of the void before, eh? Not to worry—this stuff is more concentrated and it filters through the blood rapidly. It’s not my intention to drug you. I only want you to have a moment of clarity before your Swiss cheese brain gets fogged in again. There is something you need to see.”

6.

Rourke spoke the truth in regard to the drug—within a few minutes Don’s disorientation eased and he came to his senses bit by bit. His resurgent memories lingered, frightful acuity mitigated by their fragmentary nature; a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle cast into the air.

“We have to move,” Rourke said. He snapped on a flashlight and guided Don to the trapdoor and threw it open. Night had descended with unnatural swiftness and Rourke’s beam illuminated a narrow shaft, the first half dozen rungs. “I’ll go first. Whatever you do, don’t look down.”

Don was too busy concentrating on maintaining a death grip on the ladder to worry about looking anywhere besides his knotted, arthritic hands. Maneuvering his decrepit self was difficult enough; meanwhile, memories (precognitive visions?) continued to leak through the ruptured membrane: the twins as middle-aged; of Argyle ageless and peering through binoculars; of a beefy young fellow named Hank slipping into the maw of a dolmen—

His treacherous fingers lost hold and he would’ve fallen, except Rourke caught him under the arms and righted him without much effort. Don was a sack of feathers.
I dried up like a prune in my dotage.

Rourke set aside the flashlight and ignited a torch—the old-fashioned kind with a big crown oozing pitch that shed a reddish glow and fumed with smoke. The torchlight revealed the shadowy contours of a cliff covered in brush and saplings. A cave waited. The approach was split by the sinkhole/abyss, that narrowed here to a crack six of seven feet across. Mist drifted from the crack and mingled with the torch smoke.

Christ, this has to be a dream. There’s a field at the bottom of the tower, a ridgeline. I’m high off my ass.
None of this convinced him. The crunch of gravel beneath his shoes, the scents of sap and soil were too pungent. The rock wall and the cave were too solid. Don thought of Milton and Dante and had a keen urge to pee.

Rourke said, “This is the cave in the woods at Y-22. A bit of trivia: Your elder cousin burned the village down in 1923. Admittedly, the burning was a consequence of a gun battle when the villagers ambushed Miller and his fellow loggers with the intention of sacrificing them to Old Leech. What the hell your cousin and his friends were doing this far from Slango is a mystery. Did your father ever mention the incident?”

“No.” Don hadn’t heard of this particular family legend. He was aware of distant relatives having served as snipers and spies during World War I, and another who’d been a so-called great white hunter during the 1920s and ’30s, and another who’d died of a wasting illness after assisting with an excavation of a tomb in Egypt about that same period. Certainly there was Dad and Granddad, villainous heroes in their own right. As for this yeoman logger and his link to the Slango vanishing, nada.

Rourke gestured with the torch and led the way into the earth. As they walked, Don caught hold of Rourke’s belt for balance. He recalled a similar cavern system in Mexico and the men who’d beaten him and laid him upon a prehistoric altar to some prehistoric god. He remembered their shrieks as they were snatched away into the shadows. What had occurred thereafter was yet a blank.

The tunnel twisted in steady descent and after a while opened into a grand cavern bristling stalactites. The cave was bone dry and shored by rude timbers. Its walls were scribbled with chalk drawings of stick figures bowing
en masse
before towering worms with humanoid skulls, and stranger things. “I’ve seen a painting of this.” That wasn’t quite accurate—
I will see a painting of this. In the attic at the farmhouse. About thirty years from today.
Nearby were several formations, their true parameters distorted by eons of flowstone; and a pit that exuded a foul odor.

Don knew this place. “It’s the same gallery as one I saw in Mexico.”

“All caves are the same. All of them lead to the Great Dark.” Rourke advanced several steps and the fire illuminated a stone structure not unlike a ziggurat, the whole of it rising to thrice the height of a man and encased in flowstone.

The stone was miraculously translucent and studded by myriad knurls and odd disfigurations. Rourke beckoned him and Don reluctantly approached the edifice, immediately noting two details: a perfectly round hole penetrated the ziggurat at eye level; the disfigurations were the intact skeletons of children. Hundreds of them, petrified and preserved as foundational calculus, mortar between bricks.

“The Dark Ones don’t procreate as we do,” Rourke said. “Their system of reproduction is via assimilation, absorption, transmogrification. Babies and toddlers are a delicacy. Much as I groove on a plate of nice Beluga caviar, they munch on fetuses. Although, toddlers are preferred for peak sampling, that fine line between ripeness and self-awareness. Screaming turns them on. The men and women who dwelt in the hamlet over a hundred years ago worshiped the Children of Old Leech as gods and offered their newborns as sacrifices. The women here were always pregnant. Such was their purpose in life; to breed as animals do, to provide grist for the hungry darkness. Our capacity to breed like rats is a real selling point. That and our quaint fear of the night.”

Don was stricken, although he mastered the impulse to flee blindly through the twisting caverns, or fall upon his knees and gibber like an ape. It was a close matter. He wasn’t prepared as Michelle would’ve been—his job didn’t ordinarily involve unearthing scenes of primitive bloodshed. He was no anthropologist or archeologist trained and hardened to scenes of ritual atrocity and pagan strangeness.

Even as he observed, the hole in the ziggurat dilated, rapidly expanding to the diameter of a bowling ball, then a hula hoop, and it emitted an icy, metallic keening. His flesh tingled. Blood trickled from his nose and the droplets undulated in a stream of globules that were sucked into the hole. His nipples stiffened, as did his penis, and his body verged upon weightlessness. He said, “Dear God. Dear God. This is unbelievable.”

“Behold the portal. To be taken through it is to be carried to the home of The Children of Old Leech, chief among the Dark Ones who serve vast blind things in the lightless wastes where mortal physics collapse into nonsense. Perhaps you’ll travel unto Old Leech himself. Were I not such a coward…”

“Cowardice pleases
them
just the same as devotion,” Connor Wolverton said. He emerged from the cover of a stalagmite, and bowed slightly. His robes were of a magnificent red silk embroidered with the broken ring in rusty black. He wore many rings set with black gemstones. His eyes were black as the gemstones. “Cowardice tastes like fear, and they enjoy the taste of fear very much. Eh, Barry?”

“Come away from there. The distortions in the time stream are a wee bit dangerous. Hate to see you get fused with your geriatric self, or your infant self. Be awkward to explain the second head at board meetings.” Rourke glided across the ground and steered Don away from the yawning black hole that was a deeper, darker mirror of the pit in the floor. He brought Don near the altar slab where Wolverton waited, hands folded in the sleeves of his robes.

Connor Wolverton said, “Miller, excellent to see you again so soon! I feared those vile government chaps would spirit you away from my demesne; a tragic embarrassment. Every so often intrepid do-gooders in the various world intelligence agencies slip their leashes and come sniffing around our business. Seldom does it prove more than an inconvenience. Let not your heart be troubled; those dastards are paying for their temerity as we speak. Their suffering shall last for decades. Those photographic plates you received in the mail? That material is brain-matter rendered pliable by the unspeakable technology of our friends on the other side of the abyssal gulf.”

“That’s twice,” Rourke said to Don. “Twice the Children have interceded on your behalf. You are blessed, or cursed, depending upon your perspective.” He laughed, a brittle, humorless laugh, and Don guessed that the man was abjectly terrified of Wolverton.

Probably a grand Pooh-Bah of this cult. I wager he’s well aware that man among men Barry Rourke is getting cold feet on this devil worshipping business.
Don wasn’t sure what to make of this. He filed it away while another part of his brain resisted the siren song of the black portal, the urge to run toward it and hurl himself through. The hole could easily accommodate a man walking upright and it writhed and flickered like black fire.

“Indeed,” Wolverton said. “The last time you were here was in the hands of certain loyal and capable servants. I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Kinder. A shame. His reputation as acolyte of the dread mysteries was impressive. That worthy bore you here because you were asking questions about your wife, meddling, etcetera, etcetera. Kinder was convinced the Children desired blood sacrifices, that he was bound to be rewarded for slaughtering an interloper. He underestimated our masters, the scope of their imagination, the nadir of their depravity and jealousy in regard to unholy prerogatives. In abducting you he acted impulsively and without sanction. Much like the tragic fate of agents Dart and Claxton, for that transgression, poor Kinder and his merry men suffered a thousand-thousand deaths in a pit that Dante couldn’t have imagined in a dozen lifetimes.”

Don, mesmerized by the keening of the ziggurat, marshaled the wit to say, “I remember. I remember what they did. Scoundrels were going to split me wide open.”

Wolverton and Rourke watched him, obviously waiting for him to connect the dots.

“Barry said I was spared a dreadful fate because of Michelle.”

“Yes,” Wolverton said.

“Why is she so important? What do you want with her?”

“We want her to do as her ancestors for countless generations have done—to join us, the select few, the elite. To serve the Great Dark.”

“To become like Burton, you mean.” Don visualized the pilot’s grotesque smile, the skins at Wolverton’s mansion, and thought of beautiful, vibrant Michelle gone chalky as a corpse, her mouth too wide, her dark eyes glimmering with the evil joy of an alien mind. To break the spell, he slapped himself, hard, grimly satisfied at the jolt of pain and anger. He spat a gob of blood and watched it splatter on the rock floor, then bubble and curve toward the ziggurat, a trail of snail slime minus the snail.

“Still don’t recognize him?” Rourke said. “Lupe Ramirez helped bring you to this very cave. Goes by Derek Burton these days when he’s in town.
They
put new spawn into fieldwork right away, while their perspective is still fresh. Or maybe the new spawn volunteer.”

“Best not to speculate,” Wolverton said. “The man known as Burton, or Ramirez, repaid his debt to the great ones after a period of torment. He was absorbed unto the Plenum and reborn. He is at a middle instar of development—more than a man, and thus his need to wear the suit of flesh lest the sun scorch his viscid form— yet neither is he fully of the tribe.

“On the other hand, your wife is not destined to be co-opted as an immortal; not for a while. In the meantime, her talents as an indigenous native are valuable. She will keep her own flesh, as I have mine, most of her brain, as I have mine, and most of her essential humanity. It delights them to invest select humans with subtle enhancements; human identity permits us to maintain our doubts and fears, our qualms. Our terror. She’s invited to serve as I serve, and as Barry serves, and untold multitudes of others. We are watchers, liaisons.”

“She’s an anthropologist!” Rourke said, and chuckled. “Got to love the universe’s sense of humor. The irony of it slays me. To have seen the look on her face when Kalamov pulled back the curtain on that ‘lost tribe’ she’s hunted for years… Jane Goodall in Hell.”

“The little people,” Don said, trying valiantly not to weep. “You must be joking.”

“She got the hollow Earth part right—just isn’t Terra,” Rourke said. “The Children of Old Leech dwell inside the cores of a cluster of dead worlds. These worlds are encased in a blood clot of darkness. Their Diaspora is far from here, beyond an immeasurable gulf between galaxies. A starless abyss. Yet their technology is so advanced it permits small numbers of them to slither across time and space and punch into our lovely little blue sphere, and a thousand others like it. Yonder ziggurat is a portal, an end point of a tunnel. The life-sucking tendril that taps humanity’s vein. Its activation occasionally causes quantum fluctuations in our reality. Say, a sinkhole that plunges to Jupiter; time distortions…”

Wolverton smiled with grim kindness. “No need to fret, Miller. By my reckoning the deed is done. Michelle has either fulfilled her destiny and gone to visit the masters, or she’s been destroyed. As for you… You’re doubtless wondering why we brought you here. Barry, please be so good as to tell the man what’s behind door number three.”