Urban Gothic (20 page)

She paused, tilting her head and listening. The snuffling thing was gone—or at least silent again. Kerri tried to do the same, working as quietly as possible. With little to go by but her sense of touch, she eventually uncovered the wood’s dimensions. It was bigger than she’d imagined. She pulled along the first edge and got nothing for her efforts. The second edge had a bit of yield, and the third edge lifted awkwardly a few inches, slowly and with a wet sucking sound.

It’s a door,
she realized.
But to where? A sub-basement? Who puts a door in the floor of a cave?

The air billowing up from below smelled different. Not fresher, but less vile. It was a welcome change. Taking a deep breath, Kerri slid her arm into the black space and felt the coolness beneath. Her fingers failed to touch anything but open air. Whatever might be hidden below was too far down for her to reach it. She stretched farther, trying to feel for some stairs or a ladder, when behind her, there came another noise. It sounded like something metal being scraped across stone. Several guttural voices echoed from either side of her. As she listened, they turned to whispers.

Cautious but quick, Kerri slipped her body lower. The wooden slab dropped as she did, scraping along her shoulder blades and then her back. It was heavy enough to pin her in place. She struggled with it, still trying to stay quiet, and pushed the door up long enough to slide the rest of her body beneath it. Her feet touched something solid. Standing on it, she ducked her head and lowered the door back into place. Then she explored this new area. Her left hand scraped along what felt like a stone wall. It was dry and cool. She raised one foot and thrust it out into the darkness. Kerri sighed with relief when she found another stair. She slowly started down it, wondering what was at the bottom.

***

Javier had lost his belt. He remembered that much upon regaining consciousness. He fumbled around in the darkness, searching for the makeshift weapon, and then it all came rushing back to him. The belt had been ripped from his hands by a shadowed opponent during his escape. But then what? He lay on the ground, defenseless and aching, trying to remember what else had happened. His face hurt, and a nauseating mix of blood and mud blocked one of his nostrils and filled his mouth. Coughing, Javier pushed himself up into a sitting position and shook the muck from his face and hair.

What the hell had happened?

He remembered running. Shouting at the others to follow him, trying to clear a path for them by taking the creatures on himself. And he had. He’d cut through the motherfuckers like a buzz saw, relishing each of their grunts or cries of surprise and pain. Whoever these people were (because despite their deformities, Noigel and his friends were clearly human), they obviously weren’t used to having their prey fight back. He’d been doing fine until he lost the belt. Then they’d closed in on him, and his fear had overtaken his bravado, and Javier had fled.

Javier couldn’t remember anything past that, no matter how hard he tried, so he decided to take a different tack. He gingerly felt his body, wincing as his fingers found dozens of shallow cuts and bruises. He didn’t think he was injured too badly, however. He listened, hoping to hear Heather or Kerri or Brett, but the darkness was silent. It seemed to press against him, as if trying to climb inside his body. Javier mentally pushed back. Satisfied that he’d live, at least for the moment, he felt around him, patting the ground. Then he reached out into the black void. His fingers came in contact with a stone wall.

Then he remembered. The wall. He’d run into it in the dark. He hadn’t known what it was—he hadn’t been conscious long enough to wonder. All he’d known was that he’d run headlong into something hard. Then he’d woken up again. He now assumed that he’d hit the wall with enough force to knock himself stupid.

His luck had held twice tonight—first with the glass pit and now with this … whatever
this
was. He assumed caverns of some kind. Natural or man-made. Or maybe both.

He slid over to the wall and rested his back against it. The silence deepened. There was no sign of his girlfriend or his friends. No sign of their pursuers, either. He was on his own down here. The realization filled him with shame and worry. He felt responsible for all of them. No, it wasn’t his fault that they were in this mess, but as far as he was concerned, they were under his protection. And they wouldn’t have entered the house in the first place if he hadn’t been the one to suggest it after Brett’s stupid outburst.

“What the hell was I thinking?” He muttered the words to himself and spit a trail of saliva and mud away from his lips. “Should have confronted those guys and just apologized for my idiot friend. Or called the police right there.”

He fumbled for Brett’s cell phone. He’d still had it in his hands when they were attacked, but now it was gone. He tried to remember whether he’d stuck it in his pocket as he ran. He wasn’t sure. If he had, his pocket was empty now. Javier’s heart sank. It must have fallen out of his grip during his dash through the cellar or when he crashed into the wall. He patted the ground, searching for it, but his effort s were futile. His hands came up empty. Javier was overcome by a wave of confusion, fear, and despair. Heather, Brett, and Kerri might be dead and he was lost underground, in total darkness, with no weapons to defend himself.

“Well, fuck that noise.”

Javier listened to his words echo. Wherever he was, it sounded like a wide-open space. Grinding his teeth, he slowly got to his feet, taking his time and trying to keep his balance. His legs felt a little wobbly and his head light, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to allow that. Javier had been in bad situations before—situations nobody knew about. Not even Heather. They’d happened when he was younger, before his family had moved to East Petersburg. Ancient history. He’d lived through them, and he intended to live through this one, as well. He forced himself to move forward, trailing his hand along the wall so that he had a frame of reference in the darkness. Javier told himself that he didn’t need the cell phone anyway. Using it to light his way at this juncture would have been foolish. The last thing he needed to do was advertise his position to the cannibalistic freaks.

He made a silent vow to buy Brett a new phone as soon as they got out of here, and then wondered if he’d ever see his friend again long enough to keep that promise.

Water dripped down on his head. Javier glanced upward and then felt foolish. He couldn’t see anything. He made his way through the subterranean chamber, determined to find the girls and Brett if he could, but to also find a way to escape. It had to be down here somewhere. Brett had overheard the killers say so. Javier stopped in his tracks, chilled by a sudden terrifying thought. What if Noigel and the guy wearing a woman’s skin had just been fucking with Brett? What if they’d known he was hiding in the kitchen and rather than killing him right then and there, they’d toyed with him instead, leading him to believe that the basement was the only way out of the house?

If so, there was nothing he could do about it now. Javier seriously doubted that he’d be able to find his way back to the basement stairs, even if he did find Heather and the others. He started walking again. His back felt tight and his neck was stiff with tension. He ignored the aches and pains, doing his best to listen for any possible sound, but other than the occasional drip of water, the area remained deathly still.

***

Paul woke up in transit and captive. He’d been trussed upside down on a long, metal pole. Steel, judging by its texture and weight. It would have probably fetched him a nice price at a scrap yard. Rough cords cut into his wrists and ankles, chafing his skin. He bobbed and swayed as his captors carried him along, trekking through some sort of underground tunnel. Paul was staring at the ground, so he raised his head a little and glanced at the walls. They seemed natural, rather than man-made. A cave, maybe? He’d never heard of caverns beneath Philadelphia, but the idea wasn’t so surprising. Pennsylvania was riddled with limestone caverns and shafts, as well as abandoned iron ore and coal mines.

As his full senses returned, he wondered how he was able to see if he was indeed in an underground cavern. Then he felt a slight breeze on the back of his neck. Despite his terror and confusion, the sudden gust of air momentarily soothed him. When Paul opened his eyes again, his wits had returned. For a second, he wished that they hadn’t, because with his wits came memories of what had transpired—his trip into the sewers, falling through the hole, landing in that foul pool of liquefied bodies and sewer water, and finally—the things that had been waiting for him there in the darkness. Paul raised his head and stared at his captors. His mouth went dry. He drew in breath to scream, but before he could, a particularly hard jostling knocked the air from his lungs again.

They were all around him. He counted at least eight—two on each end of the pole he was dangling from (he saw now that it was some sort of sewer pipe and iron rather than steel), their muscles bulging, grunting with effort as they carried him along. In addition to the pole bearers, there were several more beings scampering along ahead of them, as well as at the rear of the precession. He tried to figure out what they were. Humanoid, certainly, but Paul wasn’t positive that they were actually human. They varied in size and shape, and each was cursed with unique birth defects. Some of the mutations were almost mundane, while others were utterly horrifying. One of his captors was bare-chested and covered by a thick mat of curly black hair, out of which peeked four dime-sized nipples. Another seemed to have double the amount of joints in his legs, arms, and fingers. Paul stared at a misshapen lump of flesh jutting from the thing’s left shoulder, and then realized that the lump of flesh was staring back at him with one small, watery eyeball—a second head, a Siamese twin, not fully developed. What looked like a ragged pink scar was really a tiny mouth. A third creature, a female, appeared relatively normal, but she was obviously pregnant with either quintuplets or a giant lone fetus. Her distended belly stuck out before her, glistening, the bare flesh a sickly, swollen kaleidoscope of purple and black hues. Her massive breasts slapped her ribs as she walked. Clear fluid dripped from her mauled nipples. He wondered if she’d given birth before, and if so, whether it was her offspring that had chewed her nipples like that. Her wild thatch of pubic hair was filthy and matted. She gibbered as she loped along, a thin line of drool running from her mouth and dangling to a spot directly in the middle of her obscene cleavage. Her facial features were similar to that of someone with Down’s syndrome, but her expression was cruel and savage.

Despite the variations in height, weight, and physical characteristics, they all shared a few similar traits. Their skin pigmentation was a mix of gray and alabaster. They weren’t Caucasian or African-American or any other race he could think of. Nor did they appear to be of mixed racial heritage. These beings were something else, but he didn’t know what.

“H-hey,” he stuttered, working up enough saliva to speak. “W-what is this?”

An albino dwarf with pink, rheumy eyes and six fingers on each webbed hand darted forth and hissed at him. Its breath smelled worse than the sewer had. Its teeth were black and broken. Paul screamed, and the thing slapped him in the face. His jaw stung, and he bit the inside of his cheek. Paul’s fear gave way to sudden anger and humiliation.

“Hey, you little shit! What do you think you’re—”

Growling, it slapped him again. Then it grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked hard. Paul screeched as his hair came out by the roots. The dwarf scampered away, clutching its prize. The procession never slowed.

Paul began to sob. He was embarrassed by the reaction, but he couldn’t stop himself. Snot bubbled out of his nose and curdled on his lip.

“Let me go,” he pleaded, hoping they understood him. “Listen, I’ve got a wife and kids. Please let me go. Please? What is this? Tell me!”

“This is where we live,” the thing with two heads answered. Its voice was deep and somber.

For a moment, Paul was too stunned to reply. “W-what?”

“This is where we live. All of us.”

“I d-didn’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was trespassing. I thought the house was deserted, you know?”

Paul heard the plaintive, whiny tone in his voice, but he didn’t care. “I was lost. Just looking for directions. I didn’t know that … p-people lived here.”

They walked on in silence, not answering him; not even bothering to look at him. Paul heard distant howls from somewhere up ahead. They sounded inhuman.

“I didn’t know,” he tried again. “I’m really sorry. If you’ll just let me go, I can—”

“You brought tools,” Two-Head said, matter-of-factly.

“What?” Paul frowned, unsure if he’d heard the freak correctly. He had no idea what it was talking about.

“Tools.”

The creature took one hand off the pole and snapped its fingers. Another mutant ran forward. This one had a long, withered, tentacle-like appendage where its left arm should have been. The right arm was normal, and in that hand it clutched Paul’s tool belt.

“You lie.” Two-Head sighed. “You say you are lost, but you came with tools. You came to fix the sewer pipes.”

“No,” Paul protested. “I don’t work for the city. I’m from Uniontown, for Christ’s sake! I’m just here because—”

“It doesn’t matter. Either way, we still have to kill you.” The statement brought a fresh round of pleas and cries from Paul, but his captors refused to respond. They marched along, almost methodically. Some of them carried crude lanterns. A few had flashlights. Most of them were naked or covered with some type of dried red clay. A few wore tattered, dirty scraps of clothing. One—a child or another dwarf, he couldn’t tell which—looked especially bizarre. It was naked from the waist down, clad only in a once-white T-shirt that said,
I GOT CRABS IN PHILLIPSPORT, MAINE.
Another was nude, but wore a backward ball cap with a logo for Globe Package Service. Paul wondered if the odd scraps of clothing had belonged to other victims, and if so, what their previous owners’ fates had been.

His thoughts turned to Lisa, Evette, and Sabastian. He quietly wept, wondering if he’d ever see them again, wondering if they’d miss him, if they’d ever find out what had happened to him, if they’d go on with their lives without him. He wasn’t resigned to his fate—not quite yet—but things weren’t looking good. The cords binding his ankles and wrists were strong and tight. No way he could snap them. And some of his captors were physically impressive. Maybe he could have kicked their asses twenty years ago, but middle age had softened him. He swore to a God he wasn’t even sure he believed in that if he got away from here, he’d go straight. He’d get a real job again, something legal, and do right by his family. Sure, he’d justified stealing scrap metal as a means of supporting his loved ones, but look what it had led to?