Catacombs of Terror! (17 page)

“Looks like we got a problem,” I said. “That's a very little tunnel. Not much room for anything but scurrying along with our heads bent, watching the flagstones. Any ideas? Anyone?”

“Can you hear something?” said Kafka, quickly. Urgently.

“What?” asked Stonehenge.

“
Sshh
!
”

Kafka was right. It was hard to hear because it sounded so far away. But I'd heard it before. Those blind, hairless, hungry children. The pigs. We could hear the pigs. I couldn't tell how far off they were. But however far that was, it wasn't as far away as when we couldn't hear them at all. Which could only mean one thing. They were getting nearer.

“What is that?” murmured Stonehenge.

“It's the pigs, Stonehenge. The Fleet Pigs. The
flesh-eating
Fleet Pigs. Bladud's best friends. Sound like sweet little things, don't they? Yeah. For sure. Whatever. It occurs to me that we're maybe too visible here in this fucking cavern. Let's go!”

We threw ourselves into the tunnel. It was cramped, but not too bad. We pelted along, the beam from my flashlight weaving and jittering about in front. The flagstones were wetter down here, slick with algae or mould or something. I couldn't tell colours. Everything was yellow or black. The colours of plague and death. And the smell was disgusting. It wasn't just sulphur any more. It was beyond foul, the smell of rain-rotted rats and wet, tacky dead skin, of putrefying corpses and fetid ooze seeping from countless crushed bodies, the smell of the hum of thousands upon thousands of flies feeding and egg-laying in the mounds of decaying flesh, the stench of an overfull oubliette, of cramped prisoners forgotten for months in some hellish dungeon . . . .

The next thing I knew, I was being pulled up by my arm. Kafka was saying something to me, but I couldn't hear it. There was a light in my eyes. I couldn't see. I tried to brush it away. I was in some sort of thick silence. Hands grabbed at me, pulled me upright, slammed me against the cold wall.

“Valpolicella!
Valpolicella!
”

I murmured something. I don't remember what it was. Shapes started to get more distinctive. Kafka and Stonehenge. They were staring at me with some kind of urgency. They were talking. Asking me stuff.

“Get that light out of my face,” I think I said. I probably said that, because it went away. I was very wet. But I was standing. Or at least, I was being held up in a standing position. The tunnel was much wider and higher here; there was room to stand up. I looked around. You could get a truck through here.

But something else was going on. After the scuffle of getting me upright, shouting at me or whatever, Kafka and Stonehenge had gone motionless. The three of us were frozen like dead men. I flicked my eyes right, left, up, down. Nothing.

“What is it?” I said, very quietly. There was no answer, but Kafka's gaze met mine. With a couple of tiny movements, he jerked his head in the direction we were heading and pointed to his ear. I got the message. I listened, carefully. There was a voice. Distorted and broken, as if it was coming through something much denser and more evil than fog. I couldn't tell what it was saying for a little while. And then it started to form itself into thickly spoken, drooling words. It was some foreign-sounding stuff. I couldn't figure out what it might be. But it was like what Kafka had said that morning, in the café, a million years ago. ‘
Memvola sintrompo. Kontentiga morto.
' Over and over. But there were two words that I recognised, sandwiched in between the gibberish. ‘
Martin
' and ‘
Valpolicella.
' In between all of it was some terrible screaming—but still, it was distant. It was from very far away. Not round the next corner. To be honest, it didn't sound exactly as if it was in any normal sort of frequency. From any normal kind of world. And I couldn't hear the pigs.

“That's a pretty goddamn unpleasant kind of noise,” I said, my voice still low, “but I can't hear the Fleet Pigs any more. We've got to carry on. What we're hearing is probably, um, probably a tape recording.” Was I really saying this? A tape recording? “Yeah, that's what it is. A tape recording from last night is what it is, right? Kafka, isn't it just what you got on the tape last night? Am I right or am I right?”

Kafka slowly shook his head. “It's not the same. Not the same at all,” he said. “It's pretty much the same words, but it's more—frenzied.”

“Which means that They're down here already,” muttered Stonehenge. “They're preparing, already. They will have Their victim by now. Who will be terrified out of his or her wits—held in an iron cage while the altar preparations are made. I had no idea that They would be here so early.”

I swung my arm up. It felt too heavy. I took in the time. 8
P.M
. Already? Yeah, well. I couldn't be sure, not after what had happened to Stonehenge's compass. But I figured that my watch had to be at least mostly right. Not Greenwich Mean Time, perhaps. But Valpolicella Mean Time. And that had to be enough for now.

“It makes no difference. There's nothing else we can do. We've got to keep going,” I said. In that dim, fogged yellow light it was hard to tell how Kafka and Stonehenge felt. They looked like weird shadow devils in the dim amber fog. I leant back against the wall and dragged out the whiskey bottle. I had a hard swallow. Then another. I passed the bottle. It came back empty.

I held the neck in my hand and smashed it against the wall. Now I had another weapon. Not as technologically advanced as a gun, but anyway. I tested one of the gleaming glass points on my finger. It was very, very sharp. It would be helpful. But even though I knew I was going to have to use it, I still hoped that I wouldn't need to. Deceptive thinking. Dangerous thinking. I took a deep breath, and told myself to remember how to fight. Maximum violence, instantly. Don't think. Just fight. Just . . . fight.

“Okay,” said Kafka. “Okay. Let's move.”

We all had our flashlights on now. Not that they made much impression on the tangible darkness that surrounded us. The flagstones were slimy and slippery with mould, and the walls and ceiling looked yellowy-orange. Or red. Ahead and behind was a darkness that no light could illuminate. Wetness dripped down on us as constantly as rain. We trudged forward. And downward. There was a definite slope to the tunnel. I had some crazy stuff running around in my head. Bad crazy stuff. I tried not to give it too much room. I kept it shut tight behind my teeth.

Nobody said anything for a while. The distant howling continued. It kept mentioning me.
Martin. Valpolicella. Martin
. I focused on the beam of wan light ahead of me. Black-stained flagstones. Red walls. My footsteps. My heart, beating. My breathing, hoarse. My courage, faltering. I kept on wondering what I'd done to deserve this. Whether I could have avoided it. Why in hell Karen had done this to me. How could she have done this to me? We'd been, I don't know, close or something. I wasn't an expert, but I'd thought we'd got on okay. Better than okay. In my unguarded moments I'd even wondered if I'd fallen in love with her.

But now I was so far below the earth's surface I didn't want to think about it too hard. Chased by flesh-eating pigs down a foul tunnel towards some fiend chanting my name when it wasn't screaming like an audio collage of every torture victim the world's ever known. Was it just opportunism on Karen's part? Okay, we need a culprit, say AFFA. Any ideas, anyone? Oh, I know, pipes up Karen.

It just didn't gel. The Karen I knew wasn't like that at all. She was—she was
nice
. She gave every appearance of liking me—a lot. Yeah, the sex had been great, but there was something else, too. She really seemed to care about me. But what the hell did I know?

“I'm not certain, but I think we must be approaching the area where the chloroethylene vats are housed. We've been walking for an hour at least. Keep an eye out for left-hand turnings,” said Stonehenge from behind me.

“We find these vats, we make holes in them with bullets, right?” I asked him, without turning round.

“From a safe distance,” he replied quietly, “chloroethylene is, erm, rather flammable. Very flammable, in fact. So I'm told.”

I stopped. Stonehenge and Kafka stumbled into me. I was standing firm. I let them untangle themselves before I spoke.

“Very flammable? Stonehenge. Have you ever thought about what ‘very flammable' might actually mean in a series of very small tunnels? Explosions need an outlet, Stonehenge. I'm beginning to think that you don't actually know what the
fuck
you're doing. And that
worries
me, to put it fucking mildly.” I think I might have waved the broken bottle around a little, underneath Stonehenge's chin. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I don't remember.

“Valpolicella. Take it easy.” He sounded a little worried. Yeah, well.

“How easy? So easy I don't care about being a part of the wreckage after I pump a few shells into a huge vat of very flammable dry-cleaning fluid?” This was boring me. I didn't need an argument, not now. Not down here. Not with . . . .

“Did anyone hear that?” asked Kafka.

His voice was flat. The contrast with our own voices was enough to make us stop bickering. We listened. I couldn't hear anything at first. But then it was clear. Squealing. The pigs were back. I could hear them. It was a terrifying sound. Could I hear their trotters on the wet flagstones as they thundered closer, or was I imagining it? I didn't think so. The squealing was getting louder, for sure. I was suddenly aware of everything—the water falling constantly from above, the black mould below, the soul-destroying depth and magnitude of the catacombs, the impossibility of any kind of escape . . . .

I hefted my gun. The sound of the pigs was getting louder, I was sure. They were coming for us. I didn't know if they'd smelt us or been set on us or what. It wasn't relevant. They were coming.
The Fleet Pigs were coming.

“Get your fucking guns ready. Stonehenge? Flick off the safety. Remember, it's aiming that's the important thing. Steady, squeeze . . . okay?”

And that was all that I could say. There was no point in running along a tunnel with a prehistoric herd of man-eating pigs snapping at our heels. We were going to have to wait. We were going to have to wait for the pigs. They still sounded some distance away. Maybe they were having some kind of pig gathering in the cavern. Maybe they'd choose some other tunnel to cruise. I didn't know anything about a pig's sense of smell. But I knew that they had very, very big snouts. Good for unearthing food. And somehow, I didn't think it would take very long before they found us. And you know what? I wasn't wrong. I wasn't wrong at all.

It was obvious that the pigs sniffed out our tunnel. The squealing became amplified beyond my belief. It was deafening, a reverberating echo of hell that thundered along the tunnel and assaulted our ears. It was all we could do to hold our guns steady at the inky darkness that contained that demonic cacophony. I held my gun in one hand and my broken bottle in the other, trying desperately to hold both steady. The beam from Kafka's flashlight wavered around.

Nothing happened. Not just yet. Just the squealing, growing louder and louder, filling the tunnel and surging towards us like a wave of hideousness. Now we could hear their trotters thundering on the flagstones, dozens of them, closer and closer.

And now they were right in front of us, a heaving pale mass of snouts and broad backs. They were ghastly, with skins that looked like they'd been left too long in stagnant water.

I fired once, then twice. Kafka's gun roared in my ear, then Stonehenge's, again and again and again. At first I thought we hadn't even slowed them down—they came rushing on, a ghostly sinuous mass of hungry teeth and muscle. But two pigs had gone down, and the others seemed frightened. Maybe.

They came to a gradual, shuffling halt, sniffing the bodies of their dead, then eyeing us with slowly swaying heads, grunting and sniffing the sulphurous air that surrounded us. There must have been maybe a hundred of them. More, probably. I wasn't counting. I couldn't see the end of the herd. The tunnel was full of pigs, as far back as the feeble beam from my flashlight would penetrate. Their wet white skins filled me with dread. Their eyes were jet black, gleaming in the yellow light. They were big. I wasn't an expert, but they were big. I couldn't see their teeth. Their mouths were hidden under their great snouts, their nostrils contracting and dilating as they scented us. As they figured out whether or not they could take us.

I took a pace towards them. They didn't retreat an inch. So neither did I. I stood still. Then, very slowly, I lifted my gun. I aimed straight at the pig nearest to me. It stood perfectly still, glaring at me with its glistening black eyes. Its head waggled slightly from side to side, but the eyes never left me. I felt like I was frozen. I stood there, soaking wet, feet planted firmly apart, holding my broken bottle, holding my gun. Staring down the pig. I wanted it to back away. I wanted it to turn and trot away, with all its pig friends. But things weren't going to happen that way. I should have known. Maybe I did know. Maybe I was just kidding myself. Whatever. The pig came closer, so I shot it right between the eyes.

Big mistake.

Pandemonium. The herd went berserk. Crazy. With a rising, howling, squealing collective bellow of rage they charged us, the instant the pig I'd shot went down. Shots rang out all over the place, echoing ear-splittingly in the confined space. We were running, shooting, screaming with fear. Pigs were everywhere, running back, forward, turning amongst themselves, colliding with massive thumps as their flanks slammed into other pigs, into the walls, into us. I couldn't tell what was happening to Stonehenge and Kafka; my whole being was dedicated to self-preservation and I ran like I'd never run before. Two massive pigs seemed to want to catch me, knock me over, and consume me. And I went over, crashing up against another pig. I tried to keep upright but my legs were trapped in a heaving mass of flesh. In a horrible moment I moved in slow motion, my torso partly rotating, a scream wrenching itself from my throat, then I was falling forward over a pig's back, not wanting to let go of my gun, pulling the trigger, swinging the broken bottle wildly, feeling its jagged shards tearing into solid pig muscle, then it slipping out from my sweating hand—and I was on the ground.