Dead Five's Pass (14 page)

Carise held back her revulsion and inspected the strange marks and illustrations within the book. Like the markings from the leather piece on the wall, that weird language scrawled across the page. She found her lips moving again as she “read” them.

Although she didn’t understand the material directly, when she scanned the content, images bubbled up in her mind and she felt the world melt away and a new one appear.

Like stepping through a gate into a hidden garden, an entire world of unusual and peculiar structures, plants, and animals opened up to her. Towering tubed carnivorous plants writhed on their stalks, full of prey. Neon lights flickered and danced along their thick veins.

She walked past them, as if in a dream—but yet she could hear, smell and feel as lucid as at anytime in her life. It was almost
too
real.

Beyond the fields of those tubular plants stood a great pyramid. A deep red light pulsed inside its semitranslucent surface. It pulled on her like she was the opposite pole of a pair of magnets. Multilegged creatures scampered about her, and large winged beasts followed her trajectory from the air. But she couldn’t make out the details, all she knew was the pyramid, and the thing that lurked within.

It waited. So patient, so ancient. It had always been, and now it was calling her, bringing her…home. As alien and unfamiliar as it all seemed, she seemed content, relaxed.

Something on the periphery of this world shuddered, disturbed the tranquility. It itched in the back of her mind that she was supposed to be somewhere else…but the attraction of the pyramid was everything.

When she got closer, she reached out and touched the translucent surface. It was freezing cold and she pulled away instantly. Her hands were burned by it. Carise stared inside, mesmerized by the pulsing red glow, and as it dissipated a darker shape took its place and moved nearer to her from within. A depthless eye, huge and black, expanded to fill her entire field of view. And then she knew she was lost. This wasn’t home, and she could never seek to understand.

In the distance, back in her other life, she heard a scuffle and a scream.

The world desaturated until it was completely monochrome. The sounds of struggle from beyond the world increased, and the dimension, or dream, or whatever it was, started to lose its solidity as it wavered and lost focus. Through the vision she saw shadows struggling.

With a deep inhale, and a flash of dizziness, Carise broke from the dream.

She spun round, realized she was now alone.

Marcel was gone…

Faint echoes of mumbling and shuffling came from outside in the tunnel. Like a bloodhound chasing down a scent, she followed, but not before taking the book and stuffing it into her backpack.

“Marcel!” she called and then listened. A muffled response came seconds later. Her body trembled with adrenaline as she sprinted down the tunnel towards those sounds, grimly aware that if she hadn’t been so enraptured by that infernal book, she would have been able to do something.

A chanting broke out, rose and fell in time to a dread piping bass note.

Inside her mind, a great black, endless eye dominated her thoughts.

* * *

Carise ran after Marcel. Her lungs felt like dried twigs as she sucked in ragged breaths. Her ankle wound throbbed, crawled up her leg, devouring her flesh.

The backpack—riding up and down with each pace—burned a sore into her lower back.

She wanted to stop and cry away the pain, but each muffle, each distressing sound urged her farther into the tunnels. She remembered to drop a few glow sticks as she went but she worried still that she was being led into a labyrinthine nightmare of which she would never find her way out.

Sweat dripped into her eyes, the humidity becoming ever thicker.

Up ahead, light spilled from around a wide, sweeping bend in the tunnel. Pieces of Marcel’s equipment left a trail in the disturbed dust.

She rounded the bend, pulled herself up to a creeping trot, and halted at the scene before her.

Marcel was being dragged toward a wide exit by three robed men.

Beyond them she could make out the flicker of fire, its ember hue reflecting brightly against the polished stone walls.

She waited for them to breach the exit, then followed quietly behind like a specter.

Carise reached the exit, flattened her back against the tunnel to stay in shadow.

A crudely made wooden bridge stretched over a bottomless pit from a stone ledge in front of the exit. It ended at another bridge that jutted out at a ninety-degree angle from the polished walls. She watched them take Marcel across and when they had reached the ledge, she followed.

The bridge swayed with each step, and as she looked down between the wooden boards, the darkness stirred and moved as if the blackness itself was alive.

The path on the other ledge bent round back against itself to the left, and led into a domed chamber so large the lights on the walls opposite were like pinpricks. The entire place hummed with that same noise they heard before that split the other tunnel. And now she knew why.

Extending up from the darkness were hundreds of tentacles: the same ones from before with those terrible hooks. They slicked through holes in the walls like worms. Occasionally one would come back with various animals and meat attached to its hooks and bend itself back down into the murk.

The entire place rumbled as those terrible limbs infiltrated the rocks.

A flash of light caught her attention. A wedge of rock reached out over the center of the void like a ramp. At the end of this platform, a stone altar stood with a number of lighted torches surrounding it. A tall, stick-thin figure stood hunched over the dais, chanting those animalistic and other-dimensional syllables. His head was entirely too large for his body and when he turned to regard the robed figures dragging Marcel, she noticed how his eyes bulged, distended, and had that now-familiar pupil-less white-gray look to them, as if they were polished marble.

She raced down the ledge hewn from the rock and made her way onto the platform.

Not really knowing what she was doing, she took the ice axe from her belt and charged at the robed figures holding Marcel, whose head was wrapped in the same rough-cloth as their robes.

Two of the three—the ones holding his arms at each side—turned round and stared at her with pale expressions and black eyes.

Marcel slumped heavily to the floor as they let him go and shuffled towards her. They seemed untroubled by her presence, but as she sprinted towards them, eating up the distance, she raised the axe and brought it down hard onto the first one’s head. The thud and squelch was sickening, and the figure fell to his knees without a sound.

The one next to the fallen victim opened its mouth and let out a strained keening sound. Within seconds, the entire chamber was filled with an energy.

A black mass below rolled and writhed, and before she could act, hundreds of hooked limbs were crawling up the walls, making holes and dents, and then they became taut and stretched as if…as if whatever was attached to them was pulling itself up from the gloom below.

The cultist was on her now, its hands around her neck. She fell back, taking his weight with her. She hit the deck, rolled once to the side, brought her leg up between them and pushed off with all her strength. It broke his grip and the figure flew off the side and down into the void without a sound.

“Marcel!” she shouted as she scrambled to her feet. The third cultist had removed his hood and knelt at the tall figure, who held a piece of leather aloft, and read aloud from it.

His voice boomed with its weird bass tone. It was almost as if there were more voices speaking at once, covering a multitude of octaves.

As he continued to chant the incantation, the entire mountain began to shake even more violently. She sprinted again now, some twenty meters from the altar and Marcel. The cultist was waiting for her and received her charge; her momentum forced her enemy to the ground and onto its back where its hood fell away from its face. And “it” was an appropriate description. It was so far from human that for a second she was mesmerized.

It struck her across the temple and she fell to her side, banging her head against the stone surface. She was looking over the edge now and she was right; the thing attached to those innumerable limbs was rising from the deep…

An impossibly wide maw covered with mottled black flesh emerged from the gloom. Thousands upon thousands of fangs formed a perfect circle. Within the maw, a bulbous tongue slathered slowly. And then the worst thing of all…the darkness blinked. It was like the entire void beneath them was one great all-seeing eye, and she saw recognition within its reflective surface.

It was like a fairground mirror, distorting everything that shined upon it. She saw the weirdly flickering lights, the walls and limbs and the stick figure, whose shape was now curved across the surface of that dark globe. And somewhere among all the detail, all that reflection, she saw her face reflecting back at her; it was pale, and her eyes were black.

A hooded figure stood behind her, a carved bone-colored dagger aimed for her back.

“No!” she screamed as she spun round and kicked out her legs. At the same time she reached up her hands, catching the robe. She yanked it down, sending the body over the edge and into the maw of that great and terrible beast. There was no noise as the figure fell, just the wet thud as it hit the thing’s tongue.

With one slow movement, it descended into the beast’s throat. The great eye blinked again and it was getting closer; its gigantic mouth now no more than ten meters from the end of the stone ramp and its altar.

“Carise,” Marcel said, his voice strained and the muscles on his neck bulging. “Help…me.”

His face was bright red, as if the blood in his veins was being pulled out via his skin.

Grabbing the bone dagger, she rushed the tall figure standing above Marcel and plunged it into the thing’s chest. It sliced right through, its bones made of old, dry paper. The figure stumbled back against the altar where the slit in its face that she presumed was a mouth opened and a voice that clearly hadn’t spoken a human language for so long laughed at her.

“It’s…too…late,” it rasped with an alien accent before closing its hideous eyes and pitching itself backward off the ramp and into the beast’s waiting, hungry maw.

17

Carise rushed to help Marcel. “Are you okay?”

Marcel stumbled, shook his head. “I’m okay.” But his voice was weak and strained. She put his arm over her shoulder and helped him walk back down the ramp.

Rocks began to fall from the vaulted ceiling, and long cracks appeared in the wall. All the time the beast rose higher.

“We’ve really got to go,” Carise said, wincing in pain from the various wounds and bruises. She took a quick look behind her and the sight of the gigantic fanged mouth sent a bolt of primal fear through her like nothing she had experienced.

Then, as she turned back around, she halted. The massive, swirling black orb of its eye stared at them from the left of the ramp; it took up most of the void, and she felt herself swimming as she looked into its distorted reflective surface.

“Don’t look at it,” Marcel warned and pulled her face away. He slipped and fell to his knees.

Carise reached to help him up when myriad tentacles struck out and wrapped around the stone ramp. The end was ripped clean off, taking the altar with it. She lost her footing and fell onto her back. One of the tentacles grabbed Marcel and dragged him off to the end of the ramp.

She screamed, reached out for him. “No! Marc!”

Scrambling to stand, she sprinted after him and dived to clasp his outstretched hands. They both held each other, useless against the pull of the beast. They couldn’t escape; it was too strong and soon they would be devoured.

“I love you,” she said, not caring what a cliché it was, she had to tell him, to make sure he knew.

He was so weak he could barely speak, but he croaked out, “I know.” He gave her a wan smile.

They were near the edge; the thing’s fangs, like stalactites, dripped with a gooey substance. As they neared the point of no return, Marcel said, “Let me go.”

“I can’t!” she cried, not understanding.

He reached for her bandolier and pulled the sticks of Tovex from her, all the time they were dragged closer and closer.

They looked each other in the eyes and she knew what he wanted to do.

“I’m already dead,” he said. “Save yourself—for us.”

The beast roared and yanked Marcel over the edge. He slipped out of her hands and she screamed until she choked and watched in horror as Marcel, with a smile on his face, fell into the beast’s gaping mouth.

He mouthed,
Go,
and when he disappeared into the darkness, she belched out a yell of pain and grief, but behind it was the purest hatred and fury. Taking Marcel’s advice, she stood and ran down the ramp with all the strength she could muster.