Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (42 page)

“Who hasn’t?” he replies, and I’m suddenly glad he’s here.

When he’s done, he tells me he’s coming with me.

“What? You have to be kidding. What could you possibly do—”

“I can keep you alive, Jace.” He stares at me levelly. “Your blood pressure is low, your heartbeat is elevated. Your reflexes are erratic. You’re somewhere around a seven point nine on the Derleth reaction scale. Even if you’re not aware of it, reading that scroll once has affected you on a profound physiological and psychological level. Reading it again—out loud—will put your body through tremendous stresses. People exposed to high levels of HPLC have been known to age years in a moment, to go blind and deaf, to drop dead from fear. If I’m there, I may be able to buffer or counteract some of the effects.”

I pause. “You have a helluva beachside manner, you know that? Okay, it’s your funeral. But do me a favor, will you?”

“What’s that?”

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“If it looks like I’m about to die, or go irretrievably insane—give me some of the fun drugs, okay?”

He smiles, but it’s a little forced. “You got it.”

And then the three of us begin our climb.

It’s eerily quiet—no more spiral of circling birds overhead. The reason is all around us; the ground is littered with white and gray feathered shapes, dead gulls and other seabirds lying sprawled or crumpled on the rocky terrain. I have the overpowering conviction that they simply circled overhead until they fell out of the air, too exhausted or starved to stay aloft, but unable to leave, hypnotized by some subliminal call pulsing from deep underground. The stench from the dead sea life is even worse than before.

We clamber our way upslope. I have better boots this time and thick gloves for gripping mollusk-armored rocks. The black mouth of the temple gets larger and larger, gaping at us like a hungry airplane hangar, until we’re standing before it. Dr. Pete, like Tanaka, has chosen to remain in his human form.

We enter. We wrestle the stone plug out of the way and put on helmets with headlamps. Charlie uncoils a thick length of rope, and runs one end back to the entrance, where he ties it around a boulder.

The other goes down the hole, and then so do we.

At the first deep lungful of air I want to turn back. That terrible sense of alienness returns, like the air I’m breathing has had the oxygen replaced by something just similar enough to fool my lungs but not my brain. I begin to hyperventilate, and Dr. Pete notices immediately and calms me down with a few words. His voice sounds strained but under control.

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We descend about thirty feet before reaching the floor. It’s simply an antechamber, maybe fifteen feet in diameter, crudely carved out of the rock. At the far end, a stone arch outlines the mouth of a tunnel.

Charlie takes point; Dr. Pete brings up the rear. The tunnel slopes downward at a fairly steep angle, and it goes for a long, long way, first curving left, then right, always heading down. My head is starting to pulse with some kind of internal pressure—I can’t tell if it’s an HPLC effect or just the increasing depth.

Maybe the strangest thing about the tunnel is that it’s bone-dry—dusty, even. I can clearly see the treadmarks of the robot probe that preceded us at my feet. I don’t know how deep we are, but we’re definitely way below the waterline—and before Stoker dragged it topside, the whole mountain was at the bottom of the sea.

The tunnel finally levels and straightens out. I think I see something at the far end, and get everyone to switch off their headlamps for a moment.

There’s a faint, bluish glow in the distance, pulsing in time to the throb in the back of my skull. It makes me feel hungry and nauseous at the same time.

We turn our headlamps back on and proceed. The farther down the tunnel we get, the stranger I feel. Everything’s contradictory. My body’s made of lead; my head’s a balloon. I’m exhausted and charged with nervous energy. I feel like I’m heading for the most terrible place in the universe and like I’m going home.

The tunnel seems to go on forever, yet we reach the end of it almost instantly. “Whoa,” I say. My own voice sounds weird, like I’m speaking a language I don’t understand. “This

. . . this is intense.” The tunnel bends abruptly, the blue glow pulsating just around the corner.

“How . . . how are you doing, Jace?” Dr. Pete manages.

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“Holding on. Just barely. Charlie?”

Charlie’s tone is almost conversational. “Kind of getting the urge to kill both of you. Think I’m gonna head back.”

“Sure, okay, no problem.”

“Yeah, yeah, good idea. You do that.”

Charlie turns and trudges away. It’s just Dr. Pete and me now.

I unseal the tube with hands that don’t feel like my own. Ever notice how hands look like spiders? Tiny legs made of bone and skin, scuttling around, crawling over things with their little fingernails going tic tic tic—

“Jace. The manuscript.”

I’m standing there, clutching the tube with both hands. I force myself to upend the tube and slide the rolled-up parchment out. The pulsing in my head instantly subsides to a bearable level, clearing some of the murk from my thoughts. “I’m okay. Thanks.”

“All right. This . . . this is how we’re going to do this. We’re going to back in there. We have to be close. You’re going to read the scroll with your back to the thing, and I’m going to be between you and it. That way, I can see how you’re doing and help you if you need it.” His voice is ragged but sure. Dr. Pete is a lot tougher than I thought.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

We face back down the corridor, then take our first, unsure step backward. I’ve never felt so horribly vulnerable in my life. All I can think of is how incredibly, idiotically exposed both of us are. If Ghatanothoa has any kind of nasty, otherworldly guard dogs—hell, if he has a poodle with a bad attitude—we’re wide open to attack.
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The glow gets brighter as we round the corner. No, that’s not right—it gets stronger but darker. More illumination but less light, like seeing by X-rays. That’s the best description I can give.

We continue our careful, reversed walk. Just around the bend the tunnel empties out into a chamber filled with the pulsing blue nonlight, a chamber I can only see one wall of. I crane my neck upward as I step backward, like a tourist gawking at a skyscraper, and realize just how big this space is; the wall above the arch we just backed through goes up and up and up, raw craggy blue-lit rock like the surface of another planet. I have the terrible compulsion to turn around.

Dr. Pete stops. I back into him, almost turn around to apologize, and manage to stop myself in time. “I think we’re here,” I whisper.

“Yeah. . . .” His own voice sounds far away and dreamy. I wonder if I’m going to wind up looking after him instead of him after me.

I’m not doing that well myself. The room is utterly silent, no sound of water dripping or rock creaking or anything but our own breathing. My own sounds funny, erratic, like my lungs can’t quite remember the rhythm.

And, of course, there’s a god right behind me.

The sense of its presence is overwhelming, and yet I’m sure it doesn’t know we’re here. It would be like an elephant noticing a flea . . .

A flea that’s about to bite.

I look down at the scroll in my hands. The words on it are now illuminated in little flickering blue flames, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I begin to read, my voice hoarse and faltering at first, but growing stronger as I continue. The words themselves don’t
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make any sense—the first few sentences are basic instructions on where and how the scroll should be used, but beyond that it’s all f’tagh this and klaatu that. I just hope I’m pronouncing them right.

About halfway through I feel my heart stop.

Odd kind of feeling. Not painful at all. I keep reading for another full line before I collapse.

Dr. Pete catches me before I hit the ground. He checks the pulse on the side of my neck, then fumbles in his pack for a syringe. I know what’s coming; I’ve seen Pulp Fiction five times. Never thought I’d OD on alien god brainwaves, though. . . .

Dr. Pete, thankfully, is a trained doctor instead of a freaked-out junkie hit man. He slips the needle in expertly between my ribs, as opposed to stabbing me in the sternum. I feel the epinephrine kick-start my heart, and my head clears a little as fresh blood surges through it.

I don’t bother getting to my feet. I just grab the scroll from where I dropped it, prop myself up on my elbow, and start reading from the last word I spoke.

I get all the way to the end before anything really bad happens.

I utter the last word on the scroll. I stop, feeling like I’ve just run a marathon, my nerves jittering with the artificial adrenaline Dr. Pete’s pumped into my system.

“Jace,” he says, “you have to keep going—”

“I’m done. There isn’t any more—”

And then there’s the noise.

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It’s the sound of a frustrated deity that’s just been told the all-you-can-eat buffet is now closed. It’s eerie and terrifying and very, very pissed off. The blue light isn’t pulsing anymore; it’s just getting steadily brighter.

“Time to go,” Dr. Pete says.

Here’s the part where we dash out of the tunnel as it falls down around us, narrowly escaping death, emerging into the sunlight as the entire temple collapses for no good reason. That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that Dr. Pete transforms into halfwere form, slings me over his shoulder, and runs like hell. We make it up to the antechamber in about thirty seconds, and he more or less throws me out of the hole, then leaps after me.

Nothing blows up. Nothing collapses. Nothing happens at all except the endless, ululating howl that follows us, the howl of something ancient and hungry denied. If I ever survive to be an old lady with Alzheimer’s, I’m sure that long after every single memory I have has decayed away to nothing, the recollection of that awful, inhuman howl will still echo in my ears.

Charlie’s waiting for us outside the temple. “Someone doesn’t sound happy,” he says.

“That’s good, right?”

I nod wearily. “We’re good.”

And then the island begins to sink.

It’s hardly noticeable at first. The beach simply and slowly gets smaller. Without a word, the three of us begin to climb.

The howl chases us. It grows fainter, but we can still hear it.

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We manage to gain a few hundred feet in altitude before the terrain becomes too steep and slippery to go any farther. We huddle on a rocky shelf and wait.

When the water fills the mouth of the temple, the sound finally stops—on an audible level, anyway. I swear I can still feel it reverberating through the rock itself and into my bones.

The water creeps higher. When it reaches our plateau, Pete and I dog-paddle and let it carry us up, past the steep slope above us, until we can scramble ashore once more. Charlie stays where he is until we haul him up with a rope. Golems don’t swim—but fortunately, they don’t breathe, either.

This time, we reach the peak.

There’s no place left to go.

“Always wanted to ride a lost continent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,” Charlie says. “Must be my lucky day.”

“Too bad we didn’t bring an inflatable boat,” I say. “We could use you as an anchor.”

Dr. Pete’s fiddling with the walkie-talkie they gave us. “Hang on,” he says. “I’ve got something—yes, hello? . . . This is, uh, the scroll-reading people?”

The speaker crackles, then replies, “The Valcheck team?”

“Yes! We’re—we’re on top of a mountain, and it’s sinking. I mean, the island we’re on, it’s not going to be an island much longer—”

“We understand. We’re coming to pick you up, just hang on.”

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I scan the sky, but don’t see a thing. “Looks like we may be treading water while waiting for them, Doc. Charlie, how do you feel about scuba diving?”

“The same way an anvil does.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll tie the rope around you again, and feed it out as long as we can.”

“And when you get to the end of your rope?”

“That’s where I live, Charlie.”

“I noticed. I’m not going to drag you under, Jace.”

“You won’t. I’m going to haul you up.”

He shakes his head. “That’s against the laws of physics.”

“So is this whole world. Screw the laws of physics.”

Dr. Pete interrupts us. “I don’t think any of us are going to be visiting Davy Jones’s locker. Look.” He points—not to the sky, but the ocean.

And there, goggling at us like a nosy sea serpent, is a periscope.

Mu sinks. We’re not on it.

The submarine is U.S. Navy. It picks us up and takes us home. We get the good news in transit; the scroll did what it was supposed to. The paralyzed are all, slowly, beginning to move and speak and de-mummify.

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But it isn’t over.

Both Dr. Pete and I are given a thorough checkup, first by the sub’s medics and then by stateside physicians. They seem a little worried by what they find, though they won’t tell me squat. It can’t be too bad, though, because they let us have visitors after the first day and only hold us for three.