Ghostwalkers (37 page)

Slowing.

Then the toes of his boot met a new angle of the wall and he felt his legs moving outward. Then his whole body bent backward until it was his belly and then his chest that was pressed hardest against the wall. He slowed more and more … until he stopped.

Just like that.

The world and all of its madness spun down like a windup toy that had clicked on its last cog. Grey lay facedown on a curved slope of rock. Panting, sweating. Bleeding. Nearly weeping.

Alive
.

Far, far above him the screams of the living dead saber tooth were changing. He heard the hiss of frustration turn into a long wail of agony. He listened to it. He heard the demon inside the cat's shrieks.

He heard them both die.

Or, maybe it was only the cat that died. Maybe the demon was cast back into Hell.

Grey had no idea which fate was worse. Burning to death or living to burn.

It took a long time to realize what had happened.

The chasm was not a sheer drop after all. Its sides were slopped like the inside of a bowl and the deeper he went the more the bowl curved inward.

His heart lurched as he realized that had he not leaped all the way to the edge of the bowl, then he would have plummeted straight down. Providence turned a failed escape into the only possible pathway to survival.

Grey lay there and pressed his forehead against the ground, closed his eyes, and thanked whatever gods there might be for dealing him a lucky card.

Lucky.

Looks Away
.

Oh god.

“Are you dead, white man?” asked a familiar voice.

 

Chapter Sixty-Three

Grey rolled over. Slowly, painfully.

He saw Looks Away sitting with his back to a boulder. The bioluminescent fungi burned on the walls all around him and the eerie glow made him appear like a ghost from some ancient tale. Jagged lines of fresh blood were painted blackly against the Sioux's skin.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Grey.

“Not even close.”

He extended a hand and pulled Grey up as far as a hunched sitting position. It was the best they could each manage. Grey craned his neck to see if a ghost-pale face still looked down at him, but all there was at the top of the chasm was the dying flicker of fire from the burning monster. He hung his head and put his face in his palms.

“Well,” said Looks Away with weary sarcasm, “aren't we a pair?”

“We're alive,” said Grey.

“Oh, jolly good, then. All's right with the world and we can skip tra-la.”

“Fuck you.”

“Well, there's that. And a cogent argument you make.”

Grey scrubbed his face with his callused hands, and then got to his feet. His whole body trembled from exertion and injury. The slash on his hip felt like a hot poker driven all the way to the bone. His hands, toes, belly, and chest tingled with friction burns. And he doubted that, even should they escape from this hellhole, he would ever sleep soundly again.

“We have to find a way back up,” he said.

“Thank you for that shockingly obvious observation.”

Looks Away also got up, looking every bit as bad as Grey felt. They turned and studied their surroundings. The walls of the chasm rose steeply on either side, and even though there was a slope to each, it would be impossible to climb up the way they'd come down. The sides were far too smooth. No handholds, nothing to give them a chance of getting out. The bottom of the chasm was narrow but mostly flat, and it stretched away to either side of them. The left-hand path wended its way through chunks of fallen quartz and stone. The blue fungi allowed them to see everything as clearly as if a full winter moon hung over them.

“Which direction?” asked Looks Away.

“Hell if I know,” said Grey. “Pick one.”

“Well, I think we more or less came from that way,” said Looks Away, nodding to their right. “Maybe if we make our way along the bottom we'll find a way up. Not a good plan, I grant you, but it's—.”

“—better than no plan,” finished Grey. They took a moment to check their weapons. Grey reloaded his Colt and Looks Away slapped his pockets for more shells. And slapped and slapped.

“Oh, bugger that,” he growled as he found a ragged hole in his trousers. “I've lost the bleeding shells.”

They did a quick search of the debris at the bottom of the drop and only found one cartridge, but it was crushed and the buckshot spilled out as Looks Away picked it up. There were no other shells in sight. Looks Away considered the shotgun, sighed, and slid it back into its holster. “I feel like tossing this thing as far as I can, but it's been useful and we might get lucky.”

Grey wasn't sure what kind of luck his friend was referring to. The only other shells for the weapon were in Queenie's saddlebags, but he made no comment. It was easier to find ammunition than it was to acquire a new gun.

“What about the doohickey?” he said, nodding to the Kingdom rifle.

After a quick examination, Looks Away nodded. “Seems sound. A trifle dented but the mechanism works and we still have a few rounds left. Let's hope we don't need them, what?”

“Sure,” said Grey, “let's hope.”

“I have a bit of a concern about using it down here, though.”

“Why?”

“Well, the explosive force released when it obliterates the ghost rock in encounters is rather dramatic and we are, after all, in a cavern formed by an earthquake. I don't know how much we can trust to the stability of the ceiling. A blast of unexpected size in the wrong part of this place could bring the roof down and bury all of us under a billion tons of rock.”

“Jesus. And
now
you tell me?” demanded Grey.

“Be fair, old boy. It's not like I had any experience with this, and I'm sure Doctor Saint never tested it under these conditions.”

“So, we can't use our best weapon, is that it?”

“I didn't say that. It's just that we should exercise prudence.”

Grey closed his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, Esquire.”

With their expectations running low and their fears bubbling over, they set off along the path, but after three hundred yards of twists and turns the way became impossible. A massive tumble of granite and marble had toppled from the upper walls of the cleft and filled the entire chasm to a height of eighty or ninety feet.

“Maybe we can climb it,” said Grey, stepping back to look upward. The rocks were haphazardly stacked but there were many obvious hand- and footholds.

However Looks Away shook his head. “Not a chance, old sport. See there? And there? Those rocks are held in place by loose dirt and some quartz splinters. It's all as fragile as a house of cards.” To emphasize his point he picked up a fist-sized rock and walked backward, guiding Grey with him by an outstretched arm. “Stand back.”

He tossed the rock to a midpoint on the pile. He didn't throw it very hard, but the rock struck one of the crystal splinters and suddenly the whole wall began to vibrate. Chunks of broken stone ground together and a dozen boulders as big as cooking pots bounced down toward them. Both men dove for cover as the whole gully shook and grumbled. Dust belched out from between clefts in the stone. They waited until it subsided before they stood up again.

“Damn,” murmured Grey. “You've got a good eye.”

“For rocks, at least,” said Looks Away with a shrug. He turned away from the blocked trail and looked back the way they had come. “Well … there's nothing for it. Come on, dear fellow, quick march.”

With that he set off down the left-hand trail. Grey followed. They reached the point where they'd fallen and Grey glanced covertly up, still looking for that pale face. Now, though, even the firelight was gone. He wasn't sure if that was a comfort or not.

The left-hand trail wormed its way through the shattered landscape for miles. Grey figured they walked two or maybe three miles down there in the fractured gully. He was exhausted and the walk seemed to be draining what little reserves he had left. There was almost nothing left in the canteen, and neither man wanted to drink from the infrequent lines of water running down through mossy cracks in the wall. The water smelled of rot and sickness.

Then, with a start, Grey realized that one of the reasons the journey seemed so tiring is that they were no longer walking along a flat bottom. The ground had begun to tilt upward. Looks Away nodded when Grey pointed this out, clearly having reached that conclusion already.

Within minutes the incline became more pronounced and within another quarter mile was rising sharply. It was slow and ponderous work to climb that hill, and they had to press their palms against the nearly smooth sides of the cliff to steady themselves and push their weary bodies upward.

Time seemed to lose all meaning.

The blue fungi grew thicker and its light intensified until it was as bright as a cloudy afternoon. Grey could have read by that glow. It made it easier to pick out their trail and to find what few handholds were available, but Grey was sure he would have preferred less light. The glow revealed one of the terrible secrets of this cavern.

The path was littered with bones. Many of them. Some were clearly ancient and had withered to dry, cracked relics; others were far too fresh for comfort and still glistened with scraps of meat and strings of tendon. Some of the bones were those of animals. Grey saw fish skeletons and the skull of a horse. They walked between the curved ribs of some vast thing that must have been as tall as a house and as long as a locomotive.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded, slapping his hand against one of the huge ribs. “I've seen elephants and this is ten times bigger.”

Looks Away shook his head. “I've seen drawings of bones like these,” he said, “but I don't recall the name. Look, see there? That line of vertebrae? Lord above what a neck it had. And there, the skull? How delicate for so ponderous a beast.”

Grey saw where he was pointing and shook his head. “No way a brute like that had a head this small.”

But the skull lay there as if to mock him, positioned in perfect alignment to the remnants of its spine. Worse still were the marks on both skull and neck bones. Deep groves that could only have come from some savage claw. Not even the hulking saber tooth could have made cuts that deep.

Clutching their weapons, they hurried on. Then the path whipsawed through a series of switchbacks, and in the third section there were many small boulders that had tumbled down from some quake. They appeared haphazard at first, but as the men approached it became immediately obvious that this was far from the case.

“Look,” whispered Grey, “those are stairs.”

Stairs they were indeed.

Although rough-hewn and covered with moss, they were far too orderly to have been the work of anything but a deliberate hand. The steps led upward for a hundred feet and then vanished around a sharp turn.

“You're a rock expert,” whispered Grey, bending to examine the rocks, “how old are these stairs? Is this some ancient passage, maybe cut by Spanish missionaries or—?”

“No,” said Looks Away decisively. He ran his fingers along one edge and the moss peeled off easily. “Not a bit of it. This is mostly marble and it's cut from the living rock. See there? The chisel marks haven't had time to completely oxidize. No, old boy, I'd say these steps are less than ten years old.”

“Ten years, eh,” mused Grey. “And how long has it been since Aleksander Deray and Nolan Chesterfield set up shop hereabouts?”

Looks Away grunted, and then grinned. “Eleven years,” he said. “Give or take.”

“Give or take.”

They straightened and Grey put a booted foot on the bottom step. “Don't know if you're a gambling man, Looks, but I'll give you twenty-to-one odds that I know who lives at the top of these steps.”

“That, my friend, is what I believe they call a sucker's bet.”

“It is.”

They smiled at each other.

“Shall we pay our respects?” asked the Sioux.

“I believe we should,” agreed Grey. “It would be the neighborly thing to do.”

Without a further word they began climbing the stairs.

 

PART THREE

A Man of Wealth and Taste

Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

 

Chapter Sixty-Four

They went slowly, taking time because neither of them wanted to arrive at Deray's door out of breath and unable to fight.

But the steps did not lead directly to a door.

It led instead to a gate.

They emerged from the stairway on a flat plane that Grey presumed was on the same level as the underground sea. The roof here was not as high, however, suggesting that they had reached one end of the massive cavern. The stalactites reached down like fangs above their heads, and stalagmites rose around them to complete the disturbing illusion. There was a rough natural wall of some dark stone that ran all the way across this end of the cavern, broken only in one spot. This gap, clearly the result of the same earthquake that had destroyed most of California, was bridged by a stout wall of blocks fitted neatly together and fixed with lines of cement. In the middle of the blocks a gate made from tall crystal spikes stood on end and was bound, turn and turn around, by massive iron bands set with huge rivets.

A set of new-looking steel railroad tracks ran past the gates and then curved away to run along the distant underground sea, heading opposite to where Chesterfield's house lay. Halfway to the black waters sat a still and silent locomotive to which was coupled ten hopper cars laden with some cargo they could not identify and then twenty empty flatbed cars. No steam rose from the train's chimney.

Grey ducked down behind a boulder and pulled Looks Away into the shadows beside him.