Tales of the Unquiet Gods (18 page)

Pat stepped up to the now-open door and saw that, at least for the curve the door opened onto, there was nobody in sight. He motioned to Melody who followed him out and into an eerie reflection of the busy station above. Down here the walls were covered with the graffiti of long-gone urban explorers. Kids, generally, who liked to wander around the unoccupied buildings and abandoned parts of the city. They'd driven him to distraction when he was a beat cop, and now he was basically one of them.

Pat crept along, scanning constantly for anything alive. Or anything dead, for that matter. He had no idea what - besides Aram, his monster, Naomi, and Carla - might actually be down here waiting for them. The taking of Melody's regular suggested the
Iaphneth
had been busy in the time since it had taken Pat, and he was willing to bet the creature had acquired more minions like he'd been.

The powerful stink of the monster's goop hung heavy in the air as they moved through the not-so-abandoned station, following the line of safety-lights.
Farther along, they saw why: the large doors that presumably opened onto stairs to the next level had been sealed with chains and a large padlock, and then covered over in a thick layer of the disgusting sludge.

"Should we open that?" Melody leaned close enough for Pat to feel her breath on his ear as she spoke.

"No way." He shook his head. "Somebody from the MTA put the lock there, and it's a safe bet there's another door at the top of the stairs with another lock on it. There's a reason these things covered the doors with that nasty stuff." It would complicate their escape to have to go back up the ladder. Maybe closing the door upstairs hadn't been the best choice.

The pools of light led them through a darkness choked with the smells of the alien monster, but also of brackish seawater and dirt. The recent weather had done a real number on the abandoned station. In point of fact, Pat was having to pay no small amount of attention to placing his feet. The flooding had left mounds of blackish silt all over, including halfway up the walls. Someone had taken the time to clear a path in the clinging, slippery stuff, but the whoever it was had done at best a half the job.

They walked - crept, really - through the isolated pools cast by the hanging lamps. Melody moved with barely a whisper of cloth, but Pat felt as though his footfalls rang loud in the still air. He began to hear muffled sound, as if a neighbor had the television turned up, but not loud enough to make out actual words.

Moving deeper into the station, they found bridges made of planks crossed the watery canals of the unfinished subway tunnel. Pat was surprised. The bridges were basically scaffolding stretched across the gaps between platforms. Planks over piping, but sturdy. Unease stirred at the amount of work that had gone into them.

The two of them crossed the makeshift bridges, every creak and groan drawing a wince. The sound he'd heard grew louder, and it wasn't long before he discerned a rhythm to it. Someone - several someones - were chanting in unison somewhere deeper in. Halfway through the station, Melody touched his elbow.

"I can hear chanting up ahead," she said, when he leaned in.

"I've been hearing it for a while," Pat confirmed. So the ritual had already started. That was distressing. At least one life hung in the balance. "We can't have much time."

13

"No. No! Let me go! Please, noooo!" An accented female voice echoed weirdly in the tunnel, accompanied by a surge in the chanting. Pat could almost distinguish individual words, and recognized the cadences as the mind-twisting language the
Iaphneth
had used to command its monster. A craven part of him wanted to turn around and forget the mission.

Instead, they sped up as they followed the cleared path through the platform. At the other side, another pipe-and-board bridge dove down into the darkness of one of the incomplete tunnels. Pat swallowed, and thought he heard Melody whimper. When he looked over his shoulder, he easily read the terror in her face. He remembered her past, how creatures of living shadow preyed on those around her and finally attacked her.

Struck by a thought, Pat reached into his pocket and pulled out the heretofore unresponsive gold coin. He stared at it, and when nothing happened, he rapped it with the butt of his automatic. Melody blinked, still scared, but obviously curious about his actions.

"All right, you devious little bastard," he told the tiny, grinning face. He kept his voice low, but loud enough for Melody to listen in. "I'm doing all the right things, here. I'm helping Melody, I'm helping Vincent, I'm going after the
Iaphneths
to rescue Naomi -" Pat's conscious mind reeled; he barely believed what he was saying, "- and I'll even promise not to kill Aram, if I can manage it
and
I get to put a few rounds in his monster. You keep helping people, all over this city. Every time something truly bizarre occurs, you're there."

Melody stared at him as though he'd lost his mind, and Pat wasn't sure she was far off. Except that he'd been through hell in the not-so-distant past, and his common-sense incredulity had been strained well past the breaking point. He was nearly ready to believe in anything, God help him.

"Monstrous things out of nightmares, creatures that occupy bodies and move them around while the person's still inside, screaming with no voice?" All the tension, all the terror and fury, all the relief and shame he'd had no way to voice pushed his words out in a tumbled rush. "Now I need you -
we
need you, and Carla needs your help. The only edge I've got hits me with crippling pain and nausea, and Melody has zero training for this." As though he did. "I can't do this with what I have.
Please
," Pat begged. A distant, detached part of his mind noted his gun hand trembled.

A moment of pregnant silence descended as Pat finished. Coincidentally, even the formless, dreadful chanting subsided. Pat felt Melody's hand on his shoulder, offering what support she could. He kept his eyes on the tiny disc in his hand, willing
some
thing to happen.

The moment passed, and Pat felt a crushing wave of disappointment wash through him. He'd been wrong. He pushed with his odd, sick senses. Just slightly, the feathery, hesitant touch of a man testing an injury. He had to be sure.

Immediately, the nausea set Pat's stomach seething. He felt the mass of horrible wrongness ahead and below, burning on his skin. He felt Melody at his back. Waves of bright, vital energy drifted from her as she hummed a tune he hadn't heard until that moment. It still hurt, and he couldn't stifle a wince.

And from the damnably grinning little face -

A burst of brilliant golden illumination flashed from the coin. Melody's hand on his shoulder clenched with bruising force. For a split-second, Pat saw the bones in his hand. He should have been blinded, but wasn't.

Time seemed to slow down, and the wave of radiance rolled down the tunnel. The scaffolding on which they stood turned up ahead and dove into a ragged hole in the side of the tunnel. Melody's sotto voce hum transformed into a beautiful ballad he'd often heard in his regular pub. Somewhere close ahead, he heard the footfalls of something massive, and could tell it headed toward them.

More astonishing that his sudden sensitivity, was what the power from the coin - and there was far more there than met the eye - did inside him. He felt it surge up his arm from his hand, heat beyond heat that froze him where he stood for an endless instant. The consuming auric flames roared through his body in an exquisite agony, finally settling in his chest and head. Terrified wonder set his mind abuzz, at the sheer power inside his skin, at a force that could hold him stock still as the world seemed to shake around him.

Only good trigger discipline prevented Pat from firing a round into the tunnel wall. Even then, he felt his index finger curl with the force of his convulsion as his hands clenched into rock-hard knots. His head snapped back, and beams of brilliant golden light shone from his wide eyes and gaping mouth, clearly illuminating the tunnel ceiling. The same beams lanced out from between his fingers, splashing the cold concrete walls with radiant pools.

Melody cried out and covered her eyes, wrenching away the hand she'd placed on his shoulder. For a brief, endless moment, Pat felt as though he hung suspended over some unimaginable chasm, touching nothing. He only felt the raging torrent of power locked in his body.

And then, as suddenly as it had come upon him, it disappeared. Pat felt again the rickety solidity of the scaffolding bridge under his feet. He could smell the old sewage and musty earth, the damp concrete and stagnant water of the abandoned subway station. Pat felt whole for the first time since he'd awoken bruised in body and soul on the stiff, antiseptic-smelling hospital bed.

He could even hear the heavy footsteps clearly moving toward them. A sound his recent baptism had driven clean from his mind. A sound that changed from the thud of massive foot on earth to the creak of wooden board taking the weight of something they weren't build to hold.

Pat's heart leapt into his throat. Time slowed again, but this time with the familiar molten-glass flow of adrenalized combat. A low hiss crept into his ears, and he knew the eel-headed arthropodal monstrosity from his nightmares neared the broken mouth of the tunnel ahead.

Pat jammed the bizarre little coin back in his pocket. Then he whirled, and saw in an instant that even if they could both make it back to the abandoned platforms before the abomination saw them, they had nowhere to hide that the thing couldn't sniff them out. Trusting to some instinct he couldn't name, and hadn't possessed bare moments before, Pat reached out to Melody. He pulled her into a dim, shadowed space between two of the safety lights, and down, so they crouched in dark.

Melody tensed when he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, but even as close in height as they were, he still had a good thirty pounds on her. Their only hope lay in remaining undiscovered, and he slipped his free hand over her mouth, knowing that her song, which she'd continued through the light-show, would bring the horror to their poor hiding place.

She threw an elbow into his side, but froze as an enormous claw seized on the edge of the opening, easily crumbling the thick cement. And then the thing stepped into the light, and they both stopped breathing. It had grown, in size and in its hideous, alien appearance. Its chitinous armor plating seemed thicker than Pat's memories. Ridges, gnarls and spikes pushed out in all directions, and its massive claws hung nearly to the floor. He almost didn't believe it was the same creature, but the ridges of luminescent horn adorning its head matched the spots it had worn in their earlier encounter. The eyes, too, were the same dead black pits.

Pat's heart lurched in his chest. He was certain they were about to be torn limb from limb. He hoped, prayed, that the things wouldn't see them, but couldn't comprehend how it wouldn't. He stared at the horror, locked in place,
needing
to stay hidden. He glared at the hated thing with such fierce concentration that his very vision started to waver. It was though he saw through heat waves.

The horror swept its head in quick, serpentine arcs. Its jaw hung open and it gasped in quick, shallow breaths. With no tongue, it might be tasting with some other organ. It looked hesitant. Almost, confused. A moment passed. Then another.

In the background, Pat heard the chanting pick up again. Then, a voice he recognized shouted something in a language he wished he did not. The horror's head whipped around to face directly behind it, and hissed. Aram roared something again, and Pat was glad he was no closer to the source of those sanity-shredding words. As it was, his head throbbed at the sounds.

The horror turned its head back forward and stared again at the place Pat and Melody hid. With a last hissing roar, the thing slammed a claw into the edge of the tunnel, cracking the solid concrete. Then the monstrous creature turned around and stumped back the way it had come.

Pat remembered to breathe again, gulping air into grateful lungs. Melody jabbed her elbow into his side again, and turned her azure glare on him for good measure.

"Don't do that," she ordered, her voice low and intense.

"Don't do what?" Pat countered. "Save our lives? Your humming would have attracted its attention." He didn't know that, and felt guilty for latching onto it as an excuse.

"You don't know that," she said, as though she'd read his mind. "Don't stop me from singing," she elaborated. "It's the only thing keeping me on my feet right now."

Pat gave her a hard look in the twilit gloom. Melody was always pale, but now her skin appeared chalky. She breathed in short, choppy gasps, and stared at him with unnerving intensity. Not knowing he should do, Pat nodded.

"You can still head back."

Her head jerked back and forth. She wrapped her arms around her ribcage and squeezed.

"I told you, you need me here. That hasn't changed."

Pat shrugged, still unconvinced. He had no way to make her go back, though. As he turned away and they moved toward the ragged opening in the tunnel wall, Melody began singing again. He almost lost his footing as it struck him: her song didn't hurt anymore. He heard it, felt it, but the soft notes didn't excite the same slow burn in his gut they had bare moments earlier.