The Undergrave • part 8 - Bones and Silk

She heard Wes’s boots in the grit as he came after her. The light on her head swung wildly. Timbers and tunnels stretched out in every direction, like standing between two mirrors and glimpsing the infinite. In her periphery, the shadows at the edges of the lamplight oozed down the rough pillars and melded with others, all loping after her.

Each turn she made lead only to more halls, more darkness. She ran past open caskets littering the passages, bones crunching under her feet like dry twigs. Something grasped at her hair, pulling a dozen strands from her head before losing her. She heard Wes grunting angry syllables that made no sense to her ears. Her lungs burned as she lurched forward, her vision blurred by dust and panic. All around her the dark was alive.

Then the narrow tunnel became a wall of dirt and ore. She skidded to a stop inches from the dead end, afraid to see what waited behind her. Turning in the tight space, her ankle bumped something hard and she quickly bent to scoop up an impossibly long leg bone, an artifact that could only have come from a giant. She gripped it with both hands and stood there awaiting her fate.

Wes caught up to her, his body heaving with each strained breath. She could not take her eyes off the knife, shards of light reflecting from the blade.

“Get away from me.” She screamed, trying to project as much power and authority as she could manage—and feeling disappointed with her effort.

“Can’t. I can’t. I need you.”

“You don’t need me. Take what you want. I’ll find my way out of here on my own.”

“A grave,” he growled, “is a hungry thing.” His hand tightened around the handle until his fingers were white.

She felt suddenly as if she were fading, the dark crowding the edges of her vision, the knife alive in its center. He took a step toward her. In that moment, she tilted her gaze up away from the blade. Three hundred concentrated lumens of LED brightness passed through his dilated pupils, flooding the retinas behind them with blinding light. Juniper danced forward a step, another, and then swung the long bone in an upward arc. The thick knob at its end caught Wes under his jaw, sending him stumbling backward. When he began to regain his balance, she ran at him, the bone held out in front of her like a battering ram. She struck the center of his chest and this time he did fall, knocking a support beam loose with his body and thudding to the ground.

Fine dirt and rocks sifted down from the low ceiling. Wes lay sprawled on his back, the massive timber pinning one ankle.

“Look what you did!” He cried, struggling to get free from the beam.

She became aware of a pinching sensation and looked down to see the knife dangling from her thigh. Swatting, as if it were a biting insect, she knocked the blade loose, releasing a stream of hot blood.

The entire space filled with a sharp screeching sound, echoing down the corridors and back again. Wes looked up, confusion on his dirty face, just as a long metal door swung down from above, dropping the coffin it had supported for over a hundred years directly onto him.

The bottom had grown soft with generations of termites and mold, allowing his body to punch through the thin wood, leaving the sides of the casket to surround him. The lid crumbled away, and the corpse inside became a jumble of bones and rotten silk.

“Get me out of here,” he bellowed, hysterical now, gripping the edges and straining to climb out of the coffin. June took two steps toward him before she spotted the dark sludge swimming through the air. It was coming from the tunnels, from behind the wooden beams, from the hole above them. Black tentacles snaked from its surface.

The many streams converged on the casket and overflowed its sides. Within the current of liquid shadow were fragments of slimy yellow bone, murderous driftwood in a river of death.  As the crawling blobs reached Wes, serrated skeletal edges rose to the surface—finger bones like talons, broken skulls with jagged teeth—all reaching for him. Wes thrashed as the flowing muck clawed the jewelry and relics from his pockets. Razor sharp fragments ripped through his clothes, pulling off his boots, his pack, stretching him in every direction. Gold and silver spilled to the ground.

Then he began to scream.

In the unforgiving light from atop her head, Juniper watched as a geyser of crimson blood sprayed from Wes’s neck, could hear it splash against the ceiling. The darkness dug into him, carving muscle, peeling flesh. His screams became watery, heaving howls. A hooked calcification pushed its way into his eye socket and pulled from it a viscous, red-streaked jelly.

She looked frantically around herself. She had backed into the dead-end pocket of earth and was trapped there between the rough walls and the killing floor. The terrible cries of pain and horror continued while she stood petrified.

The ground quaked beneath her feet. More of the powdery dirt fell from the rafters, chittering all around her like hail, sticking to her bloody wound. A rising roar, like an approaching locomotive, pushed painfully against her eardrums. She stepped back just before the twelve-foot column of rock and concrete that had filled the grave since before her great-grandfather had been born spilled straight down from the rectangular hole above Wes, burying him and those greedy shadows beneath an enormous, tumbling mound.

She turned her head from the chalky cloud, coughing as the air became dense. Stumbling backward against the rock, she watched twisting ropes of darkness as they squeezed out from under the pile of rubble that blocked her only path.

The old heavy helplessness fell over her—lulling, numbing. Her eyelids closed against the horror. You have no power in this world, it said. Easier just to give in. Go along.

Whatever you say.

Tears spilled down her face, cold in the breeze that washed over her. She wanted to give up. She wanted to stay underground. To stay here, where they had put her mother. Though miles apart, they could both be under the world, together. The splashing sounds of liquid evil were close.

A cool draft caressed her face. The music of water echoed all around.

Just keep on running, she heard her mother say.

Juniper opened her eyes.

The dust had settled and she saw now that the hill of rock and sand was wet. Raindrops fell from the ceiling. The shaft glowed with pale moonlight.

You’re a goddam fast one.

Now run.

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The Undergrave • part 9 - Crossroad