“Now, Sammy…”
“Off with you.”
Kierney took off his Quaker hat and slapped it against his leg. “Ye miserable rutting pig! Damn ye! All right, I’ll go with ye, but ye’ll be the death of me yet.”
Clow led on to the vault, which was monolithic and shadow-riven, cut from some water-stained gray stone spread out with cracks. The door was black wrought-iron, rusting badly, carved into rose stems and vines, quite ornate. In the moonlight, trying to wet his lips, Clow produced the skeleton keys and slid one into the lock. It made a grinding, scratching sound and then the tumblers clicked and it was open.
“Easy as that,” he said.
He gripped the edge of the massive door that rose an easy six feet above them and pulled it open. It groaned dryly in the darkness, the sound echoing out below. Right away, a stench of buried things and damp recesses blew out at them. It was a curious mixture of autumn leaves, dead flowers, decay, and mildewing boxes.
Clow lit the lantern. “Stay with me now,” he said.
They stepped into a massive room with a vaulted ceiling that was patched with fungi. Water dripped and things skittered. Clow felt darkness gathering around him, felt everything inside him run like wax. He wanted to cry out, to knock Kierney out of the way and keep running until he was back in the city proper. The oil lamp threw jumping shadows around them. A set of winding stone steps led down into the clammy blackness below.
Clow started down, the steps crumbling away beneath him, crevices packed with moss and clusters of gray greasy toadstools. Beetles scuttled along the walls, dozens and dozens of them, trying to escape the intrusion of light.
“Lovely place, this,” Kierney said. “Damp and smelling and filled with crawly things. Reminds me of me mother’s womb, it does.”
Clow managed to grin at that, but it didn’t last long. This was a bad place, and on a particularly bad night. They were both nervous now, eyeing the shadows carefully like children in an empty house on a dare. The ceiling sloped down overhead, water dripping from it, beetles scurrying. They ducked under webby growths of fungi.
Kierney wrinkled his nose at the stink of age and dissolution. “You sure this is the right place, Sammy? Looks long disused. Maybe your fat little plum was having a lark at your expense.”
“No, this is it.”
The maid that Clow had bedded had told him a tale of woe. The family that employed her had lost their son and his wife in a terrible carriage accident. Their heads were both crushed but bodies untouched. The maid knew this to be true, for she had washed them with the aid of a charwoman. They had been interred only the day before.
“Looks… old,” Kierney said.
“Aye, it is at that. But this be the right one, I’m told. They probably just shoved the coffins down here and got out. This is it, all right, I swear by me mother’s honor.”
“By Christ, we’re in trouble now.”
As they got near the bottom of the steps, they saw two caskets laid out on biers, but they were old, very old. The brass plates and handles badly tarnished, the fir boxes water-spotted and set with fingers of mold. They had been there a long time. A pair of plump rats sat atop them, busily washing their forepaws.
Kierney coughed dust from his throat. “Ach, rats. Just like me mother’s womb, I say.”
Clow held up the lantern so they could see what was beyond. Great motes of dust floated in the yellow, flickering light. The floor was flagstone, the walls gray stone with cobwebby recesses set into them from which black tree roots dangled. This is what they saw at first, but then… destruction.
The vault had been pillaged.
Not just pillaged but ransacked and gutted.
Marble sarcophagi were broken open, lids split into shards, their contents dumped to the floor. Skeletons green with advanced age had actually been crushed to powdery fragments as if some great weight had settled atop them. Caskets had been yanked from their berths in the walls and shattered into kindling. What had been in them was scattered like straw in every direction… yellowed staffs of bones and cloven skulls and rotting cerements. It looked like something had chewed up everything, including the boxes themselves, then vomited it back out in a refuse of charnel debris. And over it all, like a dusting of fresh snow, a gray chalky covering of ash and crematory refuse… the contents of dozens of urns that had been smashed against the dirty, sweating walls.
Something had been here, something monstrous that had forced its way up from beneath, something that had left tangles of black slime behind.
“Christ, Sammy,” Kierney said. “Am I seeing this?”
Clow just shook his head. Yes, they were seeing it, all right, and in Clow’s mind there was only one possible explanation for it, but one that he dared not let slip past his lips.
He panned the lantern about, taking it all in, swallowing it down deep inside himself, where it poisoned him black to the very roots.
A single lidless, untouched coffin was filled with so many busy, scratching rats that you could not see the dusty skeleton beneath. As Clow stepped forward, bringing that light up higher, most of the rats scampered away, making for apertures in the walls. Dozens of burrows they had dug through the reign of centuries.
Yes, it was all terrible. But what was perhaps even worse was that at the rear of the huge chamber there was no floor. The ground had been pushed up from below by some incredible force, dirt and flagstones heaped around a great black maw that led down to fathomless black depths. The rear wall had nearly collapsed. The opening itself looked, if anything, like a very large bomb crater.
And Clow found himself thinking: Aye, but it’s no bomb crater, now, is it, Sammy? This floor was not struck from above but from below. By something immense and powerful that tunneled in here to eat corpses and gnaw on bones and caskets and the like. And you know what that something was, now, don’t you?
He and Kierney carefully made their way to the bottomless black hole that dropped away into the nighted bowels of the earth. The pile of earth and stone around it was higher than a man in places and they had to climb it. And all the while they did, hearing stones and clods of dirt falling to unknown depths, Clow was thinking that from above that hole must have looked like an anthill or the burrow of some subterranean worm.
“I’m thinking we should be going,” Kierney said.
But Clow had to see.
Something in him demanded it and would be satisfied with nothing less. He got up near the top and held the lantern over the hole. There was a rush of hot, putrid air from far below. The light reached down twenty feet, maybe. The walls of the passage were perfectly circular, rough-hewn, but circular. Kierney tossed a stone down there and heard it splash maybe ten seconds later.
The lantern shook in Clow’s hand, the handle greasy beneath his fingers. A dreamy, absent sort of terror flooded through him. He had an image of that wall of dirt and stone suddenly letting go and the both of them plummeting to what waited below. For it was there… he could smell it, something feverish and fleshy that stank of putrefaction.
Yes, it’s there, all right, Sammy, and it’s watching the both of you right now.
And it was bizarre and inexplicable, but there was a magnetism to what waited below. It wanted them to look upon it and they could not help themselves. They could feel its pull, its malevolent seduction, and it was all they could do not to give in to it, not to jump down there with it like it wanted them to.
Then the tunnel roared with a peal of hysterical, screeching laughter and they both sensed movement down there, something rising. Kierney slid down the pile of dirt and Clow was right behind him. He took one last look and saw two leering red eyes the size of grapefruits coming up toward him.