Laura glanced over her shoulder just once at the light gradually rising from the sacristy. "He's coming!" she moaned.
The last pew was thrown aside just in time and then they were hurtling out into the chill, misty morning air. The Bone Inspector was waiting for them, his face showing all the horror that they felt in their hearts. With a deafening rumble, the chapel fell in on itself, shaking the ground like an earthquake.
The three of them were already at the perimeter wall, pulling themselves over to safety. Shavi paused on the summit to look back at the devastation, hoping against hope that the monstrous thing they had unleashed would be trapped under the rubble.
He was overcome by an awful sickness when all he saw was a golden light fading into the mist, moving out across the countryside.
Chapter Eight
The first sign that all was not as it should be hit Church twenty minutes after they had entered through the well-head. No longer stale, the air in the tunnel smelled of cinnamon and mint. And it almost seemed to be singing, harmonious melodies bouncing back and forth off the walls. "Is this the start of it?" he asked.
"`This is the best part of the trip."' Tom's voice echoed curiously behind him.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just remembering the sixties."
"This is no time to be getting nostalgic." Church was tense with apprehension.
"If you'd enjoyed the sixties to the full you'd be a little mellower in dealing with everything life has to throw at you now."
"Sorry. I was born too late for the summer of love." There was a shush-boom effect deep in the stone walls, like a giant heart beating.
"You missed a great time. That smell, it reminds me of California nights, hanging out at Kesey's parties when he and the Merry Pranksters set up shop after they did the Magic Bus ride. Jerry Garcia doing the music. Two kinds of punch-normal and electric. That was before the Hell's Angels moved in and ruined it."
"What are you talking about?" Church said distractedly. "You have done too many drugs, haven't you." He reached out to touch the tunnel wall; strange vibrations rippled up his fingers.
"You know, Kesey, Leary, all those psychonauts, they set things in motion that could have changed the world before the Establishment stamped it down. They believed the psychedelics could help them see God, did you know that? And by doing that they were just like all those people who threw up the great monolithic structures around the world where the earth energy is at its strongest. Before our feeble modern culture, psychedelics fired civilisation."
"Are you saying all those hippies were right?" Church said distractedly.
"We all need to be neo-hippies if we're going to cope with this new world that's being presented to us, Jack."
The note of tenderness in Tom's voice surprised Church so much he looked around and was instantly disoriented. He appeared to be viewing Tom through a wall of oily water, the image stretched, skewed, distorted.
"Tom?" He reached out a hand, but his friend seemed to recede with the action until he appeared to be floating backwards along a dark corridor, growing smaller yet glowing brighter.
"It will be all right, jack." Tom's voice grew hollow, deep and loud, then faint, as if it were cycling between two speakers. Church blinked and Tom was gone.
Unable to understand what was happening, he was overcome by a sudden wave of panic. They had been walking along quite normally, and now he was alone; it made no sense.
Desperately, he clamped his eyes shut, focusing on Tom's advice to be mellow, and then he remembered how Tom had warned him that space and time could warp that close to such a potent source of the earth energy. He composed himself with a deep breath, accepted that he was on his own, and forged on down the tunnel.
After following its undulating path for about fifteen minutes, lulled by the background harmonics of the air, he suddenly rounded a corner into a large cavern. He could tell it was enormous from the change in the quality of the sound of his breathing and footsteps, although the roof disappeared into the deep shadows above him. The danger of getting lost in such a place was a distinct possibility. He could follow the walls with their faint phosphorescent glow around the perimeter, but he instinctively felt the correct path was directly across the floor of the cavern, through the darkness that could hide treacherous fissures, sinkholes and pits. His fears were confirmed when he glanced down and noticed a carved rock set in the floor by his feet. It was well-made, polished and indented. It showed a dragon, its tail curling to form an arrowhead which pointed the way into the centre of the cavern. He hesitated for just a moment, then strode off into the shadows.
It seemed like he had been walking for hours, although he guessed it was only about fifteen minutes. In the enveloping dark the going was laboriously slow, feeling with each foot before taking another step. At times the visual deprivation was so hallucinatory he felt his head spinning and he had to fight to stop himself from pitching to the ground; in that warped atmosphere he was having trouble discerning what was happening in his head and what was external.
Without eyes, sound took on added meaning and he was alert to any aural change in his surroundings. When he first heard the distant, reverberating chingching-ching of metal on metal he froze instantly.
Listening intently, he held his breath as the noise grew louder until it was accompanied by the trudge of heavy footsteps. A faint light began to draw closer, which he at first thought was just his eyes playing tricks on him. Gradually, though, an enormous figure presented itself to him, but it seemed unreal, like an obvious movie effect, with the light buried deep within it and seeping out through its surface. As it came into focus he felt a sudden pang of fear. From the sickening waves that rolled off it, it was undoubtedly a Fomor, but it was encased in black, shiny armour; the chainmail that glinted darkly beneath the plates was making the metallic sound that had alerted him to its presence. The oddly shaped armour with its gnarls and ridges was like a carapace, making the figure resemble a giant insect; on the head was a helmet which concealed most of the hideous face, two curved horns reaching out from the temple with a row of six smaller ones beneath. It was gripping in both hands an unusual but cruel weapon with on one side a nicked and sickly smeared axe-head and on the other a line of sharp tines of irregular length. Church heard its breath rumbling like a traction engine, the vibrations churning in the pit of his stomach.
The figure was terrifying to see. Church had the sense it was more powerful than any of the Fomorii he had encountered before. And as it advanced, the threat around it grew until he felt queasy from the potency of the danger.
His shock at what he was witnessing finally broke and he took a couple of staggering backwards steps before turning and running. He hadn't gone far when he stumbled over an outcropping rock and crashed down, winding himself. But as he glanced back to see how close the Fomor warrior was behind him, he saw the figure begin to break up into tiny particles, as if it were made out of flies. There was no sound, and a second later it had completely disappeared.
Church rolled on to his back, breathing heavily, trying to make sense of what had happened. He had felt the Fomor was definitely there, yet it didn't seem to have been aware of him. Was it simply a hallucination or a by-product of the strange atmosphere that existed in that place?
As he climbed to his feet a more important concern pushed all those questions from his mind. In his attempt to get away he had done just as he had feared-lost his sense of direction. It was impossible to tell where he had been going. There was nothing for it. Despondently, he selected a path at random and set off.