Catacombs of Terror! (11 page)

“Right,” murmured Kafka. “That's enough. Let's go back.”

It was then that we heard another noise. Squealing. Distant, but a lot of it. It was like, I don't know, children. It sounded like children. A lot of children. But not human children. There was something unearthly about it. Like the squealing of hungry children, blind, hairless children who'd never seen the sun. Who knew they were getting fed soon. And it came from somewhere behind us.

I seized Kafka's arm and pulled him sideways, along the left-hand tunnel. And we ran. We just ran. The squealing seemed to be getting louder, and we just ran. The tunnel wasn't straight, not like the one we'd walked down. It curved around all over the place, and we careened off the muddy walls every few feet. The floor was sloping upwards now, slightly, but enough to notice that the running was getting to be harder work. We came to a fork in the tunnel and for no reason took the right-hand turn. And after a couple of hundred feet the floor stopped and there were steps going upwards. We didn't stop. I don't know how far behind us the squealing was, and I didn't care. We plunged up the steps, which wound in tighter and tighter circles until it was obvious we were running fast up a spiral stairway. I don't know where I got my energy from. Terror, I guess. The steps went on and on, until I smacked my head on something hard. I fell back against Kafka, but somehow he caught me and we stumbled on the stone steps beneath what felt like wood.

“It's a trapdoor,” shrieked Kafka, “push against it! Push it!”

I got my upper back under the wood and pushed as hard as I could. Kafka squeezed up next to me and added his strength. Suddenly, with an ancient sucking sound, the trapdoor flipped up and slammed over. We scrambled out, grabbed the door and swung it back over the hole. It shuddered tightly over the darkness and we sat splayed over it, heaving with exhaustion. I think Kafka puked on the floor. I didn't feel too good myself.

I sensed that we were in some kind of room. Nothing else registered for a while. We sat there, gasping, wheezing, puking. And then everything was still. We slowly got our breathing back into some semblance of normality. A lot of puffing and blowing, but nothing too bad. Eventually I thought I'd use some of mine to speak.

“What, in the name of hell, was that?”

“I don't know,” Kafka managed to say, “and I don't give a fuck. Where are we?”

It was a good question.

“Why didn't you use that fucking gun?”

Another good question. My answer, that I'd forgotten about it, was so stupid that I didn't let it out of my mouth. But anyway, it wouldn't have done any good. I didn't know what to shoot at. I didn't know where it, or they, were. Whether bullets would have worked. That place seemed beyond guns. The bullets would probably have slowed down, or fallen to the ground straight from the mouth of the barrel, or turned back at us. I didn't know.

“I don't know. Have you still got your flashlight?”

“Yeah. It must have got itself turned off.”

“Well, turn it back on.” He did. I almost wished he hadn't. We were in a room, okay. I'd been right about that. A room lined with incredibly dusty, cobwebbed coffins. Dust was everywhere. No one had been in here for a very, very long time. They hadn't thought to employ a cleaner. The inhabitants wouldn't have appreciated it anyhow. I noticed that the beam from the flashlight was bright. The batteries were fine.

“This is nice,” I said. “Comparatively speaking. Quiet clientele. Peaceable.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” spat Kafka harshly. “We're in a fucking crypt, fuck knows where, and you sit there making smart remarks. How are we going to get out of here, you moron?”

Much as I dislike being called a moron, especially by a reporter, I could see that he had a point. We were, as he had so helpfully pointed out, in a crypt. I had an idea that crypts were not good places to hang around in. We were going to have to do some more physical exertion. There was a door at the end of the room, which was a sort of coffin-lined corridor.

“You're right.” The phrase was getting easier for me. “We've got to bust out of that door. But first, maybe we should put something heavy over this trapdoor.”

“Like what?”

I just swept my eyes around the crypt.

“You're kidding me? Surely?”

I shook my head. “Remember that noise?”

Kafka nodded. He closed his eyes for about a minute. Then we manhandled a coffin off the shelves and placed it diagonally across the trapdoor. It wasn't a nice thing to do, but it didn't rate too badly in the context of the last few hours.

“Okay. Let's get the hell out of here,” I said finally. I tried the door. It must have been bolted from the outside. Probably padlocked, too. I cast my eyes about, looking for something to try to lever it open with. No dice.

“It's going to have to be brute strength, Mister Kafka,” I said. So we took turns at ramming the door. Repeatedly. We'd got a little panicked about being trapped in a crypt with a lot of dead folks, and having just used one of their number's final resting place as a kind of doorstop against unspeakable subterranean horrors, when I remembered about the two wraps of coke I still had left. So we dealt with those and finished the whiskey. It was all or nothing. We smashed against the door without a thought about how this might damage our shoulders. And eventually it started to give. We rammed into it harder until we shot out into fresh air and wet grass. And dawn light. And rain.

We lay on the grass staring up at the pale grey sky with the delicious rain falling on our faces for about a minute before we both simultaneously scrambled up and wedged the door shut again. We were outside a church.

“Let's get far away from here,” said Kafka in one exhaled breath. I was with him on that. We walked smartly away from the door, across a graveyard, and jumped down a wall on to the pavement. I looked up at a noticeboard, and then further up at the pinnacles of the church tower.

Saint Stephen's Church,” I said. “We're halfway up Lansdown Hill. Halfway back to the city from Charlcombe. That spiral staircase must have started hundreds of feet down.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” answered Colin. “And I'm never climbing it again. Full stop. End of fucking story. End of story. This is it, Valpolicella. No more. I thought I was sticking my neck out dealing with those lowlifes at the Lud Club. But they were a fucking breeze. They were great people.”

We were walking down the hill. We could see the city, veiled in grey, below us. Just a couple of early rising fresh-air enthusiasts, that's what we were.

“From now on I'll help you, but strictly from a research perspective. However much cocaine you show me, I'm not doing any more fieldwork. No siree fucking Bob.”

I just nodded, silently. Again, I wasn't in any kind of mood to argue. We walked down the hill, and I almost didn't mind the rain.

We parted at the junction near my flat. I wanted to go back there, and pretty badly. Kafka didn't say where he was going, but I guessed it would be somewhere with a bed. I let myself into my pad and crashed. I didn't have any desire to do anything else. But I couldn't sleep. That droning, moaning chant filled my mind. Round and round. I couldn't get it to shut up. Another thing was bothering me. Why hadn't there been any rats? Underground passages and rats went together like grand buildings and tourists. And that squealing. That hadn't been rats, for sure. What had it been the sound of? That horrible, unearthly sound that was like hungry children?

And then it came to me. Pigs. When I was a kid I'd had to walk past a pig farm on the way to school. And that was the same sound. Pigs. Did pigs eat rats? Not that I knew of. But pigs, a hundred feet underground? It didn't make sense. Well, yeah. For that matter, none of this whole business made sense. Not the kind of sense I was used to, anyway. I gave up the idea of sleep. It was properly light outside now. I got up and splashed my face with water.

My eyes didn't look so good, so I closed them and turned away from the mirror. I looked at my watch. For a couple of seconds I couldn't focus, but then it swam into view. Nearly 7:30
A.M
. Sunday morning. Not much time left. I remembered that Stonehenge was going to call at 8. The battery on my mobile was nearly down, so I plugged it into the charger. I tried to eat a piece of toast, but it tasted worse than cardboard. I resigned myself to a few mugs of instant coffee.

I sat on the edge of my bed and reviewed the events of the last few hours. Moving walls? Probably. Eerie, horrifying sounds? Definitely. And pigs. Well, probably pigs, anyway. Miles of tunnels. I dug out my
A–Z
and tried to work out where we'd been. The dig was more or less directly south of the church at Charlcombe. The church crypt that we'd escaped at was . . . south again. I grabbed a magazine, and used it as a ruler to draw a line from the dig straight down. The Circus was dead south from the dig. Saint Stephen's Church, where we'd come out at on Lansdown Hill, was a notch or two off the line. That would account for the left-hand turning and the curving stairway. Interesting.

Stonehenge had said that there were three tunnels from a chamber below the Circus. And a few miles due north was another chamber, also with three tunnels radiating from it. Where all these tunnels led to didn't bear thinking about. I couldn't imagine how far they might go. And what was that horrible darkness, that seemed to consume light? It almost had texture. A really disgusting texture.

I sat there for a little while, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Then my mobile rang. I went over and unplugged it from the charger.

“Valpolicella,” I said tonelessly.

“Hello. I'm glad you're still with us.” It was Stonehenge's voice. It was exactly 8
A.M
.

“I'm still alive, if that's what you mean. But it was a close thing. Probably.”

“Is Colin still—with us?”

“He is. Sort of. He says that he doesn't want to be directly involved any more, though. It was pretty spooky. It was the pigs that really got to him.”

“Did you say—
pigs
?”

“They sounded like pigs. We didn't know what they were at the time. I figured it out later. Hell of a noise. Sounded like hungry devil children to us. But I think it was pigs. Lots of them.”

“That is extremely likely. Are you able to meet? Soon?”

“
Am I able
to meet? My life is full of meetings. Meet this girl here, that guy there, do this, go there. I can't remember when I last made a decision unaided.”

“I'll be in Parade Gardens at nine
A.M
. Do you know where that is? I'll be sitting in a deckchair by the bandstand. All right?”

“Mm-hmm. I'll be there. Haven't got much else to do. Might as well turn up. Talk to you for a while.”

“Will Mister Kafka be with you?”

“I'll give him a call, but don't count on it.”

“Goodbye, Valpolicella.” The connection was terminated. Okay. I put my mobile back on charge. What was that I'd said to myself? I was going to be the one pulling the strings? Yeah, right. Oh, for sure.

Parade Gardens is a park down in the city, next to the river, where old folk hang around on striped deckchairs waiting for the good old days to come around again. Why the hell Stonehenge wanted to meet there, I couldn't be bothered to work out. I lay back on my couch and watched the ceiling. I think I might have slept. Whatever, I was unconscious for a time. I woke up fighting a cushion and my jacket bunched up painfully under my arms. It was my mobile that woke me. I reared about like someone in a straitjacket until I finally located my phone somewhere behind my shoulder blade.

“What? Who?” I mumbled.

“It's Colin. I've got some disturbing news. Are you free?”

“No. Yes.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I fumbled around some more and got my cigarettes. “Yes, I'm free, if you can call it that. What time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes, in the morning. Can you meet?”

“What is this? Of course I can meet. I do very little else but meet people and get into trouble. In fact, I'm supposed to be meeting Stonehenge in about a minute down at Parade Gardens. He'll be wearing a deckchair so's I don't miss him.”

“Right then. I'll see you there right away. Bye.”

It seemed like everyone was being all efficient and decisive except me. Phoning up on the dot. Coming out with sentences like ‘I'll see you there right away . . . .' Good grief. I rearranged my clothes, lit a cigarette, did some swearing, and walked as fast as I could be bothered to down to the Gardens. I saw Stonehenge from the balustrade overlooking the park. He wasn't in a deckchair because it was raining. Of course. Him and Kafka were the only people fool enough to go to a park in a downpour. They were standing in the bandstand, and by the look of it they were waiting for me. I wandered down with what I hoped was a nonchalant swagger. But it was probably obvious it was an exhausted wobble.

“Hello Colin and hello Stonehenge. This is nice. Fresh air. Weather.”

“It was fine until about five minutes ago,” said Kafka.

“Oh, sure it was,” I said bitterly, “now why don't we go somewhere dry? That serves coffee? Chairs, tables, clean ashtrays, that sort of thing? There's a place just over the road. Come on.”

I was pleased with myself. I was in charge. In control. It was a good feeling, even if it was only to do with where we drank coffee. They followed me through the rain to the café. It was empty, so getting a table wasn't a problem. I ordered coffee and toast. I figured it was worth giving food another try.

“Okay,” I said as we waited. “Colin, you have some disturbing news. And don't tell me—Stonehenge has some disturbing news, too, am I right?” Stonehenge nodded. “I thought so. A double helping of disturbing news for Mister Valpolicella on this wet July Sunday morning. I am so pleased. I was just dreading anything nice. It would be hard trying to adjust, for one thing.” I blew out a plume of smoke and stared at them. “So, who wants to go first?”