Dead Five's Pass
Authors: Colin F. Barnes
DEAD FIVE’S PASS
Colin F. Barnes
First Edition
Dead Five’s Pass
© 2014 by Colin F. Barnes
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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1
The Rockies, Alberta, Canada
Some people believe in an afterlife full of consciousness and spirituality. Carise didn’t. She held the afterlife in her hands: a thick pack of Polaroid pictures. The colorful dead freeze-framed in celluloid.
Carise slugged back another mouthful of whiskey, wheezed as it burned all the way down. She would have preferred a smooth single malt, but in the remote village of Smokeywood at the base of Morant’s Peak, she had to make do with whatever the single, understocked village shop carried—which, due to the winter delivery schedule, wasn’t much.
As much as she needed that warmth and the dulling effects of the whiskey, other things occupied her mind.
Those things were dead people.
The crushing silence of the departed pressed down upon her from the walls of her rustic wooden cabin. Framed pictures of her parents and friends past hung in an uneven grid. Dust and condensation spotted the glass frames, charting time with a creeping inevitability.
The worst sat at the top of the pack of her Polaroids: an ultrasound scan of her baby.
It was cut from her, already dead.
Two years had passed, and still it haunted her.
A crackle of static and voices from the police scanner broke her from her maudlin thoughts. She leaned forward in her worn, wooden captain’s chair and rested her elbows on her equally worn, wooden desk, its surface strewn with radio equipment, notebooks, and maps of the various climbing routes in and around Morant’s Peak.
Carise was a volunteer mountain rescuer. Climbing and spelunking season would soon be over. Luckily she didn’t have many emergencies to deal with this season, but the voice on the scanner sent an adrenal shiver down her spine far colder than any Canadian winter could produce.
“Charlie Code 1, this is Mounty 2. We have two stuck climbers at the top of Dead Five’s Pass. I just received their emergency call, they’re not responding. Please advise. Over.”
“Mounty 2, this is Marge. Where are you, Frank?”
“Marge, I was patrolling at the base of the pass when I saw a flare and heard some screaming over the emergency channel. I tried to respond but there’s no reply. It was a male’s voice and he referred to himself and his girlfriend. Said something about a new cave.”
“A new cave in the pass? That place has been thoroughly charted, how—”
“I don’t know, Marge, all’s I can figure is there’s two kids somewhere in the pass and they’re panicking. It’ll be dark soon enough and we need to get the chopper up there before they freeze to death.”
“Okay, Frank, you keep scanning that radio and trying to stay in contact. If they can’t respond, they still might be able to hear you. I’ll get in touch with the volunteers and get someone up there for a look. Keep me updated if you see or hear anything. Over.”
“Roger that. But…Marge? I didn’t like the screams one bit. It was like nothing I ever heard before…”
Carise slugged back the last dregs of whiskey and tossed the bottle into a trash can under her desk. It was time to get to work. It would do her good to get out of the cabin, would stop her from dwelling on the past and her failures.
Maybe this rescue would be a chance for redemption. A chance to make up for the last attempted rescue. She blamed herself and she knew the townsfolk did too. When they learned about her drinking problem, they backdated it to that tragedy, not realizing it was
because
of that tragedy that she picked up the bottle to drown the guilt.
She flicked on the CB radio and set the channels to switch every ten seconds. If the kids had found a new cave, then there was a chance they would have told someone; and maybe there would be chatter among the other climbers or villagers of Smokeywood. Something new like that would surely get the gossip flowing.
While she prepared her winter climbing gear, checked her ropes, flashlights, and various other kit, she wondered if Marcel would get the call too. She hadn’t spoken with her ex-boyfriend for nearly two months. The thought of seeing and talking with him again filled her stomach with snakes.
What would she say? She’d turned it over in her mind so many times, but as each day passed, it became more difficult to form a suitable answer. He took the loss of their baby much better than she, and if Carise was honest with herself, she hated him for it.
He left her to deal with the grief herself—locked away in her cabin while he shacked up with a new model, that spiteful bitch Janis. But she knew it wasn’t like that really: it was she that pushed him away. Just like she pushed away his support over the failed rescue attempt that haunted her.
No matter, she’d have to put it all out of her mind and wait for the call, if she were needed, to rescue that kid and his girlfriend. In the meantime, she sat at her desk, listened to the chatter on the CB radio.
It was unnaturally quiet; not a single mention of any new cave.
Her mind wandered: what could have been in there that would have sent the pair of kids screaming into the pass?
* * *
The darkness flowed into the boy’s mind like a rolling storm.
The reception on his cell phone crackled before dying completely. The screams of his girlfriend reached a deafening high pitch over the furious wind, her voice full of pain and fear. His legs turned to jelly; he fought with the fear of going back into the cave to save her, but that blackness…that something
other
…it was devouring his mind from within. He couldn’t go back, so he ran, stumbled, clawed his way down the snow-covered mountain pass.
But it was right there, on his shoulder, on his back, invisible, intangible, but still…
there
.
He dropped his cell phone into the snow; his backpack followed.
Tears stung his eyes as the cold wind thrashed against his exposed face. The air was thin this high up the pass, and each frosted breath rasped at his throat as he sucked in lungfuls of air to keep his arms and legs pumping, to keep him moving through the soft, powdery snow, and away from that…that…
thing.
“Jason! Jason!” His girlfriend’s screams broke beyond the bounds of her vocal cords, stretched and torn. From within his mind, the blackened cloud smothered her voice so that all he could hear was the dull, bass-piping noise, like notes from some diabolical instrument.
Jason tripped over a submerged rock and crashed to his knees with a heavy thump.
In the dying hours of the afternoon, acres of pine trees rose from the mountainside like jagged bones. The lambent light from the setting sun raked across the snow, creating long, fingerlike shadows that crept towards him.
The pain in his knees throbbed in tempo with the crashing at his temples. It reminded him of the guttural chants coming from the men in hoods lurking within the cave shadows. He closed his eyes, focused on the cold snow against his face, trying to forget. But in his head, billowing ever larger, the great shadow unfolded its infinite mass into corners and places he didn’t know existed.
“I’m…so sorry…Becky, I should have never brought us here.” Jason sobbed into thick gloves. Blood covered them from when he tried to pull Becky clear of a pool inside the cave.
At first it was an azure blue—crystalline and perfect. A source of life and refreshment. But something within the water snatched at her, refused to give her up. Soon the water turned a dark red, and her screams echoed around the damp cave walls and its low, domed ceiling.
Her face, twisted in fear and torment, would forever be within his DNA—and he knew that long after his death, the sheer terror would stay within his bones.
Jason hauled himself to his feet and stole a look behind. Despite the feeling of dread, nothing alien or monstrous stalked him, just the shivering coldness. Yet something within the cave, something deep down in the ground, conjured images within his consciousness: shapes he couldn’t quite understand or relate to—symbols and glyphs with strange angles, their perspectives skewed like an Escher painting.
He felt sick as he ran; his eyes seemed entirely too large for his head, and his brain throbbed to some unknown rhythm. Tears streamed down his face. The pine trees flashed by him, branches scratching at his face.
You can’t run from your insanity.
Still, he tried.
The sun had descended behind the peak, and he came to understand the name of the route up the mountainside—Dead Five’s Pass. When he finally broke from the tree line, he slipped on a patch of ice and fell hard onto his back. He wheezed, winded by the fall, and turned himself over onto his stomach.
A few meters down the slope stood five pointed stones rising from the snowy surface like twenty-foot fangs. It was as if the rock had splintered upwards from some inner force.
Upon their surface were more of those dread-symbols from the cave—and now his mind.
He crawled closer. It was through some compulsion beyond his understanding, and he began to gibber unfamiliar words. His lips smacked together and his tongue made new shapes within his mouth as he dragged himself closer to the stones. The dull piping noise whispered to him on the wind.
None of this can be real!
And yet his heart and mind knew it was.
When he reached the stones, he clambered to his raw, cut knees. Those terrible bass notes grew in volume. He clutched his ears, shut his eyes, screamed to drown out that unholy noise. From under his feet, deep under the ice, he felt the ground rumble.
Snow and ice burst upwards, throwing him against the stones, cracking his head. Four misshapen, tendril-like proto-limbs reached out from the ground.