Dead Five's Pass (9 page)

He knew she was right, but he wanted to come back for another reason: the thing under the mountain.

Janis’s cousin Derry ran a small mining operation nearby. He doubted the creature would stand up to high explosives. And enough people had died at its will already.

“Time to get you back to the station and have you checked out,” Marcel said, taking the radio from his chest pocket. “Smith, this is Marcel. Are you there? Over.”

“I’m here, Marc. You ready to go?”

“Yeah, quick as you can. Carise is hurt and we have…a passenger.”

“Firing up the engines now, come on up.”

* * *

Marcel strapped Carise in; she still seemed distant as she stared at the body of the boy they identified as Michael Fillion, a grad student and member of the climbing forum. They also took the rest of the backpacks and managed to identify each one of the students.

At the very least, once they had figured out what was going on, they could alert the authorities and let the parents know.

Sitting back against the bulkhead of the helicopter, Marcel closed his eyes and tried to make sense of it all. Which of course he couldn’t. It was like his brain was too slow or too numb to piece together the information and the experience. Breaking his thoughts, Carise spoke.

“I think I understand,” she said. “After the attack, the symbols didn’t seem so alien anymore…so strange. It’s a language. And the multipointed star shapes within those symbols are actually stars. All that in the chamber: it’s a star chart…constellations.

“Whatever’s living in that mountain came from the stars—millions of years ago, perhaps hundreds of millions. And those five stones by the lake? I think they’re sacrifice stones. With their dished surface and carved channels, I think they’re used to feed it blood. That pool…it’s a feeding tank. That’s why those kids were in the bottom in that state.”

“But how did they get—” And then Marcel realized. Given the drag marks and the disturbance in the dusty floor, it was probably Michael. “But how would those images and symbols turn an ordinary kid, or kids if you’re considering the girl, too, into deranged murderers?”

“It’s a madness. I feel a little bit of it in me too.”

Marcel’s spirit sank even further. Her deadpan tone full of sincerity and seriousness. Perhaps it was the cut, or the overexposure to the symbols, first back at the station, and now at the cave. But then hadn’t he also looked upon that ancient script? Was he too harboring a madness?

“It has to die,” Carise said. “Before it rises.”

Her eyes were glassy and staring. They twitched back and forth like rapid, waking REM.

“I think I know a way,” Marcel said, wondering if she would end up like Michael, the girl, and the others. Wondered if he would have to… No, he wouldn’t go there.

Not yet.

* * *

Frank and Marge rushed to the chopper the second it landed and helped Marcel and Carise out of the cabin. Frank and Marcel unlashed and carried Michael’s body into the station.

“Dear lord, you okay, darlin’?” Marge said as she put a foil blanket around Carise and helped her into the station.

“I’ve been better, Marge, but it’s not so bad…just a cut is all.” She realized then that the pain had almost completely gone and she could walk without much bother. The wound however had gone from freezing cold to a burning heat. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but when she inspected the wound once inside the station, the smell made her gag. The flesh around the cut had shriveled and blackened like a dying fungus.

Frank and Marcel placed Michael’s body in the second examination room. Marge fetched a cup of coffee. Still the same rank stuff as before, but Carise was is no mood to turn it away. Despite the heat of the ankle wound, everything inside her felt cold.

“Smith called in and said you and Marc were attacked on the mountain,” Marge said as she sat next to her on those uncomfortable reception chairs.

“Something like that,” Carise said. She could tell Smith hadn’t told her the full story. She didn’t blame him. No one would believe it and it’d only lead to all-out panic.

“Did you find that girl’s missing boyfriend?”

“No, not really, it’s… I can’t explain it, Marge. This situation is messed up. But we’re going back up there shortly. We found the cave at least…but unfortunately Michael was already dead when we got there.”

“Looks like someone cracked a rock on his head,” Marge said. She looked at Carise with her eyes slightly squinted as if she were observing her. Could she tell she was lying? Or was it something else? Could Marge tell she was different somehow…like the girl…

“Have you or Frank done anything to the observation room yet?” Carise asked.

“No, we haven’t—”

“I need to take another look.”

Marge placed her hand on Carise’s shoulder. “Are you sure you want to—” but Carise stood up with such force she knocked the old woman off the chair and onto her knees.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Marge. I didn’t mean to—”

“That’s okay, darlin’, you just let me be, I’ll be okay,” Marge said, backing away from Carise, all the time wearing a frightened and bemused expression on her face.

Carise wanted to do something or say something to ease Marge’s…what, fear? They’d known each other for over a decade. Why would she be so scared of her? “Marge, I didn’t mean anything by it, I’m just a little stressed with this situation—”

“It’s fine, darlin’, really.”

Shaking her head, Carise turned and walked across the station to observation room one. Marcel and Frank exited the second room, looking serious. Marcel caught Carise’s eye and gave her a stern “don’t say anything” kind of look as he approached her.

“Everything okay with Frank?” she almost whispered.

“We need to talk.”

“Follow me,” Carise said, opening the door and entering the hellish room. Only this time it didn’t seem so hellish, which in itself was cause for alarm. She remembered the sheer awe and terror of the last time she looked upon this scene—and on the girl as she cut herself to ribbons.

They both stood in the spot the girl had previously sat. It was barely the only place not covered in blood or shit. The room stunk and made her stomach roll in on itself. Marcel was holding his jacket over his mouth. Despite that, she closed the door and ignored the looks Frank and Marge were giving her.

“Do you see it?” she said, pointing to the symbols and tracing a route through the various star shapes. “The constellation…and the message. It’s a story. The girl was giving us a warning. Like some kind of sick prophet.”

Marcel took the camera from his pocket and looked at the photos from the lake’s chamber on the small LCD screen. He held it up and scanned the room. “She must have been there. Look, the symbols match. But no one could have that good a memory, those markings and angles are just so unnatural. It’s like they—”

“Draw you in,” Carise finished. “To another world, or dimension or something…into the mind of that…thing.”

“We have to destroy it,” Marcel said. “Derry has a small mining outfit just a few kilometers from here. I have a key to his yard… I did some consultancy for them early this year. We could get some of their blasting equipment and finish this for good.”

“But what about Frank and Marge, and what of Smith? They know all about this, we have to get rid of all the evidence so no one else is subject to this madness or tempted to go up there and find the cave.”

“We’ll have to clean this room for a start,” Marcel said. “And delete those emails. I can take down the forum posts and the… Wait a minute! Have you thought about how this all came about? Those damn satellite images of the location. Someone must have taken them for a reason and posted them on the forum. Someone else knows about this. You mentioned those stones were sacrifice stones—well they must have been used at some point, right?”

“They’ve been there for eons,” Carise said with certainty.

“How do you know this?”

“I…I can see it. That thing is ancient. Perhaps those standing stones were some kind of calendar, and this is the right time for it to wake, and well, someone fed it. I think it’s the wound…perhaps it left something in me, I feel…I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but I feel a pull to go back.”

“Same here, although I think for perhaps different reasons,” Marcel said grimly. “But listen, what perfect way to feed this beast than send up some eager cave explorers? Someone who had access and knowledge to that forum must have known this.”

“It has to be someone involved with the university. The club is secret outside of its walls, apart from us,” Carise said. But the one thing she wasn’t voicing was how she and Marcel were so far the only ones—that she knew of—to go to the cave and come out alive and sane. Michael had clearly turned on his friends in a fit of rage. The girl was also clearly mentally disturbed and her boyfriend ran away leaving her all alone: not the actions of rational humans. Why weren’t she and Marcel equally as crazy?

“Adolescents,” she said.

“What?”

“It feeds on adolescence. It’s why we haven’t completely lost our minds like those kids.” As the words escaped her mouth, a twinge of darkness and chaos played on the edges of cognition, a nagging thought, growing and feeding on her.

“I’d rather not depend on that. I’d rather see the damn thing dead and buried in its own mountain tomb. There’s plenty of time to study its effects later.”

“Let’s do it.”

From the next room came a hideous scream, followed by a smashing sound as the door crashed within its frame.

Carise and Marcel ran out of their room to see Marge backing away from the second room’s door, which was now buckling and bending under the assault from inside. Frank pulled her away just in time before it smashed open and the corpse of Michael, now reanimated, lunged at him with frightening pace.

Michael slammed Frank to the ground, covering the older man with spittle, blood and froth. A gurgling, twisting sound emanated from somewhere deep within the reanimated boy, and Carise understood every damned syllable.

11

Michael’s body continued to spit those guttural words and as Carise tuned into them like they were some far-off AM radio station, she started to see images, a narrative like a radio play. Everything else blurred into the background as if they were hidden behind a dark curtain.

In the pictures in her mind, she saw great multilimbed creatures traveling through space within meteors. At the front of their great mass was a pair of conical bones with great sawlike teeth twisting around the bone like a screw. Its massive unreflecting eye sat inside a bulbous head canopy that inflated and deflated like a hot-air balloon. Within the darkness of that meteor, its long and agile tentacles writhed and manipulated the interior. And she knew it was one of those creatures that had burrowed into the mountain with those huge drill-like front limbs.

Millions of years before humans ever came to be, she knew “they” slumbered in their mountain tombs, for there were more than one. How many, she couldn’t say. Meteor upon meteor, they arrived on Earth, devouring the rock and stone and burying themselves in the cold and long-forgotten places.

But now it was time for them to wake. She felt their pull on her mind as surely as she felt the coming winter. That long chill wasn’t just the season’s wind and snow, it was something far worse, far darker. It was
them
. They were coming back from their long death, and they needed to feed.

“Back off him, you undead bastard!” Marge screamed, and then with an explosion that shook Carise from her epiphany, the boom of the shotgun erupted, spraying Michael’s head onto the back wall, turning his neck into nothing more than a torn stump of tissue.

“Holy Jesus’s baby! Frank, darlin’, are you all right?” Marge placed the shotgun on the desk and hurried around to where Frank was pinned to the ground by Michael’s now-headless body.

Marcel, standing beyond Frank and facing Carise, blinked the gore from his face. “Is everyone okay?” he asked, as bits of Michael’s body dripped off his clothing and onto the floor. Carise nodded, although she knew she’d never be okay, not with that knowledge now festering in the dark vaults of her mind like some insidious shadow.

Frank heaved the body to one side, and with Marge and Marcel’s help, managed to stand on his shaking legs. With a handkerchief, he wiped the foul-smelling spittle and froth from his jacket and face.

“You said he was dead,” Frank said to Marcel, pointing an accusing finger.

“He was! I was the one that killed him.”

Silence.

“Well, darlin’, that makes two of us now, don’t it,” Marge eventually said, shaking her head. “What in God’s green earth have you two brought down on us, eh? What is all this?”

Carise finally spoke. “You’re right, Marge. This is all fucking crazy. But we’re going to stop it right now. You and Frank clean this place up and destroy any reports or notes or anything you have about this situation. You understand?”

“But, why, what…oh, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Marge said in despair. She sat on her chair and sobbed, the shock of everything she had seen and done clearly agitating her now. Even Frank, one of the most down-to-earth men in the village, was choked by a sense of panic.