The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (32 page)

So Worthy’s casual instructions to his two hit men — that they should walk west several miles before activating their headset resonators to return to their own dimension — actually meant they’d had to find a way to cross this miniature chasm, and then climb the bluff on the west side, before proceeding further.

And that was as far as they’d got.

On the sandy slope below one of the cave entrances, a considerable ways up the slope to the west, a dead spider — a big one — lay drying in the sun. And now, from the cave mouth itself, someone was waving. Someone wearing clothes.

“Here! Up here!” shouted Worthy Annesley’s bodyguard and personal assistant, the tall, slim black man Bucky Beausoleil, waving his shotgun.

Matthew, Chantal and Skeezix turned and started up the slope, which was littered with rocks and stones that varied from the size of a cobblestone to a few as big as a Buick.

“But watch out for the big spiders!” Bucky shouted, pointing downslope to their north.

“Now he tells us,” sighed Chantal.

Sure enough, they could now spot at least three of the giant arachnids off to the north and slightly above them on the slope, where they’d been lurking behind some of the larger boulders. Two, which were almost a hundred yards off, held their positions. But the closest one started working its way in their direction, angling to cut them off just about the time they’d be likely to reach the cave mouth where Bucky was sheltering.

“Faster!” Chantal shouted. “When I stop, you two keep going. It looks like they’re not following Worthy’s guys into the caves.”

“When you
stop?
” Matthew asked, puffing a little as he followed Skeezix up the steep slope, the two of them still burdened with their makeshift backpacks full of food.

“Just keep going!”

Sure enough, their eight-legged pursuer was picking up speed — damn, but these things were fast.

Bucky continued to wave them up to the cave mouth, but Chantal noticed he was making no effort to sight his gun at the approaching monster. How many days had he — or they — been here, holding the damned things off? Chances were his piece was empty, or damned near.

“Did Worthy send you?” Bucky yelled.

“More or less,” Matthew shouted back as they continued climbing. “Long story.”

Chantal had the strongest thighs, so she was in the lead when she stopped about twenty yards short of the cave mouth, dropping to one knee and shouldering the big 50. “Just get your asses in that cave.”

No one argued with her. She had only two rounds left in this last magazine, she reminded herself. Although she’d tried to bring as much ammo as she could reasonably carry, .50-caliber cartridges, bigger than Dona Solana’s cheroots, were heavy. She had not envisaged two days of open combat. Better wait and do this job with one shot. The big crawly thing was thirty yards away, now twenty yards, huge and hairy and skittering straight on, clacking its horrible jaws and fangs; chances were it had never seen a firearm.

Finally the head filled her sights, complete with slavering fangs, and she squeezed off the round. Thank God; yellow and pale blue spider brains blowing out in cheerful profusion as the creature tilted sideways and started slipping down the slope to her right, finally flipping on its back near its days-dead comrade. Even after this one stopped sliding, its awful legs continued to twitch for a while. Chantal followed Matthew and Skeezix up and into the cave.

The new arrivals dropped to a knee and took a few seconds to catch their breaths.

“They don’t follow you into the caves?” Matthew asked Worthy’s two hit men — the smaller white guy was indeed there with Bucky; Chantal could never remember his name.

“They don’t like the shotguns. Once we killed that big guy you see down the slope they decided to hide behind the rocks down there and wait us out.”

“So you’ve been here, what, four days?”

“About that.”

“With no supplies?”

“You can say that again,” complained the little white guy. Arvin? Alvin?

“This is a whole network of caves,” Bucky replied, obviously working to stay patient with his companion. “There’s a spring fur
ther back, so we’ve been OK for water. But yeah, what little food we carried gave out two days ago.”

“Lost your headset resonators?” Chantal asked.

“No, we’ve still got ’em, although we’re not sure how long the batteries are good for.”

“So why didn’t you jump back to Earth One?” Chantal asked.

“Now there’s a good question,” remarked little Alvin, with a level of sarcasm Chantal figured she would have found hard to take for four hours, let alone four days.

“Actually, we were planning to go tonight,” Bucky answered, calm as ever. “First off, our instructions were to not cross back till we’d made it at least a mile west of here. Two guys matching our description popping out of thin air back onto South Main Street, carrying shotguns? Out of the frying pan into the fire.”

“Which was a good argument for the first two days,” the smaller, white button man replied, his voice dripping sarcasm. “But there’s no reason we couldn’t of gone last night, or the night before. The cops don’t leave crime-scene tape around a courthouse for more than a day.”

The taller fellow took a deep breath. “Alvin is impatient,” he acknowledged. “I don’t much blame him. As of this morning, we’d both about given up hope of seeing any help from home. Then you’ve got the problem with the topography here, the elevation. You may have noticed you just climbed about fifty feet above the river level, maybe sixty. Call up a vortex from here and step through to our Providence back on Earth One, chances are you’d find yourself falling fifty feet to the ground on the other side. I don’t care how well you tuck and roll, fifty feet means broken bones, which can really slow down the rest of your getaway.”

“There are buildings, right?” Alvin asked. “With roofs?”

“And finally we did try, once, but what we could see through that vortex looked hinky to me. It shimmered, flickered. Didn’t look right.”

Little Alvin snorted and rolled his eyes. “Hinky,” he sneered under his breath.

“Metal ores in these caves?” Bucky continued. “Something those big spiders are doing to mess up our equipment? I don’t know. At any rate, we were going tonight. Out of other options, or so it seemed till you all showed up. Moon’ll set well before midnight. I figured our first step would be to work our way down close to the river, quiet as we could, then open a vortex, hope we’ve got enough battery power and hope any kind of hornet’s nest we raised last Thursday at the courthouse has died down. Of course, we always hoped Worthy would be sending someone to help us out. A little surprised it’s you three, which is not to say we’re not happy to see you. Anyone can get edgy when the food runs out. Don’t suppose you’ve got some rations in those packs?”

“Oh. Sure,” Skeezix smiled and made himself useful, digging into his own makeshift pack and divvying up some of the food the Pthang had sent along from the treehouse village that morning. Worthy’s two men didn’t stand on ceremony, but dug in.

“This is good,” Bucky smiled. “What kind of meat is this?”

“Tyrannosaur,” Chantal replied matter-of-factly, “cooked with wild grapes and some tarragon, I think.”

They only stopped chewing for a few seconds.

“Go easy, gentlemen,” Matthew advised. “Cory sent along half a dozen of the newest model headsets with Chantal, their battery packs should be fully charged. We’ve also got a pouch of fresh-picked peyote, along with a little tea in the lady’s thermos. You probably don’t want to have full stomachs when we down these plant helpers. And I agree with the decision you reached this morning, for what that’s worth. I can’t see any benefit to hanging around here any longer, waiting for our eight-legged friends to work up their courage to probe us again, especially given the ammo situation. I propose we dose up, plan on calling a vortex and getting out of here within the next 90 minutes.”

“Why get all doped up?” asked little Alvin. “The resonators work just fine all by themselves.”

“You’ve been lucky so far,” Matthew cautioned. “There are at least 30 other dimensions out here, if the quantum physics guys can be believed, and Worthy has been sending people through with little or no training in interdimensional navigation. Wrong turns are possible.”

Alvin grumbled a little but held his peace until the time came to actually pass out the fresh green cacti, with a little of Dona Solana’s tea from Chantal’s thermos to wash it down.

At that point, Alvin spit out a mouthful.

“That stuff is awful!”

“The bitter taste is one of the plant’s defenses,” Matthew explained.

“These are complex alkaloids. I assumed as a member of the Church you knew that. But we seek help on the road to have a clearer view of where we’re going.”

“The headsets have worked fine, so far,” Alvin insisted. “I don’t see why there’s any need to dose ourselves up on this crap.”

“Have it your way, Alvin,” Bucky conceded. “Nobody’s going to force you. But I don’t think Matthew and his friends are trying to do us any harm.”

“Chow down if you want, Buckwheat,” Alvin sneered. “But if you all get too stoned to make it out of here, don’t be expecting me to carry you. Unless one of you asks me real nice,” he added, leering at Chantal.

Once the rest of them had downed their share, Chantal volunteered to stay with Alvin and guard the entrance — her heavy rifle with its single remaining round being the only weapon that wasn’t empty — while Bucky showed Matthew and Skeezix a little more of the cave complex, including the spring where Bucky and Alvin had been getting their drinking water.

They returned just in time to hear little Alvin let out a yelp of pain and jump backwards to the other side of the cave entrance, away from Chantal.

“What’s going on?” Matthew asked.

“Alvin seems to have been under some kind of misperception,” said Chantal, wiping the blade of one of her knives on her pants leg before sliding it back into her boot. “But I think we’ve got it all straightened out, now.”

Alvin pursed his lips like he’d bitten into a lemon but apparently had nothing to add.

“Is anyone else feeling that?” Skeezix asked.

“Yes,” Matthew replied. “The peyote is coming on. I’ve seen this place before. This is the Cave of Doorways. I think you were very lucky that Bucky hesitated to jump through the first vortex that opened from here. Give it another 20 minutes or so and I think you’ll all see what I mean.”

They settled in, sitting with their backs to the cave walls, as those walls themselves began to shimmer and sparkle, as though embedded with a king’s ransom in precious jewels. A gentle humming, on the same frequency as the Annesley resonators, became audible.

Once again, Chantal felt the familiar warm buzz moving upward from the base of her spine, the warmth that felt like being hugged by some kind of reassuring cosmic mother goddess. She had trouble swallowing for a minute; that too was typical. And then, gradually, so you weren’t sure when it started, the cave entrance and the doorway that led back into the rest of the cave complex seemed to turn into mirrors. Those mirrors in turn began to rotate, and then to turn into vortexes — multiple vortexes.

The resonator hum became louder now. Outside the doorway that led to the rocky hillside beyond the cave an image began to appear, shimmering as though someone were projecting a slide there — an image of the street and seafood restaurants on the east side of the Providence Canal, back on Earth One.

“That’s it! That’s our vortex!” shouted Alvin, jumping to his feet.

“No, Alvin,” warned Matthew, who saw now the source of the humming was that Alvin had slipped on his older headset resonator, without consulting the rest of them, and gradually brought up
its volume to almost full blast. “Can’t you see how wrong it looks?

Bucky’s right; it’s some kind of a trap. We can’t go that way.”

“Bullshit, man. You think I’m gonna sit here, nodding out with you junkies, while we miss our connection? That’s it! That’s our Providence, man. I can see the Old Stone Bank! Let’s go!”

Bucky struggled to his feet and attempted to grab Alvin as he took off for the doorway, but he was a little unsteady. The smaller man pushed him off and set out at a run.

The strangest thing happened as he approached the exit from the cave, though. The image of the modern city beyond flickered, shimmered, and disappeared. Instead, Alvin found himself running out onto the slight lip of rock beyond the cave entrance. And once there, he hadn’t taken three running steps before the two giant spiders that had been hunkered down, waiting in ambush, rose to their full height and jumped out from behind the nearby boulders. One grabbed him while the other started slicing at him with her razor-sharp forelimbs. Alvin shrieked. Blood gushed. Then the first giant spider sank her fangs into the side of Alvin’s chest, presumably injecting a venom that would both paralyze the victim and start pre-digesting his flesh.

Alvin’s face, already contorted in pain, now turned deathly pale.

But this was not a patient pair. By brute strength they began tearing Alvin into his component parts, several of which were soon spinning through the air in different directions. The giant spiders then joined forearms and did some kind of victory dance over his segmented corpse, hopping up and down obscenely.

“Holy shit,” said Skeezix, wide-eyed.

One of the arachnidae promptly went to work eating Alvin, choosing a leg and starting to gnaw it quite energetically. Presumably if they’d been assigned siege duty here they hadn’t been eating much, themselves, during the four days Judge Crustio’s executioners had been holed up in the caves.

The second giant spider, however, now turned in the direction of the remaining two-legged dimensionauts, moving hesitantly to and then actually inside the cave entrance.

“Looks like they got tired of waiting,” Chantal observed. “Any rounds left in those shotguns?”

“No, ma’am, sorry,” Bucky replied, as they all started to back away from the approaching spider, which towered at least a foot above their heads. “How about you?”

“One left.” Chantal dropped to her butt to assume a steadier shooting position, braced her back against the cave wall and her left elbow across her knee, aiming the big .50 at an upward angle and waiting for the big spider to get close enough to guarantee a hit.