water. It looked similar to the Star Sister’s illuminations of the path to R’lyeh, their eternal land in the stars, but there were no spaceways or starships, just the boatman, the river and his burden of souls.
The stony waves on the river rippled before my eyes, and a throb went through my forehead, through my bones, through the healing shoggoth bite in my shoulder. I felt as if I’d tilted along with the sarcophagus and was falling, my mind compressing like it had when the owl attacked me in the library. The warning that something had made the world not right.
“There are stairs back here!” Cal’s shout yanked me back to the present, and the awful pressure on my bones and my brain faded away.
“Really?” I skirted the sarcophagus widely as I could, brushing against the stones of the crypt and trying to act as if I were merely scared of ghosts.
“They go way down.” Cal lowered himself into the small passageway. “Looks like the bootlegger tunnels, maybe. This could be where they stored the hooch.”
“They’d bury it in coffins during Prohibition,” I agreed. “But we shouldn’t, Cal.” The tomb felt too close, too cold. It reminded me too much of a madhouse cell.
“Oh, don’t be a goose,” he said, wriggling into the passage. “It’s daytime.” His head disappeared, and I looked back at the daylight in the door, which seemed impossibly far.
“Not underground, it’s not.”
Cal’s shout echoed from somewhere that sounded miles below. “Come on! It’s crazy down here, just like
I huffed out a sigh. Cal was such a boy—show him something shiny, ancient or hidden and all rational thought flew out of his head. “Now who’s being a goose? Cal, come back here!”
No reply floated back to me, and I could hear Cal scuffling away in the passage below, lost to my shouting range.
I sat down and scooted until I could crouch and stand, descending the stairs after him. The passage was narrow, but light trickled in from somewhere above, and air breathed over my face as I wound deeper, down into the earth.
“Cal!” I caught up with him at a turn in the passage, where the earthen tunnel met a stone main, some long- forgotten artery for water running from the north, where the cider house sat, to the south, where at one time a dairy or barn would have had a cistern.
The water was gone now and only dust and the skeletons of rats and unlucky birds remained. I rubbed my arms, my gooseflesh not born from the cold air.
“This is great!” Cal’s face was flushed even in the low light. All of the lumpy planes of his face stood out in sharp relief, and his long slumped frame filled the low space of the tunnel. Cal cupped his hands and bellowed down the passage. “Hello!”
“This isn’t great, it’s silly,” I groused. Making Cal think the tunnel wasn’t a grand adventure was the quickest way to get him back aboveground. “There’s nothing down here and it’s filthy and it smells funny. It’s just an old hole.”
“You have no imagination,” said Cal. “It could be bootlegger tunnels, or smugglers.…” He took another twitchy, excited step and jerked his head at me. “Just come! I want to see where this goes.”
“Cal, no,” I said. “All of Graystone is rigged to its clockwork. You don’t know what we could be walking into …”
Before I could finish, Cal’s foot depressed an iron plate concealed by a gap in the stone flags that made up the floor. A great hand rattled the ground under our feet, tired gears shrieked and at the far end of the tunnel, where shadows congregated, an iron gate rolled back.
“… down here,” I finished, half expecting iron teeth to flash from some hidden place and finish us off. My heartbeat redoubled.
“Neat,” Cal breathed. “Did you see that? It’s a secret tunnel!”
“It was aces,” I said, copying Dean’s most drawn-out drawl of boredom so Cal wouldn’t hear my voice shake. “You found a hole inside a bigger hole. You’re my hero.”
“You know, Aoife, that Dean has given you a regular snippy mouth,” Cal grumbled. “Time was you’d have thought this was fantastic.”
“Dean didn’t need to say a thing to make me not want to be crammed under the ground,” I snapped. “I don’t like it down here, Cal. It could be dangerous.”
“I’ll protect you,” he dismissed me, pulling back his lips so that his teeth gleamed in a bony smile. “Don’t be scared, Aoife.”
“Dean says—” I started, but before I could finish telling Cal that fear kept people alive, my shoulder began to throb anew. After my experience with the thing at the window I knew what was coming. From the dark of the newly opened tunnel, I heard the scrabble of clawed feet over rock. The snuffle of nostrils taking the air. The grind of teeth on bone.
“Cal?” My voice came out high and paper thin, with good reason I thought. Those sounds were from something alive. “Am I hearing things, or is there something in there?”
Cal’s expression had gone from delight to terror in the space of a candle flame flickering. “I think we should go,” he said finally, foot jostling foot as he tried to back away and succeeded only in stumbling. “Right now.”
I tried to move with him, but hot steam pain from the bite in my shoulder seared through all parts of me. This was worse than the owl. This was worse than anything.
Cal grabbed for my hand, and his touch was like plunging my fingers into liquid nitrogen. I screamed and doubled over, bruising my knees on the tunnel floor as I batted him away frantically, only wanting the pain to cease.
From my vantage I watched pieces of the darkness ahead break free from the tunnel mouth and crawl along the walls, growing limbs and teeth and tails. Hides gleamed like oil-stained water and high-pitched cackling like nails on glass filled the air.
I knew that sound. And nothing I knew about it was going to help us stay alive.
“Aoife!” Cal had me up and moving away from the shadow hounds, like a puppet on a string, and then his foot caught in a crack and we both went down again.
I landed hard on my wounded shoulder and screamed, and the cry that answered me ripped from no human throat. It echoed off the tunnel, a howl of hunger and delight.
The howling was younger than what Dean and I had heard on the roof, but the things coming for us were ghouls just the same. Pups, a flock of them, trapped and starved by Graystone’s defenses.
We weren’t getting out of the tunnel in less than a dozen pieces.
“I’m sorry,” Cal choked. “Aoife, I’m so sorry, I should have known.…”
Dizzy with agony, my skull pulsing like it would burst, all I could do was watch as the ghouls bounded toward us, clinging to the stones of the ceiling as easily as if it were the floor. They were the size of hunting dogs and bore whiplash tails, teeth like straight razors hanging over bloody cut lips, and blue tongues lolling with black spittle. Their eyes glowed yellow, like the Proctor’s ravens, but aether and gears wasn’t powering these devils. Only hunger drove them, and only flesh would sate it.
Cal was screaming, yelling something over and over, but through the agony that my body had been consumed by, I couldn’t understand his pleadings.
The leader of the ghouls landed in front of me, dropping from the tunnel roof, twisting his horrible glistening body in midair. He was stocky, with a smushed face like a Chinese dog, and stood on his hind legs while he scented, deep and drafty. His mouth opened in a grin and he gibbered to his fellows.
I choked in terror, tears of pain dribbling down my face. The ghoul’s speech sounded like that of the drunkards on the last jitney to Uptown in the evenings, but to hear speech coming from that razor-tipped mouth stirred a bleak horror in me greater than any viral creature I’d yet witnessed. The ghouls weren’t mindless, like the shoggoth. I knew from endless lanternreels and lectures that they were intelligent pack hunters, and they’d brought us to bay.
