somewhat eternal journey back into the earth from which it had sprung through the hands of man.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
There was the sound on the floor above. Scott flashed a glance across the room to where Harry crouched in the corner, hoping to see something comforting in his face that would allow him to rationalize the sound, to chase the fear that had crept into a ball at the base of his spine. But there was nothing, nothing but the darkness that encased Harry in the shadows. Biting at his lip, a trickle of blood spilled past his clenched teeth from the split in his chapped lips.
And just as it had the previous four or five, maybe more as he had lost count, times, the footsteps faded into a hollow resonation above, dissipating into the sound of the breeze that trickled through the poorly sealed window.
The house, it seemed, had come alive around them after they had settled into their positions, the walls around them seeming to pulsate with a life that was almost sentient, alternately feeling warm and then cold against his back. The air that slipped through the window sounded like the impeded breathing of a sick man, eerily reminiscent of a death rattle as they hid deep within the heart of the house.
In addition to what sounded like footsteps above, they could hear the house swaying in the wind atop the crumbling foundation. The creaking and groaning had at one point gotten so loud that it sounded as though a tornado was passing over head, trying to rip the house free from the rusted bolts that held the walls to the cracking cement ring beneath. There were so many noises around them at times that he feared they wouldn’t even notice when Matt entered the room.
He quickly forced that thought from his mind. While he was making a conscious effort to convert the name Matt to the bloodspawn in his own mind, he knew that was going to be impossible while he was still able to put a face to the name. There was still so much guilt surrounding what had happened so many years ago, so much pent up longing to make things right, that he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to dissociate the two. But when the time came, he knew, or at least he hoped that he knew, that he would be able to raise that gun and stare right down the muzzle over the sight at his former friend’s face and pull the trigger. Shucking back the shells over and over until he had released every ounce of the hot spray of steel pellets that the gun would offer. Deep down hoping to stand over the bloody, splattered remains and know that he had… what?
Had what? Saved the lives of two hundred people? Maybe. But the real problem was that even if he killed Ma… the bloodspawn, he would never truly know if he had saved those lives. All he would know for sure was that he had saved his own. And would that be enough, even within his own mind, to justify murdering his best friend, even after having watched him tear apart several people, stealing their lives from them in the briefest of seconds.
Only he would know the answer, and he knew that it would be the last thing he thought about at night, and, should he even be able to sleep, the first thing that entered his mind when he awoke.
But that was a moot point for now; as first he needed to do nothing more than survive the night. Come what may after that, it was only academic if he never made it out of the tomb- like cellar.
Thump. Thump.
There were the noises on the ceiling again. Not that he had gotten used to them yet, but at least the muscles in his legs no longer tightened to the point of launching him to his feet. Trembling as he sat there, waiting for the footsteps to pass, he could hear his own heart beat within the confines of his head, echoing, as his trembling finger ran up and down the sloped trigger of the weapon.
His chest shuddered with each quivering breath as he looked to the darkness for Harry, finding only the silence that cloaked them for a response. Slowly, the footsteps faded into that same silence, and he was able to hear Harry release a long breath that had been cooped up in his chest to grow stale.
There was a scraping noise now, like small pebbles being dragged across the ground. It was muffled at first, but grew louder with each passing second until it sounded as though those pebbles were dragged into the very room.
His left hand gripped the oiled pump of the shotgun so tightly that he could feel his bitterly cold, chapped knuckles split painfully as tiny globules of blood formed at the jagged seams. He could sense it all around him, taste it on his dry tongue and smell it in the cavities of his sinuses in his head.
They were no longer alone in the room.
At first, he hadn’t heard it, but now, beneath the whistle of the raging wind through the crack around the window, he could definitely tell it was there. It was a rasping wheeze, not unlike that which had comforted him from across the room as it had passed Harry’s lips, but lighter, barely audible.
Frantically, Scott tried to see anything that stood apart from the darkened room, but there was nothing at all.
There was a click from the far corner of the room as Harry disengaged the safety on his shotgun, the pump rattling slightly against the steel tube.
So Harry had heard it as well, or sensed it maybe, at least that verified what Scott thought he knew. Every muscle in his body tensed uncomfortably as he slowly slid up the face of the wall behind him, the crumbling wall giving way to a clattering avalanche of dirt that came to rest in the backs of his shoes.
Slowly, he raised the shotgun so that he was staring straight down the barrel into the center of the room. Holding his breath, he waited, listening for any sound at all that would give away the location of the presence that was with them in the room.
There was a loud boom, and the bright yellow flash from the muzzle of the shotgun straight across from him in the darkness, lighting the room like a single strobe. And in that brief fraction of a second, he had seen it: a shape darting across the room and then disappearing back into the suddenly more intense darkness that surrounded them.
Without hesitation he fired his own weapon, the butt of the gun kicking into his shoulder as the flash of light momentarily blinded him. There was the loud metallic ping as the spray of pellets ripped through the hot water heater, peeling back the metallic cylinder and exposing the hollow tube within. But there was no other sound, no whimpering or screaming as he had expected, or at least hoped, to hear. Nothing but the almost painfully loud silence that swarmed his ear drums.
With the suddenly heavy shotgun still poised against his shoulder, he stared into the darkness, as every muscle in his body began to tremble almost uncontrollably. There was a quiet click, and then another as Harry replaced the spent shell in the chamber with another that he had pulled from his jacket. Scott had forgotten to do the same, but with his body nearly convulsing through no choice of his own, he feared lowering his muzzle for even a second as that might prove to be just enough time for whatever was down there with them to tear his through clean out.
He could still hear the breathing echoing lightly in the small cellar, a distinct third addition to their ensemble of hoarse rasping. But it was light as the breeze that swept across the floor, coming from all around them at once, making it so there was no hope of pinning down a location.
There was another flash and a boom, followed quickly by another, and then another as Harry emptied the contents of his gun into the room. The pellets slammed into the wall to Scott’s left, tearing chunks of the crumbling earth from the wall, exploding them into a cloud of debris that littered the room. Dust swelled all about them, choking their lungs as the air found itself a texture.
He had seen nothing in the flare from the muzzle that time, nothing but strobe images of the hot water heater he had opened like a can and the large metal box of the furnace. There had been no image streaking through the flash as there had been before.
There was the clatter of shells falling atop one another as they landed on the floor, rolling across the ground as Harry frantically tried to grab at them. The loud sound of the pump being drawn back quickly echoed through the room as the shells clacked against one another in Harry’s hand as he forced them into the bottom of the gun as quickly as he possibly could.
Scott advanced towards the center of the room, his shuffling feet barely inching across the dirt floor. His eyes fixed intently on the corner where Harry fumbled with the gun trying to load it more quickly than his frozen fingers could accommodate.
A muffled gasp issued from that corner, then the choking sounds of a picked throat fighting to gain air. The gun clattered to the ground in the darkness, the muzzle striking first, before the heavy stock finally swung to the ground. With an ear-shattering boom, the gun discharged with the impact from the landing, the cloud of
