‘Christ, he must’ve got in a bog!’ Charles started forward, broke into a shambling run. Panicking, premature grief because it was probably too late, the dog had been sucked down into some stinking mire and was already dead. Heedless of his own safety oblivious of his shooting partner. He caught his foot in a tangled root, fell, picked himself up. Blundering on, calling almost hysterically.
Neither of them have been seen or heard since…
Stupid old bugger, they should put him away! The hooded crow was croaking again, a different note this time, a kind of mocking call. We’ve got your dog, you’re next!
A double shot, the two reports almost simultaneous so that they could have been mistaken for a single blast from a shotgun. Sod, Peter, the selfish bastard! Remus is lost, probably dead, and he’s still carrying on shooting. And then Charles heard Peter scream. Just once. He tried to tell himself that his companion had shouted for the dog, that the call had been warped out of all recognition by these high altitude acoustics.
But however much he tried to lie to himself he knew that it had been a cry of mortal fear.
And now there was only that awful silence left. You could feel it, hear it, the creeping stillness that came with the thickening mountain mist, touching you with its vile dead fingers, stroking you in readiness for…
Charles turned a full circle, slowly, gun held in readiness, safety catch pushed forward, forefinger resting on the trigger. Ferguson and old Macgregor had a gun, too, hadn’t they? Fired before they screamed. And never been seen again, alive or dead. The waiting was the worst part, knowing that there was something out there in the mist. Something that saw you, watched you. Stalked you. It had got Peter, the dog too. And now silently and relentlessly, it was moving in for Charles.
Suddenly, Charles saw it, thought at first that the head was that of a deer. A rogue Red perhaps, a giant beast that had no fear of man. But the horns were not antlers, and the body that slithered behind it was like that of some outsize black slug, grossly mutated so that it might have been the figment of a fevered nightmare. Yards of it uncoiling out of the foul opaqueness, glistening evilly in the greyness, stinking as it slimed its way towards him.
He fired twice, blasted that grotesque head at point blank range, but the shot charges did not so much as score the reptilian features; did not slow the advance of the serpentine body. A mouth that stretched and elongated to unbelievable proportions as it fanned him with its putrid breath, sunk its jagged incisors into his fleshly throat before his own scream had even begun.
Charles’s final thought was not of his own fate, nor that of his human and canine companions. But in his fear-crazed mind he heard again Stewart’s voice crackling on the phone.
‘If it wasnae for the mountains in the way, ye’d be able to see Loch Ness from the Moss!’
The Ghouls
(from Graveyard Rendezvous 2)
Their trade was in fresh corpses from the graveyard.
Granger opened his eyes, for the hundredth time, and then closed them again. It was useless peering, for there was nothing but total darkness all around him. He had not even brought a torch with him, for there is little to see when one is encased in a coffin which is a foot short in measurement anyway, and one is forced to draw one’s knees up and succumb to excruciating pain brought about by cramp. His left hand rested on the small oxygen cylinder at his side, the mask over his face was oppressive, almost frightening. Yet he knew that without it he would die of suffocation within a matter of minutes.
Once again he nearly gave way to the feeling of blind panic, an instinct that urged him to scream, to beat his fists upon the tightly fastened lid above his head, and then to rip his fingers to shreds by clawing at the highly polished wood.
Time meant nothing to him. He was unable to discern minutes from hours. That metal cylinder was his hourglass. When that ran out, then so would his life. He wondered again if he could trust Pieter, the callow youth who had sworn to return at dawn and feverishly dig down through six feet of fresh earth until he could raise the lid off the coffin. That was, unless the others came first. Granger had never been a religious man, but he prayed they would. His groping fingers now located something else by his side; something metal. Subconsciously he traced the outline of this object, from the tip of the short stubby barrel to the heel of the ivory butt. Yes, that .32 revolver certainly did something to boost his morale, he told himself. Again, he checked that it was loaded. When the time came for him to use it there must be no mistakes.
After a while he dozed, a restless slumber in which he dreamed that his oxygen ran out and he was slowly suffocating, screaming in terror the whole while. Then he awoke, his whole body glistening with perspiration beneath the white shroud.
Somewhere there was a scraping sound, the noise made by steel striking stone, and he felt his pulse quicken, his heart pounded even more wildly. He wished he knew what
