Ghouls

there.”

Below, Higgins’s flashlight winked on, but they could still barely see him. It was like following the course of a firefly.

Higgins inched onward, over a mass of rubble. Kurt could tell by his progress that the bottom of the shaft was really rather small. Higgins was at the car in less than a minute.

“Stay away from that water shaft,” Kurt warned into his walkie-talkie.

“Don’t worry, hoss. My mummy didn’t raise no dumbbell.” Then a pause followed Higgins’s transmission. The fleck of his light didn’t move. “You’ll never believe this, Kurt.”

“What have you got?”

“Ford Pinto, blue, ’79, I think… Looks like—”

“Glen Rodz’s car,” Kurt said quietly. He was more saddened than appalled; he felt responsible, as though he should have expected something like this all along. Glen just running off with his lover was too easy.

Vicky’s grief shone blankly in her eyes. “We could be wrong,” she said. “He’s not the only one in the world who drives a blue Pinto.”

Kurt just looked at her. “Check the inside,” he said into the radio.

“Empty,” Higgins answered.

“Trunk?”

“It’s a hatchback.”

“Read me the plates. We’ll run them when we get back outside.”

Kurt didn’t like the long, unearthly pause that followed. He could guess what was coming as he tracked the dot of Higgins’s flashlight from one end of the car to the other.

“No plates,” Higgins said.

“Shit.”

“No registration in the glove compartment, either.”

“You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

“No, all the glass is broken. Glove compartment was hanging open.”

The list was getting shorter. “Check for a VIN number,” Kurt told him.

“Where is it?”

“Far left corner of the dashboard. There’s a seal that whitens if it’s tampered with.”

Another grim pause. Then Higgins said, “It’s not here. There’s just a hole.”

Ripped out, Kurt thought. The only other accessible VIN number would be etched on the engine block, but Kurt didn’t know exactly where, and he doubted that it mattered. Whoever ditched this car obviously knew what he was doing. “Take a quick look around,” he told Higgins, “then come on back up.”

“What happens now?” Vicky asked.

“We call the county lab. Somebody gave that car the works, so it’s probably wiped clean, too. But most American cars have VIN numbers all over the place, they’re just hard to get to. Even a pro wouldn’t be able to get all the VIN’s without taking most of the engine, trans, and drive-train apart. Unless this guy happens to work for Ford, the chances of him getting all the VIN’s are slim. If it’s Glen’s car, the county’ll be able to find out. It just might take a while.”

The rope pulled taut against the dredge idler. Higgins was climbing up.

“And if it is Glen’s car,” Vicky said, “then I guess it’s realistic to assume that he’s—”

Kurt only nodded.

The sound of Higgins clambering back up grew louder. But abruptly the sound stopped. All they heard was the unsteady dripping from below. Kurt looked over the edge of the cause-walk, trailing the rope with his light. Higgins was angling himself into one of the stopes.

“Mark, what the hell are you doing?” Kurt said into the radio.

Reception was weaker now. “I’m in the second…what did you call it?”

“Stope. What are you doing there?”

“I thought I…”

“What?”

“I’m sure I heard something.”

“Don’t go in there. It could cave in.”

Higgins wouldn’t hear of it. Reception worsened as he went deeper into the stope, his voice warbling in and out of waves of static. “Goddamn flashlight’s starting to poop out… Can’t see much—Christ, it stinks, you wouldn’t believe it.” Higgins began to cough violently, like someone who’d just stepped into a draft of riot gas.

“Forget it, Mark. Come on, back up. We’ll punt the dirty work to the county.”

Now Higgins’s voice was nearly indistinguishable through the blurring, crackling transmission; he was coughing asthmatically. “Jesus, that smell…worse than a fucking slaughterhouse. “I—holy shit, holy fucking shit…”

“Mark, what is it?”

“The walls, my God, the walls—they’re…” But then Higgins’s voice withered off into a staccato of electric jibberish.

“I’m not reading you, Mark. The stope’s blocking our reception—you’ve gone in too far.”

There was a break, a few bursts of static.

Futilely, Kurt continued to key his walkie-talkie. “Damn it, I can barely hear you. Come out of there.”

The words that followed were faint and eroded, but Kurt was able to decipher most of them. It sounded like: “There’s someone down here, Kurt. Someone’s coming down the—”

“Get out of there, Mark! Get out of there right now!”

A shriek exploded up the shaft and wound around them in an endless echo. Kurt knew only one thing—that the sound couldn’t possibly be human.

Pistol shots rang out, six of them, all thunderingly amplified.

And after that came a second scream, mindless, ripping, insane. It was a man’s scream. It was Higgins.

Vicky was stepping back, hands pressed against her ears. Kurt reached for the rope, but then it jerked tight. The scream drew on, spiraling out of the pit. Kurt watched in consternation, watched the rope pull tighter and tighter until it snapped and burned out of his hands.

“Get out of here!” Kurt shouted at Vicky. He stuffed his light into his belt and kneeled at the causewalk, looking down. A rusted ring ladder pointed up.

“You’re out of your mind!” Vicky screamed, pulling his collar.

He shoved her back. “Get out!”

“That ladder’ll never hold you! The bolts are rusted!”

Kurt swung himself over, tested the first step with his foot. “I’ve got to try. Go to the cruiser and take the radio out of the slot. Hold the button in and say 207 signal 13. Say it over and over till you get an acknowledgment. Then give the dispatcher our location and wait for them.”

The ladder ground out an inch under his full weight. Vicky continued to scream at him. The bolts of the third step snapped like a shot. He could feel the ladder shaking now, the pitons grinding out of their seats in the rock. Looks like school’s out for me, he thought, and his fingers hooked back onto the edge of the causewalk just as the ladder fell out from under him. It toppled down the incline with a deafening crash.

His biceps cramped as he hung. He glanced over his shoulder into oblivion. Vicky helped pull him up by the seat of his pants.

Beside them, one of the stulls fell over and hit the ground with a vibrating thud. Dust sifted out of the ceiling like snow. Kurt grabbed Vicky’s hand and together they raced stumblingly out toward the vague square of dying sunlight, at the end of the manway.

Outside, he bent over the hood of the cruiser. Skirting death so narrowly had bleached him white. Vicky sat on the ground, angled against the grill. They were both smudged and sweating, taking in ravenous breaths. Kurt’s ears throbbed numbly from the previous avalanche of sound.

There was no time to even contemplate what had happened; Higgins was still down there, dying or dead.

“Got to call a thirteen in to the county,” Kurt muttered, but when he opened the cruiser door, he felt himself shrink. The recharge socket for the portable radio was empty. Higgins still had the police radio on his belt.