The thing wrapped a tendril-like hand across its throat and shook its head side to side.
“Tell us the way out!” Ethan screamed.
“Kill it!” Madison screamed.
He fired again. The thing’s head fell open, a splash of fluid spraying backward and upward from the ruined scalp. The thing stumbled again and paused. It raised its head and locked its remaining eye with Ethan. It then inverted the cane to reveal a glowing ember, the size of Ethan’s fist, and began toward them.
“Kill it!” Madison screamed again.
“Take the legs!” Abby shouted. “You can’t kill it, cripple it!”
Ethan lowered the gun a bit and fired. The flash blinded him for a moment, but it was easy to see he had hit the upper leg. The thing collapsed to one side, his leg nearly in two. It continued its progress on one knee, dragging the damaged leg. Ethan squeezed the trigger again, but this time, the round glanced off the floor and hit the thing in the abdomen. Even with the explosion of flesh from the other side, it did nothing to slow the now dangerously- close monstrosity.
The three began to back themselves closer to the wall, trying in vain to shrink away from it.
Ethan fired again and struck the good leg in the knee. It shattered visibly, and the thing fell to its face.
“Go! Go!” Ethan shouted.
They ran along the wall, the light whisking this way and that across the ancient bricks. The thing tried to reach them with the glowing end of the cane, but it had fallen just out of reach. They made the exit of the chapel, and Abby turned right.
Ethan grabbed her quickly, “We’ve been down there! This way…” He headed off in the other direction, avoiding the tombstones as he went.
Madison began to cry loudly and clutched onto Abby as she followed.
The room continued in a slow curve for many feet before letting them out and into a wide corridor. The walls here were like the room, constructed of brick, but they appeared redder, wetter. The floor became a worn wood plank decking. It was the color of the deepest soil but dry and brittle, splintering along all of its edges. On both sides stood gloomy wood doors with large iron handles, all of them black as coal. The passage ended abruptly in a wall of iron bars, a black void agape on its other side.
They entered the passage slowly, flashlights trying to be everywhere at once, trying to illuminate every detail. Each of them was driven by urgency but moved to caution by their fright. Slowly, their shoes scuffed the sand along the uneven wood of the floor, softly.
Abby noticed an odd-looking moss had overtaken the upper edges of the walls and hung downward limply, but she said nothing, still unreasonably afraid.
The doors offered no windows, just blank, aged wood patterns and an iron handle. Everything seemed moist and humid, even in the chill air. When they reached the bars, they found no latch, hinge, or any other mechanism that would allow them to move. The other side offered a continuance of the passage, continuing onward to the extent of their lights. An odd wind-driven howl held steadily in their ears from deep down the passage, far beyond the bars.
“Do you hear that?” Ethan asked.
“Is that wind?” Madison wondered hopefully.
“It sounds like it, huh?” he replied.
Abby suddenly grabbed the bars and threw her weight back and forth trying in vain to work one of the bars free. When she realized she could not, she tried to squeeze herself through.
“Abby, let’s try these doors. Maybe they will get us around there,” Ethan said gently.
“If they wanted us to get there,” she said in a strained voice, still trying to fit between the bars, “they would not have put the bars here.”
“Abby…”
“Fine, alright. Which door?”
“I would guess all of them,” Madison said as she pulled the nearest one open. It was a small storage area still stacked with old wooden crates, some stamped with illegible text, some still holding the remains of hemp rope handles, all covered in that grayish-green plant.
Ethan turned and opened another to find much the same thing, this room not quite as full as the other. There were some hides of some sort piled to one side, now almost completely gone to soil, and a small collection of iron cinder sticks leaning in one corner. They moved on to the next.
Each room had some quantity of crates stored within and a number of artifacts. There were colonial uniforms and insignia, black powder muskets, black powder horns, shot, utensils, and old fragments of clothing. In one, there was even an extensive collection of oil paintings now given to the mold that grew there.
Nearest the entrance of the large corridor, the door hid no room but another passage; this one filled with the stench of rot and wet, so much so the three where loath to enter. It appeared to slope downward and turned to the right near the end. The horrible looking plant had found purchase here as well and grew stagnantly along the walls and hung as snotty filaments from the ceiling.
They paused at the entrance until the sound of dragging and scraping came to them from the large graveyard. The priest-thing had worked its way from the chapel and was now dragging itself toward them. They took a moment to look at each other then entered the moist passage to escape the abomination drawing near.
Chapter 11
Ethan closed the door behind them, hoping their pursuer would be unable to reach the door’s rusted handle. The moisture had collected on the floor, pooling in some areas, making their footsteps sound hideous, like hissing whispers of wet sand against the ancient wood planking. Droplets of icy water fell from the stone ceiling and randomly pelted them, adding to the chill of the air.
Misery began to mix with their constant nagging fear, the pain of wounds and burns, the bone-chilling splash of water droplets, the unending suffocating darkness, and the constant nagging feeling of something watching.
Ethan, considering his past, was more capable of handling these feelings. The dirty bum that had stalked him as a preteen taught him how to cope with these feelings. Years of the bum’s torments handled by his adolescent mind produced calluses that remained even now. There were places within himself where the child-like fear could go and hide, lock itself behind a door, and cut itself off from the oppressive fright.
Abby clung to her stone-like common sense, her rock solid belief in normalcy. This all, to her, could not actually be happening, and in some small way, it provided her a shield, a lanyard to grasp instead of slipping into an infinite madness. This protection had begun to weaken, the reality of what had happened too harsh and perfectly real. It shook her bastion of beliefs and drove her to her faith for reassurance. It was weak shoring but the last of the remaining tools she could use to cope.
Madison had no such defenses, her life a script of manufactured thrills joined later by sexual frenzy. The unbridled exhilaration of roller coasters and horror movies, the timid and raw vulnerability she felt during her sexual exploits with multiple men and women was the sum of her experience and wisdom. None of what was happening now fit into any of this. She knew that no matter how terrifying a movie was, it was always hers to stop. She was free to select her own partners for her exploration of sexuality, and her no had always been no. What was happening to her now was beyond her control and something she was not ready to handle. The numbing effect of horror movies actually proved to be fragile, and this stark reality had penetrated her soul, which in turn began to change her perceptions of reality. The shift was not subtle, but an almost violent rending of her sanity.
She had first thought Chris was playing some cruel joke on them, but then when he ended his own life, she thought it the bitter result of too much liquor at too young an age, maybe even an acid trip revisiting him; but then the burning corpse thing, the priest from hell, the tormented souls, and the witches…none of this would fit easily into her understandings. Instead, they forced their way in, in a painfully jagged way. Early on, she knew somewhere deep in her mind that she might be going mad, but that was mostly a lost memory, and her thoughts now came from the darkness within her.
Many years ago, Madison had watched and thoroughly enjoyed a movie that had addressed a prime evil, an entity of Hell itself. This character had affected her greatly, and she had spent months trying to forget it, to
