Chapter Nine

Jesse sensed the passage expanding around him and thought of how wrong he’d been about newborn babies. He used to think birth was rather a cruel thing: first, content and warm and safe and wet inside the mother’s womb; the amniotic sack bursts and the child is pushed screaming into a cold, vast space of blinding lights and harsh voices. But now he viewed it all differently. The baby had been confined, grown too large for its surroundings, with no space even to flail its limbs. Then the beautiful release, the suffocating fluid vacuumed from its throat…

“Oh thank God,” he whispered, able to crawl on hands and knees again. Ahead someone was squatting and sweeping a flashlight through the blackness. It was Greeley, he now realized, and Clevenger was crouching alongside him.

Jesse chanced a look back at Ruth—the treacherous bitch—and marveled at the way her features had softened. She seemed to be staring through Jesse and beyond the figures ahead.

“You believe this?” Emma asked in a wondering voice.

Jesse frowned and stood abreast of her. Then he realized why everyone had fallen silent.

The flashlight beams carried by the others did slow, awestruck passes along the wall opposite.

It was at least fifty feet away.

He and Emma had hung back, but now they scuttled forward to see what Greeley and Clevenger were seeing. Both men, he noted with confusion, were now on their knees. They reminded him of a pair of crewmates on a storm-tossed ship, clutching the deck of their vessel and praying the surf wouldn’t sweep them shrieking into a watery grave.

The walkway, it appeared, ended in a kind of curving promontory. Above them hung innumerable stalactites, many longer and thicker than full-grown men. Their glistening contours reminded him disquietingly of dangling shrouds.

Jesse directed his gaze downward and felt the strength go out of his legs.

The valley seemed endless.

He didn’t want to venture too close to the edge—he’d always been a little afraid of heights—but his curiosity won out. He got down on all fours, pointed the mining helmet straight down.

Far, far below, perhaps ten stories, something shimmered. An underground river?

No, he realized with an inchoate sense of wrongness. The odor came next, and with it a desire to whirl and return to the tunnel, claustrophobia be damned. He scooted backward and yelped when he bumped someone’s knees.

He spun and saw Colleen squinting down at him.

“You mind getting that light out of my face?”

“Sorry.”

She nodded toward the others. “What’s everyone so…holy shit,” she said when she saw the dropoff.

A scratching sound behind him. Jesse whirled.

And let out a startled cry.

Demonic eyes stared at him from a bloody red face. Just when he was sure the Big Nasty had somehow tracked him here to finish the job, he discerned Frank Red Elk’s longish black hair, usually glossy but now clotted with Debbie’s blood.

“Want me to hold your hand?” Red Elk said.

Jesse let out a shuddering exhalation. “Shut up,” he muttered.

Red Elk scrunched his nose. “The hell’s that smell?”

“Guano,” Greeley called back.

“That’s bat shit, right?”

Greeley nodded.

Emma was casting restive glances around the yawning cavern. “So…where are they?”

“All over the place, would be my guess,” Greeley said. “This is the perfect environment for bats.”

Emma’s face had gone slack with dread. “This isn’t the perfect environment for anything.”

Greeley started, an animation permeating his face that had been absent since the playground. “Actually, this is positive for us too.”

“For a professor,” Red Elk said, “you sure are a dumbass.”

Greeley seemed not to hear him. “Don’t you see? Bats are cave animals, but they do their feeding outside.”

Clevenger nodded. “There’s a way out of here.”

Greeley flitted his flashlight beam over the walls. “Must be some…means…of egress…”

“There,” Emma said.

They crowded around her—too hastily, Jesse thought. He could just imagine the whole group tumbling over into the abyss, shrieking and gibbering the whole way down. Cautiously, he joined them.

He leaned forward and gazed where the others were gazing.

To the left and perhaps eight feet below the promontory, there was another, narrower foothold which wound to the right before disappearing into what appeared to be a good-sized tunnel. Jesse studied the black opening with a mixture of hope and dread. It might lead them back to the surface, or at least to the main tunnel. But it was just as likely that a hellish tide of vampire bats would come shrieking out of the darkness for some wholesale bloodletting.

“I had no idea it would be this beautiful,” someone behind them said.

They turned and found Ruth Cavanaugh gazing around the cavern with something akin to ecstasy. Jesse noted with unease that her face had continued its uncanny alteration. Longer, the chin was now a ghastly witch’s caricature, the nose narrow and protuberant, almost—Jesse tried but could not escape the word—like a snout.

Emma said, “There might be a way out, Ruth. There’s a tunnel—”

“No one will be leaving.”

Colleen turned to Ruth, her eyes baleful. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I saw this place last night,” Ruth said dreamily, “I saw it, but it was fragmented. Diffuse.” Her voice went thick and unnaturally low. “My eyes weren’t refined enough then…but now…” The rough, meaty sound of her voice, as though there were wet stones clogging the back of her throat, made Jesse’s arm hairs stand up. Emma was very close to the little woman now, though Ruth Cavanaugh seemed to have grown taller. Last night she’d looked a few inches shorter than Emma. Now it seemed Ruth was a head taller. But that, Jesse thought as the acid of terror began to eat away at his composure, could have been because of the frizzy black hair, which was now a glorious mane that spread over her shoulders, all the way to her waist. Her ears also—what the hell?—had grown freakish and pointed, the ears of some fairy-tale elf. Only there was nothing friendly or playful in Ruth’s bearing anymore. Nothing meek, either.

Emma shined her light in the little woman’s eyes. “Ruth?”

“So beautiful,” Ruth said, her voice an alien buzz.

“Ruth?” Emma repeated, crowding into Jesse.

Ruth’s lips spread in a grin that devoured the bottom half of her face, which was now a goblin’s face, the stuff of a child’s nightmare. Her eyes had taken on a swirling, pinkish hue, the crazed gleam penetrating Jesse’s mind.

You thought you knew, the voice rumbled. But you had no idea. Now watch. Watch what I can become…

A sound like ripping paper came from behind Ruth. Emma sucked in frightened breath, her body rigid against Jesse’s. The ripping sound echoed through the vast chamber, its quality both harsh and somehow pulpy. At first he was sure something had followed them through the tunnel, was coming out of the tunnel now to murder them where they couldn’t escape.

But the sound wasn’t coming from the tunnel. It was coming from Ruth’s back.

Dark tendrils poked out of the sides of her green shirt, the fabric tearing in fitful tremors. He caught sight of her right armpit, now exposed.

The flesh there was as black as polished obsidian.

“Shoot her,” Jesse said.

“That’s madness,” Clevenger said. He took a step toward Ruth, but she was swaying on her feet, listing drunkenly toward the drop-off.

“Jesse’s right,” Emma said, squeezing his arm. “We have to shoot her.”

“Ruth,” Clevenger implored.

She staggered toward Clevenger. He caught her, held her tremoring body, which now—Jesse fought to override his senses, but he knew his eyes weren’t deceiving him—dwarfed the professor’s. Ruth had grown as tall as Marc Greeley, who was all but melting into the cave wall to escape from the mutating woman.

“You have to kill her!” Greeley shouted.

“Kill her?” Clevenger said, his arm around her. “She’s sick. My God, can’t you see that?” His watery eyes darted pleadingly from person to person.

“We gotta shoot her, Professor,” Red Elk said with finality. “Better step away.”

Ruth was mumbling something into Clevenger’s shoulder, but Jesse couldn’t make it out because of all the black hair in the way.

“What?” Clevenger whispered to her. “What’s that, Ruthie?”

“…wanted you,” she muttered. “…wanted…”

“What, dear?” he prompted tenderly.

She drew back and Jesse bit his knuckle in fright at the buzzing voice.

“Wanted you to like me,” the thing that could not be Ruth said as its face swam into view. The face was a discolored triangular mask, the eyes blood red. Slowly, it rose to its full height, rising, rising, seven feet tall now. Eight. Jesus Christ, Jesse thought. Jesus Christ.

“What happened to you?” Clevenger whispered.

The red eyes beamed at them, the lurid expression simultaneously coy and obscene. Jesse realized with horror what the ripping sounds had been.

Giant, veined wings were expanding from the Ruth-thing’s back.

“You’re not…” Clevenger said, his voice scarcely audible above the squishy, popping noises emanating from the transmogrifying body. “You’re not…”

“Ruthie?” the creature asked, the underjaw yawning wide in an unspeakable grin. Slaver drooled from the serrated teeth.

Colleen started forward and gripped Clevenger’s arm.

“BACK!” the Ruth-thing rumbled.

Colleen jerked her hand away as if stung.

A gunshot exploded to Jesse’s left. He whirled and saw Red Elk aiming the Ruger at the Ruth-thing’s face. It was impossible to tell if he’d struck the creature or not because it was already a riot of folds and recesses, shifting darknesses and crimson splotches. The gun jumped again, but the creature barely reacted. Red Elk had to have hit it; Jesse had seen him shoot other targets at considerably farther range. Clevenger, who appeared as though he were in a trance, gawked at the ever-rising figure.

“Come on, Frank,” Emma called. Jesse felt a tug at his arm and turned to see Colleen and Emma creeping toward the edge of the drop-off. They meant to leap down to the narrow ledge, he realized with sudden misgiving.

Red Elk nodded like he needed no more convincing. The pistol trained on the Ruth-thing’s grisly face, he extended a hand toward Clevenger’s shoulder. “Better come along, Professor. This isn’t going to turn out well.”

Clevenger peeled his eyes off the Ruth-thing. When he regarded first Red Elk, then the others, his lips quivered and his eyes were rimmed with tears.

“I can’t,” he said.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Red Elk growled. “Get your scrawny ass—”

Jesse’s insides went cold.

Some thick, black, wormy-looking appendage—the Ruth-thing’s tail?—had coiled around the Professor’s right leg. It covered the upper half of the leg from bare, white knee to the upper thigh of his khaki shorts, and its sluglike tip was swishing threateningly over his crotch.

“Oh my God,” Clevenger said in a trembling voice. “Please do something.”

The creature lowered its head, then the wings snapped out like a pair of wind-caught sails. Before anyone could react, the Ruth-thing swept Clevenger over the drop-off, flapping its tenebrous wings, and hung suspended in the air before them. The wings beat in great whooshes, reminding Jesse of the illustrations of prehistoric birds he’d been fascinated by as a child. The appendage coiling around the professor did indeed appear to be a tail. Jesse watched in revulsion as the Ruth-thing’s feet—three claws with a single heel talon—curled toward Clevenger’s hovering frame.

“Come on,” Emma said, her face steeled in grief. “We can’t help him.”

Jesse saw the grim truth in her face. But he wasn’t keen on jumping down onto the narrow strip of rock below. What if they fell? What if the creature dropped the professor and swooped down—

His thoughts cut off when Clevenger began to scream.