Pan clung to the edge of the hole, the world around her burning brimstone bright from the flare. She knew she had to drop, but her fingers weren’t going to obey her. They knew the truth.
If she let go now, then she was going to fall right into hell.
“Hey, Pan,” yelled Truck from fifteen feet or so below her. “Stop hanging around, we’ve got to go.”
He laughed at his own joke.
“Hold on,” punned Marlow. “Give her a chance.”
“You guys insane? Kidding around in this place?” growled Herc. “Besides, you all know she doesn’t like heights. It’s one of her hang-ups.” He snorted, trying to cover it with a cough.
She had no idea why they were making jokes. They had breached the outer wall of the Engine. They were about to throw themselves into a battle against one of the most powerful entities on the planet. What was funny about that?
And yet the sound of their muffled giggles was contagious. The Engine wasn’t the only thing with defenses, she understood. People had them, too. Laughter was powerful. It was pretty much the most human thing you could do. Even now, with chips of broken bone and stone digging into her palms, her stomach threatening to cramp, and that godawful endless idiot chatter of the Engine in her head, she couldn’t help but smile.
It gave her strength and she let go, her stomach lurching into her throat. She managed a scream, the drop higher than she’d expected, so high she thought she might have fallen right through the floor, falling right into—
She landed lightly, a pair of strong arms grabbing her from behind and reducing the shock. She leaned into them, happy to be held and not wanting to be let go. When she turned to thank Taupe, though, she saw Marlow instead. She scowled at him, pulling loose.
“Sorry,” he said, backing away like a beaten dog.
They were standing in a cavern. She had no idea how big it was because it was drenched in darkness—darkness so heavy, so deep, that it felt like a physical thing. It seemed to press down on her, to put a cold hand over her mouth. To one side was the wall they had just passed through. Every inch of it was covered in bones, the floor, too. Herc’s flare sputtered, spitting out an infernal red light.
“Now—”
She stopped, feeling something wriggling inside her throat. She hawked it up, spat, seeing the glistening body of a fat, squirming maggot slip between the bones on the floor. Her stomach tightened, her body trying to turn itself inside out.
“Now what?” she managed, smearing her hand over her trembling lips.
“We did not see this place,” said the girl. Her voice, with its annoying accent, seemed like it came from a million miles away, as if they had dropped to the bottom of the ocean. “We passed through a … a church, then a tunnel, then entered the stairs. This is new.”
“The Liminal,” said Herc. “The space between. The Engine is surrounded by it, it’s what keeps it out of reality, keeps it hidden.”
“The space you pass through when you go through the Red Door?” Marlow asked, his voice as muted as everyone else’s. “No wonder I feel like my guts have been trampled by an elephant.”
He wasn’t wrong. Pan flexed her jaw, something buzzing inside the skin of her cheek, and she imagined a clutch of flies had just hatched there. It was unbearable, and the only thing that stopped her firing a crossbow bolt into her own head was the fear that she might be stuck down here, trapped in the Liminal for an eternity.
The thought of that was somehow even worse than the thought of being taken by the demons.
Herc’s flashlight wobbled and he gave it a slap, shining the beam into the heart of the darkness. It reached maybe fifteen feet then stopped dead, too afraid to reveal what lay there.
“How far away is it?” Truck asked.
“The Engine?” Herc shrugged. “No idea. Time and space, they’re different here. One way to find out, though.”
He set off, bones crunching beneath his boots. Pan adjusted her crossbow and set off after him. She was exhausted, everything drained. She wasn’t sure she could even conjure up enough for a burst of charge. Something popped beneath her and she looked down to see a skull. That used to be somebody’s face, she thought as she pulled her foot free, shaking the dust away. A sudden, alien scream loosed itself inside her head, like somebody had split it open and was crying into it. She gouged her nails through her hair, breathing fast, the darkness a spinning vortex around her.
In front, Marlow doubled over, groaning. She grabbed his arm, as much to keep herself standing as him. They stumbled on together, Herc’s flashlight a boat of light in the river of darkness. Behind them, the flare sputtered out. There was no way back.
Not that there ever had been. You didn’t start a mission like this expecting to retreat.
“What is that?” said Taupe up ahead. Pan could hear the fear in his voice. When she reached him she saw that he was looking down at the ground and something was moving there.
One of the bones.
It was vibrating, softly. Barely noticeable, other than the buzzing noise it was making. It stopped, then started again, reminding Pan of a bluebottle trying to fly with torn wings.
“I really don’t like this,” said Truck.
“Come on,” said Herc, hoisting up the duffel bag. “We got to keep moving.”
They had only made it another few feet, though, before something else clattered over the ground. It was another bone, a small one that might once have been somebody’s finger. It was jittering like there was an earthquake, bouncing a couple of inches then lying still.
“I really, really don’t like this,” said Truck. He stamped down on it, grinding it to powder.
A voice, up ahead. Somewhere distant. It sounded like a man crying out in pain. Pan’s skin crawled so badly she thought it was trying to slither right off her.
“Someone’s there,” she said, pulling the crossbow from her back. It was loaded with a bolt, one that had been carved from the fabric of the Engine itself. The metal was old, etched with runes. And it was powerful, especially against the undead. Fire one of these into a demon and it would be like it had swallowed a grenade.
Then why did she feel so exposed, and so helpless?
Another faint cry, more bones scuffing across the ground as though they had minds of their own. Pan squinted into the darkness, no sign of anything.
“Stay sharp,” said Herc. “Anything is possible in here.”
They huddled together, insect-small in the vast space. The shout up ahead was being answered by another that could have been a crow’s caw. More rose up in the dark, a swelling tide of noise. These weren’t the call of the Engine, Pan understood.
They were real.
Something snatched at her foot, a cluster of long bones. It punched a grunt of horror from her throat and she shook free, kicking the hand onto its back where it trembled like a dying insect. This one was decorated with smudges of rust-colored blood that looked centuries old.
Truck swore. He was skirting around a skull that was moving inside its nest of bone, its lower jaw twitching wildly like it was telling a joke. A scraggy cap of blond hair hung over its side. The big guy was smearing his palms down his T-shirt, again and again.
“Ignore it,” Herc said.
“Ignore the moving bones,” Truck said, and Pan could hear the hysteria in his voice. “Yeah, su—” His foot suddenly plunged into them, ankle deep, and his scream soared into the cavern like it was a trapped bird, fading fast. “Goddammit.” He pulled his leg free and aimed the shotgun at the skull, firing off a blast that made Pan’s ears ring.
And in the flash of the muzzle she saw something to her side—there and gone in an instant.
“Herc, your three,” she said, and Herc swung the flashlight.
It looked like a huge moonlit ocean over there, bone white and restless. There was still no sign of the end of the cavern, or the roof, but she could hear the endless, crashing crescendo of churning water.
Water?
“Oh, Jesus,” said Marlow. “That can’t be…”
Pan stumbled on, unable to believe what she was seeing. The ground before her seemed more agitated with every step, bones writhing against each other, scratching at the air, at their legs as they passed. Some of the skeletons had scraps of flesh and muscle, like leftover meat on a barbecued rib. One of the skulls had an upper lip, as fat and wet as a slug. It moved up and down in silent speech.
Then she saw a face. A real face.
It sat in the ground like it had been buried up to its neck, an old woman with patches of silver hair. The skin was withered and torn, one eye fused shut. But the other was a weak, watery gray thing that fixed on Pan and blinked furiously. The woman’s mouth opened, and through it Pan could see the floor. Her scream was just a gust of dry air, but it felt deafening.
Pan’s terror was too big to fit up her throat and she beat it back, forcing herself to stay numb. She felt a tickle of insanity in the corner of her mind, wondered how close she was to the abyss, to falling into that madness and drowning there.
The closer she got to the ocean, the more she saw that there was no water there. It was a sea of flesh and bone, of things that could not possibly be alive and yet were. Arms dug at the dirt, shedding fingernails in their desperation. Feet kicked at the ground, at the air, like the final, awful movements of somebody trapped in a landslide. Limbless torsos twitched and trembled.
And the faces. So many of them. They stared with red, bulging eyes, fat tongues sticking from their mouths as if they’d been hanged. They were obviously aware that they had company. Some of them cried, some of them called out in a language Pan did not recognize. Most of them screamed, a rising wave of sound that rippled outward, surely loud enough to bring down the walls of the cavern, to bury them all forever.
They screamed and they screamed, and Pan put her hands to her ears and screamed, too.
Herc kept moving, shaking off the hands that grabbed at him as he waded deeper into the ocean. Pan’s foot slipped on something wet and she looked to see a man’s face there, gulping at air that he couldn’t need because he had no body. His eyes scrolled blindly back and forth.
Sorry sorry sorry, she thought, but could not find the strength to say.
“There,” yelled Taupe, his shout reduced to a whisper by the roar of the dead. He was pointing ahead, and when Herc shone the flashlight Pan could just about see a column of rock stretching up.
Pan set off for it, moving too fast. Something grabbed her leg and she was falling, landing in the grasping ocean of wet flesh. Her fist plunged into a decaying torso—one that squirmed beneath her, which pulled at her. She was face-to-face with a man who had only half a head, the bowl of his skull gleaming. His one eye rolled her way and a toothless mouth moved against the air, like he was trying to kiss her.
She tried to get up but something was holding her tight—fingers sprouting from the earth and groping for her, a leg winding around her waist like a wrestler’s, another fistful of fingers probing into her mouth, tasting of spoiled food and old blood, another yet in her hair, filthy nails scraping her scalp. And the man, his lips searching for her, breathing on her with the stench of old meat, that one eye rolling madly in its puckered socket.
The fire burned up inside her, too much of it for her to control. She closed her eyes and let loose a pulse of electrostatic energy, one that blazed out of her in every direction. The man’s face erupted into ash, the ocean of limbs crumbling, freeing her. She pushed up, shaking the sparks from her smarting fingers. Her mouth tasted of copper, tingling like she’d bit down on a live wire.
“Easy, Pan!” said Herc from somewhere behind her, his voice jittery. She ignored him, moving as fast as her legs would let her, not caring that her boots were crunching through faces, not caring about the crack of breaking bones and the slap of wet meat beneath her. She just ran through the living corpses, through their endless screams, heading for that wall of rock.
It rose from the living ocean, catching the swinging beam of Herc’s light. She couldn’t see to the top—or anywhere near it—but she could feel how tall it was. The height was vertiginous, like she was standing in the shadow of the Empire State Building. There were openings in it, a collection of mouthlike caves running along the bottom. They looked like they might hold spiders, but they couldn’t be worse than this.
Nothing in all of hell could be worse than this—the countless, shrieking dead.
The caves along the wall grew vast as she approached them, each the size of an apartment block. She stumble-ran into the nearest, the Engine still pulling at her, still guiding her. Herc and the others were shouting but she didn’t care. She just wanted to be out of this nightmare. She felt that she would throw herself into the black pool, would gladly give her soul to whatever lay there, just to be free of this place.
No light here, just more groping fingers and howling mouths. She pushed on, the ground sloping beneath her, gently at first and then hard. She lost her footing, sprawling. But the drop was too steep, the dead didn’t have the strength to hold her. She rolled, bouncing between the moving corpses. She fired as she went, sparks of electricity exploding like a camera flash—glimpses of bared teeth, of rabid eyes.
Then she was falling into something rabbit-hole deep and lined with fury—a pit of snatching limbs and jaws. She reached for them, trying to halt herself, but she was going too fast. The hole was narrowing, too, arms and legs slapping against her from all sides. The sound of their panic was like a choir of the damned, enough to reduce her brain to a pulp.
She would be buried here. Buried alive, because she would not die, not in the Liminal. She would lie here for the rest of—
Light, somewhere beneath her. Just a faint glow. The forest of teeth and hands was silhouetted against it, everything still trying to grab her. It was working now, too, trapping her fall like a spiderweb traps a fly. She felt one of them bite into her arm, shouting at her through a mouthful of her blood.
She had stopped. They had her.
She pushed downward, clawing her way past the corpses like she was trying to pull herself from a tar pit. Another set of teeth grated the side of her head and she growled, almost losing herself inside an ecstasy of terror. They were tearing chunks from her, they were trying to devour her. But the light was growing, it was just there, just there.
Gravity took hold of her, and she was out of the hole, falling again. She hit the ground, squirming onto her back, her heartbeat thrashing itself into a frenzy. Above her was a sloping ceiling of red rock, a fissure splitting it in two. Gray, bloodless hands explored the edges, and past them was the flash of teeth and bone and wide, frightened eyes. Groans and howls slipped after her, like they meant to pick her up and pull her in. She scuttled back as far as she could, until her hands gave way beneath her.
Only then did she force herself to calm down, both hands on her chest as if she could massage her pulse back to normal. Her eyesight was boiling at the edges but with each breath the panic subsided.
“Get off me!” came a muffled voice, then Truck tumbled from the fissure in the ceiling, landing with a splat. Marlow and the young girl dropped out next, arms wrapped around each other, the big guy cushioning their fall. Marlow scrambled up and out of the way, spitting, and Truck was halfway to his feet when Taupe slid free, falling on him.
“Dammit,” Truck yelled. “Let me get—”
Herc was last, screaming as he crunched down onto Taupe and Truck. He rolled onto his feet, his breaths half pant, half scream. His eyes were drenched in fear, the eyes of a madman, and when he met Pan’s gaze she barely recognized him. Then the old guy blinked, twice, three times, and each time he slipped further back inside himself until it was just good old Herc standing there. He sniffed, adjusting the straps of the bag on his back.
“Everyone okay?” he asked.
“No,” said Truck.
“Non,” said Taupe and Claire together.
“Not even close,” said Marlow, brushing the grime from his clothes. “What was that?”
The French girl had been right.
That had been a little slice of hell.
“The Engine needs death,” said Herc, his voice still shaking. “It needs suffering. We all knew it, we all knew it would be bad. Now, where are—”
He stopped, and actually smiled. Pan followed his line of sight.
They might have been inside a cathedral, but one made from rock and flesh. The space they were in was the size of a football field, another vast underground cave. This one, though, was lit by torches. Thousands of them, mounted on the forest of pillars that filled the cavern. Each torch was set inside the mouth of a body mounted on the stone, their limbs seemingly fused there. The sight of it reminded Pan of Patrick Rebarre, of what had happened to him back in New York—teleporting inside the ground, and becoming part of it. It made her shudder.
Not as much, though, as when she realized that each of those poor souls had his eyes open. They stared down at her, their dirty faces marked by rivulets of tears, their mouths infernos that spat and crackled. The constant susurration of their blinking eyes was like a flock of distant birds taking off.
The columns stretched up to a vaulted ceiling decorated with sculptures that might have been people. The walls, too, could have been red stone, or could have been skinless bodies. Thankfully none of them were moving. There was only one more thing in the giant space, embedded in the far wall—something that filled her with fear, but which also flooded her mind with relief, because in the unimaginable horror of what they had just waded through, even something as rotten and wrong as this was still beautifully familiar.
“Well, what do you know,” said Herc, walking to her side. “We only went and did it.”
“Look at it,” said Truck, appearing on her other side. “Just sitting there all evil and stuff.”
“Wants us to open it,” said Marlow. “I can feel it.”
He was right. She could feel it, too, a nagging itch right in the center of her brain, and a graveyard voice that whispered, What is it you desire?
“So let’s give that bastard what it wants,” she said.
And as one, they made their way across the cathedral, to the Red Door.