Chapter Twenty-Three

"The Concrete Tomb"

Obviously, this door was not one that was very acquainted with the motions of opening and closing. It was already thick and heavy, but untold years of rust and crud and gunk caking the hinges and gaps made opening it a battle. It opened into the pit, but at a glacial pace. It took a good half a minute of tugging just to get it to the point where I could hook my fingers around the edge and pull directly. Even then, it was hardly a pushover, and it was no less difficult for the sludgy, silt mess that served as a floor for the place. At least half of my effort was wasted because I couldn't keep traction.

But I was a good soldier, though, and eventually my Hercules display paid off. I got the door cracked open enough to suck in the old gut and squeeze through, though only barely.

Now, if you've ever stepped blindly, you would know that it's common sense to do so tentatively and carefully. I've done it before and of course I knew to do so. However, for some reason, perhaps the effervescent relief of escaping the pit, I stepped blindly through that door and I didn't take the sort of care I should have. Thus, it was one hell of a shock to me when I brought down my right foot and shifted my weight accordingly, only to find that there was no floor where I had fully expected one to be. No, instead, my foot kept going. I was completely overbalanced, and that made me fall. For a fraction of a moment I was suspended completely in mid-air, and for that fraction of a moment I was completely convinced that I had tripped right into another one of those HOLEs. I had just enough time to open my mouth and scream…

…when I hit not thin air, but water. Warm, tepid water, several inches deep. I fell face-first, grazing my hands on the rocky bottom and submerging some of my head. The water strangled my screams while helping produce fresh ones. I jerked my head up and out of the water quickly, coughing and sputtering. The water tasted bitter and nasty in my mouth, and stung my nose also, for I had inhaled some of it. That was almost as frightening as falling into another hole, since I had no idea what was in the water, but I quickly shrugged off that tangent. If there was something dirty in the water and it was going to harm me, it was beyond my ability to control now.

I stood and looked around. It seemed as though I was in a flooded corridor of some sort. It looked very, very old and unused for ages. The walls were rough and looked to be hewn right out of solid rock. The water beneath me was dark and murky, and it came almost halfway up to my knees. I could feel it soaking my shoes, then my socks. It felt quite a bit colder down there, for some reason.

I trudged off to the left, but I didn't get very far going this way. Old iron bars, thick and dark from years of rust, prevented further advancement. As weakened as they looked, they were set very solidly, and didn't even so much as wiggle when I grabbed them. There was no door or latch, either. The corridor went on behind the bars, farther than my flashlight could reach, but I wasn't going to see any of it. That was okay, it didn't look particularly inviting anyway.

Of course, the open corridor behind me didn't exactly instill feelings of warmth and joy either. Yet, that was the way to go, and thus I went. My shoes were completely saturated by this point, as were the legs of my jeans. The soak was spreading up my pant legs, and it was very uncomfortable. You never realize how difficult it is to walk in a foot of water until you're actually doing it. I held onto the wall for balance as I splashed my clumsy way down the corridor. That wasn't very easy either, for the walls were slick and slimy, and didn't allow for much of a hold. It was better than nothing, however.

About thirty feet down, I came to a corner. Not a second before I reached the edge of the rock wall, the radio burst into a sudden orgy of noise. The sudden noise made me jump right there in the water. I hadn't heard the thing go off for awhile, and when it came, it was a bit of a shock. I reached for my pipe, a motion that was becoming almost instinctive, but I didn't take it. With all this water, it would be very difficult to maneuver. Instead, I took the pistol. The grip was a little slippery in my hand, but I felt a lot more confident with it than without.

Cautiously, I peeked around the corner. I held my flashlight in my right hand and stretched it, trying to see what was responsible for the radio's racket. It wasn't easy. Now, I had been in dark places almost constantly since I came to town. My flashlight was a hell of a lifesaver, no question. However, it was just a small pocket flashlight. Even in a normal, darkened room, it only helped so much. In this place, though, this rancid, dripping cavity far beneath the town, the darkness was thicker, stronger somehow. It seemed to laugh at the luminance from my piddling little pocket torch. It seemed to consume it, to remove it. Therefore, my radio was the only reliable equipment I had at the moment.

I slipped the flashlight back into my breast pocket and gripped the Glock with both hands. I approached my unseen enemy slowly, which was more the product of my environment than out of real caution. I knew the glare of the light would eventually attract its attention. I don't know if the things were able to hear. More than once I noticed that they didn't seem to respond to the radio alone. They could see though, that much I was sure of.

Sure enough, I didn't mosh along too far before I caught sight of the monster. It was one of the straight-jackets, and its back was facing me. It looked more or less like any of the dozen or so that I could remember encountering above-ground, but the strange cellophane-like skin that coated the thing seemed bloated and distended slightly. If I had to guess, it seemed to have been caused by all the water, because while other straight-jackets had a sort of messy brown coloring, this one was mottled with greens and whites, pocking the thing from head to visible calves. It was infested with mildew and water rot.

Predictably, the creature reacted to the light in my pocket, but its ability to move was even more reduced than my own. It turned to face me very slowly, like a tank turning in mud.

I wasn't about to give it a chance to get aggressive with me, though. I brought the gun up and aimed it, very carefully, at the center of its head. The weapon belched sound and flame, which drowned out the sound of its head being transformed into a shattered ruin. Of course, even if it hadn't, the close quarters and echoing quality of the corridor would have made hearing anything basically impossible. In no way was my eyesight obstructed, however, and I clearly saw the impossible creature and its head, which was caved-in by the impact of the bullet and seemed a sneeze away from imploding completely.

Before that could happen, the thing dropped like a lead weight to the ground. It landed in a strange, prone position. Its ruined head lay against the wall, but the body was propped up on its knees, making the creature's ass stick up out of the dark murk. It was the only part of the monster still visible, and while one might have found that funny in some circumstances, to me it just looked pitiful, even for an impossible, inhuman creature. I brought up my foot and tipped it over. It splashed down and lie still, now completely submerged and out of sight. I stood still with my weapon trained on it anyway. These bastards were tricky, and if anything, even more dangerous when prone. But thankfully, this one didn't seem interested in playing anymore, so I carefully stepped over it and continued forth.

Maybe two dozen feet beyond, the ground raised up some. It wasn't a particularly gradual incline, and I soon found myself out of the water and back on mostly dry land. Up ahead, the hallway came to a conclusion, with two doors leading in different directions. The one directly head had a knob that wouldn't turn, not even a little. It wasn't locked, but rather fused solid somehow. Water residue and sediments and rust caking up the lock mechanisms, maybe. I gave a cursory attempt to force it open, but it resisted even the best I had to give.

The other door resisted a little, but not nearly as strongly. It opened with just a little muscle, and I found myself in another hallway, this one much shorter. There was a door to my right, and a barred gate ahead of me that was missing its gates. I went that way first.

And there, I found another hole. Another HOLE. I now realized why my unseen friend laid so much emphasis on that word when he scrawled that message on the window of Neely's Pub. Did he see something like this in the bar? He did mention odd things in the Historical Society, and he was dead on about that. Where did his HOLE lead? I wondered if even he knew. He clearly knew something about their nature, yet it didn't seem as though he actually experienced it first-hand. He claimed to have avoided the Historical Society, and how could he mark the disappearance of the hole in the bar if he had jumped in it? Guess it didn't matter. I wasn't about to find out what he knew. Perhaps I didn't need his knowledge. I was getting plenty of it by my own volition.

That, of course, was the HOLE here. Only, this one wasn't immediately accessible. The barred gate in this small corridor didn't have doors, but there was another barred gate covering the HOLE, and this one did have doors. Doors that, by the look of them, were latched and quite locked. The latch didn't look very strong. If I stood on the door and jumped up and down, the force of impact would almost certainly break it before long. Yet, you couldn't have paid me to try it. I now knew it was possible to leap down one of these HOLES and live to tell the tale, but I wasn't about to try it that way. I didn't have that much courage, nor did I have that much stupidity. It'd have taken equal amounts of both to get me to try.

Instead, I backed away and tried the door on the side wall. It opened without hesitation, which was something new. It led into a very small room that seemed bare of anything at all. No furniture, no decoration, no nothing. The walls, floor and ceiling were made of solid concrete, much smoother than the natural, rough-hewn rock walls of the flooded corridor. The concrete was colored from dirt and rust and water seepage, but it didn't smell as bad as some parts of this underworld had. When I let the door go, it slid shut behind me. That surprised me a little at first, until my flashlight caught the top of the door. It was a spring-hinge mechanism, like one you'd find on any number of doors anywhere that you typically didn't want left open. It closed with a soft click, and I left it alone.

The room was quite disappointing at first. It took me all of perhaps five seconds to dismiss it as pointless. There was nothing here at all, save for a keypad on the wall next to the door. It looked wholly unremarkable. I was about to turn around and leave, perhaps to reconsider performing a slam-dance on the locked gate overtop of the HOLE, when a glint of metal caught my eye like a fish hook in dark water. I bent over to examine it.

It was a key. Hallelujah, brothers and praise Jesus, for He left a key. Said key itself was rather unremarkable, but the little attachment was pretty unique. It looked like a drill bit, but it was smooth, it didn't have the proper grooves. It was the phrase inscribed upon the spiral which really caught my attention, though.

'Tis Doubt Which Leadeth Thee To Purgatory

The words followed the curve of the spiral all the way, and it appeared on each curve. When turned, it repeated itself in a recurring litany of sing-song insanity. I had no idea what the phrase was from, if anything, but it sounded perfectly menacing, and wholly fitting to my current situation. I dropped the key into my pocket.

At that moment, I felt something on my foot. It was moving, and fast. For a moment I couldn't react, it was as if the senses were working but the brain was voting on a reaction. Then I felt the movement leave my foot and reach the back of my leg, moving with lightning speed. I felt circle my leg and climb up my side.

Something is crawling up my body.

The realization set it instantly, and when it did, panic followed it right through the door. I thrashed about in a frenzy. Rational thought vacated the premises as pure survival instinct took over. I swatted at it, whatever it was, but it wasn't helping. I could feel it moving around, deftly avoiding the blows.

Get it off GET IT OFF

In utter desperation, I pulled off my jacket and slammed it to the ground repeatedly, hoping to knock it off that way. Then I grabbed it back and balled it up in my hands in an attempt to crush it if it were still there. I felt several solid things, but none were alive, they were the items I had stored in the pockets.

Finally, I was satisfied that whatever it was no longer was in my jacket. It was just then that I felt it scurry up my bare arm towards my hand, it being conveyed by several tiny, needle-like appendages. From the light refracting from the walls, I could see its silhouette, and when I did, terror washed over me like a wave at high tide.

Roach!

I moaned, a toneless, haunting product of utter revulsion, and I whiplashed my arm out, hoping to dislodge it. It worked. I could feel the insect detach from my skin, and I thought I could hear it strike the wall. It was certainly large enough to make noise doing so.

Unfortunately, the roach wasn't the only thing I dislodged. The flashlight, the wonderful flashlight, my only source of vision in this hell, flew out of my hand as well. I could see it fly away from my panicked, outstretched grip for the fraction of a second it remained airborne. Then, with a sharp plastic crack, it smashed against the concrete wall.

And my world was plunged into darkness.

If I thought I knew panic a moment ago, well, let me just say that it wasn't even an adequate starter course. The moment the light went out, hell, before the thing even had the chance to hit the floor, I leapt at it like cat chasing nip. My shoulder collided with the wall bluntly, but I hardly noticed. I was way too focused on finding the flashlight and making it work again to care. My hands scrabbled around madly, reaching and sweeping in every direction. I didn't take long for me to feel the touch of hot metal and plastic under my fingers.

I almost gasped in relief when I grabbed it and flicked the switch. That relief, however, evaporated in a complete instant.

The light did not come on.

I almost lost it right then and there. If it were broken, that was without a doubt the end of me. All these times I kept finding a way out of a mess just kept leading me to new messes, and luck could only overcome so many of them.

I didn't lose it, because one of my trembling fingers managed to break through the encroaching madness in my brain to report that the battery latch was missing, and the battery with it. Relief made an instant comeback, not unlike the flick of a light switch. I would have laughed if I wasn't so close to going mad.

My free hand continued its frenzied search for the missing battery. I had to back up on my hands and knees and turn around several times, and as I did, I could feel that relief, and my ever-tenuous grip on sanity, sliding and sliding bit by bit. My breath was getting short and blood was being pounded through my veins, as though my heart was getting pissed off from being sped up and fucked with so often, and was taking its frustrations out on the blood by pumping it as hard as it could.

But finally, my fingers closed upon something round, metallic, and heavy for its size. That beautiful, wonderful D-cell battery which paved the way for me to see, it was back in my hands. I practically slammed it in the battery compartment of the flashlight, even before I bothered standing up. The back of the case was gone, but I didn't need it, and I wasn't about to waste any more time looking for it. All I wanted to do was get out of here and-

I jerked my hand back suddenly, as if it had landed on a red-hot burner. I felt that scurrying rush of that roach. The motion was so sudden that I almost lost my balance and fell over, only catching myself at the last minute. Quickly I stood, and-

There it was again, this time on my foot. Then on both feet. In several places on both feet. Up my legs! That was where one had attacked me, way back in the apartments, a million years ago. It left quite the nasty wound where it had tried to eat me from the inside out.

And that was just one of them.

Relief finally left town completely. Now I was gripped by terror, even as my finger flipped the switch on the flashlight, because I thought I knew what I was going to see.

I thought wrong. Or perhaps, I didn't think large enough. What I thought I would see was four or five of those fucking nasty puppy-sized cockroaches crawling around me.

The light came on. And I immediately found myself wishing there were only four or five. Or ten. Or twenty. Because there were fucking hundreds, thousands of them. Everywhere. Every last inch of this little concrete tomb was a writhing, churning mass of insect carapaces. Many of them were the obscenely large ones I had seen as of yet. Many more still were in increasingly diminutive sizes, all the way down to what was more or less normal, the cockroaches I was used to seeing, the ones the size of nickels and quarters. Not for a moment did I view the small ones as any less a threat than the large ones. Not that I was in much of a state of mind to really differentiate. There were far too many for the difference to matter at all.

I didn't scream. I did make a noise, but it wasn't a scream. To call it a scream would be insulting to real screams. What crawled up my throat and died was nothing but a pitiful, terrified whine.

The room was far too small to break into a run, so I leapt at the door, gripping its handle without any regard to the cockroaches crawling upon it. I crushed some of them in the process, but I couldn't care less. I turned the knob, ready to burst out the door and…

Locked.

Motherfucker.

The epithet was supposed to sound angry, but it came out sounding deflated and defeated. My grip on my self-control was slipping quickly. The writhing, massive horde of insects seemed to intensify in response. Their chittering, chitinous sounds, the soft thumps of the little bastards hitting me as they fell from the ceiling, that totally unnerving sensation of them crawling on me… it was enough to finally do me in. It was plenty.

That's when a small ray of light caught my eye, as it didn't come from my flashlight, and when I moved it away from the source, I noticed it didn't reflect that light, either. It was glowing on its own.

The keypad!

I smacked several cockroaches off of the pad, and with the faint glow from the keypad came a faint glow of hope. Only three of the nine numbers on the pad glowed. The other six were as dark as everything else.

Praying that my instincts were right, I started pushing the buttons, quickly and randomly. I heard an alarm buzz sharply several times while doing so, which I took to mean that I had entered an incorrect code. The buzzing repeated itself over and over again, and I punched the buttons faster and more furiously. With each loud denial, that faint thread of hope frayed more and more.

Just as I was absolutely certain that it was going to snap, that the keypad was just a cruel, false hope to fuck with me just a little more before I lost my sanity and my life, I heard a different sound, this one a note of definite approval, which for all its happiness and cheerfulness, was no less loud or sharp than the denial tones. Frantically, I grabbed the doorknob, again crushing several of the insects in the process, and pulled the door open hard enough to slam against the wall. I rushed out the door in a blind panic, slamming into the opposite wall myself. I threw my body around in a frenetic, crazy dance, striking the walls and rolling on the floor and beating myself so madly and wildly that one would have thought I was on fire. I was wailing as I did so, for I was so fantastically desperate to get rid of any and all cockroaches that escaped that cell with me. No matter how I tried though, I still felt the sensation of hundreds, of thousands of little monstrous bugs crawling over every inch of me. The sensation alone was driving me to the brink, and that was unfair after all I had just been through. My eyes popped open as I finally unleashed a good, thick scream…

…and I saw nothing. No roaches. Not a single one. Hurriedly, I sifted through the folds of my clothing, then I scanned the floors and walls. Not even one tiny cockroach was to be seen.

I should have been relieved. I should have been absolutely thrilled. Maybe I was. I don't know. But I didn't feel thrilled or relieved. I felt like I was crumbling from the inside out. I felt like my mind had finally had enough and had turned against me. I couldn't help myself this time. I gripped my knees and rolled on the floor, sobbing. I could hear the choked noises echoing through the corridor, I could feel the hot tears running down my face. Yet, I couldn't stop. I was afraid I would never be able to stop, that I wouldn't go out in a blaze of combat with a hellacious demon but curled up in a fetal position, weeping like a fucking infant.

I did manage to get myself under control, but it was a fight as hard as any combat I had encountered in town. It felt like I was pushing against a solid brick wall at first, but slowly, bit by painstaking bit, it yielded.

Finally, I was able to stand. I no longer wept, but my face was flushed and my mind felt numb and empty. I walked towards the locked gate and its HOLE with a zombie-like stutter. With a queer sort of detachment, I leaned over and twisted the spiral-writing key in the latch-lock. As soon as I did, the double-doors fell open, and the HOLE gaped wide and inviting.

I stared down that HOLE, the numbness giving way to anger, anger at how unfair it all was. I wound up and threw the key down the pit, hearing it bounce off of the wall with a light ting. The anger left me quickly. There was nothing to do about it. Holding it would only make this painful experience all the more so.

Now there was nothing but this HOLE, which cost me so much upstairs to access. After having to go through all that terrifying shit to open the gate, I felt much less apprehension about this HOLE than I did the first one. I couldn't see my face at that moment, but I'm sure it displayed that same dull, dim look as it had a moment ago. And I'm sure that it stuck with me as I took a light leap into the cavernous maw of the HOLE, going wherever it decided to take me.

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