Through the Gates of Hell

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->

Chapter Five

Walt tried to rub the purple gore from his shirt and trousers, but it was no use. The stuff just dug into the fibers, and he doubted that even washing his clothes would remove the stink. He could clean his pickaxe, however, so he busied himself doing that. He dug a rag from his back pocket and methodically wiped the pick and the flat edge clean, and then wiped off the handle until there wasn’t a speck of spider guts on it. Rather than put the rag back in his pocket, he tossed it away.

Spiders weren’t the worst thing they could have run into, but he had panicked and freaked out, and he hated that the others had seen him acting that way. He could have slapped Maggie for touching the web, but Robert probably would have insisted on entering the tunnel anyway, so he figured it didn’t matter much. And the spiders would have come for them either way, so maybe it was better that they were still in the larger mine chamber instead of the tunnel itself, where they would have been overrun by sheer numbers.

He stared at the carnage and just marveled at how many spiders there were. They must have killed fifty of the damned things, and they came out almost without a scratch.

Almost, that is. Robert was currently leaning against the wall, his trouser leg pulled up to reveal a nasty spider bite on his calf. Both the women were fussing over him, trying to wrap it up in a handkerchief, since no one had thought to bring bandages with them.

“Does it hurt?” Maggie asked.

“It stings,” Robert said, “but I can put weight on it.”

Eleanor touched the edge of the bite, which was puffy and red and seeping watery-looking blood. “Please tell us right away if you feel sick,” she said seriously. “Regular spider bites are dangerous enough. A bite from one of these awful creatures must be even worse.”

“I hate to say this,” Maggie said, although Walt doubted that she really hated to say it, “but should we head back to town and get you to a doctor?”

“I’m fine,” Robert said. “Good enough to keep going, at least.”

Eleanor stood up and patted dust from her knees, as if it mattered since her black nun’s dress was filthy already. She said to Walt and said, “You behaved as if you had seen these beasts before, Walter. Do you know if their bite is venomous?”

“’Course it is,” Walt said. “They’re spiders, ain’t they?”

“How venomous?” Robert asked.

Walt shrugged. “It won’t kill you. Not one bite, at least.”

“That’s all I needed to hear,” Robert said. He picked his shotgun back up and cracked it open. He pulled out the spent shells and tossed them away. “Let’s get moving. We know this tunnel is safe, at least, so let’s try and hurry. Time’s wasting.”

They walked in the same order as before, with Robert and Maggie in front. Walt was fine with that arrangement, since they were the people carrying guns, after all. He had to admit that his doubts about the gunslinger had been unfounded. When the spiders came, she pulled out her six-shooters and shot them to pieces. He didn’t think a single shot had missed its mark. The woman was good with a gun, that was for sure. Walt was more than willing to let her walk in front.

The mine tunnel was full of webs, so thick in places they were practically opaque. Robert pushed through them using the stock of his shotgun, while Maggie used her hand to brush them aside. It was like walking down a very narrow hallway draped in flimsy white blankets, and they left chunks of tangled spider webs in their wake, some of which clung to their clothing like a shroud.

The tunnel continued for a bit and then dipped down sharply and leveled out. Crude steps had been hacked out of the rock to make it possible to get down and back up the slope, but the steps were narrow and uneven. Some miners worked that way, Walt knew. Any effort that was not spent on digging out more dark stone was wasted effort. The only reason they had chipped out the stairs at all was because it would have been impossible to make it back up the incline. Hauling out the excavated dirt and stone involved back-breaking labor, but few miners took the time to make that job easier. Their focus was always digging deeper and faster to get as much dark stone as possible. Everything else was a secondary concern.

Walt let his hand touch the side of the tunnel. He could almost feel the impact of the picks and shovels against the rock, as if the ground had a memory of its own. He’d worked in mines almost since he was old enough to walk. As a small child, he had helped his father mine for silver in Colorado, carrying buckets of dirt and rocks that were almost as big as he was. When he was a young boy, he’d sifted and panned for gold in creeks and rivers in California. He’d staked his first claim when he was sixteen and he had not looked back since. A whole life spent digging and hacking at the ground, hoping to find a speck of shiny metal. When the first rumors of dark stone spread out of Arizona, Walt had packed his equipment and come right away, not even knowing for sure if the rumors were entirely true. But he trusted his instincts, and they told him that there was money to be made.

Since he had arrived, he had found and lost multiple fortunes. A smarter man would surely have stopped at the second one, saved up as much as possible, and retired somewhere nice. But Walt couldn’t let it go. Mining was his entire life, it was all he knew. It never occurred to him that he could stop and give up this life for something better.

And with dark stone, it was even worse. The stuff got into his blood. Some men said that too much exposure to dark stone could infect a man like a disease, and Walt knew it was true. He had spent too long around the stuff. He was addicted, that was a fact. Dark stone flowed in his veins.

Despite all of its uses and valuable qualities, dark stone was an unnatural substance, and it could turn men into something unnatural as well. There were times when Walt, in the middle of his most harmful periods of addiction, felt like the dark stone had taken root in his body like a cancer. He thought he could feel it just under the skin, rippling and pulsing like a parasite eating him alive from the inside.

For the moment, Walt pushed those thoughts aside. Like any hopeless addict, Walt desired dark stone even if he knew it was slowly killing him. There was dark stone down in this mine, just a little bit farther, and Walt wanted it more than anything in the world.

They passed under a heavy wooden brace. Maggie practically flinched as she crossed under it, as if it might collapse down on top of them. The other three members of his makeshift posse were all uncomfortable down here, burdened by the knowledge of the immense weight of the ground over their heads. One tiny tremble or shift and it all might come crashing down. If the mine tunnel collapsed right now, no one would ever come looking for them or recover their bodies, no one would ever know it had happened. Their disappearance would be written off as another sad tragedy, and their names would be added to the list of people mysteriously killed by the otherwordly beings in the mines. The men back in town would sigh and shake their heads and say they had been warned.

The shaft twisted left and right, the walls cut and chopped into crevices and narrow alcoves, loose dirt all over the floor of the mine. As they walked, they inadvertently kicked up some of the dirt, raising clouds of dust that obscured their vision and left an unpleasant taste in their mouths.

Robert looked over his shoulder and said, “Walt, you seem to know this place. How much farther does this tunnel go? Is there another room ahead?”

“Yeah,” Walt answered vaguely. He pointed ahead with his pickaxe. “It’s a bit farther.”

“Have you been in this mine before?”

“Yeah, I have.”

Robert narrowed his eyes. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?”

Walt couldn’t be bothered to lie, so he just shrugged. “I don’t know. Figured you already knew. Didn’t seem important. I’ve been to most of the mines ‘round here.”

If Robert was suspicious, he didn’t act on it. He seemed more annoyed than doubtful of Walt’s motives. The fact that they had discovered Elijah’s body proved that this was the right mine, regardless of why Walt had brought them there. And Walt had done his best to warn them about the spiders, so it wasn’t like he was deliberately leading them into danger.

Not that Walt cared either way. He would have come back here eventually, with or without the others. He wouldn’t have been able to stay away. In fact, bringing Robert and the others with him was fortunate, because he couldn’t have fought off all those spiders by himself. With their help, he would get what he came for, and if they managed to rescue some innocent people along the way, then that was fine with him too.

As they made their way down the tunnel, Eleanor suddenly whispered to him, “Are you a God fearing man, Walter?”

He ignored her question at first, not wanting to get into a conversation. But something ate at him until he muttered back, “I ain’t seen no reason in my life to think about God much. Plenty to fear right here in the real world, ain’t there?”

“The reason I ask,” Eleanor said, “is because I don’t believe we need to fear God. God does not want us to fear him, only to love Him as he loves us. I can tell that you’re not a religious man, Walter, but it is in trying times like these that we need God’s love the most. We are surrounded by the forces of evil on all sides. Without God’s love to protect us and guide us, we are doomed.”

“Lots of folks died in these mines,” Walt grunted. “I guess God didn’t love them enough, huh?”

“God’s love is eternal and everlasting,” Eleanor said, unperturbed. “But we must accept that love, Walter. God made us with free will, because only with free will can we truly love God. If we choose to ignore God’s love, then the Devil and his minions can lead us astray. I believe many of the people who came to these mining towns seeking fame and fortune were led astray,” she added gravely.

“I suppose that’s true enough,” Walt said. “But I thought God was supposed to be all-powerful? Don’t it say that in your little book?”

“Oh, He is,” Eleanor said. “But not in the way you think. He created the universe and created all of mankind, but He cannot override our free will. If God could force us to accept Him, then we would not truly have free will at all, and our love would therefore be meaningless. God loves us and protects us, but the Devil is always trying to tempt us and pull us away from His grace.”

Walt wondered what it would be like to think that way. To believe in some greater power that cared about whether you lived or died. Walt’s mother had died of an infection, and his father died in an accident in a mine. God’s love hadn’t protected them, now had it? Walt had known plenty of religious people who died just the same way, of diseases and accidents and plain old bad luck, and God hadn’t protected them either.

However, Walt had to admit one thing. He might not believe there was some God in the sky that represented pure love and goodness, but he absolutely believed in pure evil. If the Devil – or Satan or Lucifer or whatever you wanted to call it – truly existed, then dark stone was its most powerful weapon. Dark stone consumed men’s souls and turned them into monsters. If that wasn’t the work of the Devil, then nothing was.

He did not say this out loud. Eventually, Eleanor stopped waiting for a response and turned her attention back to the tunnel in front of them. Robert and Maggie, if they had been listening to the short conversation, did not comment on it.

They followed the meandering tunnel for a bit longer, passing through the leftover detritus of mining work: broken picks and shovels, brushes and hammers, pieces of broken wood and empty whiskey bottles, empty oil cans and discarded lanterns, and other random junk and garbage.

The mine shaft opened up into a larger space, revealing a roughly-shaped chamber with a ceiling with jagged pikes of stone like carved stalactites. The light from Eleanor’s lantern barely illuminated the far walls, which remained mostly cloaked in shadow. Walt felt sweat drip from under his arms and down his back. At some point, without him and the others even realizing it, the air had turned humid and damp, and there was a faint mist in the air like a steam pipe had ruptured, filling the chamber with watery vapor.

Robert stepped forward in the chamber and immediately glanced up at the ceiling and around the nearby walls, probably checking for more spiders. Maggie and Eleanor followed him, looking around warily, but Walt hesitated at the entrance for a moment or two, gripping his pickaxe tightly. His breath was tight in his lungs, and he felt like he was struggling to breath, but not from the humidity.

“Do you …” he stammered, “Do you feel that …?”

Robert turned and looked at him. He looked concerned for a moment, and then his eyes went wide and he nodded in a jerky motion, swinging his shotgun back toward the center of the room.

“I feel it, all right,” Robert said. “Something’s coming.”

Eleanor peered into the darkness ahead, lifting her lantern up higher. “What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t see anything,” Maggie said nervously.

Walt could feel it all around him, echoing through the stone, like the rumble of an oncoming landslide. A lifetime in mines had taught him to recognize each and every quake and tremor, to know which were natural movements of the stone, and which were the warning signs of a tunnel collapse. He could read the tremble of earth like a blind man reading Braille. And right now the entire mine was screaming with movement from every direction.

The women didn’t know what was happening. To Walt it felt like the ground was shaking under their feet like an earthquake, but neither Maggie nor Eleanor could sense it. Eleanor swung the lantern around in a long arc, trying to shine the light into every dark corner, while Maggie waved her gun in the air, trying to figure out what was happening.

“Get ready!” Robert shouted, swinging his gun left and right.

“Where?” Maggie cried in a panic, her pistol shaking in her grasp. “There’s nothing here!”

In a split-second, the world exploded all around them, filling the air with dust and dirt. Maggie screamed and suddenly all Hell broke loose.

From out of the ground, huge writhing creatures broke free and slithered toward them. At first glance, they were like enormous snakes with rough blueish skin and a soft pink underside, but they did not have heads or mouths, and they did not entirely emerge from their holes, as if most of their body was still underground. They were not independent creatures at all, but merely the huge grasping arms of one. They were like the tentacle limbs of an octopus, with oozing pink suckers on the bottom, and they swung around violently, blindly trying to grab at anything within reach.

Gunfire erupted as Robert and Maggie began shooting. The muzzle flashes from their guns lit up the mine chamber like bolts of lightning. Everything had erupted into chaos, with dirt and chunks of stone raining down, and the sound of screams and gunfire filling the dusty air. The huge blue tentacle arms slammed down and swung at them like battering rams. They all thrashed around so fast that Walt couldn’t even tell how many there were.

It was only by pure luck that Maggie didn’t get herself smashed by one of them. Guns blazing, she stumbled backwards and fell onto her back as one of the tentacles swung around, hitting empty air where she had been standing.

Walt hefted his pickaxe and jumped forward. He could only hope that Maggie didn’t accidentally shoot him in the back. With a roar of rage and hatred, he swung the pickaxe down with all his might, burying the sharp blade directly in the squirming tentacle’s rough blue flesh. It made no sound, but it shook with incredible strength, and it took every ounce of muscle for Walt to remain holding onto the pickaxe. Finally the tentacle yanked itself free, spewing purple gore, and Walt regained his footing to launch himself at the next one that came close.

Robert blasted away with his shotgun, each shot tearing off a piece of tentacle, but it barely slowed them down. When Robert had to stop and reload, one of the arms struck him in the side and hurled him to the ground. He grimaced in pain, but finished reloading and fired at the tentacles from a prone position. Walt leaped in between the flailing arms and pounded them with his pickaxe, but one of them swung sideways and knocked him clear off his feet. The impact was enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. It felt like he’d been kicked by a horse.

Maggie was down on one knee, firing away with her pistol, her left hand a blur as it swept back across the hammer. The gun spat out bullets like a gatling gun, and she flicked open the chamber and reloaded in seconds. Each bullet she fired struck home, hitting the same tentacle that was squirming its way toward Robert. Finally, riddled with holes, it shuddered and flopped to the ground.

But there were still more of the thrashing tentacles remaining. Suddenly, Walt heard Eleanor’s voice cry out loud and clear from behind them. The nun had both hands raised into the air, and Walt could have sworn that the light that shined from her didn’t come entirely from the lantern. It was as if a column of light shone down on her from above, even though that was impossible.

“Lord, give me strength!” she called out in a voice that boomed with undeniable power. “Let us feel your divine hand in our time of need! Grant me the power to carry out your divine will! These foul servants of Satan must be destroyed! Let them burn in the unholy fires of Hell!”

Walt flinched back as the entire chamber seemed to flash with dazzling light, and then one of the tentacles burst into flames. The ground seemed to split and crack open as a blazing inferno rose up to swallow it. The tentacle lit up as if it had been soaked in gasoline, and it thrashed and flailed helplessly against the pulsing fire. One of the other tentacles brushed against it and was immediately swept up in the flames as well. The entire mine chamber glowed with pulsing orange light, and Walt gasped as the intense heat swept across his face.

Maggie suddenly screamed as one of the tentacles slithered across the floor and wrapped itself around her leg. It pulled back hard, bringing Maggie with it, dragging her across the floor as she blasted it with her pistol. Walt ran over and slammed his pickaxe down into the tentacle and it thrashed, uncoiling from Maggie’s leg. She kept shooting at it until it stopped moving, shouting and using foul language that Walt had never heard come out of a woman’s mouth.

“Walt!” Robert shouted.

He was struggling against one of the other tentacles, forcing it back with his shotgun, but unable to get a shot off. The tentacle had wrapped itself around his torso and was trying to pull him back. Walt ran over and slammed his pickaxe into the wriggling arm, and it snapped backward, slamming him to the ground once more. The tentacle furiously rose up and swung down to smash into the ground with all its weight, and Walt managed to roll to the side in time avoid being crushed by the blow.

A moment later, the tip of the tentacle disintegrated by a blast from Robert’s shotgun and it flopped over, twitching and gushing purple slime. Walt rolled over and fumbled for his pickaxe, but he felt weak after getting knocked down the second time, and couldn’t seem to regain his footing.

Eleanor still held her Bible high, seemingly bathed in bright light, and stood fearlessly as the last remaining blue tentacle swung in her direction. It smashed into the wall of the chamber, knocking free bits of stone and dirt from the ceiling. Eleanor finally backed away, holding her Bible like a shield.

Robert and Maggie ran over and unloaded their guns into the tentacle, filling the air with the roar of gunfire. Walt managed to get his feet under him and tried to hurry over, but the last tentacle shuddered and flopped to the ground before he got there.

The fight was over. He bent over, hands on his knees, and tried to catch his breath. Behind him, the two burning tentacles crackled and hissed in the flames, and he turned to see one of the dead tentacles, riddled with bullets, slowly drag backwards and get sucked back into the hole that it had come from.

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->