D A Novel (George Right) - By George Right Page 0,60
even the sound of the electric motor. Then suddenly from the darkness ahead a desperate shriek came, this time female; now both Jane and Mike shuddered. Almost immediately from somewhere at the left a groan full of pain and hopeless despair responded to it; it slowly faded away and then on the right someone moaned as if trying to beg for something through a gag–probably, it was a very young girl... or even a child? And then Mike smelled a heavy, sticky stench and at the next moment–still in the same utter darkness–his face plunged into something like a dense web.
Mike had arachnophobia since his childhood and would rather have put his bare hand into a dirty toilet bowl than touch a web; his throat immediately spasmed in disgust and he desperately jerked his head, trying to escape from the nasty thing. As if having caught this movement, the car abruptly stopped, then rolled back a bit and stopped again. At the next instant a bright flash lit up what they had just ridden into.
And it was not a web.
Over the rails a long-ago decayed and dried-out corpse hung heels over head; most likely it was a women, or maybe a young girl–at such stage of decomposition it was difficult to discern an age. In any case, the victim had once had magnificent, voluminous, and long hair. Now only thin, fragile locks covered with dust remained; that was "the web." The victim was tied by barbed wire which deeply gnawed into the decayed flesh; here and there yellowed bones showed through ruptures in the browned skin. But the most terrible was the overturned face covered with a wrinkled parchment of dried-out skin: the mouth, open in a silent scream, showed rotten jaws; in place of the decomposed nose, there was a triangular hole divided by a vertical partition; gaping eye sockets resembled nibbled burrows. And the main thing, everywhere–in the mouth, in the nose, in the eye sockets—writhed small white worms. The head actually swarmed with them.
Yes, they weren't just motionless fake worms as it would be natural for a dummy. They were moving–in those three or four seconds when the light shone, Mike and Jane saw this clearly. And then the car jerked forward again, and they had to pass through her hair once more, now seeing distinctly what it was. And, no matter how they tried to turn their heads away, the dusty locks touched their faces again (mostly Mike's; Jane was only lightly brushed on her cheek). And then the light went out again.
From somewhere of the cave depths new groans sounded.
"Damn"... murmured Jane in the gloom while the car carried them further. "You were right, we shouldn't have..."
Someone's cold and wet hand touched her shoulder. The girl screamed. And the other hand at the same time touched Mike's shoulder.
The car stopped again and then suddenly turned in place–obviously, here the rails passed through a turntable. Again a directional light flashed, pulling out from the darkness what they had just disturbed.
It was a corpse, too, but this time, seemingly, male (though its back was turned to them, so it was difficult to say with full confidence) and not dried out but, on the contrary, inflated. The dead person had been rather fat even during his lifetime, but now his swollen body covered with cadaveric lividities and, apparently, ready to burst and splash out the purulent swill which had accumulated under its skin, looked especially disgusting. It was also suspended heels over head–or, more exactly, heels over neck, because the head was absent. Two meat hooks, hanging down from a ceiling on long chains, pierced its ankles from behind, having snagged the sinews. The dead man hung on these sinews stretched from its flesh by the weight of the bulky body like on terrible slings and long stains of dried-up blood–extending from the hooks covered with brown crust down along his legs which were like huge sausages–showed that he had been still alive when his flesh had been pierced.
His hands, which had touched Mike and Jane, still slightly waved, weaker and weaker. Then they stopped. The car stayed motionless, too. Then the light again went out.
"Move, damn it... " Mike murmured. As if having heard him, the car began to vibrate slightly–and suddenly the motor died again with an unpleasant metal clang. A clear smell of burned insulation added to the cadaveric stench. Engine failure? As if that wasn't enough!
"Hey!" the young man shouted into the darkness. "Hey,