time to consider it. He pulled Patrick’s quivering body against him, planning to retreat out of the mine shaft and up into the light of the world.
The mega-shriek blasted once more, this time much closer, the rancid air pressure surging.
And over Bub’s shoulder, Rulon’s yellow grin materialized in the mine shaft, like the world’s final, possessed jack-o’-lantern, come back from Halloween.
The priest’s face was the twisted rag of a man who cannot wake from a nightmare. Hell-winds caught the folds of his tattered robes and hauled them in all directions. One of his eye sockets was a cratered soup: the eyeball had been pierced and popped, like the Old Testament justice, so Rulon wept both tears and ooze.
He bore the hunter’s knife in his right hand.
“Michael Faris?” said Rulon. As if confused. Stopping for one second.
“R-r-reach—” Patrick was stuttering. He unzipped his jacket pocket, pulled out his orange plastic gun. “R-reach fer the s—”
Rulon snapped out of it. “If you know what will please your soul, boy,” he growled to Michael, “give me the sacrifice, give him to me!”
Michael pulled his brother closer.
The sounds of the Shrieks, building like drums of doom.
“Sacrifice yourself, asshole!” Michael bellowed.
The priest’s face went savage with rage. His knife sang upward. Rulon lunged toward them.
Michael had no time to plan: as Rulon attacked, Michael shoved Patrick away and out of Rulon’s path, then leapt in the opposite direction like a boy dodging the train in the very last moment in a game of chicken. Rulon screamed fury as Michael evaded him. Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw the priest try to rein back the momentum of his lunge, but perhaps there comes a time when momentum is fate: Rulon’s knife stabbed down, yes, but not on Michael or Patrick:
His blade came down, with his full force and hatred behind it, into the fractured wood of a support beam.
The support snapped like a wishbone.
The ceiling rumbled.
Rulon looked up, blinked.
The ceiling came down in front of Michael with a guttural roar. Air displaced. Michael threw up his hands, shouting, certain his life was over.
But a second later he looked up, still uncrushed. Only part of the ceiling had fallen in. How much, though, he didn’t know: the air was a swirling, nostril-burning haze.
“Bub?”
He heard Patrick hack. Over there, left, left! Michael crawled, feeling out like a blind man.
His hand found Patrick’s delicate chest, which was heaving and hacking viciously.
“Got you, Bub, here I am.” He looked down at Patrick, and he realized he could see now: light, low and weak, was illuminating Patrick. Which meant, oh thank God, that the way to the exit had not been blocked by the cave-in. In fact, all he had to do was go around that corner a few steps away, and he would be able to take them out of the mine shaft the same way he had come.
“H-here, M-Michael!” Patrick coughed.
Run. Now. That’s all. Just run around that corner and out of the mine, and this is over.
“I know. I’ve got you, Bub.”
“N-no, I mean,” Patrick racked, shaking his head, “They’re here! THEM!”
Goose chills screamed up Michael’s back.
With a sensation familiar from a hundred childhood nightmares—his vision being sucked, against every wish, toward some grim, waiting horror—Michael looked into the descending heart of the mine.
Past the mound of coal Rulon had brought down, something had come out of the depths.
Michael thought, It’s the Shrieks! but he immediately knew that wasn’t right. The Things invading the outer rim of light were eyeless, yes, and they hung upon the walls and ceiling like pale death-spiders. But they were not Shrieks, not any more than they were still Bellows.
Michael and Patrick were in the mine with something new, something ancient, and God help them.
Cady Gibson, clattering on the ceiling, led them, smiling its damned, everlasting smile.
Cady, who had entered this mine as a nine-year-old kid, still bore a ruined memory of the face, almost hurtfully beautiful, of the child it had been.
Cady Gibson, endgame mutation, was more bone than boy. The flesh of its arms was stripped entirely. Its fingers were a fan of fine, bleached blades. In its floating ribs, gray lung-sacks flapped. Raw tendon—taut and red—spiraled over the bones like the strings of a marionette brought to jigging life by some demoniacally grinning puppet master. Cady Gibson, the Terror, crawled across the black sky toward Michael and his brother, pealing forth cry after cry: a little boy leading its own hellish children outside to play.