Book of the Dead Read online

  “Wow,” Matt said, whistling softly and then inserting another mouthful of quesadilla. What’s with that? he wondered. Can’t be recovered, as the sinkholes are still active, or something else? Hmm, those damned holes must be deep, he concluded.

  And the earth really shall fall, he thought, frowning as he read on. The final pages of the paper surprised him – in the missing-pets section, there used to be maybe a single column of furry faces staring out. Instead there were endless appeals for Bitsy the black and white cat, Big Jim the Rottweiler or Sam the retriever – dozens and dozens, all gone missing.

  Times sure have changed, he thought and tore out the sinkhole article and the images from the paper. Matt jumped as his phone buzzed in his pocket, and seeing the unknown number he contemplated letting it go to message. He shrugged – he wasn’t exactly pressed for time, so he stuck it to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  He listened for a few seconds and nodded. “I’ve been known to do consulting, but my rates are – ” His eyebrows shot up. “Wow, I mean, sure, I think I can make that. A day’s work sounds interesting and coincidently I was just reading about – Yes, I understand.” He hung up and snorted. Government loves spending other people’s money. Still, a day’s consultancy at those rates with all expenses paid would take care of his rent for the next week. Why not? he wondered and looked again at the strange symbol, straining to remember its implication – nothing came.

  After a few seconds he had to look away. He took a bite of his quesadilla even though for some reason he felt a bit queasy.

  *

  Sun Valley, Idaho

  Deputy Will Kramer walked the girl up her front steps, and then checked her house from top to bottom before she would let him leave. Her face was pale, which made the dark rings under her eyes all the more prominent.

  After twenty minutes, he left her standing in the hallway, every light blazing in the house. He placed one of his police cards on the hall table, tapping it and asking her to call him if she remembered anything, or had any concerns. She never moved a muscle.

  Kramer whistled air through compressed lips. She’d gone out for a date with her boyfriend, and something had scared them – a monster, she had called it. Now her boyfriend was missing, and she looked about a hair’s breadth away from running screaming down the street and all the way out of town.

  He stood at the open door, and touched his hat. She still didn’t move, just stood with her shoulders slumped and hair forward over her face.

  “Alison, I’ll call if we find out anything, okay?” There was the slightest hint of a nod. Kramer exhaled and shut the door.

  Doesn’t look like any breakup I ever seen, he thought as he jumped back in his cruiser and eased away from the curb. He headed straight over to the missing man’s house. Mr Marc Rice lived right on Knob Hill Park at the end of Alpine Lane – ten minutes away.

  Kramer slowed as he turned into the street. It was coming up to three in the morning, and it was tomb silent. He wound down the window as he pulled over exactly where Alison had told them she had seen her boyfriend for the last time, earlier in the evening. He switched off his car, and listened to the engine tick as it cooled – there was nothing else – no sound, no motion.

  His eye caught movement and his neck wrenched as he swung around quickly. Several large fat cockroaches were heading single file along the gutter toward the park. They moved quick and with purpose. In a moment, they had entered the grassed area and vanished into the dark void.

  “Good riddance,” he whispered.

  Looking to the sidewalk, he saw that it still glistened from the spillage mentioned in the report. He grimaced as several cockroaches stopped at its edge, seemed to taste it, and then headed at top speed into the park. He pushed open the door, stepped out and stretched his back.

  Kramer wrinkled his nose; the air stank of a strange fishy odor. “Phew, garbage day.”

  He pulled his long black flashlight free and held it up in his fist. He then touched the button on the mic attached to his shoulder. “Sal, going to check out the park at Knob Hill. Over.”

  “Okay, Will: stay in contact and take care,” the voice said in among the crush of electronic noise.

  “You got it. Kramer out.” He swung the flashlight around. There was nothing but the foul odor. Stepping up onto the pavement, he saw that the black spillage marks had mostly dried, but still left a silvery snail trail that shone stickily in his beam.

  “Nice.” He walked slowly toward the park, unconsciously placing his steps to avoid crushing leaves, roaches, or making any noise. He didn’t know why, but he had the urge to be as silent as humanly possible. He came to the park edge and its fringe of trees. For the most part the park was empty save for scrubby bushes and a huge rocky outcrop that gave the area its name. Normally this time of year it was dry and smelled of dust, and not much else.

  Knob Hill Park wasn’t exactly a showpiece, like some of the national park areas closer to Bald Mountain that had willows, alders, cottonwoods, and sedges with Idaho fescue and bluebunch wheatgrass growing underneath. This was more an open space favored by dirt bike riders on weekends, much to the chagrin of the peace-loving residents nearby.

  Kramer exhaled through pressed lips and shook his head. He doubted it would even be used for that any more, now that a huge sinkhole had opened up in its center. He walked out a few dozen feet, breathing through his mouth to avoid the sulfurous odors wafting over the dry ground. He panned his light slowly over the landscape.

  “Jesus Christ.” He started, and felt his neck and scalp tingle from the shock. Someone was there. Still as a post, but around fifty feet further in, standing there in the dark. Kramer couldn’t tell if the guy was facing him or not. However, he looked big, bigger then him, and damned bulky. Marc Rice had been a little dude, according to his girl.

  “That you, Clem?” Kramer squinted. “Trying to give me a heart attack here?” Big Clem Johnson was an ex-wrestler, six-eight easy, but this guy seemed even bigger.

  Kramer reached down to unclip his gun while keeping the beam of his light on the figure. He advanced a half dozen feet. “Sir, you need a hand?” He waited, but the figure didn’t flinch.

  He swore softly, and angled his head to touch the mic button on his shoulder. “Got someone in Knob Hill Park. Not responding to instructions.” He went to take another step, but felt his primitive core rebel. “Ah, Sal, are there any cars in the area you could send?”

  “Will, is there a problem?” Her voice contained a hint of concern.

  Kramer smiled. “No, no, just like to have some backup. This guy is no lightweight and isn’t talking.” He let go of the microphone, and stood a little straighter. Kramer, at six-two, was a fair-sized man, and broad across the shoulders. But he guessed he fell about a foot shy of this guy and was outweighed by a hundred pounds.

  “Sir.” He drew his gun. In the entire time he had been in the force, he had only drawn it once, when a car chase dropped a load of out-of-town gang-bangers on their doorstep a few years back. Even then, he hadn’t needed to fire it.

  He stopped his approach, and started to crab to the side, trying to see under what he assumed was a hood or shawl up over the guy’s head. He tried again with the light, but couldn’t see to pick out any definition – inside the hood, it just looked empty – and wet.

  “Sir, you need to answer me. Sir.” Kramer swallowed, feeling the pulse of his heart in his chest and neck. He had advanced to within ten feet of the figure, and up closer he seemed even bigger than ever…Or is this guy actually getting bigger? he wondered. One thing was for sure, this was no resident.

  Kramer resorted to breathing through his mouth as the smell up close was revolting, and he wondered whether the guy had shit himself. He took another step, but felt his stomach roil, from nerves. His feet were begging to challenge his commands, as if his body recognized danger that his brain was too dumb to notice.

  Where the fuck is that backup? He ground his teeth.

 
Maybe a warning shot, he thought. He looked back briefly at the houses through the line of trees. Better not: he’d panic them. He turned back and saw that the thing had shifted, only slightly, but the bulkiness had…rearranged. Then an eye opened inside the hood – he was close enough to see in the beam of a park safety light that it was an amazing grey-blue. It blinked once, and then another opened beside it. Then, to Kramer’s horror, another eye opened – an inch above the first two.

  “What the fuck?” Kramer lifted his gun in one hand like he’d been trained – gun up, and resting on the lower wrist of the flashlight hand with the light turned toward the target. He strained, working hard to stop the shaking in his limbs as more and more orbs popped open on the thing, and just as quickly bubbled back into the body. The slimy black was no cape or hood or suit: it was the thing. What freaked him the most was that he knew all the eyes saw him, looked at him, sized him up, and stared with interest. Soon other pustules and protuberances bulged and formed, and Kramer’s nerves gave out. He dragged one foot back a half step.

  It was if that stumble was the trigger for the thing to explode into movement. It went from a roughly man-shaped column of blackness to a ragged tentacled monstrosity in a second – and in even less time it was a wave of goo enveloping him.

  Kramer felt the thing cover his entire body, and every dot of his exposed skin felt compressed, hot and greasy, and then the pain came – it was like being bathed in battery acid. He still held his gun and fired and fired, over and over, the bullets punching holes in the dark flesh, but the holes quickly closed over. It made no difference to its hold on him.

  In the last seconds of his consciousness, he felt himself lifted and something warm and wet worm its way into his mouth and force itself down his throat and into his stomach. He would have vomited if he could.

  Alison’s monster, he thought as he felt himself being carried, and he knew exactly where – the sinkhole.

  Chapter 4

  Darayya, outskirts of Damascus, Syria

  Alfarouq skipped down the early-morning street. Dust puffed up as his battered shoes touched what remained of the sidewalk – broken roof tiles, decrepit cardboard boxes, smashed windows and miles of rubble littered the bloodstained concrete. The only real traffic was the occasional beat-up truck, and perhaps a cruising military vehicle on the lookout for snipers, insurgents or other slow-moving targets. Violence was now so common and enduring that ten-year-old ‘Fookie’ remembered little else.

  Darayya City was one of the oldest in Syria, and home to over seventy-five thousand people. It was said it was where Paul the Apostle had his conversion to Christianity – on the road to Damascus, as the saying went. Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Druzes, all gone now: chased out. Fookie shrugged. Everyone would be gone soon, and then who would be left to fight? He thought about it, and then made up his mind – maybe a good thing.

  Fookie picked up a metal rod and banged it on the ground, making a hollow clang that reverberated down the street, fading away to silence…almost. A single fat roach marched out from under a broken box, and he banged the steel rod down again, crushing it in half. “I’m boss here,” he said to its remains.

  Lifting his head, he could just hear the faint sound of a radio playing somewhere, and he headed toward it, hoping some of his friends had woken and were gathering for another idle day on the streets.

  He kicked at a soda bottle, sending it spinning down the road, and watched as it whirled to a stop. Something crashed into the ground beside it in a dark and wet explosion. Fookie frowned and took a few steps closer. Another thing struck the littered street further away, breaking glass, and sending a small billow of dust into the air. Then came another and another. One of the things flapped once, weakly, and then lay still. A blackbird, then, he guessed.

  He approached one of the smashed birds and lifted his rod, ready to poke at it, but paused mid-reach as the street rumbled beneath him. Fookie looked up and saw a few windows open and heads stick out; scowling faces stared down at him, as though somehow he was the cause of the deep vibrations.

  Fookie looked above their heads, then higher – the brightening sky was filled with circling birds – not all the same – some huge crows, some starlings, pigeons and tiny fast-moving sparrows that darted in among the tornado of feathers and fury. They took turns peeling off, and then dive-bombing the ground, committing suicide in some sort of strange attack on the Earth.

  Another vibration, shallow this time, as though something was getting nearer. Fookie looked around, confused, and not a little frightened now. The ground jumped up and down, and mortar and tiles fell from roofs to explode on the already debris-littered street. As if a signal had been given, the remaining birds all started to dive at the ground, striking hard, dying instantly. They were silent missiles of flesh and feather; their fury was unbounded.

  Fookie placed his hands up over his head and ran for a tattered awning as the birds continued to explode in red wetness around him.

  “Crazy,” he screamed once under cover. He pointed his rod at the small bodies beginning to pile up in the street. “Crazy.”

  He could hear alarms going off, and shouts of confusion and also of terror. Fookie thought it might be a good idea to retreat home for a while and looked up to check for more birds. The sky seemed empty so he ran hard – just as the ground gave a mighty heave. Right then, from out of every doorway, window, drain, and crack in the pavement, roaches streamed in long lines, falling over each other, excited, skittering and scattering, moving faster than anything Fookie had ever seen.

  He screamed, but his voice was drowned out as a huge crack ran down the center of the road, unzipping to reveal blackness that was like a river of night opening at his feet. The roaches piled into it like lemmings on their suicide dive. A vile gas belched upward and then a jet of hot air that made the young boy gag as he ran. He held his nose, crying now. Fookie ran harder, in a wide-legged style, looking like a ragged sailor trying to keep his balance on the heaving deck of a ship at sea. He leaped over the crack that was widening from an inch to many feet in a blink. The ground on the other side fell a foot, then immediately rose about a dozen feet. Fookie tripped and fell forward onto his face. He lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder. The buildings, the street, the piles of dead birds, hung there momentarily, before dropping…and dropping and dropping. A deafening roar filled the air as though some giant beast was in its death throes.

  Dust rose in sheets as the buildings slid downward. As Fookie stared, he had the impression of terrified faces pressed against windows that had been three stories in the air, but were sinking now into a void that continued to grow. There was a howling, perhaps of stone and steel being crushed, or was it the sound of a thousand voices collectively shrieking their horror?

  Fookie’s nerve broke and he also screamed again, backing away crablike, as the ground continued to grind beneath him. He squeezed his eyes tight and covered his ears for many minutes until the ground stopped shaking. When he finally peeped from just one eye, there were settling clouds of dust, and a monstrous pit, bigger even than the Aarjess Soccer Stadium.

  The entire block, Fookie’s block, had been swallowed.

  *

  Hussein ben Albadi, former Doctor of Anthropology at the University of Damascus, felt the pull of vertigo as he stood at the edge of the enormous crater or pit or whatever it was that had opened up in the earth. Even standing right at its edge, and seeing the massive emptiness before him, he found it hard to believe.

  Thousands of people had been evacuated from the surrounding suburbs, but still there were hundreds of figures lining the rim: people who, like him, had come to gaze into the crater’s depths. Government forces, rebels, fanatics had all suspended hostilities to stand shoulder to shoulder with disbelieving neighbors.

  Albadi crouched, as he didn’t trust his shaking legs so close to something that overwhelmed his senses. Looking down, where the light still allowed details to be seen, there was a cross section of the s
urface world, as if someone had sliced a child’s birthday cake, and the layers of icing, sponge and cream were all laid bare. Except here, it wasn’t sugar and sweets on display, but half basements with furniture stacked against walls, an underground car park with a single car left hanging precariously at the edge of nothingness, the other vehicles having been swallowed by the monstrous pit, and broken pipes, the water pouring from their severed ends turning to mist long before it disappeared into the darkness. Further down, and just before everything disappeared in darkness, he saw what was below human intrusion into the thin outer skin of our world. The soil here became bedrock. Whatever had occurred had pulled down buildings, streets, soil, and even hundreds of feet of solid stone.

  Albadi couldn’t even guess at how far it went down but, like a few others at the edge, he had a small pair of field glasses that he used to peer into the depths. Once or twice he thought he saw movement but quickly discounted it as a trick of the near non-existent light against the dark and darker shadows.

  A few hundred feet along, someone lit and dropped a red smoking flare into the depths. Some pulled back momentarily, fearful the dot of heat and light would ignite flammable gasses, but eventually curiosity won out, and they crept back to watch it drop lower and lower, until it became a flaring spark that finally landed, creating a small pool of hellish red light on the sunken architecture about a thousand feet below them.

  Albadi exhaled and felt slightly dizzy. He perspired profusely, and didn’t feel well at all. Apart from the feeling of empathetic shock at the knowledge that hundreds of people were either dead or trapped down in the depths of the crater, there was something else – a feeling of unease and foreboding that made his gut roil. When he had read about the people going missing, and the holes opening up, he had been dreading this. Could it be true? he wondered.

  He and a few other academics had taken it upon themselves to preserve the great literary history, the precious works in the ancient Damascan library, from terrorists and looters. Albadi and the other men and women had worked with a mix of speed and care as they packed up the ancient books, manuscripts and scrolls. However, there had been one discovery that had frozen him. Wrapped in an oilcloth, hidden from sight between two religious texts, it was just a copy of an earlier work, but still, from the first page, it had taken his breath away. Fanciful blasphemy, he had thought from the scraps he had been able to read.