Beneath a Winter Moon (54 page)

“It’s silver, Delmar. No wonder the bastard freaked over the knife. The blade is pure silver!” He smiled. He had a defense after all…
maybe even an offense
.

“Great, let’s keep moving,” Delmar grumbled, but a moment later he slipped, his hand finding nothing in the blackness where there should have been tunnel floor. He muttered a curse under his breath. “I need the flashlight.”

Thomas marveled at what he saw as he looked over the big man’s back and shoulders. The tunnel halted, opening up into a cavern five times the size of those they’d seen so far in these mountains. It was amazing. The cavern was oval-shaped and at least a hundred meters across to the opposite wall from where they sat at the end of their tunnel. Pools of crystal clear water lay all around the floor of the cavern, so still and pure that they looked like mirrors.

“We’ve got to see if this is it or if there is another tunnel. By God’s grace there will be another—but if there is, will we be able to fit inside it? That will be the question.”

“Why?” Delmar asked, incredulously.

“Why, what?”

“Why does their have to be
another tunnel?
”

“Water made these. So, it had to flow both in, and out. Somewhere in here is another tunnel.” Thomas was not sure of that, but he wanted to sound positive.

“We will have to jump down…looks like about eight feet.”

“Let’s go. I will hand Jack to you.” It was not so easy to hand a seventy pound dog to a man standing at the bottom of an eight foot drop, but Thomas managed, and soon all three were standing safely in the cavern. Thomas and Delmar drank their only canteen of water and refilled from the crystal clear pools.

They heard another howl. Closer.

“We’ve got to go or we’ve got to set up a defense,” Delmar groaned. “We don’t have much time. I can feel him again.”

“Maybe he will go the wrong way, like we did,” Thomas offered.

“Maybe he just did, and that’s why he’s howling…because he’s pissed.”

Thomas scrambled along the walls, shining his flashlight. On the opposite end of the tunnel, where he and Delmar met from opposite directions, they found what they were looking for. Only they found two tunnels again, and not just one.

“Damn,” Thomas said as they stared at the tunnels. One was about six feet off the ground, up on the cavern wall, and the other was at ground level. “Which do we choose?”

“We don’t have time to make the wrong choice,” Delmar said. “We can’t afford to waste a single minute.”

“You go into the upper tunnel and I will check out the lower. Thirty seconds. We turn around and make the decision.”

Delmar shook his head, but felt the idea was sound, so he agreed. “At least these are big enough for us to stand in.”

The tunnels were three times the size of the one they had been in. Even Delmar could stand up without stooping. Thomas and Jack disappeared in their ground tunnel after boosting Delmar up into the higher one.

Thomas ran through the tunnel, splashing through trickling water. He knew it must be sloping up, as the water entered the cavern from this tunnel, but he could not feel an incline. He slowly counted to thirty. Nothing changed. He turned around, commanded Jack to lead on, and ran back for the cavern.

Delmar was scrambling down from the tunnel as Thomas made it back into the cavern.

“It slopes up,” Delmar said, panting. “No change…keeps going.”

“Damn,” Thomas cursed, “Mine too.”

It was Delmar who broke the short silence. “Look, it’s a coin toss…but think about that bastard who is coming for us. He’s a monster, now…not a free-thinking person. He’ll dive into the first tunnel he finds if our scent is inside.”

Thomas nodded. “He’ll head into the one here at ground level.”

“Right—so we go in the high one. Besides, we came here in one that was high off the ground…maybe this used to join it…like you said…a gazillion years ago.”

“You’ve sold the idea, Hero. Jack and I lead.”

Delmar nodded.

By the time they heard the next howl, which thankfully did not seem any closer than the previous one, they were up inside the tunnel and moving. Thomas led into the pure darkness of the tunnel. They could not afford to shine the flashlights any longer. Though they had already traveled in the pitch-black, Thomas was stunned at first and a little out of sorts when they turned their lights off. They had traveled so slow in the other, smaller tunnel that the roominess of this one took getting used to. Soon, though, Thomas was leading almost at a run. He kept one arm out in front and the other along the wall’s edge. He pushed back the fear of stepping off into a bottomless hole, dragging poor Jack along with him. Even so, he decided to travel as close to the tunnel wall as he could.

Delmar had tied a small piece of parachute cord to Thomas’s belt loop and held it in his hand as he followed. Like Thomas, he’d never been in or known such utter darkness. The next howl told them that their pursuer had made it into the cavern and had taken the wrong tunnel. Their were many howls now, and all were of pure fury.

The beast huffed for their scent. He did not understand why they were not there when their scent stopped. Only when he had turned and come back from the large tunnel had he come to some semblance of understanding. There was more than one human, but he’d followed the scent of just one and the small animal that was with him. It wasn’t a wolf, but the beast knew it was something like him. A predator. Small and puny, but like him in many ways.

The beast was uneasy with the complete darkness. He was a hunter of the night and usually his eyes gathered the particles of light from all around, using them to ‘see.’ But not now. For the first time, he was almost blind—almost. His masterful ability to smell out prey, and his other innate senses gave him an advantage no matter how dark—and so he still moved with confidence, rarely stumbling or running into anything. He simply knew the obstacles were there in time to stop or change directions.

But the scent had stopped abruptly and there were no more signs of the humans or their little pet. He was furious. He found their scent all over the cavern, but he could not find them. His mind could not comprehend the possibility that the humans might have tricked him somehow—he simply did not have the ability to understand all the possibilities. What he did have was the urgent need to hunt them down—an ever-growing need to kill. He was without doubt, the most horrific killer man had ever known—but his instincts were not always enough.

He howled in frustration, now. The beast had circled every inch of the cavern. He had stumbled, splashed through pools of water, slammed into stalactites and stalagmites…and he could not find them. He stood all the way up, now, raising his head high, and howled in fury—then whimpered in disappointment after the howl was complete.

There was something—something when he held his head high. He stood again, as high as he could, held his face skyward and sniffed deeply. A cool breeze touched his face. There is was. He had found the scent again. The werewolf sniffed, raised his arms out as if sleepwalking, and slowly followed the breeze and the scent. His hands hit the wall, hard, and the beast growled. He kept his face pointed skyward, and reached up, feeling along the wall—and found the ledge. The beast didn’t know how to smile, but something akin to that crossed his face as he sighed and bared his teeth. In an instant, he was in the tunnel, huffing for their scent. It was everywhere—and it was strong.

Delmar froze and yanked on the string hooked to Thomas’s belt.

“What’s wrong,” Thomas whispered after coming to halt.

“I feel him again.”

“Like at the fire?”

“No. Not a need to be with him—I just feel his presence.”

They had heard the howls of anger and frustration followed by eerie silence and Thomas’s gut, supported by Delmar’s ‘feeling’ was all that was necessary. “We’ve got to move.”

“Run!”

The two men ran, Thomas leading in the pitch black with Jack at his side. Thomas closed his eyes. It helped. He could see nothing at all in the pitch black, and closing his eyes allowed his senses to relax and accept his surroundings. He was no longer running in the dark—he was simply running by way of his senses. Their feet splashed through the trickling water on the floor of the tunnel as they ran. They breathed in the chilled breeze and hoped the tunnel would lead them to a way out. The two friends did their best—and refused to give in to fear and despair. Ten minutes past, twenty.

Thomas slowed to a walk. “The ground is changing,” he whispered to Delmar as he gasped for breath. The big man almost fell in an effort stop himself from plowing into his friend.

“Shit—give me some notice next time,” he panted.

“The ground is weird,” Thomas said. “There’s no water and it’s getting rough. There are rocks—like loose gravel.”

“I noticed it too…the moment we stopped puddle-splashing.”

“I think the tunnel is changing. We have to go slow.”

“Use the flashlight?’

“No.”

Delmar felt around until he found Thomas’s shoulder. “Alastair—the monster knows we are here. He is on our trail….”

“And a bright light would just make him move all the faster.”

“I doubt he could see it the way the tunnel has curved and turned.”

“Maybe not, but I am not taking that chance until we have no other choice. We just have to walk for now.”

“Okay.”

Thomas started forward again, moving fast but walking. His instincts had served him well, as the tunnel slowly narrowed in height and width. Soon Delmar was stooping over, followed shortly by Thomas, who groaned as he moved cautiously forward, bent at the waist.

They were crawling again. The raw flesh of their knees had begun numb, and now they burned with a new intensity as the gravel pushed into the scrapes and cuts. Thomas gave in to the pain, stopping and removing his pack so that he could find the rest of the ace bandages from the first aid kit. Six rolls. They used them all, wrapping the elastic cloth over their wounds and around their knees. Thomas was the first to notice the change.

“It’s colder.”

Their bodies had slowly adjusted from their running, and now they were stopped for the first time in hours…and the colder air became more evident.

“Colder and stronger. Feel that current?”

Thomas nodded, then realized his friend could not see him. “Yes…I think we’re getting close to an opening.” They whispered, fearing that the werewolf had to be close by now. As if in answer to their fears, a low, distant howl echoed through the tunnel. Jack growled. The Husky had behaved perfectly since the attacks at the cabin, never disobeying—never trying to free himself from his harness or the leash that attached him to Thomas. Jack’s master felt a sting of regret as he chastised the dog for the growl.

“He is not as close as I thought he would be,” Delmar said.

‘Yeah…I’m surprised.”

“I guess he has as much trouble as we do when it comes to these damned tunnels.”