Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (19 page)

“You have got to be shitting me,” said Chuck.

I peered down into the hole. It was about fifteen feet deep with a tunnel in the side facing the woods. “Feel free to stay behind.”

I jumped down. The ground was a hard mix of clay and rock and the air was musty and stale. “We’re going to need some flashlights from the workshop.”

Anne peered down at me, her hair hanging past her face and obscuring her features. “Be right back.”

A few minutes later, the feet of Henry’s aluminum ladder appeared over the edge of the hole. I grabbed the bottom and held it steady while Anne and Chuck climbed down to join me.

She handed me a light, but I declined. “I can see pretty well in the dark. As long as one of these lights are on, I’ll be fine.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, flicking on her flashlight and pointing it down the tunnel. It continued well past the reach of the beam. Roots dangling from the ceiling caught the light as she panned it back and forth, standing out starkly against the darkness. “After you.”

I resisted the urge to duck as I entered the tunnel. The sides were covered in wet roots, some hanging in shaggy, tangled sheets and others thick and wormlike, weaving in and out of the walls.

We followed the gently sloping tunnel down into the earth for several hundred yards until it dumped us out into a small cavern. Ours wasn’t the only one. At least a dozen other tunnel exits lined the walls. Each tunnel mouth was a ragged opening in the clay wall, except for one on the other side of the room.

That one was shaped like a peaked arch with edges made of entwined roots that crossed and re-crossed over each other in an elaborate weave. It was also twenty feet tall and at least ten feet wide.

Anne gasped as she stepped into the room, her flashlight pointed straight up. Above us glittered thousands of crystal stalactites, each no thicker than a pencil. Water drops flashed in the beam of light as they fell from the tips in a slow, lazy rain.

It was beautiful, but I was more interested in the pit dug out in the center of the room. Clearly ancient, it was a shallow bowl wide enough for a man to lie down in. The clay had been chopped out with crude tools, perhaps just sticks plunged into the earth, and the sides had been smoothed by hand. There were streaks and grooves clearly made by someone’s fingers in the clay that formed a spiral pattern all the way around the sides and down to the center.

The bottom was hard and blackened by fire, though any signs of ash or fuel was long gone. Around the edges of the pit were four wooden stakes, each with a dry, brittle piece of sinew tied to it.

Next to the pit was a pile of charred bones, each with symbols carved into its surface like scrimshaw. The bones were brittle and brown with age, but the symbols were still crisp and vivid.

Chuck scattered the bones with his boot. “Strung out over a fire looks like a bad way to go.”

“If you see one of these rituals call for a warm glass of milk and a cookie, you let me know,” I said. “I assume this was meant for the same spirit that Prime has been courting, considering how we got down here.”

Anne came over and picked a bone up with two fingers, then dropped it and wiped her hands on her jeans. “These are still a little bit goosey, but I’m not getting anything from the rest of it. I guess it’s too old.”

I snapped off a piece of the ancient sinew and crumbled it between my fingers. “Do you remember the part of the fox’s vision where all the wooden men were collecting bones and passing them to Prime? This must be why. Whatever this thing is, it likes fire and bones.”

“I guess,” said Anne. “But there were dozens of bones in that vision. Maybe hundreds. This is, what, five? Could be for something completely different.”

I shrugged. “Or maybe Prime is after something a hell of a lot bigger than what these guys were doing. But it doesn’t matter. We just need to focus on keeping Prime from getting the Heart and then this will be over. Let’s keep moving.”

We left through the arch of roots on the far side of the room. The tunnel here was lined with so many roots that the earthen walls were no longer visible, each casting shadows in the flashlight beams so that the entire tunnel seemed to writhe as we walked.

We ducked under massive roots that occasionally jutted from the ceiling and more than once had to push aside wet clumps that blocked the path entirely. That, plus the fact that the ground was wet and sloped downward slightly, made progress difficult and frustrating.

At first the roots looked clean and healthy, but the further down the tunnel we went the more they began to smell musty and show weirdly-shaped black fungal growths.

After about a quarter of a mile we reached an intersection where a smaller tunnel joined with ours. Anne stopped and put a hand on my chest to bring me to a halt.

Prime stepped out into the tunnel in front of us, followed by a troop of wooden men.

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P
rime grabbed the closest wooden man and hurled it down the corridor towards us, powering it with an arm the size of one of my thighs.

I shoved Anne out of the way, slamming her into the side of the corridor. The flailing creature hit me like an oak dresser tossed off the back of a speeding pickup truck, lifting me off of my feet and hurling me backwards into Chuck.

We went down in a heap. I got lucky and caught the wooden man’s wrists before it could remove my face. I snapped both of its wooden forearms, but that didn’t stop it from wrenching the right one off completely and ramming the splintered end into my stomach. I lost my breath, but fortunately it wasn’t able to pierce my skin.

Chuck reached past me and stuck the muzzle of his .45 into the blood knot on the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger. The knot burst, splattering both of us with cold, sticky blood. The wooden man went limp.

I shoved the body away and got to my feet. Down the tunnel, I could see Prime moving away as fast as he could, enormous shoulders and head hunched to fit, tearing out roots that snagged on his thorny hide.

Several wooden men followed behind him, but two remained side by side blocking our path. Each was holding a piece of colorful plastic in one hand. I recognized what they were at the same time the smell of gas reached me.

They were lighters.

In unison, the two creatures raked their hands across the tops of the lighters. Their gasoline soaked bodies erupted into sheets of flame that licked at the ceiling and threw off ropes of black smoke. They braced their feet and spread their arms wide, blocking the tunnel as Prime raced for the Heart.

Once again, Prime had proven to be too damn smart.

The fungal growths on the roots turned out to be flammable, adding heat and noxious, oily smoke to the already choking blaze.

Anyone sane would have backed off and retreated down the tunnel towards safety and breathable air, but when you find yourself racing a wooden man because a fox told you to, it’s a little late for sane. Besides, I believed the fox’s story. Letting Prime get his hands on the Heart was out of the question.

I drew Hunger and charged at the barricade of flaming monsters. They stood their ground, arms spread, flames rolling up their bodies. The one on the left lunged for me, trying to grab me in an incendiary bear hug.

I rammed Hunger into its chest with both hands and shoved the creature sideways with everything I had. Sparks exploded when it hit the tunnel wall. Hunger punched through its back and pinned it there.

I yanked my hands away and winced at the blistered, cracked skin I saw there.

“Duck!” Anne’s scream reached me and I threw myself to the floor just as a wave of heat passed over my head. The other creature just missed wrapping its burning arms around my neck.

Gunshots boomed in the narrow space, followed by a sharp bang behind me. The blood knot on the creature standing over me burst open as one of Anne’s bullets found its mark, venting steam like a log full of sap on a campfire.

She fired again and the wooden man pinned to the wall collapsed, dangling limply from Hunger. I yanked it out and let the body fall to the ground. Hunger was no warmer than usual.

We left the bodies burning on the wet clay floor. The walls and ceiling were still giving off a lot of smoke, but since it was rolling up the slope of the hallway behind us, the way forward was clear.

We pushed onward, Anne and Chuck coughing and wiping at their bloodshot eyes. Prime had gotten a good head start on us, so we picked up the pace to a near jog despite the slippery floor.

At first the thin roots hanging out of the ceiling were a nuisance, slapping us in the face as we passed through them and dripping water down the back of our necks. Pretty soon they got thicker and seemed to snag on hair and clothing more often than not. It wasn’t until the roots in the sides of the tunnel began lifting up to brush against us that I realized that they were actively trying to stop us.

Before long the tunnel was filled with grasping tendrils that reached out for us from all sides, weakly curling around anything they could reach. The roots were spongy and spotted with the repulsive fungus that grew on everything down here. The deeper we went, the less root seemed to show through the growths until it seemed that the fungus itself was reaching for us.

We covered our heads with our arms as best we could to keep the questing tips out of our faces and moved faster. I took the lead, ripping through the thicker parts so that Anne and Chuck could follow and ended up draped with torn off roots that squirmed against my shoulders and back.

It was obvious that we were in the spirit’s domain now, and that it was doing its best to make sure Prime got to the Heart first. Still, the vines were never able to muster enough mass or force to completely stop us, so we pressed forward blindly until we stumbled out into open space.

I yanked the remaining vines off of me in disgust and threw them back into the tunnel. Anne and Chuck were gasping with the effort, hands on knees, looking like coal miners after a shift, sweaty and covered in streaks of clay and fungus residue.

We had exited into a vast cavern that was easily sixty or seventy feet high and almost twice that wide. Embedded in the domed ceiling was a gigantic white crystal shaped like a piece of quartz. It was luminous, giving off enough milky white light to fill the entire cavern.

Rising up from the cavern floor was a grotesque parody of a tree made entirely of the black fungus from the tunnel. Its mouldering bulk reached nearly to the roof of the cavern.

The bare limbs formed a cascading tangle that bent to the ground like an oak, heavy and thick and close to the trunk, tapering to brittle tips at the ends.

Descending from the ceiling was a ring of clean, natural looking tree roots that hung into the open space above the towering tree-like fungus. The center tap root, longer and thicker than the rest, ended in a peculiar looking knot which resembled a lacy framework cage with something suspended in the center of it. The cage dangled low enough to nearly touch the monstrosity below. I figured that it contained the prize that Prime and I were racing for, the Heart.

Movement caught my eye as I stared at the cage. Climbing up one of the long, drooping fungal branches was Prime, already halfway up.

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