Silas: A Supernatural Thriller (27 page)

41

Dusk came much earlier than I expected, and the wheezing screech that greeted us when we stood on the side of the Crystal Mountain sounded off again, now close enough that I could almost feel the hot breath of the monstrosity that caused it.
Those that dwell in darkness don’t come out during
Orval
, Kaiser had said. I hoped his statement was accurate.

I stopped moving, ground my fists into my hips, and sighed while Silas pranced about me, wagging his tail. Tendrils of slobber dangled from his tongue as he panted. I rolled my eyes. He barked.

“Hold on,” I muttered. “I’m thinking.”

Where to go? We’d been trudging through the jungle for a long time – two hours, maybe three – and other than the debacle with the vine-snake and the constant noise, life hadn’t made itself known. Not to mention the fact that my throbbing hip and knee made each step an essay on pain. It felt like we were going in circles, and the maddening thing about circles is they never end. Moving in that way wasn’t ideal for completing our task.

“What do
you
think?” I asked Silas. “Which way now?”

He sat down and looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the barely noticeable, failing light. I nodded. “West it is.”

The longer we stayed in the jungle, the louder the sounds of the insects became. Distant treetops bustled with activity, hopefully from birds innocently finding shelter for the night and not another stalking, exotic predator. The vines and undergrowth became thicker. My feet were constantly ensnared on the webbed greenery, slowing my progress. Silas, for his part, hopped about easily, traversing the obstacle-filled land as if it was second nature. That made me more than a little jealous, even more so because the weight of the rucksack wore me down, making my bruised legs burn and my shoulders sting. I took a swig of water, and exhaustion washed over me. I needed rest, and soon.

In the moment when I reached the point where I thought I couldn’t go on, I saw something that lifted my spirits. Black squares shone through a gap in some foliage, reflecting the last of the dying sunlight. I paused and followed Silas’s lead as he approached the hidden construction.

It was a large, rectangular structure, its shape revealing itself from the backdrop of the jungle like a chameleon. I took my knife and cut away the vines that covered it, grinning.

“This is promising,” I said aloud.

The sky grew even darker as I worked at clearing away the rest of the foliage, which came off in huge, roped-off, purposefully placed chunks. I uncovered a door, solid oak, with an empty space at the top where surely a window had been at some point in time. The prospect of spending the night indoors filled me with a renewed sense of vigor.
A bed? Shelter? Oh boy!
It didn’t matter if the place looked like it hadn’t been occupied in a century. Now it was mine.

When I finished the chore of clearing off the brush and reached for the doorknob, Silas whimpered. I turned around and saw him facing away from me, looking up a hill. “What’s up, boy?” I asked. He didn’t respond to me – instead he started up the rise as if I didn’t exist. I put the abandoned house out of my mind and followed, hoping I wouldn’t lose him in the expanding darkness.

As luck would have it, he didn’t go far. At the top of the hill, where the trees were tightly packed, creating a virtually continuous wall of bark, he stopped. A strangely familiar, piney scent reached my nose. A campfire. My heart rate kicked up a notch. I remembered the plume of smoke I’d seen rising from the jungle when we stood at the foot of the Crystal Mountain. This had to be the source. If what Paul had written was correct, that wasn’t a good thing.

I reached the crest and knelt down. Silas crouched there in silence, the corners of his mouth turned down in concentration. From beyond the snarl of ferns and saplings a sound emerged, low and guttural, even a bit jovial. It sounded like talking.

I parted the wall of green and peered through the crack. Silas followed my lead, shoving his head in beside mine, almost pushing me out of the way. A pair of asses swathed in ragged jeans greeted our eyes, standing only a few inches in front of our hiding spot. The two figures had long, blondish hair that hung down to the middle of their backs. They spoke to each other in voices so soft that I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then they moved away from the trees. As they parted, a clearing and fire pit were revealed.

At least thirty people gathered around the roaring blaze. Its intense light cast everything with a yellow glow, exposing the faces of those in attendance. In that instant I knew this wasn’t a place I wished to stay for very long.

My brain wanted to call them people because that was the only term it could come up with to describe them on such short notice. Their appearances belied sex. All had long, ragged hair and each face was a living disaster of scars and open sores. Pus and blood trickled down their cheeks and dropped from their lidless, sunken eyes. Pins stuck out of their flesh in slapdash patterns. Some even had small bones protruding from their noses, cheeks, necks, or all three. They waved their hands and thrashed about like fans at a rock concert, their eyes and whooping aimed at the glowing moon above. Silas shuddered beside me. I did, as well.

This
was the
Tau
-Kin.
Now I understood why Paul told me to stay away from them.

The sorry excuse for a human who stood next to the fire pit lurched forward, heaving a surge of vomit onto the grass. Those surrounding him (or her) cheered, and then the first punch was thrown. A fight ensued. One of them threw another in a headlock, while one more ripped a hunk of flesh from another’s arm with its sharp teeth. Three more joined in, kicking and clawing like raging baboons while spewing bile from their frayed lips. I backed away from our viewing window between the branches, fearful they’d realize we were there and throw
us
into the fray, as well.

They didn’t. Instead another voice, much louder than the others, bellowed from the rear of the pack. I crawled back to my spot in time to see those involved in the skirmish retreat from each other as if they’d been scolded by an intimidating parent.

The sea of awful humanity parted and a large male humanoid stepped forward. Unlike the others, who dressed in the remains of common clothes, this one was naked save the litany of tattoos covering nearly every inch of his flesh. His huge muscles rippled and he was very, very tall. The only words I could think to describe him were
Big Guy.
He turned around and roared at the moon. His giant penis, split down the middle, flapped like a pair of snakes in a hairy nest. Lesions covered his face and chest – the only parts of him not inked – and an object dangled from his swollen bottom lip. It was a metal circle, within which sat an inverted Y. It looked like a Mercedes hood ornament, and for some reason I decided that’s
exactly
what it was.

Silas inched closer to me. I wrapped my arms around him. He was shaking.

Big Guy raised his massive hands and screamed. The sound was deafening. Soon the rest of the mob joined in, and the night air was filled with their howling. It hurt my ears. I moved back from the trees and pulled Silas close to me, burying my ear into the bulky mass of skin at the base of his neck.

Before too long the riotous bawling ceased. I shook my head to clear the ringing, noticed Silas doing the same, and, against my better judgment, went back to my peeping spot.

The scene had quieted down. Big Guy stood with his arms folded over his chest, staring at the moon’s azure radiance. Just like before the rest of the tribe followed suit. Their lips moved but the crackling fire and chorus of insects drowned out their words, if they were in fact speaking words at all. Silas whimpered. It was a much-too-loud sound. I forced him down and squeezed his mouth shut, hoping like hell they didn’t hear him.

None did – or at least so I gathered, seeing as no one came searching for us. Silas was shaking madly beneath me, however, and for that fact alone I considered leaving. My heart beat faster and faster, and for the first time in ages another heart attack seemed inevitable.

“Calm down, buddy,” I whispered, softly as I could, into my shaking boy’s ear. It was as much a plea to my own psyche as his.

The sound of movement caught my attention. Still shaking, I hopped up to my perch yet again and saw that Big Guy had disappeared. The rest milled about in a ragged semicircle, engaging in what looked like cocktail hour for savages. This lack of activity went on for a good two minutes, until a shrill whistle rose up. Without hesitation the partygoers reformed into two lines on either side of the fire pit. Their jaws hung open and drool poured from their mouths.

Big Guy reemerged, holding a heavy rope in his left hand and a wooden post, sharpened to a point, in his right. He walked laboriously, pulling whatever was attached to the rope behind him. Once he finally reached the center of the clearing, the thing he dragged was forced front and center.

It was a wolf.

The creature was large, probably a few inches taller than a Great Dane, and covered with matted white fur. It had the typical, extended snout of a wild canine, along with the bony, protruding brow. Beneath that brow, however, were a pair of hyper-intelligent eyes, oozing with fear. I’d seen a creature such as this before. Nick Goodman was one of them in this world.

Big Guy yanked the oversized wolf into the middle of the clearing and then drove the four-foot stake in his right hand into the ground, burying it at least half of it in the soil. I couldn’t imagine the strength required to pull off such a feat. He proceeded to tie the rope to the stake, which also took a great amount of strength considering the monstrous wolf attached to the other end kept trying to get away. Silas shuddered even harder than before, echoing the movements of his canine counterpart. He was still lying by my knees. I put my hand on his head to comfort him, but it didn’t seem to help.

With the rope fastened, Big Guy stepped away and admired his handiwork. The minions dropped to their knees when he did. The frightened wolf paced in a circle, snapping and hissing at its kneeling audience. Its body language suggested a hunt; its eyes, absolute terror.

Big Guy gazed at the heavens yet again, only this time it wasn’t he who screamed. It was the wolf. I glanced skyward and spotted the outline of the full moon through the canopy, now high in the night sky. Confusion reigned in my head. Whatever kind of ritual this was, I’d never seen anything like it.

The wolf collapsed as if its own weight had become too much to bear, sprawling out on its belly in the grass and writhing. Unnatural-sounding whimpers squeaked from its snout. Unfortunately, Silas chose that moment to flip out. He jerked his head from side to side and yowled. With the amount of noise he made, I thanked my luck that the thrashing wolf was even louder. I wrapped my arms around him, trying to make him stop, but he wouldn’t. Anguish imparted his every moan and whine. I feared for his life.

With bluish-yellow light cascading around us, Silas let out a blood-curdling shriek. The wolf in the clearing echoed the sound, drowning it out. Silas’s flesh then rippled, which felt sickening to my touch. He was hurled into the throes of a seizure and flipped onto his back. I grabbed hold of him and we rolled down the hill.

When the world stopped spinning, a paw came up and whacked my face. One of his claws dug into my cheek, drawing blood. “C’mon, boy, stop!” I urged him, trying to be as quiet as possible. Then I wrapped him in a bear hug and stood up, lifting his weight in my arms. In that moment I chose to forget about the dire situation we found ourselves in. Quelling Silas’s pain was all that mattered.

His chest heaved, looking like something was trying to burst out of it. I put him back on the ground and tried to comfort him while protecting myself from his flailing paws at the same time. He knocked me off of him and the back of my head struck the wet ground with a sloshing thud. Fur tickled my knuckles. I quickly sat up and looked at my hand, which held a thick patch of black hair.

I looked in Silas’s direction to see him staring at me with bulging eyes, his lips pared back in a non-threatening, pain-drenched sneer. Hair fell off of him in chunks, fluttering around his body like volcanic ash. His skull buckled and his snout veered off to the side, independent of the rest of his face, before snapping back into place, shorter than before. His sharp incisors retreated into his gums and were replaced by shorter ones. The twin-rose shape of his nose pulsed and broadened, then thinned as it moved up his increasingly hairless face. His screeching grew louder by the second, by the
transformation
.