Desperate Remedies #2
To her right three coffins nested so tightly into their niches the tomb might as well have been built around them.
Beneath them, just above the floor that had cracked and fissured with time, a single shelf lay empty.
The dirt and dust on the ground in front of it had been scraped away, leading toward the tunnel she knew led down into the oldest parts of the tomb.
A shiny new brass plaque had been fixed to it, drilled in to old holes.
She wasn’t ready for the cold stab in her stomach when she saw her father’s name.
Is this why you came down here, Dad? To move somebody’s old coffin out of the way so you could be put by the door? What the fuck, Dad?
At the back of the niche, lying in grooves in the stone, were slivers of what looked like bug cocoons. She laughed coldly. Liam had seemed so animated at the thought of graveworms, and yet here they were, no bigger than her thumb.
She jumped as the phone buzzed in her pocket, though when she pulled it out there were no notifications. There wasn’t even a signal. “Of course there isn’t,” she muttered, then froze as cracking and shuffling echoed up the rock tunnel.
“Christ,” she said, pulling the hammer out of her coat pocket and hefting it through the air a few times. “Let’s get this shit over with.”
Her torch struggled against the dark but was enough to see that a set of wide, shallow steps led down and away, each of them worn smooth by countless feet.
The wall was warm to the touch, but rough and full of divots.
As she moved, she found little niches filled with dust-encrusted rings and necklaces, some of them throbbing with old powers and enchantments she hadn’t learned to understand yet.
Trailing a hand through them softly while watching the steps, she nearly walked straight into a solid oak pole that had been wedged floor to ceiling.
It was cracked and old, but immovable, though it showed signs of recent damage.
Crouching to check, she swore it had been gnawed.
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, as the light of her torch glinted on new saliva before she turned it up to see the beam above her, and another a few feet down the stairs.
“Figures,” she muttered, surprised at the bubble of indignation rising from her core at the idea her family letting their mausoleum fall into decay.
Why are you so annoyed? It’s not like you’re going to want to be down here.
But her father would. Even if they barely spoke at the best of times she knew that. His resting place was already prepared.
The thought of him lying in his bed more than a hundred miles north, with so many words left unsaid between them, made her grip the hammer hard as she came to the end of the staircase.
The tunnel mouth was a ragged arch of old bricks shored up by two narrow oak trunks.
They’d both been scratched and gnawed, with chunks hewn from one and spat on the ground.
A great circle of sticky ichor pooled at her feet, like something had rested a while before continuing.
The tunnel opened out into a natural cavern, the floor cragged and unfinished and the walls slick with filthy dripping water.
Some of the loose chunks of rock had been swept aside when something had been dragged through – the coffin from the entrance, she presumed, before doing a double take to wonder why she could see a bit better than a minute ago.
Lumps of glowing yellow crystals had been driven into the ceiling, and the dull buzz of their old, fading enchantment made Margo grind her teeth.
Ancient magic had a flavour to it that didn’t always agree with her.
The spells were calling out for their caster to top them up, but that soul had long passed through the veil.
Maybe they were even buried nearby. Still, it was bright enough to avoid stumbling, just about, even if there were plenty of pockets of shadow to hide in.
The graves here were ruder, cruder things. Some were wood coffins – now decayed – lying on biers of metal or brick. Others were simple cairns adorned with brass plaques tarnished beyond recognition. She could barely turn without stepping on the dead.
“Don’t mind me, folks,” she said under her breath. “I promise I won’t be here long.”
If it had been Liam, a plethora of old spirits would have come out to talk, or maybe to reach out for some modicum of help.
But to Margo all there was was a background hum like electric wires on a summer’s afternoon.
Black holes ahead and to the side must have been other tunnels or caverns, leading to who knew where.
She swept the torch futilely toward the back of the cave until a cracking and whispering rolled their way across the darkness. Margo killed the torch to avoid drawing too much attention to herself.
About thirty feet away, surrounded by ruined coffins, urns, and cairns kerbed with sandstone, was a heft of purple stone struck through with dashes of quartz.
If it had been carved, the carvings had been lost to time.
But it didn’t look like it had been dug from the cave, and it was so old the lid was almost welded into the body.
Next to the sarcophagus were the remains of a wooden coffin, shattered to hell and with bones and shredded clothes thrown around it. An eyeless skull gazed up at her, turned on its side. Sticky streaks travelled across the ground in a myriad of directions.
The cracking, snapping sounds echoed again and she caught the torch against her, heart hammering in her chest and hand growing sweaty on the handle of the hammer. I should’ve brought a gun...
Climbing on top of the sarcophagus, hacking and scrabbling to try and pry it open, was a flopping, hairless thing that might have once been a man. Margo raised the hammer just enough to be ready but not enough to catch its eye.
Or eyes, she saw.
A bald, almost worm-like thing, the skin had bleached away to sickly milk apart from blue veins that strained to breach the flesh.
The head had become stretched, the jaw elongated like a dog’s but still holding the blunt curve of a man’s lips beneath a nose pulled wide and quivering as it sniffed the stone beneath it.
But its eyes… there must have been a dozen of them, all erupting at random times, all of them blinking in random sequence, all of them different colours from glazed white to piercing blue.
Two long, stick-thin arms with blackened and bloody hands scratched away at the sarcophagus as two short, bulbous arms extending from what should have been its stomach held fast so it didn’t slip off the side.
The legs, if that’s what they were supposed to be, curved in multiple places like they were fingers, clamped onto the side of the tomb and picking away at the stone.
The thing reminded her of a cat trying to dig a mouse out of its hiding place. Is this what Liam meant by a graveworm?
She took half a step back, kicking against a stray stone by accident.
The creature looked up, eyes turning in a dozen directions as it sniffed the air, slowly craning its head around until its snout was pointed right at her. The jaw fell open, showing wide, blunt teeth that dripped with green ichor and splinters.
Not sharp enough to pierce the skin, she thought, breathing as slowly as she could. But enough to bite down and leave a mark, like on her father’s skin.
It leaped at her before she knew what was happening, knocking the hammer from her and clamping her forearm in its mouth, trying to thrash like an alligator killing its prey.
Screaming in pain and anger, Margo raked her nails across its face, catching one of the eyes with enough force to make the creature howl and back off.
Grabbing the hammer, she swung it just in time to catch the graveworm’s face as it came for a second attack. Bones cracked and the skin hissed and boiled at the touch of silver, and the thing dove behind the sarcophagus.
Gathering herself, she found the sleeve of her coat had been shredded and the skin beneath it was mottled and gnawed, though not bleeding. “Jesus Christ,” she winced, as the lid of the sarcophagus crashed down in front of her, missing her toes by an inch.
Inside were the shattered remains of a man, maybe six feet tall in his pomp but now nothing but jagged bones and a few strips of grey cloth that might once have been a shroud.
A few dried shreds of what might have been chrysalises lay around his spine, though in the weak light it was hard to be sure.
His jaw hung open, leering at the ceiling.
Margo didn’t know what she’d been expecting.
This is what I came from? There wasn’t even a name she could see, though there were a handful of brown pots around the skull and what looked like a bronze dagger which must have been left on the man’s chest when he was buried.
Fuck you for saying the older the better, Liam, she thought, wishing she’d just grabbed the first skull she could find from the mausoleum on the surface.
The graveworm crawled up from the far side, big and pulsing now as it sniffed at the bones, turning them over with one of its smaller hands as half the eyes watched Margo warily.
It hummed a gentle tune that from a human might have been a lament or a lullaby.
Every hair on her arm and neck rose while a cold fear at the pit of her stomach slowly warmed to rage that this thing, this creature was desecrating one of her ancestors.
She was far from religious, but this unsettled her all the way down to her roots.
And when the worm made to bite into one of the ribs it was too much to bear – the hammer lashed out almost of its own accord, and the creature went flying in a hail of blood, dragging some of the bones with it.
Okay, time to go Margo.