Page 104 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

A bridge, supported by a thick, blue, and ornate iron frame, stretched out ahead. On either side of it, a near-opaque darkness spread and spread wider again, nothing but void beneath. Off to his right, stairs dropped down to the entrance of the burial ground. Joe stood at the top, surveying the scene. The gate below was high and flanked by green metal spikes, adjoining a longand unceasing stone wall that circled the area. Keeping the living out, and thankfully, hopefully, keeping the undead in. At least until someone came to open those gates tomorrow morning. Assuming the people of the city ever woke again. But for now, how was he to get in?

A small “Mew” broke the taut silence. Moxie tilted forward, pressed her paws to Joe’s chest, and before he could catch her, she sprang to the ground. She bolted a few feet ahead, and from the street, jumped onto the iron fence of the bridge.

“Moxie! Wait!” Joe hissed just as loud as he dared. He ran the few paces to her, but she was gone, over the edge of the bridge into the black below. Joe approached, taking in the sight. One stone grave after another, row upon row upon row, all pillars and sharp angles, and piled up all around, like the aftermath of a game of Jenga. But only the tips of that mishmash of stone memorials were visible. A fog rolled through the valley of the cemetery, set low beneath the streets. It was edged with trees that were black and formless patches of obscurity in that gothic and forbidding resting place.

He knew the only way in was to follow Percy’s kitten. To take the same leap straight over the edge of the bridge into the dark, and hope nothing reached out for him when his feet hit the ground.

He readied his knife, climbed over the guardrail, and without even the thought of saying a final prayer, he slipped into black.

Joe’s feet hit solid concrete, which, despite the pain it occasioned in his legs and back, was a welcome surprise. The rolling fog, a sickly yellow, was so dense, he could only see a few feet ahead. Of that, there was little more than the suggestion of leaves, the silvery arms of grasping trees, and looming high above him, shadowy, sharply lined monuments of the long deceased.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the sinister darkness beneath the bridge. More graves, skulls and faces chipped into their dimly glinting granite surfaces, seemed to study him, this creature of the living, stepping uninvited into a metropolis of the dead.

Joe knelt down, and with a soft click of his fingers, whispered, “Moxie.”

Not a peep of sound met his call.

He tried once more, and with a new, curling sickness in his stomach at the thought of losing Percy’s kitten, had to remind himself that it was not really a cat, but a thing of evil that had decided to befriend them.

The path forked forward and left, and Joe, with little guidance but his faith that he would somehow find Percy, walked straight ahead into the blanketing fog.

CHAPTER FIFTY

BURIED UNALIVE

There was nowhere to go. There wasn’t an inch of space Percy could back himself into to get away from the thing he had awoken.

To keep still? To lie there trying not to breathe in the flakes of its rotting and aged skin? To will his pulse to stop lest it felt that beat of a living being next to it, that it would undoubtedly want to snuff out?

Or… to get it over with. To let it strangle him, pulverise him, tear him apart—whatever it wanted to do—and be carried swiftly to that savage and ignoble death, thus putting an end to the horror once and for all.

But Joe would be on his way. Percy was sure of that. And so he had little choice but to try to survive this. Because he’d be damned if he’d let Joe find him like that.

Percy took in shallow breaths, the kind that made him feel lightheaded with the lack of oxygen, and he kept still. Very, very still. But he felt a rise in the chest of the thing beneath him, and he wondered at it. It had no lungs to expand, but he knew it was breathing, because he could smell it. He could feel it. It was cold and vile and it ran across his cheek and down his neck like a spider.

The thing shifted. It placed its one free hand against the wall of the coffin. Percy heard it. Rough bone on old satin, the threads tugging at the pull of the movement.

Was it realising? Did it understand?

The other hand, the hand he lay upon, tried to reach out. The shoulder hitched up, softly, then more violently. Should he move? Was it better to give it two hands—let it explore its fate and see what it might do? Perhaps it might think him nothing more than another corpse thrown on top, or an old blanket?

A strange grunt came from the thing, and with it, Percy began to feel an odd affinity with the creature. A sympathy. Percy considered, if he died there, now, he might not come back to life. But this thing… How long was it to spend there beneath the ground, having been so cruelly roused from its eternal slumber? How aware was it of this atrocious fate?

He decided to move, just a little. To brace his feet against the bottom of the casket and arch his back, rolling his shoulder to the outer edge, allowing the thing the opportunity to slip its arm free to explore its confinement.

That was a mistake.

Skeletal fingers clamped down on his neck just as quickly and easily as if the thing had been able to see him lying there. The power of it surprised him, as did the bold and firm intent to kill in a thing that had been dead so long.

Percy had very little to work with. His chest was almost pressed against the lid as it was. Just as if his attacker were human, he went for the face, not the hand, as experience told him a jab to the eyes or throat would disable that hand faster than his yanking at it. But of course, it had no eyes. Percy’s desperate fingers dug into holes and dusty, ragged, leather-like remnants of skin. He sunk his fingers where he could, grasping for anything that might inflict pain, but how do you hurt a dead thing with no nerves?

A strangled cough sounded in Percy’s throat, the noise of his own voice strange in the dark and claustrophobic heat his body gave off in the small cavity. He groaned again, as a subconscious reminder he could even hear anything—that he wasn’t already dead and in Hell.

The bony hand tightened, and he felt the face turn in his grasp, felt the bumps on the surface against his forehead. He flattened his palm and jabbed up, trying to hit a jaw, trying to knock the head off. He heard the teeth smash together, felt a shower of small hard lumps fall onto his shoulder, and heard the thing seethe out an angry breath. The arm beneath him shoved its way to the outer edge of the coffin and wrapped itself around him. The other shoulder came across, its left leg curled over his own, and that toothless mouth chomped at his ear as it gathered all of whatever supernatural strength it possessed, and pressed the lot down on Percy’s neck.

His air was gone—completely cut off—whatever little bit of it had been left in the coffin. His body arched violently as he tried to find some escape, as it begged for oxygen. He ripped at the thing’s wrist, which seemed held to the hand by nothing at all, but it would not give. His chest burned for a breath, as though his lungs must collapse in on themselves.

His other hand pulled at the fingers, too strong, too tight, and he rammed his shoulder up at the creature’s chin. Lifting his chest flat against the lid, he slammed down hard, intent on breaking the ribs of the thing. His adrenaline made the black space scream with movement and white noise, and in the horrifying commotion, he didn’t feel the coffin slip.

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