“So what? He knows we’re coming. You do think a bullet will kill him, right? You—”
“Stop, Ralph, stop! You’ll step in it!”
He stopped at once, heart hammering. She shone the light a bit past his feet. Draped over the last pile of rubble before the passage widened again was the body of a dog or a coyote. A coyote seemed more likely, but it was impossible to tell for sure, because the animal’s head was gone. Its belly had been opened and the viscera had been scooped out.
“That’s what we were smelling,” she said.
Ralph stepped over it carefully. Ten feet further on, he halted again. It had been a coyote, all right; here was the head. It seemed to be staring at them with exaggerated surprise, and at first he couldn’t understand just why.
Holly was a little quicker on the uptake. “Its eyes are gone,” she said. “Eating the insides wasn’t enough. It ate the eyes right out of that poor creature’s head. Oough.”
“So the outsider doesn’t just eat human flesh and blood.” He paused. “Or sadness.”
Holly spoke quietly. “Thanks to us—mostly thanks to you and Lieutenant Sablo—it’s been very active in what’s usually its time of hibernation. And it’s been denied the food it likes. It must be very hungry.”
“And weak. You said it must be weak.”
“Let us hope so,” Holly said. “This is extremely frightening. I hate closed-in places.”
“You can always—”
She gave him another of those light thumps. “Keep going. And watch your step.”
20
The trail of faintly luminous droplets continued. Ralph had come to think of them as the thing’s sweat. Fear-sweat, like theirs? He hoped so. He hoped the fucker had been terrified, and still was.
There were more fissures, but no more spraypaint; these were little more than cracks, too small even for a child to fit into. Or escape from. Holly was able to walk beside him again, although it was a tight fit. They could hear water dripping somewhere far away, and once Ralph felt a new breeze, this one against his left cheek. It was like being caressed with ghost fingers. It was coming from one of those cracks, producing a hollow, almost glassy moan, like the sound of breath blown over the top of a beer bottle. A horrible place, all right. He found it all but impossible to believe people had paid money to explore this stone crypt, but of course they didn’t know what he knew, and now believed. It was sort of amazing how being in the guts of the ground helped a person to believe what had previously seemed not just impossible but downright laughable.
“Careful,” Holly said. “There’s more.”
This time it was a couple of gophers that had been torn to pieces. Beyond them was the remains of another rattler, all of it gone except for tatters of its diamondback skin.
A little further on, they came to the top of a steep downward slope, its surface polished as smooth as a dancefloor. Ralph thought it had probably been created by some ancient underground river that had flowed during the age of the dinosaurs and dried up before Jesus walked the earth. To one side was a steel railing, now spotted with florets of rust. Holly ran the light along it, and they saw not just scattered droplets of luminescence, but palm prints and fingerprints. Prints that would match Claude Bolton’s, Ralph had no doubt.
“Sonofabitch was careful, wasn’t he? Didn’t want to take a spill.”
Holly nodded. “I think this is the passageway Lovie called the Devil’s Slide. Watch your ste—”
From somewhere behind and below them came a brief squall of rock, followed by a barely perceptible thud that went through their feet. It reminded Ralph of how even solid ice could sometimes shift. Holly looked at him, wide-eyed.
“I think we’re okay. This old cave’s been talking to itself for a long time.”
“Yes, but I bet the conversation’s been livelier since the ground-shaker Lovie told us about. The one that happened in ’07.”
“You can always—”
“Don’t ask me again. I have to see this through.”
He supposed she did.
They went down the incline, holding the railing but being careful to avoid the handprints left by the one who had gone before them. At the bottom there was a sign:
WELCOME TO THE DEVIL’S SLIDE
BE SAFE USE HANDRAIL
Beyond the Slide, the passage widened still more. There was another of those arched entryways, but part of the wooden facing had fallen away, disclosing what nature had left here: nothing but a ragged maw.