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  SINK

  Once Upon A Time

  Perrin Briar

  1.

  IT WAS a fine job, and no mistake. Montgomery reached into the water and felt at the cold skin of the deceased—and probably diseased—body. A shiver went through him. He would never get used to that—the cold, claminess of dead flesh, swollen and puffy with water.

  He suspected it was because one day it would be his skin that felt this way. It wouldn’t be long before it did, he thought to himself. He was an old man. Death was the only thing left to look forward to. But Montgomery had been saying that for the past twenty years.

  He expected every moment to be his last. The only tragedy—in his eyes—was that it never came, and so he spent his life in perpetual fear, waiting for the moment when something—or someone—would snatch his life from him.

  Montgomery wore a mask over his mouth to prevent breathing in any fumes or disease that might emanate from the body. It wasn’t right for someone living to have to go touching the bodies of those that were dead. Who knew what they had wrong with them. They weren’t from this world. They were from the underworld, and that thought terrified Montgomery more than any other.

  One half of the bodies was always puffy white with death. The other half—from the top of the head to the waist, was always scorched black and red raw, bubbled and harsh, their clothes burnt rags. The body had been ejected from the bowels of hell. There were two of them.

  Montgomery pulled them out of the water into his boat. He piled the bodies one on top of the other. It was the only way he could fit them in his tiny boat. It lacked the respect the dead deserved to be treated with, but there was no avoiding that.

  Montgomery picked up his oars and set them in the stirrups on either side of his boat. He placed the paddles into the water and bent forward, the paddles reaching back to begin pulling away.

  A single bubble formed on the lake’s surface. Montgomery peered over the side at it. The bubble popped. Montgomery leaned back on his bench and again pulled the oars through the water.

  Pop! Pop!

  More bubbles.

  Montgomery felt a churning sensation in his stomach. He knew what was about to happen. He wished he’d worked faster so he could have been away from here by now. Then they would have been someone else’s problem.

  Bubbles erupted on the surface, rushing and frothing at the mouth. The lake was going rabid, and it always resulted in the same thing. More arrivals.

  But this was unusual, happening with greater fervor. Hell really wanted to be rid of these corpses, Montgomery thought.

  He fell back into the belly of his boat, eyes wide. The bubbling water grew more violent as the lake burped, retched, and reached across the surface toward him.

  There was a bright red gleaming light from the floor of the lake. Montgomery seized the oars and bent his knees, preparing to row. He was going to leave. He’d just say the bodies must have come after he left with the two he’d found. In his fear he lost his grip, sending an oar floating to one side.

  Montgomery reached over, stretching his fingertips for the lost oar. He could just about feel it with the tips of his fingers, and began reeling it in.

  Montgomery was face to face with the surface of the lake now. His eyes boggled. The harsh red light illuminated a body, a calm face, that rose higher and higher toward the surface.

  Montgomery pulled back, but his weight was off, and he fell into the lake. His boat rocked, but stayed upright. The water was ice cold.

  Montgomery began kicking back toward the surface. He was arrested in his actions by the sight of not one, but three—no, four!—bodies rising toward the lake’s surface. They looked like souls ascending to heaven. Perhaps that was what this world was compared to the hell they had formerly occupied.

  Just as Montgomery breached, so too did the other bodies. Montgomery gasped for air, and floundered with his hands for the boat. One of the bodies nudged him with the top of their head. Montgomery ignored it and pulled himself up into the rowboat. He was panting, out of breath. He was too old for this.

  He covered his face with his hands, unable to bring himself to look over the side, quivering. The lake was calm once again, the crickets and toads continuing their tuneless vigil.

  Montgomery peered over the side. The final few bubbles popped into oblivion, leaving nothing but the faintest trace of half a dozen sets of vague ripples emanating out from the lake’s center.

  Eventually, Montgomery stopped shaking. He peered through his fingers, still clasped tight to his face, at the lake’s surface. Where there had been no more bodies, there were now four. They floated on their backs, vacant expressions admiring the sky. Their eyes were closed and still wore clothes.

  Montgomery blinked. He had never seen bodies like this before. They looked almost normal.

  These bodies were not scorched. Somehow they had managed to avoid the worst of the flames of hell, and emerged up here, on God’s green Earth, untouched. Montgomery crossed himself.

  These things must truly be work of the devil, for them to come out of hell’s own fiery void without a blemish. They must have been sent here by the great evil doer, Satan, sent here to test them, to destroy them, to slip amongst their number and do evil. Montgomery shivered.

  He leaned over the side and picked up the missing oar, arms struggling under the weight. He prodded one of the floating figures—the man. There was no response, save for the body inching away from himself.

  Montgomery cursed himself and put the oars back in the water. He turned around. Dead was dead. Even from hell. Montgomery usually liked the hollow thudding sounds of the boat as he rowed, but not tonight. Tonight they sounded ominous.

  Montgomery didn’t really want to touch these bodies, didn’t need the extra work. But it would have been too obvious to whoever took the next shift that he had intentionally left the bodies here. And what a storm that would cause.

  He sighed, grimaced, and reached over the side. He hooked his hands under the man’s arms and pulled him into the boat. If he was alive, surely that would have woken him up. But the man didn’t stir a muscle.

  Montgomery did the same with the other bodies, and laid them atop the first two crisp bodies he’d found. This had to be a record haul. He ensured to tie each of their wrists and ankles together with rope, and laid them down. It was believed bodies from hell might awaken and take their vengeance upon the living. It had never happened, but evidence never killed superstitious beliefs.

  Montgomery wiped the sweat from his brow. It was not caused by exertion—the air was damp. He cast around and listened. Was it just him, or did the world seem even more silent than usual? He got the depressing thought nature was watching him, paying attention to his every move.

  Montgomery decided to get the job done, and as fast as he could. He pulled on the oars with a strength and speed and desperation he hadn’t felt in a long time. He hadn’t even had to do the worst part yet. That was still to come.

  2.

  THE BOAT coarsed over the lake in strong pulsing movements, stroke by stroke. Montgomery fancied no one else in town could have pulled the rowboat any faster than he currently was. His form was perfect. Funny how the body’s performance kicked in when its survival was at stake.

  Montgomery steered the boat through a large gaping rent in the side of the mountain. It was triangular in shape and looked like something had cleaved a hole right in the earth.

  Montgomery hated it. He hated the look of it, hated the way it made him feel. Afr
aid. Mortally afraid. Despite having done this job a hundred times before, his feelings toward that cave never wavered.

  Montgomery had never seen unscorched bodies emerge from the lake before. This was a first. Firsts were never a good omen. Firsts were a sign of something new taking place. A reversal in the world order. New meant danger. New meant intrigue. New meant death. But in Montgomery’s mind, everything led to death. He was just that way inclined.

  He held his lantern over the side and cast the light around. It did little to break through the darkness, the small orb of light illuminating nothing beyond the water’s edge.

  Montgomery hopped from the boat and into the shallow water. He thought he heard something and brought the lantern around. He didn’t see anything. He wouldn’t with this piddling light. He made munching motions with his mouth, noises like he was chewing cud. A sure sign he was nervous.

  He gripped the prow of the boat with his swollen knuckles and pulled it onto shore. Then he reached into the bottom and pulled out the bodies. The unscorched bodies seemed heavier now, and if he didn’t miss his guess, he would have said they were getting warmer too. He decided to ignore it and get on with his job.

  Montgomery laid the bodies along the shore, just shy of the water’s edge. He glanced at the bodies and considered just leaving them there, but he knew he couldn’t. Someone would come across them and he’d get blamed for it. He sighed and bent down. He’d begin with the scorched bodies first. They were what he was used to.

  He hooked one hand under each scorched body’s armpit and dragged them across the ground, deeper into the cave. They didn’t put up much resistance, though one of them got snagged on an outcrop of rock and seemed unwilling to be pulled off it.

  The tunnels were like a maze in these caves. It was easy to get turned around and confused. You could spend weeks wandering around without knowing where you were going. That’s if you could survive there that long. There was little in the way of food or sustenance.

  Everyone in town knew someone who had gone wandering in the caves, never to emerge again. They believed they became spirits that haunted this place. Some said you could hear their cries if you listened closely enough. Montgomery had no such intention of listening, and blocked his ears of any sound.

  He came to a clearing within a large cavern, a few boulders acting as decoration. Montgomery lay the bodies down in the center. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He did not make the mistake of attempting to identify his audience in the darkness. If something was there he wouldn’t have been able to stop it in any case. He was better off not knowing. If it did attack, hopefully it would finish him off quickly.

  Still, he was scared. He wouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief until he was back in the pub and staring at the stain of the wall that morphed into nothing but friendly shapes.

  Montgomery wound through the tunnels back to the lake, and the bodies he still had to transport. When he came within sight of the unscorched bodies, he got quite a shock.

  One of the bodies—the elder female—lay on its side, a few feet from where he had positioned it. Had something come and pulled at the body? Possibly. But if it had, there were no longer any tracks in the soft wet sand.

  Montgomery’s throat felt dry. He steeled his nerve and did what any sane man would do in such a situation. He ignored it. He had a job to do. Scratching his head about a moved body wasn’t going to get the job done. But he wouldn’t touch the female body, not until he had no choice.

  He took the elder unscorched man by the wrists and dragged him backward, his boots making lines in the dirt. Montgomery kept his eyes firmly ahead, in the direction he was going. His peripheries, focused in the direction of the mysterious moving female body, were on high alert.

  Montgomery ordinarily believed the dead should be respected, no matter whether they rose from hell or descended from heaven. But he couldn’t prevent himself from carelessly dropping the man’s arms, letting them strike the ground, when he deposited the body.

  There was no way he was going to hang around any longer than he needed to. He stood up from his crouched position and hustled back to the water’s edge, almost taking a wrong turn on the way.

  “Calm down, Monty,” he said to himself. “This ain’t no time to panic.”

  He was relieved to find the three remaining bodies were right where they should be. He took hold of the young unscorched boy and girl by an arm each and pulled them along the wet sand.

  He would normally have taken just one at a time, but this wasn’t any normal time. He deposited them beside the larger man, who he was also relieved to find hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Just so,” Montgomery said, a smile tinging his lips.

  He turned and headed back into the tunnels and felt the familiar sense of relief and joy at having almost finished the job. He hustled back, a near skip in his step. He returned to the waterfront and found…

  Nothing.

  The elder female body was gone. The sand was where it should have been. The water gently lapped against the sand. Everything was in place. Save the dead body.

  Dead body.

  Montgomery spun around, flinching back in anticipation of someone striking him. But there was no one there.

  A dead body had come back to life. Something new. Something dangerous.

  “To hell with this,” Montgomery said.

  He climbed into the boat, rowed back out into the lake, left his boat at the jetty without tying it up, and ran into town. He entered the nearest pub and ordered his favorite glass of brown.

  The stain on the wall that had always brought him solace with its various morphing shapes, no longer did. Each time he glanced at it, it was fixed in the same unflinching outline.

  A dead body, lying in a position he had not set. And her eyes were open. She was looking directly at him.

  Montgomery’s jittering mouth, missing so many teeth, opened. He laughed to himself, beginning as a titter, before working up into a maniacal roar. It sounded odd even to him, even stranger to the bar flies who had never heard Montgomery so much as chuckle all his years.

  “Montgomery,” the barman said with genuine concern. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Montgomery said, stifling his laughter by biting on a knuckle. “‘To hell with this,’ I said. ‘To hell with this’!”

  The barman smiled, before turning to look at the other drinkers. The joke was lost on him.

  In the caves Montgomery had said, “To hell with this.” But now he realized the dead hadn’t gone to hell. Instead, hell had come to them. Isn’t that the funniest thing?

  3.

  BRYAN’S EYES fluttered open. He’d had the most vivid dream.

  He’d imagined himself in a giant cave, the sounds bouncing off the hard stone walls, echoing endlessly and without end in the corners of his mind. He remembered the press of sand against his face, leaving an imprint.

  He’d been aware of a man, his features unclear and indistinct, blurry and out of focus like an early model camera. He thought the man to be old. It was in the way he moved, the way he comported himself. But it could have just as easily have been a boy.

  Bryan was shocked to find himself lying on the ground, peering up at a jagged ceiling of natural rock knives. The ground at his back was hard. And there was less grit here. Had the place he recalled been real? He would swear he’d been moved.

  The last thing he remembered was being in a quicksand whirlpool that dragged him under the earth, a whirlpool he had willingly thrown himself in. It had taken him lower and lower, into the clutches of the abyss below…

  It had gone dark. He’d been worried, concerned for Zoe, Cassie and Aaron. He lost his grip on their hands. He didn’t know where he was going, but he had some faith that the sinkhole would take them to a better place—and not the shining white one in the sky with harp-playing winged creatures. He wanted to go somewhere better than the last world, that had been eviscerated by its own occupants.

  He remembered very litt
le after that, other than snatches of images and sounds. What had made him pass unconscious, he didn’t know. Perhaps it had something to do with the sand’s pressure. It might have been too much for him. Maybe too much for the others too.

  The others.

  Where were they?

  Bryan moved to lift his arms to push himself up, but found they would not obey him. Was he injured? He concentrated on his limbs and then the rest of his body. He felt a little numb, his body exhausted, but no pain. He applied pressure to his arms. Something was wrapped around his wrists and ankles. He’d been restrained.

  He moved his eyes left to right, checking the peripheries as best he could. He commanded himself to lift his head, but it wouldn’t budge. He could hardly move. He froze when he saw something out the corner of his eye.

  Clothes. On bodies. He couldn’t tell their shape and size, but they must have been the others. They were beside him, and he felt himself relax with relief. If they were together, things couldn’t be that bad.

  Bryan needed to rest. He didn’t like the idea of letting himself go, to fade into that nothingness that was unconsciousness. But there was nothing he could do in his current state anyway. His eyes rolled back, despite his best efforts to keep them open, and he fell unconscious again.

  4.

  HIS EYES opened. Faster, and with more energy this time. He had no idea how much time had passed, but he could already feel the difference in his body. He turned his head to one side. The world swam in his vision. His head hurt like someone had been swinging hammers at it. He preferred the numbness.

  His head felt heavy on his flimsy neck and didn’t react well to his commands. But it did react, and that was an important improvement over the first time he’d woken up. He was in a cavern, large, with craggy walls. He remembered the two bodies he’d seen earlier out the corner of his eyes and turned to them. His breath caught in his throat.