Hellhole Read online

  “No,” she said, “I’m not. It’s important to know this, because there have been historical references to a lineage of those priests. I once saw a record that covered most of eighteen hundred years, and there’s one in London that lists an unbroken lineage going back to the Akkadian Empire, which was founded in 2350 BCE, and that list referenced an even older one that goes back to the founding of the Sumerian culture. If all of that is true—and I have reason to believe it is—then the priests tasked with guarding that book have been at it for nearly forty-four hundred years and, if I’m correct, possibly as far back as the Sumerian proto-literate period. We’re talking six thousand years ago. Who knows how much farther back it went before the development of cuneiform?”

  “And what does all that mean?” asked Bunny.

  “It means that people have dedicated their lives to keep the information in that book secret and have kept it sealed since the dawn of civilization,” said Lizzie. “And Mr. Church had someone named Bug—who I assume is your computer guy?”

  “Yeah,” I said, grinning.

  “Bug did a deep background on James Mercer. He is not European but actually Iranian. Not a spy or anything, just in terms of heritage. The Iranian branch surname is Mehregan, and variations of that name go way back, to versions established well before the rise of Islam. Thousands of years before, actually. So, Mercer’s family is very, very old. His branch has been in America for only three generations, but there is an ancestor of James Mercer mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the first known major piece of writing.”

  “So...what’s Mercer’s connection to the book?” asked Top.

  “The last known sale of the Book of Uttu was by a third party working on behalf of James Mercer. Mind you, this is stuff I’ve found out with help from some of my own contacts, but Bug was able to verify it. James Mercer purchased the book, but what I don’t know is whether he opened it out of curiosity or opened it because he was following some other agenda.”

  “What agenda?” I asked.

  Lizzie drove for almost a mile before she answered. The clouds were thick and gray over the desert, but it didn’t feel like rain. Just dreary and sad. Maybe ominous, too, but I wasn’t trying to spook myself out. Lizzie was doing a pretty good job of that.

  “If there is a group trying to protect something,” she said, “it kind of suggests that they are trying to protect it from something else.”

  “Yeah,” said Bunny, “but the stuff on that Pauline Index is mostly supposed to be naughty shit. Stuff the Church doesn’t want people to know. Like the fact that they’ve edited most women out of old biblical stories, and that maybe we should all stop feeling guilty and enjoy getting laid.”

  Lizzie grinned. “Well phrased. Some of it is that, actually...and I may quote you on my next paper. But that doesn’t account for the Unlearnable Truths. Those books are flat out dangerous. They aren’t banned because they promote free and independent thinking, sexual equality and general tolerance. They’re books of very dark magic.” She paused. “If you believe in that sort of thing.”

  “Keeping an open mind,” Top reminded her.

  “Me too,” she said, though she did not elaborate. “ISIL killed the clerics guarding the book. Ohan sold it, a scholar bought it and began scanning it, and then James Mercer bought it. Not sure how he found out about it, though I suspect he had informants in the right places throughout various church groups and all through academia. He bought it, and I think he brought it to the Door to Hell. He killed two people and used a sacred knife to pin a key page to the body of someone he forced into the role of a sacrificial victim.”

  “To what end?” I asked.

  We passed a sign that said: Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmen. Beneath, in spray paint, was Door to Hell. A small weathered-stained sign was hung in front of the words, partly obscuring them. CLOSED.

  “Remember I said that the title of the book was incorrect? It’s called the Book of Uttu, but that was a guess because the cover is decorated with stylized spiders. However, the book is not about Uttu. Not really. Uttu, though a Sumerian goddess, was a benign figure. The goddess of weaving and of dry goods. In the translated pages, there is only a passing reference to her and instead another name is used. And that’s what troubles me so deeply. The name mentioned over and over again is Atlach-Nacha.”

  “Who?” we all asked at the same time.

  “Atlach-Nacha is a gigantic spider god with a humanlike face. In the stories, it comes from another planet and has become trapped here on Earth, forced to live in caves beneath a fictional mountain range in an equally fictional Arctic kingdom. Neither place is real.”

  “You lost me on that,” said Top.

  She held up a hand. “Getting there. Bear with me. In the story, Atlach-Nacha is trying to reconnect with her home. Not through physical space but via a spiritual pathway. Call it an interdimensional gateway for convenience’s sake. She is trying to spin a web of some kind that will connect Earth with her world. And—just to make this all even less sane—that connection will exist in a dream world, and once formed will allow her armies to come out of dreams and into our waking world.”

  “So...” said Bunny slowly, “whoever cooked that up was smoking serious crack.”

  “This is sounding familiar to me,” I said. “Dream worlds. Do you mean the Dreamlands? As in the fictional place from the Lovecraft stories?”

  “Yes,” she said, as she pulled off the main road onto a side lane that curved around toward the massive firepit. “Though in the case of Atlach-Nacha, the story was written by August Derleth, one of Lovecraft’s friends. Lovecraft allowed and even encouraged his friends to write stories using the gods, monsters and locations he came up with. He encouraged them to create their own and expand it. After a while it was like people were filing field reports from other worlds. They call it Lovecraftian fiction or Cthulhu Mythos. And thousands of writers contribute to it all the time. Even Stephen King has done Lovecraft stories.”

  “Yeah,” I said softly.

  “When I spoke with Mr. Church,” continued Lizzie, “he told me about a theory that you all played with, that the pulp fiction movement of the twenties and thirties, as well as the surrealist movement of the same era, might have had less to do with imagination and more to do with people having visions of other worlds.”

  “Other dimensions,” I suggested. “And yeah. That was a theory, and it explained some elements of our case. It explained how things like the Necronomicon and other Unlearnable Truths wound up in Weird Tales magazines. It explained some of the images from Salvador Dali and others.”

  “If so,” she said, pulling to a stop one hundred feet from the edge of the pit, “then that’s something that may have been happening for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. People having genuine visions of other worlds, other dimensions, and writing them down as stories or religious visions.”

  We started to get out, but she stopped us.

  “There’s another way to look at it, too,” she said. “If there are creatures from other worlds trapped here, and if they have somehow managed to invade the minds of certain people and fill their dreams with visions, surely it suggests a purpose. An agenda.”

  We looked at her.

  “Mr. Church told me that one of your cases dealt with a young man, a genius really, who found some kind of mathematical code in the Unlearnable Truths and used it to build and program a machine to take him to one of those worlds. That he was from there, or at least a descendant of people or beings from there. Church said that other people you’ve met may share the same connection to other worlds.”

  Top cleared his throat, and Bunny looked away.

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “So, if that young man used information to open a doorway to go home,” said Lizzie slowly, “is it really so far outside the realm of possibility that someone else might want to open a door to let someone or something come into our world?”

  Bunny closed his eyes. “Well...h
oly shit.”

  We got out of the car. The first of our equipment we unpacked was the guns.

  4

  Darvaza Gas Crater, Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan

  THERE WERE SIX US marines standing watch over the site. They eyed us warily and a sergeant came over to meet us, giving my team a thorough up-and-down appraisal. We were not wearing uniforms or insignia of any kind.

  “This is a restricted area,” he said. He was a lantern-jawed guy who could have come from Central Casting. His parents might as well have enrolled him in the Corps as soon as he was born.

  “Your boss told you we were coming,” said Top.

  The sergeant’s eyes narrowed, and I knew he wanted to ask for identification but had no doubt been told not to.

  “I’m Mr. Red,” I said, then nodded to Top. “He’s Mr. White. The big guy is Mr. Blue. The lady is Dr. Corbett.” I read the sergeant’s name tag. “And you’re Brock.”

  No one shook hands.

  I looked past Sergeant Brock to where the car sat inside a circle of traffic cones. Guess they didn’t use crime scene tape here. More cones were set in a couple of places closer to the edge of the pit.

  “Walk us through the scene,” I suggested.

  Brock nodded and did so.

  “The forensics team has been all over everything,” he said. “They left the car and other stuff in place for you but transported the bodies. Oh, and they took the murder weapons. So there’s not actually a lot to see.”

  I made no comment.

  The car was pretty much what I expected. Blood and broken safety glass on the seats, bullet holes from where Mercer’s rounds went through the driver. Small flags pinned to spots where rounds had been removed for ballistics.

  “Window’s rolled down,” observed Bunny. “He didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  “He had a Glock 26 in a shoulder rig,” said Brock, “but there was no indication he’d attempted to draw it.”

  “Driver was American?” asked Top.

  “Of Turkmeni extraction,” agreed Brock. “Guess that’s why he got the gig. Spoke the language.”

  We stepped away from the car and he led us over to a heavy-duty briefcase that lay open on the ground.

  “He’d have brought the book in that,” said Lizzie.

  There was a blood smear inside and spatter all around. Before I was a special operator, I was a detective in Baltimore and had worked enough murder cases to be able to read a scene pretty well, but before I could explain what I was seeing, Lizzie spoke up.

  “Mercer probably used a ritual knife to cut himself,” she said. Brock shot her a look, but I held up a hand to encourage her to continue. “It would be appropriate to the kind of ritual he was attempting. Historically accurate. It’s a sign of humility and commitment. Blood of the faithful. That smear inside the case is probably where he set the knife down afterward, while he opened the book and selected the page to tear out.”

  “Pardon me, miss,” began Brock, “but how do you know all that?”

  Top, who squatted down beside Lizzie, swiveled his head around and gave the sergeant a long, silent stare. The sergeant looked briefly contrite and straightened, clamping his mouth shut.

  Lizzie gave him a brief, almost apologetic smile, then scowled down at the case. “Once Mercer tore out the page he would have needed to make his sacrifice. He took the page and the knife and would need a good spot to...” She looked over her shoulder for a likely spot. Brock cleared his throat and pointed to a small cluster of traffic cones near the edge. Lizzie added, “That’s where he sacrificed the guide.”

  I saw Brock’s lips silently repeat that word. Sacrificed. He was going to have a lot of unanswered questions. As an NCO, he was probably used to some level of that.

  “Hey,” said Bunny, who was scanning the area, “look at that.”

  We all turned to follow where he was pointing. A line of spiders was running toward the edge of the pit.

  “Yeah,” said Brock, “that happens. Spiders are always coming here. No one knows why. Maybe it’s the methane smell or something.”

  “Or something,” Lizzie said quietly.

  She met my eyes. I nodded, though a chill rippled up my spine, like someone walked over my grave.

  Spiders. Shit.

  We straightened and followed the spiders to the edge of the pit and looked into the mouth of hell.

  It was twenty meters deep—not a single mass of flame but rather patches of it, as if fire was burning through the skin of the Earth to expose burning wounds. It looked like cancer and it stank of shit.

  “Door to Hell don’t really cover it,” said Top quietly.

  Bunny came up beside him. “More like the ass of Hell.”

  Sergeant Brock cleared his throat again. “A lot of people have been all over this site, but I was one of the first Americans to arrive after we got the call. There’s something maybe you should see.”

  We followed him a dozen yards along the curving lip of the crater and then stopped as he squatted down and pointed. At first all I saw was a cluster of spiders a bit heavier than elsewhere on the rim; and at least a dozen different kinds. But that wasn’t what he was pointing at.

  Although partly obscured by scuff marks from what I presumed were police and forensics people, there was a line of footprints that led from the pit to this spot. I got up and backtracked, then walked the scene quickly to verify what Brock found.

  “Those are Mercer’s prints,” I said. “Same prints go over to the car and back, go to where the guide was killed and back, and then from the briefcase to the edge.”

  “Yeah,” said Bunny, “but I don’t see any prints coming back from the edge.”

  “That’s ’cause he didn’t come back, Farm Boy,” said Top. He got down nearly into a push-up position and peered at the print closest to the edge. “See here? This one’s a little deeper, right at the sole. Like he pushed off right there.”

  “Pushed off?” echoed Lizzie. “But that would mean...”

  The last print was right at the edge. There was only one direction to go in, and that was down.

  Top got up and dusted his hands off. He cut me a look. “Probe, Cap’n?”

  “Do it,” I said.

  Bunny went over to one of our equipment boxes, opened it, and came back with what looked like a pigeon made from plastic. In his other hand, he held a small controller.

  “Surveillance drone,” Bunny explained when Lizzie and Brock looked expectantly at him. “Specially made for scouting combat environments. Durable, covered in flame-retardant and heat-resistant polymers. You can send one into a burning building and get good video feeds from up to a mile.”

  Bunny pressed a button on the pigeon, then handed it to Top, who held it ready over the edge. Then Bunny powered on the controller and gave a nod. Top hurled the pigeon high into the air and it immediately deployed its wings, flapped around until its internal gyroscopes and guidance were synched, and then dove into the smoke.

  “Nice,” said Brock. “Haven’t seen that model.”

  “And you’re not seeing it now,” I told him. He nodded.

  “If Mr. Mercer jumped down there,” said Lizzie, “what do you expect to find except charred bones?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “If we find bones, then this investigation shifts lanes and goes looking for answers elsewhere. If not, then we reassess what we know of Mercer.”

  She nodded, accepting that.

  While the drone flew, Bunny frowned at the small video display on the control unit. “Lot of smoke. Shifting through the spectrum to see what I can see.”

  A few seconds later...

  “Wait, I think I see something.”

  Then...

  “Holy fucking shit,” cried Bunny. “Guys!”

  We ran back to him. Bunny held the control device up and we crowded around to see the image. Top, Lizzie and Me. Brock stood to one side, unsure if he was invited but also clearly alarmed at Bunny’s tone.

  O
n the screen the picture was hazy because of the smoke, but we could still make out what it was. It’s just that it made no sense.

  It’s just that it was impossible.

  It’s just that it sent a thrill though me that was not revulsion at seeing a burned body, or any other normal emotion. What I felt was an absolutely ice-cold knife of real terror stab its way straight through my heart. Lizzie grabbed my wrist in a hand gone icy; her grip was vise-hard. Top made a sound that was part gasp and part cry of strict denial.

  James Mercer was down there. He was at the bottom of the burning pit. His clothes had all burned away. His flesh was cracked and splotched with brick red and charcoal black. His hair was gone.

  But he was alive.

  He knelt, naked and cooked alive, holding the big book out in front of him, reading from it even though blood and pus leaked steaming from his eyes. His cock was erect, and the skin bubbled with blisters that swelled and popped.

  Spiders—tens of thousands of them—crawled all over his body, and swarmed around him, and scaled the side of the pit. And before Mercer, as if opened like a wound in the world, was a cleft. A kind of doorway. Light poured through it, brighter than the fires that flickered around him.

  Through the speaker on the monitor we could hear the rustling of the spiders, the crackle of flames, the hiss of smoke and steam, and the constant, droning, inexorable mumble of James Mercer reading his prayers from the ancient book. The light from the cleft bathed Mercer in a hellish glow, and it showed us what all those spiders were doing down there.

  They were eating the dirt—clawing at the living rock, dragging tiny bits of it away on either side of that obscene cleft. I stared at it on the screen and felt as if the whole world was tilting under my feet. Mercer, driven to madness, kept alive through some means that could not make sense in any way, not in the wildest, warped reinterpretation of reality as I knew it. And the spiders. Milling with constant energy. Tiny creatures trying to tear open a wall of solid rock. For those small monsters it was a labor assigned in the deepest pit of insanity, and the spiders worked with tireless diligence to widen the crack.