They went over the plan, as simple as it was, one last time. They did a weapons check. Mostly everyone, including Jeremy, carried an M4 and a sidearm, although one man from each team had a 590A1 shotgun. Then, after everyone had checked their equipment, ammo, and nerves, they marched toward the portal. Jeremy’s only real instructions had been to stick close to Mwai, mostly so the commander could keep an eye on him but also so that he could keep Mwai updated on anything he might see that the rest of the soldiers could not. So he did just that.
Only the rope barrier stood between them and the undulating blue energy. A nervous current ran through the group, more hyped-up excitement than anxiety. Everyone tugged on their camo fatigues, adjusted the face shields on their helmets, and looked toward the portal with open curiosity. There was not much else to say, apparently, because Mwai just gave a quick nod, and the rope dropped to let them through.
Several of the scientists and other people from the satellite camp had followed behind them in the cloud of soot and ash they kicked up from the scorched ground. They stood around with equipment to scan the portal as they went through so they could analyze the energy fluctuations or whatever else it was that they were doing. Laptops balanced precariously in their arms as they frowned down at the screens.
Hale stood among them. She gave Jeremy a smile and a thumbs-up. He smiled back at her. It was about as fake a smile as possible. He’d been struck by the realization that Caleb was right, and this was a really stupid idea. Only a week ago, he’d been adamant that he would never go into a stranger’s house ever again, yet here he was about to dive head-first through a portal into places completely unknown. For all they knew, it was not a portal but some kind of monster-creating energy field that would zap them into dust the moment they stepped into it because there wasn’t another side to it after all.
Seargent Warner’s team stepped forward, and then it was too late to worry anyway. So, Jeremy squared his shoulders. He’d survived an old god, the first week of a magical apocalypse, a hit team straight out of a bad spy film, and he would survive this. He tightened his grip on his rifle and stepped forward as his team followed the other one.
The portal appeared unaffected as the first soldier stepped through. The blue energy continued to rotate. The little sparks still flew. A few bolts of electricity flashed, but no more so than when it hung in the air undisturbed.
As they stepped through, the energy enveloped them as though they were sinking into a viscous puddle of liquid. Then it closed around them, and they were gone. And the next person followed. When it was Jeremy’s turn to enter, he took a deep breath, hesitated for just a moment while he wondered whether to keep his eyes open or shut (then remembered he had his face shield down anyway), and marched forward.
It felt strange. His entire body felt as if he’d been scuffing across the carpet in his socks, building up static electricity, except ten times more intense. The blue glow blinded him as the energy built and then faded away. He was left blinking into darkness, trying to get his eyes to adjust. There was no shock like he expected from the build-up of energy, just an odd lingering charged feeling. It was along the same frustrating lines of needing his ears to pop as his plane lands, but they never do and his head just feels wrong for the rest of the day.
He stepped forward a little to give Mwai room to enter behind him. The rest of the soldiers stood around in a semi-circle with their guns raised, peering this way and that. As Jeremy’s eyes adjusted to the dimness after having been outside in a brightly lit forest, he could see that the area they entered was not completely dark.
They were in an enormous vaulted room with elaborate ribbed stonework walls that met in a pointed dome far overhead. The space itself seemed to create an echo overhead. Torches on the walls, which burned brighter than expected, illuminated the stonework all the way to the ceiling in sharp contrast. They cast flickering light across the rough, gray stone slab floor as well. It looked like an enormous gothic chapel, except where Jeremy expected stained glass windows to be, there was only more stone.
“Report,” Mwai ordered immediately upon stepping through to the room.
“This room is clear.” Seargent Warner said, “One entrance at twelve o’clock. The portal appears the same from this side.”
Jeremy looked over his shoulder to see that the portal was still undulating and throwing blue sparks out, just like it had on the other side. He turned back around and peered past the circle of soldiers to look for the entrance. About the height of a normal door stood a pointed archway that opened into pure blackness.
“Alright.” Mwai stepped forward and assessed the archway as well. “Anything from you, Miller?”
“No, nothing in this room has an overlay.”
Mwai nodded. “Seargent Warner’s team, you will remain in this room. Take pictures and notes. Seargent Ashford’s team, Miller, and I will continue further into the area. Get out of your night vision. Warner, let’s see if we can communicate through the radio.”
Jeremy dug through his back to find the night vision goggles they had provided him with. He held them in his hand and weighed the option of lifting his face shield to put them on. They had been told not to lift them without express permission, and Mwai had only said to get the night vision out, not to put them on. He glanced around at the rest of the soldiers and found that they were also just holding their goggles, so he did the same.
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In that time, Mwai and Warner figured out that they could communicate through the radio. This was a bit of a relief. Walking into the swirling ball of energy had been a bit frightening because…well because they literally had no idea what was going to happen. Walking into that shadowy archway, however, felt like something that Jeremy would watch a character out of a horror movie do while he munched on popcorn, shook his head sadly, and listened to Caleb criticize their critical thinking skills. Just like he had done when Jeremy first told him this entire plan. He tried to think more along the lines of Zanie’s logic – about all this being an exciting adventure. But the creeping dread that crawled out of the darkness toward them was difficult to escape.
It’s just a bunch of little imps waiting beyond that archway, he told himself. They don’t even stand a chance against kids with baseball bats, and you are surrounded by heavily armed and trained members of the United States military.
“Holy shit!” one of the soldiers shouted. Everyone’s heads whipped around to stare at the archway. Long green fingers with bulbous knuckles curled out of the shadows and around the arch’s ribbed frame. They looked like spider’s legs and elicited as guttural a reaction of horror as a giant, creeping spider might. A little green face appeared from the shadows moments later, eyes glowing eerily in the torchlight. Its thin, needle-like teeth dripped with saliva as it grinned at them.
Two of Sargent Warner’s team members had remained in formation while the rest of the soldiers had begun to prepare to start taking pictures of the vaulted room or move forward through the archway. They stood at the ready, one with her M4 and the other with his shotgun, trained on the archway. Everyone else abandoned what they were doing to join them in a defensive formation.
“That’s creepy.” The soldier beside muttered. They all held their breath for another moment as it crept through the doorway, followed by a second imp and, moments later, a third.
“McGraw and Rossi fire,” Mwai commanded once all three were in the room, and there did not appear to be any more following closely behind. The two men with shotguns stepped forward and blasted the creatures. The buckshot – they’d decided that buckshot was formidable enough against the imp and chosen it over slugs – caught the little creatures’ bodies and lifted them into the air. Two of them flew back into the shadows, and the third thumped into the wall and slid to the ground in a smear of green blood.
Silence reigned for a few beats as they looked at its shredded figure.
“Go ahead and check it out,” Mwai said, nodding at Sergeant Ashford. The tall man inched forward, flicking on the flashlight atop the barrel of his rifle to see through the archway. It turned out that he did not need it. As soon as he came within a few feet, a line of torches burst to life in the hallway beyond. They cast flickering golden light across the narrow, pointed arch hallway for a distance before it disappeared again into darkness.
A few feet down the hallway lay the bodies of the imp. None of the three had turned into toxic sludge, which was a bit of a relief.
“I don’t think we need the night vision,” Ashford called back. His voice echoed overhead. Jeremy tucked his goggles away and followed the rest of the team as they inched toward the archway.
“Did you get anything off of them?” Mwai asked Jeremy.
“Just the usual lowest-level overlays,” he shook his head, then pulled out his notebook and flipped to the first page, where he had copied over the two runes he’d seen differing between the imp that he’d encountered on the state park trail a few days ago. He pointed to the one that seemed to indicate they were of the basic variety, not the sickness-spreading variant. “Their runes looked like this. If I see the ones that are toxic, I’ll shout it out to you.”
That was what they had agreed upon. Mwai nodded in approval and turned away. Jeremy made three little tick marks next to the basic variety rune, then tucked the notebook away.
“If everyone is set, then let’s move on out,” Mwai said. They got into formation, Ashford and another soldier in front, Jeremy in the middle with Mwai, and two more soldiers behind. Like this, they marched into the hallway.
It seemed to stretch on before them endlessly. As they drew near to the darkness beyond the light of the torches, another length of them flared to life, and the ones behind them went out. It was reminiscent of the streetlamps buzzing on and off above the kelpie. Jeremy could not help but feel like they were being drawn further down the hallway.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He did not like one bit that the blackness behind them seemed to cut them off from the vaulted room and the other team. Thankfully, every so often, the radio crackled to life, and they exchanged a few words to check in with one another. Unlike in the kelpie’s darkness, communication was unimpeded. Perhaps this place was not as sinister as Jeremy was making it out to be.
Most of the walls were constructed of stones cut so perfectly that they sat together with barely a seam in smooth arches that curved over their heads between carved ribs that crisscrossed across the pointed ceiling. Every so often, the space between the ribs, which extended down to the flagstone floor, was not occupied by a solid wall but yawned open into a small square room.
A few of them contained imps, sometimes alone or in groups of two or three. Each time, they gunned them down with either the shotgun, which shredded them, or the M4s, which exploded their heads in a horrifying blast of green gore. Either way, none of them turned into the gelatinous goop that threatened to sicken their party.
They continued on this way for about twenty minutes if their watches could be trusted. Given that this entire space was potentially just concentrated, pure magic, Jeremy was not confident that their watches could be trusted or that time progressed in the same manner as it did on the other side of the portal. The whole thing was actually turning out to be pretty boring, which both disappointed Jeremy and made him feel anxious that everything was running too smoothly. They had cleared several of the little rooms before the hallway finally came to an end.
It looked as though the hallway used to continue on. The stone wall was rougher than the rest of the space had been. The blocks were not cut with perfect angles and were shoved together with layers of crumbly white mortar instead of perfectly straight joins. Jeremy brushed the pads of his fingers over the mortar, which seemed poorly and hastily applied, oozing out between the stones and never cleaned up by whoever laid them. Despite its crumbly appearance, it felt solid beneath his touch.
Two new hallways extended to their right and left, each with lines of torches beckoning their party into the shadows.
“Well then.” Mwai sighed and glanced between the two directions. “Let’s go left first.”
He brought the radio to his mouth to let the other team know.