One Last Gasp: A WWII Horror Thriller (The Cosmic Horror Cycle) by Andrew C. Piazza

Author:Andrew C. Piazza [Piazza, Andrew C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

47

We set five men at the top of the stairs to cover our retreat if we needed it. The rest of us swirled down those spiraling stone steps like water down a drain.

They were narrow, only wide enough to go one at a time, and while the Captain and I waited for Shorty to push a squad down the stairs, I noticed Major Hayward standing near Tedeski and his tankers. The Major’s face was clammy, and although the temperature in the basement was chill, a fine sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. He held on to his Sten submachine-gun like he was trying to hold something buoyant underwater.

“This is as far as we got in our search before those screams started in the shower room. Now we’ll see what’s what. Come on, John,” Wexler said, moving for the stairway, but Major Hayward stopped him with a hand.

“Major Wexler, please,” he said.

“John, it’s like the girl said,” Wexler said, nodding toward Rebecca, who stood as close as she could to Captain Powell, “where else is safer than with us? All these men, all this firepower…”

“Useless,” Major Hayward said. “If we go down there…”

“We are going down there. All of us,” Wexler said, and practically shoved Major Hayward down the steps.

I couldn’t resist a look upwards at the word written on the wall. Wilkommen. Welcome.

It was the Geist, and it knew we were coming.

The Captain and I traded a look and followed Wexler, with Rebecca set safely between us. Cappy followed, along with Doctor Schmidt, Davey and Goliath, and the rest, and I remember feeling better about being in the middle of the group with a cushion of armed men in front and behind.

The stairway wound down to a depth of about twenty feet below the level of the basement. The air got colder and thinner, and the electric bulbs did not extend this far, so we were in darkness. Flashlight beams pierced the air with insufficient light.

“This was the escape route for the Baron, when Dom Caern was a castle,” Doctor Schmidt said, his voice floating down to us from further back along the column. “It led to a small tunnel going to the surface.”

“Led?” I called back. “What happened to it?”

“Yes, it was destroyed in the experiment,” came the reply. “The journals mention this.”

We reached the bottom of the winding stairwell and came into a wide, plain stone room. Most of it, the close two-thirds, was empty and plain. The floor at the far third of the room dipped down into a wide, shallow basin, and it was only once I got closer that I realized it wasn’t the same room at all, but a tunnel that intersected with it. “Intersect” isn’t really the right word; it looked as though the engineers had dug a tunnel that enveloped the far third of the room.

“That’s it,” Wexler said.

The tunnel ran at a right angle to us, both left and right, and sloped down toward the right and ascended towards the left.

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