Dead Five's Pass

  DEAD FIVE’S PASS

  Colin F. Barnes

  First Edition

  Dead Five’s Pass © 2014 by Colin F. Barnes

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  1

  The Rockies, Alberta, Canada

  Some people believe in an afterlife full of consciousness and spirituality. Carise didn’t. She held the afterlife in her hands: a thick pack of Polaroid pictures. The colorful dead freeze-framed in celluloid.

  Carise slugged back another mouthful of whiskey, wheezed as it burned all the way down. She would have preferred a smooth single malt, but in the remote village of Smokeywood at the base of Morant’s Peak, she had to make do with whatever the single, understocked village shop carried—which, due to the winter delivery schedule, wasn’t much.

  As much as she needed that warmth and the dulling effects of the whiskey, other things occupied her mind.

  Those things were dead people.

  The crushing silence of the departed pressed down upon her from the walls of her rustic wooden cabin. Framed pictures of her parents and friends past hung in an uneven grid. Dust and condensation spotted the glass frames, charting time with a creeping inevitability.

  The worst sat at the top of the pack of her Polaroids: an ultrasound scan of her baby.

  It was cut from her, already dead.

  Two years had passed, and still it haunted her.

  A crackle of static and voices from the police scanner broke her from her maudlin thoughts. She leaned forward in her worn, wooden captain’s chair and rested her elbows on her equally worn, wooden desk, its surface strewn with radio equipment, notebooks, and maps of the various climbing routes in and around Morant’s Peak.

  Carise was a volunteer mountain rescuer. Climbing and spelunking season would soon be over. Luckily she didn’t have many emergencies to deal with this season, but the voice on the scanner sent an adrenal shiver down her spine far colder than any Canadian winter could produce.

  “Charlie Code 1, this is Mounty 2. We have two stuck climbers at the top of Dead Five’s Pass. I just received their emergency call, they’re not responding. Please advise. Over.”

  “Mounty 2, this is Marge. Where are you, Frank?”

  “Marge, I was patrolling at the base of the pass when I saw a flare and heard some screaming over the emergency channel. I tried to respond but there’s no reply. It was a male’s voice and he referred to himself and his girlfriend. Said something about a new cave.”

  “A new cave in the pass? That place has been thoroughly charted, how—”

  “I don’t know, Marge, all’s I can figure is there’s two kids somewhere in the pass and they’re panicking. It’ll be dark soon enough and we need to get the chopper up there before they freeze to death.”

  “Okay, Frank, you keep scanning that radio and trying to stay in contact. If they can’t respond, they still might be able to hear you. I’ll get in touch with the volunteers and get someone up there for a look. Keep me updated if you see or hear anything. Over.”

  “Roger that. But…Marge? I didn’t like the screams one bit. It was like nothing I ever heard before…”

  Carise slugged back the last dregs of whiskey and tossed the bottle into a trash can under her desk. It was time to get to work. It would do her good to get out of the cabin, would stop her from dwelling on the past and her failures.

  Maybe this rescue would be a chance for redemption. A chance to make up for the last attempted rescue. She blamed herself and she knew the townsfolk did too. When they learned about her drinking problem, they backdated it to that tragedy, not realizing it was because of that tragedy that she picked up the bottle to drown the guilt.

  She flicked on the CB radio and set the channels to switch every ten seconds. If the kids had found a new cave, then there was a chance they would have told someone; and maybe there would be chatter among the other climbers or villagers of Smokeywood. Something new like that would surely get the gossip flowing.

  While she prepared her winter climbing gear, checked her ropes, flashlights, and various other kit, she wondered if Marcel would get the call too. She hadn’t spoken with her ex-boyfriend for nearly two months. The thought of seeing and talking with him again filled her stomach with snakes.

  What would she say? She’d turned it over in her mind so many times, but as each day passed, it became more difficult to form a suitable answer. He took the loss of their baby much better than she, and if Carise was honest with herself, she hated him for it.

  He left her to deal with the grief herself—locked away in her cabin while he shacked up with a new model, that spiteful bitch Janis. But she knew it wasn’t like that really: it was she that pushed him away. Just like she pushed away his support over the failed rescue attempt that haunted her.

  No matter, she’d have to put it all out of her mind and wait for the call, if she were needed, to rescue that kid and his girlfriend. In the meantime, she sat at her desk, listened to the chatter on the CB radio.

  It was unnaturally quiet; not a single mention of any new cave.

  Her mind wandered: what could have been in there that would have sent the pair of kids screaming into the pass?

  * * *

  The darkness flowed into the boy’s mind like a rolling storm.

  The reception on his cell phone crackled before dying completely. The screams of his girlfriend reached a deafening high pitch over the furious wind, her voice full of pain and fear. His legs turned to jelly; he fought with the fear of going back into the cave to save her, but that blackness…that something other…it was devouring his mind from within. He couldn’t go back, so he ran, stumbled, clawed his way down the snow-covered mountain pass.

  But it was right there, on his shoulder, on his back, invisible, intangible, but still…there.

  He dropped his cell phone into the snow; his backpack followed.

  Tears stung his eyes as the cold wind thrashed against his exposed face. The air was thin this high up the pass, and each frosted breath rasped at his throat as he sucked in lungfuls of air to keep his arms and legs pumping, to keep him moving through the soft, powdery snow, and away from that…that…thing.

  “Jason! Jason!” His girlfriend’s screams broke beyond the bounds of her vocal cords, stretched and torn. From within his mind, the blackened cloud smothered her voice so that all he could hear was the dull, bass-piping noise, like notes from some diabolical instrument.

  Jason tripped over a submerged rock and crashed to his knees with a heavy thump.

  In the dying hours of the afternoon, acres of pine trees rose from the mountainside like jagged bones. The lambent light from the setting sun raked across the snow, creating long, fingerlike shadows that crept towards him.

  The pain in his knees throbbed in tempo with the crashing at his temples. It reminded him of the guttural chants coming from the men in hoods lurking within the cave shadows. He closed his eyes, focused on the cold snow against his face, trying to forget. But
in his head, billowing ever larger, the great shadow unfolded its infinite mass into corners and places he didn’t know existed.

  “I’m…so sorry…Becky, I should have never brought us here.” Jason sobbed into thick gloves. Blood covered them from when he tried to pull Becky clear of a pool inside the cave.

  At first it was an azure blue—crystalline and perfect. A source of life and refreshment. But something within the water snatched at her, refused to give her up. Soon the water turned a dark red, and her screams echoed around the damp cave walls and its low, domed ceiling.

  Her face, twisted in fear and torment, would forever be within his DNA—and he knew that long after his death, the sheer terror would stay within his bones.

  Jason hauled himself to his feet and stole a look behind. Despite the feeling of dread, nothing alien or monstrous stalked him, just the shivering coldness. Yet something within the cave, something deep down in the ground, conjured images within his consciousness: shapes he couldn’t quite understand or relate to—symbols and glyphs with strange angles, their perspectives skewed like an Escher painting.

  He felt sick as he ran; his eyes seemed entirely too large for his head, and his brain throbbed to some unknown rhythm. Tears streamed down his face. The pine trees flashed by him, branches scratching at his face.

  You can’t run from your insanity.

  Still, he tried.

  The sun had descended behind the peak, and he came to understand the name of the route up the mountainside—Dead Five’s Pass. When he finally broke from the tree line, he slipped on a patch of ice and fell hard onto his back. He wheezed, winded by the fall, and turned himself over onto his stomach.

  A few meters down the slope stood five pointed stones rising from the snowy surface like twenty-foot fangs. It was as if the rock had splintered upwards from some inner force.

  Upon their surface were more of those dread-symbols from the cave—and now his mind.

  He crawled closer. It was through some compulsion beyond his understanding, and he began to gibber unfamiliar words. His lips smacked together and his tongue made new shapes within his mouth as he dragged himself closer to the stones. The dull piping noise whispered to him on the wind.

  None of this can be real! And yet his heart and mind knew it was.

  When he reached the stones, he clambered to his raw, cut knees. Those terrible bass notes grew in volume. He clutched his ears, shut his eyes, screamed to drown out that unholy noise. From under his feet, deep under the ice, he felt the ground rumble.

  Snow and ice burst upwards, throwing him against the stones, cracking his head. Four misshapen, tendril-like proto-limbs reached out from the ground.

  “No…no…” he screamed.

  Like great snakes the limbs slithered around his legs and arms and pulled them to all points of the compass, breaking, twisting bones, stretching tendons.

  The screams caught in his throat as hooks embedded in the limbs the color of obsidian shredded his winter clothes to remnants. The flaying continued until those razorlike claws thrashed at his skin.

  He wished he never discovered that damned cave. He wished he never logged onto that damned climbing forum and saw those new satellite pictures.

  But more than that, he wished for a quick and painless death.

  He was only granted the first part of that last wish.

  2

  The weather was turning bad. Carise didn’t feel good at all about the whole situation. There were murmurings on the CB radio among two truckers about some girl covered in mud and snow, running by the side of the road. They called it in, but when Carise questioned them more about it, both of them disappeared off the line.

  Whatever happened to the girl, they didn’t want to talk about it.

  Allied with the ranger calling in the emergency request, it was shaping up to be a rough night.

  She thought about the bottle of reserve whiskey in the storage room. Her hands trembled. But no, she’d make sure she was sober for whatever might occur. She couldn’t afford anymore slip-ups; especially after the last time.

  It should have been a routine rescue, with her and her boyfriend at the time, Marcel, first on site. The cave was well-known to the both of them, and the boy, who was no more than eighteen years old, had got stuck in a common place: the dead-drop. A narrow tunnel that sunk twenty meters into a large, open cavern. The difficulty was that it tapered and twisted in the middle. It was easy for people to misjudge their alignment—and size—and get themselves stuck.

  In the struggle, Carise didn’t check that he was secured to their ropes properly, and when she instructed him to twist his body and let the ropes take the weight, his backpack slid up and above his head and he dropped all the way to the rocky basin of the cavern.

  He was dead the instant he hit the ground.

  The rope that should have pulled him up floated uselessly in the darkness with Carise clutching the other end, shouting her throat hoarse with panic and desperation.

  His body was eventually recovered and buried. She couldn’t bring herself to attend the service, the prying, accusing eyes of the villagers too much for her to bear.

  Damn, that whiskey would be good right now.

  Her throat constricted and she swallowed the grief as she sunk to the battered sofa in her cabin’s lounge area. She still had the paper with the headlines of the accident on the coffee table. She refused to throw it away because she might start to forget his face, and she didn’t deserve to forget him.

  Tears welled in her eyes, blurring her vision, and she dug her nails into her palms to try and stop herself from free-falling into grief and guilt. Her cell phone buzzed inside her pocket.

  Choking back the tears and settling herself, she answered, “Carise.”

  “Hey, darlin’. How’ya holding up?”

  “Hi, Marge. I’m getting by, thanks. This about the kids stuck in the pass?”

  “Huh. I wondered if you’d hear that. Still got the scanner, eh?”

  “Yeah, you know me. I like to keep my ear to the ground, ya know. In case of… accidents.”

  “Well, darlin’, we’ve got a peach for ya here. Ol’Frank called in an emergency, but they didn’t respond. You probably heard that. But here’s the thing: one of them was found. A girl. She’s in a real bad way. Says her boyfriend’s still up there.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “That’s the thing. She says there’s a newly discovered cave. Her story is…well, I can’t explain. Can you come to the station and hear her out? You might get more sense from her, and maybe figure out where her boyfriend got to.”

  “Sure thing, Marge. Give me ten minutes.”

  “Oh, and Carise?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Brace yourself, darlin’. She’s not in a good way.”

  Carise switched the phone off, placed it in a protective breast pocket on the inside of her winter jacket. She stood from the sofa, her legs were weak beneath her slight weight and she became light-headed.

  “Come on, girl! Get a grip, let’s do this.” Carise gripped her fists and closed her eyes before taking one last look at the paper and the smiling face of her rescue-gone-wrong victim and vowed she wouldn’t let it happen again. There were enough ghosts in life; she didn’t want to add another. And then she wondered: would Marcel get a call? Despite their split, he was still active in the volunteer rescue setup. The thought of facing him again filled her with almost as much dread as facing this rescue.

  She gathered the last of her gear into a rescue pack: spare flashlights, carabiners, ice picks, extra rope, and two-way radio handsets and prepared to leave for the station.

  The wind howled and battered at her modest cabin. With a gloved hand, she wiped away the ice forming on the inside of the window and peered out. It was snowing heavily now and the sun was minutes from setting. It was riskier in the dark, but if they could get the chopper in the air, there was a small chance they’d see something under the spotlight.

  Regardless of t
he odds, they had to at least try. Without shelter, it was unlikely anyone lost in the pass would survive the night; especially given the weather warnings. Freezing rain and heavy snowfall predicted a bad night for all concerned.

  Carise packed her gear into the back of her old, battered F-150 and settled into the driver’s seat. She started the engine and pulled away onto the dirt track, which thankfully wasn’t as bad as she first thought. A half-pint bottle of whiskey rolled around the passenger seat. She placed it into the glove box and hoped she wouldn’t need it.

  * * *

  “Brick! Hey, Brick. What’re you doing over there?” Michael called out to his fellow climber as he watched him leave the base camp tent and head over to the five standing stones with his flashlight. It was almost dark now, and the moonlight shone on the snow, creating a cool gray landscape. Dave, aka Brick on account of his muscular build, ignored Michael’s calls and continued shining his light on the ground as if he were looking for something.

  Michael pulled his head back into the tent to regard his other two friends, James and Nate. “Guys, what the hell is Brick doing?”

  James, living up to his nickname of Mouse, burrowed into his sleeping bag and shook his head. His pointed features and blonde, spiky hair only added to the rodent resemblance. “Who knows? But keep an eye on him, will ya, Mike.”

  “Guys, chill out. He’s just gone to check for a GPS signal. He’s making sure we’re on the right path,” Nate said. “If you’re worried, go after him.”

  “Yeah sure, let me take the responsibility—again, not like you two ain’t got anything better to do.” Michael sighed at the lack of help from his fellow climbers. They were all part of a local university climbing group and were out on winter break. They would have been at this new fabled cave by now if they hadn’t misread the map and got lost. And now Dave was off on a trek for no apparent reason.