Collier's Creek: 6 - Into Darkness by Nick Stead

The entrance to the mine gaped like the maw of some great beast, a gateway to Hell if ever I saw one. In the moonlight it was just visible as a patch of blackness somehow more complete than the twilight of our surroundings outside, as if the darkness of the tunnel had a different quality to it, one of a distinctly sinister nature. I wanted nothing more than to turn back from this madness I’d been dragged into, but I had a job to do and it seemed like all the answers I sought awaited in that passage of doom.

A flame burst into life beside me, the strange woman lighting a torch she’d been carrying in a pack filled with supplies. New shadows danced around the flickering light as she approached the mine, my sense of foreboding heightened as I fell into step beside her, the darkness made somehow more eerie for the orange glow in its midst. It only seemed to grow stronger at the edges of the light and I shuddered to think what might lurk just beyond sight.

There were no workers down there at that time of night but from what the woman had told me we could expect some company, and none of it good. I thought I could hear something from one of the tunnels up ahead but I couldn’t be sure, fear sending my imagination into overdrive as I strained my senses for any signs of danger. It was when we came to the point where the tunnel split into three that we heard the scream.

A brief glance at the woman confirmed there was nothing imagined about that sound, and we broke into a run, she no doubt fearing for her husband, while I was suffering from reckless heroism once again. There was no question as to which tunnel the scream had come from, and luckily this one didn’t appear to be branching off. We did seem to be running deep into the mine though, and we slowed only when we reached the dead end.

“What the hell?” I panted.

“They’re here, just gotta know where to look,” the woman said.

She handed me the torch and began to retrace our steps, running her hands over the stone as she went, clearly searching for something. I didn’t have to wait long before she found it. A look of triumph passed over her face as she dug her fingers into a crevice and heaved, a well disguised boulder rolling just enough to the side for us to squeeze through to a hidden passage.

“What was that?” a man’s voice said from somewhere up ahead.

“How in the blazes do you expect me to know?” another man answered him. “Go take a look yer fool.”

“And why do I have to go?!”

“Quit arguing; Billy will have our heads if anything happens to these guns. Go take a look and if it’s intruders shoot ‘em!”

We drew our own guns, tense as we waited for Billy’s goon to appear. But a new sound reached our ears, one that filled me with a cold dread far worse than anything I’d felt up to that point.

It was unmistakeably the growl of some mighty beast which could only be the wolf I kept hearing mention of, the noise rumbling in the creature’s chest like thunder. I was even more reluctant to head towards the animal than I had been to enter the mine, but my only ally down here was motioning at me to move on, and if the two men had a bunch of captives I couldn’t leave them to be torn apart by the beast. So I crept forwards, brandishing the torch in one hand and pointing my gun with the other.

A strange sight awaited at the end of that fated tunnel. There were the two men we’d heard with guns aimed at the wolf, but they stood as if frozen by fear. Just beyond them were the men we’d come looking for plus a dozen or so more, all bound and gagged. Behind them I could see the guns and enough dynamite to bring the entire mine down on our heads. And then there was the wolf itself.

An impressive specimen, the beast stood taller than any canid I’d ever laid eyes on, its body muscular beneath that fur black as the darkness of the mine itself, and its powerful jaws big enough to wrap round a person’s head. But what really held my attention were its eyes, blazing an unnatural red with a rage I’d never encountered in any other animal before. One look was enough to know this was no normal wolf, and after Dale had referred to it as ‘our wolf’ I had to wonder if they’d found some means to control it. Not that it really mattered in that moment. Billy’s goons no longer seemed to be in control of the situation and the mixture of fear and hate on my companion’s face told me she was as helpless against the creature as I was.

For reasons I’ll never be able to quite explain, the wolf turned its great head away from the two men it had been readying to attack, focusing on us instead. It fixed us with its gaze of fury and I suddenly found myself drowning in twin pools of bloodshed, lost in something greater than a predator’s hunger. This was a hunger I’d only ever seen in men of a certain nature, a hunger for violence and death. And I felt something stir deep within me in response, just as chaos erupted.

With the wolf’s attention on us, the goons seemed to find their courage, opening fire on the beast. I was sure the bullets hit the creature but they didn’t appear to do anything more than feed its rage, the monstrous thing turning back to them and charging. In the blink of an eye it was on one of them, his screams echoing round the mine as the other man lost his nerve and started to run. My companion rushed over to her lover while some rational part of my mind urged me to go and help free the captives, but something stronger was at work, something primal.

I had Billy’s goon in my sights, my own lips curling into a snarl. Fury roared at the centre of my being, spreading through my veins until my rational self was lost in that dark blaze. To this day I still don’t know if it was the wolf’s doing or something about that unholy mine – whether I was infected by the blackness of those tunnels, filled with an evil no light could ever hope to vanquish. All I know for sure is that my mind latched onto the idea that Billy and his goons were my enemies, and that animal need to survive took over, driving me to kill him before he could kill me.

The fool didn’t run far, stopping to take aim at the dynamite with the plan to blow us all to hell. I shot him in the leg before he could squeeze the trigger, his limb collapsing under him so that he fell to the floor, screaming and writhing in agony. The next thing I knew I was stood over his prone form, beating him with a savage pleasure which didn’t seem my own. Bones cracked and blood spilled, and finally his screams came to an end.

Panting, I looked up to see the captives had been freed, the men and the dark skinned woman running towards me.

“Run!” she shouted, but the words barely registered with the darkness shrouding my mind. “Run! It’s going to blow!”

That cleared my mind somewhat. “No, I stopped him.”

“The fuse is lit, run!”

And so we ran. Somewhere behind us the wolf howled, and I knew in my heart we had not seen the last of the beast. But whether for good or ill I could not say, and if bullets couldn’t stop it, I could only pray it would prove to be our ally when next we met.