The Underdwelling (6 page)

“Oh yeah, sure.”

McNair told them that the trees in the Petrified Forest in Arizona were from the Triassic, but what they had here was much older. Much, much older. In Arizona, some of the trees were still rooted as these, but many had been washed by prehistoric seasonal floods into sandy river channels where they were buried in gravel and sand rich in volcanic ash.

“The process is called permineralization,” McNair explained. “I imagine this entire area was in some sort of lowland swamp or valley during the Permian. A flash flood probably turned that valley into a bog or a muddy lake. Hence, oxygen which causes oxidation and rot, was kept away. These trees were buried in water and sediment. What happens next is that the trees either disintegrate or are compressed into coal over a period of millions of years, or, in this case, they permineralize. Minerals gradually replace the woody tissues and you have petrified trees.”

Breed said, “Yeah, but this is better than the Petrified Forest. A lot better.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. This entire forest must have been locked in that bog and the entire thing, through the passage of thousands or even
hundreds
of thousands of years must have dried up, but the sediment that enclosed it turned to stone, capturing our forest as we now see it. Nearly intact.”

McNair said that much later, whatever geologic upheaval swallowed up the Permian strata and sank it deep into Precambrian rock, brought the forest here as well. Through the ages, waters must have eroded the rocks away and exposed what they were seeing now.

Maki was interested. “There’s nothing like this anywhere? Not even Arizona?”

McNair shook his head. “A few years ago, a nice stand of petrified Permian trees were discovered near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica. But nothing like this.”

Some of them rose up out of the rock on spidery tangles of fossilized roots and others had trunks so huge that three men could not have circled them with their arms. McNair said there were both conifers and deciduous trees in this forest. They were looking at cycads and gymnosperms and seed ferns, an amazing variety. He pointed out short trees with fern-like fronds that were called Archaeopteris, the progenitors of modern pines. Something called a Dicroidium that looked more like a large houseplant than a tree. There were primitive Ginkgoes with broad, fanlike leaves, cycads that looked much like palm trees, and Glossopteris, another seed fern, but very treelike in appearance. This species had a massive trunk that tapered gradually upward maybe fifty or sixty feet where a cluster of whipping branches sprouted. The huge, broad leaves in the rock were Glossopteris leaves, McNair said.

He squatted next to a wide stump, examining the rings within which were bright and sparkling with mineral deposits of many colors. “Look here,” he said. “If I had a mass spectrometer, I could identify these minerals, but I’m prepared to make a guess. Much of this is quartz, but the various trace elements give the petrified wood its color. Copper and chrome oxide create greens and blues, iron oxide gives us reds and browns and yellows, aluminum silicates produce whites, etc. etc.”

Boyd, for one, was ignoring the lecture.

It was interesting stuff and any other time he might have listened intently, but not down here. Not in the bowels of the earth in the enshrouding darkness with nothing but the sound of dripping water and echoing voices to break that heavy, almost humming silence. This place was like some graveyard and he honestly did not like it. It was meant to stay buried and he wished to God it had. He panned his light around, all those fossilized tree trunks leaning and canting this way and that, clustered together, crowded like the spokes of bike tires. The flashlight beam created sliding, distorted shadows and made the trees look like they were in motion. More than once, he was certain that something had moved out there in that cemetery of pillars and monuments.

It was imagination. It just had to be.

Yet, that feeling in his guts was expanding, filling him with an oily blackness, drowning him in his own mounting claustrophobia and paranoia. This place had not known light or air in eons and the idea of that disturbed him in ways he could not adequately catalog. Like maybe this hermetically sealed graveyard might start waking up at any moment, unleashing all its terrible secrets after 250 million years.

That was crazy, of course.

But as he wiped sweaty dew from his brow, he could not dismiss it entirely. Because ever since they’d reached the petrified forest he’d had the feeling that they were being watched.

9

Twenty minutes later—after climbing through those close-packed trunks, navigating petrified logs, and fields of four-foot stumps wider than oval tabletops—they waded through a pool of freezing water and pressed through another stand of trees and what they saw on the other side literally took their breath away.

“Those ain’t trees,” Maki said. “That’s…that’s a city…”

“Can’t be,” Breed said. “Not down here.”

Boyd reserved judgment, as did McNair and Jurgens. They stepped forward, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. At first glance, sure, it did look like some sort of city, though maybe
village
would have been more accurate. Not buildings exactly, but trees. Immense things like California redwoods spread out and each bigger around than the opening to a train tunnel. About forty or fifty feet up, they had been sheared off flat, giving the impression of flat-roofed, man-made structures. Like the others they were completely turned to stone, but unlike the others they were honeycombed with oval openings, dozens and dozens of them.

Boyd was thinking that, yes, it did look like a village of sorts with gigantic trees used as buildings, but no ordinary village. This was primeval looking, weird and offbeat like those monkey villages in
The Planet of the Apes.
You just couldn’t imagine men living in places like this, climbing up into those holes and kicking off their shoes. If those cells were indeed domiciles of some sort, they looked like the sort some simian tree dwellers might fashion. Maybe even Tarzan.

“Those are trees,” Jurgens said.

McNair nodded. “Yes…but immense. I’ve never heard of anything like this from the Permian.”

“Maybe they’re not from the Permian,” Breed said.

“They have to be,” McNair pointed out. “I mean, it would be a little coincidental to assume that these were far older, that they had been standing petrified in our theoretical valley when the flood claimed the rest of this forest. It would be stretching.”

He and Jurgens walked around with their lanterns and long-handled flashlights while the others just stood and stared. There were at least a dozen of the big trees, some up on mounds, and some down in little draws sitting in standing water. They led right up to the far wall of the cavern where at some time in the past there had been a cave-in, swallowing the rest of the petrified Permian world. Set amongst them, were dozens of the other trees.

Breed kept panning his light around, studying the boles of those big trees. “I don’t know, Doc,” he said when McNair returned. “These big ones just look…I don’t know…”

“Older,” Maki said.

And Boyd was with them on that. Like this was some sort of sacred grove that had been abandoned, all the little trees inserting themselves and growing wild when whoever or
what
ever cut those cells was long, long gone. Regardless, there was something eerie about them standing so big and stark like monoliths and monuments. The flashlight beams scanning them made the cell mouths seem to move as shadows spilled from them.

Jurgens and McNair went up to one and started peering inside it. Boyd and Breed followed suit. The openings were all about four-feet in diameter. Inside, were little cells maybe five-feet high by ten long. You could still see the chopping marks in the petrified wood. McNair climbed inside one and examined this.

“It looks like this was done when the tree was still alive,” he said.

“But by
who?”
Breed said. “I mean, who was around 250 million years ago to hollow out these little apartments?”

Jurgens shook his head. “It wasn’t a matter of
who,
Breed, but
what.
There were no people during the Permian. This is,
was,
the work of some arboreal creature. Some tree-living species that chewed these cavities open.”

“They remind me of those holes the prairie dogs dig in their sand piles at the zoo,” Maki said.

“What could have made these, Doc?” Boyd asked.

“I…I’m not sure,” McNair said. “But it’s apparent that there were very many of them and it must have taken time.”

Boyd looked into another. “Almost looks like toolwork, don’t it?” he said, putting his flashlight beam on the meticulously carved ceiling, the series of hack marks that looked like maybe they’d been done with an axe.

“It wasn’t done by tools,” McNair said, but he didn’t sound convinced of that himself.

“But what cut them off flat on top, Doc?” Breed wanted to know.

McNair said, “There’s no way of telling. Could have been that they grew that way or some natural force did it. The movement of the rock above may have sheared them off over a period of millions of years. Hard to say.”

“Almost looks like it was done on purpose,” Maki said.

Boyd stood before the nearest tree, sweeping his light up it, counting all the cells set into its face. They went right up to the very top. Dozens of them. Looking at them, he was reminded of a bee honeycomb. Whatever lived in them must have been a very good climber.

McNair was taking photograph after photograph.

“Well, gentlemen, I think we should call it a day,” Jurgens said. “No sense waiting around down here until our batteries go dead.”

Boyd was in perfect agreement with that. This was plenty for one day. Let the scientists figure this all out. He wanted to get topside again, get out of the cavern and the mines in general, suck in some air that wasn’t dank and stagnant smelling.

After this I’m gonna need a drink,
he thought,
maybe four or five of them. In fact, I just might—

Maki, who had been investigating trees ahead, came running back, shining his light around up in the air. “What the hell was that?”

They all looked at him.

In the glow of the lanterns, his face had taken on the color of yellow cheese. His eyes were wide and white, his lips pulled away from his teeth.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Jurgens said.

But nobody was saying it was his imagination. They were all looking around them now as if the unpleasant possibility that they might not be alone down there had just occurred to them, had just settled into them like venom. Flashlight beams scanned about, but no one heard anything but that continual, morose dripping of water. The air smelled like it had been blown from a crypt…yellow bones and flaking shrouds, dust and advanced age.

“I heard it,” Maki said. “Up there…up on one of those trees. A kinda scratching sound.”

10

All flashlights went up.

Beams arced through the darkness.

There were lots of the other trees around them, the gymnosperms and cycads standing about like posts. Some were fifty feet in height and the flashlights played about their tops.

“There’s nothing up there, Maki,” Jurgens said.

“Wait,” Breed said. “I heard something, too.”

Then they all did. A sort of knocking sound like a woodpecker working a dead tree. It had that same hollow, continual rapping. It went on for maybe five seconds, stopped, then started again. It was coming from high above, from the apex of one of the trees…but they could see nothing up there.

“Fuck is that?” Breed said.

McNair swallowed. “I assumed this cavern was sealed, but something could have gotten in through a crevice. Bats, maybe.”

“I never heard bats knock like that,” Maki pointed out.

Boyd stood there, his heart pounding and the cylinder of the flashlight in his hand feeling very greasy like it might slide out of his fist at any moment.

Jurgens cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get on our way—”

“Shut up,” Breed said.

They were hearing more noises now. Not just that knocking, but a scraping sound from high above them like tenpenny nails were being scratched over petrified wood. A flurry of noise that went on for maybe thirty seconds. Then nothing. Nothing at all.

“There’s something up there,” Breed whispered, like he was afraid that whatever it was might hear him.

All lights were up in the petrified treetops now. Most were just posts lacking branches. The lights swept over them and there was absolutely nothing up there. Nothing that the lights could find.

The sounds started again, knocking and scraping, not from one particular tree, but from many as if whatever was up there was leaping from trunk to trunk over their heads. It stopped again and they all stood there, silent and motionless, sensing something but not knowing what it was. Boyd’s flashlight was shaking in his hand, his beam jumping around. He wanted badly to run, to get the hell out of there, before whatever it was showed. Because he had a bad feeling that it was about to. That whatever was up there was about to drop down amongst them in a flurry of scratching limbs.