The Underdwelling (9 page)

Corey shook his head. “You know same as me. If it’s just loose rubble, we can drill it in three, four hours with a reamer bit. Even cutting four-hundred feet we’ll have her in eight hours…but we don’t know what happened down there. Whole goddamn earth might have moved. Limestone is unstable. If we have to cut through solid rock it’s gonna take days.”

“And more likely weeks,” Russo said, spitting.

Weeks. Weeks down there for chrissake.
Russo pulled off his cigarette and watched Corey making his way up to the drift, hollering orders and telling the diggers to keep at it. He stood there, wondering what it was like for them down there. He remembered the time he’d been trapped below. Even now, it made his flesh crawl.

15

Boyd was waiting.

He didn’t know for what or maybe he did and just didn’t want to admit it to himself. He lay there next to the tree that had broken his leg. Maki hadn’t spoken in some time and he figured that was a good thing. The silence was killing him, the desolation and the claustrophobia that clawed at his throat, but he did not want to know what was going on in Maki’s head because he figured it was plenty bad.

Much like what was in his own head.

A sound.

Shit.

“What’s that?” Maki said.

Then a light splashed through the spiderwebbing of trees and they saw Jurgens coming in their direction, moving over mounds of rock and down into little hollows, splashing through puddles. He leapfrogged a cluster of roots and stood before them, panting.

“We’re making some progress, I think,” he told them. “Lot of rock fall over there, but Breed and McNair are doing a good job of it. When they come back, Maki, we’ll take our turn.”

“Maybe she don’t want us getting out,” Maki said.

Jurgens just looked at him, smiling as if he expected a good joke, but seeing that none was coming, he frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The sounds,” Boyd told him. “They came again.”

“Yeah?”

“Worse.”

“Click, click, click,” Maki said.

Boyd told him what had happened, realizing how ridiculous it sounded, but he did not feel ridiculous telling it. Because the fear was still on him. He wore it like a skin.

“Could have been a weird echo,” Jurgens told them. “I’ve heard some pretty strange subterranean echoes in my time.”

Boyd shook his head. “It wasn’t an echo. The same sounds repeated, but of a different caliber. And that other sound…that moaning or whatever in the Christ it was. It wasn’t natural, not at all.”

“Ghost,” Maki said. “It sounded like a ghost going
w-o-o-o-o-o-o-o…”

Jurgens didn’t even comment on that. It was absurd. “Do you realize what you two are saying? Ghosts?”

No, no, no, Jurgens wasn’t going to listen to bullshit like that and you could see it on his face. He was a mining engineer. He was the guy who cut shafts and found the raw ore that made others rich and kept industries rolling. Ghosts. Of all things. Maybe there were such things and maybe there weren’t, but not down here. Not in this Paleozoic tomb. Because when you talked ghosts you were talking the ghosts of dead men or women and no human beings had ever, ever set foot in here before them. If there was a ghost down here then it was the goddamned ghost of something that had died in the Permian.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, mister, and if you do then you need your fucking head examined.”

“Something’s out there,” Boyd said. “I heard it.”

“What? Something alive? Something that survived for a quarter of a billion years in a hermetically-sealed cavern thousands of feet down? Good Christ, Boyd. Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I guess not.”

“But it’s out there, Mister Hot-shit Engineer, and you heard it before, too,” Maki said then and the tone of his voice was as near that of lunacy as either man had ever heard. “It’s waiting out there, all right. It knows we’re here. And I think before this is over we just might get to look it in the face.

Maki was sulking and Jurgens kept fiddling with his walkie-talkie like he honestly thought he could get a message above through all that goddamn rock. You could hear the distant sounds of Breed and McNair clearing away the rubble, the muted glow of their lantern coming through the forest of petrified trees.

“Boyd thinks it’s a girl,” Maki said.

Boyd sighed. “Shut the hell up.”

Jurgen’s looked up from his walkie-talkie. His face was stern in the glow of the lantern. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

“Talking about Boyd,” Maki said. “And his girlfriend.”

Boyd lit another cigarette and ignored him. He studied the trunks of the petrified trees and imagined what the forest must have looked like during the Permian when it was growing and green. He could almost feel the dead stagnant heat of the primordial jungle. The buzzing of ancient insects, things sliding through the underbrush. He blinked his eyes and saw only the graveyard spires and stone masts around him, the spoking shadows they threw in every direction.

Jurgens asked no more about what Maki said. Boyd had a pretty good idea that he just didn’t want to know.

Then somewhere out in the darkness:
click, click, click.

Boyd felt himself go stiff as board.
Not again, Jesus, not again.

Maki made a pathetic sound under his breath that was part whimpering and part low, beaten laughter.

Jurgens had gone tense.

It came again, but louder:
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

“It’s
her,”
Maki said.

They waited there, silent, motionless, each praying it would just go away. When Maki made to answer the sounds by tapping his knife, Jurgens grabbed his wrist and glared at him. Nobody made a move, a sound, anything. They waited there as stiffly as the petrified trees around them.

Then:
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

Boyd was trembling. A cool and greasy sweat ran down his face. He felt something like a moan of utter despair building in his throat but he would not give it vent. He didn’t dare.

Whatever was out there, it seemed to be growing impatient.
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK,
it sounded.
CLICKA, CLICKA, CLICKA-CLICK.
When that brought no response, it began pounding on the boles of the trees with a hollow knocking noise as if it was hitting them with a shaft of wood.
Bang, bang, bang. THUD-THUD-THUD.

“She’s getting mad,” Maki said, his voice breaking.

“You’re crazy,” Jurgens told him.

But then it came again, that hammering and pounding. It was frantic in its desperation, beating on the stone trees, desperate, absolutely desperate for an answer, for anything.

When it had ended, echoing away into nothingness, Jurgens wiped sweat from his face with a hankie.

“She doesn’t like to be ignored,” Boyd told him.

16

Breed felt McNair grab his arm. “Quiet,” he said.

“What?”

“Quiet.”

Breed listened. There was nothing for maybe five seconds, then a weird, distant droning sound rose up and died away. It sounded, if anything, like the continual buzzing of a summer locust.

“What the hell was that?”

“Quiet,” McNair said again.

Breed gently set down the wedge of rock that was in his hands. He had a neckerchief wrapped around his mouth because they were kicking up so much dust digging through the rubble. Clouds of it drifted like fog in the light of the lantern. McNair’s face was pale, his eyes huge and wet. His lower lip was trembling.

There was another noise now.

Something circling around them out there, moving over the rocks with a sort of ticking sound like a cat’s claws will make on linoleum when they’re not retracted.
Tick, tick, tick, ticka-ticka-tick.
Now the sounds stopped as if what had made them became aware that they were listening for it.

“What’s that smell?” Breed said, pulling down his neckerchief.

But McNair shushed him. Whatever it was, it was thick in the air, a smell of age and dryness like the hot, dead stink of attics and sealed trunks. They both stood there, listening. Breed felt the sweat on his brow began to run down his cheeks. He licked his lips. He did not know exactly where their visitor was, but he could feel its nearness, sense its presence along his spine. He expected that any moment it would leap out at him, snarling and gibbering, a furry and elfin form with gnashing yellow teeth.

But that didn’t happen.

It waited.

They waited.

He felt McNair’s grip on his arm tighten and he knew why: there was another sound, maybe one they’d been hearing for some time but not truly registering: a hollow sound of drawn-out respiration like wind sucked through a pipe.

It was the sound of breathing.

McNair moved very slowly, very carefully. He picked-up his long-handled flashlight from where it sat on a shelf of sandstone. He pointed it in the direction of the breathing. Dust was suspended in the beam like silt. He played it over the heaped rocks and pale green stalagmites rising up from the floor of the cavern like fangs. Shadows jumped and slid around them.

But there was nothing out there.

Nothing at all.

“Jurgens? Maki?” McNair called out and the fear in his voice was so thick, so tightly-wrapped, it was nearly strangling him. “If you’re out there, call out for the love of God…”

Breed stood there. He was shaking. Listening to the breathing that blended into the immense stark silence of the catacombs around them in a perfect unbroken weave. Dead air that seemed to scream in his ears. His flesh was actually crawling, his mouth dry, his belly pulled up into his chest.

And it was at that precise moment that he heard it.

That they both heard it.

A high, sweet singing that was scratching and tuneless, a repetitive sound of hysteria like a song of mourning sung by a madwoman over the graves of her children. It rose up in an unearthly shrill cadence then became the drone of a grasshopper in a summer field, growing louder and louder—then cut out completely, echoing off into the subterranean depths.

Breed nearly fell over. He was hot and cold, his limbs rubbery, white-hot fingers of absolute primal dread sliding through his chest…and then, whatever was out there, was moving in their direction.
Tick, tick, ticka, ticka, ticka.
The sounds a wolf spider would make as it stalked its prey if the human ear were sensitive enough to hear them.

Breed and McNair did not move.

They stood rooted to the spot, both sweating and trembling as it advanced on them. McNair’s hand was shaking on the flashlight. The beam jumped up and down, almost strobing. He had to put both fists on it to steady it and even then he was only partially successful. The beam cut into the darkness, slicing through the clouds of rock dust and that horrible dry stench became pungent and sickening in the air.

Breed could see something…an eldritch and terrible form given body by the swirling dust. He couldn’t be sure how much of it he saw and how much he imagined. It was roughly the size of man. A semi-visible hunched-over thing, a hazy apparition speckled with dust. It was creeping at them on a dozen spindly legs. He saw reaching arms, an elongated head of undulant tendrils like a nest of writhing, loathsome snakes…and a distorted face: something with clustered pods of eyes.

Then it leaped at them, howling with black hate.

It took McNair first.

It split him from crotch to throat and by the time Breed wiped the blood out of his eyes, he saw it in the glow of the lantern. It was crouched over McNair’s corpse which was bleeding out in a steaming red lagoon. It was spattered red, lapping up blood with juicy, slobbering sounds.

Then it raised its head.

Breed saw three puckering red mouths like blow holes open and shriek in his face with absolute elemental wrath.

Then he started screaming.

17

They heard it.

That same mournful, shrill piping echoing through the cavern. Right away, flashlights were in fists, beams of light searching and searching for the source of that terrible sound. But there was nothing but the honeycombed trunks and the hundreds of petrified trees rising up around them like the mineralized columns of some primal amphitheater. The lights threw a lot of long, narrow shadows around, but nothing else.

Nothing else at all.

“Ain’t nothing up there!” Maki said, his voice nearly delirious.
“Not a goddamn thing! She’s there but she isn’t there!”

He was right, of course, and Boyd knew why. The thing making that sound was nowhere near them; it was with Breed and McNair now. As proof of that, they heard the first scream. It was high and wavering and fragmented and it was truly hard to say which of them made it. Only that it sounded out, a cry of absolute agony that was somehow animalistic and keening like an animal being tortured to death, then it was silenced with a wet, gurgling sound that echoed through the cavern.