Tim Curran - The underdwelling

They sat there quietly for some time and the only sounds now were the distant dripping of water and the noise of Jurgens, Breed, and McNair clearing more rubble from the stope mouth. And Maki breathing with a hoarse, frantic sound.

“What’re we gonna do, Boyd? Fuck are we gonna do?”

“We’re gonna wait for them above to get us out,” he said. “Listen, Maki, I don’t know what’s down here with us, but just leave it be. Don’t fool with it. Don’t try and make sounds for it. Maybe it’ll…I don’t know, maybe it’ll just go away.”

But he didn’t believe that, not for a moment.

Because it was still out there and, God help him, but he could feel its eyes on them.

They’d been at it a good six hours that was closer to seven and Russo was feeling the heat. It was coming from every direction-the media, the families, the mine execs. Felt like every damn last one of them was standing on his back. He rubbed his aching neck and swallowed a couple Tylenol. He watched the men widening the drift, the constant sound of jack hammers and rock drills, the hiss of steam and thudding of limestone chunks being shoveled into metal cars. It was all making his head pound.

He rubbed his eyes, then his temples.

Everything down here echoed. Banging and booming, clanging and ringing out. Russo lit a cigarette and motioned Corey, the shift boss, over.

“Well?” he said.

“We’re making progress, but I’m guessing it’ll take us most of the day to widen that drift so we can get the raise borer in here,” Corey told him. “If that shaft is just filled up with loose limestone, we can drill through it like cheese, but…”

Russo glared at him. “But?”

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.

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.