Tim Curran - The underdwelling

Yes, he had even gotten used to that.

It was amazing what you could get used to, given time.

He could not know what she was or what her race had been. Only that she had known a terrible, wasting loneliness that ripped open her mind. She had waited in stark, hopeless, solitary desertion as her kind had died out. As the continents shifted and the great reptiles gave way to the megafauna, as the great Permian age was devastated by mass extinction and the Mesozoic seas became deserts, as mammals claimed the land and men learned to walk and then run, filling the lands above like racing white ants.

How many days?

How many fucking days had it been?

He had read somewhere once that the average human mind will crack after three or four days of absolute darkness. The lack of sensory stimulation makes the mind turn back upon itself and submerge. Boyd could not be sure if he was insane or not. All he could do was wait in the cell. Wait for her to return because she always did.

Listen.

Yes, he heard her. She was coming. Ticka-ticka-ticka. She entered the cell and squatted at his feet. He had not seen her for many hours, maybe days. She smelled different. That’s how he began to judge her moods, by the smell she extruded. Today it was very sweet like the odor of cherries. He had never smelled that before. When she was scared it was an odor like dry straw. When she was angry it was the smell of pale green bogs. But this…this was new.

He spoke to her but she did not respond.

She waited there at his feet.

It seemed to go on for many hours.

When Boyd opened his eyes, she was still there. She was making a high singing sort of noise and just beneath it, something else: a fleshy, moist sort of sound like ripe juicy tomatoes were sliding out of her.

And the smell…black, diseased, horrid.

That’s when he knew. That’s when he understood.

That’s when it all began to make a curious and revolting sort of sense.

As she had hibernated through countless ages, a flat dormancy had brooded within her. She had carried a secret from the Permian, she had carried the seed of her kind which waited within her, gestating through the eons.

She was a female.

It was only natural that she give birth.

When it was done and he was whimpering under his breath, she sidled up next to him.

She wanted him to touch her.

At first, Boyd was offended as he felt them clustering on her back, squirming and writhing, but soon he learned to accept. And as they accepted him and ran over him like tiny, mewling rodents, he actually knew he would come to care for them. They flooded over him in a swarm of leggy young, nipping and licking at him. Down there in the dank subterranean blackness, he could remember that once he had been married to a woman named Linda and that she had carried his child.

He had been a father once.

And now he was a father again.

A father with hundreds of children that crawled and skittered and nipped.

He was a lot of things, but he certainly was not lonely.

But as the hours passed, he knew she was growing edgy, tense. She was feeling threatened and he smelled it on her. And sometime later, he knew why: the rumbling. The rock-crushing rumble of a drill. They were digging him out. They were coming to get him.

Oh no, he thought. Don’t do that.

You don’t understand.

She’s very jealous…

It took them a week to open the spider hole back up and three more days to clear out the stope leading to the cavern that Jurgens had told them about over the radio. It was hard going every step of the way, but as the nation held its breath and CNN and NBC camped out at the Hobart Mine and the families waited patiently, they made it to the cavern.

The only thing separating it from them was a wall of rock.

Sonar readings told them it was some five feet deep. They could go through it in a matter of hours.

“Get that drill down here,” Russo told them, looking about ten years older than he had when this whole business began. “I want a bore hole into that cavern.”

It took about an hour to punch a hole through the rock.

A dry, sucking blast of air blew out at them.

They tried calling out to the men through the pilot hole but got nothing. Thermal imaging cameras were brought in and everyone cheered when they picked up living signatures on the other side.

“Bring in that reamer,” Russo said. “Let’s open this mother up.”

As the crew got to work, Corey aimed a lightweight parabolic microphone into the pilot hole. He handed the headphones to Russo.

“Do you hear it?” Corey said.

“Yes,” Russo said. “Yes…”

Somebody was trying to communicate with them.

There was no mistaking the sound from inside the cavern: Click, click, click…