Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“I reached down to scoop up some of that quiet water, when this awful, awful feeling came over me. I stared down into the water and suddenly noticed in the reflection that a figure was now standing above me on the bank. I tried to cover my eyes because I didn’t want to see who or what that figure was, but the next thing I knew I was standing face to face with it. It was a woman, a very strange, very thin woman. She was trying to tell me something but she was as mute as that brook, so she traced some symbols in the air with one of her stick-like fingers. She spelled out that the water was poison. I nodded to show her that I understood. Then you know what I did? I filled that rope-handled pail and carried it back to my village and when I got there I took a wooden ladle and I doled out that poisoned water to all those wretched-looking villagers. I poured the last sip into my own palm and drank it myself. Then I woke up.”

I wasn’t sure how to react to my father’s account, but I was desperate to keep him talking, so I asked him what he thought the dream meant. Again he shrugged. Then he rose to tend to his food.

“The light’s coming,” he announced. At the time I thought he was referring to the sun that was climbing above the hedges beyond our kitchen window. Now I am not so sure.

That was the last time I spoke to my father. The next night, while I slept, he moved below.

The day’s organic gloom made it seem much later than it actually was when I edged the jeep off the lane and along the entrance driveway. At one time this passage was truncated by a heavy iron gate bearing a sign that warned of the legal repercussions and physical dangers that trespassers could endure. Today that gate hangs permanently open and the sign has been covered over with spray paint.

The floodlights shone on me, weakly, like potted moons. I gathered up the groceries and the dog that I carried and cooed to as though she were my own flesh and blood. As I crossed the gravel lot toward the mine entrance I tightened my grip on the Lab, for she’d begun to whimper and squirm.

“You’re okay, girl,” I assured her, “you’re okay. What should I name you, hmm? What do I call you?”

But the nearer we drew to that rugged tunnel with its downward pitch, the more the dog began to panic. I knew that my clutching her against her will was purely selfish. How I needed her companionship, her life.

Once I struggled to carry her up the wooden rungs and into the tunnel, the dog began to growl and bark in a sad, effete protest. She could sense the offensiveness of whatever waited beneath. She wriggled free and charged for the tunnel’s mouth. I cried out and lunged for her, but she leapt heedless of any risk. I heard her claws scrabbling against the ladder. A moment later I saw the dog tearing across the gravel plain. She neared the road and was soon gone.

I slumped against the cold black wall of the shaft and sobbed. It was the kind of outburst usually reserved for children; the frame-shaking, convulsive weeping that seems to threaten to tear the soul up by its very roots.

The sound of approaching footsteps caused me to fight for composure. How sad is it that even now, under such conditions, we pit-canaries still feel the need for personas.

“Everything alright, miss?” one of the sentinels asked me, the light on his hardhat beaming like a lustrous pearl.

I nodded, picked up the sack of food and brushed past him, negotiating the wooden slats with care as I made the long descent toward the platform where the carts nested.

A family of four sat at one of the platform’s picnic tables. They were eating peanut butter and saltines.

The people come to the upper level in shifts. For most of them this is as near to the surface as they’re willing to go, despite the dangers to their health. Strategically installed fans spin constantly, both here and deeper below. They do their best to draw the methane out of the tunnels and to coax fresh air down from the surface. But they have been rotting down here since Dunford Inc. shut down production, and I remember Dad saying that even when those fans were new it was always a risk spending too much time “under the crust” as he’d called it.

“One of the drivers will be up shortly,” the mother called once she saw me climbing into a cart. I turned back and looked stonily at them, at their wan faces smeared with soot, their clothing hanging loose and grubby from their malnourished frames. They were like a faded photo of some anonymous Dust Bowl family in a history book.

“Never mind,” I said, releasing the brake. The ancient wheels squeaked as the cart began to roll toward the greater descent.

Down I went, down, staring numbly at the roughly textured tunnel walls. I began to imagine the juts and groves as being some strange and tedious grammar in Braille, some record of a world that had existed below ours for unknowable years, their entire secret history spelled out here in angled carbon.

These walls are also veined with thick cables that feed power to the vent fans and the garlands of uncovered light bulbs. To my eye those strung lights have all the impact of a lone firefly attempting to illuminate a canyon.

The cart reached the final swoop of the track and I eased up the handbrake to soften the final thud that always came when the track fed into a pent-in platform constructed out of lumber grown soft from too many years in the methane-reeking chambers.

As yet there has been no theft or pillaging down here, but I did my best to conceal the sack of groceries all the same. The converts have commented about how this profound fellowship and egalitarianism is somehow a sign of renewal, of change. Personally I think it is only because things haven’t yet gotten desperate enough. They’d start savaging and rending sooner or later. It’s all a question of time.

The only proper shelter at this level was the rescue chamber that the miners could use in case of a collapse or other accident, a pod where they could hole up until help arrived. Now, with its oxygen tanks long drained, its food devoured and its water guzzled, the chamber serves as a curious spirit house, a shrine the people have embellished with mementos of those whose spirits they claim have been glimpsed beyond the emerald light, or with fetishes meant to represent things unfamiliar but still experienced.

I sat down at one of the picnic tables where Rita sat knitting a scarf. I watched her for a spell, watched the way her eyes would habitually move from her needles to the tunnel a few yards away.

“You get my dress?” she asked without looking at me.

“Yes, and the other things you asked for. I also got some food. Not much though. There’s water, too.”

A young girl, perhaps fifteen, moved past our table and made her way to the decorated tunnel mouth. Rita and I both watched as the girl hunched down and slid her hand into the gap. She seemed to be feeling something in the chute, something that didn’t appear to be unpleasant. For a moment it looked as though she was going to enter, but she ultimately lacked the required conviction. She went back to her mattress at the far end of the tract.

“Have there been any changes?” I asked Rita.

“Define changes .”

“Anyone else gone in . . . or maybe come back out . . . there?”

“Don’t be stupid.” She put her needles back in her canvas bag along with her yarn. I studied her as she carried the silver hairbrush and the handheld mirror into the pod and added them to the shrine. She wouldn’t look at me when she returned. “I’m going to try on my dress,” she said, almost daring me to object.

She was on her way to change in one of the old miners’ shower stalls — no running water but the remaining plastic curtains offered privacy — when the ground began to quake. This tremor was longer than previous ones, more forceful. Immediately people began to murmur, in prayer or in vexation or simply in fear. The rocking subsided and there was a false sense of relief poured over the area.