Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

The search party had apparently bored through one of the walls of the farthest tunnel. Their claim was that the lost child could be heard sobbing and pleading on the far side of that rugged culm barrier. When their picks and shovels and scrabbling hands finally pierced through, they found neither boy nor girl, but instead a luminescence. Were they the beams of some strange fallen sun long-interred in the earth’s bowels? A green jewel dislodged from a great crown of one who had fallen from heaven? I can only theorize based on the testimonials that have been whispered to me below, for I have never seen the light myself. Nor has Rita. But unlike me, she is convinced of its existence.

My sister loves to brand me as the eternal skeptic, one unwilling to accept there are things that lurk beyond the reach of our five paltry senses. Honestly, I cannot say I’m even that, for a true skeptic would be eager to disprove the myth of the emerald light, to expose the folly of those below. While I will concede that yes, there may well be a greenish glow in the depths of the mines, I suspect that its presence is some natural anomaly, some phosphorescent property in the carbon, or a trick of the eye when met with absolute darkness.

Still, I am not so convinced of these empirical theories that I am willing to creep down into those far depths to prove or disprove anything.

I was only a few hundred yards from the gate to the mine site when I witnessed the impossible.

At first my brain didn’t register what came trundling out of the roadside bracken — a dog — because the sight of a moving thing in Evendale was so rare it actually spooked me. I pressed down hard on the brake pedal and the sack spat out the tinned foods into the jeep’s foot-well. The creature plodded onto the road, pausing to turn its dismal face toward me. I put the jeep in park and stepped out, tamping my enthusiasm so as not to startle the animal.

It was a yellow Lab. I crouched down and cooed to it. She came to me without reservation or ardor.

That it had been foraging and roaming for some time was obvious. But I was unaware at just how badly the poor beast had been faring until I ran my hand along its matted coat and felt the fence slats of its ribs pressing against the fur. I raced back to the jeep and retrieved the tin of Spam I’d taken from our pantry, along with one of the bottles of water.

The dog was now reposing as though the littered asphalt road was her bed. I uncapped the bottle, poured some of the water into my cupped hand, and held it out to her. She lapped at it with a pale tongue.

I peeled the label off the Spam, opened the tin and shook the meat out onto the label. This I slid before the dog. She sniffed it, perhaps in distrust or disbelief, and began to lick and gnaw the pinkish cube.

As I sat beside the dog, her tail now beginning to faintly wag, I heard the sound of a helicopter. Shielding my eyes I looked past the rim of the escarpment to see the small chopper coasting in the ashen sky. A TV reporter perhaps, or an airlift ambulance; someone who was merely passing over Evendale. That was what Evendale was now, perhaps what it has always been: a place one passes by or through or over on their way to somewhere else. Is this why the exodus below has been allowed to occur without any outside notice at all? Or is there something other at work here?

“Do you want to come home with me?” I asked. Every inch of me went cold once I realized that I’d referred to those dank and cultish tombs as home. The dog looked at me with her teary, tired eyes. I picked her up and gently piled her onto the passenger seat. Then I drove out to the far end of the road.

Dad was part of that first group that tore the barricades from the mouth of the entrance pipe and breached the mine for the first time in years. I only learned this a few months ago from Rita. She told me that the men were glad to have my father among them, for he was the only one left in Evendale to have worked the tunnels when Dunford Inc. was still in operation. I suspect it was more than his knowledge of the shafts that made Dad a welcome member of the search party. He had always been a calming presence in our home, so I can only imagine what a balm it must have been to have his wise and careful suggestions offered in his sonorous voice, especially once they were down in that stinking darkness.

Just what it was Dad saw in that green radiance I never came to know. I only know it changed him. The fallout of his encounter below was drastic enough for Rita to plead with me to fly home and help her find some means of bringing him back around.

When I returned to Evendale I found a catatonic shell in the shape of my father. He never spoke, scarcely ate, slept nearly eighteen hours a day. I insisted to Rita that a hospital was the only place for him, where he could receive not only medical attention but (perhaps even more importantly) psychiatric care. Rita, despite asking for my help, stubbornly refused to admit Dad, stating that this was a family problem and therefore it could be fixed by the family. I suppose I should have protested more passionately, but I didn’t. It seems I also inherited the same caginess as Rita. Perhaps it’s a symptom of growing up in a small town, but propriety and fear of scandal, however slight, always seemed to trump common sense.

But three weeks ago Rita and I finally agreed that hospitalization could not be put offany longer. Dad had always been a strapping man, so his rapid dissolution was a sobering and painful wake-up call to my sister and me.

Then, the night before we planned to drag Dad off to receive help, he snapped out of his depression. Late that night my sleep was broken by the clanging of pans and the thudding of kitchen cupboards. Rita’s bedroom door was shut when I walked past it to investigate.

I found my father preparing a goulash so redolent with spices I felt myself tearing up the moment I entered the kitchen.

“Dad?” I’d said to him.

“Hungry?” was his reply.

I told him no, then watched as he left the ingredients to simmer on the range. He sat down at the kitchen table and asked me to switch off the light. I did and together we sat in the lunar glow from the window, listening to the food bubbling in its pot.

“Can’t sleep,” he admitted, answering a question I never posed.

“You’ve probably been sleeping too much.”

“Well, I’m awake now.”

Something in his choice of words made me queasy.

“Your sister told me that Sadie-Anne next door boarded up her house a couple of days ago.”

“Yes, I saw that. Any idea why?”

“Probably to become a pit-canary like the others.”

I swallowed what little moisture there was in my mouth. “Why are people running down there, Dad? What are they running to?”

His silhouette shrugged.

“I know about the glow down there, Dad. Rita told me. Is that what the pit-canaries are moving to the mine for? Are they looking for the light?”

If my father was fazed by my outburst he kept it contained, just as he had always done with all things. Dad: even-keeled, stoic, strong, like a lake of still black water.

“I think maybe they’re after what’s on the other side of that light,” he answered.

“What’s beyond the light, Dad?” Worry and tears mangled my voice into something thin and reedy. “What did you see down there?”

It seemed like a long span of time passed. We sat in stubborn silence like two monks lost in contemplation. The goulash bubbled over the pot rim and splashed onto the burner, hissing as though maimed.

“Been dreaming a lot lately,” he said at last. “Funny thing, that. In my whole life I think I can remember one, maybe two dreams. And those were from when I was a boy. But lately . . .

“There was this one dream. I must’ve had it three or four nights in a row. I’m in this meadow, real peaceful, real pretty. I’m standing beside an old-fashioned watermill and I’m holding a large bucket with a rope handle. The mill’s wheel is turning slowly, but the weird thing is, the only noise I can hear is the creaking of those wooden gears. I can see the brook moving along, I can see it being lathered up by the paddles and I can see the runoffgushing back down into the brook, but the water is absolutely silent. You know how sometimes in dreams you just know things about things? Well, in this dream I knew I had come to this brook to gather water to bring back to my village, which was on the other side of this great stone building that this watermill was attached to. Maybe they were grinding grain or something, I don’t know. But I was there for the water because the villagers were all dying of thirst.