The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“Two elements of Lovecraft’s fiction that hold perennial appeal,” for Richard Gavin “are his evocations of decayed place and the inconceivably vast machinations of life that churn beneath the crust of civilization. ‘Deep Eden’ attempts to draw upon both. It speaks of an altogether other genesis.”

Gavin is a critically acclaimed author who works in horror and the primordial, often illuminating the crossroads where these realms meet. He has authored five books of macabre fiction, including At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press). His esoteric writings consist of The Benighted Path (Theion Publishing), as well as essays in Starfire and Clavis: Journal of Occult Arts, Letters and Experience.

Deep Eden

Ash Lake occasionally embodies its name. On November days such as this, when the sunbeams can scarcely press through the leaden clouds, the lake roils gray and ghostly, taking on the appearance of shifting dunes of ash; incinerated remains that somehow survived the crematorium.

How I loved days like this when I was a girl. In those distant autumns I would venture down to the lakefront, with Dad and Rita by my side. Together we would toss stones and spy for any boats daring enough to brave the gales. Those days were buoyed by a feeling, very rare and very delicious, that my sister, father, and I were the only three people left in Evendale.

Of late this same feeling has become a constant, but it has lost its succulence.

Perhaps that was the unconscious source of my desire to make the detour to the beach today: the thin hope that somehow the sight of Ash Lake in late autumn might uplift me, give me the clarity to make sense of the senselessness that is now the norm in Evendale.

I scooped up a handful of fog-moistened stones, then let them drop un-hurled. As I made my way back to the jeep I listened to the surf whose mist-hidden waves sounded much like mocking asthmatic laughter.

The fuel gauge began to flash “E” as soon as I turned the ignition, so I began to woo the vehicle, coaxing it to carry me far enough to reach the Main Street filling station that still, as of last week, had fuel.

Veering into the narrow lot, I left the engine running and ran out to test the pumps. The first two were bone-dry, but the third valve spat out unleaded. As I filled the jeep I wondered how many tankfuls were left in this town; two, possibly three? The residents of Evendale had, up until recently, kept a routine of sorts, a choreographed pantomime of a sleepy but still functioning town. A certain segment of the locals remained above to man the fueling station, to switch on houselights on a rotating basis, to plow the main roads when the snow accumulated. The concern over keeping up appearances to the outside world has waned now that everyone’s below.

My memories of this town, paled as they are, paint Evendale as little more than a tangle of poorly paved roads lined with dreary structures. But neither the years nor the miles that I set between myself and my home could account for its present condition. The houses and shops all have the air of heaped wreckage, of withered husks that no longer sheltered living things.

Most of the spaces advertise themselves as being for lease. A few of them were boarded up with slabs of cheap wood, like coffins bound for pauper’s row.

The street entrance to Venus Women’s Wear was sheathed in brown butcher paper. A sign in the display window advised potential customers that they were closed for renovation. I made my way to the alley beside the shop and found the side door unlocked.

There was no light inside the shop but I didn’t need any. My time below has sharpened my ability to see in the dark. It took me several minutes to find the dress Rita had described to me: purple silk with a dragonfly embroidered in glittering black thread over the left breast. This was the first time she had ever requested anything since going below. How I had hoped that her desire could have lured her up and out, into the light. But Rita never comes above anymore.

I zippered the dress inside a plastic garment bag with the Venus logo and the store’s address printed on the back, then I carried it back to the jeep and drove on.

Loath as I am to admit it, I now find being above rather unsettling. The airiness, the brightness, after those first few heaves of revivifying oxygen, sours quickly. More and more I want to be below. But I do not want to want that.

I turned onto Apple Road to complete my errand. In addition to the purple dress from Venus, Rita also requested that our late mother’s silver-handled mirror and hairbrush set be collected from our house.

Hypocrisy abounds: after robbing Venus I fished out the keys for my childhood home. We keep it locked up snugly, perhaps afraid to lose our past, meager though it may be.

I took the hairbrush and mirror from Rita’s dresser. Noting their condition, I rummaged around Father’s workroom until I found a can of silver polish and a soft rag. A canvas grocery sack hung from the foyer coat rack. I plucked it from its hook and filled it with a few canned goods, a jar of instant coffee, and some packets of oatmeal. I found five bottles of water left in the back of the pantry then I headed back to the mine.

The Dunford Incorporated coal mine had opened shortly after World War II, and had been Evendale’s main employer for nearly forty years before a tragic tunnel collapse took the lives of a dozen miners. Eventually, through resulting lawsuits and legal fees, it also took the life of Dunford Inc. The company declared bankruptcy and shut down the mine in 1983. It stood deserted in the arid field on Evendale’s outskirts thereafter.

I escaped Evendale in 1991, moving to the city in search of myself. At that time there were rumblings of a new company purchasing and re-opening the dormant mine, but it was not to be. After Dunford Inc. laid my father off (mercifully, a year before the collapse) he used to tell my sister and me that there was hardly any coal left in those shafts anyway. I’d always thought these words were merely a way for my father to sooth his wounded pride, but given that no one had seen fit to resume clawing at those tunnels perhaps he was speaking the truth.

Either way, the site was left to rot; its towering iron scaffolds bowing like aging men, its subterranean maze resting hushed and hollowed like some vacated netherworld.

As to the origins of the mine’s more recent and more rarefied role in the lives of the townspeople, accounts differ depending on whom you ask. That a posse had formed to rescue a child who had climbed down into the shafts on a dare and gotten lost seems to be the most common account. But the age and gender of the strayed child varies from teller to teller. A point that did run uniform through this folklore was the discovery of the emerald light.

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.

“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.

Roughly ten minutes later there was another tremor.

Few become true pit-canaries. While the townsfolk dwell below, there is another stage, another extreme that only the most devout have courage or madness enough to explore.

Beyond the tract where the mattresses and bags are strewn there is another tunnel, stiflingly tight and perilously ragged, one bored by something cruder than even the crudest tool. Only those who have dared to squeeze through that aperture earn the stigma of pit-canary because, like their namesake, those birds go beyond.

As to what forged that tunnel, I could add my theory to the hundreds that have been posited before, but what would such a thing prove? The tunnel is somehow connected to the emerald light. I believe this. And I believe that both are the products of something even greater and stranger than both those things combined.

Somehow somebody in Evendale awoke something down there. Now that something is beginning to awaken all of us.

The change is undeniable. Everyone down here feels it, but because it is so indefinable we do not speak of it. We simply accept its presence within us, like a growing contagion.

This is a cold, unwanted revelation, like happening upon a lump in one’s breast or testicle; the kind of discovery that makes one yearn for normalcy, tedium, for all those ditchwater-dull afternoons and daily routines that we so foolishly felt needed to be stripped away by novelty and change. Yes, it is that kind of wordless knowledge that there is no going back. Even racing up to the sunlit yards of Evendale would be a small and flimsy defense. And so, we wait.

I’m told that early on some of the men wanted to place bright orange sawhorses before the mouth of that unmapped tunnel as a warning to keep away, but before they could return with their barricade, the mine had produced its own.

The vine sprouted from one carbon wall, drooped across the down-sloping chute, and then poked through the black rock of the opposite wall. Blooming out of this twisting verdant cable were five bellflowers, vibrantly red, as though colored by arterial blood that raced through transparent petals. Deeply fragrant; even the methane fumes were made sweet, so strong was their perfume. The flowers hung inversely. Set against that gaping hole in the mine wall they were positively incandescent, the beginnings of some new garden in paradise. I studied the flowers often, perched upon my plastic lawn chair, coughing into my sooty hands.

I watch the flowers and I wait. Wait for my father. Two weeks ago, much to my shrieking protests, he left the camp here on the tract and he became a pit-canary. He said he’d dreamed my mother had come to him through the emerald light and that she’d encouraged him to see what dwelt on the outer rim of that light. Dad said he believed the light was actually the breath of some living thing, large and ancient and wise. An entity that had been here long before we crawled out of the swamp, just down here sleeping, waiting . . .

He’d also said he thinks this creature, whatever it is, is calling us to descend farther and farther down so it can give us some new kind of fire, the kind that lights up the depths of space.

I’d asked him how he came to know this, but Dad couldn’t really say.

Only two pit-canaries have come back in the whole time I’ve been here, but it seems to be enough to keep people believing, waiting, wondering. The first was an elderly woman who’d owned a cake shop on Main Street. She said she’d heard trumpets and bells in that tunnel, then the green light had welled up to touch her, and for one brief but glorious moment she was able to hold her own heart in her hands. She’d said she tested it for heft and had determined that it wasn’t yet light enough, so she’d come back up to fast and pray. She stayed above. I never found out what happened to her.

The other pit-canary who returned only lived for a few seconds. He came crawling out of the tunnel screaming in agony. He screamed and he screamed. He even tore out the vine of bellflowers. When two of the men dragged him out they discovered that he’d been torn open, but the innards that spilled from his jagged and gaping wounds were fossilized; white and smooth and preserved, like the entrails of a marble grotesque.

Only after the commotion ended did someone comment about how the red bellflowers had already grown back across the tunnel mouth.

Another tremor.

And another.

It won’t be long now, whatever “it” is.

The bellflowers have begun to ring. Their chiming is open and almost without a source. They swing like their namesakes in a belfry. And like those chapel bells, these seem to rouse the faithful to service.

One by one the people began to crawl through the tunnel. Where they had once given a wide berth to avoid, they now scrambled and fought to penetrate. The emerald glimmer was now visible within the tunnel, cresting upward like a tide of foul sewer water. We both watched as the last resident wriggled toward that ill light.

Rita begged me to let her go, but I held her back. Impulsively, senselessly, she had wrestled that damned dress over her head, tugging it over her filthy T-shirt and jeans.

A short time later we felt the collapse just below us. It shook the ground. The chorus of screams from those below was muffled by the falling black rock but was no less terrible.

Is this what you lured all of them down there for? I wondered.

“Dad!” Rita cried, over and over.

I shrieked for her to follow me into the rescue pod. Eventually she did. I shut the door, praying that the cave-in wouldn’t reach this upper level and that it ended swiftly. There was no oxygen in the tank, but we needed shelter from the mushrooms of black smoke that filled the tract. Chunks of coal smacked against the pod like a shower of stones. The light leaked up through the fresh fissures in the ground.

Eventually the thunder waned. I looked through the pod window, expecting to see only blackness. But there was a distinctive glimmer, greenish and persistent, even against the thick filter of coal dust.

I closed my hand over my mouth.

She pushed past me.

I followed her, choking on the fumes and dust.

The emerald light pushed through the collapsed tunnel, shining like a lamp covered with perforated black felt. For a long time we simply stood. Then something pressed through the piled rocks. It rolled near with patient velocity.

I turned to Rita, who was bolted in place. Terror blanched her face and made her jaw hang slack.

I took a step forward.

“No!” I heard my sister scream, seemingly from the far end of the world. “No, goddamn it!”

I reached down, picked up the luminous object, and turned back to Rita.

I rolled the object in my palm before halving it with a forceful twist.

“It’s from father,” I informed her with a knowledge that had bypassed even my own consciousness.

Rita reached for her half but quickly dropped her hand. She watched in mute but visible agony as I bit into the apple.