The Underdwelling

13

While they waited, Boyd was not only thinking about his wife and the kid she was carrying that he might never see, but about Russo. He could see his pig-ugly face in his mind, see the scowl on his mouth, hear those words he’d said when he put him on the graveyard shift: You ain’t gonna get all girly and run off on me when things get tough and dirty below, are you?

And right then, remembering how his old man had died in the Mary B. and how he’d faced that sort of death day after day without so much as a twitch of nerve, he said, “No sir. I’m up to it.”

“What?” Maki said.

“Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t be talking.”

“Yeah… and why’s that?”

Maki looked at him and his eyes were practically luminous in his grimy, bruised face. “Because it uses too much fucking air.”

“It would take a hundred men a month to use up the air in this cavern, Maki. And you know it.” And to prove that, he pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “You got nothing to worry about.”

Maki shifted a bit. “Well, then maybe there’s other reasons.”

“Such as?”

Maki licked his lips. “Because we ain’t alone down here, you dumb shit. And the more we talk, the more what’s out there will know where we are.”

“Quit it. You sound like a kid scared of the fucking dark.”

Maki moved, grabbing his arm. “I am scared, cookie. I’m real scared and you should be, too.”

Of course, Boyd was scared. Scared like he’d never been before in his life. Even more scared than he’d been when news had reached him about his old man dying down in the Mary B. That had been a fear of the future and a fear of going through life without his old man’s smiling face, his salty wit, his unflappable demeanor which could weather any storm as long as they were together, as long as he had his family. That had been a fear of closure and a fear of what it would do to his sisters and particularly his mother. But even as bad as that fear had been as he laid in his bed the night of the funeral, the wind making the roof creak, he knew that it was done with. Over. That he could cry his eyes out every night and withdraw from life and make this hard on his mom… but it was over.

But this fear… it was now.

It was happening.

Nothing was over, it was still rolling along. There was something out there and he knew it and that knowledge was not only terrible, but crushing. Just them. And something in the cavern. Something unnatural.

In the distance he could hear Breed and the others clearing rubble. Hear their voices echoing off into the darkness. He had never felt so small or so helpless in his life.

And then—

Click, click, click.

Christ, not again.

Boyd felt his entire body go tight as a wire. He felt like crying out or maybe getting up and running off even though there was nowhere to run to. And maybe he would have done both those things if it hadn’t been for his bum leg and the fact that whatever was out there might hear him, might decide to come after him.

“You hear that?” Maki said, scared but also exhilarated.

“Sshhh!”

Maki didn’t say a thing after that. He just pulled in a little closer to Boyd and did it most stealthily like a soldier in the jungle doing everything he could not to draw the attention of the enemy or a sniper’s bullet. As he moved, something fell from his pocket and clattered to the ground.

It seemed very loud in the silence.

Boyd saw what it was… Maki’s lock-blade knife. Maki picked it up again and then, offering him the most unpleasant of grins, tapped it against a stone near his knee. Tap, tap, tap.

The result was immediate.

Out in that cloying darkness: click, click, click.

God, that sound. Like a claw tapped against the trunk of one of those petrified trees. At that particular moment, Boyd could not imagine a worse sound to be hearing.

Maki raised the knife again.

“Don’t,” Boyd told him.

Maki tapped it against the stone… but changed the rhythm. This time it was tap, tap, tap-tap-tap. Boyd tensed at the sound of it, at Maki attempting to communicate with whatever in the hell was out there, hiding in the trees. For several seconds there was nothing, nothing at all. Boyd made to open his mouth to tell Maki he was an idiot, then:

Click, click, click-click-click.

Boyd felt his heart plummet as fear left a hollow inside him. He was so scared at that moment that it felt like a balloon was slowly expanding in his chest. Where the hell were Jurgens and the others? Why weren’t they here to stop this madness before it went too far if it hadn’t already?

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap, tap, went the knife.

And somewhere in that night world, the clicking sound repeated it exactly. Again and again, almost excitedly. It echoed through the cavern like fingernails tapping on the inside of a coffin lid. Boyd felt himself trembling. A trickle of cool sweat ran down his temple, cutting a clean path in his dirty face. The walkie-talkie was sitting but inches away and he desperately wanted to pick it up and call for help, get the others over here. Because he was trapped with a madman and with something far worse. Any moment now, he expected that horror to come whispering out of the foul blackness on a thousand legs.

But five minutes later, it still had not shown itself.

Boyd knew it wasn’t over, though. He could feel it in his guts that now that they had communicated with it, it would never leave them alone. It would get more daring. It was curious now. Again, he was about to jump Maki for what he had done, but then he heard it out there, moving around. It was skittering. That was the only word to describe that ticking sound he heard, a skittering of many legs. It was running up one tree and down another, leaping from trunk to trunk. And that skittering noise… like dozens of scratching nails… seemed to be far distant, then very close. Off to the left, then the right. Moving away and then ominously coming right at them.

Maki and he were pressed up against one another like lovers now, needing each other’s touch.

They looked around, their helmet spots darting around in the darkness but never finding anything but the spokes of those prehistoric trees.

“Fucking place is haunted,” Maki said with absolute conviction.

Boyd did not argue with him: it was surely haunted, just not by ghosts as such. But at the same time, he could feel the atmosphere around him and it was charged with some ethereal energy, an oscillating discharge almost like static electricity.

The thing out there clicked again. Twice.

Maki did not dare answer it.

After a few seconds, it clicked again: click, click, click-click-click.

Maki made a low moaning sound in his throat.

The thing clicked and clicked, repeating the previous exchange perfectly. It wanted to communicate again, but the men were silent and as its repeated attempts went unanswered, it began to click feverishly out of what seemed anger or frustration, not just clicking now but knocking loudly against a petrified bole.

The sounds were very loud, echoing and echoing.

After maybe five minutes in which Boyd and Maki were nearly holding each other out of terror, the sounds ceased. The silence that followed was somehow worse, just pregnant with nameless possibility. And then another sound rose up, like air blown over the mouth of a pop bottle. A steadily rising mournful wailing that was high-pitched and almost hysterical in tone. It got louder and louder like the night-call of some huge insect, then died away.

The very timbre of it made the fine hairs at the back of Boyd’s neck stand up, made the flesh at his groin shrivel. Because although that shrilling was not remotely human, there was something almost despondent and melancholy about it.

“Hell is that?” Maki said.

“I don’t know what she is.”

“She?” Maki whispered. “She?”

It had been a slip of the tongue, but Boyd did not retract it. For the very sound of that crying voice had been very feminine somehow and that was sheer lunacy, yet the certainty of it remained. That thing out there… dear God… it was female.

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.