The Underdwelling

15

Boyd was waiting.

He didn’t know for what or maybe he did and just didn’t want to admit it to himself. He lay there next to the tree that had broken his leg. Maki hadn’t spoken in some time and he figured that was a good thing. The silence was killing him, the desolation and the claustrophobia that clawed at his throat, but he did not want to know what was going on in Maki’s head because he figured it was plenty bad.

Much like what was in his own head.

A sound.

Shit.

“What’s that?” Maki said.

Then a light splashed through the spiderwebbing of trees and they saw Jurgens coming in their direction, moving over mounds of rock and down into little hollows, splashing through puddles. He leapfrogged a cluster of roots and stood before them, panting.

“We’re making some progress, I think,” he told them. “Lot of rock fall over there, but Breed and McNair are doing a good job of it. When they come back, Maki, we’ll take our turn.”

“Maybe she don’t want us getting out,” Maki said.

Jurgens just looked at him, smiling as if he expected a good joke, but seeing that none was coming, he frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The sounds,” Boyd told him. “They came again.”

“Yeah?”

“Worse.”

“Click, click, click,” Maki said.

Boyd told him what had happened, realizing how ridiculous it sounded, but he did not feel ridiculous telling it. Because the fear was still on him. He wore it like a skin.

“Could have been a weird echo,” Jurgens told them. “I’ve heard some pretty strange subterranean echoes in my time.”

Boyd shook his head. “It wasn’t an echo. The same sounds repeated, but of a different caliber. And that other sound… that moaning or whatever in the Christ it was. It wasn’t natural, not at all.”

“Ghost,” Maki said. “It sounded like a ghost going w-o-o-o-o-o-o-o…”

Jurgens didn’t even comment on that. It was absurd. “Do you realize what you two are saying? Ghosts?”

No, no, no, Jurgens wasn’t going to listen to bullshit like that and you could see it on his face. He was a mining engineer. He was the guy who cut shafts and found the raw ore that made others rich and kept industries rolling. Ghosts. Of all things. Maybe there were such things and maybe there weren’t, but not down here. Not in this Paleozoic tomb. Because when you talked ghosts you were talking the ghosts of dead men or women and no human beings had ever, ever set foot in here before them. If there was a ghost down here then it was the goddamned ghost of something that had died in the Permian.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, mister, and if you do then you need your fucking head examined.”

“Something’s out there,” Boyd said. “I heard it.”

“What? Something alive? Something that survived for a quarter of a billion years in a hermetically-sealed cavern thousands of feet down? Good Christ, Boyd. Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I guess not.”

“But it’s out there, Mister Hot-shit Engineer, and you heard it before, too,” Maki said then and the tone of his voice was as near that of lunacy as either man had ever heard. “It’s waiting out there, all right. It knows we’re here. And I think before this is over we just might get to look it in the face.

Maki was sulking and Jurgens kept fiddling with his walkie-talkie like he honestly thought he could get a message above through all that goddamn rock. You could hear the distant sounds of Breed and McNair clearing away the rubble, the muted glow of their lantern coming through the forest of petrified trees.

“Boyd thinks it’s a girl,” Maki said.

Boyd sighed. “Shut the hell up.”

Jurgen’s looked up from his walkie-talkie. His face was stern in the glow of the lantern. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

“Talking about Boyd,” Maki said. “And his girlfriend.”

Boyd lit another cigarette and ignored him. He studied the trunks of the petrified trees and imagined what the forest must have looked like during the Permian when it was growing and green. He could almost feel the dead stagnant heat of the primordial jungle. The buzzing of ancient insects, things sliding through the underbrush. He blinked his eyes and saw only the graveyard spires and stone masts around him, the spoking shadows they threw in every direction.

Jurgens asked no more about what Maki said. Boyd had a pretty good idea that he just didn’t want to know.

Then somewhere out in the darkness: click, click, click.

Boyd felt himself go stiff as board. Not again, Jesus, not again.

Maki made a pathetic sound under his breath that was part whimpering and part low, beaten laughter.

Jurgens had gone tense.

It came again, but louder: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

“It’s her,” Maki said.

They waited there, silent, motionless, each praying it would just go away. When Maki made to answer the sounds by tapping his knife, Jurgens grabbed his wrist and glared at him. Nobody made a move, a sound, anything. They waited there as stiffly as the petrified trees around them.

Then: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

Boyd was trembling. A cool and greasy sweat ran down his face. He felt something like a moan of utter despair building in his throat but he would not give it vent. He didn’t dare.

Whatever was out there, it seemed to be growing impatient. CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, it sounded. CLICKA, CLICKA, CLICKA-CLICK. When that brought no response, it began pounding on the boles of the trees with a hollow knocking noise as if it was hitting them with a shaft of wood. Bang, bang, bang. THUD-THUD-THUD.

“She’s getting mad,” Maki said, his voice breaking.

“You’re crazy,” Jurgens told him.

But then it came again, that hammering and pounding. It was frantic in its desperation, beating on the stone trees, desperate, absolutely desperate for an answer, for anything.

When it had ended, echoing away into nothingness, Jurgens wiped sweat from his face with a hankie.

“She doesn’t like to be ignored,” Boyd told him.