Liam peered up the shaft, finding it impossible to judge its distance but knowing it had to be hundreds, maybe even thousands of feet high. There was no sign of rescue workers, and Madison definitely hadn’t climbed up on her own.
His parents had to be frantic by now. Madison’s, too. And Ant! Heck, even Barton must have raised a concerned eyebrow at the situation.
He remembered someone outside yelling his name as the tremors had started, probably his dad, and he hoped everyone had scrambled to safety before the ground gave way. They were probably up there now, shouting at firefighters and other emergency services to hurry up. My son’s down there, Liam imagined his dad yelling. His mom was probably a puddle of tears.
As he stood there pondering, it occurred to him how warm it was. Shouldn’t it be cool down here in the depths? Unless we’re near the Earth’s core, he thought with a shudder.
Shaking his head, he told himself to stop being so melodramatic. Still, he seemed to remember reading somewhere that tunnels and shafts were indeed warmer deep underground, but it was only noticeable at significant depths.
Looking up again, he thought, This is pretty significant.
He walked along the edge of the roof, turning at the corners until he was back where he’d started. The house was amazingly intact considering how far it had fallen. Even the landscaping around the building had survived to some degree, with a patch of grass here, part of a concrete path there, a flower bed, even part of the deck. A rectangular building filling a circular shaft—or a square peg in a round hole. And no way out except up.
He wished Madison would emerge from the darkness and call to him so they could be together again, safe and sound and sharing their misery. The reality was that he needed to head back down to the house to find her.
He jumped down, re-entered through the front door, and headed into the living room. The floor had a jagged crack across the middle. One wall bulged inward. Because the entire room was tilted, the sofa, armchairs, TV, coffee table, and numerous smaller furnishings had collected down the far end. Comically, a picture frame on the wall hung almost perfectly level as if stubbornly denying that a disaster had taken place.
The battery-powered clock on the wall told him it was just past eight-thirty. The disaster had occurred at 6:52. Taking into account perhaps half an hour of fumbled exploration, that meant he’d been unconscious for an hour or more. He tried to imagine Madison looking for him, calling out to him and receiving no answer, maybe using her phone to light her way. Had she come across his still body in the closet? If she had, she might have panicked and gone to get help. Or it could be she hadn’t found him at all.
Or she might be lying somewhere, out cold, in much worse shape than him. That had to be it. He’d already been to the roof. There was literally no way out of this place, so she had to be in the house somewhere.
Liam headed for the hallway. He shone his flashlight into every ominous corner before proceeding. He wasn’t normally afraid of the dark, but this was a different kind of dark, a suffocating blackness where all kinds of underworld ghouls could be lurking.
“Maddy?” he called.
No answer.
He shuddered and navigated his way across the small lobby into the kitchen. He cracked open several drawers and cupboards, rummaging through the mess until he found five stubby candles and a box of matches. The first candle sputtered feebly, then flared. The yellow glow was welcoming, and Liam quickly lit the other four candles before the match burnt out. He slipped the flashlight and box of matches into his pocket.
With the candles alight, the kitchen immediately felt more homely. No worse than a power outage, he told himself. He continued to tell himself that as he picked up a couple of flickering candles and headed into the downward-sloping hall.
“Maddy!” he yelled for the umpteenth time. “Wake up! Where are you?”
Still nothing. Her silence worried him. She had to have been hit pretty hard on the head to be so out of it.
He braved a look into his bedroom, the glow of his candles sending pools of light across the buckled ceiling. The room was in terrible disarray, his computer and desk turned over onto the floor and buried in bits of drywall and layers of dust, his bookshelf and books somewhere among the debris. He stared sadly for a while, then crawled about the room looking in every place large enough to hide a frightened fifteen-year-old girl.
Nothing.
Growing puzzled, he glanced into the creepy laundry room next, holding aloft his two candles. He’d never liked its unfinished walls. The room seemed to be in a perpetual state of remodeling. His parents had been meaning to switch it all around to make better use of the cramped space, maybe even doing a spot of decorating . . . but only his mom used the room, and it never seemed to be a matter of urgency. Now the washer and dryer had slid to the middle of the room, straining on their power cords and hoses.
But still no Madison. Not behind or between the appliances, nor in the narrow closet. He stared at the square hole in the floor, wondering if perhaps she’d fallen into it . . .
The bathroom was next. The toilet was intact even though the tank had cracked and leaked water everywhere. Not that it mattered. Figuring out where to pee was the least of his worries right now.
Madison wasn’t here.
She had to be in the master bedroom. She’d been standing right there in the doorway when the house had sunk into the ground, and she must have fallen deeper into the room rather than try to dash away up the corridor. He must have crawled right past her earlier.
How lucky he’d been! This entire corner of the house had buckled so badly that the ceiling and walls practically lay across his bed. The closet he’d hidden in looked about the size of a shoebox, almost squashed flat.
“Maddy?” he said, softly again now. “Are you in here?”
Putting one candle down, he crawled on his knees with the other flickering flame held in front of him as he peered around and under the bed. She wasn’t here. He checked the closet too.
Nothing.
No sign of her anywhere.
Chapter 5
Completely flummoxed by Madison’s disappearance, Liam stood in his parents’ destroyed bedroom trying to decide what to do next. He remembered the colorful glow sticks and dug around for them, knowing they’d spilled onto the floor. He stuffed as many as he could in his pockets.
He backed out of the bedroom, disappointed and bewildered. In the hall, he placed one of his candles on the floor in case he needed to return for some reason, then made his way back up the slippery floorboards toward the kitchen and living room.
Trying not to dwell on his failed exploration, he made himself busy depositing all the candles and glow sticks around the kitchen and living room. The sticks were different colors, so the effect was weird—sickly green by the small window, cool blue in the corner where the sofa had ended up, and creepy red along the wall backing onto the kitchen.
Could Madison have escaped the house before it sank into the ground? He didn’t think so, yet she clearly wasn’t here. It didn’t make sense.
His thoughts drifted once more to the surface. What was everyone doing up there at this moment? In his mind he saw dozens of fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, crowds of people standing behind yellow tape that was stretched across the yard, his dad running around tearing his hair out, his mom and little sister clinging to each other and crying buckets . . . and, in the middle of it all, reporters and TV cameras.
He hoped nobody else had been caught up in this. The idea of his parents or Ant lying buried in rubble somewhere filled him with horror. He shut out the thought and imagined himself as the sole victim in all this. Well, him and Madison, wherever she was.
The more he thought about the sinkhole, the more it didn’t seem real. How could it be so deep? Where had all the displaced rock and earth gone? And why had the ground given way at all? They’d lived in the same house for years without any hint of drainage problems, one of the main causes for sinkholes.
Did Barton know something about this? The chauffeur had lived here himself once upon a time. Perhaps he knew of a network of tunnels deep below ground . . .
At that moment, he heard a shuffling noise. He listened, holding his breath.
The shuffling noise came again. He whipped the flashlight around. Was it in the room with him? No, it was in the hallway. Rescue workers? Doubtful. Rescue workers would be making a lot more noise, shining bright lights around and yelling his name. He’d likely have heard them stamping about on the roof.
So . . . what then?
He paused, listening hard. When the sound came again, Liam decided it definitely wasn’t the scrabbling of a small rodent. It was bigger than that. It sounded like the shuffling of feet on a floor strewn with debris.
Madison!
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Hey, I’m in here,” he called, getting to his feet. “Where have you been?”
He received no answer, but he heard a hasty scrambling as though someone were dashing away from his voice.
Liam hurried into the hallway, flashing his beam around but seeing nothing. “Maddy?” he called again, looking down the hallway. “Where are you?”
No answer.
Liam peered into each room as he went, shining his flashlight into every corner. First the kitchen, then his bedroom, then the laundry room—
He stopped and sniffed sharply. There was something nasty in the air. Not a skunk, but something just as pungent. It reminded him of a rotten onion his mom had discovered at the back of the cupboard one day. It had been rank.
Steeling himself, he flashed his light through the laundry room’s doorway—and froze. Caught in the beam like a frightened deer, a man threw up his hands to shield against the glare. Liam glimpsed a ghastly face with bulbous staring eyes, the lipless teeth of a skull, tufts of hair sticking up from his bald head, small lumpy ears, oozing flesh . . .
Liam yelled and stumbled backward in horror. At the same time, the man dropped through the square hole in the floor, gone in an instant. Liam shook violently, his beam jerking across the room.
It was a while before he was able to force himself to move. Dropping to hands and knees, he scrambled across the floor and peered down into the hole. Roughly square, it looked like someone had smashed a way through the old subfloor. The floorboards on top, laid by his dad years ago, had broken apart with the all the twisting and buckling, revealing what seemed like an old, secret basement entrance. Except the house had no basement.
Nevertheless, his beam shone down past the broken ends of joists, blocks of concrete, and clumps of earth to a smooth, rock floor fifteen feet below.
“What the heck?” he muttered.
A makeshift rope of laundry hung from a joist. He recognized various garments belonging to him and his parents. They’d been tied together and used to climb down.
Madison?
What puzzled him was the faint yellow light emanating from the chamber, something he hadn’t noticed earlier. Perhaps he would have if he’d peered into the laundry room in absolute darkness instead of shining his flashlight around. In any case, could this be a hidden room he never knew existed? Surely not. It had to be the bottom of the shaft. For some reason, the house hadn’t quite plunged the entire way as he’d assumed. It had stopped short.
That didn’t make sense either.
Maybe it was an existing tunnel, much narrower than the shaft itself. That seemed way too coincidental, though. And how had Madison known to cut a square hole in the laundry room floor? She couldn’t have done that herself even if she’d had an inkling of a tunnel below.
But what other explanation was there? He studied the tunnel in the light of his flashlight, noting its sloping floor. He switched off his flashlight and studied it some more in its own faint glow. Maybe all the tons of rock and debris from the sinkhole had run off down this tunnel like muddy water in a pipe. Perhaps it was an old mine.
Puzzled but suddenly excited, Liam swung his legs over the side of the hole and prepared to jump down. Then he paused. A flash-image of the hideous man played over and over in his mind, a man whose face had partially melted away. He’d worn ragged, filthy clothes splashed with yellow stains. But no blood.
Liam shuddered.
Was the man someone he knew? His or Madison’s dad? Barton? Thoughts of lava and boiling underground springs came to mind. He couldn’t imagine anyone surviving a dunk in molten lava, but perhaps a scalding, bubbling pool . . . ? Why run away, though?
He shook his head. The man wasn’t anyone he knew. He wasn’t anyone from the surface. The man had been down here already, lurking in the tunnels, some kind of mutant. He lived down here, always scavenging for food.
Fear struck him. What if that . . . that thing had grabbed Madison?
It was a while before Liam felt safe to move. What if it got over its fright and came back? What if it was looking for food? What if it lived on raw meat and saw Liam as dinner?
He moaned quietly, his eyes squeezed shut. It was bad enough being trapped a hundred miles underground, but trapped with a flesh-eating monster with no face? It was too much. It wasn’t fair!
Get a grip, he told himself. Go find Maddy.
But what if he ran across that lurking creature? Where had it come from exactly? Assuming it lived down here in the darkness, it had to have a place it called home. Maybe there were more of these creatures. The tunnel could be teeming with them. Maybe the tunnel led to a massive underground cavern. It would explain where all the tons of rock and dirt from the shaft had gone.
A few hours ago, Liam would have scoffed at all this even after his travels through wormholes to other planets. Now he believed anything was possible. Somewhere down there in the darkness, that half-melted faceless creature was shambling around chewing heads off rodents, a nightmarish monster living deep below the ground.
And now it might have Madison. He knew she was alive because he’d seen her in the future. He knew she hadn’t had a leg chewed off or anything gruesome like that. But she still might be a prisoner somewhere, probably as scared as he was.
He had to go find her.
Chapter 6
Lurkers.
That was the name Liam gave to the hideous creatures who lived in the tunnels below the ground. His highly active imagination assured him there were more than one, probably dozens, and they ran around chewing on bugs and snakes and rodents and whatever else ran across their path.
With his flashlight in his pocket, he lowered himself down Madison’s makeshift laundry rope with only the faint yellow light of the tunnel to see by. As he descended, ancient wall-mounted gas lamps came into view, with tiny flames that flickered in a breeze.
A breeze? That suggested this tunnel—about ten feet square—had an opening at both ends. The breeze headed downward.
Liam looked in both directions. Logic told him Madison should have headed uphill, only it was pitch-black that way. The soft light from the gas lamps led downhill only, starting at this exact point under the sinkhole shaft. There were no dormant gas lamps leading uphill. Another coincidence? It didn’t make sense.
He turned this way and that, undecided. Uphill or down? Into darkness higher up—or follow the light down? Go against the breeze or with it? The air had to come from outside, right? But where was it going? Why would there be working gas lamps heading deep underground? And why start right here under the sinkhole shaft?
He decided the shaft had always been there. It must have been a way down to the mine. His house had been built precisely over the shaft on a thin layer of rock and earth.
No way, he thought.
Which way would Madison have gone? She was older than him, probably wiser, certainly more sensible. Whatever this place was, it stood to reason that the way out was up the tunnel into darkness. Even without a flashlight or candle, she could have used the light from her phone to guide the way. Or she might have taken a gas lamp from one of the walls.
A quick check told him that wasn’t the
case. None were missing that he could see.
He froze. Though the tunnel floor was smooth rock, the downhill slope was covered with a layer of loose soil and rubble—and what looked like fresh footprints. He thought one set could be Madison’s, but another set had him worried, scuffed and haphazard as they were. The Lurker’s?
Madison’s prints led down the slope. Well, so be it. If she’d gone that way, then Liam would too.
****
A secret base, he suddenly thought after what seemed like hours of walking. A military bunker, or a top-secret alien research center, like an underground version of Area 51.
His heart began to hammer with excitement. This changed everything. If there were people down here, scientists and soldiers, then he and Madison were safe. Maybe there was a super-fast elevator to the surface.
It was a much more interesting theory than an abandoned mine. And anyway, what was the point of a ten-foot-wide tunnel stretching for miles underground but with no railroad tracks to cart the coal or other minerals out of the mine? A top-secret research base seemed more likely.
He walked faster, tripping on crumbling soil and piles of loose rock. He sank to his ankles with every step. The trek had gotten harder, and Madison’s footprints were increasingly difficult to find. How far had he come? At three or four miles per hour, he must have traveled—what? Six miles or so? And all steadily downward. His feet ached, and he was drenched in sweat. The temperature seemed to be rising. Only the thought of finding Madison ahead kept him going.
Doubts still nagged at him. If a top-secret underground Government base lay ahead, then maybe the personnel wouldn’t return him and Madison to the surface after all. Maybe they would quietly ‘do away’ with the intruders rather than reveal their location. He had to be sure, though. Just to know there were other people—normal people—underground with him would make him feel a whole lot better.
The Lurkers Below Page 3
