by S T Joshi
“Yeah?” the foreman says, and he sighs loudly, exasperation or disappointment, spits on the tunnel floor, tobacco juice on rusted steel rails. “C’mon then, Professor,” and he hands a miner’s helmet to Henry, lifts a lantern off an iron hook set into the rock wall. “Follow me, and don’t touch anything. Some of these beams ain’t as sturdy as they look.”
The fat man watches them, massages his left forearm protectively when the schoolteacher steps past him, and now Henry can hear the sounds of digging somewhere in the darkness far ahead of them. Relentless clank and clatter of steel against stone, and the lantern throws long shadows across the rough limestone walls; fresh wound, these walls, this abscess hollowed into the world’s thin skin. And such morbid thoughts as alien to Henry Matthews as the perpetual night of this place, and so he tells himself it’s just the sight of the odd and squirming thing in the bottle, that and the natural uneasiness of someone who’s never been underground before.
“You’re wonderin’ what Jake Isabell’s arm has to do with that damned worm, ain’t you?” the foreman asks, his voice too loud in the narrow tunnel even though he’s almost whispering. And “Yes,” Henry replies, “Yes, I was, as a matter of fact.”
“It bit him a couple of days ago. Jesus, make him sick as a dyin’ dog, too. But that’s all. It bit him.”
And “Oh,” Henry says, unsure what else he should say and beginning to wish he was back out in the sun looking for his trilobites and mollusks with the high Octoberblue sky hung far, far overhead. “How deep are we now?” he asks, and the foreman stops and looks up at the low ceiling of the tunnel, rubs his beard. “Not very, not yet . . . hundred and twenty, maybe hundred and thirty feet.” And then he reaches up and touches the ceiling a couple of inches above his head.
“You know how old these rocks are, Professor?” and Henry nods, tries too hard to sound calm when he answers the foreman.
“These layers of limestone here . . . well, they’re probably part of the Lower Silurian system, some of the oldest with traces of living creatures found in them,” and he pauses, realizes that he’s sweating despite the cool and damp of the tunnel, wishes again he’d declined the foreman’s invitation into the mountain. “But surely hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years old,” he says.
“Damn,” the foreman says and spits again. “Now that’s somethin’ to think about, ain’t it, Professor? I mean, these rocks sittin’ here all that time, not seein’ the light of day all that time, and then we come along with our picks and dynamite—”
“Yes sir,” Henry Matthews says and wipes the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. “It is, indeed,” but Warren Wallace is moving again, dragging the little pool of lantern light along with him, and Henry has to hurry to catch up, almost smacks his forehead on the low, uneven ceiling. Another three hundred feet or so and they’ve reached the point where the gray limestone is overlain by beds of punky reddish sandstone, the bottom of the Red Mountain formation; lifeblood of the city locked away in these strata, clotthick veins of hematite for the coke ovens and blast furnaces dotting the valley below. “Not much farther,” the foreman says. “We’re almost there.”
The wet, rotten smell stronger now, and glistening rivulets meander down the walls, runoff seeping down through the rocks above them, rain filtered through dead leaves and soil, through a hundred or a thousand cracks in the stone. Henry imagines patches of pale and rubbery mushrooms, perhaps more exotic fungi, growing in the dark. He wipes his face again and this time keeps the handkerchief to his nose, but the thick and rotten smell seeps up his nostrils, anyway. If an odor alone could drown a man, he thinks, is about to say something about the stench to Warren Wallace when the foreman stops, holds his lantern close to the wall, and Henry can see the big sheets of corrugated tin propped against the west side of the tunnel.
“At first I thought we’d hit an old mine shaft,” he says, motions towards the tin with the lantern, causing their shadows to sway and contort along the damp tunnel. “Folks been diggin’ holes in this mountain since the forties to get at the ore. So that’s what I thought, at first.”
“But you’ve changed your mind?” Henry asks, words muffled by the useless handkerchief pressed to his face.
“Right now, Professor, I’m a whole lot more interested in what you think,” and then Wallace pulls back a big section of the tin, lets it fall loud to the floor, tin clamor against the steel rails at his feet. Henry gags, bilehot rush from his gut and the distant taste of breakfast in the back of his mouth. “Jesus,” he hisses, not wanting to be sick in front of the foreman, and the schoolteacher leans against the tunnel wall for support, presses his left palm against moss-slick stone, stone gone soft as the damprough hide of some vast amphibian.
“Sorry. Guess I should’a warned you about the stink,” and Warren Wallace frowns, grim face like Greek tragedy, and takes a step back from the hole in the wall of the tunnel, hole within a hole, and now Henry’s eyes are watering so badly he can hardly see. “Merkel had us plowin’ through here full chisel until we hit that thing. Now it’s all I can do to keep my men workin’.”
“Can’t exactly blame them,” Henry wheezes and gags again, spits at the tunnel floor, but the taste of the smell clings to his tongue, coats it like a mouthful of cold bacon grease. The foreman gestures for him to come closer, close enough he can peer down into the gap in the rock and Henry knows that’s the last thing he wants to do. But he loathes that irrational fear, fear of the unknown that keeps men ignorant, keeps men down, and all his life gone to the purging of that instinctual dread, first from himself and then his students. And so Henry Matthews holds his breath against the stench and steps over the mining car tracks, glances once at Warren Wallace, and to see a strong man so afraid and hardly any effort into hiding it is enough to get him to the crumbling edge of the hole.
And that’s the best word, hole, a wide crevice in the wall of the tunnel maybe four feet across and dropping suddenly away into darkness past the reach of the lantern, running west into more blackness but pinching closed near the tunnel’s ceiling. A natural fault, he thinks at first, evidence of the great and ancient forces that must have raised these mountains up, and the smell could be almost anything. Perhaps this shaft opens somewhere on the surface, a treacherous, unnoticed pit in the woods overhead, and from time to time an unfortunate animal might fall, might lie broken and rotting in the murk below, food for devouring mold and insects. And the thing in the jar is probably nothing more or less than the larvae of some large beetle new to entomology or perhaps only the hitherto unknown pupa of a familiar specie.
“Take the lantern,” Warren Wallace says, then, handing the kerosene lamp to the schoolteacher. “Hold it right inside there, but don’t lean too far in, mind you,” and Henry feels the foreman’s hand on his shoulder, weight and strength meant to be reassuring.
“Hold it out over the hole,” he says, “and look down.”
Henry Matthews does as he’s told, already half-convinced of his clever induction and preparing himself for the unpleasant (but perfectly ordinary) sight of a badly decomposed raccoon or opossum, maybe even a deer carcass at the bottom and the maggots, maybe more of the big black things that supposedly bit Mr. Isabell’s arm. He exhales, a little dizzy from holding his breath, then gasps in another lung full of the rancid air rising up from the pit. One hand braced against the tunnel wall, and leans as far out as he dares, a foot, maybe two, the flickering yellow light washing down and down, and he almost cries out at the unexpected sight of his own reflection staring back up at him from the surface of a narrow subterranean pool.
“It’s flooded,” he says, half to himself, half to the foreman, and Warren Wallace murmurs a reply, yeah, it’s flooded, and something else that Henry doesn’t quite catch. He’s watching the water, ten feet down to the surface at the most, water as smooth and black as polished obsidian.
“Now look at the walls, Professor, where they meet the water,” and he does, positions the lantern for a be
tter view, and maybe just a little braver now, a little more curious, so he’s leaning farther out, the foreman’s hand still holding him back.
At first he doesn’t see anything, angle a little less than ninety degrees where black rock meets blacker water, and then he does see something and thinks it must be the roots of some plant growing in the pool, or, more likely, running down from the forest above to find this hidden moisture. Gnarled roots as big around as his arm, twisted wood knotted back upon itself.
But one of them moves, then, abrupt twitch as it rolls away from the others, and Henry Matthews realizes that they’re all moving now, each tendril creeping slow across the slick face of the crevice like blind and roaming fingers, searching. “My God,” he whispers. “My God in Heaven,” starts to pull away from the hole, but the foreman’s hand holds him fast. “No. Not yet,” Warren Wallace says calmly, and “Watch them for just another second, Professor.”
And one of the tendrils has pulled free of the rest, rises silently from the water like a charmed cobra. Henry can see that it’s turning towards him, already six or seven feet of it suspended above the dark water, but it’s still coming. The water dripping off it very, very loud, impossible drip, drip, drip like a drumbeat in his ears, like his own racing heart, and then he notices the constant movement on the underside of the thing and knows at once what he’s seeing. The worm thing in Wallace’s bottle, coiling and uncoiling, and here are a thousand of them, restless polyps sprouting from this greater appendage, row upon writhing row, and now it’s risen high enough that the thing is right in front of him, shimmering in the lantern light, a living question mark scant feet from Henry Matthew’s face.
And later, lying awake in his room or walking at night along Twentieth Street, or broad daylight and staring up towards the mountain from the windows of his classroom, this is the part that he’ll struggle to recall: Warren Wallace pulling him suddenly backwards, away from the hole as tendril struck, the lantern falling from his hand, tumbling into the hole, and maybe he heard it hit the water, heard it splash at the same moment he tumbled backwards into the dark, tripped on the rails and landed hard. And the foreman cursing, the sounds of him hastily working to cover the hole in the tunnel wall again, and lastly, the dullwet thunk, meatmallet thud again and again from the other side of the tin barrier.
* * *
Minutes later that seem like days, and the schoolteacher and the foreman sit alone together in the small and crooked shed near the tunnel, sloppy excuse for an office, a table and two stools, blueprints and a rusty stovepipe winding up towards the ceiling. Coal soot and the sicklysweet smell of Wallace’s chewing tobacco. Henry Matthews sits on one of the stools, a hot cup of coffee in his hand, black coffee with a dash of whiskey from a bottle the foreman keeps in a box of tools under the table. And Warren Wallace sits across from him, staring down at his own cup, watching the steam rising from the coffee.
“I won’t even try,” Henry starts, stops, stares at the dirt floor and then begins again. “I can’t tell you what that was, what it is. I don’t think anyone could, Mr. Wallace.”
“Yeah,” the foreman says, shakes his head slow and sips at his coffee. Then, “I just wanted you to see it, Professor, before we bring in a fellow to brick up that hole next week. I wanted someone with some education to see it, so someone besides me and my men would know what was down there.”
And for a while neither of them says anything else, and there’s only the rattle and clatter of a locomotive passing by a little farther up the mountain, hauling its load of ore along the loop of the L. & N. Mineral Railroad. In the quiet left when the train has gone, the foreman clears his throat and, “You know what ‘hematite’ means?”
“From the Latin,” Henry answers. “It means ‘blood stone,’” and he takes a bitter, bourbon-tainted sip of his own coffee.
“Yeah,” the foreman says. “I looked that up in a dictionary. Blood stone.”
“What are you getting at?” Henry asks, watching the foreman, and Wallace looks a lot older than he ever realized before, deep lines and wrinkles, patches of gray in his dark beard. The foreman reaches beneath the table, lifts something wrapped in burlap and sets it in front of Henry Matthews.
“Just that maybe we ain’t the only thing in the world that’s got a use for that iron ore,” he says and pulls the burlap back, revealing a large chunk of hematite. Granular rock the exact color of dried blood, and the foreman doesn’t have to point out the deep pockmarks in the surface of the rock, row after row, each no bigger around than a man’s finger, no bigger around than the writhing black thing in Warren Wallace’s nitroglycerine bottle.
* * *
The chill and tinderdry end of November: Mr. W. A. Merkel’s tunnel finished on schedule, and the Water Works began laying the two big pipes, forty-two and thirty inches round, that would eventually bring clean drinking water all the way from the new Cahaba Pumping Station. Henry Matthews never went back to the spoil heaps outside the tunnel, never saw Warren Wallace again; the last crate of his Silurian specimens shipped away to Tuscaloosa, and his attentions, his curiosity, shifted instead to the great Warrior coal field north of Birmingham, the smoke-gray shales and cinnamon sandstones laid down in steamy Carboniferous swamps uncounted ages after the silt and mud, the ancient reefs and tropical lagoons that finally became the strata of Red Mountain, were buried deep and pressed into stone.
But the foreman’s pitted chunk of hematite kept in a locked strongbox in one undusted corner of Henry’s room, and wrapped in cheesecloth and excelsior, nestled next to the stone and floating in cloudy preserving alcohol, the thing in the bottle. Kept like an unlucky souvenir or memento of a nightmare, and late nights when he awoke coldsweating and mouth too dry to speak, these were things to take out, to hold, something undeniable to look at by candle or kerosene light. A proof against madness, or a distraction from other memories, blurred, uncertain recollection of what he saw in that last moment before he fell, as the lantern tumbled towards the oilblack water and the darker shape moving just beneath its mirrored surface.
All would be well.
All would be heavenly—
If the damned would only stay damned.
—Charles Fort (1919)
SOURCES
Washington Irving: “The Adventure of the German Student”
First publication: Tales of a Traveller (London: John Murray, 1824).
Text: Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller, ed. Judith Giblin Haig (The Complete Works of Washington Irving) (Boston: Twayne, 1987).
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Edward Randolph’s Portrait”
First publication: United States Magazine and Democratic Review (July 1838).
First collection: Twice-Told Tales, revised edition (Boston:James Munroe, 1842).
Text: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales (The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Standard Library Edition) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883).
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
First publication: Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1839).
First collection: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840).
Text: Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1902), Volume 3.
Fitz-James O’Brien: “What Was It?”
First publication: Harper’s Magazine (March 1859).
First collection: The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, ed. William Winter (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1881).
Text: Fitz-James O’Brien, Collected Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, ed. Edward J. O’Brien (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925).
Ambrose Bierce: “The Death of Halpin Frayser”
First publication: Wave (December 19, 1891).
First collection: Can Such Things Be? (New York: Cassell, 1893).
Text: Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York & Washington: Neale Publishing Co., 1909–12), Volume 3 (1910).
Robert W. Chambers: “The Yellow Sign”
First publication: Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895).
Text: The King in Yellow (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895).
Henry James: “The Real Right Thing”
First publication: Collier’s Weekly (December 16, 1899).
First collection: The Soft Side (New York: Macmillan, 1900).
Text: Henry James, The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949).
H. P. Lovecraft: “The Call of Cthulhu”
First publication: Weird Tales (February 1928).
First collection: The Outsider and Others, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1939).
Text: H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror and Others, ed. S. T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1984).
Clark Ashton Smith: “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”
First publication: Weird Tales (May 1932).
First collection: Out of Space and Time (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).
Text: Clark Ashton Smith, The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, ed. Steve Behrends, The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988).
Robert E. Howard: “Old Garfield’s Heart”
First publication: Weird Tales (December 1933).
First collection: The Dark Man and Others (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1963).
Text: Robert E. Howard, The Black Stranger and Other American Tales (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
Robert Bloch: “Black Bargain”
First publication: Weird Tales (May 1942).
First collection: Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, ed. Robert M. Price (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1998).
Text: Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1998).
August Derleth: “The Lonesome Place”
First publication: Famous Fantastic Mysteries (February 1948).
