We all usually brought our lunches rather than to go to the cafeteria. In a pinch, we could always use the vending machines, but nine times out of ten, we brought something. I unpacked my lunch, a plain peanut butter and jelly sandwich—hey, it’s a classic—some Cheetos, and an iced tea. So, I’m not the most imaginative person in the world. Or the healthiest.
“My dad says there’s something going on at the mines,” Zach said, trying to speak through a mouth full of some kind of sandwich. It smelled like tuna fish. I swore that if he spit any chewed up sandwich on me, I’d crack his head for him.
Zach’s dad was a shift lead at the mine. Almost everyone in town had something to do with that hole in the ground. It was the whole reason the town was created to begin with. With a name like Lode, you’d have to figure that would be the case.
“Really?” Emily said, eyebrows raising and back straightening so she sat a little taller. “What kind of thing?”
Zach swallowed—without spitting any of his lunch on me, I might add—and looked at her. His eyes had grown a little larger when she had sat up straighter. Emily typically wore clothes that understated her figure, but sometimes I got glimpses of how good her body was, like now. I think Zach noticed, too. At times, I resented her for it, but like with Sam, the thought left my head quickly. I really shouldn’t compare myself to my friends.
“I don’t really know,” Zach said. “He said something about breaking through to some other cavern or mine or something. It happened toward the end of his shift. I’ll ask him about it later. Maybe he has more information now.”
“Breaking into another cavern?” I asked. “How does that happen? I thought they did all kinds of techy x-ray stuff to make sure they didn’t accidentally tap into an underground river or something like that.”
“Dunno,” he said, taking another bite of his lunch. “I’ll ask my dad.”
“You know, Zachary,” Sam said, “I don’t understand why you said anything at all, if you don’t know any details. Do you just speak so you can hear yourself?”
“Shumtimes.” He really had a mouthful this time. I scooted a little further from him so I wouldn’t have to slap him.
I dragged myself home at the end of the day, feeling drained from the lack of sleep the night before. I came through the living room without saying a word to Bobby, my brother, and went straight to my room. My backpack I unceremoniously dropped on the floor as I collapsed onto my bed. I just wanted to sleep.
“Hey, Dani,” he said from my doorway. He had followed me to my room. “What’s up?”
I tilted my head to look at him. “You need a haircut.” He did. His hair was a bushy mess. The length wasn’t really the problem, though. The fact that he never combed it was. His brown eyes twinkled and he got that goofy grin he wore so often, his mis-sized teeth reflecting the sunlight coming through my window.
“Rough day, huh?” he asked as he plopped into the chair at my desk.
“I’m just tired.”
“I heard you moving around a lot last night, like you were dreaming,” he said. “Either that or wrestling with someone. You didn’t have anyone in here with you, did you?”
I threw my pillow at his head and he laughed.
“Maybe if you started training again, competing, you’d be tired and sleep all night without waking up,” he mused as he ran his hand over one of the trophies standing next to my desk.
It was a tall thing, over three feet high. The little girl at the top—she had a pony tail and everything—was on one leg kicking at something higher than her head. The plate on the trophy read: “First Place, Sparring—Girls 14-15.”
I laughed. “Yeah, maybe. But I’m not going to compete again. I’m done with that.”
I had studied karate for years and started doing tournaments when I was twelve. I enjoyed it and my father liked watching me. It became something the two of us could share. I actually got pretty good, winning the state championship for my age group two years in a row. That was before he died, though. I hadn’t competed since the accident, hadn’t even really trained.
My sensei encouraged me to continue training, saying that it would help me deal with my loss, but I just couldn’t do it. Since we moved, there was less pressure to train. From everyone except my brother. Bobby was proud of my accomplishments and wanted to see me fight again.
“But you’re so good, Dani,” he pleaded, “and I know you like it. Why don’t you try it again?”
“No, Bobby,” I said with a sigh. “Please don’t pester me about this now. It’s just…it’s just too soon to be talking about this. Please?”
He backed off, for which I was grateful. After he wandered back toward the TV, I lay back on my bed and closed my eyes.
It had been dark, like being underground kind of dark, that night. The rain and storm clouds obscured anything in the sky. The moon, the stars, airplane lights high above, all of it. Worse, the power had gone out for some reason, probably someone sliding off the road in the rain and hitting a power pole. We had been moving around the house by candlelight and headlamp for a few hours. I’d played some games on my laptop for a little while but settled down to sitting and waiting for my dad to come home. He was still out in it, probably on his way back from his work at the medical research company.
I spent most of the time in my room. Bobby and my mother were in the living room. For the short time I was down there with them, I watched their interaction. Mom sat rigid on the edge of the couch, her phone on the table in front of her. She was telling him about a time when she was a child and the power had gone out for a full day. As she spoke, she glanced often at the phone, as if expecting something. Her speech was jerky, halting, like her mind was somewhere else. I don’t think Bobby noticed.
He was curled into a ball on the other couch, watching my mother and listening without making a sound. Every time lightning flashed, he twitched, and when the thunder came almost immediately after, he jumped a little. While Mom darted her eyes back and forth from him to the phone, he shifted his from her to the battery-powered camping lantern on the table. I’d always suspected he was afraid of the dark, but that confirmed it in my mind.
I left them to their own ways of coping and went back to my room. I’d just wait there patiently until he got home. I’m not sure how long I lay there on my bed waiting before I fell asleep.
The boom of a thunderclap shook me awake. It rattled my window and vibrated my skull. It scared me, my disoriented mind trying to grasp what was happening. Where was I? What day was it? What was going on? An irrational fear gripped me, and I started shaking. A voice from the other room pierced the wall of my room.
“What? No, oh no!” It was my mother. She sounded frantic.
The sense of foreboding I had felt, magnified by the manner in which I woke, doubled and then doubled again. I rolled from my bed onto my feet, tripped over a sweater I had dropped to the floor earlier, and almost pitched headfirst into the wall. I caught myself, stood upright, and took a breath. Why was my heart beating so fast?
I rubbed my eyes and tried to shake off the grogginess. By the time I got to the living room, my mother had ended the call and was staring at her phone, her eyes strangely unfocused.
“Mom,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
Lightning threw strange shadows across her face. The thunder almost immediately after made me jump. Bobby moaned and curled up on himself. My mother didn’t move.
“It’s…it’s your father,” she said, continuing to stare at her phone. “There’s been an accident.”
Chapter 4
The news really didn’t affect me at first. I think maybe I was in shock, because it didn’t seem real. That wore off.
They never did let me see my dad’s…body. They said he had lost control of the car in the storm and slid off a cliff. I saw a picture of the car once, what was left of it. It made me think maybe they were right not to let anyone see his condition. No one except my mother, that is. She insisted on identifying him, though
they had already determined who he was. Dental records or something. I had to stay with my aunt for a week until my mother was speaking again after that.
Bobby and I were both a mess, but I think he recuperated faster. I don’t know, maybe since he was younger, a given amount of time was longer to him. All I know is that I felt the effects of what happened long after we moved. The scariest part was the things I couldn’t think about and identify, the “subconscious effects of the trauma,” as the psychologist I had to see called it.
I think my mom was probably worse than me. She would go through her day, carry on as if things were ordinary, but each night I could hear her trying to hide her sobbing. Though to anyone who knew her casually she seemed normal, she didn’t laugh and joke around like she did before.
About six months after the accident, Mom had an opportunity to take another job with the company she worked for, The Great Southwestern Mining Company. It was an office manager position at a small satellite office fifty or sixty miles away.
“I want to talk to you about something,” she said to me and Bobby. We sat on the couch in the living room watching her. She wrung her hands and tapped her fingers on the coffee table. Her eyes darted from Bobby to me and then back again.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I have an opportunity for a promotion,” she said. “From clerk to Office Manager.”
“That’s great, mom,” I said.
Bobby sat there tossing the racquetball he sometimes carried around.
“It…will mean that we have to move.”
“Move?” Bobby’s head raised at that, and he missed catching his ball. “How far? Will I still be in the same school, with my same friends?”
“No,” Mom said. “It’s about an hour away.”
“Mom!” he said. “We can’t—”
“Bobby!” I interrupted. “Be quiet for a minute.” Turning to face my mother, her eyes liquid, I said softly to her, “It’s hard to be here for you, huh?”
That was all it took for the tears to flow. Her face didn’t change much, just a tightening of her jaw as she clenched it, but liquid streamed from her eyes.
“Everything here reminds me of your father,” she said. “Every time I turn around, there is a memory of the two of us, or of all four of us. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode or go insane. It’s been six months, but it seems to get worse every day. I don’t know if I can handle it.” She wiped at her eyes and sniffled. “Plus, we need the money. It’s a good opportunity.”
We discussed it, but I knew from the start it was something we had to do. I had memories, too, and the ghosts of what had been assaulted me also. Bobby wasn’t happy about it, but he finally, grudgingly, agreed. He hadn’t needed to. My mother had looked at me most of the time, gauging my reaction. She knew I would support her. Besides, I would have made the same decision if it was up to me.
So we moved. To Lode, a small town of maybe eight thousand people. It was a mining town, built when a prospector found a small cave and thought it might contain gold. It didn’t. There was copper, though, so The Great Southwestern Mining Company bought the land and mineral rights and started mining. The town grew up around it.
Things were still rough for us. There was still a hole in our lives, but time dulled the edges on the blade that seemed constantly pressed to my heart, and life became less torturous. Mom and Bobby seemed to snap right back into a routine, living life and not moping. I couldn’t. Did they still think of my father? Did it still feel like a piece of them was missing? Or was it just me?
I didn’t want to think about it. Not right now.
My backpack stared at me accusingly. I sighed and picked it up. Mr. Reynolds had assigned homework, as had my other teachers, and it wasn’t going to do itself. After a moment of digging around in the largest compartment of the backpack, I pulled out the copy of Dante’s Inferno. Just the thing to suit my mood, a dark account of traveling through hell.
My teacher had said there were many translations of Inferno out there. The one he chose for us to read didn’t focus on trying to make the words rhyme but instead tried to be as accurate as possible, capturing the feeling of the original work in Italian. It lost the sense of meter, of being like a song, but the “prose still produced the important imagery.” That’s what Mr. Reynolds said. After reading some of it, I agreed with him.
I sat at my desk with a small desk lamp shining its beam onto the pages. As I read, I could picture the darkness, the caverns through which Dante traveled. I smelled the damp stone and the pervasive, pungent scent of sulfur in the air. I could almost hear the sounds as I went through the account, first of the great river Dante had to cross, then the storm, and the wailing, and…
“Hey!” a voice said, much too loud in the quiet room.
I nearly jumped completely out of my chair, book flying. My shoulder hit the desk lamp as I leaped, and it tottered before settling back down on the flat surface of my desk. Bobby stood in my darkened doorway. When had it gotten dark? I shivered, the memory of what I had read fresh in my mind.
“God, Bobby,” I said. “You scared me to death. What’s wrong with you?”
My brother eyed me as if he was searching for something. “Why are you so jumpy? Mom called you a couple of times. Dinner’s ready.”
“Oh,” I said “Okay.” I picked the book up from where it had landed on the floor and set it on my desk. “I guess I was engrossed in my reading. I’ll be there in a minute.”
He smirked at me, and I half expected him to say “boo,” but he just nodded and turned to leave. Why was I so jumpy? I turned on the other two lights in my room and scanned the corners for anything lurking in the previously shadowy spaces now flooded with light. There was nothing, of course, but a shiver raced up my back. I took a breath, looked around one more time, and left my room. Despite my mother’s constant nagging not to leave lights on when not in use, I didn’t shut them off as I went to eat dinner.
The next day found me sitting with my friends in the big auditorium at school. They called it an auditorium, anyway. It was really just the gym with all the bleachers pulled out. The Principal had announced an emergency assembly just a few minutes before we all started piling into the gym.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” Ms. Tonner, our principal, said. “We know it is an abnormal situation, but the staff felt it necessary.” She scanned the entire room, nodded, and continued. “Some strange things have happened in and around the mine. There was apparently some sort of explosion or collapse. Some of the miners are still unaccounted for.”
Many in the audience started whispering. It was no wonder. Most of the kids had parents who worked for the mine company. Ms. Tonner raised her hands and waited for the buzz of whispered voices to soften.
“We will update you as we get more information. There have also been…reports of some sort of animal loose, possibly from the caverns adjacent to the mine. We don’t have a lot of information yet, but the Mayor’s office is highly recommending that no one be outside their homes after dark. It appears that this animal is nocturnal and dangerous. Pets and a few people have been reported missing. It may be a coincidence, but best to be safe.
“This same announcement is being made on the local TV stations, radio stations, and at places of employment. If your parents are not aware of it, please share the information with them when you get home from school this afternoon. Remember, be in your homes after dark until the authorities have determined if there is any danger and have taken steps to remedy it if there is. You may return to your classes now. Thank you.”
I stumbled back toward my class, my friends around me. I heard them talking, but their voices echoed strangely, almost like we were all in a big steel tank half filled with water, the sounds bouncing from the walls a few times and then dying suddenly.
“This is the thing my dad mentioned,” Zach said.
“What do you think it is?” Sam asked.
“Maybe it’s a bear,” Emily offered.
Their words meant nothing to me. An animal from underground, coming out only at night? I pictured the formless thing that came for me in my dreams, hunting me, constantly chasing. I shivered, though I could feel the desert sun hot on my skin.
“Dani?” Sam said. “Dani, are you all right?”
Something pressed onto my shoulder. A hand, shaking me gently.
“All right, Dani?” Emily said.
I blinked a couple of times and shook my head, turning toward them. Both girls and Zach had concerned looks on their faces. Sam’s eyes were locked on mine, hers intense. I dropped my gaze to watch her mouth as she spoke.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, trying to act nonchalant. “I’m really tired. I must have zoned out there for a minute.”
“That look on your face was not zoning out,” Sam said. “It…it looked like you were afraid. Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I lied. “Maybe I did have a scary thought or two. Aren’t you scared of a bear that is too smart to be caught and strong enough to take pets and even people? It’s like some kind of horror movie.”
“I’m sure they’ll sort it all out,” Emily said. “We need to stay in the house when it’s dark, like Ms. Tonner said, and we’ll be fine. They’ll find it and capture it and pretty soon we’ll be going to the zoo to see what it looks like.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.” An uncomfortable feeling, a sort of burning nausea, formed in my belly. I doubted it would happen that way at all.
Chapter 5
Over the next week, there were more reports of strange things happening in conjunction with the mine. And in the dark. It didn’t look like it was some escaped animal.
Sam and I were watching TV at my house after school. After that irritating sound they play when there’s a natural disaster or something, a special announcement came on. The picture resolved into the police chief, Charlie Fretz.
“There have been troubling reports throughout the city,” he said. He was an older man, a little heavy, and the head underneath his uniform cap was bald. He was dressed up in the formal uniform he wore when officiating at public functions, dark blue with shiny buttons and a glimmering badge on his chest. “More pets have disappeared, and several people have been reported missing as well.
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