by Tim Curran
Twenty minutes later—after climbing through those close-packed trunks, navigating petrified logs, and fields of four-foot stumps wider than oval tabletops—they waded through a pool of freezing water and pressed through another stand of trees and what they saw on the other side literally took their breath away.
“Those ain’t trees,” Maki said. “That’s…that’s a city…”
“Can’t be,” Breed said. “Not down here.”
Boyd reserved judgment, as did McNair and Jurgens. They stepped forward, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. At first glance, sure, it did look like some sort of city, though maybe village would have been more accurate. Not buildings exactly, but trees. Immense things like California redwoods spread out and each bigger around than the opening to a train tunnel. About forty or fifty feet up, they had been sheared off flat, giving the impression of flat-roofed, man-made structures. Like the others they were completely turned to stone, but unlike the others they were honeycombed with oval openings, dozens and dozens of them.
Boyd was thinking that, yes, it did look like a village of sorts with gigantic trees used as buildings, but no ordinary village. This was primeval looking, weird and offbeat like those monkey villages in The Planet of the Apes. You just couldn’t imagine men living in places like this, climbing up into those holes and kicking off their shoes. If those cells were indeed domiciles of some sort, they looked like the sort some simian tree dwellers might fashion. Maybe even Tarzan.
“Those are trees,” Jurgens said.
McNair nodded. “Yes…but immense. I’ve never heard of anything like this from the Permian.”
“Maybe they’re not from the Permian,” Breed said.
“They have to be,” McNair pointed out. “I mean, it would be a little coincidental to assume that these were far older, that they had been standing petrified in our theoretical valley when the flood claimed the rest of this forest. It would be stretching.”
He and Jurgens walked around with their lanterns and long-handled flashlights while the others just stood and stared. There were at least a dozen of the big trees, some up on mounds, and some down in little draws sitting in standing water. They led right up to the far wall of the cavern where at some time in the past there had been a cave-in, swallowing the rest of the petrified Permian world. Set amongst them, were dozens of the other trees.
Breed kept panning his light around, studying the boles of those big trees. “I don’t know, Doc,” he said when McNair returned. “These big ones just look…I don’t know…”
“Older,” Maki said.
And Boyd was with them on that. Like this was some sort of sacred grove that had been abandoned, all the little trees inserting themselves and growing wild when whoever or whatever cut those cells was long, long gone. Regardless, there was something eerie about them standing so big and stark like monoliths and monuments. The flashlight beams scanning them made the cell mouths seem to move as shadows spilled from them.
Jurgens and McNair went up to one and started peering inside it. Boyd and Breed followed suit. The openings were all about four-feet in diameter. Inside, were little cells maybe five-feet high by ten long. You could still see the chopping marks in the petrified wood. McNair climbed inside one and examined this.
“It looks like this was done when the tree was still alive,” he said.
“But by who?” Breed said. “I mean, who was around 250 million years ago to hollow out these little apartments?”
Jurgens shook his head. “It wasn’t a matter of who, Breed, but what. There were no people during the Permian. This is, was, the work of some arboreal creature. Some tree-living species that chewed these cavities open.”
“They remind me of those holes the prairie dogs dig in their sand piles at the zoo,” Maki said.
“What could have made these, Doc?” Boyd asked.
“I…I’m not sure,” McNair said. “But it’s apparent that there were very many of them and it must have taken time.”
Boyd looked into another. “Almost looks like toolwork, don’t it?” he said, putting his flashlight beam on the meticulously carved ceiling, the series of hack marks that looked like maybe they’d been done with an axe.
“It wasn’t done by tools,” McNair said, but he didn’t sound convinced of that himself.
“But what cut them off flat on top, Doc?” Breed wanted to know.
McNair said, “There’s no way of telling. Could have been that they grew that way or some natural force did it. The movement of the rock above may have sheared them off over a period of millions of years. Hard to say.”
“Almost looks like it was done on purpose,” Maki said.
Boyd stood before the nearest tree, sweeping his light up it, counting all the cells set into its face. They went right up to the very top. Dozens of them. Looking at them, he was reminded of a bee honeycomb. Whatever lived in them must have been a very good climber.
McNair was taking photograph after photograph.
“Well, gentlemen, I think we should call it a day,” Jurgens said. “No sense waiting around down here until our batteries go dead.”
Boyd was in perfect agreement with that. This was plenty for one day. Let the scientists figure this all out. He wanted to get topside again, get out of the cavern and the mines in general, suck in some air that wasn’t dank and stagnant smelling.
After this I’m gonna need a drink, he thought, maybe four or five of them. In fact, I just might—
Maki, who had been investigating trees ahead, came running back, shining his light around up in the air. “What the hell was that?”
They all looked at him.
In the glow of the lanterns, his face had taken on the color of yellow cheese. His eyes were wide and white, his lips pulled away from his teeth.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Jurgens said.
But nobody was saying it was his imagination. They were all looking around them now as if the unpleasant possibility that they might not be alone down there had just occurred to them, had just settled into them like venom. Flashlight beams scanned about, but no one heard anything but that continual, morose dripping of water. The air smelled like it had been blown from a crypt…yellow bones and flaking shrouds, dust and advanced age.
“I heard it,” Maki said. “Up there…up on one of those trees. A kinda scratching sound.”
10
All flashlights went up.
Beams arced through the darkness.
There were lots of the other trees around them, the gymnosperms and cycads standing about like posts. Some were fifty feet in height and the flashlights played about their tops.
“There’s nothing up there, Maki,” Jurgens said.
“Wait,” Breed said. “I heard something, too.”
Then they all did. A sort of knocking sound like a woodpecker working a dead tree. It had that same hollow, continual rapping. It went on for maybe five seconds, stopped, then started again. It was coming from high above, from the apex of one of the trees…but they could see nothing up there.
“Fuck is that?” Breed said.
McNair swallowed. “I assumed this cavern was sealed, but something could have gotten in through a crevice. Bats, maybe.”
“I never heard bats knock like that,” Maki pointed out.
Boyd stood there, his heart pounding and the cylinder of the flashlight in his hand feeling very greasy like it might slide out of his fist at any moment.
Jurgens cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get on our way—”
“Shut up,” Breed said.
They were hearing more noises now. Not just that knocking, but a scraping sound from high above them like tenpenny nails were being scratched over petrified wood. A flurry of noise that went on for maybe thirty seconds. Then nothing. Nothing at all.
“There’s something up there,” Breed whispered, like he was afraid that whatever it was might hear him.
All lights were up in the petrified treetops now. Most were just posts l
acking branches. The lights swept over them and there was absolutely nothing up there. Nothing that the lights could find.
The sounds started again, knocking and scraping, not from one particular tree, but from many as if whatever was up there was leaping from trunk to trunk over their heads. It stopped again and they all stood there, silent and motionless, sensing something but not knowing what it was. Boyd’s flashlight was shaking in his hand, his beam jumping around. He wanted badly to run, to get the hell out of there, before whatever it was showed. Because he had a bad feeling that it was about to. That whatever was up there was about to drop down amongst them in a flurry of scratching limbs.
What they heard next was a clicking.
Click, click, click.
The sound of a deathwatch beetle in the wall of a deserted house or a cicada up in a gum tree. Just that repetitive, chitinous clicking like some insect rubbing its forelegs together or tapping them on its carapace. Whatever it was, it was not a good sound and nobody dared speak. Dared acknowledge what they were hearing.
It’s like Morse Code, Boyd thought. Like something up there is trying to communicate with us.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Maki said.
But he didn’t move. What came next stopped him dead.
Stopped them all dead and took away any slim hope they had that what was up there was a bat or something ordinary. It started as a low whistling sound and built to a screeching, strident piping that went right up their spines. It sounded almost frenzied, desperate, the shriek of some mountain cat crying out in agony and despair and maybe even stark melancholy. It rose up to a shrill cacophony and then slowly faded. And by then, they were all scared.
Nothing with a voice like that could be remotely normal or remotely sane.
Boyd just stood there, trying to pull air into his lungs. He could not get past the idea that there was an almost feminine caliber to that cry. Anguished, haunted, and demented, but somehow female. Like some big and hideous insect imitating a human cry. The idea of that made his flesh crawl in waves. It was not a human voice or even a tone a human would be capable of producing, yet it was not strictly bestial and there was no denying a certain sorrow in its pitch.
But it was enough.
It was plenty.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jurgens said and the desperation in his voice was real.
They made it maybe ten feet before things started to happen.
The earth below and above them rumbled like a hungry belly and things began to move and shake and tremble. Rocks and dust fell from overhead. The prehistoric trees began to sway back and forth. Everything was in motion, including the men who tried to stay on their feet. Lights went spinning in all directions as their owners pitched this way and that.
“A cave-in!” Breed called out. “A fucking cave-in!”
Boyd hit the ground, waiting for millions of tons of rock to come down on top of him, for the lot of them to be squashed flat like his old man in the Mary B. mine. He heard that rumbling from the distance and realized that whatever was happening, it was apparently not happening in the cavern. Rocks were falling and dust was kicked up, but the real thunder came from the distance. And then a shock wave rolled at them, throwing everyone to the ground. In the glow of a dropped lantern, he saw one of those giant stone trees sway back and forth and come right down on top of him. He felt the impact as its trunk trapped his leg with a white-hot rush of pain.
And in the back of his head, a voice said, yer probably the only guy ever crushed by a falling tree out of the Permian.
Then there was darkness.
11
Up in Level #8, it was a dog and pony show and Russo, the mine captain, didn’t expect much more. But he was there, hell yes, cracking the whip and kicking ass because time was a factor here. Those men were down there. Trapped. Maybe dead, but maybe alive and this is what he was counting on. It was what everyone was counting on. The brass at Hobart were having kittens over this one and they were crawling up Russo’s ass. They were so far up there he could feel them in the back of his throat.
And what he got, he gave.
Standing there in his rainsuit, boots, and miner’s helmet, he was watching the diggers clearing rubble from the drift. They were going at it hard, but not hard enough for Russo’s liking. “C’mon! C’mon, you fucking pussies! Clean that drift! We got to get it blasted out to get that drilling rig in! Move! Move! Christ, you boys dig like I fuck!”
It was a hive of activity down there with the clearing and the blasting, the rubble being carted away. But the brass were on him and he had never let them down before and he wouldn’t let them down now.
They wanted action.
They wanted results.
There were families out there who wanted to know what the hell was going on and what was being done to free their men. They were riding the Hobart people hard and when they hopped off the saddle, the Safety and Mine people hopped on. And topside, Jesus, the media were already descending and interviewing family members and word had it they’d already dug up a few old hands that were more than happy to spill the beans about the unsafe working conditions at the Hobart. Russo knew who those guys were…people like Lem Rigby and Charlie DeCock. Men he’d fired for being lazy, careless, or downright incompetent. Here was their chance to bask in the sun and point fingers and, goddamn yes, they were sure pointing them.
Revenge, that was it.
Against the Hobart mine. Against Russo himself.
And Russo, like every man who’d worked those drifts and channels, knew that the word of those guys wasn’t worth a sip of piss on a hot day, but the media didn’t know that. The journalists and TV parasites didn’t know the difference between a stope and a gopher hole, just like they didn’t know the difference between a hard-working man and a guy like Lem Rigby who’d shown up drunk and been canned on the spot by Russo.
No, they didn’t know what Rigby’s game was.
They only knew that in him and half-wit Charlie DeCock they had eyewitnesses to the workings of the mine itself that would sweeten the deal and make the Hobart look guilty as hell. And already the brass were smelling those lawsuits and they did not care for the stink.
Russo knew somebody would get dragged over the rocks on this one.
And that somebody would probably be him.
So he shouted. He yelled. He threatened and intimidated and raised three kinds of holy hell.
But what he was thinking about all the while was not his job and not lawsuits and not those candyass reporters topside.
He was thinking about Jurgens and the miners.
Down in the darkness, far below.
Russo had been trapped underground for thirty-six hours once, so he knew. He goddamn well knew what that score was about.
As the air hammers chiseled and the rubble was dragged out, as hydraulic lines vibrated and steam hoses hissed and men scrambled, he said under his breath, “Don’t worry, boys. I’ll get you out. Johnny Russo is on the job and I’ll get your fine white asses out of the pit. See if I don’t. And if you’re nothing but corpses, by God, then I’ll carry you out with my own bare hands.”
12
Gasping and clawing out, Boyd came awake from a dream where he was crushed beneath a mountain of solid rock.
“Easy now,” a voice said.
Breathing fast, he found that he was laying on his back, his leg from the knee down numb and rubbery feeling. He could see the glow of the lanterns, but they were dimming fast. He blinked his eyes and tried to speak, but all that came out was a groaning sound.
“He’s coming around,” Breed said.
“Take it easy,” Jurgens told him. “One of those goddamn trees caught your leg. We got it off you, but you got a nasty compound fracture, son. Don’t try and move.”
But, of course, Boyd did and right away the pain kicked in. It felt like somebody was driving a spike into his shin. He let out a little muted scream and settled back down again.
“T
ake it easy now,” Jurgens told him. “You’re going to be fine. We’ll get you out of here.”
Maki let out a high little laugh. “No shit, Jurgens? And how do you plan on doing that? How do you plan on getting us out of this fucking tomb? Huh?” He just shook his head. “Let me be the first to clue you in on something, Boyd. We’re trapped down here. We’re trapped in this fucking cavern—”
“Shut the hell up,” Breed told him.
“—and we can’t get out. We get to sit around and twiddle our fucking thumbs while our lights go out and the air goes bad. How’s that for kicks, Boyd? How’s that for company incentive?”
“Swear to God,” Breed said, “you don’t pipe down, I’ll kick the living shit out of you right now.”
“We’ll be fine,” Jurgens said. “Even now they’ll be digging to get us out.”
They were all sitting around him in a little circle by lantern light and Boyd looked from face to face to face. None of them looked particularly hopeful. Jurgens told him that the cave-in had sealed the stope leading out of the cavern. But that was no real reason for concern, because the cavern was huge and it would no doubt take weeks and weeks to use up all the oxygen in there. And long before that, they’d be dug out. Boyd listened and didn’t honestly believe a word of it. Maybe if it was just the stope that had caved-in and the tunnel leading to it and even the spider hole from the drift above…maybe then, they’d actually get dug out. But what if it was more than that? What if it was Level #8 above? What then? Then getting to the cavern would take months maybe.
The only good thing, he supposed, was that Jurgens had called up to the drift with his walkie-talkie every fifteen minutes. He had told the men above about the stope they found and the cavern it led to. That was something and under the circumstances, it would have to be enough.
After a time, Boyd said, “How about those sounds?”
“We haven’t heard anything else,” McNair said.
Maki laughed again and it was a bad sort of laughter, the sort that echoed from a mind on the verge of a nervous breakdown. No one had ever doubted who the weak link in their chain was. But then again they had not imagined a scenario like this that would put it to the test.
