I’d been at the field three weeks when Burke rode up with a pair of horses, told me to mount up and follow him. We rode out past the edge of the field, past the last of the derricks, to a spot where a copse of trees once stood, ‘fore they were all dragged down and sawed up for timber. The ground was swept as smooth and flat as if it was the floor of some fella’s house.
“This here,” Burke said, “is what I bought this land fer. There was somethin’ here when I come out, a wheel a stones like them the Injuns set aside, though I could’n find nobody from ‘round here could say which tribe mighta put ‘em up. I come out ‘fore the men, moved them stones myself, by hand. Didn’ want nobody gettin’ spooked off. They’s a wild mix a folks works th’ fields, as you well know, an’ some of ‘em are too superstitious fer their own good. But look here; I don’ think this was no burial ground nor nothin’ of th’ sort. I think them Injuns, whichever ones they was, knowed they was somethin’ unner this ground an’ they marked th’ spot.”
“You mean oil?” I asked. I knew some folks believed oil was medicinal, that they’d set up shacks and stagecoach stops around tar springs and drunk the black stuff that bubbled up to cure everything from gout to infertility. And I knew the Indians were better geologists than anybody’d ever given ‘em credit for, better able to find the flow of underground rivers and stratas of good rock than they’d any right to be. So, I didn’t suppose it was unreasonable to think they mighta known there was oil down there, or marked the place to find it.
Burke just shrugged at me, didn’t answer my question straight. Instead, he said, “Gonna build me a derrick here. Gonna dig deep, deeper’n any well we dug so far. I want you on it, ‘cause I know I kin count by you.”
And I didn’t think nothing more of it, save that I was proud to be trusted, to be depended on. The next day, we started digging.
The digging didn’t go easy. It seemed like every day, there was something new went wrong. A storm come up and dropped bucketfuls of hail on the whole field, blew a derrick over. Two of the men got into it over something, and one pulled a knife and killed the other. Three of the men took sick and couldn’t work. Four more vanished over the course of a week and weren’t never found. And, through it all, the pipe went down and down and down.
We passed over several promising-looking strikes, ‘cause they weren’t whatever Burke was looking for, and the men working the towers got restless. Still we went down and down, until finally we hit something else.
There was a sound come up from the hole, like a gasp. The men figured we’d hit a pocket of gas and everyone backed off in case it was like to burn. Then the derrick shook all the way up and the ground seemed to slide a little under our feet. There come a noise from the hole like I ain’t never heard the ground make in all my years. When I was a boy, my pa’d known a man who worked a whaling ship and he said that whales sang to one another. He’d put his hands together over his mouth and blown a call that he said was as close as he could do to what they sounded like. This sounded like that call.
All the men went back another pace, not knowing if maybe we’d hit a sinkhole, or God knows what. There was another groan, then an old cave stink, and then the black stuff started coming up around the pipe like a tide. I’d seen gushers in my day, the pressurized wells that blew the tops off the derricks, but this weren’t the same. This weren’t no geyser; this were a flood, the oil pouring up from under the ground like a barrel that’s been overturned. Everybody was silent for another minute and then the men gathered ‘round all cheered, ‘cause they knowed we’d finally hit whatever it was we’d been aiming at.
I’d expected Burke to be blown over by our success, but when he come out to look at the well, his smile didn’t touch his eyes none.
That night, he invited me to eat dinner with him in his shack, which weren’t really much better’n mine, though it had a coupla rooms. I remembered his wife and little girl had lived in it with him when he started the field, back before his wife got carried off by whatever it was carried her off.
Burke served me a dinner of baked beans and set out a bottle of whiskey on the table between us. He seemed distracted, thoughtful. ‘Pensive’, as they say. He told me I’d done a good job on the well, but didn’t seem to want to talk much more about it.
“I got no need ta tell you what oil is,” he finally said, after we’d drained most of the bottle. “Dead stuff. Rotted a thousand years, pressed down by th’ dirt. You know who th’ first wildcatters in this country consulted ‘fore diggin’? Not geologists. Mediums. Spiritualists. They knowed, even then. Hell, mebbe they knowed better. Mebbe it’s us has forgot.”
He stopped and raised his glass, only to find it empty. He sat it back down and continued, without refilling it, “Somethin’ dies an’ you put it down in th’ dirt; it’ don’ disappear. It stays, forever. They’s not a place on this earth somethin’ ain’t died, where somethin’ don’ lay buried. All this world’s a boneyard an’ us just ghouls crouched on top, breakin’ open tombs. I made my peace wi’ it. A man does, ta live th’ life we live. But here ....” He reached over to a sideboard and took up an old, worn black Bible and opened it up. From the back, he took out a scrap of paper, brown and worn smooth by years of handling, and passed it to me. “Kin you read that?” he asked.
I could, but only just. The handwriting was careful but uneven, like it’d been copied down slow by a palsied hand. It was just one line: THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE.
“Took that off a feller came ta shut down th’ field,” Burke said. “Fancied hisself some kinda preacher, though nota-th’ Word a God. He said all sortsa things, crazy things, ‘bout there bein’ somethin’ underneath us, somethin’ that dreamed though it was dead. He had a gun. Managed to light a buncha th’ place on fire. Took an ax ta one-a-th’ derricks, ‘fore I shot him wi’ my rifle. He had that in his pocket. Can’t rightly say why I kept it, but I thought about it a lot since. An’ damned if it ain’t right, just a bit. Oil, right? It’s dead, jus’ dead stuff crammed down there in its tomb, but it can lay there forever, cain’t it? An’ when we dig it up, there it is, waitin’ to come out, fulla heat an’ fire an’ life. What does that tell ya?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer him and I don’t rightly know what I’d’ve said if I had, because right then, he noticed the flicker of the shadows against the wall. “Fire,” he breathed and my heart jumped up, ‘cause fire’s the worst curse there is when you’re in the field.
Burke rushed out, already barking orders, and I followed him. If the doubtful and morbid thoughts of a few minutes before were still in him, as they must’ve been, then he kept ‘em well hid. He shouted to the men and they jumped to, fighting to keep the fires away from the pipes and the nitroglycerine trucks.
I was a few paces behind Burke and when the ground shivered under my feet, I stopped and swung my eyes across the field. The fires seemed like they was burning everywhere, like they’d sprung up from every corner of the place at once. I could see the whole field, it seemed like, all licked with curling orange tongues, the derricks that wasn’t yet burning standing like the silhouettes of ships’ masts before the flames.
The ground gave another shake under me, like the flank of a horse shivering to throw off flies. Through the smoke, I saw my derrick sway. I ran toward it. The fire hadn’t reached it yet and I was prob’ly needed someplace else, but I somehow had a feeling that the derrick was where I had to be.
As I got right up to it, I heard that same sound, the one I remembered from earlier in the day, and I saw the derrick start to topple. At the same time, a crack opened up below me like a mouth in the dirt. I felt my feet going out from under me and saw that big skeleton of wood and metal coming down toward my head. The next thing I remember, I was hanging from the derrick where it laid across an empty black chasm, a pit that seemed like it went down all the way to the center of the earth. Down in that darkness, I saw something move.
In the years that’ve intervened since that night, the doct
ors have tried their best to convince me that I misremember some of what come next, but I know they’re wrong. I remember it clear as day. There was something down in the dark below me, something that heaved itself up toward the surface, toward the light, toward me. I remembered suddenly why that place was called ‘Black Hill’. I saw that great bulk heave and slop toward me in the dark. I saw what looked like golden eyes opening and closing, and hungry mouths smacking. I smelt a smell like what sometimes comes up from caves and holes that’ve been closed away fer too long. I heard a hiss and a groan, and I believe I closed my eyes. Then I heard Burke’s voice.
He was shouting, but there was something different about the sound. It was ragged and hoarse, but that wasn’t it. It was like he was talking straight at a feller, not like he was yelling all around as he had been before.
I opened my eyes up again and I saw him, standing by the edge of the crack in the ground, looking like some heathen god with the fires burning behind him. He was shouting down into the pit.
“What more kin you take from me?” he demanded. “What more could you want? You took ma hand, ma face, ma wife! I done give you ever’thin’ I got, damn you, ever’thin’ I am. I ain’t got nothin’ left you kin take, nothin’ but her, an’ her y’ll not have! I’ll see you in hell myself, first.”
And then he stepped into the hole. Other men in the field heard Burke shout and saw me hanging there on the tipped-over derrick. But if anyone else saw what happened to him, they pretended not to. They said they saw him standing there, and that they saw him fall, but that’s it. I know, though, that he didn’t fall. That he went down there to spite the Devil, or whatever it was he saw down there, and something came up to meet him, something black and old and putrid as a rotted log that’s set for months at the bottom of a pond. I saw him go down into that blackness like a mammoth being pulled down into a tar pit. That’s the last thing I saw ‘fore I blacked out.
By the time I come to, the fires had been put out. The men told me that, even though I’d been unconscious, it’d taken three of them to pry my arms off the derrick’s supports.
Soon as I was able to walk again, I made a man take me out to survey the field. The damage was bad: nearly half the derricks lost, barrels of oil burned up, and one of the nitroglycerine trucks had exploded. My derrick still lay on its side, but there was little enough to show that the crack had ever been beneath it. I asked the man with me. He said that the ground had shaken again and the crack sealed up. There was just a scar to mark its passing, an uneven place where one lip of the ground was higher’n the other.
Burke had a business partner, a banker from Wichita, who took over his interest in the Black Hill Oil Company and sold it off to one of the other concerns. In his will, Burke had left a stipulation that his daughter never have a stake in it. By the time she was of an age to marry, she was provided fer nicely by the investment of Burke’s money into other ventures.
I never worked the fields again. When my wife died, I come here to the sanitarium, where I’ve stayed ever since. My two girls are grown and married now, but they take turns coming to visit me. They’ve taken such good care of me since the incident.
There’re days when I think I could leave this place, move in with one of them and have a life outside these walls, long as I stayed out of automobiles and away from oil fields. And maybe I would, were it not fer the dreams.
I dream, not of the world, but of the future. The future that Burke and I helped to bring about and that I’m powerless to prevent. I see a country criss-crossed with roads where thousands of automobiles drive every day. I see ships as big as whales, plying the sea with bellies full of black blood. I see a world of perpetual light and motion, powered by the unquiet dead.
Orrin Gray is a skeleton who likes monsters. His stories of cursed books, mad monks, and ominous paintings have appeared in Bound for Evil, Delicate Toxins, and, of course, at Innsmouth Free Press, among other places. He can be found online at www.orringrey.com.
The author speaks: I actually spent a lot of my formative years right near where “Black Hill” was set. The real place was called ‘Oil Hill’. It was long gone by the time I lived there, its passing only marked by the occasional pump jack out in someone’s pasture. But there were photographs up here and there that showed what the fields had looked like back in their heyday. I always wanted to set a weird story in those old oil fields. When I started thinking about all that oil down there, made up mostly of ancient organic matter, dead but not inert, well, that sounded pretty Lovecraftian to me.
AMUNDSEN’S LAST RUN
Nathalie Boisard-Beudin
Amundsen tapped on his pilot's shoulder, indicating to Rene Guilbaud where they should attempt their sea-landing – a small, canal-like harbour in the huge iceberg below them. The Frenchman shook his head. Too narrow. Too short. Unable to hear his own voice over the noise of the motors, he made wide gestures to emphasize his meaning, tapping the sheet with the coordinates, as well. They were still too far from their planned destination yet. The Italia had foundered much farther to the east.
Roald Amundsen stamped his foot. Guilbaud raised his arms in anger. The explorer leaned over his shoulder and brought the drive stick sharply down. The seaplane did a mad dive as Guilbaud scrambled, screaming, to regain control of the aircraft. Then, all of the sudden, both engines stopped. Like that, while they glided into the iceberg.
Amundsen regained consciousness, his body’s pain a welcome indicator that he was alive. His first estimate told him his right leg was broken and a few of his ribs might be in the same state. The crushed-up cabin of the Latham 47 was obscenely embedded in the ice, making it unlikely that Guilbaud and Leif Dietrichson, his co-pilot, might have survived the impact. Amundsen had only managed that by racing to the back of the plane at the last minute, flinging himself down just before the impact. It infuriated him to think they could have floated to a stop in the small inner canal he had indicated to Guilbaud. But the Frenchman’s obstinate refusal had put them all in jeopardy, forcing him to desperate measures.
He dared not disobey the humming.
During his expedition of 1925 to the North Pole, he had encountered this giant iceberg and experienced technical difficulties in its presence. A radio breakdown, followed by sudden motor extinction, had nearly killed them all. By an incredible fluke, they had saved themselves, but lost a plane. While the team was clearing the ice for one of the two remaining planes to fly off, they had heard a slow, whining hum rising from the ice, like a chant, in particular at night. A commanding chant. Back then, and for awhile after their return to safety, they had dismissed the experience as a collective hallucination. They had existed on very little food in critical temperatures for a long time, after all. And icebergs do have their own noises, as they creak and float and melt.
However, back home, images of the massive, ‘S’-shaped iceberg, its humming calling to him in tones he thought he could understand, invaded his dreams. He woke in the mornings disorientated and passed his days looking for clues he did not recognize in books, newspapers and the odd film. Icebergs were not charted, as they tended to drift, but this one had a singular shape: tapering in its middle from an almost-square basis, with sinusoid lower banks forming what looked like natural harbours, with fairly shallow, underwater quay-like banks, possibly carved by a spinning current. The damaged seaplane had neatly severed one such quay and the iceberg’s course would have been affected by the loss of symmetry.
Night after night, the dreams had plagued him with urgent-yet-undecipherable messages, until one day, he had stumbled upon an article recalling the so-called “Curse of the Pharaohs” that had afflicted the team of Carter and Carnarvon, fully illustrated with strange god-figures and a picture of the Pyramids. Amundsen immediately recognised the tapering pattern at the center of the iceberg in that picture, a realization that had sent him racing to unearth the history of such cold giants. A geologist from Oslo had confirmed that the huge ice mountains were very old, indeed – possibl
y as old as the earth – and must, perforce, like any mountain, contain many trapped organisms and skeletons inside their folds, remnants of ancient earth creations
Could the iceberg be some sort of grave? The idea had taken root in his mind and refused to budge, despite his stern, realistic upbringing. His dreams became more vivid, vague forms oscillating in time with the humming against a pyramidal background, with the noise level rising to a thumping rhythm, as of a heartbeat. A ruler was waiting for him, said the chanting dreams; a ruler was waiting in the mountain’s heart to rise again.
During the day, the explorer was able to dismiss the visions as ridiculous, a product of hysteria, but each night, they came back to haunt him until they became an obsession. Amundsen was nothing if not driven by a scientific mind and curiosity. It was all tosh, he told himself. He would find out the truth and be rid of this nonsense, once and for all. He therefore put together a plan for investigating the iceberg and its reality. However, the following year, he had been drawn into another run for the North Pole race and had to postpone his plans. He found that the exertion of that quest had calmed him, somehow – a point for the hysteria theory – and that his dreams were not so frequent then, or during the series of talks and conferences he had found himself propelled into by his victory.
The ice cracked under his weight and the pain caused by the slight movement flashed, sobering him greatly. What had he done?
It had taken him almost two years to come back. Two years, during which the dreams had returned, scaling the walls of his sanity, eroding his nights until he had driven his whole crew to their deaths. All in pursuit of a chimera! He attempted to stand up, helping himself with a bent part of fuselage. He should survey the plane, see if there were any other survivors. His first attempt to move was unsuccessful, the metal folding under his weight, his ribs screaming with pain. Crawling, then ….
Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time Page 30
