by Jeremy Bates
He counted forty-one rungs—perhaps the height of a three-story building—before the rock opened around him, and another ten rungs before he stepped off the last one onto solid ground.
Transferring the flashlight to his hand, he turned around, sweeping the beam through the dark—and found himself in a passageway similar to all the others. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but more of the same depressed him. He was wandering blindly, irrationally hoping that the passageway he’d departed when he’d crashed through the floor would eventually meet up with wherever this one led him.
In truth, he was getting lost.
Rex was tempted to finally call Ellie’s name, but he didn’t. The reason for remaining silent was not only to keep his presence secret, as it had been when he’d first entered the mine, but because he now feared Ellie might not call back.
And a lack of response would be the worst possible reply.
The time for wishful thinking had long passed, and he had to be brutally honest with himself. There was no sugarcoating Ellie’s predicament. This was not a movie in which the creature was going to keep her alive only for Rex to ingenuously rescue her at the last moment. It had brought her down here for one reason and one reason alone: to devour her. So if he called to her, and she didn’t call back, that meant she was likely already dead, and he didn’t know if he could deal with that reality right then—sometimes you’re better off not knowing, isn’t that what they say?—and so he kept quiet as he forged resolutely, and perhaps pointlessly, ahead.
Twenty feet on, the tunnel split.
He chose left.
Twenty more feet and it split again.
He chose right.
He came to several more crossroads and selected his path equally recklessly and randomly as he zigzagged ever deeper into the underground labyrinth.
He was no longer even pretending to keep track of the way he’d come. The lack of natural light was not only disheartening but disorientating. He was not getting lost; he was lost. He knew that—and in a moment of self-loathing he realized he almost secretly hoped he was lost, because then he could turn around and leave this dank tomb. He would not have to face off against the abysmal creature, an encounter no bookie worth their salt would back him to win, even armed with a pistol as he was. He would not find and rescue Ellie
(she was already dead)
but she wasn’t even his kid anyway. If it were Bobby down here, he would spend his dying breaths tracking him down. But Ellie…wasn’t his kid. He loved her, he thought she was a great girl, but she wasn’t his. So why was he risking his life to find her? It was madness. She was gone, and Bobby was still alive. That’s what mattered. Bobby was alive. He needed his father. So it was time Rex stopped playing hero and got the hell out of there. That was the
(cowardly)
right thing to do. Get back to the cabin, protect Bobby until the police arrived. This nightmare could all be over in a few hours. He and Bobby and Tabitha would be safe. Ellie would be gone, but the rest of them would be safe…
Rex realized he was mumbling unintelligibly and viciously to himself. He was losing it. He really was.
Stop being such a fucking pussy. You’re not a coward. You never have been. Ellie’s down here, and you’re going to find her, and you’re going to kill the abomination that’s taken her.
You’re going to do all of that, or you’re going to die trying.
***
Later.
Rex was deep in the earth. Very deep. The section of mine he had recently descended to was not solid rock, nor was it shored up with timber supports. It was simply compressed dirt, the walls lined with backfill. A smaller tunnel veered left. He ignored it, continuing straight on his chosen path.
Soon he came to yet another false floor. Most of the timber boards were missing. Looking down, he could see a lower, irregularly shaped stope.
He dropped onto the rubble pile. The stope led to a new subterranean corridor that was nearly twice as wide and tall as all the others he had passed through. It was also the most precarious looking, with a patchwork of stulls bracing up platforms that would have once supported miners, the series of wooden props held in place with nothing more than rusty nails and baling wire.
The ground was strewn with relics from the past. Another Edison battery, like the one he’d first seen upon entering the mine. Bits of rusted machinery of which he could make neither heads nor tails. A tobacco tin. What appeared to be a utilitarian lunchbox. A dynamite box labeled “Hercules I.C.C.C 14.” A repurposed can turned into a sieve. Blasting caps, wooden ties, a pickaxe.
Further along, Rex entered another stope, different than the last, as this one was so large the flashlight beam didn’t reach the far side, revealing instead only impenetrable darkness.
In fact, it wasn’t a stope at all. It was a natural cavern. Swaths of the walls and ceiling were stained aqua blue by dripping water. Translucent calcite crystals as large as his fingers sprouted from the rock, alongside deposits of brilliant shiny gray galena, and buttery hued fool’s gold.
Rex entered the vast space cautiously. The ground was littered with more junk the miners had left behind, including a faded newspaper from the turn of the last century with the headline proclaiming “Russia at War with Japan,” and a denim jacket missing one sleeve and covered in white drops that might have been candle wax.
The flashlight beam played over another skeleton.
Not a small bird this time. The animal had once been a mature stag. A set of tined antlers were still attached to the skull, though something had happened to its legs, as only an elongated vertebrae and a partial ribcage remained of the body.
The sight, morose as it was, buoyed Rex’s spirit. It meant there must be another way to get down here other than via the ladder shaft.
Which meant there was another, and likely closer, way out as well.
Two dozen paces onward the ground disappeared into a great black hole at least fifty feet wide and who knew how many across.
A subterranean sinkhole?
Struck by an idea, Rex retrieved a stone from the ground and threw it into the hole. Only it wasn’t a hole. It was, as he’d suspected upon second analysis, a subterranean lake. The water, which had been as smooth as a black mirror moments before, now rippled around the spot where the stone had plopped and sunk.
He started along the lake’s perimeter—and came to four more skeletons. They had once been animals the size of cougars or wolves, and they were within touching distance of one another.
Rex frowned.
Animals did not die together like that.
Not naturally, at least.
***
Sensing he was no longer on a wild goose chase, Rex continued along the shore of the subterranean lake—discovering more and more piles of bones. Two here, six there. They were all largish animals, with one skeleton appearing to be the remains of a bear.
The creature had not only killed a bear, it had carried it down here.
A bear for God’s sake.
How the hell did it do that?
While Rex worried about this, the piles of bones multiplied rapidly, becoming so numerous they were no longer individual islands but a connected sea of white, flooding the ground as far as the flashlight beam allowed him to see.
Rex’s head spun, even as an odd numbness anesthetized his terror, allowing him to think relatively calmly and clearly.
It would take decades, perhaps tens of decades, for the creature to devour this many animals. So how long had it inhabited the cavern? Had others before it called it home as well? Did those ancestors discover the cavern once the mine was abandoned? Or were they here before the mine? Did the miners inadvertently blast into this cavern, stirring up the proverbial hornet’s nest? Was this why the mine shut down?
Were some of these bones human?
Banishing these questions from his mind—the pitch black was not the place you wanted to ask such things—Rex longed to return to the surface more than
ever. He should never have come down here. He was in way over his head. Ellie was dead, and he was going to be dead very shortly too. He was going to become a meal to a prehistoric insect that had no right existing in the modern world. This was his sad fate.
Unless he turned around.
Rex’s pulse quickened at the prospect. He would have to climb up and out the hole through which he had fallen earlier. He had not thought this possible before, but it had not been a matter of life and death then. Now, he sensed, it was, and if he could find his way back to the hole, he was sure he could climb out of it. He could scavenge some timber, build a rudimentary ladder. Tricky, no question, but doable. And once he was back on that upper level, it was easy sailing. Twenty minutes to the surface. Less than that. Because he would be running this time, hazards be damned, running for all he was worth to get away from this crypt and the evil it harbored.
All he had to do was turn around.
***
He couldn’t, he thought with angry despair. He simply couldn’t.
He couldn’t abandon Ellie if there was even the slightest chance she was still alive.
He forced himself to continue forward, toward his all too likely doom.
***
Ellie didn’t believe that any of what was happening to her was real.
On one level she did. She knew the monster had kidnapped her. It had brought her to its underground home, and it was going to eat her, using her bones as toothpicks to clean its teeth when it was full. She knew all of this as she sat where the monster had left her, with her back against a rock wall in the perfect black, too terrified to move, listening for it to return.
But knowing this didn’t mean she had to believe it. Believing was a choice. It was like pretending. You could know something was true but just pretend it wasn’t. She did this all the time. Like if she was playing a game with Bobby, and she was losing, she would pretend she didn’t know the score so he couldn’t win. Or if she wanted to use a certain toy in the classroom at school during free time, and it was someone else’s turn with it, she would pretend she forgot the rules so she could still use it and not get in trouble.
She was doing the same kind of pretending now—pretending that none of this was real, that it wasn’t happening, that she would wake up and it would be one of her bad dreams.
The problem with pretending, however, was that she always knew when she was pretending. It was like lying. When she lied to her mom or her teacher, she knew she was lying, but just pretended she didn’t know what they wanted to know.
So maybe pretending wasn’t like lying, she decided. Maybe it was lying. And if that was the case, she was lying to herself right now.
The monster was real.
It was going to eat her.
Ellie felt tears spill down her cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter than they already were and pressed the balls of her hands against them, so she didn’t accidentally peek and see something in the dark she didn’t want to see. I promise, God, that I’ll never pretend or lie again if you send me back to my mommy right now. I’ll even be nice to Bobby and stop cheating when we play games. I’ll wash the dishes when my mom asks me to and I’ll do all my work at school and try my hardest at everything. Please God? Is that good enough? Just send me back to my mommy with your magic. Please God? God? Are you listening? I’m still here. It’s still dark. It’s so dark. I hate the dark. I’m really scared God. Please send me back to my mommy.
And then just as Ellie was giving up hope that God was listening, He appeared.
***
Brittle femurs and cracked tibias and splintered jawbones snapped beneath each step that Rex took as he continued along the edge of the subterranean lake.
Time was playing tricks with his mind. He had only been underground for fifteen or twenty minutes, yet it felt like days; he had only been in this large chamber for a couple of minutes, yet it too felt like much longer. It was akin to those last sixty seconds in a hockey game when your team was winning by a one-goal margin and the other team had their goalie out and an extra attacker on the ice. Those sixty seconds could feel like an eternity.
How’s this match going to play out, Rex? he asked himself. You going to win or lose? There won’t be a draw. That’s not happening, so hope you don’t lose, really hope you don’t, because there’ll be no rematch either. This’ll be it. You’ll be dead. Ellie will be dead. Nobody will ever know what happened to both of you. Nobody will believe Tabitha that the Mosquito Man got you. They’ll have a good laugh over that, no doubt. You’ll become a joke, a punch line at summer barbecues while people are swatting mosquitos. And after that, when you’re no longer even relevant enough to be a punch line, you and Ellie will simply be gone, numbers added to the sad statistic of people who go missing and are never found. Like Mom and Dad. Like Logan. Only Loge’s body did turn up, that was true, but Mom’s and Dad’s didn’t. They didn’t bleed to death beneath the cabin. They just vanished into thin air—
Rex froze as suddenly as if he had just stepped on top of his own grave. His heart reared in his chest. The flashlight beam did not move an inch from the grisly remains directly before him.
The skeleton was different to all the others he had already become desensitized to. It was human and fully clothed. A beige cowl-neck shirt draped pointy shoulders and a flattened ribcage. A pair of flared yellow shorts outlined a butterfly-shaped pelvis and sticklike legs. Silver bangles encircled a bony wrist. Platform shoes held no feet inside them. Dark shoulder-length hair sat atop the skull like a wig. The two crusty orbits stared at him blankly if not facetiously, as if amused he wasn’t in on the morbid joke that death was.
“Mom…” he said, barely aware he had spoken.
Look at you, Rexy, all grown up, she said inside his head, the tender, smiling sound of her voice forgotten to him until that moment. My little boy, all grown up. Her tone changed, hardened. But you shouldn’t be down here, Rexy. It’s not safe.
“Mom…” he said again, the strength leaving his body in a rush. He sank to his knees, stretching a trembling hand toward her.
I told you to go, didn’t I, Rexy? Yes, I did. My little boy, my October pumpkin, I told you to run, and you did, you ran and you ran and you ran…
“Mom…” he mumbled for a third time, the backs of his fingers brushing the smooth coolness of her cheekbone. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I should have stayed. I should have tried to help. But I was so young, so afraid…”
Whatever else he had to say was drowned out in a choke of sobs.
***
Ellie mistook Rex’s voice for that of God’s, and when she opened her eyes in innocent relief, and saw the bright beam of the flashlight, she cried at the top of her small lungs: “God! I’m right here! I’m right here!”
***
Rex’s head snapped toward the cries of alarm emanating from somewhere in the dark directly ahead of him.
“Ellie!” he said, arcing the flashlight from side to side.
“I’m right here!”
Rex leapt to his feet and stumbled forward, careful to give his mother’s remains a wide berth. Yet in his haste to reach Ellie he tripped over other bones and fell to his knees, tripped and fell and scrambled. Then he saw Ellie standing against a looming wall. She was squinting at the light blinding her eyes, and waving her hands over her head like a castaway lost at sea trying to catch the attention of a passing boat.
“Ellie!” he said when he reached her, scooping her into his arms and holding her tightly against his chest. “You’re alive,” he whispered into her hair. “Thank God, oh thank God.”
“T-Rex?” she said, her voice muffled against his chest. It was shaky and uncertain like it got when she was all cried out after a big blow-up with her mom. “I thought you were God.”
“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” he said. “We have to get out of here, okay?” He set her down and aimed the light at a patch of floor with no bones so they could see each other in the backsplash. “Where’s the creature?”
he asked quietly.
“I don’t know! It just left me here.”
Rex didn’t like the sound of that. Just left her here? Did it understand that, as a young child, she would be too frightened to attempt to escape on her own? This seemed improbable, which meant it likely had a way to track its prey in the dark.
Was it watching them, or monitoring them, right now?
“This way.” He nudged Ellie along the wall. The direction they chose didn’t matter. Following it either way would lead them back to the entrance to the chamber. It might take them a little longer than following the shore of the lake, but they would not be so exposed. They would have the rock wall att their backs if the creature attacked them.
When they were halfway or so back to the entrance of the cavern, Ellie yelped and pointed.
Twenty feet away Daisy lay on her back, just as dead as she’d been on the cabin porch, the difference being her arms and legs were now stiff with rigor mortis, and three creatures sat around her body. They were just babies, Ellie’s size. Their bodies appeared to be soft and fleshy, their appendages glued down with a slimy substance. Each had a proboscises plugged deep into Daisy’s chest.
Ellie had begun making a sound Rex had never heard anyone make before: a mewling whine that was equal parts loathing, pity, and terror.
And then before he knew what he was doing, he was moving, closing the distance to the abominations quickly. They did not look at him, did not react in any way to his approach.
Were they too stupid to register him as a threat, just as mosquitos were too stupid to realize they were going to get swatted if they landed on your skin? Or were they simply too busy sucking up blood?
