He had no choice but to stick it out here. He wished he had thought to bring something to use as a weapon; even the two jagged rocks which had nearly beaned him would have been better than nothing. But the prospect of having to defend himself against . . . some kind of attacker . . . had never even occurred to him. He was alone between two closed bulkheads, with no possibility of anyone coming or going, so self-defense had not been a top priority when compared with trying to survive poisonous gases.
Karl closed his eyes and concentrated on Susan. She would be his rock; she would help him survive. It made him feel somehow even more vulnerable to be sitting in this supposedly haunted mine shaft with his eyes closed, but what difference did it really make? He couldn’t see a damned thing anyway. This was a darkness thicker than any he had ever known.
Karl slowed his breathing and concentrated hard, listening closely for the slithering noise. Nothing. Maybe the whole thing had been the product of his fevered imagination working overtime. It would make sense. Stuck in the dark in an abandoned—and some would say haunted—mine shaft with no company, facing an uncertain future and possible death, it would be strange if a person’s mind didn’t play tricks on him.
Before he knew it, Karl Meyer fell into a fitful sleep.
***
In his dream, Karl was lying on a beach, stretched out in a lounge chair with a drink in his hand and the sun beating down on his tanned body. A few feet away, the waves pounded onto the sand, the ocean’s hypnotic efficiency lulling him to sleep. He was warm and comfortable and happy, and Susan lay next to him on a lounge chair of her own.
Karl had never been to the beach, had never seen the ocean. He had grown up an immigrant in central Pennsylvania, raised by a drunken father and a disinterested mother. The family had never taken a vacation, to the ocean or anywhere else.
Karl knew he was dreaming but didn’t care. He was warm and comfortable and happy.
***
Something was on his arm.
Karl gasped and his eyes flew open. Something was on his arm and it was thick and cold, ropy but hard, like a flexible tree branch or a wire cable or something similar. He jerked his arm, pulling reflexively to get it away from the awful cold thing but could not move.
The ropy cable-like thing wrapped itself around his injured right wrist tightly and pulled with a steady pressure and Karl screamed in terror and pain and the sound fought its way through the unnaturally thick air in Alpha Seven and disappeared. Karl felt his body sliding sideways, moving deeper into the pitch-black mining shaft. His injured wrist pounded and throbbed, sending white-hot bolts of pain shooting through his arm like someone had inserted TNT into his wrist and chosen this moment to detonate it.
He kicked and scrabbled in a desperate attempt to halt his attacker’s progress and succeeded only in losing a boot. He was stretched out on the tunnel floor, sliding through the dirt in the endless black hole that was Alpha Seven. He knew the thing had begun pulling him deeper into the abandoned mine shaft, but in his panicked attempt to free himself, Karl had lost all sense of direction. It was possible the thing had turned around while he struggled against it, but somehow Karl knew that was not the case.
His attacker dragged him along steadily. He gasped and moaned and was rewarded with absolutely no response whatsoever. The monster either had nothing to say or no way to say it. In the midst of his mindless panic, Karl Meyer now realized all the stories he had ever heard about the Tonopah Mine were true. The whispered rumors of some horrible entity lurking in the long-forgotten depths of Alpha Seven, eternal and vicious and deadly, were not just stories but fact.
Karl pulled and yanked and tugged on the ropy thing which had clamped itself around his wrist like a vice. It felt scaly and cold but organic. It throbbed with ancient life. He closed his eyes in silent prayer and then reached up and tried to bite the thing, and as he did he felt a second ropy tentacle twist its way around his chest and move relentlessly upward. The thing wrapped and twined and worked its way to Karl’s mouth, forcing it open.
Karl tried to spit it out and failed. He twisted and writhed and kicked to no effect; more ropy things—Sweet Jesus, where are they all coming from?—worked their way around his body. In a matter of seconds, he found himself completely immobilized.
And then the invasion began in earnest. His jaws were pulled apart, the cold alien things wriggling into his mouth, gripping his upper and lower teeth with inhuman strength and he screamed, long and loud, now beyond all conscious thought, the explosion forgotten, the mine fire forgotten, Susan forgotten, his children forgotten, Alpha Seven forgotten.
He twisted and struggled. It made no difference. A single ropy protrusion slithered into his mouth, pausing for just a moment on his tongue, flitting back and forth as if reassuring itself it was safe to proceed. One second later it did, sliding down Karl Meyer’s throat. As he felt himself being torn apart, possessed from the inside, Karl wished with all his heart he had stayed inside the main tunnel. Dying from poison gas would be infinitely better than this.
And then he was gone.
2
Present Day
Tonopah, Pennsylvania
A mountain of blankets covered twelve year old Tim McKenna’s small form as he lay shivering in his bed. Tim’s mom felt his forehead with the back of her hand for the third time in the last twenty minutes. “You’re burning up,” she muttered. “I wish I could find that darned thermometer. You’re definitely not going to school today, but I’m a little concerned about leaving you here alone. Your fever seems to be spiking.”
“I’ll be okay,” Tim told her with a weak smile. “If you could leave some orange juice for me to drink while I doze, though, that would be good. I’m pretty thirsty.”
“Of course you can have juice,” she said. “I’ll get it before I leave for work. I have a couple more minutes before I have to leave, so I’m going to look for that thermometer one more time. I know I left it in the medicine chest.” She clucked distractedly and ruffled Tim’s hair and walked out of the bedroom.
Tim waited until he heard the click-click-click of her high-heeled shoes fading off down the hallway and then ducked under the covers, pulling them tightly over his head and anchoring them against the mattress with both hands. He had almost blown his whole plan the last time his mom left the room by going overboard, staying under the blankets too long. He had come up for air red-faced and sweating, raising his body temperature almost to the point where a fever might no longer be believable.
One thing he didn’t have to worry about was his mom finding the thermometer. Last night before bed, Tim had swiped it out of the medicine cabinet—right where Mom always left it; no wonder she thought she was going crazy—and slid it under his bed, between the mattress and the box spring. There was no way in the world he would be able to pull off a fake fever if he had to fool a thermometer as well as his mom, but as long as he didn’t stay under the covers too long again or do anything else stupid, in a few minutes Mom would leave for work and he would have the whole day to himself.
The whole day to do a little exploring.
Tim McKenna wasn’t in the habit of ditching school. He didn’t earn straight-A’s or anything like that, but knew how important it was to his mom that he get an education, “so you can do something with your life,” she would say wistfully, the unspoken message clear even to a twelve year old, that she hadn’t done that, and look where it had gotten her.
So even though he didn’t care much about school, most of the time Tim followed the path of least resistance. He attended regularly, paid attention in class—more or less—and generally did at least enough work to keep his mom happy. They had always been close, but when his dad abandoned them, going out for a drink and never returning—a scenario straight out of some depressing country song—their bond had deepened, moving from a typical mother and child to a pair united against whatever the future might bring.
Until his mom had found Matt, of course, but that was another story. Ma
tt was okay, Tim knew Matt cared about his mom and was happy she had found someone to make her stop crying every night after she thought he was asleep, but Tim wasn’t in the market for another dad and mostly just tried to stay out of his way.
Despite the fact Tim wasn’t exactly a pro at skipping school with a fake illness, he had known the minute his teacher covered the infamous Tonopah mining tragedy in history class last week that he was going to take a little field trip out to the site of the disaster the moment he could work out the details.
He had to check it out for himself. The disaster involving the Tonopah Mining Company had everything a kid could want: explosions, fire, crooked business owners sacrificing the safety of their workers for the savings of a few dollars, death, destruction. Heck, there were even legends of murderous ghosts! The whole thing had happened almost a hundred years ago, but it was still a darned good story, even if it was ancient history.
He learned in history class that the mine had had a notoriously poor safety record for decades, and then in 1925 a worker simply disappeared, vanishing without a trace after a suspicious underground fire. Government authorities had come in and abruptly shut down the entire operation, sealing up the entrance to the main shaft and throwing the mine’s owner in jail for negligence to boot.
But the best part of the whole story was that the mining camp was located only a couple of miles away and had never been destroyed. After they finished sealing the thing off, everyone had simply walked away. What had once been a busy, heavily-traveled road between the center of Tonopah Township and the Tonopah Mine had fallen into disrepair and was now nothing more than an overgrown path through the woods, with the Pennsylvania forest mostly reclaiming the land for itself. Tim assumed the mine was also heavily overgrown—no one he knew had ever been there, so he could only guess—but he figured if he looked hard enough it would be pretty easy to find.
Tim had listened, spellbound, over the three days Miss Henderson recounted the tale, amazed that an event which had made headlines all over the country—heck, all over the world—had taken place right here in little Tonopah, Pennsylvania, the town where nothing exciting ever happened. Tim was immediately filled with enthusiasm about the prospect of exploring the old mine and just knew his small circle of friends would be as well.
But he had been disappointed. No one would agree to skip school to trek out to the mine for a little field trip. As the newcomer in town, and a smallish, shy kid as well, Tim had struggled to make friends in the year since he and his mom moved here from Harrisburg to be with Matt. He had a grand total of just three friends, and all three had flat-out refused to consider it. They hadn’t even bothered to discuss the matter. It was as if they had been brainwashed by their parents or something.
Tim couldn’t understand it. Everybody knew there was no such thing as ghosts or monsters. Sure, they made cool subjects for books and movies, and especially for video games, where zombies routinely attacked and twelve years old were routinely called upon to save the world. But that was fantasy, not reality. It seemed obvious to Tim that there was an important distinction there.
His friends, however, failed to recognize that distinction. Jake Mallory, not exactly a tough guy but the acknowledged leader of the small group, not only refused to hike out to the mine but told Tim if he was going to be so fucking stupid he could just find himself a new bunch of kids to hang out with. That was how he said it, too: “so fucking stupid.”
Well, Tim didn’t think it was stupid, he thought it sounded like one heck of a lot of fun, certainly better than sitting around in Jake’s basement watching reruns of Two and a Half men. That was fucking stupid, as far as he was concerned. Tim had shut his mouth and pretended to let the issue drop, all the while figuring out a way to get some time to himself.
He heard his mom clomping down the hallway—thank God for the high-heeled shoes she liked to wear to work—and burst out from the blankets, worrying he had once again stayed under too long. He was so busy brooding about Jake Mallory and his other two friends, wondering where their sense of adventure had gone, that he may have blown everything.
“I don’t know, honey,” his mom said, opening the door and poking her head in to smile at Tim. “I can’t find that darned thermometer anywhere, and I thought I knew exactly where I had put it. I guess I’ll have to buy a new one.” She looked him over critically. “You seem even more flushed than before. Are you sure . . .”
“Yeah, Mom, I’ll be okay.” Tim remembered to put a little weakness into his voice. “I’ll call you if I start feeling really bad, I promise.”
She paused for what felt like forever, staring at him through narrowed eyes, but Tim knew he had her. At twelve, he didn’t know—or care—much about finances, but he had overheard enough conversations between Matt and his mom to know they needed money, and while he felt guilty as heck about deceiving her, he knew she wouldn’t stay home just because he was running a little fever.
“All right,” she finally said. “But not too much TV, okay? Try to get some sleep. And drink plenty of fluids.” She walked over to his bed and bent down to give him a quick kiss on the forehead, furrowing her eyebrows in concern when she felt the warmth of his skin. Tim felt another, more powerful surge of guilt and almost confessed the whole thing—pretending to be sick, planning the hike out to the old abandoned mine, everything—but somehow kept his mouth shut and then the feeling passed.
His mom smiled down at him and ruffled his hair again. Then she turned and walked out the door with a wave. Tim listened do the click-click-click of her high heels on the hallway floor as she headed toward the front door. He stayed under the blankets pretending to be sick until he heard her car start up and back down the driveway. He pushed the covers back and sat on the edge of his bed, listening to sound of her Honda’s rough-running engine fading and then disappearing entirely.
Then he got to work.
***
Sweat poured down Tim’s face as he struggled through the underbrush. He had filled a backpack with supplies—three water bottles and a few snacks, as well as some tools he thought he might need—before leaving the house and his pack seemed to have grown steadily heavier as he hiked. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head and he swatted and cursed.
He had been walking for over two hours and it seemed as though he should have run across the old mine by now. The long-abandoned road had been mostly retaken by the forest over the last eighty years, but it was still easy enough to follow. Eighty year old fir trees and oaks were hard to miss when they were surrounded on all sides by trees easily three or four times that.
Tim paused for a moment, taking a seat on a boulder and unzipping his pack. He took a long drink of water—it was no longer cold but still tasted sweet and refreshing—and then checked his map. Miss Henderson had let him borrow the authentic 1920’s era road map she had shown the class as part of her presentation on the Tonopah Mining disaster, pleased that one of her students was showing an interest in the tragedy that had played such an influential part in local history.
Tim scratched his head and shooed away mosquitoes and wondered how much farther he would have to walk. The mine should be impossible to miss, because for one thing the road didn’t lead anywhere else—it had been built specifically for use by the miners to get to work—and for another, the clearing where the old base of operations had been built had to be at least an acre in circumference, if the ancient map could be believed.
Tim wondered if he had been played for a fool by his friends. No one wanted to come out here because they all knew the mine didn’t even exist. It was either a figment of everyone’s imagination or, more likely, had been demolished by the government after being closed down. The map was a fake and the whole story had been concocted by his class to make him look silly.
But of course both possibilities were ridiculous. The mining disaster had been national news. Miss Henderson had shown the class old, yellowed, brittle copies of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, both papers splas
hing headlines about the disaster across the front page.
So it had definitely happened. And as far as the mine being demolished, even if that were the case, there would still have to be some kind of evidence the place had existed, even if the evidence was nothing more than a big empty clearing.
Tim sighed and took one last drink, then stowed his stuff in his pack and zipped it up. He shrugged it onto his back and stood. He decided he would walk another half hour or so and if he still came up empty, he would admit defeat and hike back home. It wasn’t like anybody knew he was coming out here, so no one would call him a quitter or give him a hard time about giving up. And even if he somehow found out, Jake Mallory couldn’t say much; he had refused to come!
Tim resumed hiking and five minutes later stopped in the middle of the forest, awestruck. He had found the old mine. And it was magnificent.
***
The clearing was filled with relatively new forest growth, just like the abandoned road leading to it. Field grass swayed in the warm breeze, thick and hardy in patches, thin and dying in others. A rusted chain-link fence encircled the area, topped with nasty-looking rolls of concertina wire, complete with a closed gate which had been padlocked for security. Tim’s heart sank. He had stuffed a few tools inside his backpack, but his mom’s boyfriend didn’t own a set of bolt cutters and Tim knew he wouldn’t have thought to bring them along in any event.
He approached the gate slowly and as he got closer, he realized the padlocked entrance would pose no problem because he wouldn’t be using it, anyway. Thirty or so feet into the woods to the left of the gate the fence listed severely, to the point where Tim guessed he could crawl right over it, barbed wire be damned. A tree had crashed down onto it during some long-ago storm, and the fence had suffered the worst of the confrontation.
The Becoming - a novella Page 3