by Jeremy Bates
In the chimney?
Rex grabbed Logan’s hand and all but dragged him into the connecting room. He stuck his head into the fireplace’s firebox and looked up. The flue was too narrow. Neither of them would fit. When he pulled his head back out, Logan had already thrown the little rug back to reveal the trap door to the root cellar. Rex and Logan had used to play down there. But then at the beginning of the summer their dad found that a family of raccoons had moved in and told them it was off limits, and they hadn’t been down there since.
Logan jumped into the hole. “Come on!” he said, his head poking up above the floor.
Rex hesitated. If he went down too, who would put the rug back in place? Someone needed to, or the man who attacked their dad would easily find them (Rex couldn’t believe that the person coming after them wasn’t a person).
He started swinging the hatch back in place.
Logan stopped it with one of his hands. “What are you doing?”
“I need to put the rug back.”
“Where are you going to hide?”
“I’ll find a better spot.”
Logan held his red-stained hands in front of him. “Am I losing too much blood, Rex?”
Rex shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t feel good.”
“Just hide. Mom will be back soon.”
Rex closed the hatch and pulled the rug back in place. With his heart beating so fast and loud in his chest he could hear it in his ears, he tried to think of a place to hide. In the stove? He was too big. Under the sofa? That was as bad as under the bed. In the closet? No room with the shelves. The bathroom? He could lock the door. No, the attacker would just break it down.
Outside, he decided. There were way more places to hide outside than inside.
Rex left the cabin. It was late afternoon, the sky dull and gray. The forest seemed especially quiet and still. His mind raced through all the places where he had hid before when he and Logan played Hide and Seek—
His mom screamed.
She sounded like she was near the Sanders’ place, which was next door but still far away. Maybe she was going there for help? No, it was late summer, and Rex and his family were the last people remaining on the lake. She understood that. She was just leading the attacker away—
(and he caught her)
Rex grimaced. His first instinct was to go and help her, but he knew he would be too late and too small to help. His second instinct was not to hide but to run. He could try to get to the highway, and then to town. Even though nobody was on the lake, there were always cars on the highway. If he could reach it, someone would drive by and pick him up and—
His mom screamed again. It sounded like she was in great pain. This terrified Rex because he had never heard his mother in pain before. Adults, he had thought up until that point in his young life, didn’t feel pain, at least not the way kids did, which was why they never cried.
But was his mom crying right then? It sounded like maybe she was, crying and screaming at the same time.
Rex ran down the driveway toward the road. The air was warm, laced with the scent of pine needles and earth and wildflowers. This felt out of place. Nobody should be screaming when the smell of wildflowers was in the air. Especially not his mom. She should be down at the dock with him and Loge, wearing her straw hat, reading one of her books and sipping a glass of lemonade.
When Rex reached the road, he did not turn down it toward town. He continued straight across it, crashing into the woods, in the direction he’d heard his mom screaming.
He bashed through branches and trampled saplings and small brush, barely slowing, and then he saw her in the distance, his mom, and the thing dragging her by one arm.
It was a bug.
A huge human-sized bug. But not like the ones in the old black-and-white monster movies. It was the same size as a man in a suit, but everything else about it was wrong. Its legs and arms were too long to be human. Its waist was too skinny. Its upper body was too compact. Its head was too small. And it moved in an unnatural yet effortless and precise way. Definitely not how a human moved. More like how a man on stilts might look if captured on film and fast-forwarded.
“Mom!” he shouted in fright.
“Rex?”
Rex kept running toward her, closing the distance. His mom’s face, he could now see, was ghostly white and slack, her eyes closed. Her beige shirt was torn open and her tummy covered in blood.
The bug-thing either didn’t hear him approaching or didn’t care. It kept moving without looking back.
“Mom!”
“Rex?” Her eyes opened. They appeared dead. Eyes of the living dead, or of the living who knew they were going to be dead any moment. “Rex? Baby, no…”
“Stop!” he cried, coming himself to a stop a dozen feet behind the bug. “Leave my mom alone!” He scavenged a pinecone from the ground and threw it. It whizzed past the bug’s head, but it got its attention. Its head turned independently of its body, just enough so one buggy eye could look back at him.
The eye was so devoid of emotion, so utterly alien, that everything inside of Rex turned into a mushy soup of uncontrollable fear.
“Mom…?” he rasped, stumbling backward.
“Rex,” she said, “go, get away, go…”
The bug released her arm. She fell limply onto her back.
It came for him, fast.
Rex turned and ran, careening through the trees as quickly as his legs would take him, no looking back, no slowing down. He was blind with terror. Even when he reached the road he didn’t look back or slow. He just ran and kept running all the way to the highway. He didn’t remember when he finally slowed to a walk, but he did at some point, because when a white pickup truck pulled up beside him he was limping on scorched feet. The window was rolled down, and a man was asking him where he was going.
Rex no longer knew. He didn’t even know what he was doing on the highway. The man told him to get in, he would give him a lift to town. Rex knew not to accept rides from strangers, but that didn’t seem important right then. There was a coldness inside him, a steady throbbing of terror and loss and unfamiliarity, and nothing and nobody seemed important right then, and so he got in the truck and stared silently out the window, watching the world pass by in a film of darkening despair.
***
Ellie screamed from somewhere ahead of Rex, tugging him back to the present. He wiped rain from his eyes, shouted back, told her he was coming.
He couldn’t risk falling any further behind. If he did, Ellie was a goner. The forest stretched for millions of hectares. It could swallow an army without a trace.
He ran faster.
***
He’d been giving chase for what must have been ten minutes now, and Ellie’s plaintive screams were becoming faint and far in between. Rex tried to keep his thoughts positive, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to catch up to her. The beast was too fast. He was falling too far behind.
This understanding enraged him. He was the only person in the world that could save Ellie, her young life depended on his perseverance, and he wasn’t up to the task.
Rex sagged next to a giant tree trunk, his breath coming in heaving rasps, his stomach so nauseated he thought he might throw up.
As the rain tore through the canopy and beat down upon him, he realized he could no longer hear Ellie’s cries for help.
“Ellie!” he shouted, shoving himself away from the trunk in pursuit once more.
“Help!” came a faint cry.
“Ellie,” he said to himself, almost a moan. “Ellie!” he repeated, louder.
“Help!” Distant, evanescent. “Help!”
It was a haunting and surreal experience to be running through a primeval forest in a raging thunderstorm, trying to locate a child only by her terrified screams. It was so outside the norm of daily existence Rex could scarcely believe it was happening, and for perhaps the first time in his life he understood why people wh
o experienced something horribly uncanny often believed themselves to be sleeping, for it all to be a bad dream.
“Ellie!” he shouted.
Her reply was a distant shriek, yet different than all the others, for it also held the glassy urgency and intensity of pain.
What had the beast done to her? Rex thought frantically, at the same time wondering if “beast” was the right word to describe the ungodly thing. Because although a beast usually referred to a large, scary animal, it was an animal with a backbone. And the thing that had taken his mother thirty-eight years ago, and Ellie now, was by all appearances an invertebrate, an insect.
A mosquito.
A six-foot-tall mosquito that stands like a man.
Rex came to a halt at the base of a crag where the ground rose steeply and abruptly, and where an abundance of talus had collected from a long-ago rockslide. He turned in a circle until he was facing the scree once more.
A dead-end.
He was not about to turn back, which meant his only option was to climb the debris and see where it led him. Before he could do this, however, Ellie cried out—and it seemed her voice originated from beneath the ground.
Stymied, Rex tore through the vegetation clinging to the rocks and boulders before him…and discovered rotting slabs of timber framing the entrance to a mine.
In his excitement, Rex nearly called to Ellie again, to tell her he was coming, but he didn’t, deciding it was best not to let the creature know he had discovered its lair.
***
Inside the mine the air was cool, moist, and stale. The blackness was stuffy and suffocating.
Rex ran his hand through his wet hair, mustered his nerves, and started into the depths of the mine, sweeping the flashlight beam ahead of him.
The passageway was roughly hewn, circular in shape, the floor strewn with loose stones. A little ways in, it angled downward, leading to a new horizontal shaft that conformed to a more rectangular shape. Here, a set of flat-bottom steel rails resting on timber ties disappeared deeper into the darkness.
Rex followed them, passing a table on which sat an ancient Edison alkaline primary battery, and a marking on the wall, made by the smoke of a carbine lamp, that read Dec. 18, 1902. Roughly fifty feet along, he came to a metal hand winch that stood at the top of a steep thirty-degree rocky stope.
He skidded down the stope, stones shifting beneath his feet. Twice he nearly fell over but managed to keep his balance. At the bottom, he hurried forward—and didn’t notice the false floor until he was halfway across it.
He came to an abrupt halt. The series of timber boards beneath his feet creaked precariously. What lay below them? A hundred-foot vertical shaft? One of those booby-trapped spiked pits from an Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider film?
He took a cautious step forward, testing the strength of the boards with his foot before exerting his full weight. They flexed and creaked more but held. He took another step, then another, then he was back on solid ground.
Rex picked up his pace once again, wondering how deep the tunnels snaked. It would depend on the length of the ore vein they pursued, but they could easily meander for miles. Thankfully, there had so far only been a single, albeit zigzagging, path. Which meant he was not lost. He was on Ellie’s trail. He would be able to find his way back to the surface.
He was still telling himself this when the passageway branched in two.
Of course, he thought mordantly.
Rex shone the Maglite down each passage. Both appeared nearly identical. There was no reason to choose one over the other.
“Shit,” he mumbled, randomly going right.
The passageway’s walls and ceiling closed quickly around him, the rock becoming increasingly jagged and cave-like. Then the tunnel came to an abrupt end. Evidently it had been an exploratory shaft that had struck out.
Rex had only taken a dozen steps back the way he had come when Ellie cried out, her voice small and distant. He resisted the impulse to call back and broke into a reckless trot to make up for lost time. Soon his lungs were heaving and his heart was pounding so quickly and painfully he wouldn’t be surprised if it seized up in cardiac arrest. Nevertheless, his only concern right then was finding the poor girl. He could scarcely imagine the terror she must be experiencing. Not only had she been kidnapped by something from the mind of H.R. Giger, she was being whisked away deep into the bowels of the earth—
He tripped over a loose pile of rocks, landing hard on his hands and knees. Grunting in surprise and pain, he glanced back over his shoulder. What appeared to be a small cairn, the size of an ottoman, rose in the center of the tunnel. He’d scattered several of the stacked rocks when he’d driven his foot through it, but the pyramidal shape remained intact. His first thought, ludicrous as it might be, was that the creature had laid a trap for him. But then the flashlight beam revealed a portal in the ceiling directly above the cairn: an ore chute from a higher-level stope. The pile of rocks was not a conscience creation but the result of gravity.
Rex got back to his feet—and hesitated. The creature had wings. It would likely have no problem flying up the ore chute, even burdened as it was with Ellie’s weight.
Was that where it had gone?
No, he decided. Ellie’s cry had come from somewhere below him, not above.
Hadn’t it?
He didn’t know for certain. The enclosure of rock and earth dampened sound, making it difficult to judge the distance and direction of the source.
Besides, whether the creature went up the chute or not was a moot point. Rex didn’t have wings and couldn’t follow it that way even if he wanted to. There was only one direction he could go, and that was forward.
Fifty yards onward the rail tracks ended at a sharp corner where an ore cart, empty of any cargo, lay toppled on its side. Another fifty yards after this, a wall of debris blocked the passageway.
Rex experienced a moment of gut-churning defeat until he got close enough to determine there was just enough space along the left wall for him to pass. Carefully, he shimmied sideways between wall and debris, trying not to think about a cave-in and failing miserably. In fact, as his shoulders scraped the unyielding rock, and clumps of dirt fell from the ceiling to break apart over his head and shoulders, a cave-in was suddenly the only thing he could think about. The experience of being buried alive beneath tons of dirt, unable to move anything except your fingers and toes, and maybe not even those, taking your last few tortured breaths as the world faded around you into oblivion…
Rex stumbled free of the narrow space, doubling over, gasping for breath. He closed his eyes and felt as though he might be swaying. Yet with each passing second he felt a little bit better, and when he opened his eyes again the symptoms had passed.
He continued down the passageway, now all too aware of the shortness of his breath and the tightness in his chest and the trembling in his muscles, though he did his best to ignore these discomforts. The one sure way to have another panic attack was to think about having another panic attack.
He was so preoccupied with these thoughts, he once again didn’t realize the false floor beneath him before it was too late—only this time it really was too late.
There was a loud crack-splinter, and then he was falling through the air. His feet struck the ground hard, and he fell backwards onto his butt. Pain shot through his tailbone and up his spine. The Maglite launched from his hand and clicked off upon colliding with something.
Blackness reigned.
Rex scrambled around on all fours until his hand curled around the cylindrical barrel of the flashlight. Switching it back on—still worked, thank God!—he aimed the beam at the hole he’d fallen through.
He didn’t think he could monkey his way back up there, which meant he would have to continue the way he had been going and hope this new shaft mirrored the direction of the one above.
Back on his feet, ignoring the dull pain pulsing in his bones, he went straight for fifty feet or so before veering left and
downward. Twenty feet later he did a double take, snapping the flashlight beam back to what it had flitted over.
A skeleton.
It was small, yellowed, most likely avian. Yet a skeleton was still a skeleton, a representation and reminder of death, and his stomach soured.
Rex pressed on, though his mind remained on the bird. What had it been? A canary that had escaped a miner’s cage? A crow or sparrow that had flown into the tunnel system and had gotten lost and died? He didn’t know, and he told himself the bird didn’t matter, shouldn’t matter…but it did. There was something about its remains, something sinister, something he was missing…
Wildlife, he thought in an epiphany.
Where was all the wildlife?
Thus far, the mine had been completely barren of any such life. This was wrong, unnatural. An abandoned mine was the perfect habitat for bats, owls, rattlesnakes, rats, mice. Maybe even a mountain lion, or a black bear. So why had he not yet come across a single living animal?
It was possible the tunnels were filled with lethal concentrations of dangerous gases—methane or carbon monoxide perhaps, or hydrogen sulfide—killing trespassers not long after they entered.
Yet the more probable explanation, he believed, was that wildlife simply knew not to come down here, knew, or sensed, that it was home to an apex predator that outclassed anything else on the food chain.
***
The tunnel dead-ended. At least Rex thought it did, for a moment. Then he saw the square hole cut into the rock floor. He knelt at the lip of it. A wooden ladder descended into its inky depth.
He frowned. The creature didn’t climb down a ladder. Its physiology would make this unlikely, comical even. Ladders are for humans, stupid.
Nevertheless, what option did Rex have but to descend? Turning around would lead him nowhere.
Maneuvering to his butt, his legs dangling into the hole, he tucked the Maglite beneath his left armpit and latched onto the ladder. It was bolted into the rock. He descended, keeping his left arm pressed tightly to his side so as not to drop the flashlight. It was a long way to the bottom, made more so by how slowly he seemed to be progressing. He couldn’t help but think he was entering the depths of hell, a clichéd metaphor, but apt for the circumstances.