Earth Cult Page 16

  Helen rolled her eyes melodramatically and said, ‘No, it was the Earth waking up. You know, early alarm call?’

  ‘I like your sense of humour,’ Frank said. ‘You should have been an undertaker.’

  But the vibration had been so faint that a moment later they all wondered if they had imagined it. The evening was gentle and unruffled, the dusk gradually encroaching like a soft blue mist, quite unperturbed by the events happening deep in the Earth’s core. The stars were coming on one by one.

  THREE

  Even as a child he had never been afraid of the dark. He had never slept with the light on and the threat of bogie-men coming to get him during the night had always seemed, even then, to lack menace and credibility. But the darkness within the mountain was a palpable thing, dense and claustrophobic; it filled the tunnels with black air that pressed against his face with a chilly dampness and entered his mouth like the taste of old rusty iron.

  The foul stagnant smell reminded him of animal matter slowly decomposing, and it was with an effort that he tried to dismiss from his mind the image of the four of them as tiny microbes in the intestines of a large cold-blooded creature: the endless labyrinth of tunnels forming an enclosed system, leading nowhere, without entrances and exits.

  The first team had partially cleared away the debris and had done the best they could to shore up the tunnel with odd pieces of timber which littered the workings. In the light of the lamps it looked none too safe and Frank voiced the opinion that a decent sneeze would bring the whole assembly down on top of them.

  ‘How much more do you reckon there is to move?’ Lee Merriam asked one of his engineers.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ the man answered, annoyed by Frank’s comment and letting him see it. ‘The tunnel narrows beyond this point and the roof seems to have held. If we clear the entrance you should be able to get through without any problems.’

  ‘Famous last words,’ Frank said dryly.

  ‘You try digging it out with your bare hands,’ the engineer came back at him hotly. ‘We’ve no powered equipment, no proper lighting—’

  ‘Okay, okay, boys,’ Lee Merriam said placatingly. ‘This is difficult enough without squabbling; let’s all just do the best we can and leave it at that.’

  He went forward to inspect how the work was progressing, his large beefy face grim and determined in the light from the heavy-duty lamps. It suddenly occurred to Frank that Lee Merriam was so desperately keen to find a way through into the detection chamber that he wondered whether it was from a sense of duty or if there was an ulterior motive. Of course he was only doing his job, yet even so his anxiety seemed to be verging on the obsessional.

  He came back and reported that it was almost clear, except for one or two boulders that were too big to be moved. ‘We’ll have to squeeze past those,’ he said, sucking in his stomach. ‘This is when I could do to be carrying thirty pounds less weight. The tunnel looks in reasonable condition from there on in – as far as we can see, anyway. Can you remember what it’s like farther on? Do we keep to this tunnel or cut off into another?’

  ‘We keep to this one. It gets pretty narrow farther on.’

  ‘You do remember some of it,’ Lee Merriam said. He watched Frank’s face intently in the dim light.

  ‘Some,’ Frank conceded.

  ‘There must be one helluva gradient if it drops to the level of the chamber.’

  ‘That’s the part I can’t recall. We’ll come to some old workings and there’s a large main tunnel leading off it the other side. From there we’ll have to take it as it comes.’

  ‘That tremor must have really shook you up.’

  Frank didn’t reply. He looked to where the men were clearing the last of the rubble, partly obscured by dust which swirled in the beams of the lamps.

  ‘We’re about set to go,’ Lee Merriam said. ‘Do you want me to lead the way?’

  ‘No, I’ll go first. There’s a chance it’ll come back to me if I recognize any of the features.’ He smiled inwardly, thinking that he would recognize the mirror-like black rock soon enough if he ever set eyes on it again. But he didn’t expect the rock to be at the end of the tunnel as before: it had moved to the lower level, hadn’t it? Assuming there was only one mysterious black rock in the Telluride Mine.

  The engineer in charge of the clearing operation called out that it was now clear enough to proceed and added caustically that he hoped no one would sneeze as they went through.

  The tunnel was as familiar to Frank as the recurrence of a bad dream. Without thinking about it he started counting the number of paces in his head, knowing that by the hundredth the four of them should have reached the small cavern with its shallow workings … and beyond that the tunnel where he had seen the reflection of his lamp signalling to him.

  Lee Merriam was close behind, his breathing magnified by the confined space, and by an odd trick of the acoustics it seemed to be coming from some distance ahead – preceding them into the depths of the mountain.

  Frank suddenly began to exude cold sweat. He thought: This is madness, tempting fate twice. I survived one tremor and got the hell out of the place. What am I doing, repeating the same stupid mistake? The mountain let me off once, it isn’t going to be so magnanimous a second time.

  And then he thought: I’m getting to be as crazy as Friedmann and Leach and all the others, imagining the mountain to be alive. Next I’ll be thinking that it knows we’re here inside its entrails, waiting for the moment with sly malice when with a single muscle contraction it will squash us into smears of blood and splinters of bone. Quit it, he told himself. You’re surrounded by dead unfeeling inanimate rock. Nothing exists down here, nothing is alive, nothing can pass through solid granite.

  Except neutrinos and antineutrinos.

  The tunnel narrowed, became lower, just as he remembered. It was gradually descending and bearing to the left. Shortly it would begin to—

  In a sudden seizure of panic he thought: What is this, what’s happening? It should be bearing to the right. Have I got it wrong? Was it to the left or to the right?

  And he knew without any doubt that before the tunnel had curved in the opposite direction – which was plainly impossible. How could a man-made tunnel alter its course? The answer was that it couldn’t, and yet it had.

  He stumbled on through the dust, now obliged to bend his head as the roof became lower and the tunnel itself more confined. The beam of the lamp illuminated the smooth concave walls and the steady downward curve to the left: a tube becoming smaller and smaller as it sank deeper into the Earth.

  Lee Merriam was breathing strenuously from the exertion of having to walk in such a cramped crouching fashion: it was punishing to the legs and the small of the back. He said, wheezing, ‘If this gets any narrower you’re gonna need a shoe-horn to ease me through.’ Already his shoulders were brushing the sides of the tunnel.

  Frank didn’t answer. His body moved mechanically forward while he attempted to figure out what could have caused the tunnel’s change in direction. There might have been a slippage of the strata, the bedrock shifting as a result of the tremor, but surely the tunnel wouldn’t have remained intact? At some point its course would have been disrupted as the vast pressure of rock twisted it out of shape. There had to be another explanation. The trouble was, he couldn’t think of one.

  They were now having to slant their bodies sideways in order to move along. If the tunnel decreased much more they would have no choice but to halt and retrace their steps. And it was becoming stuffier, the air stale and foul-tasting, which made breathing even more difficult.

  ‘When does it start to open out?’ Lee Merriam asked, gasping.

  ‘Any time now,’ Frank said, wondering if by some bizarre chance they would come upon the cavern and the old working mysteriously transposed into the mirror-image of themselves, everything reversed in exact detail as in a perfect reflection. Not the true image, but the anti-image.

  Was that what ha
d happened? Were the antineutrinos responsible for creating a complete and faithful reproduction in reverse? Could they have changed the metabolism of the strata so that it was transformed from matter into antimatter? He was reminded of the antineutrino-antitrimuon interaction and wondered if this was one possible side-effect, the nuclear transmutation of particles into their anti-particle equivalents?

  The tunnel was now at its narrowest and Lee Merriam was in real difficulty. His progress was slow and laboured, moving sideways one step at a time, his body scraping against the walls and in danger of becoming wedged.

  He said, ‘This is no good, Frank. Any minute now I’m going to get stuck good and fast. Can you see up ahead – does it begin to open out? If it doesn’t I’ll have to go back.’

  Frank directed the lamp along the narrow fissure and the beam was lost in inky blackness. It touched nothing, illuminated no rock, threw back no reflected light.

  ‘We’re almost there. If you can make it through this section it seems to open out; I can’t see anything, but I guess it must be a large cavern.’

  He thought: A large cavern that wasn’t there before. Is the mountain playing games with us? Does it know just where we are and what we’re doing, laying traps for us, making caverns appear from nowhere, having fun at our expense?

  He squeezed through the last few feet and came out of a thin cleft in the rock face and nearly stepped over the edge of a precipice into black space. It wasn’t a cavern after all, but a large jagged shaft which went straight down, the sides sheer and vertical dropping away into the depths. The dank sour smell was very strong now, borne up on a draught of chill air.

  ‘Watch your step, Lee. There’s nothing here but a narrow ledge about three feet wide. Keep your back to the rock face.’

  Lee Merriam edged carefully on to the lip of rock, sliding each foot experimentally before trusting it to carry his weight. He was breathing gustily. ‘You didn’t warn us about this, Frank. How do we reach the cavern from here?’

  ‘You tell me. This shaft wasn’t here before.’

  The other two men sidled on to the ledge and one of them said, ‘Christ, what a stench. Where’s it coming from?’

  ‘Down there,’ Lee Merriam said unnecessarily. ‘Wasn’t this the way you came before?’ he asked Frank.

  ‘I’m not sure. Everything’s changed.’ He swept his lamp round, trying to make out the far perimeter of the shaft, but the beam wouldn’t reach across what he was only now beginning to realize must be an enormous yawning pit in the heart of the mountain.

  ‘If this wasn’t here before it must have been caused by the tremor. Maybe the whole inside of the mountain fell apart and left this hole. Can’t see any other explanation.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ Frank said, but he wasn’t happy with Lee Merriam’s interpretation. An underground landslide of these proportions would have sent the seismic recorders wild for miles around; it would have registered as a severe turbulence almost on the scale of a major earthquake.

  ‘I guess this is as far as we go,’ said one of the men. He was trying not to sound relieved but his voice betrayed the fact that he was rather glad they weren’t able to proceed and farther.

  Lee Merriam shone his lamp down into the shaft, which had less effect than a match in a train tunnel. ‘What do you think? Is there a way to get down?’

  ‘If it’s a natural fissure it could be miles deep. And how do we know if it’ll take us into the detection chamber or not?’

  ‘I guess you’re right. But at least it’s going in the right direction,’ Lee Merriam said with mournful mock humour.

  ‘We don’t have the equipment,’ said one of the other men. ‘You’re gonna need an experienced underground rescue team to get down that.’

  They stood close against the rock face, staring into the fathomless blackness and debating what – if anything – could be done. In the end they all agreed it was a hopeless situation and there was no alternative but to return. Frank didn’t care to admit it, but he was more than a little relieved himself. He wanted to get back on the surface before the mountain decided to open up any new chasms right under their feet and consign all four of them to the Ultimate Void.

  Lee Merriam said reluctantly, ‘All right, there’s not much we can do here. Let’s get on back.’ Frank heard him shuffling sideways in the darkness, feeling cautiously for the narrow cleft in the rock face, and then an irritable exclamation. More scrabbling, followed this time by a couple of genuine obscenities.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘This is stupid. I can’t find the entrance to the tunnel. It was here, right here, by my right hand, and now I can’t locate it.’ There were further sounds of him fumbling his way along, and then he encountered the outstretched arm of one of the other men feeling its way towards him. He swung his lamp round to examine the rock face: the cleft had been between the two of them and now it wasn’t. The rock was flawed with small cracks but none was wider than the thickness of a finger.

  ‘Hey, Jerry,’ Lee Merriam said to the man nearest him, ‘how far along there did you move?’

  ‘We didn’t. Frank just moved far enough to let me get on the ledge.’

  ‘I did?’ Frank said, disconcerted. ‘I’m over here, on the other side of Lee.’

  ‘No, he means me,’ said the other man.

  Frank nodded, thankful to have solved that little puzzle: there were two Franks. But where the hell was the entrance to the tunnel?

  The same dull unease rose up in his chest like a faint yet persistent pain. They were being observed: the mountain had altered the direction of the tunnel and deliberately led them to this central pit: now they were here it had sealed off the entrance, leaving them stranded on a rocky ledge with an unimaginable drop directly in front of them. Was it really possible for this to have happened? Of course it wasn’t, his mind rejected the thought, mountains weren’t able to change their inner structure at will; yet his disbelief didn’t alter the fact that the four of them were standing precariously on a narrow ledge in almost total darkness, nor that Lee Merriam was still unable to locate the tunnel entrance, despite the mounting fervour of his language.

  The man to his right – Jerry – was tapping hopefully at the rock face with a small pick, as if the right sequence of taps would magically reveal the missing tunnel. Evidently he still believed in fairy-tales.

  Lee Merriam thought it high time he became decisive. ‘Everybody turn their lamps on the rock. Let’s examine every square inch of this son of a bitch. We just came out of the tunnel and it has to be there – in fifty-three years I ain’t never heard of one vanishing so goddam fast.’

  Frank thought it best to go along with the plan, if for no other reason than he couldn’t suggest an alternative, much less a better one. They did as he instructed but the rock yielded up nothing but its inscrutable craggy face, marked with numerous yet tiny cracks which even a mouse would have had trouble crawling into. It slowly – yet still disbelievingly – became apparent to Lee Merriam and the other two that the tunnel had gone, that the rock had sealed up its secret places.

  The other man called Frank said, ‘I don’t believe this is happening to me. For chrissakes it’s a dream; somebody tell me I’m dreaming.’

  ‘You’re dreaming,’ said Lee Merriam. ‘Does that make you feel any better?’

  ‘Do you reckon we’ll get out?’ Jerry said in a high nervous voice. He was the one, Frank recalled, who had been pleased that the chasm prevented them going any further. Now they were trapped on the ledge, with no way forward and no way back.

  ‘Okay, take it easy,’ Lee Merriam said. ‘We’ve got somebody with us who knows plenty about climbing underground. Just stay calm, listen closely, and do as he says.’

  Frank was about to ask the name of this super-hero who was going to save them all with his marvellous skill and vast experience when he realized it was him. He thought of his eight week-end trips underground – in what had been a kerbside gutter compared to this – and wo
ndered whether he should correct Lee Merriam on a simple point of fact; he decided against it, mainly because it would have undermined his own confidence even more than theirs.

  ‘I don’t think we’re gonna make it,’ Jerry said. He shone his lamp wildly in all directions, blinding everybody, and Lee Merriam told him to shut up, embroidering it with a couple of ripe obscenities to lend weight.

  He went on, ‘This shaft has to lead somewhere. Maybe it cuts right through some of the old tunnels—’

  ‘And maybe it doesn’t,’ said the other man called Frank, who believed himself to be dreaming. ‘What if we just keep on going down and down and down? We’re a mile underground already. For chrissakes, Lee, don’t feed us bullshit.’

  ‘What do you intend to do – stand on the ledge till your knees start to rot? There’s a way out, I know it. There has to be.’ He said to Frank, ‘What do you think? Do we see how far the ledge goes or do we try it with the ropes?’

  ‘How much rope have we got?’

  ‘Eighty feet altogether.’

  ‘Let’s keep to the ledge. As you say, it might intersect with a tunnel or one of the old workings. And I think we should only use two lamps and save the batteries on the other two.’

  Lee Merriam agreed. He switched his lamp off and told the other Frank to do the same. ‘Stick close to Jerry,’ he said. ‘If we all stay within touching distance we should be okay.’

  Frank didn’t share his optimism; he was wondering what else the mountain had in store for them. If the tunnel had been deliberately sealed behind them, and this ledge conveniently provided, perhaps they were being led somewhere – or to something – they were meant to see and experience. There could be little doubt now that behind all this there was an intelligence of some kind: a conscious life-force that was planning and controlling everything that happened. Was it the mountain, or the Earth itself, or even the particles streaking in from the centre of the Galaxy? And what seemed strangest of all was why something on such a scale should take an especial interest in them. Why had they been chosen … and for what purpose?