Free Earth Cult by Trevor Hoyle

carefully-preserved historical exhibits in a museum. The mine had yielded up its treasure and then been left to moulder in dripping, creaking silence; and very slowly, with the infinite patience of nature, the earth was reclaiming its own, the vast pressure of billions of tons of rock squeezing tighter and healing the wounds so that in time nothing would remain but a tracery of scars.
    The first stage had been easy. They had been lowered in the cage to one of the upper levels and entered a gallery which Lee Merriam had calculated was along the same line as that of the detection chamber. They were headed in theright direction but still separated from the lower level by 150 feet of what could well be solid rock. The plan of the mine gave no indication of natural faults or old shafts – nor indeed if it was possible to work their way along without progress being halted by a blocked tunnel. It was a blind gamble with no guarantee of success.
    One of the engineers led the way, with Frank close behind and the others following on. They carried heavy-duty lamps, nylon ropes, a light-weight folding aluminium ladder and a small kit of basic medical supplies. Lee Merriam had suggested they take along wet-suits and breathing apparatus but Frank had vetoed the idea, saying that if they came to water too deep to wade through they wouldn’t proceed any farther: none of them had experience in negotiating underground water courses and it would be risking lives needlessly even to make the attempt. Fortunately the tunnel was mainly dry, with here and there only a small stagnant pool formed by condensation. The one thing they all noticed was the smell: it was, as somebody remarked, ‘as if the mountain had halitosis’. The air was chill and yet had a sour bad taste that Frank imagined to be coming from a large prehistoric animal decomposing in the darkness.
    Not for the first time it occurred to him how susceptible the human mind was – in certain situations – to the suggestion that unknown terrors and supernatural forces lurked in the most innocuous of inanimate objects. The night before, sitting in the Cascade Hotel with Cal Renfield, he hadn’t thought anything of the tales that the Telluride Mine was a haunted place; it had been nothing more or less than a bit of quaint local folklore that he had patiently listened to and then dismissed. That had been with a drink in front of him and in the comfortable environment of a well-lit room. Now the same story took on meaning, became real, changed from being a childish fairy-tale into something that just might have a basis in fact. The difference of course was that he had exchanged the bright outer world for this dank subterranean granite tomb, which was the natural abode of spirits, phantoms and things that went bump in the night.
    It was foolish imagination, he told himself, and for a rational man of the twentieth century rather weak and pathetic … yet he couldn’t dismiss the notions lurking in his mind, nor dispel the sense of foreboding which seemed to weigh like a heavy leaden lump in his chest.
    The engineer at the head of the party – a man called Craig – halted every now and then to check his plan of the workings. They had left the main gallery some way back and were following one of the narrower side tunnels which intersected with other tunnels of varying sizes. At first Frank had tried to memorize the party’s route, holding a plan of it in his head, but he soon lost track of the number of tunnels they entered, whether they had turned left or right, how far they had walked before turning into yet another tunnel – identical to the last one which was identical to the one before that and the one before that. It was hopeless. Everything depended on Craig knowing where he was going and, even more importantly, being absolutely sure of how to get back.
    They had been following the labyrinth of tunnels for just over an hour when the engineer