Free The Underdwelling by Tim Curran Page B

foot in here before them. If there was a ghost down here then it was the goddamned ghost of something that had died in the Permian.
    “I don’t believe in ghosts, mister, and if you do then you need your fucking head examined.”
    “Something’s out there,” Boyd said. “I heard it.”
    “What? Something alive? Something that survived for a quarter of a billion years in a hermetically-sealed cavern thousands of feet down? Good Christ, Boyd. Do you know what you’re saying?”
    “I guess not.”
    “But it’s out there, Mister Hot-shit Engineer, and you heard it before, too,” Maki said then and the tone of his voice was as near that of lunacy as either man had ever heard. “It’s waiting out there, all right. It knows we’re here. And I think before this is over we just might get to look it in the face.
    Maki was sulking and Jurgens kept fiddling with his walkie-talkie like he honestly thought he could get a message above through all that goddamn rock. You could hear the distant sounds of Breed and McNair clearing away the rubble, the muted glow of their lantern coming through the forest of petrified trees.
    “Boyd thinks it’s a girl,” Maki said.
    Boyd sighed. “Shut the hell up.”
    Jurgen’s looked up from his walkie-talkie. His face was stern in the glow of the lantern. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
    “Talking about Boyd,” Maki said. “And his girlfriend.”
    Boyd lit another cigarette and ignored him. He studied the trunks of the petrified trees and imagined what the forest must have looked like during the Permian when it was growing and green. He could almost feel the dead stagnant heat of the primordial jungle. The buzzing of ancient insects, things sliding through the underbrush. He blinked his eyes and saw only the graveyard spires and stone masts around him, the spoking shadows they threw in every direction.
    Jurgens asked no more about what Maki said. Boyd had a pretty good idea that he just didn’t want to know.
    Then somewhere out in the darkness: click, click, click.
    Boyd felt himself go stiff as board. Not again, Jesus, not again.
    Maki made a pathetic sound under his breath that was part whimpering and part low, beaten laughter.
    Jurgens had gone tense.
    It came again, but louder: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
    “It’s her,” Maki said.
    They waited there, silent, motionless, each praying it would just go away. When Maki made to answer the sounds by tapping his knife, Jurgens grabbed his wrist and glared at him. Nobody made a move, a sound, anything. They waited there as stiffly as the petrified trees around them.
    Then: CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
    Boyd was trembling. A cool and greasy sweat ran down his face. He felt something like a moan of utter despair building in his throat but he would not give it vent. He didn’t dare.
    Whatever was out there, it seemed to be growing impatient. CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, it sounded. CLICKA, CLICKA, CLICKA-CLICK. When that brought no response, it began pounding on the boles of the trees with a hollow knocking noise as if it was hitting them with a shaft of wood. Bang, bang, bang. THUD-THUD-THUD.
    “She’s getting mad,” Maki said, his voice breaking.
    “You’re crazy,” Jurgens told him.
    But then it came again, that hammering and pounding. It was frantic in its desperation, beating on the stone trees, desperate, absolutely desperate for an answer, for anything.
    When it had ended, echoing away into nothingness, Jurgens wiped sweat from his face with a hankie.
    “She doesn’t like to be ignored,” Boyd told him.

 
     
     
    16
    Breed felt McNair grab his arm. “Quiet,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Quiet.”
    Breed listened. There was nothing for maybe five seconds, then a weird, distant droning sound rose up and died away. It sounded, if anything, like the continual buzzing of a summer locust.
    “What the hell was that?”
    “Quiet,” McNair said again.
    Breed gently set down the wedge of rock that was in his hands. He had a