“These ladders are rusted clean through. You’ll break your neck, you moron.”
Kurt didn’t know what suddenly impelled him to want to do this. The mystery of the stopes beckoned him, prodding his blackest curiosity. He needed the final proof to what a day ago he would’ve dismissed as pure insanity.
“There’s nothing in that stope but
Kurt wasn’t listening. At last he found a ring ladder that had remained secure.
“You’re really gonna do this?” Sanders said. “You’re really gonna be this stupid?”
“That’s right.” Kurt climbed onto the ladder and began to go down.
Sanders said, “Shit,” and followed him.
The ladder wobbled slightly but held. Kurt descended with great care, testing each rung. He made a point not to look down.
“This is crazy,” Sanders complained above him. “This rickety piece of shit’s gonna break apart. Then we get to do free-falls without chutes.”
Kurt angled out of the safety ladder and stepped out onto the first-level catwalk. From there he took another ladder down to the next level. He moved slowly along the cat, grasping pitons for support when he could. Sanders cursed faintly behind him.
Kurt stopped at the side of the orepass, the entry to the stope where Higgins had died. He felt dead himself for a moment, his heart still, his brain inert. Did he doubt the safety of the stope? Sanders was certain the ghala weren’t here now. It seemed that what he feared was what drew him.
Sanders caught up to him.
Kurt took a deep breath and entered the stope.
A stench hit him like a blast from a cracked steam pipe. It was hot in here, the air viscid as syrup; he could barely breathe.
Sanders entered as if wading in muck. “This place stinks worse than a corpse pit. What the fuck are you trying to prove?”
Kurt didn’t answer. He roved his light back and forth over the longwalls. The stench rose; he tried breathing through a handkerchief, but that was a joke. As the stope began to veer, he found the first of what he was looking for.
Bones. Stripped ribs. Femurs split and sucked of marrow.
“See? I fuckin’ told you,” Sanders said, gagging.
Kurt’s light played at his feet. Sections of spine lay like big, malformed spools. Fillings glittered up from the teeth of a disconnected jaw.
He stepped forward, stupefied. Water dripped from a crack in the topwall; bones crunched underfoot. A gnawed hand lay to the left, a stripped foot to the right. At the base of the pass he saw what looked like the top of a grapefruit, but realized with numb revulsion that it was the top of a skull.
Sanders sounded like he was about to throw up. “We’ve seen enough.”
“I’m going to check the stope chamber. It can’t be far.”
Sanders stopped, leaning on his rifle. He spat, gagging, shaking his head. “You’re crazy to want to do this, man. This place is an open grave. You’re gonna dream about this for the rest of your life.”
“I know,” Kurt said.
They continued through the orepass. Soon Kurt didn’t even bother to look at what he was walking on. He followed the face of stull-less, trickling black rock. The longwalls drew on, still sharply gnashed by the dredger, which had bored this pass decades ago. A tenuous buzzing droned from up ahead.
“What’s that?”
“How the fuck should I know,” Sanders said.
“Could it be the ghala?”
Sanders was exasperated, and sick. “I fucking told you. The ghala aren’t here. They don’t stay in their lair at night. If the ghala were here, they’d have torn us to pieces by the time we were two steps into the manway. They only guard the den in the winter, when they spawn.”
“Then what’s that sound?”
At last they came to the wooden headrig which marked the end of the pass. Through this would be the main chamber of the stope, what miners called “the hang.”
Kurt stepped through the rig. The hang was huge, supported not by stulls but pillars of rock which looked much thinner than the OSHA regulations demanded. It was a miracle that this stope had not fallen years ago.
Now the buzzing was loud and irritating as static.
With their lights, they combed the sides of the hang for the buzzing’s source, turning a vast circle. The walls were etched cleanly by cutmarks from miners’ hammerbars. The floor lay barren, save for scatterings of twiglike bones. But what was the sound?
Far left of the hang, they found it. Mounds of things.
“What the hell is this?” Kurt said.
As they approached, Kurt stumbled on something. He cast his light down. At the base of a pillar lay several heads. Kurt’s light remained on one. Long, matted hair and clumps of beard, lipless, eyeless, but intact enough for recognition. It was Lenny Stokes’s head.
Sanders nudged him on. The buzzing and the stench seemed to coat them like glue. Their lights fell on the mounds, which had been stuffed into an undercut in the hang. The mounds were black and seemed to shimmer with movement.
“Good Christ.”
“Oh, no,” Sanders said. “Oh fucking no.”
The mounds were bodies, or pieces of bodies, covered by blankets of cavern flies. Kurt prodded the mass with an iron rod. The flies lifted in a swarm of swirling, buzzing black.
Some of the bodies had been dismembered, others remained whole. At least a dozen bodies had been packed into the undercut, but they all seemed heinously bloated, as if the torsos had been first hollowed out and then filled with something.
Sanders stared speechless, his eyes riveted to the swollen, putrescent mass. The bodies seemed melted together.
“There—there’s something in them,” Kurt gasped. “They’re stuffed with…something.” With the rod he forked some of the bodies out of the undercut, stirring a miasmic stench and slops of maggots. Enslimed bodies flopped out as if deboned. Shapes seemed to move beneath the bloated bellies. At first Kurt thought that the ghala must be storing the bodies as a food supply for winter, but then the iron rod punctured one of the distended bellies, which immediately burst, as if under pressure. The hole the rod had made split wide, pouring forth a lumpy, liquid mass of—
“Eggs,” Sanders aid. “Larvae. The ghala are spawning.”
They were a translucent scarlet, each about the size of an avocado. Kurt popped one with the rod, and it effused a vile, thick fluid. When they’d spilled onto the floorwall, they began to move slightly, twitching, and there were so many. Dozens of larvae must have been ensiled into each corpse.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sanders groaned.
“You said the ghala only spawn in winter!” Kurt yelled.
“Well, I guess I was fucking wrong!” Sanders yelled back.
Kurt grabbed Sanders by the collar. “Does this mean that the ghala are in the mine? Right now?”
“Yes.” Sanders’s voice was very hoarse. “Yes,” he said again.
They turned and ran. They stumbled over bones and line rods and chunks of ore. Kurt meant to run full speed out of the stope, but Sanders had to nearly tackle him at the headrig. “Shithead. You want to run right into them?”
Kurt was livid with anger. “Goddamn you, you said they only spawn in winter, you said they wouldn’t be in the mine.”
“You’re the asshole who wanted to come down here!”
Kurt supposed that a fistfight at this time would not be very practical. Sanders shook his head and said,
