The Underdwelling Read Free Page B

that, Boyd was stealing his stage. He thought working drift would make Boyd piss yellow in his boots, but it wasn’t working. Boyd wanted it.
    “Well?” Boyd said. “Let’s go.”
    Maki threw his half-eaten pasty in his bucket and called Boyd a mouthy little sonofabitch and then they were on their way up the ladder road, making for the main shaft. The whole way, Maki was doing everything in his seriously strained repertoire to intimidate Boyd and put the scare into him.
    But it wasn’t working.
    Boyd was scared, all right. But not of Maki. Not of his stories.
    It was something else and that something didn’t have a name.

 
     
     
    5
    “You never know what’s going to happen in a drift,” Maki was saying. “Sometimes the charges misfire and they blow your arms off. Sometimes you tap into a pocket of gas and it’s Goodnight, Irene. Sometimes there’s cave-ins. Guys get squashed flat, cookie. I seen it once. A guy, friend of mine, crushed between two slabs of rock. All that came running out was something like red jelly. Those cave-ins happen all the time. Probably happen to you. Then I’ll get stuck scraping your ass off the rocks.”
    “No, don’t worry about it, Maki,” Boyd said. “We’ll be working together. If I go, you go. Won’t that be a fucking scream?”
    Maki was getting exasperated. “You think it’s funny, cookie? You think cave-ins are funny?”
    Boyd turned on him. Turned on him fast and made him back right up. “No, dumbass, I don’t think cave-ins are funny,” he said. “My old man died in one over at the Mary B. when I was fifteen. I don’t remember laughing much.”
    Maki just stood there with a dazed and helpless look on his face. He closed up like a flower and didn’t have shit to say after that. His book of underground horror stories was just plain used up. When they got to the cage for the ride down, he had a cramped, uncomfortable look to him like he was constipated.
    Finally, he said, “Listen, Boyd. I was just letting you know that this is dangerous. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.”
    “Sure you were,” Boyd said.
    Then the door was closed and the cage jerked and plummeted down into the depths of the earth, the air smelling of minerals and standing water.
    When they stepped out, Boyd could taste the dust on his tongue. It was like the dust from a chalkboard, but grittier and thicker. He could feel it settle over his face right away and it made him want to breathe through his nose and sneeze a lot. There was a smell, too, one that he couldn’t quite put his finger on…something like moldy rocks and crumbling masonry, a distinct and unsettling smell of antiquity.
    “How do you like it here?” Maki said, looking down the carved tunnels where nothing moved but a pall of shadows.
    “I like it just fine,” Boyd told him.
    But, good God, what a lie that was.
    It was even worse down here than it had been on the other levels. It was like being in a tomb a mile underground and Boyd literally felt the walls closing in on him. This was Level #8 and the majority of it was still being excavated. He could hear the distant sound of hammers and machinery, but it sounded like it was coming from miles away. His heart thudded in his chest and the breath rasped in his lungs.
    And he was getting that feeling again.
    Just like before, that crawling, shivery sense that he was in grave danger. He’d written it off earlier as maybe simple paranoia couched with a healthy dose of claustrophobia given that his old man had been crushed to death years back at the old Mary B.
    But this was something different. A separate species of dread.
    As he stood there by Maki, next to the shaft house, feeling the great depths they had descended to, he had the weirdest sensation of deja-vu like he had been through something like this before. Maybe not in real life, but perhaps in a dream. One of those cloying, crowded awful nightmares of suffocation that you wake gasping and sweating from at three in