Allan Leverone
The Becoming
For my wife, Sue: The patience you exhibit while I indulge my obsession for making stuff up and writing it down is awe-inspiring. As always, thanks for your unflagging support.
Special thanks to Neil Jackson for the breathtaking cover art…
1
The handcar’s rusty iron wheels squealed out a song of complaint as the big box wound its way deep into the earth. Karl Meyer shuffled along behind it, weary after a long day, counting the minutes to the end of his ten hour shift. Seventy-five to go. Glittering black coal dust caked his boots, his jumpsuit, his helmet and every inch of exposed skin.
Karl guided the car — empty now, but soon to be filled almost to overflowing with black Pennsylvania gold — around corners, along straightaways and through switchbacks, moving ever farther from small entryway back at the surface. The Tonopah Mine had been in continuous operation since the mid 1850’s, and over the ensuing seventy years a complex network of underground tunnels had been engineered.
Many of these tunnels had been sealed off, mined until the coal was played out and then abandoned. Rusting signs nailed to rotting two-by-fours placed in gigantic X’s across mine shaft entrances warned miners DANGER — TUNNEL CLOSED! Some of the signs had been in place so long they were virtually unreadable. Karl passed them all without a thought and kept going.
Karl Meyer was a trammer, a mine worker whose job it was to run the empty container along the tracks to an active mine shaft, fill it with coal, then muscle the now-heavy iron box back to the surface, where it would be unloaded and he would begin the process again.
It was now 10:45 p.m., and this would be Karl’s final run of the night. By the time he made his way to the shaft in use — Charlie Five was the shaft’s rather unromantic name — loaded his car with coal, and worked his way back to the surface, his two to midnight shift would be just about over. He would have enough time to clean up in the crowded shack employed as a base building by the Tonopah Mining Company before clocking out and trudging down the street to The Lucky Shamrock Bar — Tonopah Mining owned and operated, of course — to exchange some company scrip for a few beers.
Karl moved slowly along the main shaft. For an operation as busy as Tonopah Mining, he was continually amazed at how deep into the earth he could travel without setting eyes on another human being. He could hear workers every now and then; sound played tricks on the senses down here, so far beneath the earth’s surface. Long-abandoned mine shafts and tunnels to nowhere and unreliable ventilation all combined to result in strange, eerie sound patterns.
Snippets of overheard conversation might float through the air as if miners were near, but the shaft would be empty. Weird, toneless noises, ululations like the cries of a loon on a lonely lake, would begin without warning and end just as suddenly. Pockets of dead air would float through tunnels for no apparent reason, warm and thick and stifling as opposed to the cool dampness typical of a tunnel hacked into the earth hundreds of feet below its surface.
Men had died down here, dozens that Karl knew of over the seven-plus decades the mine had been in operation. Coal mining was a difficult, dangerous job and the risk of violent death was a constant companion to miners, but that was especially true in the Tonopah Mine. Here safety standards were generally lax, the miners viewed by management as interchangeable parts; replaceable cogs in the operation.
The old timers told stories of shadowy creatures living in the far reaches of the deepest closed-off mine shafts, of hideously deformed monsters skulking through the darkness, stalking miners and wreaking havoc on them. There were stories of good men who had walked into the mine and simply disappeared, vanishing into thin air, their bodies, clothing and tools never recovered.
Karl had heard all the stories, plenty of times. He tried to ignore them. Working ten hour shifts six days a week, three-quarters of a mile under the earth’s surface was hard enough to handle without adding superstitious nonsense to the mix. He was an uneducated immigrant with a wife and three hungry children to support, and Karl knew he was lucky to have a job at all. So he wasn’t about to complain, about the difficulties of the job or about the stupid stories told by a bunch of old men with coal dust lining their lungs and overactive imaginations or—
— Bang!
Something smashed into Karl’s empty coal cart and bounced off, sending a loud gong reverberating through the mine shaft. He ducked reflexively and jumped back, then gazed into the murky semi-darkness at the edge of the six-foot-wide shaft. A jagged rock, roughly the size of a baseball, settled into the dust of the ancient shaft floor, spinning a couple of times and then falling still.
What the hell?
Karl had been pushing his cart, lost in thought, rolling it past the entrance to one of the oldest and deepest closed-off shafts in the entire mine. Alpha Seven it was called, and it had been abandoned for as long as Karl could remember. Hell, even old Sandy Schaefer, at sixty the oldest and longest-tenured Tonopah Mining employee, had never stepped foot into Alpha Seven and couldn’t remember a time when the shaft had been active.
It was also one of the shafts rumored to be haunted.
But of course that was ridiculous. Karl stood at the corner of the long-abandoned Alpha Seven and peered as far into the tunnel as he could, which wasn’t far at all. The light provided by incandescent bulbs strung too far apart on frayed wiring was weak and insufficient even in the active portions of the mine; the abandoned shafts were as dark as a hooker’s heart, as Karl’s father would have said.
“Hello?” Karl attempted, cupping his hands and directing his voice down the inky blackness of the long-dead shaft. “Who’s there?” The sound fought its way into the tunnel and then seemed to give up. There was no echo, no indication anyone could hear him.
There was also no reason to believe anyone would. Who the hell would be hanging around in the unrelenting darkness of Alpha Seven? And for what purpose? No one would have known Karl — or anyone else — would be passing by at this exact moment, so even in the unlikely event someone wanted to pull a prank, that person would have had no way of determining when a potential target might appear.
Karl took a step into Alpha Seven, then two. “I said who’s there?” he repeated, more forcefully this time.
Silence.
He turned back toward his mining car, shaking his head, and the moment he did, another rock whizzed past, this one so close to his helmet the displaced air tickled his ear. It passed directly over his cart and smashed into the tunnel wall on the other side.
“Goddammit!” he shouted, and that was when the explosion occurred.
A muffled roar marked the blast, and then a wall of compressed air rolled through the tunnel, invisible but unstoppable. It knocked Karl to the ground seconds after the ragged boom echoed down the chambers. He covered his head with his arms as he fell and rolled over once, striking Alpha Seven’s side wall, instantly forgetting about nearly being beaned with a rock.
Of all the potential dangers posed by earning a paycheck under the earth’s surface, fire was the worst. It was worse than a cave-in by far, because after a cave-in, unless a miner was unfortunate enough to be standing in the exact spot of the tunnel’s collapse, the possibility of rescue was high. He simply stayed where he was and waited. Collapsed tunnels could be re-dug and reinforced.
But fire was different. In addition to the obvious danger of being blown to bits or burned alive, fire meant smoke and smoke meant toxic fumes which had nowhere to disperse other than through the tunnels.