Dig

CHAPTER TWELVE

  Loretta breaks through

  Loretta was busy sweating while Rusty and Robyn drove to the pre-reunion. The air was cool that deep inside the earth, her clothes were drenched through to her skin. She adjusted one of four battery powered, fluorescent work lights to better see what she was doing. There were five buckets full of soil and one to still left to fill. She dug the shovel into the ground and hit rock with a solid CLANK that rang back up through her arms, into her shoulders and rattled her teeth.

  “Damn,” she said. Her voice echoed inside the tube. She tried in a dozen other spots and found the same result. She was inside a long, winding, stone sock and had just found the toe end. Loretta dropped the shovel on the ground below her, inhaled deeply to sigh but instead she coughed until she saw stars. Whatever was seeping up from the bottom of that hole had grown worse. The odor, she was used to. Sulfuric and rotten like an old bloated hunk of roadkill ready to burst in the heat of the sun. She’d smelled it since she could walk down into that place with her daddy and no longer noticed its foul quality. At that depth, it had taken on a thickness which seized her lungs.

  In the past, she felt gained strength in the hole. Strength that was inconceivable for most women and some men her age. She hauled five gallon buckets of earth, two at a time, up and out of the pit daily and had for years. She moved dozens of them back and forth like kings in a 3D game of checkers and hadn’t taken a day off since she could remember. Some nights, Loretta worked in her solitary mine for eight or ten hours before her body gave up on her. Her mind never gave up.

  It was the first time Loretta could recall feeling tired. Her hands ached and her back ached and her knees ached. It was as if she had aged all at once, and time had caught up with her harshly as if she’d been cheating. She needed to rest.

  Gripping one bucket’s handle in each hand, Loretta walked back toward the first lift. For the first time, it took effort. Effort she didn’t know if she could maintain. After ten steps she set the buckets back down to catch her breath, but something else was wrong. Something clawed at her insides and felt as if there was a rubber band attached on one end to her guts and on the other end to the toe end of the sock. The hole underneath her house had always had its pull on her. She felt it when she ventured to the grocery store or to the hardware store for more tools. She felt it when she was out in the yard tidying up or when she would walk for the mail.

  Her daddy spoke about the power in that hole and her grandfather before him, but this feeling was different than those others. What she felt standing there was concentrated and for the first time in her sixty-three years, Loretta was afraid of it. She wanted to leave, but couldn’t make her legs work. She couldn’t make her hips turn or even look away. When her feet began to slide along the stone floor, she recited the only prayer she knew.

  “Father, hear my cry and hasten to me. Touch me and make me wicked. Feed me with your blood. Fill me with your power. Show me the way.”

  It was involuntary, a chant she had taken to saying while she tossed dirt into buckets. She regurgitated it with all the enthusiasm one musters to sing Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall so they might pass the time. As her feet slid along the floor of the tunnel, taking her back to the toe of the sock, she used it as a distraction—something to take the fear away. Loretta knew of the power in that place, but had never felt it used against her. She fell down on her backside and continued to slide toward the end of the passage as if the world had tipped upright and she was no longer on level ground.

  Pebbles and loose dirt scrubbed underneath her and the friction heated her buttocks as she picked up speed, slamming her knees into the end of the run hard enough that it propped her back upright. If she hadn’t put her hands up, she might have broken the impact with her face. Her labored breathing became panting and Loretta’s heart pounded. When she caught her breath, she realized the pull was gone.

  Did it let me go or does it just have me where it wants me?

  Loretta looked around in the odd glow of the fluorescent lamps. She listened for any sound, but aside from her own breathing and shuffling, there was nothing. As she readied herself to run, to leave everything behind and never return, she heard a scraping sound. It was a familiar sound. It was the metallic, dragging sound of either the shovel or the pickaxe being dragged along the stone floor.

  She turned to see it was the pickaxe dragging itself along the floor and coming towards her. She held her hand out and caught the fiberglass handle before it stopped. It was vibrating and felt hot in her hand. She hoisted it up onto her shoulder like a batter stepping up to the plate and it stilled as if its life was gone.

  “This is what you want?” she said to the emptiness. “I’m supposed to break through this rock? I’m supposed to continue on like always?” Her words trembled and she was shocked by the sound of her voice.

  The shovel slid toward her next, standing up on its point about five feet away. It balanced there, X marking the spot. “There?” she asked. Nothing answered. Only the feeling in her guts pulling her again, this time toward the shovel, the other end of the rubber band taut. Three steps and she was next to it, staring at it in awe.

  What is this magic? What will my prize be once I am finished? Will I finally be with my daddy again? My granddaddy?

  The questions circled in her mind like buzzing mosquitoes. Loretta raised the pickaxe with both hands, her eyes wild, her biceps burning with exhaustion. She kicked at the shovel and it fell out of the way as if nothing at all was holding it up. When she brought the tool down on the ground, it sparked and a baseball sized chunk of rock cleaved loose from the floor and shattered into pieces which rattled down randomly about the point of impact. Strength slowly returned to her body and the pick came down again and again and again. New blisters raised on her callused hands and her shoulders screamed.

  Again the pick came down, but this time it was a sound like punching meat instead of the metal CLANK. It opened up another hole…a hole wearing through the big toe of the giant stone sock. It started out three inches deep and ten inches wide, then it was six inches deep, then three feet across and a foot deep. She used the shovel to clear the rubble from within the new hole.

  Eighteen inches.

  Twenty…

  Twenty six…

  Then there was a THUNK and the pebbles and sand inside the hole fell through like the grains inside an hourglass. A long gasping sound escaped the hole as if a giant serpent was hissing just beneath her. The orifice around the point of the tool cracked and the entire world began to vibrate underneath her feet. The handle of the pickaxe wobbled and then in an instant, it was gone, fallen through. Loretta screamed, stumbling backwards, and all at once the rumbling stopped. A faint orange glow shone up from below and the hole she had just made. She crawled on her belly to its edge and peered into the void. A giant cavern lay below, lit by an unknown source…its bottom obscured by haze as were the walls.

  How big is it?

  Filled with terror and excitement, she watched. Her life’s work, the work of generations of her family was complete. Whatever was down there, Loretta Gates—descendant of Robert, Robert, James, Albert, Albert and Albert—she would finally witness. Fumes escaped, more noxious than any before. They burnt her eyes and the fragile tissues inside her nose and throat, even into her lungs. She coughed so hard she thought she might vomit and then rolled away, her eyes streaming with tears.

  When she was done retching, Loretta lay still and listened. A steady, rhythmic sound beat below her in that empty place. It grew louder and more defined. Flapping. The sound of wings. Something was coming up from the depths to meet her. Flying up from within the earth. The unknown thing screamed, something akin to the cry of a massive hawk. More calls followed it. Other creatures answering from great distances, perhaps coming to join the leader.

  The flapping grew louder, building from faint to thunderous in a matter of twenty wing beats and then stopping just beneath her as something large made vi
olent contact with the rock she was lying on.

  Did it crash? Surely not.

  Loretta held her breath, straining to hear something of the being she had freed. Perhaps it was too large to fit through the hole. Maybe it needed just a bit more help so it might squeeze through and greet the world. To greet the surface for perhaps the first time.

  Loretta did something she hadn’t done in decades, perhaps since she was a child. She hoped. She closed her eyes and hoped for whatever it was to show its face. She’d heard tale of birds crashing into windows or glass doors, breaking their necks and dying. No birds ever approached her home, but she watched them through her binoculars and enjoyed them. She hoped it wasn’t like that. She hoped the magical thing which had taken her family so long to free hadn’t killed itself trying to escape.

  But there had been more, hadn’t there? It called, and others responded. Many others.

  She listened again, keeping as still as she could manage. For almost a minute, she held her breath. Then, ever so faintly, Loretta heard the scraping of something against the stone. Something was gripping the wall of the giant stone sock and climbing. Then it was in the hole. It was some time mid-morning on Saturday after the Smithville High School pre-reunion had ended and that thing was coming out to what?

  Is it coming to greet me? To thank me? To…what?

  “Father, hear my cry and hasten to me. Touch me and make me wicked. Feed me with your blood. Fill me with your power. Show me the way,” she said.