The Pit

I sat on the weathered brick wall above the town tunnel, looking down at the occasional car or truck that passed through. It was late and traffic was light. I’d arrived in town an hour or two ago and had been sitting on that wall all the while, motionless, thinking. A mile ahead, illuminated by pale moonlight, I glimpsed the open pit copper mine—the place where all of our troubles began.

I was already on my second pack of Marlboro Reds by the time my phone alarm rang. Thirty minutes to midnight. With a sigh, I puffed on the cigarette again. Time to go, I thought.

Just one more smoke, my mind suggested, procrastinating the inevitable.

I shook my head. Not enough time.

The growing sense of distress in my mind had ballooned in the last hour, and so had my trepidation. I snuffed out the cigarette with my foot and began to walk off the paved road and onto a nearby dirt path. I’d ridden my bike down this path as a kid at least a hundred times. God, I never thought I’d be back in this town again—not after what my friends and I had seen and done here some twenty years ago. But then, the universe is full of odd synchronicities, pulling us in like flies drawn into a spider’s web, and we’re caught in the weaving, whether or not we asked to be.

After fifty or so yards, I switched on my phone’s flashlight. I knew the direction, but the terrain had changed significantly over time, and the last thing I needed was to break an ankle. A quarter mile in, the path narrowed, with dead weeds poking through the sunbaked dirt in large formations. My boots stepped onto ground where human feet hadn’t tread in some time, and I began to sweat nervously.

They need me. Keep going.

I carried on, my internal compass guiding me through thickets of mesquite trees and yuccas. I came to an overturned pine tree that had once stood some twenty feet in the air, its roots now jabbing into the sky, making me think of the upturned legs of a dead insect. Beside the tree was a boulder that hadn’t moved in eons. I climbed atop the boulder and gazed out. The moon was bright, the air still. I could see the surrounding hillsides, and I could hear my heartbeat, louder now than when I’d gotten the call in North Dakota.

Another mile or so from the pit, if my memory served correctly. I carried on, allowing my mind to wander back to the day when…

***

…We’d entered the pit, not for the first time, but hopefully for the last. Ronny had been there, and Sonya, and Jamal. I’d been in the middle of the formation—I’d never been the bravest—with Ronny at the back and Sonya and Jamal leading the pack. We all carried lanterns we’d taken from home. In my hand, I grasped the stone. It was pulsing blue-green light, brighter than the lanterns. I feared it would give us away, that someone would see us and call the police and force us out of the pit, and the mission would be a bust. But none of that happened. We went deeper into the pit, the smell of sulfur and dead animals rancid.

“God, it stinks,” Ronny said from behind me, his voice muffled by the sweater covering his nose.

“So does your mom,” Jamal cackled.

“Shut up, both of you,” Sonya said. “What’s the stone doing, Jake?” she asked me.

“Still shining,” I replied. “It’s a little brighter than before.”

“We’re getting closer,” said Ronny.

The bottom of the pit was soggy from the previous night’s rain. If we’d had any sense, we would have worn better shoes. We slogged through the mud, my new sneakers already caked in the stuff a few steps in. An absurd thought struck me: “Mom’s gonna kill me when she sees this.” Of course, I knew she wouldn’t—but I realized I’d already been planning for the eventuality that I would come out of this pit alive and intact, that I would see my mother again at sunrise. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that whatever we were facing in the mine could kill me in the dozens of ways it had killed others. It didn’t matter that I was twelve; if it got a grip on me, it wouldn’t hold back.

“How much farther?” asked Jamal.

“We’re almost there,” I heard Sonya say.

The night had been dark, the moon concealed by heavy rain clouds. Thunder boomed in the distance now and then, and even with the occasional lightning strike, the sky remained black and menacing. We walked into thicker patches of mud, sometimes deep enough to bury our ankles.

“I can hear it,” Sonya said. “Like a heartbeat. It’s close.”

I could hear it then, too, powerfully loud. But it wasn’t a heartbeat. The thing—whatever it was—was shifting.

We walked a hundred more feet, and then I heard Ronny say, “Look!”

We all saw it at once: the archway, some twenty feet high, a perfect half-circle that appeared to have been dug into the wall of the pit—the cave where we’d found the glowing stone days ago.

Suddenly, we heard a low rumbling, and at the same time felt it vibrating beneath our feet. The stone in my hand began to pulse, no longer only blue-green but also shades of violet and crimson and tangerine. We all looked down at it momentarily, but our attention was wrenched back to the cave when an enormous bellow echoed from within.

I felt my spine tingle, my hands trembling with fear, and I nearly dropped the stone. In front of me, Jamal and Sonya posed in a battle-ready stance, while Ronny hid behind me, his hands clasped on my shoulders.

There was another roar.

And then, with me and my three best friends watching, the thing began to emerge from the cave.

***

Some time passed. Another mile on and I came to a tall metal fence with barbed wire strung about the top. Every quarter mile, a sign on the fence read, NO TRESPASSING. I kept walking.

The path snaked along a ridge, the fence line precariously following the edge of the pit. If I slipped now, it would be a twenty foot slide almost straight down, and there was a good chance I might bounce and collide with the dangling barbed wire before hitting the fence. The path began to narrow further, and a flood of childlike fears suddenly overwhelmed me—fears that this would be the last time I saw the moon, or felt the cool fall air on my skin, or saw my old friends again.

Or that Ronny isn’t dead, but he’s down there in the cave, in the midst of the thing’s grip… and God knows what it’s doing to him.

I followed the ridgeline. I saw a faint orange glow a hundred yards away, and I followed it. As I drew closer, I heard laughter—a man’s booming cackle, followed by light chatter. The closer I got, the easier it was to make out that the orange glow was a result of a small fire; plumes of smoke drifted into the air, just visible in the moon’s dim light.

I got closer. Twenty feet away, I heard a woman say, “Is that you, stranger?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Uh… It’s Jake.”

“Well, yeah, dummy. Who else would it be?”

Sonya stood up, and as she got closer, I could see a grin on her face. She opened her arms, and we hugged tightly. “God, it’s been too long, hasn’t it?” she asked me.

“Too long.”

Behind her was Jamal, tall and broad-shouldered—much bigger than he’d been at twelve years old. He was grinning and me, too, and pulled me into a bear hug and patted me hard on the back. “Good to see you again, man. Shame this is what brought us here, though.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Have a seat,” Sonya told me. “There aren’t any chairs, but there’s plenty of dirt.”

I chuckled. “Thanks,” I said, and sat down opposite my childhood friends, the fire between us. I stared into the flames, remembering—

The pit, the battle, the fire, the temporary victory.

“I thought it was dead,” Jamal said. “Or, at least, that it had left. But then it got to Ronny and…” He stopped mid-sentence, shook his head.

“We all thought it was dead,” I said. “We thought the stone had killed it.”

“I barely remember the stone,” Jamal said, embarrassed. “That night’s kind of fuzzy to me, to be honest.”

“I’ve never forgotten,” Sonya said. She looked from the fire to me. “It was scared of you because you had the stone. You were the one who stopped it, Jake.”

I shook my head. “It was all of us,” I replied. “The stone was a weapon. The thing was weakened by the stone, that’s all. We stopped it together because it was scared of us.”

Jamal chuckled. “You really believe that?”

“The courage of children is unmatched in a town driven by fear,” Sonya said. “This town is cursed.”

“Haunted,” I said. “Just like us. Just like Ronny.”

We sat silently for a minute, staring into the fire. Finally, Jamal asked, “Can you guys show me what you see? Like we used to as kids?”

Sonya and I nodded. The three of us stood up, circling the fire. We held out our hands to each other, and when our fingers touched, we saw…

***

…The creature, tall like a towering mountain to our eyes, its details shrouded in a prolific darkness that consumed galaxies like a black hole. We were all huddled together in a semicircle, heads turned to see the creature, which writhed in a restless dance, watching us.

“It has eyes,” Jamal said. “I can see them.”

“Me, too,” said Sonya, a shiver running up her spine.

“I’m so scared,” Ronny whimpered.

“It is, too,” I heard myself saying, hoping it would reassure them, to remind them of why we’d ventured to the bottom of the pit in the first place—and also to reassure myself. “I can feel its heartbeat. It’s as scared of us as we are of it.”

The creature rose up, swiftly blotting out the sky and stars and moon. With tremendous effort, it reared back what appeared to be its head, bellowing out a shriek that popped my eardrums. I was sure we’d all gone deaf—but then, I could hear the other three screaming.

“It’s trying to scare us!” I cried. “But it’s afraid, too! It’s—”

The creature fell to the ground, and shadowy legs like tentacles sent shockwaves that knocked us off our feet, cracking the earth beneath us. We’d just had time to sit up and look back at the thing when it began bounding toward us, faster than any animal.

All at once, the gang of us kids was on our feet and stood in our battle positions, holding our lanterns, and me with the stone, the one I’d found in the bowels of the pit the first time we’d entered into its crawlspace, the one that would kill it for good and we’d be okay, again, right? Right? We’d be okay, everything would be—

***

“Okay,” said Sonya, withdrawing her hand. She placed it on her forehead and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s really hard to go back to that memory.”

“It’s starting to come back to me now,” said Jamal. “Thank you both.”

A heavy gust of wind passed across the pit, sending sparks westward from the small fire. From below, it sounded like the cave—or something inside of it—was shrieking at us. Sonya doused the fire with a jug of water she’d carried in a backpack. Then she took another deep breath and said, “Do you still have the stone, Jake?”

I shook my head. “I used it to fight off the… creature… whatever it was. I never got it back.”

“So we’re down a weapon, and a team member,” Jamal said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “But… you were right. It was scared of us.”

“And that was as powerful as the stone,” said Sonya. “Maybe more so.”

We looked down into the pit, and I could barely make out the faint outline of the cave. “Do you think Ronny’s dead?” I asked. “Or do you think the thing has him in there?”

“I can still feel his presence,” Sonya replied. “I don’t know how I understand that, but… I just know that thing has Ronny, and we have to get him out.”

I glimpsed the cave’s archway in the pit one more time, thinking it looked like an open mouth waiting to swallow us whole. I nodded to my old friends. “Let’s go,” I said. Then, we started the trek down into the pit—and this time, I led the way.

We made our way to a familiar spot in the fence line—the one we’d clipped with wire cutters as kids—and wiggled through the fence beyond the NO TRESPASSING signs. After nearly an hour, we made it to the bottom of the pit. The dirt was hard-packed instead of muddy this time of year, and the ground level felt ten degrees cooler. We approached the cave, and from within, we heard a familiar bellowing roar. We took our battle stances, waiting for the creature to pull itself out into the open where we could see it.

I turned to face Sonya and Jamal. In a moment of childlike inspiration, I extended my fist to them. “For Ronny,” I said.

Sonya and Jamal placed their hands over my fist and said, “For Ronny.”

We turned to face the thing that was slowly emerging from the cave. Remembering the courage we’d had as kids, I uttered my own bellowing roar as loud as I could.

I’m so scared, I remember Ronny saying to me all those decades ago, right in this spot.

Me, too, buddy, I thought. Just hang on. We’re coming for you.



Then, I began to run toward the monster, with Jamal and Sonya close behind me.