The Becoming - a novella (6 page)

He made up his
mind. That was what he would do. He stretched his left hand out as far as he
could, camera turned toward his body, hoping he could get a wide enough angle
so the picture would show that half his body was inside the mine shaft everyone
was so afraid of.

Then he froze.

Something was
wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on what it might be, but something was definitely
not right.

Then Tim realized
what it was: Total silence had fallen over the old mine. The site was one
hundred percent quiet. Tim knew there was always ambient noise, even in the
middle of nowhere: Birds chirping, rodents rustling the grass, animals moving
through the woods.

But now there was
nothing. Even the light breeze had abruptly died down. The phrase
deathly silence
flashed into Tim’s head and he suddenly understood its meaning. The
formerly bright sunshine now seemed muted and dim and the only sound Tim could
hear was the blood rushing through his ears, loud as a waterfall, and all at
once he recognized exactly how alone he was out here, miles from anywhere, and
that he had told no one of his plans.

No one knew he was
out here.

No one knew
where
he was.

And something
touched his ankle.

Tim screamed even
though no one could hear him and he instinctively jerked his leg toward his
body, away from whatever awful thing had touched him. He pulled his leg up and
tried to propel himself away from the broken concrete slab and out of the mine
shaft, but his left foot was barely touching the ground and it slipped on the
weed-strewn dirt.

And then he felt
it again, except this time the thing—it was thin and ropy and felt slithery and
throbbing and somehow alive, all at the same time—wrapped itself around his
ankle in an instant. Tightly.

Tim screamed again
and tried to regain his footing, but the thing began pulling him, and it was
powerful, it was unbelievably powerful, and it pulled on his ankle and Tim felt
himself being dragged steadily over the slab. Into the tunnel.

He scraped his
shoulder on the top of the wooden beam which until just a few minutes ago had
held the concrete seal over the mineshaft. He didn’t notice.

He scraped his
head against the beam as the thing continued pulling, reeling him in like a
fish on a line, and he didn’t notice that, either.

He felt blood
trickle down his neck from the scrape on his head and didn’t care.

Then he
disappeared into the mine, the blackness so complete it was like floating into outer
space, still screaming for all he was worth.

But it didn’t
matter. Because he was all alone.

3

Julie McKenna stood in her son’s
bedroom doorway, puzzled. Tim’s bed covers had been thrown back haphazardly, as
if he had gotten up in a hurry, and Tim was nowhere to be found. She had come immediately
to his room to check on him upon her arrival home from work, and after
discovering he wasn’t there, she had searched the entire house—it was easy,
being just a five room ranch—ending up right back here in a matter of minutes.

An ill-defined
feeling of unease took root in the pit of her stomach. Tim was not the type of
kid to take off without asking permission, even when he
wasn’t
sick with
the flu, and this morning he had been burning up. His fever had been so high,
in fact, that Julie had momentarily considered taking her son straight to the
emergency room. He had been that sick.

Or had he?

She thought back
to her son’s strange behavior, how he had seemed nervous and jumpy, completely
unlike his usual cheerful self. She had chalked it up to the illness, but now
she was not so sure.

The disappearing
thermometer.

The sudden onset
of illness after seeming completely normal all day yesterday.

His extreme
reaction to her suggestion on the phone that perhaps she would come home from
work early. She had expected him to be excited and happy and he had practically
bitten her head off.

Tim wouldn’t be
the first kid to skip a day of school by faking illness—Julie had done it
herself a few times, now that she thought about it—but it would be so out of
character for her son, who was always so conscientious, she was having a hard
time believing that might be what he had done. He was growing up, though, and
he
had
changed since the move here to Tonopah last year. It hadn’t been
an easy transition for him, first losing his dad and then moving away from the
only home he had ever known, in Harrisburg. Maybe the sudden “illness” was
actually Timmy’s way of acting out.

Julie turned away
from her son’s bedroom door and padded down the short hallway to the phone in
the kitchen. She would call around to his friends’ homes—it wouldn’t take long,
he only had a couple—and read him the riot act when she finally found him.

The uneasy feeling
in her stomach grew a little. She knew she should be angry, but there didn’t
seem to be any room for anger in her body. The fear was taking up too much
space.

***

Julie couldn’t stop pacing. Back
and forth, one end of the tiny kitchen to the other: Circle to the left in
front of the kitchen table then back across the well-worn vinyl tiles to the
oven, circle to the left again and start over.

Timmy was missing.
He had now been gone nearly twenty-four hours. None of his friends would cop to
knowing where he was, and all of them had had their feet held to the fire by
their parents when they heard the panic in Julie’s voice. They claimed they didn’t
know his whereabouts and she believed them. One thing she did know was that he
hadn’t gotten dressed and gone to school after she left for work yesterday, not
that she really believed he would have. None of his friends had seen him all
day.

“Honey, you need
to relax,” Matt said, and she ignored him.

He tried again.
“Tim’s probably off smoking cigarettes or something, trying to be a rebel. He’s
a kid, remember?”

She stopped pacing
abruptly. “I think I know my son,” she said curtly and immediately regretted
it. Matt was just trying to help. “I’m sorry,” she said with a weak smile, and started
walking again. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Her boyfriend held
up his hand in surrender. “You don’t have to apologize, I know how upset you
are. And I’m not trying to say I know him as well as you do. The cops are
looking for him and by now so is pretty much everyone in town. Someone will
find him. He’ll show up. Let’s not panic.”

The telephone rang
and Julie sprinted across the floor, reaching the receiver before Matt could
even move. She put her hand on it and then pulled back as if she had been
burned. “You get it,” she said. “I’m too nervous to talk to anyone.”

She continued
pacing, chewing her fingernails as Matt answered the call. She tried to pay
attention to his end of the conversation but couldn’t seem to concentrate.
Where
are you, baby?

Finally her
boyfriend replaced the receiver and turned to look at her. His face seemed to
have paled a bit. “That was the police. They talked to all of his friends again
and one of them mentioned some crazy idea Tim had talked about.”

He hesitated and
Julie wanted to scream. “Well? What was it?”

“Apparently he
tried to talk his buddies into skipping school and exploring the site of the
old Tonopah Mine, the one that was closed down back in the 1920’s after a miner
disappeared following an underground explosion and fire.”

Julie’s legs
turned to jelly and refused to support the weight of her body any longer. Her
eyes filled with tears and she crumpled to the floor. She thought she might
throw up, even though she hadn’t had anything to eat since yesterday at
lunchtime. Before Timmy had gone missing. “Are you saying my baby is lost in a
mine?”

Matt moved to the
middle of the kitchen floor and sat next to her. He put his arms around her.
“We don’t know that,” he said quietly. You know how kids shoot their mouths off,
trying to look cool in front of their friends. The old mine is just one
possibility, and the cops are heading out there right now to check it out. They
say it’s sealed up tight, anyway, that there’s no way anyone break into it and fall
into a shaft, especially one twelve year old boy. They’re going to call as soon
as they know anything. Let’s wait and see what they say.”

“I’m not waiting
for anything,” she said. She pushed herself up off the floor. “We’re going out
there right now.”

***

Julie could not believe the
ruggedness of the terrain. Matt’s four wheel drive Jeep bounced and skidded,
navigating the abandoned road leading to the old mine agonizingly slowly. She
wanted to shout at him to step on it, that she needed to get to her baby, but
she knew he was doing the best he could. Any faster and the truck would
probably just ricochet off the rutted, overgrown path into a tree, or break an
axle or something, and then where would they be?

So she held her
tongue, and her breath, and finally the Jeep rounded a corner and the woods
opened up into a massive clearing and they were there. A chain-link fence,
rusted and bent, surrounded the site of the old mine, its front gate standing
open. Two police vehicles, a four wheel drive pickup truck and a four wheel
drive SUV, were parked in front of a dilapidated shack roughly in the middle of
the clearing, their hazard lights flashing busily, the officers nowhere to be
seen.

Clouds boiled
overhead, dark and threatening, a blackish-purple smear hanging low over the
scene. Matt gunned the engine and the Jeep shot through the open gate, the
ground at last flat and relatively clear. He rolled up next to the two police
vehicles and Julie leapt out the passenger door before the truck had even
stopped moving.

She pounded up to
the ramshackle door, vaguely aware of Matt following behind telling her to slow
down. “Be careful,” he said. “You won’t be doing Tim any favors if the building
falls on you and you have to be taken out of here in an ambulance.” She ignored
him. Her baby was here, she just knew it, and he needed her.

She pushed through
the doorway and into the building’s nearly empty interior. Her attention was
immediately drawn to the far side of what had clearly once been an office, or a
base building of some sort. Through a pair of windows filthy with grime and
crud she could just barely make out the two policemen standing together, maybe
fifty feet behind the building. They seemed to be staring at a rise in the
earth, and one of them was talking into what looked like a walkie-talkie or
some type of radio.

Julie clapped a
hand to her mouth, terrified, and ran out the half-open rear door. Once again,
she could hear Matt behind her telling her to slow down, and once again she
ignored him. “Is it him?” she cried as she ran. “Did you find him? Is he okay?”

The two officers
jumped in surprise and looked up, the one with the radio reaching toward the weapon
at his hip. Julie didn’t care. She kept running; it wasn’t like they were going
to shoot her just because she had surprised them.

She stopped right
behind the two policemen. They were standing in front of what was clearly the
mine’s entrance. It had been dug into a small hill, maybe six feet high, and
capped with a big concrete block, probably way back when the mine was shut down.
Now the block was destroyed, half of it in pieces on the ground, the other half
pulled partly away from the big wooden beams to which it had been bolted.

It didn’t seem
possible that a twelve year old boy—and a small one, at that—could have smashed
the concrete apart, but Julie knew immediately Tim had done exactly that. He
had broken the seal to the old mine shafts and was now trapped underground,
lost inside a maze of tunnels and warrens, some of them over one hundred fifty
years old.

“We’ll find him,”
the cop with the radio told her, understanding immediately she must be the lost
child’s mother. “We’ve already called out a search and rescue team, with dogs
and plenty of men. He can’t have gotten far. We’ll find him,” he said again,
although more quietly.

Julie whimpered
helplessly, staring at the ground in front of the tunnel as Matt finally caught
up to her and curled an arm around her waist. Scattered among the rubble of the
broken mine seal were the tools Tim must have used to smash the concrete: a
heavy hammer and a gigantic screwdriver, as well as his backpack, filled with
water bottles and snacks. Lying a few feet away was his flashlight, still
switched on.

Tears spilled from
her eyes. His flashlight was on the ground. Tim would never have voluntarily entered
a pitch-black tunnel all by himself without a flashlight.

But his flashlight
was right here.

On the ground.

And Tim was
nowhere in sight.

***

Julie was exhausted. She felt as
though she had searched the entire Tonopah Mine herself, tramping through miles
of confusing underground pathways, none of which had seen human beings for
nearly a century.

And she would have
done it, too, had the search and rescue team allowed it, but instead she had
been forced to cool her heels outside the entrance, pacing back and forth on
the dusty ground, waiting for word of her missing son’s fate. Praying. Dozens
of men had come, with dogs as promised, and disappeared inside the old mine, toting
flashlights and survival gear and GPS units.

And weapons.

“Why do they need
guns to look for a twelve year old boy?” she asked, and no one looked her in
the eye. No one answered, either. Julie McKenna had lived in town less than a
year, but she had heard the stories—whispered rumors, really—of the supposedly
haunted Tonopah Mine, the one from which grown men had disappeared, never to be
heard from again.