Content Warning: SPOKEY (don't spoil yourself but the real CW is in the post description)
Before the Fall "Mineshaft"
by beforethefall [Inkbunny]
I had always loved going to my grandparents' property with my parents when I was a kid. It was this simple little clapboard three-room cabin with a big porch, a loft that I got to sleep in, and a big stone fireplace in one wall which was pretty great in the winter. We went there for a few weeks every summer, usually in late July, to escape the heat of the city and spend some time out in nature. The cabin was built on this big stretch of rural property deep in the woods near Aardvark Lake and nestled in a valley of the low-lying so-called ‘mountains’ of the Midwest, and there were about forty acres of woods on my grandparents' plot of land. Their property was surrounded by similarly large lots, some with homesteads and cabins, though most people used the land out here for hunting.
It was a peaceful place. Safer than the city, and it was a refuge from the sun-baked asphalt and interstate noise of our spot back home. I remember seeing my very first fireflies here when I was a little boy, along with a lot of other firsts as the years came along. Nothing bad ever seemed to happen out here, though. Really, nothing at all seemed to happen out here, and there was a certain sort of respite in that, for an inner city kid like me. That all changed when I was sixteen, though.
We'd heard on the news just a couple weeks before that someone from near our grandparents' property had gone missing; a thirteen year old boy, last seen in a denim jacket and a red baseball cap. The county police and a bunch of locals formed search parties and went out and combed the woods in the whole valley, but nobody ever found a sign of him. His parents said they'd had a big argument before he'd stormed off, and the police ruled it as a run-away given the circumstances, since they couldn't find any signs of accidents or foul play.
At first, my parents were pretty guarded about letting me wander the property freely that year, but eventually I managed to convince them to let me at least take walks in the woods near the cabin. I was plenty old enough to fend for myself if I had to, and besides - I had been roaming those woods for years on my own already and nothing even a little concerning had happened so far. The part that they didn't know was that I had also recently picked up smoking and was absolutely fiending for a fix, so this wasn't a discussion I was willing to just drop.
There was a route I liked, that circled around the back half of the property - it went down the side of a hill, and then followed a creek to an old fallen tree that was, more-or-less, a marker for the property line on that side of the lot, then I'd follow the old 4-wheeler track back to the long driveway that led to the cabin. It was a walk I'd taken dozens of times, and now had the added accompaniment of my new best friend, tobacco, to walk with me. After a few of these walks, I'd settled on a sort of routine; walk down to the old fallen tree and sit there, smoke a cigarette or two, bury the butt in the silty shore of the creek bed so my parents wouldn't find them, then head back up the hill on the single-track trail.
It was one of those days as I sat there on the old fallen tree counting my remaining cigarettes - of which there were fourteen - while smoking the last drag of the day's ration, when I noticed an odd sound in the woods. At first I thought it was a bird, but it seemed muffled and echo-y, like it was coming from far away, down a long hall. My ears twitched and pivoted as I scanned my surroundings, and eventually localized the noise as coming from someplace up the hill, close to the back of the property. I climbed the hill, and as the hill leveled out near the top, I came around a patch of brush and spotted an ancient-looking timber frame, embedded in a rocky outcropping. Its entrance was boarded up but it looked heavily weathered, like it'd been there for a hundred years, if not more, and I stood there for a moment, marveling that I'd never found this before in all the years I'd been roaming around out here. The noise I was hearing was a sort of whistling, but it seemed too musical to be some random forest critter.
Naturally, I went to investigate. After all, what sixteen year old city kid is going to turn down an opportunity to check out an abandoned mine? As I approached the sound got louder… It was whistling. Some old timey tune I'd probably heard in a movie I watched with my grandma, but I couldn't quite place it, despite being right there on the periphery of my memory. It wasn't loud, but it was whistled with a bouncy sort of pizzazz that lent it the sort of energy you might have when you're whistling to yourself while doing chores. As I climbed the hill and approached that boarded-up entrance, the whistling abruptly stopped when I was only a few feet from the boards. I squinted, peering into the blackness beyond the boarded up entrance, with no luck at making out anything inside.
“Hello?” I called into the darkness, “Is someone in there?”
There was a long pause, as I leaned in closer to the boards and cupped my hands around either side of my eyes to shut out the glare of the daylight around me.
Under the rustle of leaves and sound of wildlife in the woods around me, with my ears pointed straight into that blackness, I could only barely make out the quietest murmur of vocalizations. It wasn't words, but just a quiet, sort of grumbling murmur, babbling to itself somewhere deep in that hole in the mountain that made me bristle for some reason.
“Hello? Is someone there? Are you lost?” I called. It sounded like a little kid, but when the only response that came was a faint little giggle from somewhere within that inky-black darkness, the fur on the back of my neck stood on end. After a moment there, frozen in a strange sort of confused shock, I started realize, slowly, what must be happening.
Local kids must be fucking with me, I thought as I edged back from the boarded up entrance to that mineshaft and gave a wary look around for anyone else who might be lurking nearby, ready to jump out and scare me or something. There wasn't anyone around, though, and I was getting creeped out. But… just in case, though, I shouted one more time.
“Hello? Look, if you need help, just shout for help!” I called into the darkness, but no response came, even as I stood there for a couple minutes trying to piece it all together. I had had enough of this shit, though, and was ready to get the hell out of there, and after a little more looking around for anyone that might be having a laugh at my expense - and finding nobody - I did just that.
The next day, I came back to my usual smoking spot and looked for that place again, but it was the damnedest thing; even when I climbed the hill I couldn't find it, that rocky outcropping and the mineshaft embedded in it were both gone, so far as I could tell. The hill looked the same, there hadn't been a landslide or a tree fall or anything, just, as far as I could tell, untouched woods with no mine in sight.
I went back and looked for it for a few days after that but every day it seemed to be further back in my mind, like the way the memory of a dream fades away slowly over time, until after a week or so I wasn't even thinking about it anymore. I walked down and sat on the old fallen tree, watching the creek's meandering waters beneath me as I rattled the last four cigarettes in the box; I'd been bad about breaking my rationing, and now I'd probably have to go a couple days without before we got home, and I could get back to the bowling alley to buy more from the vending machine. I snubbed my half-smoked cigarette out and pinched out the cinder until threads of unburned tobacco showed, then I twisted the paper shut and tucked it back into the pack, upside-down so it wouldn't empty itself out.
Sacrifices must be made.
I felt my ear twitch, then realized why it had - an odd, lilting sound in the air under the general din of the woods and the creek. A low, echo-y whistle. My heart jumped in my chest, I remember it distinctly, and before I knew it I'd run halfway up the hill following that sound. I rounded a small bit of scrub to see it with my own two eyes. There it was again; that rocky outcropping with the lonely, weathered old mineshaft embedded in it, boarded up just how I'd left it. I knew I'd checked here, at least three or four times after that first time - it was right where I expected it to be. And I heard that whistling, again. Still soft, with a jovial, merry little bounce to it. I still couldn't place the song any more than knowing that I'd heard it before. Just like the first time, the whistling stopped as I approached and peered into the blackness between the gaps in the boarded up entrance.
“If you think you're funny, think again,” I called into the darkness this time. There was a brief silence, but as I listened closer, I heard a faint sniffling and sobbing deep in the dark. A little girl, crying? And then a weak voice.
“Hello?" it started, almost questioningly. Then it came a bit more strongly. "Hello? Is someone there?” I stood there in shock that I got a response before I even really processed the input.
“Yeah? Hello? Are you okay?” I called.
“I fell, I need help!” cried the voice. It was definitely a young girl, probably five or six years younger than me, I'd guess.
“Where are you? I can't see anything. How'd you get in?” I called, looking over the boarded up entrance for a way someone might have been able to squeeze inside.
“There's a loose board,” the voice called. “Please hurry, I- I think my leg is broken!" it cried. I was panicking a little at this point. I quickly found the loose board, though, and was able to pull it, and a couple others off once I got a decent hand-hold behind them. I had to sort of shuffle in on my hands and knees but eventually got inside, and fumbled for the lighter in my pocket before flicking the flint and striking a flame that barely afforded any light against the blackness inside, until my eyes adjusted.
“Alright, keep talking! I'm on my way," I shouted into the darkness. It was quiet for a moment, before I heard the faint sounds of sniffling and crying from further down the tunnel. My lighter barely broke through, flickering every time I moved and threatening to go out - and it did, several times, needing to be flicked back to life before I started shielding the flame properly. But, it was enough to see glints off wet rock walls and floors, the occasional puddle splashing under my feet. I slipped in some mud, just an inch, but it might as well have been a mile with how my stomach jumped into my throat. “Hello? Where are you?”
No response, now, just faint sniffling and crying as I stepped forward, feeling my way along carefully until my foot bumped something solid that clattered on the floor. I leaned down and realized it was a board - a bunch of boards, laid out across what looked like a gap in the stone, and the sniffling was coming from down inside. I knelt, and let the lighter go out as I smelled burning plastic in the air, the casing was starting to melt from the prolonged frame.
“Hang tight, I think I'm there,” I said in the dark, as I pulled one of those planks to the side, and then another, before one slipped and knocked the rest to the side, and together they fell down into the pit. I cursed. “Shit! Heads up!” but the boards seemed to have only fallen a few feet; it wasn't like in the movies where it just kept going and going and splashed down in some unseen body of water after a half-minute. They fell maybe only six or ten feet and landed with a clatter below. There wasn't any sounds coming from down there, now, but as I leaned down and struck my lighter once more, an awful image was permanently seared into my brain in the flashbulb-flicker of the flint's spark.
A body laid in the pit, which was only about six feet deep. The body of an adolescent boy, in a denim jacket and red baseball cap, several weeks decayed. The miasma of putrefaction wafted up to greet me along with a veritable haze of flies and bugs from below, upset by the falling boards. I retched instantly, dropping my lighter by accident as I recoiled and stumbled over my own tail, scrambling backward and tripping over myself while I ran for the entrance, only twenty feet back. I didn't stop to crouch through the opening I had made; I shoulder-checked the boards and burst through like a linebacker, sending rotted, splintered boards flying, and I ran all the way back to the cabin, smoker's lungs be damned. The weirdest realization settled in as I was running that only made me push harder…as I was running out of the mine, I could have swore I heard a little girl's laughter echoing down the tunnel behind me.
At the cabin, I managed to convince my parents to call the county police out, which was easier than I think I expected it to be, probably helped along by my absolutely panicked state. An hour later and a truck lazily rolled up the drive, and I hurried to show the portly fifty-something county sheriff to the hill, and to that mineshaft, except… it wasn't there. I knew without a doubt I'd never forget its location, right up the hill, around the little scrubby cluster of brush and it's right there, on a rocky little outcropping…but just like a week ago, it had seemingly just vanished into the hillside.
I pleaded with the sheriff and tried to defend myself and talk him into getting more of a search together, but without any proof, all it got me was a stern tongue-lashing by first the sheriff, then my parents. They thought I made it all up, some city kid in the country causing a ruckus for no good reason other than boredom. To hell with them, I know what I saw. I know what I smelled, and what I heard.
Without a lighter, I didn't have much of a reason to back into the woods, and I wasn't exactly inclined to go out there again anyway, if we're being honest. I kept to myself, and, I'm not exactly proud to admit, largely sat and sulked about not being believed for the rest of the trip. I never did pick smoking back up after that, come to think of it.
Eventually, we went home, and life slowly went back to normal, the memory of that day fading in my mind over time. Back to the city, back to my friends and video games, back to the local bulletin board, and catching up on the Food Fight game I hadn't been able to attend for a few weeks. That was the same year I met Marissa; our Junior year of high school.
And the days sort of just…kept coming. I finished high school, Marissa and I dated through school, and we both decided to go to the local community college so we wouldn't have to split up or go long-distance. I proposed to her on the day we graduated, and, lucky me, she accepted. We decided that engagement was enough for now, and we shouldn't worry about a big wedding and all the trimmings until we had our feet under us. I started my biotech career soon after, while she made use of her horticulture degree working with the local botanical garden.
All while the years wore on, we kept going to my grandparents' cabin every summer. The first few years, I'd go out into the woods, and look for that inky black hole in the side of the hill again, and I never did find it. Eventually, me and my dad started taking over more of the property maintenance as my grandparents were getting too old to keep up with it, and a couple years before we got our degrees, Marissa started to join us. She put in a little gardening around the cabin, I helped her build some planters, and we put in a little grove of edibles that would draw more wildlife near the cabin. I'd gone on plenty more walks in the woods by then, mostly egged on by Marissa, but I'd always urge her to turn back or head a different way if we got too close to that spot where…whatever it was had happened. I never did tell Marissa what happened there, back when I was sixteen.
This year, she kept pushing up that hill though, even when I mentioned we should turn back. I was just about to grab her arm and insist, when I heard something that made my stomach jump into my throat all over again.
“Hey, what's that?” Marissa said, as I rounded the corner behind her and there it was, all over again. Just how I'd left it. A gaping, black opening in a rocky face, littered with splintered boards around it, some still hanging from rusted nails.
“We need to go,” I said, as adrenaline started surging through me. My hands were shaking.
“Oh, you're such a chicken, it's just a hole,” Marissa said, and before I could grab her, she'd already started up the hill.
“Marissa, wait!” I half-shouted after her, before I started to chase her up the hill. It was too late, though, and she was already sticking her head through the entrance, before stepping in and disappearing from sight into the dark. I had to stop at the entrance; my gut wouldn't let me go further so quickly. “Marissa, what the fuck!” I shouted into the dark. Something reminded me in that moment of the first time I'd seen this place.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, unfolded it and turned on the camera. The picture was grainy and useless in the dark, but it did have a LED that provided at least a dim, pale light that barely afforded a glimpse into the dark.
“Oh, what the fu- Marissa, stop fucking around, this is dangerous, there's a pit!” I shouted. I squinted and mentally counted the steps I took in, watching the floor as best as I could in the dim light of the phone's LED. “Don't go any further! Let me find you, I have a light,” I said, but I didn't hear anything from deeper in that tunnel. Not a step, a splash in a puddle, the sounds of rustling clothing as someone moved. Nothing but my heart pounding in my chest, rushing in my ears, but even that wasn't loud enough to drown out something else that made my blood run cold.
Whistling. Not just any odd whistling, but a quiet, casual, jaunty sort of whistling that echoed in the tunnel with an eerie sort of resonance. A familiar tune, that I couldn't quite place, but I knew that I'd heard it before. It was that tune, and it wasn't coming from deeper down in the deep, dark mine, now.
It was coming from behind me.
-END-
To the Reader:
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this very special halloween episode in the Before the Fall series. I hope you really enjoyed yourself. ;)
For more writing like this, I’ll be posting new stories to my Inkbunny account at https://inkbunny.net/beforethefall, which is my only presence related with this content. I’d be happy to receive your PMs, comments and feedback there.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who did a Halloween story :3 good little spook, may or may not have made the hairs on my neck stand up, but who isn't terrified of someone or something appearing behind you in the dark like that. I'm a grown ass man and I wouldn't go in there xd
Glad to see I'm not the only one who did a Halloween story :3 good little spook, may or may not have
Thanks for reading, bud! I'll have to dig around for your Halloween story when I got some time, if I can disengage the damn blacklist lol. Feature idea for ib: white-list users regardless of blacklist tags :p
(spoilers) the spook here that got me conceptually into the idea was that there could be something out there with all the time in the world to bide its time, mask up and work the long game to lure you into its trap :9
Thanks for reading, bud! I'll have to dig around for your Halloween story when I got some time, if I
I can just direct link it and it'll give you a warning screen to click through, but it's exceptionally dark, even moreso than my first story so I don't want you to feel like you have to read it. The blacklist is there for a reason :p https://inkbunny.net/s/3442260 You definitely did good on the spook, your descriptions are great. There's something about the idea of places that come into and out of existence like that just to fuck with people that just adds it's own special level of creepy
I can just direct link it and it'll give you a warning screen to click through, but it's exceptional
Lmao; dude don't sell yourself short. You're a talented writer, and I'm curious the sort of content you're producing even if it gets blacklisted from my feed. I don't really have moral aversion to most (non-ait) blacklist tags, it's just stuff I don't get off to ;)
After all, it's just fiction. Nobody's getting hurt. And I've actually got a side project I'm outlining right now that's going to be a bit bigger-scale story in the After the Fall universe that involves some pretty fucking hard shit in a gritty grimy cyberpunk setting. :)
Lmao; dude don't sell yourself short. You're a talented writer, and I'm curious the sort of content
I appreciate the praise x3 I used to have my blacklist set the same way, just things that didn't get me off til I realized how many artists were posting great art I was missing out on because they had alt versions in the same posts. I'm looking forward to your big project :3 you're one of like 2 or 3 writers on here where I straight drop what I'm doing to read the second I see a new post, normally I open in an extra tab to come back to a week later when I'm in the mood to read xD
I appreciate the praise x3 I used to have my blacklist set the same way, just things that didn't get
Hahaha! That means the world to me that you'd do that. Obviously I have no expectation of such things but it thrills me that you find yourself so drawn.
That big project..I really want to see it happen. It's going to be a chapter by chapter thing - it HAS to be - but first I need to get a solid fucking foundational arc going and a few sub-arcs. Outlining is a bitch XD
Hahaha! That means the world to me that you'd do that. Obviously I have no expectation of such thing
