Echoes from the Alien Shaft
The mine sat silent since the last blast, a jaw of rusted rails and stone that refused to die. When rain spilled into its mouth during a storm, it sounded like a chorus from some forgotten planet.
I returned after a decade, drawn by a rumor that the old shift boss kept his secrets in a lockbox of dust. The entrance yawed like a mouth waiting to speak, and I felt the air tilt with a gravity not my own.
The Descent
Below the surface, the air cooled to a breathless winter. My lamp trembled, throwing halos on walls that were not simply stone but a map of the world I could not read. Fingers of cold pressed along my spine, and I heard a soft, almost musical tone—not a song, but a request.
We did not wake you. You woke us; it is our time to listen.
The shaft spiraled, a throat that swallowed each step. Rail ties curved in ways that made sense only to someone who did not exist in our gravity. The ladders creaked with a language that my skin learned to translate, and every rung pressed a memory into the marrow of my bones.
Signs in the Dark
On the walls, glyphs glowed faintly, like frost breathing on glass. I kept a list in my head, because my notebook was found years later in another mine, miles away, pages filled with a language that didn't belong to us:
- The rock hums when you stay too long in one place.
- Footprints appear behind you, then vanish as if erased by a breeze that isn't there.
- Air tastes metallic, tasting of wind from a distant, uninhabited sky.
- Tools rearrange themselves into strange constellations.
Then came the shift—an echo that did not repeat, but multiplied, a chorus of voices from spaces between the stones. I spoke to the void, and the void answered with a geometry that bent light and time.
The Bottom of the World
At the end of the tunnel, the shaft opened into a chamber that resembled a galaxy bottled in ore. Not ore, but something older: a memory you could hold in your hand if you could bear the weight of it. The alien presence—neither benevolent nor hostile, but patient—wired its patience into the mine like roots, listening for a new stratum of fear to learn from.
I left before dawn, carrying only the echo of that encounter. If you listen at the mouth of an abandoned mine, you may hear what I heard—the long, slow breathing of an intelligence that used our world as a listening post, waiting for someone to wake up inside the Earth again.