Echoes in the Hollow Mine: The Alien Below
The old mining town forgot the night the mine was shut. The rails smiled with rust, and a wooden sign still hung crookedly: Galloway Shaft. I returned not for a story, but to answer the echo that wouldn’t quiet itself. At midnight, the wind carried the scent of wet limestone and something else—cold and very far away.
Beyond the gate, the air pressed against my chest, a gravity that pulled the notes from my skull. I followed the rusted rail, counting the seconds between dripping water and a distant thrum that didn’t belong to any engine. The walls bore marks—careful, measured lines that formed a circle around a black seam. The circle was a tongue speaking in syllables of stone.
We learned to listen, not to shout. The mine speaks in breaths, and if you answer, you become a whisper in its mouth.
At the heart of the corridor, the mine opened into a chamber where the air felt older than rock. The glow was not a flame but a patient light that hovered between warmth and chill. A presence moved with the grace of something not made to walk, but to glide between dimensions. The alien below did not announce itself with claws or teeth; it arrived as geometry bending, a shape that refused to be contained by human nouns.
- Rhythmic echoes that don’t match any drill pattern—like a heartbeat buried beneath the earth.
- Strange sigils etched around a seam of ore, glowing faintly whenever I blinked.
- A chill that crawled along the skin, as if a breath pressed against the nape of the neck.
- Pinpoint whispers that rearranged themselves whenever I tried to listen closer.
When I stood before the seam, it parted not with an explosion but with a sigh—the kind that precedes rain in a desert. A form not quite a creature and not entirely light pressed through, settling into the air like a geometry that refused to be named by human tongue. The alien below did not seek to erase me; it wanted a channel, a pause between worlds, a listening thread for things living in borrowed time.
I stepped back as the chamber closed around the glow, the echo of an otherworldly chorus fading into the limestone. Outside, the town stirred with the sense that something changed, as if the earth remembered a contact made in the dark. The mine kept its secret, but every night the ground remembers the echo that fought gravity—and won, just barely.