It’s hard to tell where to begin, so I’ll just begin with me, and my friend. We’re spelunkers. I don’t know if you could call us ‘professional’ spelunkers, but we’ve done some of the pretty insane things you see on National Geographic or Discovery or whatever. Y’know, like squeezing through caves hundreds of meters down in the darkness, or doing cave diving, where you put on scuba gear and go through flooded and underwater caves. I’ve seen some pretty breathtaking things, but nothing like what I’ve come to tell you about now.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m Collin, and my partner is Craig. We’re just twenty-somethings with crappy jobs who are always looking for a new ‘fix’, a new place to discover. I think we were drawn to caves because, unlike mountains, nobody yet knows what’s the biggest challenge, or what’s the best cave. We all know about Carlsbad or Mulu, but unlike Everest or K2, we don’t know if Carlsbad is one of the biggest caves. You never know when you’re going to stumble onto the mega-Everest of caving, way deep down. That excitement sticks with you on every expedition, I promise, and it’s what keeps us coming back as often as we can. So, when Craig got a tip that some old Appalachian mines might lead to some insanely deep and undiscovered natural caverns, we knew we had to give it a shot. The caving community is very helpful, and a lot of people had been out there trying out other caves. Craig tracked down a mining ledger for a company that had been used in the 1890s. It detailed employees, locations, and yields, but what interested us what one shaft that had been closed due to ‘mysterious circumstances’. Seriously, it said that shit on the paper. It’s in a town called Coalsborough, Pennsylvania, and I’m still in that shithole now, working with whatever passes for internet. All we knew going in is that nobody else reported ever caving there. We were excited to get the chance to be the first people down there in 120 years.
We shipped our gear ahead of us, flew out, rented a car then head out. It was dark, and chilly. A blanket of fog lay thick on the roads, so we couldn’t see more than fifty feet in front of us. Craig drove. I watched the streetlamps and headlights pass by like yellow ghosts in the mist. I’m not easily spooked, but as we slowed off the paved roads and got on the backwood dirt roads through the mountains, with black trees towering above us, I have to admit I felt a shiver go up my spine.
We go to Coalsborough sometime in the middle of the night. It was everything you’d expect from an Appalachian mining town that hadn’t had a mine for over a century. Only a few hundred surly people. We unpacked our things and headed to the only motel in town, a flickering ‘vacant’ neon sign the only thing that guided us.
A frumpy woman managed the counter, looking half-dead herself. She didn’t greet us when we came in the door - just stared, with drooping eyes.
"We need a room," Craig said helpfully.
"What for?" She asked roughly, even as she got a key from the (full) rack behind her.
“‘Cause we want to sleep, lady,” I replied. Her face didn’t even register my smarm - which wiped the shit-eating grin off of mine. “We’re here to survey the mineshaft in town. It’d actually be great if you could give us directions to it?”
She looked between the two of us, as if thinking. “No,” she finally replied. “We teach our boys t’stay away from there. For good reason. Ain’t nobody’s gone down there that’s come back. Ain’t none. Two city-slickers don’t belong here. I’ll give you a room for free tonight, if you promise to high-tail it first light.”
Craig and I exchanged a look. “Listen, lady…” he began, leaning on the counter, but she cut him short.
"No, listen to me, fancy-pants. Every time a fellow goes down there, they don’t come back… and when they don’t, we hear this… howling.” She looked out the window. The light outside only illuminated a wall of fog, pressing up against the glass, as if it were listening to us. “Howling in them hills,” she whispered. “Howling, for hours. Days. Like the Devil’imself is torturin’ souls down there. I tell you what, there’s something down there. Something t’ain’t meant to be found.”
Craig put down his pack. Bless that mine, he has a way with words. Or lies. Whichever. “We’ll leave in the morning, Mrs…?” He flashed a charming smile. The ass.
"Floyd," she said flatly. His charm was lost on her, but she gave us a key, and we even paid her for the room, despite her offer. Nobody can accuse us of being dishonest.
We flopped down onto the shitty retro mattresses from the 40s. “What’re we gonna do?” I asked, half to myself, half to Craig.
"We’re going in anyway," he said matter-of-factly. "I’m not gonna let hillbilly superstition keep me out. We already spent hundreds on the trip out here, man! Why wouldn’t we go in?"
I shrugged, looking at the yellowed ceiling and the feebly rotating ceiling fan. “Howling in the hills, I guess.”
Craig rolled onto his side. “C’mon, man, you didn’t buy Mrs. Loyd’s spiel, did you? That mine’s been closed for over a hundred years. Of course there are gonna be some ghost stories, but that’s just all the more reason to check it out. See what’s making the noises.”
"Yeah, I guess," I agreed. I didn’t mention the disappearances she had mentioned. Maybe she had made it up, maybe not. I didn’t want to believe her, but I felt something was wrong. Craig did not share my concerns. Maybe it was the fog, or the sad look she gave us when he promised we wouldn’t go. I think she knew he was lying. I think she knew we wouldn’t listen to her. I think, maybe we should have.
We got up early. Packed our things, left the keys on the counter with a note, and we drove up the hills. The mine was close, an overgrown trail of stone and foliage that our Honda could barely navigate. We emerged into a clearing, and we saw it: the reticent Cobalt Co. Shaft 1. It was the only one they dug. It was like an ugly maw, with rotted teeth of wood and rusted iron. The opening was ten meters wide, and it had been boarded and taped up, reading ‘CAUTION’ and ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’. A sign nearby stood alone, warning that trespassers would be shot.
We unpacked.
Spelunking isn’t as simple as hiking. We had helmets, overcoats, kneepads, belts of tools and batteries. It took us almost an hour to get dressed, and all the while that shaft taunted us, daring us to enter. Once we had triple-checked our gear, we began.
The wood was hammered haphazardly to the opening of the mine, and it had been rotted for, likely, decades. We didn’t even need any tools - we kicked aside the barricade and slipped inside, to be greeted by abject darkness. Behind us, light and safety. Ahead, darkness and the unknown.
We turned on our headlamps.
The walls of the shaft were covered with decaying supports which creaked ominously as we walked past. Beneath our feet a wide railway stretched into the darkness, but only the red, rusted iron, as the wood had long ago rotted entirely away. We walked in silence. We had no idea how far down the mine went, but we had resolved to try to get to the end of it before we went back to the surface, so we could at least plan to find the alleged ‘cave’ that Craig’s source had told him about.
We passed by a minecart less than ten minutes of walking in. It was just as rusted as the rails it sat on. It rose out of the darkness and nearly gave me a heart attack, and once we passed it it faded back into the blackness again, to return to being forgotten.
We trudged along, accompanied only by the sound of our feet scraping the dirt and the darkness that constantly threatened to overwhelm our light. On all sides, it felt like the darkness was pressing in on me, trying to suffocate me. Even with a wide beam, it still felt like I could barely see a few feet in front of me. It felt like it was getting worse. “Hey Craig,” I called, hoping my voice wouldn’t betray my nervousness. “Is your lamp getting dimmer, too, or is it just me?”
I heard a grunt from beside me. I looked at him and nearly jumped. His face was stony and humorless, and he didn’t even spare a sideways glance at me as my light hit him. “We need to keep going,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure, anymore. “No, man, maybe we shouldn’t,” I said, stopping. Our footsteps stopped echoing, and my ears rang in the dead silence that settled between us. “Look at these support beams, man, it’s a wonder this place hasn’t collapsed. I don’t think this maybe-cave is worth maybe-dying over, Craig.”
With a weird look, he looked at the support beam closest to him. He almost looked surprised, as if he hadn’t seen it before. Reaching out, he grazed his hand across its surface - and pulled it away when the wood crumbled beneath his fingers.
"See man, I told you this shit isn’t safe," I pointed out. I felt like I was being a stick in the mud, but I couldn’t deny I was feeling full-blown fear at this point. Even as we stood there, I felt my light growing dimmer. I reached into my waist belt and pulled out the spare lamp. Turning it on did nothing. It wasn’t the lamp. It was the mine. "Seriously, Craig, we need to -" I paused. Craig was just standing there, his burly framed turned away from me. He was just taking handfuls of wood from the support beam - and that’s when I realized that it wasn’t wood.
It was mushrooms.
He was pulling big, broad, flat black-capped mushrooms off of what must have once been the support beam but was now no more than mulch. They weren’t like mushrooms I’ve ever seen before. When he dropped them, they withered rapidly, like watching decay in fast-forward, and they were practically dust by the time they reached the ground. Spores drifted in their wake, up to Craig and into his nose.
It also occurred to me that these mushrooms were the only thing keeping the mineshaft open. I looked up, and sure enough, every piece of ‘wood’ was actually just a thick colony of mushrooms. And Craig was tearing that support down. “What the fuck!” I yelled at him, backing away. “Stop, you’ll bring down the fucking roof! We. Need. To. Go!”
Craig paused his destruction - and he jerked his head towards me. Quite literally - I heard it crack as he looked over his shoulder to me. Even in the dim light with a haze of spores around him, I could see the way his pupils dilated, the way his eyes seemed to be as empty and as dark as the mine we were in. “No,” he said. “We must go deeper.” He turned and began to walk methodically forward, inward, like a man being marched to death row.
That’s when I saw the eyes.
Not his eyes… I saw others, in the darkness. I turned to watch him go, nonplussed, when the light from my lamp reflected back at me from two, head-level height points in the darkness, right where Craig was walking to. I froze, and they froze, for only a heartbeat, before they turned and disappeared once again into the ocean of impenetrable darkness. Craig marched diligently on, his own headlamp becoming dimmer and dimmer until his silhouette disappeared, melding imperceptibly with the darkness. I was too frightened to call after him. I was left alone, with only the sound of his distancing steps and the cloud of spores moving steadily towards me, filling the passage between me and him.
I ran.
I felt warm urine on my leg. I’ve never been much of a sprinter, but I sprinted for every damn yard to the exit. The calm dripping of water and patter of footsteps was replaced with the pounding of my heart and my feet. I thanked every god I knew when I saw the light of the barricade, even though I didn’t think anything was following me. I wormed through the entrance we had made, and then put the wood back into place, breathing hard.
I hopped into the car, not bothering to take off my gear, and drove back into town. Now I’m in the bar on my laptop. I had to beg, but the bartender let me onto his internet that he uses for taxes.
The sun is just now beginning to set, and ever since I was a kid I’ve never been so afraid of nightfall. The idea of any darkness… it terrifies me. I fear I’ll look outside and see those horrible eyes looking back at me, only to disappear again. I’m writing this because I can’t leave Craig, and as afraid as I am, that man is my friend. If I were down there, I think he’d come and help me.
So, I’m going back in tomorrow. Alone, it would seem, because nobody here can help me. I even thought about calling the police, but, we were trespassing - and I don’t think that they’d be too keen on going in, especially since they’ve never gone in after the other people who’ve disappeared in there before.
I want help. I’ve never dealt with this before and nobody here can help me and nobody else will believe me. I’ll come back and write about what I hopefully discover tomorrow. I don’t know what caused Craig to go crazy like that, but I’m going to find out.
—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta
Comments