Billy's father paused for the first time since beginning. He drew in a breath that seemed to last forever, pulling the air in the room down under the bed, and I bit back the compulsion to tell him to stop, to save some for the rest of us.

There was plenty of oxygen to spare.

Of course there was.

Of course.

♫

Thirty minutes later, the gate opened for the last time. Hot air belched into the cage where Carl stood alone with Mike and Gabriel.

"Home sweet home," said Mike.

"Indeed, amigo. Indeed."

"This weather, don't it just remind you of Méjico?"

"I'm from Texas, pendejo."

"Same difference."

The pair stepped off without looking back. Carl thought of staying right where he was, fuck you and fuck you and fuck the basement, he'd find himself another job, one out in the sun where he could get a tan while he worked. He'd build houses, cell towers, anything. Who cares if he was terrified of heights?

The gate started to close.

Carl slipped out.

Loading Station F, or Level F, was a tenth the size of the level above it and one hundredth the size of Loading Station A. Its craggy walls were braced by tinder beams. Carl could hear those beams creaking sometimes. Sometimes he could hear them creaking when they weren't. Around the shaft a cluster of LEDs hung from the low ceiling. Too many lights, too bright. They scrubbed the dark out like a germ, cleaned each and every nook of shadows. That was unnatural. That was dangerous. A man works under those lights long enough and he forgets where he is. He lets his guard down and one day the power goes off and he's gone, not a man anymore, not even a human, just a piece of nothing digested inside the guts of the mountain.

A driller blocked the way. Carl squeezed by it to find Gabriel sitting on the explosive's safe and idly swinging his legs. Across from him was Level F's solitary Porta-Potty. Carl could hear some grunting going on in there. Not to mention other sounds.

"Be a pal, Rascal, and open this thing." Gabriel kicked the safe's heavy black door with his heel. "Dear Mike is all blocked up inside. He requires a wee pop to clear things up."

"Get off," said Carl.

Gabriel smiled and went on swinging his legs, beneath his skinny ass enough ANFO to launch him to the surface of the mountain. There was a safe like this one on every level of the mine but the basement, which could hardly be called a level at all, and the combination for each safe was known only by one man (except for old asshole McCormick, the overseer, who had the combination to all of them). Carl was one of the lucky few chosen. Why was that? Not out of respect. And certainly not trust. No. He was picked because he had spent thirty years at Blackstone's heels, following the company across the country like a good little doggie, and so what if that good little doggie wet the rug once in awhile? That's what rolled-up newspapers and deep, deep underground digs were made for.

Carl turned away from Gabriel and the safe. There'd be no explosions today, unfortunately. The boom work, as his father used to call it, had all been finished last evening. What remained now was the dead work, a week straight or more of pickaxe-ing and wheelbarrow-ing, of moving rubble from point A to point B in the hope of finding something that glittered behind the rock.

Carl sat down in the transpo cart parked at the tunnel's entrance. He pressed a button to start the electric motor.

"Hey," Gabriel shouted, "that's our ride."

Carl grinned his way off into the mountain at a bumpy eight miles per hour. Passages of gloom stretched between each light fixture. Dust hazed the air behind him. After a year of turning up little more than sedimentary rock, Level F had been all but abandoned. Gabriel and Mike kept house here alone, running the heavy machinery that ran the floor's one final active dig. Lucky bitches.

Heavy machinery couldn't even reach the basement.

Carl passed the turnoff for the ramp that led down to the sump, which sat at the true bottom of the mineshaft, collecting all the runoff water and chemicals from the levels above. He passed an outlet filled with rusting equipment and soon arrived at a fork in the road, where a secondary drift branched off from the main tunnel.

He left the cart there for Mike and Gabriel, but not because he had a choice.

The drift was only three feet wide.

Carl lifted his hardhat and ran a hand through his damp hair. This part of the journey always reminded him of that moment, hiking in the woods, when you leave the foot-trampled path for the underbrush. The trees squeezing in on both sides, heavy boughs forcing your head down, branches scraping at your arms. The first tickle of disorientation as you realize nature is choosing your route for you.

Carl was in the earth now.

He was the earth's.

Somebody had dug this channel, not him, but somebody like him. And still he couldn't escape the feeling that he was going where the mountain was letting him go, where the mountain wanted him to go. The walls sweated and the ceiling dripped. LED lamps shone on rock that hadn't seen sunlight since the sun was born. Each lamp glowed just long enough for him to trigger the next. As the way ahead revealed itself, darkness walled in the way he had come.

Carl slowed his pace, the air thick and sour in his throat, like a whiskey he couldn't swallow. He was breathing harder. He couldn't help it. The lamp behind him seemed miles away. He paused at a curve in the path and bent over to pick up a large pebble. Then he followed the curve around until the last little bit of light was swallowed. Carl stopped, standing on black, wrapped in black, black velvet cloth pressed to his eyes.

Nothing, a voice whispered inside his head. You are nothing.

He threw the rock up high. Twin flashes went off above, pop, pop, washing the enormous space around him in light. This was what a successful dig looked like. An ore deposit had been discovered here and then stripped away layer by rocky layer, leaving a great big emptiness, a ballroom below ground. He looked at the LEDs fixed to the rounded ceiling, cursing the dipshits who had hung them there, so far up the motion sensors didn't do a damn bit of good unless you chucked something at them. Thirty seconds until the lights turned off again. Now twenty-nine. Now twenty-eight.

Carl walked across the ballroom and stopped before the hole in the floor. It was as wide as a well, and as deep. Every single inch of its fifty vertical feet had been carved out slowly, painfully, by hand-operated drills.

. . . twenty-three, twenty-two . . .

He kicked his legs over the edge, gripping the top rung of the ladder. Then he started down fast.

. . . eighteen, seventeen . . .

His hardhat wobbled.

. . . twelve . . .

His palms grew slick.

. . . seven . . .

A wild glance down told him he was halfway. The bottom of the shaft was blanketed in shadows.

. . . two . . .

Sweat dripped into his eye.

. . . one . . .

He blinked, and there was darkness. Hooking an arm through the ladder, Carl wiped his hands off one at a time. He continued down blind. His breaths sounded strange, layered, like there was someone in the shaft with him. Breathing with him.

Only echoes, he told himself, only echoes.

Eventually, Carl lowered his foot for the next rung and felt it settle on solid ground. He turned a careful ninety degrees, stretched out his arms, and took three long strides away from the ladder.

A light flickered, followed by a second and a third.

He had arrived at the basement.

♫

If we were in a movie, this was the part where Billy would have turned to us and said, "You may want to sit down."

He didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

Ash and Nip took seats by Bitchmaster and hugged their legs tight to their chests.

♫

Carl reached for the flask in his inner breastpocket. He twisted the cap off and enjoyed a long, slow swallow. It wasn't a very leaderly thing to do, but life was full of shouldn't haves and did anyways. Just look at the crack between his ex-wife's legs and what had come from that. Or the original miners of Widow's Peak, when it was dug this deep in 1978. The company had to send down crazies and softskulls, guys like Leonard Higgins who couldn't even talk right, and what happened next?

One big bloody mess, that's what happened next.

As warmth filled his stomach, Carl headed down the tunnel. It made the one upstairs look spacious by comparison. He ducked his head and hunched his back. Rock squeezed him on both sides, rubbing at the sleeves of his coat. He would have taken the damn thing off by now, except then he'd have to carry it, which would tie up one of his hands and make it harder to feel his way forward. God, it was hot. Like the pocket of air below a blanket after you've been breathing into it all night. Carl stepped down and felt a warm splash. An apple-sized LED woke up inside a crevice, revealing the murky water pooled around his boot. He continued on with a grunt.

It was a joke, all a joke. Even if he and his crew stumbled on a cache of copper down here, like Blackstone's personal geologist insisted they would (strata-this and strata-that), it'd take six months to widen the tunnel and install the elevator to haul their treasure up to Level F.

Speaking of his crew, where the hell were they?

He should have been able to hear them by now.

Carl paused, listening, and became aware of the silence in the basement for the first time. Behind the steady trickle of water and his own fast breaths, there was nothing. A black hole of sound. A deep-space quiet.

Maybe they had gone topside to look for him when he hadn't showed up on schedule.

Ha. Funny. Carl never showed on up schedule. Besides, the mine had only one shaft and elevator, not counting the lift used to carry waste and copper back to the surface. His men were down here, had to be down here, unless they hadn't punched in for their shift at all. Unless the three of them were passed out in some dirty motel along the highway, dicks wet and wallets empty. It wouldn't be the first time, would it?

Bastards.

Good-for-nothing, lazy bastards.

Carl started to move when another possibility dawned on him. His crew was down here, and had heard him coming, and now they were huddled somewhere up ahead with fingers to their lips, waiting to jump out. Gotcha, Rascal! Gotcha real good! He crept along, one hand on the rock. The tunnel listed sideways, leaning slowly off center. A light winked on. By its glow he made out the end of the passage, crooked and black. Carl screwed the cap off his flask and took a burning swig. He was smiling.

Somebody was going to scream, and it wasn't going to be him.

Carl hunch-staggered forward, letting up a deep growl from his throat, and leapt out of the passage with his arms raised high in the air. An LED flashed overhead, exposing him. Only him. He stood alone in the cavern he and his men had stumbled upon two weeks ago.

They had been making slow progress with the tunnel, clearing a foot of earth each day, when Carl's drill had punched through the rock and kept going straight up to the handle. As he had pulled the drill out of the hole, air had come with it. Old air, bottled up for thousands of years, maybe millions. Breathing it had been like drinking hot sludge. Carl had dropped his drill and run, shoving his crew along ahead of him. But the fire boss's gas monitor had turned up nothing deadly, and so right back down they had come.

Carl scanned the cavern. It was a treasure to be sure, but Blackstone only cared about treasure that could be exchanged for currency. Stalactites reached up from the floor and connected to stalagmites reaching down from the ceiling. There were ranks and ranks of these formations, some so thin at the center the rock was almost transparent. They reminded him of trees, dead for centuries and starved down to nothing.

Looking at them made his mind spin in weird directions.

Looking at them made him picture the woods of Honaw sucked dry, as white as bone.

Carl realized he was panting. He pulled off his coat and set it beside a case of water bottles. His shirt was pasted to his chest. He could see his heartbeat shudder against the wet cloth. Walking on the balls of his feet, he moved deeper into the cavern.

"Block?"

A shrunken voice called back to him. Block . . . ock . . . ock?

"Cricket?"

Crick . . . et . . . et?

"Mancini?"

Man . . . see . . . nee . . . nee?

Shadows stitched together around his feet. Carl waved his arms. Where was the second LED? Why hadn't it turned on yet? They had brought down one of the big ones used to light the main tunnels. He stepped over a muddied drill lying on the ground. Ahead of him stood a clearing where none of the dead trees grew. The clearing had started off small and slowly expanded thanks to the ANFO in Level F's safe. Piles of rock reached as high as his waist. He picked his way carefully through the debris. When he reached the cavern wall where yesterday's blast had been set off, he stopped moving, stopped breathing. The rubble had been cleared away. In its place was a black gash. An incision of darkness, cut six feet high into the stone.

It must have been here the whole time, he thought, waiting to be uncovered.

Carl walked toward the opening, tugging at the bristly hairs on his chin. A scene had begun to form in his head, a three-man play starring his crew. Taking the 8:00 AM elevator down, two hours earlier than Carl. Walking side by side down Level F's tunnel, then single file down the drift to the ladder. Mancini, his sleeves rolled up to show off his always shining biceps. Cricket, his Surry County Club sports cap tucked underneath his hardhat. Block, the skinniest of the bunch and also the brightest, his forehead scarred from a thrown brick in his childhood. They arrive here without him and get to work moving last night's rubble, and somewhere along the way that rubble starts moving itself, tumbling down like a curtain whose ties have been severed, revealing a crack in the wall. They explore it. They do. Of course they do. And the LED? They carry it with them, shining light onto the stage behind the curtain.

Which led to the question:

Where was that light now?

Carl stopped in front of the fissure. Around it hung that same smell of oldness, soupy thick. He stared into the dark.

The dark stared back.

"Turn around. Turn around and go."

He stepped inside.

____ ____

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Poor Things, please consider hitting the vote button—it will help other readers find the story. Comments are always appreciated, too. Seriously, I love them.

Coming up on Friday, Billy's dad sees something that was never meant to be seen . . .