Life in Deep Rock

"All I did," Kassiter said, careful to keep Maggie out of this, "Was drop some artifacts into some of those bore holes and cover them up. It might be a long shot, but if those things find them, they might replicate them like they do with the ammonites and other fossils. If they do, we have proof. If not, well, that might not prove anything."

"I can't believe I'm doing this," John said, checking his digital camera, "But all right. Show me where you buried them."

They walked over the rock-strewn ground, now running with rills of rain water. Water was dripping from the rocks and the wind picked up, lashing them with more rain.

"I staked them," Kassiter said. "See? I drove little wooden stakes into the holes. These stakes were just laying around."

"Old surveying stakes." John nodded. "Yeah, they're all over the place. There's one. That one there."

An old weathered one by two was sticking out of the rock face at chest height, held in place with rock flakes and stones. Kassiter grabbed it and wiggled it out, then cleared out the detritus with his fingers as thunder pealed above their heads. he dug his fingers in and scooped out more rock chunks and mud and let it fall and John leaned over, shined his light on a rock and picked it up. He held it to his eyes and then showed Kassiter.

It was a perfect replica of a carved wooden stake—a one by two chiseled to a point, made of seamless sandstone, perfect even down to the grain of the wood and some stubborn knots.

"I'll be damned!" John said. "I'll be fucking god damned!"

Kassiter felt laughter welling up in his throat like hysteria, wild and panicked, but he fought it down. he reached into the hole with his fingers and found the seed—an old screwdriver he'd taken from the back of his truck and shoved into the hole, now rusted and corroded from its months in the wet rock. He threw it aside and felt back in the hole.

"Give me the pick. The pick."

"Here," John said, moving past him. "I know these rocks."

He lifted the pick and sent the point into the soft rock, knocking off a flake the size of a dinner plate, then another. Three more strikes and he'd uncovered the base of the hole. He bent down to examine the chips, but Kassiter was already on his hands and knees holding one of the to his face, his eyes wide. It contained a stone relief of the screwdriver, still embedded in the rocky matrix and made of the same limestone, only glossy and finished, just like the fossil John had been working on that very afternoon. He looked up at John in astonishment.

"They're here!" he said. "They're really here!"

"What else you got?" John stormed past him in the rain, headed for the next stake. He pulled it out and pulled the rocks from the hole, not even bothering to look for the stake replica in the dark.

He pulled out an old, filthy pair of sunglasses encrusted with sand and grime and tossed them aside, then started chipping at the hole. The rock fractured in smooth lines, and there, embedded in the rock, was a pair of stone sunglasses, the lenses as smooth as glass. He dropped the pick and stared at them as if he'd struck a vein of pure gold, and the blank eyes of the glasses stared back.

"I must be nuts!" he said. "I swear this isn't happening!"

"This doesn't mean anything," Kassiter shouted through the rain. "This could be some natural phenomenon, some kind of pattern-crystal thing. There should be more. More of these things, scattered around the quarry. We have to find them somewhere else to prove it. Where do you find the most fossils? The ammonites? We have to look there."

"The south face," John said immediately, then caught himself. "No. No, we can't go there We can't dig around there. It's dangerous. Too unstable."

But Kassiter had already picked up a shovel and was off. John could see his flashlight bouncing in the dark.

"Hold it Kassiter! Hold it! You can't go there! That rock's spalling all the time, especially when it rains. It ain't safe! God damn it!" He shouldered his pick and hobbled after the younger man, but just then there was that sound again, that sibilant hissing beneath the ground, like a million little stones coming to attention and falling back as a wave passed by. It felt like the earth was alive, like there was some intelligence down there in the very rock, shifting beneath his feet.

"Kassiter! Kassiter? Are these things dangerous? Can these things hurt us?" But the younger man was already far ahead, his light beam playing over the south face a hundred yards away.

There was a paralyzing flash of lightening but the sound that followed wasn't thunder. It was the grinding hum of things in the earth, followed by the rending crack of rock splitting, breaking off the south wall of the quarry and shattering as it slid down to the ground in a solid sheet, like plate glass. There was no dust. It was too wet for there to be any dust, but already John could see Kassiter's light shining on the wall, on the new rock that had been exposed. There in the light of his torch like some grim monument or open-air catacomb were the fossilized replicas of Maggie—a score of them— the shoulders and arms, the naked hips and legs, the pert noses and expectant lips, all growing from the living rock, perfect copies, even down to the tarp and rope he'd used to cover the body with—a gallery of dead Maggies, done in living stone.

John watched in horror as Kassiter's light picked out first one then another, then the beam wavered and pointed to the ground as if no longer able to look.

There was that rushing sound again, all around him, as if circling him, a kind of victory lap, then it disappeared, and at last, here was the sound of thunder.