Trembling With Fear 7-9-23

Left Behind, by Henry Martin

I tried opening my eyes before I realised they were already open.

Blackness. A blackness so deep it was oppressive, engulfing me like a death shroud. There was something supernatural about it. I was alone. Panic surged through my body.

I raised my back from the hard wall it was pressed against and strained all my senses against the foreboding gloom. 

Am I dead? Have I gone blind? Where am I? Who am I?

A thousand disjointed thoughts ripped through my head in a fraction of a second. My mind blank, as barren as the void surrounding me.

I stretched out my arms in front and to both sides—nothing. Loose gravel and bigger stones covered the ground where I sat. A wild scream burst from my throat.

“Help!”

No answer came, nor any echo. Even the sound had died and the silence was deafening.

I strained my ears, but the only noise came from my shaking body on the surface I sat upon, and the wild pounding of my heart. There was only a living black hole. My head hurt, and I touched it.

“Ouch!” — My fingers found a damp patch on the back of my head and the seeping wound matted my hair. 

The total absence of light wrapped me in a cloak of terror.

Then, my hand encountered something on the ground. I picked it up and memory came flooding back. A helmet. My light. I found the lamp on the hard hat and despite turning the knob to turn it on, it remained black. I shook the battery on my belt, still nothing. Where is my teacher? Where are my friends? I stumbled and fell when they told us to turn off our lights. 

They left me behind!

My bladder emptied and the warm urine gushed out, soaking my pants. I tried to stand, but I wasn’t even halfway to upright before my head smacked against the roof of my prison. I tried to put the hard hat back on, but the wound on my head hurt too much.

Twisted fingers of fear clawed my guts. I screamed over and over.

“Help!”

I received no answer. Fervently, I prayed to God, but He chose to ignore me.

Kneeling, I felt my way around for a few minutes before opening my belt and dropping the useless battery to the ground. 

Coming on this school outing to Grimley Colliery had been a mistake. Left alone in a coal mine, half-a-mile underground. Why did they leave me? I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m only thirteen.

Bursting into tears, I curled up on the floor. Should I wait or try to find a way out? 

After waiting for what seemed like hours, my gut told me I must keep moving, so I crawled with no sense of direction. 

The air was hot and humid, sweat poured down my cheeks and into my eyes,

Sharp pieces of coal and rocks lying on the ground cut into my hands, but I kept moving.

I inched along on hands and knees until my head hit something hard. It was a solid metal door.

A massive padlock sealed the door, but rust flaked off on my fingers. I picked up a rock from the ground and struck it. Three of four blows and the lock smashed.

My questing hand contacted a huge handle, and I pulled at it until the door’s rusty hinges squealed in protest. The door opened a crack. A wave of indescribable stench washed over me. My stomach instantly revolted. I retched and then vomited.

My head throbbed. Pulling with every ounce of my strength, I forced the door wide enough to squeeze my body through it, tearing my clothes. In the distance was a faint blue glow.

The ground sloped downhill. The stomach-wrenching smell grew even more vile, but anything was better than the total blackness. My stomach heaved, but I kept moving in the direction of the light. As I got closer, the tunnel’s walls dripped with thick slime. It was high enough for me to stand.

Rising to my feet, I walked. My fingers crawled through my matted hair until they found the wound again, and I could feel it was still seeping blood. Instantly, my head throbbed as if something inside it was urging me forward.

The stench was getting ever stronger, and a faint sloshing sound made me shudder. 

I stumbled and fell to my knees. The sharp rocks dug into my flesh.

“Ouch!”

My knee hurt real bad. I put my hand on it and felt the warm blood. The throbbing in my head grew louder. The air was getting hotter.

My fingers scrabbled around until I found the thing I had tripped over. It was a piece of rusted rebar, around two feet long. It made me feel comfortable with it in my hand, so I carried it and kept moving.

After a few more minutes, I came to the end of the tunnel. I looked over the edge into the pit and something glowed with a bluish light as it lay in a pool of revolting slime. The thing partly emerged from the depths of the liquid. The noise in my head grew ever louder.

Had I every word in the dictionary, I would be unable to describe it adequately. Such a thing should not exist, yet here it was.

The monstrous creature filled me with revulsion and a desire to kill it, and at the same time, it terrified me. All the devils in hell had nothing on this thing.

It reared from the slime, a seething mass of tentacles, each one with eyes and mouths loaded with sharp teeth. It had smelled the blood. I could feel the creature’s hatred emanating from it in waves and I could feel its hunger for blood.

I screamed in panic and ran back up the slope. Raw terror gripped me in an icy embrace. My heart hammered in my chest. The horror was pursuing me. I could hear it. 

In my haste, I slammed into the metal door and fell. Squeezing my body through the door, ripped my flesh on the sharp edges. Once through, I forced it closed.

I could hear the sloshing sound as the creature came closer.

Fumbling in the dark, I pushed the length of rebar through the two holes where the padlock had been.

Terror gave me the strength to bend the rusty bar into a loop. As it bent, I could feel it crumbling. It would keep the door closed, but for how long? The piece of metal was thick with rust, as was the door.

I had to get out of here. Heart pounding, I crawled, my knees and hands bleeding. The throbbing in my head was excruciating.

A few hundred yards further, stones and rocks blocked the passage. I clawed at them and tried to clear them until my fingernails broke and my hands were slick with blood. The sound of the hellish thing slamming against the door made me work even harder. 

No food. No water. At last, completely exhausted, I gave up all hope. My mouth was so dry I could barely move my tongue and my limbs refused to function. I was alone here, abandoned and entombed. I gave up all hope. Curling myself up, I tried to cry, but there was no water for tears. All that I could do was to wait for death. Fear, exhaustion and dehydration caused me to fall into a merciful sleep, hoping that God would take my soul before the creature came and took it.

Two days later, the search team broke through the rockfall. They found Terrance Dulson, unconscious, dehydrated and barely alive. They transported him to the Infirmary.

###

Tom Oakcliffe picked up the News of the World, which had dropped through his letterbox a few minutes earlier. He checked the soccer results and then saw an article on page two. 

The Legend of Grimley Continues

by Laura Welsch – investigative reporter

Grimely Colliery is once again in the news. 13-year-old Terrance Dulson, the boy trapped down the mine for two days, regained consciousness on Friday. He woke shrieking in an unintelligible language. When a nurse tried to restrain him, he stabbed her six times in her throat, penetrating the carotid artery. She died before they could get her to the operating theatre. Then, he stuck the scissors into his mother’s right eye whilst she was attempting to help the nurse.

The children were on a school trip to see how their grandfathers had worked. Terrance was a quiet boy and he must have fallen unconscious at some stage, and the teacher and his classmates didn’t notice he was missing until they were back on the surface.

Police caught him as he ran naked and screaming out of the Infirmary. They sent him to a hospital for the criminally insane.

“Terrance was always afraid of the dark,” his mother explained when she recovered from the anaesthetic. “Being left alone down there must have unhinged him.”

Grimley has one of the thickest coal seams in Britain, and when it first opened it was one of the most productive. After a major roof fall which killed 5 men, the mine was reputed to be haunted by an evil presence. Men disappeared and some went mad, raving about an evil blue horror which drank men’s blood and devoured their souls.

The mine offered higher pay for men to work there, but there were always deaths and disappearances. It was one of the first mines to close and become a show mine for visitors.

Did Terrance wake some sleeping evil?

###

In the mine, the rusted rebar finally snapped, releasing the star-spawned horror that pulsed with ancient power and unholy life as it renewed its search for blood.