The sinkhole opened up under the excavator right after noon.
One moment the machine was chewing through asphalt on Route 15. The next, the earth gave way beneath it with a crack that sounded like thunder. The excavator vanished nose first into darkness, dragging tons of stone and dirt with it.
The crew scattered when the ground began to give way.
When the dust settled, a hole nearly forty feet wide gaped in the middle of the road. Foreman Rick Dawson approached the edge first. “What the hell…”
The beam of his flashlight disappeared into the darkness. But something reflected the light.
Thousands of things.
Bones.
The entire cavern was filled with them.
Animal skeletons. Dear antlers. Cow skulls. Human ribs. Femurs. Vertebrae. Piles upon piles stretching beyond the reach of the flashlight.
The Pennsylvania state police arrived an hour later. By sunset, a recovery team was ready to descend.
Rick hated every second of it. The place smelled wrong. Not rotten. Too dry. Like an old grave left open for centuries.
The recovery team consisted of Rick, two workers named Dale and Hector and one deputy that seemed more annoyed than concerned.
They descended by rope. The deeper they went the colder it became. Their boots landed on a floor made entirely of bones.
The sound was sickening.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Hector’s flashlight swept across the cavern and the color drained from his face. “Jesus Christ…”
At first Rick thought it was just another collapse of bone, another impossible drift of white piled against stone. But the center of the chamber wasn’t a pile. It had depth like something had pressed downward and left a shallow, unnatural basin.
A man lay inside of it.
Half buried. Half exposed. His body sunk waist deep in the skeletons. He was emaciated, his skin stretched tight over his frame, his ribs sharply defined beneath it. His entire body was reduced to something skeletal and fragile.
The deputy moved first. “Sir? Can you hear me?”
The man’s eyes opened slowly. It looked like it cost him everything just to focus. When he finally saw them, panic flared across his face so violently it almost broke into relief.
“Don’t…don’t come any closer,” he rasped.
Rick frowned. “We’re here to get you out.”
The man shook his head in one small, desperate motion. “No…you can’t stand on it.” He said. “It hears you when you step on it.”
The bones beneath him shifted. Not a collapse. Not settling. A response.
A slight ripple moved through the skeletal field around his hips, like something underneath was waking. A femur slid a few inches. A skull rotated slightly, teeth scraping bone.
The man’s breath hitched. “No,” he whispered. “No…don’t…”
The surface around him changed. The bones didn’t simply move aside. They opened. A section of the field depressed inward in a slow, controlled motion. The man’s body jerked downward.
Then something rose. It came up through the bone field without breaking it in a clean burst. The skeletons simply shifted apart just enough to allow it through. What emerged was pale and slick, almost eel like but wrong in its construction. It wasn’t one body. It looked layered, segmented as if multiple thick, corded forms were braided together. Two more slid to the surface, the tendrils flexed independently, each ending in something like a circular jaw. Teeth lined those openings in tight, rotating rings, clicking softly as they adjusted to the air.
The man saw it and made a sound that didn’t fully develop into a scream. “It’s under us! It’s under all of it!”
The thing did not hesitate. One of the appendages shot forward.
It didn’t strike him like an animal hunting prey. It moved with intent. Precise and immediate as though it understood exactly where he was anchored in the sea of bone. The circular jaw clamped down onto his torso just beneath the ribs.
The man’s body jerked upward. The bone field around him shifted. The skeletons that had been holding him adjusted all at once, not breaking free but releasing their grip in sequence. It felt coordinated, like the entire bone bed was part of the same organism.
The man screamed.
The sound was cut short as the second tendril locked around his shoulder. Another snapping into place around his waist. Not tearing him apart, just securing him, positioning him.
Then the pull began. His body dropped first then sank. Then was taken completely as the bones beneath him parted like a mouth swallowing. His upper half vanished into the field while his arms flailed once, desperately, uselessly, before disappearing as well.
For a few seconds nobody moved. The place where the man had been was empty. The bones had already settled back into place, erasing any evidence that a living human being had been there moments before.
The deputy was the first to find his voice. “What the fuck was that?”
No one answered. Rick wasn’t sure he could.
The movement was so subtle at first that he didn’t even notice it. Nearby a ribcage shifted a few inches through the pile. Then a different section stirred. The disturbance spread outward in widening circles. Soon the entire chamber felt alive with motion. Hector slowly swept his flashlight across the cavern floor. The beam traveled over thousands upon thousands of bones before stopping on the far wall. Whatever color remained of his face had vanished.
Rick followed his beam.
At first his brain didn’t register what he was looking at. Pale tentacles were rising from the skeletons. The shapes emerged slowly, displacing bones as they ascended.
Rick’s stomach tightened.
The thing that had dragged the man under the bones seemed large enough at the time. Standing here now, looking across the cavern, he had realized that they had seen only a small portion of whatever lived below. The appendages were surfacing everywhere. Some rose from the center of the chamber. Others appeared near the walls. One emerged less than twenty feet away, lifting itself from the skeletons with unsettling ease before swaying gently from side to side.
The deputy took an involuntary step back. His boot crushed a human skull. The crack echoed through the chamber.
Instantly every appendage stopped moving.
The appendages remained perfectly still for another heartbeat before slowly turning in unison toward the source of the noise. Toward them.
A deep vibration rolled through the bone field beneath their feet. The skeletons rattled violently. The piles near them collapsed inward as something vast shifted below. For the briefest moment, Rick saw something enormous moving beneath the bones, a pale shape passing under the camber floor like a shark gliding in dark water.
Then the tendrils struck.
∼ Kathleen McCluskey
© Copyright Kathleen McCluskey. All Rights Reserved.
Pen of the Damned 