“Ready?” Sanders asked.

  “You’re sure the ghala aren’t here now?”

  “One hundred percent sure. They only stay in their lair after dark when it’s their mating season, and that’s winter.”

  Kurt loaded his five-round clip. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  They slung their rifles, turned on handheld lights. Entering the manway was like stepping into a Freudian nightmare. A queer, warm draft siphoned overhead, bringing fetid odors of rotten wood, niter, and decay. The dripping sound could be heard even this far out. Sanders let the spool of line unravel as he followed the uprooted trolley rails deeper into the mine. Kurt struggled to keep up, thinking of Theseus and the Minotaur.

  “What’s that stink?” Sanders asked.

  Kurt shined his light on the crusted deposits. “Sulphur, zinc, saltpeter. It bleeds through the rock. And it gets worse, too.”

  “Should’ve brought a fuckin’ gas mask.”

  Sanders walked slowly, to inspect each stull. Some of them remained in good condition, but most were rotten or swollen by decades of seepage. Further on, he stopped, noticing the sign on the last overhead prop: MAIN SHAFT AHEAD.

  “This is the end of the manway,” Kurt told him. “The stope pit’s about thirty yards in front of us, down that ramp.”

  Sanders pried at the final manway stull with his fingers. The wood came apart in pulpy, termite-infested splinters. “What’s more likely to be weaker, the manway or the ceiling over the main shaft?”

  “Hard to say. The greater weight’s over the pit, but then there’s a lot more reinforcement.” Kurt aimed his light ahead, revealing the inner cavern’s labyrinth of stulls. “How many grenades do you have?”

  “Three, all fuzed M25’s, like the one I dropped at the house.”

  “I say we set them off here, at the juncture. The concussion should bring down the ceiling and the manway as well.”

  Kurt held the light as Sanders set to work and opened the string bag full of things he’d brought from Willard’s. He removed a box of one-inch flathead nails and the three grenades. Then he took the first grenade in his hand, gripped the safety spoon, and pulled out the retaining pin. He threw the pin aside.

  Kurt gulped.

  “It won’t go off unless I release the spoon,” Sanders said, and into the pinhole above the grenade’s pyrotechnic train, he inserted one of the nails. “Safe now.” He handed the grenade to Kurt, and repeated the procedure with the other two grenades.

  Next, Sanders removed three eight-inch shepherd nails and a hammer.

  “Don’t hammer too hard,” Kurt said. “Loud noises and old mines don’t mix.”

  Sanders chuckled.

  Each of these grenades had an additional hole in the striker housing, known as a “tack hole.” (The Army had implemented tack holes for a variety of fuze assemblies during the late Vietnam era, to make booby-trap techniques safer.) Using the tack-holes, Sanders began to nail each grenade to the overhead prop. Kurt glanced up furtively as Sanders drove the nails. The pounding shook loose dust and chips of stone from the manway’s ceiling. The inner cavern bounced back echoes of each blow.

  Lastly, Sanders tied a yard-long piece of line to the smaller flathead nails in the safety-retainer pinholes, then tied the other end of each piece to the original piece of line which ran to the outside of the mine.

  “Done,” Sanders said.

  “Why bother removing the pins? Wouldn’t it have been less complicated just to tie the lines to the rings themselves?”

  “Forget about what you see on TV; it takes about fifty pounds of elbow grease to jerk a pin out of a grenade. That’s why I replaced the pins with nails. The nails’ll come out easy, a quick tug is all we’ll need. This is how we used to booby trap spider holes in the war when we didn’t have any demo.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We go back outside and dig in. When the ghala return in the morning and come back into the mine, we pull the other end of this fishing line, and that will be it.”

  To Kurt, it almost sounded too easy.

  While Sanders double-checked his rigging, Kurt wandered down the haulage ramp, toward the main shaft. He felt drawn to it somehow, challenged to take one last look into the pit. At the causewalk, he shined his light down into the black void. It looked bottomless now, a chasm without end. The dripping echoed up, a maddening almost metallic pap. He could feel heat rising. His light trailed the winze groove from the bottom of the shaft, then stopped at the row of stopes. The pit’s blackness made him reel.

  He stared at the stopes for a long time.

  “This the shaft?” Sanders had come up from behind. He took one look down and said, “My God.”

  Kurt continued to stare.

  “Come on,” Sanders said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I have to go down and see.”

  “See what?”

  “The stope,” Kurt said. “I have to see what’s inside the stope.”

  “You got some sure-fire shit for brains. This place is rigged to blow.”

  Kurt began shaking the rusted ring ladders which descended to the stope ledges. He needed to find one that would hold his weight. “I’m going down,” he restated. “You said yourself that the ghala won’t be back for a couple more hours. This will only take a minute.”

  “These ladders are rusted clean through. You’ll break your neck, you moron.”

  Kurt didn’t know what suddenly impelled him to want to do this. The mystery of the stopes beckoned him, prodding his blackest curiosity. He needed the final proof to what a day ago he would’ve dismissed as pure insanity.

  “There’s nothing in that stope but bones,” Sanders called after him. “It’s skeleton city down there.”

  Kurt wasn’t listening. At last he found a ring ladder that had remained secure.

  “You’re really gonna do this?” Sanders said. “You’re really gonna be this stupid?”

  “That’s right.” Kurt climbed onto the ladder and began to go down.

  Sanders said, “Shit,” and followed him.

  The ladder wobbled slightly but held. Kurt descended with great care, testing each rung. He made a point not to look down.

  “This is crazy,” Sanders complained above him. “This rickety piece of shit’s gonna break apart. Then we get to do free-falls without chutes.”

  Kurt angled out of the safety ladder and stepped out onto the first-level catwalk. From there he took another ladder down to the next level. He moved slowly along the cat, grasping pitons for support when he could. Sanders cursed faintly behind him.

  Kurt stopped at the side of the orepass, the entry to the stope where Higgins had died. He felt dead himself for a moment, his heart still, his brain inert. Did he doubt the safety of the stope? Sanders was certain the ghala weren’t here now. It seemed that what he feared was what drew him. Death in there, Kurt thought. Skeletons. Emptied skulls. Waiting for me to see it all.

  Sanders caught up to him.

  Kurt took a deep breath and entered the stope.

  A stench hit him like a blast from a cracked steam pipe. It was hot in here, the air viscid as syrup; he could barely breathe.

  Sanders entered as if wading in muck. “This place stinks worse than a corpse pit. What the fuck are you trying to prove?”

  Kurt didn’t answer. He roved his light back and forth over the longwalls. The stench rose; he tried breathing through a handkerchief, but that was a joke. As the stope began to veer, he found the first of what he was looking for.

  Bones. Stripped ribs. Femurs split and sucked of marrow.

  “See? I fuckin’ told you,” Sanders said, gagging.

  Kurt’s light played at his feet. Sections of spine lay like big, malformed spools. Fillings glittered up from the teeth of a disconnected jaw.

  He stepped forward, stupefied. Water dripped from a crack in the topwall; bones crunched underfoot. A gnawed hand lay to the left, a stripped foot to the right. At the base of the pass he saw what looked like the top of a grapefruit, but realized with numb revulsion that it was the top of a skull.

  Sanders sounded like he was about to throw up. “We’ve seen enough.”

  “I’m going to check the stope chamber. It can’t be far.”

  Sanders stopped, leaning on his rifle. He spat, gagging, shaking his head. “You’re crazy to want to do this, man. This place is an open grave. You’re gonna dream about this for the rest of your life.”

  “I know,” Kurt said.

  They continued through the orepass. Soon Kurt didn’t even bother to look at what he was walking on. He followed the face of stull-less, trickling black rock. The longwalls drew on, still sharply gnashed by the dredger, which had bored this pass decades ago. A tenuous buzzing droned from up ahead.

  “What’s that?”

  “How the fuck should I know,” Sanders said.

  “Could it be the ghala?”

  Sanders was exasperated, and sick. “I fucking told you. The ghala aren’t here. They don’t stay in their lair at night. If the ghala were here, they’d have torn us to pieces by the time we were two steps into the manway. They only guard the den in the winter, when they spawn.”

  “Then what’s that sound?”

  At last they came to the wooden headrig which marked the end of the pass. Through this would be the main chamber of the stope, what miners called “the hang.”

  Kurt stepped through the rig. The hang was huge, supported not by stulls but pillars of rock which looked much thinner than the OSHA regulations demanded. It was a miracle that this stope had not fallen years ago.

  Now the buzzing was loud and irritating as static.

  With their lights, they combed the sides of the hang for the buzzing’s source, turning a vast circle. The walls were etched cleanly by cutmarks from miners’ hammerbars. The floor lay barren, save for scatterings of twiglike bones. But what was the sound?

  Far left of the hang, they found it. Mounds of things.

  “What the hell is this?” Kurt said.

  As they approached, Kurt stumbled on something. He cast his light down. At the base of a pillar lay several heads. Kurt’s light remained on one. Long, matted hair and clumps of beard, lipless, eyeless, but intact enough for recognition. It was Lenny Stokes’s head.

  Sanders nudged him on. The buzzing and the stench seemed to coat them like glue. Their lights fell on the mounds, which had been stuffed into an undercut in the hang. The mounds were black and seemed to shimmer with movement.

  “Good Christ.”

  “Oh, no,” Sanders said. “Oh fucking no.”

  The mounds were bodies, or pieces of bodies, covered by blankets of cavern flies. Kurt prodded the mass with an iron rod. The flies lifted in a swarm of swirling, buzzing black.

  Some of the bodies had been dismembered, others remained whole. At least a dozen bodies had been packed into the undercut, but they all seemed heinously bloated, as if the torsos had been first hollowed out and then filled with something.

  Sanders stared speechless, his eyes riveted to the swollen, putrescent mass. The bodies seemed melted together.

  “There—there’s something in them,” Kurt gasped. “They’re stuffed with…something.” With the rod he forked some of the bodies out of the undercut, stirring a miasmic stench and slops of maggots. Enslimed bodies flopped out as if deboned. Shapes seemed to move beneath the bloated bellies. At first Kurt thought that the ghala must be storing the bodies as a food supply for winter, but then the iron rod punctured one of the distended bellies, which immediately burst, as if under pressure. The hole the rod had made split wide, pouring forth a lumpy, liquid mass of—

  “Eggs,” Sanders aid. “Larvae. The ghala are spawning.”

  They were a translucent scarlet, each about the size of an avocado. Kurt popped one with the rod, and it effused a vile, thick fluid. When they’d spilled onto the floorwall, they began to move slightly, twitching, and there were so many. Dozens of larvae must have been ensiled into each corpse.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Sanders groaned.

  “You said the ghala only spawn in winter!” Kurt yelled.

  “Well, I guess I was fucking wrong!” Sanders yelled back.

  Kurt grabbed Sanders by the collar. “Does this mean that the ghala are in the mine? Right now?”

  “Yes.” Sanders’s voice was very hoarse. “Yes,” he said again.

  They turned and ran. They stumbled over bones and line rods and chunks of ore. Kurt meant to run full speed out of the stope, but Sanders had to nearly tackle him at the headrig. “Shithead. You want to run right into them?”

  Kurt was livid with anger. “Goddamn you, you said they only spawn in winter, you said they wouldn’t be in the mine.”

  “You’re the asshole who wanted to come down here!”

  Kurt supposed that a fistfight at this time would not be very practical. Sanders shook his head and said, “Damn, I can’t believe I could be that dumb.>, b

  “Neither can I!”

  “I didn’t think of it till just now. It’s true; they only spawn during the winter. But winter in Riyadh is about the same temperature as Maryland now.”

  “That’s just great, that’s just fucking great.”

  Sanders pointed to the mouth of the pass. “Is this the only way out of the stope?”

  “No,” Kurt said. “Each stope generally has two orepasses. The other pass for this stope is on the other side of the hang.”

  “Good. That means we can split up.”

  “Split up! What the hell for?”

  “One of us has to make it back outside to set off the grenades. Splitting up will increase those odds.”

  “Shit,” Kurt said.

  “You take the other orepass, I’ll take this one. The guy who makes it out of here first waits five minutes, then pulls the cord.”

  Kurt’s mouth fell open.

  “It’s the only way to do it,” Sanders said. “If we stay together the ghala only have one target to go after, but if we separate, that gives them two targets to worry about.”

  Kurt stared at Sanders. He knew he was right, but he felt doomed just the same.

  Sanders turned on the two flashlights taped to his rifle. “Good luck,” he said.

  “I think we’re both going to need a lot more than that.”

  “Don’t be too sure. I’ll see you outside.”

  Sanders disappeared into the black of the pass. Kurt scrambled to the other side of the hang, wincing as he passed the undercut full of larva-stuffed corpses. With the double flashlights on his rifle, he combed the hangwall for the second ore-pass out. Just as he was growing frantic that there was no second pass, he spotted the heavy headrig in the twin flashlight beams. His exit to the catwalks.

  Kurt sprinted into the second orepass—

  —and then stopped cold.

  What he saw taking place before him was far more than his mind could behold in that split-second glance. He saw two things. He saw the mangled body of Officer Mark Higgins stretched out on the floorwall. And crouched above it was one of the ghala.

  The thing was swollen huge, pregnant with larvae. From its own abdomen stretched a ribbed tubelike ovipositor, the other end of which disappeared into Higgins’s dead mouth. The ovipositor was extending, working its way deeper down Higgins’s throat. Kurt could see the shapes of larvae moving down the heinous umbilical, as the ghala began quickly transferring its spawn from its own belly into Higgins’s eviscerated corpse.

  Kurt broke from the freeze. Outraged, the ghala looked up. Kurt raised his rifle, took aim, and fired one shot. The report cracked an echo like a cannon.

  The ghala flinched. The bullet missed.

  Kurt back-stepped, nervously clearing the chamber for the next round. Raw-boned in the light, the ghala rose, a living monstrosity. Its coarse muscles and ropelike veins contracted beneath gray, enslimed skin. The sickly glistening ovipositor began to retract.

  Kurt was caught in its spheroid, black sight. He cracked off two more rounds.

  The ghala flinched left in a blur. The bullets missed.

  The rifle wasn’t working. The ghala remained crouched, cocked back on stout, sinuous legs. Kurt was finished, and the ghala seemed to know this. It wasn’t afraid—it was mocking him, playing with him as a cat does a mouse.

  Then its back arched, separating the huge knots of its spine. The taloned, three-fingered hand reached out. The ghala lunged forward.

  Kurt thought his heart had suddenly shrunk to the size of a walnut. But he didn’t waver. He squeezed off one more shot.

  The bullet caught the ghala in the shoulder, knocking it flat over Higgins’s corpse. Pain drew the sharp hollows of its face to black slits; it released a bellow nearly as loud as the rifle shots.

  From above came a heavy, regular bumping sound. The concussion of the rifle slugs had caused a tremor in the ridge. Behind him two stope pillars crumbled. Something was about to go.

  Lurching, the ghala rose back up. As it sprung forward, the orepass collapsed.

  Kurt closed his eyes. He leaned against the longwall, dropping the rifle to cover his head with his arms. The bumping increased; he could hear the rock planes of the stope shifting all around him. Pulverized stone ground out of the ceiling; more pillars crumbled. Then the entire rear hang shifted out, its wall of dense rock drawing even, diagonal cracks. The wall broke and slid forward in a wave of chunks of ore.

  Kurt was kissing the longwall, waiting to be crushed by the slide. Behind him came a clapping, cacophonous roar.

  Good-bye, Vicky, he was able to think. I love you, I love you, I—

  The bumping stopped. The stope held.

  Aloud, Kurt muttered incomprehensible words. The dust began to settle, sticking to his sweat, which now popped through his pores like bugs. He picked up his rifle and shone its lights into the orepass.

  Rock had swallowed the ghala whole, save for one long-boned hand which hung out of the mass of collapsed ore.

  “How’s the fit, you ugly fuck,” Kurt said.

  Then the hand moved. Rocks began to pop out of the mass. The ghala was shouldering its way out.

  Kurt ran backtracking across the stope. If the first orepass had also collapsed, this would be his grave. He dashed through the headrig, expecting to run full-faced into a mountain of ore. But it never happened. The first pass had held.