There isn’t much time. If I am going to tell this story, I’m going to tell it now. It’s late, I know, but the dogs are spooked and that means it’s on the way. The skin on my face is peeling. The backs of my hands are raw meat. If I hadn’t found Annie’s old tape recorder, then I wouldn’t have been able to document the facts. I can press record. I can pull a trigger. I’m going to tell the whole story because I know that when they find what’s left of me, or what isn’t, they’re going to ask questions, and I don’t want them…you, whoever you are, to think this was a murder. This was a feeding. You’d better just put down the cause of death as “mauled by animal.” You’ll probably have another name for it soon.

This all started out in the fourth district a year ago when we got bogged down in the war with Iraq. Gas prices jumped a dollar fifty and as any coal man in Kentucky would tell you, expensive Arab oil meant it was time to clean off the dozers. Sixty dollars a ton, that was what did it. Who in western Kentucky had ever heard of that? Those East Kentucky mines got that, sure, but they pulled it out of mountains. That wasn’t cheap. Here we just peeled back the top soil and there it was: money.

After the price went up, every old coal baron got into his equipment barn and started calling back the miners he’d laid off in ‘79. Course, most of them were dead or enjoying black lung settlements so they sent their kids. That’s how I came into this. I was on a road crew running a backhoe when Snodgrass called.

“Pheps,” he said, shortening Phelps like every Butler County septuagenarian does, “your daddy worked for me. Now I got a golden opportunity for you. What’s Scott paying you to run that hoe?”

“Pretty good, Mr. Snodgrass.” I didn’t want to ruin any offer with the truth.

“Would you come work for me for twenty-two an hour?”

“Can I get overtime?”

He laughed at me. “Boy, you’re gonna be begging me for a Sunday morning off. We’ll get going at Aberdeen Grocery at four-thirty tomorrow morning.”

We talked for awhile about the old days, my father, his purchase of the Lindsey land back when everyone thought coal was dead. I was almost off the phone when he asked if I knew a good dozer operator. Two more seconds and I would have been off the phone. Two more seconds and I might not be sitting on my porch with a loaded shotgun and a tape recorder. I’m not saying that all this wouldn’t have still come down eventually had I not recommended Zan. It was in the seam after all, and somebody would have run across it before too long, but maybe, just maybe, if I had gotten off that phone, I wouldn’t be the one waiting to die.

Zan had come back from Iraq six months before. He’d joined the army after high school, encouraged by his recruiter and the possibilities opened up by his unusually high ASVAB scores. His daddy was a dozer operator and so was his older brother. The army would get him out of that terrible inevitability. That was what the recruiter had said. Two months after signing up, Zan was in Felujah, running a dozer in the grand task of pushing down neighborhoods deemed “lost to the insurgency.” It turned out he was genetically predisposed to being a top notch dozer operator. ASVAB stands for “Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.”

I found Zan that very night, lying in his underwear on his blue couch in the den of his pink trailer, smoking pot.

“Come in!” he hollered when I knocked, not bothering to find out who it was.

“Zan, it’s me, Andy.” I called out as a precaution.

“I know, I could hear Annie’s car from a mile away. What’s new? You want to hit this?” He extended the three-foot red plastic bong toward me.

“No, I’m fine. I got you a job.” He pulled a long, gurgling lung-full of smoke as I talked, then held it in, his upper body poised awkwardly upright by the tension of maintaining his expanded chest cavity. Curling fingers of blue-white smoke trailed out of his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, drifting in the stale dead air of the living room and into the cone of light emanating from the television. It was the History Channel showing a documentary called “The Battle for Felujah.”

“They drug test?” I told him they didn’t, and he agreed to meet up with us at four-thirty in the morning.

He was on time. Everyone was; the money Snodgrass had promised was too good. I left the house at four; the stars were bright and cold, as I warmed up the truck and my breath fogged heavily in the pre-dawn November air. Aberdeen grocery was ten minutes drive from the house, but I planned on getting a sausage biscuit down while I was there and buying a bologna sandwich for lunch. Aberdeen grocery would slice off the bologna as thick as three slices at other places, and they steadfastly used real mayonnaise. I came into the grocery and immediately found the crew. Surrounded by the haze of a dozen cigarettes, twelve men sat around the picnic table that occupied the middle of the fishing tackle room. I sat down beside a bleary eyed Zan and ordered a coffee while we waited for Snodgrass to arrive. It was a good crew. I knew three of them well. The rest I knew fairly well. I had played ball with Curtis Ward; he would be a mechanic. Owen Kelley and B.J. Smith would be on equipment. Eric Ingram and his brother, Jay, would be running the trucks. We were all about the same age. Only Johnny Lindsey had experience from the days before the ‘79 bust and, as Johnny was a mute, he wouldn’t be telling any stories. He would be another mechanic.

Our small talk ran in short rounds, punctuated by yawns as the low, wet gurgle of the minnow tank aerators lulled us all to sleep. Occasionally, one of the group would fall into light slumber only to be jolted awake as the table shifted on the ancient and uneven planks of the floor, sending coffee spilling everywhere. Then Snodgrass arrived and we were caravanning north on Highway 70 to the wide open ridge-top fields of the county’s fourth district. Zan rode with me in the old Chevy truck I had resurrected from my yard the summer before. Its front wheels had been scavenged from a smaller truck, causing it to ride at a pitched-forward angle that made your butt want to slide off the cracked vinyl bench seat.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this shit again.” Zan said, as we whipped along the dark, cold, ridge road.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Dozer work. I mean, Christ-sake, dude. I wasn’t meant for this. I can do so much. Remember all those ferns and fossil fish your dad used to get from the shale? You know I learned the name and age of every single species of those things. I was only eight! I should be a scientist or something.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You remember that trip to the Kentucky Museum in the sixth grade? That tour guide was showing off those worm fossils and you told him they belonged to some other species and he tried to say you were wrong, but when we went back in the seventh grade they had changed all the tags on them to what you had said.”

“They were called nautoloids. Yeah, I remember.” We rode along in silence, then Zan continued, more subdued, “When I was in Iraq, we had this job where we were looking for hiding places in some rock outcrops. While I was running some equipment I uncovered some caves. At the end of the day I got down off the dozer and all of a sudden all these towel heads who lived nearby came running up to me screaming and waving their arms and shit. The infantry guys who were with us almost popped ‘em right then and there. One of them spoke some English and managed to convince the guards to come and get me. Turns out they wanted me to cover the cave back up. They said they wouldn’t sleep until the cave was closed. I was shit tired, but they were practically in tears. Kept saying the Djinni will come out.”

“The gin?”

“No, Djinni, genies. Like with the lamps.”

“I thought those were good luck. Three wishes and all that.”

He was quiet for awhile, staring off to a bright star rising on the horizon, “No, that’s just Disney shit. Over there the Djinni are terrible things. They’re like spirits of hate made from the elements. Some of them are just like pranksters, the Djinni from the sky. They steal your goats, knock over your piss pot while you sleep. The ones from underground–” He chuckled. “Well those are the bad ones. They’re imprisoned underground by the gods, or by God I guess now, and they get loose and it’s all your asses. They come down from the sky and eat the skin off whole herds, not one goat, the whole herd. They carry village girls out into the middle of a field and tear their arms and legs off, then when people come to help them they tear off their limbs until the whole village is a big pile of limbless bodies.”

“Well, I know what I would do with three wishes,” I offered lamely. Zan didn’t reply.

Two semis waited at the site. The drivers had already unloaded the two dozers and two end-loaders, and Snodgrass had signed for them. After a brief consultation with a surveyor who showed up in a shiny new dodge truck, Snodgrass gave us our orders.

I was put on one of the end-loaders, a heavy dirt shovel that had seen better days, and dispatched to the middle of the bowl-shaped expanse that made up the Lindsey mine. Zan followed me on the E-6, a mammoth dozer, and Eric brought up the tail in a dump truck. The other crews were dispatched at the back of the five-hundred-acre mine.

We went straight to it. Zan peeled back the topsoil and I scooped it up and put it in the dump. When the truck was full the spoil was packed off to a pile for later use in reclamation. Zan and I worked well together. I could anticipate his moves, his strategy, and before noon we had two trucks packing off our spoil. Zan was good. There were no wasted moves. He seemed able to predict the material under the brown sage grass of the field. He knew rocks were there before he hit them, and when a clean run of clay was found he pushed it hard. We worked like that for the rest of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. After a week of prep, we got into the black.

The seam was not deep. We cut through a layer of clay, then shale, and that was it. The run of coal was around two feet thick and looked good. The crew on top of the ridge had been pulling coal for two days so we were both anxious to get it out of the ground, and get it out we did. We had a smaller crew, thinner seam, and older equipment but, by the second day, Zan and I had already matched the others ton for ton.

When we kicked off at dark we busted on the other crews. “How two dozers and two loaders on a four foot seam can’t keep up with me and Zan can only mean one thing!” I yelled at the ridge crew.

“What does it mean?” Zan called out from the truck bed, shot gunning a beer as he did.

“Pussyitis!” I cried to a reply of ‘fuck-yous’ and the high-pitched throat squeals of mute Johnny’s damaged laughter.

That’s how it went. For a week, a month, all the way to spring we cut and busted the ground. Hundreds of tons became thousands, tens of thousands. The Lindsey mine was rich, unusually rich, and now so was Mr. Snodgrass. We all got raises. Zan and me both got up to forty dollars an hour, and I knew we were the highest paid. Zan moved into a house not far from mine on Green River. I got a new truck. Zan got a motorcycle. Annie started talking about us having kids. That’s how it goes when times are good. Slow changes. Nothing good happens fast. It may seem good, but it’s really just difference playing tricks on you. Abrupt things are hateful to life. I could not appreciate that until recently, so when Zan and me were on my porch drinking beer and half watching the grill on a warm March Sunday and he suggested that we try a new strategy at work, I didn’t have the sense to say no.

“That seam we’ve been chasing, it’s been the same thickness since we started,” Zan said.

“Yeah it has. Nice and regular. No hide and seek.”

“Well I think we’re missing something. We been peeling that thing north to south from day one. It’s time we take a sharp turn to the west.”

“Boss won’t like that. Anyway, he has test drills all over that mine and they don’t show shit where you’re talking about,” I said, taking a pull from my beer.

“Boss don’t know what I know.” He leaned over to me, speaking in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Due west from the strip we’re mining is a seam thirty feet thick.”

“Now how do you figure that?” How indeed.

Strike is the angle a layer of strata takes in its journey through the crust. Most layers of strata pitch at a shallow angle that, not counting faults, crustal deformities, or such contortions as kimberlite pipes, run from the place the strata hits the surface to the point where they meet the gluey depths of hell thousands of feet underground. It’s the little deformities that make the money, and as Zan explained it, just to the West of where our equipment was working six days a week, was a vast pit of coal, deep as hell and thick.

Monday morning we ran the idea by Snodgrass. I did most of the talking, selling Snodgrass on the strike of the seam and fossil unconformities while Zan backed me up on the finer points of geology. I finished off our argument with the “gut feeling” approach. Snodgrass, eyes narrowed, looked at the two of us without speaking. I liked to think he saw a streak of the old wildcatter he used to see in himself. It was the kind of thinking that drove his generation to make dynamite out of fertilizer and blast away at hills while hiding under pickup trucks.

“We’ll see,” was all he said, but while Zan and I worked nearby, he and Johnny did a test bore to the depth Zan had suggested. Thirty feet was an understatement.

It was deep, it was thick, and it was perfect. We had to go and rent a longer bore bit to find out how thick it really was. The coal was high sulphur, as was all west Kentucky coal, but also high BTU. In fact this coal was so high in heat output that the Paradise power plant bought every ton we could produce on spec. We got new equipment. Me and Zan got bonuses. We thought things could only get better. That’s rapid change for you.

By the end of March the Lindsey mine looked like a crater on the moon, as we bore into the giant orb of coal that hid at the bottom. Long, hastily constructed, earthen ramps spider-webbed the gray shale walls where endless streams of dump trucks carried overburden to the rim that now made up the horizon line in all directions. On the lip of the pit a whole army of yellow earth moving equipment waited, looking like dinosaurs posed into a strange tableau. Snodgrass had not revealed the true dimensions of the seam to anyone, and asked us to keep quiet as he signed over our bonuses. “I don’t want to get a bunch of Frankfort busybodies down here. Regulators ran me out the first time around. Longer we can pull this out of the ground without anybody getting too interested the better.”

Nobody came to see it. Nobody came to study it, and we just kept on digging.

The spring thaw held off until April, then came a kind of half-assed spring that doesn’t clean the winter out of your pipes and leaves you feeling stung until August. It was the first chill week of April that we found the bones. I was on the loader trying to dump a shovel load into the dump truck. I knew Zan had kicked the dozer engine off because the endless, bone jarring vibration that surrounded me shifted pitch, causing a tickling in my inner ear and nostrils. I dumped the load and locked the break, turning to see what had happened. I thought it would be a split hydraulic hose, maybe empty of diesel. Instead I saw Zan crouched down in front of the dozer pouring out his soft drink and wiping the liquid around with a blue grease rag. I radioed the driver of the dump truck to hold on, and climbed down from the end-loader to go and see what was going on. As I got close I saw what had stopped him.

In a long arc, running at a shallow radius across the entire layer of coal we had just exposed were hundreds of fossils. Not ferns, nor small lung fish that miners saw with regularity, but giant four-legged monstrosities, eight- and ten-feet long. Their legs were short, a foot long or so. The rear legs had elongated toes and on many of the skeletons I could discern the faint trace of webbing between them. The front legs had shorter, more rotund feet that were tipped in tiny sharp nails. The tail was also short with large protrusions on the individual vertebrae. The heads were shark-like, torpedo shaped with rows of jagged, needle-like teeth turned back at an angle.

“What the hell are these?” I asked Zan.

“I have no clue. I have never seen anything like this. Not in here, not in the upper carboniferous.”

“Are fossils usually laid out in circles?” I asked.

“No.” He looked at the arc of bones that disappeared into the cut and his eyes continued to move around the crater of the mine. “This circle goes around the entire seam. I bet there are more of them further in too.”

“We should stop and call up to Western. I bet they’ll send a scientist down. You’ll be famous.”

He turned to me. His face serious and pale. “No I won’t. When some guy uncovers a bone in his backyard the history books don’t give him credit. They give credit to the scientist who first identified the bone. They say ‘so and so’ discovered ‘such and such’ after some bumpkin found it. I’ll be known as ‘the coal miner,’ that’s all.” He crouched back over the skeletons. “No, I’m going to do this. There ain’t no reason to call Western. We’ll work the higher seam for awhile then after work I’ll come back here and dig some of these out. Promise you won’t tell nobody.”

I promised. Now that I think back on it, that is when my life really ended.

We worked the higher seams during the day. The ultra rich coal coming out by the hundred-ton load to go to the Paradise furnace. In the evening, after everyone knocked off, Zan would go to the lower seam and excavate bones.

“It’s a perfect circle of remains,” he told me one evening while having a beer on my porch, “Every skeleton is facing the same direction too. They are all pointing to the middle of the coal deposit. It’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen. It’s like thousands of animals came to this one place and died, one on top of the other. I don’t know what kind of animals they were. I can’t find any examples of anything like them online.”

As the days wore on, Zan began to look worse and worse. I noticed that the lower excavation was also growing. One night I swung down by the mine and saw the lights of Zan’s dozer in the pit as he cut further into the seam. It was one in the morning.

“You’re going to get your ass fired.” I said the next day.

“No way.” he replied, “I discovered the damn seam.
Snodgrass wouldn’t do shit to me. Ten minutes stripping pays for the diesel I use. Anyway, I’ve discovered something you should see.”

After work I went with him to the excavation site and what I beheld took my breath away. Zan had indeed gone further in toward the middle of the crater. The track he had cut was now only about one-hundred feet from the center. The bones were there too. It was apparent that they were arranged, not in a circle around the crater, but in a disk, a complete disk of fossils that covered the entire seam at that level. They did not seem to occur beneath that disk nor above it, and every single skeleton was oriented toward the center. The only change in the bones was the bones themselves. The skeletons closest to the middle looked nothing like the ones that had been uncovered at the perimeter.

“Look at the head!” Zan exclaimed, as he dusted off a particularly large specimen of nearly twelve feet long. This

head wasn’t a torpedo, but was anvil shaped. Its jaws extended two feet to each side and were filled with regular, three-inch-long teeth. “And look at the feet,” he said, pointing to the back feet. The webs were gone. The toes on the rear appendages now had three joints and looked nimble and dangerous, tipped with wicked claws. “If I walk back to the edge of the fossil bed I can see the feet change. Thirty feet back the last of the webbing disappears. The jaws start extending to the anvil shape you see here at about fifty feet back. These are the same animals we found at the edge. It’s like they are evolving right in front of our eyes!” He seemed manic, jittery. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought he had taken up a meth habit.

“Listen, Zan, I’m worried about you,” I said, crouching down beside him. “You’re doing all right. Maybe you should take a few days off. Say you got the flu or something. I can keep this safe.”

He turned toward me, his face frantic and contorted with fear. “No! No, no, no! I am getting close to something here. Something big. It’s in the middle. Something is in the middle. Something big. I’m going to find it. I’m going to get out of this shit-hole once and for all! So either help me or leave me alone!”

What was I supposed to do? I helped him. That night I came back to the mine and found him on the dozer, gingerly pealing away at the fossil shelf, working toward the center. When I got out of the truck and went to fire up the loader, he waved to me, nothing more. As the night wore on we worked the layer of overburden, pulling out the priceless tons of coal and pushing them aside as if they were so much shale. About four hours into the dig Zan climbed down from the dozer and began to dig with a shovel, uncovering the fossils that lay not forty feet from the middle of the pit. He waved to me and I came down, leaving the loader running.

“Look at this.” He called out over the competing roar of the diesel engines, his breath coming out in great, ghostly torrents of steam in the chill air. He pushed aside the black, crumbling coal with a booted food to reveal the latest skull.

I have to confess that at first I didn’t recognize what it was I was looking at. I didn’t see a skull, or even a thing produced by a natural process. There was too much order to it to be a thing of random creation, but there was nothing in the form that suggested a linear or sensible derivation from understandable life. I can say, however, that the first thing I recognized, were teeth. Hundreds of them, of all sizes, jutting out at obscene angles from what must once have been four distinct shelves of a mouth. They interlocked and ground into one another in a manner that must have insured a life of constant gnashing and pain. The only consistency in the mass was that every tooth was uniformly sharp and terrible. It would seem the evil god that had spawned this abomination could not find a design more awful than the predator’s tooth, and so made it more dreadful by forcing it to hurt the predator as much as the prey.

“What, what the hell is that thing?” I was shaking as I spoke and it was not from the cold. “Those are holes for the eyes.” He sounded like a child discovering the mechanics of some simple device for the first time: this is how a bicycle works; this is how a skateboard rolls; this is how an animal fits fifteen eyeballs into its head.

He jumped up from the wretched thing and climbed back onto the dozer, roaring up the engine. I was glued to my spot, beholding the bones in the dead lights of the dozer’s halogens. Zan called down to me, “Come on, we’re going to see what these things were looking at. He plowed the dozer toward the center of the crater, unconcerned for the fossil bed he had gone to such great lengths to protect until then. The tracks of the giant Cat twisted and shattered the skeletons as Zan charged hard into the remaining overburden. I stumbled over to the loader, dreading the act with every halting step. I know I could not have stopped him even if I’d wanted to. I know that. I know.

Zan charged into the remaining feet of cover. Black dust boils rose in the lights, and cracks rang out as the coal seam splintered in the petroleum-powered onslaught. Then I heard the ear shattering ping of steel breaking. The dozer’s engine went dead and I watched Zan leap from the cab and run around the front of the machine. I killed the loader and climbed down, not sure if I wanted to know what had happened. As I came around the dozer I found Zan looking down at the base of the dozer’s blade. Two of the inch-thick steel teeth that lined the bottom of the blade were cleanly broken off, rent back under the blade by the terrible pressure of the Cat’s unrelenting drive.

“What the hell did that?” I asked. We might be able to hide the fact that we’re using up fuel, but two teeth busted on a new dozer was going to be trouble. “Shit. We’re going to have to weld those on before Monday or it’s going to be our ass. What did you hit?”

Zan dusted off the black ground the teeth had apparently struck. He spat and, using his shirt sleeve, rubbed the spit on the patch of ground. It quickly took on a reflective, even luminous quality like black glass.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It looks like obsidian, but that would never have broken steel teeth.” He dusted around the broken steel and withdrew a six-inch-long shard of the glassy material, sharp and dagger-like. “I’m going to see what I can figure out about this stuff.”

We decided to knock off. It was four in the morning and even though we weren’t working on Sundays anymore, I knew my wife would skin me for staying out so late. It was freezing outside and Zan was on his motorcycle so I offered him a ride. We loaded the bike into the back of the truck and set off down the road.

We pulled out of the mine’s gravel access road and out onto the deserted highway 70. “What do you think all that shit is?” I asked, trying to keep fear out of my voice as best I could.

Zan’s voice was calm, reserved in a way it had not been for days. “Do you know much about the Pennsylvanian age?”

“It’s full of coal. I know that. Bowling Green is Mississippian, at Hadley Hill you climb up into Pennsylvanian.”

“Yeah, well back during the Pennsylvanian age all this was a great big swamp. I mean really big. The Appalachians were bigger than the Himalayas, and all the moisture got trapped on this side making one giant swamp at the edge of a hot shallow sea. All that shit died and sank and became coal, all the trees and ferns and fishes. But something happened then. Nobody knows why, but everything died. Every fish and fern and tree. All of it. Scientist think it was a meteor.”

“Oh, yeah. Off the coast of Mexico. Killed all the dinosaurs. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. That show about the T. rex.”

“No. That was millions of years later. That was a meteor, and it killed like, sixty percent of the world’s species. The extinction that I’m talking about was bigger, and they’re not certain that it was a meteor at all. There is no evidence it was, and this extinction took out over ninety percent of the species. The dinosaurs first appeared a few million years later. Plants started bearing seeds, shit started running on two legs. Everything that survived the extinction got a lot meaner and they got meaner really fast. It was like all of a sudden a whole bunch of pressure was put on every living thing. The ones that survived did so because they could run, or hide, or have lots of babies.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“What if it wasn’t a meteor, or volcanoes changing the climate that made everything die? What if it was some new species, or old species that changed real fast and had the edge all of the sudden? Not in a million years where everything could get used to it, but in just a few thousand years, or even a few hundred. What if something was changing the animals that came near it, like a virus, or some sort of mutation? What if all those bones were the generations of some new super-predator that got, I don’t know, changed, and then started killing off all the other species that were just too weak to compete?”

I didn’t have an answer. I dropped Zan off at his house, then drove home, an uncomfortable pit of anxiety in my gut.

That night I dreamt of swamps, great reeking swamps floating on miles of hot, rotting filth. I dreamt that deep, deep down the rottenness beat like a heart, slowly rising up until it bubbled onto the surface, a vast black pool of vile contamination. I heard the screams of the tiny, unfortunate amphibians as the black pool engulfed them. And I heard them change. I heard it. It was the sound of bones breaking, of skin splitting. It was the noise of an incomprehensible power, ancient even in infancy, a remnant sound from the bridging of the gulf between a dead universe and bloody, fecund life.

I was roused from sleep by the gasp of my wife. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know something was very wrong. In fact, I couldn’t open my eyes. Pain came on quickly and did not stop.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” I cried.

“Your face is…is…it’s cooked!”

I knew what she meant. It was the pain of twelve hours in the sun, of scalding water poured on the arm. From my neck to my forehead the skin was tight and throbbing. Every time I tried to speak I felt it crack, sending jolts of misery into the core of my brain.

The ER doctor questioned me for an hour. He all but accused me of botching a batch of Meth. When I continued to deny any drug activity he threw up his hands. “Well, have you been exposed to any radioactive material?” No, no of course not.

I had to have my wife dial the phone and hold it to my ear. My hands were wrapped in gauze. My face was covered in a mask of thick, white cream. I could smell the blisters festering on my skin. The phone rang until the answering machine picked up. “This is Zan, leave a message or don’t.”

“Hang it up.” I told her. She was convinced I was cooking meth with Zan, and no amount of pleading would convince her to give me a ride to his house. With no other option left, I called the sheriff’s office. Two hours later a white police car pulled up into my drive.

“We didn’t find Zan. Something got his dog though. Poor thing got tore to pieces. His house was trashed, but it didn’t seem like anything was missing. Just a bunch of food everywhere and the tub was full of black water.” Even through my half closed eyes I could see that the deputy was suspicious. I looked every bit like a victim of mishandled anhydrous ammonia, and it must have seemed like I was trying to use the police in some sort of backfired drug burn. “You mind if I have a look around?”

“Go ahead,” I muttered through split lips, hearing the skin around my mouth crackle with the words. He poked around the yard and shed for several minutes then returned.

“Well, if he ain’t turned up by this time tomorrow his family can file a report.” He was halfway out the door when he stopped and turned back to me, “You sure you and him ain’t been into nothing?”

I didn’t bother replying.

It rained hard that night and into the next day, and the day after that. Snodgrass called to see how I was and to tell me that the walls of the coal pit had collapsed in the rain and work would be halted in the bottom seams until they could get the water and mud out. Zan’s father filed a report. Zan stayed missing.

By the end of the week the bandages were removed and my face no longer caused people to look away. Now they only winced. I got the call at around noon.

Mr. Snodgrass sounded tired, shaky as he said hello. “How you doin’ boy?”

“Fine, Mr. Snodgrass. I’m a whole lot better.”

“Good, that’s real good. I got some bad news for you. Seems Owen and B.J. had an accident. Well, they um, they’re dead. Ain’t no mincing words here. I ain’t got any operators worth a damn and Monday we are going to be hitting the seam hard. I know Zan was your friend, but the kid’s gone AWOL and I need all the help I can get. What are the odds of getting you on-sight Monday morning? You ain’t got to operate, just keep an eye on the new ones, make sure they ain’t screwing around.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had known Owen and B.J. half my life and on top of everything else, it was just too much. “Mr. Snodgrass, I’m going to need more time than this.”

“How’s Wednesday then?” he replied, not taking my meaning.

“I’ll call you next week and we’ll figure something out.” A thought occurred to me then, and I asked the question, “You’re not planning on digging out the crater are you?”

“That’s where we are going to be digging. I hired a dirt crew to come in and they’ve already got it cleaned out. It was a big mud hole when they started, and now it’s dry. Just a big oily pool at the bottom, but we’ll get that drained out Monday, I guess.”

“Did you notice anything weird down there when they were cleaning it out?”

“Well, that’s odd. B.J. found a frog he’d run over with the track hoe. Thing was big around as a dinner plate and had five eyes. Damnest thing I ever saw.” He paused, then added, “how did you know that?”

I gave no reason and got off the phone. It was a five-minute drive to the county impound lot where the truck B.J. and Owen had been killed in was being kept. The big red Ford diesel was still on the back of a long flat bed hauler, chained down to the deck. It was obvious that the truck had rolled several times. The cab was crushed down to the level of the dash and the whole body appeared twisted. That those two had wrecked didn’t surprise me; hardly a day ended that they hadn’t consumed a case of beer apiece before heading home from the job. What was unaccountable was that both doors were missing, and along the crushed holes where they should have been hanging were deep gouges in the red body that left jagged rents in the metal. I turned to leave, noticing off in the distance, thirty miles or so to the west, a vast black cloud drifting up from the ground. Paradise. The old coal plant had its environmental scrubbers off. They never ran them unless the EPA was going to do a fly through, and the smoke was as dark as the coal they burned, our coal, full of heat, full of something else. I thought about all the millions of tiny particles of the bones and black glass that must be rising up in that midnight plume, drifting up and up to rain steadily back down across the earth.

I raced home and started looking up numbers. Curtis Ward, no answer. Jay and Eric Ingram, answering machine. I called what cell phones I had numbers for, but nobody picked up. Finally I even called Johnny Lindsey, why the mute had a phone had always been a point of humor for all of us at the mine, but as he answered with his back throat squeal. I was glad of the fact.

“Johnny, listen. It’s Tom Phelps. Listen to me now. I think something’s wrong with Zan. I think, well, it doesn’t matter.
You get yourself out of the house and come over to my place. Bring a gun with you and you don’t stop.”

He started to make the affirmative squeal, then, halfway through, cut off. I heard a loud banging in the background, like someone beating a door down. Johnny made a low, suspicious moan.

“Johnny, Johnny! Don’t answer it! Get your gun.” I screamed into the receiver. In answer I heard the sliding clunk of a shotgun pump. There was another sound then as Johnny’s door must have exploded, followed by a shotgun blast.

I have to ask you if you’ve ever heard a mute scream. I think it was worse than normal screams. Maybe they save ‘em up for really important moments. The noise that came from Johnny’s throat was like nothing I had ever heard, primal and utterly free of restraint. It rose and rose, higher in pitch and volume, then, suddenly, seemed to fill with gurgling liquid. Then all was silent. I listened, not daring to breathe. Seconds stretched out unbearably and I strained to hear. A slippery sound finally came across the line, a sound like wet rubber being pushed across metal. The phone popped and a voice came over it. “Hiiiiiii Tommmmy.” It was a whisper made through wet leaves, “Caaann Iiii cooomme oooverrrr?” I dropped the phone, then scrambled to pick it back up.

“Zan! Zan, is that you?” But there was no one there.

Mr. Snodgrass didn’t answer the phone when I called. Everyone that had worked the Lindsey seam was away from their phones, and their cell phones. So were their families. I sat on the couch staring at my burned hands. Every bit of exposed skin I had was cooked by the black substance and I had been around it for less than half an hour. Zan probably experimented with the shard for hours. Did he notice what was happening? Did he feel himself changing? I wondered what would happen if he’d tried to taste the thing? He had been desperate to keep our find a secret. How much more did that matter after he’d realized what was occurring to him? Did he take the shard and flee into the woods? Bury himself in the cold dead ground like some grub, shedding skin and hair, coming out changed into something new, something mean and repellant?

I had to get Annie out of the house. She refused to go to her parents until I gave her a good reason. I know she thought I was hiding something, drugs probably. In a last desperate bid to get her out of the house, I slapped her. Whoever finds this tape, make sure she knows I didn’t mean it. I just wanted her to be safe for as long as possible. I know that nobody will be safe for long. Whoever you are, don’t let the Lindsey mine open back up. I hope to God that the coal price drops. As long as it’s running high, some fool will try and open up that godforsaken pit.

I can hear him. He’s on the roof. I know what feet sound like on our roof. The neighbors kid cleans my gutters and I know the sound of feet. That’s not what I’m hearing. I’m not hearing feet. I can’t tell you if I am hearing limbs. The bugs and frogs have gone quiet. Even the mosquitoes have stopped buzzing in my ears. I hear its breath, like a hot-air balloon inflating.

Andrew Porter was born in Kentucky but now calls Nashville home.He has written one novel which is currently unpublished. His work often explores the emergent forms of awareness brought about by new technologies, although he has an abiding love of H.P. Lovecraft. “In the Seams” is a story borne of the latter’s influence. You can contact Andrew at silverstairs@gmail.com.

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