We Broke Into a Hollow Beneath a Nevada Mine — And Something Down There Started Knocking Back

I still taste the coal dust when I think about that winter, the way it sat on the back of my tongue like a film of burnt iron no matter how much water I drank, no matter how carefully I wiped my mouth before sleep. It finds its way into every crack of memory, black and bitter and fine, the same way it found its way into the seams of our clothes and the wrinkles of our knuckles. We were thirty miles outside a Nevada nowhere that had once been called Halloway Junction and then forgotten when the richer veins moved north, a scatter of timber sheds and canvas pitched around a narrow-gauge spur that hummed only twice a week when the locomotive from Ely bothered to come. The company paperwork labeled it Northline Coal Station, but everyone in the camp called it Dry Camp Four—dry because the creek that once ran through the arroyo had dwindled to a trickle decades before, and dry because even the whiskey tasted like dust. To me, at twenty-three, it was just a bunk where my feet stuck out into cold air and a promise of steady winter pay in a year when every other mine I knew was letting men go.

I came from Price, Utah, riding south with a bedroll, a Bible I didn’t read, and a letter from a cousin who’d worked briefly on a surveying crew. The letter said the coal seam under the ridgeline east of Northline was thick, close to the surface, and “soft as sin,” which meant it cut easily and burned well and would keep the company’s boilers fed until spring at least. It also said nothing about the Shoshone families who weren’t supposed to be there but were, or the way they kept their distance from the ridge even when they came to trade, or the way the company man smiled too wide when he talked about what lay under that hill. That I learned for myself. The company’s man on site was a short fellow named Briggs, with a gut that strained his vest buttons and a watch chain heavy enough to pass for decoration in its own right. He had a habit of thumbing the chain when he lied, which was often. “We’ll strip this ridge and all of you will be rich men by next Christmas,” he told us the first week, standing on a crate outside the cookhouse with the winter sun painting his breath in front of him. “Two winters at most and you’ll be gone back to Utah or Kansas or wherever the hell you came from with pockets too heavy for your old trousers.” I looked at his clean hands, at his boots with no coal ground into the stitching, and wondered if he believed the words for even a breath.

Our crew on the day shift numbered six, which meant we were small enough that each man’s habits became everyone’s business in short order. I bunked next to Connelly, a tall Irishman whose beard refused to grow in even, leaving an odd patchwork of pale skin like clouds over his cheeks. He hummed old tunes under his breath while he swung the pick, hymns twisted into mining songs and back again, and he told stories about collapsing galleries in Pennsylvania with the detached humor of someone who’d watched men die and learned that laughter was easier than silence. On the other side of him slept a man we all called Manny, though his name was Manuel Ortega, Sonoran by his own claim and veteran of three silver camps in Virginia City and Tonopah. He had hands like carved walnut and a cautious way of moving in the drift that said he trusted the rock more than he trusted the men. “This coal is wrong,” he told me within a week, when we were sitting on the bunkhouse steps with our boots off and our socks steaming in the evening cold. “Too dry on one side, too sweet on the other. Veins like this sit over empty places. Old hollows. You can hear it when you hit.” He rapped his knuckles softly against the plank beside him, once, twice: solid on one beam, hollow on the space between. “You listen,” he said. “You will hear.”

The youngest among us was a boy we called Finch because of the way his eyes darted and because his real name, Amos, sounded borrowed from a church he’d stopped believing in. He claimed he was eighteen, though the down on his chin and the softness in his cheeks argued for closer to sixteen. The company took him at his word because they needed bodies and he could push a cart as well as any man, and because his hands were quick and clever and he didn’t complain about the cold. When talk turned to deep shafts or bad timber, Finch would straighten his back and pretend he didn’t hear, but I saw the way his knuckles whitened on his tin mug. Rounding out our crew were the Crocker twins from Kansas—Jonah and Luke—broad-backed and slow-spoken, the kind of men who could lift a full coal car just enough to get a rock out from under the wheel and then go back to eating without comment. They smoked cheap tobacco that smelled like burning rope and rarely spoke unless it was to each other. In the narrow dark of the drift, their presence felt like pillars you could lean on.

Our days were simple at first, simple in the way that only repetition and ignorance can be. Before dawn, the cook would bang a bent pan with a ladle until the men in both bunkhouses groaned and sat up, coughing dust and curses in equal measure. We’d pull on stiff trousers and shirts that already smelled of sweat and coal even when we washed them on Sundays, eat beans and hard bread with coffee sludgy enough to stand a spoon in, and walk the narrow track up toward the mouth of the main drift, our lamp hooks clinking against our belts. The drift itself was a dark slit cut into the base of the ridge, braced with rough timber and piles of tailings on either side. Frost lined the rails some mornings, making them shine white and brittle under the lanterns that hung by the entrance. Inside, the air was cold at first and still, the sort of still that felt less like calm and more like a held breath. Our lamps burned thick and yellow, the light pooling at our feet and collapsing into blackness just a few yards ahead, but we could see the rails, the rough-hewn walls, the pick marks like bite marks in the stone. We cut where the foreman chalked the walls, wedged where the seam widened, loaded cars, pushed them back to the adit where the mule team would haul them out to the tipple to be dumped and sorted. We cursed the weight, cursed the coughs, cursed the way the rock always fell where you didn’t want it and refused to break where you did. In that first month, our accidents were small: a sprained ankle, a bruised shoulder from a falling wedge, a broken finger caught in a coupling. Enough to remind us the hill could hurt us, not enough to prove it hated us.

If anyone talked about stories the Shoshone told in the winter, about old rooms under the ridge or things that moved when the snow pinned the world down, I did not hear them. I saw the people themselves often enough: figures on horseback silhouetted on the far side of the creek, women with braided hair who came into camp to trade dried meat and sage bundles for flour, men who watched us from just beyond the clearing’s edge. One older man came sometimes with an interpreter from the bigger camp down-valley, and he would stand near the cookhouse with arms folded while the interpreter went with Briggs to the office. I saw his eyes once, standing in the doorway with my bowl of beans in hand. He did not look at me like I was an enemy, only like I was the sort of fool who walks into a flooded arroyo because the sky is blue and the sand looks dry.

It was Manny’s talk of hollows that came back to me two weeks later when my pick bit through the wall and the rock answered with something that wasn’t rock at all. We’d been pushing the main heading downward, following the seam as it dipped and thickened, and the air had grown warmer with every yard we stole from the hill. It was the kind of warmth that didn’t comfort, the kind that clung and slicked your spine with sweat even when the air outside froze in your nostrils. My shirt stuck to my back, my lamp flame flickered with each swing, and every breath felt like it passed through worn cotton. Then, between one strike and the next, sound changed. Instead of the solid, punishing thunk of metal on coal, I heard a dull, hollow thud, the note of a drum where there should have been wall. The pick’s point punched forward, the resistance vanished, and a draft of air spilled out across my knuckles, dry and stale and colder than the drift behind us.

I froze with my hands still on the handle, the steel embedded in the wall up to its neck. Behind me, Finch’s cart wheels squealed to a stop on the rails. “You feel that?” he asked, voice too bright. His lamp threw my shadow huge against the cut. Connelly stepped up beside me, his beard catching the light in uneven patches, and held his own lamp near the spot where my pick had gone through. The flame bent toward the opening, drawn by the new breath of air, then steadied. On the other side of the fracture, there was nothing but darkness—a different dark than the tunnel’s, deeper somehow, as if it had been waiting longer. “Well, hell,” Connelly said softly. “You’ve knocked a hole in God’s pantry.”

We worked the opening wider with care, knocking away chunks of coal and stone, watching the way the ceiling above responded to each blow. The Crocker twins set a new set of props around the breach without being asked, their faces unreadable as always. I heard someone dispatch Finch to fetch Briggs and the foreman, his boots retreating back along the rails in quick, eager slips. By the time he returned with Briggs in tow, we had opened a jagged hole wide enough that a man could crouch and squeeze through. The air that came out of it was like nothing I’d smelled before—not the sulfur stink of bad coal, not the damp under-rot of flooded galleries, not the warm breath of a mountain that’d been tunneled too deep. It was dry, almost chalky, carrying a faint mineral tang like the dust at the bottom of a box that hasn’t been opened in years.

Briggs arrived in a coat that had never seen the inside of a mine, scarf tidy around his neck, an unused lamp swinging in his hand. A small figured man, but the way he walked down the drift made it feel like the hill itself had stepped back to make room for him. He peered into the gap, sniffed once, and rubbed his thumb over his watch chain as if the curve of the metal could tell him how deep the void went. “You boys found yourself a present,” he said. “Might be a pocket. Might be the start of a whole new heading. We’ll get it surveyed before daylight tomorrow. If it’s big enough, we can timber it and stash supplies. If it runs in the right direction, we might just save ourselves six weeks of cutting. Who wants to make the first look?” He said it like he was asking who wanted seconds at dinner. His eyes slid over us and settled on me, on Connelly, on Jonah Crocker. “You three,” he said before anyone could volunteer or refuse. “You’re steady. Take a line, see what’s in there. No heroics. You see anything that looks like it might fall, you come back out.”

We stripped down to shirtsleeves to keep our coats from catching, looped a coil of rope around our waists, and one by one squeezed through the jagged mouth of the hill. Coal scraped my back, leaving an itch that felt like fingernails. For a moment I was wedged, one shoulder in the drift, one shoulder in the void, breath caught halfway as rock pressed against my chest. Then I popped through like a cork into cold air and almost fell on my face. The lamp I held swung wildly, throwing frantic shapes on the ceiling overhead, and when it settled I realized I was standing in a low chamber with a packed dirt floor and walls that curved away into the dark. The ceiling was close—so close that I had to keep my head ducked a little—and the air smelled of age in a way I hadn’t known air could smell.

Connelly came through behind me, swearing under his breath when his elbow bumped the stone, then Jonah, his big frame making the opening seem smaller than it was. We tied the rope off on a knob of pale stone near the breach and moved slowly, lamps held out, boots sliding cautiously over ground that hadn’t felt a human foot in however long. The chamber widened as we went, stretching into an oval maybe twenty feet across at its widest point. What held my eye first was not the shape of the space, though, but the object at its center: a column of stone that rose from floor to ceiling, smooth and pale and utterly unlike the dark rock of the ridge. Its surface was etched with shallow lines—curves and angles and repeating motifs—that caught the lamplight in strange ways, neither reflecting nor absorbing so much as bending it.

Jonah reached out as if to steady himself and let his fingers brush the carvings, then pulled his hand back sharply. “Not natural,” he said. For Jonah, that was a speech. I stepped closer, lamp held up near the column, and tried to make sense of the marks. They weren’t letters I knew, not English or Spanish or anything I’d seen in the few books that passed through dry camps. They weren’t pictures either, not of animals or men. They were something in between, as if someone had tried to write a language in strokes that imitated cracks in stone and the trails left behind by water. I circled the pillar slowly, boots whispering on the packed earth, and on the far side I saw that the chamber did not end with the oval. A narrow passage led away at a slight downward slope, its walls more rough-hewn than the curved chamber’s—marked with a multitude of small, repeated gouges, like the scars left by tools used over and over by unsteady hands.

Closer to the floor, in the dust that had gathered along the edges of that passage, were depressions. They were not heel prints or boot soles. They were not hooves or paws in any sense I recognized. Each impression was long at one end, with two shorter lobes branching from the other, like a three-pronged fork that had been dragged lightly through powder and lifted cleanly. I crouched, the lamp nearly touching the ground, and ran my fingers along the nearest depression. The edges were sharp, the displaced dust still ridged, not crumbled smooth. “Fresh,” I said without thinking. The word felt loud in that low space.

“Fresh from what?” Connelly asked. He stepped up behind me, his lamp overlapping the circle of light with mine. His breath made the flame flicker. “There’s no bats in here. No rats. No sign of anything living.” He exhaled and the coal dust in his lungs turned it into a harsh little cough. As if to prove him wrong, a faint sound reached us then from farther down the passage, so soft that at first I thought it was my own heartbeat: a gentle clatter, like small stones tapped together, coming in pairs with a measured pause between them. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap-tap. Pause. Not loud enough to tell distance. Just enough to prove there was more to this hill than compressed dead plants and company promises.

We went back to the breach and shouted through for the rope to be tightened and for Briggs to bring the rest in. While we waited, Connelly drifted back to the pillar and spotted something lying near its base, half buried in dust. It was a strip of pale material, about as long as my hand, thin as a fingernail but more flexible. One side was smooth. The other bore a set of parallel ridges, regular as the teeth of a comb. He picked it up and held it closer to his lamp, squinting. “Skin?” he suggested. “Hide?” It bent without breaking when he flexed it gently, then sprang back almost straight. Jonah’s lips pressed together. “Put it down,” he said. Connelly lay it on a nearby rock, wiped his fingers on his trousers, and didn’t touch it again.

When the others came through—the twins, Manny, Finch, Briggs with his chalkboard and improbable neatness—the chamber grew smaller just from the press of bodies and breath. The extra lamps scattered the shadows thinner, though never completely, and made the carvings on the pillar look like they were shifting when you caught them from the corner of your eye. Briggs ran one hand over the etched stone and smiled in a tight way. “Well now,” he said. “Somebody’s been busy down here. Sparrow, draw this.” He thrust the chalkboard and a stub of chalk at Finch, who swallowed, wiped his palms on his trousers, and knelt to sketch the lines as he saw them, carefully, as if drawing them wrong might offend the rock. Manny stood near the mouth of the downward passage and did not move his lamp away from it, his jaw set. “There are marks in the dust,” I told Briggs. “Not ours. Trails. Something’s been using that hallway. And there’s a sound farther down. Like tapping.” Briggs crouched, examined the floor where I pointed, and let his gaze follow the impressions to where they curved and disappeared into the deeper dark. “We’ll take a look,” he said. “Short way only. No one gets clever.”

We set anchors for the rope around the pillar, left the weight of the Crocker twins on the other end, and went into the throat of the hill single file: me first, then Connelly, then Finch with the board, and Briggs behind to see what he wanted to see. The passage sloped gently, the walls pressing in so our shoulders brushed them, leaving smears in the dust that glowed faintly under the lamp like chalk on slate. The air warmed as we went, trading that dry mineral chill for something heavier, wetter, as if we were walking into the breath of a living lung. The tap-tap came again, clearer now, still faint, somewhere below and ahead: two strikes, pause. Two strikes, pause. It was less like an alarm or a knock and more like work, like the rhythm of someone carving or hammering with patience.

We reached a fork where the passage split into two narrow throats. The left one smelled sharp and metallic, like a forge banked for the night. The right one carried a thread of air that lifted the hair on my forearm when it brushed my skin, and from it the tapping seemed slightly louder. I took my knife and scored a notch into the wall at the fork, a habit learned in older mines where too many turns could make you forget your way, and we took the right-hand path, the rope uncoiling behind us with each step. The stone underfoot began to change, darker, laced with thin gray veins that didn’t reflect the lamplight so much as swallow it, leaving our flames looking smaller and more fragile. The air grew thick enough that breathing felt like work.

The chamber we found at the end of that slope was smaller than the first but taller, its ceiling invisible beyond the lamplight. The floor was scattered with fragments of a pale, brittle material that snapped to powder between my fingers when I picked one up. It smelled faintly of old bone and something else I didn’t want to identify. On the far wall, there were grooves carved vertically from floor up to the height of a man’s shoulder, spaced so evenly that my mind insisted a human hand must have measured them, though no human hand I knew could have cut into that stone. Near the base of one groove, someone—or something—had arranged a ring of small stones on the floor, each fist-sized, with a smear of blackened residue in the center. It looked like a fire pit, but the ring was too small for any fire that would warm a room. It was more a place to heat an object or a handful of something, not to sit around. Beside it lay a scattering of thin bones, hollow, brittle, curved in ways that did not match any rodent or bird I knew. They crumbled when I tried to pick one up.

We did not stay long. The tapping came again while we stood there, and in that smaller space it seemed to rise through the stone under our boots rather than through the air, buzzing our ankles like a tuning fork. Finch looked at me with wide eyes. “We should go back,” he whispered. “Just tell him what’s here.” For once, I agreed immediately. We marked the chamber in rough notes, let the rope lead us back to the first chamber, and reported what we’d seen and heard. Briggs listened, face unreadable, thumb on his chain, and only when I described the grooves, the faint black residue, the bones, did anything shift in his expression. Then he sighed, told us to seal the downward passage temporarily with a brace, and said the company would send a proper surveyor from Ely to make sense of it. “Until then,” he said, “no more than you’ve seen now. We keep working the seam. Men talk too much when they don’t understand something. I’d rather not have a ghost story shut production down.”

It might have ended there if the hill had been content with being hollow. We might have gone back to our picks and carts, complained about timber, spat stories about strange carvings to pass the time, and waited for some distant engineer to come and declare the chamber “naturally formed” in a way that erased anything it didn’t have words for. Instead, the ridge began to knock.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was a dream. I woke in the small hours, the bunkhouse dim, the stove at the center only a faint red eye, the men around me a chorus of low snores and coughs. Outside, the wind rasped at the canvas, and ice had formed on the inside of the north wall where breath had condensed over days. Beneath all that, faint and muffled, came a sound like someone tapping two pieces of stone together far away: tap-tap. Pause. Tap-tap. Pause. I lay still, blanket pulled up to my chin, listening. The rhythm went on for perhaps a minute, no louder, no closer, then stopped as if it had never been. No one else stirred. In the gray wash before dawn, when the cook’s bell dragged us upright and we stomped toward the drift, I almost convinced myself it had been my imagination, some echo of the tap I’d heard in that lower chamber chasing itself around my ribs.

The second time, there was no pretending. Two nights later, the tapping started again, louder this time, clear enough that men sat up on their bunks and looked at one another through the half-dark, the whites of their eyes catching the lamp glow. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap-tap. It was coming from the direction of the ridge, but not from the drift mouth; it had the muffled quality of sound coming through earth. “It’s the timbers settling,” someone muttered. “Or rockfall.” But rockfall doesn’t keep rhythm. Rockfall doesn’t sound like patience. The taps went on for a full five minutes, regular as a heartbeat, then stopped so cleanly it felt like a door closing. When we stepped outside that morning, the Shoshone elder and his interpreter were already there, standing in the cold between the cookhouse and Briggs’s office, their horses tied a good distance away.

I was close enough to hear them this time. The elder’s hair was long and streaked with white, his face wrinkled deep from sun and wind, his eyes like polished obsidian. He spoke in his own language, each phrase short and precise. The interpreter, a younger man with callused hands and a battered hat, turned the words into English. “The hill has old rooms,” he said. “They were made before our grandfathers, before their grandfathers. It is better if they stay closed. In winter, when the earth sleeps, things wake down there. They do not like noise above them. They do not like light in their rooms. Tell your men not to go further.” Briggs listened, face impassive, then said in the same calm tone he used when telling us the day’s cut numbers, “The company owns the hill. We have a job to do. We’ll be careful.” The elder lifted one hand, palm out, in a gesture I did not understand, then let it fall. He set a small bundle wrapped in hide on the packed dirt and said something else, softer. The interpreter translated: “For luck. To keep you from being seen.” Briggs glanced at the bundle and something in his jaw ticked. “We don’t need charms,” he said. When they were gone, I watched him toe the bundle aside, not quite kicking it, not quite respecting it either.

The days after that blurred together in a way that only fear and monotony can produce, each one colored by the knowledge that something under the ridge knew, in some sense, that we were there. The company halted work beyond the first chamber, braced the opening, and reassigned most men to tailings and tipple expansion while we “waited for the surveyors.” Those of us who had gone inside that hollow found ourselves doing very little beyond pretending to rest, sitting in small knots around the stove, listening for noises we could not admit we were listening for. The taps came every night, sometimes just after midnight, sometimes closer to dawn, always with that measured two-strike rhythm, always from the direction of the hill. On the third night, the sound shifted. It grew stronger, not only in volume but in presence, as if it had moved closer. Men stepped outside their bunks to stand in the hard-packed dirt between buildings, bare-headed in the cold, listening without talking. The taps came not only from under the ridge but from beneath the camp itself, faint at first beneath the bunkhouse, then nearer the cookhouse, then closer still, until one double knock sounded sharp and intimate right beneath the tool shed’s floor.

There is a peculiar kind of silence that falls on a group of men when they are all thinking the same thing and none of them want to hear it said aloud. That silence settled over us as the last tap faded. No one joked about pipes or mules. No one said, “It’s nothing.” Briggs came out of his office with the pistol I had only glimpsed before clutched in his hand, eyes narrowed. “Back inside,” he said. “All of you. We’ll keep watch in pairs.” No one argued. Fear had stripped us down to obedience.

I could tell you every watch I stood after that, every minute spent with my lamp low and my pick across my knees, ears straining for a sound I both dreaded and craved. I could describe the way Connelly confessed, on one of those watches, that he’d seen a man go mad in a mine in Pennsylvania after hearing voices in rock that no one else heard, how the man had taken a pick to his own head to “let them out.” I could tell you about Finch, how he stopped making jokes and started chewing his lip until it bled, how he clutched the chalkboard he’d used to sketch the pillar as if it were some sort of shield. I could talk about Manny walking the perimeter of the camp in slow, tight circles, muttering in Spanish, eyes flicking between the ridge and the ground as if he expected it to open at his feet. But all of that is seasoning. The meat of it comes on the night when whatever lived in that hill decided we had been warned enough.

The taps came earlier that evening, starting as the last light drained from the sky, three double knocks from the ridge, two from under the tool shed, then a scattering of irregular strikes near the collapsed drift mouth where we’d sealed the breach. We were all outside by then, gathered in a loose semi-circle facing the hill. The stars above were cold and impassive, the air so dry it stung to breathe deep. The taps stopped as abruptly as always. For a heartbeat, the world hung suspended. Then there came a new sound: a slow scraping, as if something hard dragged across the dirt just beyond the edge of camp, moving in a wide arc. Then another scrape, closer. The bunkhouse walls seemed to lean in behind us. The lamp flames jumped, though there was no wind.

They appeared one by one at the edge of lamplight, not with drama, not with some monstrous roar, but with the quiet certainty of things that know they belong. The first shape I saw crouched low, its body close to the ground, long limbs folded like a spider’s. Its skin was a pallid, matte green, the color of lichen on stone, stretched taut over muscles that moved with unnerving economy. Its head was narrow and elongated, without hair, without ears I could see, the eyes set wide and flat, dark as coal seams. When its mouth opened, it did so slowly, revealing rows of short, sharp teeth that looked more suited to crushing than tearing. It breathed in little measured bursts, each inhalation a visible effort, though there was no hint of weakness in its posture.

Behind it, two more figures resolved from the dark, at slightly different heights, their outlines similarly wrong for any animal I knew. They did not unfold into the lamplight like predators eager to pounce. They rose, instead, with an unsettling deliberation, first onto the balls of their feet, then straightening up until they stood balanced and bipedal, taller than any man in camp, their long arms hanging almost to their knees. Ridged patterns ran along the sides of their torsos and limbs, overlapping scales or plates, though their skin did not shine like scales; it drank the light, the way the stone in that lower chamber had done. They did not hiss or roar or rush us. They simply stood there, breathing, their heads tilting in tiny, precise movements as if they were cataloging each of us.

Briggs fired first, his pistol coming up in a reflex that had nothing to do with orders or thought. The crack of the shot shattered the brittle quiet. The nearest creature’s head snapped slightly as the bullet struck—not enough to be a dramatic jerk, just enough to prove contact. I heard the impact like a stone striking wet clay. It did not fall. It did not howl. A thin, dark smear appeared along one side of its head, and its eyes shifted to Briggs with what might have been curiosity. Then it moved, and all the myths about slow, lumbering monsters died in a single heartbeat. It was on him before my brain finished the thought “it’s coming.”

One moment it stood six paces away. The next it had crossed the distance in a blur of pale and shadow, like the space between positions had simply been erased. Its arm came up, claws catching Briggs’s forearm, three parallel arcs that sliced through coat and flesh with such clean force that his hand opened and the pistol sailed free, spinning. The sound Briggs made was not a scream so much as a forced exhalation, cut off at the end. He fell to one knee, clutching his torn arm, blood already pattering onto the dirt. The creature did not press the attack. It stepped back, weight centered, eyes on us, as if it had swatted an offending hand rather than defended itself.

“Back,” Manny shouted, though his voice shook. “To the creek!” Connelly seized Finch by the collar and yanked him backward, lamp swinging wildly. The Crocker twin who remained—Jonah—stepped forward with his pick held across his body, not as if he intended to swing, but as if he needed something between himself and them. The creatures adjusted in unison, fanning slightly to form a low arc that blocked the path toward the ridge and the drift, leaving the route toward the shallow creek and the deeper desert beyond open. It was so clear a gesture that even in my terror some part of me recognized it as intention rather than chance. They were not herding us back to their hollow. They were driving us away from it.

From the direction of the tool shed came a crash, wood on wood, and Thomas Crocker’s voice, raw and distant: “He’s moving.” We had left his brother’s body there on a table, wrapped in a tarp, because Thomas had refused to bury him until the officials and surveyors could see for themselves what had happened. For a moment, the image of that table bucking under some invisible pressure made my knees weak. I took a step toward the shed and was jerked back by Manny’s hand on my sleeve. “You go there, you die there,” he hissed. “They already chose. Don’t make them choose again.”

We backed toward the creek in a stumbling line, our boots catching on loose stones and brush, lamps jouncing. The creatures mirrored our movement, never stepping into the water, never closing the distance quite enough to force a collision, but never letting the space lengthen either. Their bare feet left those same three-lobed impressions in the dust, neat and measured. At the creek’s edge, where the narrow flow cut a shallow channel through the arroyo floor, they stopped. The nearest one raised one arm slightly, showing the curve of its claws, and let out a dry, rasping exhale that might have been a sound of warning or simply breath forced through odd anatomy. Another answered from farther left. They made no move to cross.

We splashed through water that came only halfway up our shins but felt colder than any river I’ve ever crossed, the stones underfoot slick with algae, the lamps threatening to gutter with each stumble. On the far bank, panting, we turned. The creatures stood in a loose semi-circle on the opposite side, watching us. One shifted its head slightly, as if testing the boundary. None stepped into the water. Behind them, across the dark smear of the camp, the tool shed door shook again, then buckled inward. Through the open rectangle, all I could see was blackness and the brief flare of lamplight as something moved inside. Thomas never shouted again. His voice, like his brother’s, was swallowed by that hill.

We did what scared animals do: we fled. We didn’t talk about going back for anyone. We didn’t argue about whether to stay close to the spur or cut into the scrub. We put our backs to the ridge and walked into the night guided by a strip of starlight, the thin line of track barely visible once we found it. We walked until our legs shook and our lungs burned, until Briggs nearly fell from blood loss and Connelly half-carried him, until the lamps burned low and the cold prowled up our sleeves. Once, somewhere around midnight, a single, clear tap rang along the steel rail beneath our boots, pinging through the metal like a message. Just one. No rhythm. No reply. None of us commented. There are some things that become more real if you name them, and we were done making things real.

We reached the next spur—a shack, a pump, a telegraph line, and a name I can’t recall—just as dawn bled faint color into the sky. The man at the telegraph looked at us like we were revenants, half-dead things dragging coal dust and fear in behind us. Briggs went inside to send his messages, his bandaged arm stinking faintly of infection, his eyes sunk deep. When he came out, he said he’d wired the territorial authorities, the company, and anyone else whose name he thought might carry weight. “They’ll send lawmen and a survey party,” he said. “They’ll go up and see what’s in that hill. They’ll close it, one way or another. It’s not our problem anymore.” Then he sat down heavily on the station porch and stared at the horizon as if expecting the ridge itself to crawl closer.

I wish I could tell you that the story ended in a way that satisfied the part of me that still likes neat rows of numbers in a ledger. But the West doesn’t care for neat endings, and neither, it seems, did the things under that ridge. The lawman came. He took our statements one by one, his pencil scratching in a cheap notebook. His eyes grew more skeptical with each repetition. Men from another camp rode out under orders to check the site, to bring back bodies and measurements and anything else that could make sense of what we said. When the telegraph office received their report two days later, the operator read it aloud with an expression caught between disdain and unease. The camp at Dry Four was empty. The bunkhouses stood, the cookhouse stove still warm with ash from recent use. The tool shed table was clear. No bodies. No blood. No footprints. The drift mouth had collapsed in on itself, the timbers crushed and buried under a slide of rock and coal, the hill sealed again as if our breach had been a scab picked too soon. The ground showed no sign of those three-toed impressions, no gouges, no drag marks. The only oddity the riders noted was that the timbers around the drift were scored with thin, parallel scratches, too clean for rats, too shallow for pick teeth.

“Maybe you boys were dipping into the wrong bottle,” the telegraph man suggested, after he finished. No one answered him. How do you argue with absence? How do you prove a bruise once the skin has gone unmarked?

Briggs died before the week was out, fever taking him as neatly as any claw. The doctor in that spare settlement cut his sleeve away and wrinkled his nose at the wound. The cuts themselves, he said, were clean, almost surgical. The flesh around them, however, had begun to blacken in odd starburst patterns, the veins dark, as if something foreign had traveled inward from the scratches. “Poison,” he said. “An infection I’ve never seen.” He bled him, poulticed him, did every useless thing medicine knew in 1906, and still Briggs’s breath rattled to a stop one gray morning with his eyes open and his hand clamped on the bedsheet as if he were still holding that pistol. They buried him before sundown, quick and quiet. None of us asked to see his arm again.

One by one, we drifted away from that stretch of Nevada. Finch left first, vanishing with an eastbound crew. I heard, years later in a bar in Ogden, that a young man fitting his description had walked into the Weber River during spring flood and not come out. Connelly lasted three more winters in other mines before pneumonia took the strength out of his lungs. Manny went south, they said, back to silver for a while and then to a small ranch where he would not have to hear anything knocking under his bed. The Crocker brothers were already ghosts in my mind; I never heard word of Thomas again, though sometimes when I wake in the dark I think I hear his voice just outside the door, flat and resigned, saying he can’t leave his brother.

As for me, my life folded back into narrower concerns: tallies and train schedules, shipments and receipts. I married, once. It did not stick. I spent more years above ground than below and learned to live with the ache in my chest that never quite went away, the one that wakes when I’m in a cellar or a tunnel or any place where the air feels older than it should. I don’t tell this story often. When I do, men either lean forward, hungry for fear they can file under “tall tale,” or they look away, unsettled by the possibility that some places are not ours to catalog. The official record, such as it is, shows a cave-in, a camp abandoned, a company that cut its losses and moved on. Hills shift, mines fail, men die. The land forgets their names.

But I remember the sound of that tapping: the patient, measured work of something that had been carving its own world out of stone long before we drove a rail spur into that valley. I remember the feel of the air in those chambers, the way it pressed on my skin like a hand testing a surface. I remember the three-lobed depressions in the dust and the way they circled the bunkhouse in an even ring, as if counting. Most of all, I remember the moment when those pale shapes stood at the edge of the creek and chose not to follow us, not to finish what they so easily could have. We were intruders, noisy animals that had broken into their rooms and scrawled notes on their walls. They drove us out and shut the door. Whatever bargain was made that night, we weren’t the ones who set its terms.

Maybe the hill is quiet now. Maybe the collapse sealed everything neatly, like a wound scabbed over. Maybe no one has swung a pick into that ridge since, and the rooms beneath have gone back to whatever slow work filled them before we came. Or maybe the tapping started again one winter under some new camp, under some new bunkhouse where young men lie awake and pretend they don’t hear. All I know is this: there are places under our feet that do not belong to us, no matter what the paperwork says. And if you are ever working a seam in a hill that the locals walk around instead of over, and your pick bites into a pocket of air that smells too old to name, and that night the ground under your bunk gives two soft, deliberate knocks—do not go back down to see who’s there. Some doors stay closed not because they are locked, but because something on the other side has decided, for now, that you are not worth the trouble of opening them.