20 comments/ 31878 views/ 5 favorites Life in Deep Rock By: dr_mabeuse It was the shell of an ammonite, about three inches across, a spiral whorl with deep scallops between each chamber so that it looked strangely malicious, like a blade for a little circular saw. It was very old, about 400 million years, and it was embedded in the sandstone in a way that John was seeing more and more these days, held in a tight, intimate embrace as if it had crystallized right out of the rock. The same tiny veins of silvery quartz than ran through the rock ran through the fossil too, innervating the shell like blood vessels in an organ. Only the obsidian gloss of the fossil against the flat gray-black of the fractured rock gave a hint that it hadn't appeared like a crystal right out of the stone itself. It hadn't, of course. It had come from the living world of the Devonian sea that surged over the quarry long before there was a consciousness to see it. Still, it was strange. Disturbing. He slid his facemask back down and picked up the old dental drill, gritted his teeth against the irritating whine and started to work as the dust and tiny chips flew. He worked in the front window of the museum-gift shop. The light was good here and he was able to keep an eye on the parking lot and front door. It wasn't much of a gift shop, just an old house that guarded the entrance to the quarry where the fossils came from, fossils arranged on the walls and lying in the mismatched collection of glass display cases beneath the fluorescent lights. It was early spring and business was slow, still too raw and muddy for people to trek to the quarry to do their own collecting for thirty dollars a head. The light outside was harsh and thin like snow melt, and the racing clouds sent shadows flying over the deserted parking lot. It was peaceful—serene. It was much quieter now that Maggie was gone. There were times when he didn't think about her for hours at a time. He shifted on his stool to take the weight off his right hip, and just then heard tires crunch on the parking lot gravel, and here was a car. A big SUV, not new and streaked with mud. The car pulled right up to the window so that the grill was grinning at him and a man got out—mid-thirties maybe, and slight, frazzled and academic-looking, in jeans and worn denim barn-coat, his jeans spattered with dried mud. A digger for sure. John put down his drill. took off the face shield, and slid off his stool, always favoring his hip. "Good morning sir." He could afford to be gracious to a single visitor. The man looked confused and stood holding the door. "You're open? I couldn't tell if you were open or not from outside." "Open we are. Yes sir," John said. "All year 'round." The man looked at him long enough for John to form the opinion that he wasn't a normal tourist or rock hound. He seemed confused and almost alarmed, then he walked in with studied nonchalance and started peering intently into the display cases as if hiding his face. John watched him carefully. The man cleared his throat and looked up. "Is Maggie here? Maggie Livingston?" John stuffened. "Maggie? No sir, she's not." He limped over to the display case. "She no longer works here, I'm afraid." The man looked at him blankly, confused. "She was my wife," John said. "I'm John Livingston. We're no longer together." "Oh, I'm sorry," the man said. "I'm sorry to hear that. I came out here to see Maggie. She was very helpful the last few time I was here, some months ago." That would have been when John was the hospital, but there was no sense in telling the stranger that. John was still sensitive about it, even thugh he knew quite well that a lot of people needed help at times, and after what she'd put him through, it was perfectly understandable. The smile stayed on his face. "Well, maybe I can be helpful too now," he said. "Anything special you're looking for?" It was obvious the man was looking for something. The man tore himself from his reveries and looked around at the display cases. "Ammonites, crinoids, brachiopods. Local stuff. Things from this quarry." "Yes, sir! A man who knows his fossils! You'll find most of the invertebrates over here." He gestured to a long, low display case that had once held high school trophies. "You're a collector?" "I'm a chemist," the man said. "A surface chemist. Fossils were a hobby of mine. You own the quarry?" John laughed. "Not hardly. Monee Limestone still owns the quarry. I just lease rights from them." "But you still live here, right? Maggie said she lived upstairs. I suppose you...?" John gave the man time to feel his embarrassment, then answered politely. "Yes. We lived here together. I was in the hospital for a time around Christmas—bad hip, you know? That must have been when you were out." His smile barely slipped as his guard went up. "Just what is it you want, my friend? Is this a personal matter? Or is this business?" The man took off his glasses and turned pale eyes on him. "Well, it's a bit of both, I suppose. See, I was talking to Maggie. She was helping me. She never mentioned me? Ron Kassiter?" "She did not. Not that I remember." Kassiter sighed. he seemed very disappointed, almost distraught, and that made John uneasy. He waited for him to continue. "I'm curious as to whether you hear noises at night around here," the man said. "Maggie said she sometimes heard noises." "Noises? What kind of noises?" Kassiter realized that John was looking at him very suspiciously now, and he dropped the subject. He turned back to a case and tapped on the glass. "This ammonite here. Astronathes. May I see it?" "What kind of noises?" John repeated, hobbling over and fishing the keys out of his pocket. "Noises in the rocks," the man said. "Maggie—er, your wife—mentioned hearing them. Tapping. Clicking. Sharp sounds. Or maybe all at once—a kind of swishing sound, like rain." "Like spalling? Rocks splitting? Sure. Happens all the time when the weather changes. That's how I find some of my best stuff. Water melts into the cracks and freezes at night and the rocks split. Sometimes sounds like cannon fire." He opened the case and took out the fossil but he kept an eye on the man. It wasn't an exceptional fossil, a twisted cone like a little narwhal horn, but this specimen was very large and handsome, one of the first he'd found showing that strange veination, quite striking. The man took it in his hands and turned it over eagerly. "Left handed whorl," he said. "You've noticed how rare these are?" John looked at the spiral shell and shrugged. "Can't say as I have. Some are left, some are right. They go both ways." "No," the man said. "The shell of Astronathes is a right-handed helix. This one's left-handed." The man put down the shell and glanced rapidly over the rest of the display, the various fossils, some still in their rocky matrices, some totally free, some polished and some left crude and rough. John watched him carefully. There was something not right about him.. "Not all these specimens are local, are they?" the man asked. "The matrices are different. Limestone, chert, granite. Marble too, huh?" "Well, we like to keep a good stock on hand. I go to the shows, buy some interesting stuff. But most of the sandstone stuff is from here. Monee Number Four is pretty famous, you know." "Yes," the man said. "I know." John went on, "You can dig your own if you like, right out of the rock. Maggie tell you about that? Thirty dollars and you get to keep what you can carry out in a bucket. Rent you a hammer for another five." "Yes, yes, she mentioned it. She said it was forty dollars, though." Despite himself, John had to repress a smile. Maggie had been a character. The man looked up at him and suddenly seemed exhausted. He was pale as he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a slightly grimy business card. It bore the logo of the NaturaPure Water Company and said "Ronald A. Kassiter, M.S." John looked at the card and then up at Mr. Kassiter, M.S. He smiled a bit indulgently. He was used to PhD's visiting his quarry, and apparently Ronald hadn't made the grade, but his expression turned grave when he saw the man pull out an inhaler and take a couple of quick hits. He truly looked ill. "Are you okay. Mr. Kassiter? You want to sit down? You some water? Coffee?" Ronald waved his hand but sat down on the stool John pulled out for him. "I'm all right. I'm okay. It's just been an exhausting morning. An exhausting week, really. I was really looking forward to seeing Maggie." "Yes, well, she's gone, I'm afraid, and I don't know where." This was more information than he ever gave out, and he waited for some reaction, but there was none. He was relieved. "Just what are you looking for, Mr. Kassiter, if you don't mind my asking? I know most of the diggers and collectors around here, know most of what's available too—who found what and where. Maybe I can help you out." Kassiter turned rheumy eyes on him. "Anomalies. Enantiomorphs. Know what those are?" "I know anomalies, sure. What's that other?" Kassiter slid his spray back into his pocket and tested his breathing, his hand on his chest. "Enantiomorphs. Mirror images, reflections. Like your left hand is an enetiomorph of your right? Like the Astronathes shells. Astronathes has a right-handed helical shell. Only once in a great while do you find the enantiomorph, the left-handed helix, and only around here, like in this quarry here, this very one." John shrugged "Well, it's a kind of sport or sub-variety, I guess. That figures. Makes sense they'd be localized in one area. They worth much?" Kassiter ran his hand through his thin, wild hair. His voice was weary, as if he'd told the story to disbelievers a hundred times. "The left-handed shells aren't really fossils. They're something artificial, something put there in the rocks." John looked at him.. "You mean phonies? Frauds?" He laughed. "Mr. Kassiter, why would anyone do that? I sell Astronathes for ten bucks a pop and I've got buckets of them. If I were going to fake something, I'd fake something valuable, not a common fossil like that." "No, that's not what I mean," Kassiter said. "I mean there's something in the rocks that manufactures them. Something's making them. Whatever it is, I think it's alive. There's something living in the rocks. In the quarry." John's smile froze on his face. The man was a nut case. He got them out here surprisingly often, mostly religious nuts, anti-evolutionists. Some of them could be troublesome or even dangerous. Kassiter was a small man, but he had a rabid look to him. "Something living in the quarry? In the rocks?" He smiled. "Okay, Mr. Kassiter. Whatever you say." "No, look— I'm sorry. I don't mean to come off as crazy, and I know it sounds crazy..." He sighed and tried to look reasonable. "I'm a surface chemist. You know what that is?" "Haven't the slightest." "I study surfaces, the surfaces of things—solids, liquids— the parts we see." John snorted. "Sounds fascinating." "I know. Sounds dull as dirt, but it's not. See, when you stop to think about it, all we ever see are surfaces, right? All we ever interact with are surfaces. All chemical reactions happen at surfaces. We interact with the world through surfaces. That's all we know—what's on the outside of things. Those rocks you have, the ones with the fossils in them. You don't know what's inside till you open them up, do you?" "So?" "So when you open them up, what do you do? You create new surfaces to look at, see? You're still looking at the surface." "And?" "And I got interested in trying to see what's inside. I wanted to see what's under the surface, understand?" John shrugged, not very interested, and Kassiter moved to engage him. "Think of it this way— That piece of sandstone on your bench over there. What color is it inside?" John looked over at the piece of rock he'd been working on. He realized now that the shell he'd been freeing was left-handed, and that gave him a little thrill. "It's gray," he said. "Same color it is inside." Kassiter shook his head. "No. It's not. If you crack it open or drill into it it'll look gray, but that's just the new surface you expose. The truth is, it has no color inside. Color has no meaning on the inside of a rock. There's no light. We can't say what color it is. "There are other properties like that, other things we don't know about the insides of things. Acoustical properties are one. We don't know whatthings sound like in rock. How waves behave. There's all that rock in your quarry, and we have no idea what's going on inside. No idea whatsoever." A semi passed by outside, causing a swift black shadow to race through the shop. John shrugged. The man was insane but not dangerous and he was losing interest. He was still hoping to learn something about Maggie, though, so he indulged him. "Did you say there was coffee?" Kassiter asked. John ignored him. "So what does all that have to do with something living in the rocks? That's pretty far-fetched. And how does that relate to Maggie? Just what was she helping you with?" Kassiter slipped off the stool, reached in his back pocket and pulled out a crumpled spiral notebook. John understood he was supposed to look at it, but when he did all he saw was indecipherable scrawls and diagrams. "You can see past the surface," Kassiter said. "Well, not see, but you can poke around in there, you can probe. Sonar does it—seismography—sending sound waves into it. That won't tell you what it looks like in there, but it will tell you where density changes, where things are. That's what I was doing, using seismography to look at ground water sources." "What kind of things?" There was a loud crack and a gravelly rumble outside, as if a truck had just dumped a load of coal down the wall of the quarry. Kassiter looked at John in alarm, but John just shrugged. "Spalling," he said. "Just like I said. Now back to the subject. What kind of things?" Kassiter flipped some pages in his book. "Not just seismography. You can use NMR too—nuclear magnetic resonance, what the medical people call MRI. It's not easy, and you can't use it in the field, but you can get an idea of what's going on there inside smaller rocks, what the internal structure's like." "And what's in there?" John asked. "Fossils swimming around? Bigfoot living in there? Nessie?" Kassiter was used to ridicule. "No. Nothing like that. But there's something. When I was listening in the deep rock I heard something. Patterns, too regular to be natural. I've been listening for months now, all over the county, but this is the best place—the Monee Formation. Wherever it surfaces and the rocks are exposed, you can hear them. Your quarry has the largest exposure of Monee limestone in the state, and that means in the world. That's why I've come here. I've been recording them." The man was serious. "Your wife Maggie? She let me listen out here. Just put some microphones into cracks and holes in the rock. I could hear them. We both heard them. I can't believe she never told you." John straightened. "Just how well did you know my wife, Mr. Kassiter? How many times were you out here while I was away?" The man wasn't very succesful at hiding his look of alarm. He looked hurt and drew back. "Five, six times. Doing research, that's all. She was very helpful. She didn't tell you I was here? She didn't tell you about the recordings?" "No, but there's a lot she never told me about. Quite a lot." Kassiter picked up his notebook and put it away, and his hands were shaking. John watched him closely. "You have no idea where she is?" Kassiter asked. "I really need to find her to corroborate. She was my only witness for the recordings, and I need her to vouch for the experiments we set up." "What experiments?" "Just some simple things. Little experiments, but very important. Outside." John grew angry. "You set up experiments here on my property without my permission? What kind of experiments, Mr. Kassiter?" Kassiter looked frightened now. "It was minor, all very minor. We just buried some objects. Your wife said it was okay." John drew himself up. "Well she never told me, and I don't like people poking around without my permission. Did you get permission from Monee?" "I can't go to them until I have proof," he said. "They'd laugh me out of there. I'm sorry. She said it would be all right. There's no way you can contact her?" John drew himself up. "I'm afraid you're out of luck," he said carefully. "I don't know where she is. She just disappeared. Packed up some things and cleaned out our savings and disappeared. I think she had a young man out in California, but it seems she had young man quite a few places." Kassiter's face went blank and he grew even paler. He slumped in his stool. "I'm sorry to hear that. Very sorry. You must think I'm nuts then, huh?" "Quite honestly? I don't much care. But I want you to collect your experiments and get them out of here. You want to do research on my land, maybe we can work out a deal if the price is right. Otherwise you're trespassing, Mr. Kassiter, and the sheriff is a friend of mine." "I'm sorry, Mr. Livingston," Kassiter said resignedly. "I've been under a terrible strain. These last weeks have been terrible. I've quit my job, been traveling non-stop, trying to arrange funding, no one listening..." He lifted his face up and John felt contempt as he thought the man might start to weep "Do you have any idea of what it would mean if I'm right? The fame, the prestige? This would be the scientific discovery of the century—a new form of life, right under our feet, sharing the planet with us, living within our world. Can you imagine the money? Isn't it worth at least hearing me out?" In the silence of the shop the ticking of the big antique regulator wall clock could be heard. John locked the display case and stood up, ignoring the stiffness in his hip. "What do you take in your coffee, Mr. Kassiter?" "Two sugars and cream," he said. "And thank you." * * * Dark clouds chased the sun from the sky and a cold spattery rain began to fall. Occasionally, a passing car's tires sizzled on the wet asphalt outside, and John sat on his stool, his right leg extended, holding his coffee in both hands as Kassiter set up his laptop "What geologists call homogeneous isn't homogeneous to a chemist. Rocks are mixtures—solid mixtures of minerals. These microscopic crystals of mineral form domains and they have different properties from the domains around them. The properties I care about are acoustical, because I think these things in the rocks are standing waves." "Waves?" Kassiter looked at him. "You shouldn't be surprised. We're waves too. All the cells and neurons and all that stuff in our head, it's all there to produce very complicated waves. For us, they're electrochemical. For these creatures, they're acoustic, but the result is the same—the phenomenon we call thought. Complicated, but it's built up out of very simple processes, like Fourier waveforms: very complex wave forms built out of many, many simple ones." It was obvious John didn't know anything about Fourier transforms, so Kassiter dropped it. "Anyhow, these creatures, these entities, are like brainwaves, only they're vibrations instead of electrical, and instead of being in our brains, they're in the earth—the rock. They're like the thoughts of the earth." "But waves go through the earth. They don't stay in one place." "No, they do. Standing waves do. When there's a change in density at the ends — the nodes — the material in between can act like a violin string, vibrating between two fixed points. A standing wave. Build up enough of these simple standing waves in one area, and you've got very complex patterns, patterns that could be thought." Life in Deep Rock Kassiter sat back from the computer and looked at him. "I think of these things like tangled webs of vibrations, shifting around from one set of nodes to another inside the solid rock, like apes swinging through the trees. They can go anywhere - anywhere the rock can reach - but they're stuck in that rock formation." John blew on coffee that was long cold. "That's very nice, Ron. But what proof do you have? You ever seen one of these things? Ever have one sit up and beg?" "I've heard them," Kassiter said. "Your wife did too. I've heard them in the rock, their signals, their waves. It's nothing natural. It's too perfect, too precise to be anything natural or random. They're standing waves, moving around in the rock. And they do things in there. They have enough acoustical energy to change things, manipulate them." Kassiter reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper. "I had this sawed for me by a guy at the museum in Mayfield. I don't have my own rock saw, but you must. Why don't you try some yourself?" He unwrapped the tissue and placed half an ammonite shell on the glass counter. It had been sawed along the plane of the shell into two halves, and he laid it down sliced side up. "Where are the septa inside?" he asked. "The little chambers the thing lived in? You can see the sutures on the outside, but inside it's all blank, all smooth stone. It's a fake, a replica of the surface. All the lefties are like that. They're all fakes. These things just perceives the surfaces, and the recreate what they find." "Why would they do that?" "Who knows? These aren't human intelliogences. These are nothing like what we think of as intelligence. Who knows why they do anything? But they recreate what they find in the ground. They duplicate them in the only medium they have, which is solid rock." John picked up the shell. The ammonite was a distant relative of the chambered nautilus. It grew along the spiral of its shell, adding another chamber every season, and a shell sawn in half like this would show the chambers. This one had none. It was one long, open tube. "So? It's a mutant. A subspecies. It doesn't form chambers, or something ate them up before it fossilized. It's a long way from finding an ammy without chambers to believing in beasties in the rocks. And as for your noises..." Kassiter typed some commands into the computer and an acoustical graph came up on the screen. He upped the volume and the line began to spike and shudder. John heard a wall of low, white noise, punctuated by creaks and groans and occasional sharp snaps. "That's what it sound like inside the quarry, beneath the surface. In the rock itself. This was recorded at three AM, when the thermal expansion was minimal." They listened to the sounds inside the rocks, dark, mysterious sounds, There was a sudden whine rising in volume and Kassiter turn down the volume till it passed. "That's a truck on the highway. I think part of the reason they're in this quarry is because there's so little traffic. External acoustics bother them. Now listen. This one is filtered and enhanced." A sharp, rich sound, like a little spring being snapped, with a fast echo. One snap, then two — three, five, then it repeated. "Fibonacci series," Kassiter said. "That seems to be how they echo-locate, how they see their way around. Now here's what they sound like themselves." A rushing, hissing sound, rich with overtones — totally unearthly and yet strangely soothing, like the sound of surf on gravel on an unimaginable beach, thick with rhythms and shot with little tonal spikes. If the earth breathed or sighed, it might sound like that. "That's the standing wave," Kassiter said. "That's one of them — his mind, his very thought. I played back their echo location into the rock and one of them must have come to investigate, and I got his acoustical picture, his mind at work." Despite his doubts, the hair on the back of John's neck stood up. The sound was eerie and almost suffocating. "You're nuts, Ron! That could be anything! Sounds like someone holding a microphone over their shirt! How could anything live in solid rock? How could they move?" "You don't understand! They're not 'things'. The don't have bodies. They're standing waves, collections of energy. The use ambient vibrations for food and incorporate them into their waveform. They're in the rock!" "And where'd they come from? How'd they get here?" "I have no idea. Maybe they're always been there. No one's ever listened to rock using high-resolution before. Maybe they're older than we are." John made a face. He'd had enough. "Where's your bathroom?" Kassiter asked, unplugging the laptop. "Let me show you one more thing before you throw me out." "Right behind you. Through that door." "Come with me." John limped after him and Kassiter made him stand in the bathroom door as he went in and sat on the side of the tub. He pressed the case of the laptop against the spout, turned on the sound and adjusted the volume and held the computer pressed to the metal spigot as the hissing sound rose and filled the room, echoing off the tile. "The pipes go right into the ground," Kassiter said, rasinging his voice above the sound. "You're in a little pocket of sand here, but this is close enough so they can hear it. Their 'hearing' is, of course, very very good. And they're very fast. Do you know what the speed of sound in rock is?" "Haven't the slightest." At that moment there was a tapping. A kind of prickling in the earth under the floor that bloomed into an exquisite, lush wave as if the basement were being licked by a huge, velvety tongue. The sound was in the walls, the windows, traveling up through the bones in John's legs till her felt it in his balls and belly. He jumped, spilling his coffee. "Jesus God! What was that?" "They're here. The pipes carry the sound into the rock. They've come to investigate." John stared at him. The prickling sound started again, this time sweeping from one edge of the house to the other like the sound of waves gently rolling up on a gravelly beach and rolling back down with a muffled, harp-like resonance, a hiss from the rocks below, and then silence, a strange silence, as if all the sound had been sucked away. "Turn it off! Jesus Christ! Turn it off!" John shouted. "What do they want? What are they doing here?" Kassiter pulled the computer away from the tap "Want? I don't think they want anything. Why should they want something? People want. These things are something totally different. Alien like nothing else we can even think of. they don't eat. They don't sleep. They just are." There was the sound of a great subterranean sigh and a few residual pops and creaks from beneath the house. "See, all this time we've been looking to outer space for signs of life, on Mars, on the planets. No one ever thought to look in rock because we're always looking for flesh and blood creatures. No one ever thought to look at acoustical patterns. No one ever thought life could be like this — inorganic, pure energy." "And the fossils? Why should they screw around duplicating fossils?" Kassiter shrugged. "Don't know. With the kind of energy they have at their disposal, it wouldn't take much to reorder the mineral domains to duplicate whatever they find in their world. They find an ammonite, they duplicate it, only they get it backwards. I think it might be a kind of play, or just curiosity. Or maybe they're trying to communicate in the only way they know how." "Communicate?" "Look, I don't know. They're very sensitive to vibrations and noise. They must know there's something beyond their surface, something that comes and digs up fossils and takes them away. God knows what they make of that." "So they know we're here?" "Oh, I think so. I don't know how fast they think or sense. They can move much faster than we do — speed of sound in solid rock, I'd imagine — but I don't know much about their sensorium, what they can perceive. That's what I wanted to find out today. I wanted to set up some more mikes and try and make contact." "Make contact?" John asked. He sat back and sighed. "Ron, you know how absolutely ridiculous this whole thing is, don't you?" Kassiter's look said that he knew quite well. "Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. But you know what'll happen if we do make contact? It would be the scientific discovery of the century, of the millenium. It'll change everything." John had a vision of newspaper headlines, of reporters and crowds flocking to the quarry — money, interviews, fame; maybe a Nobel prize, Geraldo Rivera and Oprah Winfrey. Books and movie deals "What's the next step?" John asked. "What are these experiments you got set up outside?" "They're easy," Kassiter said. "We just seeded the rocks, buried some artifacts in holes and packed them in to see if they'd be replicated. I figured that if these things can imitate whatever they find in the rocks, they might imitate other things they find too." He didn't mention that the original idea had been Maggie's. John hesitated for a moment, his face growing suspicious. "Just where did you bury these artifacts?" he asked. "What part of the quarry?" "Right near the house. About a hundred yards away in that weathered east face." He thought for a moment and said, "All right. As long as we don't have to dig. And we stay away from the south face. There's all sorts of sink holes in there and that rock isn't stable. The public's not allowed back there." "No problem," Kassiter said. "It'll take us ten minutes." John turned and walked out and Kassiter followed. As they passed the den, Kassiter glanced inside. There was the daybed with the same green coverlet on it, now drawn smooth and unwrinkled. The was the red pillow she'd rested her head on, and the old easy chair where his pants had ended up. It was too dark to see if there was a stain on the cover, but he doubted it. She hadn't been as careful as he'd hoped, but apparently John still didn't know, and that was a great relief. ***** She had been helpful—very helpful—and she hadn't laughed or sent him away as he explained his theories to her. She'd listened to him as only a young, bored housewife would, desperate for some novelty or excitement, and the things she told him confirmed his ideas—the noises at night, the strange swishing under the house. Her husband was away, where or why she wouldn't say, but after Ron's first visit, after he'd spent hours in the lonely shop telling her about his ideas, she'd called him as he was on the road and told him she was frightened now, frightened of these noises in the quarry and the subtle vibrations in the empty house, the sudden explosions of the spalling rock. She couldn't go into the front room where the museum was because the fossils frightened her too—strange, twisted alien shapes made by God knows what now. It was his fault she was frightened, and he had to come back that very night. Either that or she was leaving herself and the hell with the whole place. She wasn't going to stay there at night among these invisible monsters. She was nervous and she was frightened, and she was beautiful too, in her way. An early bloomer, over ripe, married too young to a man too old. She had needs of her own, needs her husband couldn't satisfy, and she wasn't meant to live like this, running a stupid fossil shop in an abandoned quarry in a backwater part of the state. Ron knew all that, but she'd been so helpful and friendly, and she'd been on his side. She'd met him outside beneath the winter moon—a strange, unnaturally warm winter—waiting by the main road that ran past the quarry. She held an axe for protection. Her hair was dyed red, but in the moonlight it looked gold, and she wore tight jeans and a sweater and a jean jacket that could barely close over her chest. She wanted to go into the house immediately but he wanted to listen to the rocks first, so they went to the weathered east face where he inserted his microphones into old test-bore holes and plugged the holes with rock chips and spoil. He put on the earphones and listened but he hadn't worked out his filtering system yet and all he heard was random hisses and pops and groans—the sounds of the rocks themselves, cooling, contracting, rubbing against one another. Even so, the weirdness of what he was doing—standing in the autumn moonlight listening for sounds of life in the rock—gave him chills and got him unaccountably aroused. Maggie didn't help when she crowded against him to share the earphones, pressing her warm and heavy breasts against his shoulder. They stood there in the shadows of the quarry with their cheeks almost touching as they tried to share the headpiece, listening to the strange eerie sounds of the earth's winter sleep. In the house she poured them both whiskey from her husband's cabinet and then turned off the lights in the kitchen so the neighbors wouldn't see she was still awake, and then he was kissing her and she was in his lap, pressing her tits against him as his glass of liquor dangled in his hand. Her lips were soft and hungry, and he realized that she wasn't as scared as she'd said—not of the creatures, anyhow—and had called him back here for something else. But by that time, he didn't care anymore' She got off his lap and then straddled him in her tight jeans, leaving no doubt as to what she wanted. Her jacket fell to the floor and she put his hands under her sweater then put her arms around his neck and rocked against him, showing him. She knew what she wanted. She'd done this before, he was sure, but he didn't care about that either. She was beautiful in the pale light that reflected from the moon and off the ghostly white walls of the quarry, painting her features in luminous intensity. He was confused and exhausted and this was all he wanted too. She led him into the den, the house dark and silent now—no pops, no hisses, no spalling—as if everything were holding its breath and waiting. She reminded him how to undress and he threw his clothes on the easy chair, and she stripped off her sweater and jeans but left her underwear for him to remove. She seemed to enjoy that part, as if that proved that he was seducing her and not the other way around. Kassiter was thin and slight, but he was endowed, and she appreciated that, fawning and cooing over him, eager to use her hands and mouth to show him how good she was. He remembered those pert and eager lips, the upturned nose. She had a butterfly tattoos on her breast and a compass rose on her left shoulder. She loved touching his face as she kissed, and licking the inside of his mouth. And she was appreciative—wildly appreciative. He knew he wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last. She just loved it too much, like she was born to it. Kassiter had never been with a woman like her, who squeezed him with her thighs and rocked against him, put his hand in her mouth and sucked his fingers. She ended up on top, riding him and laying her tits against his lips, taking his hand and pressing his fingers between her legs so that he felt themselves conjoined—his hardness moving into the tightness of her body. He finished first but she didn't stop, grinding slowly and insistently against him with feminine urgency till she got what she wanted, coming in great, wracking, waves. She was so generous in her pleasure, so joyous that she made him feel much more than himself. It occurred to him that if ever a woman were made for sex, Maggie was it, and even if he wasn't the first and probably wouldn't be the last, he could hardly hold it against her. It was the just the way she was. He could hardly believe it. She was so simple and innocent on the outside, yet with such depths of passion within. He lay there beneath her as she squeezed his deflating member in the aftershocks of her pleasure and felt himself hardening again, as if she summoned it forth from him, and before long he was hard inside her again, reaching for her in her darkness. Somehow they ended up on the floor and this time she let him take all the initiative, clinging to him and whispering in his ear as he took her with a passionate intensity like he'd never known. before he came he levered himself up on his arms and looked down at her girlish face. She had a smile of pure pleasure, almost religious in its blissfulness and surrender, and that smile, coupled with the lewd and obscene movement of her hips, drove him over the edge. It was like she was an angel on top and the very devil below. He'd never had anyone like her. After that the routine was the same—the quarry, the kitchen, the den. She would never let it be anything more than physical, though the physicality itself was more than enough for him, and soon she was more obsessed with his work than even he was. She was never afraid of the quarry again, and she had no doubts that the creatures existed. In fact, she became almost affectionate towards them and motherly. It was Maggie who gave him the idea for the seeding experiment. Innocent as she was, she'd started writing notes to the things and burying them in the holes and cracks of the rock, and on one visit she'd shown him a chunk of limestone from the quarry with a perfect replica of a note she'd left on it, complete with her handwriting—only a fragment, though, because the fossil was so thin, paper-thin. He was astonished. "Where's the rest of it, Maggie? Did they replicate the whole note?" "I can't show that to you, Ronnie. It's kind of private. I smashed it." "Smashed it? But Maggie, this is the proof we're looking for! There's no way this could have happened through natural forces. Do you have any more?" Maggie took the fossil back from him and pressed her thumb against it, crushing the delicate face of the note into dust.. "No, I can't let you see. This is just between them and me. I tell them all sorts of personal stuff, just write up my thoughts and put them in the rocks." "But there's no way they can read these, Maggie. There's no way they can understand." She pursed her lips stubbornly. "Well maybe that's what you think, but I think different. I think they can understand, and you know, sometimes they even come and visit. Late at night I can feel them coming by the house, like to see if I'm okay. I think they can even understand me when I talk, like if I go and whisper in a crack in the quarry? They can hear. I can feel them with my fingers on the rock swimming around in there. They know me, Ronnie. They know a lot more than you think. They listen and they know what goes on up here." And she told him more. She told him about her husband's temper and about her fear of him. She told him that he was in the hospital in Mayfield not for his hip, but for his mental state, and she was afraid of what might happen when he got out. She never asked Kassiter for help though, never asked him to take her away or lend her money. She knew some people in California and she already had her bus ticket. If John tried anything, she'd be gone like that. She urged Kassiter to be careful too. And then work and his investigations took him farther afield as he wandered the highways, tracing the Monee formation as it snaked through the state, a hump appearing above ground here, or limestone beds exposed by a road cut there. he got better at listening and could hear them everywhere, but nowhere so clear as at the quarry, and never so strong as when Maggie was with him, whispering into the rock and calling to her friends. And now she was gone, without so much as a note. He wished her well wherever she was. He wished she were here to see the results of the experiments. ***** It was raining and getting dark but they didn't want to wait. Kassiter got a poncho from his truck and John found a long slicker and fishing hat and some picks and shovels and they walked out to the east wall of the quarry using flashlights to see the way, John moving slowly and favoring his hip. Life in Deep Rock "All I did," Kassiter said, careful to keep Maggie out of this, "Was drop some artifacts into some of those bore holes and cover them up. It might be a long shot, but if those things find them, they might replicate them like they do with the ammonites and other fossils. If they do, we have proof. If not, well, that might not prove anything." "I can't believe I'm doing this," John said, checking his digital camera, "But all right. Show me where you buried them." They walked over the rock-strewn ground, now running with rills of rain water. Water was dripping from the rocks and the wind picked up, lashing them with more rain. "I staked them," Kassiter said. "See? I drove little wooden stakes into the holes. These stakes were just laying around." "Old surveying stakes." John nodded. "Yeah, they're all over the place. There's one. That one there." An old weathered one by two was sticking out of the rock face at chest height, held in place with rock flakes and stones. Kassiter grabbed it and wiggled it out, then cleared out the detritus with his fingers as thunder pealed above their heads. he dug his fingers in and scooped out more rock chunks and mud and let it fall and John leaned over, shined his light on a rock and picked it up. He held it to his eyes and then showed Kassiter. It was a perfect replica of a carved wooden stake—a one by two chiseled to a point, made of seamless sandstone, perfect even down to the grain of the wood and some stubborn knots. "I'll be damned!" John said. "I'll be fucking god damned!" Kassiter felt laughter welling up in his throat like hysteria, wild and panicked, but he fought it down. he reached into the hole with his fingers and found the seed—an old screwdriver he'd taken from the back of his truck and shoved into the hole, now rusted and corroded from its months in the wet rock. He threw it aside and felt back in the hole. "Give me the pick. The pick." "Here," John said, moving past him. "I know these rocks." He lifted the pick and sent the point into the soft rock, knocking off a flake the size of a dinner plate, then another. Three more strikes and he'd uncovered the base of the hole. He bent down to examine the chips, but Kassiter was already on his hands and knees holding one of the to his face, his eyes wide. It contained a stone relief of the screwdriver, still embedded in the rocky matrix and made of the same limestone, only glossy and finished, just like the fossil John had been working on that very afternoon. He looked up at John in astonishment. "They're here!" he said. "They're really here!" "What else you got?" John stormed past him in the rain, headed for the next stake. He pulled it out and pulled the rocks from the hole, not even bothering to look for the stake replica in the dark. He pulled out an old, filthy pair of sunglasses encrusted with sand and grime and tossed them aside, then started chipping at the hole. The rock fractured in smooth lines, and there, embedded in the rock, was a pair of stone sunglasses, the lenses as smooth as glass. He dropped the pick and stared at them as if he'd struck a vein of pure gold, and the blank eyes of the glasses stared back. "I must be nuts!" he said. "I swear this isn't happening!" "This doesn't mean anything," Kassiter shouted through the rain. "This could be some natural phenomenon, some kind of pattern-crystal thing. There should be more. More of these things, scattered around the quarry. We have to find them somewhere else to prove it. Where do you find the most fossils? The ammonites? We have to look there." "The south face," John said immediately, then caught himself. "No. No, we can't go there We can't dig around there. It's dangerous. Too unstable." But Kassiter had already picked up a shovel and was off. John could see his flashlight bouncing in the dark. "Hold it Kassiter! Hold it! You can't go there! That rock's spalling all the time, especially when it rains. It ain't safe! God damn it!" He shouldered his pick and hobbled after the younger man, but just then there was that sound again, that sibilant hissing beneath the ground, like a million little stones coming to attention and falling back as a wave passed by. It felt like the earth was alive, like there was some intelligence down there in the very rock, shifting beneath his feet. "Kassiter! Kassiter? Are these things dangerous? Can these things hurt us?" But the younger man was already far ahead, his light beam playing over the south face a hundred yards away. There was a paralyzing flash of lightening but the sound that followed wasn't thunder. It was the grinding hum of things in the earth, followed by the rending crack of rock splitting, breaking off the south wall of the quarry and shattering as it slid down to the ground in a solid sheet, like plate glass. There was no dust. It was too wet for there to be any dust, but already John could see Kassiter's light shining on the wall, on the new rock that had been exposed. There in the light of his torch like some grim monument or open-air catacomb were the fossilized replicas of Maggie—a score of them— the shoulders and arms, the naked hips and legs, the pert noses and expectant lips, all growing from the living rock, perfect copies, even down to the tarp and rope he'd used to cover the body with—a gallery of dead Maggies, done in living stone. John watched in horror as Kassiter's light picked out first one then another, then the beam wavered and pointed to the ground as if no longer able to look. There was that rushing sound again, all around him, as if circling him, a kind of victory lap, then it disappeared, and at last, here was the sound of thunder.