The Dread, Part Two

The unearthly din neared the surface and so uneuphoniously threatening, the two young men turned and fled. Once in the safety of the truck, they sped over the rough and ungraded roads, back to the paved security of Main Street and U.S. 95.

Stricken with an incorporeal fright, they refused to acknowledge that thing they knew, as naming it would confirm its existence, however they accidentally invited it back into their now settled and placid lives one afternoon, five years later, when they bumped into each other at the Gold Bar in the Sparks Nugget. After a few drinks, the memories spilled out, with one memory standing out beyond the rest that both attributed to a folie à deux.

There in the jingle-jangle of coins striking the tin pan of one-armed bandits and the cacophony of excitable voices, they took turns describing the strange sounds and the hideous decay their panosophic learning acquired in the instant ahead of flight.

As Jimmy talked of the moment he  fled, Eddie interrupted, “I…I…I saw something that’s left me frighten ever since.”

“Saw what?” Jimmy asked.

“A pair of gray, rotting hands and a blue-chalked face,” Eddie continued, “I think it was one of those dead miners and it pointed a bony finger at me and whispered, ‘We are coming.’”

“That’s jus’ your imagination,” Jimmy chided Eddie. “You need another drink.”

“No! I tell you they’re coming for me,” Eddie muttered argumentatively, “I know it.”

Jimmy sat at the bar long after Eddie left, draining his sixth beer and sipping a whiskey, all the while believing his best friend since grade school had lost his mind.

A week later, Jimmy received a telephone call from Tasker, Eddie’s only brother. His voice was a whisper at the end of the line, “The corner of Eddie’s house, where his bedroom was, was swallowed up by a sinkhole.”

Tasker went on to explain, “Eddie’s had this strange fascination with the mines beneath Virginia City. He told me that he could hear the distant, muffled sound of pickaxes and he had the crazy idea that something from one of the old glory-holes was searching for him. I thought he was nuts.”

Jimmy shuddered at the implication.