Soon the underground cathedral was empty save for the wafting smoke from the burnt gunpowder and the five dead men lay on the floor of the place. Howard, deafened and blinded from the blast of his Colt’s muzzle, sat paralyzed, waiting and praying for his senses to return to to him before the horde returned and ripped him apart.

His eyesight drew accustom to the semi-darkness faster than the return of his hearing and the continued internal reverberations. He crawled over the bodies and to the altar, grabbing the radiating gem and starting to smash the crystal idol, but the sound of movement from somewhere deep in the recesses of the dark cave, necessitated his withdraw.

And because he could see again, the mistiness of the gun smoke as it found its way out of the grotto, marked an avenue of escape. He crawled in the direction of its exodus, leading him to a passage and eventually the same secreted door venting to the outside, over looking the lighted town below Sun Mountain.

Staggered by what he’d witnessed, Howard stumbled down the now familiar path, with barely enough glow from the gibbous moon, throwing down on the ground so he might find his way off the mountain. The path led to the red-light district, vaguely quiet following a night of lessening attention.

Still Harold stumbled forward and to the lavishly adorned crib of Mademoiselle Julia Bulette. He toppled hard against her door frame and then rolled into the pathway beneath her stairs.

Having heard the sound and felt the vibration at her door, she opened it with a once-concealed derringer in her palm. See that it was the Marshal, and that he was half naked and shoe-less, she without thought sought to render the man her aide.

It would be hours before she could make sense of his rantings, those that came in fits of screams and still others, in the mumbling of a mad man. Julia did her best to nurse the disheveled man back to his mind and physical self.

“I know that it’s hard to believe,” he told her, “but I’m not insane. I know what I saw!”

“I believe you,” Julia said, trying to comfort him, “But honestly, no one’s missing.”

“I have proof,” he excitedly claimed, “The red gem stone.”

“Gem stone?,” she asked, adding, “My poor man, the only thing you had was your gun.”

“Then someone stole it!” he frantically exclaimed.

Harold clambered from the bed and began searching for the missing rock. Quietly, Julia sent for the doctor.

Soon a number of citizen came to the district to hear and see for themselves the wild actions and ramblings of Marshal L.C. Howard. This included the once missing Thurlby, who smiling, asked, “Are you alright, Guv?”

Howard eventually slipped away, unnoticed and on foot, down into the valley, deep into Six-Mile canyon, as far as he could to escape the horror captured in his shattered mind. He spent his final years. drunk on cheap whiskey, searching for proof of what he’d seen, of the wild images and that odious chant, “Voquulo Zaa-q’ran,” which had been so thoroughly pressed into his damaged mind by the beings that continue to dwell underground.

Old timer’s say he could often be heard sloppily muttering the meaningless phrase, “Should’ve smashed it to pieces when had the chance.”

In the gloomy darkness, moved dwarf-like humanoid creatures, skulls peaked and flattened on the sides, with no ear holes, and reptilian eyes, large and round, and protruding jaws with two pointed fangs. Their hands and feet appeared unnaturally sinuous; bodies – if one may call it that – were unclothed, and possessed of a whitish skin, not unlike that of the under-belly of a viper.

Within the movement came the dragging noise which soon revealed the lifeless bodies of the five missing men. Howard felt a shudder of cold terror vibrate throughout his entire body and he nearly gagged.

He watched in helpless silence as Thurlby’s stiffened body was raised to the altar, face up and one of the creatures, adorned with a golden circlet on its head, crawled and laid on top of the body, placing what appeared to be a mouth against the corpse’s mouth. As this happened the voiceless gathering began to chant and writhe to the sound of a single drum beat.

Again the voices came, wailing, “Voquulo Zaa-q’ran,” from within Howard’s skull and as he battled to close out the noise, he watched in great fear as the body atop the dead man, seemed to transfer part of its spirit into the lifeless form below. Then much to his relief, he saw the body roll from the altar and drop to the cavern floor, still dead and unmoving.

Again and again the ritual was repeated, with each time the being laying on the dead body and appearing to breath life back into the rotted corpse. And each time the still dead body failed to reanimate, leaving Howard certain that the gruesome ceremony had not worked.

Then it happened, the first of the five bodies jerked violently and drew itself up and onto its hands and knees. In the red glow, Howard could see the refraction of the light as it shine off the dead milky eyes of the now-extant thing.

He shrieked in terror as the first one was joined by another, then another and until all were writhing to the soft thumping of the drum. Howard pushed himself to the right, attempting to avoid the malformed congregation, with their undulations and clammy skin, chilling to his touch.

That’s when he discovered his holster, still encumbered with its revolver. Excitedly, he drew it out, lifting and aiming for the glint of gold he saw as the gem’s glow cast itself on the frightful headband.

Howard squeezed and the thing with the unholiest of halos, vanished from sight. The subteranne exploded in pandemonium as yet another bark of the gun shattered along the stone-walls with a violent echo upon echo.

From where Howard stood he could tell that the night would be a fairly slow one as it was the middle of the week and most men had used up what money they had at the beginning of the week. He set off back up the hillside, retracing his steps along the dark path that led to the most recent vanishing.

Quietly, he stood near where Thurlby had been standing. Howard looked down the long hillside, gazing at the lights of the city, and lost in speculative thought when he heard a faint noise from be hind.

He started to turn, to look behind, when he felt himself suddenly jerked from his feet and sucked into an inky darkness. Howard tried desperately to struggle, to free himself, but whatever had him, was too much for him to escape from and he felt himself squeezed until he slipped into the other kind of blackness, that of unconsciousness.

Howard opened his fogged eyes upon an otherworldly darkness, finding himself laying face-down on a worn and glass-like polished floor of what he assumed to be a natural cave. Nearby, stood a low altar, adorned by a large red-glowing gem, whose illumination was jus’ enough to cast the cavern into vague shadows, and a close-by crystalline statue carved into a hideous and obscene snake-like, bat-winged figure, which gave off the appeared of being alive in the gems luminosity.

Slowly Howard rolled over, sat up, only to realize he was missing his pants and boots. As quickly as the thought came to his mind, it disappeared and he found himself in the throes of agony as his brain felt like it was about to explode.

Then he heard a voice cry out,“Voquulo Zaa-q’ran,” followed by many voices and each seemed to come from inside his head and therefore he could not escape the unearthly and grotesque chanting. With the chanting came visions of unwholesome thoughts and images, that lead to a piercing, guttural and reverberating scream of agony from the lone man.

Then…silence.

Howard tried to stand, but the ceiling was far to low. Instead, he could only crawl on his hands and knees.

As he searched for a way out of this hellish nightmare, if indeed that’s all it were, he heard the scurrying of inhuman feet and the soft scraping sounds of a something weighty being dragged. Finding no way out, he turned and placed his back against the wall of the cave, prepared to fight whatever was coming towards him.

The shuffling and the dragging grew closer and closer. Howard wish that he had his Colt, but along with his pants and boots, it too was gone.

The church mouse to the field mouse: “Can I talk to you about cheeses?”

As the years passed, the cho’er-ja koe’kro became less dependent on the outside world, developing ways of growing and gathering food from the Earth’s interior. Meanwhile, their bodies adapted to the dark: to change physically, becoming more bestial, shunning sunlight.

Far below the budding mining town, and hidden within Six-Mile Valley by the eons of time, shifted sands and regenerating sage brush, the ruins of their abandoned above-ground din’ee lay decayed and fallen. As for the valley it remained shunned and unsettled by the Paiute and Shoshone tribes, but it soon became well populated by White settlers, expanding into Nevada.

The cho’er-ja koe’kro transformed the caverns into a semblance of those buildings they long ago had abandoned; upper reaches lines with shaped stone, similar to the ruins. But as they drove passages deeper and deeper, the stone work fell away to a more primitive design, finally ending in rooms crudely hacked from the surrounding stone.

Howard spread the map out across his small desk and weighted down the corners. Next, using the stub of the only pencil he had, he marked each place a missing person had last been seen, then he stood, studying the results.

“Nothing,” he grumbled, though he still couldn’t remove himself from the thought that each disappearance might be related.

Marshal Howard needed a drink, so he rolled up the map, set it aside and headed out the door and into the street. He noted that the shadows were growing longer in the east and that nighttime would soon be over the town.

“Well, howdy there, Marshal,” came the genial address of Territorial Enterprise newspaper hack and chief freeholder of The Monumental Liars Club, Sam Clemens, “Anything worth gossiping about?”

“Nope, not yet,” Harold smiled.

“Lemme buy you a drink anyway, my good man,” Clemens offered as he got up and took a seat across from the law officer.

Slowly, Clemens drew out the concerns of the law man, until Howard was explaining the details leading up too each disappearance. Finally, Clemens took a gulp of his drink, brushed the damp from his mustache and quipped, “Do be disheartened, lots of things disappear in this God-forsaken land – gold and silver, water, people and eventually even virtue. Most can be found again – save for virtue.”

The pair nursed their glasses for about two hours. By then Clemens was regaling Howard with tall-tales of his youth spent in Missouri. Eventually, Howard pushed back his chair from the corner table, excused himself and strode out onto the wooden walk way leaving the news man to find someone else to share his verbal conjuring with.

Beneath Sun Mountain, east of Carson City and above Virginia City, in the rugged passes of the Sierra Mountain Range, men continue to toil, wrenching silver from the depths of the earth in untold qualities. Yet more than precious mineral is hidden amid the rocky crags and deadly holes of the miners’ jack; the old people – cho’er-ja koe’kro – or what once had been those ancient people — still secretly dwell.

L.C. Howard came into the Nevada territory from the Ocean State to find his fortune, instead he discovered his calling as a brazen outlaw first, then as a town’s marshal. He found the work much more to his liking, with the wild nights of an ever increasing population, free-flowing whiskey and the even freer women of the bawdy houses.

“I tell ya Marshal, Thurlby was standing right there and then he was gone,” Bartholomy complained.

“Maybe he quit the claim and packed her in,” Howard replied.

“Naw…he jus’ up and disappeared,” Bartholomy continued, “He was right there one minute, gone the next!”

Howard studied the ground and where the old miner pointed. He saw a set of boot prints left by the Cornish hard-rock miner, but little else.

“Well, I don’t see any blood or drag marks, and he didn’t fall in a hole, so I got nothing to go on,” Howard stated.

“Well, something happened to him…” Bartholomy started.

“Tommy-knockers, perhaps?” Howard interrupted.

“That ain’t real, Marshal, and you know it,” Bartholomy growled.

“Well, until I have more to go on,” Howard said sternly, “I can’t do anything about a man who seems to have vanished like you say he’s done.”

Howard turned and followed the narrow path back down the mountainside and into the growing city. He didn’t want to say anything, but he couldn’t get his mind off the fact that the disappearance of Thurlby made five people having gone missing.

He stepped into the shade cast by The Riesen House and peered back up the hillside. It looked like nothing more than it was, a vast landscape of escarpments and crevasses, littered with the unkempt hovels of miners and the shallow diggings of mine shafts.

Howard strolled towards his office, but first he needed to stop by the land office. He needed a decent map.

Millions of kids wish to clean up the Earth and their parents wish they’d start with their rooms.

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.

The blaze wasn’t a serious one. It was discovered while small and attacked for some time at close quarters, yet the insignificant flame developed into a deadly disaster.

That was 1911.

For sometime since, the old Belmont mine has been left to rot, abandonment and what ever nervy tourist or rock hound wishes to explore its depths. But the locals around Tonopah know the  ineffable horrors dwelling in those depths of the isolated silver mine.

Miners complained about the many bad omens surrounding the dig. Along with the ever-present disembodied voices, attributed to Tommy Knockers, there were the numerous carrion crows living in the subterranean vaults as well as the neighing of startled horses along the numerous passageways at unseen entities.

Walking up the hill, they avoided the mud puddles, formed by a midnight thundershower. Clouds of mist still hovered above the hole threateningly, whispering, ‘turn back,’ to return to the familiar comforts of the town below: Cisco’s, the Burger King, even the Clown Motel and the haunted historical, but still dismal cemetery next to it.

Beyond, lay the trail, marked by a rusty chain-linked fence. They approached, mindful of the eroded metal fencing poking up out of the gelatinous earth; sharp and menacing.

Twenty paces further and they were upon it: the Desert Queen shaft! And it was more blasphemous than imagined.

Their imagination was settled tales of people falling in; curious children  mysteriously disappearing; pets that strayed to far only to vanish. All were declared victims of whatever roamed the unfathomable passageways at the bottom of that accursed pit.

Then — movement from below. The movement came in the form of a sound: a shuffling, labored progression; the sound of frail, ashen hands clutching blindly at unseen hand-holds in the rocky sides of the crumbling shaft.

The metal extension ladder still stands against the cabin, where I placed it. To bad that I’m at the foot of it, neck broken, unable to move. Cooper, my half-shepherd, half-wolf and mostly wild, is tied outback. No one knows we’re here and I can’t help wonder which of us will starve first.

I think I heard Coops dog door, if so, he’s free and hungry. So now I know.