Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Deep Below the Surface

I was told a bit about the dam when I passed through a nearby town on my way to the cabin. It was officially decommissioned six months ago but it stopped being maintained decades before then. Even though the dam was decommissioned, neither the dam nor the operator's hut were demolished. The company didn't want to pay for the demolition and opted for bankruptcy instead. Now it was the Bureau of Land Management's job but progress was slow.

After hiking a few hours I reached the operator's hut. It definitely lived up to its name, hut. I'd barely call it that. The window was shattered, the door was long gone, and it looked as if the roof was replaced multiple times but only a small section at a time. The place was dilapidated.

I stepped into the hut and with each step, the floorboards squealed in misery. There wasn't much dust... likely because the wind is free to blow through. I searched the cabinets for anything that could help me. There were piles of logbooks, most of which were weathered and unreadable. The few that were in reasonable condition were useless, full of maintenance notes and random doodles of... the human anatomy. It was obvious a dam operator wasn't the most exciting job.

After twenty minutes of brushing aside cobwebs and wiping dust encrusted logbooks I found files from Edgar L. Armstrong. The writing was faded but still mostly legible.

 

***

 

October 7th, 1922

Isla and I moved to the cabin nearly four months ago. I thought it would do us good, get out of the city and away from her family. After her stillbirth, she holed herself up in the bedroom for days at a time. She would not eat. She would not sleep. No doctor could cure her ailment.

Before we married, she often spoke of her love for the wilderness. She longed to live among the fauna and flora of this world, tending to her home far out in the woods; though, her interest had waned since the stillbirth. She had a dream of owning her own award winning garden, one as beautiful as the Japanese gardens she would see in the paper.

I thought taking a job as a dam operator and moving out here would help her, clear her mind, help her move on. I see now that was a mistake but I need to be clear. My mistake was not bringing her to her dream, my mistake was thinking her dream was here, at Crystal Lake.

She was ecstatic when we first arrived and it was the first time I saw her smile in months. After I bought her a shovel and a few gardening tools from the nearby town, she immediately started in her garden. Things were back to normal... for a while. I don't know when she began to change. I don't think there was any single defining moment. She began to wake at night, drenched in sweat, screaming about her buried daughter.

In her dream, we had just buried Isabella in the garden behind the cabin. I would go inside to prepare dinner so Isla could rest. After I left, she would hear faint cries coming from beneath the ground.

"It's Isabella," she would cry, "she's calling for me, I have to save her."

She would dig and dig and dig but no matter how deep she went, how desperate she became, she could never reach her. I couldn't console her and she became more and more obsessed with her gardening. She always called it gardening but the holes she was digging were far from any definition of gardening. She was manic.

No doctor could help her and my words were met only with hostility. Her mental state changed a few days ago after another dream about Isabella. In this dream she finally reached her after digging for weeks straight. When I came home the next night I fell in a hole she dug in her gardening room and sprained my ankle.

I wish I had known what I know now before we moved here, before I accepted this job.

I was looking through my predecessor's logbook for notes on a recurring issue with the dam's floodgates when I came across something strange. His notes devolved into madness the longer he was here. I would simply excuse it as a symptom of loneliness but it was the similarities between what he said and Isla's manic episodes.

He kept writing about it. How he had to find it. How it was buried somewhere nearby and how he would be freed once he freed it. I looked at his predecessor's logbook and the operator before even him. They were all the same. Normal notes devolved into drivel about digging and finding it.

Finally, I found the original operator's logbook. He was the one who built the cabin I now live in. He didn't come here as an operator though. He built the cabin because he needed shelter to keep digging. He became the first dam operator because he needed money for supplies. His notes never turned into nonsense. In fact, he was quite coherent but there was something off about the way he wrote. It was as if he feared what he was after. As if he was forced to dig.

Whatever he was digging for, it was beneath the cabin.

I am not sure what he was afraid of and I am certainly not sure what it is these people were digging for. I do know that I am not going to stay here and find out. Tonight I am going to leave here and take Isla back to the city where we belong.

If you are reading this, please take this as a warning and leave. You may not believe me, and I am not sure I believe it myself, but something is happening.

 

***

 

I stood there for a while. My mind was turbulent. I wasn't sure what to believe. None of the other logbooks were readable and there was no way for me to confirm what Edgar had written.

It was already getting dark and the wind was picking up. It looked like a storm was coming. I closed the logbook and tucked it away in my jacket. I was far from the cabin and wouldn't be able to make it back without getting caught in the storm. Unfortunately, it would be worse to stay in the hut. I set out towards the cabin.

Only an hour passed before the storm was on top of me. The dark clouds blotted out what was left of the sun's light and the wind screamed through the trees towering over me. Thunder boomed in the distance. Each flash of lighting sparked a flame of pain that raced across my temples. The roar of thunder reverberated through my body. An avalanche of water and hail began to fall from the sky.

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It was becoming too dark to see yet my body was being guided by unseen hands. I reached the cabin about thirty minutes after the last bit of light had fled from the sky. Exhausted and sodden from the journey, I stumbled through the back door, into the gardening room.

I stood just beyond the doorway as I watched the water pooling between the floorboards. The water flowed along each crack and disappeared underneath some crates. I didn't notice it before but one of the floorboards was split into the shape of a rectangle with a hole carved along the seam. I reached for the hole, just barely large enough for me to fit my hand into, and pulled. There was movement.

I knocked aside the crates on top of the door, scattering pots, tools, and other debris around the room. I pulled open the door beneath me. It creaked open and snapped at its apogee. Damp, moldy air wafted into my nostrils. A wave of fire washed over my body and my head began to throb.

I lowered myself into the tunnel below and began down the path ahead. The light from the cabin quickly faded but there was only one way to go. I kept moving. Hours had passed and the tunnel began to narrow. I continued on, my body guiding itself through the tunnels.

I continued to crawl as the dirt around me encased my body, wriggling through an ever narrowing coffin of dirt. Eventually it came to a dead end and I couldn't move back. My hands reached out before me and began to dig, filling up the tunnel behind me as advanced. I could barely move. Thousands of tons of soil above me pressed down around my body. I could only move my fingers and scratch at dirt I couldn't see.

A purple light began to fill the voids between each grain of dirt. I found it. Finally, I had found it. I punched through the dirt into open air and was ejected from the earth along with the soil behind me.

Unlike my dream, I wasn't in a cavern filled with purple gems. The cavern was filled with moss and small plants. The purple glow reflected off the wet surface of the rock around me. I could hear flowing water in the distance. However, it wasn't the fact that there were plants far below the surface that concerned me. It was the heat. The heat, not from the ambient temperature of the air, but clearly from the light itself.

I could feel my head start to throb again. It was a slow, methodical pulse. My vision began to blur and my body began to heat up. It had only been seconds since I breached the wall of the cavern and I barely had time to breathe clean air before my body began to move once again.

I could feel my arms start to numb. Then my feet. Then my legs. As I rounded a corner, I saw it and I understood. I was being called here. It needed me.

Before me stood a purple crystal at least five feet across and twelve feet high. There were cracks throughout the crystal and it was at the center. Each one of its tendrils projected away from its body as if it was trying to force its way through the cracks surrounding it. Its face could only be described as a cross between a squid and a human.

Its eyes bulged from its face. Tentacles snaked down from its mouth and around its neck. Its body was humanoid, fat, and round, covered in scaly skin that refracted the light around it like a diamond — only it was tinted purple by the crystal it was encased in.

I looked around the cavern and there were dozens of skeletons lying around the crystal. The one closest to me held a pickaxe. I walked towards the long deceased body and when I bent down I noticed its necklace. A silver necklace with a large amethyst gem at the center surrounded by obsidian.

My head began to throb once again. I grabbed the pickaxe and turned towards the crystal. I could see it pulsing. It pulsed and my head throbbed once again. Another pulse and my body moved towards the crystal. Once more and I swung the pickaxe.

Every strike I could feel my body becoming increasingly numb. Every strike I could feel my mind losing consciousness. I stood, helpless in my body, watching myself try to free whatever it was, wondering if I was going to meet the same fate as the people around me.

Another pulse.

The crystal began to crack.

Another pulse.

I strike the crystal harder.

Another pulse.

The crack grew larger.

Another pulse.

And the pickaxe snapped, the head flying somewhere into the abyss behind me.

The creature's eyes opened and locked onto me. I could feel the pure fiery rage flowing out with each pulse. A wave of unfettered terror washed over my body as its eyes pierced my soul. I felt as though my head was being cracked open with a hammer, each pulse another blow to my head. The operator's hut flashed into my mind. Inside was another pickaxe.

In an instant the pain subsided and my body turned towards where I came. I was being forced to retrieve the other pickaxe only to be forced to come back here and break the creature free.

It was hours before I reached the surface again. It was already morning and the air was still damp from the storm the night before. As I stumbled out of the cabin, the pressure on my body was released and I fainted.

I don't know how long I was unconscious for but I could tell it wasn't the same day. The air was dry now and there was no moisture in the ground anymore. I could still feel its presence in my mind, telling me to go to the hut but I had control for now. It wouldn't be long before I was under its influence once again.

I knew what I had to do.

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