03 Jun Black Lobe
“Black Lobe”
Written by Micah Edwards Edited by Craig Groshek Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek Narrated by N/ACopyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).
🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available
⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 12 minutes
The papers say Lawrence Hardigan is a hometown hero, come back to revitalize the community of his youth. He’s made out to be a philanthropist. I suppose that might even be the case. He’s certainly doing great things for the economy of this town. I don’t think it’s out of the goodness of his heart, though. I’m not even sure he has a heart anymore. Or any goodness.
He was a miner once, decades ago. Long before he got rich. Back then, he worked for a living, dirty, backbreaking work. He spent every day down in the coal mines, chiseling out that black rock that makes the world run. Day in and day out, Larry and men just like him were down there deep underground, sweating and shoveling and digging away.
He wasn’t a tall man, which was a benefit down in the mines. The seams didn’t always conform nicely to the height of a man, but the bosses up above didn’t want to leave anything behind. They thought that four, three, even two feet was still good enough to work on. As long as a man could work the tools, they didn’t care if that man had to crouch or kneel or even lie down. They’d run the numbers, and comfort wasn’t one of them.
Larry was short even for a miner. He never quite cleared five feet tall. Might’ve had something to do with generations of his family living in that same small town, breathing that same dusty air and drinking that same tainted water. Not that there was anything wrong with the water, mind you. The mine owners had it tested regularly, and their test results always showed that it was just fine for the people in the town. So maybe Larry’s height was just one of those things.
His stature didn’t hurt his strength at all, for certain. Larry could lift twice as much as anyone he worked with. His endurance never seemed to fade. He was always the first to step up to cover shifts, and he never missed one of his own.
“I’m saving up,” he’d say over beers. “I’m gonna be the last of my family who has to be born in this town. I’m getting out.”
His friends all jeered, of course. Not with any real malice, if only because no one wanted to take a hit from one of Larry’s rocklike fists. But they mocked him for wanting to leave, for even believing that he could.
“You’re one of us,” they’d tell him. “You’re part of this town, and it’s part of you. You’ll never leave the mine. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you did.”
Larry would just shake his head, drink his beer, and imagine his life after the mine. The other miners weren’t entirely wrong; try as he might, he could never quite picture what things would be like once he left. But he knew he was going to find out.
It was no surprise that Larry was in the mine when it collapsed. He was always in the mine. The ones who escaped said that he could have made it out too, if he hadn’t been so focused on getting them out. His voice was a beacon in that terrifying moment, hoarse but strong as it cut through the rumble and clamor to call his brethren to a safe path out. As they rushed past, they saw him braced against the wall, pick jammed in the ground for extra support, straining against the rock slab behind him. It was fractured, a deep, ruinous cut that ran from floor to ceiling, and the pieces were inexorably sliding apart. Larry kept his back against it as if he could fight the entire mountain. Incredibly, it was working.
It could not hold forever, but a dozen men who would have been lost in that mine made it out that day because of him. Larry, unfortunately, was not among them. He was still shouting for the last of his team when that slab collapsed, dropping uncountable tons of rock down to seal the tunnel and bury Larry and the four other miners who had not yet scrambled to freedom.
The ones on the outside tried to mount a rescue, of course. As soon as the dust settled, they grabbed picks and lamps and started back in, but the ground was still too unstable. Even their footfalls caused new rocks to fall from the ceiling, and they quickly retreated before they triggered a new collapse. When the mine owners finally arrived, the miners begged them for the equipment to shore up the walls in order to protect a team, so they could go in and look for the five lost miners.
The owners made concerned noises and said that they’d certainly look into it, but unless they could get a structural engineer to declare the mine safe, there was no sense in sending more men into danger. When pressed about when they might get such an engineer in to assess the damage, they hemmed and hawed and allowed that it might be weeks before they could get someone out there to handle it safely.
The miners argued that the men might still be trapped, not crushed, and that they couldn’t survive for weeks. The owners appealed to the men to use their reason, not their sentiment. They had witnessed the ceiling collapse. They could see for themselves how ready it was to fall in still further. If the miners inside were still alive, they would have doubtless been trying to free themselves, and those very movements would have destabilized their fragile shelter, condemning them. Either they had died immediately, or they had died soon after. It was the only logical conclusion.
No one liked this answer. A miner named Cork advanced on the owners with fists balled, the desire for violence scrawled in coal-crusted lines across his face.
“You think you can dress up your money-grubbing in fancy words and call it reason?” he bellowed. “You cheap weasels would kick a man straight down a mine shaft if it would let you get a dime from under his boots. Don’t tell us what’s logic and sense. Your accountants told you that the lives of five good men aren’t worth the pennies it would take to save them. You’d let us all die to save your bottom line!”
The other miners dragged him off, still ranting, before he could take a swing at one of the owners of the mine. They all felt the same as he did, but getting blacklisted from mining jobs in this town was as sure a death sentence as Larry and the others had received. It was just a little slower. Cork had a family to support. Throwing away his livelihood wouldn’t save the men trapped down below.
The owners clucked disapprovingly and shook their heads as men put up barriers over the unstable entrance. They spoke to the news reporters about what a terrible tragedy it was, and how they fully intended to invest in better safety training to avoid such disasters in the future. It was a subtle shift of the blame onto the miners themselves.
The reporters accepted this answer and did not ask any sharp questions. The mine owners also held a majority share in the paper, and the reporters could no more afford to lose their jobs than the miners. And what would it change?
The mine was sealed for three days while the mine owners discussed where to dig next over dinner and drinks, and the miners sat at home, drawing no pay. But on the third night after the mine collapse, the owners’ dinner was interrupted by a panicked call from the security guard. There was a disturbance at the mine, he said.
Someone trying to get in? they asked.
No, came the reply. Someone climbing out.
It had taken three days of struggle, of scratching and scraping and shoving his way through, but one miner had made it out. Larry stood there, filthy from head to toe, looking more rock than man. He had been closer to the surface than the others, he said. His small stature had helped him out as it had so many times before in the mine, this time by allowing him to wriggle through the rubble while disturbing as little of it as possible. He was the only one who could have fit through the path that he took. He knew, because he’d tried to get the others out.
“They’re still alive in there,” he said. “We’ve got to get them out.”
Obviously, everyone agreed with that, the mine owners told him. Just as soon as they figured out a way to do it safely, they’d get those men out. They were absolutely thrilled that Larry had made it out. But—and here their voices took on a note of concern—was he really certain that the others were alive? It was a miracle that even he had survived, and certainly the mind could play funny tricks down in the dark, especially in the chaos of a collapse. They could hardly risk more men’s lives for wishful thinking.
Larry reached into his coverall and pulled out several filthy and ripped pieces of clothing. They were the shirts of the lost miners. One by one, he turned them inside out to reveal scrawled writing. The letters were large, messy and overlapping, words crammed on top of each other in unsteady, wandering lines, barely readable over the dirt and blood marring the fabric.
“They wrote notes to their families,” Larry said. The reporters were here by now, their pencils flying. The mine owners winced every time a flashbulb went off. “In case they never got out of the dark. They sent their words up with me.”
The messages had been written without light, using blunt chunks of coal to make the marks, on bumpy surfaces and on poor material. They were barely readable, but the words that came through carried the sentiment well enough. The names of their wives and children were in there. They talked of love and regret. They pleaded for help.
None of the messages were fully complete. Every one of them had strips torn from the fabric, taking away words or entire sentences. It had been an arduous trip to the surface, and although Larry had protected them as best as he could, it seemed that the messages had suffered as much as he had.
One of the reporters returned to the mine the next morning to take photos in better light. She was photographing the barricade Larry had pushed aside to exit the mine when she noticed something light-colored inside. It was a bundle of fabric strips, roughly torn and tossed aside.
She unfolded one to find it covered in the same chaotic writing from the shirts Larry had brought out. One string of sentences stood out clearly in the mess:
“Come quickly. The voices say no one will. We can only hold for so long.”
The others were less easy to read, but “voices” showed up again and again. As the reporter was attempting to decipher more words in the desperate scrawls, the rough hand of the security guard hauled her from the mine entrance. Despite her protestations, she was not even able to grab the fabric strips before being booted from the property.
Without supporting evidence, the editor refused to run the additional lines with the story. The voices were correct, though. Despite their soothing words and vague promises, the mine owners let days tick by and sent no one at all to help the trapped miners.
A full week later, there was a rumble that shook the town awake. Black dust billowed forth from the mine entrance once again, covering everything nearby in a choking cloud. Once it had dissipated, it was clear that there would be no rescuing the lost miners. The entire tunnel had collapsed.
Some said that the roar had sounded an awful lot like an explosion at the beginning. Some said that the dust that burst out of the mine stank of dynamite. But they said it quietly, in whispers behind closed doors, because accusing the mine owners of something like that was a good way to lose everything.
Larry came the closest to speaking up. The day of the second collapse, he went to where the tunnel had been and stood there with his hands on the rocks, as if trying to commune with the mountain. After several minutes, he turned to the mine owners and asked, “When will you free them?”
Regrettably, they said, at this point it would not even be feasible to recover the bodies. The town would have to mourn and move on. Obviously, the families would receive death benefits. Larry himself would be given a sizable check for his trauma and service to the company. But the other men were lost.
Larry stared into all of their eyes for a long, uncomfortable period, his gaze flicking from one suited man to the next as if committing each of them to memory. Finally, he spoke again.
“They will be freed.”
He turned and left. Not just the mine, but the entire town. No one saw Larry again after that. The check the mine owners mailed him was cashed, but outside of that, no one heard from Larry at all until he came back to town thirty years later, as rich and well-appointed as those besuited men who’d once sent him to work in the mines.
The town had not done nearly so well for itself in the intervening years. The mine never did reopen. The owners had eventually hired a structural engineer, months after the collapse, and he had declared the whole thing a lost cause. There was no safe place to dig after the way the ground had shifted, at least not for any reasonable amount of money. There were plenty of other, more easily accessed coal seams. It was more cost-effective to just let this one lie fallow.
Not everyone had been able to move on as easily as the mine owners. Most families stayed in what was left of the town, getting by on grit and government assistance. Things got older and dingier and dirtier year after year, until Larry showed back up to turn it all around.
He went by Lawrence Hardigan now, or Mr. Hardigan to most who had the opportunity to talk to him. He moved with a cold purpose. He treated people like tools. He issued commands and expected them to be followed. The papers expected him to be folksy and down-to-earth, a man returning to his roots after getting rich. The reporters who interviewed him still wrote a story implying that, because it was the sort of feel-good piece that padded papers well, but they used almost no quotes from Hardigan himself.
His answers to their questions were short, brusque and more than a little odd. They did their best to lead him toward the friendly tone they wanted, but even the softball question of “So what brings you back home after all of these years?” was met with a long pause and a cocked head, as if Hardigan could not understand why they were even asking the question.
“I’ve come to free the lost,” he said at last. “They have been so long in the dark.”
Lawrence Hardigan, “Larry” to his friends, says he’s come back to help the community, the article read. It was close enough.
He was certainly willing to pour money into the community. No one knew the details, but Hardigan had somehow turned that check from the mine owners into a seemingly inexhaustible source of funds. He declared that the mine would be reopened, and offered paychecks large enough to get the necessary people within days. He brought in machinery, resources, experts, and the people necessary to facilitate and support it all. The town sprang to frenetic life like the desert after a rain.
The truth was that although Hardigan had lived simply and invested well, he was burning through his wealth at an astonishing rate. He would be completely tapped out, both funds and loan opportunities exhausted, in under three months. He was well aware of this. He had calculated it endlessly. He had been willing to wait as long as was necessary, but not one day more. He had money enough now. It was time at last to move.
He had spent the last year buying up the shares of the mine from the previous owners. Their heirs had always been willing to sell. It was nothing but a defunct space, good more for a tax writeoff than anything else. And it had always been the heirs with whom Hardigan was dealing, because he had visited the owners shortly before. He had come into their houses, moving past their gates and doors as surely as he had once wriggled his way through hundreds of feet of fallen rock. He had entered their rooms in the dead of night. And there he had shown them what had brought him forth from the mountain all those years ago. Not strength, not willpower, not determination, or at least not those things alone.
In the dark of those rooms, Hardigan had opened his mouth and let true darkness flow out. It cascaded across the floor like a velvet curtain, piling higher and deeper until all light was denied. It sat on the chests of the mine owners, pressing down with geologic weight, squeezing their breath away. And as they gasped for life, their eyes wide and searching for any scrap of light, Larry spoke to them not in the cold, quiet terms of the thing that lived inside of him, but in his own angry voice.
“These hours of panic are still less than you deserve. Daniel, Armand, Rob, Sean—they died over the course of several days down there. And those voices tantalized them with freedom the entire time. They wouldn’t give them the release of death, not if there was the slightest hope of escape. I hate them for that, the voices. But they were only doing what their nature demanded. They were only seeking the freedom that had been denied them. There’s no evil in desperation.
“You, though. You, who sent us down there. You, who cut corners on safety because our lives were low-value items on your balance sheets. You, two-faced and viciously uncaring. You were evil. And you were allowed to enjoy the fruits of that for far too long.
“Your death will take as much time as I can afford to allow. You will suffocate in the clinging, infinite darkness. And I pray that after the last breath leaves your body, whatever comes after is darker and crueler and longer than anything I can inflict. May you suffer until your own balance sheet is finally even.”
Larry’s low, threatening tones were the last sounds the mine owners ever heard. He cursed them slowly and continuously until the darkness pressed the last breath from their bodies, and only once it all flowed back into his body did his speech finally cease.
Hardigan exited each house as quietly and seamlessly as he entered, and when the bodies of each of the mine owners were discovered, their deaths were thought to be natural causes. He visited each a number of months apart, and if any thought it odd that their deaths all occurred in the same year, it was easy to point to the air and water of the mining town they had lived in. No matter what the studies had said back then, the environment had been less than healthy.
It was possible, Hardigan knew, that the deaths and his purchase of the mine would trigger some manner of investigation. It did not matter. Those sorts of cases moved slowly, and he was now speeding ahead. The mine was reopened. The tunnel was being cleared out and shored up. They would be at the old vein in ten weeks.
And then, at long last, the rocks that had trapped his brethren down there for so long would be removed, and they would be free to come once more into the light. Not the miners, who had been nothing more than desiccated corpses for many years, but the compatriots of the thing driving Hardigan. The thing that, long ago, had promised Larry anything he wanted, if only he would carry it out of the depths inside of him. It had offered riches, fame, immortality, anything he wanted.
Revenge, said Larry, and opened his body and mind to the invading dark.
It had brought him through. It had calculated, plotted, and planned, promising all the while that it would deliver. And now that it had done so, it needed just one more thing: vessels to carry the others up from below.
Hardigan told the papers that there would be a ceremony to recover the bodies of the lost miners. It was the sort of thing that various mid-ranking officials liked to attend, to show their connection to the populace. They were already contacting his people to make arrangements, and Hardigan was more than happy to smooth their way.
They would go in with their own aims.
But they would walk out with the goals of the lightless.
🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available
Written by Micah Edwards Edited by Craig Groshek Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek Narrated by N/A🔔 More stories from author: Micah Edwards
Publisher's Notes: N/A Author's Notes: N/AMore Stories from Author Micah Edwards:
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Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).