Our Hearts. Prologue

The earth here had always whispered.

But people did not hear it—to people, it remained silent, stubbornly and deafly silent, like an old man who knows the answer but has decided that silence is the only honest way to participate in someone else’s catastrophe. It whispered to itself: a thin, almost imperceptible hum rising from the depths, from the cracks, from the pores, from that primordial space between the stones where neither light, nor air, nor time could penetrate in the way it was understood by those living on the surface.

One of the workers—a man who had been working here for his third year and had long ceased to distinguish superstition from geology—said it was water. Underground, mine water, seeping through limestone and quartz. Water that murmurs as it flows through narrow veins, like blood through capillaries. He spoke with the certainty reserved for things one desperately wants to believe in, just to keep from losing one’s mind before Saturday arrived.

The others fell quiet. Because the sound they heard—everyone heard it, but no one confessed to it, for to confess meant turning the sound into a fact, and a fact could no longer be undone even by Saturday, even by the fear of losing one’s sanity—that sound was too low for water and too rhythmic for dead stone. It was like breathing. An inhale-exhale, unhurried, deep—the kind of breathing that belongs to something that has been asleep for far too long and has no intention of waking up human.

The air at a depth of one hundred and twenty meters was solid, angular. You had to chew it, forcing it into your lungs along with dolomite dust, dampness, and the metallic aftertaste of centuries-old, petrified salt. Time didn’t flow here; it crumbled. The vibration of the massive, old rotary hammer tore it into small, jagged seconds. Rrr-tack. Rrr-tack. The recoil hammered into their shoulders, shaking the last remnants of warmth from their joints, turning the men into submissive, mindless appendages of blind, roaring iron. Darkness pressed in from all sides—a thick, physically tangible mass smelling of stale sweat, heated machine oil, and cooling, disturbed rock.

They had been working the face for the past two weeks. The task was simple, like anything done by hand: advance another twenty meters along the vein, verify the composition, record the coordinates. But this morning, everything went wrong. Joseph noticed it while still in the cage on their way down: the air was thickening, becoming denser, as if someone had added weight to it, and every breath left a thin film of dampness on the alveoli.

The sound changed suddenly. A syncopation. The dull, familiar resistance of the stone vanished. The drill plunged into the void sharply, without warning, squealing idly like a dog broken off its chain. The wall let out a guttural, heavy sigh. Fine crumb sprayed beneath their rubber boots, the monolith cracked, and the rock crumbled with a dry, rustling cough, exposing an uneven, jagged breach some sixty centimeters in diameter.

Silence descended. Deafening, heavy as cotton, sucking in the echo of the falling rubble.

A piercing, impossible cold wafted from the newly formed gap. It was the scent of forgotten millennia, of damp, primordial rot, and a disturbed, deep sleep—the smell of the abyss itself, vomited to the surface. The beams of their headlamps darted into the opening, slicing through the suspended dust with yellow, trembling cones. The light glided over the invisible vaults of the inner void. There, beyond the edge of clear visibility, shadows were stirring. Vague, pulsating clots of gloom slowly flowing into one another, like black water beneath a sheet of ice.

“Carlos. Light, over here,” Joseph said hoarsely.

Carlos, a stocky driller with a habit of chewing on dry grass whenever fear bubbled up inside him, stepped closer. His calloused fingers, white with tension, gripped the sharp, crumbling edge of the breach as he peered inside. He tilted his head back, trying to make out the invisible ceiling of the cave, from which emanated a strange, barely perceptible rustling, like the whisper of dry leaves in a windless garden.

A drop broke free from above.

It fell onto his dirty left cheek, slick with cold sweat, just below the cheekbone. Warm. Thick. A viscous heaviness crawled sluggishly down his skin toward the corner of his weather-beaten mouth. Carlos froze. He mechanically wiped the liquid away with the back of his hand, his fingertips sensing its unnatural, almost living temperature—the fluid was warmer than anything that could possibly exist at this depth. He lowered his gaze to his hand and aimed the trembling beam of his lamp at it.

In the harsh electric light, the moisture gleamed with a thick crimson gloss. Fresh. Scarlet. Blood. Smelling of frankincense and blooming gardenia.

“It’s blood,” Carlos said. His voice was even—so even that its flatness was more terrifying than a scream. The stone above the breach was bleeding, sluggishly and with difficulty, as if the rock had flesh, and this flesh had just been sliced open by rusty iron.

Before reason could process this fact, a sound erupted from the bowels of the cave. A piercing, vibrating shriek at the very edge of human hearing, one that instantly burst the capillaries in their eyes and sent their jaws into spasms. Its pitch was an impossibility for a throat, a larynx, for any living vocal cords. The howl penetrated not the ears, but the bones, the skull, the spine, forcing their bodies into freezing.

A living, pulsating mass spewed out from the black maw of the breach. Enormous bats—unnaturally huge, with leathery wingspans of over a meter—flung themselves outward. A black river flowing against gravity, against logic, against creation itself. They battered the men’s faces with taut, cold webbing, hooked their claws into the plastic of their helmets, and tore their clothes to shreds. A real, physical wind arose, sending the light of their headlamps thrashing across the walls in ragged flashes. The creatures’ pupils—Joseph managed to see this for a split second—were not red; they were blind, glowing with the deathly white, phosphoric luster of deep-sea monsters.

The shriek became unbearable; the rock resonated, vibrating in time with this madness. The workers screamed, covering their heads with bloodied hands, but their voices drowned in the howling hurricane like stones sinking in bog sludge.

A minute later, the swarm surged up the shaft, toward the surface, leaving behind only a whistling echo and the stench of a primordial slaughterhouse.

Silence descended. But it was the silence of absent sounds, a post-catastrophic silence, when the air continues to tremble, retaining the memory of violence. Joseph lowered his hands. His fingers were smeared with a strange, hot lymph. Carlos stood nearby, unmoving, the dry grass frozen between his whitened lips.

And then the lamps on their helmets began to die.

One by one. Slowly, as if being drunk dry by the darkness. The yellow cones of light narrowed, dimmed, turning into tiny, dying sparks. The workers lunged toward the cage, but Joseph froze, unable to tear his gaze away from the breach.

In the absolute darkness that followed, there, behind the shattered wall, the sound of the earth breathing did not stop. It had changed. It grew closer. And through this rhythmic, deep inhale-exhale, Joseph clearly sensed how, in the pitch black, something enormous, heavy, and watery sluggishly rolled over onto its other side and took its first step toward them.

From the depths of the opening, straight to his feet, a fresh torrent of warm, thick liquid gushed soundlessly, splattering the workers’ boots with a viscous, purple wetness.

Chapter One. Blindness →