undefined
“Mr. Tiler?”
Sam Tiler smiled. She was a beautiful woman, as most television personalities were, but Tiler thought that Maria Sherman was one of the best looking one’s he’d seen in a very, very long time.
“Mr. Tiler?” she said again. “We’ll be back on the air in thirty seconds.”
“Ok,” he said, making sure his tie was straight and the collars of his suit coat were flat against his chest. For a fifty-year-old man, he had the looks and the body of a forty-year-old. He exercised every day to stay healthy. He ate right. His full head of silver hair and smooth skin would make most believe that he worshipped Rogain and electrotherapy, but everything about Sam Tiler was genuine.
He took another quick swig of water from the humming water fountain and rushed to his seat beside Maria. She sat down next to him and he took her hand to help her. He didn’t bother to get up for her, and after she was seated he held onto her hand for two heartbeats too long, but he didn’t care. She was beautiful, he was single, charming, and available. He threw his toothy grin at her and she smiled back.
Her lips smiled but not her eyes.
One of the camera men said that there were ready and began to count backwards from five. After he reached one, he pointed at Maria.
“Welcome back to Focal Point,” she said to the camera, then turned to Sam. “Mr. Tiler...”
“Please,” he interrupted. “Call me Sam.”
She cleared her throat and shifted herself in the chair. “Mr. Tiler. Before the break, we were discussing you rise to wealth, independence, and that you’ve now reached the Forbes top ten wealthiest living men in the world.
“Now, I want to get down to the main point of this interview. Why, after all your accomplishments are you taking on this challenge that you’ve set for yourself? Some are calling you childish. That you don’t know when enough is enough. They say that you’re like a child at Christmas, gimme, gimme, gimme. Can you explain your thinking?”
“When I was a boy,” Sam began, leaning forward toward Maria. She leaned back in her chair. “I was fascinated with the Guinness Book of World Records. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the most recent issue. Of all the books and magazines and television programs I wanted to be on or in, I think Guinness influenced me the most.”
“So where will you be drilling this hole,” she asked him, not bothering to hide her boredom in the subject.
“I’ve erected a rig deep in the West Texas flatlands. In fact, I’ve already started drilling…”
The fact is, Steven thought, turning off the television, we’ve been drilling for months now. He glanced out the window at the rig. It rose from the ground like some rotting, black, alien skeleton. The sun was slowly being eaten up by the horizon, and the shadows grew long and menacing. Steve’s only wish was that with the sun’s demise, the night would provide some sort of relief from the menacing heat of the Texas summer.
Drilling had slowed to a crawl over the last week. Three-fourths of his crew had left for reason’s he still didn’t quite understand. Tiler had hired a handful of Mexican’s to help him out with the rig, and Steven didn’t know one bit of Spanish. He had to rely on Juan, the only English speaker among the group, to translate for him.
“El Diablo!” Juan had shouted, just before he disappeared into the night, three days ago. Many of the other’s had been shouting the same thing. “El Diablo! El Diablo!”
The remainder of his crew had left last night, leaving only Steven and Rico, a Mexican who’s curiosity was stronger than his fear of the unknown. Rico’s English was terrible, but he could usually get across to Steve what he was trying to say.
The rig was quiet tonight. This was the first night since the project had begun that the rig had been shut down for more than just repairs. With only Steven and Rico, there was no way to run the expensive drill.
The last of the light faded from the western horizon, turning the sky gray, then black. The solar lighting flared on, splashing the rig and the trailers with their artificial sun. Like most nights, Steven’s eyes drifted over the area outside the front windows of his trailer. The drilling platform was directly in front of him. To the right were more sleeping trailers, now empty. And off to his left was the supply shed with everything from replacement drill bits, to dynamite, to tools. Outside lay ten rolls of thousand-foot cable. Steve often wondered why Tiler had included the cable. It wasn’t just any cable either. It was a high dollar, fiber optic cable used in telecommunications.
“Now why does Mr. Tiler need all that?” Steven whispered to himself. His eyes glanced to the other trailers. “And what is it that scared you guys so badly?”
Steven knew he should go to sleep. Tiler was sending one of his advisors tomorrow, and he knew that he needed the rest, but something was nagging at the back of his mind. Why did the phrase “El Diablo” sound so familiar? What did it mean? He wasn’t from Texas, he was from Canada, and even the simplest Spanish phrases were completely unfamiliar to him.
Steven rose and walked outside. Rico was at the other end of the trailer, snoring quietly. He closed the door behind him and stepped out into the night.
His sleeping quarters were the farthest from the rig and he had to pass each of the other mobile homes to reach the oil platform. He was tired, and a little groggy from the many hours of work he’d spent over the last few months, so he didn’t notice the voices right away.
He strolled leisurely toward the drilling platform.
“Help Me!”
Steven stopped.
“Oh, God! Pleeesssseeee.”
“What the…” Steven said as he rushed to the trailers, opening the front doors then slamming them again as he searched for the voices. The trailers were empty. He could hear hundreds of voices, all screaming in pain and calling for help in one form or another. He could tell that the voices were screaming, but to his ears, the sound of their torment was far away, as if he was hearing them from a great distance.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, turning in a circle.
He ran toward the rig, and the voices became slightly louder, though still only just above a whisper. He climbed the stairs to the platform and ran to the pipe at the center of the structure. This was the main tube that connected the rig to the drill bit, miles and miles below the surface. The pipe was hollow, so sensors or other instruments could be lowered into the hole. Steve leaned over and put his ear to the open end.
Steve jerked away and fell to the wire-mesh floor of the platform. “Rico! Rico!” he shouted, stumbling down the stairs and away from the rig. “Rico, get up!”
Rico burst out of the trailer door just as Steve approached. The voices could barely be heard over the pounding of Steve’s heart.
“El Diablo.” Rico said, as his eyes clouded over in fear.
He couldn’t believe how little Ms. Sherman had treated him throughout the interview. He pounded his leg in annoyance as he wove in and out of the Dallas traffic. ‘Guinness,’ he thought. ‘These people will believe anything.’ His annoyance turned to laughter in the blink of an eye. He cut off a Toyota as he pushed his Porsche across two lanes and onto the next exit. The driver of the Toyota blared his horn at Tiler as he barely missed the other car.
Tiler glanced out his driver side window. The airport was over there. He could see the huge jumbo jets taking off and landing like bees to their hive. Jessica should be boarding his twin engine Interceptor by now. He would be a couple hours behind her, though she didn’t know this. If what Steven Chance said was true, then the object of Tiler’s desires was at hand, and he needed to be in west Texas to lay his claim. He had to get home and pack.
Jessica hated to fly. She didn’t eat breakfast before the flight, but even that didn’t help the queasiness she was feeling in the pit of her stomach. She leaned over her knees and dry heaved into the complementary barf bag that the airlines provided. She was definitely going to hate this trip.
She couldn’t believe the craziness of Tiler’s story either.
“Go out there and find out what exactly is going on.” he had said, giving her a sealed envelope. “if there’s anything spectacular going on, open the envelope. If what is happening out there matches what I’ve written in that envelope, then call me immediately. Then I want you, Steven, and whoever else is left out there to get on the plane and leave. Tell Steven his work is done and he needs to report to the main office for his next assignment.”
Jessica leaned back in the soft flight chair, trying to regain her composure. She fingered the sealed envelope in her pocket as the twin engine plane leapt into the sky. The ride was smoother than she thought and she began to relax a little more. She pulled out the envelope and ripped open the seal. She couldn’t wait till she got out west to see what she was up against, she had to know now.
There was a single word on a torn piece of paper.
“Voices?” she mouthed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jessica turned over the paper in her hand. That was the only word. Nothing else. But there was something about that single word that sent a chill up her spine. What did the word ‘voices’ and an oil rig out in west Texas have to do with each other.
She’d find out soon enough.
Steve sat at the computer terminal within the small office building that was attached to the back of the rig. His head slowly leaned toward the keyboard and Rico nudged him in the side. The two of them had been up all night trying to figure out what was going on with the voices. It was just within the last hour or so that he was able to actually make some headway.
Like all of Rick Tiler’s toys, this computer was no exception. It was one of the best personal computers that you could buy. It also came with an impressive array of software. Steve was able to find one that would locate, isolate, and amplify patterns in audio tracks.
He and Rico had spent the entire night and morning rigging up a microphone to a spool of the fiber-optic cable that Tiler had included in the site inventory. Steve had wondered most of the evening if there was something behind all this than just Tiler’s trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. There must be something more hidden behind the Rick Tiler that everybody was familiar with.
Steven’s head lulled forward again, and he jerked it back up, fighting sleep as a new sound began to fill the small office. It was an airplane. Tiler’s advisor had arrived.
Steve pushed himself away from the computer desk as a chill ran through him. He couldn’t get his discovery out of his head, and it frightened him to the core. Rico sat slumped over in one of the other chairs, his eyes were closed and he was snoring quietly. Steve didn’t wake him on the way out to the dirt landing strip.
He walked out into the noon day sun and its brightness seemed to put a little spark into his step and give him a second wind.
The twin engine floated out of the cloudless, azure sky like a huge bird, coming home to rest. Steve was there to meet it as it came to a stop at the end of the runway.
He watched as Jessica stepped off the plane. She was overdressed in a business suit. Her skirt draped down to just above her knee, and Steven couldn’t help eyeing the sensual contours of her calves.
“I sure hope you brought a change of clothes,” he told her. “You’re going to burn up in that getup.”
“I don’t plan on staying here very long.”
Steve could tell that Jessica had either in a bad attitude or a miserable flight out west. The more he talked to her, the more he thought that it was probably both of these.
“So, what’s going on to get Tiler all riled up?”
“Voices,” Steven said. “Voices.”
That wasn’t the word she wanted to hear. She patted the right pocket of her jacket that contained Tiler’s note, and despite the early morning heat, a chill of dread vibrated through her body.
Steven led her to the computer room. “Don’t mind him,” he said, hooking a thumb in Rico’s direction. “He’s had a long night.”
Jessica found the sleeping man’s snoring completely annoying; it was a perfect clincher to an already miserable day. “Just show me what you’ve found.”
Steve explained what had been going on over the last week, and his excitement grew and grew as he went over the events of the last twelve hours. “Rico and I rigged a microphone to a thousand feet of cable and lowered it down the shaft. Here’s what I recorded.” Steve entered a couple of commands onto the keyboard and an audio play box appeared on the screen. Using the mouse, he pushed play and the voices began to issue from the speakers.
Jessica’s hand went instinctively to her throat as her breath caught in her lungs. She could hear the obvious distress in each and every voice playing through the speakers. The screams, the howling, the torment of the voices hit her like a brick to the stomach. She was speechless.
“I’ve isolated some of the voices. Do you want to hear them?”
Jessica shook her head no, but the word “yes” escaped from her lips.
His fingers danced across the keyboard again, then once again, he pushed play.
“Water,” said a female from deep within the computer speakers. The word was followed closely by a scream of anguish, then curses. “Water! Please, just one drop of water!”
“Here’s another one,” Steve said, opening another computer file and pushing play. Jessica could see that Steven was clearly upset by the utterances.
“AAARRRGGG!” The audio was too loud and Steven rushed to turn it down, while Rico woke behind them. The voice echoed curses and pleas, simultaneously to God above, while between each word were the screams of the speaker’s anguish and pain.
“I’ve got one more for you here. This one disturbs me most, but I think you’ve got to hear it in order to explain to Tiler why I have to do, what I have to do.”
“What do you have to do?” she asked him, he didn’t answer but played another audio file.
“We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming…” said the speaker of the voice with a hissing, snakelike quality.
“What is this?” she asked.
Steve stopped the stream of audio. He couldn’t bear to listen to it any more.
Rico moved behind them and said, “El Diablo.” The Mexican didn’t try to hide the fear in his tone.
“Exactly,” Steve said, agreeing with Rico. “I think we’ve dug a hole to hell.”
“Hell?” she asked. “You’ve got to be kidding? This has got to be a joke or something.” She said this convincingly, but the back of her mind kept going back to the note that Tiler had given her.
“Here, listen to it again. This is the live audio.” The voices streamed from the tiny speakers, hundreds and hundred of them, folding and blending together. Jessica was listening to a symphony of anguish.
“Turn it off,” she whispered.
“Wait,” Steve said. “Look.” He pointed at the screen where a bar graph was being displayed. The bar on the left was shorter that the one on the right. Both had a time entered below the graph. “See this graph. The one is the decibel level that I measured early this morning, the other was measured just before you arrived. I don’t know what it means, but I believe that whatever is down there is coming up the shaft. We’ve given it a way out!” Steve stood up, panicked at the thoughts his mind was throwing out. These thoughts hadn’t even gone through his mind till now.
He turned to Jessica, but she had left the room, leaving the door open behind her. Steve rushed out into the Texas heat. Jessica was walking toward the plane, where the pilot was slowly going over the engines.
Steve saw that Jessica had a phone to her ear and she was talking with a panic rush.
“…I don’t care Mr. Tiler. I’ve only been here ten minutes and I’m freaking out at what I’m hearing. I don’t know if these voices are a joke or what, but I don’t like it one bit. I’m leaving now!”
She stopped and turned to Steven.
“Here,” she said, handing him the tiny phone. “He want’s to talk to you.”
Steve took the phone. “Yes, sir, Mr. Tiler?”
“Steven? What’s going on there?”
Steven explained what he’d discovered coming out of the shaft and how he’d isolated some of the voices. He also told Tiler his fears that they were about to release something from the pits of hell.
“It’s dangerous here, we can’t leave that shaft open.”
“Now, Steven. I don’t think that’s a decision you need to be making. That’s my rig you’re working on, my land, and my shaft. Now something’s come up and I can’t make it there today, so you need to get on that plane with Jessica and get back here.”
“I’m sorry Mr. Tiler, but I can’t leave here knowing that you’re wanting to release some sort of hellish evil into the world. You haven’t told Jessica the truth, have you? You haven’t told her why we’re really drilling this hole?”
“Don’t you dare, Steven. Your job, no, your life depends on you following my orders. I’ll kill you if you jeopardize my plans.”
“I’m sorry Mr. Tiler, but I think Jessica’s battery is running low.” Just before Steven pressed the end button on the digital phone, he heard Tiler screaming his name.
Jessica was standing in front of the plane now and as Steve approached, she asked, “Now what was that all about? What is it that Mr. Tiler hasn’t told me?”
Steven grabbed her arm and led her away from the pilot and toward the drilling rig. They could hear the voices coming from the pipe leading into the ground. Despite the heat, chill bumps rose over their bodies.
When they were out of earshot from the pilot Steven told her the truth behind Tiler’s dig. “Do you buy that crap he said about Guinness last night? Do you really think that this is why he’s doing all this? If you do, then you’ve been just as deceived as the rest of the world.
“Sam Tiler isn’t doing this to get into the record books, he’s doing it for religious purposes. Actually, it’s the lack of religious purposes that is driving him.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, lost with the direction his discussion was taking her.
“Tiler, in a dream, was visited by a man who said he was Lucifer. Satan himself, visiting Tiler!” He laughed as his hands danced through the air with dramatic, exaggerated gestures while he spoke. “Tiler’s an atheist and the devil, in this dream, challenged him to a bet. Tiler dug this hole to prove that hell doesn’t exist, and now, I believe that Tiler is about to unleash an evil on the world that we haven’t seen before.”
“Are you crazy?” Jessica couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I think you’ve been out here baking in the sun too long. How do you expect me to believe you?”
Steven still had her phone and it began to ring.
“Give me that.” she ordered, reaching for the phone, but he snatched it away from her.
“It’s just Tiler, and I don’t really want to talk to him right now.” He threw the phone down, shattering it against the hard grown.
“You are crazy!” Jessica tried to slap him, but he caught her hand easily. “Why should I believe anything you say?”
Steven didn’t say a word, but pointed at the platform behind him where the voices seemed louder than before. There was a menacing undertone now as the voices built upon each other in a panorama of pain.
“How do you know all this about Mr. Tiler?” She was calmer now, the voices changing her anger at Steven back into fear of the unknown. “How do you know?” she asked again.
Steven was silent for a heartbeat. Before he answered, Rico stuck his head out of the door to the computer room. He was shouting something and holding up a phone. “Senior Tiler!”
“Hang up on him,” Steven said. Rico did just that, then ducked back inside, obviously going back to sleep.
“Are you going to answer me?” Jessica asked.
“Sam Tiler is my father.”
He had to struggle to keep from laughing at the look on her face.
“Damn that boy!” Sam Tiler slammed down the phone after the Mexican on the end hung up on him. He hit redial and wasn’t surprised by the busy signal on the other end. He looked at his watch. He should have been on a plane to west Texas right then, but engine troubles had grounded him in Dallas for at least twelve hours. He should have gone himself, instead of sending Jessica, but he couldn’t have afforded to go if it would have turned out to me a false alarm. He had needed her confirmation, there had been no way around it.
He knew that he was allowing this project to drive him like an obsession, but his dream visitor wasn’t just a visitor of dreams anymore. When Sam went to the bathroom, he saw the specter in the mirror, riding in the backseat of his car whenever he looked in the rear-view mirror, in the reflections of the windows he happened to glance at. Everywhere he turned, there was the devil, smiling broadly, a constant reminder that Sam’s beliefs were wrong.
As he watched the phone siting silently on his desk, he contemplated calling out to God for help, but Sam had always been afraid of lightning.
He’d just have to wait till morning, when he could confront the Devil.
“Your father?” Jessica thought that was just as crazy as the story he told about the true nature of the hole.
“Yes. That’s why I have to destroy the shaft. If I don’t destroy it, all the legions of hell will be released on earth. I don’t believe my dad is in his right mind anymore. He’s a pawn in the devil’s game. El Diablo.”
“What?”
“El Diablo. It means Devil. Rico finally explained it to me last night.”
“So what are you planning to do?”
“You’ll help me?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ll help you. Those voices scare the hell out of me.” She turned to walk back toward the plane, then turned back on him. “And for the record, I still think you’re just as crazy as your father.”
“Dually noted.”
“Hurry up and get this thing off the ground.”
Ten minutes later, Sam Tiler was airborne and heading west. He hoped that it wasn’t too late.
Steven, Jessica, Rico, and the pilot, a beefy guy named Bubba, worked all evening setting up the fiery destruction of Sam Tiler’s months of planning and work. ‘My work,’ Steve thought, ‘I did all this, not him…and now I’ll destroy it.’
They had retrieved the cable with the microphone from the hole and re-wired the end with an explosive package of dynamite and an electrical fuse, all complements of Sam Tiler’s supply shed. At the end of the thousand-foot length of line, they added another set of explosives, then another set of explosives after the third thousand-foot length. They lowered everything with a fourth cable and set it to a timer.
They had thirty minutes to get the plane prepped and off the ground before the bombs went off. Steven wasn’t expecting a spectacular explosion, maybe just a short burst of flame from the pipe, but the four of them didn’t want to be anywhere around that well of voices any longer.
Steve grabbed some of his belonging from his trailer as Bubba, Jessica, and Rico waited at the plane. As he exited, he heard a familiar sound over the chatter from the shaft and his eyes were drawn east. The sun was being swallowed by the horizon behind him and the blinking lights of another plane approached from low on the horizon.
“Oh, no. Here he comes.” Steven ran for the plane. “Bubba, get that thing started.”
“What about the timer, can’t he stop it from going off?” Jessica asked as he got into the aircraft.
“No, I destroyed the timer mechanism. There’s no way to stop it without actually pulling the blast caps out of the dynamite.”
“Get that door shut, we’ve got to go now if we’re going to go at all.” Bubba’s voice was as low and country, all he was missing was a cowboy hat.
The other plane was settling onto the runway ahead of them.
“Go, Go,” Steve shouted, and the craft began to crawl forward.
“What about them? We can’t take off with them landing too, can we?” Jessica put her seat belt on.
“Sure we can. My father made sure that we make the runway long enough and wide enough to accommodate two planes.” Steve put his seat belt on too, the way he watched the oncoming craft didn’t relieve her fear of a collision.
The other plane touched down and Bubba threw on the brakes, bringing the plane to a slow crawl.
“What’s wrong?”
“Our boss is wanting to play chicken.” Bubba stopped the craft.
Steven saw that Bubba was right. The oncoming aircraft was veering toward them.
“Let’s get out,” Steve said to the others. “We’ll have to confront him sometime, might as well be now.” He opened the door, unhooked his seat belt, and jumped to the ground. Jessica followed close behind.
Rico and Bubba didn’t move. This wasn’t their fight.
Tiler’s plane sped by and rolled to a stop a hundred feet up the runway. Dust eddied around everything, swirling into twin, vertical tornadoes behind the plane.
Steven stopped halfway to the plane and Jessica stopped beside him. “What’s wrong?” He was looking up at the sky.
“Is it just me, or is it getting darker?” He looked at his watch. “It’s only nine a.m.”
“Oh, God,” Jessica said.
“What?”
“This just keeps getting creepier and creepier.”
“What is it?” Mark asked, still looking at the sky.
“There’s supposed to be a solar eclipse today.”
“You’ve got to be kidding?” His eyes were still fixed on the sky when his father approached them.
“Jessica?” he said. He didn’t look happy.
“Yes, sir?”
“You’re fired.” Then he turned on his son. “And you! What have you done to jeopardize my project?”
“Dynamite. Three sets, a thousand feet apart down the shaft.” Steven checked his watch as Tiler started off toward the platform. “You’ve only got twelve minutes. There’s not enough time to stop it.”
Tiler kept walking and didn’t acknowledge that he had heard his son.
Steven rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said to Jessica. “Let’s see if we can get him out of here.”
They rushed to catch up with Tiler as the day continued to grow darker.
Tiler found the timer and jimmied the back off the small metal box.
“You can’t stop it like that,” Steven said, climbing the stairs up to the main level of the rig. He almost had to shout over the noise from the shaft.
Tiler pulled a knife from his pocket and moved to cut the wires.
“No!” Steven shouted. “You’ll set them off!” He reached out and pulled his father’s arm away from the cables. “I know you’ve got a death wish, but there’s no need to take us along with you.”
“Leave then.” Tiler didn’t sound happy at all, which, in his mind, there was no reason to be happy.
The sun disappeared behind the moon then, leaving the desert in semi-twilight. The automatic lights flared on, splashing artificial light and heavy shadows across the platform. Then, a new chill spread over each of them as a new sound began to issue from the hole.
“TILER!” It came from deep within the well. “WE’RE COMING. WE’RE COMING FOR YOU SAM!”
“Hombre!” shouted another voice, and Steven looked back toward their plane. Rico was leaning out the door, motioning for them to come on. “El Diablo comes!”
“Oh, God,” Jessica said, pulling at Steven’s arm. “We’ve only got two minutes.”
“Last chance, Dad. We’re leaving. Are you coming with us?”
“Pray for my soul, Steven.” Tiler turned his back on the couple and walked over to the pipe. He leaned over the opening and shouted, “And you! You’ve tormented me enough! Go back to hell!”
“Come on,” Steven said, ushering Jessica off the platform.
They rushed toward the plane, whose engines were already screaming. They jumped in and buckled up as Jessica told everyone that there was less than a minute left. The little plane leaped forward and gained speed dramatically. Bubba was pushing the aircraft to its limits.
Sam Tiler watched the plane rise into the twilight sky. As it rose, he glanced down at the countdown display as it changed from three seconds to two. He never thought it would end this way for him. He was rich, successful, and good looking though sometimes a little pompous, but never much of a hard nose. He wondered why he was so unhappy?
It would be his last thought as the world around him erupted into a symphony of flames and voices.
In the next spit second, several things happened at once. First, as the counter reached zero, an electrical pulse was sent down the cable, which ignited each package of explosives. The ground began to rumble as a ball of flame erupted from the shaft and shot almost a hundred feet into the air. The explosion shred the metal pipe that Tiler sat next to and the force of it sent burning pieces of his body in ten different directions. Then, as the sun began to emerge from its temporary hiding spot, the ground began to boil and crack. The house trailers shook in their frames as rocks and large chunks of ground began to spew into the air. The drilling rig crumpled like a house of cards as molten lava began to seep up through the ground. A sinkhole began to form. The lava retreated back into the ground as slabs of earth began to fall into the ever-widening circle of emptiness. The trailers disappeared into the void, and were quickly followed by Tiler’s plane.
“Are you watching all this?” Steven asked as their aircraft circled the sight.
Jessica wasn’t watching what was happening down below, she was watching Steven’s reflection in the window. She was pretty sure that there were tears running down his cheeks, yet she heard no sadness in his voice.
“Are you all right?” she asked him, and he wiped his face before turning to look at her.
“Yeah, I think I’ll be ok.” He looked back down at the site below as Bubba flew by for one last pass. “I think we avoided something very, very evil tonight. I don’t think we’ll ever know just what we stopped from happening.”
“I think your father was the only one that knew that, Steven.” She rubbed his shoulder as the plane climbed higher into the lightening sky.
Steven returned to the mysterious sight a couple of weeks later. His last images of this place still flashed through his mind.
…The explosion…
…The pool of lava that devoured everything then disappeared back into the ground…
…The dry earth falling away into the black abyss…
…And the screams of torment and agony…
…And the voices of demons, shouting his father’s name, telling him that they were coming for him…
It was all still so fresh in his mind, and even though he was never real close with his father, he still felt an intense loss for the man he never really got to know. He wondered if he had tried to get to know his father better, would have still happened?
Steven knew that this was the site of the drilling platform, but there was nothing here to confirm it. The ground was just as dull and brown as the rest of West Texas. The abyss that had devoured the site was gone, as if it had never been. But where’s the rig, the trailers, the storeroom? It had to have gone somewhere, didn’t it? All these questions repeated themselves over and over in Steven’s mind, but there were no answers.
He kicked a rock absentmindedly as he returned to the plane, where Bubba waited quietly. His eye was drawn to his left where something sparkled on the ground. He picked up the object and more questions flooded his mind.
It was his father’s ring. Sam had worn it on his left index finger and had used every opportunity to flash its sparkling diamonds to anyone who would take notice. Steven placed it in his pocket and returned to the plane. He had a special place to put the ring, to remember his father by, but he vowed that he would never let money get in the way of his happiness. He would never wear the ring, and he vowed to never let his inherited riches be the focal point of his life.
Bubba got the plane airborne and the two of them flew away in silence. Steven never returned to West Texas, to the site where his father’s drilling rig had opened an entrance into hell. He didn’t need to. He relived the entire episode in his dreams where the tormented screamed for water, and the fallen sought to own his soul.
Luke 16:23-24…”Parable of the Rich Man” …In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.”…
Copyright May 2001 by Christopher J. Thomasson
