Unlucky

The black liquid was oil, we were sure of it at first. We were sure that we had found our treasure chest, our pot of gold. We actually started writing down all the ways we’d spend the money. The first choice was a vacation home in Hawaii, but later Jack scratched that because it was “cliche.” We had to agree with him. Alex was the only one of the three of us who was tied down—awesome wife, Jamie, and a baby girl named Lily—so he was only thinking of college funds and savings. Jack and me though, we had the high life screaming in our veins--and what we heard was a socially elite, high-rolling-bouncers’ needed 24/7-private access bachelor pad. In Holland. Every luxury catered to.

Reading through this list now... I can’t believe how stupid we were. We were young, yes—early 30’s but secretly still living the college lives of our young 20’s. I think that’s what kept us friends all these years. We all secretly—desperately—wanted to reconnect to the invincibility and possibility of college life.

Alex was the first to suspect that something was off. Jack and I probably had stars and dollar signs swirling in our eyes because that was all I remember thinking about. He had always been more sensible than us. “Guys. Listen to this.” He was holding out the headphones that monitored drill progress. We didn’t have fancy equipment so the monitor helped us navigate what we were drilling.

I put the headphones on, looking at Alex as I listened to the normal tones of the drill—a sharp yet dull kind of hum—trying to pick out anything odd. We couldn’t afford a new drill if this one was malfunctioning. “What is it?” I realized by Alex’s expression that I had yelled and took off the headphones. “What’s wrong?” I specified, quieter.

“Put them back on, but don’t listen to the drill. Just—keep listening.” He insisted and I put them back on.

It took me a minute to hear it. It was hard to distinguish between the drill’s buzz and it’s various pitches, and the sounds I slowly began to hear interlaced in the backdrop. It was like a humming—not like a drill, like people, humming. Honestly it sounded like a bunch of guys humming the same, slow song in a low key.

Alex was nodding quickly at me and I realized my eyebrows were raised. I took the headphones off. “What the hell was that?” I asked and Jack immediately grabbed them and put them on.

“I don’t have a clue, but it’s not the drill.” I shook my head. It definitely wasn’t the drill.

We watched as Jack’s face changed from intent with his eyes shut tight, to surprised—eyes wide open. “What is that?” He yelled. I pulled the headphones off his ears. “Is that our drill? Another drill?” He asked, lowering his voice.

Alex shook his head. “You heard the... humming right?” He asked, and we both nodded.

“It sounded like people—like people were humming. In the ground.” I felt as stupid as I sounded and I could hear skepticism lacing my words—begging an alternate opinion.

“Danny. There aren’t people down there.” Alex sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than me.

“Could we be picking up... something else? I mean, I don’t really know how this monitoring system works, but is it possible?” If it’s like a baby monitor, or walkie talkie, that had to be possible.

Alex shook his head, thinking, and Jack chimed in as well. “No man. This kind of monitor doesn't work in waves like that.”

Alex had put the headphones back on. “Record me!” He shouted, and started a very off-key attempt to mimic the humming. I pulled out my phone and hit record. At the very least, this would be a good story to show his wife.

Alex did pick out the tune—though it took the first 15 or so seconds of the video. It wasn’t a quick tune. Very melodic, with low drawn out notes contrasting a few higher ones. It sounded old, and if you asked me how I knew that, I would have absolutely nothing to answer.

After Alex went through the tune and found it repeating, he took the headphones off. “Did you catch it?” I had him watch through the video—almost a minute total—and then asked if he’d recognized the tune. He hadn’t.

We kept drilling, with each of us checking in on the humming in case there was any change. In three hours there wasn’t even a missed note. Not even a pause or break before repeating. We had briefly considered stopping the drill, but couldn’t wrap our logic or our egos around why we should. Because the earth was humming? Because our system could be weirding out? We all had a laugh, but decided that we should monitor for changes just in case it was our equipment malfunctioning.

Like I said, three hours passed with no change. But I was on shift when something finally did happen, and it took me a couple seconds to notice. “Guys, guys!” I waved them over. More excited that something had happened than what had actually happened.

It had stopped. The humming had abruptly been cut off by something. I knew because I remembered how far into the verse it had been.

They each took turns listening before putting the headphones on the desk. “Well... I guess we don’t need to monitor it anymore. I wonder what happened.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck, but turned back to his laptop. He was probably talking to Jamie. Jack had been entertained by this anomaly, but now he sat at the table with a deck of cards.

“You wanna play?” He held the cards toward me.

“Nah. I’m gonna listen a little longer—see if it comes back.” I had been entertained too, and wasn’t willing to just let it end there. I put the headphones back on, but after 10 minutes or so of mind-numbing drill buzzing, I accepted a silent game of war. It was easy to tune in and out of the noise to check in, but not get lost in it when I was counting aces and praying for high cards. Jack was a betting man and I wanted to test my luck before putting money on it.

“—here” I froze, the nine I had played still under my hand and over Jack’s three on the table. I saw Jack grimace as he looked at the small stack of one’s he’d bet out of confidence from a winning streak.

I put my head down and pressed the headphones closer to my ears. I swear I had heard something. I waited for a couple minutes, shooing Jack’s curious hand away a few times. I could hear muffled sounds—like two people talking, but farther away. “Shut it off!” I shouted to Jack—startling Alex dozing on the couch. “Shut off the drill! They’re talking” Jack was hesitant for only a few seconds before my urgency propelled him forward. He shouted something at me as he went, but it never made it through the headphones.

About a minute later, the buzz of the drill began to slow. “—can we do?” There was definitely a voice. I looked wide-eyed at Alex and he pulled his phone out. The voice was low, gravel-like and I repeated what I heard to Alex as he recorded. I heard stirring. Like rocks shifting and crunching, and again repeated to Alex. There was more muffled sound, but they grew louder till I caught one word. The last one. “—stopped?” Then I heard a loud banging—like two taps on the biggest, emptiest bongo drum.

“They’re tapping--or hitting--” I winced at the decibel of the sound “the drill.” I saw Alex mouth “they?” and I nodded. There were people down there, I was certain.

The earthy voice was speaking again, but farther away. I struggled to make out words. “Tell... bring… goes up?” I couldn’t pull much meaning out of it, but I could tell he was talking to someone. There was more rock crunching noises—some fading out, and others getting louder. I could hear something sliding—a loud, metallic, uncomfortable scraping noise. “I think they’re... I think they’re doing something to the drill.”

Jack was back and my statement panicked him. He shook his head vigorously and made a motion to mimic pulling up. I shook my head at him—if we moved the drill out, we lost our ears too. Jack took wide strides over to me and pulled the headphones off. “We need to pull the drill up if they’re damaging it! I mean, we don’t even know what’s happening down there!” It felt like every third word had extra stress on it and I recognized Jack’s “I’ve made the decision so move” tone. I could tell that Alex agreed, but I pulled the headphones on quickly as Jack went down to the controls.

I had missed something. Lot’s of rock crunching—moving, I assumed—was happening, and there were more voices, overlapping each other to the point that words in general just didn’t exist. It was all muffled tones and intonations, until I heard the drill starting to retreat. Then I heard one final word in a low rough voice: “free.”

It’s been two years since that day. Nothing ever happened. No trolls crawled out of the hole, or dwarves toting pick axes. And Jack and I never purchased our bachelor pad in Holland. The oil we thought we had found turned out to be a fairly expensive false alarm, and the three of us actually ended up splitting ways shortly after.

Recently though—about a month ago—we realized we would all be in the same city for a weekend and agreed to meet up. Casual catching up and small talk became somber only minutes in when I asked about Alex’s family. He relayed quietly that Jamie had passed away due to an infection contracted during her second pregnancy. The baby hadn’t survived either. It would have been a boy. It had only been six months and Lily was still with his parents. He hadn’t been able to look at her since the funeral, and after a few drinks, he confided that he didn’t think he ever would.

Jack had also suffered a stroke of bad luck. His gambling habits had gotten out of hand—and into the hands of the wrong people. He’d been harassed and threatened and had been under the police’s radar for a year now. He’d dropped contact with the people close to him just to keep them safe and was basically wandering from town to town, trying to avoid his tail.

The misfortune and horrors of my old friends startled me. Not only had I noticed my own trail of faulty luck, but I’d started seeing it everywhere else. Bad things just... started happening with so much more fervor than I felt they had before—almost as if with a vengeance.

We discussed this, tracing unlucky events and bad happenstances through the years. What we all agreed on was that life has seemed pretty good until after our oil-drilling adventure. We had gone home the next day—empty handed but armed with a story and video of our encounter with the “dwarves” as we came to call them. Jamie had laughed at the strangeness of it, bouncing Lily on her knee and repeating “dwarves!” to her in a childish, smiling voice. Now she was gone, and Alex looked like he hadn’t smiled since.

Knowing Jack, he had shared it with everyone. Probably beefing it up and adding suspense where he felt we had failed to deliver. I’m sure it was received wonderfully, but I doubt he’s told it since his run in with—or run out of, I guess—Lady Luck. He’s avoided everyone since then--that story likely far from his mind.

I actually hadn’t shared it. Life handed me an armful of distractions when I got back, and honestly, I just had moved on. However, of the three of us, my bad luck seemed the most generic. I’d been laid off--twice--since that day, and my mind had stayed preoccupied with survival almost since then.

By this point, we’d each had enough drink in us to seriously contemplate if we really had unleashed something that day. I could still remember the final “free” I had heard. And the tune; honestly I caught myself humming it while walking at times. All of us could remember the tune, and it was as we hummed it together in the back table of a bar, that we agreed--no matter how close to drunk we were—that we had unleashed something. And they definitely were not dwarves.

With each low note we echoed into the noisy air, small holes in our vision appeared. Not the black out spots that pop in and out before you hit the ground. There were things—creatures—almost dissolving into existence in front of us, around us. They were tiny, and I think winged. They were completely black, and would have easily passed for shadows or small toys or pets--except for their faces. Red eyes with black slits took up slanted spaces right above large, sharpened teeth; always twisted into a smile.

These things were everywhere, and more appeared as we hummed. They spread out over the bar—unnoticed by anyone but us—and caused casual havoc. A trip, a spilled drink, a dropped phone. All done by their hands. We hummed until we saw one of them whispering into the ears of an obviously drunk man as he insisted that he could drive home. It perched on his shoulder, smiling, as he climbed into his car.

We stopped, immediately reminded of the horrible chaos these things seemed to be capable of. We left soon after, the conversation suddenly too heavy to carry.

It’s been a few days, but I still catch myself humming their tune. Except now I can see snatches of them--twisting horror into people’s lives. Even now, sitting in my home, I am humming, and I can see a pair of red eyes appearing in front of me, followed by a twisted, fanged smile as it met my gaze. I wondered briefly what horrors awaited me before it opened its mouth to speak. It’s gravely voice was immediately familiar.

“Liberator.”