Originally Written 2021
Warn: [ horror ]
Prompt: You are a miner. Every day you and your crew slowly dig deeper and deeper for resources. Until one day, when taking the elevator out of the shaft, it simply takes you to another mine. You know your elevation is above the surface. But every time you take the elevator up, you remain underground.
submitted to r/WritingPrompts by u/KidKonundrum
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Item: a leather-bound journal retrieved from the corpse of ████████████ found outside a mine in ████████, Idaho. Cause of death: loss of blood due to multiple lacerations, estimated to have died shortly after leaving the mine.
Location: to be stored in the non-anomalous item storage of site-██ locker ██
Contents:
Excerpt from the first few pages:
I'm not sure what kind of hell I have stumbled into, but I have been stuck for a few weeks at this point. This place gets stranger and stranger the further I go. I'm going to tell my story in case anyone manages to find this book. Hopefully writing in this thing will help me keep my sanity, all that journal writing therapeutic bull-shit there always talking about on TV.
I worked in a mine, God knows I should not have taken that job. Every day me and my coworkers would go, one at a time, down this tiny lift into the depths below. It was a real shit job, but it paid the bills. At the end of the shift, I was the first one heading back up that day. I climbed into the cramped lift. It started moving and was taking forever.
When it came to a stop, I thought it had malfunctioned. I was still in the damn mine. It should have been the surface. I got out, I wish I hadn't, the lift closed behind me and went back down. No matter how many times I pressed that damn button, it would not come back. I thought I was stuck in an abandoned arm of the mine.
With nowhere else left to go, I started to walk the mine. It seemed eerily familiar. I could swear it was the same exact layout as the deepest part of the mine. Like I was at the bottom, head towards the surface. Sure enough, it matched the layout exactly. Following the familiar path I knew, I eventually reached the elevator out. The damn thing should take me to the surface.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
It was the exact same thing, a long ride only to end up back at the bottom of this god-forsaken mine. The elevator would never come back up and facing a sheer drop I continued forward, walking up the mine again, to the next elevator, hoping this was some kind of bad dream, maybe I had inhaled some sort of gas and was slowly dying. Hallucinating all this
I knew something was really wrong at about the seventh elevator. There was a sickly sweet smell. The floor was crumbly and seemed to squish under my feet. The walls were coated in this similar substance, being soft and malleable, I reached and pulled a hunk off of the wall. It smelled sickly sweet, it was warm. It was a huge handful of cookie. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, were all one giant cookie. I used my hands to dig into the walls. I got through about 6 feet of cookie pulling off hunks, and it was never-ending. I was starving by that point, so I ate it. It was good cookie, what more can I say.
Eventually, I had to move on, it was better than staying stagnant forever in a cookie mine. There were quite a few other oddities in these mines. I came across one where all the walls were smooth white, it felt like porcelain. I was very careful, god knows I don't need to be crushed to death by a giant piece of porcelain should it happen to shatter.
Eventually, I made my way here, this one is strange. The walls of this place are lined with convenience store shelves, with all sorts of different things on the shelves. It's a godsend, fresh clothes, supplies. I grabbed all sorts of things, flashlights, batteries, a watch, god knows I have not been able to tell time in this god-forsaken place, a BIG hunting knife, and this journal. I'll stay here for a while. Stock up on supplies, live my life here before I have to move on. There's a good amount of food and a drinking fountain with running water.
The next 27 pages detail notes of his daily life and descriptions of different mines. As the number of accounts increases, the writer notes increasingly large deformities in the structure of the mine, including one with an entirely new room containing an Olympic swimming pool.
On page 30 he describes a mine as follows:
That one was different, I went through it as quickly as possible, all the walls were soft and warm, upon closer inspection it seems they were made of human skin. As I advanced I began to find things like a knee sticking out of the wall, it was really creepy. I started hauling ass after an arm grabbed me, and I heard a scream from somewhere. Gave me a fucking heart attack. I have not been that out of breath in a long time. fuck that place.
Excerpt from page 157:
I can hear a constant screeching coming from the shaft to the next floor. I don't know what's up there, but I have my hunting knife. Please god, please, let it not be another one of those horrible mutated things. The last one took 3 of my fingers before I could kill it. I'm going to try to run past it, maybe one of these times that elevator will get out of this hellhole
this is the last entry in the journal
Later testing of blood samples taken from the hunting knife removed from the corpse lead to DNA highly similar to the DNA of the Tarsiidae family more commonly known as the Tarsiers.