The Man with the Compound Eyes

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The trickling of water through the fissures in the subterranean rock was suddenly drowned out when the mountain made an immense but also somehow distant sound.

Everyone fell silent.

Then Jung-hsiang Li shouted. That sure wasn’t groundwater surging. Wasn’t loose rocks shifting or bedrock bursting, either. And it obviously wasn’t a vocal echo. It sounded more like when something bumps into a flawless glass vessel — from somewhere within the glass you hear a spider’s web begin to spread before the cracks appear. The sound vanished straightaway, and the only thing the people in the cave and the control room could hear was the huff of each other’s breathing and the hiss of the radios.

Detlef Boldt heaved a huge sigh of relief and asked, “Did … did you all hear that sound just now?” speaking in English with a heavy German accent. Nobody replied, not because they hadn’t heard it, but because they didn’t know how to describe it. Then the electrical system cut out, and deep in the mountain the cave went black. It was too dark to see a thing. There it was again. It was as if some colossal being was marching through the mountain, either toward them or away.

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