The Slate Tongue

I’d driven past the old granite quarry a hundred times, its rusted machinery and crumbling office blocks a silent testament to the town’s boom-and-bust past. When I heard they were finally going to fill it in, I knew I had to see it once before it vanished. The chain-link fence was ancient, but a section near the back had been peeled back like a tin can lid, leaving a gap just wide enough to slip through.

My boots crunched on loose gravel as I followed the old access road, flanked by towering piles of gray rock and the skeletal remains of conveyor belts. The air was thick with the smell of wet stone and something acrid, like burnt metal. A low-hanging mist clung to the ground, and the early morning light didn’t seem to penetrate far beyond the road. I’d brought a heavy-duty flashlight, but even its beam felt swallowed by the gloom.

The main pit yawned ahead, a massive crater lined with stepped benches of rock descending into darkness. I walked along the top edge, looking for a way down. Near one of the old crusher buildings, I found a set of iron rungs bolted into the rock, leading to a narrow ledge. It felt sturdy enough, so I started to climb down, the sounds of the surface fading with each step.

At the bottom of the ladder, a horizontal tunnel bored into the quarry wall, its entrance I hadn’t seen from above. The walls were slick with moisture, and the air was noticeably cooler. My breath began to fog, though the day outside was mild. The tunnel stretched ahead, perfectly dark except for the cone of my flashlight.

I walked for what felt like ten minutes, the only sounds my breathing and the scuff of my boots. The rock around me was banded with streaks of black and gray, and I noticed small chisel marks on the walls, remnants of the blast-and-bore technique. The quiet was profound, oppressive even. Then, a sound broke it: a rhythmic tapping, like a loose cable whipping against rock, coming from deeper in the tunnel.

I froze, training my light ahead, but saw nothing. The tapping continued for a few seconds, then stopped. I took a step forward, and it resumed, but it seemed to come from a different spot, slightly to the left. I called out, ‘Hello?’ and my voice echoed strangely, multiplying. No response. A chill ran down my spine, and the hair on my arms stood up.

I kept going, but the tapping followed me, never right behind me, always just ahead. It was like something was measuring my progress. Then I heard a whisper, so faint it was barely there, like a dry leaf skittering across stone. I couldn’t make out words, but it had a cadence, a pattern that felt almost like speech in a language I didn’t know.

I stopped, and the whispering stopped too. I turned my flashlight in a slow circle, but the beam only revealed gray rock. My heart was hammering now. I had read about the quarry, about the accident in the ’70s when a sheet of slate had peeled off and buried a crew of three. They’d never found them. Their names were on a small plaque near the main gate.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said out loud, not knowing why. The whispering started again, but this time it grew louder, and I could almost pick out individual sounds, like ‘come’ and ‘down’. A wave of cold air hit me, and I could see my breath again, thick and white. I turned to head back, and the beam of my flashlight swept across the wall, catching a glimpse of something that made my blood run cold: a handprint, but not quite human. The fingers were too long, the palm too wide, and it was pressed into the rock as if the stone had been soft when it was made.

I ran. The tapping became frantic, echoing around me, and the whispers swirled into a cacophony of angry voices. I didn’t stop until I burst into the daylight, gasping and sweating. I scrambled up the iron rungs and didn’t look back until I was in my car, engine revving.

Back home, I tried to shake it off. But that night, as I was brushing my teeth, I noticed something on my bathroom mirror. It was a smudge, like a handprint, but too large. I wiped it away, but the next morning, it was back, and this time, I could hear a faint tapping from inside the walls.

I don’t sleep much anymore. And whenever I walk past a construction site or a pile of rocks, I hear that whisper, that dry, slithering sound, calling to me, asking me to come back and join them in the dark.