Chapter Fifty-Seven: What Does It Want?

Chapter Fifty-Seven: What Does It Want?

The storyline was nearly over, yet we hadn't reached The End yet. There was something further to get done.

We raced back to the mine entrance where Nicholas' SUV was parked. When we arrived, we saw that the workers had left.

Off-Screen.

So we were back to that.

Hesper was sitting in his wheelchair at the entrance to the mine. His guards were carrying boxes as they walked past him and disappeared into the area where the elevator was. Hesper had one of the boxes next to him. He was reaching into it and messing with its contents.

“What are they bringing in?” Anna asked.

Hesper lifted one of the items out of the box as if to examine it. I saw it glinting in the sunlight.

"It's gold," Dina said. "Boxes of gold."

"Why would he be bringing boxes of gold into the mine?" Kimberly asked.

That was a good question. He had clearly thrown his wife into the caverns in exchange for something. Was it gold? Success? Who knows.

“Maybe he was trying to return ill-gotten gains,” I suggested.

Nicholas shook his head. “I don't know what he's doing but he didn't have any gains. Not from this mine. He went bankrupt after this venture. It was his most embarrassing personal failure. He was humiliated. And then our plane went down. The crash put him in a wheelchair and killed my moth-“

He stopped talking as he realized that the story he had been told must not have been true.

"I'm going to trap them in there," Nicholas said.

"What?" Anna said. "We can leave now. They aren't going to stop us."

Nicholas ignored her.

"We need to jam the elevator," he said. "Then we can have a talk."

"They have guns," Anna said. "We should just leave."

Finally, Nicholas acknowledged her. "And what happens when they discover we have escaped? You think they'll just let us be? They threw us into that pit to die. Threw his own son... They're not just going to let us walk free."

That was probably true, but it didn't really affect us. Still, our characters would likely be motivated by that logic. It was clearly scripted as much as anything was scripted in this broken storyline.

“We just need to see if there's an emergency shutoff,” Camden said.

“Do you want to get that close?” Kimberly asked. "They have guns."

"We'll wait until the elevator has lowered some and then jam it up," Nicholas said, looking around for some means of doing so.

"That might work," Kimberly suggested, pointing to the earth mover that had been used to unseal the mine.

Nicholas' eyes lit up.

Nicholas scurried toward the earth mover. He got into the operator's seat and found its key. As Hesper and his guards started moving into the elevator, he started trying to turn the machine on and get it moving. Yet, he clearly didn't know how to operate it very well. He started moving forward clumsily, lowering the jackhammer attachment on the front of the machine into the ground on accident.

"Let me do it," Kimberly said. "My dad had a construction business. I know how to operate it."

Her Savvy jumped up as her Convenient Backstory ability kicked in. I didn't think it would work off-screen, but then, I don't think we were supposed to be off-screen in this scene anyway. The storyline was still broken. In fact, I noticed that the story went off-screen for anything involving Hesper, as if he and the big dead thing in the mines were somehow being hidden from the audience, glitched.

After a few more failed attempts at operating the contraption, Nicholas finally relented and let Kimberly try. Thanks to her ability, she was able to make it work well enough.

“It's now or never,” Camden said. “Hesper is about to get back on the elevator.”

Of course, we couldn't just walk away. Not really.

We needed a final word from Hesper. An explanation.

Kimberly's savvy was pretty high right now. Odds were, her plan to use the earth mover would work. It wasn't too far-fetched even by real-life standards. By movie standards, it was practically guaranteed.

One of Hesper’s guards wheeled him around into the elevator along with a stack of boxes and his other guards. The mine elevator was slow compared to a normal elevator.

As soon as the metal gate closed and that elevator started to descend, Kimberly kicked the earth mover into gear and drove it as fast as it would move down toward the entrance to the mine. From there, she didn't slow down much at all. She lifted the scoop of the earthmover so that it would knock into one of the support beams for the elevator and bend it over into the motor relay.

Crunch.

“You were not what I asked for. Why would it not tell me what it wanted? I would have given it anything. See, I think my mistake was that I didn't get Martha's consent. I think that must have been it. She did not walk into the mines willingly. But you did. I was certain that would be enough, but apparently, it wasn't. Why won't it just tell me what it wants? I tried to figure out how to profit from the mine but I couldn't.

"Soon some government agencies started asking about pollutants. I couldn't have them poking around, not with your mother down there. I sealed up the mine, planning to open it in a few years once I had a better plan and some more money.

"After some worse luck, we lost the company to bankruptcy. I put the past in the past, but this has been eating at me for thirty years... What does it want?”

Hesper had a madness in his voice. A crazed obsession. I knew that the Unknowable Host could passively create servants, but it was more than that. I think using its power also infected you in a different way. One of its many unreadable tropes must have caused this.

It was nice to have a bad guy not try to justify himself or convince you to go along with their plan. It was a change of pace.

Nicholas could not comprehend what he was hearing.

He didn't have very long.

Outside of the mine, the sound of a motor starting up echoed through the gravel pit.

“What's that?” Anna asked.

No one knew.

We began running out of the entrance of the mine. As we did, water started to trickle down into the entrance. At first, it was a single stream but it grew and grew until a small river of water began splashing its way down the entrance.

“The water pump,” Camden said.

The mine drainage system was situated outside and up around to the left. When we turned and got a view of it, we found Corey smashing the controls with a blank expression on his face. The pump wasn't just blowing water back into the gravel pit where it ran down into the entrance of the mine, it was blasting water everywhere, dozens of feet into the air. Much of it was getting out onto the fields to the east.

When he caught sight of us he turned. “We weren't supposed to stop the spread,” he said. “I think this is what he wants.”

Corey smiled.

We heard yelling from inside the mine. The water reached Hesper. Hope he wasn't thirsty.

“What do we do?” Kimberly asked.

"We leave," I said.

“Any of that water that doesn't get back in the mine is going to end up in the water table,” Camden said. “I'm guessing that's how the animals got possessed last time.”

“We need to go,” Anna said. “Look.”

She pointed out to the field next to the gravel pit. The animals had made it out of the air shaft. They stood watching us. They didn't attack. That part of the story was over.

“What about the machine?” Dina asked.

“It's gas-powered; it'll run out in a few hours,” Camden answered. "Besides, I don't think those animals will let us near it."

With the workers all gone, there were far fewer vehicles near the gravel pit. Nicholas' SUV was still there.

We loaded into the SUV, but before Nicholas started the engine, he paused. He handed the keys to Kimberly.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I'm going back to get my inheritance and my mother,” Nicholas said. “Go home. I'll be back in a little bit.”

He leaned over and gave Kimberly a kiss.

He ran away from the SUV back to the table where we had gotten our climbing gear. He started grabbing things off the table. I didn't know what he was getting but he seemed to have a good idea of what the equipment was.

“Is he going back in the mines?” Kimberly asked.

Surely not.

Nicholas gathered all of the things that he needed and tossed them into the back of the truck near the table. He opened up the door and fished a key from his pocket.

He turned on the truck and started to drive away from the entrance to the mine. He drove west.

“He’s going for the wishing well in the Straggler Forest, isn’t he? The money at the bottom?” Camden asked. "I wonder what the deal was with that."

"I think we'll find out soon enough," I said. As I watched him drive away, I noticed something familiar. “You guys recognize that truck?”

“Isn’t that the same one Akers had?” Anna answered.

“I think it will be,” I said, as the needle on the Plot Cycle clicked toward The End.