The Becoming

By Allan Leverone

Nearly a century ago, the Tonopah Mine in Tonopah, Pennsylvania was shut down, sealed off by the government and abandoned after a series of unexplained disappearances deep beneath the earth's surface. But whispered rumors of something . . . unnatural . . . roaming the long-abandoned tunnels continued, decades after its forced closure.

When twelve year old Tim McKenna decides to explore the site of the tragedies, he reawakens an ancient evil, one that has been trapped in the darkness.

Waiting.

And now it's free.

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Praise for Allan Leverone:

"...it will keep you up, and on the edge of your chair, long into the night." -- Nashua NH Sunday Telegraph

"...a sure-footed, masterful thriller with a breakneck pace that never lets up...I loved this book!" -- J. Carson Black, New York Times bestselling author of THE SHOP and ICON

"Suspenseful and well-written..." -- Debbi Mack, New York Times bestselling author of IDENTITY CRISIS and LEAST WANTED

"Written with edge-of-your-seat suspense and precise detail...The successor to Michael Crichton has landed. And his name is Allan Leverone." -- Vincent Zandri, New York Times bestselling author of the Dick Moonlight series

"Allan Leverone raises the stakes with every turn of the page..." -- Sophie Littlefield, Anthony Award-winning author of A BAD DAY FOR SORRY

"...a high-suspense thrill ride..." -- Derry (NH) News

"...a must have for anyone looking for a great page turner with mystery and mayhem." -- Community Bookstop

"...a spectacular thrill ride...with lots of action, danger, hold-your-breath suspense...this is definitely one you don't want to miss out on!" -- Life in Review

"...sexy, sophisticated...with all the intensity of THE LONELY MILE" -- CJ West, author of THE END OF MARKING TIME

"...a rocking read from start to finish!" -- Ian Graham, author of PATRIOTS AND TYRANTS and VEIL OF CIVILITY

"Allan Leverone delivers a taut crime drama full of twists and conspiracy..." -- Scott Nicholson, Amazon bestselling author of LIQUID FEAR and THE RED CHURCH

"A scorching supernatural thriller - Allan Leverone...is a writer on the rise..." -- Mark Edward Hall, author of APOCALYPSE ISLAND and SERVANTS OF DARKNESS

"A tense, tightly-plotted thriller that will keep you turning pages into the night." -- Christopher Allan Poe, author of THE PORTAL

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Allan Leverone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly twenty novels, as well as a 2012 Derringer Award winner for excellence in short mystery fiction and a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives in Londonderry, NH with his wife of more than thirty years, with three grown children and two beautiful grandchildren. Learn more at Facebook, Twitter (@AllanLeverone), and at www.allanleverone.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rock Bottom Books
• Release date: Aug 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386581161

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Copyright ©2012 by Allan Leverone

All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is unintended and entirely coincidental.

First edition: 2012 by Rock Bottom Books

For my wife, Sue: The patience you exhibit while I indulge my obsession for making stuff up and writing it down is awe-inspiring. As always, thanks for your unflagging support.

Special thanks to Neil Jackson for the breathtaking cover art

1

July 12, 1925

Tonopah Coal Mine

Tonopah, Pennsylvania

The handcar’s rusty iron wheels squealed out a song of complaint as the big box wound its way deep into the earth. Karl Meyer shuffled along behind it, weary after a long day, counting the minutes to the end of his ten-hour shift. Seventy-five to go. Glittering black coal dust caked his boots, his jumpsuit, his helmet and every inch of exposed skin.

Karl guided the car—empty now, but soon to be filled almost to overflowing with black Pennsylvania gold—around corners, along straightaways and through switchbacks, moving ever farther from small entryway back at the surface. The Tonopah Mine had been in continuous operation since the mid 1850’s, and over the ensuing seventy years a complex network of underground tunnels had been engineered.

Many of these tunnels had been sealed off, mined until the coal was played out and then abandoned. Rusting signs nailed to rotting two-by-fours placed in gigantic X’s across mine shaft entrances warned miners DANGER—TUNNEL CLOSED! Some of the signs had been in place so long they were virtually unreadable. Karl passed them all without a thought and kept going.

Karl Meyer was a trammer, a mine worker whose job it was to run the empty container along the tracks to an active mine shaft, fill it with coal, then muscle the now-heavy iron box back to the surface, where it would be unloaded and he would begin the process again.

It was now 10:45 p.m., and this would be Karl’s final run of the night. By the time he made his way to the shaft in use—Charlie Five was the shaft’s rather unromantic name—loaded his car with coal, and worked his way back to the surface, his two to midnight shift would be just about over. He would have enough time to clean up in the crowded shack employed as a base building by the Tonopah Mining Company before clocking out and trudging down the street to The Lucky Shamrock Bar—Tonopah Mining owned and operated, of course—to exchange some company scrip for a few beers.

Karl moved slowly along the main shaft. For an operation as busy as Tonopah Mining, he was continually amazed at how deep into the earth he could travel without setting eyes on another human being. He could hear workers every now and then; sound played tricks on the senses down here, so far beneath the earth’s surface. Long-abandoned mine shafts and tunnels to nowhere and unreliable ventilation all combined to result in strange, eerie sound patterns.

Snippets of overheard conversation might float through the air as if miners were near, but the shaft would be empty. Weird, toneless noises, ululations like the cries of a loon on a lonely lake, would begin without warning and end just as suddenly. Pockets of dead air would float through tunnels for no apparent reason, warm and thick and stifling as opposed to the cool dampness typical of a tunnel hacked into the earth hundreds of feet below its surface.

Men had died down here, dozens that Karl knew of over the seven-plus decades the mine had been in operation. Coal mining was a difficult, dangerous job and the risk of violent death was a constant companion to miners, but that was especially true in the Tonopah Mine. Here safety standards were generally lax, the miners viewed by management as interchangeable parts; replaceable cogs in the operation.

The old timers told stories of shadowy creatures living in the far reaches of the deepest closed-off mine shafts, of hideously deformed monsters skulking through the darkness, stalking miners and wreaking havoc on them. There were stories of good men who had walked into the mine and simply disappeared, vanishing into thin air, their bodies, clothing and tools never recovered.

Karl had heard all the stories, plenty of times. He tried to ignore them. Working ten hour shifts six days a week, three-quarters of a mile under the earth’s surface was hard enough to handle without adding superstitious nonsense to the mix. He was an uneducated immigrant with a wife and three hungry children to support, and Karl knew he was lucky to have a job at all. So he wasn’t about to complain, about the difficulties of the job or about the stupid stories told by a bunch of old men with coal dust lining their lungs and overactive imaginations or—

Bang!

Something smashed into Karl’s empty coal cart and bounced off, sending a loud gong reverberating through the mineshaft. He ducked reflexively and jumped back, then gazed into the murky semi-darkness at the edge of the six-foot-wide shaft. A jagged rock, roughly the size of a baseball, settled into the dust of the ancient shaft floor, spinning a couple of times and then falling still.

What the hell?

Karl had been pushing his cart, lost in thought, rolling it past the entrance to one of the oldest and deepest closed-off shafts in the entire mine. Alpha Seven it was called, and it had been abandoned for as long as Karl could remember. Hell, even old Sandy Schaefer, at sixty the oldest and longest-tenured Tonopah Mining employee, had never stepped foot into Alpha Seven and couldn’t remember a time when the shaft had been active.

It was also one of the shafts rumored to be haunted.

But of course that was ridiculous. Karl stood