Read The Becoming - a novella for Free Online

Mosquitoes buzzed around his head and he swatted and cursed.
    He had been
walking for over two hours and it seemed as though he should have run across
the old mine by now. The long-abandoned road had been mostly retaken by the
forest over the last eighty years, but it was still easy enough to follow.
Eighty year old fir trees and oaks were hard to miss when they were surrounded
on all sides by trees easily three or four times that.
    Tim paused for a
moment, taking a seat on a boulder and unzipping his pack. He took a long drink
of water—it was no longer cold but still tasted sweet and refreshing—and then
checked his map. Miss Henderson had let him borrow the authentic 1920’s era
road map she had shown the class as part of her presentation on the Tonopah
Mining disaster, pleased that one of her students was showing an interest in
the tragedy that had played such an influential part in local history.
    Tim scratched his
head and shooed away mosquitoes and wondered how much farther he would have to
walk. The mine should be impossible to miss, because for one thing the road
didn’t lead anywhere else—it had been built specifically for use by the miners
to get to work—and for another, the clearing where the old base of operations
had been built had to be at least an acre in circumference, if the ancient map
could be believed.
    Tim wondered if he
had been played for a fool by his friends. No one wanted to come out here
because they all knew the mine didn’t even exist. It was either a figment of
everyone’s imagination or, more likely, had been demolished by the government
after being closed down. The map was a fake and the whole story had been
concocted by his class to make him look silly.
    But of course both
possibilities were ridiculous. The mining disaster had been national news. Miss
Henderson had shown the class old, yellowed, brittle copies of the New York
Times and the Chicago Tribune, both papers splashing headlines about the
disaster across the front page.
    So it had definitely
happened. And as far as the mine being demolished, even if that were the case,
there would still have to be some kind of evidence the place had existed, even
if the evidence was nothing more than a big empty clearing.
    Tim sighed and
took one last drink, then stowed his stuff in his pack and zipped it up. He
shrugged it onto his back and stood. He decided he would walk another half hour
or so and if he still came up empty, he would admit defeat and hike back home.
It wasn’t like anybody knew he was coming out here, so no one would call him a
quitter or give him a hard time about giving up. And even if he somehow found
out, Jake Mallory couldn’t say much; he had refused to come!
    Tim resumed hiking
and five minutes later stopped in the middle of the forest, awestruck. He had
found the old mine. And it was magnificent.
    ***
    The clearing was filled with
relatively new forest growth, just like the abandoned road leading to it. Field
grass swayed in the warm breeze, thick and hardy in patches, thin and dying in
others. A rusted chain-link fence encircled the area, topped with nasty-looking
rolls of concertina wire, complete with a closed gate which had been padlocked
for security. Tim’s heart sank. He had stuffed a few tools inside his backpack,
but his mom’s boyfriend didn’t own a set of bolt cutters and Tim knew he
wouldn’t have thought to bring them along in any event.
    He approached the
gate slowly and as he got closer, he realized the padlocked entrance would pose
no problem because he wouldn’t be using it, anyway. Thirty or so feet into the
woods to the left of the gate the fence listed severely, to the point where Tim
guessed he could crawl right over it, barbed wire be damned. A tree had crashed
down onto it during some long-ago storm, and the fence had suffered the worst
of the confrontation.
    Tim left the old
road and walked along the fence line to the damaged portion. A closer
inspection revealed accessing the old