História curta: túnel sendo cavado, caçador de fósseis pediu para olhar para dentro e encontra uma pequena coisa de verme

Isto é Nos trabalhos de água por Caitlin R. Kiernan. Eu li na antologia American Supernatural Tales.

O professor, Henry Matthews, está vasculhando uma pilha de detritos procurando fósseis quando ele é abordado pelo capataz, Warren Wallace:

A week later, and Henry Matthews is again picking over the spoil heaps, a cool and sunny October day crisp as cider, an autumnsoft breeze that smells of dry and burning leaves, and his spirits are high, three or four exceptional trilobites from the hard limestone already and a single, disc-shaped test of some specie of echinodermia he’s never encountered before, almost as big as a silver dollar. He stoops to get a better look at a promising slab when someone calls his name, and he looks up, mildly annoyed at the intrusion. Foreman Wallace is standing nearby, scratching at his thick black beard, and he points at Henry with one finger.

Wallace tem o verme como criatura em uma jarra:

“Now, Professor, you tell me if you ever seen anything like this here,” and the foreman produces a small bottle from his shirt pocket, apothecary bottle Henry thinks at first, and then no, not medicine, nitroglycerine. Warren Wallace passes the stoppered bottle to the schoolteacher, and, for a moment, Henry Matthews stares silently at the black thing trapped inside.

“Where did this come from?” he asks, trying not to show his surprise but wide eyes still on the bottle, unable to look away from the thing coiling and uncoiling in its eight-ounce glass prison.

“From the tunnel,” the foreman replies, spits tobacco juice and glances over his shoulder at the gaping hole in the mountain. “About five hundred feet in, just a little ways past where the limerock goes to sandstone. That’s where we hit the fissure."

Henry e Warren entram no túnel onde encontram o mau smaell:

“Sorry. Guess I should’a warned you about the stink,” and Warren Wallace frowns, grim face like Greek tragedy, and takes a step back from the hole in the wall of the tunnel, hole within a hole, and now Henry’s eyes are watering so badly he can hardly see. “Merkel had us plowin’ through here full chisel until we hit that thing. Now it’s all I can do to keep my men workin’."

E olhando pelo buraco na parede do túnel, eles veem o resto dos vermes:

At first he doesn’t see anything, angle a little less than ninety degrees where black rock meets blacker water, and then he does see something and thinks it must be the roots of some plant growing in the pool, or, more likely, running down from the forest above to find this hidden moisture. Gnarled roots as big around as his arm, twisted wood knotted back upon itself.

But one of them moves, then, abrupt twitch as it rolls away from the others, and Henry Matthews realizes that they’re all moving now, each tendril creeping slow across the slick face of the crevice like blind and roaming fingers, searching. “My God,” he whispers. “My God in Heaven,” starts to pull away from the hole, but the foreman’s hand holds him fast. “No. Not yet,” Warren Wallace says calmly, and “Watch them for just another second, Professor.”