The Deep Calls

The water looked black. Not just dark — black, like a mirror reflecting nothing. Mallory stood at the edge of the quarry, shivering despite the heat that pressed down on her shoulders like a hand that wouldn’t lift.

Cicadas droned from the trees. The air smelled of dust and iron and the faint sweetness of algae.

The others had left hours ago. Only the echo of their laughter still clung to the rocks — faint and hollow, as if the quarry itself were trying to remember what joy sounded like.

She’d been coming here since childhood, climbing over the guardrail with her brother and his friends, their sneakers skidding on sun-hot metal. She remembered the thrill — the sense of trespassing against something ancient and forbidden. Back then, she’d swim across and touch the far wall just to prove she could.

Every summer, the water seemed to sink deeper, its color darkening from cobalt to ink, as if the earth were swallowing it by degrees.

But this time, she wasn’t here for that. This time, she wanted to go down.

No one had ever reached the bottom.

People said it was bottomless — a hole bored into the planet’s heart. The quarry had been abandoned before she was born, flooded decades ago when a storm broke through the old tunnels. Her grandfather used to tell her stories — of drowned machines still down there, of miners who never came back, of lights that moved like lanterns far beneath the surface. Mallory didn’t believe the stories, but she also didn’t not believe them. Some places seemed built for superstition.

She crouched, set down her bag, and uncoiled the rope. The nylon hissed across the rocks. A few dragonflies skimmed the water, their wings catching the sun in fleeting flashes. She tightened her goggles, adjusted her fins, and stared into that blackness until she could almost convince herself it was staring back.

One deep breath. Then another. And she dove.

The first shock was the cold — bitten-steel cold, like stepping through a door onto another planet. The world turned muffled and viscous. Sunlight fractured above her, scattering into liquid shards. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears. She kicked down, each movement a negotiation with gravity and fear.

Fifteen feet. The light dimmed. Thirty. Her chest began to ache. Forty. The rope she’d tied to the surface trembled behind her, a thin, quivering lifeline. She thought about turning back.

Fifty. Then the water around her shifted. A current — no, a pulse, as if the quarry itself had taken a breath.

Her goggles fogged slightly. She blinked, peering downward. Below her, faintly, something glowed — a steady blue-green shimmer, like foxfire on old wood. It flickered once, then steadied, throbbing faintly in rhythm with her own pulse. She swam closer, drawn toward it the way moths are drawn to flame, forgetting the cold, forgetting her lungs.

At sixty feet, she saw it — an opening in the rock, perfectly round, rimmed with light. It didn’t look natural. The edges were smooth, almost carved, and the glow seemed to come from within the stone itself, breathing softly in the dark.

Her rope went taut. She’d reached its end.

She hovered there, suspended in that liquid twilight, feeling the cold creep into her bones. The sensible part of her whispered to go back.

She thought of the air above — the sun on her shoulders, the dry heat, the simple certainty of the surface world. The thought bloomed in her chest like breath she hadn’t taken yet.

But the other part — the restless, hungry part that had brought her here — whispered louder.

Mallory unclipped the rope.

The moment she did, the light flickered, as if acknowledging her. Then she dove again, straight into the hole, swallowed by the glow.

For a heartbeat, everything was silence and light. It wasn’t just illumination — it was presence, pressing against her skin like touch, like a question she couldn’t answer.

Her lungs burned. Her vision warped. The light became sound — a low hum vibrating through her ribs. She reached out — and felt something reach back.

Then the quarry was still again.

The rope floated gently on the surface, untethered, rippling with the faintest shimmer of blue-green light that faded slowly into the dark.

The water looked black once more. The air hummed with insects and the low grind of summer heat, as if nothing had happened at all.

But no one saw her surface.

The search went on for days. Sheriff’s boats crisscrossed the quarry, their engines muttering against the cliffs. Divers went down until their teeth chattered and their lights dimmed, but they found nothing — no gear, no body, not even a print in the silt. The quarry refused to give her up.

After a week, they stopped looking. The newspapers ran her picture- Local Girl Vanishes in Abandoned Quarry. In the photo from her college graduation, her smile was bright and uneven, the corner of her cap slipping down. Her mother sat on the porch every evening that summer, watching the horizon until it blurred into night.

By autumn, the story had already started to twist. Some said she’d run away. Some said she’d drowned. Others whispered that she’d been pulled under by something that wanted her.

Then the lights began.

Fishermen were the first to report it — a faint glow beneath the surface, pale and pulsing, sometimes green, sometimes blue.

Kids dared each other to go at night and watch. The glow came irregularly but always in the same place, just off the old diving ledge. One boy swore he saw a figure down there, drifting slowly through the water, hair spreading like black seaweed.

By winter, the quarry was fenced off again.

But fences never stopped anyone.

Years passed. The town changed — strip malls, new roads, kids with earbuds instead of bikes. The quarry became rumor again, a ghost story told around campfires.

But every so often, someone still saw it. A flicker of light under a frozen surface. A shape standing in the shallows on nights when there shouldn’t be any moonlight at all.

And always, when the wind was right, a whisper carried across the water.

Sometimes people said it sounded like their own name. Sometimes it sounded like hers.

If you stand there long enough — alone at the edge — you might hear it too- faint and low, like a voice calling from beneath the surface, asking the same question it asked her before she vanished.

Not Where are you? But Will you come down?