At 1:51pm in Mineral, Virginia on August 23, 2011 the ground began to tremble. The shaking and rumblings beneath the surface of the earth traversed the east coast for the next few moments. They said it was a 5.8 on the Richter scale, and they said that the fault causing it was last active 200 million years ago…an ancient fault in the middle of the tectonic plate. There was no widespread damage, no casualties. A bit of cracked foundation, toppled lawn furniture.
And the odd thing is, not everyone felt it. Some got a taste for ten seconds, some for twenty. People in buildings directly next to each other had widely different experiences. Why?
I know the truth, and the government is trying to keep it quiet. No, it wasn’t terrorists. It would cause massive panic though no less. The “they” I referred to earlier want to keep them a secret.
Strange creatures make their home deep within our earth’s crust. They have been there for millennia. Typically, they slumber for centuries on end, moving little, disturbing no one. They are relatively harmless, and they go unnoticed and forgotten. I only know of them because of the stories that I heard from my great-grandfather. I always thought they were just that, stories. That was until the Great East Coast Earthquake. I recalled his strange words and all of the detail that he had rambled on and on about even into his senility. He was so interested in these real monsters that he had heard about from his own grandfather.
I figure there were at least four creatures behind the so-called earthquake. They are a rare species of annelids. Annelids are worms – segmented worms, like earthworms and ragworms. This species isn’t like those familiar worms though, they are giants. They are set-up like earthworms, I think, but they’re thirty to forty feet in diameter with proportional lengths of hundreds of feet. My great-grandfather never mentioned them harming anyone, only that they cause things that seem like earthquakes. They behave just like the little earthworms I’m sure you’re familiar with. They burrow and tunnel, but my great-grandfather said something odd about them.
“They have minds,” he would always insist. “Minds,” he repeated over and over. “The worms you know don’t have minds, kid.”
The giant worms are ancient, you see. My great-grandfather told me that once, a long time ago, they were worshipped as gods, great earth gods. They are intelligent and that is why you don’t see giant worm carcasses on the interstate after it rains. They know not to get stranded like that. They know all of these things. They know about our civilization and about us. My great-grandfather told me about all of these signs of the worms. He said they were mistaken for earthquakes. Anomalous, out-of-place earthquakes. Because they are sensible, they don’t often wish to harm us, so not much damage will be done. And then the tell-tale sign that the culprit behind the earth-shaking is the worms is that inconsistency of the experiences. I figure these four worms began their ascent toward the surface somewhere near Mineral and from there, two went north and two went south. When they had finished their mission, they simply went deeper into the earth where they most often reside.
My great-grandfather always concluded his stories with the same line, “If the worms surface, they are trying to tell us something, kid, so don’t ever ignore those worms.”
I’m just not sure what they were trying to tell us.