Scary Stories - Descent

In the winter of 1990, a man named Jack Hutchinson was working at a remote drilling site somewhere in the frozen north, babysitting pressure tanks for a company that paid him a fortune to sit in isolation for months. While repairing water damage in the bunkhouse, he found an old technical logbook hidden behind the drywall. It contained a journal written thirty years earlier by another drifter named Jack—Jack Hutchinson, the same last name, as if the story had been waiting for him. The logbook told the tale of a man and his Ukrainian mining partner, Vlad, who uncovered a buried iron hatch in a crater blown out by a faulty pressure tank. What they found beneath the permafrost was not a bunker or a mine shaft, but a hand-carved tunnel descending thousands of feet into the earth, lined with pictographs that told a story of alien enslavement, escape, and a hidden civilization. The journal ended with Vlad walking through a door at the bottom of the hole, glowing from within, and Jack sealing the lid behind him. The finder of the logbook, the second Jack, now had to decide what to do with the story.

The Discovery of the Hatch