Scary Stories - Descent

In the winter of 1990, a worker at a remote drilling site in the far north found an old technical log book hidden behind a section of wet drywall in a leaky bunk house. The log had been written 30 years earlier by a man named Jack Hutchinson, who had been stationed at the same site with a partner named Vladislav—a retired deep earth isolation miner from Ukraine. What Jack recorded over the course of several months is a story of an impossible discovery, an ancient underground tunnel, and a revelation that changed everything Jack thought he knew about his partner.

Jack arrived at the site first, then Vlad showed up. Vlad was a tiny, shredded man barely five feet tall with enormous hands and feet. He had spent 25 years alone in deep mines, operating small excavators and hand tools at depths where no one else could survive. He told Jack stories about being trapped for five days with only 20 ounces of water, digging his way back out. Not long after Vlad arrived, he disappeared for four days without explanation. He returned looking fine but started acting strange—standing alone at night near a pressure tank, staring at the ground, speaking in a language Jack didn't recognize. Jack followed him on multiple nights and watched him zombie out to the same spot.