“Tilda, I think we found another set!” Mario fiddled with a button on his shirt, waiting for his partner to dig herself out of her usual mound of paperwork. “I can’t imagine what they were doing way up here.”
“What strange poses!” Tilda observed, leaning over his shoulder to view the monitor. “I can barely tell which is which, but they seem like they’re upright.”
“Wait, did you see that?” Mario grabbed for the controls, trying to sharpen the image.
“See what?” Tilda’s eyebrows met in the middle, not that that was a stretch. “Hold up, you’re shaking the camera, you’ll destroy the site!”
“How many times do I have to tell you? There’s no camera and we’re not touching the site. We didn’t move anything. They moved!” He stared at the screen, twisting the button completely off his shirt.
“Well, if there’s no camera, how come we can hear sounds from down there? It’s shifting against the rock, I can hear it scraping.” Tilda reached for the controls herself, then froze. “Does – does that sound like – like words – to you?”
Mario’s tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth, the only sound coming out a whimpering moan. Voices like the whisper of falling sand and the cracking of gravel underfoot swelled and eddied within the lab. “Souls,” they said. “So long have we waited for sacrifice.”
Tilda opened her mouth, swallowed desperately, then tried again. “Sa- sacrifice?” She squeaked. The shapes on the monitor stretched in sinuous curves and began to glow a deep red. “I thought all our imaging was black and white.”
One of the stone bodies reached it’s cracked hands upward, impossibly locking eyes with Tilda. “We will wait no more.” The voices issued from Mario’s motionless lips, and the mountain beneath them rumbled. “We are so hungry!”
The Word Worker 
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