Adventures In Drilling

Sometimes, late at night, when there is nobody in the room, or everybody is asleep, sometimes, and never for more than a second or two, sometimes a reflection appears in the mirror.

So. Right. Yes, Jeff.

Jeff claimed he had a landmine hidden somewhere in the house, perhaps nestling down the back of the sofa, perhaps one of the bumps under the kitchen floor, perhaps resting inside a pillow case on the guest bed. A few of us even believed him, Jeff was that sort of a guy, it was that sort of a friendship.

He met this girl, Jeff, back in that July of 2003 when the heatwave hit. They got talking on the tube, the District line I think. She told him she worked at an otter sanctuary in Somerset and Jeff stayed with her beyond the limits of his travelcard and jumped the barriers in zone six just to hitch a ride three hours west and dive in a pool with her and the otters. It was love that, right there, though what the otters thought of it goes unrecorded.

Anyway, the point is that this girl had this grandfather, Calhoun. A driller. Who wanted to go to Russia.

Calhoun had been drilling holes all his life, he had skin like sandpaper and a grip like pliers, Jeff claims to have seen him pull a six inch masonry nails out of a wall with his fingertips. He had been salt blasted in the North Atlantic and burned in the furnace of the Persian gulf, he had worked in Africa, Alaska, Antarctica, South America and the far east. He had been to almost every major city on earth, and had been arrested in most of them. He had been around. He had stories. But he'd never been to Russia.

So Jeff had some sort of extended family -slash- friend -slash- unspecified connection thing in Russia. It might have been a bit dodgy, Russia was all oil oligarchs, Mafia, and ex-KGB as far as we knew, and the only thing we knew for sure about Jeff was that Jeff wasn't his real name and he had a funny accent.

Anyway, he took the girl and the grandfather to Russia. Calhoun wanted to see the worlds deepest hole which is on the Kola Peninsula.

If you imagine Russia as like this big blob, the Kola Peninsula is the sticky up bit at the top left which has Scandinavia hanging off the side of it.

So they're in Murmansk, these three, and something happens, I'm not sure what exactly, the story is some ex-KGB -slash- Russian Mafia -slash- oil oligarch tries to have Jeff killed in a restaurant. I don't know if I believe it or not, Jeff just says nothing happened but we know something did because we know they went up to the drill site three days early.

So they're there, and there's nothing much there to look at because most of the equipment has gone, and there's nobody much there to talk to because they weren't expected and because, well, it's hardly a big tourist attraction or anything. But they find this one technician and Calhoun gets talking to him about drilling, I don't know if Jeff was translating or what, I guess so, it doesn't matter. The technician tells them about how it was an experiment, and how they bored a shaft twelve thousand metres deep and only stopped because the surrounding rock became so hot it started melting the drill bit, and he shows them any equipment that was still there, and where the rest of the equipment once went before it was taken away, and then Calhoun starts telling this story.

He tells this technician, all this is being translated into Russian as he goes, that back in nineteen eighty he did this exploratory drill for Texaco in Lake Peigneur in Louisiana, which is apparently this lake that was only about eleven foot deep, and that when they were only a few hundred metres down the drill stuck and the platform started to move. I mean this whole drill platform started to move about, which is not supposed to happen, so all the guys on there they thought, bugger this, and got the hell off. Just in time to watch it disappear into the water, I mean seriously, they motored ashore in their little boat and watched a twenty foot drilling derrick sink into an eleven foot lake. And then the water starts to rotate, forming a whirlpool, and they're standing there on the lakeside watching with no idea what the hell was going on. What was going on was, they'd drilled in the wrong place and had broken through into a salt mine beneath, and the lake right, it's connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a canal, and all this water starts flowing through the canal and into the salt mine.

It took three days for the mine to fill, the salt dissolving as it did so that when it was finally all over this eleven foot lake was thirteen hundred feet deep. Calhoun had camped out at the lakeside for all of those three days watching the waterfall. The sight had had some kind of mesmerising effect on him that he could never explain, but ever since he had apparently had an unquenchable urge to visit the Kola Peninsula shaft, the deepest hole in the world, just to see it.

So all that's that, and the girlfriend's curious because this story obviously means all sorts of things to her grandfather but she's never heard him tell it before, and Jeff, well I don't know about Jeff, he wasn't the sort of person who gets excited by holes in the ground and suchlike. But the technician, the technician is rapt, he seizes Calhoun by the arm and says in Russian that finally he has found a man who will understand, and nobody knows what he means by that but he takes them all into this little hut where he sleeps and gets out a bottle of vodka and four glasses and passes it round and tells them this story.

He tells them that it was all a lie, that it did suddenly get much hotter after twelve thousand metres but the drill bit didn't melt because the drill bit broke through into a hollow void. A hollow void twelve thousand metres down, and all these Russian scientists and technicians, including this guy who's telling the story, are gathered around the hole right, wondering what the hell is going on, arguing and that, when one of them suddenly shouts for everybody to be quiet, and when they are, finally, all quiet, they all stop talking, they can hear, very very faintly, but they all agree they can hear it, they hear screaming coming from the hole.

And they agree this lie, that the drill bit melted, and they pull out the shaft and at that depth the rock just flows back and seals it up again, and they all make a pact never to talk of it - but this one technician, he says that Calhoun will understand because he understands holes. And Calhoun goes over to this guy and gives him this enormous hug, and they're hugging for so long that Jeff and his girlfriend start looking at each other you know, and when they finally part there are tears in both of their eyes, these two big drillers.

Anyway, apparently whatever happened in Murmansk caught up with them, or something, or maybe it was all bullshit I don't know, but apparently Jeff had to hire a fishing boat to take them back to Finland straight away. And then Calhoun died not long after that, just a heart attack I think, and then the girlfriend split up with Jeff, apparently because she found a landmine in the airing cupboard but we don't know that for sure - she went back to her otters and Jeff won't talk about it. And Jeff, well he's just Jeff, we see him in the pub every few weeks much as always, you know, it's that kind of a friendship. But none of that is the point, the point is the thing with the mirrors.

This technician, he told them that ever since the day when the drill hit empty space, reflections sometimes appear in mirrors when nobody is looking, and nobody knows, unless you know, you know. You don't see, but you know. It's hard to explain. I mean, I didn't believe it, but then this one night the other week I woke up and I saw one of them, just for a second, half a second, less than half a second, there was this reflection, and then it was gone. And I know, you know, I know it came up out of that hole.