“I’ll tell you what I’ve read and what I’ve heard, if you want to listen.”
“Shoot,” he said, and instantly thought that was a very poor choice of words.
Ariel began.
SEVENTEEN.
She was good at painting pictures with words, and so now Ariel painted them for Truitt Allen: yellow dust blowing through the mountain air, the stillness of the red-rimmed stone, the sun burning hot upon the cracks and fissures of a dry, old earth, and deep down below that baked brown crust the men sweating in the light of their lanterns as they swung pickaxes in the sweltering rooms of Silver Mine Number Three.
The Spanish had worked the mine before, using Indians as slaves, but not until 1887 did the industrious white men find the hole in the ground and haul up a taste of what was in it. They brought their pack mules, their tent canvas, their lumber boards and their picks and shovels by the hundreds, and then with the arrival of the barrels of nails and a proper team of construction surveyors paid for by the San Francisco investment company, wooden buildings took shape. The two whorehouses were given painted signs. The four bars earned their solidity, their batwing doors and their brass spittoons. Wagons began bringing in the wives and children. At night the wind picked up, and under the stars it sang through the telegraph wires that stretched down along the poles to Gila Ridge. A school was built, well away from the saloons and houses of ill repute. It was the third silver mine owned by the Company, and by now the managers knew how to build a town around a dream of wealth.
A lot of silver was coming out of that mine. Some other things too: a little lead, a flash of zinc, enough gold to quicken the pulse and cause women to crave the gleam and men to go buy a pocket pistol, just for protection. But a lot of silver was coming up, and Silver Mine Number Three was going to make a lot of people very rich.
A man of God arrived, in the summer of 1890. He introduced himself at a town meeting as the Reverend Daniel Kiley. He brought with him his own wife, his two young sons, his baby daughter and a wagon full of Bibles and hymn books. He was a good man. He was an intelligent man. He was a man who had his own dreams, of making a difference in a world that needed salvation.
He was a man.
Daniel Kiley had had some difficulty in Denver, their last place of residence. It might have had to do with the power of whiskey, or the power of a woman who whispered things in a man’s ear that a wife would not dare to speak, and who did those things laughingly and then laughingly watched a man’s face crumble along with the plans for a new church on Blake Street. He had been cast out of that Eden, and had wandered long in search of a purpose to redeem himself in the eyes of God, in the eyes of his wife and in the hearts of his children. He had to win his way back, and the only way he knew to do that was to build something holy, something that would last, something like a beacon to lead sinners home from the dark path. Because he knew what lay at the end of that; he had seen his destruction in a pair of green eyes and a pair of green-gloved hands. He had seen it in the distorted reflection of his own face in a mirror down along the hallway where a red curtain hid his secrets.
It was to laugh at.
The Company was all for what Daniel Kiley proposed: a church to settle the community, to give the beginnings to the law and order that towns needed, to give the people a place to wed, a place to bring their babies for baptism, a place to prepare for the journey that every man and woman must make. The church kept workers satisfied. It would go up at the center of the fledgling business district of Silver Mine Number Three, and at Daniel Kiley’s urging the Company would build this church not of ordinary timber and tar, nor of bricks fired from the town’s new kiln, but from the stone of the mountain itself. It would be built to last a hundred years, and in mid-1891 a great hurrah rose into the red-dusted air as the shovels bit first earth, after which there was a pause while the photographer loaded his glass plates into the camera, repositioned the scene and memorialized the moment with a bright flare of magnesium powder.
When the church was finished, it was a thing of beauty. A thing of pride and of promise. The stones were tight and precise, the mortar as white as God’s beard. In front of the door, stone steps stood chiseled and firm underfoot, to guide the needy to their places. Who knew what the future of the town might be? The silver was still coming up, and much more to be found. This town of over four hundred people might be a city one day. A city on a mountaintop, to rival even Denver.
Oh yes, said the Reverend Daniel Kiley, from his new pinewood pulpit to his congregation in their pews. That’s a nice thought.
Within a month of the church going up, the mayor called a meeting. With the Company’s permission, he was suggesting a new name for their town. He was suggesting Stone Church, and may it stand for a hundred years as the beacon of this community.
“No one knows exactly how it started,” Ariel said, as the Scumbucket crept up the mountain road. “But it did start.”
“What started?” True asked.
“The end,” she said.
Maybe it started with the mine itself. But it wasn’t that the silver ran out. It didn’t stop gleaming in the walls when the lantern light touched it. But the streams of silver ran deeper down, and to get to them the miners went deeper too, and day after day—week after week and month after month—the miners went deeper. And deeper still.
Who was it who first had a nervous drink at a saloon and said he’d seen something, down in the passageways and gloomy rooms where heaving pumps brought in the gritty air? What had he seen? What did others see, that made them come up from that hole, pack into their wagons their picks, their shovels, their wives and their children, and leave their houses with bedspreads still on the bed and dishes in the cupboard?
Some talked, before they left. Not going back down in that hole, they said. No sir, not for any coin on this earth. Because there are things down there. There are things that watch me from the dark, and when I hold my lantern up I only see their shadows as they pull back into the rock. Did you hear me, sir? I said…into the rock.
The town’s doctor was an old man named Leon Lewis who had seen his own share of visions among the lotus eaters of San Francisco. He told the mayor and the council that he thought these hallucinations were a result of bad air down in the chambers. The bellows pumps were outdated and inefficient at the depth the mine had reached, he said, and it was time to present the Company with a plan for a steam boiler that would run a new air circulation system.
The Company’s response was to study the plan. In the meantime, more men were emerging from the rooms and vowing never to go back. Most would not talk, not for money or whiskey. When one of them spilled his story to a prostitute, it was likely the town would be less both one miner and one prostitute in the next day or two.
More than the shadows, more than the glimpses of figures standing where they should not be, more than the quick shine of eyes in the dark, it was the music that began to shred their nerves.
It was always faint. Always just at the edge of hearing. But all who did hear it were sure it was a brass band playing a march. Down in the deep dark of the mine, down in a place where picks and shovels had just begun to pierce the earth, a brass band was playing a John Philip Sousa march. There was some difference of opinion over whether it was ‘The Washington Post’ or ‘The Gladiator’ or some combination of the two, because there were only seconds of it to be heard, drifting amid the wheeze of the pumps and the scrape of the shovels.
Doc Lewis said working at that depth could affect a man’s inner ear, in such a way that phantom music might indeed be heard. He volunteered to go down himself, with Sheriff McKee and the head foreman.
“Ariel, you’re creeping me out,” Berke said. “You’re making half this shit up, anyway.”
“I wish. There are three books I know of on the subject, and last April there was a documentary on the History Channel.”
“What’ve you been doing? Studying this?” Nomad asked. Christ, he wished he had a cigarette! The
higher they climbed up this freaking mountain, the more nervous he was getting, and he did not as a rule get nervous.
True followed the car ahead through an open orange metal gate. A small adobe-style building stood next to it and out front were a couple of guys in white shirts and sand-colored shorts. They wore caps that had GB Promotions on them. The security men looked like fleshy ex-football players, and one was making the devil horns hand to four girls in a Jeep while the other was hollering at somebody over a cell phone. True saw a sign ahead: Campgrounds. An arrow pointed to the left. He was supposed to keep going straight on, to the artists’ area.
“I think maybe you’ve been reading too much Stephen King,” he told Ariel. “But go ahead.”
She did.
When the doctor, the sheriff and the foreman came back up from the mine, they spoke to none of the other men waiting at the entrance. They walked straight to the stone church, and it was seen that Sheriff McKee had to help Doc Lewis because the doctor’s knees buckled at the foot of the steps. Then they went inside and didn’t come out for a while. Nobody followed them in, but one of the miners ran to get Daniel Kiley, and when the reverend arrived and went into his church he didn’t come out for a while, either. Finally everybody went home, and that was the first night the telegraph in the Company office started tapping out the message News! News! News! Stone Church has been destroyed over and over again from somewhere down the mountain, but nobody in Gila Ridge was sending it.
What got out, over the next few days, and what was whispered in the saloons over the half-guzzled bottles and the forgotten whores, was that the three men who’d gone down into the mine had followed the faint snippets of music, the ‘Washington Post’ or the ‘Gladiator’, whatever it was, the kind of music that ordinarily would have made a man doff his hat and salute his flag in a fine frenzy of patriotism. They had followed the music from chamber to chamber, armed with lanterns and in Sheriff McKee’s big ruddy paw of a hand a Colt Navy revolver. And, the whispers went, the music drew them deeper and deeper, until suddenly it stopped and the woman stepped out into the lantern light.
She was a striking-looking woman. A beautiful woman, in an elegant dress. She wore green gloves, and—so the whispers went—she told the three men she wanted to speak to the Reverend Daniel Kiley. She said it would go hard for the town, if he wouldn’t see her. She said it would go hard for the town even if he would see her, because that was how things were. But, she said, at least from such a righteous gentleman as him she expected a courtesy call.
The wagons began to roll out. The head foreman and his wife were gone the next morning after it had happened, left everything behind that couldn’t be thrown into a single trunk. Sheriff McKee had to be awakened from a drunken stupor by the thin Chinese girl who slept on his porch like a lovesick mongrel. Even Doc Lewis thought about running for it, but he was on his last legs anyway, he had no family, he was a horse waiting to be shot. He decided to stick it out, with a little lotus leaf to steady his nerves.
Daniel Kiley called a gathering in front of the stone church. It had to be in broad daylight, because no one walked the streets after sundown. He addressed the remaining seventy or so frightened people in what many considered a voice carved from the Rock Of Ages. He stood firm before them, with his family at his side, and commanded the crowd to also stand firm. He lifted up his Bible and told them he had found his purpose here, his calling, his truth. He had found what he’d been looking for, in one way or another, all his weak and miserable life.
He had found a fight with Satan. And by God he was not going to let Satan take his town.
At that point, about thirty more people headed to their wagons at a pretty quick clip, but the forty who stood their ground spat their tobacco and scratched their balls and hollered back at the reverend in the Greek language, in Chinese, in the Nordic tongue, in the brogues of old Ireland and the burrs of Scotland and in the toughened timbres of men who have learned to sleep standing up with one eye open.
They would send their wives and children down the mountain to safety—if they could, because some of the wives spat their tobacco and the children scratched their balls just like Papa did. But what was life if it was lived like a scared sheep?
“Now that’s where it runs off the tracks,” Nomad said. “Nobody would’ve stayed in that town. Nobody. My ass would be going down that road.” He realized, quite suddenly, that his ass was currently going up that road.
“Maybe.” Ariel saw, as True did, a double sign pointing to a turnoff on the right. The top sign said Vendors and the bottom one Artists. “But, according to what I read, the people who elected to stay were told the Company was sending a bonus for every man who would go back into the mine. The Company didn’t know what was happening—they thought it was a work stoppage over the air pumps—but they were sending a strongbox of gold dust from San Francisco. And no one had been hurt yet. There was the music, the woman, and the threat of harm from the telegraph, but the telegraph had stopped its chattering.”
“What do you mean, no one had been hurt ‘yet’?” Berke frowned. “That sounds fucking ominous.”
“For a few weeks, nothing else happened. The miners went back to work. The music had stopped. There were no more half-seen figures in the dark. Even some of those people who’d left came back. Then whatever it was…evil, Satan, whatever you want to call that force…left the mine and entered the town.”
Did Daniel Kiley want to go into the mine, to meet the woman—the creature—who called him? Did the reverend’s wife throw herself in his way, and beg him not to go? He didn’t go. Then…one morning they found their little girl dead in her bed. There were bruises on her face. The reverend’s sons woke up to the noise of horror…and one of them said he’d had a dream, a bad bad dream, in which he’d walked quietly into their room while they were sleeping and looked into his sister’s bed and had seen a snake coiled next to her head. And in this dream he’d had a pillow already in his hands, and he’d smashed it down upon the reptile, had pressed down hard with all his strength, and when he’d tried to call for help…the strangest thing…his voice was gone. His voice had been stolen from him, there in the night. But he kept pressing down, and pressing down, and at last he’d lifted up the pillow and seen that the snake was dead. He’d told his father that he thought he was a real hero, in that dream, and maybe he ought to earn a medal.
A Company wagon bearing the strongbox of gold dust from San Francisco arrived the next day. It was accompanied by four men with the names of Barton Taggett, Miles Branco, Jerrod Spade and Duke Chanderley. They wore dirty Stetsons on their heads and notched Colts in their holsters. They were ready to declare war, in the name of the Company, on sluggards and malingerers and weak-willed sonsofbitches who didn’t want to dig for silver just because of an old air pump. When they found fifty or so people where four hundred used to be, and the new head foreman a red-bearded Scotsman with one leg, they changed their attitude. When they heard the stories and talked to Sheriff McKee and Doc Lewis and Daniel Kiley, and when they saw the body of the little girl in its casket and the haunted eyes of the boy who’d suffocated her in a bad dream, they sat down for a while in the last remaining saloon with the last of the soiled doves looking on, and they drank some whiskey and smoked some cigars and figured they were getting too old for this shit.
But the thing was, they were moral men who had had immoralities thrust upon them. So as the night went on and the lamps burned across Stone Church, and the church itself stood silent and solid in the center of the town, the Company enforcers decided they didn’t know if demons could bleed, red blood or black, but maybe it was up to four Civil War hellraisers to find out.
“They went down into the mine with Daniel Kiley and Sheriff McKee,” Ariel said, as the Scumbucket passed a huge gated parking lot full of trucks, vans and trailers. Vendors Park Here, a sign directed. “They went down to find the woman. The thing. Whatever she was. It was. And that’s the end of the story.”
“The
fuck it is!” Berke had nearly yelled it.
“Come on!” Terry said. “That can’t be the end!”
“There’s no good end,” Ariel clarified.
True scanned the vehicles in the vendors’ lot. Rings Of Saturn Tattoos, Inc. Body Art by Sarafina. ShockIt Tattoos. Tribal Attitudes. The Living Needle.
“Finish it,” he said, as he drove on.
“I’ve heard and read about a daily journal in a library somewhere. Kept under lock-and-key, available for study only to parapsychologists and the clergy.” Ariel said quietly. “It was written by one of the Stone Church prostitutes. The story is that she and all but two others of her profession left on a wagon as the enforcers, the sheriff and the reverend were walking into the mine. The women didn’t look back. But all the details come from that journal. They talked about it in that documentary on the History Channel. The women heard nothing. They just kept going. But when the Company didn’t hear anything more, they sent a Pinkerton’s detective from Tucson to find out what was happening with their investment. The detective found…nothing and no one. Fifty-something people, and the four enforcers, were gone. There was no evidence of a fight. The horses, mules, cows and pigs…all gone. There was not a living thing left in Stone Church. But clothes still hung on lines, dishes were stacked up in washbasins, and mops and brooms leaned in corners as if their owners had just stepped out for a minute. A pan of browned biscuits sat on a table. Some of the doors to the houses were open, some closed. The strongbox was locked in a cell in the sheriff’s office. All the sacks of gold dust were still there. An empty casket was found in the parlor of the reverend’s house. Child-sized. Two other things…the Pinkerton detective found that all the gravestones in the cemetery had been knocked flat, and the windows had been blown out of the church from the inside.” She’d been looking to her right, through the green tint, and now she narrowed her eyes slightly. “There it is,” she said.