I got fresh beers from the refrigerator, popped the caps off, and put the bottles on the table. Although snow flurries softly brushed the windows, and although the fluting wind played a chilling medley, we were all grateful for the cold Pabst.
For a while no one spoke.
Each of us communed with his own thoughts.
Growler sneezed and shook himself, jangling the tags on his collar, and put his head down again.
I thought the dog had been dozing, but though resting, he was still alert.
In time Horton Bluett said, “You’re determined to have a close look at the mine.”
“Yes,” I said, and Rya said, “Yes.”
“Can’t be talked out of it?” Horton said.
“No,” Rya said, and I said, “No.”
“Can’t be taught caution at your age,” he said.
We agreed that we were infected with the foolishness of youth.
“Well, then,” Horton said, “I guess I can help a bit. Guess I should better, or otherwise they’ll just catch you blundering around inside the fence and have sport with you.”
“Help?” I said. “How?”
He took a deep breath, and his clear, dark eyes appeared to grow even clearer with his resolution. “You don’t have to bother trying to get a peek at the mine entrance or at the equipment—forget that stuff. Probably wouldn’t see anything worthwhile, anyway. I figure the important things—whatever they’re hiding up there—are deep inside the mines, underground.”
“I figure too,” I said, “but—”
Raising one hand to cut me off, he said, “I can show you a way to sneak into the place, through all their security, into the heart of the Lightning Company’s main working shafts. You can see firsthand, up close, what they’re doing. I don’t advise it any more than I’d advise putting your bare hands against a buzz saw. I think you’re both too damn spunky for your own good, too caught up in the romance of what you believe to be a noble cause, too quick to decide you can’t live with yourselves if you back off, too crazy-eager to override those little engines of self-preservation ticking over inside you.
Rya and I started to speak at once.
Again he silenced us by raising one of his big, leathery hands. “Don’t get me wrong. I admire you for it. Sort of the way you might admire a damn fool who goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel. You know he’s going to have no effect whatsoever on the Falls, while it’s real likely to have a drastic effect on him, but he does it ’cause he sees a challenge. Which is one of the things that makes us different from the lower animals: our interest in meeting challenges, beating the odds, even if the odds are so high we can’t beat ’em, and even if beating them don’t accomplish anything. It’s like raising a fist and shaking it at the sky and threatening God if He doesn’t soon make some changes in creation and give us a better break. Stupid maybe, and maybe pointless—but brave and somehow satisfying.”
While we finished our second beers, Horton refused to tell us how he would get us into the Lightning Coal Company. He said it was a waste of time to lay it all out for us now because in the morning he would have to show us, anyway. He would only say that we should be ready to move out at dawn, when he would return for us.
“Listen,” I said, “we don’t want to get you involved so deep that you’re sucked down with us.”
“Sounds like you’re positive of being sucked down.”
“Well, if we are, I don’t want to be responsible for getting you caught in the whirlpool.”
“Don’t worry, Slim,” he said. “How often I got to tell you? I wear caution like a suit of clothes.”
At nine-forty he left, declining our repeated offer of a ride home. He had walked to our rented house so he would not have a car to hide when he arrived. Now he’d walk home. And he steadfastly insisted that he was looking forward to that “little stroll.”
“It’s more than a stroll,” I said. “It’s a fair piece to go, and at night, in this cold—”
“But Growler’s looking forward to it,” Horton said, “and I just wouldn’t want to disappoint him.”
Indeed the dog seemed eager to get out into the cold night. He had gotten up and hurried to the door as soon as Horton had risen from the chair. He wagged his tail and growled with pleasure. Perhaps it was not the brisk night or the walk that he anticipated with so much delight; perhaps, after sharing his beloved master with us for an evening, he was pleased by the prospect of having Horton to himself.
Standing in the open door, pulling on his gloves while Rya and I huddled together in the chilly draft that swept in past him. Horton peered out at the lazily swirling snowflakes and said, “Sky’s like a boil straining to bust itself. You can feel the pressure in the air. When it lets go, there’ll be a true blizzard, sure enough. Late in the year, last snow of the season—but a doozy.”
“When?” I asked.
He hesitated as if consulting his aged joints for their best meteorological opinion. “Soon but not real soon. It’ll flurry off and on all night and not put down half an inch by daybreak. After that . . . it’ll come, a big storm, sometime before noon tomorrow.”
He thanked us for dinner and for the beer, as if we’d had an ordinary neighborly evening together. Then he took Growler with him into the prestorm darkness. In seconds he was gone from sight.
As I closed the door, Rya said, “He’s something, huh?”
“Something,” I agreed.
Later, in bed with the lights off, she said, “It’s coming true, you know. The dream.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going into the mines tomorrow.”
“You want to cancel?” I asked. “We can just go home to Gibtown.”
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
I hesitated. Then: “No.”
“Me neither.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Just . . . hold me,” she said.
I held her.
She held me.
Destiny held us both. Its grip was firm.
chapter twenty-seven
THE DOORWAY TO HELL
In the morning, just before dawn, snow flurries still fell in fits and starts, and the pending storm seemed to be clogged in the lowering sky.
Daybreak came with reluctance too. A feeble thread of wan gray light appeared along the irregularly crenelated mountains that formed high ramparts to the east. Slowly other dull threads were added by the loom of dawn, barely brighter than the blackness across which they were being woven. By the time Horton Bluett arrived in his four-wheel-drive Dodge pickup, the fragile fabric of the new day was still so delicate that it seemed as if it might tear apart and blow away in the wind, leaving the world in perpetual darkness.
He did not bring Growler with him. I missed the dog. So did Horton. Without Growler the old man seemed somehow . . . incomplete.
All three of us fit comfortably in the cab of the truck, Rya between Horton and me. We had room at our feet for the two backpacks that were crammed full of gear, including forty of the eighty kilos of plastic explosives. There was room, as well, for our guns.
I did not know if we would actually gain entrance to the mines, as Horton assured us we would. And even if we did get inside, we would most likely find things in there that would require a secret exit, stealthy withdrawal to give us time to assimilate discoveries and plan our next step. The chances of our needing the explosives today did not seem great. However, based on past experience with the goblins, I intended to be prepared for the worst.
The pickup’s headlights tunneled through the coal-black flesh of the recalcitrant night. We followed one county route, then another, up into narrow mountain valleys, where the equivocating dawn had not yet reached even one dim, glimmering finger.
Snowflakes as big as half-dollars spun through the headlights. Only flurries. Modest treasures of them stirred across the pavement like coins sliding across a table.
“Man and boy and baby,” Horton said as he drove, “I’ve lived
here all my life, birthed by a midwife in my folks’ little house right up here in these hills. That was back in 1890, which probably seems so long ago to you that you’re wondering if there was still dinosaurs in them days. Anyway, I grew up here, learned this land, got to know the hills, fields, woods, ridges, and ravines as well as I’ve ever known my own face in a mirror. They been mining these mountains since back in the 1830s, and there’s abandoned shafts, some sealed up and some not, all over the place. Fact is, some mines connect up with others, and underground there’s something of a maze. As a boy, I was a great spelunker. Loved caves, old mines. Intrepid, I was. Maybe I was intrepid about exploring caves because I’d already smelled out all the bad people—the goblins—around about, had already learned that I had to be cautious out in the wide world, cautious in the rest of my life, so I was more or less forced to satisfy the usual boyish urge for adventure in solitary pursuits, where I didn’t have to trust anybody but myself. Now of course it’s downright dumb to go cave haunting alone. Too much can go wrong. It’s a buddy sport if there ever was one. But I never laid a claim to genius, and as a kid I didn’t even have my full share of common sense, so I went underground all the time, became a regular mine rat. Now maybe it all comes in handy. I can point you a way into the mountain through abandoned mines dug in the 1840s, which connect up with mines from the early part of this century, which in turn eventually snake all the way into some of the narrower side tunnels of the Lightning digs. Dangerous as hell, you understand. Reckless. Nothing I’d recommend for sane folks, but then, you’re mad. Mad for revenge, mad for justice, mad just to do something.”
Horton swung the truck off the second county road, onto a dirt lane that was plowed although occasionally obstructed by new drifts. From there we turned onto a less well cleared but still passable lane, then drove overland across an up-sloping field that would not have been negotiable even to a four-wheel-drive vehicle if the wind had not conspired to sweep most of the snow away and pile it up at the line of trees.
He parked at the top of the hill, as close to the trees as he could get. “We go on foot from here.”
I took the heaviest backpack, and Rya took the other, which was not exactly light. We each carried a loaded revolver and a silencer-equipped pistol; the former were worn in shoulder holsters under our ski jackets, while the latter were kept in deep, open pockets in our white, quilted, insulated pants. I also carried the shotgun, and Rya carried the automatic rifle.
Though decidedly well armed, I still felt like David carrying a pathetic little slingshot and scurrying nervously forward into Goliath’s shadow.
Night had finally relented, and dawn had found the courage to exert itself. Shadows were everywhere still deep, lingering, and the storm-choked sky of day was not dramatically brighter than it had been at night; nevertheless, Sunday was fully upon us at last.
Suddenly I remembered that I had not yet telephoned Joel Tuck to tell him that Cathy Osborn, ex-professor of literature at Barnard, would be arriving on his doorstep, seeking shelter and friendship and guidance, perhaps as early as Tuesday or Wednesday. I was annoyed with myself but only briefly. I still had plenty of time to call Joel before Cathy rang his doorbell—as long as nothing happened to us in the mines.
Horton Bluett had brought a canvas duffel bag with a drawstring top. He hefted it out of the bed of the pickup and dragged it after himself as he kicked through the drifted snow at the edge of the woods. Something clattered softly inside the canvas. Stopping just beyond the perimeter of the forest, he slipped one arm into the bag. He withdrew a spool of red ribbon, cut a length of it with a very sharp penknife, and tied it around a tree at eye level. “So you can find your way back on your own,” he said. He quickly led us onto a winding deer trail where no underbrush and only a few tree branches interfered with our progress. Every thirty or forty yards he stopped to tie another length of red ribbon around another tree, and I noticed that you could stand at any marker and see the one that he had left before it.
We went downward on the deer trail to a long abandoned dirt road that cut through the low-lying part of forest, and we followed that for a while. Forty minutes after we had set out, at the bottom of a broad ravine, Horton led us to a long, treeless area for the service of which the road had apparently been constructed. There the land was badly scarred. Part of the face of the ravine wall had been sheared off, and other parts of it looked chewed. A large, horizontal mine bore pierced the heart of the looming ridge. The entrance was only half hidden by an avalanche that had come down so long ago that silt had filled in the spaces between the stones; good-sized trees had grown up with their roots webbed through the jumbled rockfall.
Having stepped around strangely bent and gnarled trees, around the wing of fallen rock, and into the horizontal shaft, Horton paused and withdrew three high-powered flashlights from the duffel bag. He kept one, gave the others to Rya and me. He shone the beam of his light over the ceiling, walls, and floor of the tunnel into which we had come.
The ceiling was only a foot above my head, and I had the crazy notion that the uneven walls of rock—arduously carved out with picks and chisels and shovels and blasting powder and oceans of sweat in another century—were slowly closing in. They were lightly veined with coal and with what might have been milk-pale quartz. Massive, tar-coated support timbers were evenly spaced along both walls and across the ceiling as if they were the ribs inside the carcass of a whale. Though massive, they were in poor condition, cracked and sagging, splintered, crusted in some places with fungus, probably half hollowed out by rot, and some of the angle braces were missing. I had the feeling that if I leaned against the wrong beam, the roof would come down on me in an instant.
“This here was probably one of the first mines in the county,” Horton said. “They worked it by hand for the most part and hauled out the coal cars with mules. The iron rails were removed to some other shaft when this one played out, but here and there you’ll stumble across what’s left of some of the ties sunk halfway in the floor.”
Looking up at the moldering timbers, Rya said, “Is this safe?”
“Is anything?” Horton asked. He squinted at the rotting wood and at the moist, seeping walls, and he said, “Actually this here’s as bad as it gets because you’ll be moving from older to newer mines as you go, though if you’re wise, you’ll step careful all the way and not rest no weight on any of the supports. Even in the newer shafts—say, those that’re only a decade or two old—well . . . a mine’s just a void, really, and you know what they say about nature’s tendency to want to fill a void.”
From his duffel bag he brought forth two hard hats and gave them to us with the admonition that they must be worn at all times.
“What about you?” I asked as I slipped the hood of my jacket off my head and put on the metal helmet.
“I could only lay my hands on two,” he said. “And since I’m just going a short ways with you, I’ll be fine without. Come along.”
We followed him deeper into the earth.
In the first few yards of the shaft, piles of leaves had blown in on dry autumn days and had drifted against the walls where they had been slowly saturated by seepage and had compacted into dense masses under their own wet weight. Near the entrance, where winter’s chilly touch still reached, the moldering leaves and the fungi on the old timbers were frozen and odorless. Farther back, however, the temperature climbed well above freezing, and a foul odor repeatedly rose and subsided as we advanced.
Horton led us around a corner, into an intersecting tunnel that was much roomier than the first, its width in part dictated by the rich vein of coal that had occupied the space. He stopped at once and took an aerosol can of paint from his canvas bag. He shook the can vigorously; the hard rattle of the ball-type agitator echoed off the walls. He sprayed a white arrow on the rock, pointing toward the direction from which we’d come, though we were only one turn away from the exit and could not possibly get lost here.
He was a careful man.
>
Impressed by his caution and emulating it, Rya and I followed him a hundred yards along that tunnel (two more white arrows), turned into a shorter but even wider corridor (fourth arrow), and went fifty yards farther, where we finally stopped at a vertical shaft (fifth arrow) that led down into the lower bowels of the mountain. That hole was just a black square of a subtly different shade than the black floor of the tunnel and was virtually invisible until Horton stopped at the edge and shone his light down. Without him, I might have blundered straight into the shaft, dropping to the chamber below and breaking my neck in the fall.
Raising his flashlight from the vertical shaft, he directed the beam toward the end of the tunnel in which we stood. The corridor appeared to open into a man-made room of considerable size. “That’s where the vein of coal just petered out, but I guess they had reason to suspect it turned downward and that a wide swath of it could be profitably dug on a lower level. Anyway, they sank this vertical shaft about forty feet, then went horizontal again. Not much farther now before I set you loose, all on your own.”
After warning us that the iron ladder rungs embedded in the wall of the vertical shaft were old and untrustworthy, he switched off his flashlight and descended into the gloom. Rya slung the shotgun over her shoulder and went where Horton had gone. I brought up the rear.
Downward bound, with the ancient rungs wobbling in their sockets as I put my weight on them, I began to receive clairvoyant images from the long abandoned mine. Two or possibly three men had died here before the middle of the past century, and their deaths had not been painless. However, I sensed only ordinary mining accidents, nothing sinister. This had not been a locus of goblin-engineered suffering.
Four stories below the first level I entered another horizontal tunnel. Horton and Rya were waiting for me, eerily illuminated by the beams of their flashlights, which lay on the floor.
In these lower reaches of the mine the heavy tar-coated support timbers were virtually as old as those on the previous level, but they were in somewhat better shape. Not good. Not reassuring. But at least the walls weren’t as damp as those in the higher tunnels, and the wood was not crusted with mold and fungus.
I was suddenly struck by how quiet it was in this deep vault. The silence was so heavy that it had weight; I could feel the cool, insistent pressure of it against my face and against the bared skin of my hands. Church-quiet. Graveyard-quiet. Tomb-quiet.
Breaking that silence, Horton revealed the contents of the big duffel bag, which he was turning over to us. In addition to the red ribbon that we no longer required, there were two cans of white spray paint, a fourth flashlight, plastic-wrapped packs of spare batteries, a couple of candles, and two boxes of weatherproof matches.
“If you ever want to find your way back out of this dismal hole,” he said, “you’ll use the spray paint just like I showed you.” He employed one can now to draw an arrow on the wall; it pointed up to the vertical shaft over our heads.
Rya took the paint when he offered it. “That’ll be my job.”
Horton said, “Maybe you think the candles are here in case the flashlights give out, but they’re not. You got enough spare batteries to cover that. What the candles are for is if maybe you get lost or if there’s—God forbid—a cave-in behind you, cutting off the way out. What you do then is you light a candle and really study the bend in the flame, watch where the smoke goes. If there’s a draft, the flame and the smoke will seek it, and if there’s a draft, that means there’s bound to be an outlet to the surface, which may just be big enough for you to squirm through. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
He had also brought food for us: two thermos bottles full of orange juice, several sandwiches, and half a dozen candy bars.
“You got a full day of spelunking ahead of you, even if you just work into the Lightning Company shafts and take a quick peek and head straight back the way you come. Of course, I suspect you’ll do more than that. So it’s likely, even if all goes well, that you won’t be coming out until sometime tomorrow. You’ll need to eat.”
“You’re a sweetheart,” Rya said sincerely. “You put all this stuff together last night . . . and I bet that didn’t leave much time for sleep.”
“When you get to be seventy-four,” he said, “you don’t sleep much, anyway, ’cause it seems like such a waste of what time you got left.” He was embarrassed by the loving tone of Rya’s voice. “Heck, I’ll be up and out of here and all the way home in an hour, so I can nap then if I’ve a mind to.”
I said, “You told us to use the candles in case there’s a cave-in or we get lost. But without you to guide us, we’ll be lost in about one minute flat.”
“Not with this, you won’t,” he said, producing a map from one of his coat pockets. “Drawed it from memory, but I got a memory like a steel trap, so I don’t suspect there’s any wrongness in it.”
He hunkered down, and we did the same, and he spread the map out on the floor between us, picking up a flashlight and tilting the beam down on his handiwork. It looked like one of those maze puzzles in the Sunday newspaper’s comics pages. Worse, it was continued on the other side of the paper where the rest of the maze was, if anything, even more complex.
“At least half the way,” Horton said, “you can talk like we’re talking now, with no fear of it carrying into shafts where the goblins might be working. But this here red mark . . . that’s the spot where I think maybe you’d better go quiet, whisper to each other and only when you have to. Sounds do carry a fair piece along these tunnels.”
Looking at the twists and turns of the maze, I said, “One thing’s for sure—we’ll need both cans of paint.”
Rya said, “Horton, are you certain about all the details of what you’ve drawn here?”
“Yep.”
“I mean, well, maybe you did spend most of your boyhood exploring these old shafts, but that was a long time ago. What—sixty years?”
He cleared his throat and seemed to be embarrassed again. “Oh, well, wasn’t all that long ago.” He kept his eyes focused on the map. “See, after my Etta died of cancer, I was sort of adrift, lost, and I was full of all this terrible tension, the tension of loneliness and of not knowing where my life was going. I didn’t see how to work it off, how to ease my mind and spirit, and still the tension built and built, and I said to myself, ‘Horton, by God, if you don’t soon find something to fill the hours, you’re going to wind up in a rubber room,’ and that was when I remembered how much peace and solace I’d gotten out of spelunking when I was a kid. So I took it up again. That was back in ’34, and I prowled