The Croning (32 page)

Don stared at the monitor and its stark images. Cheek bones, left orbital, teeth, a black wedge where the throat began. He looked up at the older man and met his shiny eyes. “That’s—there must be a mistake.”

“Yeah. I thought so, too. The equipment checks out. Carl and Derek know what they’re doing. The sink opened when it opened. Best part is, this isn’t the first time. Look at the topo from ’64 and compare it to the one in ’76 and the ones we shot five days ago.”

The 1964 photo showed a noticeably smaller version of the sinkhole. It was utterly absent from the 1976 record. Don had the unsettling impression of a vast, earthy maw opening and closing with geological implacability.

“Okay.” It wasn’t okay by any means. Sinkholes were unstable by definition, but they didn’t behave this way. This was something beyond his experience.

“The thing is, we’ve had people looking into this from the get-go. The brass sent in a couple of specialists. Weird guys—one’s a freelance geologist named Spencer Duvall, a hotshot Canuck. He’s cooling his heels in the infirmary—sprained an ankle when he was mucking about the site. The other one is a physicist named Ed Noonan. They flew him in from the University of Washington, don’t know why. All very hush-hush. Nice enough fella, seemed to know his business. He spent about seventeen hours walking around the sink, taking readings and whatnot. Then he went AWOL. Strangest damned thing I’ve seen.”

“Noonan ran off? Where’d he go?”

“He’s holed up at the weather station. It’s about two kilometers north of the village. We tried to talk him out of the building, get him back on the job, or at least figure out why he hightailed it in the first place. He won’t talk to me and he won’t budge. I left some emergency supplies and reported the incident to HQ. They said carry on and that’s what we’ve done. I mean, maybe we should call the forestry department or the troopers.”

“No, the company would have our heads if we jumped the gun and created bad press. I’ll drop in on him after I survey the site.”

“Well, thank God. Mr. Rourke said you’d take care of this—”

“Mr. Rourke? You spoke to him?”

“Uh, yes. And you’re one hundred percent right—he absolutely positively wanted this Noonan situation resolved without police involvement. He gave me explicit instructions.”

Don nodded calmly while inside his thoughts ricocheted from one another. What was Barry Rourke up to anyway? Frick and Frack, the creepy photos, a sinkhole that apparently defied the laws of physics, and now this, a loony scientist who’d locked himself in a fire watch tower. He was sorely tempted to back away from the whole mess, radio HQ and inform them that this crap was
way
above his pay grade. Something stayed his hand, compelled him to proceed, to follow the breadcrumbs and see where they led. This compulsion was more than duty, more than stubbornness. A slow burning fury had kindled in his heart. He said, “Is that everything?”

“There’s some other details. Best they wait until you see for yourself, though. It sounds crazy and I’ve been onsite.” Smelser wiped his mouth and capped the booze and stuffed it in the top drawer of the file cabinet.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Like I said, headquarters gave us our marching orders—hold the fort and wait for further instructions. This is your show from here.”

“Appreciate the recap.” Don’s heart quickened as he contemplated the possibilities of landing in the center of a momentous geological find. “Where I do I bunk?”

3.

Don snapped awake, trapped in the coils of a down mummy bag. Irrevocable darkness filled the tent. “Am I dead?” His chest throbbed. The wind rattled the canvas tent and it was bitter cold. “Am I dead?” Repeated and repeated in breathy whispers until, “No, you’re alive.” He wondered, as his skin prickled, if that was his own voice returned from the void, if a double of his own face floated pale and unearthly.

Then he was asleep again and dreaming of Michelle. She stood naked and smiling before the entrance of a cave. Strange, bony hands emerged from the shadows and caressed her, drew her into the cave. The moon flared.

The Man in the Moon turned his misshapen head, beamed green cheese eyes upon Don’s cocooned form. The Man in the Moon said,
It feels good, my boy
. A black swarm of insects poured from his chasm mouth, took wing and scattered into the icy void of limitless space.

4.

Derek Burton took Don and Ring up in the chopper right after breakfast.

Don tried not to stare. He recognized the pilot from another era of his life, or in the creeping smoke of a dream.
I should know you. We have met.
Ah, the question was where.

Burton moved with a hitching gait reminiscent of Bronson Ford’s crow hop. Haggard in the glare of sunrise, his drinker’s face sallow and dented and pocked, eyes twinkling, thin mouth pursed in the midst of a tuneless whistle, a culling song. His flesh hung loose as the sloughing wattles of an uncured pelt. His hair was white. He grinned at Don and winked.
Yes, Don, we’ve met
, that grin said.

Don shook the fellow’s hand, suddenly averse to climbing into a cockpit with this unwholesome character. Too late, too late.

Burton chatted with Ring regarding the locations of various structures, the mostly buried remnants of the ruined village. Don eyed the pair, mildly disturbed at Ring’s deferential, almost obsequious behavior; a lapdog that had met his new master. When the chopper was aloft, Don awkwardly donned the headset to cut the engine roar and listened as Burton explained the various landmarks. The trees lay green and plastic in the folds and rumples of the land. Here and there small rivers and creeks slashed through valleys. Nothing but miles of crag and trees and low, misty clouds. The shadow of the chopper passed over a trench in the earth. From a height of five hundred feet the gash of yawning rock and dirt and subterranean darkness gave Don a chill. He swore under his breath as the engine stuttered and a series of lights twinkled in the cockpit.

“Hang tight,” Burton said, his voice crackling through the headset. “She’s old and cantankerous. U.S. Army surplus. Bloody rotor could break off any second now.” After a couple of beats the man laughed. Whether in jest or to reinforce his observation, Don couldn’t decide.

They landed near a pup tent on a delta in a narrow river valley. An elderly man in a wool jacket and cap fiddled with pieces of video equipment recently unpacked from several large crates. Carl Ordbecker ceased adjusting a tripod-mounted laser camera and cheerfully greeted Don and Ring, clapping both hands to his wool hat until the blades ceased spinning.

“Ah, the blokes I’ve been waiting for, then. Good show!” He doffed his cap to swipe at a cloud of gnats. “You’ll be wanting to see our find. Right around the corner, Mr. Miller, Mr. Ring.” Without ceremony he led them through a copse of mixed fir and cedar.

The trio splashed across a shallow expanse of swift-flowing water and through a hundred yards of tall, brown grass, and then they were among the remnants of the nameless village. There was a hollow of weeds and bushes and from the morass jutted the lines of a low, shattered palisade like a piece of art from the set of a Revolutionary War movie, and beyond the palisade a handful of partially burned cottages. The central longhouse was roofless, but its walls stood. The ominous canted tower from the photographs rose at a crooked angle on a plot toward the far edge of the community. Don spotted a few more rotted cottages on a steep, forested hillside.

“Holy shit!” Ring said. “This is…” He closed his mouth and simply stared.

“Ayep, watch your step, boys.” Ordbecker gestured to a section of ground where the sinkhole began as a crevice and rapidly widened to a chasm. “Mr. Miller, I don’t have to tell you the footing is perilous yonder.”

“Any changes since your last report?” Don said. He tapped his watch, a fancy digital model allegedly good for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro or deep-sea diving. The blocky numerals flickered, faded, came back to life.

“No sir. The sink is stabilized for the moment. Obviously that’s not going to last. I got some film on it, taking some readings with sonar. But, well…” The old man took Don’s elbow and drew him aside from the vacuously stricken Ring and Burton who hung back near the longhouse, smiling his strange, devious smile and rolling a cigarette. “Sir, I was given to understand this is a feasibility study. We’re looking for copper, gold, natural gas.”

“That’s my understanding as well,” Don said.

“Okay, I’m game. No boat rocker. That said, you’re a consultant. You aren’t AstraCorp to the bone, am I right?”

“Where is this going?”

“I’m saying that if you’re playing straight with me, then somebody on high is keeping information from us. I recognize Ring. He’s famous. That physicist, Noonan, he ain’t a slouch either. Ask yourself why the company needs a physicist on this job.”

“Their business is their own. I’m also wondering why it’s anything to you.”

“It’s on my mind because this hole isn’t correct. You and I both can see that. The numbers are screwy.” Ordbecker turned to regard the chasm. It ran along level ground for roughly seventy-five meters and dug into the flank of the hillside, a low mountain, gradually narrowing to a fissure before it disappeared among the underbrush. “What happened to Noonan is screwy too. Then there’s the cave.”

“I hadn’t heard of a cave.”

“See, that’s what I mean. We’re mushrooms—keep us in the dark and feed us shit. Yep, yep, a cave just yonder in the heavy brush. Whoever built this place excavated the entrance of the cavern. Can’t see why—no evidence of mining. There’s a honeycomb under this mountain. A whole system, completely undocumented, unrecorded, maybe unexplored. Although, I ain’t sure I’d bet the house on that last part.”

Ahh, why did he have to say that?
Don regarded the great trees and steep foothills. Birds chirped, water chuckled, and that was it. The sun tried to burn through the clouds and created that flat light that always gave him a headache if he didn’t wear sunglasses, and of course he’d forgotten to pack them. “With due respect, if there was a system around here it’d be in the books.”

Ordbecker gave him a cynical smile, then lowered his voice even further and said, “Look, it’s probably nothing. I checked the sink for gas, and it’s real baseline methane venting. No radiation. Deep, though. I pinged two hundred meters and didn’t hit bottom.”

“Equipment malfunction. Gotta be.”

“The crevice widens to the point there’s…nothing. It’s registering as an abyss. I’m hoping it’s a glitch.” The old man’s eyes glittered with what Don finally recognized as fear.

Don said, “Okay. Leave it there for the moment. You check inside any of these structures?”

“Hell no. Mr. Ring can have that pleasure. Bet he doesn’t find much. Fire burnt everything to a crisp from what I can tell.” Ordbecker spit and stuck his hands into his pockets. “Got the feeling it’s for the best, too.”

Don thanked the surveyor and approached the near end of the crevasse. He’d disposed with thinking of the phenomenon as anything so mundane as a sinkhole the moment he’d seen it from the chopper. A crevasse, or if Ordbecker’s readings were correct, an abyss. He stood at the rim where soil and rock crumbled into a gulf and eyed the striations and demarcations in the exposed substrata. A breath of subterranean air riffled his sleeve. It was dank and strong and cold. Faint metallic groans were carried on the breeze. He retreated several steps and called to Ordbecker. When the surveyor hustled over Don said, “Did you hear anything down there?”

“No sir.”

“There’s movement below. Major shifting. Stay the hell away from this thing.”

“I won’t argue with you.”

“Pack your gear. We can squeeze you on the chopper.”

Ordbecker laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay, take my seat. I need to hike to the station and try to coax Noonan down from his tree. You know anything about the man? Is he a drinker? Seem like a loon? Beyond the obvious, that is.”

“Real pleasant fellow. Eager beaver. He was all over that sink. I had to drag him into camp for supper after it got dark. He stayed up by the fire for hours, going over some papers and a manual by flashlight. Next morning started fine, then around lunchtime he disappeared into the cave I told you about. I followed him for a few yards. Too spooky a situation, what with no supplies and nobody topside to come after us right away, so I retreated. Couldn’t raise base camp on the horn due to interference. After maybe five hours I was getting a mite panicky. Noonan sort of stumbled from the cave. He didn’t seem right. He turned and wandered up the mountain. Later, I managed to contact Smelser and he came and tracked our boy to the station. Couldn’t make any progress, couldn’t even get him to talk.”

Don noticed that Burton was watching them just out of earshot, grinning broadly now as he braced one boot atop a stump.
What the devil is wrong with his face?
Don had seen a few victims of cave-ins and fires and strokes, and the pilot’s soft and drooping visage was similar, yet completely different. The skin fit like a bad mask.
Syphilis? Syphilis could do it. Or St. Vitus’s dance…Or leprosy. Does this guy have leprosy? Does leprosy make your face look like it’s going to slide off at any second? Maybe he’s not grinning and giving me the evil eye. Maybe his face is just screwed beyond repair.

Bronson Ford whispered,
They took his skin and wore it for a while.

Don tried to remember when and where Bronson Ford had uttered such a cryptic line, and failed. “I get the picture, Mr. Ordbecker. Go on, then.” He whistled to Burton and walked over and explained that the man was to return Ordbecker and Ring to base camp at once.

Ring overheard the conversation from where he’d knelt to take pictures of the charred and fallen center-beam of the longhouse. “Hold on a dang second there, Miller. We just got here.”

“I’m aware of how long we’ve been here. Stuff your camera and get your butt back on the chopper. That’s not a request.” Don kept his tone bland, but he secretly enjoyed Ring’s shocked expression. Guys like Ring only respected brute force; to reason with them was to exhibit weakness. “You’ve got enough shots to get started. Pick a team, return to the site tomorrow.” And as the archeologist took a breath to protest, Don finished with, “This is my call. In matters pertaining to company safety policy, I’m God. Want my head on a stick, file a report.”