Twilight Eyes (59 page)

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 these here mines and a lot of natural caves every weekend for the better part of eighteen months. And just nine years ago, when I reached mandatory retirement age, I was faced with a similar situation, so I went spelunking again. Crazy thing for a man my age, but I kept it up for almost a year and a half before I finally decided I didn't need it no more. Anyway, what I'm saying is that this here map is based on memories only about seven years old.”

Rya put a hand on his arm.

He finally looked at her.

She smiled and he smiled, and he put his hand over hers and lightly squeezed it.

Even for those of us fortunate enough to avoid the goblins, life is not entirely smooth and easy. But the myriad methods we employ to get ourselves across patches of rough ground are a testament to our great will to survive and to get on with the act of living.

“Well,” Horton said, “if you don't soon pick up your boots and head on, you'll be old codgers like me before you get out of here.”

He was right, but I did not want him to leave. There was a chance that we would never see him again. We had known him less than a single day, and the potential of our friendship had been barely explored.

Life, as I might have said before, is a long train ride during which friends and loved ones disembark unexpectedly, leaving us to continue our travels in ever-increasing loneliness. Here was another station on the line.

Horton left the canvas duffel bag and its contents, taking only a flashlight. He climbed the vertical shaft down which he had recently led us, and the rusted iron rungs rattled and creaked. At the top he grunted as he heaved himself out onto the floor of the tunnel. Once he had gotten to his feet, he paused, peering down at us. He seemed to want to say a great many things, but finally he merely called softly to us: “Go with God.”

We stood at the bottom of the dark shaft, staring up.

Horton's flashlight faded as he moved away.

Then it was dark up there.

His footsteps grew softer, softer.

He was gone.

In thoughtful silence we gathered up the flashlights, batteries, candles, food, and other items, packing them carefully in the canvas duffel bag.

Carrying our backpacks, with the larger weapons slung over our arms, dragging the duffel bag, carving the darkness with flashlights, consulting the map, we moved out, heading farther into the earth.

I perceived no immediate threat, yet my heart pounded as we followed the tunnel toward the first of many turns. Although I was determined not to retreat, I felt as if we had stepped through the doorway to Hell.

Descending . . .

Somewhere far above, a sullen sky roofed the world, and blackbirds swooped through a sea of air, and somewhere wind rustled trees, and snow blanketed the ground and new flurries fell, but that life of color and motion existed overhead, beyond so many meters of solid rock that it increasingly seemed to be not real but a fantasy life, an imaginary kingdom. The only thing that
seemed
real was stone—a mountain-weight of stone—dust, occasional shallow pools of stagnant water, crumbling timbers with rusted iron braces, coal, and darkness.

We disturbed coal dust as fine as talcum powder. Nuggets and a few big chunks of coal lay along the walls, and small islands of coal formed archipelagos through the puddles of scum-coated water, and in the walls the sheered edges of nearly exhausted veins of coal caught the frost-white flashlight beams and gleamed like black jewels.

Some subterranean passages were nearly as wide as highways, some narrower than the hallways of a house, for they were a mix of actual mining shafts and exploration tunnels. Ceilings soared to twice and thrice our height, then dropped so low that we had to hunch down in order to proceed. In places the walls had been carved with such precision that they almost seemed poured of concrete, while in other places they were deeply scored and peaked. Several times we found partial cave-ins, where one wall and sometimes part of the ceiling had come down, cutting the tunnel in half or even forcing us to crawl through the remaining space.

Mild claustrophobia had taken hold of me when we'd first entered the mines, and as we proceeded deeper into the labyrinth, that fear gripped me tighter. However, I successfully resisted it by thinking of that world of soaring birds and wind-stirred trees far above—and by constantly reminding myself that Rya was with me, for I always drew strength from her presence.

We saw strange things in the silent bosom of the earth, even before we got close to the goblin territory that was our destination. Three times we came upon heaps of broken and abandoned equipment, random yet queerly artful piles of metal tools and other artifacts designed for specialized mining tasks that were as arcane to us as the laboratory devices of an alchemist. Welded together by rust and corrosion, those items rose in angular agglomerations that were not merely chaotic, as if the mountain were an artist working with the detritus of those who had invaded it, creating sculpture from their trash to mock their ephemeral nature and as if intending to construct monuments to its own endurance. One of the sculptures resembled a large figure, less than half human, with a demonic aspect, a creature bedecked with spurs, razored barbs, and a bladed spine. Irrationally but with disturbing certainty, I expected it to move with a rattle and clatter of metal bones, open a now hidden eye formed by the fractured pane of an ancient oil lamp used by miners in another century, and crack an iron mouth in which bent screws would protrude like rotten teeth. We also saw mold and fungus in a panoply of colors—yellow, bile green, poisonous red, brown, black—but mostly in dirty shades of white. Some were exceedingly dry, and they burst when touched, spewing clouds of dust—perhaps spores—from the ruins. Others were moist. The worst forms glistened repulsively and looked like the things a surgeon, on an exploration of another world, might find within the carcass of an alien life-form. Some walls were crusted with crystallized accretions of unknown substances secreted by the rock, and once, we saw our own distorted images moving across those millions of dark, polished facets.

Abyss-deep, more than halfway to Hades, in a sepulchral hush, we found the gleaming white skeleton of what might have been a large dog. The skull lay in a half-inch-deep puddle of black water, jaws agape. As we stood over it, our flashlight beams were mirrored by the underlying puddle, so an eerily reflected light shone out from the empty eye sockets. How a dog could have gotten to these depths, what it had been seeking, why it had been driven to such a strange pursuit, and how it had died—those were all mysteries that could never be solved. But there was such a strong element of inappropriateness to the existence of this skeleton in this place that we could not help but feel it was an omen, though we didn't wish to dwell on its message.

At noon, nearly six hours after entering the first mine with Horton Bluett, we paused to share one of the sandwiches he had left with us and to drink a little of the juice from one of the thermos bottles. We did not speak over our meager and uncomfortable lunch, for we were close enough to the Lightning Coal Company's operations that our voices might have carried to the goblins working in those shafts—though we heard nothing of them.

After lunch we had proceeded a considerable distance before, at twenty minutes past one o'clock, we turned a corner and saw light ahead. Mustard-yellow light. Somewhat murky. Ominous. Like the light in our shared nightmare.

We crept along the narrow, dank, crumbling, lightless tunnel that led toward the intersection with the illuminated shaft. Although we moved with exaggerated caution, each footstep seemed thunderous and each breath like the exhalation of a giant bellows.

At the tunnel junction I stopped and put my back to the wall.

Listened.

Waited.

If a minotaur inhabited this labyrinth, it was evidently wearing crepe-soled shoes as it prowled the passageways, for the silence was as deep as the locale. But for the light, we seemed to be as alone as we had been for the past seven hours.

I leaned forward. Looked into the illuminated tunnel, first left, then right. No goblins were in sight.

We stepped out of concealment, into a fall of yellowish light that lent a jaundiced waxiness to our faces and eyes.

To the right the tunnel continued only twenty feet, narrowing dramatically and terminating in a blank wall of rock. To the left it was more than twenty feet wide and ran on for about a hundred and fifty feet, growing wider as it went, until it must have been sixty feet across. At its widest point it appeared to intersect another horizontal shaft. The electric lamps, strung on a cable fixed to the center of the ceiling, were spaced about thirty feet apart; conical shades over medium-wattage bulbs directed light down in tightly defined cones, so there was a stretch of ten or twelve feet of deep shadows between each pool of brightness.

Just as in the dream.

The only appreciable differences between reality and nightmare were that the lamps did not flicker and that we were not, as yet, pursued.

Here Horton Bluett's map ended. We were entirely on our own.

I looked at Rya. I suddenly wished I had not brought her down into this place. But there was no going back.

I gestured toward the far end of the tunnel.

She nodded.

We drew our silencer-equipped pistols from the deep pockets of our insulated pants. We switched off the safeties. We jacked bullets into the chambers, and the muted
snick-snick
of well-oiled metal against metal whispered along the coal-veined rock walls.

Side by side we advanced as noiselessly as possible toward the wide end of the shaft, passing through light and shadow, light and shadow.

At the intersection of horizontal shafts I again put my back to the wall and eased forward, cautiously peering into the connecting tunnel before proceeding. It was also about sixty feet wide, but it was two hundred feet long, three quarters of its length lying to our right. The timbers were old but still newer than any we had seen heretofore. Considering the width, this was more an immense room than just another tunnel. There were not one but two rows of amber electric bulbs hung parallel under metal hoods, which created a checkerboard pattern of light and darkness on the floor.