Twilight Eyes (55 page)

We had seen two cars at the gate, and both had been occupied by goblins. The guard was a goblin, as well.

Now, as we trekked southward along the ridge top, the forest became a greater obstacle than it had been theretofore. In these heights, the deciduous trees—hardwoods such as oaks and maples—had given way to evergreens. The farther we walked, the more spruce we saw, and pines of many varieties; they grew closer together than before, as if we were witnessing the forest receding toward a primeval state. The boughs were often interlaced and grown so low that we had to stoop or even—in several places—crawl on our hands and knees beneath living, needled portcullises that were lowered nearly to the ground. Underfoot, dead and broken branches thrust up like spikes, requiring caution and promising impalement. In many places there was little underbrush because there was inadequate light to nurture it, but where enough light reached through the evergreen canopy, the lower growth seemed half comprised of brambles and briars bristling with thorns as sharp-edged as razors and as thick as the tips of stilettos.

In time, when the top of the ridge narrowed dramatically near its southernmost point, we approached the fence again. Crouched against the chain link, we were able to look down into a small valley about four hundred yards wide and—we knew from our terrain map—a mile and a half long. Below, there were none of the evergreens that commanded the heights. Instead stripped-bare hardwoods reached skyward in spiky black profusion like thousands of immense fossilized spiders lying on their backs with petrified legs poking up every which way. From the county route and the main gate that lay half a mile to the south, a two-lane company road came out of the trees into a large clearing that had been carved out to accommodate the administration buildings, equipment garages, and repair shops of the Lightning Coal Company. The road continued on the other side of the clearing, disappearing into the trees again, leading toward the mine head that lay a mile away, at the northern end of the valley.

The nineteenth-century one- and two-story buildings were all of stone that had been darkened by the years, by coal dust blown off passing trucks, and by the exhaust fumes of machinery. Now, at first glance, they almost appeared to have been constructed of coal. The windows were narrow, and some were barred, and the glow of fluorescent lights beyond the dirty glass lent no warmth to those mean panes. The slate roof and the exaggeratedly heavy lintels over the windows and doorways—even over the larger spans of the garage doors—gave the structures a beetle-browed and scowling demeanor.

Side by side, our smoking breath combining in the preternaturally still air, Rya and I stared down at the coal-company employees with growing uneasiness. Men and women entered and exited the garages and machine shops from which came the ceaseless clanging-clattering-grinding noises of mechanics and craftsmen at work. They all moved briskly, as if filled with energy and purpose, as if they were, to a man, reluctant to give their employers less than a hundred and ten percent in return for their salaries. There were no loiterers, no dawdlers, no one lingering in the crisp air to enjoy a cigarette before returning to his labors inside. Even the men in suits and ties—presumably executives and other white-collar workers who might ordinarily be expected to proceed more slowly, secure in their higher positions—moved between their cars and the gloomy administration buildings without delay, apparently eager to get on with their duties.

Every one of them was a goblin. Even at that distance I had no doubt of their membership in that demonic fraternity.

Rya also perceived their true nature. Softy: “If Yontsdown’s a nesting place for them, then this is the nest
within
the nest.”

“A damned hive,” I said. “All of them buzzing around like so many industrious bees.”

Once in a while a truck laden with coal growled down from the north, through the leafless trees of the valley, along the road that bisected the clearing, into the other arm of the forest, heading for the front gate. Empty trucks came the other way, going to the mine to be reloaded. The drivers and their partners were all goblins.

“What’re they doing here?” Rya wondered.

“Something important.”

“But what?”

“Something that’s no damn good at all for us and our kind. And I don’t think the focus of it is in those buildings.”

“Then where? The mine itself?”

“Yeah.”

The somber, cloud-filtered light was waning swiftly toward an early winter dusk.

The wind, absent all day, returned full of vigor, evidently refreshed by its vacation, whistling through the chain-link fence and humming in the evergreens.

I said, “We’re going to have to come back early tomorrow and go farther north along the fence, until we get a look at the mine head.”

“And you know what follows that,” Rya said bleakly.

“Yes.”

“We won’t see enough, so we’ll have to go inside.”

“Probably.”

“Underground.”

“I suppose so.”

“Into the tunnels.”

“Well...”

“Like the dream.”

I said nothing.

She said, “And like the dream, they’ll discover we’re in there, and they’ll come after us.”

Before nightfall could trap us on the ridge, we left the fence and headed back down toward the county road where we had parked the station wagon. Darkness seemed to well up from the forest floor, to drip like sap out of the heavy boughs of spruce and pine, to seep forth from every tangled clump of brush. By the time we reached open fields and slopes, the luminescent blanket of snow was brighter than the sky. We saw our old footprints, which appeared to be wounds in that alabaster skin.

When we reached the car, snow began to fall. Only flurries now. They spiraled down out of the steadily darkening heavens, like bits of ash shaken from charred ceiling beams that had been burned in a long forgotten, long cooled fire. However, in the extreme heaviness of the air and in the numbing cold, there was an indescribable but undeniable omen of a big storm to come.

During the drive to the house on Apple Lane, the flurries fell ceaselessly. They were big flakes carried on the erratic currents of a wind not yet working at full power. On the pavement they formed opaque veils, and I could almost believe that the black macadam was actually a thick sheet of glass, that the veils of snow were sheer curtains, and that we were driving across an immense window, crushing the curtains under our tires, straining the glass even though it was thick. It was a window that perhaps separated this world from the next. At any moment, breaking, it might cast us down into Gehenna.

We parked in the garage and entered the house by the kitchen door. All was dark and quiet. We switched on lights as we passed through the rooms, heading upstairs to change clothes, after which we intended to prepare an early dinner.

But in the master bedroom, sitting in a chair that he had drawn into a deeply shadowed corner, Horton Bluett was waiting for us.

Growler was with him. I saw the dog’s shining eyes a fraction of a second before I clicked on the lights, too late to stay my hand from the switch.

Rya gasped.

She and I were both carrying silencer-equipped pistols in our insulated ski jackets, and I had my knife, but any attempt to use those weapons would have resulted in instant death for us.

Horton was holding the shotgun that I had bought from Slick Eddy in Gibtown a few days ago. It was aimed at us, and the spread pattern of that weapon could take us both out with a single blast, two shots at most.

Horton had found most of the other things that we had carefully hidden, which indicated that he had been searching the house most of the afternoon, while we had been on Old Broadtop. Spread on the floor around him were various items that Slick Eddy had obtained for me: the automatic rifle, boxes of ammunition, eighty paper-wrapped kilos of plastic explosive, detonators, vials of sodium pentothal, and the hypodermic syringes.

Horton’s face looked older than it had when we had first seen him earlier in the day, closer to his true age. He said, “Just who in the hell
are
you people?”

At seventy-four, Horton Bluett was not humbled by age and did not fear the proximity of the grave, so he appeared formidable as he sat there in the corner with his faithful dog beside him. He was tough and resilient, a man who dealt uncomplainingly with adversities, who ate everything life threw at him, spit out what he did not like, and used the rest to make himself stronger. His voice did not tremble, and his hand did not shake on the stock or on the trigger guard of the shotgun, and his eyes did not waver from us. I would have preferred to deal with almost any man fifty years Horton’s junior rather than with him.

“Who?” he repeated. “Who are you folks? Not a couple geology students working for doctorates. That’s goose poop for sure. Who are you, really, and what’re you doing here? Sit down on the edge of the bed, both of you; sit there facing me, and keep your hands in your laps, folded in your laps. That’s right. That’s good. Don’t make no sudden moves, you hear? Now tell me everything you got to tell.”

In spite of the evidently powerful suspicion that had driven him to the extraordinary step of forced entry, in spite of what he had found secreted in the house, Horton still liked us. He was extremely wary, intensely curious about our motives, but he did not feel that a friendly relationship was yet ruled out by what he had uncovered. I sensed that much, and considering the circumstances, I was surprised by the relatively benign state of mind that I perceived in him. What I sensed was confirmed by the attitude of the dog, Growler, who sat at attention, alert but not overtly hostile, ungrowling. Horton would shoot us, yes, if we made a move against him. But he did not want to do it.

Rya and I told him virtually everything about ourselves and our reasons for coming to Yontsdown. When we spoke of goblins hiding behind human masks, genetically engineered soldiers from a lost age, Horton Bluett blinked and repeatedly said, “By God.” Nearly as often he said, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” He asked pointed questions about some of the most outlandish parts of our tale—but he never once seemed to doubt our veracity or to think us mad.

In light of our outrageous story, his imperturbability was rather unnerving. Country people often pride themselves on a calm, collected manner, so unlike most city folk. But this was rural unflappability carried to an extreme.

An hour later, when we had nothing more to reveal, Horton sighed and put the shotgun on the floor next to his chair.

Taking his cue from his master, Growler let down his guard too.

Rya and I also relaxed. She had been more tense than I, perhaps because she could not detect the aura of good intentions and goodwill that surrounded Horton Bluett. Guarded and cautious goodwill but goodwill nonetheless.

Horton said, “I could tell you was different from the moment you walked into my driveway and offered to help with the shoveling.”

“How?” Rya asked.

“Smelled it,” he said.

I knew at once that he was not speaking figuratively, that he had indeed
smelled
a difference in us. I recalled how, when he had first met us, he’d sniffed and snuffled as if suffering from a cold but had not blown his nose.

“I can’t see ’em clear and easy the way you two see ’em,” Horton said, “but from the time I was a tot, there’ve been people who smelled
wrong
to me. Can’t explain it exactly. It’s a little bit like the smell of very, very old things, ancient things: you know . . . like dust that’s been gathering for hundreds and hundreds of years, undisturbed in some deep tomb . . . but not actually quite dust. Like staleness but not
quite
staleness.” He frowned, struggling to find words that would help us understand. “And there’s a bitterness to the smell of them that’s not like the sourness of sweat or any other body odor you’ve ever whiffed. Maybe a little like vinegar but not really. Maybe just a touch like ammonia . . . but, no, not that, either. Some of them have a subtle odor, just tickles the nostrils, teases—but others reek. And what that odor says to me—what it’s always said to me ever since I was a tyke—is something like: ‘Stay away from this one, Horton, he’s a bad one, a real no-good, watch him, be careful now, beware, beware.’”

“Incredible,” Rya said.

“It’s true,” Horton said.

“I believe it,” she said.

Now I knew why he had not thought us mad and why he had been able to accept our story so readily. Our eyes told us the very thing that his nose told him, so on every fundamental level our story rang true to him.

I said, “Sounds like you’ve got some sort of olfactory version of psychic ability.”

Growler said, “
Whuff
,” as if in agreement, then lay down and put his head on his paws.

“Don’t know what you’d call it,” Horton said. “All I know is I’ve had it my entire life. And early on, I knew I could rely on my smeller when it told me someone was a nasty bugger. Because no matter how nice they looked and acted, I could see that most of the people around them—neighbors, husbands, wives, kids, friends—always seemed to have a lot tougher time of life than was reasonable. I mean, these ones that smelled bad . . . shoot, they carried
misery
with them somehow, not their own misery but misery for other folks. And a powerful lot of their friends and relatives died off too young and in violent ways. Though, of course, you could never point a finger at them and say they was to be held responsible.”