29. The Pit
Once light touched the southern sky, Eleanor and I set about our tasks.
Neither of us liked being outside for long, so we took turns standing guard while the other worked. We gathered branches from the nearest trees, sharpening the thickest ones into stakes. There was no way to drive them into the bedrock at the bottom of the shaft, so I tossed them down along with a board to affix them to at the bottom.
Before I descended into the mine, we pulled apart the windlass and moved it to the side, so it wouldn’t block the path across the pit trap. Then, while Eleanor stood guard above, I started my climb down the ladder.
I’d thought it rickety the first time I climbed it, when it had been less than half its current length. As we’d dug down to bedrock, we’d extended it again and yet again. Now it shook and swayed beneath my weight; twenty-five feet of cobbled-together lumber leading down, down, down into the darkness.
The mouth of the shaft grew farther and farther away, as though I climbed down a huge throat, about to be swallowed. The light of the lantern I carried glittered off the thick rime coating the walls. Even though the permafrost was frozen once again, I could smell that strange combination of rotten eggs and petrichor.
Where was Doug?
The thought hit me so fast and hard that I twisted around to look below me, half expecting to see his eyes gazing back. The ladder shuddered, but no pale face peered back at me from the shadows below.
Was he lurking in the tunnel where we’d followed the paystreak? Or somewhere else altogether?
I never thought I’d be afraid of my own brother.
As I neared the bottom, the lantern light wavered over a floor much more uneven than I recalled. Another rung or two later, the lumpy shadows resolved themselves into piles of paydirt.
Doug had been working the mine without us, but this made no sense. Why pile the dirt up down here, leaving it to refreeze, instead of raising it with the bucket and windlass?
Maybe he didn’t want to keep climbing the ladder and risking a fall. Or perhaps he’d had some even less rational motive. I no longer had any insight into my brother’s mind.
I set up the board and stakes, keeping a wary eye on the black tunnel following the paydirt. Once I was done, I hesitated.
I could scurry back up the ladder, out of this stinking darkness. But what if Doug was down here? If I left without checking and our plan worked, he’d end up trapped with the creature.
Swallowing past the dread that clamped a cold hand around my throat, I bent over and entered the tunnel.
More piles of dirt narrowed it, but I could still move freely at first. The paystreak wound sinuously through the earth, rolling and curving like a snake, and the tunnel followed its path. It stretched on and on—how had Doug burrowed so far on his own?
The tunnel began to narrow, the walls turning to a frozen conglomeration of gravel in which gold glinted here and there. Doug had stopped clearing out the paystreak, but hadn’t stopped tunneling.
Why? What could he possibly hope to gain that way?
The tunnel grew smaller and smaller, until I was forced to my hands and knees, my lantern thrust out ahead of me. At last I could go no farther without crawling along on my belly, which I was unwilling to do.
Doug had gone mad. He must have.
I peered past my lantern into the dank hole. Was he inside, squirming like a worm in the embrace of the earth?
“Doug?” I called, and my voice shook with the fear he’d answer.
ShouldI go farther? Lie down on my stomach and wriggle into the narrow hole? Follow my brother one last time, into the heart of the paystreak. Forget everything else. Close my eyes and sleep, surrounded on all sides by gold.
Eleanor’s cry echoed faintly from above.
* * *
The tunnel was too narrow to turn around. I backed up frantically, my heart pounding with the sudden conviction I was about to back into something blocking the way behind me. The moment I could contort myself enough to turn around, I did so—but that left the unknown black of the tunnel behind me. How far did it go? Could anything besides Doug be lurking there?
I scrambled in a near-panic back to the shaft, banging my head, shoulders, and knees against the iron-hard permafrost around me. When I finally emerged, I was out of breath, my back in agony from the cramped position I’d been in.
“Eleanor! I’m coming!” I shouted as I stumbled over the careless mounds of paydirt Doug had left in the way.
“It’s here!” she shouted down. “Hurry!”
The ladder shook and swayed beneath my weight as I shot up it as quickly as possible. Eleanor crouched by the pile of spruce boughs, her eyes wide as she swung her lantern back and forth. The shadows jumped at the shifting light.
Her father’s voice boomed from the darkness behind us. “Get over here, girl! I won’t ask you again.”
A baby wailed ahead of us. Then, from the side: “Help me, Colin! Help me!”
I grabbed up an armful of boughs and tossed them across the opening of the shaft. “Get in the cabin, now!” I ordered Eleanor.
She hesitated for a moment, so I gave her a small shove. “Steve needs you.”
That did it; she raced for the cabin. A few seconds later, the door slammed shut.
I finished covering the mine shaft and straightened up. Where was the creature? It could throw its voice—it might be on the other side of the cabin, or just beyond the light of my lantern.
My pulse beat hard, shaking my body. More than anything, I wanted to run to the cabin and hide.
But that would only mean slow starvation. This needed to end, and I was the one to do it.
“Over here!” I shouted, swinging my lantern back and forth in great arcs to get its attention. “I’m over here, you bastard!”
The trees began to thrash, as if something huge forced its way through them. I fell back, making sure the concealed pit remained between myself and it. My throat tried to close up, but I forced the words out. “You want me? Then come and get me!”
The shaking branches stopped as it emerged into the clearing cut from the wilderness. My nerve almost failed, but I forced myself to remain still as it reached the light. I finally got a good look at what had haunted and hunted us.
It moved like a great, crawling centipede emerging from a burrow. Its body was abnormally long, composed of spines of varying sizes—a few vertebrae from a mammoth here, the ribs and back of a bison there, conjoined onto a smaller torso. Mismatched legs supported its length, some nothing but bone, others dug out of the ground with most of the flesh still attached.
There was a human arm as well—slender and pale, it must have belonged to Anna. A man’s leg, gone sickly black with rot. A rag of skin, still bleeding, that must have been from Roland.
It was taking parts of those it killed and adding them to itself. Had their spirits flown free? Or were they trapped in the hideous amalgam of their butcher?
Terror washed over me, and I took one step back, then another.
It reared up, lifting its foremost three limbs off the ground, displaying claws and hooves. Atop its horse-like neck, Anna’s long hair hung like a mane, a dark curtain behind its caribou head. The great antlers stretched up to cup the night sky.
Its bone jaw opened, and Bessie’s scream as she burned alive roared from its empty throat.
Then it charged directly at me.
* * *
I ran from it—but not toward the cabin. I kept the mine shaft between it and myself, praying it wouldn’t notice anything amiss.
It reached the pile of boughs—and sprang over them.
Five pairs of mismatched limbs struck the frozen ground, so close it buffeted me to my back. I lay there, the wind knocked out of me, and stared in horror as it loomed over me.
This was it. I’d tried everything I could, and now I would meet my end at its ravaging claws. The empty sockets of its skull stared down on me, Anna’s hair blowing in a light breeze. There was no pity, no understanding; I might as well beg an avalanche not to sweep me away.
Then it began to slip backwards.
Shocked, I rose to my elbow and realized its entire length hadn’t cleared the pit. The hindmost spine had fallen in, limbs scrabbling at the side of the shaft as it tried to hoist itself out.
Tried—and failed.
It’s long body whipped and coiled, kicking up snow as it tried to keep itself from sliding backward. Claws and hooves and coffin bones gouged the hard ground, its struggle becoming more and more frantic. Anna’s arm stretched out toward me, as if begging me to save her. The caribou head tossed, bones clacking together, and Bessie’s scream split the air again.
Then its flailing legs found the ladder. Like a caterpillar on a stem, it wrapped more and more appendages around the wooden rungs. Its fall slowed—then stopped.
Skeletal teeth snapping angrily, it began to heave its bulk out of the pit. My plan had failed, thanks to the damned ladder, and now we were all going to pay the price.
With a loud crack, the cobbled-together ladder broke under its weight. First one rung, then another, until finally entire sections tore free with the sound of rending nails. It flailed and clawed, but as the ladder crumbled out from under it, the fiend tumbled into the pit.
I rose to my feet, shaking so badly I could barely stand. Waiting for it to clamber back out somehow. But no antlers once again heaved into sight.
I didn’t dare get too close, but the sound of its struggles cut through the cold, clear air. It began to call out, cycling through its many voices, both the ones I’d already heard and others. A woman, a man, then more, shifting into languages I didn’t recognize.
Slowly, the cries grew weaker. Silence fell over the scene, the deep emptiness of the arctic night, without even a bird to break it.
“Hello, brother.”
A shocked cry tore from me, and I spun to see a figure standing near the cabin, a lantern in his hand. Before I could so much as take a step toward him, Doug hurled the lantern overhead and onto the cabin’s roof.
The glass shattered, and oil spilled out, carrying flames across the logs making up the pitched roof. The fire caught, spreading over the dry wood with shocking speed.
Steve and Eleanor were in there. I had to warn them.
“Fire!” I yelled as I raced toward the cabin.
An iron grip closed on my arm, spinning me around as though I were no more than a child. Between the growing flames and my lantern’s light, I finally beheld what my brother had become.