2 #2
“What is this squeeze he’s referring to?” I asked.
“Ah,” said Ingold. “In a mine like Hollow Elk, they leave pillars of rock between excavations to hold up the ceiling. If the weight of the ceiling is too great, it bears down on the pillars and the floor rises toward the ceiling, so the passage becomes very narrow.”
“That is horrifying and I want to go home,” I said, although I pronounced it, “Ah. I see.”
Despite the formal tone of the letter, it was far too easy to put myself in Oscar’s shoes. I could imagine the weight of all that rock overhead, pressing down, squeezing ...
I have never thought of myself as claustrophobic. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I just had never been required to test that.
The waiter appeared at my elbow with another gin and tonic before I noticed that my glass was empty. Funny how that works sometimes. Denton thanked him absently, his eyes distant. I suspected that in his head, he was a great many miles away, underground, watching strange lights.
The next letter was dated two days later, and the handwriting was notably less even, with occasional blobs of ink.
Denton —
I have found the strangest thing in the mine—or more accurately, behind the mine.
It is all so peculiar that I am dashing off this note at once, lest I start to doubt my own recollections.
Undoubtedly you will doubt them as well!
If you come here, though, and I wish that you would, I will show you what I am referring to .
I am sorry, I am telling it all out of order.
I went through the squeeze and found, as I had half expected, that mining had stopped on the far side.
The coal seam had run out and these tunnels were mostly exploratory to see if they could pick it up again elsewhere.
But it was not a dead end, as I had believed.
There was a gap in the stone, amid the rubble left over, though it seemed so narrow that only a boy could fit through.
I would have missed it entirely, but there was air coming through from the gap .
My first thought was that there was another mine nearby and that the shaft had broken into this one. But there are no nearby mines, so far as I know, and unless their shaft ran for miles underground, I would certainly be aware of it .
The other possibility—that this was somehow a natural cave—defied geology. Coal seams and caves do not coexist easily, particularly in this part of the world. Nevertheless, I will spare you suspense and tell you that it was a cave. How natural it is, I am not certain .
Roger had grave concerns about excavating the rubble, afraid that the ceiling would come down upon our heads. Given the squeeze, I cannot blame him. We put up timbers, which I confess most likely provided only psychological support, and began clearing the rubble .
The tunnel we found is low and broad, requiring one to traverse on hands and knees, sloping downward.
The walls are very smooth, but of a curious, almost undulating shape, tapering inward for perhaps two feet before belling out again for another two, then back again.
Despite the discomfort of crawling, it was a very easy passage, though it went for a remarkably long distance, moving downward in a gentle spiral.
I could not determine if we were directly beneath the Hollow Elk Mine or if the spiral veered to one side or the other .
When it finally ended, it was at a tangle of limestone seamed with cracks.
(By this I knew that we had gone down extremely far indeed.) It looked like a natural cave system, though many of the stalactites had fallen and broken, probably in recent times judging by the wear.
But far more important was a passage leading upward to the right, from which light was emerging.
Not the red light that I had seen before, but a steady white glow .
Denton, it was a marvel. A chamber a hundred feet across, floored with some gemstone that I have never seen before. It was perfectly smooth, almost like glass, and shone like mother-of-pearl, and it glowed in the darkness, with a light strong enough to read by .
I have never seen anything like it. It was beautiful and impossible and it filled me with the awe and dread that only the inexplicable can invoke. I do not know how such a thing came to be .
The gemstone was too hard to break off, and Roger certainly tried his best. He did not like the cave though, pronouncing it “not canny .”
You must come and see it, for I can hardly believe my own eyes and would be grateful for someone else’s. Roger has many fine qualities, but objectivity is not among them .
That is the bulk of my discovery, and the most important thing.
I will note in passing that on our return, I found the tins that had gone missing.
They were in the small cave, each of them punctured in the middle and drained.
So our mysterious thief is staying down here, although we did not see him during our visit .
Please come at once. This is an extraordinary find, and one which deserves to be brought before the eyes of men of learning .
Yrs, Oscar
“Huh,” I said, when I had reached the end and handed the last page to Angus. “A gemstone cavern underground? It sounds almost too fabulous to be true.”
“You’re not the only one to think so,” Ingold muttered.
“Obviously I went down at once,” Denton said. “He was nowhere to be found. I spent a day or two trying to find him, but no one had any leads at all. When I came back, this was waiting for me.” He shoved a much-folded slip of paper across the table at me. I unfolded it and saw another telegram.
MY APOLOGIES FOR HAVING MISSED YOU STOP I TOOK ILL FROM THE MINE GAS STOP PLEASE IGNORE MY PRIOR LETTERS AS I WAS NOT IN MY RIGHT MIND WHEN WRITING STOP HOLLOW ELK MINE IS OF NO INTEREST STOP
“Wordy fellow, your cousin,” I said, passing the telegram to Angus. I would have used half as many words and paid a great deal less. Then again, perhaps this Oscar fellow was too wealthy to care.
“Wordy, yes,” said Denton, “in letters, as you saw. But he writes telegrams the same as the rest of us ... or he did.”
“You don’t think he wrote this one?” I hazarded.
“I’m nearly sure of it. For one thing, he hasn’t responded to any of the letters I’ve sent after, and he hasn’t sent any more of his own.”
“Maybe he’s embarrassed,” rumbled Angus. “You go off your head on mine gas, you see things that aren’t there and send wild letters about it? A man has a right to feel like a damn fool.”
“Maybe,” said Denton. “I’d have said that Oscar is more the type to make a joke out of it.
But even so, he would never have said that the mine was of no interest. And even if that was true, he would simply have gone home.
But his mother says that he hasn’t been back, and he hasn’t written to her , either.
Trust me, Oscar could be off his head from mine gas, half dead, and missing both hands and he would still have written home to his mother. ”
I half smiled at that, but it turned into a frown. “I suppose that leaves the possibility that someone murdered him and sent the telegram to cover it up.”
“That’s what I think has happened,” offered Ingold.
“I grant that the letters about what he was finding are unsettling, but there’s no reason to think it was anything but straightforward murder.
He had an assistant. If there was something valuable in the mine and his assistant wanted it, he may have killed Oscar to get it. ”
There was a tightness around Denton’s eyes, but he didn’t protest the suggestion that his cousin was dead. I wondered if he had accepted the possibility, or if he and Ingold had simply argued it so many times that it no longer had the power to sting.
“Roger was incredibly loyal to Oscar,” Denton said. “And yes, I know, men have turned their coats before. But Roger was also very nearly illiterate. He couldn’t have sent that telegram.”
“He got someone else to write it, then,” argued Ingold. By the well-worn feel of the debate, I was pretty sure this wasn’t the first time. “And that’s why you’ve had no more letters. He knew he couldn’t fake those.”
Denton sighed. “Would you think less of me if I said that was what I hope happened? But the letters ... and the mine.” He rubbed his hands over his face.
“There is something very wrong with that mine. I made the trek to West Virginia myself and found his gear and papers still there, but not Oscar. I only went a little way into the mine, just far enough to call for him, but it felt ... wrong.” He met my eyes across the table.
“It felt like standing in Usher’s house again.
And you of all people, Easton, know that I don’t say that lightly. ”
Usher’s house. The creeping malignancy that had seemed to infest the walls there, made of more than just the library full of rotting books and the worms gnawing on the beams. The thing that had dwelt in the dark lake and sent fungal fingers up into the house itself. Yes, I knew.
The thought of facing such a thing again made me want to turn around and head straight to the docks for a ship going back to Europe. In fact, if there wasn’t a ship, I might see how far I could swim.
But Denton had asked for my help, and there was nothing in me that would allow me to turn tail when a friend needed me. Ours is not to question why, etc. (I hate that poem, but I understand it.) Denton had stood beside me against the horrors in Usher’s lake. It was my turn to stand beside him now.
I drained my gin and tonic and set it down. “All right,” I said. “When do we leave?”