6
U pon returning to the mine that evening, we discovered that Kent had finished making camp, in much the same sense that an army makes camp when it settles in for the duration.
He had set up a kitchen area and dishwashing station, improved the picketing for the horses, and spruced up the latrine.
I can’t swear to it, but I think he even fluffed my pillow.
“Well,” I said as we ate the surprisingly good meal that Kent had produced out of tins over an open fire. “What’s next?”
I knew the answer of course. We’d found Roger, and we had no idea where to find the man who had sent the telegram. That left only one avenue to explore, and it was lying beneath our feet.
Given the size of the mine, we determined—or rather, Denton determined, and we all agreed—that we should start by mapping the third horizontal shaft, the deep one that Oscar had described in his letters.
If something had happened to him in the mine, his body was most likely down there, not in one of the upper levels.
“And I’m curious about this pearl chamber he wrote about,” said Ingold. “It must be a natural formation, but I’m stumped as to what it could be. There are cave systems all through West Virginia, but none that I’d describe as pearl.”
I was beginning to understand Ingold, and I confess, I found him rather charming.
He was, above all, interested in things.
He wanted to know why things worked, but unlike some scientific minds, he didn’t lose interest once he knew.
The world was an endless source of fascination and wonder.
On our way back from town, he whipped out a magnifying lens to show me what he called a “wheel bug”—a bizarre insect with a thick body and tiny head, and a strange ridge on its back.
“Look at him!” Ingold said, clearly delighted.
“Or her, I suppose—I can’t tell them apart. ”
“Presumably they know.” The bug had a small, wickedly sharp pointy bit tucked under its absurdly small head. “What do they eat?”
“Other bugs. They’re a member of the assassin bug clan. They drive that beak into an insect and pump it full of digestive juices until its innards turn to liquid, then slurp it all back out.”
I took a step back from the wheel bug, even though it seemed extremely unconcerned about our existence or its current place in the spotlight. “That sounds painful.”
“Excruciating, I should imagine. If one stabs you, it hurts like a sonuvabitch, so don’t put your hand on one.” He beamed at me, putting his lens away. “They’re slow and docile and not terribly bright and if you underestimate them, they extract a terribly painful vengeance. Isn’t that marvelous?”
I agreed that it was. It came as no surprise that Ingold was as eager to see this pearl chamber as Denton was to find out what had happened to his cousin.
For my part, I could have left at once and the mystery would have nagged at me for perhaps ten minutes total, but I am, as I have said before, a simple soul. Leaving Denton to face the unknown alone, though, would have eaten at me for the rest of my life.
Bright and early in the morning, therefore, Ingold assembled his mapping equipment—a compass, a notebook, and a long string—and looked for a partner to spot him in the depths of the mine.
I could think of nothing that I would like less, so naturally I volunteered.
(If this doesn’t make sense to you then I suggest you reflect for a time on the Spanish word macho , and on how even sworn soldiers who damn well ought to know better still occasionally find themselves with something to prove. Besides, I wasn’t claustrophobic.)
The mine had not improved in the last forty-eight hours. The weight of it still hung over me like the sword of Damocles, although swords are light and thin and airy, so perhaps this was more like the club of Damocles. The maul of Damocles. The bloody huge rock of Damocles ...
We descended the shaft to the third horizontal tunnel, and paused. The main shaft kept going downward. “Should we go all the way down?” I asked, hoping that Ingold would say no.
“At least to make certain there’s not another tunnel we missed,” said Ingold, and down we went.
I couldn’t say how much farther we went. Not terribly far, I think, but my perceptions were definitely being colored by my surroundings. I could hear things. Little noises, like distant sighs, and the occasional creak, like an old house settling. Things you wouldn’t think twice about aboveground.
It’s just the mine breathing , I told myself. There’s no one else here .
No one alive, anyway .
That wasn’t a comforting thought. I don’t disbelieve in ghosts, but that’s not quite the same thing as believing in them.
I have no reason to believe that the spiritualists were lying.
I had encountered ... something ... in Gallacia that I still could not quite pass off as a hallucination brought on by fever.
(It is possible that I believe in ghosts less now than I did before, because if I admit that they are real, I will have to admit that what happened to me was also real and that I killed a lost, starving ghost in a dream of a war that never ends.)
In the depths of the Hollow Elk Mine, though, it was easier to believe. Not in ghosts precisely, but in things that did not follow nature’s laws as I understood them. Hollow Elk did not feel haunted. It felt alien .
The blackness at the edge of our headlamps became deeper and flatter and then the smell changed to something dank and oily and we found ourselves looking down at a pool of water the color of tar.
“Well, that’s that then,” said Ingold. “I suppose if this mine was still active, they’d use pumps.”
I stared at the water. It was absolutely flat and looked poisonous. “Is there a chance that Denton’s cousin is in there?”
Ingold grimaced. The beam from his headlamp jerked across the tunnel walls as he turned toward me. “If he is, we’re not going to find him. That water’s more acidic than vinegar, and full of arsenic. You don’t want to go mucking about in it.”
In this, he was absolutely correct. I took a few more steps forward anyway, playing my headlamp over the water’s edge, just in case there was ... oh ... a hand lying half out of the pool or something.
“Easton, wait,” said Ingold from behind me. “Back up.”
I obeyed hurriedly. When a man who sets firedamp alight tells you to back up, you don’t argue.
“Farther,” he said, waving me behind him. “This is where blackdamp would be. Let’s check.”
Another damp. Lovely. “Does this one explode?”
“No, quite the opposite.” Ingold pulled a candle from his pack and lit it. Pulling his shirt up over his nose and mouth, he inched down the slope, holding the candle in front of him.
He was only a step or two farther along than I had been when the flame winked out. He scrambled back up, looking pleased with himself. “As I thought. Blackdamp is heavy, so it gathers in the low places.”
I winced. “And what would that do to us?”
“Oh, you’ll suffocate,” he said. “You’d feel lightheaded and fatigued first, mind you. Then it hits a critical level and ...” He mimed a swoon.
“I suppose that’s better than being splattered all over the landscape.”
“Really?” Ingold looked thoughtful. “I think I’d rather be splattered. It’s much more dramatic, don’t you think?”
“I’ve seen more than my share of dramatic deaths,” I said, perhaps a bit more testily than Ingold deserved.
He stopped in his tracks, and since I was following him, I stopped, too.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was thoughtless of me. You and Denton both, I should know better.” Ingold shook his head. “And now I’m drawing attention to it, which is probably worse. Sorry again.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Things are what they are.” It was kind of him to acknowledge it anyway, and to be aware that even the acknowledgment was fraught.
We ascended back to the third tunnel and Ingold took out his notebook and began to draw.
The mine wasn’t a maze, fortunately. Each tunnel split off into others, usually two or three, spread out like fans, but finding your way back to the main shaft was easy enough.
All that you had to do was turn around and take the passage back to where it met up with others, then take the passage opposite the branch, over and over, until you were back at the root.
Nevertheless, each of those passages had to be mapped, and Ingold carefully paced each one, paced it again to confirm, then noted the numbers down in his book.
That boredom and terror are bedfellows is of no surprise to any soldier.
Watching Ingold rapidly stopped being interesting, while the darkness continued to press down on us like physical weight.
I had a bad moment when we reached a dead end and Ingold pointed out a hole that had been hollowed out under the stone wall and explained that a miner would lie down there, wedged tightly beneath the rock, and pick away until there was enough space to blast out with explosives.
Just imagining being stretched out with the stone right there at your back was enough to make the six inches of air currently between my head and the ceiling seem as holy as the air inside any Gallacian cathedral.
I’ve no idea how many tunnels Ingold had carefully plotted when I started to hear the echo.
Our footsteps echoed, of course. There was no way that they wouldn’t.
After a time, we stopped paying attention, or perhaps I would have noticed it sooner.
But gradually I noticed that when Ingold was pacing out his latest tunnel, there was an echo that did not seem quite right.
It went on an instant too long and it fell flat instead of ringing. And it sounded ...
... wet.