8
“ I know how it sounds,” I said wearily. “Like a snail with a human body on top instead of a shell. But it was horrible.”
“I believe you,” said Ingold. “I just wish you’d woken me in time to see it.”
I almost said, No, you don’t , but thought better of it. Ingold would have wanted to see it. He would probably have found it fascinating. He was that sort of person.
“Do you think it was what was following you two earlier?” Denton asked.
“It almost has to be, doesn’t it?” I thought of the way the flat thing had moved. Yes, it would probably make wet slapping sounds like that. “What are the odds of two horrible inhuman things lurking in the mine?”
“What are the odds of one horrible inhuman thing lurking in the mine?” Angus said dryly.
“We don’t know that it’s horrible,” Ingold pointed out. “It didn’t do anything to us, and presumably it would have had the opportunity.”
“It did something to Oscar,” said Denton.
“We don’t know that either,” Ingold said, with more truth than tact. “Unless you think it’s in league with the man from the telegraph office.”
It was hard to imagine any human being in league with the thing I’d seen. You might as well be in league with a snail or an octopus.
We sat around the fire, which Kent had rekindled from embers.
It was so late it had become early, and I was busy second-guessing what I had seen.
Maybe I hadn’t gotten that good a look at it.
Maybe I’d seen a person on all fours and my brain had made up the details, aided by the low light and probably some of Ingold’s firedamp fumes.
A few years ago, I’d have said that my brain couldn’t have come up with anything quite so bizarre, but I had lived through some things since then.
Still, this seemed a little bit beyond the limits of my imagination.
Big things with teeth, certainly. Any horrible thing involving mushrooms, sadly.
But a flattened-out human slug-thing? Even for me, that was a bit much.
Despite what you might think, I’m not a particularly fanciful person.
And there remained the fact that I had heard the wet slapping sound, and then Ingold and Denton had heard it, too.
No matter how I tried to turn it around in my head, I was pretty sure I’d seen something awful and inexplicable in the mine shaft.
Something that had been right there , only a dozen yards from the top, something that could have been up here .
Something that could have been hiding in the darkness, underneath one of the dozens of ruined bits of machinery, watching us.
You might walk by it a dozen times and never think anything of it, because that space was much too small for a human being to fit.
The mine is unsafe for humans ...
Christ’s blood, maybe that hadn’t been the wrong choice of words after all.
I opened my mouth to say something of the sort, when Angus’s head jerked to one side and he held up a hand.
“There’s something out there,” he said, gazing outside the mine entrance.
“Dangerous?” asked Ingold.
“Big,” said Angus, which didn’t quite answer the question. I reached casually for my pistol.
A moment later we heard scrambling footsteps and saw a light approaching. Human , I thought, and relaxed, though only slightly. (I’ve known too many humans.)
“Hello?” our visitor called. “Doctor? Are you there?”
Denton opened his mouth, but Angus beat him to it. “Who’s asking?”
Firelight shone on a tall figure, wearing a familiar hat.
It was Stovepipe from the camp, looking both bedraggled and slightly frantic.
“Me, Elijah,” he said. He scanned the circle of faces, settled on Denton’s.
“Roger said you were a doctor. Will you come? There’s been an attack. Lousia’s hurt bad.”
“How bad?” Denton was already scrambling to his feet.
“Bear got her,” said Elijah. “Got Lee Mason first. She near tripped over them both. Tore her arm all to pieces. She needs help.”
“Yes, of course. Just let me grab my bag. Ingold, will you come?”
“Of course.”
Angus and I exchanged a single speaking look.
The odds were good that Elijah was telling the truth, but if he wasn’t, Ingold and Denton could be walking into a trap.
And while they might be able to defend themselves, Denton was a surgeon, not a soldier.
On the other hand, neither of us wanted to leave Kent alone or the campsite unguarded.
I suspected that Kent could defend himself quite well with a frying pan, if it came to that, but one person is a helluva lot more vulnerable than two.
“I’ll come with you,” I told Denton, “if there’s a bear about. Are we taking the horses?”
Elijah shook his head. “Too dark. Faster as the crow flies,” he said, gesturing to the wooded slope behind him. “But we gotta hurry.”
“I’m ready,” said Denton, and the three of us followed the man and his stovepipe hat out into the night.
***
It was indeed faster as the crow flies. We were only about two miles from the shantytown, but it wasn’t an easy walk.
Leftover rock extracted from the mine made an ankle-breaking slope coated in wet leaves from the nearby trees, and a couple of times I thought that Denton was going to be treating one of us before we ever got there.
But then the ground evened out and turned into scrubby woodland, overgrown with briars and thorny vines.
I concentrated on following exactly in Elijah’s footsteps, and before long we were coming around into the camp from the opposite direction as last time.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Elijah said. “Bear’s still out there.”
I put my hand on the butt of my pistol, while thinking that “keep your eyes peeled” was a horrifying turn of phrase.
I generally quite like English, don’t get me wrong—it lacks a great many pronouns, but it has so many other words to cover every shade of meaning.
But Christ’s blood, what an image. I imagined someone scraping my eyeballs with a knife, peeling the corneas off the way I’d peeled potatoes for Kent last night.
We did not see a bear. I can’t say I was disappointed. Pistols are not what you want to have in hand if a bear is charging at you. I would prefer a rifle to a pistol and a ticket to another country to either. I hear that Guam is lovely this time of year.
Elijah took us to a shack that was larger and cleaner than Roger’s had been.
A dog barked at us until he shushed it and opened the door.
A woman lay on the bed inside, her arm wrapped in a blood-soaked wad of clothing.
Denton stepped in, all business, and pulled the makeshift bandage back, whereupon I found a pressing reason to be outside.
(I don’t mind injuries on dead bodies, but the same injury on a living person can turn my stomach.
I got far too much of that during the war.)
I sat down on the step. The dog whined at me, a brownish mutt that was mostly hound, judging by the ears. It flattened itself and approached hopefully, and I held out my fingers.
Unlike Thunder, this dog was delighted to sniff me, and then to try to convince me that it had never been petted in its life.
I rubbed its ears, and it leaned against my legs and sighed.
“Rough night for you too, huh?” I asked.
“Your humans running around and yelling and getting hurt.” The dog sighed again, more deeply.
The door opened and Ingold joined me outside. I couldn’t imagine that he was squeamish the same way I was—doubtless he’d find grievous wounds just so interesting —so I wasn’t surprised when he said, “Elijah said the dead body is behind the building.”
I’ve seen enough dead bodies for a hundred lifetimes and didn’t really feel the need to examine this one, but I also didn’t want to let Ingold wander around and possibly be eaten by a bear.
I reluctantly pushed the dog off my legs and followed him around the back of the shack, where there was, indeed, a suspiciously body-shaped lump underneath a blanket.
I gazed off into the dark, looking for bears.
A Gallacian bear would be long gone after having been scared off, but might return a day or two later if it thought there was food.
Were American bears similar? Did they try to shake hands with you before they attacked?
Ingold crouched down and lifted the blanket, then let out a low whistle. “Easton? Come take a look at this, will you?”
I stifled a sigh and padded over. Ingold folded back the blanket and moved the lantern to get a better view.
It took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing. The body was of an older man. What was left of it, anyway. The abdomen was simply gone , flesh and organs torn away until I could see the exposed backbone. Not the worst corpse I’ve ever seen, but certainly not a pleasant sight.
“Have you ever seen an animal attack that looked like this?” Ingold asked quietly, tilting the lantern until he could see into the rib cage. It was practically hollow inside, absent lungs or heart or anything else.
“No,” I said. “But I don’t know anything about American bear attacks.”
“Well, I do,” said Ingold, “and they don’t look like this.”
“It looks almost like ...” I stopped, hardly wanting to finish the thought. “It looks like somebody gutted him like a deer,” I finally said.
“Exactly. Most predators will go for the viscera, of course, but they don’t clean their prey out like this.” He sat back, frowning.
“You think a person did this?” I asked, keeping my voice low so that they couldn’t hear me inside the house.
Ingold dropped the blanket back over the dead man’s face. “I think that very few bears unbutton somebody’s trousers so they can get a better shot at his guts.”
Christ’s blood . “You think ... ah ... it could be the thing from the mine?” I really didn’t want to think of it getting up and leaving the mine.
If there was a horrible thing in the earth, it should stay in the earth, not get up and wander around the countryside.
Particularly not when I had to walk two miles through that countryside in the dark.
Ingold shrugged helplessly. “The thought had occurred to me, but how could we tell? We don’t have enough information. And for all I know, this poor fellow was taking a piss when the ... the whatever-it-was got him.”
He rose to his feet. “We are drowning in ignorance at the moment. And the only place with possible answers seems to be deeper in the mine.”
I turned away from the body. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
***
Denton emerged from the shed an hour later, bloody but quietly satisfied. “It’ll be touch and go with infection, but the wound itself won’t kill her.”
“Did she say it was a bear that she saw?” asked Ingold.
“With the amount of whiskey they poured down her, I doubt she’d remember seeing the president,” said Denton. “Anyway, there’s nothing more that I can do for her now. I’ll check back on her tomorrow.” He rubbed his face, leaving a smear of blood that shone black in the lantern light.
“Come look at this,” Ingold said, beckoning him over to the corpse. I had no desire to look at it again, but a thought had occurred to me. I could see Roger’s shack only a few dozen yards away, a black outline on the gray-black of the hillside.
I excused myself from the dog again and made my way over to it. He probably hadn’t seen anything—was probably drunk right now, as a matter of fact—but I could ask.
Well, I could have asked if he answered the door, but he didn’t. Even hammering on it didn’t wake him, assuming that he was inside at all. I listened, trying to make out snoring, but couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of America’s nighttime wildlife.
I thought about opening the door and stepping inside, but breaking into the house of a drunken man with a gun and a guard dog seemed like an excellent way to get shot, so I abandoned the thought and went to rejoin Ingold and Denton.
It was only as I was slipping and slithering my way across the rubble back to the mine that it occurred to me that Roger’s dog hadn’t barked at me either.