Chapter 9 #3
Rounding a bend in the tunnel, Katherine spied one of the storage alcoves Mrs. Chrysler had found earlier and drew her party to a stop.
“Here, here!” she said. “We can’t outrun them.
” Mrs. Chrysler gave an assenting nod, and the pair pushed aside the empty barrow and buckets, slipping in behind them as carefully as they could in their haste.
Mr. Scruffles dove inside too, crouching at the women’s feet in the darkness.
Tilly, however, froze, staring at the tiny space, its muddy floor, and its splintered support beams. Katherine called her name, and she shook her head, snapping out of the memory of being pinned in the mud under the wall of Mr. Splint’s office. She dove under Katherine’s skirt.
No sooner had they hidden, a trio of workmen rounded the bend and hurried by, one of them limping gamely.
“They must be heading for the exit!” their leader called.
Katherine watched them with deeply drawn breath as they passed.
Their voices soon faded, and she reached out a hand in the darkness, signaling to Mrs. Chrysler with a reassuring tap on the shoulder that they’d wait a bit longer just to be safe.
Mrs. Chrysler patted her hand in assent.
“Wait, stop!”
Ernie’s voice halted Mrs. Chrysler mid-pat.
Katherine looked up sharply as the limping miner doubled back and squinted in their direction.
Cautiously, he approached their hiding spot, adjusting his lamp into a narrower, penetrating beam.
Katherine noticed the shadowy figure of Mrs. Chrysler drawing her duckie scissors from her blouse, and reluctantly she felt for her own knitting needles in the gloom.
The blue glow from the miner’s helmet found the tip of their protective wheelbarrow, then Mrs. Chrysler’s stubby shoes. It hesitated for a moment, then swept higher, illuminating her thick stockings and her skirt up to the knees.
“What the––?”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Chrysler said, her face still hidden in the darkness. “You’ve found us.”
Tilly’s hackles rose, and she began to growl.
Ernie jerked his light away from Mrs. Chrysler’s knees, presumably to find the source of the eerie, rumbling sound near her feet.
“You have three choices now, dear,” Mrs. Chrysler continued. “Forget you’ve seen anything and go back the way you came. That’s your first choice.”
Ernie paused a moment, then dared to raise his beam a bit higher. “Or… or what?”
“Choice number two: I explain we just needed some of your product for perfectly justifiable reasons. You take my word for it. We leave. Just like that.”
Tilly’s growl rose to a pitch tuned by nature to stir twitchy ancestral memories of dark nights and big cats. Ernie’s beam continued to sweep anxiously around Mrs. Chrysler’s feet.
“You can’t just take some,” he pleaded. His two companions had doubled back now to join him and began narrowing their own beams to search the alcove.
“The boss won’t tolerate bandits,” the leader said, stepping in front of Ernie.
“We’re not bandits,” Katherine said hotly. “We’re thieves. There’s a difference.”
The leader homed his lamplight on Katherine’s masked face, then spotlighted Mrs. Chrysler beside her. “They’re just a pair of old ladies!” he cried.
“Just?” Mrs. Chrysler said.
“All right,” said the leader, jerking his chin at the third worker, apparently to signal that he should pull aside the wheelbarrow. “They must be from the home,” he muttered to his companions. “Get out of there now,” he demanded in a louder voice. “And what is that ghastly noise?”
Ernie, still concernedly sweeping his light around the floor as Tilly growled and hissed, stopped his co-worker from moving the barrow. “What is the third choice?” he asked.
“A fight,” Mrs. Chrysler said levelly.
The leader guffawed and turned to his companions. “A fight, she says.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Chrysler.
A very short one! Tilly yowled. She leapt from her hiding place, claws unsheathed and hissing madly. Mr. Scruffles followed her with a whoop of delight, a blur of howling dark fur and flashing green eyes scrambling alongside Tilly’s disembodied purple tail.
“Yaaah!” Mrs. Chrysler bellowed and moved to follow the cats, but her skirt caught on the barrow. “Darn it, I’m stuck, Katty. Buy me a moment, will you?”
Katherine braced herself. “Yah!” she echoed sportingly, if a little half-heartedly, and struck the tips of her knitting needles together, sparking deeply impressive, albeit harmless, golden fireworks, which shot out of the alcove in a shimmering blaze.
The three miners drew back in alarm, fending uselessly against raging claws and hissing, spitting, biting teeth.
“They’re not just old ladies!” Ernie said, his terrified face glowing intermittently orange in the light of the sparks.
“They’re witches!” He and his companions bolted back down the passage.
Tilly remained hot on their heels, splashing mud and filth as she ran.
You just keep running! she shrieked.
“Ha-ha, look at her go!” Mrs. Chrysler chortled, finally pulling her skirt away from the splintered catch on the barrow handle.
Katherine sulked as she tucked her knitting needles away. “Why do they always assume we’re witches?” she mumbled to herself, then louder: “Kitties! Come, kitties!”
Mr. Scruffles skidded to a halt in the muck and called after Tilly, much farther ahead. They’re gone! You can come back now! The purple tail swung round in space and darted back, puffed and splattered.
“Good kitties,” Katherine said, hustling everyone forward once more.
“Let’s go now, before they get reinforcements.
” Mrs. Chrysler stowed her scissors with a nod, and they turned at the first junction they encountered, agreeing wordlessly to take the exit and navigate back to their start aboveground.
The upward slope proved to be more of a challenge to their balance and stamina than the downward slope had been, but at least the ascent was unblocked and deserted, and soon they found themselves in a quite identical little house of skylights and fake windows.
“Well, that was a bit of a thrill, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Chrysler puffed with a grin, after a moment of silence to make certain that they weren’t being followed up the tunnel.
“Sure, thrilling,” Katherine said, catching her own breath and glimpsing her friend’s beaming face gently outlined by the faint glow of the floor.
She moved into a shaft of moonlight and tried to inspect the rock she drew out of her pocket, but even then she couldn’t see much detail.
The object seemed to suck in all of the light that struck it, betraying little about itself in the process. She tucked it into her bag.
“We can’t be far from that other entrance,” Katherine said, “the one where those barrows were lined up.” She cracked open the door of the little hut and looked around.
“If I had to guess…” She scanned the horizon, her eyes slowly adjusting to a gloom unaided by glowbugs.
“I’d say it’s that one.” Mrs. Chrysler joined her at the door, and Katherine pointed across the small brown lawn to the north.
Next to a squat building just like all the others sat the huge crate they’d seen that morning, or one very much like it.
An agitated cluster of men was bustling around it, like an upset nest of ants.
“Well, well, well. What they’re doing with that wouldn’t I like to know,” Mrs. Chrysler said. “Reckon that crate’s really full of caskets, Katty?”
“Maybe. But who says that caskets that leave this property have people in them, Imogene?”
Mrs. Chrysler put a finger to her nose conspiratorially. “Let’s find Ruben,” she said.
After so much twisting and turning underground, the two women were admittedly a bit disoriented upon emerging back under the sky.
The two cats, however, seemed quite sure of the way back to their companions, and Katherine was quite happy to let them take the lead.
All of Eagle Heights’ nocturnal mineral extraction appeared to be confined to that one corner of the property for now, and the small party met no one as they nevertheless hugged the shadows, making their way as clandestinely as possible across the winding gravel paths that connected the outbuildings.
“I’m guessing each of these is near a vein of… whatever that stuff is,” Mrs. Chrysler whispered.
“Maybe,” Katherine said. “I really am no expert in mining, Imogene.”
“Neither am I. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Presently they reached their starting point and the bench where they had left Ruben. But he was gone.
“Ruben!” Mrs. Chrysler whispered hoarsely. “Ruben, where are you?”
“Oh!” Ruben’s face appeared around the corner of the sham building.
He was on his hands and knees, and Mouser was crouching beneath him.
The moon was quite high above the plain now, but the shabby poncho was doing its job of keeping him well concealed.
He could have easily passed for a dirty boulder.
“There you are,” he said. “I heard a commotion over that way, and this one”—he indicated the incandescently fidgety Ember by his side—“hopped off my lap and we hid.” The small dragon trotted over to Katherine in a shower of short-lived flames.
“I’ve been watching that door, waiting for you to come out of it. ”
“We found an alternate route,” Katherine said, lowering her fingers for Ember to rub.
Ember greeted Mr. Scruffles with an affectionate head-butt, then drew back in surprise as Tilly materialized next to them. The small purple cat was purple no more, caked head-to-toe with dark mud. Oh, Tilly! Ember said. You’re filthy!
Yes. I know, Tilly said, sitting primly down on the gravel.
I haven’t seen you this dirty since that time in the old days, when you—with the—
Yes, Tilly said. And I think we can leave that all in the past now. She closed her eyes in satisfaction and, with a back foot, scratched vigorously at the dried mud on her neck.
She was very brave, Mr. Scruffles said magnanimously, having no trouble himself with the minimal amount of soil that clung to his fur. He washed it daintily.
I’m very proud of you, Ember gushed, sparking a brief blaze with her dancing paws.
Tilly pulsed sheepishly out of sight, then reappeared and began to groom herself, lifting a forepaw to her tongue and wiping it determinedly behind an ear. After a few rather ineffectual licks, she happily accepted her friends’ much-needed help. And began to purr.
Mrs. Chrysler stepped away from the fastidious cat cluster at her feet. “Ruben, you said earlier that one of those big casket shipments comes in once a month? And they leave by degrees?”
“Right. That’s what I’d seen, anyway.”
“You have any idea where the crate comes from? Or where the caskets go?”
Ruben shrugged. “I mean, the crate always has freight stickers all over it. But no. Why?”
“Ruben,” Katherine said. The old man was still on the ground on his hands and knees, answering Mrs. Chrysler’s questions as if he had every intention of simply staying there. “Why don’t you get up from there? Here, come take a seat.” She motioned to the bench.
“I…” Ruben grimaced. “I can’t get up.”
Katherine sighed and looked pityingly at Mrs. Chrysler. “Of course you can’t.”
“Not my best idea, I’ll admit,” Ruben said.
Between them, Mrs. Chrysler and Katherine hauled the old man to standing and guided him back to the bench, where he sat heavily down and stretched his legs.
“Now what about the crates?” he said.
“That one we saw this morning,” Mrs. Chrysler said. “We saw one just like it at the end of the tunnel.”
“Being loaded,” Katherine added, “with this.” She withdrew the find from her bag and showed it to him.
“Rocks?”
“Yes.”
“Rocks.”
“Uh, yes.”
“What kind of rocks?” Ruben adjusted his glasses for a closer inspection. A weak milky moonlight was streaming now through patchy clouds overhead, but even the brightest sunshine couldn’t have helped him.
“We don’t know.”
“I’m confused.”
A shocking development, Tilly said.
Don’t be unkind, Ember gently admonished her as she licked her face. I think the mistress is beginning to like him.
Hmph.
“It was a mine, Ruben,” Katherine said. “The tunnel entrance in the building led to even more tunnels, branching off all over.” She swept her arm to take in the property and all of its identical little buildings. “They’re mining under here, mining whatever this is.”
“That’s… that’s outrageous,” Ruben finally spluttered.
“Splint did tell Sister Agatha he could make money from the bog. Seems he wasn’t lying about that.”
“That’s why he wanted the land so badly.”
“Certainly seems so,” Mrs. Chrysler agreed.
“Probably the reason for the nunnery sinking too.”
This also made sense. “Such soggy ground, there’s probably some pumps round here somewhere, shunting the water away…”
“Well, that’s not right!” Ruben’s creased face deepened into an indignant scowl. “If they’ve been making money off mining all this time, the least they could have done is treat us a bit better!”
“I don’t disagree with you there,” Katherine sighed. “I don’t think Splint’s business plan was ever to provide exceptional long-term eldercare. Just wanted to take the bog away from Sister Agatha, I suppose.”
“And the home has made one heck of a front,” Mrs. Chrysler said. “Not many visitors poking around.”
The group sat in silence a moment, all thinking of those nearly comatose figures in the common room. Katherine suspected they all had relations as uncaring as Tucker Hoode… if they had anyone at all.
“I don’t like it, Katty,” Mrs. Chrysler finally said. “A secret mine… and an old folks’ ‘active living’ home where everyone’s as active as an old mop? Something really funny’s going on here. I don’t think Sister Agatha knows the half of it.”
“Well, what do we do?” Ruben asked.
“I say,” Katherine said, “we should learn more about what we’re dealing with here. Splint never said what he thought was in the bog, did he? I certainly don’t have a clue what this is,” she added, securing the rock back in her bag.
“I don’t either, Katty. How do you suggest we find out?”
A moment passed in silence.
“How about a troll doctor?” asked Ruben.
More silence passed while the two women waded in deep thought.
“That’s not a bad idea, Katty,” Mrs. Chrysler said finally. “They’re bound to be familiar with all sorts of minerals.”
Katherine ruminated on this awhile. “That is a pretty insightful contribution, Ruben,” she said. “But where to find one…?”
“We passed a row of doctors’ offices on Low Street earlier,” Mrs. Chrysler recalled.
“Well, that settles it. Back to Low Street.”
“I think they’ll be closed now, you know.”
“Got anywhere else to go, do we?”