SIX THE DOOR
The mine mouth breathed warm air into the cold desert.
Arlo smelled wet stone, fuel, and something sweet beneath it. The black opening at the end of the shale track had been fenced years ago, but the chain-link now lay flat on the ground.
Inside, a pale glow moved against the walls.
Tomas tied the red cord around his waist and handed the other end to Arlo. “If I say pull, you pull. If I say run, you run. If I stop talking, you leave.”
“No,” Arlo said.
Tomas met his eyes. “That is not how this works.”
They went in.
The first chamber held Gerald Holt’s bicycle helmet. The second held shoes, wallets, necklaces, and objects too personal to name. Farther back, they found Chenoa’s jacket, torn open along one sleeve.
A voice called from the dark.
“Arlo.”
It sounded like his mother.
Arlo gripped the cord and kept walking.
At the end of the tunnel was a natural shaft, black and deep. A thin membrane stretched over the opening, shivering like oil on water. Shapes pressed against it from below.
The winged watcher clung to the ceiling above the shaft.
Tomas raised the bell. “The noise opened it. The noise will close it.”
“That is a bell,” Cawley said.
“It is iron. The sound is only the invitation.”
Tomas rang it.
The mine erupted.
Pale hands pushed through the membrane. The Walker burst from a side tunnel, low on four limbs. Cawley fired twice, driving it back long enough for Arlo to shove the black stone into the center of the membrane.
The stone caught. The surface pulled tight around it.
The watcher dropped from the ceiling.
Tomas stepped between it and Arlo. For the first time, his eyes flashed gold.
“You have your count,” he told it.
The watcher’s chest-eyes flared.
Then the Hairy Man’s roar came from outside the mine.
It had broken the cord.