Auraria: A Novel

by Tim Westover

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Riders poured off the mountains and into the lowlands, minutes ahead of the flood waters. But instead of inspiring people to seek higher ground, the alarms drew them to the shores of the river below the Terrible Cascade. Families packed umbrellas and picnic baskets for the spectacle. Entrepreneurs brought watercolors and charcoal pencils to illustrate the astounding scene, hoping to sell their drawings to newspapers yearning for sensation.

  The crowds waited, but there was no crashing wall of water. The river bubbled above its banks then spread far across the level bottomland. It was a disappointing scene—less dramatic than what had transpired on the dam itself. The flood waters got into the dusty roads and loamy farm soil, making swathes of mud. Cart wheels got stuck. Best dresses, which spectators had worn on the chance that they would be drowned in the floods and that those who recovered their bodies would appreciate their sartorial elegance, were stained at the hems.

  Auraria’s reputation as a gold-mining place was not forgotten, and some of the spectators swore that the spreading waters had a golden sheen to them. A few people brought washtubs or frying pans and tried to pan some of the water that dampened their feet, but in the lowlands, gold panning was not a common skill. The panners caught only bits of mica and shiny shards of iron and steel and minute yolk-colored flecks that could only be discerned by the sharpest-eyed children among them.

  The only report of treasure was highly suspect. A small boy had been chasing rabbits when the ankle-deep water came rolling through to tickle his toes. He returned home bearing on his back a gasping catfish larger than himself. The boy’s mother, filleting the fish for supper, cut into its belly. Inside were a hundred dollars of gold dust and six coins decorated with pictures of bumblebees, terrapins, and chestnut trees.

  •

  In an hour, Lake Trahlyta drained completely. Most of the crowd had dispersed long before then. After the novelty had worn off, watching the water run out of the lake was no more enthralling than watching a bathtub drain.

  The waters left behind a sodden mess in the valley: black oozing mud, half-rotten stumps, gasping aquatic life, and the old forms of existence before the lake. These combined to form a powerful odor. The guests of the Queen of the Mountains waved their hands in front of their noses and called for sweet smells. Even a rag soaked in the sulfur waters, they said, was preferable to what came up from the lake. Five days of rain had not been enough to force gold seekers off the mountainside, but a whiff of the valley’s new aroma sent them fleeing.

  In front of the Queen of the Mountains, a line of carriages stood waiting for Saratoga trunks and their human companions. Those who could not get a cab left on horseback or on mules or stuffed into wagons behind their possessions. Barons and baronesses trudged behind wheelbarrows that held a season’s worth of clothes.

  Townsfolk trickled back into the valley, exploring what had been revealed. Under all the half-decomposed muck of leaves and limbs, they could follow the familiar desire trails: paths of courting, bootlegging, and ginsenging. From old cornfields, root cellars, barns, and porches, they gathered bass and mussels. Charred foundations harbored pink-flanked salmon and cherry-red crawfish; freshwater shrimp bobbed in glass bottles. From the entrance to an abandoned mine, brook and rainbow trout spilled forth. Inside the Cobalt Springs Lake swam a trio of catfish, circling each other and struggling for room. An enormous catfish had expired on the town square. The townsfolk tipped it into the Lost Creek, reduced to its historic dimensions. It followed its old mazy motion along the valley floor, past the foundations of old Auraria, and then between the divided halves of the dam and down the Terrible Cascade, through the soggy lowlands and out to the ocean far beyond.

  •

  In the aftermath of the dam’s bursting, Holtzclaw could not find Shadburn. He was not in his quarters at the top of the hotel, nor in the New Rock Falls. There, the only spirits were Mr. Bad Thing and Hulen, the headless plat-eye. The former was packing barware into a straw-lined crate; the latter took pictures down from the wall.

  Holtzclaw walked the perimeter of the lake, searching Shadburn’s known fishing spots. He found his way to the artificial promontory and the boat dock from which the Maiden of the Lake had begun its ill-fated last cruise. The love-apple bush there looked desiccated; the fullness of its fruit was past, and rotting remnants hung from the branches, quivering and complaining. Amazingly, the dock still stood, despite the forces of the evacuating lake. It jutted precariously into empty space; eighty feet below, a rill tumbled toward the main branch of the Lost Creek. Holtzclaw walked out to the end, testing the sturdiness of the structure.

  The valley, for once, was clear of mist. He scanned the entire valley from this high perch, looking from the dam, to the blasted site of the Hag’s Head, to the top of Sinking Mountain, to the Cobalt Springs Lake, to the clearing where the Queen of the Mountains stood. Tiny specks of people spread out over the oozing mud; another line of specks followed the roads away.

  “Don’t fall, James,” said the princess, from behind Holtzclaw.

  “I don’t intend to,” he said.

  “It’s just that you’ve fallen many times. Muddy cart tracks. Wet rocks. Bowled over in an explosion. You even fell into that love-apple bush. You’re like a foal that has not worked out the mechanics of its feet.”

  Holtzclaw teetered back to solid ground. Trahlyta caught his hand, and he felt a vast relief.

  “Are you looking for your employer?” said the princess.

  “He’s somewhat less luminous and therefore more difficult to spot than yours, Princess.”

  “Shadburn’s gone back to the Raven Cliffs, to the moon maidens’ old resort.”

  Holtzclaw sighed. “I’d thought as much. I don’t know how to get there. I don’t suppose you’d take me back to the lake of gold, eh?”

  “If you like,” said Trahlyta.

  “Must I cover my head? Close my eyes? Ride in darkness to keep the secret?”

  “Not at all. You can draw a map if you like, leave signposts.”

  “Shadburn went through so much trouble to hide it away.”

  “He needn’t have worried. It is a very different place now.”

  “I’ll need light sources, provisions, equipment, food, water. Last time, I was caught unaware by the difficult voyage.”

  The princess waved her hand. “Last time, you took the difficult way.”

  They walked together slowly over the land. She led him around a rock that resembled a long, slender animal. They wandered over a ridge line made of muck that was being erased by a cheerful spring. From her footsteps sprang small cobalt-blue flowers. Holtzclaw stepped carefully so as not to crush the fresh and fragile blooms.

  Sooner than he anticipated, they were at the cliffs. The eyes of many ravens were upon him. There was a single caw, unintelligible, but the other thousands were silent. Holtzclaw and the princess slipped into darkness, a pale white light illuminating their path. They traveled through impossibly narrow cracks. Tunnels led to tunnels. Holtzclaw saw signs and symbols: a stylized lizard, hieroglyphics, a lifelike charcoal drawing of a four-fingered hand. If these were secret tunnels, they were still well-traveled.

  Then they came to the great domed cavern with its pipes and cottages. A waterfall traced an arc from the high ceiling to the large stone structure that crowned the cave. Green lights gleamed from every window. And on seeing it again, Holtzclaw was astounded. The roofline of the building, the wide verandas with overhanging eaves for shade, though there was no sun underground, and even the long staircase up to the grand entrance—all were familiar. This building was the twin of the Queen of the Mountains. Shadburn had designed his hotel, consciously or unconsciously, as an homage to this underground place. Holtzclaw wondered if there was an older, nobler original—a palace made of lunar marble or cast in pure silver or gold.

  “Why did the moon maidens abandon this place?” said Holtzclaw.

  “Taste and fashion changed,” said the
princess. “Rumors and memories clung to the walls. The birds too caused trouble. When the Raven King made his pact with the chickadees, there was a great deal of squawking before the territories were settled. But the most profound reason, I suppose, was an uncharitable spirit that arose among the holiday-goers. The moon maidens, even the sickest, didn’t want to be near others who were sick. How foolish! Their condition isn’t even catching—at least, not in a casual way. Those who weren’t here for the cure, who were here for congresses or leisure, demanded that the sick be put out of the hotel, into these cabins. It’s fortunate that your hotel never reached that point, James. It would have made you sick in your heart.”

  The tumbling waterfall ceased for a moment, and Holtzclaw and the princess went through an archway that was revealed behind it. They followed a spiral staircase, which descended much more directly than the wide, shallow flight that Holtzclaw and Abigail had traveled during his earlier visit. Still, he grunted and puffed from the exertion.

  Holtzclaw took a dose of Effervescent Brain Salts from the bottle in his coat pocket. The princess took it from him and poured a measure of the salts into her own mouth. Her eyes bulged in surprise, as though cold water had been splashed in her face.

  Before the salts could even charge his extremities, Holtzclaw and Trahlyta reached the underground lake, though it was almost unrecognizable. All signs of gold were gone. Instead, the lake lapped quietly inside a glistening white chamber made of marble and quartz. Square columns, which had been buried in runoff before, supported vaults in the ceiling. All the rock was polished smooth, but the angles were imprecise—the polishing had been done by flowing water.

  “Isn’t it so much more pleasant?” said Trahlyta. “The flood carried all the waste to sea. The pressure of the lake above us broke up the jam and swirled the gold into suspension. And when the dam burst, the quick emptying cleaned this chamber to a high polish.”

  Holtzclaw ran his hand over one of the columns. It felt as smooth as silk.

  “You aren’t disappointed, are you?” said the princess.

  “Disappointed? No, I don’t believe that I am.”

  “You’ve saved me a millennium of work, James. That isn’t much time for pharaohs and princesses—we are patient—but mortals, like our employers, are more demanding.”

  “So my dam and my lake were turned into a scouring brush?”

  “Shadburn’s lake and dam,” she corrected. “Yes, and a very good one, too. It’s cleaned not only this reservoir, but a dozen others, and every rivulet and vein in between.”

  Holtzclaw walked to the lakeshore and lifted some of the water in his cupped palms. It had no color, no smell, no taste. He turned back to the princess, but she was gone.

  In her place, gazing into darkness, was Shadburn. He was sitting on the clean marble floor, cross-legged, leaning his back against a strongbox, tossing some shimmering object up and down in one hand. A bright lantern glowed behind him, turning his bald head into a burning lightbulb. Shadburn did not stir from his thoughts until Holtzclaw put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Oh, hello, hello!” said Shadburn. “Some pumpkins! What a show, eh?” He threw the shiny object that he’d been juggling out into the lake. It skipped twice, then sank.

  “A spectacular success,” said Holtzclaw. “Just what you wanted.”

  “I suppose it is, Holtzclaw. Yes, a success. Every evidence, washed away, and even more thoroughly than I’d planned. A total, permanent success. And we didn’t need a hotel at all, did we? A lake and a dam were enough. How did I let you convince me that we needed a hotel?”

  Holtzclaw kept a diplomatic silence.

  Shadburn smiled. “There’s not a crumb left in the Queen of the Mountains either. Just enough for two third-class tickets back to Milledgeville. We’ll have to be more careful with money, in the future. It’s simply splendid.” He stood, hooked his thumbs under his suspenders, and gave them a jaunty snap. “Say, Holtzclaw, you aren’t hungry, are you? I’m famished.”

  He opened the lid of the strongbox. Inside was a picnic of two peaches, a pint of mushrooms, and a sheep-fruit. The only cutlery was a rock hammer.

  “I forgot to take it out,” said Shadburn.

  •

  Of all the many loose ends he and Shadburn were leaving, the cairn troubled Holtzclaw the most. Future travelers may take it for a meaningful monument and give it undue reverence. Someone might try grave-robbing, and he might be unlucky enough to find something—a cache of coins, a spool of thread, a stairwell.

  Holtzclaw picked up some of the smaller stones from the cairn and tossed them out into the woods. The larger ones he carried away and dropped haphazardly. He buried some under handfuls of dirt, and others he wedged beneath young trees, hoping that roots would envelop them.

  “They say it’s bad luck to take the stones away,” said Abigail. She’d followed him up the path, or perhaps she’d only been passing by chance.

  “We said it was bad luck. We invented that,” said Holtzclaw. He stood back from the scene and tried to judge if it looked natural enough. “Well, what do you think?”

  Abigail scanned from side to side and shook her head in the negative. “It started out as a snare for the tourists, but now it might as well be a natural feature, like the Hag’s Head or the Terrible Cascade. In twenty years, no one will be able to tell the difference.”

  “What will you do now, Ms. Thompson? There’s no hotel to run anymore.”

  “Of course, there is. I’ll put back the Old Rock Falls. The floors and daguerreotypes are salvageable. I’ll build it right where it used to be.”

  “Back to the way it was, then? It will be like we were never here.”

  “Not quite. I haven’t dreamed about gold since the dam break.”

  “And I don’t suppose you will ever again. It’s a new life for you.”

  “Nothing’s ever new.” Abigail picked up a white rock—a chipped piece of leftover marble made poignant by a fairy tale—and folded it into Holtzclaw’s hand. “A souvenir.”