Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Yeah, I know.” Like her own daydream of becoming some kind of successful professional. She’d have had to start fifteen years ago. Tamara felt the approach of a heavy depression. “You don’t believe there’s anything strange about Iron Mountain?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “Your husband told me there were ghosts up at the mine.”

  “They don’t hurt nobody. Just poor lost souls got stuck here somehow. Mostly the old-timers. Fred says he’s seen Abner up there some nights.”

  “Abner Fistler? Did he die of starvation like Miss Kopecky?”

  “Just the opposite. Sick in bed and eatin’ off a tray’s what I heard. Choked on some food when he got a coughing spell. But them apartments never been lucky. That’s why we built this. Figured if we ever left, company’d buy us out. Now, the Baggettes, they—”

  “Mrs. Hanley, about the dreams everyone seems—”

  “Ain’t so bad here. They’re worse closer in to the mountain where you are. Folks used to say when we first came that people slept better before they got electricity out here. Which wasn’t till the thirties. My daughter claims she don’t have half the dreams she used to when she was a kid here, and don’t remember the ones she does. Could just be ’cause she’s got a job and family now and more on her mind.” She poured coffee for them both and let a whining German shepherd in the back door. “Dumb dog doesn’t want to go out at night anymore. If he does, he wants right back in again.”

  “I don’t understand you people. You see ghosts, dream, sleepwalk, and everybody pretends it’s all normal.”

  “Now, Mrs. Whelan, you’re old enough to have noticed that people can get used to most anything if it comes on slow enough. Look at the cities, where they take murder, rape, stealing, like it was regular. Much rather live out here with a few ghosts and dreams. ’Course, if you ask me, things have speeded up some since Jerusha Fistler moved here. She don’t belong to the place, neither. Maybe she’s enough of an irritator she stirs things up.”

  The wind was chilly when Tamara crossed the limestone road. As usual after a chat with Agnes, she felt frustrated and defeated. Perhaps Fred Hanley’s hearing problem was a blessing.

  Miriam Kopecky’s golden sheers were pulled across the window, but Tamara saw the shadows of two people behind them as she stepped up onto the porch. Inside, Jerusha Fistler stood with a coat over one arm, both hands clutching the back of a chair. The air seemed charged.

  With the plumping of face and figure, Jerusha was turning into a remarkably beautiful woman, and oddly made more so now by a look of fury that caused Tamara to flinch. All the laughter and mockery were gone.

  “Deloris Hope tells me,” Jerusha said slowly and as if biting down on rage, “that Russel Burnham is planning to close the six-hundred-foot portal, block it up with cement like the three-hundred-foot portal.”

  “Not Russ. It’s the company. B & H has opened a new strip mine, and it’s easier and cheaper to mine. Russ expects to get word any day of the closing of Iron Mountain. Mrs. Hanley thinks the company will give us six months’ notice. But we’ll all have to leave here when—”

  “They can’t do this.” Dark hair, pale skin, bright red lips and nails, dangling earrings, tight-fitting flowered dress, stiletto heels held on by the thinnest straps. Did she have a date on Saturday night?

  “I’m afraid they can. Can I get you a cup of coffee or … were you going out?” Tamara hoped it was the latter.

  “Deloris and I were going to the Stage Stop. I felt like dancing,” she said vaguely. “How can they do this? The mine has been here since 1905. Won’t the government stop them?”

  “I don’t think the government has any authority in this matter. The company leases the land and pays to keep the mine open. If the mine no longer pays a return and there’s another source of limestone, there’d be no reason for them to continue at Iron Mountain.”

  “But I cannot leave here.”

  “Russ says a Wyoming reclamation law would make them raze the buildings. Everybody’d have to move.”

  “Raze?”

  “Tear them down, level them. I assume so that they wouldn’t become dangerous eyesores.” Would that mean future generations would never see a ghost town?

  Jerusha sat in the chair and let her coat drop to the floor. “I do not feel like dancing now.”

  For some minutes she stared inward, her eyes unfocused, and ingored Tamara’s comments and questions. Finally she picked up her coat and rose in one graceful movement, focusing on Tamara. Her glance moved to Adrian. “I see that I mus’ hurry up my plans.”

  21

  Hoarfrost made weed stalks and pods, tree limbs and leaves look like ghostly lace against the darkness before dawn. Tamara ran away from Iron Mountain, cold air burning in her lungs, warm breath steaming on the air. The prairie wind ran with her, pushed her from behind, whispered at her side. It made cold things crack and creak in protest.

  But on the way back, the prairie wind was in her face, made her eyes water and nose run. It tried to hold her away. The sun was behind her, and the hoarfrost shimmered and fell to the wind. The mountain was bright with splashes of red and yellow and the white of remaining frost patches. The sky behind it swirled with clouds. Jagged streaks of clear sky separated the clouds and radiated out like lightning flashes, almost too symmetrically to be natural. Dried leaves clacked and clattered on the cottonwoods along the creek, and the creek ran very low.

  Tamara was tired on her return, but not sated. She walked into the backyard and Alice leaped in delight, clicked his tiny hooves together, butted the fence, and baaed a greeting. She pulled some weeds and stuck them through the wire for him to nibble. “Are all goats as happy as you?”

  His little devil face with the dark slits in the yellow eyes surrounded by black and topped with horns should have looked evil, but she’d grown so fond of Alice, even his goat smell seemed pleasant. “It’s after a run, and I still feel as jumpy as you act. Think I’ll climb that mountain. Pick you some more weeds when I come down, okay?”

  Alice’s objections followed her up the side of Iron Mountain. The funny cloud patterns were not as obvious from here. She wondered if they meant snow. And she wondered what she and Adrian would do if the mine closed. Perhaps Mr. Curtis would have to find her something in Cheyenne for what was left of her contract and the school year.

  Several times as it hairpinned up the mountain, she crossed a dirt track that had once been a road. The body of an ancient roadster with scraps of cloth or canvas still clinging to it lay off to the side. The foundation of a cabin filled with rotting boards. A gully cluttered with empty cans, their color a uniform rust. Some miner’s dump? Could those all be pork-and-bean cans? Two leaning fence posts. Some barbed wire. A leather strap that looked like it might have belonged to a horse. And holes everywhere, some hidden by weeds and rocks. Others filled with debris.

  As she neared the top, piles of crushed limestone below stood out like sugar and the prairie stretched in gentle rolls to every horizon. There were some ranch buildings, dots of cattle, and a ribbed windmill to her right—probably where Mike and Rene Nygard lived. The road to Cheyenne shot straight toward the eastern sky and the one to Horse Creek angled off to her left.

  Tamara didn’t know what she’d expected to see from the top of the mountain, but she hadn’t expected to feel so alone and small. Of course, with the morning and a rested mind she didn’t see danger and conspiracy in everything. There would be an element of the unusual and coincidental in a place with so few inhabitants. And people had dreams and claimed to see ghosts in places other than Iron Mountain. Still, she was uneasy.

  That intuition was at work, the one most women supposedly put their faith in, and it told her something dreadful was about to happen. She’d had these intuitive warnings before, and they’d been invariably wrong. When something did happen, she was taken as much by surprise as anyone.

  Perhaps it was just that emergency resources were so far away. Something comfort
ing in having police and fire departments and hospitals close to hand. Perhaps it was just that Tamara felt Jerusha was in some way responsible for the death of Miriam Kopecky and probably Abner. And she didn’t know how to keep Adrian away from Jerusha. It could even be that Tamara, too, sensed something evil inside this mountain.

  She started down, idly tracing the outlines of the awful-yellow school when she should have been watching her step. She was even higher than Augie Mapes’s television antenna. What possible harm could Jerusha do Adrian? Certainly not starve her to death. Adrian would have to be tied to the bed to keep her out of the refrigerator.

  If someone like Jerusha had tied Miss Kopecky into her bed and untied her just before Russ found her … But any kind of binding would have left marks on the skin. Someone would have heard her cries for help. Unless she’d been drugged. The Hanleys’ dog ran up and down along its clothesline tether, barking wildly. Tamara pitched forward onto her face and chest as something caught her toe. She slid downward toward a yawning hole along with a bunch of rubble she’d knocked loose in her fall.

  She grabbed the root of a gnarled bush that grew in groves low to the ground. When her feet swung around past her, she rolled over and dug in the heels of her running shoes. The hole was an uneven diameter of perhaps five feet, fairly open. She could see into it only partially.

  Tamara waited. Her nose and chin felt scraped, burned. Her frightened nervous system struggled to recover some sense of equilibrium. Still she waited for the sound of the debris, which had tumbled into the hole just before she almost had, to hit bottom … knowing that if she hadn’t heard it by now she wouldn’t, but not ready to accept that fact.

  The twinge of a stretched muscle in her armpit. Her wrist threatened to separate. She reached for another root with the other hand and pushed sideways with her heels. A loosened rock bounced off a neighbor and cleared the edge of the hole. Again no sound of its landing.

  Her escape route brought her to the side of the opening and would have been less difficult had she not felt trembly and ill. She peered over the edge. And heard a rumbling sound, muffled. And felt cold damp air streaming from its depths. Probably some kind of ventilation system used in the mine. But the three-hundred-foot portal was closed. Could this come all the way from the lower shafts?

  Retying her shoelaces to be sure they wouldn’t trip her up, Tamara determined to walk carefully back down. On no condition would Adrian be allowed on the mountain again. Russ Burnham and B & H simply had to put a grating or something over this hole. She couldn’t imagine how such a dangerous condition had been allowed to exist.

  The muffled rumbling grew fainter, and she turned to listen. A woman with tightly curled gray hair rose up on the air stream coming out of the hole. A pink velour robe covered a nightgown with gathers at the wrists and throat. Tall. Rather gaunt. Lips beginning to wrinkle with age. She stared through Tamara as if sightless. Tamara could see through her, too. It was Sunday morning. Broad daylight.

  Boulders, bushes, weeds, clouds—all showed clearly through the gray curls, the pink velour robe. The woman turned and walked on air through the very shrub that Tamara had clung to a moment before. Then she evaporated.

  Tamara’s screams hung in the wind and chased her down the mountain. For all her careful intent, she flung herself along the most direct route to safety, ankles twisting, detouring for obstacles only at the last minute. She wasn’t aware of when her screams stopped, but when she reached the gondola cars and rusted metal tracks above Alice’s pen, all she could hear was the wind and her heart.

  Even from here she could see over the duplex’s roof to the school, the Hanleys’, Augie’s trailers. Most of the settlement. A normal early-morning scene for Sunday. No one peering out a window or running across a yard to investigate screams on the mountain. Because they didn’t want to get involved? Because they were used to odd happenings here and no longer paid attention? Whatever the reason, people minded their own business altogether too well in this place. Would anyone have investigated Miss Kopecky’s calls for help from her bed if she’d made them?

  Still breathing hard, Tamara walked thoughtfully into the backyard. Not even Alice appeared to notice anything abnormal. Perhaps the wind had blown her screams away and no one had heard them. Perhaps Adrian should return to Iowa City and live with her grandmother until Tamara was transferred to a different school. Adrian still slept when Tamara showered and began preparing breakfast.

  Augie Mapes arrived to take their order for a Sunday paper before they’d finished it. He was on his way to Horse Creek for some, and he too acted as if this were a perfectly normal Sunday morning.

  Tamara explained the scratches on her face were due to a fall on the mountain and warned Adrian that it was a dangerous place. Then she called Russ Burnham and told him of her near-disaster on the mountain.

  “No ventilation holes on top there. And I told you about the dangerous holes all over that hill and to stay off it.”

  “Russ, I heard machinery rumbling from clear down in the mine.”

  “No machinery running. It’s Sunday. Nobody in there to run any. Wouldn’t hear it that far up anyway. Hell, we’re working six hundred feet.”

  “I demand you investigate, and today.”

  “Oh, shit. Anything else?”

  “Was Miriam Kopecky wearing a heavy pink robe and a long white nightgown gathered at the neck and wrists when you found her dead?”

  A long pause. Finally an exhalation, and his voice dropped an octave. “Augie tell you?”

  “I saw her this morning. By that hole you’re going to barricade.”

  “She’s on the mountain too? Christ, what next?”

  Tamara put a roast in the oven and cored some apples for baking. When the papers came, she and Adrian stretched out on the Persian rug in a patch of sun to read. The pork soon began to splatter. It all seemed natural and cozy, made it hard to believe in the bizarre events of the morning. So many unusual things had occurred, maybe she was merely getting used to them, as Mrs. Hanley predicted. She hadn’t even asked Russ or Augie why they hadn’t heard her screams.

  Regardless of the morning, Tamara planned to spend some long idle hours with the thick paper. Iron Mountain, Wyoming, had swallowed her up, and she’d lost touch with the rest of the world.

  They read contentedly until Tamara rose to add carrots, potatoes, and onions to the roast. The apartment took on the sweet, tangy aroma of roasting pork and cinnamon apples. Adrian’s stomach gurgled. Tamara had begun to feel listless and stiff from too much relaxing when, in a world-news section, she came across an item toward the bottom of a page:

  BRITISH DESTROYER

  RUMORED MISSING

  IN CARIBBEAN

  Belize City: Undisclosed sources here today report that a British naval vessel has been lost in the waters off the coast of the tiny Central American nation of Belize, formerly known as British Honduras. HMS Gloucestershire, a guided-missile destroyer, which normally carries a complement of 230 men, was known to have been on maneuvers in the area. The 410-foot, 3,500-ton vessel is believed to be armed with missiles, long-range guns, and to be carrying a helicopter. The Gloucestershire was last sighted in an area of sea known as the Metnál, an extensive region notorious for its many coral reefs and shipwrecks.

  Although officials refuse to comment on the incident, a massive sea and air search is reportedly under way, with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy operating out of Florida and Guantánamo.

  The Metnál has long been believed by some to be too far west to come into the range of the controversial Bermuda Triangle. Others believe it forms a western corner of the supposed Triangle, where such disappearances are touted as being more common than elsewhere.

  When an official at the Admiralty Office in London was asked to comment on the possible similarity to Triangle disappearances, he answered with a brief “Rubbish!”

  “If you want to eat, you’ll have to get dressed, lazybones,” Tamara said, and rose to set the table, pou
r the milk, find the horseradish.

  In her dream, the Dixie woman had told Backra of a missing British destroyer. Mayan Cay was in the Caribbean off the coast of Belize. What connection could that place have with this one? Why did she dream that Backra dreamed of Iron Mountain? It all made no sense. But apparently HMS Gloucestershire had really disappeared, and she’d dreamed of it before she could have known it.

  A gust of wind swirled around the duplex and buzzed in the weather stripping.

  If the British destroyer was real, did that mean Backra was real?

  22

  Alice was gone. Tamara looked out the window and noticed the empty pen, realized she hadn’t heard his bleating in the last few days. Adrian said that Jerusha simply wouldn’t say.

  Every time she looked out in the backyard now, Tamara felt as if she’d let down a friend. How she’d become so involved with a goat, she didn’t know. But then, life had come to make less and less sense the longer she lived in Iron Mountain. Finally she stomped over to Jerusha’s. Jerusha raised thin perfect eyebrows and Tamara felt instantly silly. Alice was, after all, the other woman’s goat.

  “I sold him.”

  “Sold Alice? How could you? To whom? You never go anywhere.”

  The vaporizer chugged steam into the room. The night-blooming cereus seemed to have grown more leaves to crowd the light from the windows. The sun had gone down behind Iron Mountain. Jerusha sat at the table under a hanging fixture with a metal shade that spread the light in a circular pool below. The apartment was overwarm.

  “I will miss Alice too,” she said sadly. “But time is running out, isn’t it, Tamara?”

  “Running out for what? And if you miss Alice, why’d you sell him?”

  Jerusha rose and began sponging off leaves on the cereus. She was tall enough that by standing on tiptoe and stretching she could reach the highest leaves. “My one experiment that did not fail,” she crooned.