“Way I see it, the mob can go back and forth on that machine without having to go through the metal detectors at airports and can carry their guns with ’em this way.” Russ nodded at his own logic.
“Ain’t that the place Jerusha tried to send us in our heads?” Agnes asked Tamara. “At the last party, when somebody fell against a table, knocked over the candles and all. And burned the place down.”
“I didn’t live here then.” She was surprised to find a drink in her hand and to realize she’d been sipping it.
“Oh, yeah. Augie, wasn’t that the place at the last party, where—?”
“Sure sounds like it. Lucky nobody was killed.”
“Jerusha and Abner used to live next door before the fire,” Agnes explained.
“I dream about that Mayan place,” Will Baggette offered. “All the time. It’s an island.”
“You do?” His mother looked startled to find him still in the room. “How come you never told me?”
“You never asked.”
“Where’s Adrian?” Tamara set down her glass and pointed to the place where her daughter had slept at the table. “Jerusha made her into a ghost like she did Miriam Kopecky!”
“Oh, God, here she goes again.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going home before the fire starts this time.” Darrell Johnson went into Jerusha’s bedroom and returned with his coat and those of his wife and son. Helen gathered the place settings she’d brought for her family and found her casserole dish.
“Thanks for the party. Nice plant,” Darrell said with little conviction, and pushed a sleepy family out the door ahead of him.
Nancy Baggette tried to get Saul to leave too. When he wouldn’t, she took her boys and left without him.
“Be home as soon as I convince old Russ here that his hole’s gone,” he yelled after her.
“I think there is only one way to prove it,” Jerusha said. “And that is to move the party to the mountain.”
“Company policy don’t allow civilians in the mine. Insurance company—”
“Russel …” Jerusha took hold of his shoulders, turned him to face her, and said in her cheerful lilt, “If you refuse me this, I will do it anyway, and I will make your life very miserable.”
Tamara lost track of some time, because the next thing she knew, Augie was carrying the folded playpen, Deloris held Ruthie and pushed Bennie. She said she’d be back for Vinnie and had no intention of going into the mountain. Then Tamara stood in Jerusha’s bedroom, where the vine was even thicker, the blossoms bigger, and the scent deadening. Adrian slept under Jerusha’s coverlet, and Vinnie slept beside her.
“Don’t they look cute and innocent when they sleep?” Tamara’s tongue was too swollen to get around the th’s properly. “I really don’t drink like this very often.”
“Fresh air’ll do us both good.” Agnes Hanley helped her into a coat sleeve. “Adrian’ll be all right till we get back.”
“I can’t leave her here with Jerusha. Jerusha’s evil, bad person.”
“She’s going with us into the mountain to find Russ’s hole, remember? She won’t be here to do anything.” Agnes and Tamara were suddenly helping each other down the wooden steps of the utility porch, and Tamara took thankful bites of the cold fresh air.
Jerusha walked ahead between Russ and Saul, linked them with her arms, and made them walk slower so the other two could catch up.
Saul Baggette stumbled suddenly and went down, taking Jerusha with him and forcing Russ to his knees. There was much good-natured cursing and insults.
“Some night watchman you got, Burnham. Hasn’t even come to see what all the commotion’s about.”
“Probably having coffee in the guard shack with his ear aids off.”
“How come he never brings the dog up, Agnes? Thought that’s what he bought him for.”
“Dog won’t go past the school no more. Gettin’ so’s he won’t even go out to pee-pee if I don’t give him a kick. Damn dog.”
They stumbled through shadows and guided each other over rough places in the path down to the giant doors of the six-hundred-foot portal. Russ opened them with a flourish and then handed out helmets and lanterns.
“Company policy,” he told Tamara, placed a helmet on her head and a kiss on the end of her nose.
Five pairs of shoes crunching along the tracks echoed and magnified to make them sound like an army. Lanterns, held haphazardly, danced on walls and ceiling and ground, and cast deformed shadow shapes.
Russ and his underground manager argued over several turnings, but Russ finally found the lantern he’d left outside the round room with the machine in it. “And here’s the shovel I used.”
“How’d you get out with no lantern?”
“One minute I was in South America and the next I was outside on the mountain behind Jerusha’s house. Heard the party and headed for people.” Both men ran their lanterns over the end of the tunnel. “Well, I’ll be pussy-whipped.”
“Told you. It’s clean.” Saul set his lantern down and tried pounding on the wall and pushing at it, till his face turned red.
“Yeah, too clean.” Russ struck at it repeatedly with the shovel, then put his ear up against it.
“Who do you suppose put things all back together?”
“The mob. What I can’t figure is how come we never see them coming and going.”
“Mob of what?” Jerusha asked Tamara.
“Criminals.”
Jerusha flattened herself against the wall at the end of the tunnel.
“Hear anything?” Agnes sat down hard on the ground with a grunt of surprise. She looked at her lantern as if she’d forgotten she’d carried it in with her.
“I can feel it. I can feel the power of Russel’s machine stronger than I’ve ever known it.” The melody in Jerusha’s voice slid into rapture. “Tamara, are you thinking of Adrian?”
“Ummmm?” Tamara leaned against a cold, dank-smelling wall and thought more of falling asleep. “Adrian?”
“Yes, your daughter. You do love her, don’t you? So much that you can feel her now?”
“I love my Fred,” Agnes said matter-of-factly, and listed far to port. “Most of the time.”
“Tamara, come over by me and think of Adrian.” Jerusha’s eyes were dark and compelling, her voice soothing. “Stand right here and let’s think of Adrian together. Adrian.”
“Adrian.” Tamara found her back pressed against the end of the tunnel.
“Fred,” Agnes insisted.
“Don’t you feel the power?” Jerusha asked them.
“I feel it,” Saul said.
Tamara blinked as Agnes and the floor trembled.
“Holy … me too. Come on!” Russ pulled Agnes to her feet and started down the tunnel with her. Agnes’ helmet had fallen off, and it jumped around as if it were alive. The mountain shivered. Pieces of dirt and rock clunked and pinged on Tamara’s helmet. Saul grabbed her arm, and Jerusha’s.
The young widow pulled away. “No, not when I am so close.”
“Follow Russ. I’ll get her. Hurry!”
But Tamara, woozy as she was, knew he’d need help with Jerusha Fistler. Rocks exploded from a corner as part of the roof came down. One hit Jerusha on the back and head and literally pushed her at her rescuers. They each grabbed an arm and dragged the woman along the tunnel, leaving her lantern behind, choking on dust, sobering with every running step on and in a pitching earth.
Tamara made a squeaking noise every time something hit her body. She expected to die momentarily, to be crushed, suffocated. And now she could think of her daughter with no trouble. She couldn’t die because of Adrian, but she was about to anyway. All that mining of a mountain since 1905 to hollow it out so that it could come down on her now. Why hadn’t she turned the car around and driven away that first day she’d seen it, as Adrian had wanted her to?
Tamara lost her lantern, and they were guided only by Saul’s. She continued to help drag the deadweigh
t of the woman she hated. Someone in her head said, “Malfunction. Do not enter. Macrordial systems repairing. Do not enter funnel. Repeat, do not—”
But Tamara drowned it out screaming, “Adrian!”
31
Russ deposited Agnes on the tracks outside of the portal and raced back in to help the others. He was sweat-cold sober. Clouds of dust came at him up the tunnel as if moved by a giant fan. The ground jumped up to jar his legs whenever he stepped down, much as he would expect it to do in an earthquake. Tracks buckled, ties splintered. Just before the line of overhead lights went out, he saw them straggling toward him, two dragging the third between them.
And then, instantly, Russ was outside with Agnes—not sure how. The three others were with him—all dark shadows, one of them unconscious. The earth stilled. Russ looked up, expecting to see the mountain diminished, caved in upon itself. Although sandstone dust still puffed along its moonlit side, the mountain remained the same.
“Did you hear a voice like God or somebody telling you not to go into the tunnels?” Saul asked.
“I thought it said ‘funnel,’” Russ said. “It was the same voice I heard in that round room, and it wasn’t any god. He would’ve known we were in there already and trying to get out.”
“Then just how did we get out?” the teacher asked.
Russ didn’t have an answer. He helped Baggette get the limp Jerusha up to the first level, where some of the older buildings had tumbled. Dust on the air here too, but the yard lights were still on. He wondered where Fred Hanley was. Even if his night watchman hadn’t heard anything, he would have felt the disturbance beneath his feet. The concrete plug in the three-hundred-foot portal had buckled. A pile of debris spilled out the opening, to sprawl for yards. Russ couldn’t understand what was holding the mountain up.
Darrell and Augie came running toward them as they reached Russ’s house. They’d loaded all the women and children they could find into the back of a pickup and had Saul’s wife drive out onto the prairie and away from the mountain.
“I’ve called Gridley from the office in Cheyenne, and the sheriff,” Darrell said.
“Adrian …?” the schoolteacher asked in a dazed voice. “Is Adrian in the truck?”
“Ain’t she with you?” Augie looked over the bedraggled group. “When Deloris went back for Vinnie, she said Adrian was gone, and we checked at your place.”
“I knew it. Where is she?” Tamara Whelan pummeled the unconscious woman Russ and Saul held between them. “I knew it!”
Russ had Augie take Jerusha into Cheyenne in Russ’s truck. How was he going to explain the presence of civilians in the tunnels to his supervisors? This probably meant the end of his future with B & H.
He, Darrell, and Agnes helped Tamara look for her daughter. If she sleepwalked that mountain tonight, the kid was in real danger. They searched all the buildings in the settlement first. There were noticeable cracks in the walls of all the homes next to the mountain. But the Hanleys’ house across the road seemed barely touched, and Augie’s TV antenna still rose straight and true into the sky.
The huge pile of crushed limestone behind the school had slid into it, almost encased the back of it. Russ insisted they stay together while searching there, and feared the structure could give way any second. Then they hunted through the company buildings. No trace of either Adrian Whelan or Fred Hanley. Russ wouldn’t let anyone on the mountain to look.
They took the Hanleys’ dog and old sedan and left Iron Mountain to join the truck on the prairie and await the authorities. Russ had an arm around Tamara Whelan. She cried softly against him and drifted into an exhausted sleep.
Help arrived, including Al Gridley from the home office. Russ, Gridley, and half the sheriff’s office went back into Iron Mountain, while the residents were moved into Cheyenne to temporary quarters at F. E. Warren Air Force Base.
“We were about to close this mine anyway,” Al Gridley said as they stood before the tumble of rock sprawling from the three-hundred-foot portal.
Just what is holding this mountain up? “Yeah, folks here’ve been dreading that for a while. Heard about the open pit.”
“Russ”—Al placed a comforting hand on Russ’s shoulder, and that’s when Russ realized how frightened he must look—“I just put through a recommendation to send you to Eagle, Colorado. It’s a lot quarry and not much mine, but with your experience in limestone, we weren’t going to forget you.”
“Whole damn thing should’ve caved in by now. Wait till you hear from the widow Fistler.”
“Huh? Hey, you’ll like Colorado, Russ. ’Course Eagle is a going concern, and you’d only be assistant. But you’d be next in line, and things do happen to managers.”
“They sure do. Thanks, Al.” They shook hands. Russ wanted to recommend Saul and Darrell but figured his word wouldn’t be worth a slag dump once Al heard of the party. Let him hear it elsewhere. Honor was for thieves. Russ had more important things to consider now. “Two people of this little community are missing. One’s a kid, the other a deaf old man. Want to help me search?”
“Sure, Russ.” Another slap on the back.
More men arrived to help, and they spread out among buildings and along the prairie. Russ left the reporters who came with them to Al Gridley and started up the mountain. Two deputies who met him on their way down said they hadn’t seen anything and worried that the missing could have fallen into one of the bottomless holes. Russ went on alone, passing the body of an old roadster rotting in the weeds, traces of an old roadbed. He continued to the top, puffing with effects of the excesses of the night before and lack of sleep.
He searched along the upper ridges of Iron Mountain for the hole Tamara Whelan had found, but couldn’t find any that far up. Using her apartment roof as a rough guide, he zigzagged partway down until he found a hole that fit the description. He took off a glove and held a hand over it, but with the constant wind it was difficult to tell if there was a special movement of air coming from the opening. Kneeling beside it on the downhill rim, he leaned over as far as he dared. The air was damper here, and there was a low, muffled rumble that wasn’t wind. And a smell he’d never be able to describe, that wasn’t limestone dust or the dankness of tunnels.
It was one he would always associate with the blue-and-white city that had encased Iron Mountain, diminished it to the proportions of an anthill. But he knew something now that he’d never admit. That city was of a time other than his own. And he doubted even the mob had the means to eject people instantly and unharmed from the tunnels, as he had been twice. And the second time, those tunnels had been collapsing around him. He tossed rocks down the hole. He could hear none of them land.
Too nervous to swear, Russ turned and walked rapidly downhill. Someone had somehow managed to shore up the inside of this mountain without showing themselves. And they left at least one vent hole into the heart of the mountain. No sheriff or Al Gridley would believe any of this. So if anybody mentioned it, it wasn’t going to be Russel Burnham.
Newspaper headlines talked of the cave-in and the fact that “Night Watchman Disappears with Twelve-year-old Girl!” intimating Fred Hanley had abducted the adolescent Adrian for foul purposes.
“Fred ain’t had no interest in sex for fifteen years,” Agnes replied to the charge, and the newspaper gleefully reported that too. Some official declared the earth stabilized, and the residents were allowed to move back into their homes temporarily until they relocated. B & H was closing Iron Mountain.
“Hope my daughter’ll take me in,” Agnes Hanley had worried to Russ. “Without Fred, I don’t have nothing. All those years of work, and I don’t have nothing.” Because Fred had not yet retired from the company, his wife was not entitled to the “widow’s portion” of his pension. He’d been with B & H for over thirty years.
Jerusha Fistler was judged to be in a coma and put on a life-support system. Russ convinced the others to uphold the story that they’d all chased Jerusha, who’d had too much to dri
nk at the party, trying to get her out of the mountain, and had rescued her when the tunnels caved in—which wasn’t too far from the truth and would help Russ keep his job. And all the men who’d worked the mine could vouch that she’d been known to enter it regardless of repeated warnings. If Jerusha revived from her coma, she’d tell of Russ’s mistake in practically inviting the party into the tunnels. She was the vengeful type. But if she didn’t revive, they’d never know the whole story. Russ believed only Jerusha Fistler had any idea of what was going on inside the mountain.
The Cheyenne school system closed the school permanently. It was considered unsafe, with the giant slide of crushed rock that appeared about to eat the mustard-colored cinder-block building. Parents were expected to relocate their children near other schools as soon as possible.
Tamara Whelan sat in her daughter’s bedroom and refused to come out.
Agnes finally came to get Russ. He was packing company papers and office equipment and didn’t know what he could do to help. The teacher had just closed herself in. But he went along with Agnes. Privately, Russ had decided the big kid had gone sleepwalking on the mountain and fallen into a hole. Probably never be found. That didn’t sound like something that would happen to Fred, though.
After trying to talk her out of Adrian’s bedroom individually, they stormed in together prepared to pick her up bodily and move her out. But a change that hardened her expression stopped them.
“Backra,” she said with a snap of her fingers, and stood of her own accord. They had to step aside to let her pass.
32
“You’ll have to excuse me.” Tamara busied herself in the kitchen. “I haven’t eaten in a long time.”
When Agnes and Russ tried to leave, she insisted they stay, and soon had everyone arranged around Miriam Kopecky’s coffee table with sandwiches and coffee. At first she ate steadily, staring through the wall over Russ’s head. Finally she said, around a tumbler of milk, “He was even here that morning. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me till now.”
Nightmare Country Page 23
