by John Saul
A sound was coming to her. Her mind began to drift.
Usually it came to her at night, when the wind was blowing. But today was bright and clear; the wind was still.
And yet the sound was there. A baby, crying out for its mother.
Instinctively Diana knelt next to Christie and took the child in her arms. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Perplexed, Christie looked into Diana’s eyes. “I am all right, Aunt Diana. Really, I am,” Christie insisted.
“But you were crying. I heard you. Good girls never cry. Only bad children cry. They cry. And cry. And then they must be punished …”
By John Saul:
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
PUNISH THE SINNERS
CRY FOR THE STRANGERS
COMES THE BLIND FURY
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS
THE GOD PROJECT
NATHANIEL
BRAINCHILD
HELLFIRE
THE UNWANTED
THE UNLOVED
CREATURE
SLEEPWALK
SECOND CHILD
DARKNESS
SHADOWS
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
Copyright © 1981 by John Saul
All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law
The trademark Dell® is registered in the U S Patent and Trademark Office
eISBN: 978-0-307-76827-8
v3.1
With appreciation for their
continuing concern for social progress,
this book is dedicated to
Morrie and Joanie Alhadeff
Contents
Cover
Other Books by John Saul
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Prologue
The wind swept down out of the Rockies like a living thing, twisting its way through the evergreens and aspens, curling through the ravines before spilling out into the valley where, gathering a cargo of dust, it ground eastward, choking the villages and hamlets that dotted the area like prairie-dog colonies.
The people hadn’t known about the wind when they built their towns, but they discovered it soon enough, and, as with all such things, they chose to live with it, ignoring it whenever possible, hiding from it when it got too bad, wryly commenting about it to each other and comparing it favorably to the tornadoes they had left behind when they had migrated westward.
The wind was just one more thing to be lived with, contended with.
And besides, the mines were worth it.
Even the coal mine at Amberton, which, though neither as rich nor as glamorous as the gold and silver mines that seemed to be everywhere but there, was worth the wind.
And so, on a bright spring morning in 1910, the miners made their way into the tunnels of the mine, ignoring the wind, intent only on getting through another day, bringing up the coal to feed the railroad, and returning home to rinse the black dust from their throats with endless shots of whiskey washed down with beer.
Within the mine there was no evidence of either the wind or the spring morning. There was only the flickering yellow glow of the miners’ helmets, the hot, musty, coal-choked air, and the constant undercurrent of fear. Something could go wrong.
In the mines, something always went wrong.
That morning, though, fear mingled with a feeling of optimism, for on that morning they were extending Shaft Number Four, which promised the largest deposit yet discovered in the Amberton mine.
The dynamite had been set the night before, and through the morning the miners worked, checking the fuses, laying the wire, hooking up the blasting machines. Then, finally, they were ready.
They gathered outside the mine, the wind lashing at them as they prepared for the final moment.
The plungers of the blasting machines were shoved downward, and then there was a low rumbling from the depths of the mine.
The miners listened, then grinned at each other.
It was over.
Hundreds of feet down, there was now a pile of rubble, ready to be loaded and hauled to the surface. Picking up their tools, they went back into the mine.
At first no one noticed the water as it seeped through the shattered coal face at the end of Number Four.
When the first miner felt the dampness through his boots, he was more annoyed than worried.
But then the water began rising, and soon the miners realized what had happened.
Somewhere in the depths of the earth, there was a pocket of water, and the blast had disturbed it.
They began hunting for the source of the leak. Someone went to the surface and brought back the shift supervisor and the owner of the mine. Lumber was brought down, and the walls of Number Four were quickly shored up. But even as they worked, the water began to rise, and soon the miners were wading.
“At the back,” someone cried. “It’s coming in from the back!”
The men surged toward the far reaches of the shaft. Then they saw it.
What had started as a trickle was now a raging torrent, spewing from a gap in the wall.
As they watched, great chunks of coal broke away to be replaced by ice-cold, crystal-clear water that was quickly stained inky black by the pulverized coal over which it flowed.
Suddenly the wall of Number Four caved in, and water rushed over the men, flattening some of them on the floor of the shaft, pinning others to the walls.
The lucky ones were crushed immediately by the crumbling wall of the mine.
The less fortunate drowned in the first few moments of the flood.
For the rest, it was an even more horrible death.
For them, the flood played tricks, picking them up and sweeping them along, then pressing them up near the roof of the mine, where pockets of air were trapped, allowing them to keep their heads above the tide while the icy water numbed their bodies, allowing them to hope for a way out where there was none.
The pressure of the inrushing water began compressing the pockets of air, and for the men trapped against the roof, a new agony began.
Their ears began to hurt, and they swallowed over and over again, trying to clear the pain from their heads. But as more and more water—tons of it—drained into the unnatural shaft that the men had created, the pressure grew; the pain increased.
Some of them plunged into the depths of the water, then fought back up, their fingers clawing instinctively at the roof of the tunnel, trying to find a way out, even while their lungs filled with water. Soon their struggles ceased.
For the few who griml
y clung to life even when they knew it was over, the mine had saved one last torture.
The current stopped flowing, and there was suddenly quiet in the blackness.
Each of the men, unaware that he was not alone in his survival, began to listen in the sudden silence.
None of them knew what he was listening for.
Voices, perhaps.
The voices of friends, calling out for help.
Or the voices of others, rescuers, perhaps.
The sound, when it came, was low. A distant murmur at first that grew and swelled to a chorus of voices. The voices of children, crying in the darkness. Crying for their mothers. Crying a lonely dirge of abandonment.
One by one, the last of the miners began to die. Outside the mine, dusk fell. The wind ceased. Toward the end of the day, it was over.
In the end, all that was left in Number Four was the sound of the children’s voices, still crying, though there was no one left to hear them.
Down the hill from the mine, in a large house that stood alone at the edge of the valley, a woman lay in her bed, pain racking her body.
She was dimly aware that something had happened, that there had been an accident at the mine. And even in the agony of her labor, she knew that her husband had died.
As her baby moved inside her, struggling to release itself into the world, the woman began to know the taste of hatred.
Her husband was dead, and her life was over.
She hadn’t wanted a child, but her wishes hadn’t mattered to her husband—he had insisted. She had been clever for a while and lied to him about the ways of her body, but it had only been a matter of time before she became pregnant.
And now, as she delivered the tiny gift that her husband would have loved, he had abandoned her, leaving to her only the baby and the mine that had killed him.
The doctor, too, had left her, insisting that he was needed at the mine. The Indian woman who only days before had delivered a baby of her own, was perfectly qualified to care for her, he said. But all the Indian had done was sit by her, muttering to herself in a guttural voice about the curse of this day and the children she thought she could hear crying in the wind.
The woman herself could hear nothing.
Outside, the wind was screaming through the aspens, tearing at the house, rattling windows and plucking at the shingles on the roof.
Inside, the woman screamed silently, refusing to let the Indian woman see the anger and hatred that were growing within her.
As the child came into the world and began crying softly, the Indian crossed herself in the tradition of her religion, while in the depths of her mind she invoked the ancient spirits of her people to protect the child who had the misfortune to be born of this day.
Late that night, as the people of the town gathered in front of the mine to mourn their dead, the woman mourned the birth of her child.
And all through the night, while the wind blew down from the mountains, the sounds of children crying filled the depths of the mine.
For half a century there was no one to hear them.
1
Esperanza Rodriguez, her dark eyes set deep in her lined face, watched silently as the body of Elliot Lyons was brought up from the depths of the mine. All her life she had been expecting something like this to happen. Over and over her mother had told her the story of what had happened when she was only a few days old, and the gringos, in their stupidity, had disturbed the cave of the lost children. They had died that day—many of them—and the mine had been closed. For fifty years it had remained undisturbed, its depths flooded with water, until a month ago, when Señor Lyons had come from Chicago and begun poking around. And now he, too, was dead. Dead like Amos Amber, who had owned the mine and died in the flood; dead like her own father, who had also been in the mine that day.
Esperanza had no memory of the flood, but in the half-century since, as she had grown up near the mine, her mother had been careful to warn her of what would happen if the mine were ever reopened. It was part of the sacred cave now, the cave of the lost children. Though the gringos claimed the cave was only a legend, what the gringos thought didn’t matter to Esperanza, for she knew the cave was real, as did all her friends. It was real, and it had to be left alone.
Elliot Lyons had not left it alone, and now he was dead.
Esperanza waited until they’d taken the body away, nodded briefly when the doctor whispered in her ear, then wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, told her son to stay at home, and started walking toward town, where, before obeying the doctor’s instructions, she would go to church and pray.
Amberton had never been much of a town—not like the other Mineral Belt settlements, which had boomed for years with gold and silver. Amberton had prospered only mildly, its coal providing a fortune only for the Ambers, who owned the mine and most of the land as well.
And then, in 1910, the mine had flooded, and the people of Amberton wondered what had happened.
Esperanza Rodriguez knew what had happened.
As she paused in the little park at the center of town, she looked up at the bronze statue of Amos Amber that kept watch over the village. Her own father, whom she had never known, had tried to warn Amos Amber of what could happen to the mine. But Amos had never been one to listen to the superstitious mumblings of a Mexican married to a Ute.
And because Amos Amber had not listened to Esperanza Rodriguez’s father, Amberton had suffered.
It didn’t show on the surface. The village was a pretty place, nestled in a valley low in the Rockies, its Victorian houses neatly painted in the bright colors that had been fashionable a century ago. Its streets, though never paved, were well-kept, and shaded by aspens that had long ago replaced the firs that once thrived there. It seemed, at a glance, to be prospering. Its shops were busy, selling memorabilia of days long gone when the town had been a center of commerce, and its old railroad depot, restored and turned into a restaurant, was, during the summer months, constantly filled with tourists who paused on their way to Aspen or Denver, spent a few minutes absorbing the quaint atmosphere of the village, then moved on to the next stop on their Triple A tourist maps.
The tourists never went where Esperanza was going, for the tiny Catholic Church was near the edge of town, in the midst of the shacks that were occupied by Esperanza’s friends, the few mixed-breed Indians whose Mexican, Indian, and white blood left them fitting into no easily identifiable group. They existed in poverty, scratching out a living as best they could by doing the menial jobs that the shop owners tossed to them. Esperanza herself did not live in Shacktown—she still lived in the caretaker’s cabin near the entrance to the mine, where she’d lived most of her life—but every week she came to the church to pray for the children who, though their graves were marked in the tiny churchyard, were buried somewhere else.
Today, she didn’t stay long.
Today, she wasn’t praying for the dead children.
Today, she was praying for the one who was still alive.
Christie Lyons stared straight ahead, her eyes unseeing, her tiny white hand lost in Esperanza Rodriguez’s large brown one. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and her chin quivered as she struggled not to sob out loud.
She hadn’t believed it at first. Her father was all she had, and she was sure that what was happening was all a bad dream, that any minute now her father would wake her up and tell her it was only a nightmare.
Dimly, she wondered if they were going to send her to an orphanage. She supposed they probably were. If you didn’t have any family, where else could you go?
Though she was only nine years old, Christie knew exactly what had happened. Her father had gone to the mine by himself, and he’d fallen down the shaft. Many times, when she’d gone to mines with him, he’d told her what could happen if you weren’t careful. Now it had happened to him.
And now she was alone and going somewhere with people she hardly knew at all.
She looked out the window of the car an
d realized they were driving toward the mine. Was she going to have to look at her father? Were they going to show him to her? She hoped not. Knowing he was dead was bad enough—she didn’t want to have to look at him, too.
She stared up into the face of Esperanza Rodriguez, who had held her in her lap while they told her her father was dead. Now Esperanza was smiling at her, the way her mother used to smile at her when she was very little.
Christie didn’t remember her mother very well, but right now, with her father dead, she desperately wished that her mother would come back to her.
For some reason, she remembered how her mother used to wash her hair, making her blond curls light and fluffy. Now they clung damply to her forehead, and she wished her mother were there to wash them for her. But that, too, would never happen again, for her mother had died five years ago.
She felt the man who was driving the car squeeze her leg and looked up at him. He was Dr. Henry, and even though she didn’t know him very well, she knew he was a friend of her father’s.
She touched his hand, and he squeezed her reassuringly before putting his hand back on the steering wheel of the car. Feeling hopeless, Christie Lyons stared out the window, not really seeing the house they were approaching.
At fifty-two, Bill Henry was still lean and ruggedly handsome. His brown hair was shot through with gray, and his skin, darkened by the Colorado sun, was the color of saddle leather. He wished he knew how to comfort the little girl beside him, but she seemed to have drifted away somewhere, and he hadn’t the least idea what to say to her. Unmarried, he had never really learned the trick of talking to children. And never had he had to deal with one who had just lost her only parent.
Rather than risk saying the wrong thing, Bill Henry kept his eyes on the road and, as he turned the car into the driveway of Edna Amber’s mansion, examined the details of the house. The comforting of the child he would leave to Esperanza, or, in a few more minutes, to Diana Amber.
The house, the largest in Amberton, stood brooding on a rise that let it overlook the village like a sentinel. In contrast to the houses of the village, the Amber place had not been painted in years, and it had taken on the look of a derelict, its paint peeling, its shingles loosening. A few aspens and one or two firs dotted the scraggly lawn that surrounded the living quarters, and the outbuildings—a barn and a chicken coop, along with a carriage house that had been converted to a garage many years earlier—looked as forlorn as the house itself. Though Edna Amber still regarded the town as her personal fiefdom, she had never taken part in its restoration. Indeed, she had objected to the restoration every step of the way. Bill Henry supposed that, to her, turning Amberton into a tourist attraction meant admitting that the mine would never again produce—and that was one of the many things that Edna Amber would not admit.
