by John Crowley
“They weren’t his!” Hildy said, outraged by the unfairness.
“Said he smelt the Devil onm,” Bobby said mildly. “Look,” she said. She pointed behind her to the wreckage of her house, as though they might not have noticed. “Know who done that? Devil done it.”
The day seemed to have darkened around Pierce, a strange hooded dusty dimness fallen over the sun.
“Got his mark on it,” Bobby said. “You want to see?”
“I want to see,” Warren said.
“Warren,” Hildy said. “You stay.”
Bobby pulled Pierce by the hand, and the others after him, to where they could look in at the rock squatting in a nest of shattered floorboards.
“See?” she said.
Someone—Floyd probably—had outlined with a burnt stick a ridgy place in the rock, to bring out its resemblance to a knuckly, three-clawed reptilian hand. It was striking without being for a second convincing.
“Wow,” said Warren. “A claw.”
“But it’s make-believe,” said Pierce. The shudder of repugnance that covered him was because someone had done this, had pretended it, had wanted it to be unnatural: make-believe for real. “Just because it’s a lumpy rock.”
“Devil thowed it at my grandpap account of what he knows,” Bobby said. Then she shrugged one shoulder: “What he says. Missed him though.”
“Nobody threw it,” Pierce said. “It came from up there, from whatever they’re building.”
“Ain’t buildn nothn,” Bobby said. “Tearn down the mountain.”
Then Bobby shrieked: the sheet hung in the rent of the wall was snatched aside, and Floyd Shaftoe stood looking at them, the whites of his eyes unnaturally huge and his pupils black.
“Let’s run!” Bobby said, and set off away from the yard toward the woods. Pierce ran after her to stop her, having glimpsed in her face that she was almost certainly pretending, inciting their alarm for the fun of it; and Bird hurtled after him in genuine alarm, and Warren after her; Hildy last, embarrassed and afraid.
Bobby ran fast, her skinny legs scissoring rapidly; once she lost a shoe, a grownup’s worn slip-on shoe too big for her, and stopped to retrieve it without missing more than a step. She led them up a track through the woods (Hildy calling from behind that they had to go home now, stop a sec) and over a hump of hill to an outcropping shelf of slate.
Panting, pleased with herself, she turned to them coming up behind. “Y’all’s slow runners,” she said.
“Well you didn’t have to run,” Pierce said, his eyes burning with sweat or tears. “Why did you run?”
“Lookit,” she said to him from up above on the outcrop. “Cmere.”
He climbed up to where she stood. Warren had stumbled on the path and skinned his knee, and his sisters were comforting him. Warren he doesn’t have a gun, it’s illegal, don’t cry or he’ll hear you. Pierce looked where Bobby pointed.
He could see all the way up the holler toward the mountain top, through the flattened trees and the standing ones. There was the source of the noise and the stones and the dirt: big yellow cats, he could see one, were cutting a shelf of earth out of the mountain. He saw one backing up, could distinguish its gray smoke from the orange dust it raised. The matter of the mountain was being heaved off the shelf they were cutting, smashing the trees and growth beneath and covering the remainder with thick clay like butterscotch icing dripping down a cake’s sides. Above the shelf a straight wall of exposed mountain rose.
“Strippn,” Bobby said.
Like eating an ice-cream cone: push a trail along with your tongue at the perimeter of the cone, lick up the excess, while on the other side the melting slob slips over onto the cone and your fingers. Tongue comes around and cleans up. Pierce could see the dump-trucks that followed after the cats to be loaded with the coal they uncovered: heavy ribbed trucks, just like the one Warren had used to play with daylong in his own pit. Gradually the mountain would be worn away.
“The Enda Days is acomin,” Bobby said in a voice not hers.
“What,” Pierce said.
“Sure. My grandpa knows. Holy Sperta God tole him.” She clutched her bony knees where she sat on the slate. “That’s why the Devil flang that rock at us. So he don’t tell the world.”
“That’s stupid,” Pierce said desperately. “Cut it out.”
“All the dead hereabouts gone break open ther graves and come on out.” She gauged his response. “Not skullitons,” she said. “Gone put on ther flesh.”
“Pierce.” Hildy had had enough; the calm authority of hysteria in her voice made Pierce jump.
“My ma’s ma,” Bobby said. “My grandpap’s ma. Ther ma too.”
“We have to go,” Hildy said. “Warren is hurt.”
“They’s a witch lived up Hogback onct,” Bobby said. “Devil tore out her house too.” She clambered higher up the stones above Pierce. “Ain’t gone get us, though, cause we’re movn away.”
“No, where,” Pierce said, a sudden awful hollow opening in his heart.
“Deetroit,” Bobby said. “Can’t get us there.”
“No,” Pierce said.
“Find my mawn pa.”
“No.”
She stood on tiptoe on the rock ledge, and looked down the trail toward the house. “Whoops, he’s acomn,” she cried in mock terror. “Y’all better run.”
Hildy drew Warren to his feet and grasped him, her eyes round and her mouth set in an awful bravery. “Wait,” Pierce whispered, not to Hildy, not to Bobby.
“Don’t go to Detroit,” Bird said. “We want you to stay.”
“Cain’t live here,” Bobby said simply. A sudden jolting bark sounded from up on the mountain, a horn of great power sounding repeatedly. Pierce realized that for some time the grinding of the cats and the trucks had ceased. Bobby danced down the outcrop to the path and took Bird’s hand. “Come on,” she said, and tugged Bird after her farther into the woods.
“Wait.” Pierce clambered down after her. “Wait.”
“Don’t you hear the sigh reen?” Bobby called back to him. “Y’all’s got five minutes.”
The horn drove them along behind her down the faint trail. Where amid piles of other rubbish an old refrigerator lay fallen headlong down the slope (thrown there long ago, the refrigerator’s white was stained with rust) she stopped, pointed to where the path ran down. “Git along,” she said. “Down there’s the road.”
Now Bird was crying too, not from fear but from urgency, wringing her hands in a way Pierce had read of people doing and not been able to picture. “Don’t go away, don’t,” she wept.
The siren ceased, the world for a second stopped too.
“Gwan, git,” Bobby said, arms crossed against her colorless shirt.
“Come with us!” Pierce cried, knowing suddenly what the only possible solution to this was. “Run away! Come with us now!”
Bobby turned from the path and sat down in the shelter of the old refrigerator. Hildy and Warren had gone on ahead, hurrying, nearly out of sight.
“Don’t stay with him,” Pierce said. “Stay with us. We’ll protect you. Their Dad will.”
“Cain’t,” she said. She withdrew her gaze from Pierce, as though he had gone on already.
“It’s not true,” he called to her retreating spirit. “It’s not!”
Bird was tugging at his shirt, weeping. Bobby closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears.
“Pierce!”
He had to turn away then, with Bird, and hurry stumbling away with the others, the Invisible College in full retreat along a path that was not likely to lead anywhere but farther into the woods for good. The horn still sounding in his ears was his own heart beating, taking huge thudding turns.
“Will she be all right? Will she?” Bird wept.
The dynamite set off at the strip mine wasn’t like movie explosions, mild, thunder-rumbling. It was less like a noise than like something huge that rushed with impossible speed down through the woods to whack them in the back.
And then through the trees there came a dry rain of fragments pattering and dust whispering, coating the leaves and the path downward and the Invisible College too.
The road away appeared through the brush and the rubbish.
“We won’t tell,” Hildy said fervently, eyes on the road below. “Don’t any of you ever tell.”
“We won’t,” Bird said.
“We won’t.”
“Just don’t,” Hildy said. “Not ever ever.”
TWELVE
The Sun is ninety million miles from earth; it burns with an unquenchable nuclear heat, consuming its own atoms, each one a bonfire; it will burn for æons, it will become a nova or a red giant or a white dwarf in a billion years or two or ten: but it won’t go out like a candle, it won’t refuse to shine. She did not need to believe the things she believed; he could show her how to drop it, forget it, return into the world from it. Dinosaurs. Didn’t she know there had been dinosaurs once, their bones are in museums, they lived for a million, ten million years on earth, hundreds of times longer than human beings have even been alive. When the Bible says “six days,” they don’t mean days, they mean ages of earth, Pleistocene, Pliocene, Eocene. Why even have all those years, countless years, before man if the world was just going to end? Why? Why would God be so dumb?
He sat on the steps of the breezeway thinking, thinking, for hours together, his hands and his mouth in unconscious motion, convincing Bobby that the story she thought was happening had no authority whatever to happen. The summer sky was hooded with dust, the air not refreshing but ashy, and a red sun, ghastly, going down for the last time.
“Fire somewhere,” Sam at the screen door behind him said. “Criminal.”
What could he do? It was as though she were going off, not to Deetroit, but into the darkness of the story’s conclusion she had told, into the night of the world’s end and the dead rising, whose weather Pierce sensed gathering around him as he plotted desperately to keep her from it. That the Invisibles could ever have saved her, ever have rescued her as Bird had last summer been daily rescued from the play-bonds and play-prisons that held her—Pierce knew it had only been a game, a game’s dangerous and thrilling extension into somewhere beyond pretend but still a game, they were all only kids and not knights really: and yet it was as though it weren’t a game but a true story he was caught within, a story in which he had failed to do what the hero was supposed to do, had lost his sword and his map, had no real resources after all, did not know what a hero would know, how to make the sky lighten, the dreadful magic lift.
How many nights and days did he live within the spell? He couldn’t think how to ask Sam’s help or even Winnie’s: to ask his mother’s help would have meant confessing to her how afraid he was, and thus running the risk of breaking the bond between them—the risk of bringing to her an insoluble problem that would shatter her rest, force her to fruitless action, and cost him her unqualified love.
So he turned, finally, to the one person who was outside the story and yet all unawares inside it too: he went in shame and hopeless hope to ask his President what he should do.
“So what the heck,” Joe Boyd said. “She should go. Detroit’s better than here.”
“But it’s really important she not go. Really important.”
Joe Boyd looked away from the television, where with careful gravity Mr. Wizard was at work, transforming one thing into another, while his young friend watched. “Why?” he asked.
Pierce would not answer that; could not answer when he asked it of himself. In Mr. Wizard’s jar a crystal grew within the fluid, many-sided, brilliant. “Just what if it was,” Pierce said. “Really important.”
Joe Boyd thought. “Well it’s not her that’s going. It’s him. She’s just a little kid. She doesn’t have a say. So you have to keep him from going.”
“How?”
That took more thought. Joe Boyd seemed to slip away entirely for a time into Mr. Wizard’s garage, where now from his pocket the wizard drew gemstones. “Pay him,” Joe Boyd said at last.
“What?”
“Pay him to stay. Make it worth it to him, to stay.”
“But pay him what? I don’t have anything to pay him with.”
“It wouldn’t have to be much,” Joe Boyd said. “Just enough to make him think there’s more. To think there’s more here. Then he’ll stay around.”
Pierce sat confounded for a long time, waiting for more, his waiting growing increasingly irksome to his cousin, who turned at last and asked why he had to hang around.
Just enough to make him think there’s more. Drawing precious gemstones from his pocket: Look. More where this came from. In the basement he stood before the soft-roaring furnace, and with the blackened crook he opened its door. Its voice grew louder; he gazed afraid and resolute into the interior, where blue flames skittered over the coruscating lava; he swallowed its bitter breath. Into its white-hot heart he plunged the tongs (abstracted from the never-used set of fire tools beside the fire-place above) and with them grasped the centermost coal and drew it out.
Quickly, with Sam’s tools and vise and with the force of his need and his knowledge, he tormented the coal until it had to give up the diamond it somehow was: there, on the charred workbench, the tiny living stone hatched from the exhausted cinder, refracting its first gasp of light.
No it was high summer and the furnace of course was cold; what he did was to go upstairs to Sam’s room when Sam was far away (delivering a baby, or maybe bringing a dead man back to life as he had done once by striking him in the heart with all his might) and take from Sam’s drawer the little box containing Opal’s diamond ring. With Sam’s needle-nose pliers he pulled away the tiny golden claws that grasped the stone, and when it was loose he shook it into his palm: smaller there than it had appeared to be in Opal’s ring, and seeming likely to roll away, get lost, avoid its fate.
He put the stone into a velvet pouch no into the plastic box from which Sam had taken the ampoule of penicillin he’d injected into Pierce. Alone he went back up the road to Hogback, and when he stood in the dirt of the yard he called out to Floyd Shaftoe no to Bobby.
Show this to your father. Tell him I found it in the old Good Luck mine. Tell him that deep down in the mine, I’ll tell him where, there’s coal that’s become diamonds. Tell him I won’t tell anyone else. He won’t want to go away to Detroit.
She took it no he went with her into the cabin, where Floyd shirtless and shoeless lay on the bed, the long scars white over his torso. He looked into the box that Bobby held solemnly up to him and saw the shy glowing stone within: beckoned, awed, fooled.
Or no he took the road not up to Hogback but the other way, toward Good Luck Number Two. He followed the railroad tracks along the Little No Name, through the town of Good Luck where no one lived and where the gray cabins in their rows watched him go by, and past the Good Luck school whose inside he would never know and the Good Luck hospital likewise from which Mousie said they used to throw out like cut-off arms and feet and such into the crick where you’d see them floatn.
Strike up the wooded mountainside, climb the wall of shale above which the tipple could be seen (he had seen it, once, from Sam’s Nash) and up to the mouth of the mine itself, Good Luck Number Two, an arch riven into the mountain, into which the traintracks disappeared. He had flashlight and paper and pencil, and in his pack the plastic box with Opal’s stone. He began at the entrance, marking on his paper the arch of it; then he began a dotted line, mimic of his own progress in and downward.
The flashlight, topped up with Evereadies that projected an unfailing cone of light into the darkness, showed him the squat shapes of miner’s cars, like placid bears asleep; the posts and beams of the low roof; the naked electric wires that Sam deplored running close overhead, but juiceless now maybe probably. At every broad room, corridors crossed, and after choosing one Pierce marked the turning on his map. And when he had turned downward and then downward again into darkness deep enough to feel a
nd taste, where the tracks ran out, where the miners had quit forever and their picks and shovels lay abandoned, he took out the plastic box, and from it the jewel; and he placed it naked on the shelf of coal. X marks the spot.
Time to turn back then, follow the map outward, mail the map to Floyd Shaftoe no carry it to him no lose it on his farm. No.
No. Pierce on a white afternoon came up the dusty road to Good Luck Number Two, feeling his plan rapidly evanescing but willing belief in it anyway, and with the reproachful stone in his pocket. A voice that since he had come down from Bobby’s place on Hogback had gone on talking to him unceasingly and so loudly he could hardly hear anything else was, if not done talking, growing at least distant and intermittent.
He should have known it. He had known it, only he had not been able to think of what to do with the knowledge, and so had refused to recognize it: The mine, the real mine, wasn’t a mouth cut into the wooded mountain’s face but a large and daunting industrial installation, the more daunting for being on the way to ruin. There was Absolutely No Trespassing, and violators would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Well that’s great, Pierce said in Winnie’s voice, just great. The chainlink fence across the road stopped him a long way from the mine entrance, which was itself housed in a complex building of corrugated steel and filthy windows. A place to have an accident in, fall down, stab yourself on a rusty spike, get lockjaw. Tall structures—breakers, washers, sorters—stood up on skinny rusty legs over the endless slate dump. On the tallest of them the name Good Luck was painted, and (scrubbed almost to invisibility in the corrosive air) the company’s sign, a hand of four aces neatly displayed. Good luck.
Even then he thought it was possible that if he dared climb the fence, if he dared to get to the mine and break a window and scramble in, if he could get down inside (he remembered now how on television the miners had gone down an open elevator into the depths), if he could do all that just by the strength of his needing to, then it might be that his plan could still be brought off; he might by his effort make this obdurate place the nexus of his desires. But he knew he wouldn’t do it.
