A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  Darkness.

  The dripping of water. The mountain’s complaints.

  “Somebody’s out there.”

  “It’s ghosts.”

  More despondent rock-rattling.

  “Lee, somebody’s out there, trying to call to us—”

  She pulled away from him, out of his arms. He could hear her move away, awkward on the loose footing. He switched the flashlight on and caught her, surprised, looking back into the blinding beam.

  “It’s the mountain, Rayna. Walking in its sleep.”

  “Don’t you go Doug on me,” Rayna said. She picked up a big rock, crawled into the upsloping collapse, and began to hammer on the wall of the mine shaft, screaming, “WE’RE IN HERE!!”

  Nothing.

  “WE’RE IN HERE!!” she yelled. “WE’RE IN HERE!!”

  Lee killed the light. In the black void Rayna drummed on the wall for as long as she could, as hard as she could, until her arms got tired and she could no longer lift the rock. When she stopped, Lee used the flashlight again to locate her, and crawled to her, pulled her back from the wall, and wrapped her in his arms. She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were wide, an animal trapped.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He turned her, held her, and kissed her tenderly and turned the flashlight off.

  And at almost the same instant, the unbroken bulbs of the fallen mine lights flickered on.

  What—

  And off.

  “Ghosts?” Rayna whispered.

  And on again, fluttering—off, on, off, on—a slow smile spread across Lee’s face—off.

  “No,” he said. “It’s Grant.”

  The mine lights stuttered and popped and after a while stopped, but it was a few moments before Lee and Rayna realized it because the light-dark pulsing rhythm had imprinted itself stubbornly in their heads.

  “Grant,” Lee repeated.

  “Your ghost,” Rayna said.

  Wet, cold fingers struggling to loosen a wing nut on the contact terminals of the rattling, gas-powered generator, Grant knelt in the muddy tailings, rain dripping from his nose. Soaked through. One wire of the mine lights finally came free of its terminal, and Grant pinched it between his fingers and tapped it against the copper post three times, quickly.

  And Lee and Rayna’s darkness was split by light, three times, strobing Lee’s quick movement across to the fallen string of lightbulbs on the shaft’s muddy floor.

  Now the lights flashed again, twice.

  Then three times.

  Lee recognized the pattern as Morse code, except, he noted, barking at the rocks that separated him from his brother, “You’re sending us the SOS, moron.” He asked Rayna to give him some light over there, and she turned on the flashlight and crossed to find Lee with a Swiss Army knife, trying to slice through one of the strands of wire from the mine lights.

  “I’m gonna let him know we’re here,” Lee said.

  Outside the collapsed mine, the next time Grant put bare wire to the terminal, he got a spark so unexpected and angry it scared him.

  He frowned, tried again, and got another backfiring spark.

  Then nothing. He didn’t have to think about it; he sat back and left the wire loose.

  Three sparks.

  Grant smiled, his heart unclenched. “Hey bro.”

  Then he was up and running across the slag to Doug’s Subaru, picking up a rock to cave in the headlight glass, jacking open the hood to dive in, half-swallowed by the engine compartment, legs flailing, hands fumbling on both sides of the broken headlight, ripping at cables, pounding on the plastic parts, finally extracting what he wanted: a bulb with some wires.

  He ran back to the generator and twisted the stripped wires of the headlight bulb in position roughly between the terminal and the exposed copper wire of the mine lights.

  After a moment, the headlight blinked on and off. Again. Again. Long and short. Grant laughed and sprinted away again to the car. Thunder rolled overhead, high on the mountain, but the rain had eased. Stray white baby clouds skiffed past under a sky of slate. In the glove compartment of Doug’s Subaru, Grant found a pen and a camping brochure.

  The rhythmic patterns of sparks from the wires in Lee’s hand revealed, in splintering glimpses, his face and Rayna’s expressionless, as if mesmerized.

  Outside, where Grant hunched over the camping brochure, tenting it from the rain and pressing hard because the paper was wet and the ink wasn’t flowing. The headlight bulb flicked on and off. On and off.

  Grant wrote: B L O

  His fingers were cold, cramping.

  W F S

  He shook the pen. Ink beaded on the paper.

  F

  The last letter, no ink, just the faint impression in the paper: P.

  He rocked back on his heels, staring at the message.

  “What the hell is that?”

  In the mine, Rayna asked Lee what he had spelled out to Grant.

  “His Morse code is spotty, by the way,” Lee remembered, after a moment’s consideration, not exactly answering the question. “About on par with his math skills,” Lee said. “He never worked at it. It was always he could receive but he couldn’t send, or vice versa . . . there’s no guarantee he’ll even get this right.”

  “That’s positive thinking.”

  Lee shrugged. “Realistic.”

  “He’ll get it,” Rayna insisted.

  Lee told her she only believed that because she’d fucked him. The words just came out, and shocked even him.

  Rayna rocked back on her heels. Blinked. But held her ground.

  “I didn’t, by the way,” she said simply. And she said she only believed in Grant because she didn’t want to die to prove Lee’s stupid point.

  Lee fell quiet and wouldn’t meet her steady gaze.

  But, sure enough, outside the mine, Grant stared at the message he’d transcribed, dumbfounded. Blowfsfp? He knew that couldn’t be right, but he remembered that Lee was all thumbs when it came to sending messages and was too fucking proud to admit it. Grant wracked his brain for what he’d learned from his brother twenty years ago or more. The two F’s were wrong. But they were the same letter, just wrong. Blowfsfp. F was two shorts, a long, a short. “Dit dit dah dit.” A U was “dit dit dah.”

  He changed two letters.

  The message read: BLOW US UP.

  Oh shit.

  Grant looked over at the detonator.

  Oh shit.

  Into the darkness of the mine came Grant’s urgent, agitated response, flashes of light, jittery Morse code patterns that Lee translated without trouble.

  “Tell him to go for help,” Rayna was saying to Lee. “They can dig us out, can’t they? Somebody can dig us out.”

  Lee watched the lights’ flashing suddenly cease and scowled, “What do you mean you can’t do it?”

  Grant’s message had ended.

  “Do what?” Rayna asked.

  “I was talking to Grant.”

  “Lee.” Rayna had a worry in her voice. “What did you ask him to do?”

  In that darkness, wires clicked and sparked together again, as Lee tapped a response to his brother.

  “Rayna,” he said finally, answering her question, but in a way she couldn’t understand, “how long do you think you can hold your breath?”

  Outside, the sky was darker and the rain had worsened and Grant was pacing, unhappy, the headlight bulb on the generator flashing at him, spitting letters and mocking him as he paced and translated the longs and shorts into language and argued with his brother:

  “You can’t ask me to do that,” he said. “What you’re asking me to do—”

  T.

  “I don’t know, but. I mean, well. What are you asking me to do? Help you finish the kamikaze mission so some greedy Pakistani cowboys can’t get your precious gold, or—”

  T - O - R.

  “which, by the way, isn’t in there—”

  Dah dah dit dah: Q?

  He screamed it: “
THERE’S NO GOLD IN THERE!” But Lee couldn’t hear him.

  Q - U - E.

  “THERE’S NO GOLD IN THERE, LEE!! JUST MORE OF MY SHIT!!”

  And then the word came together for him: Torque?

  Torque.

  Nothing moves without it.

  The yellow beam of the dying flashlight plumbed the watery darkness of the flooded downshaft, and Lee looked into the depths of it with a growing uncertainty.

  “Long,” he said. “Short, long, short.” Behind him, Rayna tapped the sparking wires together. “Two shorts and a long,” he told her. “Then three shorts . . . ”

  Outside, Grant was writing the letters as they flashed again; he so didn’t want to get this wrong: TRUST . . .

  “Two long. One short,” Lee said to Rayna. “And that’s it.”

  Rayna finished. “What did I just tell him?”

  “You told him to trust me.”

  “Trust you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rayna thought: Shit.

  Grant stared dully at the letters he’d written, the words TRUST ME, not an order, a plea; he put the brochure down on the ground and stood up. His knees cracked, his chest ached. An act of will. Every movement had to be deliberate; he was a man learning to walk again.

  “Trust and torque,” Grant said out loud. T-words. Trust and torque. Trust, and torque.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “It’s actually, technically, not torque,” Lee was explaining to Rayna. “But Grant’s working knowledge of physics is whimsical at best,” he continued. “For all my little brother knows, Darcy’s Law could be the odds of getting the head cheerleader pregnant if she’s using a spermicidal sponge.

  “Anyway. It doesn’t matter whether he understands it; that’s the beauty of science: It’s there, whether we understand it or not. And it’s gonna help us here. How? Well . . . Water being an incompressible solution, according to Darcy’s Law, and the conservation of mass—” Lee hesitated, and then, ever the teacher, asked, “What do we know about it?” Rayna knew nothing about physics, so she stayed quiet. Lee answered his own question: “We know, A) standing water is in a hydrostatic condition; B) if there’s a pressure gradient, flow will occur from high pressure to low pressure; and C) the greater the pressure gradient, the greater the discharge rate.”

  “I’m not going to remember this if there’s a test.” She knew he was talking just to keep her mind off what was coming, this thing that was about to happen that he still wouldn’t tell her about.

  “Remember those toy rockets you could fire by filling a bladder with water and then jumping on it?”

  “No.”

  Rayna dipped her hand into the water of the downshaft. It was ice-cube cold. Lee loomed, a murky reflection, over her shoulder, fragmenting as she stirred the surface trailing her fingers.

  “It’s painfully cold,” she offered, unnecessarily.

  “We played this game when we were little,” Lee told her. “Me and Grant. Our house, before we moved to Hiwan Meadows, was on a hill, two-story with a garden level. I was downstairs, Grant’s room was right above mine. I ran a wire up, and we could pass messages back and forth by Morse code after bedtime.”

  Outside the mine, Grant dropped to his knees in front of the detonator, hands shaking just a bit as he carefully stripped the protective sheathing off the detonation wires and fastened them to terminals on the side. He’d never done this before, but it seemed logical. Inevitable.

  Just like in all the movies, he thought.

  Except, he noted, it’s not torque, it’s more like, well, pressure. Lee probably said “torque” because he didn’t think I’d know Darcy’s Law. But, he thought, is it Darcy, really? Changes in hydraulic head are the driving force that makes water move from one place to another. In this case, velocity head resulting from the explosive energy of the dynamite in the confined space of the mine on the surface of the water. Darcy’s Law must be at play here, he conceded. The incompressibility of water.

  But fuck physics, this was going to be all blind luck and desperation.

  Two conditions, Grant told himself, that Lee knew he understood implicitly.

  Inside, Lee continued telling Rayna: ”So, on my signal, which was my bedroom light clicked just once, on and off, Grant had exactly ten seconds to go to his window, open it, and drop his sleepy thing—it was a stuffed killer whale he called, in a moment of little-kid inspiration, ‘Whalie’—he’d drop Whalie down to me, in the window below.

  “I’d put my hands out for exactly two seconds, which was the time it took for a plush stuffed whale to fall from the second floor. We’d timed it.

  “A second too early or a second too late and Whalie went into the evergreen bush—I think it was one of those prickly junipers—which was a sonofabitch to get anything out of, and anyway, he’d have to wait until it was light out again, so he’d be sleepy thing-less if we failed.”

  Rayna turned and studied Lee as he finished strapping two big rocks together with multiple turns of duct tape, in a kind of drooping dumbbell. There was a rope tied around Lee’s chest, under his arms. He bent down to Rayna and tied the other end around her, tethering the two of them together.

  “How old was Grant?” she asked.

  “Five or six.”

  Lee tested the weight of his rock assemblage and adjusted his grip until he seemed comfortable with it.

  “How did he know you wouldn’t just let his sleepy thing fall?”

  Lee’s puzzled look told her he’d never even considered it.

  The mine lights flashed on behind them, just once.

  “Oh Jesus.”

  Rayna, freaking, “What? What is that?”

  Outside, Grant was running across the wet slag to the detonator, counting aloud: “ . . . Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four . . . ”

  Wrapping one arm around her, Lee faced Rayna, gripped the stone barbell weight in his other hand, and said, with as much calm as he could muster, “When I say ‘jump,’ we’re going to hop into the water. It’ll be cold. The cold will probably rip the air right out of your lungs, but you’ve got to hold your breath, Rayna, okay? And the flashlight—hold on to the flashlight, and keep it aimed downward for me as best you can.”

  “Lee—”

  “Shhhhhhh,” Lee said.

  “Do you love your brother?”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Do you love me?”

  He held her tightly against his chest, felt the trembling heat of her body and the fear in her heart. He closed his eyes, counting: “Five, six, seven . . . ”

  “ . . . Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi . . . ” Grant’s fingers were wrapped around the detonator’s plunger switch. He looked up at the collapsed mine.

  “Ten.”

  Lee said: “Now.”

  They made a synchronized hop and gravity tugged them, knifing, feet-first into the flooded downshaft with hardly a splash.

  Grant pushed the plunger down. The ground beneath him jumped. There was a savage, visceral, muffled thump, and a gentle spill of rocks down the scar of the mine.

  Underwater in the mine’s inky downshaft, Lee and Rayna sank in a frozen liquid silence like some weird primordial bathys-thing; they couldn’t breathe if they’d wanted; they thought their hearts would stop; the heat between their bodies was all that sustained them; Rayna’s flashlight beam cut across dark, rotted, crisscrossing timbers from which Lee kicked them free with his boots—and above them was the hellfire of the mine explosion, the shaft suddenly lit up with a carnival of colors from the rocks, the sediment, the inferno, and the timbers.

  And gold.

  Impossibly: a jagged vein as wide as a man’s hand, twenty or more feet in length, Lee guessed as they free-fell past it, but reaching who knows how far further back into the mountain, lode gold deposits being part and parcel of orogeny and other plate collisions, sourced from the crazy metamorphics of basalt dehydration, then shot through rock faults by hydrothermal events and left behind when the water cools an
d can’t hold the gold in solution, and this lode all crazy dull-glowing-yellow in the expiring light from the fireball above them. Lee let go of their stone ballast, slowing their descent; he clawed at the slick rock walls of the shaft, to slow them further, to touch the gold, his fingers finding the smooth, impossibly pure metal scar in the rock and trailing along it . . . just touching it.

  The concussion wave from the explosion above arrived along with a suffocating silence and turned Lee and Rayna into human pinwheels and Rayna was torn away from him, connected only by the vinculum of rope he twined around them both, air fizzing from her lungs in a stream of silver bubbles. She went limp and dropped the flashlight, and it trailed behind, uselessly sweeping its beam across them as they surged downward into darkness.

  The vein was just a hallucination Lee may have had.

  Then the water-dead roar of the blast found him, weird and distorted, a droopy thunder that made his ears hurt, and Lee no longer could tell up from down and as he reached for Rayna, his lungs burning, his oxygen spent, he blacked out, the current shifted violently, and then a cold grey light traced the outlines of two bodies hurtling toward a pinprick of salvation that grew quickly larger, and larger and larger because Lee and Rayna were cartwheeling toward a pinprick of day, life, part of the detritus riding spontaneous rapids that had blown out of the side of the mountain.

  Water being incompressible, and energy always conserved, the force of the explosion put stress on that part of the geophysical equation that could give way, specifically a second adit some hopeful prospectors had punched into the mountain down below the initial strike, long since buried but with only a relatively superficial amalgam of loose rock and soil blocking it that, subjected to an outward force presented by a contiguous fluid, caused the landfill to give way, and brackish water geysered out from the steep slope of tailings below the Blue Lark Mine, throwing rock and soil a hundred yards into the trees. Grant ran to the edge of the drop and looked down as Lee and Rayna were ejected in the cascade of water and rock and muck, adrift, disappearing for a moment, and then, by some miracle, they were free of it, and Lee was crawling up out of the channel the water had gouged in the mountainside, hauling on the rope to pull Rayna with him.