by C. L. Bevill
All Anna needed was a few hours. She dropped the Barbie doll’s head on the floor of the garage and looked for the items that she needed to take with her. She didn’t even need Sebastien to open the gates of the mine for her. Anna had her own private entrance, the same one she had used to come out.
No matter what was waiting for her at the bottom of the mine, no matter if it were some great hulking creature that moved in the shadows and threatened her, Anna had to find out what was hidden there.
•
Anna easily found the sign that invited tourists to come back soon to Unknown. Its lights were brilliant as it illuminated the large appealing words on the billboard. She had walked the distance in twenty minutes, with her pack over her shoulder. Cars passed on the road. A few who had obviously already made merry had honked cheerfully at the solitary pedestrian, far from the festivities. She had faded into the shadows after that, wishing to be inconspicuous. Most of the people who were coming to the Mardi Gras festival were already there, only a few stragglers were dragging in for the fireworks and the crayfish boil. The tourists weren’t an issue, but any family members might wonder why Anna St. Thais was off by herself on a festival night.
In the distance Anna could feel Gabriel talking with someone. He was drinking a beer and laughing at a joke that Mathieu Landry was telling him. Gabriel was a different man than the one who had first grabbed Anna after she had woken up. She now realized that it was the concerned man that had relentlessly sought her out, intent on rescuing her from her abject horror, who was the man she cared about. His desperation that other day had masked his confusion. Inside he was good and caring. Her conclusion made her wonder who else was privy to terrible secrets.
Anna? Gabriel began to sense her interest and Anna retracted the thoughts, sliding away before he could perceive any of her intentions. She arranged herself accordingly, pulling a flashlight out of the pack and slithered down into the earth, allowing it to swallow her up.
•
A niggling feeling of alarm cast its shadow over Gabriel, making him glance around uneasily as if he could immediately find the cause. Mathieu was helping him load some supplies on the Mere. Camille was rounding up their children. Cecily and Jean Bergeron were talking to some people on the dock. Everyone that he cared most about was here with him, except Anna.
Anna? She didn’t answer. It didn’t mean anything particularly. He knew that she probably heard him, but her closed nature went hand in hand with her upbringing. She wasn’t used to sharing all that she was with a group of strangers. She shared with Gabriel and there were times when she shut him out. He didn’t hold that against her, although it was an irritating trait to which he’d have to adjust. He knew that it would become easier for her and that in time she wouldn’t have the fear of closeness with the rest of the family.
But that isn’t quite it, is it? Gabriel frowned. She had that wall up, the same mental one he wished a thousand times that he hadn’t told her how to construct, and the one that prevented him from understanding what she was doing.
Sebastien said something to Gabriel. Then the older man tapped him on his shoulder. “What’s up with you, cher? You ain’t heard nothing I’ve said.”
“The sodas are coming, Sebastien,” Gabriel said. “Alby and Anna went for it about forty-five minutes ago. If Alby didn’t make a pit stop at the German beer tent.”
“Well, they started singing beer songs about an hour ago,” Sebastien said laughingly. “If Alby heard that, then well, there’s no accounting for what might happen.” He looked up. “Well, look at that. The moon’s full. You know what they say about people when the moon is full?”
“Uh-uh,” Gabriel muttered. He looked around and his eyes scanned the crowd. He could tune out the voices that trickled across but he couldn’t find Anna. Then a little bit of something came to him, slipping out beneath her imaginary door. The smell of dirt was heavy in his nostrils as if he had dug his hand into the earth and held it up to his nose. And it was dark, far darker than the night around Gabriel, with colored lights flashing from the tents with the games, and the floodlights that had been set up for the band, with the bright light of a full moon shining down upon the surface of the lake.
“They say the really crazy ones start to howl,” finished Sebastien and he howled just to show Gabriel.
Gabriel focused on the older man. “If you see Anna, you tell her to talk to me, oui?”
“Oui,” replied Sebastien, nonplussed. “Sure, I tell her. But-” he winked at Gabriel-“it’s that full moon. I’m a-telling you. Oww-whooo.”
Gabriel stared at Sebastien for a long moment before turning away. What now, Anna? What are you doing now?
He didn’t see the odd look that passed over the older man’s face.
•
Being inside the mine gave Anna a case of goose bumps. Once she was past the dead-end where there was illumination from the fluorescent lights of the sign, there was nothing but blackness, blacker than the lake. Deep and forbidding, it was as silent as a church five minutes after mass was concluded.
Anna could have reached out to touch the darkness; it seemed as solid as any substantial object. She used the flashlight to find the headlamp she had discarded on her last trip but its batteries were dead. The spare batteries she had dropped had been lost in the soil that she had disrupted climbing out and then back in. She dropped the headlamp and knew that the flashlight with its own spare batteries would have to suffice. A four-D-cell MagLite, it could be adjusted to a tight beam or a broad span to shed light on as much as possible.
The flashlight was immediately adjusted so that it was the broad span. She wanted to see as much as possible. Anna took a breath and began to thread her way down the narrow passage. It didn’t really seem like a mine to her. It was just a constricted burrow someone had once dug looking for something to mine. Whoever it had been, could probably see that the sand on the walls indicated the closeness of the surface and that no more salt was to be found here. Was it to make an airway for the miners? Was it a construct so that some industrious miner could steal salt from the mine on his own time? It didn’t really matter. She set her shoulders and went deeper.
If she concentrated she could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. Anna was so sensitized to herself that it seemed like her breathing was as loud as the speakers at a rock concert. She suspected that no danger was presented to her unless she lingered too long, and she wanted, no needed, to see what was being hidden from her. And what was being hidden from much of the family as well.
White streaks of salt on the rough-hewn walls indicated that she was headed in the correct direction, downward. The passage widened and she saw a rusting piece of rail half-buried in the floor. Minutes later she found the railcar she had hidden behind, while recovering her self-control and attempting to conquer her rampant fears.
Anna shuddered again and knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Once she had said to herself that she had never been afraid of anything in her life before the experience of Dan Cullen. She suspected that she had never allowed herself to fully live before that, either. Being afraid isn’t a crime. Being afraid to challenge yourself, being afraid to ask questions that you need the answers to, that’s a crime. But not mine, she thought determinedly.
She came to the first cross section of the mine. A tunnel bisected the one she was in and she knew which way she needed to go. She couldn’t explain why she knew this, but she continued straight. But first Anna took the pack off her back and opened it. She retrieved what she had put inside it and began to swiftly shake the object in her hand while glancing around her. No breadcrumbs for me to lead my way back through the forest. No skein of twine to mark my passage through the labyrinth. No, I’ve got three cans of Gabriel’s marine-quality primer. The color, battleship gray.
Anna sprayed the wall of the tunnel with an arrow, pointing the way out. She wanted no confusion in case she was in a hurry upon her exit.
•
Gabriel looked around
the crowds of people and grimaced. All of the extraneous thoughts tended to baffle his gifts. He’d experienced it before. He’d caught her voice, thinking something very odd and he repeated it to himself, attempting to understand what Anna could possibly be thinking about. “Battleship gray?”
Then he caught sight of Alby LaGraisse and called, “Alby!”
Alby meandered over to Gabriel with a silly grin on his face. “I bin to the German beer tent and the Australian beer tent and I gotta tell you, those Germans don’t got shit on the Aussies. I mean, the glasses are this big.” He made a gesture with his hands indicating the extreme size of the beer.
“You’re not driving home tonight, are you, Alby?” Gabriel said ruefully.
“Hell, no. My daughter-in-law’s driving.” He hiccupped. “She doesn’t drink. She’s a prissy little thing. Dreams about white posies and mittens on kittens and stuff like that.”
“Where’s Anna?”
“Anna?” Alby’s tone was innocuous. “Oh, Anna. She stayed at your house for a minute. Said she’d walk back.”
“At my house?”
Alby’s voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper that wasn’t a whisper at all because half a dozen people heard him anyway. “Female stuff, she said. You know, she is a female. Though I don’t think she dreams about white posies”
“I’ve noticed,” said Gabriel dryly. Feeling a little tinge of relief, he thought, Female stuff? Anna, what are you doing?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Saturday, February 21st
The practice of opening all the doors and the windows of a house while a man is dying will ensure that his soul will have free egress upon his death. A locked door or a closed window will keep his tortured self near the place he passed and he will haunt the living thereafter.
Anna knew the way. She didn’t stop to ask herself how she knew the way, but she knew it all the same. All she had to do was to pause at an intersection and it came to her which way to go. The tunnel became increasingly snowy white as she descended into the mass of the salt dome itself, finally losing all vestiges of the dirt and sand that lay far above her. Passages became larger as men had once cleared the way for removing the white gold to the surface. The world transformed into a glittering cosmos of spectacular walls the color of glistening milk pouring down into the deepest chasms of the earth.
At each junction Anna took the spray can from the pack and marked her exit. Within an hour she had used up one can. She passed through tunnels she was positive she hadn’t seen before, even in the confusion of her past exit, but now she was sure of her route. The passages became cavernous with vaulted ceilings where salt had been taken from every crevice, and she saw remnants of the mining process as it had been before. There were machines down here, left to rot in the humidity, and air ventilation units that were silent in the musty closeness. Metal shrouds disappeared into the salt, eventually finding their way to the world above to allow fresh air to circulate below the ground.
Like the Madonna she’d seen before, there were other carvings. Some were crude caricatures of figures. One was obviously a woman someone had admired greatly, judging by the size of her basketball sized breasts. Another was a large cross upon which an almost ambiguous Jesus hung, demonstrating the fundamental Catholicism of the region. One wall had a virtual roster of men who had worked this mine, carved into the salt, only perceptible when the shadows were cast diagonally across the surface. There were names scratched there and dates accompanying them. Theriot was there. So was Bergeron. Benoit was another. She recognized some of the names. Alby LaGraisse had carved his in September of an unreadable year. She lingered only for moments and went on.
Anna didn’t hear anything but herself moving and the drips of moisture as it gathered at points of the mine’s tunnels and dropped down causing funny echoes to ring through the passageways. She looked down at her watch and discovered that it had stopped at 7:35 p.m., not giving her any indication of how long she had been down here or how long she had before Gabriel started waving the red flag of distress.
Her internal sensor guessed about an hour, or perhaps two. She didn’t know how far it was to where she was going. The salt dome was crisscrossed with shafts making it a literal maze of tunnels. Meg had said that some of the shafts were flooded, that only God above knew when the rest of them would go. But Anna hadn’t seen any sign of flooded tunnels, only the relentless drip-drip-drip of water working its way downward, just as she did. Little rivulets of water showed her the way.
The shadows danced around her as she walked, holding the MagLite in one hand, the beam of the flashlight bounced with her movements. She kept looking over her shoulder but found nothing but darkness following her. Keeping her seeping anxiety under her personal lock and key, she further forced it down where it couldn’t be used to alert any of the family to her activities.
Abruptly, Anna was standing in the same place she had been before. The pristine white of the salt path beneath her feet had leveled out, showing a long passageway that ended in a dark hole. Her knees were shaking with exertion of climbing downward. Her thighs burned with effort. Pausing, she knew she had stood here before, in the very same spot and watched something huge move in the shadows beyond her, something that had threatened her with its sheer force and will.
Imagination? Or someone playing psychic games?
The broad beam of the MagLite revealed only the opening to another room in the mine. The residual refraction of the light bounced off the salt in that cavernous area and revealed nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that shifted and moved like a giant beast intent on eliminating the unwary intruder. Anna forced her tired limbs to move forward. One achingly slow step after another she worked her way down the last part of the passageway, until she reached the edge of the opening.
Inside there were dark shapes that remained completely still. Trembling, Anna brought the flashlight up and saw vehicles. There were dozens of them. Mining equipment? The bones of a once grand operation left to rust in the bowels of the earth. She caught herself and remembered something she’d seen contained in the book that featured the lake’s history. There had been a photograph on one of the pages showing the interior of the mine. It was deep inside where it hadn’t been practical to tote broken equipment and machinery back to the top to be disposed of properly. So the miners had designated a huge well-worked tunnel for all of their garbage and began to put what didn’t work or was no longer needed in there. The caption on the photograph called it what the miners had laughingly named it.
The graveyard. Meg’s thoughts came back to her. Graveyard. Anna? Beware, Anna. Beware.
Here it is. The graveyard. Not an actual cemetery, but a graveyard of misbegotten apparatus, of parts they couldn’t use anymore, of disabled tools, and vehicles too old to rebuild.
Anna stepped inside and found a huge room full of items dating from the thirties, the forties, and so on. She saw a Ford Model-T, mostly whole, its rubber tires falling away from its skinny metal rims. As she followed a cleared path into the room she noticed that the oldest things were in the front, as if the miners had deposited it in the closest area, with the minimum amount of effort, then worked their way to the back. There was other miscellaneous equipment that she couldn’t identify and there were parts of cars and whole cars covered by falling mounds of salt. There was a tractor off to one side and a funny kind of car that looked like it dated from the forties with a third headlight centered on its grill. She brought the flashlight all around her in a slow, sweeping arc and made a disturbing discovery.
Not enough mining equipment. Too many cars. Anna chewed on her lower lip. Maybe some of these people got rid of their cars this way, instead of leaving it to rust into their yards. But…
She approached an old sedan from the fifties. Black and once sleek like the lines of a great sea animal, the window was half open and its prominent, oversized steering wheel was visible. The seats were shredded by time and dry rot, but the vehicle itself was complete. All the t
ires were resting flat on their rims, but Anna knew that if she opened the hood she would find the engine there, and only a little rust discolored the body.
Anna froze into place. There was a leather purse sitting on the passenger’s seat. A black ladies purse rested there as if a woman had put it down only a moment before. She unfroze her limbs and reached for the purse. A wallet fell out of the top and she touched that instead, pulling her hand slowly back out of the window with her prize. Bracing the flashlight between her arm and her body she opened the wallet and saw that it belonged to Liza Trent of 13411 Harrowway Street, Los Angeles, California. The driver’s license expired in 1954, but the money inside the wallet was still good, some seventy-six dollars of it. Most of the bills were dated in the forties and one twenty-dollar bill was dated 1952.
Anna dropped the wallet back inside the car and looked in the rear. There was nothing there. Who had Miss Liza Trent been and why was her car and her purse at the bottom of a salt mine?
Casting the beam of the flashlight around she caught her eye on a 1950 Nash Rambler. It was a roll-top convertible. The top was missing off this model. It was once white with its funny little car shape so distinctive. Anna had worked on one once in El Paso. A man with a T-shirt shop owned it and kept it pristine, but he drove it to work every day. There was a suitcase in the backseat of this one. An old fashioned, plaid suitcase, it had a tattered nametag attached to its handle. She flipped it over and read the name. Jared Slate had lost this suitcase, and probably this car, as many as fifty years before. He had lived at 211 Oakville Manor, in Memphis, Tennessee, and there was a five-dollar reward for the return of the suitcase.
