He slid out of the booth, signaling for the waitress. “Can you put this in a box for me?”
She didn’t roll her eyes, at least not where he could see.
“Got to go. We’ll talk later about you and that .38 of yours. You aren’t registered to carry concealed.” He stood over me as he fished bills out of his wallet, then strode off.
The waitress swept his plates away and carried two loaded take-out boxes to the register for him. I sat alone with my oatmeal and my thoughts.
Early this morning, I had driven Fran to pick up her car, and reassured her that I’d keep her posted, given her Rowly Edwards’s number in Atlanta so she could follow up with him, if she wanted, and sent her off to Atlanta with a hug. Nothing more I could do.
I’d relished the thought of Sunday alone, with my house and my office to myself. I hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed not having to answer to anyone or fill an employee’s task list. Then Rudy had called about breakfast and disrupted my sanctuary with specters of things I’d rather not think about.
As I took a bite of my lumpy oatmeal full of blueberries and walnuts, my cell phone buzzed. I half expected it to be Rudy with something he’d forgotten to lecture me about or Aunt Letha wondering why I wasn’t in church.
Melvin’s radio announcer voice was the last voice I expected to hear. “Avery, you might want to head up the mountain to Stumphouse Tunnel, if you’re of a mind to help out our little ghoster friends, as you call them.”
“I call them your friends, not mine.”
“I’d call them in trouble.”
“I thought you were supposed to be fishing.”
“I am. Colin called my cell phone. How he got that number, I want to find out.”
His tone implied he might suspect me, but he was wrong on that score. “Maybe they’re psychic.”
He snorted. “I just know they’re getting to be a pain. Colin said they were filming at the tunnel and Sheriff Peters and the ambulance had been called. The reception was bad, so I didn’t get the details. Don’t know why I care, but I wouldn’t wish L. J. Peters off on anybody.” Melvin and L.J. had a history.
“Okay.” A drive up the mountain was always preferable to chores. Still, I sighed for dramatic effect. “I’ll go check on them.”
The tunnel wasn’t far. In horse-and-buggy days, taking a picnic lunch to the tunnel had been an all-day affair, but fifteen minutes after I closed my cell phone, I pulled off the state road and swung down the double-back road to the tunnel.
The football-field-sized parking lot was jammed. I’d never seen so many vehicles here, even on the hottest summer days when people drive up to enjoy the natural chill of the never-completed railroad tunnel. I’d also never seen a fire truck here, or six pickups with mail-order flashing lights—members of the county’s volunteer Rescue Squad.
Someone had removed the barricades that usually block the road up to the tunnel entrance, and the fire truck was perched at the top of the short, steep hill. I didn’t smell smoke and suspected the fire truck had another reason for being here.
I ignored parking lot etiquette and blocked two of the Rescue Squad trucks. They wouldn’t be going anywhere until whatever had happened in the tunnel had been milked for all its entertainment value.
Stumphouse Tunnel had been former vice president John C. Calhoun’s key to a railroad that would connect the Charleston port with Knoxville and Cincinnati. He wanted to minimize Southern dependence on Northern trade as the economic ties between those two sections of the country tightened to the snapping point in the decades before the Civil War.
Unreconstructed Southerners still wistfully espoused, “If only the railroad had been finished in time . . . ,” even though that had been little more than a pipe dream. True, only nine hundred feet of the six-thousand-foot tunnel remained unfinished when war broke out, but other Southern states had already managed to build railway connections with the Midwest. South Carolina’s construction had been delayed thanks to muchballyhooed and characteristically shortsighted intrastate infighting over how to fund the enterprise.
In the 1950s, Clemson College had found a more pragmatic use for the abandoned tunnel, which mimicked perfectly the temperature and humidity of the cheese-making caves in France. The Continent came to the Carolinas, and Clemson bleu cheese was born. Nowadays, the tunnel was again abandoned, except for the tourists—and now a mob of sightseers.
I climbed the graveled embankment to the plateau entrance to the tunnel. I was used to being alone here, or one of only a handful of other visitors. I always stop to breathe in the damp earth smell and commit to memory the uncountable colors of green. The first waft of cold air from the yawning black hole always came as a never-quite-expected jolt.
Today, I didn’t anticipate a peaceful green interlude. Weaving my way past a gawking crowd planted on the old rail bed as if waiting for a parade to march out of the boxcar-sized black cave, my mild irritation evaporated in the heat, replaced by an ice cube of fear.
What had happened to draw the official and the idle in such numbers? Had the naive ghosters gotten into some serious trouble, something temporal and dangerous?
I eased between two men in hunting camouflage and past an imaginary line that encircled the opening at a twenty-foot distance. I didn’t acknowledge their disapproval of my pushiness or give them a sweet smile. Both were probably pleased when an official voice barked at me.
“Halt!” The deputy I’d been looking for. He stood to the right of the entrance, in the shadow of the overgrown rocks. I gave him a smile and started to ask a question when another voice, echoing from the tunnel, interrupted.
“Might as well go ahead and arrest her now, dep-ity. She ain’t nothin’ but trouble.”
Pudd Pardee, the head of the Rescue Squad, waddled into the sunlight on his stumpy, spraddled legs, looking like some mutated mythological woodland character. All he needed was a leprechaun’s brocade vest instead of a khaki work shirt with his name embroidered in an oval patch.
“Pudd.” I sounded delighted to see him. And I was. “Is everything all—is anyone—?” What exactly did I want to know?
“This is takin’ am-ba-lance chasin’ to new lows, A’vry. What’cha gonna do, sue the state ‘cause somebody dug a big hole a hunnert years ago? Don’t want to break your heart, but nobody’s even hurt. Yet.” He paused for effect. “I get Cuke Metz down outta that shaft, I’m gonna make that ol’ boy wish he’d fallen down that shaft and died before I got here.”
Pudd referred to a broad, vertical shaft dug from the top of the mountain down into the tunnel, a 180-foot-tall skylight designed to provide light and air during the antebellum construction.
“Cuke? He fell down the shaft?” As soon as I heard his name, I flashed back to the campfire storytelling, the mismatched gathering of good ol’ boys and ne’er-do-wells. “You say nobody’s hurt.” I didn’t want it to be a question.
“Like I said, not yet.”
“Have you—are there three folks in there, from out of town?”
Pudd pursed his meaty lips and studied me. “Nope.” He nodded behind me. “We’re holding ‘em in the fire truck for the time being.”
Relief and irritation vied for first place. With a glance over my shoulder, I could make out shapes in the truck’s cab.
“Been lovely chatting with you, A’vry. But I gotta get around to the top of that shaft before one’a them nidgits drops Cuke on his dumb ass.”
“He’s still in the shaft?”
“Swinging there like a gong in a bell and begging for somebody to save him.” Pudd hitched up his britches with the air of one donning the inevitable mantle of greatness, knowing he was the only one to supervise such a harrowing rescue.
I gave Pudd a half salute and trailed him back through the crowd to where his battered pickup sat parked beside the shiny red fire truck. Once he’d driven around to the top of the hill, I had no idea how pudgy Pudd planned to get from his truck through the rough terrain to the air shaft’s upper opening.
Three completed air shafts had been dug through the top of the mountain. Today, standing at the bottom of the one remaining shaft was an eerie experience—part beam-me-up shaft of light in the darkness, part mystery. Water droplets always rained down the wide shaft. Far overhead, trees sheltered the shaft’s opening, green in summer, stark in winter.
As a kid, I’d heard that one of the tunnel’s fatalities had occurred in that shaft. A donkey being lowered in a harness for the day’s work fell and killed both the donkey and the man below who broke its fall. I’d never read that story in any official account of the tunnel, but I still can’t think about that ten-foot-wide shaft without imagining the risk of being lowered almost two hundred feet into the deepest darkness to begin a deafening day’s work hammering granite.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Rudy’s campfire chat hadn’t stopped Cuke Metz from getting himself in trouble staging another haunting for the ghosters.
I turned to the fire truck, climbed up, and wrestled with the driver’s door.
The three ghosters sat inside, sweltering in the heat.
“Why don’t you roll down the windows or open the door?” I asked.
Trini, sandwiched between the two guys, her hands clasped between her knees, said, “They told us not to touch anything.”
“Come on.” I motioned for them to follow me. I climbed around into the rumble seats behind the cab. At least here we might catch a breeze.
We attracted some attention from the crowd below us. Since my brush with fame, in the person of Pudd Pardee, and since they had nothing else to stare at but an empty black hole, some of them turned their backs on the tunnel to study us instead.
I leaned over close to the three of them, keeping my voice low to avoid curious ears.
“So what happened?”
They looked from one to the other, silently electing Trini as spokesperson.
“We were filming. Inside. We’d been told there’d been an accident when the tunnel was being built, that someone had fallen down the shaft and that people sometimes hear him.”
“Or even see him,” Quint added.
Cuke had probably figured it’d be too dangerous to lower a live mule down the shaft, so he’d changed the story and volunteered himself.
“At first, it was just cold and damp. And drippy. Water sounds everywhere.” She sounded really spooked.
“Then we saw these legs.”
“And a scream—”
“At first, we thought—”
Colin interrupted. “We soon knew it was real.” He needed some face-saving, given the goofy stunts he’d already fallen for.
“We ran out to call for help,” Trini said.
“From inside, we could see some guys on top of the shaft. But they couldn’t pull him back up.”
“Unreal.”
They fell silent. I glanced over at the tunnel opening, a scant thirty yards away, the edges hidden and softened by vines, bushes, and weeds. The tunnel, from whatever vantage point—on the ground or high up in the fire truck—was black, solid, both ominous and inviting.
“We have it on tape,” Quint said, almost apologetic. He proffered the camera.
At my nod, he switched on the miniature screen and scanned for the beginning.
On the replay, I watched and listened as they walked through the black tunnel toward the shaft of light. The dripping water was audible, but I could only catch some of their whispered words.
Their scuffling steps in the wet sand discernible at times on the tape, they walked toward the light that descended into the blackness. I knew from experience that the light was capable of illumining their path. However, the darkness around them was so complete, they likely hadn’t quite trusted the light ahead.
Drips, scuffles, whispered words, dark and light. Not exactly compelling television.
“What the—” Quint’s voice replayed loud with alarm.
The camera then picked up the sounds that had drawn Quint’s reaction. An animal bellow, a plea.
The camera stopped moving.
“What is that?” someone—Trini?—whispered.
“Who’s there?” Colin yelled.
In the truck, we all jumped at the unexpected volume.
“Help!” a loud bellow in the distance answered.
The camera continued to move toward the light shaft, sweeping slowly from side to side, perhaps scanning for threats.
As it drew closer to the light, the camera angle slowly lifted, drawn upward into the tall shaft. The wide mouth at the top of the mountain looked small from where they stood. The falling condensation sparkled in the bright sunlight and fell in shades of green, colored by the trees thick and far above.
The yells for help grew louder, more distinct.
What at first looked like a clapper in a bell hung halfway up the shaft. The two legs gave a wild kick as if clamoring for a foothold.
“Oh, dear,” I said. That about summed it up. Cuke hung in the center of the shaft, at least eighty feet from the sandy stone floor.
The picture cut off.
“We went for help,” said Trini.
We all sat silent.
“Sorry this hasn’t worked out for you,” I said after a time.
“Oh, it’s worked better than we expected,” said Colin. “Much better, thanks to Trini’s scream.”
“Oh?”
All three nodded.
“We stayed up last night brainstorming some plot ideas. We’ve decided to make a horror movie. All thanks to Trini’s one helluva scream.”
I remembered their awed mention of her scream after one of their adventures.
“Bloodcurdling,” said Quint, giving her an admiring smile.
“The real stumbling block is distribution,” said Colin. “I know a guy in Charlotte who quit his big bank job to get into movie production. He made a serious film, entered festivals and such before he did a DVD release. We figure the straight-to-DVD market will be a better route for horror.”
The other two nodded enthusiastic confirmation.
“Another guy used to make movies around Charlotte. We’re hoping to hook up with him. After you get some credits, you can get hired on film crews. Charlotte gets a good bit of filmmaking traffic, even big Hollywood work.”
“That’d be fun,” I said. Probably not lucrative, but fun. I’d never asked what they did in the rest of their lives when they weren’t chasing their artistic dream. College students? Retail? Fast-food restaurant staff? Something with flexible hours, obviously.
“Bet you guys could make quite a horror picture,” I said.
“You reckon that would be something Mr. Bertram would be interested in investing in?”
If persistence was the key to success, Colin had what it took.
“I don’t know,” I said. I sincerely doubted it, but why should I deliver the bad news?
Outside our perch in the fire truck, a loud cheer echoed out of the tunnel, and the crowd gathered below began to clap and chatter in a slow wave, no more certain than we were what had happened but taking it as a good sign.
With so many members of the Ghouly Boys present—the scanner addicts who don’t have anything better to do than show up at car accidents hoping for gore—they might have preferred something more tragic just because it would make a better story when they were sitting around in the pool hall waiting for the next scanner call. But since it was one of their own who’d almost re-created the made-up miner’s fatal fall, they graciously celebrated the happy ending.
I was surprised to see Rudy exit the tunnel, waving his arms and yelling.
“Okay, I’m gonna have to ask you to break it up,�
� he called. “Break it up. Everything’s fine now. We just need to get him to the ambulance to be checked over. Let us have some room here.”
The crowd milled about, condensing toward the edges of the drive, but nobody turned toward the parking lot or made a move to leave.
Their persistence was soon rewarded. Two men, one wearing a complicated harness that looked like a parachutist’s apparatus, supported a third man—bushy-headed Cuke.
The crowd erupted in cheers and claps. No lack of enthusiasm.
Cuke, with what looked like blue nylon ski rope still knotted around his thighs and waist, waved his hand high overhead, acknowledging his well-wishers before he ducked his head with a sheepish grin.
If he’d pulled a successful stunt, nobody but his buddies would have known. A royal screwup, and most of the town’s underemployed population turned out and cheered. Cuke Metz had to have mixed feelings about the contradictions of fame.
His escorts walked him through a cross between a ticker-tape parade and a perp walk toward the ambulance. Looking at the thin ski rope he’d dangled from, I had no doubt he was having trouble getting his legs—and more personal parts of his body—to function again.
Rudy came over and waved up at us. “You all can go home now. We may need to talk to you later.” He gave Colin a nod for emphasis. “We know where to find you.”
The ghosters exchanged glances, the official menace not lost on them.
I followed them to the ground and walked them to their van. Miraculously it was no longer blocked in by other cars.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said. “Mumler. That’s an interesting nickname.”
Colin gave me a pleased grin. “After the first spirit photographer. The man who first captured recognizable apparitions on film. During the Civil War, so many restless spirits were taken when they didn’t expect to go. He helped comfort a lot of family members after their tragic losses.”
“That’s—interesting.”
As Colin walked on ahead to the van, I caught sight of Quint and Trini as they exchanged glances. I raised my eyebrows.
“Nobody really calls him that,” said Quint.
“Except him.” With a gentle smile, Trini rolled her eyes.
Hush My Mouth Page 23
