“They got it in the basement,” said the caretaker, leaning back in his rocker and expelling a gob of tobacco juice. “Keep goin’ down till you can’t go down no more, mister, an’ that’ll do it.”
The basement of that courthouse was like a mine itself; you might almost have believed they’d dug the whoosit out right there, in situ. Keith and I came to the bottom of a winding flight of stairs and found ourselves in a musty sort of crawlspace, its farther corners filled with shadows the single electric bulb on the ceiling couldn’t hope to reach. The ceiling was low enough that we both had to stoop a little, and most of the floor was taken up with trunks and boxes and filing cabinets full of junk. Thank God we weren’t looking for anything smaller than a pork barrel. We’d have been down there all night. As it was, we began on opposite sides of the basement and aimed to get the job done in something under an hour.
“This is annoying,” Keith called over his shoulder. “These damn rubes don’t realize what they’ve got a hold of here.”
“Toad in a hole,” I called back. Keith ignored me.
“This miner fellow—”
“Lamar Tibbs,” I sang out in a poor approximation of the caretaker’s Virginian twang.
“—he probably thinks he’s sitting on a crock of gold, just like the mayor here and the mining company with their slab of coal. But the two things apart don’t amount to a hill of beans, and they don’t have the sense to see it.”
“How so?” I didn’t think the whole thing amounted to much, myself.
“Because the one authenticates the other, don’t you see? Look here, I’m the authorities, okay? This here’s some sort of a strange beast you claim to have found in the middle of a piece of coal. Who’s to say it’s not a, a, what-d’ye-call-’em . . .?”
“Feegee mermaid.”
“Feegee mermaid, exactly.” A grunt, as he moved some heavy piece of trash out of the way. “Nothing to make a man suppose it ever saw the inside of a slab of coal – without the coal to prove it. The imprint of the beast in the coal goes to corroborate the story, see?”
“Yes, but—” I was going to point out that you didn’t find beasts, living or dead, inside slabs of coal anyway, so there was no story there to corroborate, only a tall tale out of backwoods West Virginia. But Keith didn’t seem to be interested in that self-evident proposition.
“And it’s the same thing with the coal. Suppose there is an imprint of something in there? What good is it without the very thing that made that imprint? It’s just the work of a few weekends for an amateur sculptor, is all.” He bent to his task again, shoving more packing-cases out of the way. “They don’t understand,” he muttered, almost to himself. “You need the two together.”
“Even if you did have the two things, though . . .” I wasn’t letting this one go unchallenged “. . . it still wouldn’t prove anything, in and of itself. It might go some way towards the appearance of proof – hell, it might even make a good enough story for page eight of the newspaper, I guess. That’s your business. I just take the pictures, that’s all. But at the end of the day . . .”
At the end of the day, Keith wasn’t listening. I happened to glance in his direction at that moment, and saw as much immediately. He was standing in the far corner of the basement, hands on hips, staring at something on the floor – from where I was, I couldn’t make it out. I called his name. I had to call again, and then a third time, before he even noticed. When he did, he looked up with an odd expression on his face.
“Come over here a second, Fenwick,” he called, and his voice sounded slightly strained. “Think I’ve found something.”
I crossed to where he was standing. In that corner the light was so dim I could hardly see Keith, let alone whatever it was he’d found, so the first thing we did was lay ahold of it and drag it to the centre of the basement, right beneath the electric bulb. It was heavy as hell, and we pushed it more than carried it across the packed-mud basement floor.
It was lying inside an open packing-case, all wrapped up in a bit of old tarpaulin. You could see the black gleam of coal where Keith had unwrapped it at one end. “You raise it up,” muttered Keith, and again I heard that unusual strain in his voice; “I’ll get the tarpaulin off of it.”
I laid hold of it and heaved it upright, and Keith managed to get the tarp clear. It was just one half of the slab, as it turned out; its facing piece lay underneath wrapped in more tarpaulin. Stood on its end, the half-slab was roughly the size of a high-back dining chair: it would have weighed a lot more, more than we could have dreamed of shifting, probably, except that it was all hollowed out, as if someone had sawn a barrel in half right down its centre.
The hollow space was nothing more than an inky pool of shadow at first, till I tilted the slab toward the light. Then, its shiny black surfaces gave up their secrets, and the electric light reflected off a wealth of curious detail. I gave a low whistle. Whoever’s work this was, he was wasted on Oram. He ought to have been knocking out statues for the Pope in Rome. For it was the finest, most intricately detailed job of carving you ever saw – intaglio, I believe they call it, where the sculptor carves in hollows instead of relief. There was even a kind of trompe l’oeil effect: if you looked at the cavity while turning the whole thing round slightly, the contours seemed to stand out in projection, that strange hollow form suddenly becoming filled-out and real. I’d have to say it was actually a little bit unsettling, for a cheap optical illusion. It was as if you were looking at the sky at night, the black gulf of space, and the stars all of a sudden took on a shape, the shape of something vast and unimaginable . . .
“My God.” A fellow would have been hard put to recognize Keith’s voice. It made me turn from the slab of coal to look at him. He was staring open-mouthed at the hollow space at the heart of the slab, with an expression I took at first to be awe. Only later did I come to recognize it as something more like horror.
“It’s pretty good at that,” I allowed. “The detail . . .”
“It’s exact in every detail,” said Keith, in wonderment. “You could use it for a mould, and you’d cast yourself a perfect copy.” He shook his head, never taking his eyes off of the coal slab.
“Copy of what, though?” I squinted at the concavity, turned it this way and that to get a sense of it in three dimensions. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen – it’s a regular whoosit, all right. Are those things supposed to be tentacles, there? Only they’ve got claws on the end, or nippers or something. And where’s its head supposed to be?”
“The head retracts,” said Keith, almost as if he was reading it from a book. “Like a slug drawing in on itself.”
I stared at him. “Beg your pardon, sir?”
“You said it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” said Keith. “Well, I’ve seen it. Or something exactly like it”
“You have?” It was all I could think of to say.
Keith nodded. “Let’s get out of this damn mausoleum,” he said abruptly, turning away from the packing-case and its contents. “I’ll tell you up in the real world, where a man can breathe clean air, not this infernal stink.” And with that he turned his back and was off, stumping up the wooden steps and out of the basement, leaving me to rewrap and repack the slab of coal as best I could before hastening after him.
I was full of questions, all of them to do with the strange artefact we’d been looking at. I have to confess, the level of realism the unknown sculptor had managed to suggest had impressed me – not to say unnerved me. I mentioned before the optical illusion of solidity conjured out of the void, that sensation of seeing the actual thing, not just the impression it had made. That actually began to get to you after a while. Three-dimensional, I said? Well, maybe so. But the longer you looked at it, the dimensions started to looked wrong somehow; impossible, you might say.
On top of that was Keith’s admission that he’d seen the like before. What did he mean by that? And over and above everything . . . well, Keith was right. We needed to be i
n the fresh air. Fact was, it stank in that damn basement: I’ve never known a smell like it. It was as if a bushel of something had gone bad, and been left to fester for an awful long time.
An awful long time, at that.
Back at the hotel Keith went straightaway up to his room for about an hour, leaving me to pick at my evening meal in the all-but-empty dining room. The smell down in that basement had killed my appetite, pretty much; in the end I pushed my plate aside and went to the smoking lounge. That was where Keith found me.
He looked better than he had back outside the courthouse, at least. I’d found him leaning against the side of the building, looking as if he was going to be sick: he had that grey clammy cast to his face. I asked him was he all right, and he waved me away. Now, there was a little more colour in him, and his eyes were focussing properly again, not staring off into the middle distance the way they do when a fellow is on the verge of losing his lunch.
“You got any of that brandy left?” he said, taking the chair opposite mine. “Medicinal purposes, you understand.”
“You’re in luck, as it happens,” I said, offering him the flask. “I’ve just taken an inventory of our medical supplies.”
“Good,” said Keith, and took a long swallow. His eyes teared up a little, but that was only natural. It had kind of a kick to it, that bathtub Napoleon. You could have used it to open a safe, if you’d run out of blasting gelignite.
“Well, then.” Keith handed me back the flask. “I believe I owe you a story, Mr Fenwick. Recompense for leaving you with the baby, down there in the basement.”
I waved a hand, which could equally be taken to mean, no problem, don’t trouble yourself about it, or – as I hoped Keith would read it – go on, go on, you interest me strangely. The reason I waved a hand instead of actually saying either of those things was because I’d just taken a pull on that flask myself, and was temporarily speechless.
Keith settled back in his armchair and crossed his long thin legs. “It might help explain why I took this assignment,” he said, throwing me a cigar and lighting one himself, “why I asked for it.” He puffed on his stogie till it was properly lit, sending up a wreath of smoke above his head. Then from the heart of that smokescreen he told me the following tale, in about the time it took us to reduce those big Havanas down to ash.
“I was thirty at the time: a dangerous age, Mr Fenwick. You’ll learn that, soon enough. I was working on the Examiner in San Francisco when gold fever hit up in the Yukon, back in ’98. The news came at exactly the right time, so far as I was concerned – a lot of other folks too, among that first wave of prospectors and adventurers. I was missing something, we all were: the frontier had been closed, and the wild days of excitement out West were history, or so it seemed. For better or worse, the job of shaping the nation was finished, over and done with, and us latecomers had missed the chance to leave our stamp on it. We felt as if we’d all been running West in search of something – something magical and unique, that would make real men out of us – only once we’d gotten there, it had already set sail out of the Golden Gate, and there was no way we could follow. The Gay Nineties, you say? I tell you, there were folks dying in the street in San Francisco. Hunger, want . . . maybe nothing more than heartbreak.
“So you can bet we jumped at the chance to go prospecting, away up in the frozen wastes. That was a new frontier, sure enough: maybe the last frontier, and we weren’t about to miss it. And we piled on to those coffin-ships out of Frisco and Seattle, hundreds of us at a time; ‘stampeders’, we called ourselves. There was about as much thinking went into it as goes into a stampede.
“The Canucks wouldn’t let you into the country totally unprepared, though. You had to have a ton of goods, supplies and suchlike, else they’d stop you at the docks. And that took some getting together; 1,100 pounds of food, plus clothing and equipment, horses to carry it with, that sort of thing. I was travelling light – reckoned to hire sled-dogs up in Canada – but even so, my goods took some lugging at the wharf.
“So we sailed North. A thousand miles out of Seattle we made the Lynn Canal, which was where every one of us bold prospectors had to make his first big decision. Where was he going to disembark? ’Cause there were two trails, see, up to Dawson and the gold-fields, 600 miles due north. You could take the easy route, avoiding all the big mountains – that was Skagway and the White Pass. The other route started in Dyea, and it took in the Chilkoot Pass, leading on to the lakes. Even us greenhorns knew about the Chilkoot by that time.
“A lot of folk chose Skagway, but I never heard anything good about that town. In Indian it’s ‘the place where a fair wind never blows’, which pretty much sums it up, I guess. Leave it to the Indians to know which way the wind blows. Soapy Smith’s gang ran the town – he was an old-time con-artist out of Georgia, and he knew a hundred ways to pick the pockets of every rube that staggered down the gangplank. Twenty-five cents a day wharf rates on each separate piece of goods. Lodging-houses where they fleeced you on the way in and the way out. Saloons and whorehouses; casinos with rigged wheels and marked cards. Portage fees. Tolls all the way along the trail – and bandits too, armed gangs and desperadoes, hand in glove with the ‘official escorts’, like as not. No sir: I chose Dyea, which was not a hell of a lot more salubrious, but at least you didn’t have Soapy’s hand in your britches all the while.
“There was ice all over the boat as it hove into Dyea. It looked like a ghost ship, and I guess we were a sorry-enough looking bunch of ghosts as we stumbled off. The mountains came right down to the outskirts of town; took us two weeks of hard going to climb as far as Sheep Camp, at the base of the Chilkoot. I tell you: there were lots of men took one look at that mountainside and gave it up on the spot, stayed on in camp and made a living for themselves as best they could. You couldn’t call them the stupid ones, not really. A thousand feet from base to summit, sheer up and down, straight as a beggar can spit? Any sane man would have turned round and said ’scuse me, my mistake, beg your pardon.
“We were obliged to stay in Sheep Camp for the best part of March, till the pass came navigable. Bad weather, and the worst kind of terrain; even the Indian guides wouldn’t touch it in those conditions. It was just before spring thaw, and the weather was ornery in the extreme. Minus sixty-five one night, by the thermometer in Lobelski’s General Store. It stayed light from nine-thirty in the morning to just before four in the afternoon. The rest of it was pitch dark and endless cold.
“They were building some sort of a hoisting-gear up the Chilkoot, the tramway they called it, but I never saw it finished. I hauled my goods up there, the old fashioned way. I could have paid the Indians to do it for me, a dollar a pound, but I didn’t have 2,000 dollars to spare. That was why I was bound for the Yukon in the first place. So I hauled every last case up that mountainside, forty trips in all. I was raw from the chafing of the ropes on my shoulders, and I was nigh on crippled by the exhaustion and the cold – but I managed it. Somehow. Don’t ask me how. It’d kill me now if I tried it.
“Truth is, I don’t know how it didn’t kill me back then. Fifteen hundred toeholds in the ice, up a trail no more than two feet wide. Take a step to left and right, and you were in the powder stuff, loose and treacherous. If a man slipped, it was all up with him; you never saw him again. That pass was filled with the bodies of good men.
“Anyway! Come April I was over the Chilkoot and heading toward Dawson, a mere 550 miles off. The trail led along Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett: if you waited for the thaw, the sheer volume of melt coming down off the mountains turned the rivers into rapids. If you went early, like I did, it was just a question of praying the ice wouldn’t break. You put it out of your mind, till it came time to camp at night and you’d hear the ice creaking and groaning below you. We rigged up the sleds with sails, and the wind used to push us along at a fine clip. All we had to do was trust in the Lord and watch out for the cracks.
“The lakes weren’t properly clear of ice till the
end of May, and by that time we bold sled-skaters were already in Dawson, just six months after we’d first set out to strike it rich. Dawson was a stumpy, scroungy kind of town at the bend of the river, set on mudflats and made of nothing much but mud, or so it seemed. Five hundred people lived there as a rule: gold fever pushed that up to 12,000 by the start of the year, 30,000 by that summer’s end. It was a breeding ground for typhoid – I stayed clear of the place, except when I made my victualling run once a week.
“I was working my claim south-east of Dawson city, out among the dried-up river beds. That was where I got my crash-course in mining – a year earlier, I’d have thought you just scuffed around in the dirt with the toe of your boot till you turned up some nuggets. Not in Yukon territory. You had to dig your way down to the pastry, we called it, the layers where the gold lay, through forty, fifty feet of rock and frost-hard river muck; tough going? Yes, sir. You broke your back on nothing more than a hunch and a hope. Besides that, all you had was the comradeship of your fellows and the one chance in a hundred thousand your claim would pay out big. I almost came to value the one more than the other, because when the chips were down you could rely on the comradeship at least. Money ain’t everything, not in those latitudes. Maybe not in these.
“All through that summer I dug away in the dried-up beds, till it came autumn, and time to make another big decision. The last boat out of Dawson sailed on September the sixteenth, and a lot of fellows I knew were on it, the ones who’d struck it rich and the ones who’d simply had enough. I didn’t fall into either camp: I waved that boat away from the landing, and made my plans to stay on through the winter. Plenty did: the proud and foolish ones like me, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to admit defeat and go home with only a few grains of gold in their pokes; the optimists, who couldn’t believe that the best was over, that the juicy lodes were already worked out and the rest only dry holes; and worst of all the hard core, the ones who’d caught it worst of all, who had no place left for them back in the real world. Quite a bunch.
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