Deep Sky tc-3

by Patrick Lee

  “I heard of this place a while back,” Travis said.

  Jeannie didn’t look up from her work. “Yeah?”

  “Guy I used to know told me I should stop by, if I was ever in the area.”

  Jeannie said nothing.

  Outside, the sedan with the stuffed trunk went past.

  “He said he left something of mine in the basement,” Travis continued. “Said someone here would know what I was talking about.”

  At last Jeannie glanced up at him.

  Travis studied her face for any sign of suspicion. Any hint that she understood the significance of this place’s basement, and that a stranger requesting access to it was probably tied to that significance in some way.

  But all she did was knit her eyebrows together. “I think it’s pretty empty down there,” she said. “How long ago was this?”

  “Few years,” Travis said.

  Jeannie shrugged, thought about it another second and then went back to her straightening, as if that concluded the discussion.

  “Can I take a look anyway?” Travis said.

  She seemed amused at the request, for some reason. She shrugged again and said, “Knock yourself out,” then reached under the bar out of sight. Travis heard a coffee can slide on wood, and objects clinking against one another. After a moment Jeannie brought out two keys, each on its own ring. The rings had plastic tabs attached to them, labeled simply #1 and #2. She pushed them across to Travis. “Entrance is outside, around the back.”

  With that she returned to the register and ignored them.

  Travis traded looks with Paige and Bethany, and then the three of them stood, leaving their drinks. They were almost to the door when Travis stopped and turned back toward Jeannie.

  “You ever heard of a man named Ruben Ward?” he said.

  She met his gaze.

  Travis had seen lots of people play dumb before. They almost always overdid it. Their faces scrunched up. They registered too much confusion. Really, any confusion was too much; it wasn’t confusing to simply hear an unfamiliar name.

  Jeannie didn’t look confused. She looked puzzled, which was stranger yet. Travis got the impression that she knew nothing about Ward, but that she’d heard the name. Maybe recently.

  After a moment she shook her head. “Can’t help you.”

  Travis considered pressing her on the subject, but held back. He turned and led the others out.

  They were halfway along the building’s left side, moving down an alley floored with cracked pavement and a few lonely tufts of grass, when it happened.

  It started as a sound—or what seemed like a sound. Maybe the frenetic hum of an electrical transformer about to fail, or the snapping, static-like buzz you sometimes heard over a field of grasshoppers on a dry summer day. It rose over the span of a second, seemingly from a source very close to Travis—behind him, he thought at first. He spun to look for it but saw nothing there, and noticed as he moved that the sound’s direction didn’t change at all. It had no direction. It was just everywhere, as if he were hearing it through a set of headphones. He saw Paige and Bethany reacting the same way. They were hearing it too. They looked at him and each other, their eyes narrowing in concern—and then widening.

  Because they’d just realized the same thing Travis had.

  That it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It wasn’t anything they were picking up with their ears. It was closer than that, somehow—already inside their heads.

  It was a thought.

  They were hearing it the way they heard their own internal monologue.

  All three of them came to a stop, facing one another. None of them spoke. Second by second the sensation intensified, its apparent volume and clarity mounting. Travis felt it becoming almost a physical presence, its insectile quality growing sharper. It felt like bugs swarming inside his skull. The effect began to push him toward nausea. He saw it doing the same to Paige and Bethany. Saw them taking careful breaths to keep their stomachs under control.

  And then it was over. The sound was gone as if someone had thrown a switch, and there was only the hush of the town again.

  The three of them stood there for a long moment, still not speaking. Just breathing, getting their bearings.

  “What the hell’s happening in this place?” Bethany said. It came out as hardly more than a whisper.

  Travis thought of the sea withdrawing before the arrival of a tsunami. Of people’s hair standing on end before a lightning strike. Of the supposed panicked behavior of animals in the hours before a major earthquake.

  “No idea,” he said, his own voice quieter than he’d intended. He nodded to the back of the building. “Come on.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A passageway beneath the Third Notch.

  They didn’t even have to enter the basement to see it. It was there in plain view to any stray dog that wandered through the rear lot. Centered on the back wall, one story below the main level, was the arched entry to a corridor beneath the building. A set of concrete stairs descended to it, hugging the cinderblock foundation. A stamped metal sign was bolted to the bricks just shy of the opening:

  720 Main St.

  Apt. 1

  Apt. 2

  An orange security light glowed softly, somewhere in the gloom beyond the arch. The floor down there was more concrete, probably from the same pour that’d laid the stairs.

  Travis understood Jeannie’s amusement now. He also knew what they would find beneath the restaurant.

  Nothing.

  Both apartments were long deserted. They’d probably been declared illegal for residential use: each had only a tiny window, tucked up near the ceiling, all but impossible to crawl out through during an emergency.

  Each unit’s layout was a mirror image of the other: kitchen and bathroom on one end, balanced by undefined space that served as living, dining, and sleeping quarters. Like a slightly oversized hotel room minus carpeting and a view. Both apartments were empty. Not even boxes of random junk had accumulated—just a few cracked laundry baskets in unit two, nested together and forgotten in a corner.

  There was nothing else that could’ve been called a passageway. No hidden tunnel behind either derelict refrigerator—they checked. No mirror on any wall that could swing out on concealed hinges. The corridor itself was the only thing the notebook could’ve been referring to.

  “A passageway beneath the third notch,” Bethany said. “And the next sentence started with Look for.” She thought about it. “Look for one of these apartments? It wouldn’t make sense to word it like that. You don’t have to look very hard to find these doors, once you’re in the hallway.”

  “Look for John Doe in Apartment One,” Travis said. That sounded better. He couldn’t think of anything else that sounded right at all. “Maybe Ward met someone here. Was instructed to meet someone here—someone who lived in one of these units back then.”

  Before he could say more they heard Jeannie’s voice through the ceiling straight above them, yelling at someone. They were standing in the second apartment, roughly beneath the seats they’d taken at the bar. Travis couldn’t quite make out Jeannie’s words, but her angry tone was clear enough. It went quiet for three seconds, then started again. There’d been no one else speaking in between. She was on the phone—probably with whoever she’d talked to earlier, reiterating her demand: get your ass over here and get us out of this town. Her second spiel ended on a note of finality. Silence followed.

  Paige turned to Travis. “Who could they have told Ward to meet here?” Her lower eyelids edged upward. “One of their own?”

  Travis weighed the idea. He turned and studied the dark recesses of the apartment. It didn’t exactly fit the image that’d come to him earlier: the sprawling penthouses above the nerve centers of the world. But that’d been a snap impression at best. A guess based on nothing at all, because they knew nothing at all about who they were up against. Power took other forms, he knew. Like anonymity.

  He turned
to Bethany. “Can you check records for who lived here in 1978?”

  She winced. “I can try. Tax records might turn up something—assuming whoever lived here even filed.”

  “Maybe there’s paperwork on old tenants upstairs,” Paige said. “I think our approach needs to lose its subtlety.”

  They pushed back in through the front door and Travis asked about the paperwork.

  Jeannie stared at him. The anger she’d put into the phone call was still on her face.

  Then she said, “I didn’t think you’d stick with the ‘good cop’ thing much longer.”

  “Excuse me?” Travis said.

  The two kids were watching now, their video games forgotten.

  “In back, both of you,” Jeannie said.

  The kids complied, disappearing into the kitchen.

  “Ma’am,” Travis said, “whatever you think—”

  “That’s the idea, right?” Jeannie said. “All morning we get the bad cops—all these hard-asses in their Humvees scaring the shit out of everyone who catches a look at them. Coming into all the shops and grilling us about Ruben Ward, Allen Raines—What do we remember? What have we seen?”

  “Raines,” Travis said. He’d always intended to ask her about the man, but only after checking the basement. It would’ve been one thing too many to stuff into the first conversation.

  “Yeah, I knew him,” Jeannie said. “Everyone knows everyone here. You people, we don’t know, which is why we’re not talking to you about him. And putting on street clothes and acting casual isn’t going to change that.”

  “We’re not with the others,” Travis said. “We came over the ridge on foot to avoid them.”

  She didn’t buy it.

  “Get out,” she said. “And if your friends are supposed to be fixing whatever’s wrong inside that mine, tell them to stop screwing around and do it.”

  “Mine?” Paige said. She looked at Travis, then Bethany. Each shared her bafflement.

  For the first time since they’d come back in, Jeannie’s anger slipped. She glanced from one of them to the next, reading their reactions.

  Travis advanced and rested his hands on the back of the stool he’d sat on earlier. He met Jeannie’s eyes and didn’t blink.

  “We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”

  She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”

  “And what time was President Garner killed?”

  She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.

  “This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”

  For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.

  Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.

  Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the way stories do when they’re made up.”

  “Tell them about the ghost,” the little girl said.

  Jeannie waved her off.

  “You told us it was real,” the girl said. “You said you and Dad heard it talk.”

  Jeannie looked annoyed at the girl’s insistence, maybe a little embarrassed. But there was something else in her expression, Travis saw. Some inability to refute what the kid had said, because no doubt Jeannie really had told her children those things.

  “I don’t know what’s up there,” she said at last, keeping her focus on Travis and Paige and Bethany. “There’s . . . something.” She was silent a bit longer, then just shook her head. “The stories all go like this: the mine was nothing special until 1987—kids might go up there to drink or make out, but nothing strange ever happened. Then, that year, the government came in and fenced it all off. The nearest shaft entrance is actually on Forest Service land, outside the town limits.” She nodded out the front windows. “You probably saw the house up at the treeline with all the Humvees in front.”

  “Raines’s house,” Travis said.

  She nodded. “His property butts up against federal land. The mine access is two hundred yards straight uphill from that house, deep in the woods. They say the government took over the site and . . . did something up there. Built something, maybe. Down inside the shaft.”

  Travis looked at Paige. He saw her processing the information and drawing the same conclusion as he was: Jeannie had it wrong. The stories had it wrong. The government—working with Tangent—had only found something in the mine shaft. The Scalar investigation’s long search for answers had led to this town in the end, and in turn had led to the mine. Whatever was in there, Ruben Ward had created it. Maybe with help.

  “They say most of the government’s comings and goings were at a different entrance,” Jeannie said, “over the ridge to the north. That opening is a lot lower down, accessible by old logging roads. I guess some teenagers from here in town got pretty close to it a few times, when everything was going on. Close enough to overhear workers talking about what was in the mine.” A shiver seemed to pass through her. She shook it off. “The workers called it the Stargazer. They were scared of it. They hated being down inside with it, whatever it was—whatever it is. They said it had to be kept under control, but they were still working out how to do that. And then Mr. Raines bought that house up on the slope—he paid twice what it was worth to speed up the deal. He moved in, and around that time all the government activity just went away. It was pretty clear Raines was involved somehow. I don’t think anyone trusted him, at first. But after a while something became obvious: the man never left this town. And I mean never. I’ve seen that for myself, living here almost twenty years now. In all that time, Raines never took so much as a drive down to the ocean, three miles away. He’d come down to Main Street for groceries, or to have a sandwich in here. Then right back up to that house. The way people eventually saw it, he was the one keeping the Stargazer under control, whatever the hell that entailed. He got stuck with that job, and he did it. He kept us safe from it, all those years. And if we weren’t sure of it before, we are now. It was about six hours after he died that we got the first . . . hum.”

  Travis had been staring down into the bar. Now he looked up. “Like the one five minutes ago. Feels like bugs in your head.”

  Jeannie nodded. “Second one was about four hours after the first, then less than two hours, and they’ve been coming faster and faster ever since.”

  No wonder the town was emptying out. Twenty-five years of these stories, and now physical evidence that they weren’t bullshit. That there really was something bad up in the mine.

  Travis considered the word: Stargazer. A uniquely strange name for something that was deep underground.

  Much of what they’d learned was strange—both here and before they’d arrived in Rum Lake. There were giant gaps in the puzzle, and Travis couldn’t picture what would fill them. The Stargazer itself was one: it had to have been in that mine since the summer of 1978, some nine years before the Scalar investigators found it, but in all that time it must’ve been effectively dormant. If it’d been generating these hums back then, this place would’ve become a ghost town. Yet when Allen Raines had taken watch over the thing, he’d had to stay on top of it day and night, right from the beginning. Those two facts were hard to reconcile. As was a third: even if he and Paige and Bethany could reach the Stargazer,
it was unlikely they could do much more than Raines had. Which was to keep the thing in check, assuming they’d see how that was done. But what sort of Achilles’ heel was that? If all they could do was babysit the thing, how long could they stay on it before someone interfered with them? Like these guys in the Humvees. A few hours, at best?

  He knew he was thinking in circles, and that doing so wouldn’t help until they’d seen the Stargazer for themselves. For better or worse, they’d have the whole picture then. He drew hope only from what Bethany had said back in Casper: If they consider us a threat, then we are.

  The little girl stepped out of the doorway and tugged on Jeannie’s arm.

  “The ghost,” the girl said. “Tell them.”

  Jeannie’s forehead furrowed. She seemed stretched between frustration and sober gravity, as if she believed the story herself but would never expect others to.

  “Try us,” Travis said.

  Jeannie frowned and let out a long breath, giving in. “They say it always happens around the two entrances to the mine. They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t. My husband and I . . . we like to think now we might’ve imagined what we heard. The wind really was blowing that day. Maybe that’s all it was. I don’t know.”

  Travis tried to picture the mine entrance relative to Raines’s place, on the satellite image they’d seen. The moment he did, something occurred to him. He turned to Bethany.

  “That satellite was looking almost straight down, right?”

  She nodded. “Perfectly straight down. Default angle unless you command it to do otherwise.”

  “From that perspective,” Travis said, “even redwoods would have lots of gaps between them. Plenty of open ground visible in the image.”

  Bethany shrugged. “I guess. Probably quite a bit.”

  “We didn’t see any heat signature uphill from Raines’s house,” Travis said. “No bodies moving through those woods. Not even one.” He thought about it a second longer. “I don’t think these guys are going near the mine shaft.”