Blowback nd-4

by Bill Pronzini

  I let the car drift to a stop near the building and shut off the ignition and stepped out. The sun's glare up here was intense; mica particles glittered and winked in the rocks, almost blindingly in some places, and every piece of shade seemed to have a knife edge. It was so still I found myself straining to hear some kind of sound.

  The palms of my hands were damp, and I wiped them on my trouser legs as I walked away from the car and alongside the building. Decaying timbers and strips of iron banding littered patches of grass and Indian paintbrush. There were huge gaps in the structure's walls, a jagged hole near the back where a window might once have been. I picked my way carefully up to the hole and peered inside. More debris, eerily displayed in a mosaic of dusky sunlight and shadow; from the look of it, the place had been a combination workroom and living quarters. One of the crossbeams for the roof hung at a forty-five-degree angle, and I thought that it would not be long before the whole thing collapsed. This, maybe, was the last summer of its existence.

  But there was nothing out of the ordinary in there, and I turned away finally and walked a few more paces. Another building squatted behind the larger one-a shed of some kind, probably, hidden from sight of the wagon trail and the county road below. One side of it had folded in, giving it an oddly triangular shape, like a partially collapsed house of cards. I made a circle of it, looked inside along the one wall still erect. Nothing to see there either.

  Turning, I looked up the slope at the mine entrance. Then I ran my tongue over dry Lips and went back to the car and got my flashlight out of the glove compartment. I crossed to the slope, climbed it past the skeletal remains of an ore cart-shoes sliding on the hard rock, stirring up small puffs of dust that seemed to hang in the air behind me, mistlike. When I got up in front of the entrance I stopped and stared at a large metal sign that somebody had wired to one of the framing timbers. It said: WARNING! DANGEROUS PREMISES-DO NOT ENTER.

  I hesitated, and then moved forward cautiously until I was standing just outside the entrance. The wood frame was rotted and insect-ridden, one of the vertical supports half-splintered out in the middle so that the horizontal beam above was canted at a lopsided angle. When I extended my arm inside and clicked on the flashlight, the beam penetrated far enough to let me see small mounds of fallen earth and rock, two or three collapsed timbers scattered across the floor. Ceiling supports tilted downward in places, a wall support leaned drunkenly toward the tunnel's center.

  Unsafe, all right, I thought. You're a damned fool if you go in there.

  But I kept on standing where I was, moving the flashlight up and down, from side to side. Bits of mica-or maybe bits of gold-gleamed dully in the rock. Within the range of my light, I saw nothing you would not expect to find in an abandoned mine shaft.

  And yet there was an odd sour musty smell in there; part of it was dust and dry rot and animal or bird droppings, but there was something else, too, that I could not quite define. I dried my palms again, switching the flash from hand to hand.

  Somewhere nearby, a bird made a sudden whickering cry, and it was loud enough in the heavy stillness to jerk my head around and up. At first I did not see anything in the glazed sky; then, off to my right, a hawk came wheeling down across the flat, made a long gliding loop as though reconning the area, whickered a second time and then vanished. Silence resettled, and the emptiness seemed so complete again that it was as if the hawk had never been there at all, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

  Hawk, I thought.

  And all at once I was thinking of the hawk I had seen yesterday circling up here above the mine-the hawk and the two ravens. I felt myself frowning, and there was a tickling sensation at the edge of my mind. Unusual to see birds like that in the same vicinity at the same time, now that I considered it. Unless…

  Jesus.

  The hair went up on my neck, and I could feel my stomach knot up in an empty, hollow sort of way. I tasted bile on the back of my tongue.

  Jesus!

  I swiveled my gaze to the mine entrance, rubbed a forearm across my eyes. I had to go in there now, no choice in the matter. Even though I was abruptly and painfully certain of what I was going to find, I wanted to be wrong-and I had to know.

  Another moment of hesitation; then I stepped through the entrance and made my way forward heel-and-toe, swaying the light in front of me, not touching anything with my body, stepping over the mounds of rock and earth, avoiding the fallen and leaning timbers. The deeper into the shaft I went, the sharper the smell became-and I could recognize it now, and I began to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.

  The ore track rails were intact here, extending into the blackness ahead like a pair of brownish-red ribs. Shadows wavered at the perimeter of the flash beam; timbers and the head of a pick and another toppled ore cart seemed to leap into the cone of light. A chunk of rock the size of a beach ball glittered briefly with squares of yellow metal: iron pyrites, fool's gold. Thirty feet in, the latticework of support timbers appeared to be in a more stable condition, and there was less rock, less debris, spread across the rough stone floor. The ceiling, more than seven feet high to that point, sloped abruptly downward until it was only a couple of inches above my head. I bent a little at the waist, shuffling-stepping; sweat matted my shirt to my torso, the sultry air put the tightness back into my chest.

  When I had taken another half-dozen steps, the light picked up a turning in the shaft, hard to the left. The smell was so bad here that I had to pinch my nostrils shut with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. I clenched my teeth, went forward to the turn.

  I was halfway through it when I saw the body.

  The beam flicked over it at the lower extremities: lying supine, one leg crooked under the other. Near the bent foot were two bloody towels and a sixteen-inch pipe wrench; the head of the wrench was faintly smeared with dried blood, as though it had been wiped off in a haphazard way. I stopped and planted my feet, and then pulled the light back and moved it over and put it on his face.

  Only he did not have much of a face any more. The side of his skull was brutally crushed, and the goddamn hawks and ravens-carrion feeders-had sought him out all the way in here and pecked out his eyes.

  But there was no mistaking who he was; his clothing told me that, if nothing else.

  Walt Bascomb.

  I turned sharply, and my stomach convulsed and I dry-retched a couple of times. Then the retching became a series of hard coughs, and finally nothing at all. And all the while my mind kept trying to sort facts and speculations, kept trying to open memory cells and drag out scraps of things seen and heard and perceived-as if I knew enough now, subconsciously, to piece the whole thing together, to identify not only Bascomb's killer but Vahram Terzian's as well. But I could not concentrate in there, with the stench and the ugly thing on the tunnel floor behind me. I needed to get out into clean air, sunlight, the inside of my car where I could let my mind work slowly in familiar surroundings. It would come together then: I could sense it grimly, as I had sensed such insights in the past.

  Without looking at Bascomb again, I stepped out of the turn and started toward the dusty yellow rectangle that marked the entrance.

  Thud!

  The sound, sudden and explosive, came from up at the tunnel mouth, sent echoes rolling like hollow thunder through the shaft. I pulled up, muscles bunching in alarm, a chill sliding along my back. The sound came again, and close to the entrance thick puffs of dust burst down from the ceiling, turned the light there hazy, shimmering. The concussive noise came a third time, wood on wood or stone on wood; there were more plumes of dust, and the creaking of timbers and the bouncing clatter of rocks, and through the haze I saw movement, a man-shape without recognizable features, and then the shape shifted position and seemed to swing something at the rotted wood frame of the entrance Thud!

  Panic climbed inside me, and I shouted “No, for God's sake!” and started to run.

  Thud!

  Thud!

&n
bsp; The cry of my voice was lost in the reverberations, in the gathering rumble of loosened rock and earth and wooden supports. Dust obliterated the opening now, spiraled back toward me in smoke-like billows that cut my visibility with the flashlight to less than fifteen feet. I could not see clearly where I was running, and my foot stubbed against one of the rails, sent me lurching into a wall, off it and hard against a loose timber; the timber gave and I went down, jarring on knees and forearms, pain slicing up into my left armpit and the flash spinning free and winking out and rocks like sharp-edged hailstones buffeting my back and buttocks and legs. The tunnel was filled with a rage of sound now, with upheaval and suffocating grayness.

  I tried to get up, gagging, choking, but I could not pull my legs under me. I crawled instead and kept on crawling until I came up against a miniature avalanche of earth and limestone, until something that felt like a collapsed support struck a glancing blow across the backs of my legs. Then I flung my hands over my head in blind sick terror And the entire front of the shaft seemed to cave in around me.

  Seventeen

  It might have lasted seconds or minutes; I was suspended in time, lost inside myself. Falling things pummeled my body, made me jerk and squirm in agony, and I kept waiting with a kind of wild fatalism for a heavy chunk of rock or wood to shatter my spine, my neck, the back of my skull. A slide of pebbly earth threatened to bury my head; I twisted fetally so I could keep my nose and mouth free, but they were already clogged with hot dust, the taste of it like cinders and mold. My lungs felt as though they had been set aflame.

  The echoing, banging roar reached a crescendo, and then ebbed so rapidly into a vacuumlike stillness that I believed at first I had gone deaf. There was pressing weight the length of my body-but I could no longer feel the bite of assaulting objects. A thought took shape in my mind: It's over. Is it over?

  All around me, the upheaval seemed to have ended; I could sense a restless settling. I moved my arms away and raised my head a little and opened my eyes. Gray-black, faintly mobile; a rivulet of earth that I could not see sifted down inches from my right cheek. I wanted to raise up, get up off my belly, but the feeling of fatalism was still with me; if I moved, it would start all over again, maybe it hadn't really stopped, there was still a rock or a timber ready to come crashing down on me A wash of pain in my chest cut through that. Then my ears popped and the false deafness vanished, and I could hear myself gasping; I realized like someone coming out of heavy sedation that there was no air where I was lying, there was only a stagnant graininess all but void of oxygen. Breathing was impossible-like trying to draw solid matter into my lungs.

  Panic clawed at me again, forced me to struggle under the weight along my back and hips and legs, push up and turn into a sitting position with earth and rocks sliding off me- man rising up out of his own grave. My shoulder brushed against the splintered edge of a timber, and I jerked it away reflexively, hunching, and twisted over and around until I was on hands and knees. Blood hammered in my ears, there were flashes and shimmers of yellow-white behind my eyes and a sudden slow, spinning dizziness. I was close to blacking out; if I didn't get air I would suffocate. But the entrance was blocked, I knew it was blocked. Back into the shaft then. If I could gut to where Bascomb's body was, if that part of the tunnel had not caved in too, there would not be so much dust and the air would still have oxygen.

  I started to crawl, but immediately a part of my mind said: No, get on your feet, get your head close to the ceiling; air's clearer, you might even be able to breathe a little up there. Half coughing, half retching, I pulled one foot under me and then shoved up, staggered forward a step and caught myself without touching anything around me. I stood swaying, and it was not quite so bad nearer the ceiling, all right. I forced my mouth open wide, craning my head back; my lungs heaved, dragged in a series of shallow breaths. The coughing slacked off and the giddiness eased-not much, just enough so that I could make my body work with some control.

  The tunnel floor was strewn with debris, but it didn't seem as bad going backward as it must have been the other way. I located one of the cart rails with my foot, because I had to keep myself at the center of the shaft; I did not dare touch either of the walls. Then I moved forward a step at a time along the rail, stop and go, hands probing in front of me in the clotted dark. My legs had a liquidy weakness at the knees, there was a thin pain in the left one every time I put weight on it. Five steps, ten-and my forehead banged into a hanging ceiling support that I had missed with my hands. I stumbled, toppled to one knee and then broke the fall skiddingly with both palms. Above me the timber made a groaning noise that built into a low rumbling. Earth fluttered down, then a piece of rock that narrowly missed my head as I scuttled forward and kept on scuttling until I butted up against a mound of rubble.

  The timber did not fall and the shaft grew still again.

  I crawled over the mound, bumped into something round and metallic that my fingertips told me was a wheel on the broken ore cart, and detoured around that. When I relocated the track, I stood up again so I could lift my head above that stifling pall of dust.

  It was another ten steps before the congealing graininess began to thin out; the floor around and between the rails seemed clear of debris. I moved with a little more speed, felt the track begin to curve to the left and knew I was coming into the turn where Bascomb's body lay. The jellied feeling in my knees was so strong now it forced me down into a sitting position on one rail, legs out at an angle and head thrown back. The air here was foul and oppressive, smoky, but at least I could breathe it, it was like pure oxygen after the forward section of the tunnel.

  Pretty soon the last of the dizziness went away, and some of the fire in my chest with it; my mind began to function more or less normally. I was aware of a dozen separate aches, of a stickiness on my left forearm that had to be blood from a gash or smaller cut. Fear tugged at me. Suppose the entrance was so badly blocked I could not dig my way out? Nobody knew I was in here except the man who had caused the cave-in, the man who had killed Terzian and Bascomb-and how many hours of breathable air could there be? A dozen? Less than that?

  I fought down another surge of panic, got a tight hold on myself. One thing at a time, one minute at a time. Let the dust settle, that was the first priority. Then go back up there and check out the extent of the blockage and start digging, it might all just be loose rock and earth and timbers Check it out how? I thought.

  I had not been able to see anything earlier and I could not see anything now except blackness. Unless the dust had helped to obscure light, the entrance was completely closed off. How would I know where to dig, what to watch out for? The flashlight was gone, probably buried, and even if I could find it in the dark it had to be damaged and useless. I had no matches-and wasn't that a goddamn nice piece of irony for you? If I had not given up smoking, if I did not have a lesion on one lung, I would have had a pocketful of matches, I would have had the one thing now that I needed desperately.

  And then I thought: Bascomb. Christ, Bascomb.

  Convulsively, I pushed off the rail and went forward on all fours until I came up next to the body. The smell of it flared my nostrils, made me gag again. I reached out, touched it, felt an arm mushy soft and yielding and jerked my hand up across the front of his shirt, groping for the pocket.

  It was empty.

  I brought the hand down and fumbled at one trouser pocket, dug inside it; keys and coins, nothing else. I leaned forward, touched the second pocket-and there was something rectangular in there, crinkling sound, cigarette package? I dragged it out with shaking fingers. Cigarette package, yes, Bascomb had been a smoker.

  Tucked inside the cellophane wrapping was a booklet of paper matches.

  I fished it free, opened the cover. Three-quarters full. I held it tightly in clenched fingers, slid around away from the corpse and crawled back through the turn and sat down on the rail again. Sweat streamed on my body, slick and gritty like oil mixed with dirt. A sudden spasm of coug
hing left me panting; I tried not to think of what that dust was doing to my lungs, to the lesion that might already be malignant.

  How long before the dust settled?

  Ten minutes? Fifteen?

  I held my left wrist up to my ear and listened to my watch and heard it ticking; somehow it had escaped damage in the cave-in. When I looked at the luminescent hands I saw that they read twelve-fifteen. I put the arm behind me, to keep from staring at the watch, and tried to make myself concentrate on the things I knew that would identify the son of a bitch who had murdered Terzian and Bascomb and sealed me in here. Bascomb's sketch, the wrench, the bloody towels, the Daghestan carpet-all of those things, yes, but how did they fit together? Other things too, dancing out of reach. Round and round, round and round, but none of them quite joining with each other to make a whole or part of a whole…

  I had to give it up finally. The tension was too intense, the edge of panic too close to the surface of feeling; learning the name of the man would not matter at all unless I got out of here. I looked at the watch then, and nine minutes had passed. I used a forefinger to clean grit out of my nostrils, wiped away sweat, made an effort to work up saliva to rid my mouth of dust and dryness.

  Another three minutes gone.

  I stood and stared into the blackness, trying to tell if the air along the shaft was any less clogged with powder, trying to make out a ray or glimmer of light. There was nothing but dark up there, but if I could trust my senses the air did not seem to be as dusty, as abrasive in my throat and lungs.

  I could not wait any longer, I had reached the limit of passive endurance. I started to walk along the rail, willing myself to go slowly and cautiously, and when I came up to the mound of rubble beyond the ore cart I opened the matchbook and struck the first match. The flare of light half blinded me; I had to look away and then back before I was able to see anything. In the eerie flickering glow, the walls and ceiling had a pocked look where the rock had given way; most of the support timbers were still holding. Five feet ahead I could just make out the hanging timber I had run into during my retreat.