The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Charles wanted to love him. He tried. The weather in the boy’s heart was cold, though, and hugs meant nothing to him. He never played. He never cried. And always, around him, children died. Diphtheria. The grippe. Typhoid. The croup. Pneumonia. Whooping cough. Smallpox. Lingering diseases. Wasting illnesses. The cemetery filled with tiny corpses.

  The ore cart rattled on the rails as Charles pushed it toward the broken ore. For the rest of his shift he’d fill the cart, take it back to the lift, empty it and return for another load. No candles lit the path, but that didn’t matter. Charles didn’t mind the dark most days, but today he couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. What does the boy do while I’m at work? What does he daydream about? Charles imagined him wandering through the camp, looking for children.

  In the spring he’d taken the boy to a funeral. Seamus McGarity had lost both his boys and his wife to dysentery three days apart. McGarity, his kin and friends circled the coffins, two tiny wood boxes and a long one. During the prayer, Charles looked down at his boy dressed in mourning black. The corners of the boy’s mouth turned up and his eyes were shining. At the ceremony’s end, the boy dropped dirt in each grave. Surreptitiously, he also put a handful of grave soil in his pocket.

  “Lucky your kid’s doing good,” McGarity said to him the next day as they waited for the bucket to take them down the shaft. His lunch pail dangled from his hand, and the miner looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept for a month. “He came by a week ago. Found him sitting by the door.”

  “What did he want?” Charles wished he could pat McGarity on the shoulder. How would it be to lose your whole family? There’d been other men whose children died who drank themselves to death. The other miners stood away from them. People died in the camps all the time, but it wasn’t easy to be next to the bereft, not at first.

  McGarity didn’t answer for a while. He stared out over the valley, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything. Finally he said, “Caleb used to sing his little brother to sleep. I don’t think he knew I was listening. ‘Amazing Grace’ it was. Learned it from his mom. He had a nice voice for a ten-year-old.”

  They found McGarity at the bottom of a shaft a week later. Was he drunk and fell in, or did he jump?

  At the blasting site the dust still hung in the air, surrounding the candle in a pale globe. Charles hefted ore into the cart. My boy’s not human, he thought as each rock crashed against the metal. Methodically he bent and lifted, bent and lifted. Not human. Not human. Charles pictured the boy with his finger in his mouth, salty-bitter from the Laughlin girl’s scarlet-fever sweat.

  After a while Charles stopped loading. His hands stung. He stepped next to the candle’s feeble light and held them up. Blood ran down his wrists from his ragged fingertips. Dully he realized he’d not worn his gloves. And a certainty came to him, a grave-stone-solid conviction: My boy’s a monster!

  Charles lay in his bed, motionless. The boy breathed evenly on the floor below him. Only the silver-moonlit window floated in the dark. Charles kept his eyes wide open. If he shut them, even for a second, the boy might stand. He might lean his unsmiling face close. The boy might run his finger across Charles’s forehead.

  “I see you burning, Papa,” the boy would say. He always called him Papa, like it was a curse.

  And dawn was hours away.

  Ron sat in his van on the abandoned mining road near the boulders that the park service had used to block the path, his map spread out on the seat beside him marked with Xs for mining claims. From Central City there were so many. The historical marker at the town limits proclaimed THE RICHEST SQUARE MILE ON EARTH. He shook his head. If only it were that small.

  Starting at Black Hawk at one end of the valley to the other end of Central City was a couple of miles. Mine tailings spotted the slopes on both sides. Then there were the gulches: Chase, Eureka, Russell, Lake, Pecks, Fourmile and others the map didn’t name with mines of their own, and the road went on to the ghost towns of Yankee Hill, Ninety-Four, Alice and Kingston. Nevadaville was only a stone’s throw to the west. He could almost see the honeycomb of tunnels.

  Ron smoothed the map, but his attention shifted. On the floor, barely visible in the blue dusk of sunset, a red plastic building brick lay canted on its side. He stretched around the steering wheel, crinkling the map with his elbow, and picked it up. The brick had almost no weight sitting on his palm. He straightened, put the brick on the dashboard.

  They didn’t have building bricks when he was a boy. His dad had given him Lincoln logs, and over the years, Ron’s dad had added to the set until they filled a box almost too big to fit under his bed. Ron made forts and villages and fences and barns. Two short logs crossed over each other served as cannon. His dad came into his room one night and they built a tower together, half as tall as Ron.

  Years later, when Levi was six, Ron had said to his dad, “You never told me how much fun being a father would be.”

  “I didn’t think of it at the time,” his dad said.

  Ron fingered the building brick. He’d never made a tower with Levi.

  The sky grew dark, and Ron didn’t move. He thought about putting Levi to bed. “Have good dreams,” he’d say. For forty nights now, Levi had not had Ron to wish him a bedtime without nightmares. He thought about throwing a baseball back and forth. He remembered reading to him, book after book, Levi’s head resting against Ron’s arm as they sat on the couch.

  Ten days ago the Denver detective in charge of the investigation said, “We’re giving up the search, Ron. You’re going to have to face the possibility that your son is dead. Sims killed his victims. We know that.” They sat in the detective’s temporary office in the Gilpin County Court house. Ron struggled to remain calm. The detective didn’t look over twenty, and it was clear that Ron made him uncomfortable.

  “He didn’t kill them right away,” Ron insisted. “The Perez girl he kept in his basement for a week. In Colorado Springs he kept that baby in a storage garage for four days. His house was in Central City. My boy is in a mine somewhere. It’s logical.” Ron held a crumpled flyer. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? Levi smiled from the page, a strand of his black hair across his forehead, his dark eyes turned toward his cake before he blew out the candles.

  With the detective, Ron had walked through Sims’s house, a restored turn-of-the-century Victorian gingerbread with no closets. Posters covered the living-room walls, all children. Except for the kitchen, blocked with yellow crime-scene tape and the outline of Sims’ body on the floor, the rooms were meticulously tidy. Magazines on the coffee table were fanned out perfectly, the same half-inch overlap on each. On Sims’s dresser in the bedroom, a line of brass padlocks stood like sentinels in a military row. They were the only decoration. Ron wondered what could make a man like Sims. Couldn’t love have saved him? Love, pure love, might have kept Sims from hating, just as pure love would find his son. The police didn’t love Levi enough to find him.

  The detective shook his head. “If he hadn’t shot himself, we could ask him. But he did. We’ve had crews up and down the area. If your son were there, we would have found him. He might have lasted a week without food. Only a couple days without water. It’s been a month. Sims buried his victims. I’m sorry to have to say it this way, but I’d guess your boy is in a shallow grave.”

  Ron gripped the arms of the chair to keep from leaping at the man. “There’s bonds between a father and his son. I’d know if he had died.”

  “The department can arrange counseling, if you request it,” the detective said.

  “You’re not a father, are you?” Ron looked past the detective. Black and white photographs hung on the wall behind him: men standing in front of a wagon, holding shovels and lunch boxes; a long shot of Central City down main street when it was still dirt; the front of a school, forty or fifty children sitting on the steps, their severe-looking teacher standing behind them with her arms crossed.

  Ron touched the hard edge of the plastic building brick sitting on t
he dashboard and thought about the kids in the school a hundred years ago no different than his own boy, all dead by now for sure, and Levi who might not be. Razor-edged stars filled the sky through his windshield. The air had cooled, caressing his face through the open windows. This far up the rutted road he couldn’t hear traffic from the highway or crowd noise from the casinos that filled Central City. He canted his head to hear better. Something clicked repetitively in the distance, maybe a night bird or a locust. He wondered if locusts lived this high. For a long time he rested his finger on the brick and listened. The night vibrated with its own muttering. Unidentifiable sounds that he guessed might be the breeze sliding over rocks and through the scrubby grasses. A high squeak that might be a bat. He couldn’t tell. The mountain was perfectly black and the cloudless sky danced with stars that provided no illumination.

  He turned on the ceiling light to read the map. If someone saw him from a distance, he thought, he’d look like a time traveler in his craft, light glowing through the windows, unattached to the Earth.

  Eventually he turned the light out and fell asleep sitting up, his head pillowed on a jacket against the door, windows still open so that he could hear if Levi should call.

  Charles slipped out of the cabin before dawn, the eastern sky just barely lighter than the west. The wind came up the valley, and in it he could hear the stamp mills thrumming as they crushed ore.

  He trudged up the switchback trail toward the mine, his hands heavy; his head, heavy. Had any child the boy met lived? There weren’t that many children in the camps. The school in Nevadaville had 150 students last year, he’d heard, but there were 10,000 miners in the district. Central City had a small school and so did Blackhawk. Charles had never sent the boy, but he was supposed to go in the fall. The town was growing. More families came in every day. They were building churches.

  At the top of the hill, he paused. From here in the pre-sunrise grimness, most of the town was visible in purples and blues. He couldn’t find his own cabin, though. Then he gasped. A black aura like a cloud hid it from him, and for a moment it seemed as if it grew tentacles that flowed down the dirt roads, over the wooden sidewalks, sniffing at each door. The wind rippled the cloud’s top, then blew in his face, carrying the smell of a crypt and the fevered dampness from the Laughlin cabin.

  Charles shook his head. There was his cabin! There was no black cloud. He held his hands over his pounding heart. Am I going mad? A hallucination! But the question echoed hollowly. This was not madness. He’d seen the cloud as a vision, a sign. He backed up the trail, afraid to take his gaze away from the cabin.

  When a man’s dog goes wild, he shoots him. It’s his responsibility. What was his responsibility as a father of a monster?

  When Charles worked the mine that day, he stuffed his pockets with candles, and he kept one lit no matter where he was. The shadows beyond the weak candlelight were like the shadow creeping from his own house.

  If Sims had locked Levi in a mine, it would have to have several qualities, Ron thought as he shouldered his pack. Pines lining the mountain top glowed in the morning light, but the sun wouldn’t touch the valley’s floor for another hour. Ron checked his map and began the long hike up the old road. It had to be both close enough for him to get to, but far enough off the beaten track that it was unlikely anyone would find it. It had to be far enough back that even if Levi screamed for help, no one would hear him. There would be food and water. The question was, how much food and water? Sims wouldn’t have planned on leaving Levi with over a month’s supply.

  Each step up the road felt like the ticking of an immense clock counting down. How much time was left? Was Levi even now crouched against a locked gate, light leaking around the edges, on the brink of death by thirst or starvation? If he ran out of water, might there be water in the mine itself that he had been drinking to keep himself alive? Ron thought about Tom Sawyer, not the high jinks of the little boy, but the awful image of Injun Joe trapped in McDougal’s cave. After Ron’s dad had read him that part, Ron had nightmares for months about eating bats while trying to carve through a thick wooden door with a broken knife.

  Ron quickened his pace, his calves burning, keeping his eyes open for evidence of tunnels not on his map. He’d followed dozens of faint trails to dead-end mines in the last ten days, peered down scores of open shafts, rattled the locks on handfuls of metal gates, always looking for a sign, always listening for Levi’s voice. He crossed from the valley’s shadow into the sunlight, and even this early in the morning the rays heated his shirt. It would be a hot one today.

  The road ended at the tumbled remains of a small mill. Busted beams pointed skyward, a skirt of rotten wood at their feet. Ron rested for a moment, his hand against a grey post. Splinters flaked onto his skin. Behind the ruin a narrow path vanished over a ridge. Weeds grew into the twin grooves that were too narrow for an automobile. He imagined steel-rimmed wagon wheels and a cart of ore making its way down the road behind a team of horses. Time seemed irrelevant here. It could be 1880 again, or 2080; the mountains wouldn’t know the difference. But he wasn’t timeless, and the clock counted; every minute that passed was another minute that Levi suffered alone. Could an eight-year-old die of fright? What if he believed that his daddy had forgotten him? Ron whimpered at the thought.

  His photocopied map called this the Sunderson Mill. Above it were several mines: West Yellow Dog, New Baltimore and Crossroad. Ron spread the map over his knee. Small Xs indicating digs crowded the gulch. There could be ventilation shafts, drainage tunnels, powder-storage crypts, false starts, dead ends and full-bore excavations that needed checking.

  It would take all day.

  “Come with me, boy,” said Charles, his hands shaking. It had taken him several minutes to push open the cabin door. He couldn’t shake the impression of the cloud he’d seen around his house in the morning. It seemed to hover still, insubstantial, but present just the same. The sun shone mutedly through it, and the air felt cooler than it did ten feet away.

  “It won’t work,” said the boy. He sat on the edge of his bed, his dark hair disheveled, his gaze steady and challenging.

  Charles swallowed hard. “What won’t work?”

  “What you are planning.” The boy came toward him, across the cabin’s single room.

  Charles backed away into the sunlight, gripping the hammer hanging from his belt. The weight of his satchel tugged at his shoulder. For a second he envisioned beating the boy down where he stood, before he could get away. He forced his fingers from the hammer.

  “We are taking a walk.”

  “I know.” The boy strode past him and up the road out of town.

  Charles watched him, his breath caught in his throat. Suddenly the air seemed to clear, and the sun pressed against him. Had it always been this way around the boy? Had he been in a daze from the moment the child was born?

  It was as if the boy followed a trail traced for him in the dirt. He walked in the road’s middle, barely giving way when a wagon came toward him. The horse’s nostrils flared at his smell.

  Charles caught up to him when they turned onto the Sunderson Mill Road. The mines above it had gone bad the year before, and the mill was closed.

  “The mountains hold things, Papa.” The boy’s hands hung straight at his side, as if he were standing at attention, not hiking a steep road.

  He had no words to say to him. Am I the monster? thought Charles. The boy’s mother wouldn’t want this. Have I done something to deserve a curse? Every step hurt. Part of him wanted to run away. He could do it: leave the boy on the road, catch the new train out of town and be in Denver before anyone knew. His family lived back east.

  Another part denied that anything was wrong. Charles thought, What if I’m insane? My boy is strange, for sure, but he’s not evil. What child growing in the mountains with a dead mother and a father who worked the mines wouldn’t mature differently?

  And a third part wanted to fall on the boy like a bear and rend him, bl
oody bone from bloody bone.

  “Keep going,” Charles said when the boy slowed at the mill. The windows were already broken and its door hung askew.

  “Don’t you love me, Papa?” he said. The boy looked at him sardonically. “A Papa should love his son.”

  The trail climbed as quickly as stairs for a hundred yards, while the afternoon sun touched the mountain top ahead of them. Charles choked on the words: “Of course I love you.” And he knew that he did. He loved him even as he wanted to kill him, even as he was afraid. Was this right? He thought of sick children sweating in their fevers, dead children. “They’ll burn, Papa,” the boy had said.

  At the ridge’s top, the trail flattened and split. Winding to the right, it led to West Yellow Dog, a fifty-foot drift that started with a yard-wide vein of quartz and wire gold but petered out into low-grade ore that wasn’t worth the cost of the powder to extract it. The middle trail ended at the New Baltimore, a failed attempt to find West Yellow Dog’s wire gold by coming at it laterally. Charles had worked the New Baltimore for six months before the owners shut it down.

  He’d never been in the Crossroad on the left trail, but, as the hard-rock Cornishman who told him about it said, “The claim was snakebit from the beginning.” The rumour was that the first prospector had been drilling into the rock to set a charge, and when he hit the drill for the last time, it disappeared into the rock. There was a tunnel already there. A silly story, but the claim didn’t pay out, and there had been accidents.

  They took the turn to the left, around a granite wall, out of the sun and into the stone bowl that held the mine. Rock surrounded them on three sides, like a small arena. The sound of Charles’s hard-soled boots echoed. At the far side, a metal gate held closed by a clasp lock marked the mine’s entrance.