The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Out of the darkness, a voice: “Henry?”

  Gasping, he managed to fill his lungs. He sat up and aimed the flashlight at the voice. Perry Holland’s handsome face floated in the murk.

  “You okay?” Perry asked.

  “Yeah.” He clambered to his feet, feeling a little like Alice tumbled down her rabbit hole, and swept his flashlight tentatively—

  —around a flat shelf of rock, beyond which a low corridor plunged into the heart of the mountain.

  Ben placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  But he wasn’t. He stood there in silence, buoyed on a tide of nightmare, uncertain whether he had for all these years been sleeping and was only just now waking up, or whether he had finally left the world of waking men behind for good.

  Emily touched his hand. “Henry—”

  “I know.”

  He went to the edge of the gently sloping platform and flashed—

  —his light into the gloom. Outside, thunder hammered at the mountain. The stony columns, which here and there buttressed the low ceiling, groaned.

  “Henry? What are you doing?”

  Perry’s voice sounded hollow as it bounced back—

  … doing, doing, doing …

  —from the deep corridor that lay before him.

  Henry turned and flashed the light at Perry’s pale, fretting visage, but he felt nothing, nothing at all.

  He was made of glass.

  “Let’s take a look around,” he said.

  Without pausing to see if Perry would follow, he edged down the corridor of rough-hewn stone. Ancient wooden beams stretched across the ceiling at intervals. The air tasted sour, like the air in a bottle of flat soda. It was cold too; his wet clothes clung to him as he descended.

  “Henry—”

  Perry stood at the crest of the corridor, gazing down, as Henry impaled him on the flashlight beam.

  “We should stay here.”

  “Stay then.”

  “Henry—”

  “I didn’t come all the way up here to sit. I want to explore. If you want to sit there, I’ll be back.”

  “You could get lost. You could fall. Who knows what could happen.”

  “You my mother, Perry?”

  The words escaped him before he could bite them off. Tears sprang up in his eyes. Nothing, he thought. I feel nothing. I am made of glass.

  But there it was: the image of his mother, dwindled to a rack of bones in her sickbed, her face translucent under her mutilated cap of hair. He had inadvertently invited her into his mind by speaking her name; he’d read that demons could be conjured up that way, and now, thinking of his mother, he recognized the truth behind the superstition: She haunted him, her and the sickness that was devouring her from within. If she was going to die, then let her get about doing it. But he wasn’t sticking around to watch, no matter what Dad said.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Glass. I am made of glass.

  And then he opened them and descended. He could hear Perry’s timorous footsteps not far behind, following, and deliberately he picked up his pace. Passages wound off to either side. Rooms. Several times he passed abandoned tools or piles of rubble, and once a rusting mantrip. Ahead, in the inconstant beam of the flashlight, rails snaked away into the heart of the planet.

  “Henry!”

  He sped up, the corridor twisting away before him. Perry’s footfalls sounded louder, and suddenly Henry realized that he could hear nothing else. For some time the storm noise had been diminishing and he hadn’t even noticed. Now it was gone entirely.

  They were that deep.

  “Henry, please!”

  The voice trembled on the verge of tears.

  He did not respond. Faster. Faster.

  And then the sobs came, great, heaving sobs that grated at Henry’s nerves. What had Perry to cry for, after all? His parents were alive and well, weren’t they?

  Hurrying out of view, he ducked into a side passage and flattened himself against the wall, clicking the flashlight off. The darkness enveloped him immediately, an inky-purple wave of nothingness. His bedroom never got this dark, not even on a moonless night. There, no sooner than the light went out, the eye began adjusting—collecting the bright line beneath the door and the faint glow of the window blind, constructing from these stray illuminations the old familiar room, redone in shades of gray and black.

  Here the darkness fell around him in suffocating pleats, like a shroud. His eyes strained to no purpose. He choked back the icy panic climbing into his throat. He could feel nothing.

  Glass.

  But it was bad all the same, and the whole time he was holding the flashlight right there in his hand. What would it be like for Perry out there, alone in the dark, no light close at hand?

  He felt a seed of pity taking root within him—

  But just then Perry started up with his puerile whining.

  “Please,” he sobbed. “Please, Henry, don’t leave me here alone, please, please—”

  For a moment Henry thought the other boy would just collapse, crumple weeping to the floor. But he kept moving instead, afraid maybe of what might be creeping up on him. A delicious thrill of fear zipped through Henry at the thought, and—as Perry drew still closer—he considered leaping out of the passage, giving him a real scare and then being done with the whole thing. The mine was beginning to creep him out, too. But then the character of Perry’s whining changed. It grew shriller, more incoherent, a low, mewling plea—

  —“Mommy, help me, Mommy, please”—

  —that sent a bright stroke of hatred through Henry’s heart.

  He pressed himself against the wall and bit his knuckle until he thought he might draw blood. Perry passed through the corridor outside, wending his way deeper into the bowels of the mine, and Henry—

  —hadn’t said a word. He had allowed the other boy to go on alone. Without even a candle to guide him.

  “Jesus,” Henry said aloud.

  And Benjamin Strange turned, flashing his light into Henry’s eyes.

  “What is it?”

  But how could he ever say? How could he explain?

  Henry lifted a hand, warding away the blinding light. “Nothing,” he said.

  Ben pointed the light at the floor. Glittering motes of black dust whirled in its beam, stirred up by their passage, and Ray Ostrowski’s words came back to Henry: Them old mines ain’t played out, after all.

  They stood in a silent circle, their faces ghostly in the backwash of the flashlights.

  And in the silence Henry thought of his unforgivable cruelty that long-ago summer afternoon, of how he had allowed Perry Holland to descend alone into the abyss, driven by a rage he could neither comprehend nor control—rage for the mother who had been slowly dying, for the father who had allowed it.

  An explanation, but not an excuse.

  There could be no excuse.

  Henry turned, flashing the light into the black pit that awaited them.

  “We may not have much time.”

  Looking at their drawn faces, he could see the unspoken knowledge they all shared: It might already be too late. Even so, they stood there for another moment, gathering the courage to descend. The silence of the pit—

  —welled up around him, formless and immense. Perry’s panicked voice had faded, winding deeper into the abyss, ever more shrill and hysterical as it diminished in volume, audible finally only as a distant echo, and then not audible at all.

  Once again, that bleak panic surfaced within him, like some loathsome bottom-dwelling creature risen to hunt the midnight surf. Henry dragged down a choking breath. Water dripped somewhere far away. An overburdened column creaked.

  His thumb hovered at the switch of the flashlight, but suddenly he dared not drive it home. A grim certainty had possessed him: Something stood in the darkness before him. Something hungry. Something with many teeth. Who could say what
might be lurking in this squalid pit? And so he stood, his back to the wall, waiting—

  He took a deep breath, and with one sweating finger slid the switch home. Ghostly radiance flooded the chamber.

  Nothing leaped from the gloaming to claim its frightened prey. He saw only the rough walls of the surrounding passage and the yawning mouth into the corridor beyond—the corridor into which Perry had descended, fearing the dark, but fearing more to remain alone at the coal mine’s shattered summit.

  He stepped into the corridor and glanced with longing at the slow ascent. Guilt clutched at him. He had to find Perry.

  So he turned his steps the other way, his heart quailing within his breast, and—

  —resumed the descent. They didn’t speak as they went down, their lights mere pinpricks in the omnipresent dark.

  Henry fought to keep his breath steady, to repress the panic hammering at his sternum. He reached out to grasp Emily’s hand and listened always for the telltale rustle of that nightmare pursuit.

  And still—

  —he descended, trying to reassure himself that nothing could live in these tangled passages. Only darkness and time, the slow crushing age of mountains, squeezing coal from lifeless rock.

  Oh, Perry, he thought. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  He clutched the flashlight as a drowning sailor might clutch a broken spar. The knobby handle pressed into his sweating palm. Overhead—

  —the mountain shifted, creaking. A thin rain of dust sifted over Henry’s cheek.

  He played his flashlight along the ceiling overhead. The roof bolts that had been set by Perry’s crew dwindled here, and the beams looked dry with rot, unutterably weary. He wondered how old they were. Decades, Ostrowski had said. Nearly a century.

  That creaking again. Another soft whisper of dust, like the wings of a moth brushing his face in the darkness.

  Henry shivered.

  Benjamin Strange, just ahead of them, paused and lifted his hand. “Listen,” he whispered.

  And they listened. Through the vast and formless dark it rose up to them—

  —a low, faraway sound so familiar and yet so unutterably alien that it halted Henry in his tracks. Not the hysterical tears of the terrified boy who had descended into the pit before him, not the familiar sobs that accompanied a scraped knee or a broken arm, but a sound more ancient—a hushed lament for all things past and passing, for doomed beauty, glimpsed without hope or expectation in the midst of ugliness and fear. Broadcast throughout the lower tunnels by some trick acoustic, the quiet dirge drifted through the sable depths in the voice of a boy on the verge of manhood. Perry Holland’s voice.

  Henry Sleep paused—

  —as seventeen years later his elder self would pause and draw Emily Wood close against his breast.

  Somewhere in the abyss below, Perry Holland was screaming.

  Chapter 24

  Eerie and inconsolable, those strange sobs reverberated through the depths of Holland Coal’s abandoned mine, rusting twelve-year-old Henry Sleep nerveless in his tracks. For a moment, he could no more conceive of pushing deeper into the labyrinth below than he could have imagined deliberately hacking off a finger. The muscles of his legs had gone rigid and unyielding; fear petrified his knees and ankles.

  For a moment, he just listened.

  And such a sound: a wordless keen of terror and awe, it spoke to him on an almost cellular level, to some atavistic knowledge in his bones. Nothing that compelled a human being to make such a sound would leave him unaltered, Henry sensed. Whatever lay below had the power to destroy him utterly, to erase the boy he was, the man he was becoming, and leave in his place … what? Who could say?

  Yet in the end, he knew something else, as well, even then: Whatever else it might be, it was first and always the sound of a boy weeping. A boy he knew. Perry Holland.

  And this thought—the name itself perhaps—recalled him to the moment: buried in this earthen vault while thunder walked the ridges. Alone, whereabouts unknown to anyone in the waking daylight world he had left behind. For the first time in weeks, the knowledge of his mother’s impending death and his father’s withdrawal into silence retreated.

  Perry Holland was lost down there. Lost and alone in the dark. And it was his fault.

  He forced himself to begin the descent once again—to lift his legs and drive them leadenly forward, deeper and still deeper, until he could no longer recall the route back to the surface, to sunlight and grass and the life he had left behind.

  As abruptly as it had begun, Perry Holland’s scream was gone. Cut off, stifled, choked, just gone, with all those endless fathoms of charged silence rolling up in its place. Henry jumped as Emily’s hand clamped around his arm. Willa Holland’s voice echoed inside his head.

  Go to him.

  They descended, nearly running, three abreast where space permitted, in single file where the tunnels narrowed—Henry first, Emily following, and Ben last of all, his clotted lungs wheezing with effort. Twice coughing fits overwhelmed him, but they pushed on, following the narrow-gauge tracks down a passage that curved slowly deeper.

  They paused at last before a low, narrow tunnel that wound off to the right, and there—

  —remembering—

  —Henry switched off his flashlight, signaling for Ben and Emily to do the same.

  A winding bolt of night enfolded them. Henry fumbled for Emily’s hand, perspiring despite the chill, and clutched it while his eyes adjusted. He waited, uncertain what he had expected to see. Then it was there: a faint, chill radiance, almost imperceptible.

  “What is it?” Ben whispered.

  It seeped from the narrow aperture in the wall, dim and uncertain, occasionally flickering. Coal dust sparkled and whirled inside it, settling slowly to the floor. Henry’s mind spun back into that half-forgotten past. Seventeen years ago, noticing the dark graying toward light, he had paused before this same aperture. It had been brighter then, much brighter, and he had stood before it, switching off his flashlight as he reconstructed Perry’s descent through the pitch-black corridors, the relief he must have felt seeing that faraway glimmer of illumination.

  Henry’s heart thudded in his breast. Stale air cycled through his lungs, thick as slowly coagulating blood.

  Dear God, he thought. Dear God.

  And once again, unbidden, the nightmare world possessed him: the tangled labyrinth, the breathless agony of pursuit, the thunder of onrushing wings.

  By force of will he wrenched himself from the dream. He squeezed Emily’s hand once more, his gaze flicking between them: Emily, ashen and determined, her thin lips set in a bloodless line, and Ben, his eyes ablaze with excitment. Looking into those eyes was like brushing aside a veil of weariness and ill health to glimpse the man Ben must once have been, the reporter hot on the scent of a story, a big one.

  He touched Ben’s shoulder.

  “I hope you get your story,” he said.

  Ben glanced at the mouth of the passage into light and grinned a reckless grin. “Let’s find out,” he said.

  Henry went in first, stooping as the ceiling pressed lower. The tunnel twisted six strides ahead of him. He eased around the corner into the passage beyond, the shorter end of an ell, lower still. The tunnel narrowed into shadows, dark but for the faint alien radiance visible beyond the opening before him.

  His heart hammered.

  He seemed to have slipped into an alternate time stream. Moments inflated into hours, launching themselves into the past with the slow majesty of dirigibles receding into flawless blue. Every step took a million years. He might have been wading through quicksand.

  The strange luminescence flickered, guttering like a candle in a drafty room. The mountain shifted its enormous weight above him, and a tiny breath of sand dusted his face, exhaled from the mouth of a jagged overhead crevice that snaked the distance of this arm of the corridor. No supports at all had been set here—no roof bolts, no rotting wooden props. Perry would have forbidden work crews her
e. Perhaps no other step had fallen here at all, just Perry’s and maybe Harold Crawford’s—

  Henry swallowed, stricken with an image of Crawford, spouting nonsense—

  —I won’t do it I told you I was done with you—

  —as he rose up behind the desk—

  And then he stood before the terminus of the tunnel, a bright window into some other place—

  —into the past—

  —no higher than his chest.

  He dragged in a long breath. Ben touched his shoulder.

  Okay then, he thought.

  He hunkered down. He went in.

  For a moment he could see almost nothing at all—not Perry Holland, not Harold Crawford, nothing, just that strange shifting funhouse light, a sea of shadow around a dimly radiant core. And then a series of impressions broke upon him, one after the other, like storm waves crashing on a solitary shore. He glimpsed Perry first—

  —dear God let him be alive—

  —slumped in the shadows half a dozen paces away, and then the surrounding space itself, like a cathedral, dizzying in its immensity, a wedge of vacuum driven into the heart of the mountain, narrowing into shade where that frigid radiance failed. Last of all, his eye was drawn to the bright center, the low stone slab and the thing curled, sleeping, there.

  Beauty.

  Beauty like a physical blow, stark and unforgiving and wholly inhuman, like jagged alpine heights or the black reaches between the stars. Beauty and power and such a cold magnificence that he could not comprehend it. Breath caught in his breast. He had not imagined such creatures existed in the world.

  He stood there, trapped like a beetle in the moment’s amber, his mind aclamor with thought and memory, tracing out the way it must have happened, the fool’s errand that had brought his father to this place, his father and Asa Cade as well. For the thing was dying—its body wasted, its glamour fading and diminished. So Perry must have sought what help he could. A fool’s errand, and he must have known it at the time, for no man—no mere human art, no paltry human faith—could salve such a creature’s pain.