by Aaron French
The wooden handle fell with a clunk.
“I’ll be damned,” said Shaughnessy.
There were many theories as we headed to the tunnel entrance. The surveyor was convinced some unknown magnetic-type mineral existed within this mountain and the train tracks would have to be diverted. However, since the shaft had been dug, hopefully some useful purpose for the mineral could be found. Thus the railroad could recoup its losses and everything would be fine in the final analysis.
Except for the hundred and twenty dead men.
I was still trying to figure out how I was going to report this story when Shaughnessy contradicted the surveyor.
“No,” he said. “It was an unknown gas, now dissipated and harmless. The tunnel goes through. We’ve only got a couple hundred feet to dig and if the men are careful there’ll be no more problems. Besides, the tracks are already constructed on the far side, so we can’t change the route now.”
A blast of cold air announced we were nearing the tunnel opening.
The canaries began to sing.
“Then how do you explain the birds? They’re certainly fine,” said the surveyor. We bumped into each other as Shaughnessy stopped.
“You’re right,” he said, reaching into the cage. We watched in horror as he grasped each canary and deliberately squeezed the life out of it.
Giving us a look, he said, “See? It was gas. Nothing else.”
***
As we emerged into the blowing maelstrom that was the third blizzard of the winter season, Shaughnessy climbed atop the wagon. Pointing at the birdcage in the surveyor’s hands, he spoke religiously to the diggers, graders, and track layers. He wove fact with fiction, passion with folkisms, and in the end offered a three thousand dollar bonus to be split amongst every man who went back to work and succeeded in finishing the tunnel in the next three days.
“How do we know we can trust you to pay?” someone shouted, and grunts of agreement swept through the crowd.
Shaughnessy answered the challenge. “You all know Mr. O’Shea of the Saint Louis Daily Times. He is an honorable Member of the Press. He will hold the funds and make the payout if the tunnel is finished on schedule. Are we agreed?”
A roar of approval went up from the men and within the hour I had three thousand dollars of railroad gold in my care. The crews had gone back to work in a fever, and soon, the dead bodies had been stacked in a large grave, the defective tracks removed, and the familiar sound of blasting and excavation filled the camp.
***
By the second day, the storm had cleared and the camp was coated with fresh snow trampled with the muck of five hundred men. Fires sparked into a sky awash with winter stars.
The surveyor, whose name I learned was Jack, poked his head inside my tent.
“May we speak, Mr. O’Shea?”
I offered him a cigar, and we sat smoking. It was a newsman’s trick—to wait silently for the other person to speak first. I puffed several clouds of smoke while I poured him a glass of whiskey, which he accepted.
He produced a sheet of paper upon which there were scribbled notes.
“It’s the corpses,” he said. “I’ve analyzed a dozen. There’s no iron in any of them.”
Intrigued, I leaned forward. I had my own theory but I wanted to hear his.
“Nor the rails. They are devoid of iron as were the remnants of the tools. I wanted your opinion before I went to Shaughnessy. The men are in danger inside that mountain.”
“I agree,” I said. “I think the old Indian was telling the truth.”
“You, sir, are drunk.”
“Perhaps. But that does not change my opinion—that we are encountering a force beyond our knowledge and experience.”
“O’Shea, I compel you to understand that the force is a natural force. We may not understand it, but for heaven’s sake, we white men are too intelligent to believe the primitive superstitions of savages.”
“Nonetheless, I have concluded that force is Naschuai, an ancient God that requires iron to sustain it. We have awakened him from his hibernation, if one is to call it that.”
I downed another shot of whiskey.
Angrily, Jack the surveyor stood.
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“Then I will take my findings directly to Shaughnessy. He, at least, is a man of science and not a cheap newspaper sensationalist!”
With those words he stormed from my tent, and I watched as he slipped through the muck and snow toward Shaughnessy’s tent.
Pulling on my coat, I walked to the camp’s edge where it was dark. On the summit of the mountain a brighter-than-ever shaft of multi-colored light reached toward the stars and, to me, it looked as if the light might actually be touching them.
In the morning, the railroad thugs discovered Jack’s dead body. Apparently he had stumbled in the dark, gashed his head on a pile of rails, and bled or frozen to death.
The newspaperman in me knew better.
***
On the fourth morning after the disaster, the tunnel finally blasted through to the other side; the general temperament became optimistic, and the men were gambling their bonus money even though I had been instructed to only distribute funds once the inauguration of the tunnel had been completed.
In the distance, chugging down the tracks was a CPPR Diamond Stack locomotive, its steam creating a massive plume in these winter temperatures. Behind it was its wood tender, followed by a half-dozen flatcars, three box cars and a passenger carriage, which I knew doubled as offices for the Union Pacific railroad.
The flatcars were stacked high with fresh rails and ties destined for the push to Laramie and points west. As its wheels rolled to a stop, the hissing of the brakes announced its arrival.
The day was spent in a furor as camp was broken. Lucky Jim helped me, and we packed the tent and my meagre belongings. Looking at my notepad, I realized I had been in camp for five weeks.
By dusk, everything—man, beast, supplies, and equipment—had been loaded aboard the train. The whistle blew for departure and the train was ready for its inaugural voyage through the tunnel.
Shaughnessy motioned to me, and when I hesitated, Lucky Jim came running.
“Time to leave,” he said.
It was at that moment I decided not to go.
“You ever think about learning to read?” I asked.
Lucky Jim looked at his boots. “Sometimes.”
“Then get our horses off the train and tell Mr. Shaughnessy that we’ll ride through afterwards. Tell him I said it’s what newspapermen do.”
“Yessir.”
Lucky Jim hurried to wrangle our horses. Shaughnessy gave me a friendly wave and signaled the engineer. With a blast and a roar the locomotive kicked into life, its wheels spinning to catch, and a cheer echoing from the flatcars where hundreds of workers hung on for dear life.
The train gathered speed and disappeared into the tunnel.
Astride our horses, Lucky Jim and I were left in the near darkness of early evening. As the thundering of the train diminished in the tunnel a screeching reached our ears. Like an injured owl or maybe a raven, the sound became a vibrating scream.
Before we could cover our ears, the brightest light I’d ever seen emanated from the tunnel. At first it was a searing white, but soon it was filled with every hue and tint imaginable. The colors billowed in spirals like the swirl of a carnival ride after one too many whiskies.
Then darkness fell on us again as the distant sound of the train disappeared.
On the mountaintop, an immense bulbous creature floated above the peak. Alive, it was translucent, and was filled with a multitude of glowing bubbles, each emanating its own unique color. Uncountable diaphanous floaters were contained within the singular organism. Articulated legs extended from this otherworldly being, giving it a spider-like appearance. Its head, if one could call it that, was covered in thousands of eyes, apparently seeing in all directions at once.
&nb
sp; The creature rose into the night sky until Lucky Jim and I could no longer see its glimmering body.
“What was that?” asked Lucky Jim.
“Superstition.”
A confused look crossed his face. “I think we best go tell Mr. Shaughnessy.”
“No need, Lucky.”
I turned my horse and headed toward Cheyenne.
***
As I hurried from the stable to Dyer’s Saloon and Hotel I spied the old Indian asleep in an alley doorway. Huddled under a blanket, he was half-covered with fresh snow and at first I thought he was drunk and in danger of freezing to death.
I shook his shoulder hard and though his eyes were bleary, he recognized me and smiled. He wasn’t drunk; he was just an old, tired man. Now, as I mentioned, I don’t speak Indian, and he spoke little English. So I motioned upwards with my hands and pointed to the sky, and when I saw tears running from his eyes I knew he understood that Naschuai had gone.
“Iron horse?” he asked.
“Gone,” I said, indicating disappearance with my hands.
The old Indian nodded.
I pressed the pouch of three thousand dollars into his hands. It was poor compensation for the ruination of a proud people and the loss of their god, but it was all I could think to do.
Helping him to his feet, I indicated that he should go to the stable where he could sleep in the hay with my horse. His feet slid through the snow as he made his way and that was the last I saw of him.
Stepping around the corner, I pushed through the saloon doors and saw Lucky Jim leaning against the bar, telling the story to anybody that’d listen and buy him drinks.
I’d already decided on my version.
FREAK TUNNEL DISASTER KILLS 500.
My report would be about unstable rock and dangerous gas. I would tell the heartbreaking story of the brave men who built the tunnel and perished, and how the Transcontinental Railroad tracks would have to be re-routed causing a minor but ultimately unimportant delay in the goal of linking East to West.
But it was night, I was tired, and that dispatch could be written tomorrow. I signaled to the bartender for a double whiskey and shouted loudly over the drunks, cowpokes, and gamblers for that girl named Molly.
I needed a bath.
About the author: Assembled from stolen body parts (the Los Angeles Coroner’s dumpster), and stitched together with baling wire and fishing line, R. B. Payne lives in the hope of someday being a complete human. Meanwhile, he writes. His literary aspirations can be found in anthologies such as All American Horror of the 21st Century: The First Decade and Permuted Press’ Times of Trouble, his book reviews can be found at Shroud Online, and he’s proud of his analysis of three 1930's black-and-white slasher films for the upcoming Butcher Knives and Body Counts from Dark Scribe Press. As always, contact information is at www.rbpayne.com - especially if you are willing to contribute a body organ.
Amundsen's Last Run
Nathalie Boisard-Beudin
Amundsen tapped on his pilot’s shoulder, indicating to Rene Guilbaud where they should attempt their sea-landing, a small canal-like harbour in the huge iceberg below them. The Frenchman shook his head. Too narrow. Too short. Unable to hear his own voice over the noise of the motors he made wide gestures to emphasize his meaning, tapping the sheet with the coordinates as well. They were still too far from their planned destination. The Italia had foundered much farther to the east.
Roald Amundsen stamped his foot. Guilbaud raised his arms in anger. The explorer leaned over his shoulder and brought the drive stick sharply down. The seaplane did a mad dive as Guilbaud scrambled, screaming, to regain control of the aircraft. Then all of a sudden both engines stopped. Like that, while they glided into the iceberg.
Amundsen regained consciousness, his body’s pain a welcome indicator that he was alive. His first estimate told him his right leg was broken and a few of his ribs might be in the same state. The crushed up cabin of the Latham 47 was obscenely embedded into the ice, making it unlikely that Guilbaud and Leif Dietrichson, his co-pilot, might have survived the impact. He had only managed that by racing to the back of the plane at the last minute, flinging himself down just before the impact. It infuriated him to think they could have floated to a stop in the small inner canal he had indicated to Guilbaud. But the Frenchman’s obstinate refusal had put them all in jeopardy, forcing him to desperate measures.
He dared not disobey the humming.
During his expedition of 1925, he had encountered this giant iceberg and experienced technical difficulties in its presence. A radio breakdown followed by sudden motor extinction had nearly killed them all. By an incredible fluke they had saved themselves but lost a plane. While the team was clearing the ice for one of the two remaining planes to fly off, they had heard a slow, whining hum raising from the ice, like a chant, in particular at night. A commanding chant. Back then, and for a while after their return to safety they had dismissed the experience as a collective hallucination. They had existed on very little food in critical temperatures for a long time, after all. And icebergs do have their own noises, as they creak and float and melt.
However, back home images of the massive S shaped iceberg, its humming calling to him in tones he thought he could understand, invaded his dreams. He woke in the mornings disorientated, and passed his days looking for clues he did not recognize in books, newspapers and the odd film. Icebergs were not charted as they tended to drift but this one had a singular shape; tapering in its middle from an almost square basis, with sinusoid lower banks forming what looked like natural harbours, with fairly shallow underwater quay-like banks, possibly carved by a spinning current. The damaged sea plane had neatly severed one such quay and the iceberg’s course would have been affected by the loss of symmetry.
Night after night the dreams had plagued him with urgent yet undecipherable messages, until one day he had stumbled upon an article recalling the so-called “Curse of the Pharaohs” that had afflicted the team of Carter and Carnarvon, fully illustrated with strange god figures and a picture of the pyramids. Amundsen immediately recognised the tapering pattern at the centre of the iceberg in that picture, a realisation that had sent him racing to unearth the history of such cold giants. A geologist from Oslo had confirmed that the huge ice mountains were very old indeed – possibly as old as the earth – and must per force, like any mountain, contain many trapped organisms and skeletons inside their folds, remnants of ancient earth creations.
Could the iceberg be some sort of grave? The idea had taken root in his mind and refused to budge, despite his stern realistic upbringing. His dreams became more vivid, vague forms oscillating in time with the humming against a pyramidal background, with the noise level rising to a thumping rhythm, as of a heartbeat. A ruler was waiting for him, said the chanting dreams, a ruler was waiting in the mountain’s heart to rise again.
During the day, the explorer was able to dismiss the visions as ridiculous, a product of hysteria, but each night they came back to haunt him until they became an obsession. Amundsen was nothing if not driven by a scientific mind and curiosity. It was all tosh, he told himself. He would find out the truth and be rid of this nonsense once and for all.
He therefore put together a plan for investigating the iceberg and its reality. However, the following year, he had been drawn into another run for the North Pole race and had to postpone his plans. He found that the exertion of that quest had calmed him somehow – a point for the hysteria theory – and that his dreams were not so frequent then or during the series of talks and conferences he had found himself propelled into by his victory.
The ice suddenly cracked under his weight, and the pain caused by the slight movement flashed, sobering him greatly. What had he done?
It had taken him almost another two years to come back. Two years, during which the dreams had returned, scaling the walls of his sanity, eroding his nights until he had driven his whole crew to their deaths. All in pursuit of a chimera!
He attempted to stand up now, helping himself with a bent part of fuselage. He should survey the plane; see if there were any other survivors. But his first attempt to move was unsuccessful, the metal folding under his weight, his ribs screaming with pain. Crawling, then...
He went over to the mangled debris of the seaplane, calling. Only silence answered. Silence and... creaking? Sharper. Something more metallic, like... overheated motors. Cracking. Cracking ice cubes.
He spun as fast as he could, to find himself facing a crystal-like pyramid. One of its sides had been breached by the crashing aircraft and it gaped open, slowly breaking down under the weight of the cabin. Had the iceberg been rock solid, it should not have been affected but the impact showed the structure to be hollow, as indeed it had been in Amundsen’s dreams, minus the humming or fantastic-looking creatures.
Peeking inside a crack, he could make out an inner wall, about a metre deep inside the pyramid. In the uncertain gloom of the never-quite night of June, Amundsen could only guess at its volume, which – like the outer shell itself – looked manmade. Was it some kind of inner chamber?
He crawled closer to the plane, trying to see if he could salvage some food, some covers or other means to keep warm. Holding on to the shafts that supported the wings, he was finally able to stand and get his hands on two broken pieces of rod. He wrapped these with a piece of cloth to hold his leg stiff. Another piece would serve well as a cane but as he was searching the wreck, a thick layer of clouds obscured the horizon, makeshift night for the Arctic Circle, and his lighter proved a feeble and insufficient alternative light source. He returned close to the breached ice wall, which would serve as windbreaker for the night. If he survived the cold, he would be in a better position to start looking for valuables in the morning. A broken wing floater might serve as a makeshift boat to carry him away – possibly...
Dropping a handful of papers on the ground, Amundsen sat as close as he could against the wall. It did not feel any colder than the walls of his rooms as a boy back in Borge and far less rough than the wood panelling he had nestled against then. He should not sleep. Without anyone to wake him, slumber in icy conditions might mean he would never wake up. Unfortunately, his broken limbs ensured he could not walk or dance and stamp or just keep himself busy as he would normally have done in such circumstances, as he had done in the tremendous ordeal that had been the rescue of 1925. But then they had been a whole team, working night and day to clear a path on the ice so a plane could take off. They had kept moving in sub-freezing conditions and had taken turns to sleep. Yet lack of food and rest had created this ludicrous hallucination that had brought him back here today. That had preyed on his mind for three years, nearly driving him mad in the process. Humming, vibrating through his brain, through his bones, a plaintive chant with dark edges where sacrifice was expected and exacted. He reflected that, in the present case, sacrifice had indeed been performed. Five men had died in the impact and he, himself, wasn’t in too brilliant a shape. His head felt warm, much too warm to be healthy, melting the ice next to him. His body shook slightly, pulsating softly with pain. And a rhythm.
