by Hunter Shea
Old, dust-covered rail tracks led into the darkness. I looked to my left and saw one of the ore cars off the tracks and on its side, rusted from the elements. Teta bent low to look inside the car. He spit on his hand, swept it along the bottom and inspected his fingers.
“Nothing in there but dried ore. Definitely no gold.”
“I don’t expect we’ll find any gold this close to the surface. Anyone who took the time to bring it this far would have taken it with them.”
The steady plink-plink of dripping water echoed in the shaft. I took a hesitant step inside and squinted into the blackness. I couldn’t see a thing beyond twenty or so feet. It was easy to imagine Nock-ay-det-klinne and his Apache warriors waiting in the depths to perform their ghost dance. I shivered, and it wasn’t from the dip in temperature in the tunnel.
I struck a match against the rough wall, lit my lamp and handed the match to Teta so he could fire his up.
I motioned him forward and asked, “Would you care to lead this dance?”
He shook his head. “Teddy called you to come here. I’m just the sidekick.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him make the sign of the cross. “You got any prayers to go with all of that gesticulating?”
“I’m praying the ceiling doesn’t cave in on us and we get back to our camp in one piece so we can share some of the whiskey I bought in Laramie.”
“Sounds like a worthy prayer to me. And I like the whiskey incentive. Come on, let’s get a wiggle on.”
We walked in the center of the tracks, our bootheels and spurs making quite the racket. It gave me a sort of comfort, knowing that there was no way for someone to sneak up on you in the mine without being heard from a mile off. There was a bend to the right and when I turned around, the bright mouth of the shaft was replaced by dark walls. Timber pilings lined the walls and ceiling, the wood soft with decay.
“I’ll give this one thing, it is a hell of a lot cooler in here. Feels better than a cold bath,” I said.
“I’ll settle for the bath.”
The farther we went in, the narrower the passage became. The ceiling dropped and my Stetson caught on a finger of rock and flipped off my head. Teta was a good five inches shorter than me, so his sombrero was safe. I had to hunch down to keep from braining myself on the ceiling.
“I don’t like this,” Teta said. “It feels like we’re buried alive.”
“In a way, we are.”
“Thank you, Nat. I needed your reassurance.”
As we ventured deeper, more water ran along the carved floor. Our boots splashed through water colder than a well-digger’s ass. My toes started to tingle. I’d never been much of a cold-weather person. My first winter in New York nearly killed me. I’d gotten frostbite more times than I could count while walking my beat.
I saw a few bottles on the ground and a dented miner’s cap. I watched the floor carefully, mindful of any holes that had opened up. I wanted to avoid plunging to my death at all costs.
We came to a fork and stopped.
“I don’t suppose you want to split up,” I said.
“You suppose right.”
“Right or left?”
“Right. I’ll hang my bandana here so when we head back, we know we’re in the right direction. It’s so dark in here, I have no idea which way is up.”
He hung his soiled red bandana on a splinter jutting out from a two-by-four. It didn’t take long to see that this particular vein was just big enough to accommodate a medium-sized man and a small ore car. Now I had to bend at the knees and hunker my head down. My shoulders scraped against the jagged walls. Even Teta was feeling the pinch. He’d removed his sombrero and it hung down his back.
The more we walked, the colder it got. The water was up to our ankles in spots, barely a trickle in others. I held up my hand to stop.
“Let’s just listen for a bit.”
Even holding my lamp out as far as I could, its light was devoured by the impenetrable black of the mine. This was no place for men. This was where nightmares were stored, a place where secrets remained for eternity. I had a feeling that nature made it so alien, so inhospitable for a good reason. Everything about this place said, BEWARE. COME NO CLOSER.
But we had a fledgling country and we needed raw materials, as well as wealth. Warning signs had no place when it came to progress or prosperity.
“No bats,” I said. “Or rats.”
“Doesn’t seem right. Not that I want to run into a flock of bats.”
I looked at the tunnel walls, saw where pickaxes had chiseled away. The wet surface reflected my light like an oil spill. I saw different colors bending as I moved the lantern about.
The echoes of water, when we paused to take everything in, blended so they sounded like people murmuring in the far distance. It was unnerving.
“Ghosts,” Teta said.
“Come again.”
“Ghost voices. Can’t you hear them?”
“I can hear water that sounds like talking because of the way it’s bouncing off the walls.”
“Maybe it’s the tommyknockers.”
“Is that something from your Mars book?”
“No, tommyknockers are real. I met a man in St. Augustine who had worked in mines until his lungs couldn’t take it anymore. He spent his days drinking until he was full as a tick and nights playing cards. He was a damn good poker player. Anyway, he told me about the tommyknockers. Miners depended on them to alert them of danger or cave-ins. If they heard rapping against the rocks coming from an area where they knew no one was, they’d head for the surface. Sure enough, there’d be a cave-in or a full ore car would break loose. The tommyknockers looked after the miners. Those who ignored their warnings paid with their lives.”
“And who are the tommyknockers?” I asked, hiding the fact that his little story had me on edge, even knowing the fella he talked to was probably three sheets to the wind when he’d spun his tale. Somehow, down here in the confining gloom, anything was possible.
“The spirits of the earth. The ghosts of miners who have passed. Little people. No one knows for sure.”
I was about to tell him to stop being superstitious when we heard three soft cracks. It sounded as if someone had taken a small hammer to the shaft wall.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
Chapter Eleven
“Tommyknockers!” Teta hissed.
I shushed him and waited to see if the sounds repeated themselves. The tunnel was silent again.
“There’s running water and chiseled rock. I sincerely doubt your tommyknockers are making themselves known the moment you start jawing about them.”
“We should get back anyway. I don’t feel safe here.”
“I think we should go back to the fork, take the left tunnel, see what we see. No sense looking to shin out already. We have other openings to explore this week.”
I heard Teta draw his gun. “I’ll feel safer this way.”
Turning and going ahead of him, I said, “Don’t go shooting any of them tommyknockers.We may need them.”
I chuckled but Teta didn’t see my humor. I saw his bandana and veered into the other tunnel. It was more of the same, but there was a little more room to move. Still felt like I was creeping through my own coffin.
We didn’t see much, heard even less, which was fine by me. There were no signs of gold veins in the walls. So far, I’d done a fair job convincing myself that the oppression and pitch black of the tunnels didn’t bother me much. That veneer was wearing thin the longer we stayed underground. There was no telling how far down we were from the surface, but I could tell from the gradation that we had gone down a ways.
After a while, I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for. Did I think the troops were camped out in the mine, picking for gold? Was I looking for the miners and their families? If there was g
old, how would I really know?
The mines were the heart of Hecla, the reason for it ever being a town. I guess I just wanted to see if the heart was as dead as the rest of the body. In this place, death was everywhere. I could feel it in my gut, taste it in my mouth with every breath.
It was time to cut out, call it a day.
When we got back to the fork, Teta pulled his bandana off the splinter and stuffed it in his pocket.
He said, “It feels like we’ve been in here all day. I bet the sun won’t even wait around for us.”
“Place this dark makes you forget there was ever such a thing as the sun. I don’t know how those men do this for a living. Makes me appreciate long, shitty cattle drives and getting shot at by Apaches.”
“Does it make you appreciate being a cop in New York?”
I sucked my teeth. “We haven’t been down here long enough for that.”
I noticed we’d quickened our pace the closer we got to the mine exit. My feet were so cold I couldn’t wait to get my boots off.
“Ah shit!” Teta cried out.
The tunnel got darker. When I turned around, he was holding his empty hurricane lamp at eye level. “Looks like we outlasted the oil.”
We both looked at my lamp as the fire grew dimmer and dimmer. It was only a matter of seconds before the flame dipped down into the wick and disappeared.
It was a darkness so complete we could feel it swallow us whole. “Candles,” I said as calmly as I could manage.
It was amazing how I instantly had no idea which way was out and which was back into the center of the mine. The totality of the pitch blackness in the tunnel was so foreign to me it disconnected my senses.
Teta struck a match and lit his candle. I tipped mine into his and the meager light was just enough to see by.
“I think if you turn around we’ll be on the right track,” Teta said.
We hadn’t taken more than a few steps when a soft breeze whistled down the tunnel, blowing our candles out.
“That wind had to be coming from outside,” I said. “We’ll have to hold our hands in front of the flames until we get some daylight in here.”
I relit our candles and we cradled the flame so close you could smell our skin burning.
Tink-tink.
The tiny sound of metal on rocks echoed from somewhere far behind us. “It’s just rocks falling,” I said.
“That’s what you keep saying.”
Because of the fragility of our candlelight, we had to take it slow. Teta was practically on my back, breathing heavily. I’d been next to him with hundreds of bullets whizzing by our heads and had never seen him the least bit afraid. Now, I could feel his fear pushing me forward.
“It didn’t seem to take this long to get in here,” I remarked. “But then we were able to move a little faster.”
I thought I saw a bend up ahead, which meant the exit wasn’t far. I felt the first rumble beneath my feet and stopped.
“Did you feel that?”
Chapter Twelve
Another tremor followed, this one longer and strong enough to shake some rocks from the ceiling. They bounced off my Stetson.
Teta suddenly grabbed me by the back of my collar and propelled me forward with such speed and brute force my feet barely touched the ground. Our candles were forgotten as they fell to the ground. How he guided us without slamming into a wall was beyond me. When I tried to protest and regain my footing, he snapped, “Just go before we end up here for eternity!”
The light of day came into view and Teta hauled me up and launched us the last few feet out of the mine. As we hit the ground, my elbow cracked into one of the steel rails and stars exploded in my head.
A belching noise erupted from the shaft and the entire hillside gave a short jerk. A cloud of dust and debris poured from the mouth of the mine, sweeping over us like a dust storm.
We choked, gagging on the mine’s regurgitation. When it settled, we were on our backs, facing the sun. The bright rays felt like hot pokers jabbing into my eyes. It did make me forget the pain in my elbow.
“My fucking head,” Teta said. I could make out his shadow as he leaned over me. He was on his knees and holding out a hand to help me up.
“I think you broke my damn elbow.”
“Better that than leaving you in there for an early burial.”
It was hard to see his logic when my bone was smarting so badly I wanted to cut my arm off to make it stop. If it was broken, our little mission was going to be cut very short.
“Rub it fast and hard,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
“Touch my arm and we’re going to have a problem. Let me clear my head a moment.”
The dust settled along the open mouth of the mine. The grass around us had turned an ashy gray.
“It’s like the place exploded. I can’t see how our walking around could trigger a cave-in like that,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead. The hot air outside felt more severe than it should because we’d been so cool, downright cold, in the mine.
“It doesn’t take much, but when it goes, it can be bad.”
“You learn that from a book?”
“Read a serial in a magazine about it. Very interesting. I never thought I’d get to experience it for myself.”
“So you’re telling me our wandering around could have set the whole place off?”
“I don’t think it had anything to do with us. Miners make a lot of noise. Sound can’t trigger something like that, jefe. That tunnel was either meant to collapse, or someone brought it down on us.”
I thought of the person at our door the night before. Someone knew we were here. A well-placed stick of dynamite was a good way to make us disappear. Was that what happened to the troops?
My elbow stopped barking and I dusted myself off with my leather gloves I’d kept in my back pocket.
“I think that’s enough mines for the day. We’ve got some work to do back in town.”
* * *
We rode the horses at a full gallop on the way back so they could stretch their legs and lungs. A lazy horse was your worst enemy in a tight spot. I wanted to keep them fresh but active. Hecla’s assortment of decrepit abodes was the same as we’d left it. Our spare horses and the mule were grazing beside the house we’d commandeered.
After feeding them some apples and getting fresh water, I rolled some cigarettes. “Where’s that whiskey you’ve been hiding?”
Teta got a bottle from his bag, pulled the cork out with his teeth and took a swig. He passed it to me and I took an extra long pull.
“I don’t know what in the hell happened back there, but I don’t like it,” I said, drawing heavily on the cigarette. “Teddy sent us here because he knows we get things done. Sitting-back and taking-the-lay-of-the-land time is over. We need to take control of the situation.”
“Good,” Teta said with a wicked grin. “What do you want to do?”
“First, we’re going to scrub this area clean. Grab as much loose, fine dirt as you can find and spread it around, especially on the steps and under the windows. Next time someone comes around, I want tracks. Maybe we’ll get a sense of how many folks are around. If there’s gold in those mines, it stands to reason that some folks want to keep it for themselves. A man could die out here and no one would be the wiser.”
The burn of the whiskey felt damn good and focused my thoughts. “We should sleep in shifts,” Teta said.
“I agree. One sleeps here while the other stations himself in that house over there.” I pointed to a cabin that was in such a state of disrepair it looked like a good sneeze would bring it to the ground. “They think we’re spending our night in here because it’s the only solid place in town. Let’s keep their attention here while we have their backs in our sights.”
“What about booby traps? I could set a couple up a
round the house.”
Teta was an expert at rigging all manner of traps. He liked to find creative ways to break a man’s legs and leave him for the wolves and vultures.
“Not tonight. I’ve got a feeling they won’t do anything rash. Not after what happened up at the mine. They need to regroup, figure out a better way to get rid of us.”
“But they could just come in and shoot us in our sleep.”
“They could have done that last night. And even if they try it tonight, we’ll have each other’s backs.”
Teta said he would take the first watch and brought his rifle, spare ammo and two revolvers to the busted-up cabin. The day was hot and long, and we spent a better part of the afternoon looking for tracks. Nothing but small critters had moved about recently, but that didn’t mean bigger, two-legged critters hadn’t covered their own comings and goings.
It was a relief for night to finally come. We both went into the house, with Teta slipping out the window to take watch. My nerves were still humming from the incident at the mine. I had to grab some shut-eye so I didn’t nod off during my shift.
A coyote called out in the darkness. I strained to see if it was an actual coyote or an Indian mimicking their call. Another lonely cry echoed in the distance, then more joined in response. Coyotes always sounded sad to me. I could hear the touch of melancholy in their throaty yowls. Even a skilled Indian couldn’t do that.
I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind, but I couldn’t shut it down. Something was going on in Hecla. Something odd. Something bad.
It wouldn’t take long to get stranger.
Chapter Thirteen
The tiny knock at the door roused me from a troubled dream. It was just a couple of raps, but the sound was so out of place I immediately went on high alert. I grabbed my Winchester that I’d left propped against the wall and was on my feet before my eyes had even opened.
