Ghost Mine

by Hunter Shea

  I lashed out and kicked Angus on the top of his kneecap as hard as I could. He staggered a bit but didn’t fall. My foot throbbed. It was like giving the boot to a cannon.

  “Maybe you drugged us,” I said to Matthias. “Maybe you’ve been prowling around all this time and put something in the well. I’ve spent my time with the Apache and know the effects of some of their herbs.”

  The entire house shook. A chorus of shrieks rang out. I fought to concentrate on Angus.

  If he got a swipe at me, I was done for.

  Matthias said, “You’ve lost your mind. There’s something very real trying to break into this house and you’re wasting time accusing us of…of…sheer lunacy! Wake up. We’re not your enemy. In fact, if you let us, we might be able to help.”

  Selma had come up behind me. I could feel her hot breath against the back of my neck. “Nat, let him go. We may need him if whatever is outside gets in.”

  I looked at Teta. He had a good grip on Matthias and I knew he’d go along with whatever I decided.

  The front door shuddered. They were making their way in.

  I pulled the gun out of the big man’s mouth and pistol-whipped him across the cheek.

  To my surprise, he fell to his knees, grasping his head.

  Selma screamed and pointed at the window.

  An impossibly tall, hairy creature with red eyes that burned like the sun crouched outside the window, staring at us with what I could only describe as hunger. It bared its teeth like a rabid dog.

  I fired three shots into its face. The glass shattered and the beast dropped away from view. I turned to Matthias and said, “You’re right, what’s out there is real. For your sake, I hope they’re not people you care much about.”

  “I told you—”

  I pushed him away and went for the door. “Selma, light the other two lamps.”

  By shooting whoever was outside the window, I had riled up the gang. The fact that they were still shouting like creatures and not men didn’t stop my resolve to put an end to this, no matter what was outside the door. I’d played my hand and it was time to take it to the bank.

  The pounding at the door had stopped but I could hear plenty of movement outside. “Put the lamps down there,” I said, motioning to the edge of the door with my pistol, “and hand me my rifle.”

  Selma did what I asked. I traded her my pistol for the rifle. I wanted to inflict maximum damage when I started shooting. Teta was on the same page and warned Matthias, “If either of you move, I’ll turn around and shoot you in the eyes.”

  I kicked the wedges out from beneath the door. “You ready?” Teta nodded.

  “Selma, step back to the corner and shoot anyone that comes near you.” I hoped she understood that Teta and I were excluded.

  “Do it,” I said. My jaw clenched tighter than a virgin’s pussy.

  Teta threw the door open and the light of the lamps provided just what I needed.

  Targets.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  There must have been a half dozen of them gathered outside the door. They were tall, broad, covered in matted hair and downright repulsive smelling. Man or beast, it no longer mattered. I’d had enough.

  Teta and I didn’t wait a beat. We pulled back on our triggers, hitting everything in sight. The noise was deafening. It should have echoed off into the distance, but it was like the darkness had come with thick walls and a close ceiling. I was past trying to make sense of things.

  “Hurts, don’t it?” I shouted as I took one of the beasts right in the gut. It jumped and folded in on itself, falling to the dust and dirt. Teta shouted something in Spanish, unloading his pistols into everything that moved.

  The creatures, or men, took off in the direction of the hills. We shot as many as we could in the back. Fuck honor. Dying was dying and it made no difference whether you took it head on or looking away.

  I threw one of the lamps and flames erupted in a long line as it shattered. It gave us a longer field of light so we could take care of business.

  Teta took aim at a retreating beast. It was the tallest of the bunch, maybe a good eight feet tall. He squeezed the trigger and the top of its head exploded. It ran a few more steps before falling facedown.

  The rest had dashed off into the dark. We could hear them but we could no longer see them. A half-dozen wooly bodies lay about the street. I saw the chest rise on one of them and shot it in the heart.

  I should have been breathing heavily and my nerves should have been singing with adrenaline. Instead, I was filled with a warm sense of calm. It felt damn good to take matters into my own hands for once, no matter how brutal or messy.

  “Mierda, jefe,” Teta said, covering his nose and mouth with his dirty bandana. “It hurts to breathe. How can you stand it?”

  The bodies were smoking.

  A part of me knew I was standing in the center of one of the most malodorous shitpiles a man would ever come across. Instead of gagging, I savored it. The closeness of the air made sure the stink draped over us like a blanket dipped in skunk entrails, horse shit and spoiled meat.

  I was so busy admiring our handiwork that I had forgotten about Selma.

  Relief swept over me when I darted back inside and saw her standing tall, covering Matthias and Angus with my pistol. The gun quivered a bit in her hand, so I took hold of the barrel and holstered it.

  “Did you get all of them?” she asked.

  “Most. The rest will think twice before coming back.”

  Teta came back inside and slammed the door. He brought our two remaining lamps in with him. “We’re going to have to move upwind. This place is going to get bad real quick.”

  Matthias stroked the ends of his dark mustache. I didn’t like the cocky look on his face. “What’s on your mind, Reverend?”

  “I’m not quite sure you understand what you’ve started.”

  “I didn’t start anything. For the first time since I got here, I sure as hell ended it.”

  Matthias poked his head out of the shattered window. I kind of hoped one of those creatures would come by and take his head as a souvenir.

  I added, “You should be thankful we did what we did. At least now I’m convinced that you and Angus aren’t behind everything. What we shot out there isn’t human.” I still wasn’t convinced he and Angus were a pair of traveling oddballs with a chest of trapped spirits, searching for the source of the Trumpets of Armageddon. Putting it all together like that made me think I was ready for the nuthouse.

  Matthias turned to me but had nothing to say. He looked uncertain – about what, I wasn’t sure.

  Selma broke our little stare-down. “Nat, what are those things?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  There was no need to tell her they bore a striking resemblance to the wild-man stories I’d been told by plenty of Indians from different tribes. All that mattered was that a good number of them were dead and the rest were gone.

  What concerned me was how Hecla could control the sun and what we’d do when we ran out of lamp oil.

  Teta said, “Maybe they’re some kind of diseased bear. Could be a whole clan has some kind of sickness.”

  “A sickness that makes them walk on two legs?” Matthias interjected.

  “Maybe they have a deformity. Nat, you remember that guy we met in Montauk who had his upper legs fused together?”

  I recalled the poor soul. He had been leaning against a boathouse, begging for spare change. He wore shorts, both because of the heat and so passersby could see his deformity and take pity on him. Teta and I gave him a dollar as well as a fresh bottle of rum. He was happy for the dollar, but he was over the moon about the rum. We had both survived battle and disease in Cuba and were grateful to be able to give the guy a little something. We were quite the charitable pair for a while after landing in Long Island. Becomi
ng cops wiped that all away.

  “Could be just like it,” I said.

  “Do you two always run for the safety of the physical and mundane when you’re faced with questions larger than your tired paradigms?” Matthias said.

  What the hell was a paradigm?

  “Big talk coming from a guy who professes to have a spirit in a box,” I snapped back.

  “If you’re going to stand here arguing, I’m going to shoot you both,” Selma barked.

  Judging by the set of her jaw and the squint in her eye, she just might.

  She continued, “What we all should be doing is figuring a way to get out of here. There’s nothing natural about this place and we all know that the longer we stay, the better the chances that we never leave. So, for the moment, you need to end your suspicion of one another and think. And, Nat, you should apologize to Angus for hitting him.”

  I looked at the big man and gave a short nod. He nodded back. There was no lingering anger in his eyes.

  Teta raised an eyebrow and gave an approving nod. The air seemed to go out of all of us. Selma was right. We were trapped in Hecla like insects on flypaper. The one thing we all had in common is that we were all of the same species, whereas Hecla was in a world all its own.

  We cast our heads down like scolded children.

  “That’s more like it,” Selma said. “The four of you all have very different takes on what’s going on here. Somewhere in the middle is the key to figuring everything out. If we’re going to get anywhere, we have to be honest with one another. Nat, Teta, that means you have to tell me exactly what happened in the mine. And then I’ll tell Matthias and Angus about Franklin.”

  “Don’t forget the dog,” Teta said.

  “Right, and the dog.” She looked directly at Matthias. “I’m not entirely sure why you came here, but your lives are in just as much jeopardy as ours. You say you capture spirits. I believe Hecla is full of spirits. Maybe some are the miners or other people that have come through. And maybe it’s the land itself. My mother came from a town that believed very much in the sanctity of the land and that it had a soul, just like you and me. Something’s gone terribly wrong with Hecla’s soul. The five of us need to make it right if we ever want to go home.”

  If I’d had eyes for the pretty half-Mexican before, I wanted to pull her into my arms and lock lips until the real Trumpets of Armageddon sounded and we could let the whole world crumble away around us.

  Matthias cleared his throat and said, “Your candor and call for honesty has opened my eyes, as well as my heart. Gentlemen, she is absolutely right. Angus and I answered our calling many years ago, choosing to live in the gray areas between rationality and the preternatural. Please, fill us in on all you saw so we can help find our way out of this conundrum.”

  I had to grit my teeth and draw a big breath not to say something wise to Matthias. When he wasn’t quoting Scripture like some snake-handling false preacher, he was using words no normal person could understand to show his superiority.

  Selma must have sensed my budding anger. She gave me a look with her big brown eyes that said, Stand down. So I did.

  She said, “Teta, why don’t you start?”

  He dug his fingers under his sombrero to scratch his head and looked at me. “Should I tell them about the first time we went in the mine with the tommyknockers?”

  “Might as well spill it all,” I said. And we did. Selma grew a little more uneasy with each bizarre story. Matthias seemed very interested in the boy and girl with the black eyes.

  “Eyes are the window to the soul. Their windows are shuttered up,” he said.

  “What the hell do you mean by that?” Teta asked.

  “What you saw, the black-eyed kids, are children taken before their time by something sinister, trapped between heaven and hell.”

  “Did they ask for something strange?” Angus said.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “They wanted something to drink and eat. But when I offered it to them, they didn’t take it.”

  “Trapped in a loop,” Angus said, turning to Matthias who played with his mustache. “Selma, you must have had some interaction with the miners and their families, considering you’re from the nearest major town,” Matthias said.

  “I did. A lot would come over once a month for supplies.”

  “Were there many children?”

  “I saw some. I don’t know how many were in Hecla itself.”

  “People out here like to breed, so I’ll assume there were a good number. I think we know who those children were. The question is, how do we help them?” As I opened my mouth to speak, the entire house began to vibrate. Selma covered her ears, expecting the horn to sound again.

  Angus threw his arms out, trying to steady himself. For the first time, he looked frightened.

  He said, “Earthquake?”

  Suddenly, a pair of massive arms crashed through the wall. I fell back on my ass. The hands were dark and bloody, with fingers bigger than the length of my entire hand. Thick splinters pelted us like hail and I had to raise my arm to protect my eyes from being impaled.

  Next thing I knew, Selma was screaming for her life.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I looked up just in time to see the horror of those hands, attached to thick arms covered in long, dark-brown hair, as they grabbed Selma around her waist. Her eyes rolled up and she screeched loud enough to wake the dead. The ground was still shaking and we couldn’t get our footing. The walls of the house moaned and swayed.

  Fumbling for my pistol, I tried to find an exposed spot to shoot without hitting Selma.

  She was thrashing in the thing’s arms, hammering it with her fists.

  Before I could get off a shot at the upper part of the arms, they pulled her back with a tremendous shattering of wood and the crack of what I hoped wasn’t bone. In an instant, she was gone. An enormous hole had been blown through the wall. I ran into the dark, following the sound of her screams.

  “Help me, Naaaaaaaaat!”

  Her cries were so raw with fear, my heart felt like it was going to explode. My lungs burned as I forced my legs to move faster than they had since I was a young buck on my first cattle drive, chasing after steers for fun.

  I couldn’t see where I was going and tripped on something hard yet yielding. I landed face-first into what felt like a pile of wet rags.

  I looked up and couldn’t believe my eyes.

  The night was receding, following the direction of Selma and the creature that had ripped her from the house. Daylight returned. There was a clear line between night and day, and I watched that line speed into the distance, straight to the Deep Rock Hills.

  Selma’s cries were swallowed up by distance and the wind. Whatever had her was moving so fast there was nothing known to man that could keep up with them. Not even Matthias’s fancy car.

  Teta, Matthias and Angus skidded to a halt behind me.

  My blood was soaring through my veins and drumming a deafening beat in my ears. I had to get up and follow Selma.

  When I balanced myself with my hands, they slid out from under me and I collapsed again.

  Now, back in the light of day, I could see exactly what I had stumbled upon and fallen into.

  It was Teta’s horse, or what remained of it. Something had opened up a four-foot gash in its side and I was up to my elbows in its entrails. Black and red organs swam around my hands and I tasted its blood as it dripped down my throat.

  A pair of hands helped me to my feet. I looked around.

  All of the horses had been gutted. The mule had been torn in half, one part tangled amidst the branches of a nearby tree, the other emptied its insides into the trough. Its blood splattered the red-soaked earth in a steady, nauseating beat.

  “Sons of bitches,” Teta swore under his breath.

  I’d seen and done
a lot in my time, and I wasn’t prone to squeamishness. Vomit hit the back of my teeth before I could even open my mouth, and then it was pouring in a hot torrent into the exposed cavity of the horse. I was so repulsed by the sight and smell that I threw up even more, heaving until my ribs ached.

  I collapsed on the ground, rolling away from the defiled carcass. The sun was so bright I had to drape my arm over my eyes. I’d never felt so weak before, so completely helpless. Covering my eyes spared me from having to see Teta’s reaction.

  Where the hell did they take Selma? And why? How could we get her back from something that could control the goddamn sky?

  It was Angus who offered me a cup of fresh water. The cup looked like a child’s toy in his hairy-knuckled paw. I sat up so I could rinse my mouth out. I think I muttered a thank-you.

  “They took her to the mines,” Teta said. “I watched the hills absorb the dark like it was going down a funnel.”

  Struggling to my feet, I pointed at him and grumbled, “If you make the sign of the cross I’ll tie your arms to your sides. God has nothing to do with this place and I don’t think he much cares about anyone fool enough to end up here.”

  Teta’s hand was midway to his forehead when he stopped. He was a hard man and not one to take threats lightly, but we knew each other at this point better than our own mothers, had they been alive.

  “We’re going to have to find her ourselves, without divine guidance,” I said, looking for my hat. It was perched on one of the stiff, upright legs of our spare horses. I dusted it off and thought better of putting it back on my head, which was covered in blood and guts.

  “There’s always divine guidance, Mr. Blackburn,” Matthias said.

  I walked to the water pump and ducked my head under the spigot. The water was cold as ice and chased away any fuzziness in my skull. It turned a dark pink as it sluiced over my head and hands.

  When I was cleaned up as best I could, I turned to Matthias and said, “You keep telling yourself that. Maybe the hands of providence will raise you up and out of here, seeing as we can’t escape any other way. Or maybe you have room in that chest of yours for whatever hell breathes in Hecla. You think you can stick it all in your spirit box?”