by Hunter Shea
I chuckled thinking about it. “Not our brightest idea. There were easier things to do to help stop the boredom.”
“But that’s just it. Guys like you and me, we need moments like this. You’re only a few years older from when I met you in Cuba, but all I hear you talk about is what an old man you are. You never said it once that night at the dock. And your bones may be feeling things more now than they did when you were riding cattle, but you still have the fire, you know. And here we are again, climbing up to who knows what, and it’s just me, you and some guns.”
“You forgot Angus.” The big man grunted.
“Yeah, we’ve got Angus.”
“Hold on a sec. Let me see if I can climb up next to you.”
I jammed my fingers into a fissure and pulled myself to the right, finding a good spot to support my feet. I managed to get myself in line with Teta. It was only another five feet until we got to the ridge.
“Now we’ll hit the top together,” I said, a little out of breath but ready.
He smiled and said, “If it comes to it, I’ll shoot to the left, you shoot to the right and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“If our bullets hold out.”
“They always do.”
We scrabbled up the rest of the way, managing to keep our fingers on the triggers of the shotgun and rifle without setting them off. As soon as we hit the ridge, we got into a firing position on our knees. Angus hauled himself between us, brandishing a machete in each hand.
I looked around and sighed. “Ah shit.”
Chapter Forty-One
We didn’t manage to get to one of the mine entrances. In fact, there were six.
This side of the hill was honeycombed with open shafts. Four were on the bottom ridgeline, each spaced twenty to thirty feet apart. A tall conifer sprouted between them, giving partial cover to the other two up top. This made my earlier assessment of the number of shafts very shy of reality.
“Why would they cut six shafts so close to one another?” I mused, walking the perimeter to make sure I hadn’t missed any.
Teta pointed to the widest entrance. “I’ll bet that was the one they first dug for the copper. They must have found multiple veins of gold inside and just tunneled into where they thought it led.”
“Gold fever makes for dumb miners?”
“I don’t know. I never read much about mines.”
“I would think that by carving out so many tunnels so close together, it would make for a very unstable series of shafts. I’ll bet there’re a lot of bodies down there that never made it to the boneyard.”
Angus leaned against the support beams of one of the smaller shafts. He tilted his head toward the interior of the shaft, listening.
“Hear anything?” I asked.
“Crying.”
It’s funny how one simple word could raise the hairs on my arms and neck.
“Does it sound like a woman crying?” If it was Selma, I was about to make a mad dash into the dark and hope I didn’t fall down some pit.
“No. Men. Many men. All dead.”
Teta came up beside him and took two steps into the shaft. He put his finger to his lips and stood quietly.
“I don’t hear anything,” he said in a hush.
“You can’t,” Angus said. “The dead don’t talk to you. I’ll go to them now.”
Teta held his arm. It looked like a child trying to wrap his fingers around a bull’s neck. “You can’t go in there. We have to decide which shaft to take and go in together.”
Angus stared at him, unmoving. Teta stared back, but I could see him starting to waver. He knew there was no way he could hold Angus back, short of shooting him. I decided to break their silent struggle.
I said, “What do you plan to do?”
He looked at me with eyes tinged with a sadness I’d only seen on folks who had lost someone close. “End their suffering. Send them home.”
“Will you be long?”
“No.”
“Do you want us to come along?”
“It’s not necessary.”
I may not have heard the crying, but looking at Angus, I didn’t doubt that he did. He needed to exercise whatever ability it was that Matthias swore he’d been given. “We’ll wait right out here, then. You call out if you need us.”
His back heaved and he disappeared into the darkness. We heard the crunch of his heavy footsteps as he walked deeper into the tunnel. I had a sense that we’d seen him for the last time and desperately wanted to be proven wrong. If he didn’t come back out, that would make it a perfect score for Hecla and the mines eliminating everyone who had been drawn to it thanks to mine and Teta’s little expedition. Things like that could weigh a man’s conscience down.
“This is crazy,” Teta said. “We came here to find Selma, not wait for him to talk to dead people only he can hear.”
“Crazy just about fits here,” I said. “We’ve been trying to fight everything. We might as well take a different approach and go with the hand we’ve been dealt.”
The wind started to kick up again. Teta’s greasy hair flopped to one side of his face. “It would be nice to have a good shave and a haircut before we die,” I said.
Teta huffed and absently fingered the remains of his lucky sombrero in his waistband. “I wouldn’t mind a rare steak, good whiskey and an even better woman after that shave.”
I had the same fantasy, only the woman in my dream was Selma. Angus’s footsteps suddenly stopped.
“I hope he’s not so far back that we can’t even hear him. Be a fine mess if he needed us and we had to run too far in the dark to get to him,” I said. We stood on either side of the tunnel’s mouth, listening hard.
“When we get out of here, I’m throwing the biggest fiesta Wyoming’s ever seen,” Teta said softly.
“I hope gringos are invited.”
“I’ve been around you so long I’ve become half-gringo myself.”
The shaft was silent. The air coming from the tunnel was cold as well water. We waited a couple of minutes. It was as if Angus had been swallowed whole by the mine. He was no Jonah, and this wasn’t Sunday school.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “Angus! You all right in there?” My voice echoed down the tunnel.
The big man didn’t reply. “That’s not good,” Teta said.
“Thanks, professor.”
I called his name again and was met by my own voice responding back to me. Something moved in the trees below us and I tensed. If it was one of those wild men, or a bunch, we might be able to hold them off if they took the same route we had. It didn’t happen again, though. It was a small relief.
When I sucked in some air to call for Angus again, I was stopped by the sound of murmuring. It was coming from inside the tunnel. It was a deep baritone, so I knew it had to be Angus. What I couldn’t make out was what he was saying.
“At least we know he’s alive,” Teta said.
I shushed him. I wanted to hear what Angus was up to.
His muttering got louder, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch a single word. “Is he speaking Spanish?”
“Not any Spanish I know.”
“Could it be French? He looks a little French.”
There was a musical quality to the way he spoke, with hard consonants and soft syllables riding up and down in a kind of wave. If I listened long enough, it might lull me to sleep.
“What’s he doing?”
“Singing to ghosts, far as I can tell,” I said. And then he went silent again.
“Nat, we’re wasting time.”
“What do you propose we do?”
“For starters, we have to decide whether we leave him there with his ghosts or get him out.”
“We’re not leaving him.”
“Then it’s
settled. We get him out.”
“You have a team of horses somewhere that can pull him out?”
“I’m sure he’ll listen to reason.” Teta clicked the hammer back on his pistol. I knew he wasn’t going to shoot Angus. He just needed to make a point.
I scratched the bristly stubble on my chin and thought about mentioning option three, which was to do what I said we would before and wait for him to come out. But dammit, Teta was right. We needed to get a move on.
“Let’s go then.”
We’d taken no more than four steps when the tunnel rang with Angus’s fevered shouting. The words, which were nonsense to begin with, blended into one another as the echo melded into fresh vocalizations. His voice was as fierce as he was big and if I didn’t know it was coming from him, my bowels would have turned to water.
“LADALLL MISTRUCT! FELDAL UTAME BISCOOD! ENDAMANTE! ENDAMANTE MADOOL!”
We froze, stupefied by Angus’s chant.
“ENDAMANTE MADOOL! ISHTOK UTAME SANSIDAR!ENDAMANTE!”
He was shouting at the top of his lungs. I was concerned that the vibrations of his voice could bring the whole works down on us. I grabbed Teta’s sleeve and pulled him back, out of the tunnel.
“He sounds like he’s lost his mind,” Teta said. The whites of his eyes practically glowed in the dark. Angus continued with a litany of foreign words, yelling like an angry god amid the heavens.
“ISHTOK UTAM SANSIDAR!”
“That’s definitely not French,” Teta said. “That’s not anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“If the wild men didn’t know where we are before, they do now.”
Angus stopped for a blessed moment, then he roared. It went on louder and longer than any man should have been capable of doing, and I wondered if what we heard was, in fact, Angus at all. What we’d heard could be the language of the thing in the hills.
Fast, thunderous footsteps flowed from the mine. I hoped to hell it was Angus.
“Get back,” I cautioned Teta. If it wasn’t our giant friend, it was best to give it some room. We had our pistols aimed at the black tunnel. Again there was noise down by the trees. There hadn’t been a single critter in sight, so it had to be something bad. Sometimes that was just the way luck ran.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Angus’s bald head emerged from the gloom. He skidded to a stop when he saw our guns.
“We didn’t know it was you,” I said, pointing my gun to the ground.
“What the hell were you doing in there? It sounded like you were speaking in tongues,” Teta said, slipping his pistol back in his holster.
“I was trying to set them all free.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
He bit his lip, looked down at the ground and bit his lip. “No. There are too many and the hold on them is too great.”
“How many is too many?”
“Hundreds.”
“That’s a lot of miners,” Teta said.
Angus shook his head. “Not all miners. Women and children too. Everyone in Hecla.” I peered into the shaft as though by staring long enough I’d be able to see the heart of things in these cursed hills outside a damned town. “You mean to tell me that everyone in the town is in there, dead?”
“They’re all dead, yes. Their bodies aren’t all there, but their spirits are trapped.”
“Too bad we had to leave your spirit chest behind,” Teta said. “I’d guess even a whole town of spirits could fit in there since there’s not much to them.”
“Don’t mock,” Angus growled.
I asked, “So, are they all in that one shaft?”
“No. Within the center of the hills.”
Damn. “What about Selma? Did you get any sense where someone living would be?”
He thought it over and my heart paused. The one thing I didn’t want to hear was that he’d found her amongst the dead and disembodied.
“No. She’s not in that shaft. I went to its end. It doesn’t go far.”
“At least we can rule out one,” Teta said. He picked up a jagged rock and carved a big T into one of the support pillars. “They all look just about the same. Now we’ll know not to go back in there.”
“We’re going to need some light and holding tiny matches isn’t going to do it,” I said. “Angus, give me a hand with that tree over there so we can make some torches.”
Chapter Forty-Two
I pointed out a thick, low-hanging branch on a young pine tree. It would have taken an axe or saw for Teta and me to break it off, but for Angus it was only a matter of getting a good grip and pulling until it ripped free from the trunk. It made a hell of a racket and we stayed still for a bit to ensure we hadn’t gotten any undue attention.
He broke the branch in half over his knee. Teta and I each took a section and went about carving off the bark with the machetes. We hacked the ends open so we could stuff the bark into the splits. When we were done, I gave the machete to Angus. He chopped a section of the tree away until he came to its stores of sap. We collected the sap with leaves and added them to the shards of bark.
I held a makeshift torch in front of me. “It’s not pretty, but it’ll do. We may have to load it up with more bark and sap within an hour or so.”
“‘And God said, Let there be light’,” Angus said, barely above a whisper. I’m sure it’s what Matthias would have said.
Teta struck a match and the end of his torch went up with a quick whump! I lit the second torch with the first.
“Guess we’ll take the next one over,” I said. “I’ll go first, and Angus can take the other torch at the rear. If we have to turn about and skedaddle, we’ll have a light leading the way.”
“Good. That leaves my hands free for protection,” Teta said.
The rifle was in his left and the pistol in his right. He was deadly from either side.
We stepped into the crudely constructed mineshaft. I could tell from the start it had been tunneled out in a hurry. There weren’t as many supporting structures and the sides of the cave were ragged and raw. The ground was clear of tracks because they’d never gotten around to laying them.
“Must be another small one,” I said. My voice sounded like a trumpet’s blast in the cold silence of the tunnel.
“We can only hope,” Teta said.
The torchlight flickered and popped and we had to make sure it didn’t set the timber on fire. If there were any pockets of gas, we were in for a short trek into the hills. It was a concern I had to force to the back of my mind. There was no sense worrying about something you couldn’t avoid.
Sure enough, the tunnel died a little over a hundred feet in. We turned and headed back outside, now with Angus in the lead.
“Must have been a bad vein,” Teta said.
“Must have.”
I felt an itch at the back of my skull. This wasn’t what it seemed, but I had no way of knowing the truth. Why would miners take the time to blast their way in, then stop after such a short while? It was a lot of work for nothing and didn’t make a lick of sense.
All the while, I couldn’t shake the image of us being surrounded by the dead, begging to get out, but unable to set themselves free. I felt hundreds of sets of eyes on my back, imagining myself passing through their untethered bodies. It was chilly in the tunnel. Was that natural, or was I feeling the icy grip of death?
When we made it back to the false-night air, Teta got the rock from his pocket and etched another T on the outer beam.
We moved on to the next. It was the tiniest of the ones on this side of the hills and we had to crouch to get inside.
“What was this one made for, Chinamen?” Teta groused.
“You’re the shortest one here. Quit your complaining.”
It was narrow, to say the least. We were hemmed in by solid rock. Here, more than in the other t
unnels, I could sense the spirits brushing past us as we inched our way down. The floor dipped into a sharp decline and I worried about us slipping into God knows where.
My arm scraped against the wall and my hand jerked up. I nearly set my hat on fire with the torch. My face was singed from the heat.
I motioned for everyone to stop so I could listen. If Selma was there, we might be lucky and hear her cough or move or, worse, cry. I could only hear the steady flapping of the flames, like a new flag atop a pole on a windy day.
The silence made my ears ring. Moving forward, I dug my heels into the loose-dirt floor to keep my balance as we descended.
“Angus?”
“Yes.”
“What language were you speaking back in that first tunnel?”
With all of the unknowns before us, I wanted to scratch at least one thing off the list. If knowledge was power, I had all the strength of a baby calf.
“Deadspeak,” he replied. A cold creek ran down my spine.
“You learn that in some special school?” Teta asked, all sarcasm in the face of fear.
“No. I was born with it. So was my mother. She called it deadspeak. Now I do.”
I said, “And you use that to—”
“Talk to spirits.”
Suddenly, I no longer wanted to know about his deadspeak. Hunched over, feeling claustrophobic and stepping into the bowels of haunted hills were not the ideal conditions for talking about the dead. It was bad enough I imagined them pressing against my face, their sightless eye sockets gazing into my soul.
The rock walls bled cold water. It ran down the declining tunnel floor. My torchlight played crazy games with the surface of the water. I didn’t realize we had come to the end of the floor until I stepped up to my knees into an ice-cold pool.
“Dammit, that’s freezing! Turn around, guys, this one is clear.”
The hike up was even harder and we had to grip jutting rocks along the walls to haul ourselves along. When we got to level ground I tried shaking the water from my boots.
