by Ben Farthing
“That was God’s honest truth--we haven’t seen or heard from her.”
“She called you last week.”
“Which she does twice a month.”
Cessy swallowed her annoyance. When Mom was embarrassed about something, she acted like a creative lie wasn’t a lie. “I asked if you’d heard from her.”
“It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.”
“Kate’s in town.”
“No.” Mom waved her finger. “My baby girl would have visited me. And now’s not a good time for Hamlin to have visitors.”
“Jackson talked to her. Gordon talked to her. Her rental car is parked not a mile away. She’s here somewhere. And she called you before deciding to come. Maybe I could have found her more quickly if you hadn’t lied to me yesterday. Did Kate tell you she was coming?”
Mom paced in little shuffling steps. “It was a normal call. How are you and Dad? I love my new job. Anything good on the TV lately?”
“You mean on the radio?” Cessy prompted.
“Maybe.”
“She asked you about Lockler and the Maple Table.”
“No. I might have mentioned them, though. The good they’re doing for Hamlin.”
This woman in front of Cessy, who’d raised her, now felt a dangerous stranger. “How many of your neighbors will be alive to enjoy it?”
“I deserve respect, too. You wouldn’t speak to your father like that.”
“You know I would.”
Mom tugged at her blouse and chewed her lips. “You don’t understand how badly this town needed Lockler.”
“He’s hurt people. How could you possibly tolerate that? Yesterday you were handing out lunches to old folks. You’re not a violent person.”
“Protecting your town isn’t violence.”
“Tell that to Olivia Wilder.” Cessy shook her head, felt something akin to grief. “Why did you come find me?”
“To help you leave. Go home. I’m sure you’ll find that Kate already did.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She’s smart, and she’s good. She wouldn’t keep poking around where she doesn’t belong.” Mom sighed. “Cecelia, you didn’t see how full of vermin Hamlin became. Let me help you leave. There’s a walking trail that follows Mud River west of town.”
“And if I refuse?”
The look on Mom’s face was like when Mom had seen her wear baggy jeans for the first time. “Why would you? This is all for you. One day, you and Kate, your future husbands, and our future grandchildren, God willing, will move back here. You can’t grow old in the big city. But the vermin were ruining our town. I love you. This is for you.”
“What is? Tell me what you’ve done.”
“I’m not having this conversation with you, young lady. It’s time to leave. I’ll show you the way out.”
Cessy sighed.
The truck door opened. Jackson leaned out. “Mrs. Timms, you coming, too?”
Mom narrowed her eyes at Cessy. “Where are you going?”
“I told you. I’m finding Kate. Then we’re leaving.”
Mom squeezed arthritic fingers into a bony fist. “You’re as stubborn as your father.”
Cessy shrugged.
She got back in the truck.
Jackson rocked in his seat. “She coming?”
“Nope.”
Cessy waited, watching through the mirror. It took Mom thirty seconds to decide to get back into her car. Another thirty seconds to turn around and drive away.
Once Mom’s Chevy was out of sight over the closest hill, Cessy put the truck into gear.
40
They parked next to Kate’s rental minivan.
The mountain stretched up before them, visible only partially through the forest.
Cessy replayed in her head her conversation with Mom. Should she have asked for more help? Wanting to help Cessy leave town was one thing; helping her disrupt Lockler and the Maple Table was another. Mom was a stranger.
Cessy got out of the car. A single bird sang, perched atop the minivan. Her tires had kicked up gravel dust, painting her view of the surrounding woods in a gray haze.
Mom wasn’t a stranger, though. This was the same woman she knew. It wasn’t surprising that Mom would act irrational. You couldn’t expect anybody to act rational all the time. But how Mom was acting was something else. It was like the worst parts of her personality were amplified.
Jackson slammed his door. He shot the door a distrusting sneer.
Cessy opened the back door. “Do you know what’s waiting for us up there?”
Jackson cupped his hands to peer into the minivan. “No, I’ve been keeping my head low. I know what comes after me. I don’t know what happens when we go after it.”
Cessy put the dust mask and flashlight into a backpack, slung it over her shoulder. She used a knife to widen her holster to fit Sheriff Miller’s revolver. Only five rounds for it, but better than no sidearm. She stuffed her pockets with shotgun shells, tucked the gun over her elbow.
She handed Jackson her extra flashlight. He clicked it on and off, then patted his waist.
“What are you carrying?” Cessy adjusted her backpack.
“H and K VP9.”
“Fancy.” Cessy motioned to the trailhead with the barrel of the shotgun. “Lead the way.”
The walk up the mountainside was uneventful. The heat of summer crept up on them as the morning progressed. The forest’s thick undergrowth blocked the wind to keep the air stale.
Their feet crunched dead leaves.
Gradually, the bushes, young trees, and vines grew thicker on either side of the trail. As Cessy’s thighs started aching from the climb, the depth of the forest around her contracted, until she was walled in by crowded pine needles from finger-thin trunks, tangles of thorny vines, and broad-leaved bushes.
Above, the thick canopy of oaks, pines, and maples. And in between the overgrown undergrowth and the high leaves which hid the sky: relative emptiness.
Cessy searched the forest floor for the fallen tree that had ripped up the buried cable. She’d known these woods perfectly as a teenager, but now every switchback in the trail brought on more of the same. The unnatural tunnel of undergrowth adulterated the familiar.
Jackson spoke, startling Cessy. “Olivia used to love hiking. She’d go jogging up this mountain, can you believe that?” He faced forward, walking up the trail without even breathing heavy.
Cessy didn’t know how to respond. She’d never been close to someone with this level of grief before. One of Detective Landis’s old friends from the department was killed a few years back, but it’d been a decade since Landis knew him well. That was a grief of distance, of processing the fact that something horrible had happened to someone far away. That was easier to compartmentalize.
Jackson now dealt with a grief far more immediate than anything Cessy had faced.
Although, depending on what they found in the mine, that might soon change.
They curved around a switchback. Jackson stopped. Birdsong behind them faded away.
Up the hill, in the empty space between canopy and undergrowth, tiny perforations swarmed tree trunks and branches.
Cessy froze. Her wound itched. She thought of Gordon’s final scream, muffled by the walls of his kiln.
The holes moved like schools of fish, independently yet together, along branches, up tree trunks. Despite sun rays piercing the forest canopy, and the myriad angles at which the holes faced the light, they all allowed only a whisper of light inside. Gray emptiness.
Jackson’s hand went to his waist. Cessy leaned forward to hold it still.
“I saw this, once,” Jackson whispered. “When the ground swallowed my house. The ground rumbled, the house fell. I crawled away, and these things showed up. But I was trying to get away already by that point, what with Olivia...” He trailed off.
Cessy quietly told him how she’d seen a small patch of similar perforations when she’d found the mine yeste
rday. “But I almost missed spotting it. Nothing like this.”
“They know we’re coming,” Jackson said.
“They can’t.” But she couldn’t shake the truth of what he said. If Lockler and the Maple Table could respond over their broadcast to what people said in the moment, and if the walls of darkness appeared in response to discussing them, then of course Cessy and Jackson couldn’t sneak up on them.
“It’s different from how you saw it before. It’s only different because something’s changed. Lockler’s almost finished. That’s what’s changed.”
“Finished what?” Cessy searched for the break in undergrowth that she’d found before.
“Everything they’ve been doing. Driving Hamlin crazy. Taking people. My dad and Sheriff Miller were two of the people most excited about Lockler. They told everyone how great he was for helping clean up their town. If they took those two, they must not need that support anymore. Must be they’re almost finished.”
That list of people most excited also included Cessy’s parents. If she went home right now, would she find that they’d been taken, too?
She couldn’t process that right now. Mom and Dad were complicit in what had happened here, maybe complicit in whatever had happened to Kate. But they were still her parents.
Cessy gently spread apart a copse of young pines. She crept through it, nervous to draw the attention of the hundreds of holes above.
Jackson stumbled through behind her. Thin trunks swung down, needles whooshing behind them.
The forest went quiet. Cessy stared at the perforations, willing them to ignore her.
After a few moments, Cessy forged her way uphill. Every step farther away from those things lifted her spirits.
She resumed her search for the fallen tree and lifted cable. It didn’t take long.
An oak tree as big around as her waist, toppled from the dirt, roots jutted up like crooked tentacles. A black, dirt-encrusted cable stretched up from the ground, hung atop a root, and went back under the ground.
“You think this is what Kate followed?” Jackson asked.
Cessy nodded. “It probably goes up into the mine.”
She navigated the thick undergrowth, straight to the mine. Wind whispered from within. Cessy clicked on her flashlight and shined it inside.
Twenty feet in, the dirt and rocks of the collapsed ceiling blocked the way.
The flat curtain of darkness was gone.
Jackson came up behind Cessy. “What are you looking for?”
“Yesterday, I saw a rushing wall of shadow, like we saw in the rental house. It’s gone now.”
“It moves.” Jackson kicked at the dirt at his feet. “You think the cable’s under here?”
They found a pair of thick branches, and used them to carve a narrow ditch in the mine entrance.
A foot down, Jackson said, “I don’t think it’s down here.”
Cessy ignored him until they’d dug another eighteen inches. He was right. She’d assumed the cable would lead here, but it didn’t.
“If Kate followed the cable, wouldn’t she have had to dig it up herself?”
Cessy leaned on her digging stick. “She didn’t have a metal detector, did she?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Then yeah.” Cessy led the way back to the toppled tree. She climbed up onto the trunk and searched the woods around her.
She spotted three patches of exposed dirt, about twenty feet away from where the roots lifted the cable. One of them revealed the buried wires.
Kate had guessed the wire’s path, then dug until she found it.
Farther up the hill, Cessy saw evidence of the same careful searching.
She followed her sister’s trail. Every ten or twenty feet, a series of freshly dug holes, until Kate had found the cable, judged its direction, and repeated the process.
Jackson hummed to himself as he followed Cessy, a tuneless drone.
The trail led them past the mine entrance, farther up the hill.
Cessy thought it was leading them to the peak, straight to Valerie’s shed, when she found the pit.
A shallow ravine ran down the mountainside, ending in a pit that hugged the edge of a boulder. It was twice as thick around as Cessy’s shoulders. Rainwater runoff must have gathered here, until it broke through.
A knotted rope was tied to a pine tree, and dangled down the hole.
A foot down the hole, gray cable stretched out of the dirt, bent ninety degrees, and disappeared down the hole.
“They’re really down the mine,” Jackson said. “Kate was right.”
Cessy’s heart thumped up in her throat. This was where Kate had gone. She’d find her sister down this pit. Or her sister’s corpse.
Cessy jammed the shotgun through her belt along her back, tested the strength of the knotted rope, and descended.
41
The pit was tighter than Cessy estimated. She shoulders knocked down chunks of earth that fell into her sneakers. The shotgun cut grooves through the wall.
Finally, her feet kicked free of the tight hole. She swung wildly until finding the ground.
She turned on her flashlight. The click echoed down a tunnel. She was in the mine, thirty feet past the collapse.
Around her, packed dirt floor, roots sticking out of a soft ceiling and walls, timber supports every twenty feet. They didn’t seem enough to hold up the mountain.
Dirt splattered the ground, and then Jackson dropped into sight. “The coal mine’s asshole, that’s what that was.”
A trickle of sunlight came down through the pit.
Jackson turned on his flashlight.
Cessy inspected their surrounding.
At the farthest stretches of her light, something moved.
“Did you see that?” Jackson whispered.
Cessy crept forward. She rested the barrel of the shotgun on the wrist of the arm holding the flashlight. “What is it?”
“I can’t see their face.”
Cessy stopped. All she’d seen was a shifting of shadows. It was possible Jackson’s younger eyes were better suited for the dark. “What do you see?”
“Someone was standing in the middle of the tunnel. Now they’re crouched in the corner.”
Cessy aimed the light into the corner. All she saw was a lump of shadow. It was too far away. “Keep your flashlight trained on it. And keep your pistol handy.”
“That means I’m in front?” Jackson aimed his flashlight, and drew a semiautomatic pistol from his waistband.
Cessy squinted, trying to see in the lump of shadow what Jackson saw. “Sorry. I can’t let an amateur with a gun behind me.”
Jackson aimed his flashlight at the same point, although his was dimmer. “Seriously, you don’t see that? I swear it’s looking at us.”
“Do you recognize them?”
Jackson shook his head. They walked into the mountain, Cessy behind and to one side, so she had a clear line of sight to the lump of shadow. Jackson pointed his flashlight ahead, but kept his pistol at his side.
Twenty feet deeper into the mine, Cessy saw the shadow slide up the tunnel wall, then get yanked out of sight.
Jackson sucked in air. “Did you see that? Someone got swallowed.”
“Did you recognize them?” Cessy’s heart pounded. “Was it Kate?”
“No, I think they were already dead.” He raised the pistol.
Cessy lightly kicked the back of his knee. “Are you crazy? Don’t fire that.”
He was crazy, and she shouldn’t trust what he saw. She’d seen shadows move. That was all.
Rumbling beneath Cessy’s feet, up her shins, thighs, torso. Cessy’s teeth chattered. Dust and pebbles fell from the ceiling.
Jackson grabbed Cessy under the armpits, shoved her against a wooden support, hunched over her.
The rumbling stopped. The patter of dirt on the packed-down floor diminished to silence. Wind whistled past the mine entrance, forty feet behind them.
“Did the mountain
shake?” Cessy asked. The damage Lockler and the Maple Table had done to this town was disturbing enough. To think they had the power to disturb Black Gold Peak itself--Cessy shuddered.
But it raised a simpler possibility. This cult leaders were doing some excavating of their own.
Jackson stepped back. The smell of unwashed clothes and flesh lingered. “You yelled too loud. It shook down some dirt. That’s all.”
He was lying, giving them an excuse to keep searching. Maybe she could consider that a noble move, but moreso, it was an excuse to use Jackson as a canary in a coal mine. By insisting they continue, he was volunteering for whatever happened next.
More confident in her disdain for her sister’s teenage tormentor, Cessy walked deeper into the mine. She got out Gordon’s dust mask from her backpack to fit it over her face. The trapped humidity of her breath quickly made her face feel sticky. A relief valve hissed and popped with each breath.
Cessy motioned for Jackson to lead the way. “After you.” The mask muffled her voice.
They continued deeper into the mountain.
42
First, came the echoing voices of the Maple Table.
Then, more softly, overshadowed by the radio hosts, a low chorus of weeping.
Cessy touched Jackson’s elbow to signal him to stop.
The daylight from the pit entrance had disappeared from view as the tunnel sloped downward. Their flashlights lit up the dirt and wooden supports directly in front of them, and cast two shifting beams that danced around deeper into the mountain.
They’d been walking for five minutes when they first heard the staticky broadcast of the Maple Table from somewhere beyond their flashlights’ reach.
“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Cessy asked.
Jackson shook his head. “That’s the Maple Table, though. I’d bet on it.”
“Do you hear the crying? Or am I imagining that?”
“No, it’s there.”
They kept walking. Cessy squinted to see the edges of her flashlight’s reach. “Do you think the weeping is the people taken?”
