The Croning (31 page)

As a boy, Don once asked Luther if he believed in aliens on account of all those secret government projects the documentaries and non-fiction books talked about. The old man had regarded him with eyes brittle and cool as those of a snake. Luther seemed almost prepared to eat his grandchild, such was the manner he hunched forward and widened his mouth. Then he laughed that horrible, phlegmy laugh until tears squirted and his nose went purple.
Idiot flesh of mine, O precocious whelp. Magic 8 Ball says try again later.

The plane yawed and Don’s gorge filled his throat and he almost believed his hands were losing coherence, that he was dissolving in the suffocating blackness—

—
the train was so cold his breath steamed despite the stifling mass of humanity pressed from stem to stern. Such a tiny, tiny boy; his name was Xin or Hin and his mother crushed him against her as the windows disappeared, smothered in tar, and the lamps failed and the tube of the hurtling train became a blind canister full of groaning metal, of muffled cries, the sour stink of unwashed bodies, milling animals, of terror. His mother’s arm fell away and he floated above his seat as the carriage began to revolve—

Don moaned and clamped a hand over his mouth and bit his palm and fell into himself—

—the capsule revolved and the Earth slewed below the rim of infinite night and someone’s water bottle floated toward the nose of the shuttle, someone’s belt, an alabaster string of lower intestine, a wristwatch, the crucifix and rosary end over end. The Lieutenant vomited inside his helmet; window plates turned black as empty sockets and bloody light seeped from somewhere deep within the ticking heart of melted circuitry. One of the others babbled through the headset and beneath that a discordant tone, an animal growling, wires sputtering, a train wreck, an avalanche and who was shrieking, who—

Mr. Claxton said from directly behind his right ear,
It didn’t hurt much. We liked it. You should try it sometime. You will. You are.
Don was afflicted with a crystalline image of Dart and Claxton, Frick and Frack, pinned in the front seat of a government-issue sedan. Blood poured from faucets in their skulls and covered their faces. They screamed and ejected bubbles of gore, soundless. Bronson Ford ducked his head into the frame. He smiled and waved and the agents flailed like drowning men.

The boy said,
They eat children. The Children prefer children, haha! The brain, while alive, is their favorite. She’s with them at last. Your wife finally knows everything. Maybe you will too, before the end.

Don groaned and covered his face and bit his tongue. This phantasmagoria had to be from exhaustion or heavy drinking or payback for prior indiscretions— a bad hit of purple haze or microdot, he hadn’t lived the choirboy ideal in his youth. The imagery assaulted him with the heft and force of a suppressed memory that once unleashed possesses the force and violence of a tidal wave or an avalanche. The icy, diamond-headed conceit that this might be a real memory filled him with despair.

Then the jet punched through the clouds and sunlight blazed into his eyes. The pilot came over the intercom, to apologize for the rough ride and promise smooth sailing the rest of the way. Don glanced around at the other men, noted their discomfort—Pike had dropped his glasses and Rush slumped sideways, green around the gills; meanwhile, Ring glared at the disheveled attendant when she uttered her conciliatory lines. Nonetheless, even as Don observed them, their momentary terror evaporated with awkward chuckles, snorts of relief.

Lisa unbuckled and briskly sealed the softly bumping door of the baggage compartment. She graced Don with a strained professional smile before ducking into the galley. He swallowed and wiped his face with his sleeve. Thunder clouds raced below them; black-crowned and murderous and shot through with white-hot licks of fire.

They landed without incident. Unfortunately, the driver slated to acquire the passengers and their luggage was nowhere in evidence and Ring vociferously questioned his companions and sundry about the logic of packing them into a car instead of a company chopper, but no one could answer that because no one really knew what was going on, least of all Don who felt much like a sacrificial lamb. After nearly two hours of loitering in the mechanic’s lounge, they convinced an off-duty pilot to ferry them to a nearby diner for lunch. Don ordered a hamburger and a grape soda, chewed doggedly while the other men conversed in low tones, except for Ring’s abrupt barks of sarcastic laughter.

The diner sat within spitting distance of the highway among a drab confederation of minor businesses including a locally operated grocery store and a car dealership flagged by a balloon giant, a Cyclops jabbing its claws at passersby. The whole comprised a strip town, one of the essentially anonymous blights that had eaten into the country and spread like cancer since the beginning of the previous decade. Low mountains rose in the east, bearded and misty. The sun shone small and hard and white through a film of iron overcast. Don noticed he’d been scribing a crimson doodle on the plastic table, tracing irregular lines between discolorations and blemishes with his wet fingertip. He shook his head, concentrated on bits of ice decomposing in his soda, tried to recall how he’d pricked his finger.

The driver finally appeared; a surveyor sent from base camp who rolled up in a muddy Blazer. Elli Mills was a grubby woman with oily, shoulder length hair and a wide, tanned face. She was missing some teeth and Don noted that her knuckles were large and scarred. Ring started haranguing her when they gathered in the parking lot to load the vehicle. Elli shrugged and laconically suggested that pretty boys should watch their mouths and that put a damper on his theatrics. Don was mildly impressed.

The party got rolling as the light softened into violets and oranges. A few minutes north of town, Elli took a narrow spur road that wound through dense forest and rugged hills and meandered toward the mountains. She warned everyone that it was another hour to camp and the ride would become “rough as hell.” Long shadows swept over the potholed roadway and the country music radio station descended into static as they entered a gorge of jagged cliffs towering one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet above the surrounding firs and the angry river coiling through their roots. Don sat in the back of the Blazer, wedged between Rush and Pike. His head brushed the cab’s roof with every savage jounce and he thought his kidneys might be jellified if Elli persisted in driving at Baja 500 speeds.

Night descended without stars. Don lost his sense of direction or the real shape of the land; he strained to follow the lane beyond the headlights until his eyes hurt. He’d actually nodded off when they left the spur and bashed along a severely rutted dirt track squeezed by boulders and trees. Dust caked the windows, filled his mouth with grit, sifted into his nose, his tear ducts.

Elli clanged gears and made the engine roar as they barreled up a slope, skirting a sheer drop into the invisible trees, the river and the rocks. She explained this had been a logging road and that one or two ridges over a railroad track snaked its way from the mountains toward the lowlands and civilization. The Pickett-Maynard Line historically serviced a string of mining and logging camps that died off shortly after WWII. The line was mostly forgotten; rails overgrown and blocked by slides; trestles rotting; and tunnels carved like arteries through limestone were now empty cylinders except for bat guano, moldering bones of small animals and the faux occult graffiti of bored teenage campers. The state nominally maintained the Pickett Road because of the weather station atop Mystery Mountain, although it too was practically abandoned eight months out of the year, tenanted by the infrequent hermits, meteorologists or astronomers who’d escaped into the wild. This was a lonely territory.

Camp Slango occupied a shallow basin ringed by shale and granite bluffs on the opposite of Mystery Mountain from the Mystery Mountain National Park. Half a dozen small tents nestled near a central pavilion, a powder-blue dome that glowed like a firefly. Plastic beads of electric light festooned the camp, wrapped the clustered tents in shimmering coral, mingled and counterbalanced the sharp lamplight that streamed from open flaps and through mosquito netting, refracted from the hoods of several parked vehicles.

Don extricated himself from the Blazer and inhaled deeply of the cold, dry air while his companions wrestled with luggage and exchanged greetings with several surveyors who were loitering about. Leroy Smelser, head man prior to that moment, emerged from the confluence of surreal lighting and shadowy confusion to shake his hand and escort him to the “office”, which was a partitioned niche inside the central pavilion.

Smelser proved genial; a ruddy, energetic man with a trim white beard and a wry smile, his skin was cracked and hard and there was dirt under his thick nails. Don knew in an instant he was in the presence of a workhorse. Men such as Smelser comprised the backbone of field operations and at the end of their tenure they received the aforementioned Taiwanese watch and a retirement condo in Florida where a fellow could suffer with his rheumatism in peace and quiet. Or they died in their traces. Such a fate might’ve befallen Don if not for Michelle’s pleasant, though relentless prodding that he branch out, explore management and design, indulge his latent artistry.

Who the hell are you kidding, Miller? You’re afraid of the dark. You’ve gone soft. By the way…what was that about two hundred loggers disappearing from this very spot?
A fragment of the nightmare he’d suffered on the plane revisited him—Frick and Frack screaming while Bronson Ford laughed—and he set his jaw with grim determination.

Smelser waved Don to a folding chair and fetched a bottle of Dewar’s and they had a drink while Don took in the cubby—a small metal desk and half-stack filing cabinet, a computer and numerous electronic components piled willy-nilly, a folding shovel and oodles of rope and a frame pack hanging against the canvas wall. Smelser disappeared for a few minutes and returned with leftovers from mess hall; pork & beans and biscuits.

After Don had eaten, Smelser broke out several geophysical maps and stretched them across the wall with brightly colored pushpins. The two large ones were circa the latter 1970s during the most recent BLM flyovers. Three much smaller maps were the handiwork of Smelser and his able photogrammetrist, Carl Ordbecker, who was currently in the field. Ordbecker was at The Site, as Smelser emphasized in his convivial manner.

“What kind of site?” Don inwardly damned Wayne to hell for making a fool of him.

“Eh?” Smelser’s wrinkles deepened and he scratched his chin, obviously calculating the ramifications. “I thought…”

“I mean of course there’s a site. They just didn’t go into detail. If I’m called in, it’s generally a personnel matter.”

“A personnel matter. Right.”

“I’m generally not greeted with pomp or enthusiasm, Mr. Smelser.”

“Oh, I bet. On a Roman galley you’d be the gentleman with the whip. As it happens, we do have a bit of red tape mucking the works, and there are some minor staff difficulties. That’s why we asked for the mouthpiece and the sawbones. But that isn’t our problem.”

“Aha,” Don smiled with dread and crossed his arms. “Lay it on me.”

“This area was always rich in timber and minerals. Big companies logged here in the 1920s. Then there were some…incidents, I suppose you’d say, and shop got closed for about a decade. Mining companies moved in, bored a few holes, and so on. The mines are dead; nothing suggests anybody would make a profit by reopening them, and so far the chance of dredging up any sizable measure of placer, leastwise what would turn a corporate bean counter’s crank, is fairly remote. We’ve got to stick it out another eight to ten days to fulfill our contract and that’s that. Except for Lot Y-22.” The older man turned the computer monitor toward Don and conjured a matrix of topical maps and photographs. The photos captured trees, rocks of various shades, the skeletal remains of buildings (perhaps shacks or cabins), and a ragged discoloration akin to a lopsided seam. “Y-22. This was a small village about a jillion years ago, probably abandoned the same decade as Slango Camp, so far as we can determine. No name on record except a notation that B. Kalamov had surveyed the area in 1849, discovered a cave system. Can’t vouch for the authenticity of that because I can’t find corroboration that such a cave exists.”

“B. Kalamov,” Don said. “Huh. That’s a coincidence.”

“What is, sir?”

“Eh, nothing. Please, what else?”

“There really aren’t any records except for a reference at the library archives in Port Angeles, and that document came from a decrepit historian who everybody considers a crackpot. A passage in a local history book mentions several ghost towns and this was one. There was an old, old picture of a queer little village with guys in furs and ladies in Puritan bonnets standing around in front of a stone tower like you’d see on a castle in England. A very serious crowd, which was basically the norm in those days, I expect.”

“A mining camp.”

“Maybe. But it’s sixteen miles as the crow flies from the nearest vein—and no roads, no trails, nothing to suggest the homesteaders traveled that way. Carl figures it was an isolated community of hunters and trappers, or something along those lines. Coulda been a religious commune eking out a living in the hills. It’s all very interesting, but the site is the peculiar thing. A bunch of ruins, except for that sinkhole you see there.” Smelser traced the quadrant of the map with his fingertip.

“Damn. Must be ninety meters horizontally—”

“And about twenty across at the widest point. Yup, it’s formidable. You want another drink?”

“Thanks, no.” Don’s glass was yet untouched; he’d sniffed the whiskey and been transported into the recent unhappy past. “Very impressive. So, what’s the problem, exactly?”

Smelser poured another three fingers of pitchy liquor and drank it with a grimace. “It opened six days ago. Carl and our pilot Burton were buzzing the area in the chopper and noticed it probably five or six minutes after the event.”