Blowback

Sixteen

A little ways beyond the shelf was a circular area, like a roadside turnaround, and then a steepening rise; between a series of outcroppings on one side and a man-made limestone cutbank on the other-if you looked closely-the eroded and grass-choked remains of a wagon road wound upward in a loose S. I swung the car onto the circular area and took it up to the cutbank. The road looked passable enough; some of the brown grass and underbrush had a crushed appearance, as though another car had come up it not too long ago.

I put the transmission into low gear and went up the trail at a crawl, tires thudding into deep ruts, springs complaining. The road ended pretty soon at a shallow, natural fiat. The weather-beaten building sat there, off on my left, and the mine entrance was at the far end and fifty feet above on sloping ground, like a broken doorway into the hillside. The rusted ruins of what had once been a steel-railed ore track came out of the shaft and down to the right, at a sharp angle, and terminated at the edge of the flat; there had at one time been a cut or incline below there, but it was filled now with tailings from the mine, half-reclaimed already by the forest

I let the car drift to a stop near the building and shut off the ignition and stepped out. The sun's glare up here was intense; mica particles glittered and winked in the rocks, almost blindingly in some places, and every piece of shade seemed to have a knife edge. It was so still I found myself straining to hear some kind of sound.

The palms of my hands were damp, and I wiped them on my trouser legs as I walked away from the car and alongside the building. Decaying timbers and strips of iron banding littered patches of grass and Indian paintbrush. There were huge gaps in the structure's walls, a jagged hole near the back where a window might once have been. I picked my way carefully up to the hole and peered inside. More debris, eerily displayed in a mosaic of dusky sunlight and shadow; from the look of it, the place had been a combination workroom and living quarters. One of the crossbeams for the roof hung at a forty-five-degree angle, and I thought that it would not be long before the whole thing collapsed. This, maybe, was the last summer of its existence.

But there was nothing out of the ordinary in there, and I turned away finally and walked a few more paces. Another building squatted behind the larger one-a shed of some kind, probably, hidden from sight of the wagon trail and the county road below. One side of it had folded in, giving it an oddly triangular shape, like a partially collapsed house of cards. I made a circle of it, looked inside along the one wall still erect. Nothing to see there either.

Turning, I looked up the slope at the mine entrance. Then I ran my tongue over dry Lips and went back to the car and got my flashlight out of the glove compartment. I crossed to the slope, climbed it past the skeletal remains of an ore cart-shoes sliding on the hard rock, stirring up small puffs of dust that seemed to hang in the air behind me, mistlike. When I got up in front of the entrance I stopped and stared at a large metal sign that somebody had wired to one of the framing timbers. It said: WARNING! DANGEROUS PREMISES-DO NOT ENTER.

I hesitated, and then moved forward cautiously until I was standing just outside the entrance. The wood frame was rotted and insect-ridden, one of the vertical supports half-splintered out in the middle so that the horizontal beam above was canted at a lopsided angle. When I extended my arm inside and clicked on the flashlight, the beam penetrated far enough to let me see small mounds of fallen earth and rock, two or three collapsed timbers scattered across the floor. Ceiling supports tilted downward in places, a wall support leaned drunkenly toward the tunnel's center.

Unsafe, all right, I thought. You're a damned fool if you go in there.

But I kept on standing where I was, moving the flashlight up and down, from side to side. Bits of mica-or maybe bits of gold-gleamed dully in the rock. Within the range of my light, I saw nothing you would not expect to find in an abandoned mine shaft.

And yet there was an odd sour musty smell in there; part of it was dust and dry rot and animal or bird droppings, but there was something else, too, that I could not quite define. I dried my palms again, switching the flash from hand to hand.

Somewhere nearby, a bird made a sudden whickering cry, and it was loud enough in the heavy stillness to jerk my head around and up. At first I did not see anything in the glazed sky; then, off to my right, a hawk came wheeling down across the flat, made a long gliding loop as though reconning the area, whickered a second time and then vanished. Silence resettled, and the emptiness seemed so complete again that it was as if the hawk had never been there at all, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

Hawk, I thought.

And all at once I was thinking of the hawk I had seen yesterday circling up here above the mine-the hawk and the two ravens. I felt myself frowning, and there was a tickling sensation at the edge of my mind. Unusual to see birds like that in the same vicinity at the same time, now that I considered it. Unless…

Jesus.

The hair went up on my neck, and I could feel my stomach knot up in an empty, hollow sort of way. I tasted bile on the back of my tongue.

Jesus!

I swiveled my gaze to the mine entrance, rubbed a forearm across my eyes. I had to go in there now, no choice in the matter. Even though I was abruptly and painfully certain of what I was going to find, I wanted to be wrong-and I had to know.

Another moment of hesitation; then I stepped through the entrance and made my way forward heel-and-toe, swaying the light in front of me, not touching anything with my body, stepping over the mounds of rock and earth, avoiding the fallen and leaning timbers. The deeper into the shaft I went, the sharper the smell became-and I could recognize it now, and I began to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.

The ore track rails were intact here, extending into the blackness ahead like a pair of brownish-red ribs. Shadows wavered at the perimeter of the flash beam; timbers and the head of a pick and another toppled ore cart seemed to leap into the cone of light. A chunk of rock the size of a beach ball glittered briefly with squares of yellow metal: iron pyrites, fool's gold. Thirty feet in, the latticework of support timbers appeared to be in a more stable condition, and there was less rock, less debris, spread across the rough stone floor. The ceiling, more than seven feet high to that point, sloped abruptly downward until it was only a couple of inches above my head. I bent a little at the waist, shuffling-stepping; sweat matted my shirt to my torso, the sultry air put the tightness back into my chest.

When I had taken another half-dozen steps, the light picked up a turning in the shaft, hard to the left. The smell was so bad here that I had to pinch my nostrils shut with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. I clenched my teeth, went forward to the turn.

I was halfway through it when I saw the body.

The beam flicked over it at the lower extremities: lying supine, one leg crooked under the other. Near the bent foot were two bloody towels and a sixteen-inch pipe wrench; the head of the wrench was faintly smeared with dried blood, as though it had been wiped off in a haphazard way. I stopped and planted my feet, and then pulled the light back and moved it over and put it on his face.

Only he did not have much of a face any more. The side of his skull was brutally crushed, and the goddamn hawks and ravens-carrion feeders-had sought him out all the way in here and pecked out his eyes.

But there was no mistaking who he was; his clothing told me that, if nothing else.

Walt Bascomb.

I turned sharply, and my stomach convulsed and I dry-retched a couple of times. Then the retching became a series of hard coughs, and finally nothing at all. And all the while my mind kept trying to sort facts and speculations, kept trying to open memory cells and drag out scraps of things seen and heard and perceived-as if I knew enough now, subconsciously, to piece the whole thing together, to identify not only Bascomb's killer but Vahram Terzian's as well. But I could not concentrate in there, with the stench and the ugly thing on the tunnel floor behind me. I needed to get out into clean air, sunlight, the inside of my car where I could let my mind work slowly in familiar surroundings. It would come together then: I could sense it grimly, as I had sensed such insights in the past.

Without looking at Bascomb again, I stepped out of the turn and started toward the dusty yellow rectangle that marked the entrance.

Thud!

The sound, sudden and explosive, came from up at the tunnel mouth, sent echoes rolling like hollow thunder through the shaft. I pulled up, muscles bunching in alarm, a chill sliding along my back. The sound came again, and close to the entrance thick puffs of dust burst down from the ceiling, turned the light there hazy, shimmering. The concussive noise came a third time, wood on wood or stone on wood; there were more plumes of dust, and the creaking of timbers and the bouncing clatter of rocks, and through the haze I saw movement, a man-shape without recognizable features, and then the shape shifted position and seemed to swing something at the rotted wood frame of the entrance Thud!

Panic climbed inside me, and I shouted “No, for God's sake!” and started to run.

Thud!

Thud!

The cry of my voice was lost in the reverberations, in the gathering rumble of loosened rock and earth and wooden supports. Dust obliterated the opening now, spiraled back toward me in smoke-like billows that cut my visibility with the flashlight to less than fifteen feet. I could not see clearly where I was running, and my foot stubbed against one of the rails, sent me lurching into a wall, off it and hard against a loose timber; the timber gave and I went down, jarring on knees and forearms, pain slicing up into my left armpit and the flash spinning free and winking out and rocks like sharp-edged hailstones buffeting my back and buttocks and legs. The tunnel was filled with a rage of sound now, with upheaval and suffocating grayness.

I tried to get up, gagging, choking, but I could not pull my legs under me. I crawled instead and kept on crawling until I came up against a miniature avalanche of earth and limestone, until something that felt like a collapsed support struck a glancing blow across the backs of my legs. Then I flung my hands over my head in blind sick terror And the entire front of the shaft seemed to cave in around me.