Rogues

HEAVY METAL

Cherie Priest

Kilgore Jones wrestled free from the Eldorado and kicked the driver’s door shut. It bounced and swung back open again, so he gave it a shove with his hip. The old car rocked back and forth, creaking in protest, but this time the latch caught and held—mostly for its own good. The Jolly Roger was a big car, but its driver was a big man.

It wouldn’t be a real bold stretch to say he was six and a half feet tall, and a good carnival guesser might put his bulk at a quarter ton. Bald of head and fancy of facial hair, he boasted a carpet of impressive brown muttonchops that shone red in the sun, and a pair of mirrored aviator glasses. Everything else he wore was black. If you asked him why, he’d straight-faced tell you it was slimming.

His wardrobe notwithstanding, Kilgore threw a globe-shaped shadow on the ground—a one-man eclipse as he walked across a set of ruts that passed for parking spaces.

The old hoist house loomed before him: a nineteenth-century behemoth built for work and not beauty. It was red brick with a green roof, and easily the size of the grand old church in Chattanooga where he was no longer welcome—because a pastor singing about Satan made sense, but a layman going on about monsters was just plain silly.

As he approached, he saw patched-up places where new brick filled in old windows, doors, and shafts. He noted the remains of white paint around the main door and its entry platform, all of it lead, most of it peeling and fluttering in a cold, sharp November breeze.

Gravel crunched beneath his feet, and the wind yanked at his coat. The sun was vivid and white against a crisp blue sky without any clouds, but there wasn’t much warmth to go around. The Smokies were not yet brittle like they would be in another month, but he could smell it coming.

“Hello?” Kilgore called. The word went wild, echoing against the hoist-house walls and adjacent boiler rooms, banging off the time shack and the bit-building across the way, rattling against last century’s mining equipment abandoned on the end of the track. “Anybody here? Miss Huesman?”

He scaled the steps of the entry platform and stood on the wood-slat landing—gazing toward the cavernous interior. Inside he saw pumpkins, leftover from a Halloween fund-raiser, if the banner could be believed. They were laid out on pallets with discount signs scrawled by hand in thick red marker. Even the largest, a gourd advertised as a seventy-pounder, looked tiny beneath the vast, gabled ceiling strewn with crisscrossing tracks that toted great tubs of ore back before Kilgore’s grandparents were born.

Wind whistled through the rafters above, scattering dead leaves and ruffling the fat little birds who huddled on the hauling lines.

“Hello?” he tried again. “Anyone here?”

“Hello?” someone called back, then added more, but he couldn’t make it out. The voice came from deep inside, past the pumpkins on their pallets and back against the far wall … behind a door that might lead to an office.

He headed toward the sound of the speaker.

“… sorry if you’re here about Rich. He’s gone home for the day—and I think he took the money pouch for the pumpkins. But if you want one, and you have exact change, I’ll see what I can do. All the proceeds go to support the museum …”

The door banged open, forced that way by the shoulder of a woman whose arms were full of miscellany: files, papers, magazines from the first Bush era, and a messenger bag from which peeked the sleek shape of a tablet. She paused. Or more precisely, she froze. Whatever she’d been expecting, Kilgore Jones wasn’t it.

“Can … can I help you?” she asked. She shifted her weight and deposited her armload of stuff onto an old telephone seat that languished against the wall.

She was young, lanky, and tall. Long blond hair, shiny and well kept. Wearing an oversized cardigan over a black tee shirt for a band Kilgore didn’t recognize, and that was saying something. Her dark jeans were dusted with Ducktown, Tennessee’s, ubiquitous red dirt in the shape of handprints. Her own, he assumed.

He pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head. “Miss Huesman?”

“Yes? I mean, yes.” She nodded, finding some relief in hearing her own name. “I’m Bethany. No one calls me Miss Huesman outside the university. And you are …?”

Now he stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Kilgore Jones. Jennifer Andrews told you I was coming, I think?”

Bethany’s stiff fight-or-flight stance softened. “Yes! You’re the guy who worked with Pastor Martin on Sand Mountain, back in the day. And you’re … you’re The Heavy? Well, Jenn did say …” She extended her hand to take his and shook it. Her fingers were small and cold, and they sported a cute assortment of shiny silver rings.

Kilgore smiled, and hoped it was disarming. At his size, putting people at ease took extra work, so he’d learned to watch all of his language. “Let me guess: She said that when you saw me, you’d know why people call me that.”

She blushed, or maybe it was only the chill hitting her cheeks. “More or less. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. Any friend of Pastor Martin’s …” Her voice trailed off and her gaze swept the hoist house, scanning the vast interior as if making sure they were alone. “Jenn said the pastor wouldn’t come. Why do you think that is?”

Kilgore should’ve said something about Sand Mountain. After all, she’d brought it up first.

He kept his mouth shut anyway. She deserved the truth, but it wouldn’t do her any good. “I couldn’t say, but I’m here to help if I can. If you’ve got a few minutes, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Okay, but can we go someplace a little warmer to talk?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Just up the hill,” she indicated with a toss of her head. “The museum’s closed, but I have a key—and they have a heater.” She retrieved her messenger bag but left everything else where it was sitting. “We can walk it, no problem. Even with the wind, it’s so close that it’d be crazy to drive.”

He was inclined to disagree with her, but he restrained himself. “All right. Can I help you carry anything?”

“Naw,” she said dismissively, yanking the office door. It closed with a sticky squeak. “This stuff’ll be fine where it is. There’s nothing worth stealing, and nobody to take it. Not since …” She paused, and changed her mind. “Not anymore. But I’ll tell you about that when I’ve got a cup of coffee in my hand.”

The hill was blessedly short, but not so short that he didn’t wish for the Jolly Roger to help him scale it. He hated hills. Counted them among his archest of enemies. But at the top waited the museum, a squat, single-story building that was too modern to match the old buildings, but too new to call vintage. Its roof sloped unevenly above cheap white siding, fronted by a gravel lot that might’ve held half a dozen cars if you stacked them right.

Kilgore pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his forehead, never mind the breeze. “Museum doesn’t see a lot of traffic, does it?”

“Why would you say that?” she asked, digging keys out of her bag and unlocking the door.

“The parking lot says they don’t expect much company.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen more than three or four cars up here. And one of those usually belongs to Ammaw Pete.”

“Ammaw Pete? The volunteer coordinator?”

The door swung open. Bethany reached inside and flipped on a light, though the day was still bright enough they almost didn’t need it. “How did you know?”

“I called this morning before I came out, and she’s the one who answered the phone. Seems like an … interesting lady.”

“Interesting. That’s her. She volunteers here most days. Other than that, she’s retired.” Bethany tossed her bag onto the counter and led the way to an understocked and overdirty kitchenette.

She rummaged for the Folgers, scooped out a filter’s worth, and fidgeted around the small, cold space while the coffee brewed and the freshly rebooted heater took the frost out of their breath. It had its work cut out for it; the building had the cheap, temporary feel of a trailer, and the walls were thinner than sandwich cheese. It hadn’t been closed up more than a couple of hours, but all the warmth had bled out already.

She dug her fingernails into the cup, leaving small half-moons in the smooth white surface. The heater hummed loudly and the coffee oozed warm curls of steam.

Bethany cleared her throat.

“I know how crazy this sounds … but Adam and Greg are dead. I don’t know why it took them, and I don’t know if I’m next. There’s … there’s a lot I don’t understand, about what happened. About this place. About that thing.”

Kilgore prompted, “Is this your first time in Ducktown?”

She nodded. “If it weren’t for the program, I never would’ve heard of the place. The ecology department at UTK has been involved in the cleanup here for ten or twelve years now—monitoring it and making recommendations. I’ve gone through the files and casebooks; it’s fascinating stuff, if you’re that kind of nerd. And if I weren’t, I’d be doing my grad work in something else.” She added a soft, quick laugh that was meant to sound light but only sounded strange.

“All right. And to be clear, it was you, Adam Frye, and Greg Malcolm on this trip, correct?”

“That’s right. I took point because they were first-years, and I’m only a semester away from finishing my master’s. The bulk of my research was geared toward the mountaintop removals. You know—the coal companies to the north and east of here. But the Burra Burra Mine is a legend, and the destruction it caused in the copper basin is virtually unique in scope; so even though it wasn’t my cup of tea, when the field assignment came up, I threw my hat in the ring. It sounded like a good idea at the time.”

“Famous last words.” Kilgore poured himself another cup and slipped the carafe back onto the burner. “Now tell me, when did you first arrive?”

“A week and a half ago. We were staying at a Holiday Inn Express out by the highway. The university put us up, gave us a little per diem, the whole nine yards. We were supposed to check the soil pH levels across a mapped grid and catalog the plant creep along the preserved area.”

He frowned. “Preserved area?”

“It’s a stretch of the old red dirt—the blighted turf left from the sulfur dioxide—where nothing grows and nothing lives. The government’s restoration campaign left this one section unreclaimed. I heard they did it as a reminder, but I bet they just ran out of funding.”

Kilgore knew about the dead red dirt, but he hadn’t realized there was any of it left. He’d seen the old pictures from the EPA reports, and a big spread in LIFE magazine from decades ago, before the cleanup. Fifty square miles of lifeless landscape, nothing but poisonous red hills as far as the eye could see. Except for the smattering of houses, churches, and the central hub of the mine facility, it’d looked like the surface of Mars.

Bethany continued, intermittently raising her eyes to see if he was listening. “It looks normal now, like the trees have been here forever, and we’re surrounded by regular old forests; but it took years of planning—adding new species of acid-resistant grasses to anchor the turf, and planting specially imported trees. They brought in plants that could filter toxins with their roots and flora that would give these hills a fighting chance at recovery. Eventually.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the valley. “It worked. But they left this one stupid patch of the old red dirt, down by the water. That’s what we were sent to examine. That, and the water itself, down in the crater.”

His ears perked. “Where is the crater? If this museum’s on the old mine site, it must be nearby …?”

“It’s on the other side of the parking lot. You know what? Forget this coffee. It’s terrible.” She rose suddenly and tossed the cooled contents of her cup into the nearby sink. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

Out the door she went, past a wooden rack stuffed with local-attraction brochures—for a relative value of “local.” He tagged along in her wake.

She was nearly at a run. She wanted to get this over with.

Her boots crunched and scuffed across the unpaved lot, and she paused beside a big metal cage that had once lowered miners three thousand feet down the shaft in search of copper. She turned then, and her hair billowed wildly as the wind rushed up the crest behind her. She raised her voice to be heard, almost shouting as she pointed off to the north.

“That’s where the plant used to be, right over there—facing the hoist house, on the ridge’s natural peak! Used to be, they had a set of tracks that ran ore buckets overhead between them!” She turned around, and now her hair was a halo, vast and golden, wilder than Medusa’s. It looked for all the world like she stood at the edge of a cliff and was prepared to jump.

She said something else but Kilgore couldn’t hear her; she was speaking into the wind and the words were lost. But when he joined her, he understood.

More quietly now, she told him, “The mine caved in years ago, but by then, they weren’t digging copper hardly at all: They made more money on sulfuric acid, generated from sulfur dioxide as part of the smelting process—you know, the same stuff that denuded this whole corner of the Smokies. But anyway, there it is. There’s the lake where my friends drowned.”

Beyond the miner cage, all the way down the far side of the sharp, ragged ridge, waited a great crater full of bright blue water surrounded by stiff green trees. It looked like someone’d pulled a plug and the landscape had sloughed down the drain, leaving only this cerulean pool, shimmering at the very bottom of the world.

Kilgore resisted the urge to call the scene “beautiful.” Instead he drew Bethany back away from the edge, stepping down out of the wind.

When they were standing again in the gravel lot, she said, “That’s where they died. Adam first—two days after we got here. A freak accident, that’s what they said. He fell in and … forgot how to swim, or some bullshit like that.”

“Did they send his body back home? I don’t expect they have the facilities out here for an autopsy.”

“Yeah, he’s home by now. Greg, though—he died two days after that, and he’s at the Copper Basin Medical Facility, unless they released his body and no one told me, which is possible. Nobody out here tells me a damn thing. Ammaw Pete thinks I’m an uppity little city bitch, like Knoxville is New York, and I’m carpetbagging for the ages. She doesn’t know I heard her say it, but she probably wouldn’t care if she did.” She looked at Kilgore with something new in her eyes, something cunning. “Maybe they’ll talk to you.”

“I try my best to be a sociable man … but in my experience, people open up faster to a pretty woman like you than a guy like me.”

She shrugged. “Not here. They don’t like me. They don’t trust me. They put me in the same category as the lawyers and environmentalists who closed down the mine and put the whole town out of work. If you’re not for the copper, you’re against it. Like all the life we’re bringing back to this place isn’t worth a damn thing.”

Kilgore Jones made noises of polite protest, but she didn’t respond. She only stared over the ridge, toward that bright blue hole in the pale red dirt, surrounded by all the defiant trees, roots clinging to the steep crater walls, twisted and anchored and still alive—like a big “fuck you” to history.

But she still hadn’t said what he needed to hear, so he prodded her again, friendly but firm. “Tell me what you saw that night, when Greg went under.”

Slowly, she nodded. Not to him, but herself. “Something came up, almost out of the water but not quite. It whispered to Greg,” she said, hardly any louder than the whisper she described. “It called him. Lured him. And when he wouldn’t follow it, it grabbed him—and it dragged him right into the lake.”

“Describe it—the thing you saw.”

“I … I can’t.”

“You’d better, because I’m shit when it comes to mind reading. Bethany,” he said, urgently if not impatiently. “You sent for help. Now talk to me.”

She swallowed and crossed her arms over her stomach, drawing her oversized sweater tighter around her body. “It looked like a man, but it wasn’t. It looked like a miner—one of the old miners, from the eighteen hundreds. But not exactly.” Her eyebrows crunched together. “Do you think it was a ghost?”

This was more comfortable turf for Kilgore, if not for the grad student. “Ghosts are mostly made of memories and imagination—their own, and everyone else’s. Once in a blue moon one’ll have the strength to make a ripple in the real world, but I’ve never heard of one tough enough to drown a grown man.”

She burrowed her hands deeply into her sleeves, then stuffed them under her arms. “This thing … whatever it was, it wasn’t a memory. It was really there. So if it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?”

“I don’t know yet.” He didn’t give her any guesses because they’d only frighten her. He needed more information, and that meant he needed a local. All his polite protests aside, Bethany wasn’t one, and everyone in the county knew it.

Kilgore wasn’t local either, and Chattanooga wasn’t any more rural than Knoxville—but there was more to being local than your starting address.

He left Bethany on the museum steps. He shook her hand and made her promise to be in touch and stay away from the crater. She agreed to these terms, but he didn’t know how much that meant. Her abject horror at watching her fellow student drown might be nothing compared to the siren song of an otherworldly creature, or even her simple curiosity.

Siren.

The word floated to the surface of his brain and refused to sink back down. He made a mental note of it because there was no sense in denying the overlap. Sirens were water elementals, of a fashion; they called, lured, and killed—though they usually came in a prettier package than that of an old miner. “There’s a first time for everything. Then again,” he mumbled, as he yanked the Eldorado’s bum door and settled back inside the car, “it talked to Greg, and Greg didn’t listen. So it resorted to force.”

He gazed up at the silver crucifix that hung from the rearview mirror, trembling and bobbing like a pendulum. It’d been a gift, from someone who wouldn’t speak to him anymore—a man he’d come to view as a father, at the third church that threw him out. The last church. The one he drove past sometimes, still not quite finished with that argument but knowing better than to go inside.

They’d disinvited him, like he was some kind of goddamned vampire who knew better than to cross the threshold.

He stayed away anyhow. He knew where he wasn’t wanted, and no amount of wishing or praying would change that. Apparently.

He sighed because he sure could’ve used the help right about now; but he sucked it up, withdrew his small notebook from his pocket, and added what he’d learned. Then he flipped to the back page—where two addresses were written down: One was the local watering hole, a joint that went by the uninspiring legend of “Ed’s,” and the other belonged to the woman either named or called “Ammaw Pete,” who volunteered at the museum and allegedly didn’t think much of poor Miss Huesman.

His watch said it was too early to bother with the bar; he wouldn’t find anyone useful to chat up. But Mrs. Pete? It wasn’t even suppertime yet, and she’d said he could swing by before nightfall. She knew to expect him but he would’ve liked to call first, as a matter of manners … but by her own admission, she didn’t have a phone. She took all her messages out of the museum’s line and appeared perfectly content with that arrangement.

Kilgore Jones did have a phone, but it was a POS without a GPS. He consoled himself with the knowledge that by the grace of God, Ducktown had made it onto Google Maps, and therefore a stash of home-produced printouts gave him an idea of what the area looked like.

Ammaw Pete lived within spitting distance of the mine—walking distance for someone more hiking inclined than Kilgore—but it took him fully twenty minutes to find his way to her driveway via the Eldorado. Her road was neither marked nor paved, and he stumbled upon it only after the process of elimination ruled out four other identical roads. How anybody got their mail delivered was a mystery to him, but small towns and out-of-the-way places all had their methods. When everyone knows everyone, things don’t often go lost or missing. And that made the situation with the UTK ecology students all the stranger.

Or then again, maybe it didn’t. Those kids were outsiders, and the community didn’t feel obligated to look out for them. They went missing more easily than the mail.

He engaged the parking brake and the car lurched hard, then settled with its customary squeaking.

Ammaw Pete’s place was an early craftsman in good repair, with a yard that didn’t get as much love as the hanging flower baskets on the porch. The baskets were emptied of everything but the purple and pink petunias; everything else had died for the season, and these would too, probably before Thanksgiving. But for now they gave the white house with its gray roof a pop of color that said somebody lived there, and somebody cared about the place.

Kilgore tried the steps and found them true, then knocked upon a red-painted door.

Behind the door, he heard a television mumbling what sounded like the local news; a chair squealed, a board creaked, and then a set of footsteps stopped long enough for an eyeball to appear in the small window that served as a peephole.

The door didn’t open. “Who’s there?”

He assumed his most polite pose, hands folded in front of himself, slight stoop to minimize his prodigious height. “Pardon me, ma’am—but I’m looking for Ammaw Pete. Would that be you?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m Kilgore Jones. We spoke on the phone this morning,” he told her.

“That’s right, I recall. You’re a big son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“What is it you do again? You’re not with the po-po, I remember that much.”

“I’m a machine-shop worker from Chattanooga.”

The eyeball narrowed. “And investigator of the occasional drowning …?”

“Not the drowning, ma’am. The thing what caused it.”

He heard a click, the twist of an old knob, and the scrape of a door being drawn back an inch. “You’ve got my attention, big man. Don’t waste it.” She opened the door enough to reveal herself. Small and old, but not elderly yet. Silver-haired and bright-eyed, in a tidy blue dress and gray slippers. “You ain’t a feeler, are you?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t detect anything I can’t see.”

“You’re a fighter, then. Got to be one or the other.” She sighed and tossed the door open all the way with a flick of her wrist. “I guess you’d better come inside.”

Withdrawing to make room for him, she turned and sauntered through a cluttered home that was not the least bit dirty or unorganized—only filled to capacity with whatever things moved her magpie of a soul. Here there were stacks of Time-Life books on the Civil War and the Old West, and over there, that series from the eighties about unexplained phenomena; figurines from nearby and faraway lands alike; rows of bells from assorted tourist traps; spoons with small emblems identifying them as collector’s pieces; photos of loved ones framed and arranged across all but a few square inches of wall space; a batch of prettily organized teakettles and pot holders; a latticework of diverse coffee mugs hung on the walls around the cabinets; handmade afghans with bright colors and unfortunate patterns; curtains sewn from bed-sheets; Christmasy villages with ice-skaters and post offices and train stations awaiting the next month with flickering lights and cheerful miniature residents, pets, vehicles—plus wreaths on every door.

“I’ll put the kettle on and you can have a seat.”

Of course she’d put the kettle on. Kilgore would never escape an old Southern woman’s home without tea, same as he’d never settle down to a young Southern woman’s company without coffee, now that he thought about it. It was like nobody could talk without something to sip for distraction.

But they’d done the same thing at the old First Baptist, hadn’t they? If not potlucks then communions, and that’s why they called it a Fellowship Hall.

Ammaw, whose name he’d first misheard as “Grandma,” gestured at the dining-room table, a well-varnished and rough-hewn piece that someone must’ve made for her. None of the pretty little chairs matched, and none of them looked like they’d hold Kilgore without protest and structural failure.

He was prepared to suggest that perhaps they could sit outside on the porch, but then he spied a cedar bench that probably belonged in a garden—but in Ammaw’s kitchen it was piled with folded hand towels and a stack of cast-iron skillets nested together. “You think perhaps I could just … clear off that bench? We’ll both be happier if I don’t break anything.”

She coughed the laugh of an octogenarian smoker, but her age wasn’t so advanced and Kilgore didn’t see any cigarettes. “Do what you gotta.”

It wasn’t just her laugh, he realized. Her words were offered up with that same ragged edge that sounded like more than age peeking through. While he gently adjusted her décor, he said, “I hope I haven’t intruded on you, particularly not if you’ve been feeling poorly.”

“Poorly?” She paused at the stove and shot him a look. “Oh, the cough, you mean? Hardly even a rattle, and I guess you ain’t been in town too long, or you’d have heard it by now. All us old folks who grew up here … we all got the voice.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Why? It don’t hurt, and I don’t mind. Makes you feel like part of a tribe,” she informed him, and she hauled a box of tea bags from a cabinet, then yanked two mugs off the wall. For herself she chose a soft pink jobbie with a nicely shaped handle. For him, Tweety Bird sitting in a bathtub. “Once upon a time, Ducktown and Copperhill had a big tribe between ’em. The mine took good care of its workers,” she insisted, her cough to the contrary. “Now it’s gone, and so are most of us. It’s just the way of things.”

“But the land’s come back real nicely,” he said, accepting a measure of steaming water and dipping his tea bag, prompting it to steep. “So there’s that.”

“There’s that, yes. And there’s snakes, and there’s rats and bugs, too. Didn’t used to have any of that nonsense, but here they come, creeping back. None of them worth the trouble of those goddamn trees. We liked our red dirt, I’ll have you to know …” She eyed him over the edge of the mug. “But you’re not here for tea or bitchin’. You want to talk about the crater, and what sleeps inside it.”

He didn’t like the way she phrased it. It offered up too many suggestions, too many implications. He wondered how much she really knew, so he asked outright. “Yes, ma’am. And you’ve worked the museum longer than anyone, besides being local to boot. I figure you’re the best person to ask.”

“How much do you know already?”

“Only what Bethany Huesman thinks she saw.”

Ammaw Pete made a derisive noise that flicked at the surface of her tea. “That girl. Thinks she knows so much. She didn’t tell me she saw anything. Didn’t tell the sheriff either.”

“She said you don’t like her any. Thinks it’s because she’s an out-of-towner.”

“It’s because she tried to order a skinny half-caff something-something at a gas station on the edge of town, and acted snotty when she couldn’t have anything but old-fashioned drip,” she snapped. But Kilgore figured they were saying the same thing. “So she didn’t say a damn thing to me … but she’ll talk to you. All right then, so she saw something, did she?”

“Something shaped like one of the old miners, rising up from the water. It dragged her friend down into the crater and drowned him.”

“Shaped like one of the miners?” she echoed pensively, and gave it a question mark. “Well, sometimes these things take the shape they’re called by. They show us what we expect to see.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply over her mug, taking the steam and smiling at it, but her smile verged on the grim. “Them things that were here before us … before the mine. Before the Indians. They’ll be here still, when the last of us are gone.”

“You think that’ll make them happy? The last of us being gone?”

“I don’t know. They belong to the land.”

Kilgore frowned. “But the ecology students from UTK are here for the land too—they’re putting it back in order. You’d think any resident haints or elements would be glad to see them.”

“Ducktown don’t want ’em here. Whatever’s at the bottom of the lake don’t want ’em here. The whole world ain’t made of hippies and sunshine, big man. It’s a balance, you know—and here in the basin, it’s always been about the metal. There’s the earth that holds the copper, the things that draw the copper, and things that work the copper. A balance.”

“Yeah, well, this place hasn’t been in balance for 150 years, and those kids shouldn’t have to risk their lives to put it back.”

“Why not?” she asked with a wink, but there was a gleam of something hard behind the flutter of her lid. He feigned astonishment, but she waved it away. “No, now. You know I’m only teasing. Whatever that little ol’ Nick might be, it shouldn’t be left to grow there. Shouldn’t let it fester. You’d better take it out and deal with it.”

“How?”

“Beats me. But if it’s nasty enough to kill people, a good talking-to won’t do it. Not from you, anyway.”

He considered this. “Thank you,” he finally said, his lips pausing on the rim at the top of Tweety’s head. “You’ve given me plenty to think about.”

He finished his tea, thanked the woman again, and retreated to his hotel to get ready for the night’s work. He’d booked a room in the same Holiday Inn Express the grad students used, not by any great design but because there was nothing else for miles.

Down the corridor on the way to his room, he ran into Bethany—who was barefoot and holding an ice bucket. “Hi there!” she chirped, and he said “hello” in return, adjusting the backpack he toted as luggage. Then she added, “I don’t know why I’m surprised to see you here. Can’t imagine where else you’d crash.”

“This is close and clean. It’ll be fine for the night.”

“Is that how long you’re staying? Just overnight?”

“Depends. We’ll see what happens.”

She shuddered and clutched her ice bucket. “You sure you’ll be okay?”

“I always am.”

She laughed nervously, and he wondered if she ever laughed any other way. “I guess nobody bothers you, not very often.”

“No, ma’am, they do not.”

They said their good-nights and he went alone to his room. He flipped on the light to reveal nothing at all outstanding but nothing offensive either: a bed with an ugly comforter, a tiny stack of sample-sized toiletries, and a sink with a chipped faucet head.

He wondered what Bethany would’ve thought if he’d blurted out the things he kept close to his chest—if he’d said that no, nobody bothered him too often but when they did, they did it for keeps. Anyone who’s ever watched a prison movie knows you take down the biggest man first; and the monsters knew it too. So far he’d escaped those greetings with only a few scars to show for it, but they were ugly scars, and they reminded him daily of those who hadn’t been so lucky.

The nothings out there … they were worse than the nobodies.

Sometimes the nothings bit and fought, screamed and spewed poison or fire. Nothings could change their shapes and shift their bones, and sometimes, only a Bible and brute force could put them down.

Kilgore’s Bible was a small red leather-bound thing, thumbed into softness with onionskin pages that flapped, fluttered, and stuck together. He didn’t read it much anymore. Didn’t need to. Knew it forward and backward, just like the devil. But he kept it on his person because once it’d deflected a swipe of claws that would’ve otherwise opened his chest instead of leaving him looking like he’d passed out facedown on a barbecue grill.

And that made it lucky.

In the absence of mortal assistance, he’d take what luck he could get. He’d rather have Pastor Martin by his side, but that ship had sailed, hadn’t it?

So when night came, he tucked the Good Book into his pocket, smashed up against his battered notebook—a worn thing filled with thoughts and research on the case, scribblings and small, carefully drawn images that might or might not mean anything to him later on. An hour or two of potting around on the Internet had given him a name, or at least a direction. It was only a starting point, but it was better than nothing.

Back into his car he climbed. He tossed his pack onto the passenger’s seat, and in doing so, he winged the silver cross that hung from the rearview mirror. It swung back and forth, smacking the glass with a loud crack. He grabbed the holy trinket and steadied it. He held it an extra moment or two, then said, “Fuck it,” pulled it off the mirror and slung it around his neck. He didn’t have a church, but he had his faith. And he had the trusty old Jolly Roger, which started on the first try.

Out past what few streetlights and corner stores Ducktown boasted, the car’s headlights cut a bold path through the pitch-black, middle-of-nowhere murk.

He wasn’t more than a couple of miles from the mine, but there were few signs to guide the way and little in the way of civilized lighting; the stars were so damn bright overhead, and the trees loomed so tall, so close together on every side of the service road that would take him down to the crater lake.

He watched those trees as he drove, hunting for something that might live there and hide behind them. Some hint of the old balance. Some kind of resurrection.

When he hit a low-slung bar across the road, the headlights shone bright on a big-ass NO TRESPASSING sign. The high beams glinted off the rest of the message, which stopped just short of promising that anyone who drove any farther would be shot on sight and fed to the bears for fun. Probably because there weren’t any bears.

He left the car to inspect the situation in person. The hip-high gate across the road wore the sign like a badge, but Kilgore couldn’t find a shit to give, and nothing but a rusted padlock on an old chain held the whole thing together. A pair of swift kicks with his steel-toed work boots made short work of the matter, and one more kick sent the gate swinging back into the trees, where it dragged itself to a halt and leaned off-kilter against a raggedy evergreen.

It almost wasn’t worth the effort to clear the way. The dirt road ran out another hundred yards down the line, petering into a wide patch that gave a vehicle enough room to turn around, but that was about it.

With some creative steering, he maneuvered the car into an about-face so he could hit the ground running if conditions called for it later. Then he parked, pulled the brake, and left the door open so the dome light would stay on while he checked his supplies.

A plastic ketchup squirt bottle full of holy water. A well-worn gris-gris he’d had made in New Orleans, the year before The Storm. Flashlight and extra batteries, and a head-mounted lamp he’d borrowed from a buddy who was a mechanic. An old silver cake knife because sometimes silver meant something, but it was expensive—so he took it where he found it.

A loaded nine-millimeter because you never know.

He patted his chest and felt the reassuring bulk of the notebook and the Bible. Tucked the gun into his waistband, up front where it’d be easier to reach even though the cold metal on his belly gave him a full-body shiver. He donned the headband with the LED light on it, and felt ridiculous but his hands were free, and that was more important than dignity in the dark.

Everything else he stashed in his trench-coat pockets.

He closed the car door and the light went out. He flipped the switch on his headlamp, and it came on, illuminating the woods without quite the vigorous panache of the Eldorado’s beams; but outside what passed for town, a little light went a long way.

For a moment he stood still and listened. He didn’t hear much. It almost bothered him, but then he remembered Ammaw Pete grousing about how all the critters were only just coming back, and then he supposed it wasn’t quite so unsettling. There weren’t any crickets to fiddle their legs in the grass. No mice to rustle in the leaves, or squirrels to build nests high above. Nothing and no one, except whatever waited in the crater.

Kilgore had a pretty good sense of direction—almost an uncanny one, or so his mother used to tell people. He could feel it in his head, the tug of the crater’s location. The smell of its water wafted up through the trees, an unpleasant stink of bottom-pocket pennies and stagnation.

The service road had gotten him close.

He sniffed, wiped his nose on his forearm’s sleeve, and started marching.

The grade grew steeper as he proceeded; with every step, the ground dropped away more sharply beneath him. He slipped and skidded, catching himself on the vegetation or—on one particularly unpleasant stumble—his own hands.

And then he reached the clearing that surrounded the water—a ring of red dirt that held back the trees, or maybe the trees just didn’t want to dip their roots into that questionable pond. It was a creepy little beach, angled and naked, with all the grimy allure of a bathtub ring.

Unmoving except for the pivot of his neck, the big man surveyed the scene and still, he heard nothing. But he felt something, and he didn’t like it: the prickling, unhappy sense that he was being watched.

He fished out his notebook. The brightness of his headlamp washed out the pages and made it tough to read, but he squinted and forced his own words to appear.

“You took two boys.” He said it quietly. Like the light, a little sound went a long way. “They were here to help the basin, and you killed them.”

A ripple scattered the calm surface of the night-blackened pool. He heard it, the soft rush of water in motion, the ripple of a solitary wind chime playing its only note.

“Ammaw Pete said something that got me thinking: She said a good talking-to wouldn’t stop you, not if it came from me. So I wondered if there was anyone you might obey. Everything’s afraid of something, but you’ve been living the high life up in here, haven’t you?”

The water moved again. From the edge of his vision, Kilgore saw it, the shifting lines of something traveling below the surface but not yet rising.

“She called you a little ol’ Nick, and that’s not just an expression. She meant you’re a little ol’ devil, but I doubt you qualify for the title. A devil could leave the water and wreak more … interesting havoc someplace else. And you can’t, can you?”

He lifted his gaze without lifting his head. The offset glare of the light showed him a shape that was round and bald, a head not unlike his own. Eyes rising just far enough to break the waterline and see what motherfucker was doing all this taunting.

Kilgore fought back a shudder and returned his eyes to the notebook, to the word he’d written down. “Not sure how to pronounce this,” he admitted. “And it might be the wrong name anyhow, but it’s a pretty coincidence all the same, so I’m going to call you Kupfernickel.”

The eyes in the water were blacker than the sky above or the water below. They were so black that the darkness spilled out in an ambient glow of evil.

Kilgore met the thing’s glare. “That word … does it mean anything to you?”

A low, burbling sneer blew bubbles in the lake. And then, so softly that it could scarcely be understood, the creature replied.

Silly sprites.

“Silly sprites,” Kilgore repeated, too surprised to say anything else until he’d checked the notebook again. Often these things couldn’t speak—or if they could, they found it hard to make themselves understood. This one’s voice was clear, though it sounded like it came from miles and miles underground. “But they’re dangerous, aren’t they? And tied to metal … like the metal here at the Burra Burra Mine, sort of.”

German miners of old complained about copper that was bedeviled and could not be smelted. They didn’t know that the metal wasn’t copper at all, but nickel arsenide; they couldn’t get copper out of it because there wasn’t any copper in it.

“You’re not so different from that, Kupfernickel. One thing pretending to be another. You’re no elemental—no creature of life, that’s for damn sure.”

Your word means nothing. You mean nothing. There is no life here.

“You ought to be a small thing, a cold spot. A patch where grass won’t grow. But the pollution from the mine let you outgrow your britches.”

I am stronger than you know, it hissed, and it lifted itself, crawling toward the bank, and toward Kilgore with a deliberate slowness that showed off its fearsome, knock-kneed, and razor-sharp shape.

“No,” he insisted, and he did not back away, calling its bluff. “If you had any strength of your own, you wouldn’t be wearing the skin of a dead man. You haven’t got enough substance. Not enough life.” He looked up quickly, scanning the woods with the white-bright beam that shot from his forehead. The tree line appeared impenetrable and unbroken, a row of trunks divided with stripes of darkness. It felt like a cage.

The creature fussed some moist complaint, but it stopped its progression from the water and remained thighs-deep in the glassy lake. It scanned the tree line too, seeking whatever Kilgore might be hunting; but seeing nothing, it sneered afresh.

You know little and understand less than that.

“Then come up out of that water. Get out here and teach me a lesson, eh, Nick?”

The creature hesitated, then lunged—and retreated, as if it’d changed its mind.

But Kilgore knew a fake-out when he saw one. “You can’t, can you?”

Can, it insisted.

“Show me.”

But the thing watched the trees again, seeking some response that Kilgore couldn’t see. It cowered in the water, stuck in a pose between menace and retreat. The thing wore loose-fitting clothes—the homespun and overalls of a miner a hundred years ago, in boots and gloves, and the smudge of candle soot around its empty eyes. Sopping and stark, its clothing clung wetly to its skin-and-bones form, showing off the crooks and bends of something made of little more than gristle and myth.

“Come on out and take a swing at me if you think you’re so tough. I’ve smacked the shit out of bigger things, and I’ll smack it out of you.”

The coal-black eyes squinted, and tendrils of pitch-colored smoke oozed from the sockets. You fear the water.

“You fear the land,” he countered.

I fear nothing.

“Then why do you watch the trees?”

It scowled and dipped, its joints creaking and bowing, as it adjusted itself in the water. The smoke that poured from its blank, deep eyes likewise spilled from the corners of its mouth when it spoke. I fear no trees.

“And I ain’t afraid of the dark, but I know what’s in it.”

Kilgore checked his distance from the water’s edge: a good thirty feet. Far enough that even with a lunge, the creature probably couldn’t grab him. Even so, to be on the safe side … he sidled back another yard or two, never taking his eyes off the two smoking craters in the creature’s shriveled-apple face.

His notebook slipped, but he caught it. He held it up to the light of his headlamp and began to read.

“By the standing stone and twisted tree, thee we invoke—where gather thy own.” He cleared his throat, and ignored the splash and hiss from the creature that still stood in the water. “Mighty Lord of the woods and animals, hunter and hunted, I call to you.”

None shall answer! There is no life here!

“Hear me, and come once more to this, your sacred home. Keeper of the mighty gates of winter, watcher of the living land,” he breathed, and it might’ve been his imagination that something flickered in the trees beyond the edge of his headlamp’s glare.

None remain to hear you!

“You’d best fucking pray that’s the case,” Kilgore growled. “In the name of Jesus, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit …”

Hear yourself, you coward, the creature spit. Singing to the crucified king and calling the old gods with the same breath.

He shook his head. He’d heard it before, from holier things and people by far. “God of Creation, send Your angels. Send them in a shape this motherfucker will know, and lend them Your Almighty power.”

Your God has no angels for the likes of me. No swords. No choirs.

There, back toward the Eldorado, he saw it this time for certain: moving between the gnarled greenery like a stream flowing past rocks, one moment slow, one moment lightning-fast, shifting in some strange spot between the worlds. “And He shall give His angels charge over thee.” He repeated his favorite bit from the red-bound book. “To keep thee in all thy ways.”

Nowhere did it specify what those angels would look like or how they’d do any of the promised keeping.

You cannot have it both ways. Old ways and new gods.

“One God,” he corrected. “Just the one—old, new, and always. But He’s got a very diverse workforce.”

And one thing was certain, sometimes things took the names they were called by. They assumed the shapes that were best believed. He didn’t know how it worked, or why. He didn’t understand the mechanisms of the Law, but he suspected that no one on earth ever had—or ever could. All he knew was that God was on his side. He believed it harder than he believed his own name.

Your Christ has no power here!

“You’re wrong about that and everything else,” he said—and he might’ve said more but a vivid white light sparked, quivered, and blasted out from the tree line. It all but blinded Kilgore, who still had the good sense to keep one watering eye on the creature, though he backed away farther. One arm up, shielding himself from the sudden illumination.

The supernova cast shadows of trunks sharper than prison bars, flinging the shapes across the crater lake and around the hole where a mine once worked, and up the ridge around it—past the miners’ cage that split the light into lace, and all along the determined sprouts that clung to the piss-poor dirt, red as the face of Mars.

“There is life here yet!” he gasped, his breath sucked out of him by that divine, demanding illumination.

Between his fingers, around the edges of the fierce brilliance that was colder than November, he saw a four-legged shape, each limb as narrow as a sapling; there stood a barrel-chested trunk and a proud head capped with a crown as wide as Kilgore’s outstretched arms. Or not a crown at all—antlers, then, if that’s what they were.

This thing had names as well as antlers, though Kilgore could not bring himself to call any of the common ones. Not for prayer or entreaty, for it was too close to blasphemy. Even if he knew what his own God called this thing, it wouldn’t be a word for lips like his to pronounce.

He inhaled, exhaled. Forced himself to breathe through the rapture of this piercing light that cut through the copper basin and everything in it.

“Tubal-cain,” was the best he could muster in salutation. A name for the horned guardian from the mighty red book. He gagged on a small laugh, remembering a tidbit of lore he’d almost forgotten. “You were a metalsmith, praise Jesus! I see Your patterns, Lord. I see You turn the wheel …”

The great stag shifted. Its shape wavered between wafer-thin projection and flesh and blood, but it held and it glared down at the creature in the lake—which cringed against the light.

The creature struggled in place, a fly in molasses. It fumed and reared, lunging backward and going nowhere … no, going forward, toward the shining thing in the trees. Dragged up, kicking and fighting from the water until it was free and suspended, angry and dripping and swearing in a tongue no living man has ever understood. Shrinking and withering like the grass once withered and the trees once wilted where they stood.

“Take him away!” he gasped, not quite laughing anymore, too winded to do anything but wheeze. And as the miner-shaped creature rose up, wriggling and dying, sailing reluctantly toward the woods, Kilgore felt a pressure in his chest like a hand squeezing. The pressure crushed hard, and he wiped at his eyes but saw only the searing afterburn of the light from the trees … and then he saw stars.

And then he saw nothing, not even the ever-present light.

Not anymore.

Not until it crept back, a flicker here and there. A pixel at a time, that charred patchwork of vision, gleaming around the edges from all the cones and rods adjusting to the light that wasn’t there.

The stars came back, but this time they were above him. He blinked. Real stars. Not the ones that snowed across his vision when the light went away.

He was lying on his back, and a sharp jabbing sensation in his side suggested that someone was poking him with a stick.

“Ow …” he mumbled, then swiped at the stick.

The stick was held by Ammaw Pete, who also hefted an oversized flashlight with a big 9-volt battery exposed on its underside. To her credit, she didn’t aim it at his face. She aimed it at the ground beside him, illuminating his headlamp—which had fallen off and ceased to function.

“Wake up, big man. You’re done here.”

“Done … here? I didn’t …” He rose slowly, ratcheting himself up with his elbows. “I didn’t do anything.”

The frown on her face suggested she might argue, but she only said, “Whatever. Get yourself together. I found your car up the hill there, but your battery’ll need a jump. There’s more than one kind of life, you know, and I’ll want a ride home.”

“You walked here?”

She shined the light in his face this time, and he winced. “Of course I walked. How else was I supposed to follow that light? Drive through the trees? Not sure what kind of car you think I got, and I don’t ride a bicycle. Never did learn. It ain’t natural, running around on two wheels like that.”

“Pretty sure it’s … pretty natural,” he argued with a grin. She offered him a hand for the sake of show, but he pushed himself to his feet without her assistance. “Is that how you found me? You followed the light?”

“Better than the star of Bethlehem.”

He was only half-serious when he said, “Hush your mouth, ma’am.”

“Oh, sure. You can ask the pagan holdouts for a handout, but I can’t tease a bit about astrology. Fine. You big fat hypocrite.”

He dusted himself off and felt around for any broken bits. All in all, he felt pretty good. Tired, but good. “I’m a big fat lot of things, but that’s not one of them.”

“Well then, maybe you’re only confused. Whoa now,” she said, and stepped in to steady him. It worked, mostly because he didn’t want to fall down on top of her. “Take a moment if you need it.”

“Not sure what’s wrong with me,” he muttered. “I didn’t do anything. I asked for help, and it came. That’s all.”

She patted his arm. “No, darling. That wasn’t all. You were right,” she told him, guiding him by the crook of his arm, back up the hill toward the Jolly Roger. “There was life in this place. A lot of life. Your life. And my Old Man,” she said with a wink. “He borrowed a bit to make his point. You did a good job, calling him back.”

Kilgore frowned down at the small woman with the fierce grip on the meat of his arm. She carried on, straight ahead.

“I knew if I asked you outright, you’d never do it. Not in a million years. Bless Him, He’s got the time, but you and I don’t.”

And as they walked, the flicker in her eyes didn’t come from the flashlight, or the moon.