The Radio Magician and Other Stories

THE BOY BEHIND THE GATE

Pine tree tops creaked overhead, but the air didn’t move in the granite-strewn gully as Ron hiked up the steep gulch. He consulted his compass, then rechecked the map. Another hundred yards above him should be The Golden Ingot #9, and if the rusted mining equipment he’d been climbing over and around for the last ten minutes were any indication, the map was right. He scanned the ground, his eyes aching from sun and dust. The backpack, heavy with a powerful flashlight, rope and bolt cutters thumped against his kidneys. Was anything out of the ordinary? Was there any sign? A patch of cloth? A child’s shoe? Could Levi have walked this far? Ron imagined the eight-year-old being towed up the mountain, hand- in-hand with the stranger who’d taken him. Would Levi have been crying, aware in his little boy way of the danger he was in?

Ron closed his eyes. He wanted to imagine Levi scared. He hoped he was scared to death because the alternative… Maybe he’d been wrapped in a blanket or a plastic sheet slung over the man’s shoulder. They knew who the man was, Jared Sims, but Levi wouldn’t have known. Ron shivered and continued climbing.

A jumble of cable, thick as his wrist and so rusted that wherever the metal crossed itself it had corroded into one piece, blocked his path. Ron scrambled partly up the gully’s slope around it. Piles of yellow and white mine tailings humped up above him, and soon he topped out to the relative flatness of the claim. The old map he’d photocopied in Central City had shown him where the mine was; it wasn’t marked on the USGS maps. Most of the abandoned mines and shafts had been filled in. Too much chance of some tourist wandering around old mining property, snapping pictures of busted down mills and what was left of miners’ cabins, and then stepping on some rotten boards covering a shaft a hundred feet deep. So over the last twenty years, the state and park service had been closing the properties. Still, the Gilpin County mining district had been huge, and thousands of claims had been made. There were hundreds of openings even now for someone to find if he knew where to look. Perfect, mysterious holes blasted into the mountain, timeless monuments to long-dead miners’ hopes. Perfect places to hide a little boy you didn’t want found. Here, at the Golden Ingot #9, except for the rust, it could be 1880 again. He half expected to surprise a dozen miners waiting for their turn in the bucket and the long ride down the shaft.

Ron kept his eyes down. Little chance that there’d be a footprint in the yellow gravel, but it didn’t hurt. Maybe Levi would have dropped something for him to find. It seemed years ago, but it was only last winter that Ron had read him The Lord of the Rings. The hobbit, Pippin, had broken from the orcs and dropped a sign that he was still alive, a beautiful beech-tree leaf brooch. Levi had said, in his little man’s voice, “That was very clever of him, Daddy, wasn’t it?” Ron remembered Levi’s head resting on his arm while he read. He could almost feel the weight of his little boy leaning against him until they got to the end of the chapter. “Read some more, Daddy. Read some more,” he’d said sleepily.

A pile of boards laying almost flat looked hopeful. Ron lifted the end of one. It creaked as it rose slowly, pulling a dozen nails from the rotted plank beside it. Dust slapped into the air after Ron moved it aside and dropped it. The next one showed a shaft’s edge. A minute later, he’d cleared most of the boards. The pile looked like it hadn’t stirred since Grover Cleveland held office, but since he was here, he was going to check.

The afternoon sun showed only six feet of shaft wall, while the rest was black. Was the bottom only a dozen feet away, or was this one of those deep, deep holes reaching hundreds of yards down?

As always, as he had scores of times since the police gave up looking ten days before, he crouched at the shaft’s edge, cupped his hands around his mouth and called into the darkness, “Levi! Levi! Are you there, son?”

Wind stirred sand behind him, blowing a little over the edge where it glittered in the sunlight, then disappeared. Only the breeze’s sibilant hiss answered him.

Images flitted in Charles’ mind as he stayed motionless in his bed, listening to the boy’s even breathing on the floor beside him. It was the small hours of the morning, when time came unanchored, and memories piled willy nilly atop one another. Charles could see them all: his wife dying, the Laughlins, the McGarity’s, the bloody hands in the mine. The fireplace coals had long since died, and the moon’s thin line outside the window cast almost no light through the muslin drape. He’d light a candle if he dared, but if he did, the boy’s eyes might be open; he might look at him through the flickering light and know that he knew.

He couldn’t sleep. No, not that. Charles would dream, and in his dreams he’d see the Laughlin children burning up, their red skin baking from within. “Scarlet fever,” the nurse from Idaho Springs had said. “Poor things.”

Charles had stood at the Laughlin’s door that morning, a basket of bread and clean sheets hanging from one hand, blinking at the darkness in the room. Only the sun behind him provided light. They’d covered the one window, and the cabin smelled close and moist and sweaty sick. The nurse sat by three-year-old Lisa to his left. Against the back wall lay Evelyn with her mother sitting beside her. The baby’s crib rested in the opposite corner. William Laughlin sat at the rough-hewn table in the room’s middle, resting his forehead in his hand.

The boy crept around Charles, even though he’d told him to stay with the mule. His arm wrapped around the back of Charles’ leg, and he leaned into the room. Charles put his hand down to push him back, but he didn’t. He didn’t like touching his son, the stranger who lived with him every day. Lisa panted under the blankets, blonde hair plastered to the side of her face. Four-year-old Evelyn turned to the wall, her chest still for a moment before she drew her next wheezing breath. Her mom, a hint of the scarlet flush across her own cheeks visible in the sunlight, pressed a wet cloth to Evelyn’s forehead.

“The little one?” Charles said.

William Laughlin shook his head without moving his hand. “She went during the night.” He coughed. It sounded wet and pathetic.

“I brung some things,” Charles said. He stepped deeper into the room, and the atmosphere pushed back. Outside, the sun shone bright and men filled the valley, moving surely from mine to mill, loading ore wagons or carrying supplies. Blasting echoed off cliff walls above, and Clear Creek murmured like watery wind. But here, the air felt dead with fever.

William draped a hand over the basket’s edge. “You’re a right Christian, Charles.”

“You going to your shift?” Charles moved back. The heat in the room oppressed, and he didn’t want to breathe so close to the sick girls.

“I’ll be along.”

Charles retreated to the porch. The boy leaned over Lisa, his legs bright in the sun pouring through the door, while his upper torso faded in the room’s shadows. He drew a finger across the little girl’s forehead, through her fevered sweat. He stood, facing his father, his finger up as if he’d erased chalk off a blackboard. For a moment he looked at Charles as if surprised to see him still waiting for him, then he put his finger in his mouth.

When they crossed the footbridge over the creek, Charles said, “Why’d you do that, boy? I told you to stay out.”

The boy held onto the mule’s bridle, his head not even coming up to the mule’s chin. “They’ll burn, Papa.”

Charles nearly stumbled, then glanced at the boy. He wore an old, flannel shirt too big for him with the sleeves rolled up. Pale, skinny arms. Dark hair cut above his eyebrows. Dark eyes. He was given to long, unblinking looks. A serious mouth, like his mother who died bringing him into the world eight years before.

“I’m glad he’s out of me,” she’d said in the moment before she died screaming.

“What do you mean, boy?”

“I put the death in them.” He held up his finger that had touched the girl as if in proof. “Just like the other lambs.”

“Don’t talk like that.” Charles pulled the bridle from the boy’s hand, his own hand shaking. “You go on home, and I don’t want to see a mess in the cabin when I get back. Sweep the floor.”

“I can smell the fire,” the boy said before turning toward their cabin.

Charles thought about his son all day, deep in the mine, as he worked the single jack, bent low in the tunnel only three quarters of his height, placing the steel bit against the stone, pounding it a bit deeper with each blow, rotating it each time to clear the bit. Pausing just before he drove the hammer home. The angle had to be perfect. The placement, perfect. He had to judge before he struck. Striking without looking could shatter the drill. There was always the pause before the hammer came down to be sure he was doing the right thing. So there could be no mistake. It was a feeling of good or bad in the way the drill stood. Charles considered his judgement with the hammer to be his only genius. He never struck wrongly. Clang! The hammer would fall against the rod. Rock dust crumbled from the hole. Clang! He’d hit it again, his strong right arm driving the blow home. Numbing work to create a hole for the charge. He could raise the hammer all day with that arm; the work had made it larger than the other one, a giant’s arm, but he couldn’t shape the boy with it. He couldn’t even hold him.

The boy had been bad from the beginning. His wet nurse took sick and died. After that, no one would help Charles, so he fed the child himself with goat’s milk, certain that the first winter would kill him, having no mother to care for him, but as winter filled the mountains with snow and cutting wind, even as influenza swept through the camp taking many babies, the boy thrived. He was walking by the next summer, and Charles would leave him locked in the cabin when he worked his shift, half expecting to find the toddler dead on his return. But every day the boy met him, a little taller, a little stronger, and never smiling.

Setting the powder took a half hour. Each hole had to be filled with the proper amount. Then the fuse cord had to be measured. Charles worked methodically. This deep in the mine, the stale air hurt his lungs and gritty rock coated his eyes and tongue. He checked the candle burning brightly in its shadowgee stuck in the wall. When he set the last charge, he retreated to the bucket lift, covering his nose and mouth with a soaked bandana to protect against the dust. After the blast, he stood with head bowed, breathing through the wet cloth.

Charles wanted to love him. He tried. The weather in the boy’s heart was cold, though, and hugs meant nothing to him. He never played. He never cried. And always, around him, children died. Diphtheria. The grippe. Typhoid. The croup. Pneumonia. Whooping cough. Small pox. Lingering diseases. Wasting illnesses. The cemetery filled with tiny corpses.

The ore cart rattled on the rails as Charles pushed it toward the broken ore. For the rest of his shift he’d fill the cart, take it back to the lift, empty it and return for another load. No candles lit the path, but that didn’t matter. Charles didn’t mind the dark most days, but today he couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. What does the boy do while I’m at work? What does he daydream about? Charles imagined him wandering through the camp, looking for children.

In the spring he’d taken the boy to a funeral. Seamus McGarity had lost both his boys and his wife to dysentery three days apart. McGarity, his kin and friends circled the coffins, two tiny wood boxes and a long one. During the prayer, Charles looked down at his boy dressed in mourning black. The corners of the boy’s mouth turned up and his eyes were shining. At the ceremony’s end, the boy dropped dirt in each grave. Surreptitiously, he also put a handful of grave soil in his pocket.

“Lucky your kid’s doing good,” McGarity said to him the next day as they waited for the bucket to take them down the shaft. His lunch pail dangled from his hand, and the miner looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept for a month. “He came by a week ago. Found him sitting by the door.”

“What did he want?” Charles wished he could pat McGarity on the shoulder. How would it be to lose your whole family? There’d been other men whose children died who drank themselves to death. The other miners stood away from them. People died in the camps all the time, but it wasn’t easy to be next to the bereft, not at first.

McGarity didn’t answer for a while. He stared out over the valley, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything. Finally he said, “Caleb used to sing his little brother to sleep. I don’t think he knew I was listening. ‘Amazing Grace’ it was. Learned it from his mom. He had a nice voice for a ten-year-old.”

They found McGarity at the bottom of a shaft a week later. Was he drunk and fell in, or did he jump?

At the blasting site the dust still hung in the air, surrounding the candle in a pale globe. Charles hefted ore into the cart. My boy’s not human, he thought as each rock crashed against the metal. Methodically he bent and lifted, bent and lifted. Not human. Not human. Charles pictured the boy with his finger in his mouth, salty-bitter from the Laughlin girl’s scarlet fever sweat.

After a while Charles stopped loading. His hands stung. He stepped next to the candle’s feeble light and held them up. Blood ran down his wrists from his ragged fingertips. Dully he realized he’d not worn his gloves. And a certainty came to him, a gravestone solid conviction: my boy’s a monster!

Charles lay in his bed, motionless. The boy breathed evenly on the floor below him. Only the sliver-moon lit window floated in the dark. Charles kept his eyes wide open. If he shut them, even for a second, the boy might stand. He might lean his unsmiling face close. The boy might run his finger across Charles’ forehead.

“I see you burning, Papa,” the boy would say. He always called him Papa, like it was a curse.

And dawn was hours away.

Ron sat in his van on the abandoned mining road near the boulders the park service had used to block the path, his map spread out on the seat beside him marked with X’s for mining claims. From Central City there were so many. The historical marker at the town limits proclaimed THE RICHEST SQUARE MILE ON EARTH. He shook his head. If only it were that small.

Starting at Black Hawk at one end of the valley to the other end of Central City was a couple of miles. Mine tailings spotted the slopes on both sides. Then there were the gulches: Chase, Eureka, Russell, Lake, Pecks, Fourmile and others the map didn’t name with mines of their own, and the road went on to the ghost towns of Yankee Hill, Ninety Four, Alice and Kingston. Nevadaville was only a stone’s throw to the west. He could almost see the honeycomb of tunnels.

Ron smoothed the map, but his attention shifted. On the floor, barely visible in the blue dusk of sunset, a red plastic building brick lay canted on its side. He stretched around the steering wheel, crinkling the map with his elbow, and picked it up. The brick had almost no weight sitting on his palm. He straightened, put the brick on the dashboard.

They didn’t have building bricks when he was a boy. His dad had given him Lincoln logs, and over the years, Ron’s dad had added to the set until they filled a box almost too big to fit under his bed. Ron made forts and villages and fences and barns. Two short logs crossed over each other served as cannon. His dad came into his room one night and they built a tower together, half as tall as Ron.

Years later, when Levi was six, Ron had said to his dad, “You never told me how much fun being a father would be.”

“I didn’t think of it at the time,” his dad said.

Ron fingered the building brick. He’d never made a tower with Levi.

The sky grew dark, and Ron didn’t move. He thought about putting Levi to bed. “Have good dreams,” he’d say. For forty nights now, Levi had not had Ron to wish him a bedtime without nightmares. He thought about throwing a baseball back and forth. He remembered reading to him, book after book, Levi’s head resting against Ron’s arm as they sat on the couch.

Ten days ago the Denver detective in charge of the investigation said, “We’re giving up the search, Ron. You’re going to have to face the possibility your son is dead. Sims killed his victims. We know that.” They sat in the detective’s temporary office in the Gilpin County Courthouse. Ron struggled to remain calm. The detective didn’t look over twenty, and it was clear Ron made him uncomfortable.

“He didn’t kill them right away,” Ron insisted. “The Perez girl he kept in his basement for a week. In Colorado Springs he kept that baby in a storage garage for four days. His house was in Central City. My boy is in a mine somewhere. It’s logical.” Ron held a crumpled flyer. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? Levi smiled from the page, a strand of his black hair across his forehead, his dark eyes turned toward his cake before he blew out the candles.

With the detective, Ron had walked through Sims’ house, a restored turn-of-the-century Victorian gingerbread with no closets. Posters covered the living room walls, all children. Except for the kitchen, blocked with yellow crime-scene tape and the outline of Sims’ body on the floor, the rooms were meticulously tidy. Magazines on the coffee table were fanned out perfectly, the same half-inch overlap on each. On Sims’ dresser in the bedroom, a line of brass padlocks stood like sentinels in a military row. They were the only decoration. Ron wondered what could make a man like Sims. Couldn’t love have saved him? Love, pure love, might have kept Sims from hating, just as pure love would find his son. The police didn’t love Levi enough to find him.

The detective shook his head. “If he hadn’t shot himself, we could ask him. But he did. We’ve had crews up and down the area. If your son were there, we would have found him. He might have lasted a week without food. Only a couple days without water. It’s been a month. Sims buried his victims. I’m sorry to have to say it this way, but I’d guess your boy is in a shallow grave.”

Ron gripped the arms of the chair to keep from leaping at the man. “There’s bonds between a father and his son. I’d know if he had died.”

“The department can arrange counseling, if you request it,” the detective said.

“You’re not a father, are you?” Ron looked past the detective. Black and white photographs hung on the wall behind him: men standing before a wagon, holding shovels and lunch boxes; a long shot of Central City down main street when it was still dirt; the front of a school, forty or fifty children sitting on the steps, their severe looking teacher standing behind them with her arms crossed.

Ron touched the hard edge of the plastic building brick sitting on the dashboard and thought about the kids in the school a hundred years ago no different than his own boy, all dead by now for sure, and Levi who might not be. Razor-edged stars filled the sky through his windshield. The air had cooled, caressing his face through the open windows. This far up the rutted road he couldn’t hear traffic from the highway or crowd noise from the casinos that filled Central City. He canted his head to hear better. Something clicked repetitively in the distance, maybe a night bird or a locust. He wondered if locusts lived this high. For a long time he rested his finger on the brick and listened. The night vibrated with its own muttering. Unidentifiable sounds that he guessed might be the breeze sliding over rocks and through the scrubby grasses. A high squeak that might be a bat. He couldn’t tell. The mountain was perfectly black and the cloudless sky danced with stars that provided no illumination.

He turned on the ceiling light to read the map. If someone saw him from a distance, he thought, he’d look like a time traveler in his craft, light glowing through the windows, unattached to the Earth.

Eventually he turned the light out and fell asleep sitting up, his head pillowed on a jacket against the door, windows still open so he could hear if Levi should call.

Charles slipped out of the cabin before dawn, the eastern sky just barely lighter than the west. The wind came up the valley, and in it he could hear the stamp mills thrumming as they crushed ore.

He trudged up the switch-back trail toward the mine, his hands heavy, his head heavy. Had any child the boy met lived? There weren’t that many children in the camps. The school in Nevadaville had 150 students last year, he’d heard, but there were 10,000 miners in the district. Central City had a small school and so did Blackhawk. Charles had never sent the boy, but he was supposed to go in the fall. The town was growing. More families came in every day. They were building churches.

At the top of the hill, he paused. From here in the pre-sunrise grimness, most of the town was visible in purples and blues. He couldn’t find his own cabin though. Then, he gasped. A black aura like a cloud hid it from him, and for a moment it seemed as if it grew tentacles that flowed down the dirt roads, over the wooden sidewalks, sniffing at each door. The wind rippled the cloud’s top, then blew in his face, carrying the smell of a crypt and the fevered dampness from the Laughlin cabin.

Charles shook his head. There was his cabin! There was no black cloud. He held his hands over his pounding heart. Am I going mad? A hallucination! But the question echoed hollowly. This was not madness. He’d seen the cloud as a vision, a sign. He backed up the trail, afraid to take his gaze away from the cabin.

When a man’s dog goes wild, he shoots him. It’s his responsibility. What was his responsibility as a father of a monster?

When Charles worked the mine that day, he stuffed his pockets with candles, and he kept one lit no matter where he was. The shadows beyond the weak candlelight were like the shadow creeping from his own house.

If Sims had locked Levi in a mine, it would have to have several qualities, Ron thought as he shouldered his pack. Pine lining the mountain top glowed in the morning light, but the sun wouldn’t touch the valley’s bottom for another hour. Ron checked his map and began the long hike up the old road. It had to be both close enough for him to get to, but far enough off the beaten track that it was unlikely anyone would find it. It had to be far enough back that even if Levi screamed for help, no one would hear him. There would be food and water. The question was, how much food and water? Sims wouldn’t have planned on leaving Levi with over a month’s supply.

Each step up the road felt like the ticking of an immense clock counting down. How much time was left? Was Levi even now crouched against a locked gate, light leaking around the edges, on the brink of death by thirst or starvation? If he ran out of water, might there be water in the mine itself that he had been drinking to keep himself alive? Ron thought about Tom Sawyer, not the hijinks of the little boy, but the awful image of Injun Joe trapped in McDougal’s cave. After Ron’s dad had read him that part, Ron had nightmares for months about eating bats while trying to carve through a thick wooden door with a broken knife.

Ron quickened his pace, his calves burning, keeping his eyes open for evidence of tunnels not on his map. He’d followed dozens of faint trails to dead end mines in the last ten days, peered down scores of open shafts, rattled the locks on handfuls of metal gates, always looking for a sign, always listening for Levi’s voice. He crossed from the valley’s shadow into the sunlight, and even this early in the morning the rays heated his shirt. It would be a hot one today.

The road ended at the tumbled remains of a small mill. Busted beams pointed skyward, a skirt of rotten wood at their feet. Ron rested for a moment, his hand against a gray post. Splinters flaked onto his skin. Behind the ruin a narrow path vanished over a ridge. Weeds grew into the twin grooves that were too narrow for an automobile. He imagined steel-rimmed wagon wheels and a cart of ore making its way down the road behind a team of horses. Time seemed irrelevant here. It could be 1880 again, or 2080; the mountains wouldn’t know the difference. But he wasn’t timeless, and the clock counted; every minute passed was another minute that Levi suffered alone. Could an eight-year-old die of fright? What if he believed his daddy had forgotten him? Ron whimpered at the thought.

His photocopied map called this the Sunderson Mill. Above it were several mines: West Yellow Dog, New Baltimore, and Crossroad. Ron spread the map over his knee. Small Xs indicating digs crowded the gulch. There could be ventilation shafts, drainage tunnels, powder storage crypts, false starts, dead ends and full-bore excavations that needed checking.

It would take all day.

“Come with me, boy,” said Charles, his hands shaking. It had taken him several minutes to push open the cabin door. He couldn’t shake the impression of the cloud he’d seen around his house in the morning. It seemed to hover still, insubstantial, but present just the same. The sun shone mutedly through it, and the air felt cooler than it did ten feet away.

“It won’t work,” said the boy. He sat on the edge of his bed, his dark hair disheveled, his gaze steady and challenging.

Charles swallowed hard. “What won’t work?”

“What you are planning.” The boy came toward him, across the cabin’s single room.

Charles backed away into the sunlight, gripping the hammer hanging from his belt. The weight of his satchel tugged at his shoulder. For a second he envisioned beating the boy down where he stood, before he could get away. He forced his fingers from the hammer.

“We are taking a walk.”

“I know.” The boy strode past him and up the road out of town.

Charles watched him, his breath caught in his throat. Suddenly the air seemed to clear, and the sun pressed against him. Had it always been this way around the boy? Had he been in a daze from the moment the child was born?

It was as if the boy followed a trail traced for him in the dirt. He walked in the road’s middle, barely giving way when a wagon came toward him. The horse’s nostrils flared at his smell.

Charles caught up to him when they turned onto the Sunderson Mill Road. The mines above it had gone bad the year before, and the mill was closed.

“The mountains hold things, Papa.” The boy’s hands hung straight at his side, as if he were standing at attention, not hiking a steep road.

He had no words to say to him. Am I the monster? thought Charles. The boy’s mother wouldn’t want this. Have I done something to deserve a curse? Every step hurt. Part of him wanted to run away. He could do it: leave the boy on the road, catch the new train out of town, and be in Denver before anyone knew. His family lived back east.

Another part denied that anything was wrong. Charles thought, what if I’m insane? My boy is strange, for sure, but he’s not evil. What child growing in the mountains with a dead mother and a father who worked the mines wouldn’t mature differently?

And a third part wanted to fall on the boy like a bear and rend him, bloody bone from bloody bone.

“Keep going,” Charles said when the boy slowed at the mill. The windows were already broken and its door hung askew.

“Don’t you love me, Papa?” he said. The boy looked at him sardonically. “A Papa should love his son.”

The trail climbed as quickly as stairs for a hundred yards, while the afternoon sun touched the mountaintop before them. Charles choked on the words, “Of course, I love you.” And he knew that he did. He loved him even as he wanted to kill him, even as he was afraid. Was this right? He thought of sick children sweating in their fevers, dead children. “They’ll burn, Papa,” the boy had said.

At the ridge’s top, the trail flattened and split. Winding to the right, it led to West Yellow Dog, a fifty-foot drift that started with a yard-wide vein of quartz and wire gold but petered into low-grade ore that wasn’t worth the cost of the powder to extract it. The middle trail ended at the New Baltimore, a failed attempt to find West Yellow Dog’s wire gold by coming at it laterally. Charles had worked the New Baltimore for six months before the owners shut it down.

He’d never been in the Crossroad on the left trail, but, as the hard rock Cornishman who told him about it said, “The claim was snakebit from the beginning.” The rumor was that the first prospector had been drilling into the rock to set a charge, and when he hit the drill for the last time, it disappeared into the rock. There was a tunnel already there. A silly story, but the claim didn’t pay out, and there had been accidents.

They took the turn to the left, around a granite wall, out of the sun and into the stone bowl that held the mine. Rock surrounded them on three sides, like a small arena. The sound of Charles’ hard-soled boots echoed. At the far side, a metal gate held closed by a clasp lock marked the mine’s entrance.

“You’re going to be staying here, boy.” Charles removed a chisel from his satchel, set its edge against the lock, raised the hammer, then paused. Always he judged before he struck. Was the chisel set correctly? Would the hammer do its job? There could never be a strike without the pause for judgement, where a mistake could be saved. The metal’s sharp report reverberated off the rocks. Another blow broke it, then Charles pulled the door open; it screeched against the stiffness in its hinges. He’d never seen a mine entrance like the Crossroad’s. The floor looked worn smooth, as if thousands of feet had marched on it through the years. How had the miners done that?

“Don’t you love me, Papa?” the boy said again.

Charles didn’t look at him. From his satchel he removed a blanket, candles, a small bundle of food and a water bottle. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You must not be my Papa.” He didn’t sound insincere this time. “My Papa loves me. He’ll find me, my Papa.”

“Just get in!”

Charles could barely see the new lock he put on the door through the tears.

Behind the iron gate, he heard the boy move, a large sound, as if what stirred in the tunnel had suddenly grown huge. He fell back. Impossibly, the door stirred in its iron frame, and for a second Charles thought the inch-thick bolts might pull from the rock. He scuttled away. Even at the edge of the granite arena, when Charles looked at the mine entrance, he could hear the boy behind the gate, breathing loud, his heart throbbing. The sky grew dark and the air thick. A noxious cloud seeped around the door’s edges, filled the stone chamber, its tendrils crawling on the floor toward Charles. The boy said, his voice full of old mining timbers and cold, wet stone a thousand feet deep, “Papa?”

Charles fled.

West Yellow Dog had been dynamited. All that remained of its entrance was twisted ore cart track. Ron searched the cliff base to both sides. A niche three hundred yards to the right might have been where they stored powder, but it was only ten feet deep and didn’t have a door. Below the mine, partially hidden behind scrubby pine growing between the rocks, he found a small tunnel barely tall enough for him to enter on his hands and knees, but twigs and dirt blocked the way a few feet in and it smelled of marmot. Ron sat on his haunches outside the hole and closed his eyes against the sun.

He’d know if Levi had died, wouldn’t he? A father and son had a bond, he’d told the detective.

Within his view, visible only because the sun cast long shadows, several foundations rose from the grass in the clearing below the slope. There must have been a small community here, or they might have been part of the mining operation. At the Gilpin County Courthouse, Ron had looked at pictures of the town from the 1880s, and beside them were modern shots taken from the same spot. The buildings changed. Trees changed. But the rocks and mountains stayed the same. He trembled. To the mountain, time didn’t exist; all times were interchangable. He glanced at his watch. To a little boy dying in a mine, every second stretched like skin on fire.

He pushed himself upright.

The New Baltimore had a park service gate on it. Ron slowed as he approached. Covered in dust, the remains of a broken lock lay on the ground. He rubbed the scratches in the metal. No rust. Someone had been here this summer.

“Levi!” His voice sounded hollow and out of place.

The gate gave reluctantly, its base dragging over the rock as he pulled it open. Moisture seeped from the walls a few feet in. Resting one hand on the black-slime ceiling just above his head, he shone his flashlight on indistinct footprints on the muddy floor. Back in the depths, a watery plink-plink-plink broke the silence. The tunnel split. To the right, a pile of rock and broken timbers blocked the way. To the left, the passage sloped downward for another twenty feet before ending at a pool of water. The footprints led here. Ron played the quivering light across the surface, penetrating to the bottom. Rocks. More timber. Metal so heavily rusted he couldn’t tell what its original shape had been. No wrapped bundle. No horror-story patch of white that resolved itself into a face.

He released a pent-up breath. Why had someone broken into the mine? Turning, he studied the walls and ceiling. A slippery, unhealthy looking fungus covered the surfaces, and the stagnant air smelled rotted and mildewed. Near the ceiling to the left of the pool, a patch of rock peered through the growth, as if it had been brushed clean, and above it, a crack wider than his fist swallowed the light. Ron reached in, touched plastic. He found four bags in the crack, about a pound each. A whiff of the first one showed he’d uncovered someone’s stash.

Ron left the bags on the floor. Ten minutes wasted.

According to his map, all that remained was the Crossroad. It took a half hour of backtracking across the gulch’s east side before he found a faint trail that led to a gap around a rock wall.

He spotted the lock on the door on the other side of the stone arena as soon as he rounded the corner, a brand new, brass padlock, like the row of them on top of Sims’ dresser. He ran without thinking about it. Old metal door, not park service. Ron ripped off his backpack, fumbled for the bolt cutter, gripped the handles and squeezed. The lock snapped.

Was now the moment when he would know? Ron had dreamed of finding Levi in a thousand ways. Bad dreams, in some, where Levi was dead. Either dead over a month, or even worse, dead a few days. He’d be starved or dead from thirst or exposure. In some dreams he was alive but sick, damaged from exposure or the time alone. In one dream Levi didn’t know him, his mind gone. What could be worse than an eight-year-old driven insane by abuse and fear? In that dream, Ron loved his son back to sanity. No evil could be so bad that love could not change it to something good.

Ron tore the lock from the hasp, jammed his fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame. Pulled.

In the good dreams, Levi waited. “Daddy!” he would cry. He always called Ron “Daddy,” like it was a blessing.

The door swung open.

Charles didn’t even try to get to sleep. Sitting at the table in his cabin, the tiny slice of moon providing the only light again, he thought about the locked gate and the boy behind it. His intention was to never return.

He thought, what’s the greater evil? Every time he closed his eyes, he saw dead children, a fingerprint on their foreheads; he also saw the boy at the Crossroad, staring at a candle, maybe, or sleeping. What kind of dreams would a bringer of death like him have? But Charles was evil too. The boy, no matter what else he was, was his son. A father should take care of his own. One time when Charles was young he locked a storage shed on his father’s farm. A week later his father sent him to fetch some tools. The storage shed stank, a solid wall of putridness rolling out when Charles opened the door. A cat had been locked in, its mouth gaping open, dry as dust, the stomach burst. If he had known, wouldn’t it have been merciful to have killed the cat a week earlier?

Charles looked through the darkness to his own bed. He couldn’t imagine sleeping again. The boy behind the gate moved in his mind. The room was so black, Charles could almost see the boy without closing his eyes. Like the cat, the boy was locked in. But the cat wasn’t the devil. No, not by a long shot. Maybe a creature like the boy thrived on the black air behind the gate. Could such a thing be killed by an act as simple as being shut into a mine? What if it could do some magic to save itself?

In a sudden vision, Charles saw himself as an older man walking down a street. A beautiful carriage clattered by, the horses’ hooves loud on the bricks. In the vision, Charles glanced up. Sitting in the carriage was his son, grown now, and the look he gave from the carriage was full of hate.

Charles made a fist on the table, alone in his cabin in the midst of the night and moaned. The boy was behind the gate. “I’m cursed,” Charles said to the four walls. Already he felt the guilt like a blood-soaked blanket settling over his head, suffocating him.

He’s a boy dying slowly, my son, Charles thought. He’s a monster who can save himself in some evil way.

Like the New Baltimore, the Crossroad was wet. Footprints showed clearly in the mud. Little prints. A child’s shoes.

“Levi!” Ron’s eyes strained to see into the mine, pulse throbbing huge in his chest. “Are you there, son?”

He took a few steps down the tunnel. Where was Levi? Ron turned on his flashlight. The powerful beam cut into the air showing the path curving away before him. His feet slipped on the muddy floor as slick as polished marble, and suddenly he felt scared, as scared as he’d ever been in his life. His breath puffed out in a plume before him. Every instinct told him to run. The mine didn’t feel right. The air clung to his arms like icy cockleburs, and he had to brace himself with a hand against the wall. Then the floor shook, but it wasn’t just the floor; everything jolted or quivered. Every cell in his body flinched. He wasn’t sure if he had turned around and was heading out. He thought, the world has shifted.

He stepped forward again. Where am I? Where am I going?

A voice came from the tunnel before him, a little boy’s voice.

“Papa?” it called.

Ron rushed forward, his fear forgotten. He would greet him with love like he’d never known.

“Papa?”

His son was coming home.

Charles stood at the Crossroad gate. He’d pulled it open, but he wouldn’t step inside. No, he was too frightened for that. He couldn’t see the boy, or all would be lost. He had one chance to make it right, and only one.

“Boy?” he yelled into the mine.

For a long time there was no sound, then Charles felt a peculiar twitch, like the mountain had shrugged. The air itself contracted, and his ears popped.

He shook his head. Whatever else was going on, he could not be swayed.

“Boy?” he shouted again.

A voice came from far back in the mine. “Daddy?” it cried. “Is that you, Daddy?”

Small feet splashed through the mud, growing louder.

“I knew you’d come, Daddy,” the voice exclaimed, very close now.

Charles stood by the door out of sight, his hammer raised high, paused above him. When the boy stepped out, he would bring it down. Oh, yes he would. He would end it here.

And all would be right.