Down the Throat of the Mountain

by Jennifer Erickson

  "What good could that possibly do?" he barked.

  Margaret blinked. He had never lost his temper with her before.

  "You know, I'm sick of your giggling and flirting and your obsession with the goddamned cave. Why not do something useful? Hand me a tool once in a while, or--I know! Cook a meal, for God's sake!"

  Margaret's breath caught in her throat. She clenched her fists and looked away until the threat of tears diminished. She had been right not to tell him about her treasure. He didn't deserve to know.

  "I thought we were friends," she whispered. "I thought that you might...like me."

  Ron froze. Oh, it was what he wanted. But was she playing him again? What happened when Joe got better? Could he take a chance? Wouldn't it be worth it if it were true?

  Ron swung his leg around and backed down the ladder.

  Stooping, he peered into her face. She was so close that he could gather her into his arms, but Ron wasn't one for romantic gestures. What if she pushed him away? He reached out a hand, let it drop. She stood rigid, glaring at him.

  Then he turned on his heel and left. A minute later, he returned, took Margaret's hand and dropped the skeleton key into her palm.

  It was a promise, a contract. Did she understand that?

  "Thanks," was all she said.

  He waited up for her. It was hard to tell what bothered him more. Was it the fear that something might happen to her in the cave? Or was it the fear that she had played him once again, that now she had the key, she'd have no more use for him?

  The old hotel groaned above him, a giant settling down for the night. This night was different, though. For one thing, he was sober. He had his cigarettes, and he held the pack like a life ring.

  Joe and Rich were gone. It was easier to imagine Margaret in the cave with them, as though their presence might buffer her from its energy, might even save her from herself. Sure, he had been jealous of the three of them down there together, but Ron was her rescuer, the knight in shining armor who came to get her when it all fell apart, even if half the time she didn't know it, she was so spaced out.

  Now Rich was gone forever, and Joe might never be the same. Joe's parents and Margaret talked optimistically about his recovery. They thought that his mind had wandered off somewhere, lost, like a puppy. Ron suspected that it had run away and didn't want to return.

  Ron gave her until three a.m. He forced himself to wait in the dim basement hallway until the second hand on his watch swooped all the way around the dial.

  Then he adjusted his head lamp and stepped into the cavern.

  The cavern seemed to grasp at him, even from the hallway. He moved swiftly, hoping to stay ahead of his fears.

  The narrow crevice was every bit as tight as on Christmas, but his body remembered how to negotiate it, where to duck, where to lean. Margaret was curled up in an alcove about where he expected, feverish and distraught.

  "It's not here," she moaned. "How could it not be here?"

  Ron hauled her out. Again. She cried. Whatever her problem was, it could wait.

  All night and through the next day, he hovered over her futon while she slept. In her dreams, she whimpered and mumbled. Finally, mid-afternoon, she opened her eyes and with a mischievous smile, said, "Where's my soup?"

  Like a spoiled child.

  Ron smiled and went to warm some soup for her. But as he watched her slurp her chicken noodle, sitting up in bed, he realized something: she kept him around to wait on her. He waited and waited, but the thing he waited for, it would never come.

  "Do you see me at all?" he blurted.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Nothing. Never mind." Ron squeezed his eyes shut. If he pretended he hadn't said it, maybe she wouldn't answer.

  She set her empty bowl on the floor and looked him over, as though for the first time.

  "The Chamber of Wonders, the chamber where...the accident happened," she said.

  Did he even want to hear this, he wondered?

  "How could it just disappear? How could it be there just that one time?"

  "You think it disappeared?"

  "Come on, Ron. You were there."

  He racked his brain, trying to remember. Maybe it had been different the second time. He hadn't paid attention. He had been concentrating on not freaking out. And as he looked back, it was hazy, like a story from long ago. There had been the tunnel, and his rage, and then the most unlikely looking place. A palace of white pillars. Marble sculptures rising from the floor. But that was impossible.

  "You probably took a wrong turn. I'm sure it's still there."

  "No!"

  Ron flushed.

  "Joe and I explored that whole passage, lots of times. The chamber was not there. And then it was. And now it's gone!"

  "So...that's good, then, right? We can forget what happened and move on."

  "We have to go back." Her eyes glistened.

  "I don't think that's a good idea."

  "We have to."

  "Funny how there's only a 'we' when it suits you."

  "How can you say that?"

  "This is my property now. Joe is gone, and it's time for you to leave."

  The color drained from her face. Neither of them moved. Ron couldn't believe he'd actually said it, but when he thought about it, he realized it was the only way. The real question was, would she go?

  It was easier than he could ever have imagined. She rose silently, gathered her clothes, her stained teapot, her half-dead hanging fern, left the vault key on the window sill. He helped her carry down the futon and tie it to the roof of the Mercedes. On the way to Boulder, to her parents' house, she seemed lost in thought.

  He told himself it was good that she was gone. But even so, without her, the old hotel felt so much colder. That night, he drank half a fifth of Wild Turkey, sitting on the floor in Margaret and Joe's empty room, and he ruminated about the impossible Chamber of Wonders, about how everything had fallen apart on Christmas. In the silent pause just before daylight, he came to the conclusion that the palace of white where Ron had beaten Rich and left him for dead was not a place. What he'd found there had nothing to do with a room of pillars or his friends or the Golden Bear. What he'd found there was the worst part of himself, the worst of all of them.

  And that part that must be renounced.

  He drove to Boulder and bought concrete at the hardware store, collected a pile of large stones, and in one exhausting, hallucinating forty-eight-hour push, he built a wall, a thick rock wall, sealing off the passage to Margaret's Chamber of Wonders. Then he slept for two days.

  Winter dragged on.

  Ron's brain fogged. He lost track of tools, and even how far he'd progressed on a project. Food seemed to vanish from the kitchen. Furniture tripped him when he didn't pay attention. He heard strange noises like voices, like footsteps.

  He poured the last of his Wild Turkey into a snowdrift under the window, but nothing really changed. In fact, sober, things were freakier. He moved all of his possessions into the tiny room behind the bar, arranged his food on the windowsill and in a Styrofoam cooler.

  A spring storm snowed him in. He hunkered by the fireplace, burning broken furniture, rotten floorboards, sawdust and debris from the renovation. The Mercedes huddled under a drift of snow. Only the aerial peeked out.

  On a night with a full moon, Ron jerked awake with a snort. His room smelled both sweet and foul, and the orange glow of the smoldering fire backlit a figure beside the bed. Ron squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the figure remained. Moonlight gleamed off the cooler lid.

  A full minute passed, then two. Ron's heart hammered away.

  At last, the shadow shifted. "Sorry to wake you," it croaked.

  Ron let out his breath. "That's okay," he said, as long as they were being polite.

  "It's just that I was hungry."

  "Who are you?"

  "I'll leave you alone. You never have to see me again."

  Ron sat up and fumbled for the flashli
ght on the floor. In its sudden glare, he blinked, blinded.

  The figure threw up its arms and stumbled toward the door.

  "Wait!"

  It slipped away.

  Ron heard footsteps on the stairs and the slam of a door. Upstairs.

  He closed his own door, pushed the dresser up against it, perched on the bed with his blanket draped over his rigid shoulders and stared at the flashlight beam, smoking cigarettes until daylight, when he could almost think it had been a dream. Well, almost.

  Although it couldn't penetrate to the bottom of the canyon, the sun appeared high above. Rivulets of water ran down the hillsides. The snow turned to slush. The Mercedes came out of hiding.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch. A teenaged boy postholed up the middle of the snowy road, all angles and acne. Ron was startled, then curious.

  From the front portico, Ron waved. The young man studied the scene warily, then veered toward him, sinking knee-deep on each step. He stopped short of the sandstone steps.

  "Are you Jeff Davis?" the boy asked.

  Ron shook his head. "Aren't you cold?"

  The boy looked down at his soaked jeans and sneakers.

  "Come on in," said Ron, grateful for the company. An ally, perhaps, against that shadowy apparition in the night. "I've got a fire."

  "I'm looking for my dad. He's supposed to live here."

  "Nooo," said Ron. "Just me. And a ghost."

  The young man drew back at Ron's honking laugh. Ron realized he’d been spending too much time alone.

  "Actually, I don't know what he is. I just discovered him last night." That didn't sound as reasonable as Ron had expected.

  The boy looked left and right. "That's cool, then. Maybe I'll just look around a little."

  He trudged fifty yards up the road, then something made him turn and gaze at the upper levels of the old Long Shot Hotel. He stood frozen for several seconds, then Ron heard the scrape of a window opening. A voice croaked, "Petey?"

  "Dad?"

  Ron fumbled the cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one like his life depended on it.

  The boy retraced his own tracks back to the building, stood waiting at the bottom of the steps, then he grinned, a big, boyish, lopsided grin. "Dad?"

  Ron shrank back, bumped into something and there behind him was--him. Not Ron, no, but he was wearing Ron's missing clothes. His long hair was damp and slicked back and he smelled of Ron's shampoo. Smile like a rictus in his translucent face, he stood there like nothing weird was going on, like he belonged there. Like he owned the place and Ron was the ghost.

  "You're a whole person now," said this well-groomed apparition.

  The boy nodded, a little sheepish, a little confused. "They call me Pete now. I'm thirteen."

  "I remember. Today, right?"

  "Tuesday."

  "How's your mom?"

  "She's--Dad, can I live with you? She's driving me effing crazy."

  Ron turned, astonished, to see what the apparition would say.

  "What does your mom think?" he asked at last.

  "She--well, she can get kind of worked up. She said, ah, it was the stupidest idea she'd ever heard."

  "Yes!" Ron shouted. "He doesn't even live here! He doesn't even exist! And he's wearing my clothes!"

  "Ron, take a deep breath. You're confused again."

  "I am not--"

  "Pete, why don't we go upstairs and talk in private." He led the boy up to Ron's room behind the bar and shut the door in Ron's face.

  Ron had no way of guessing that forty years later, his life would still be tangled up with Jeff and Pete.

  Chapter 32

  Instead of banging on the door and demanding that they get out of his room (it could easily have gone that way), Ron rummaged in Rich's old tool box for a heavy carpenter's hammer and a long screwdriver. Up the narrow staircase he crept. His footsteps creaked in the third floor hallway. Some day he'd get the damned lights working. He felt his way down to the doorway at the end, a stout oak door that had remained locked all this time. A linen closet, he'd thought. Nothing important. But now he realized he'd been wrong. Linen closets didn't have doors like that.

  Months before, Ron had tried his hand with one of Margaret's bobby pins, had peered through the keyhole at darkness, had put his cheek to the floor and strained to see under the door. This time, he wedged the screwdriver between the door and the frame and hammered until the casing splintered. Pried it away. He glanced behind him, expecting any moment for the apparition-man to appear there. If so, he'd put the hammer through his head.

  Ron hammered some more, knocked off the doorknob for good measure, jabbed the screwdriver into the lock, flung his body against the door. It swung open, taking Ron with it, and spilled him onto the floor.

  It smelled of scalp and urine and the stifling sweetness of the cave.

  Then, he sensed movement in the darkness. He scrambled to his feet, hammer raised, slipped out the open door, tried to fling it shut behind him. It bounced open again. Something the size of a cat scuttled out. Why was this happening? Why had his life become a nightmare?

  "Back off! Scat!" his voice rose by an octave.

  "Get away from them!"

  Ron's teeth clacked together as a body slammed into him, knocked him to the floor, tore the hammer from his grip.

  Squeak, squeak, squeak.

  He wished he could see.

  "Dad, what's going on?"

  "Pete, go away!"

  Ron heard a clatter. A shaft of light laid itself down the hallway.

  The shadowy man knelt on top of Ron, hammer raised, haloed in dust.

  Two musty pack rats, whose eyes and teeth glinted in the half-light, sniffed at Ron's cheeks. Their whiskers tickled.

  By the window, velvet curtain heaped in his arms, Pete said, "Dad?"

  "He wants to kill Luster's babies!"

  "Dad."

  "Please, please let me up," Ron babbled between shallow breaths. "They're going to eat me."

  The man was heavy on his chest.

  "You touch them, I'll hammer your eyes into your skull!"

  "I won't hurt them. I didn't know. I'm sorry."

  The other man shifted. Ron winced and drew in a half-breath. Then the weight left his chest.

  The other man was cooing, "Come to Daddy, Darlings. Good girls." He cradled one in each arm and backed toward the darkened doorway.

  "Get out of here. Both of you."

  Ron scrambled up, fled toward the stairs and shooed Pete down to the main entrance, where they both hovered, uncertain.

  The light had bled out of the day and the wind kicked up. The building creaked and groaned.

  Pete shifted from foot to foot. "I guess I should--"

  He turned the knob and the door blew open. Ron leapt to shove it closed.

  "Where are you headed?"

  The boy lifted a bony shoulder.

  "Do you have a ride?"

  The boy snorted.

  "If you help me dig my car out in the morning, I'll drive you home."

  "I can't pay you," said Pete.

  "You can come back sometime, work it off." Ron didn't really expect the boy to return.

  The boy glanced toward the door.

  "I swear I'm not as crazy as it looks."

  "What about him?" Pete nodded toward the stairs.

  "I have no idea," said Ron.

  Ron built up the fire in the ballroom, gave the boy some dry clothes and blankets to sleep in.

  Pete lay awake for a long time, watchful and nervous, but the day had taken its toll. He fell asleep dreaming that he was awake. In the blackest, most silent part of the night, Pete awoke with a start. His father kneeled next to him.

  "Your mom's done a good job with you." Jeff gripped Pete's shoulder, sighed and started to speak. Sighed again. "I need you to do something for me."

  Pete tried to read his shadowed face.

  "I want you to go away from here and never come back,” Jeff said.

  "
Never?"

  "Maybe when you're older. But for now...you have to trust me.”

  "I want to sleep now," said Pete, turned his back to his father and held back his tears until Jeff's footsteps finally creaked away.

  "We have to talk," said Ron to the empty hallway the next day.

  He had returned Pete to his grateful mother, a tense little woman with too many questions and no time for answers.

  "Jeff?" It felt wrong that Ron's apparition should have a name. Especially such an ordinary one. But he did have a name. And a son, even.

  Ron rapped his knuckle gently against the splintered door jamb. The door creaked slightly ajar.

  "I'm coming in," he said, and gave the door a nudge.

  Gloomy light leaked into the room from the hall. As Ron's eyes adjusted, a ragged heap in the corner came into view.

  "Jeff?"

  Ron fumbled a cigarette lighter from his breast pocket and examined the room in its flickering light. He had been correct after all. It was some sort of closet. And in the corner, a heap of rags, twigs, watery glints of shit: a pack rat midden. Ron shuddered. The lighter scorched his thumb. He flinched and the flame went out.

  Ten minutes later, he came back with a flashlight. From the midden he plucked a Cross pen he'd thought long lost, an earring, a fork coated in urine. He tossed the fork back.

  For days, Ron wandered the hotel, searching for more hidden rooms, looking for signs of Jeff Davis and his rats, doubting his own sanity, wondering, yet again, whether he'd made a huge mistake. He'd sunk most of his trust fund into the place. And for what? It was nowhere near finished. There were still boarded up windows and leaks in the roof, and no electricity. But he was in too deep to quit.

  Repeatedly, he found himself standing in the sour-smelling rat room, pacing around with his flashlight, looking over the rat nest, the one wooden chair, the shredded horsehair mattress, hoping they'd tell him some story, that it would all suddenly make sense.

  Where had Jeff gone? It had snowed again and there were no footprints leading into the woods or down the road.

  Ron had stocked up on supplies in Boulder on the day he drove Pete home, so he knew that part had really happened. Here was the fresh pack of Newports in his pocket. Proof. He peeled away the cellophane and poked one between his lips, disgusted with himself.

  Leaning against the wall, he held the cigarette out, watched it glow, let the aroma of tobacco and menthol spread through the stinking room.

  He pushed off the wall to pace some more, and startled when the wood paneling seemed to give way behind him.