Down the Throat of the Mountain

by Jennifer Erickson

  Great, he thought, more structural issues, as if he didn't have enough problems. But when he stepped back, the wall stood as it always had, mocking him. When had he last eaten? He needed to start taking care of himself.

  He prodded the paneling, here and there. And just when he decided it was sound after all, it gave way with a groan.

  "Aaaw, craaap," it seemed to say.

  A section of the wall swung inward like a door, and behind it a stone staircase barely as wide as Ron's shoulders spiraled downward into the mountainside.

  Ron tossed his cigarette on the floorboards, scuffed it with his toe, flicked on his flashlight and ducked in.

  At the bottom, a rough tunnel dead-ended at a short flight of steps and a trap-door in the ceiling.

  A rusted lever and spring contraption on the wall invited Ron to pull, and the trap door squeaked open. A puff of dirt poured down. Rubbing his eyes, he scrambled upward and out.

  He recognized the room immediately. It was the cave chamber they called the Crypt, where Margaret had found a human skull.

  "Are you one of them or one of us?" croaked a voice from the other side of the Crypt.

  Ron jumped. His flashlight beam bounced around until it found Jeff, crumpled on the floor. Two sets of eyes glowed from nearby.

  Jeff was even more diminished than before. And Ron wasn't a good judge of pack rats, but they did seem less frisky. The man croaked and mumbled, huddled on a rumpled blanket in a sea of Twinkie wrappers and empty Fresca cans. So that's what had happened to Ron's groceries.

  "One of us?" Ron guessed, preparing for a hasty retreat. "You can come back, you know. I won't hurt, ah, Luster's babies."

  "You killed Luster," said Jeff.

  Ron racked his brain. "The rat?"

  "You're a murderer."

  "Yes. I'm sorry. Luster was your pet?"

  "Pet?" Jeff huffed. "Pet?"

  "I'm sorry," Ron murmured.

  Something clunked and Ron spun around. The trapdoor had completely vanished. If he hadn't just come through it himself, he wouldn't know it existed.

  Panic threatened as he played his flashlight over the rubble of the cave floor. The vault door was locked from the outside, and the key was back in Ron's room, wedged in a crack under the window sill. Please let him not be locked in here with this...ghost! Ron scuffed the ground with his toe until he kicked a softball-sized rock that didn't budge. Squatting down, he heaved on it and the trapdoor hinged open again.

  He fled back up the hidden staircase.

  Ron drove down to Boulder and loaded up with Twinkies and Fresca and handfuls of batteries, then consulted with the teenaged clerk in the pet store about the care and feeding of rats. He bought four ten-pound bags of rat pellets. She recommended something called a "habitat", shaped like a choo-choo train with an exercise wheel and plastic tubes to scurry through. It was, he explained, too small for these rats.

  He hauled a paper sack of stuff down the secret passage, sprang the door open, plopped a six-pack of Fresca and a Twinkie by the open trapdoor, then strewed a trail of Twinkies and rat pellets through the tunnel, up the stairs and into the room with the rat’s nest. He propped open the hidden door and waited.

  The rats showed up almost immediately. Two days later, Jeff followed.

  "You stole my Golden Bear, didn't you?" Ron said to him later that week, when he surprised Jeff rummaging through his cooler.

  "Your bear? It's not your bear!" Jeff scoffed.

  Jeff was acting normal, which put Ron even more on edge, for some reason. "Look, this is my property," Ron said, "and I don't want you haunting the place."

  "But I was here first."

  "I can set you up someplace else. There are other abandoned buildings in town. Why does it have to be this one?"

  "You know why."

  The two men locked eyes. Finally, Ron couldn't stand it any more.

  "You want me to call the cops?"

  Jeff snickered, jerked his head up and to the side like he'd been shocked.

  Ron drew back.

  "I know what happened that day," said Jeff.

  Ron's heart hiccupped. "Which day?" he breathed, needing, but not wanting to know.

  The other man actually smiled, a gap-toothed smile, like they shared a secret.

  Of course, there was only one day that mattered: Christmas, just a few months before.

  "I was there," said Jeff.

  Ron's mind ran in circles. It was impossible, wasn't it? But then, lately it seemed that almost anything could happen.

  "I could have bashed your head in, the way you did to Luster and to your friend."

  "Why didn't you, then?”

  Jeff seemed at a loss. "I want you to apologize."

  "You think an apology will help?"

  Jeff shrugged.

  Ron leapt for Rich's old tool box, threw it open, brandished the carpenter's hammer he'd used to break down Jeff's door. He shoved the hammer in Jeff's face. Jeff cringed.

  "Take it!" Ron shook the hammer at Jeff.

  Jeff hesitated, then curled his fingers around the handle.

  Ron dropped to his knees in front of Jeff. "Do it, goddammit!” Ron craned up at him. “What are you waiting for? Just fucking kill me and get it over with. You'd be doing me a fucking favor!" Ron waited, and waited.

  "That's why," said Jeff, at last.

  "What?"

  "That's why I won't do it."

  Chapter 33

  Sometimes, when Jeff spoke to other people (which wasn't often), he didn't speak the truth. It wasn't exactly lying. It was more like the truth was too complicated to be boxed in by words.

  So when Jeff had refused to kill Ron because he wanted Ron to suffer, that was true, in a way, for a time.

  And then time unspooled, and Jeff watched Ron and realized that Ron had punished himself enough. And Luster the pack rat was as one with the world now. Maybe she was in a better place. So there was no sense in holding a grudge about that.

  Plus, Ron had built a wall to block off the strange heart of the cave, the place Margaret had called the Chamber of Wonders. At first, Jeff had been outraged. But eventually he realized that the wall protected them both.

  After all, Jeff had found himself there once and been swept away, and when he came back to himself he was so hungry and so thirsty that he could barely stand, and he felt like he had seen all of creation and the history of the world in one very long and complicated Technicolor movie.

  Since then, he'd spent days and months trying to return. Searching, searching for this thing he did not want to find, like a salmon swimming upstream to die.

  Once you went down the throat of the mountain, you could never be the same.

  So, one morning months after the girl had left and Ron stopped badgering Jeff to leave, Jeff added his own deterrent. Not a wall, but a sign.

  He painted the ghosts that escaped through the gap around the vault door. Ghosts that moved with the convolutions of the rock and the sweep of a flashlight's beam. They were a warning for the benefit of those who could not see what Jeff saw.

  He finished his painting just before dawn and left the paint cans by Ron's door as a hint. Then he hid and watched.

  When Ron stumbled, bleary-eyed, out of his room behind the bar, he nearly knocked over the paint cans.

  Jeff slipped deeper into the shadows as Ron scanned the ballroom. When Jeff peeked again, Ron had gone to investigate. Good.

  Jeff strolled into Ron's room looking for something clean to wear, and for some reason the bathrobe hanging from a nail on the back of the door called to him. It was a manly brown color, practical because it wouldn't show the dirt. It was also an appealing combination of cuddly and dashing.

  He stripped off his paint-splattered sweater and left it lying on the bed. Slipping the robe over his shoulders, he backed up to admire himself in the tiny square of mirror above the dresser.

  Pretty good. He stood taller. The robe lent him a kind of authority he hadn't felt with the baggy old sw
eater. While Jeff was rummaging in Ron's top drawer for clean underwear, Ron careened into the room, wild-eyed and panting.

  He skidded to a stop and looked Jeff over. Jeff stuffed a pair of wadded-up underwear into the robe's roomy pocket.

  Ron seemed at a loss for words.

  "I like your wall," said Jeff, and waited.

  "I like your painting," Ron said at last. "It captures the spirit of the place."

  That was the beginning of Jeff and Ron's uneasy truce, which evolved into a business partnership, and if not a friendship, a cautious kind of respect.

  Ron never did get his robe back.

  Chapter 34

  Forty years later, in November of 2013, Ron and Margaret stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor of Long Shot, Inc. and were greeted by Crystal the receptionist, pink message slips in hand.

  Margaret snatched hers from Crystal's thin fingers as she steamed past. Ron took his, darting Crystal a quizzical look. She wasn't usually so eager for them to get their messages.

  Ron glanced down and scanned the note, then looked up to see Margaret, frozen in mid-step. All color had drained from her face. Her trembling lips clamped together.

  Crystal said, "I thought maybe you'd want to know right away, if Joe was a good friend of yours."

  Joe, whose mind had run away on that horrible Christmas day, so long ago, was dead.

  "Margaret, I'm so sorry," said Ron.

  "I'm not sorry," Margaret blurted. "I'm…" She let out a shaky breath.

  Ron could see the pain under the careful mask. The set of her mouth. The tightness at the corners of her eyes. And it stabbed him in the heart.

  It was still Joe. It had always been Joe.

  "Maybe," Ron said as gently as he could, "he'll be free now." Maybe Margaret could finally let him go, he thought.

  Chapter 35

  Andrea leaned on the corner of Ron's desk a couple of days later.

  "What is up with her?" she fumed.

  "Who?"

  "Your new vice president. She makes me homicidal."

  "Oh, her," Ron chuckled. "She's something, isn't she?"

  Andrea's nostrils compressed. "Oh, Christ, Mom was right."

  "What does your mother have to do with this?"

  "You're making a fool of yourself over Margaret Gundy."

  "It's not like that, Andrea. We're old friends. She understands the business. Bringing her in was a smart business move, that's all."

  Andrea rolled her eyes, rounded on him again. "Margaret seems to think there's something you're not telling me about the cave."

  "You already know all you need to know," he said.

  "About what? About the ethylene?"

  "Mm-hmm." He avoided her eye.

  Andrea studied him. "So if it's not that, what is it? Radon? A dragon?" She snorted.

  He blew out a breath between his teeth, acknowledged her joke with a half-hearted smile.

  "It’s like you trust everyone but me, Dad. You’ve got Roxy working with the Oracle, and now Janie--"

  Janie stuck her head through the door and knocked. "Oops. Sorry. It's just that I have a question about exactly what some of these terms mean on the spreadsheet. Like, what's this C2H4?"

  Andrea rolled her eyes.

  Ron stood and waved Janie in, smiled indulgently at Andrea. "We'll talk about this later."

  Face stony, Andrea brushed past Janie and flicked the door closed.

  Janie spent the week trying to wrap her mind around the Trends statistics. She revised all of her errors and pestered Ron with questions. She worked up a series of color-coded graphs. Gradually, patterns emerged, but Janie didn't trust her own work, so she put her pretty graphs in a drawer and started over. With winter coming, cold air swirled over her cubicle wall. She took to wearing a ski hat at the office. Word had gotten out that she was the new VP's niece. Even Jeff, the erstwhile Oracle, called her "Sparky Junior" one day as she passed him on the portico.

  "Don't call me that," she snapped.

  "What's your auntie's plan for you, Junior?" he shouted after her.

  Ron had explained to her what the column headings stood for. C2H4, for example, was ethylene. According to Wikipedia, ethylene was both explosive and psychoactive, which explained some things.

  By the second week of November, Janie started to worry. The ethylene levels were rising and seismic activity, well, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to be on the upswing. And it wasn't just the data that made her worry. That little itch in her temple was back. Did she believe all that gobbledygook about experiencing the undifferentiated world and seeing through the illusion of time? Not really. After all, Ron and Aunt M were freaks. But something was happening. Janie could feel it.

  "Ron's at the holiday craft fair in Lakewood," said Crystal when Janie arrived at the fifth floor with her charts and spreadsheets. "He and his wife Nancy make candles," she added helpfully. "They're very artistic."

  "What about my aunt, Mrs. Gundy?"

  Crystal's eyebrows drew together and she tipped her head in sympathy. "I thought she was around earlier but nobody seems to know--"

  Janie nibbled on her lip. "Andrea?"

  Crystal shook her head. “I don’t think you want to talk to her right now.”

  On the steps of Long Shot, Inc. the next morning, Jeff wore long underwear under his bathrobe. He leaned toward Janie and hissed, "You're in over your head and you're going to wreck it for all of us."

  Janie stopped dead and stared at him. That was exactly her greatest fear. Then Roxy caught Janie's arm and dragged her into the building.

  "Ignore him. By the way, your car is fixed. Charlie finished a couple of days ago, actually. I just forgot."

  All morning, the building seemed to buzz. Janie dialed Crystal's extension. No one answered. She left a message reminding Crystal that she needed to talk to Ron. Then, she waited.

  Now that she had decided to tell Ron her results, she could think of nothing else. She stared, unseeing, at her computer monitor. Eventually, she dozed on the keyboard.

  From deep in the bowels of the building, Janie heard a muffled yell. Later, a door slammed on the floor above her and the ceiling creaked with running footsteps.

  She heaved herself out of her desk chair and peeked into the ballroom. All was quiet. Then she took herself over to the window, from where she could see the parking lot and a swath of Main Street. It all looked as usual.

  The elevator slid open on her floor and footsteps approached. Janie didn't even try to pretend she was working. She turned from the window just as Pete reached her doorway.

  "Let's go," he said.

  Janie drifted toward him, lightheaded.

  "It's five o'clock already?" she asked, as she veered back to her cubicle for her jacket and purse.

  "No."

  He was beside her immediately, yanking her jacket and purse out of the file cabinet.

  Janie tagged along, wondering in an abstract way why they were leaving. The elevator glided up instead of down, squeaked open on Ron Essing's floor, where Crystal welcomed them with a beatific smile. Pete punched the button and the doors juttered closed in her face.

  Pete mumbled, "Should have taken the damned stairs."

  They stopped again on the third floor, where Andrea forced her way on, white-faced, followed by Roxy, who bounced and giggled with excitement.

  "It's like a thunderstorm!" Roxy said.

  “Shut up,” said Andrea.

  Janie didn't think to ask what Roxy had meant until after Pete shoved her out of the elevator in the lobby, propelled her out the door and down the worn sandstone steps.

  They got into the Explorer. Pete pulled carefully out of the lot.

  A mile down the road, he stopped at a gravel pull-out and slumped over the wheel.

  "What just happened?" Janie asked.

  Pete groaned and sat up. He lolled back in his seat, eyes closed. "A surge. Cave energy."

  "I should have known."

  "That's the thing," he said.
"You never do really know at the time. It's only afterward."

  "How did you know, then?"

  He shrugged. "I've been doing this for a long time."

  "Shouldn't we call the police or the fire department or something?"

  "No."

  "But it seems like--"

  "We just don't do that."

  After a while, he sat forward and pulled out onto the county highway.

  A horn blared and a shiny sedan swerved around them.

  "Fuck! I mean, effing hell! Sorry."

  "I was supposed to know," she said in a small voice. "It's my job."

  He glanced over at her as he drove. If he was surprised, he didn't show it. "You just save your energy for the big one."

  The next morning, a notice taped to the door announced that Long Shot, Inc. was closed due to "unforeseen circumstances". Broken windows marred the crumbling facade, and file folders and papers were strewn across the front steps.

  Guilt. Shame. Worry. And a little voice in her head trying to silence them all with platitudes. Janie wondered if everyone was okay. Should she call Aunt M to check on her? To apologize? Pete and Janie crossed to the casino, where a group of employees had gathered around the bar for the Irish coffee special. Conversation paused when Pete and Janie approached, but Pete didn't seem to notice.

  At the fringe of the group, a man turned. "Are you happy?" he said. The rest of them averted their eyes. "Now that we're all out of work?"

  Face red, Pete turned and strode out.

  Janie lingered, searching for a clever retort. Settled for: "I think it's actually closed because of the energy surge yesterday, not because of Pete's complaint."

  Then she trotted after Pete.

  "Why don't you just effing butt out?" he snapped.

  "Fine. I'm sorry."

  He sped up. She was losing ground.

  "Pete, wait up! Where are we going?"

  He whirled around. "There's no 'we'! I'm not your effing father. Didn't you say your car is fixed? Why are you still following me around?"

  Janie reeled. So it was back to this again? After all they'd been through, Janie had thought they understood each other. Apparently, she'd been fooling herself. She was just a pain in his ass.

  Pete marched off. Alone on the sidewalk, Janie wondered: had everyone in the casino bar seen them argue?

  Should she wait for Pete to calm down, walk off his snit and circle around to the Explorer?

  Or should she just grow up?