Worse Angels

by Laird Barron

  “Pruitt’s body was discovered at the bottom of this shaft within hours of the fall. He drove here in a jeep.” I indicated a spot near the berm. “Security and other personnel had access to a fleet. What brought him this far? He could’ve jumped into any of the other shafts. What was special about this one?”

  “You’re latched on to the idea he killed himself,” Lionel said.

  “Can’t uncover a solid reason for him to be out here in the weeds. Wasn’t part of his task assignment. I’m not latched on to anything, though.”

  “Good. This is also a cozy spot for a murder, which could be the reason he was here.” He leaned over and spat. “Nothing down there. Bottomless.”

  “It’s not bottomless. It’s maybe a hundred and eighty or ninety feet. And behold, a ladder.”

  “Yeah, I see that shitty ladder.” He put his hat back on. “There’s a diamond mine in eastern Siberia. Open pit, over three thousand feet in diameter. Enormous, gaping wound; a borehole to hell. The mineshaft creates its own weather system. Choppers won’t fly over the pit. The vortex will suck ’em in.”

  “Hate to ponder how they made that discovery,” I said. “Although it sounds apocryphal.”

  “Reporting the news, bud.” He watched as I tightened the Velcro head strap of my miner’s lamp. “Wait. What are you doing? Your fat ass is definitely not climbing onto that ladder.”

  I clicked the headlamp on and off. Its halogen bulb wasn’t as bright as the sun. Close, though.

  “Kicked pasta last month.” I patted my gut. “Lost a pound, easy. Now to reap the benefits.”

  “Turn around; you’ll find it again. Coleridge . . .”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “Weren’t you the one who said that the cops and CSI already picked the crime scene over? Multiply futility by four years and you get one hundred percent futility.”

  “If there wasn’t a ladder, I’d cede the field to your pessimism.”

  “But there’s a ladder.”

  “You call it a ladder; I call it a sign. Have you ever walked around a supercollider track? Sean P was so enthralled with the notion, he had it inked on his arm.”

  “Right on,” he said. “The dead guy was a nerd. Nerds and their science fiction tats.”

  “You were standing there when Herzog said he thought this place might be the new Area 51. Your girlfriends at the bar gave you valuable intel. Suspicious nocturnal activity, the ladies said. Sounds like a clue.”

  “Sounds like an excuse for you to play Frank Hardy. Difference between today and last night is that I’m relatively sober. People worried that the Hadron Collider would tear open a black hole, or create a parallel universe. Paranoid delusions are the jelly in the PB and J sandwich.”

  “Told you before, I’m not a Hardy. I’m Jonny Quest. I’ve never, ever gone caving. What red-blooded private eye would ignore this golden opportunity to go spelunking?”

  “One who isn’t a big fucking dummy?” he said.

  “We only come in fun-size.”

  “Mandibole wouldn’t like it.”

  “We crossed that line in the sand a few dunes ago.”

  The goal wasn’t to uncover an overlooked clue, although with the crackling aura of kismet, it wouldn’t have shocked me to discover a new puzzle piece. This expedition spoke to my identity as a hunter and a man. Once I got going, there was no return until I’d exhausted every lead, turned over every rock, and followed every trail to a dead end. In the Outfit days, I hadn’t possessed the luxury of returning to my bosses empty-handed. The mob levies an exponential penalty for repeated failure, so I did my damnedest to succeed and success generally aligned with perseverance. The habit was ingrained to the bone. Sean Pruitt’s wedding band represented the Rubicon. Odds were, I’d find nothing down there except an abandoned tunnel. I had to go see for myself.

  I unrolled a bandanna and fashioned it into a mask to cover my nose and mouth like a stagecoach robber. No sense eating any more flakes of rust or grit than necessary.

  “Allow me to log my objection, for the record,” he said.

  If I’d spoken on the record, I would’ve copped to being terrified at the prospect of leaving the sunlit world behind on what amounted to a double-dog dare issued by the angel on my left shoulder. He’d been damned pushy of late.

  “Duly noted. Any patrols or the cops happen along, tell them we’re conducting a safety inspection. Should charm fail, casually toss a rock down and I’ll double-time it back to the top. Cool?”

  “Uncool,” he said. “Way, way uncool, man.”

  * * *

  ■■■

  Lionel was on the money: The situation was maximally uncool. I arrived at this conclusion sixty or seventy feet into the descent. Darkness, heights, and underground spaces weren’t generally a problem for me. Combine the three, add a sense of urgency into the mix, and that caused me to reassess. The ladder was relatively sturdy, albeit creaky as hell under my not inconsiderable weight. It wrapped around me in a tubular cage. There was a platform at what I estimated to be the halfway point. I rested. The open hatch and sky had shrunk. Lionel clicked twice on the two-way; I responded with two clicks and resumed the descent. The ladder style changed to skinny rungs. An unsettling shimmy accompanied the ominous creaks of protesting metal.

  This was the farthest I recalled ever being underground. Caving isn’t high on my list of recreational activities, nor was it something often required to fulfill mob contracts. Water streamed from cracks in the retaining wall and sluiced into the abyss. I’d read that the shelved Texas supercollider project of the 1990s had flooded the tunnels to stave off inevitable collapse. Optimists crossed their fingers in hopes of resuming work one day.

  I tread carefully, in no hurry. Imagine my chagrin when the mooring bolts snapped loose as I grasped a rung. My weight precipitously transferred to my feet, and that rung snapped. I had a moment to regret a whole bunch of rash life decisions, including the recent one to climb into Shaft 40. I could hear the exasperation in Lionel’s voice as he relayed the bad news to Meg: Welp, what’s another hospital bill on the ol’ pile, right? Of course, it was more likely he’d have to cover his heart with his hat and explain to her the circumstances of my untimely demise and its macabre similarity to Sean Pruitt’s.

  My reflexes are above average, so I managed to flail in a semi-coordinated manner and catch another rung. Sadly, brackets tore free with a ping of unseated bolts and it was slick from dripping water anyway. This time I toppled backward and downward.

  Yes, I screamed. A cartoon caption bubble would’ve spelled Aaaeeeiii!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A sudden drop of three feet can maim or kill. Your spine snaps as easily as that rung had. I fell a solid two stories; farther than twenty feet, but less than thirty. Plenty far to constitute a dangerous, possibly fatal impact against solid ground. Whiro, or Satan, or whoever watches over guys like me, stepped in to save my bacon; I was in a semi-chair position when I landed in a pool of drainage water. The impact stole my air and momentarily stunned me as surely as if I’d gotten slugged in the kidneys with a baseball bat; the shock of cold water shooting up my nose brought me around again. I lightly touched the side of the pit and rebounded to the surface by straightening.

  Water sloshed against the sides of the tunnel as I clambered to my feet. It was much deeper at the center where workers dug a foundational trench for the vacuum tube and guiding magnets. Near the wall, water came to my ankles. I’d been extremely fortunate to have pitched away from the ladder, else I would’ve broken a few bones.

  Soaked and shivering, I bent double and coughed until my lungs were raw. Dull throbbing in my legs and lower back promised a world of pain once the adrenaline subsided. I caught my breath and shined the light around; grateful it survived the ordeal. Weatherproof and water resistant to one hundred and twenty meters. Thank you, German engineering.


  An arched tunnel of exposed rock was shored by girders that curved like a giant’s rib cage; the passage traveled beyond my light. New York State isn’t renowned for seismic activity, yet a recent earthquake had severely damaged the tunnel and its foundations. A fissure cracked through the rock ceiling, split the wall, and disappeared into the hardpack floor beneath the veil of water. More cracks extended in both directions. This explained the dire condition of the ladder. What if it had come unmoored nearer the apex of the shaft? The tunnel had shifted and separated and sections were uneven. Chunks of loose stone jutted like fangs. There was no estimating how far the crevices descended into the earth; I’d have to step lightly or else discover the answer firsthand.

  X marked the spot where Sean Pruitt went splat, to put it indelicately. The ME’s report was ambivalent as to whether he’d fallen down the middle, which meant a jump or a push into the shaft proper, or slipped while climbing the ladder and caromed like a pinball. Unfortunate soul; no mud puddle to save him and it wouldn’t have mattered since he plunged from a much greater height.

  The cell phone was bricked. The two-way made it, more or less, although the connection sounded patchy when Lionel called. He’d heard me scream and was reluctantly prepping to scale the shaft. I described the situation. After some back-and-forth, we agreed he’d roll to Shaft 41 and wait for me make the hike. While we conversed, I unloaded the .357, dried it and the bullets as best as possible with a wrung-out corner of my sleeve, reloaded, and holstered the gun. Somewhere in the middle of that operation, the radio screeched and gave up the ghost. I was on my lonesome. Of course, when a man is carrying his faithful sidearm, a sharp knife, and the image of true love in his heart, he’s never alone.

  * * *

  ■■■

  As I limped northwest toward the rendezvous, my feet and shins ached. I’d bumped against the side of the pool with significantly greater force than I’d reckoned during the initial excitement. The entrance fee to life isn’t steep. The micro-transactions are what eventually kill you.

  I hadn’t gone a dozen steps before I noticed the graffiti. Sprayed on the sloping wall with alternating black-and-white paint. Arrows (singles and clusters), quadrilaterals, trapezoids, crescents, and triangles were plain. Infrequent, slashed into rock, directional. Then frequent, degenerative, and splashed onto girders, the ceiling. Neat trick, that last detail, as the roof vaulted nearly two stories high at its apex. Geometric symbols segued to gibberish symbols and these composed a gibberish language.

  The headlamp brightened, dimmed, brightened in a nauseating cycle. No phone, no radio, a flaky light source, and weird damn graffiti. A bizarre day kept getting stranger, for which I had no one to blame except Isaiah Coleridge. I congratulated myself that at least the symbols weren’t threatening or satanic. Who’d decorated the tunnel? I’d already discounted teenagers and disaffected locals. The scenery changed as I proceeded. Geometric designs and vaguely Nordic runes were superseded by those stickmen I’d seen around town and environs. Stickmen hunting. Stickmen congregating in caves, bowed in worship. Basking in the veneration of the stickmen were variations of the demonic creatures—the prodigious heads with T. rex appendages and gaping jaws—displayed on the Nameless Field mural. These monstrosities squatted beneath black-and-white disks of sun and moon that overlapped like empty Venn diagrams. The sketches were contemporary, yet, as with the other examples I’d witnessed, emanated antiquity. A mind preoccupied with old, old sentiments guided the hand of this artist, or artists.

  Herzog’s theories regarding the site might not be so fantastical.

  Lamenting my inability to snap photos, I vowed to locate and interview Sean Pruitt’s buddies Buckhalter and Thorpe at my earliest convenience. Someone with personal knowledge of the site was damn well going to tell me what the Redlick Group and a cabal of government scientists had had on their minds. Atom-smashing, particle physics, and quantum what-the-fuck-ever aside, the multitude of spooky vibes I’d gotten since day one suggested an agenda quite divorced from pop science. Or any science. It stank of alchemy and the occult, which is to say, black magic hoodoo, and like the rest of the bad ideas of ye olden times, the provincial superstition powering those avenues of human inquiry usually portended trouble for everyone outside the inner circle of trust.

  Strangeness performed a flying trapeze leap to the outright bizarre. I entered a section of improved tunnel that extended for roughly two hundred yards; here a foundation was poured and a metal sheath inserted. Panels, sockets, and a narrow channel that traveled the floor and ceiling waited eternally to be fitted with circuit boards, lighting fixtures, and the main conducting rails of the particle accelerator. I had a glimpse at what might’ve resembled a final working product. The whole tube was painted in swirling patterns and recurring motifs of primitive animism. More thunderbirds and terrible faces; more stickmen and contemporary petroglyphs depicting animals and celestial bodies. Alternating tiger stripes of white and black created a disconcerting optical effect of the tunnel revolving. This mural couldn’t be considered graffiti by any means. Far too sophisticated. Service doors were slotted intermittently, camouflaged by the artwork. I lay my hand flat against one door and swore it thrummed as if transmitting a faint vibration of heavy machinery. The metal tube ended and I stepped down into watery muck and rudely hacked earth.

  I passed equipment wreathed in tarpaulins, stacks of prefabricated wall panels, cement blocks, and pipes. Distant metallic groans interrupted the tomblike atmosphere of the collider track. A seismic shift? Generators kicking in? The groaning morphed into the shrill bellow of a primitive hunting horn, then an air raid klaxon. The ground trembled and its vibration traveled through my bones. The hairs on my body prickled the way they do when you scuff your socks on a carpet. My heart fluttered and I imagined a cartoon version of myself pulsing with an electrical current that caused tiny bright sparks to travel along the contours of my body.

  The headlamp blinked out. I remained stock-still, right hand glued to the wall, enduring waves of vertigo while coming to terms with the idea that I’d gotten myself into a bind.

  * * *

  ■■■

  The chorus of deep-sea rumbling subsided. Silence resumed except for the gurgle and drip of water oozing through rock. I thumbed the headlamp toggle and hoped my eyes would adjust, but nope on either score. Dark as a mine. Dark as the bottom of a sealed supercollider tunnel. I’d possessed the foresight to carry an emergency all-weather penlight as a backup. One of those dense little steel numbers that fits in the palm of your hand. I got the light out of my pocket and was feeling for the on-switch when I heard an odd noise somewhere back the way I’d come. My brain required several moments to reconcile this particular sound with the context of my environment—nearly two hundred feet beneath the surface, alone in the dark. Except not entirely alone. Arrhythmic splashing approached. Someone, or something, was shambling along the tunnel toward my position.

  For a long, horrible second, I didn’t think the penlight would activate. Its ghostly thin beam powered on, feebly. Much better than nothing; still crappy. I aimed it with my left hand and drew the revolver with my right. It’s too embarrassing to catalogue the fevered possibilities my mind conjured as a shadow moved against the backdrop of deeper gloom. Heart rate jacked into the red, pouring sweat, I was a little boy confronted by the absolute certainty monsters lurked under the bed and in the closet.

  Something larger than a dog and shaped like a spider broke into view. I didn’t hesitate to empty the .357. The revolver kicked in my fist, booming in that enclosed space. Bullets sparked as they pinged the lurching thing’s carapace. The object advanced with a herky-jerky, side-slipping gait. No time to reload; I twisted, dove, and skidded behind a pallet of pipes. The dog-spider thing lunged past on segmented legs, off-balance and whipping a pair of spindly, flexible arms that ended in pincers. Its cylindrical body was metal-plated and pocked by bullet holes. Blue and red running lights glo
wed softly on its carriage, vaguely illuminating the blades of a retracted auger. That last detail would’ve been hilariously phallic under other circumstances. This mining machine was an updated, highly modified cousin of the militarized robots that soldiers and SWAT teams sent ahead to perform reconnaissance and defuse bombs. Few carried onboard weapons, although rumors of autonomous killbots abounded. The aggressive style of its approach and those flexible, telescoping arms spelled lethal prototype at the very least. Was the device automated or was it piloted remotely? Excellent questions for future study, assuming I had a future.

  I dropped the gun and the penlight and hefted a six-foot length of heavy steel pipe. To paraphrase Archimedes, give me a mighty enough lever and I’ll roll the earth. I put that theory to the test. The robot wheeled, clunky and slow, and I smashed it with all my muscle and all my weight. The reverberation numbed my wrists and elbows. I felt the shock in my gritted teeth. The robot faltered, listing to its side, jointed legs scrabbling for purchase. I walloped it again, aiming for the dent I’d made near its front end where ports and nodes nested, and, I fervently hoped, a brainbox. I brought that pipe down like fabled John Henry driving a railroad spike. This blow nearly tore my arms out of their sockets. It wasn’t lost on me that John Henry fought a steam engine and died. The robot swayed in caricature of a boxer who’s gotten stung. Adding to the nightmarish atmosphere of struggling in the poorly lit tunnel (the penlight lay under a couple of inches of water, emitting a pallid radiance), an unearthly grinding whir started somewhere in the machine’s innards. Had to be loud, because my ears rang from the gunshots. I would’ve gone for another power swing, but a metal arm interposed, pincers clamped the pipe, and we were locked in a tug-of-war. In a sickening exhibition of brute power, the pipe crimped and flattened under the robot’s clamps. I released, instinctively ducking as the other arm slashed my back and shoulders like an iron-corded bullwhip. I stumbled with the glancing blow, grabbed another length of steel from the pile, and circled counterclockwise, avoiding those threshing arms. My saving grace was the machine’s slow, ungainly pivoting radius, of which I took full advantage. A critical rule to defeating a bigger, stronger opponent is to either target his offensive capabilities, or cripple his mobility. I hammered the nearest leg at a knobby joint and was gratified to see metal bend, then buckle. Circling, hammering, circling. Once I’d severely damaged three of its legs, I stabbed the pipe under the robot and into the ground and lifted with that fulcrum. Budging that floundering, uneven weight proved a daunting task. Famous strongman Eddie Hall suffered a brain bleed after his world record dead lift. That was on my mind, you bet. Eddie Hall was no regular-issue human being. I kept lifting, straightening my knees. The robot swiped at me and missed. It toppled into the trench at the center of the passage and sank, trailing a rush of bubbles and foam. Its red and blue lights shimmered like reflective stones.