To Break a Covenant

by Alison Ames

  LONGIN: Sir—

  NELSON: If I see you starting to mobilize over there, I will arrest you. I will confiscate your footage and your equipment and I will not reimburse you for it, and you will never know how much of a debt you owe me. But if you sneak in, if you go behind my back and you go down there, we will not look for you. I don’t know how to make this clearer to you, son. I won’t risk my people for yours. You going down there, all it will do is wake it up, and then—

  (NELSON shifts. His face comes into frame and he looks at the camera.)

  NELSON: Are you still filming? What the fuck—

  (NELSON lunges for the camera. The picture swings, a scuffling sound, darkness.)

  SIX

  It was Saturday morning. The four of us hadn’t spent more than a day apart in the two weeks since Piper moved to town. We were sprawled on the floor of Piper’s living room eating cereal, half watching some animated show about a raccoon.

  “Why is the keyboard magic?” Piper asked through a mouthful of cornflakes. Nina made a muffled sound, i-unno, as she chewed. Lisey was braiding Nina’s hair, unbraiding, rebraiding. She kept taking locks about an inch wide and pulling gently, all the way from root to tip, her long pale fingers disappearing into the bright henna-red mass. It gave me shivers to watch. The only time I ever wished my hair was longer was when Lisey was doing Nina’s hair, that gentle pulling, like following a thread. I mashed my cereal down, waiting for it to get soggy. Nina swallowed and kicked me in the ankle.

  “That’s so gross,” she said. “Just eat it.”

  “The marshmallows get fluffy if you leave it alone,” I said. This was an argument we’d had before, and it was more a comforting ritual than an actual debate.

  “Slimy,” she corrected. “They get slimy.”

  “I say potato …” Lisey singsonged, twirling a strand of Nina’s hair.

  The sound of the front door jangling open made us all look up.

  “Hi, girls,” Carlisle said, setting down a battered leather bag. “Happy Saturday.”

  “Hi, Carlisle,” we replied, already returning our focus to the television.

  “Hi, Dad.” Piper got to her feet. “What’s up, is the mine collapsing?”

  He laughed. “Not yet.”

  “Do you know why the town council thinks it’s going to?” Nina turned around to look at him. Lisey started running her hands through her own hair, looking for split ends.

  “I think they’re just trying to be safe,” he said. “The fact that the fire’s still not out means those seams of coal go pretty deep into the ground, so the possibility of the earth shifting isn’t out of the question.”

  “Creepy,” Piper said.

  Carlisle waggled a hand, kind of. “It’s less about immediate danger, really more a question of next steps,” he said. “Filling it in, reinforcing the tunnels, things like that. They want me to recommend some different approaches.”

  “Is there a way to tell, like, how much coal is left?” Nina asked. “Like, how much longer the fire will burn?”

  “Not without excavating it. Just have to keep checking every so often.”

  “Hmm,” Piper said. “Weird.”

  He looked around at all of us then, taking in the rumpled pajamas, the tangled hair. “Big plans today?”

  “Nah,” said Nina. “This, probably. Maybe go to the pool.”

  “Do you girls want to go down into the mine with me? I only came home to replace the batteries in the probes. I have to go back as soon as they’re charged, but if you don’t have anything to do, I don’t know, it might be fun.” He spread his hands, shrugged a little bit.

  “Is that allowed?” Piper asked. “I thought the whole thing was—”

  “Yeah, it’s super illegal,” Nina said. “The sheriff is really intense about it.”

  “Well, you’d be with me, and it’s an educational outing,” Carlisle said. “But also, I won’t tell if you won’t.” He grinned, his expression almost heartbreakingly eager.

  Nina and I looked at each other. None of us had ever been into the mine. Lisey had walked there in her sleep as a toddler and almost fallen in, so she was vehemently opposed to going anywhere near it. She was avoiding eye contact right now, keeping her face turned toward the floor. I could see her hands shake as she pulled them through her hair.

  We stared at each other for a beat too long, and Carlisle started to say, “Never mind—”

  “Sure, Dad. That would be cool.” Piper flicked a look at each of us in turn. She wanted to go, it was clear, but she also didn’t know the things we knew. Nina and I both looked at Lisey. After a long moment I saw her chin dip in the tiniest nod.

  “Yeah,” I said, still watching her. “Cool.”

  We retreated to Piper’s room to get dressed. Every time I saw it, the room looked a little more like her. She didn’t decorate much because she didn’t know how long she’d be in Moon Basin, but little by little she was claiming the space. There were pictures of her old cheerleading squad tucked into the edge of her mirror, and there was a sewing kit on her bed I’d never seen before. It looked like she was hemming fabric for curtains. It made me happy; I wanted her to settle in. I wanted her to stay.

  “Can we wear flip-flops?” Nina yelled down the stairs, holding hers to her chest.

  “Absolutely not,” Carlisle yelled back.

  “Ugh,” she muttered, pulling a pair of battered sneakers out of her bag. “Too hot for these.”

  “Well, you don’t want to fall in,” I said, half paying attention. I was watching Lisey, trying to gauge her mood. She still hadn’t spoken.

  “Fall in,” Nina said. “We’re going in. On purpose.”

  “Yeah, but we’re climbing in,” I reminded her. “Not slipping off the ladder halfway down and breaking our ankles.”

  “Ugh,” she said again, twisting her hair up on top of her head.

  “I can’t believe you guys have never been down there.” Piper handed her a hair tie.

  “Well, we—” I glanced at Lisey, unsure if she was willing to share.

  “I walked there in my sleep when I was really little,” Lisey said. “Almost fell in.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. It was like a magnet pulled me there. My mom ran halfway across town with no shoes on and she barely caught me.”

  “That is … creepy as hell,” Piper said.

  “The whole thing is creepy,” I said. “I know we didn’t tell you a whole lot about it, but it’s … not totally safe to be down there. Not just from, like, a physical standpoint, but sort of a mental one. I mean, people think it’s haunted for a reason.”

  “Well, let’s not get carried away—” Nina started.

  “The sheriff doesn’t even let the ghost hunters go down there anymore,” I said. “The last crew that went in got really messed up.” I thought about the scars on my mother’s wrists. “People just react to it … strangely.”

  “God, are you sure you want to do this?” Piper’s brow creased with concern as she looked from me to Lisey. “I didn’t realize you had, like, history with it—”

  “Yeah,” Lisey said. A small, brave smile crossed her face. “We’re together. It’ll be fine.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “Remember, you’re not allowed to talk to anything down there,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “No ghost friends.”

  Nina pursed her lips. “If you start making ghost friends, Lise, I’m leaving you in there. ‘Cask of Amontillado’ style.”

  Lisey crossed her eyes. “Seal me in,” she croaked in a deep, ominous voice. “The ghosts will keep me company and we will drink all the Amontillado, which I’m pretty sure is wine …” She reached for Nina, warbling in the back of her throat. “You will hear us in the night….”

  Nina threw one of the flip-flops at her.

  Piper bumped a drawer shut with her hip and leaned against the dresser. “So you guys really believe the stuff people say about this place? In ghosts and shit?”

  “Y
es,” Lisey said, at the same exact time that Nina said, “No.”

  All three of them looked at me.

  “Yes and no,” I said.

  Piper snorted. “Very diplomatic.”

  “I believe in what I can see and touch.” Nina tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear and folded her arms. “I know that’s unpopular around here, but there it is.”

  “I believe what I feel,” Lisey said.

  “I … don’t know what I believe.” I tugged at the hem of my shirt. “I definitely believe in something, though. I don’t think Moon Basin is the same as other towns.”

  “What does your dad think?” Lisey asked. “He’s the only one who’s been down in the mine in years. Has he seen anything?”

  Piper laughed. “He definitely doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Still, though.” Lisey leaned toward her. “He hasn’t even heard anything or felt anything?”

  Piper looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Should he have?”

  Lisey blushed. “No, I don’t—I just mean—I think most of the people that have ever gone down there have experienced something. So I just wondered.”

  “Well, he’s probably not ‘open to it’ the way you are.” Piper grinned as she lilted along the words. “I think the whole being-a-scientist thing keeps him on this side of reality.”

  “Rude,” Lisey said. “It’s not my fault I was conceived at Burning Man.”

  “Guys!” Carlisle yelled up the stairs. “It’s not a fashion show! Let’s roll!”

  We drove out to Old Town. Carlisle’s equipment rattled around in the trunk. Piper sat up front, fiddling with the radio dial as the signal faded out. Nothing really worked under the heaviest parts of the ashfall. Cecil was on, reading horoscopes, but his voice flickered and then died altogether as we navigated into the grayness of the old Basin. I fiddled with the door lock, popping the little stick in and out of the window ledge. I couldn’t tell what I was feeling. The blue leached out of the sky as I watched, my head tipped back, and after a few more minutes Carlisle stopped the car.

  I opened the door and immediately a wave of humidity rolled in, slicking my skin in sweat. We followed Carlisle into the fog, all of us in a scraggly line behind him. My shirt stuck to my back, and I wished for the air-conditioned vacuum of Piper’s living room. We trudged forward, all silently regretting coming, and then Carlisle threw out an arm. There, in the ground in front of him, was a tiny orange flag on a wire.

  “It always sneaks up on me,” he said with a laugh.

  He unsnapped the helmet from its place on his belt, put it on his head, and flicked on the light mounted in front.

  “There are stairs cut into the walls.” He pointed the beam into the hole in the ground. Ash floated in the light like dust motes, twirling lazily. He knelt on the ground, then backed his feet over the edge, climbing down until only his torso was visible.

  “There are thirty steps,” he continued, looking at each of us in turn. “Wait until I’m all the way down before the next one of you goes.”

  We stood there looking at each other, listening to Carlisle’s footsteps echo up to us. It was very quiet in Old Town. No birds, no wildlife, no traffic. Nothing to create the sounds of life you’re so used to hearing that you only notice their absence. When Carlisle called up out of the mine the sound was flat and muffled, like a handclap in a dark room.

  “Come on down!”

  Piper shrugged and wriggled over the edge of the hole. Nina and Lisey and I watched her get swallowed into the dark mouth of the tunnel, and a few minutes later her voice floated up.

  “Clear!”

  Lisey went down then, eyes big as she disappeared from view, and then Nina. Then it was my turn.

  I climbed down into the mine. The daylight faded almost immediately, like a curtain dropping as soon as my head got below the lip of the tunnel. I counted as I descended, keeping my eyes turned up toward the dwindling light above me. I pressed myself hard into the wall, nails scratching into the dirt, toes reaching for each step, brushing against the wall every time I extended a foot.

  I was about halfway down when I realized the light was gone altogether, and immediately I felt a needling panic in the base of my skull. The walls of the mine shaft began to close in around me, pressing against my back, squeezing the air from my lungs. I took small, shallow breaths, flattening myself against the warm earth as I tried to push myself down faster, and I was gasping by the time my searching foot met the floor of the mine. My knees buckled as I released my death grip on the wall and I stumbled. Nina touched my arm, her face questioning. I smiled weakly at her, nodded, tried to slow my heart rate. Carlisle clapped his hands.

  “Here we go.” He handed Piper a massive flashlight. “Stay close. The tunnels branch out.”

  I had thought the light was gone when I was still on the ladder, the dark, small space sucking the air out of me, but as I looked around me I almost wanted to climb back up. The bottom of the mine was so much worse, so much hungrier. The darkness was penetrating, alive, and utterly opaque. The flashlight beams only reached about three feet in front of us, ash swirling and clouding the air. Recognition shivered through me. It felt like town during a new moon. I thought about coyotes dragging dead men up out of these tunnels.

  We moved forward slowly into the mine along the main tunnel. It curved out and back, and the darkness seemed to be crawling toward us, swallowing our advancing light. The ground was flat, mostly, and as we moved, my fear settled a little. It was swelteringly hot. Beads of sweat crawled down my face, trickling onto my neck, and I swiped my arm over my forehead, trying to keep my eyes clear. Ash smudged along my skin, sticking to the dampness. I could see electric lights, or something that looked like electric lights, up in the ceiling where wooden beams ran across in an arch to hold the shaft up.

  “Why aren’t the lights on?” I asked.

  “No way to light ‘em,” Carlisle called over his shoulder. He reached up to the ceiling, stabbed a small, thin metal sliver up into the earth, and moved forward, looking at the flat black device in his hand.

  “Okay, so what are you doing?” Piper asked. She trotted up alongside him in the dim light.

  “So these are probes that measure the PSI of the earth.” Carlisle handed her a metal spike. “Basically, as long as they stay consistent, we’re in good shape. It’s when the pressure starts to drop that we have to be concerned, because that could mean that the earth is collapsing somewhere else, causing the rest to spread out….”

  Lisey paced herself back next to me, letting Piper and her dad get a little farther ahead. “It feels bad down here,” she said under her breath. “Like it’s hungry.”

  It was true. There was all around us a sense of wanting, of craving. I felt like I did when Danny Nelson and his minions leered at us from across the street. Slightly nauseous, ashamed, afraid I was somehow responsible. Part of me wanted to press my body flat against the earth and see what happened, but the other part—the underneath part, the animal part—said the ground was soft and fragile, like rotting cloth, and couldn’t be trusted.

  “I feel like it can see us,” I said, trying to keep my voice as quiet as possible.

  “What can?”

  I almost shrieked as Nina’s face appeared just inches from ours. “Jesus, Neen!” I hissed. “Don’t sneak!”

  “Are you anthropomorphizing inanimate objects again?” she asked, walking backward so she could face us. Lisey sped up and ducked past her to Carlisle and Piper. Nina looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I gave her my best I don’t know shrug and she frowned, but she dropped it. She turned back around and called out, “Where are we, Mr. Wharton? In relation to town?”

  “Under the edge of the graveyard,” he said, squinting at the little device in his hand. He dug in a pocket of his bag with the other hand. “Here.”

  Nina took the tattered piece of paper from him and opened it to reveal a crude, hand-drawn map of the Basin. Scrawled across it were wide, nonsensical loops
and whorls, dead ends and sharp turns.

  “The mine?” I asked, taking it from her. The lines seemed strange, unbalanced, but I didn’t know how to dig a coal mine. Maybe you followed the coal, and maybe sometimes the coal went in—I peered closer—something that really, really looked like a perfect spiral.

  “I didn’t realize any of the tunnels were under the graveyard,” I said, an inexplicable shudder working through me. “Uck.”

  Nina shot me a look. “You love that cemetery.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t like knowing the mine is underneath it.”

  Piper called to her dad, who had moved ahead of us while we looked at the map. “Why don’t you just tell them to fill it in?”

  “It could make things worse,” Carlisle said. “There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and as you would say, cub, it’s wicked expensive.”

  She laughed. “So what is the plan, then?”

  “That I haven’t decided.” He looked at us over his shoulder and winked. “Obviously, I’m very glad to have this job, but most towns like this, people leave. Actually leave, not just move a few miles over. There’s not a lot of precedent for a project like this.”

  The tunnel widened into a larger clearing—not much larger, though. There was room enough for us to squeeze in and still be able to move around a little bit. Carlisle clamped a pair of headphones over his ears and started waving another flat black box around.

  “What’s he doing now?” Nina asked.

  “EMF readings?” Lisey guessed. “For ghosts?”

  Carlisle saw us looking at the box and held it up so we could see. “Fancy metal detector,” he almost yelled. “Large deposits of metal could cause problems later!”

  He stopped a few feet away from us, peering at his tablet. The little room got smaller and hotter every time I took a breath. I backed away, and my foot caught on something that rattled. I crouched, eyes on Carlisle, hand extended behind me, until my fingertips brushed over one of the little metal probes. I closed my hand around it and straightened back up, squeezing the point of it into my palm. As I focused on the way it felt in my hand, my breathing slowed. The jagged edges of my brain started to think about smoothing themselves out. I turned my attention back to Carlisle.