by Patrick Lee
“We’re not with the others,” Travis said. “We came over the ridge on foot to avoid them.”
She didn’t buy it.
“Get out,” she said. “And if your friends are supposed to be fixing whatever’s wrong inside that mine, tell them to stop screwing around and do it.”
“Mine?” Paige said. She looked at Travis, then Bethany. Each shared her bafflement.
For the first time since they’d come back in, Jeannie’s anger slipped. She glanced from one of them to the next, reading their reactions.
Travis advanced and rested his hands on the back of the stool he’d sat on earlier. He met Jeannie’s eyes and didn’t blink.
“We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”
She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”
“And what time was President Garner killed?”
She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.
“This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”
For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.
Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.
Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the way stories do when they’re made up.”
“Tell them about the ghost,” the little girl said.
Jeannie waved her off.
“You told us it was real,” the girl said. “You said you and Dad heard it talk.”
Jeannie looked annoyed at the girl’s insistence, maybe a little embarrassed. But there was something else in her expression, Travis saw. Some inability to refute what the kid had said, because no doubt Jeannie really had told her children those things.
“I don’t know what’s up there,” she said at last, keeping her focus on Travis and Paige and Bethany. “There’s … something.” She was silent a bit longer, then just shook her head. “The stories all go like this: the mine was nothing special until 1987—kids might go up there to drink or make out, but nothing strange ever happened. Then, that year, the government came in and fenced it all off. The nearest shaft entrance is actually on Forest Service land, outside the town limits.” She nodded out the front windows. “You probably saw the house up at the treeline with all the Humvees in front.”
“Raines’s house,” Travis said.
She nodded. “His property butts up against federal land. The mine access is two hundred yards straight uphill from that house, deep in the woods. They say the government took over the site and … did something up there. Built something, maybe. Down inside the shaft.”
Travis looked at Paige. He saw her processing the information and drawing the same conclusion as he was: Jeannie had it wrong. The stories had it wrong. The government—working with Tangent—had only found something in the mine shaft. The Scalar investigation’s long search for answers had led to this town in the end, and in turn had led to the mine. Whatever was in there, Ruben Ward had created it. Maybe with help.
“They say most of the government’s comings and goings were at a different entrance,” Jeannie said, “over the ridge to the north. That opening is a lot lower down, accessible by old logging roads. I guess some teenagers from here in town got pretty close to it a few times, when everything was going on. Close enough to overhear workers talking about what was in the mine.” A shiver seemed to pass through her. She shook it off. “The workers called it the Stargazer. They were scared of it. They hated being down inside with it, whatever it was—whatever it is. They said it had to be kept under control, but they were still working out how to do that. And then Mr. Raines bought that house up on the slope—he paid twice what it was worth to speed up the deal. He moved in, and around that time all the government activity just went away. It was pretty clear Raines was involved somehow. I don’t think anyone trusted him, at first. But after a while something became obvious: the man never left this town. And I mean never. I’ve seen that for myself, living here almost twenty years now. In all that time, Raines never took so much as a drive down to the ocean, three miles away. He’d come down to Main Street for groceries, or to have a sandwich in here. Then right back up to that house. The way people eventually saw it, he was the one keeping the Stargazer under control, whatever the hell that entailed. He got stuck with that job, and he did it. He kept us safe from it, all those years. And if we weren’t sure of it before, we are now. It was about six hours after he died that we got the first … hum.”
Travis had been staring down into the bar. Now he looked up. “Like the one five minutes ago. Feels like bugs in your head.”
Jeannie nodded. “Second one was about four hours after the first, then less than two hours, and they’ve been coming faster and faster ever since.”
No wonder the town was emptying out. Twenty-five years of these stories, and now physical evidence that they weren’t bullshit. That there really was something bad up in the mine.
Travis considered the word: Stargazer. A uniquely strange name for something that was deep underground.
Much of what they’d learned was strange—both here and before they’d arrived in Rum Lake. There were giant gaps in the puzzle, and Travis couldn’t picture what would fill them. The Stargazer itself was one: it had to have been in that mine since the summer of 1978, some nine years before the Scalar investigators found it, but in all that time it must’ve been effectively dormant. If it’d been generating these hums back then, this place would’ve become a ghost town. Yet when Allen Raines had taken watch over the thing, he’d had to stay on top of it day and night, right from the beginning. Those two facts were hard to reconcile. As was a third: even if he and Paige and Bethany could reach the Stargazer, it was unlikely they could do much more than Raines had. Which was to keep the thing in check, assuming they’d see how that was done. But what sort of Achilles’ heel was that? If all they could do was babysit the thing, how long could they stay on it before someone interfered with them? Like these guys in the Humvees. A few hours, at best?
He knew he was thinking in circles, and that doing so wouldn’t help until they’d seen the Stargazer for themselves. For better or worse, they’d have the whole picture then. He drew hope only from what Bethany had said back in Casper: If they consider us a threat, then we are.
The little girl stepped out of the doorway and tugged on Jeannie’s arm.
“The ghost,” the girl said. “Tell them.”
Jeannie’s forehead furrowed. She seemed stretched between frustration and sober gravity, as if she believed the story herself but would never expect others to.
“Try us,” Travis said.
Jeannie frowned and let out a long breath, giving in. “They say it always happens around the two entrances to the mine. They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t. My husband and I … we like to think now we might’ve imagined what we heard. The wind really was blowing that day. Maybe that’s all it was. I don’t know.”
Travis tried to picture the mine entrance relative to Raines’s place, on the satellite image they’d seen. The moment he did, something occurred to him. He turned to Bethany.
“That satellite was looking almost
straight down, right?”
She nodded. “Perfectly straight down. Default angle unless you command it to do otherwise.”
“From that perspective,” Travis said, “even redwoods would have lots of gaps between them. Plenty of open ground visible in the image.”
Bethany shrugged. “I guess. Probably quite a bit.”
“We didn’t see any heat signature uphill from Raines’s house,” Travis said. “No bodies moving through those woods. Not even one.” He thought about it a second longer. “I don’t think these guys are going near the mine shaft.”
“I’m certain they’re not,” Jeannie said. “I’ve been watching all morning, waiting for them to head up into the trees and get in there—get working on the problem. I’ve assumed that’s what they were sent here to do. But all they’re focused on so far is that house. In and out, hours on end now.”
The more Travis considered it, the more that made sense, and not because of any strange phenomenon that could be mistaken for a ghost. Simple priorities were enough: these men had been sent to find and destroy the cheat sheet, and failing that, they would at least prevent anyone else from getting into that house and obtaining it—if it still existed at all. And while those who’d sent them probably wanted some muscle close at hand to protect the mine if the need arose, Travis wasn’t surprised these guys were staying back. Being kept back, more likely, by strict orders. They were almost certainly nothing more than hired guns; why let them sniff around the mine at all? Whatever the Stargazer was doing in there, it was doing without anybody’s help. All it needed was for Allen Raines to stay dead, and none of his powerful friends to show up in his place.
“Two hundred yards isn’t much,” Travis said, “even with tree cover. But maybe it’s enough. Maybe we can get in there from the uphill side without them seeing us.”
The sound of a loud engine faded in. A second later an old pickup went by, heading out of town, its bed loaded with boxes and bags.
Travis put aside the mine for the moment, his thoughts going back to earlier questions. He turned to Jeannie. “What about the man I mentioned before? Ruben Ward.”
“I never heard that name until today,” Jeannie said, “when the others came in and asked about it.”
“And none of these old stories talk about the summer of 1978?” Paige said.
Jeannie shook her head.
“Do you have paperwork for who lived here back then?” Travis said. “I know it’s a long shot—”
“It’s possible,” Jeannie said. “There are old file boxes in the office—”
She stopped and cocked her head.
Travis listened too, and heard another engine rumbling. Another loud one, though it sounded different from the truck. Jeannie appeared to recognize its tone.
“Shit,” she whispered. “I only meant to complain.”
“What are you talking about?” Travis said.
“When you went downstairs I called the number they gave me earlier. I yelled at them for sending in the good cops.”
The engine grew louder, drawing very near now. Its growl spoke more of power than age. A second later it cut out and brakes whined, somewhere just out of view past the edge of the glass front wall.
“That’s one of the Humvees,” Jeannie said. “They know you’re here.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Storage room, back right,” Jeannie said. Her hand shot out toward the corner of the building opposite where the Humvee had stopped. “No screen in the window.”
Paige and Bethany were already moving. Travis took a step after them, then pulled up short. He looked at Jeannie and the two kids.
Jeannie shook her head. “We’re fine if you’re gone. You left three minutes ago.”
Travis nodded, spun and ran after the others. He’d almost cleared the room when Jeannie called after him. He stopped again and faced her.
“Cell phone number,” she said. “I’ll find the old paperwork.”
From outside came footsteps and men’s voices.
Travis said the number aloud once. Didn’t wait to see if she’d caught it all. He sprinted for the back room, and in the same second that he slipped into it, he heard the front door open.
Paige already had the window up: an old single-pane affair with about ten layers of paint on its frame. It was on the side wall, leading out to the back stretch of the alley they’d walked down earlier. Bethany slipped through; the alley’s pavement was only a couple feet lower than the floor. Travis motioned for Paige to go ahead of him, and took hold of the raised sash as she let go of it. He went through after her, got his feet on the concrete and stood upright, his hand still holding the sash in place.
He considered just leaving it up—an open window in a back room shouldn’t stand out as unusual, if any of the men from the Humvee came to check this part of the building. Travis relaxed his hand on the bottom of the sash.
It immediately slipped downward a quarter inch, its sides lightly shuddering against the frame. If he let go entirely it might stay where it was, or it might hold for five seconds and then drop, making all the sound in the world as it went.
He heard Jeannie’s voice, through the doorway and down the hall. “Is ‘Go to hell’ too subtle for you people to grasp?”
A man replied, his tone coming from a deep, broad chest cavity. “Where are they?”
“Probably bullshitting the shop owner next door. They’re your people, why don’t you call them?”
No reply. Just boots thudding around on the ancient wood floor.
Travis leaned back inside and looked around for something with which to brace the window.
There was nothing.
He’d have to shut it, and not quickly—he couldn’t trust it to stay quiet at any real speed. There were long vertical abrasions where it’d rubbed against its frame over the decades, probably on humid days when the wood had expanded. Days like this one.
He began to ease it downward, making about an inch per second.
“You saw which way they went?” the deep voice said, still somewhere up front by the bar.
There was no audible reply. Travis pictured Jeannie just pointing, too pissed to speak. She would send them along Main Street back in the direction of their Humvee, to keep them from walking past this alley.
He had the window half shut now. Twelve inches left.
Paige and Bethany were right beside him, watching the progress with gritted teeth.
Nine inches. Eight.
“Sorry to bother you when you’re this busy,” the deep voice said. The boots clumped away toward the front door.
Six inches.
Then a bird started screaming, somewhere above Travis. He looked up sharply at the sound.
A blue jay. Right on the cornice ten feet overhead. It scolded in loud, double squawks. It probably had a nest up there. The cries went on for four seconds and then the bird flitted out of sight onto the roof.
Silence followed, outside and inside. The boot steps toward the front door had halted.
Then they began again—thumping quickly over the hardwood toward the back room.
“Shit,” Travis whispered.
He lowered the window the last six inches in the next second, risking the sound. It made none.
Paige and Bethany had already covered the distance to the back corner of the building across the alley—ten or twelve diagonal feet. Travis followed, got past the edge and stopped alongside them, his back against the old cedar siding. They listened.
At first there was only silence.
Then came the scrape and whine of the window going up. The sill creaked as heavy weight leaned onto it. Travis waited for the clamber of a body coming through, and the scuff of soles on pavement, but all he heard was a fingertip drumming idly on wood. After a moment it stopped. There was a click and a wash of static, and then silence again.
“Anyone copy at the Raines house?”
Static as the man waited.
Then a tinny voice: “Go ahead.”
“Leave three men up there, send the rest down here for a coordinated search. Bring every Humvee.”
“Got it.”
“Put the three that stay behind on lookout. Eyes on the slopes below the treeline. These people didn’t come in a vehicle.”
“You want to take Holt up on his offer? Grab law enforcement from nearby jurisdictions? We could have an army in here pretty soon, taking orders from us.”
The fingertip drummed again. Less than a second.
“Make the call.”
A click ended the static and then the window came down hard, and muffled steps faded away behind it.
The three of them ran along the row of back lots until they’d passed four more alleys. They stopped behind a building that nestled against a side street, and listened.
Far away, across and above town, the Humvees at Raines’s house fired up one by one and began to move. Then their sound was lost to the roar of the one near the Third Notch.
Travis nodded quickly and they sprinted across the street to the next block. They continued into it past the first building, then turned down an alley and moved farther away from Main Street, at last coming out between a little art gallery and the town’s post office. The street they now faced ran parallel to Main. Across it were small homes tucked close to one another, and beyond lay three more blocks of the same, the whole spread rising toward the exposed hills. Those hills could be easily climbed—the three of them had come down them fifteen minutes ago—but it would take a good sixty seconds to reach the redwoods from the concealment of the highest backyards. That hadn’t been a problem when nobody was watching. Now that at least three sets of eyes would be, an undetected crossing was pointless to even think about.
Travis thought about it anyway. If they could get up into the trees and hide, they could circle around to the mine, probably a mile away through unbroken forest.
Paige gazed up at the woods too, and the open ground beneath, clearly running all the same calculations.