Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  • • •

  Wei Ming was glad when his sister’s family left. He found these visits a strain, he told Justine after their guests had been shepherded to the airport, after they’d lingered awkwardly until the last possible moment to enter passport control, not quite able to say goodbye. Particularly after the accident with the daughter. Silly girl. He had never felt particularly close to his sister, nor to the rest of his family. People in general bothered him: he much preferred libraries, the mustier the better. His sister, her quiet husband and surly daughter had grazed the tourist attractions and shopping malls like a small herd of ruminants, chewing on low-hanging fruit, and stubbornly refusing to be shepherded towards the cultural and historical riches that he could have so easily shown them. He tried to talk to them about what he was writing, but they found it difficult to grasp. Why are you interested in old mines? his sister had asked. Why not new ones? Because there might still be gold, of course, his brother-in-law had interjected. He’d stumbled in reply. It wasn’t the mines or the gold that drew him, only in those old stories of discovery, what they told us about modern society. Michelle had nodded sympathetically at this point, but he thought she was probably only agreeing with him to defy her parents.

  With the visitors gone, their days soon fell back into a rhythm. He spent most of the day at the library, or in the office at the university where he was spending the rest of his sabbatical. Justine would cycle downtown, to the NGO where her part-time position in the resource centre threatened to grow into a full-time one. August evenings were still long and golden. They’d walk on the beach at Jericho, and then come back to the apartment for dinner. Food would be simple: after eating, they would drink wine and watch the sunset from the balcony. Sometimes he would return to his study for another two hours of reading or writing, to a messy desk enclosed by low walls of papers and books. She wanted him to linger, to take time out from work. Only a few weeks, she reminded him, and she would fly back to Singapore. He would be staying on for another four months: when the rains came, in October, he’d not feel like doing anything but work. Now they had time for something more than work: for themselves, and for each other. This was what they had planned. And yet they could not somehow quite reach out to each other. They could talk, of course, but their conversation followed the same old comfortable patterns. When they had first met, fifteen years ago, she had wanted to know everything about him, to read every single book on his shelves, to be able to name every single relative in the old photo albums that he brought over, ever more reluctantly, from his mother’s house. She had wanted to eat up all of his past, and so make it hers. At times, she still felt that hunger, but she did not know where to start. They fit together perfectly, seamlessly, but like two fists held together, so tightly that no light could seep through.

  To keep him from work on those long evenings, she found that the best way to draw him out was to talk about his family. They unpicked the visit, slipping easily from remembrance to criticism.

  “Ee Kiong,” he said, talking of his brother-in-law. “So cheap. Three of them with so much luggage and still don’t want to hire a car.”

  She joined in. “It’s Michelle that worries me. Always fiddling with the handphone: probably get trigger finger. You think sometimes, that they never seem to get a childhood. They’ve forgotten how to play. Let her out into nature, and she falls into the river. And that story she told us about books in the river. Where did that come from?”

  “Books?” He looked at her in surprise. And so she told him what she remembered Michelle had said to her. Grey books, like salmon at the bottom of the river. With writing in an unknown script. Not Chinese, of course—the girl’s Mandarin was better than either of theirs. Where? That day on the North Shore, where they’d rested for lunch, by the tailings pile from the old mine.

  “Just a minute.” He vanished into his study, wine glass still in hand. A minute or so of scuffling, and he emerged triumphantly with a photocopy.

  “Here. The same place where Michelle fell.”

  She took the sheet, spread it on the table before her. Blurred type with battered serifs, blown up from microfilm.

  “Scott Watanabe’s diary. Start from this column.”

  His finger at the first subtitle. She read, straining her eyes against the smallness of the letters.

  June 18, 1952

  Last Saturday, a very strange incident, outside my understanding. I have hesitated to write it down until now. Indeed, I now wonder if it really happened, or whether this is a final descent into madness. I have been recording my symptoms for months, this struggle with what my doctor calls the early onset of senility. Even now, writing this, I fish for words. I pause every two or three lines, with my thesaurus open on the desk beside me. I know the shape of a word, and sometimes I can hear an echo of its sound. It is nearby. I can smell it. I approach it softly, but then find that it has gone, moved off further into the undergrowth. There is a word, for example, for that place outside the building where I waited for the bus, sheltering from the rain. Not awning, because that is soft, made of fabric. This thing, which projects from the building over my head, is hard, made out of steel and glass. The word has an architectural feel, like pilaster or architrave. Not foyer or vestibule: those are places inside the building. The thesaurus in my study gives me canopy, which is better, but not quite right.

  I took the bus to the end of the line. The rain had stopped by then, and I re-laced my boots, shouldered my knapsack, and set off. A long June day ahead of me, the woods green with promise. I crossed the creek near the mine tailings, and followed what I took to be an old logging road. Hikers had been this way before, and beaten a smaller path among the hemlock saplings. I climbed higher, and the undergrowth grew sparser underneath the forest canopy. Above me, the branches of spruce, cedar, and Douglas fir. The area had been logged perhaps fifty years ago. Huge cedar stumps still persisted, with little slots cut in them to support the platform for the saw. I stopped to drink water next to one of them. Something glinted on the forest floor, a little further down from me. I went over and bent down. An iron nail, thick, curved over on itself, like a fern frond. Two pieces of decaying wood that had been split, and then cut to size, laid next to each other. I looked left, and then right. A straight line, a raised scar across the forest floor. A corduroy road, perhaps, or the bed of a railway, faint but still traceable. I followed it uphill. There were two creeks, I remember, which must have originally been bridged by trestles: the line of what I now knew to be a railway broke up here, falling away into thin air. I was lucky that the morning rain had been a rare event that spring. The water in the creeks was low, and I crossed each of them in turn, moving carefully from boulder to boulder. And so, after a good hour’s climb, I came to the entrance to the mine.

  It wasn’t much to look at, I remember. A clearing. There was a flat space, covered in grass and stones, shaped like a baseball field. Where the infield should be, the clearing tapered to a wall of granite, stretching dizzyingly upwards. At its base was a concrete lintel, weathered, covered in green moss, but on which I could easily read the raised capital letters of a warning: “KEEP OUT. NO ADMITTANCE.” Below this, the dark mouth of a tunnel opened.

  I checked the flashlight in my pack. The beam was yellow and weak, and gave me little confidence. But more rummaging at the bottom of the knapsack uncovered a new set of batteries that I could not for the life of me recall buying. The light was stronger after the battery change, and white, enough to guide me on my way. The mine was warmer than I expected, the tunnel burrowing directly into the rock. I thought there would be supports every few yards, but there were none, only the uneven arch of the roof above me, blasted directly out of the stone. The floor was dry. There was a small recess, I noticed, and every now and then a frame of rusted steel beams, like another doorway. When I came to the first fork, I switched off the flashlight. Absolute darkness. No light from the entrance. I could not even see my hand when I waved in front of my face.

 
I didn’t feel afraid, but I did wonder how far in I should go. Further into the hillside there would be more forks to take, making it more and more difficult to retrace my steps. There might be shafts, too, straight down into the depths of the mountain, their guardrails rotten or even removed. And truth to tell, it was much less interesting than I’d hoped, fumbling around in the dark, poking at the walls with the flashlight. The atmosphere grew humid, and I found myself sweating. A seam of quartz every now and then, sparkling copper or gold; blue-green stains on the walls; once, an abandoned drill, like an oversize piece of dental equipment, on which I bruised my shin. At the second junction, I turned right again, and the tunnel led off, straighter this time, further into the mountain.

  The flashlight had just picked out a third fork ahead when I heard something behind me: a thud, like a single, distant footstep, without an echo, and then silence. I waited. Still nothing. I shone the light back down the tunnel. Just a cone of rock, bleached by the light, and then blackness. I wasn’t yet afraid. The sound was too singular, too inexplicable. It might, I reflected, have come from anywhere in the mine. Or indeed, from my imagination. Yet it served as a warning. I had found nothing of interest here. I should go back.

  After a minute or two walking back up the tunnel, I found the cause of the sound. A flat, grey stone had fallen from the roof, and was now lying in my path. As I passed I kicked at it with my foot. It gave; it was soft. I bent down, flashlight in hand. A book, with a grey leather cover, or really the cover only, its pages long gone, open, smooth as a discarded mussel shell. Where had it come from? There was a side-turning, I noticed now, hidden behind a flange of rock. There was a step up, with the remnants of another book balanced on it. The same grey leather cover. The pages were gone again: I was sure, this time, that they must have been removed. I held it up to the light. There were indentations on the spine where letters should be, but they were blurred. The script was not Roman: not even Japanese or Chinese. The passage led upwards. It was narrow, but much more smoothly finished than the tunnel outside. I came to a metal door, in something like stainless steel, much newer than anything I’d seen in the mine. Above it, a painted sign, faintly streaked with rust, but its letters still easily decipherable: LIBRARY.

  She was at the bottom of the page. Wei Ming was no longer next to her. More scuffles in the study.

  “Ming!”

  “Ah?”

  “The next page?”

  “Just looking.” He came out, thumbing through a sheet of papers. “You know, that’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “The entry ends there. The next page begins on the 20th, with his next visit to the psychiatrist.”

  He showed her.

  “He didn’t go back?”

  He shook his head. “He was pretty ill. He might have forgotten about it. He’d been exploring the North Shore since they let him come back from the interior in 1949.”

  “You think there’s a connection with the books Michelle saw?”

  “It doesn’t make sense, of course. Books wouldn’t last long in the river. They could never last fifty years.”

  But they were already in his study, sifting through books and papers, spreading out stiff, unyielding maps on the worn carpet.

  • • •

  It took them longer than they had expected to go back to the river to look for the mine. Wei Ming had wanted to do some cross-checking about the site’s history. Then on the Sunday they had planned to go, it started raining and continued for a week. She used the time to pack, to get ready for the flight back to Singapore. She found herself checking blogs, news sites, Facebook posts, even the LTA expressway webcams near the workplace she would return to. It was night over there: quiet, and clear, jigsaws of light through the rain trees washed over by the headlights of an occasional car. Nobody around. A footbridge, thin and elegant, in the distance, marked by a smudge that might be a human being. Each morning, she found new messages in her work email inbox: Instructions on Reporting for Duty. Important Notice to All Staff. Ten Tips to Work Smarter. Collection of Encrypted Flash Drives.

  When there was a break in the weather, they waited a day or two, and went back to the river. Not the path they had walked before, Wei Ming had shown her on the map, but a less well-used trail, on the other side of the water. They’d soon reach the bank Michelle was trying to get to when she fell. He thought the river would be too high for them to explore there, to search for those books, but they could follow a trail along the bank, into the woods and then, for the last few hundred metres or so, take the old railway bed, as Watanabe had done, to the entrance to the mine.

  The river was even higher than they had thought, jade-grey, the silt-heavy water roiling noisily over stones. They turned away, into a narrow, gently curving gully. On either side of them were mounds of bleached stones where nothing grew. She prodded one with her walking pole. The regularity of the hillocks disturbed her: they were not natural, surely, but they had no purpose. They ran parallel to the water; when one finished, another would begin, each nestled inside the last like a plump segment of fruit. There were no straight lines. If you followed one of the little valleys between them, you would quickly lose your companions: you would be close, so very close, and yet out of sight. Then they left the mounds behind, crossing a creek clustered with thin aspen saplings whose leaves fluttered like tinsel, not yet quite ready to fall.

  The trail climbed quickly. Once or twice there were gaps in the canopy, and they paused for water, and looked back. They had climbed up the flank of the hill, so that they could look back down over the river again. She could see a hut, tiny as a toy, and those long, lobe-like mounds again, like intestines. Or worm casts, she thought. Tailings, Wei Ming told her, left by the dredges of half a century ago, working over the river valley after the first wave of miners left empty-handed, wringing every last particle of gold out of the silt. There was still one old decaying dredge left, he said, a few miles off one of the provincial highways. Everything about it was monstrous. The buckets from its chain, a yard broad, cast from a single piece of iron, now served as bollards by the roadside.

  There were still no tall trees here, early on the trail to the mine. Only the thin aspens and small, whippy hemlocks. Every now and then they would see a cedar stump, big enough to lie down on, with a hemlock sapling growing out of it, its branches jutting up at right angles like a piece of plumbing. He walked quickly, and she followed as best as she could, the backpack’s chest strap high and tight, almost choking her. Once or twice he looked back, asked her if the pace was fine, but she heard a challenge as much as concern in his voice. Then other voices, soft as water first, then growing louder. A bark. Two trail runners passed them, followed by a stumpy, panting dog: smiling, young, in gym gear only, the girl with her hair tied back in a pony tail, a bottle of water clutched in the hand.

  He quickened his pace. She wanted him to slow down, to listen to her and to the forest. To touch her. When they paused to rest, he fiddled with the GPS on his handphone. Not far, he said. We turn off here. He pointed to the screen, but she put a finger to her lips. Quiet, she wanted to tell him. Listen to the beating of your heart. And then the other sounds. A rhythmic knocking, and the red, white and black of a woodpecker in flight. The boom of grouse, just on the edge of hearing.

  When they started again, they moved more slowly. Mature second growth, the tall trees dark now, high branches and foliage shading out the plants on the forest floor. Yet the forest was not quite what it seemed. If you looked carefully, you could see traces of another life. A long, brown nail under your foot, wrapped around a tree root. In the undergrowth, pieces of what seemed to be wood or stone, perfectly formed and yet unnatural, with the symmetry of sea stars or of flowers. Cast iron machine parts, their surfaces smooth brown with rust, over which the new trees had grown. A pulley wheel was woven into the roots of a cedar, while a steel rope threaded its way through a tree trunk and emerged frayed but unblemished on the other side. Seamless, she thought, or scarif
ication become adornment. And yet this landscape, they both knew, had not fully healed. Minerals leached from old workings; embankments, their supporting timbers rotted through, threatened to collapse with each year’s spring rains. Railway ties decayed, becoming part of the forest floors, but the metal spikes, loose from their baseplates, remained sharp forever, even if concealed in the trunks of trees.

  They left the trail at the end of the railway line to the mine, barely visible, curving up the side of the hill. Sparse undergrowth under the darkness of the canopy, and a single creek to ford. After half an hour, the trees gave way suddenly to level ground, smothered in saplings and blackberry bushes, with a rock wall behind. She paused in the last few feet of shade, and reached for sunblock, spreading it on her face, ears, and the back of the neck where her gathered hair did not fall. She worked the last cream into the loose skin of the back of her hands. A memory, somewhere, of a teacher at primary school, telling her that you could know the age of a lady by pinching the skin on the back of her hands. See if the skin springs back quickly, or if it remains puckered up in a ridge. Then you’ll know. Just as you tell the age of a horse by its teeth. So I am like that now, she thought, a dutiful daughter-in-law a little past her prime, traded and apprised. And then that skin of hers, that easily burned and never browned. Care for it, and at best it would fill up with freckles, like crystals forming, or stones at the bottom of a river coming ever more sharply into view. She finished, and offered the sunblock to Wei Ming, but he waved her away, and pointed ahead.

  “This is it.”

  In single file, they followed the faintest hint of a trail. The thorns tugged at them. She wanted to pause, to reach out and gather the fat, glistening berries, but he moved too quickly, brushing the runners to the side, and holding them just long enough for her to follow closely behind. The rock face, when they reached it, was blank, but they shuffled along it until they found an opening. He fumbled in his backpack for a flashlight.