Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “No. Jerusha has to rest a lot. Vinnie and I took a walk today, but her snotty brother tagged along and spoiled it. The Baggette kids came home from their grandma’s today. They’re nerds. Larry Johnson comes home this weekend. He went on a fishing trip with his uncle. Jerusha’s chickens got out, and we had to round them up before the Hanleys’ dog got to ’em. We helped Vinnie’s mom wash the baby.”

  Tamara was pleased at the reversal in Adrian’s behavior, her interest in someone other than herself—but uneasy at the suddenness of it.

  By Friday evening when she staggered in carrying stacks of forms, questionnaires, outlines, and plans, she was too dispirited to care. And too grateful for the creamed-egg-and-noodle dish Adrian put before her to comment on their recent cholesterol intake or the fact that the fresh eggs had come from Jerusha’s hen house.

  The next afternoon there was a cloud in the sky. Tamara left Adrian with her nose in a book and went out to see it. It was not a large cloud and it obviously didn’t plan to do anything, but it did break up the tedious consistency of blue sky. She remembered ironically of having prayed for a break in the rain in Columbus and for the sun to shine. Any change in this changeless place was worth remarking.

  Tamara wandered up the road to the company fence and along it until it ended at the base of the mountain. A track with old gondola cars and weeds growing between the ties lay along an embankment, and she followed it into no-trespassing territory.

  Some stockpiles of limestone nudged up against the mountain and looked like giant snowbanks next to its iron-stained sides. The mining operation’s buildings spread around the mountain’s curve and formed a separate town, larger than the one down the road near the school. Metal sheds, obviously in use, sat next to wooden shacks with their roofs fallen in. An ancient outhouse leaned away from a rail siding as if blowing in the windy wake of a motionless ore car loaded with rock.

  A shack with a flat tar-paper roof still had glass in its windows, antique glass—murky, dirty. And a once-painted door with a porcelain doorknob and an elaborate bronze knocker that belonged to other years and richer doors and merely thudded when she dropped it against the striker. She could see a wooden table just below the window and a spider making hairlike tracks in the dust across a patch of sunlit surface.

  “There’s some history there you’re looking at,” a voice said behind her, and she swung around to find Russ Burnham in pin-striped coveralls and a hard hat with padded metal earmuffs swung back out of the way. “Used to be the chemist’s shack.”

  “I … probably shouldn’t be here.”

  “Used to check samples of the rock that came out of the mine every day.” The corners of his eyes crinkled and his ears stuck out below the helmet. “Up until a few years ago, used to run an average of ninety-seven, ninety-eight percent. Purest anywhere in the country.”

  He slapped heavy gloves against his leg, and white dust flew. His workshoes were white to the laces, as if he’d been walking through powdered sugar. “Yeah, been producing since 1905. Used to use horses to pull wooden cars out of the mine. Company’d send men down to Denver, Larimer Street. Hire drunks out of the gutter, bring ’em up, put ’em to work. Nobody sober wanted to come out here. Made for some pretty rowdy times and some pretty tall tales.”

  “Russ, I know the sign says not to come up here, but I was curious—”

  “’Course we’re more mechanized now, don’t need many men. Still hell trying to find and keep those we do, though.” He pointed to a sagging shed next to a snow fence. “That used to be the magazine, held explosives. Mostly ammonium nitrate. See those big doors? That’s the three-hundred-foot portal. Three hundred feet from the top of the mountain. That part of the mountain’s almost hollow after years of mining, and that portal’s sealed off. One good earthquake, and that whole baby’d cave in.”

  Tamara laughed and threw up her arms. “All right. All right, you’re hired. I’ll bring my students up for a guided tour.”

  “I only guide teachers.” The eye crinkles disappeared. “If you’re going to teach in a company town, you ought to know something about it. Curiosity’s been known to kill more than cats.”

  He snorted and spit into the weeds. “Now, come around here and look down.” He led her to the curve in the mountainside, where the ground fell away sharply. “You can’t see it from here, but down there’s the six-hundred-foot portal, where we’re working now.”

  “Aren’t you afraid the hollowed-out top half will cave in on the tunnels and miners below?”

  “Yeah, but like I said, it’d take a earthquake. Which has never been known to happen here. ’Course I don’t imagine the Indians and buffalo kept much in the way of records. I think the company’ll shut down here soon. Cheaper to surface-mine limestone. And the purity’s giving out.”

  “It’s odd to have the bowels of the mountain so white and the outside so rusty-colored.”

  “Unusual land formation, all right. There’re a few others like it. Those big buildings at the other end of the tracks down there are the crusher, where all the noise comes from, and the screening plant. Back up on this level here, that foundation used to be the hotel for single miners and that great heap of boards behind it was the old icehouse.”

  “Hey, boss?” A man with a light on his helmet strode up the road from the lower level. “She’s back down there again. Says she’s checkin’ on our progress. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know, but just get her out, by force if you have to. You know the insurance won’t—”

  “No way, man, I ain’t messin’ with that.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute.” Russ Burnham sighed and then stared at Tamara for the longest time while the other man waited impatiently. “I sure wish you’d just chuck it in, leave this place, go back East, anything.”

  16

  Thad stood next to Dixie Grosswyler at the Mass for the Dead Padre Roudales celebrated for Aulalio Paz. Padre Roudales flew in every three weeks to administer to the needs of the citizens of San Tomas.

  The women of San Tomas still covered their heads in church, even though the church didn’t cover their heads. The gray concrete shell had no roof and no seats. Sun flooded from above, drying puddles left by the rain the night before. Lacy scarves and the priest’s vestments fluttered in the sea breeze. Palm trees spread a moving shadow benediction over the celebration for Aulalio.

  A bird screeched from the jungle as if being murdered, and two silent frigate birds wheeled overhead, so narrow of wing and lean of body they barely left a shadow on the church and the people gathered below. The sky-roof was too blue, the palms’ greenness suspect. The murmur of believers blended perfectly with the surf against the barrier reef. The world appeared lullingly normal.

  After hours of poring through his father’s junky literature, Thad decided the surfacing-submarine theory sounded better and better. He said as much to Harry when they left the open-topped services.

  “Oh, Doc, I liked the other one.” Harry turned to Dixie as they walked down the beach. “You see, we are just the leftovers of a once-advanced people who were destroyed or died off, now we are just rediscovering knowledge that’s been around since before God and even before the earth was formed, and this huge egg that came up out of the Metnál and almost sank our boat is a machine from those old times before there was anything, and it’s going berserk ’cause there’s no one around to run it anymore.”

  “Well, you’ve seen the egg, you should know.” Dixie forced a laugh. “Rafaela will be busy, Thad, come eat with us.”

  He followed them through the compound and across the veranda to a dining room where guests served themselves at a buffet and sat at long tables from which fans in the ceiling kept the flies moving.

  “Had any reservations canceled yet?”

  “No, but we will when news of this gets out.” Dixie rested her elbows on the table and brushed frizzy curls off her forehead. “Thad, what really happened out there? You’ve had time to r
ecover your senses.”

  He chewed a piece of gristly conch and buttered a slice of bread. “Rafaela’s chowder is so much better than this. You should get the recipe.”

  “I have to know. There’s a British naval officer coming in. He’s booked a cabana and wants to talk to anyone ‘familiar with the disturbance in the Metnál.’ We can’t tell him a big egg—”

  “How about a gray eyeball?”

  “That’s even worse. Thad, I’ve got a business to run. I can’t have stories like this—”

  “Five people died out there.”

  “And more will. If this gets too crazy, every nut in the U.S. and Europe will want to dive the Metnál.”

  “And rent cabanas and buy booze in the bar hut.”

  “I thought you were a friend.”

  “All right, how about it was a submarine? Might be tough to convince a British naval officer that there’s a submarine twice the size of the Titanic that can lie buried under the sea floor, but—”

  “We have to make up some kind of crazy story that can be believed. The whole tourist industry of this area could be ruined. And the people of Belize can’t afford to lose any money-making industry. Have you seen the slums of Belize City?”

  “I bounced off it like I was a gnat—but it could have been metal. I remember an echo inside it when I hit.”

  “I had an uncle who went on vacation to Mexico and said he saw a flying saucer.” Dixie still hadn’t touched her food. “When the Mexican authorities wouldn’t look into it, he raised hell with the American authorities, got furious with any family or friends who suggested it was something else and maybe he’d been mistaken. Ended up losing his job, wife left him, got a drinking problem—the whole bit. All because of that one little thing.”

  “Five dead people are not ‘one little thing.’”

  The helicopter had impersonal bug-eye glass windows wrapped around its front. They shed back the sunlight like the dark glasses on a highway patrolman. Jungle grasses spread away at the edge of the landing strip, palms tossed frantic heads as if a hurricane were upon them, and Dixie’s long skirt flattened against her legs as the squat machine pulled up its nose and lowered itself onto Mayan Cay.

  A door slid open far enough to emit a tank, but one man jumped to the ground—red-haired, chubby, dressed as a tourist, but with the indefinable stamp of the British Navy.

  Belize had achieved its independence somewhat reluctantly. It remained under the protection of the Queen because Guatemala claimed the tiny country that blocked her coastline and wasn’t above sending troops down the Belize River or planes over the airport at Belize City. So a small portion of her Majesty’s dwindling fleet was stationed in these coastal waters and six British Harriers at her main airport.

  A disembodied arm handed down a suitcase to the new arrival. Dixie waved as he turned from the dark-olive helicopter and walked briskly toward the jeep, bent low under the still-whirling blades. Dixie usually sent one of the boys to the airstrip to meet guests, but this trip she’d decided to make herself.

  “Miss Grosswyler? Geoffrey Hindsly here. Splendid of you to meet me. I’ve heard nothing but good news about the Mayapan.”

  “I hope you won’t be disappointed, Mr. Hindsly—or is it lieutenant or captain or … I’m afraid I don’t know your rank.” She slid behind the wheel, and he came around to sit beside her.

  “Let’s forget all about that, shall we? I’m looking forward to a small vacation. The other matter we discussed by radio is just a by-the-bye, so to speak.” Geoffrey Hindsly would never make a decent liar. “You might tell me something of the people I’ll be meeting, though. The ones we discussed this morning? Might make matters move more quickly. Get this little business over with so I can enjoy myself, what?” His smile was expectant, his eyes studied her closely.

  “Mr. Hindsly, the government of Belize has yet to get off its collective butt to begin an investigation—except to interview survivors before they flew back to the States. The press won’t be here for two hours, but the British Navy has a sudden interest in this ‘little business’ in which four of my guests and one employee lost their lives and others were injured, by-the-bye, so to speak.”

  “Well, yes, won’t be good for business, will it? Then again, it might be very good. In any instance, it will have some effect, won’t it?” He settled back, glanced pointedly at the ignition key.

  “What’s up? I mean, God, the press is coming.”

  “We’ve sidelined a bit of that, I think. Some of the Mayan Airlines planes have been pressed into duty elsewhere. May interfere with the arrival and departure of your guests. Inconvenience shouldn’t last long. Uh … shall we go?”

  “Not until you tell me what’s happening.”

  He withdrew a pouch with pipe and tobacco, made a great display of filling it and tamping. “Miss Grosswyler, her Majesty’s Navy does have some interest in what happens in these waters. You must know that.”

  “I know that two years ago a yacht anchored inside the reef off this island disappeared with a family of four aboard.”

  “We can’t be responsible for every boat lost at sea.” He lit the pipe and squinted at the windshield, his manner chilling perceptibly.

  “Some months ago an American living on the island just disappeared.”

  “Edward P. Alexander, the writer. Yes, I’d heard. But one need not make a mystery of every death or disappearance. Accidents do happen. And not just here.”

  “And her Majesty’s Navy shows little interest in them,” she yelled over the departing helicopter.

  “You must admit the stories of the people involved in the Metnál incident were indeed strange.”

  “You’ve talked to them?” There went her plans to keep things rational.

  “All but those that are still here.”

  “Mr. Hindsly, I don’t care if your rank is admiral. You’ve come to question my guests and interrogate me about them. Before I cooperate with you or move this jeep one inch, I want to know why.”

  “It’s all rather embarrassing, actually.” And indeed his face reddened to almost match his hair, but in anger at her persistence, Dixie thought, instead of embarrassment.

  She had still to decide if his David Niven/Terry Thomas act was real or feigned. “What is embarrassing, Mr. Hindsly?”

  “One had hoped, you see, that it had merely been misplaced on paper. That it would turn up before the press got after it, but we can’t seem to raise it by radio. News may be going out on the wires even now.”

  “Misplaced what?”

  “See here, couldn’t we discuss this over a whiskey somewhere? I’m afraid I’m fairly done in by all this.”

  “Misplaced what, Mr. Hindsly?”

  “It seems we’ve lost a vessel. In the vicinity of the Metnál.” He’d let his pipe go out, and made a face when he tried to draw on it. “Possibly about the time your guests had their accident.”

  “What kind of vessel, Mr. Hindsly?”

  “A destroyer, Miss Grosswyler.”

  Interim

  Between Time

  It was an almost automatic thing for Edward P. Alexander III to be walking along assuming his mind was concentrating on his journey and to discover instead that it was reworking an awkward sentence he’d written earlier in the day: “The bane of science, like that of religion, is not that which it explains but all that which it ignores.” No. Too many “thats.” How about: “… rather that which it ignores”? He was still stuck with the excess “that.” Edward was on his way to a point of craggy coral at the very tip of one end of the island.

  Although from the air the island looked to be ringed by sandy, passable beaches, Edward had found that in fact walking around it could be a messy business—sucking mud one minute, the need to wade in the sea shallows the next. He feared Rafaela would have a fuss washing his clothes again.

  He arrived at last, camera and film dry, and set to reconstructing the blind he’d built several days before but which had fallen over—mer
ely a batch of palm fronds stacked in such a way as to provide shade, hide his rather large form, and offer a suitable hole through which to poke a camera lens.

  He settled into it thankfully, aware of his age after the long walk, and took a pull on his canteen. He’d come to photograph an iguana. They often crawled up onto the craggy dead coral on the other side of his blind to soak in the sun, and he needed an especially good one now for a book jacket he wished to propose to his publishers.

  This book would surely set the world on fire and some of his scholarly detractors on their asses. Now that he’d pieced everything together, it was almost luridly simple, and he couldn’t fathom why someone smarter than he hadn’t figured it out long ago. Perhaps one had to adventure without preconception and yet seek with determination in order to relate all these mysteries of existence. And then of course it helped to have come across the machine.

  There were still some loose ends. The most baffling one, Edward thought, as he took the luncheon from his rucksack, was how did they manage to get fresh eggs on the Ambergris? He unwrapped the tortilla rolled around a mixture of seasoned black-bean paste and stringy strips of chicken. If Ramael did actually breakfast aboard the yacht a year after her disappearance, how, then, did the Kellers renew their egg supply? Or were they the same eggs they’d eaten the morning of their disappearance?

  But once consumed, that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?

  He finished his lunch, wondering what had become of the iguanas, and adjusted his tripod, put a 500-millimeter lens with an ultraviolet filter on his Nikon, and stuck it through a hole in the blind large enough to allow for proper movement. He ought to get a fine shot of any creature at this end of the point. He’d barely settled himself in for a long wait when he heard a splash and the clicking of many long toenails on a hard surface. An iguana, looking every bit a tiny dinosaur, reared its warty face above a coral peak and then drew its body up onto a flat resting place with a flap of its tail. The ridge of spines along his back glistened wet with sea water. He settled his belly on the warmed coral shelf with what Edward imagined to be a “humph.”