by Dan Simmons
There are mineshafts up there. Most of them are dug horizontally into the mountains and run only a few hundred feet back before ending in cave-in or flood. But some are sinkholes, some are pits where the soil has caved in above an old shaft. Some are vertical dropshafts, long since abandoned, that fall two or three hundred feet to rocks and water and to whatever slimy things there are that like to live in such darkness.
I knew where one of these dropshafts was—a deep one, with an opening wide enough to take the Jeep and me. It was way the hell above the canyon back there behind Sugarloaf Mountain, off the trail and marked by warning signs on trees, but someone trying to turn a Jeep around in the dusk or dark might drive into it easily enough. If they were stone stupid. Or if they were a known drunk.
It was about seven on a July evening when I left Bennigan’s, picked up my camping stuff at the apartment on 30th Street, and headed up north on Highway 36 along the foothills for three miles and then west up Left Hand Canyon. Even with the two or three hard miles of 4-wheel-drive road, I figured I would be at the mineshaft before eight P.M. There would be plenty of light left to do what I had to do.
Despite the three beers, I was sober. I hadn’t had a real drink in almost two months. As an alcoholic, I knew that I wasn’t recovering by staying just on this side of the sober line, only suffering.
But I wanted to be almost sober that night. I had been almost sober—only two beers, perhaps three—the evening that the pickup crossed the lane on Highway 287 and smashed into our Honda, killing Allan instantly and putting me into the hospital for three weeks. The driver of the pickup had survived, of course. They had tested his blood and found that he was legally drunk. He received a suspended sentence and lost his license for a year. I was so badly injured, it was so obvious that the pickup had been at fault, that no one had tested my blood-alcohol level. I’ll never know if I could have responded faster if it hadn’t been for those two or three beers.
This time I wanted to know exactly what I was doing as I perched the Jeep on the edge of that twenty-foot opening, shifted into 4-wheel low, and roared over the raised berm around the black circle of the pit.
And I did. I did not hesitate. I did not lose my sense of pride at the last minute and write some bullshit farewell note to anyone. I didn’t think about it. I took my baseball cap off, wiped the faintest film of sweat from my forehead, set the cap on firmly, slammed the shifter into low, and roared over that mound of dirt like a pit bull going after a mailman’s ass.
The sensation was almost like going over the second hill on the Wildcat ’coaster at Elitch Gardens. I had the urge to raise my arms and scream. I did not raise my arms; my hands stayed clamped to the wheel as the nose of the Jeep dropped into darkness as if I were driving into a tunnel. I had not turned the headlights on. I caught only the faintest glimpse of boulders and rotted timbers and layers of granite whipping by. I did not scream.
THE last few days I have been trying to recall everything I can about Kelly Dahl when I taught her in the sixth grade, every conversation and interaction, but much of it is indistinct. I taught for almost twenty-six years, sixteen in the elementary grades and the rest in high school. Faces and names blur. But not because I was drinking heavily then. Kelly was in my last sixth-grade class and I didn’t really have a drinking problem then. Problems yes; drinking problem, no.
I remember noticing Kelly Dahl on the first day; any teacher worth his or her salt notices the troublemakers, the standouts, the teacher’s pets, the class clowns, and all of the other elementary-class stereotypes on the first day. Kelly Dahl did not fit any of the stereotypes, but she was certainly a standout kid. Physically, there was nothing unusual about her—at eleven she was losing the baby fat she’d carried through childhood, her bone structure was beginning to assert itself in her face, her hair was about shoulder length, brown, and somewhat stringier than the blow-dried fussiness or careful braidedness of the other girls. Truth was, Kelly Dahl carried a slight air of neglect and impoverishment about her, a look we teachers were all too familiar with in the mid-’80s, even in affluent Boulder County. The girl’s clothes were usually too small, rarely clean, and bore the telltale wrinkles of something dredged from the hamper or floor of the closet that morning. Her hair was, as I said, rarely washed and usually held in place by cheap plastic barrettes that she had probably worn since second grade. Her skin had that sallow look common to children who spent hours inside in front of the TV, although I later found that this was not the case with Kelly Dahl. She was that rarest of things—a child who had never watched TV.
Few of my assumptions were correct about Kelly Dahl.
What made Kelly stand out that first day of my last sixth-grade class were her eyes—startlingly green, shockingly intelligent, and surprisingly alert when not concealed behind her screen of boredom or hidden by her habit of looking away when called upon. I remember her eyes and the slightly mocking tone to her soft, eleven-year-old girl’s voice when I called on her the few times that first day.
I recall that I read her file that evening—I made it a practice never to read the students’ cumulative folders before I met the actual child—and I probably looked into this one because Kelly’s careful diction and softly ironic tone contrasted so much with her appearance. According to the file, Kelly Dahl lived in the mobile home park to the west of the tracks—the trailer park that gave our school the lion’s share of problems—with her mother, divorced, and a stepfather. There was a yellow Notice slip from second grade warning the teacher that Kelly’s biological father had held custody until that year, and that the court had removed the girl from that home because of rumors of abuse. I checked back in the single sheet from a county social worker who had visited the home and, reading between the lines of bureaucratese, inferred that the mother hadn’t wanted the child either but had given in to the court’s ruling. The biological father had been more than willing to give the girl up. Evidently it had been a noncustody battle, one of those “You take her, I have a life to live” exchanges that so many of my students had endured. The mother had lost and ended up with Kelly. The yellow Notice slip was the usual warning that the girl was not to be allowed to leave the school grounds with the biological father or be allowed to speak on the phone if he called the school, and if he were observed hanging around the school grounds, the teacher or her aide were to notify the principal and/or call the police. Too many of our kids’ files have yellow Notice slips with that sort of warning.
A hasty note by Kelly’s fourth-grade teacher mentioned that her “real father” had died in a car accident the previous summer and that the Notice slip could be ignored. A scrawled message on the bottom of the social worker’s typed page of comments let it be known that Kelly Dahl’s “stepfather” was the usual live-in boyfriend and was out on parole after sticking up a convenience store in Arvada.
A fairly normal file.
But there was nothing normal about little Kelly Dahl. These past few days, as I actively try to recall our interactions during the seven months of that abbreviated school year and the eight months we spent together when she was a junior in high school, I am amazed at how strange our time together had been. Sometimes I can barely remember the faces or names of any of the other sixth-graders that year, or the sullen faces of the slouching juniors five years after that, just Kelly Dahl’s ever-thinning face and startling green eyes, Kelly Dahl’s soft voice—ironic at eleven, sarcastic and challenging at sixteen. Perhaps, after twenty-six years teaching, after hundreds of eleven-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds taught—suffered through, actually—Kelly Dahl had been my only real student.
And now she was stalking me. And I her.
II
Pentimento
I awoke to the warmth of flames on my face. Lurching with a sense of falling, I remembered my last moment of consciousness—driving the Jeep into the pit, the plunge into blackness. I tried to raise my arms, grab the wheel again, but my arms were pinned behi
nd me. I was sitting on something solid, not the Jeep seat, the ground. Everything was dark except for the flicker of flames directly in front of me. Hell? I thought, but there was not the slightest belief in that hypothesis, even if I were dead. Besides, the flames I could see were in a large campfire; the ring of firestones was quite visible.
My head aching, my body echoing that ache and reeling from a strange vertigo, as if I were still in a plummeting Jeep, I attempted to assess the situation. I was outside, sitting on the ground, still dressed in the clothes I had worn during my suicide attempt, it was dark, and a large campfire crackled away six feet in front of me.
“Shit,” I said aloud, my head and body aching as if I were hung over. Screwed up again. I got drunk and messed up. Only imagined driving into the pit. Fuck.
“You didn’t screw up again” came a soft, high voice from somewhere in the darkness behind me. “You really did drive into that mineshaft.”
I started and tried to turn to see who had spoken, but I couldn’t move my head that far. I looked down and saw the ropes crossing my chest. I was tied to something—a stump, perhaps, or a boulder. I tried to remember if I had spoken those last thoughts aloud about getting drunk and screwing up. My head hurt abysmally.
“It was an interesting way to try to kill yourself” came the woman’s voice again. I was sure it was a woman. And something about the voice was hauntingly familiar.
“Where are you?” I asked, hearing the raggedness in my voice. I swiveled my head as far as it would go but was rewarded with only a glimpse of movement in the shadows behind me. The woman was walking just outside the reach of firelight. I was sitting against a low boulder. Five strands of rope were looped around my chest and the rock. I could feel another rope restraining my wrists behind the boulder.
“Don’t you want to ask who I am?” came the strangely familiar voice. “Get that out of the way?”
For a second I said nothing, the voice and the slight mocking tone beneath the voice so familiar that I was sure that I would remember the owner of it before I had to ask. Someone who found me drunk in the woods and tied me up. Why tie me up? Maria might have done that if she had been around, but she was in Guatemala with her new husband. There were past lovers who disliked me enough to tie me up and leave me in the woods—or worse—but none of them had this voice. Of course, in the past year or two there had been so many strange women I’d awakened next to…and who said I had to know this person? Odds were that some crazy woman in the woods found me, observed that I was drunk and potentially violent—I tend to shout and recite poetry when I am at my drunkest—and tied me up. It all made sense—except for the fact that I didn’t remember getting drunk, that the aching head and body did not feel like my usual hangover, that it made no sense for even a crazy lady to tie me up, and that I did remember driving the fucking Jeep into the mineshaft.
“Give up, Mr. Jakes?” came the voice.
Mr. Jakes. That certain tone. A former student… I shook my head with the pain of trying to think. It was worse than a hangover headache, different, deeper.
“You can call me Roland,” I said, my voice thick, squinting at the flames and trying to buy a moment to think.
“No, I can’t, Mr. Jakes,” said Kelly Dahl, coming around into the light and crouching between me and the fire. “You’re Mr. Jakes. I can’t call you anything else. Besides, Roland is a stupid name.”
I nodded. I had recognized her at once, even though it had been six or seven years since I had seen her last. When she had been a junior, she had worn her hair frosted blonde and cut in a punk style just short of a mohawk. It was still short and cut raggedly, still a phony blonde with dark roots, but no longer punk. Her eyes had been large and luminous as a child of eleven, even larger and lit with the dull light of drugs when she was seventeen, but now they were just large. The dark shadows under her eyes that had been a constant of her appearance in high school seemed gone, although that might be a trick of the firelight. Her body was not as angular and lean as I remembered from high school, no longer the bone-and-gristle gaunt, as if the coke or crack or whatever she’d been taking had been eating her up from the inside, but still thin enough that one might have to glance again to see the breasts before being certain it was a woman. This night she was wearing jeans and work boots with a loose flannel shirt over a dark sweatshirt and there was a red bandana tied around her head. The firelight made the skin of her cheeks and forehead very pink. Her short hair stuck out over the bandana above her ears. She held a large camp knife loosely in her right hand as she squatted in front of me.
“Hi, Kelly,” I said.
“Hi, Mr. Jakes.”
“Want to let me loose?”
“No.”
I hesitated. There had been none of the old bantering tone in her voice. We were just two adults talking, she in her early twenties, me fifty-something going on a hundred.
“Did you tie me up, Kelly?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“You’ll know in a few minutes, Mr. Jakes.”
“Okay.” I tried to relax, settle back against the rock as if I were accustomed to driving my Jeep into a pit and waking up to find an old student threatening me with a knife. Is she threatening me with a knife? It was hard to tell. She held it casually, but if she was not going to cut me loose, there was little reason for it to be there. Kelly had always been emotional, unusual, unstable. I wondered if she had gone completely insane.
“Not completely nuts, Mr. Jakes. But close to it. Or so people thought…back when people were around.”
I blinked. “Are you reading my mind, Kelly?”
“Sure.”
“How?” I asked. Perhaps I hadn’t died in the suicide attempt, but was even at that second lying comatose and brain-damaged and dreaming this nonsense in a hospital room somewhere. Or at the bottom of the pit.
“Mu,” said Kelly Dahl.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Mu. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
I remembered. I had taught the juniors…no, it had been the sixth-graders that year with Kelly…the Chinese phrase mu. On one level mu means only yes, but on a deeper level of Zen it was often used by the master when the acolyte asked a stupid, unanswerable, or wrongheaded question such as “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?” The Master would answer only, Mu, meaning—I say “yes” but mean “no,” but the actual answer is—Unask the question.
“Okay,” I said, “then tell me why I’m tied up.”
“Mu,” said Kelly Dahl. She got to her feet and towered over me. Flames danced on the knife blade.
I shrugged, although the tight ropes left that as something less than a graceful movement. “Fine,” I said. I was tired and scared and disoriented and angry. “Fuck it.” If you can read my mind, you goddamn neurotic, read this. I pictured a raised middle finger. And sit on it and swivel.
Kelly Dahl laughed. I had heard her laugh very few times in sixth grade, not at all in eleventh grade, but this was the same memorable sound I had heard those few times—wild but not quite crazy, pleasant but with far too much edge to be called sweet.
Now she crouched in front of me, the long knife blade pointed at my eyes. “Are you ready to start the game, Mr. Jakes?”
“What game?” My mouth was very dry.
“I’m going to be changing some things,” said Kelly Dahl. “You may not like all the changes. To stop me, you’ll have to find me and stop me.”
I licked my lips. The knife had not wavered during her little speech. “What do you mean, stop you?”
“Stop me. Kill me if you can. Stop me.”
Oh, shit…the poor girl is crazy.
“Maybe,” said Kelly Dahl. “But the game is going to be fun.” She leaned forward quickly and for a mad second I thought she was going to kiss me; instead she leveraged the flat of the blade under the ropes and tugged slightly. Buttons ripped. I felt the steel point cold against the base of my throat as the knife slid sideways.
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“Careful…”
“Shhhh,” whispered Kelly Dahl and did kiss me, once, lightly, as her hand moved quickly from left to right and the ropes separated as if sliced by a scalpel.
When she stepped back I jumped to my feet…tried to jump to my feet…my legs were asleep and I pitched forward, almost tumbling into the fire, catching myself clumsily with arms and hands that were as nerveless as the logs I could see lying in the flames.
“Shit,” I said. “Goddammit, Kelly, this isn’t very…” I had made it to my knees and turned toward her, away from the fire.
I saw that the campfire was in a clearing on a ridgeline, somewhere I did not recognize but obviously nowhere near where I had driven into the mineshaft. There were a few boulders massed in the dark and I caught a glimpse of the Milky Way spilling above the pines. My Jeep was parked twenty feet away. I could see no damage but it was dark. A breeze had come up and the pine branches began swaying slightly, the needles rich in scent and sighing softly.
Kelly Dahl was gone.
WHEN I was training to be a teacher, just out of the army and not sure why I was becoming a teacher except for the fact that it was the furthest thing from humping a ruck through Vietnam that I could imagine, one of the trick questions the professors used to ask was—“Do you want to be the sage on the stage or the guide on the side?” The idea was that there were two kinds of teachers: the “sage” who walked around like a pitcher full of knowledge occasionally pouring some into the empty receptacle that was the student, or the “guide” who led the student to knowledge via furthering the young person’s own curiosity and exploration. The obvious right answer to that trick question was that the good teacher-to-be should be “the guide on the side,” not imposing his or her own knowledge, but aiding the child in self-discovery.
I soon found out that the only way I could enjoy teaching was to be the sage on the stage. I poured knowledge and facts and insights and questions and doubts and everything else that I was carrying around directly from my overflowing pitcher to those twenty-five or so empty receptacles. It was most fun when I taught sixth grade because the receptacles hadn’t been filled with so much social moose piss and sheer misinformation.