by John Pelan
With each word Poe was a step closer, and with each step his flesh seethed and decayed until the thing that stood heaving, inches from James, seemed to be animated as much by the constant action of the maggots that writhed in its pudding flesh as from any commands coming from whatever brain lay in that dissolving skull. “Show me, James. Show me.” And Poe's ripe hands clutched about his host's face, drawing it close to his lid-less eyes so that he could see what was etched there as he planted a kiss upon Allyson's lips.
When James awoke, he was lying in his bed. He opened his eyes. His window was wide, the screen letting in the cool breeze that evening had brought with it. By his bed, Poe sat, looking whole again, and very sad.
“I am sorry, James. If it could have been another, so be it. But it was you, and you chose yourself as surely as we did.”
James merely lay where he was, and the fear in his eyes must have been evident.
“Don't be afraid. I have done what I came to do, and now I will leave. I … I thank you. I realize it must mean nothing to you, but I thank you. It's all that I have.” He rose then, and James could see that Poe held a book in his hands. James recognized the dark green jacket.
“There is one thing that I can give you. I should like to warn you that someone else is coming. There is another who is coming to visit you. He wrote rather well, and I can only imagine what singular visions he will conjure here.
“Good-bye, James. Don't hate them. They only told us of your admiration.”
Even as Poe vanished, fading into nothing, James knew that he should flee. But night was falling, and there was some comfort to be had in the security of four solid walls. Outside, though, in the coming gloom, the forest was alive with the call of whippoorwills.
Gingerly, James reached out and felt at the book, peering through teary eyes at Lovecraft's name stamped there in black ink. Waiting, he cried softly as the bird noise increased to a scream. He thought of his parents, wondering if he should curse them.
THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE
James Van Pelt
What the beginning of my tale must do is to convince you that a man of science like myself could do what I did at the end. I don't know if I can. Some actions are too hard to explain. Maybe it was the fever born of living in a foreign land. Maybe Charlie Crump and his superstitions affected me. Perhaps I actually became insane for a moment. All I can tell you is that the events are true, and for what it's worth, I did what I did.
It started with young Colonel Thomas Montgomery, eyes bleary with drink, sitting on the edge of the vertical shaft that stretched down into the Epitome. He was facing me as I cranked the windlass that lowered a bucket carrying four Negro miners a hundred feet down into the tunnel.
When I'd arrived in the Colorado Territory two weeks earlier, Montgomery had squinted at me from under his hat. “What kind of black boy are you?”
“I'm mulatto,” I'd said a bit stiffly, and quite a bit better educated than you, I thought.
“Neither fish nor fowl, eh?” He scowled.
Now, only fourteen days later, the colonel seemed to have forgiven me for my African mother. I believe he found in my English accent a sign of kinship not present in my American cousins.
“Surly bastards,” he said, gesturing toward the men, now vanished below. “Before I surrendered with the Western Army in North Carolina, Jonas, they were properly scared of me. Hell, Charlie Crump served as my houseboy.” Charlie Crump was the crew chief, a likable man of twenty-five or so, about my age. He'd tipped his hat at a jaunty angle and grinned at me as I lowered the crew. Montgomery rolled a whiskey bottle between his palms. Only a swallow or two remained. I concentrated on holding the bar against the cable's tension. If the bucket jerked, it could spill the miners.
Looking into the shaft, he said, “I should have become a raider. There would be glory in that.” He pulled a drink from his bottle. “For my service, the Confederate government gave me one Mexican dollar for food, and a mule to get home on. You know what I found there? Do you? Surly, superstitious, brown bastards from pantry to parlor. No Klan then. I should go back, you know. Give them a bit of the white sheet. Give them a bit of the ghost. You can scare a man into better behavior. Nothing like a little terror to keep him awake at night. Better than guns. Better than nooses.” He sounded introspective suddenly. Very quiet. “Plant an imp in a man's head, and he'll walk always in darkness.”
I nodded. Some variation of this story came whenever he drank, and he hadn't missed a day since I joined him. Now he was worse than usual, swearing more, slurring his speech.
But keeping the bucket ride smooth was my job now, not listening. They didn't warn me at Oxford's School of Mines about drunken, Southern expatriate owners who knew nothing about hard-rock mining. He tunneled on whims, overworked his crews, and stored blasting powder too near the machinery. Reading American authors —Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe —hadn't prepared me for this land either. Well, perhaps Poe, who wrote, “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of Hell.”
Across the canyon, a puff of smoke billowed from the Daedelus. A few seconds later the explosion echoed sharply. Up and down the gulch, yellow tailing piles marked the slopes. Powder blasts resounded regularly, and when no wind rattled through the trees, the sound of hammers on drills filled the air. Below, tents and rude log structures occupied nearly every flat spot, and in the middle, Clear Creek oozed like muddy soup.
I wasn't thinking about the colonel, though. In my mind's eye, I pictured the shafts and drifts and crosscuts underground. One hundred and eighty feet down, we had hit water. If we were to go lower, we'd need pumps or a drainage tunnel.
More troublesome, however, was the cavity in Bernice, the middle of three coyote tunnels Montgomery had extended. A miner lost a hand drill while setting a powder charge the day before. He'd placed the drill, whacked it twice, and the third time it had disappeared into the hole. He'd fled, blubbering about witches and demons. Now none of the men would go into Bernice. I went down by myself and widened the cavity until it was large enough to extend a lantern into. When I did so, no light reached walls or ceiling, and when I pitched a rock through, it clattered once against something, then made no other sound as it fell. Suddenly I'd felt nauseated. My light dimmed, and I backed out. Bad air.
How could there be a natural cavern in granite? This was a conundrum more interesting than any story I'd heard from the colonel.
Still he droned on, “I didn't have a home to go to. That damned Sherman gave the land over for slave occupation. Camp followers, the whole cursed lot. I could see the Atlantic from my porch, you know, the clipper ships. I remember their sails, full of the sea breeze. It's been two years, now. You think they've grown a decent crop yet? You think they can care for themselves without proper direction? Might as well have burned the building to the ground.”
“You did well with your dollar, sir,” I said absently. The bucket would be nearly to the new shaft now. I waited for the signal. One bell meant “stop” or “lower the bucket.” Two meant “bring it up.”
“Investors,” he said, leaning over the hole. From where he sat he would be able to see the men's candles eighty feet down, if the air was clear. “Not everything ended in Yankee banks.” He flicked a pebble over the edge. I cringed. If it hit one of the men, it could sting. They were runaways who'd fled west during the war. That's all Montgomery hired. At first I thought it was because he could pay them less than white miners, but now I think it was his hatred of them. He relished the chance to make their lives miserable.
He swung his feet out of the shaft, and stood. “The air's too dry here. Too damn thin. The work's dangerous. The gold, what there is of it, is impossible to dig out, and what I ship to the stamper mill is stolen. I can't get a decent breath that doesn't smell of Chinese, Yankees, and darkies.” He paced around the shaft, the empty bottle dangling from his hand, a dangerous scowl in his eye. “Did yo
u see how they looked at me before they went down? Insolent. Pure disrespect. In Atlanta white women walk in the street because the Negroes won't give way, and the law, Northern law, protects them. Used to be they knew their place.”
I watched the bell, a hammer strung next to a panning plate. When they tugged on the cord, the hammer struck the metal. They were working the new dig, and I didn't have the cable marked for the proper depth, so I relied on them to signal me to stop their descent.
After I'd explored the odd cavity down in Bernice, I'd spent most of the afternoon in the Epitome collecting samples from the shaft walls. Before I'd arrived, the colonel had found the main vein, much thinner than he hoped it would be. Several tunnels followed it through the mountain, the coyote tunnels, so named because they were exploratory, not like the engineered shafts I was used to seeing. The support timbers gave me nightmares, roughly hewn beams jammed haphazardly into place. A good nudge would knock any one of them down. My first day in the mine, while Charlie gave me a tour, a foot-wide support timber fell over, nearly smashing my foot. Neither of us had touched it. Charlie grinned and wedged it against the floor and ceiling. I'm not claustrophobic, but the Epitome gave me shivers. The mountain's weight hung over me. The ore was low grade, too. Colonel Montgomery hoped for better luck at other levels, which is why he'd hired me. “Expertise,” he had said, “solves problems.”
I'd noted the promising spots. The assay numbers were posted on a beam by the windlass. I studied them. The rock was thick with quartz, but it was difficult to tell with small samples what bore gold thread and what was worthless bull quartz. I ignored the colonel as he continued his rant. Work went better when he stayed in his tent farther down the mountain or rode his horse into Blackhawk where there was a proper saloon, with wood floors and glass in the windows.
The hammer clanged once. I leaned against the bar, stopping the bucket's descent. The colonel stood on the shaft's edge again, his back bent, looking down. At first I didn't realize what he was doing, his posture seemed so odd, as if he were praying. Then I saw: He held a rock the size of a human head. He swayed a little, from the weight or the drink I couldn't tell. I opened my mouth to speak—I have no idea what I would have said—but he lurched forward and pitched the rock into the opening before I could speak. Whatever I might have uttered stayed frozen in my throat. The colonel stood perfectly poised, his hands empty, while the rock—it must have weighed fifty pounds —hurtled down the shaft.
The retarding bar jumped out of my grip. I didn't hear the rock hit. Everything seemed silent, but I felt it in my hands, the vibration leaping up the cable and through the bar. The windlass spun a half turn before I grabbed the bar to stop it.
Stunned, I looked at the colonel. He never raised his eyes. If he had, the spell might have been broken, but he stood like a dusty statue, head down. Behind him the mountain rose steeply. Pine spotted the slope, clinging to gaps between dark granite outcrops. A lone bird, a hawk, glided overhead at a level with the ridge's top. I held the bar, the vibration no longer alive in my fingers, the metal a deadly still, cold weight against my hand.
Two bells. I watched the hammer, not believing it had moved. Two bells again, insistently.
I started the laborious process of bringing the bucket up.
The colonel stepped back, dusted off his hands, then strode past me. “I'm getting a drink. You tell those men I don't pay salary if they're aboveground.” His voice was absolutely steady.
Time crept as I turned the windlass. They didn't ring the bell again, and they made no noise. I'd almost convinced myself that the rock must have missed. Maybe it clanged off the bucket's rim. They were iust scared. The walls weren't steady if rocks were falling off, they'd be thinking. They wouldn't suspect the rock had been dropped intentionally. Who would toss a stone down a mine shaft on purpose? They were frightened and coming up to tell me we needed to stabilize the walls.
The buckle holding the bucket to the cable appeared, then the men. Three held one like a broken toy. Blood soaked them all. At first I didn't recognize what I was seeing. They've covered his head, I thought. Why would they do that? But his head wasn't covered. That was his head, not head-shaped anymore, and his shoulder hung awkwardly. They didn't move, the three men, they just held him, as if by supporting him they could put him back together.
I shifted my gaze down. On the bucket's edge a deep dent bent the metal. A single bloody drop and a clump of hair marked the dent.
“We need a mortician,” Charlie Crump said. All the Negroes spoke with thick accents, but this was clear. He didn't ask for a doctor. He didn't ask what happened. He just held his dead companion. “We have to be burying,” Charlie said. They carefully lifted the dead man from the bucket and laid him beside the shaft. I covered the corpse with a tarp.
One of them said to another, “It's dat debil man again.”
“This has happened before?” I said, unable to take my gaze from the lump under the tarp.
They nodded.
There was no constable in Veronica Falls, which wasn't a full-fledged settlement yet like Idaho Springs or Central City, so I walked along the cart trail to the jailhouse in Idaho Springs, about a five-mile trip. The air smelled of blasting powder and shook with explosions. Sawing, hammering, cursing.
Enduring their angry stares, I stepped aside for men on horseback or leading mules, hauling supplies in huge baskets draped over their backs. The farther west I'd gone from Boston, the worse this country had become. Boston, at least, had retained a sense of civility. A man wearing a jacket over a white shirt with starched collar would be considered properly attired. Here, I couldn't tell if it were the color of my skin or my style of dress that attracted so much attention. It cost fifty cents a shirt to have them laundered, which was what I paid for them new, but a person had to keep an appearance of dignity about him or be reduced to the barbaric. Men lying in open tents, waiting for their shifts, stared at me.
Signs advertising tools and dry goods hung from log buildings that weren't even chinked yet. I could see tables and chairs through the cracks in the walls.
“You're that fancy, European mining engineer Montgomery's hired on, ain't ya? Heard you were a bit of a dandy. Didn't know you were a black fella, not that you're all that dark,” said the sheriff, sitting on a stool outside his cabin, which also served as a jail. “What are you, some kind of Arab?”
“I'm British,” I said.
Like everyone else in the camps, he was desperately in need of a bath. Grease and dirt stained his shirt so heavily, I couldn't tell what pattern it was. I don't know why I thought I would get justice from a man such as this.
“Did anyone else see this happen?” he asked. “How 'bout the colored boys. They see it?”
I shook my head.
He rubbed his hand down his beard. “I've been out to Montgomery's claim before. Heard a rumor, but the darkies wouldn't answer questions. You being foreign, I reckon you don't understand how things work around here. We need proper, believable witnesses to make an arrest.”
“I saw it,” I said.
He rubbed his beard some more. “There is that,” he said, “but it's just you. One witness won't do.”
“That's outrageous! If Montgomery came to you saying I dropped a rock down the shaft, would he need a corroborator?”
The sheriff laughed. “Of course not. He's white, even if he is a Rebel.”
My mind reeled at this turn of events. “I thought the War Between the States was supposed to emancipate the Negro race.”
He seemed to think that over, then said, “We freed 'em. That doesn't make them the same as everyone else. I hear the plan is to round them all up and ship them back to where they came from.”
“Are you going to arrest Montgomery or not?”
“Look, I don't like him any better than the next man, but there's no use in me going up there if there's no case. You could be mistaken. It'd be your word against his. If he's stupid enough to kill his own crew, then he won't last long
out here. Anyway, miners die all the time. If I'd had any sense, I'd have bought a hearse instead of a mining kit. That way I'd be one of the few to make money from digging holes.”
I left his cabin. By then the day was nearly done, and the tree stumps cast long shadows behind them. When I got to Veronica Falls, night had fallen, stars glittered in the dark blue sky. Lanterns lit mine entrances in the slopes above, while silhouetted forms sat in glowing tents along the creek. Woodsmoke filled the valley, carrying the smell of cooked beef and vegetables. It had been six months since I left London, and I missed the rain-washed streets, the pubs, the way boat lights reflected on the broad Thames, waiting for the tide to turn. I missed an enlightened city where even a street urchin's death deserved an investigation.
I made my way toward my quarters in Brown Town, where the Negroes, Chinese, and Mexicans pitched their tents. Montgomery's crew tent might have been made for ten men, but twenty-four slept there. Generally eight-man teams worked the Epitome in round-the-clock shifts, so we weren't stacked on top of one another all the time. Nonetheless, it made even the primitive conditions of the Pakistani gold dig where I'd worked with my Oxford mentors look palatial by comparison. No native servants taking our laundry in the evening here. No break for tea in the afternoon, even if field rationing had meant boiling the leaves twice.
Somewhere in the dark, a gunshot echoed. Then two more. I shuddered and drew my coat closer. Americans!
I'd spent nearly all my money to get to Montgomery's mine. In our correspondence he'd promised to reimburse my traveling expenses, but now he said I needed to “earn it out.” If I quit his employment, I'd have no way to get home again. But I swore to myself then, as I wandered up the darkened cart path, Clear Creek gurgling in my ears, that I would stand in harm's way rather than let him hurt another miner. Accidents can happen both directions. There are many ways a man can be killed in the Colorado mine fields.
A strange scene greeted me in the crew tent. Rather than the still forms of men bedded down for the evening, I saw a circle of heads bent over an oil lantern. They chanted low, deep words that made no sense to me. It might have been nonsense, but it sounded like language. The lantern lit the faces nearby, serious, white eyes, flashes of teeth. Charlie Crump saw me. He pushed his way out of the circle, grabbed my arm, and took me from the tent.