The Cunning Man

by D. J. Butler

  “Is this the Latuda Mine?”

  Nothing.

  “Am I standing here with Vilhelm Sorenson, the foreman of the Kimball Mine?”

  The pointing tip of the rod dipped sharply, pulling Hiram’s hands down with it.

  Sorenson raised his craggy eyebrows, visible to Hiram in a gray penumbra at the edge of his vision, but said nothing.

  “Is Teancum Kimball in the Kimball Mine?”

  Nothing.

  Hiram felt a sharp pang of disappointment. Where had he gone wrong? Maybe the presence that haunted the mine wasn’t Teancum Kimball. Maybe the old man had run off to Mexico, like Hiram’s father, abandoning his family to their daily struggle.

  Hiram sighed.

  Bill Sorenson cleared his throat. “Can we find Teancum Kimball by going into de Kimball Mine?”

  The rod dipped down.

  Sorenson chuckled. “Okay, den. You heard de rod.”

  On the way in, they passed a tin advertising plate, rusted over its lower third, advising the miners to chew Copenhagen smokeless tobacco.

  Within the mine, the air was warmer still. The tunnels were tall at first. Sorenson pointed at the chiseled rock. “When de coal was dere, dey called it high coal,” Sorenson said. “Dat means dat you can mine it standing up. At first, before I was here, it was all high coal, de work was easy. But you can see here, de high coal is all mined out.”

  Hiram swept the Mosaical Rod from side to side, careful to hold it loosely in his hands, so that if it moved, he’d feel it easily, and also so that any movement that occurred would be due to the rod, and not due to involuntary muscle contractions in Hiram’s hands.

  The tunnels gave opening to galleries, long rooms wide enough to hold dances in.

  They passed beaten, rusty metal carts, not much larger than large wheelbarrows, standing on the railroad tracks. The mine was supported by beams climbing the walls and across the ceiling, but also by half-length railroad ties stacked in pairs in alternating orientation, creating rough wooden columns that held up the ceiling.

  Sorenson slapped his hand onto one. “Dese are called cribs.”

  Affixed to the cribs hung brief signs in multiple languages. Many were in characters Hiram didn’t know, that could be Greek or Chinese. In letters he recognized, he read one that said non fatevi male.

  “Latin?” he asked. Wasn’t fata a word that meant something like fairy? No bad fairies?

  “Italian,” Sorenson told him. “Dese are all safety warnings. Dey say ‘be careful.’”

  “None of them are in English.”

  Sorenson laughed. “None of my boys read English. Half of ’em don’t read deir own language. Maybe you heard dis already, but dey call Helper ‘de town of fifty-seven varieties.’”

  “Like the beans?”

  “Ja, like de beans. Like beans in a can, me and my men.”

  They walked through the galleries and passed shafts exiting left and right. Hiram continued sweeping the road as he moved. Hiram wished he’d brought a pocket watch, and thought they might have walked half a mile.

  Sorenson pointed out tunnels that were only four feet tall. “Here you see where dey found de crawler coal. Same kinda coal, burns just as good, only de seam is shorter. You gotta do de work sitting on your bum, or on your knees. De work is harder, de pay ain’t no better.”

  “You could still dig a taller tunnel.”

  “Ja, but den you do more work to get all de extra rock out. Dat’s no good. But you see dat? Dis is de eastern seam, and dat’s coal.” He pointed at a wall of black rock. “Dat’s good coal, dat can be mined, everybody knows dere’s good coal down here, only de crazy Kimballs got to sort out deir heads.”

  Samuel Kimball had said the eastern seam was petering out? Was he simply mad? Or under the sway of Mahoun?

  As he spoke, they passed an opening that was boarded over. Hiram swung the Mosaical Rod past the opening, and the rod tugged downward. He tried it again, and a third time, and each time the rod clearly signaled that he should go down that passage.

  “Mr. Sorenson,” he said. “Is that boarded off because it’s dangerous?”

  “Ja, sort of. It’s boarded off because it ain’t de mine.”

  “What?”

  “Ja, in a couple of places, de Kimball mine ran into old caves. Dat ain’t de mine. It’s a maze down dere, you can get lost, easy, so we boarded up to keep de boys from wandering off and getting lost.”

  It might not turn out right because it’s so easy to get lost down there.

  “That’s where I have to go.” Hiram brushed a fat fly away from his face.

  The insect lazily drifted off him and through the wooden slats. In the enclosed space, trapped under all the rock, the buzz sounded like a sawmill.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sorenson threw a coiled length of rope over his shoulder, and then they ripped off two of the planks boarding up the side passage.

  The walls in this new passage were rougher, with the jagged look of a chasm torn open by an earthquake fault. The planks supporting the ceiling, as well as the beams overhead and the stacks of short railroad ties, were nonexistent here.

  “Something’s wrong with my eyes,” Hiram said.

  “Tunnel vision.” Sorenson laughed. “It’s just because of de way de carbide lamp works. It shines most brightly in a line straight ahead of you, and your eyes focus on dat line, but dat means dey adjust to dat brightness, and everything else looks dark.”

  “Can I do anything about it?”

  “You can avoid looking straight ahead. Den your eyes will adjust to de darkness some. Or you can just get used to turning your head to where you want to look every time.”

  “But never at another person’s face.”

  “Ja, very good, you have just avoided de number one reason a man gets his lights punched out on de first day of de job. Look ahead, and down, so if you meet anudder man, your light is on his feet.”

  They followed the crack down. Five feet wide, seven feet tall, it was a rough passage created by the Earth itself. Sorenson lumbered ahead, slouching and half-leaping from one stone to the next. It was a steep and long descent, choked with boulders and wet with seeping moisture that trickled down one wall and disappeared among the rocks at their feet. Hiram saw it all a few square feet at a time, with the entire periphery of his vision filled with darkness.

  And again, a distant sound.

  “If we meet another man down here, though,” Hiram said, “he won’t be a miner.”

  “Right,” Sorenson agreed. “He would be an outlaw, or a lost hobo who got stupid drunk.”

  “You’ve seen outlaws?”

  “Oh, sure, from time to time. De biggest was back in de early days, when old Teancum Kimball ran dis place. You know de name Butch Cassidy?”

  “Butch Cassidy mined coal?”

  “No, but he robbed a coal company. Pleasant Valley Coal Company, at Castle Gate. Dat’s north of Helper, up in de canyon. About forty years ago, Butch robbed de payroll. Dat’s why even today, every mining company in Carbon County pays its payroll on a different date every month, and dey choose de date at random. De foremen draw cards, or roll dice, or stick a pin in a calendar. It makes it harder for payroll robbers to plan.”

  “How do you pick the day?” Hiram asked.

  “I got a bag of poker chips with numbers written on ’em. I pull chips out of de bag. Maybe I should switch to using de dowsing rod, eh?”

  “Using a dowsing rod requires a chaste and sober mind. A prayerful heart at all times. I find it helps to fast often.”

  “Can you use a dowsing rod if you drink?”

  “I think it helps not to drink.”

  “Okay, den I’ll leave de dowsing rod to you and I’ll stick to de poker chips.”

  At the bottom of the chasm, they entered a wide, oblong chamber. To their left, the floor gave way to a pool of water, punctuated by strawlike stalagmites reaching for the unseen sky. On the right side of the chamber, three different passag
es broke the cavern wall, two descending and the third boring away into darkness on the level.

  “Spare de rod, spoil de child.” Sorenson laughed raucously. “Come on, Woolley, pick a trail for us.”

  First, Hiram chalked a clear, large arrow on the cavern floor, and a second on the wall, pointing back up the way they had come, along with an estimate: 200 yds to mine.

  Then he held the Mosaical Rod and paced sideways down the chamber, facing rightward, swinging the rod back and forth to give it the chance to indicate which of the three passages would help him find Teancum Kimball.

  The rod didn’t indicate any one of them.

  He tried it a second time, and then a third.

  Nothing.

  “I think you broke de rod,” Sorenson said.

  Hiram examined the Mosaical Rod. His carvings all seemed intact, the wood otherwise unblemished. His eyelids were heavy, fluttering perilously close to sleep as he huddled over the witch hazel.

  Hiram brushed at his face. Flies? Or was he seeing things? He was sweating copiously, though the air was cool, and he was so tired that every time he shut his eyes, he was afraid he’d fall asleep standing.

  “Unless, of course,” Sorenson added, “de rod wants us to take a swim.”

  Hiram snapped back to full wakefulness. Standing, he walked in a slow half-turn on the shelf of rock—there.

  A definite tug on the rod, and when he repeated the turn in reverse, the rod pulled again.

  “Oh ho,” Sorenson said with a chuckle. “Dis is interesting.”

  Hiram tilted his head down to look into the water. He felt a cool breeze on his neck, and a faint tickling sensation. In the water, small white things that might have been fish or salamanders scurried along at the edge of his view.

  “Does anything…dangerous…live in these waters?”

  “Not dat I know,” Sorenson said. “But den, I never walked around caves like dese following a dowsing rod, so I’m learning all kinds of new stuff about de world.”

  Hiram took his bearings again with the rod, made another chalk mark on the stone, then stepped into the water. It was deeper than it appeared from the surface, and he sank immediately up to the middle of his thigh.

  “Oh, dat’s cold.” Sorenson lurched into the pool beside him. “Hey, are you hearing a buzzing sound? Like bees?”

  “Yes.” Hiram stopped, and something like a crayfish, but totally white, crawled over his boot. “Are you armed?”

  “I got a knife. In my experience, if I don’t carry a gun, de boys are less likely to bring a gun to talk to me when dey’re angry.”

  “What about for defending yourself against criminals?”

  “Ja, well, dat’s why we pick a random payday.”

  “I’ve got a revolver.”

  “You keep it. I’ll use my knife. We’ll both look really silly when we get attacked by de big white swarm of cave-bees.”

  Hiram pushed ahead, crossing the water. When he got closer, he saw that, where the cave wall had appeared to him to drop down into the water and end the cavern, it in fact stayed above water, and there was a two-foot tall space between the water and the ceiling, over a passage moving forward. Holding the revolver and the Mosaical Rod above the water to keep them dry, he crouched and waddled along the submerged passage.

  Something slimy felt its way briefly up one leg of his overalls. Shuddering, he shook his foot and dislodged it.

  He felt a tugging at his ankle. Was that a rise in the pitch of the buzzing?

  But no, the tugging was only water current, and in two more steps, he had passed it, and then the ceiling rose, and in two more steps he was able to stand.

  Sorenson shook himself dry like a bear with a fresh salmon in its jaws. “Give me a coal mine any day. For one thing, de mine has supports to keep up de ceiling. Here, I don’t know.” They both looked up, and saw that they stood inside a chimney-shaped hollow. An exit from the chimney to Hiram’s right hinted at unknown further passages. “Maybe de rod will warn us of a cave-in.”

  Hiram laughed at the joke, but only for a moment.

  “Shout,” he murmured. “For the Lord hath given you the city.”

  “Dis ain’t no city.”

  Hiram didn’t know any charm for bringing down a wall, not the wall of a city or the wall of a cave. Such hexes existed. They were in books like Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s, or the Picatrix. They were books Hiram had never read, and most likely never would read, since they were written in Latin.

  But Gus Dollar read those books, and owned them. He’d created a lead lamen with quotes from Joshua on it. Was it possible Gus wanted to cause a cave-in of the mine? Yet he’d truthfully said he didn’t care about the mine. Then again, these caves were below the mine.

  Gus had said he was making the Book of Spirits to defeat Samael.

  Climbing out of the water onto another dry shelf, Hiram found himself looking at a chunk of stone. At first, due to its blunted edges and slick appearance, he took it for a lumpy stalagmite. After a moment’s observation, he realized that it couldn’t be natural. For one thing, the walls here were of reddish stone, and the rock in the center was nearly white, marked by black streaks.

  Also, the stone was shaped very distinctly like a lizard’s head. Hiram clearly saw eyes, and the ridge of a brow; the great flat top of the stone, like the upper surface of an altar, lay behind the reptile’s eyes.

  As in Samuel’s painting.

  Only the lizard’s head seemed to have three mouths.

  And then Hiram realized that the streaks were stains.

  “By Gud, de rod was right. Look dere.”

  In the corner of the chimney, slumped against the wall of the cavern, and beside a foot-wide horizontal crack in the stone, lay a corpse.

  The body was a man’s, and it was dressed in Sunday best, though wearing a mine helmet much like the one Hiram had on. Its long-bearded face was twisted in an expression of horror, which Hiram could read clearly, because although the flesh had rotted away and the eye sockets gaped wide, the body’s skin and hair were intact. The skin had a bluish tint under the carbide light, but Hiram recognized the face.

  “Teancum Kimball,” Hiram said.

  In the crook of one arm lay a collapse tangle of small bones, under a skein of desiccated skin. A lamb?

  “Ja, I’d know dat old bugger anywhere. You want to…check his pockets or something?”

  Hiram did want to search the body. What was he looking for? Some indication of witchcraft, maybe. Some sign of intent, a hint that it was Teancum Kimball who had ultimately caused all the trouble at the mine. Some sign it might be Teancum’s shade speaking to his sons through the peep-stone, lying to Samuel, and hardening Ammon’s heart. If Hiram could do something as simple as lay Teancum’s body in a grave and bless it, for instance, he’d be thrilled to do it, to bring an end to all the conflict.

  First, he marked the floor with chalk.

  “I should have brought a blanket or a sack,” Hiram said. “I don’t think we can carry him out.”

  “If we do dat, he falls apart.”

  Hiram knelt. He set the revolver and the Mosaical Rod to one side. The buzzing sound was definitely louder. Gingerly, he patted down the corpse’s pockets, finding keys and a billfold, which he took.

  “Ffffffffffff…”

  Hiram nearly fell over, pulling away.

  Had he heard the corpse speak?

  “What’s wrong?” Sorenson asked.

  Hiram felt too silly to answer. However, if Teancum Kimball’s spirit wanted to speak to him now, the easiest way to find a solution might be to listen.

  Slowly, he leaned in over the corpse’s open mouth. Turning his ear to the corpse meant that his tunnel vision reduced the entire cave to a single spot of bare stone wall, a few feet across. He imagined the body lurching forward to bite him, but that was ridiculous nonsense, the lurid sort of thing you would read in cheap magazines.

  “Teancum,” he whispered. “Talk to me.”

  A col
umn of flies exploded from the corpse’s mouth. It struck Hiram in the face like the kick of a mule, knocking him backward. He struck the altar under one shoulder blade and fell to the ground, reeling. Flies banged off the reflecting disk of his carbide lamp, and he smelled the bitter stink of burnt insect.

  He managed not to lose his helmet.

  “Jesus!” Sorenson shouted, flapping his arms to drive the flies away. The foreman staggered back to the water’s edge. “Come on, Woolley, we’ll do dis anudder day, bring a big basket of flypaper with us.”

  Lying nearly on his back, propped on his elbows, Hiram peeked into the crack. What he had taken for darkness, he now saw consisted of swarming flies. Was this the locus, the epicenter? Had he stumbled into some kind of flies’ nest?

  Scooting around to point his lance of light into the crack, he looked for more. Eggs? Larvae? A way through?

  He saw mouths. Mouths with jagged teeth, and white slug-like larvae dripping from the mouths like slobber. Three mouths, all set in the same gray, scaly face.

  Hiram threw himself backward. His helmet slipped and he grabbed it, burning his hand on the carbide lamp. He searched for the revolver and the dowsing rod, but his sight was hampered by tunnel vision. He managed to get his hand on the revolver, but felt the rod skitter away from him into the darkness.

  An arm burst from the crack. It was huge and gray, and it jostled Teancum Kimball’s corpse to one side. Hiram leaped back into the water, managing to avoid the talons. His breath came in short gasps made shallow by fear and by the chill of the water.

  “Dis way, Woolley! Duck!” Bill Sorenson grabbed Hiram by the shoulder and pulled him backward and down. Hiram stared at the crack, seeing the many-mouthed face once more before the dropping ceiling obscured it, and the reptile-head altar with it.

  He and Sorenson dragged each other to their feet on the stone shelf on the other side, and Hiram was hyperventilating. Light speared his eyeballs, and then his vision went dark, a blackness pierced by a dull red sun that illuminated nothing.

  “Woolley!” Sorenson slapped him across the cheek. “Woolley, get hold of yourself! What was dat thing?”

  “I can’t see!”

  “Your helmet’s on backward, and you looked into my lamp. Here.” Sorenson adjusted Hiram’s helmet, and he regained a narrow tunnel of vision, though now it was marred with bright red circles.