by D. J. Butler
“Let’s go,” Michael said. “Can we take the truck?”
Eliza stood still, snowflakes piling up on her dark hair. Her brother’s kidnapping had curbed her tongue.
“Sorry, Hiram, your big truck is too conspicuous,” Mary said. “But four will fit in my car.”
“As long as I can stop carrying this toolbox around.” Hiram nodded.
“I can drive,” Michael said.
“Are you assuming I can’t, because I’m a woman?” Mary challenged him.
“I’m just saying I’m probably better. Not because you’re a woman, but because I’m really good at driving cars.”
“You know, I drove myself out here. All the way from Denver, Colorado, and I didn’t wreck my car once. Had a flat tire outside Green River. You know what I did?”
“Swooned?”
“Fixed it.”
Michael nodded. “You got me.”
“Ride in the back,” she told him. “With your father.”
“I need to grab something first.” Hiram put his toolbox inside the car’s trunk. He tucked the two stolen lamens—the brass plate for summoning and the lead for collapsing a wall—into his inside coat pocket.
After a moment’s thought, he put the bloodstained whip into one the largest pockets, too.
Michael still had his bronze Oremus plate.
Hiram climbed into the car and huddled under the blanket. “Keep me awake,” he said to Michael. “Kick me now and then or something.”
But Michael didn’t kick him. Hiram gripped his Saturn ring in his clasped hands and promptly fell asleep, rocked to sleep by the battling rhythms of the car’s engine and the wind’s blast.
* * *
Mary McGill’s Model A jerked to a stop, bouncing Hiram awake. Tattered fragments of a dream escaped him—a maze of tunnels, an enthroned demon before whom Hiram had prostrated himself, and an object buried beneath the throne that Hiram would not quite see.
He needed to consult his dream dictionary.
“You should wake him up now,” Hiram heard Mary say.
“I’m awake.” Hiram physically pried his eyelids up with his fingertips and then pulled back the blanket. Cold night air blasted his face and neck, which helped shake him to alertness. He could only see thirty feet, for the blasting snow.
His hands shook and he felt nauseated, but if his path crossed the path of a bottle of Coke, Hiram resolved to drink it immediately.
“Pap,” Michael said. “The miners are here. I…I think they’re waiting for you.”
Hiram unfolded himself out of the Model A’s back seat. His joints hurt, and when his booted feet touched the frozen soil, he felt as if someone was pounding his soles with a mallet.
The miners stood under the imposing structure of the silent tipple. There was Hermann Wagner, the German leader with his blocky head, and all the Germans with him. There were the Greeks, other than Dimitrios Kalakis, lined up behind the miner who always wore a bandana on his face. There was a scattering of Chinese and Japanese and Italian miners too, and they all held weapons. They had ax handles and spades and several even held rifles, but they weren’t standing against each other, and they didn’t hold their weapons as if they were about to attack.
They stood as if waiting, and when Hiram gingerly climbed up the hill to meet them, a welcoming murmur rippled through the mob.
Hiram straightened his back and tried to look the men in the eye. He wished he had a stone for eloquence, or a gift for it. Instead, he just looked every man in the eye he could and spoke plainly.
“I expect some of you think I’m a killer.”
“Did you murder Callista?” The voice that asked was a woman’s voice, so Hiram turned, looking for Dimitrios. To his surprise, the voice came from the red-bandana man; the miner pulled the bandana down, revealing a woman’s face that Hiram knew—Medea Markopoulos.
Hiram managed not to stare.
“I didn’t kill her.” Hiram met her gaze.
Her eyes burned with rage, but tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Did Samuel Kimball kill my daughter?” Medea asked.
“I…I don’t think so.” Hiram met Mary’s gaze. “But I can’t be completely certain.”
Medea nodded.
“I didn’t kill the Sorensons, either. The last I saw of Bill Sorenson was after he took me down into the mine last night.”
“Ja, we know.” Wagner jerked a thumb at one of his Germans. Hiram recognized the man as the foul-smelling miner who had tried to shoot Samuel Kimball. “Paul saw you.”
There had been a witness? “Did you see who killed the Sorensons?”
Paul shook his head. “But I saw Sorenson take you down into the mine, and bring you back up again.”
Medea sniffed and cleared her throat. “I believe Hiram Woolley.”
“Ja, we do, too,” Hermann Wagner added.
There followed a round of general nodding and affirmation noises. Hiram took a deep breath; a weight he hadn’t realized was there had lifted from his chest.
“How did you…? Did you know I was coming?” he asked.
“I received a note from Samuel Kimball,” Medea said, “telling me to guard the mine to stop you from coming in. Or rather, the note came for Dimitrios, and made its way to me.”
“She’s the Head Greek now,” the club-footed Greek said, as if Hiram needed the explanation. “She a woman, but she smarter than us blockheads.”
The Greek with the bad foot bobbed his head. “I’m Stavros.”
“I received a similar message from Ammon,” Hermann said. “And we got to talking. The food you brought is gone, and Herr Sorenson is dead. We are hungry and tired. Then we remembered what Mrs. McGill said, that we must work together to get the Kimball brothers to behave, and not fight each other when the Kimballs tell us to.”
“The Kimballs have been…” What should Hiram tell the miners? “They haven’t been themselves. I think they’re going to come around, but the reason they asked you here was to stop me from trying to…fix the situation.”
“Is that who’s got the missing carbide lamps and helmets?” Medea asked. “Is it the Kimball brothers, down in the mine?”
“It is my brothers,” Eliza said. “I’m Eliza Kimball. Let us go down into the mine, and we’ll set the situation right.”
“You certainly look like Teancum’s girl,” Stavros said.
Medea cast a narrowed gaze on Eliza.
“I need a little more help than that.” Hiram sighed. “I need all the entrances watched. If anyone tries to leave—Ammon or Samuel or anyone else—I need you to hold them for me. Can you do that?”
“We will all help,” Wagner said.
Medea nodded. “I’ll do more than watch.”
“So will I,” Mary said.
“There are two more mineshafts, higher up on the hill.” Hermann Wagner gestured up at the ridge above Kimball Canyon. “We can bottle those up, easy.”
“What about the caves?” Paul said. “I know where there are a couple of cracks in the rock. I’m not sure, but I think they connect into the mine tunnels.”
“And there’s at least one near Gus Dollar’s store,” Hiram added. “If the shopkeeper is there, make sure he doesn’t leave.”
The miners floated several other locations that needed to be watched to completely bottle up the underground complex. Then they broke up into squads of four to five men each and scattered to the various openings.
Hermann stayed at the main opening, with Paul and Stavros. All three had rifles.
The German miner with a large neck goiter and a bright red waistcoat volunteered to accompany Hiram and his party. Eliza objected that the mine tunnels were narrow, and the German bellowed in response, “Den ve go in zinkle file!” He shook a pickaxe in both hands. “My name is Valter,” he said to Hiram. “I apolochize for any earlier rudeness.”
Medea didn’t say a word, and she didn’t leave Hiram’s side. A blade appeared in her hands, the same sword Hiram had seen in her
home. The weapon had a curving blade like a scimitar, narrow near the hilt and broader near the tip. That and her denim jeans and bandana around her neck made her look like a Janissary dressed as a cowboy.
“Why did you hide your face?” Hiram asked her. “Wouldn’t Dimitrios know who you were, anyway?”
“When my Basil got injured,” the woman explained, “I had to take his part. All the Greeks knew who I was, but I wore the bandana so the Germans and the others wouldn’t give me trouble.”
“I’m glad to have you.” Hiram checked his inside coat pockets and felt the two lamens from Gus Dollar’s Book of the Spirits. He had not recovered the heliotropius from the back seat of Police Chief Fox’s cruiser. He handed what he hoped was a protective lamen to Mary. “Will you carry this? In a pocket, or wear it on a string?”
“From the man who wrote the apostles on a sage leaf and sprang me from jail? Yes, I will.” Mary smiled, but took the lamen. She tucked it into the inside of her jacket. “It’s heavy.”
“It’s made out of brass, I think.” He didn’t mention the lead plate in his own pocket, the Saturnine one with the astrological markings, the text from Joshua and the words he couldn’t read. The lamen that—he thought—was designed to collapse the caves below the mine.
Hiram realized he should have stopped at the Double-A to pull his other protective lamen from the door. Too late.
Hiram took his chi-rho amulet from his neck and offered it to the Kimball sister. “Eliza, would you wear this?”
She shook her head and stepped away. Hiram felt embarrassed.
He offered the amulet to Medea and Walter both. Walter shook his head and Medea snorted, so Hiram put the talisman back on his own neck.
Turning to Eliza, he asked, “When you were a child here, did you ever learn to ignite a carbide lamp?”
“It’s been a long time.” Eliza’s voice was dull, as if she were very tired. “Perhaps you can show me.”
“One last thing,” Hiram said. He quickly thumbed through the pages of his dream dictionary. There was nothing for either king or throne, but he did find one apparently relevant entry:
underground—if you go underground and you are not digging, it denotes your early death.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The caffeine had left Hiram’s system. He wasn’t shaking anymore, and his heartbeat was regular, and he didn’t want to vomit. On the other hand, he struggled against an urge to lie down in a mine cart and fall asleep. Once the affairs of the Kimball Mine were set right, he’d sleep for a week and eat for a month.
First, he had to rescue Ammon from Samuel.
Medea and Walter had moved various chits to the “in” board. Then they’d entered. Coming in out of the snowstorm, the mine’s warmer air was a relief.
“Samuel!” Hiram called ahead of them in the darkness. With the bright carbide beams and their noisy footsteps, there was no way his party was going to surprise Samuel, in any case. “It’s Hiram Woolley! Your sister’s with us. Don’t do anything you’ll regret!”
But was there anything a drug-addled maniac like Samuel Kimball would regret?
Hiram wished he had a way to know where the demon was. He wasn’t sure whether he preferred the idea that it was on the surface and therefore wouldn’t attack them in the mine, or in the mine and therefore wouldn’t kill innocents on the surface.
He led the way, Eliza Kimball to one side, Mary and Michael following, and the two miners bringing up the rear. He had no trouble finding the cave entrance with its removed boards, and the six of them crawled down the bottom of the boulder-choked crack and onto the flat stone shelf beside the waters, following Hiram’s previous chalk marks.
Mary bent over to gaze into the pool. “Ugh, it’s full of little white things. Fish and insects and snakes. Why are they so white?”
“They don’t need pigment,” Michael said. “They’ve never seen the sun, not their whole lives. I read that in Popular Science.”
Hiram looked down the three passages he hadn’t stepped in before. Might they be exits? Or might Samuel have taken Ammon down one of those tunnels? But he didn’t think so.
Hiram wished he had another hazel rod. “I don’t think they’ve gone down any of those passages.”
“Why not?” Medea held her sword up and to one side of her body, as if she were a warrior, entering a hostile castle. She looked competent and controlled; Walter, by contrast, nervously swung his pickaxe around with one hand as if he were strolling in the park and the pickaxe were a parasol. Hiram worried he’d hit someone.
In his other hand, at Hiram’s insistence, the German carried a gas can.
“Samuel?” Hiram called, turning and facing over the water.
No answer.
“Follow me.” To Michael, he said: “Stay close behind me.”
Then Hiram stepped into the water.
The shock of its temperature took him by surprise; he had forgotten how cold it was. At every step, the knobby texture of the walls presented a new landscape. His eyes, tightly focused by the carbide beam, interpreted those changing shadows as movement, and he continually turned his head one way and then the other, trying to find the sources of the flitting and swooping motions in his nearly-blind peripheral vision.
He wished he had his revolver.
Hiram climbed out of the pool and onto the shelf of stone with the lizard-head altar. The sound of water sluicing from his clothing and splashing all around him was loud. He wouldn’t hear anyone or anything approach over that racket, he thought, but then Eliza climbed out of the water after him and was even louder.
Ammon and Samuel Kimball both sat against the wall, beside the mummified corpse of their father. The two men both stared at Hiram with expressions of horror, and then he realized that they couldn’t see him, due to the power of the carbide beam.
“It’s Hiram Woolley,” he said.
“The witch!” Ammon gasped.
“No.” Hiram sighed.
But then he realized that both men sat with their hands tied before them, and more rope knotted around their ankles. “Wait a moment.” He raised a hand in warning to his friends behind him.
“So it will come to a confrontation here, will it?” A beam of light snapped on in the darkness. It shone in Hiram’s face, blinding him. He held his hands up and still could see nothing but flashes of light. He knew the voice, in any case.
It belonged to Gus Dollar.
The beam came from waist height, so it was a flashlight, not a carbide lamp. It was still plenty powerful enough to blind Hiram, whose sight was already squeezed into tunnel vision by the effect of the carbide lamp on his helmet.
“It doesn’t have to come to any more confrontation, Gus,” Hiram said. “Let the Kimballs go. Walk away.”
“You haven’t come alone.” Gus hissed. There was a brief silence. “You brought a warrior maiden and a jolly dwarf, I see.”
“I decided I wanted reinforcements,” Hiram said.
“You are a tricky old man after all,” Michael added.
“I should have bound you. I would have bound you, only he stopped me.”
Who was he? How would Gus have bound Hiram?
“What do you mean, have me arrested?” Hiram asked. “You certainly don’t want a judge of the Helper Justice Court to come look at the charms and hexes in your shop and try to figure out what they mean.”
Hiram shifted slightly to one side, and the beam came out of his eyes. He still couldn’t see a damn, with all the blazing suns of red and green that splashed across his vision and swam in circles.
“I can see through your eyes,” Gus said. “I know you think I’m pitiful, and my best weapon has been taken from me, but I’ve come down here to bring you to heel.”
With his tunnel vision and the light in his eyes, Hiram had no idea what the others were doing. At least one of them was moving—he heard the sound of shoes scuffing on the damp stone of the shelf.
“If you can see through my eyes,” Hiram quipped, “
you’re seeing nothing at all.”
He heard squirming and whimpering noises. At first, he took them for Samuel, but then he realized it was Ammon who was wiggling and crying.
“I don’t need the book,” Gus said. “I’ve brought you here with another gift, a little tender piece of bait. You can’t resist the offer of a deal, but now you’ve stepped inside my circle, and you are mine.”
A tender piece of bait? That was the strangest imaginable way to characterize Ammon Kimball, and not much better a description of his brother Samuel.
Hiram swung his face down on a hunch, looking at the top of the lizard-head altar.
A small sphere sat there, glistening.
Flesh.
An eyeball. That was the bait.
“You’re not talking to me,” Hiram said out loud.
Gus Dollar hadn’t been talking to Hiram at all. Who had Gus been addressing?
The skin on Hiram’s neck crawled.
Was the demon present?
Gus laughed, a shrieking whoop that ended abruptly in air being sucked in through his teeth. “You’re a sideshow, farmer. Your death here is incidental and irrelevant.”
Hiram snapped his head back in Gus’s direction. The beam of his light caught the shopkeeper in the face. Scabbed whip marks slashed down from his forehead to his chin. For an instant, Hiram felt bad for whipping the man. Then he felt revulsion. Gus retained his glass eye, but the socket which had recently housed an eyeball of flesh and vitreous liquid was now empty.
Gus had sacrificed his second eye. As bait.
The demon had to be present.
Eliza laughed, but it was a deep laugh, below baritone, below bass, a rumbling laugh like the sound of a mountain shifting from one foot to the other. A cold wind gusted from her as she laughed, and Hiram heard a buzzing of flies that rose in crescendo to a shrill whistle.
“Pap…”
Hiram grabbed in the darkness and found Michael. He dragged his son behind him, trying to put himself between the young man and either of the two dangerous figures they now confronted. Hiram grabbed the whip—it was his best weapon.
He wished he could see better.