Netherworld

by Lisa Morton

  “Huh,” Bell murmured, his eyes wandering off as he stroked his mustache and mulled it over. “Injuns worshippin’ lizards. Well, that’s ‘bout the strangest thing I’ve heard since Pegleg Pete claimed to have seen El Dorado.”

  As Bell continued to think, Yi-kin stepped up to Diana and whispered, “Gam.”

  “Right,” she whispered to Yi-kin, then turned to Bell and added, “this tribe had supposedly amassed a great deal of gold.”

  “You don’t say,” Bell said. Then suddenly he snapped his fingers and shook a finger excitedly at Diana. “Come to think of it, there is somethin’ ringin’ a bell there…’scuse me just one sec.”

  He turned and went back behind the partition, and they could hear the sounds of papers being flung madly about. After a few seconds the busy sounds were replaced with a loud and hearty, “Aha!”

  Bell re-emerged and strode to the front counter, presenting an old issue of the Porcupine to Diana. He laid it out flat for her, then jammed a finger down on one story. “Take a look at that. Maybe that’s what you’re lookin’ for.”

  Diana read the headline first:

  LOCAL MINER FINDS

  DIFFERENT KIND OF GOLD

  Then she scanned the article, with growing excitement. Although only two paragraphs long, she thought they might finally have found their first clue:

  Local miner and general all-round eccentric Hugh “Crazy Mac” MacLean recently showed up in town with the strangest gold find ever made in these parts: A gold nugget, roughly the size of a man’s fist, and in the shape of a lizard. Those who saw the gold were unanimous in believing it to have been manmade, although by whom no one can guess. Crazy Mac, who came to town in 1835 to work the placers but refused to leave with the other prospectors when more gold showed up in Northern California, stated he had found the gold in a creek running through his claim in the Santa Monica mountains some ten miles northwest of Los Angeles. Although the find paid off handsomely, Crazy Mac said he had no plans to relocate. He hopes to find gold in the shape of coyotes, horny toads, and possums, too, we reckon.

  Diana’s pulse had quickened considerably by the time she finished reading the article. She scanned the date and saw it was 1874.

  Good, not that old, she thought.

  She looked up at Bell and asked, “This is exactly what we’re looking for. How would we get in touch with Mr. MacLean?”

  Bell burst into howls of laughter. “Well, Lady Furnaval, that makes you ‘bout the first person ever wanted to see Crazy Mac, not get away from him! It ain’t gonna be easy; first you’ll have to find him.”

  Diana glanced back down at the article. “It says here he lives in the Santa Monica mountains—is that far?”

  Bell said, “No, ain’t far…but you gotta understand, Crazy Mac’s up there on some little bit of land he’s claimed, way up in the hills. This ain’t no city street you can just ride up to; it’s probably gonna take a while just to find him. If you’re lucky, there’ll at least be a path heading to his place.”

  A path?! Diana wondered how these Americans could live the way they did.

  Before she could ask anything else, Bell continued, “And you might end up wishin’ you didn’t find him—they don’t call him ‘Crazy Mac’ ‘cause of his personal hygiene, though that’s none too sane, neither. He’s as likely to meet you with a shotgun as a ‘hello’.”

  Diana exchanged a worried look with Yi-kin, then pushed away from the counter and reached for her purse. “Thank you, Mr. Bell, you’ve been very helpful. Perhaps I can recompense you for your time?”

  Bell motioned away her offer of money. “No need, I’m just happy to help. But keep me in mind if you do any socializing with the upper crust ‘round here and pick up any juicy tidbits!”

  Diana assured him she would. She didn’t bother to add that the only people she expected to be socializing with had lizard heads.

  Chapter XX

  June 29-July 1, 1880

  Los Angeles, United States

  They spent the rest of the day deciding on a plan for seeking out Hugh MacLean. First, they needed their own horses; Diana, who had ridden in a number of hunts and cavalcades back home, adored horses and was very impressed with the local breed. They were large, muscular animals, bigger than what she was accustomed to but equally beautiful, and she was only too happy to take charge of this purchase. Yi-kin, it turned out, had never ridden, but fortunately he was a natural, being already possessed of exceptional agility and strength.

  Next they needed a guide. A few inquiries at the stable produced a quiet young man of Mexican heritage, Manuel Navarro. Manuel could ride, shoot, and even cook, and he knew the area very well; he’d even heard of the loco gringo in the hills, and thought the prospector could be found without too much difficulty. Diana paid him an advance, and promised him a considerable bonus once they’d found Crazy Mac.

  Yi-kin was mildly upset at first by the addition of Manuel to their little party (“I can do everything he can do!”), but Diana convinced him without too much struggle that they would never find their way around Los Angeles’s dirt roads and trails on their own.

  Besides, Diana had another plan for Manuel. Although she hadn’t told him exactly why they sought Crazy Mac, once they’d found him—and provided they found an entrance to the Lizard People’s tunnels nearby—she planned to offer Manuel a considerable amount of money to join them underground. Despite Yi-kin’s claims, Diana knew he’d never touched a gun in his life, and Manuel had his own pistols. Besides, she liked and trusted him.

  Manuel and Yi-kin assembled their supplies, anticipating spending several days in the wilderness to track down Crazy Mac (a prospect which most certainly did not delight Diana). Finally, early on the morning of the thirtieth they headed west, each mounted on their own horse, with one extra mount for supplies. Diana, dressed in her new riding clothes and broad hat, seated Mina in a traveling case directly in front of her; although she didn’t anticipate needing the cat’s talents for discovering gateways, she wasn’t about to leave her behind in the hotel.

  The area west of Los Angeles was a quilt of orange groves, sheep pastures and wilderness, with fewer and fewer buildings to be seen. Diana had heard there were a number of small communities further west, along the area’s lush beaches, but they wouldn’t be going that far. After a few hours at a mild trot their way began to wind uphill, through oak and sage. Manuel led, and Diana had absolutely no idea if they were actually following some kind of path or simply picking their way through the brush. Still, the ride wasn’t without its distractions—the air was perfumed with herbs, and the mild buzz of insects reminded Diana of her garden back home on a summer afternoon.

  Manuel had spoken very little since they’d left Los Angeles, and so Diana jumped when he pointed at a small stream just ahead of them and said, “This is Watson Creek. The crazy man is said to live near it.”

  They’d passed several such creeks, and Diana was baffled as to how he could tell one from another.

  They rode their horses across the ten-foot wide stream, and found what did seem to be (at last!) a clear trail on the other side. It was late afternoon by then, and the streambed became a small canyon, angling slightly uphill between sandy cliffs on either side.

  It was the perfect place for an ambush.

  Diana could tell Yi-kin had the same thought; he glanced at her, and she saw him flex his shoulders and glance around uneasily. Manuel, however, seemed unconcerned, and so Diana tried to relax.

  She was mildly successful—until a man stepped into their path with a shotgun pointed directly at them.

  “Y’all just hold it right there!” the man yelled.

  He was at least eighty, with a heavily lined face and gray hair and beard down to mid-chest, but he carried himself with the vigor of a much younger man, and the shotgun leveled at them was unwavering. The man’s clothes—a cowboy hat, flannel shirt and blue denim work pants—were all ancient and ragged, and he was missing most of his teeth. Diana could tell t
he latter fact because he was grimacing at them.

  “Y’all are trespassing. Ya got ten seconds t’ turn them horses around and git off my land.”

  It was Diana who answered him. “Are you Hugh MacLean?” she asked.

  That did at least cause the grimace to twitch. “Maybe you didn’t hear me right, girly—just git!” he screamed again.

  None of them budged. Diana said, “Mr. MacLean, we’ve come a very long way to see you. Please just talk to us.”

  “Got nothin’ to say,” he growled.

  “So you don’t know anything about lizard people?” she asked.

  It was a risk that paid off. The old man—who could only be Crazy Mac—lowered the gun a few inches. “Lizard people?” he said back to her. “And they call me crazy.”

  Diana tried another gambit. “Mr. MacLean, if you’ll just talk to us for a few minutes, we can make it worth your while.”

  “I don’t need your money—”

  And then he was interrupted as Mina picked the inopportune moment to poke her head up out of the satchel and meow loudly.

  Mac squinted in perplexity. “What the hell…you got a cat in there?”

  Damnation, Mina! Diana put a protective hand on Mina’s head, and the cat immediately began to purr. “Yes. This is Mina,” she admitted.

  And then, to everyone’s absolute astonishment, Crazy Mac lowered the shotgun and grinned. “Always had me a weakness for felines. I reckon you must be decent folk after all.”

  Mac suddenly turned around and motioned forwards with the shotgun. “C’mon. Just be sure to bring the cat.”

  Diana, Yi-kin and Manual all shared a look with an obvious collective meaning:

  Crazy Mac, indeed.

  Mac led them another few hundred yards up the trail, until they came to a ramshackle one-room cabin, not far from the small stream. The cabin, made from rough-hewn planks, had a dirt floor, a small woodburning stove with a pipe leading up through a hole in the roof, and a clutter of old junk—bent and useless tools, old newspapers, utensils with missing parts. One corner was devoted to prospecting tools, which included several dinged gold pans, a pickaxe, and a wooden crate alarmingly labeled DANGER EXPLOSIVES.

  “Do you often blow things ups, Mr. MacLean?” Diana asked.

  The old prospector opened the crate and pulled out a paper-wrapped stick stamped DYNAMITE on one side, with a long fuse dangling from it. “Sure. I could show ya right now,” he said, as he nonchalantly tossed the stick from one hand to the other.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Even before the aging eccentric had juggled high explosives before her, Diana had been loathe to stay in the cabin, which exuded much of the same scent that he himself gave off, and so she was hardly unhappy when Mac told them they could camp outside, if necessary.

  It would be necessary: Mac told them that he had dug the lizard-shaped gold piece out of a placer in the stream in front of his cabin one morning, and had no idea where it had come from. He swore that the stream’s source—a spring several miles further up—was nowhere near any cave opening, and in fact he’d never seen any cave openings in this area. “Land’s too dern sandy in these parts,” he claimed.

  Still, Diana insisted on exploring the area further, but knew that any such exploration would have to wait until morning, since the sun was already setting.

  Manuel set up an efficient camp for them, one ringed in the half-dozen lanterns they’d brought, and centering on an aromatic, cheery bonfire. The night was chillier there in the hills than down in the town, and Diana was none too keen on trying to sleep on the ground, but she supposed it could have been far worse. Fortunately her American garb kept her warm.

  And Mina was happy. She romped in the nearby trees and at the edges of the stream, and returned to Diana at one point to proudly display a squirming lizard in her jaws.

  “I feel safer already,” Diana told her.

  “Miss Diana…wake up….”

  She came swimming up out of a troubling dream of hearing William’s voice calling to her from a thick fog, and although she searched and searched she could never find him. Then she realized it wasn’t William bending down close to her, but Yi-kin, and she blinked the last of her sleep away.

  “Yi-kin…mat yeh a?”

  She sat up, and from the chill in the air and the jet-black sky overhead, she knew she hadn’t been asleep long.

  Yi-kin was wide-awake and gesturing in the direction of Crazy Mac’s cabin. “Crazy Mac just now go out.”

  She reached over to her jacket, which had her pocket watch within. It was just after two in the morning.

  Diana looked around, and saw Manuel watching them carefully from within his bedroll. He evidently wasn’t concerned enough to sit up, and Diana took that as her cue. “Well, I’ll admit it’s odd, Yi-kin, but….”

  “I do not trust him,” Yi-kin said, with a hooded look.

  “Of course not,” Diana answered, “he’s crazy. But that’s probably why he’s up at two in the morning. I, however, am not crazy.”

  She lay down again, pulling her blankets up snugly over her shoulders. Yi-kin crabwalked backwards a few paces, then sat cross-legged on a blanket, looking completely alert.

  “I keep watch,” he declared.

  “Very good,” Diana mumbled, already drifting off.

  Mina crawled into Yi-kin’s lap and meowed her own approval.

  When they awoke at dawn, Crazy Mac ambled out of his shack, stretching and yawning, then joined them for breakfast. They invited him to share their provisions of salt beef and a local Mexican bread called tortillas, and Diana took the opportunity to question him, as off-handedly as possible.

  “Yi-kin thought he saw you up and about during the night,” she said in between mouthfuls of Manuel’s spicy beef and hot black coffee.

  “Oh, I reckon he did. Old-timer like me, joints start to ache, ‘bout all I can do is get out and walk it off.”

  She shot Yi-kin a look, but he seemed unconvinced.

  After breakfast, they started up the trail on foot, following the stream. Mac led the way with his shotgun, cackling as he told them they might encounter coyotes, rattlesnakes, or even mountain lions in these parts. Within an hour temperatures had risen dramatically, and they all started removing their outer coats.

  After several hours of walking, often clambering over rough rocks, climbing short cliff faces or pushing through brush, they came to a wide pool nestled into a flat area near the mountaintop. Approximately thirty feet wide and perhaps five feet deep, it was the spring opening that Mac had described. Diana supposed that it would have been a lovely place to relax or even swim, but she wasn’t here for her own amusement. They searched the area thoroughly, looking behind boulders and around overhangs, but the old fellow had been right—there was absolutely no sign of any sort of cave opening, and it did seem an unlikely place to find one.

  They decided to stay by the inviting pool long enough to have a brief meal, then started the trek back downhill. At least the going would be easier.

  This time they looked more carefully for any sort of feeders or tributaries, although Mac had assured them there were none.

  He was wrong.

  They were only a few minutes from camp when Yi-kin cried out excitedly, “Miss Diana—!”

  She spotted him by a corner of the stream, holding back a thick growth of cattails on one side. She ran up to join him, tilted her hat up, and saw what could have been a smaller creek winding through the cattails to join the larger one.

  “Excellent, Yi-kin,” she commended him. “Now let’s just see where it comes from.”

  They began pushing through the tall, thick cattails, up to their knees in water and feeling insects scuttle across their faces and hair. Diana heard the old man mutter behind her: “Well, I’ll be goshdarned…never knowed that was here.”

  The cattails finally thinned out, and they were able to follow the small creek along soggy banks for perhaps fifty yards or so. It narrowed to n
o more than two feet wide, and disappeared beneath a tangle of brush growing against one wall of the ravine. Yi-kin pushed aside the brush, and there was what they sought:

  The small creek flowed from a cave opening in the side of the cliff.

  It was a small opening, no more than three feet wide and two feet high, but it was undeniably there. Manual joined them, and he shared a smile with Diana. They both turned to watch as Yi-kin tore away some of the brush, then kicked experimentally at the dirt around the edges of the opening.

  It crumbled away easily, and there was no doubt that there was a much larger cave behind the opening.

  “Manuel, see if you can find us some sturdy branch, something we can use as a lever.”

  Manuel said, “Si”. He started to turn around—

  —and flew backward as a shotgun blast struck him.

  Diana whirled, and saw Crazy Mac standing five feet away, smoke still curling out of the barrel of his raised shotgun. “S’pose you did save me the trouble of havin’ to drag ya here,” he said.

  Diana looked down at Manuel, who had fallen into the brush, blood and clumps of gore protruding from a foot-wide hole in his midsection. Diana knew he was dead.

  “You killed him!” she cried out.

  “Yep. They didn’t care squat ‘bout no Mexican—it’s you they want.”

  Diana wanted nothing so badly at that moment as to see Crazy Mac fall over dead. “My god…you’re helping them….”

  Mac giggled. “Working for ‘em, more like. You oughta hear how much gold they promised me if I brought you to ‘em alive. Dead was okay, too, but it’s more if you’re alive. I reckon they got somethin’ big planned fer you. Nope, wouldn’t want to be in yer shoes right ‘bout now, little lady…now I ‘spect we’ll just sit here quiet-like ‘til nightfall, then they’ll be round to collect ya, and I’ll be rich—”

  Just then something flew into the branches of a tree over Mac’s head. Startled, he jerked the barrel of the gun up, and in that split-second Yi-kin seemed to literally fly from behind Diana, his legs extended before him. The shotgun went off as it was kicked from Mac’s hands, then, as Yi-kin landed perfectly, one of his fists ploughed into the side of Mac’s head, and the old man crumpled. Yi-kin stood over him for a second, fists still clenched, making sure he was unconscious; when he was certain, he picked up the shotgun and turned to hand it to Diana.