by George Wier
Close by was a huge lake, its still waters reflecting the stars overhead. I had no way of knowing at that moment that in the very near future I would become extremely intimate with the water, mud and ooze from the bottom of that lake.
“This is where Bradley died,” Sandy said.
“I’ve been wanting to see this place,” I told him.
“Oh, you’ll see.”
We pulled up by the building and got out. The night air had stilled. Overhead there was a dazzling display of stars. The moon was down and it was terribly dark. The deputies clicked on a couple of flashlights, shined them at the black pickup that was parked there close to the door.
“Won’t even need flashlights once we get inside,” Sandy said. “Come on.”
“Whose truck?” Larrabeth asked him.
I answered for him. I knew the truck.
“We need those suits,” I told deputies Cook and Cooper.
They retrieved a large box from the trunk and set it down by the door of the building.
Beside the front door Sandy stopped and flipped up a small covering to a backlit key pad.
“I hope they haven’t changed the codes,” he said. “If they have and won’t answer our knock, we’ll have to go the long way around. As of two days ago, though, the code worked.”
“What’s the code?” Larrabeth asked.
“You don’t have to remember any numbers,” he said. “It’s easier just to spell out ‘gold’. That’s the code.”
Sandy entered the code and there was a soft ‘snik’ sound and a green light by the door.
“See?” he said.
Sandy opened the door.
*****
The lights inside the substation were on, full bright. The place was air conditioned and cold. There was an enormous chiller in operation in the center of the room and a desk littered with papers, a LaserJet printer and a laptop computer. The man there stood up as we all came inside.
“Hello, Mike,” I said.
“Hi, Bill. Sheriff. Brought the posse, I see. Hello, Sandy. I thought you were incommunicado.”
“I got better,” Sandy said.
“Then, I suppose the jig, as they say, is up.”
“You’re not as stupid as you were in high school,” I told him.
He regarded me, smiled thinly.
“Heidi has smartened me up a bit since those days,” he said.
“We’re going down,” Sandy said, and nodded to Larrabeth.
“Oh? Well, I won’t stop you,” Mike said. “But I won’t help you to destroy me.”
“Jim, Lawson, why don’t you stay with Mr. Fields while we go down. Make sure he doesn’t leave.”
The deputies nodded. Their hands were on the butts of their guns.
“Am I under arrest, then?” Mike asked. “I do know a little about police procedure.”
“I’m sure you do,” Larrabeth said, “seeing as how your father is a Police Chief.”
“Hmmm,” Mike said. “I wonder if the Grimes County Sheriff knows you’re investigating on his turf?”
“Maybe he doesn’t,” Larrabeth said. “But you see this badge?” She pointed at her chest. “It says ‘State of Texas’ on it.”
“Point taken,” Mike said. “I suppose I’d be out of line to ask to see a warrant.”
Mike’s question was answered by silence.
He sighed. “Well, fellahs, there’s coffee over in the corner. You’re welcome to help yourself.”
Larrabeth rolled her eyes.
“Let’s get this done,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In 1673 a French marauder sacked and scuttled a Spanish Galleon among the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. Her captain took the treasure, a string of captives and an obscure object and ran before a hurricane toward the Texas coast. The French ship came up the Brazos River a hundred miles or more before becoming stuck in the mud, at which point her captain burned the ship and assimilated himself and his men with the natives.
The object — the ‘blue bone,’ as du Orly referred to it — caused madness. And in a moment of lucidity on his death bed, the captain requested as his dying wish that the blue bone be buried far beneath the land, where its curse would never again bring harm.
I had known the who and the why behind Brad’s death, and I was beginning to suspect how.
Larrabeth, Sandy and I stepped into a small elevator with our overly bulky radiation suits on, and pushed the only button there: an arrow pointing down.
The elevator lurched and descended rapidly.
“Sandy,” I said. “It’s down there, isn’t it? The treasure, the skeletons, the blue bone, everything?”
Our eyes met through the leaded glass face plates, dusty with age. There were traces of cobweb around the edge of mine.
Sandy looked away without acknowledgment.
The descent took a whole minute.
We’re not so innocent.
Our actions twist in our minds and hearts and we attempt to reconcile them with our vision of who and what we are.
Sandy’s guilt, though slight when compared with the person who had taken Brad’s life, was still as palpable and real as if he had been responsible for many deaths.
I wondered how far I could trust Sandy. Would we have to watch him? What was he capable of? The hardest thing for a person to face is a true reflection of himself. And Sandy had yet to be forced to have a full look.
The elevator slowed at the last instant, shimmied like a dog with a fever for a moment, and came to a grinding stop. The door opened and we stepped out into a well-lit cavern, greater than a football field in length, nearly the same in width, and with a height that was staggering. The ground had been cleared of stalagmites and temporary flooring had been laid in some areas, as pathways were needed over the undulating landscape.
The center of the cavern was occupied by what could have been a blunt-nosed intercontinental ballistic missile. It was metallic blue, seamless and huge.
“What the hell is that?” Larrabeth asked.
Sandy turned to her. “It’s how rich men get richer. Don’t ask me how it works, ‘Beth.”
I touched Sandy’s arm, got his attention.
“We’re at least half a mile from the other site,” I said. “Which is the first one you found?”
“The other one,” he said. “But I found this cavern not long after during weekend spelunkings. It was Brad, doing what he called ‘simple trigonometry’ that figured out where to sink the elevator shaft.”
“From there,” I said, “all that had to be done was to put a building on top of it, and you’ve got your own underground laboratory.”
“What does that thing really do?” Larrabeth gestured to the large object.
Sandy looked at me.
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “It locates radiation.”
“Radiation? Our whole planet’s got radiation all over it,” she said. “We’ve been setting off atomic bombs since the forties, under the Earth, under the water, in the sky. I don’t get it.”
“Not the same radiation,” I said. “There’s a reason they had to build it underground. It’s also the world’s biggest lightning rod. It puts out ions by the boatload, and nature seeks to balance differences in potential. If they had built it on the surface, it would have been getting lightning strikes every time a bundle of clouds passed overhead. I found the plans in Brad’s desk. It was the last place anyone would have looked for a motive for killing Freddie, to be sure. I’m not sure Freddie’s actually ever read a book, much less a schematic.”
“I’m lost, Bill,” Larrabeth said.
“Gold,” Sandy said.
“Gold? What’s this about gold? You’re not talking about the Le Royale treasure, are you?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Tell her all you know, Sandy.”
He sighed, looked from her to me and then back again.
“As far as I can see, it’s like this — that thing that I found, that little chest I sa
id was haunted — it had the blue bone in it. It was the smaller version of this thing,” he gestured to the large object at our backs. The thing dwarfed us. “It not only detects gold, it moves when it locks onto a good ‘source’, as Brad called it.”
“How does it do that?”
“I don’t know. That’s the technical stuff.” Sandy gestured to me.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I know the theory, but that’s all. On Brad’s tape, he talked about the original. He examined it thoroughly, put it through tests in the make-shift lab that Throckmorton set up for him back at the power plant. Brad surmised that the original was carved by the Aztecs or the Mayans or the Incas or somebody out of a piece of meteorite. It put forth questing ions of a peculiar nature, almost like a form of gravity, and these latched onto the signature of certain forms of radiation, even at a distance. But it was small and weak. Something bigger was needed.”
“What’s radiation have to do with gold?” Larrabeth asked.
“Gold is a very heavy element,” I said. “It has a low level of radioactivity, but of a kind that’s not harmful.”
“Gold mines,” Larrabeth said. “I’ve been reading up on Throck-morton and his gold mines during the last few weeks. This thing,” she gestured, “accounts for his string of lucky strikes.”
“Yep,” Sandy said.
“Where’s the treasure?” I asked Sandy. “The Le Royale treasure. And the original blue bone?”
“I don’t know where the thing is, but the treasure is still here. It was being used for testing purposes. I’ll show you.”
Sandy led us along a series of planks over low pools of water and past small stalagmites, many of which had been sheared off below waist height as if they had been trees logged by heavy equipment. A series of three industrial coolers — the kind used by grocery stores to store and display ice cream — lay end to end in a small grotto to what felt to me to be the west side of the cavern. Through the glass were wooden chests. They looked ancient, yet of superior manufacture.
“This is it, huh?” I asked.
“That’s all there is. Or all that’s left. I took about five pounds of the gold in a croker sack and — you know what happened.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Where are the skeletons you mentioned?”
“There were two of them. They’re in the last locker.” Sandy pointed.
“Why all this?” I asked. “Why move them here? Why save the skeletons?”
“You’re always asking why,” Sandy said. “As far as I know the ‘find’, as Throckmorton called it, was to remain intact until he and Mike and Brad were done. Then, he was going to appear the big good guy by moving it all back where I originally found it and reporting it to the authorities. There would have been a complete excavation, with everything roped off and eggheads running things up at the University. Like they did with La Salle’s ship La Belle out in Galveston bay. I heard about all that stuff until I was sick of hearing it; that’s why I know.”
“He was going to give it back to Texas, but only after he was finished with it himself,” I said. I walked down the line and peered into the last ice cream locker. A skull grinned up at me. There were two sets of bones, arm in arm, like lovers.
“Hello, Louis,” I said.
“We think the other one is his wife, left beside him years after he died,” Sandy said.
Larrabeth was beside me, looking in.
The other skeleton wore beads and a leather skirt and moccasins that looked as thin as parchment.
“Now there’s a love story,” Larrabeth said.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” I said.
“Right. Let’s get out of here,” Larrabeth said. Suddenly, even in her suit with her uniform covered, she was all Sheriff.
We turned away from the grotto and made our way back toward the elevator.
And at the moment we drew even with the large missile-like object that was the centerpiece of the cavern, the lights went out.
*****
“Shit,” Larrabeth said. “Don’t anybody move.”
I wasn’t about to. The silence was huge but for the sound of my own breathing inside the suit. It was getting furiously hot inside it and I felt lines of sweat beading up on my brow.
A yellow strobe light flashed from a metal pole close by. There was a large ‘click’ sound, then the whir of muted motors. The object in the center of the room began to turn.
“We’re in big trouble,” Sandy said.
“Where are the controls for this thing?” Larrabeth asked.
“On the surface,” Sandy said. “That computer Mike was sitting in front of.”
“The laptop?”
“Damn right,” Sandy said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
There was just enough light from the maintenance strobe to be able to see to move, and move we did, back toward the elevator. Before we could reach it, though, the elevator car went into operation, moving upwards. We stopped in our tracks, watching it climb into shadow.
“We’re under surveillance, aren’t we?” I said to Sandy.
“I think so,” Sandy said.
“My deputies had better be all right,” Larrabeth said. “I’m gonna kill somebody if they’re not.”
Behind us the object continued to turn, its arc describing a sixty to seventy-foot radius.
“This is how Brad was killed, wasn’t it Sandy?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I believe so,” he said. “Especially now.”
“When that thing points at us,” I said, “we’re toast.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“There’s a reason,” I said, hurriedly, “that they have to control it from above.”
We were already in motion, moving to the right cavern wall, closer to the object but towards the rear. We left the meandering walkway of wooden planks and darted across the uneven cavern floor.
“Yeah,” Sandy shouted, his voice muffled by the suit. Whenever any of us talked, it had to be at a near shout to be heard.
“Because it uses so much power,” I said. “When it’s going, it kills.”
“Yeah,” Sandy shouted back.
“Damn!” Larrabeth yelled. I looked behind me to see she had fallen down. I went back, grasped her hand and pulled her up. She had a tear in her suit at the knee. A two-inch gash. She was going to be either bleeding or badly bruised.
The massive nose of the object continued its arc towards us. I had the inkling that all we had to do was be in its general vicinity when it was discharged, and that would be it.
“I’ve got you,” I told Larrabeth, and took her arm around my shoulder. She limped, favoring the hurt knee. It was fortunate I couldn’t see her face. I didn’t relish the expression of pain I knew must be there.
Sandy flashed past us. I paused and looked.
He picked up the Sheriff’s gun from where it had skidded into a low pool of water.
“Come on!” he shouted, and ran ahead of us again. “The other side!”
It began as a very deep but loud hum, a sustained thing at the lowest threshold of hearing. I’ve heard the amplifiers of car stereos cranked up to their highest volume by kids passing by on the street late at night outside my bedroom window, and the sound is sufficiently loud to rattle the windows in their frames. This thing, though — its hum went down into my very bones.
The sound began to cycle upwards in tone.
Small pieces of cavern ceiling debris began raining down around us — small stalactites, shaken loose from their ancient roots by the terrible sound.
I brought Larrabeth around to where Sandy stood. He had the gun in front of him, finger worming its way into the trigger guard. He aimed near the base of the machine where what must be a power cable snaked upwards past a gigantic hydraulic armature.
It took no more than a glance to assess what he was trying to do. He was trying to cut the power of a four-inch cable with a .357 magnum, but directly behind that was the device that raised and lowered the
object itself.
“Wait,” I cried, but for the second time since I’d met him, Sandy didn’t hear me. And this time, it wasn’t his fault.
He fired.
*****
When things go wrong, sometimes they go badly wrong. That’s been my experience, at least.
What happened after Sandy Jones fired his cousin’s revolver — which made its own noise amid the cacophony of sound created by the object itself about the way a small fire-cracker might sound during a city-wide fireworks display — was out of all proportion to what could have been reasonably anticipated. And that, I believe, pretty much sums up my life.
The bullet deflected off the side of the cable and punctured a neat hole in the hydraulics system of the side we were on.
A flood of grease squirted from the hole, arcing through the air the way a male giant might relieve himself.
Sandy began backing away.
The hum from overhead increased in intensity and tone, higher in octave now, approaching Middle “C”.
I pulled Larrabeth backwards, nearly stumbled and caught myself, but my eyes were glued on the lifting mechanism. As the grease spewed, the lift dropped. The object overhead began to tilt. My eyes fastened on the housing ten feet overhead that held Brad’s large blue bone in place. Thin, metal straps only held it down. It had been designed such that gravity held it down and hydraulics lifted it and turned it, with the straps there as an afterthought. I took another step back. Another.
A high-pitched grating whine ensued, and this sound momentarily overcame the high-decibel production of the object itself. I watched, mesmerized, as first one, then the second metal strap snapped.
The object rolled toward us and fell.
*****
Inches.
Mere inches, and Larrabeth and I would have been crushed. We flew backwards on the shockwave and landed hard.
My faceplate cracked, a small silvery, spider’s web that wove itself into being before my eyes.
Larrabeth, beside me, had her eyes glued on the spectacle unfold-ing before us.