The Battle of Iron Gulch

by R. G. Thomas

  “Just looking around,” Thaddeus replied. To switch the focus of conversation from him to her, he gestured to the papers in her hand. “What do you have there?”

  “Oh, these!” She handed one to him. “Flyers for our town meeting tomorrow night. You and your group should come. You’ve been doing a lot of good at Hannah’s place, the whole town’s talking about it, and I know they’d love to meet you all.”

  Thaddeus smiled. “That’s nice to hear. I’m glad we’ve made a good impression.”

  “Oh, you have.” Ruby leaned in a little closer and lowered her voice. “We’ve been keeping our eyes on you, and we like what we’ve been seeing.”

  A squiggle of nervousness started up in his belly. “You’ve been watching us?”

  Ruby waved his question away. “Oh, not in a creepy way. Just, you know, making sure you all are from good stock. The work you’ve been doing for Hannah is top notch. I just might be able to put the house on the market and get her a sale once you all are finished with it.”

  “That’s good.” Thaddeus held up the flyer. “Thanks for telling me about the meeting, but I should be getting back to the inn now. Chores to do.”

  “I don’t mean to keep you, by all means,” Ruby said, her lipstick a garish slash across her round, pale face. “I hope we’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to convince everyone,” Thaddeus said.

  “Good.” Ruby looked past him and smiled. “Hello, Desmond!”

  Thaddeus turned to see an old man approaching. He walked with a cane and was slightly stooped, giving Thaddeus a good view of his bald pate.

  “How are you, good sir?” Ruby asked.

  “Oh, you know, can’t say too much that’s good,” Desmond replied in a croaky voice.

  “I know you’ve been feeling down since Arnold ran off,” Ruby said as she gave his arm a gentle squeeze. She looked over her shoulder at Thaddeus and said, “Arnold was his dog. Just up and disappeared one night.”

  Suddenly Thaddeus realized he had not heard or seen one pet in their entire time in Iron Gulch. No cats patrolling the streets, no dogs barking from yards or being walked.

  “Oh, that’s very sad,” Thaddeus said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Who’s that?” Desmond lifted his head as high as he could and peered at Thaddeus. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m so very sorry,” Ruby said. “How rude of me! Desmond Anderson, this is Thaddeus Cane. Thaddeus and his father are staying at the Iron Gulch Inn.”

  Desmond grunted a greeting, then continued on his way.

  “Poor, poor man,” Ruby said, holding the flyers close to her chest as she and Thaddeus watched Desmond’s back. “He loved that dog something fierce. When Arnold just vanished like that, I think he took a bit of Desmond’s heart and will to live with him.”

  “That is sad.” Thaddeus gave Ruby a little wave. “Well, I need to get back.”

  “Of course. And I need to pass out these flyers. Remember, tomorrow night, whole-town meeting.”

  “I’ll tell my dad and the others,” Thaddeus promised, then turned in the direction of the inn.

  As he walked along the street, Thaddeus looked in the yards he passed. All of them were empty, even the ones with Beware of Dog signs attached to the fences. There were no cats sitting in windows, no dogs barking warnings at his passing. Except for birdcalls, the drone of insects and an occasional passing car, everything was quiet.

  He found Teofil in the backyard, working in one of the flower beds. He was surrounded by flowers with bright, colorful blooms, and he was humming as he pressed his fingers into the dirt. It had been a long time since Thaddeus had seen Teofil look so content, and, with a smile, he paused a moment to stand and watch. A breeze rattled the town-meeting flyer in his hand, and Teofil looked up.

  “Hi there,” Teofil said with a smile. “Where’d you get off to so early?”

  “My dad and I went out to work on some magic,” Thaddeus said.

  “How’d it go?”

  Thaddeus shrugged. “All right.” He pulled the bit of asphalt from his pocket. “I am really in tune with this rock.”

  “It’s a start, right?” Teofil said.

  “Guess so.” Thaddeus sat on the ground near him. “I just wish it were easier.”

  “If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth the work,” Teofil said, then laughed at Thaddeus’s eye roll. “Leopold told me that once, a long time ago. Right after I moved there with him.” He shook his head and chuckled quietly, sitting back on his heels as he looked at the flowers he had planted. “I was really struggling to get the drachen narcosis to take in his yard.” He looked over at Thaddeus. “It was the whole reason he needed me to live there, but he never told me that, or the reason he needed the plants to thrive.”

  “To keep my mom sleeping underground,” Thaddeus said, and shook his head. “So many secrets.”

  “Probably plenty more where those came from,” Teofil said. “Anyway, I was frustrated with the drachen narcosis not responding to anything I could think of, and Leopold said those words to me: ‘If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth the work.’”

  “Did you throw a handful of dirt at him?” Thaddeus asked.

  Teofil laughed. “I thought about it. But then I realized he was right. I started trying different combinations of magic and sounds and soil, and suddenly the plants perked right up. Maybe you need to look at magic from a different point of view.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I know what else I could try,” Thaddeus said, feeling a bit surly.

  “You’ll get it,” Teofil assured him. “I’ve seen you do magic before.”

  “Yeah, when it was a matter of life or death,” Thaddeus replied. “It would be nice to be able to just, you know, summon an empty juice bottle and not a hunk of asphalt.”

  Teofil frowned. “What?”

  Thaddeus sighed. “Never mind.” The breeze rattled the paper in his hand again, and he held it out to Teofil. “I saw Ruby in town when my dad went to work. She gave me this. They’re having a town meeting tomorrow night, and she invited us. Said they were happy with what they’ve seen us doing for Hannah and the Iron Gulch Inn and that they’re thinking of us as residents now and not just visitors.”

  “Might be nice to get out and meet some people,” Teofil said. “We can only lose at cards to Dulindir so many nights.”

  Thaddeus chuckled. “Yeah, you’re right.” He got to his feet and took the flyer back from Teofil. “I need to get started painting the front of the house.”

  “I’ll come help you once I’m done back here,” Teofil said.

  “That would be nice.”

  Thaddeus stepped into the kitchen and set the flyer on the table, placing the salt and pepper shakers on it to weight it down. He walked down the basement steps and waved his hand to activate the motion sensor light across the room, which illuminated the paint cans, tarp, brushes, and rollers. Shivering in the chill of the stone-walled basement, he gathered the supplies and climbed the steps once again, wondering if there was some magic he could learn that would paint the house for him.

  Chapter TEN

  IT WAS Astrid and Dulindir’s turn to clean the kitchen after dinner, so Thaddeus and Teofil used the opportunity to get a few more chores done. It was too dark to paint by that time, so Thaddeus pulled weeds from the front flower bed by the front porch light. Aisha stopped by and helped Thaddeus for a time.

  “Are you and your mom going to the town meeting tomorrow night?” Thaddeus asked.

  Aisha shrugged. “I dunno. Probably. It’s something to do.” She looked over at him. “School starts soon. You going to go to school here?”

  It was Thaddeus’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll be starting our climb up the mountain soon.”

  “You all are really into climbing, huh?”

  “Yeah. That’s why we’re here in town.”

  They weeded in silence for a while, and then Thaddeus said, “I’ve
noticed there aren’t many dogs or cats in town.”

  “No, there aren’t. It was really weird. The beginning of the year, the mine caved in and a lot of people died. A few months later, all of these lost pet posters started going up. We had a cat. My brother Tyler found it hanging around near the mine and brought it home. It was a skinny yellow cat that he named Joe, and he used to say, ‘Hey, Joe, whaddya know?’ when he came home. Joe loved Tyler; followed him all around the house, jumped up in his lap whenever he sat down, and slept in his bed. I didn’t really like Joe, and he didn’t like me, but we tolerated each other.”

  She was quiet a moment, sitting back on her heels and staring at the ground. Just when Thaddeus was about to ask her what had happened to Joe, Aisha started talking again. “When Tyler died, Joe missed him something awful. He sat in the front window and watched for him, meowing really loud. Drove me and Momma crazy ’cause we were missing them all too. Then a couple of months after we lost them, we let Joe out one night… and he was just gone. Never came back. Momma said he probably got hit by a car or run down by a coyote or something. I guess there were a lot of bad drivers or hungry coyotes around, ’cause I saw an awful lot of ‘Lost Pet’ posters.”

  Aisha fell silent again. Then in a voice that Thaddeus had to strain to hear, “I was starting to like that cat too.”

  “I’m sorry, Aisha,” Thaddeus said. “I know it’s been difficult for you and your mom.”

  She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “That’s one way to put it.”

  They were both quiet after that. When Aisha finished her section, she cleaned up with the hose and waved at Thaddeus.

  “I’ve got stuff to do,” she said.

  Thaddeus nodded. “Thanks for the help. See you tomorrow night?”

  Aisha shrugged, not meeting his gaze. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Thaddeus watched her walk away along the sidewalk. He wished he knew something to say to make everything all right. But every time he came up with an idea, he realized it would lead to a lot of more difficult questions. If he shared that he had grown up without a mother, she would ask what had happened. “Car accident” was what Thaddeus had told kids at school in the past, but back then that had been what he had truly believed happened. Now it felt like a lie, and he couldn’t very well say his mother had been changed into a dragon by a witch and been hibernating underground while he was growing up.

  Thaddeus went back to weeding. It seemed the visions came when he was relaxed and his mind clear. He hadn’t had one while he was asleep, which made him wonder just how active his mind was at night. But the act of pulling weeds wasn’t nearly as trance-inducing as scraping paint, and his mind was too active anyway to allow him to slip into a more contemplative state.

  An hour later, he decided to call it a day. Sore muscles and an unsettled feeling in the back of his mind had combined to make him feel antsy. He needed to walk, and he needed to talk through his thoughts about the visions he’d been having, his fumbling attempts to do magic, and the lack of cats and dogs in Iron Gulch. It was too late to hike up the trail to the hot spring, but he had another destination in mind, and he hoped Teofil would be open to accompanying him.

  After Thaddeus cleaned up, he found Teofil just finishing with the flower bed along the side of the house.

  “Looks great,” Thaddeus said. “Did you find those flowers by the trail?”

  “I did.” Teofil got to his feet and stood beside him, both of them looking at the multicolored blooms. “And I thinned out some of the nacht macabre along the trail too.”

  “Maybe that will keep the goblins away.”

  “I decided it couldn’t hurt,” Teofil said. “Want to help me pick up?”

  “Sure.” Thaddeus grabbed some garden tools. “I was thinking of going for a walk, if you want to join me.”

  “Where did you want to go?” Teofil looked up to the mountain’s silhouette against the fading blue sky. “Going to be pretty dark soon, so that rules out the hot spring.”

  “Yeah, too late for that long of a hike,” Thaddeus said. “But I was thinking, if you were open to it, that we’d head over to the mine and check things out.”

  Teofil stopped, hands full of gardening tools, and gave him a long look. “You want to go to the mine? The place where all those people died?”

  “I do. There’s something about this town that doesn’t feel right. Something bad’s going on, and I think it all stems from that accident in the mine.” Thaddeus lowered his voice. “And I’ve noticed a few strange things today that made me uneasy.”

  “Strange how?” Teofil asked, also lowering his voice.

  “I’d rather talk about it away from the inn,” Thaddeus replied.

  Teofil nodded. “Let me clean up and we can go.”

  Thaddeus waited in the yard for Teofil. Through the open windows, he could hear Astrid and Dulindir talking as they polished silverware. It all felt normal and peaceful, but a nervous dread trembled in a spot low in his belly. What was going on in this town?

  Teofil stepped out of the back door and they set off along the sidewalk. For a long time, they were silent, looking around at the houses and nodding to the few people they came across. Thaddeus was glad Teofil didn’t just start peppering him with questions. The comfortable silence between them, and the simple act of walking, were helping Thaddeus put his thoughts in order.

  “It’s a quiet town,” Thaddeus finally said.

  Teofil nodded. “It is.”

  “Too quiet, I think,” Thaddeus continued.

  “How so?”

  “There are no pets. Since we’ve been here, I haven’t seen one cat or dog. I haven’t heard any dogs barking in the distance.”

  Teofil frowned. “That is unusual. Back in Superstition I could hear dogs barking all around Leopold’s house.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Thaddeus whispered. “Where are Leopold, Vivienne, and your father? Why can’t any of us get in touch with them?”

  “I wish I knew,” Teofil said. “I’m worried about everyone we left back home, including my other brothers and sisters too.”

  “There’s something really weird going on in this town,” Thaddeus said. “And it seems to have started right after the mine collapse.” He told Teofil about his discussion with Aisha about her father and brothers, as well as Joe the cat.

  “It does sound suspicious,” Teofil said.

  When they reached Main Street, they turned left and walked through the business district. The lights were still on in Heap’s General Store. Nathan was working a late shift that day, and Thaddeus saw him ringing up a customer at the cash register. He really wanted to go into the store and ask his father to join them, to just punch out at the time clock and walk with him and Teofil to the mine. But he knew that couldn’t happen, and that he and Teofil were on their own for now in their…. What? Investigation? Inspection? Exploration? He decided that exploration was a good fit, and by that time they had left the stores behind and were crossing the bridge over the narrow Iron Gulch tributary.

  “So different on this side of the river,” Thaddeus said.

  “Lots of people live over here,” Teofil said. “The houses are so close together.”

  “A lot different than where we are, isn’t it?” Thaddeus asked.

  “It is.” Teofil gestured to a sign ahead of them. “The mine is another two miles up the road. Did you know it was that far?”

  “I knew it was along this road, but not that far outside of town.” Thaddeus stopped and looked across the open field that ran right up to the foot of Wraith Mountain. “What about trying a shortcut?”

  Teofil smiled. “You’re getting more adventurous the longer you’re away from Superstition.”

  Thaddeus grinned. “Maybe it’s all the gnomes I’m hanging out with. Come on.”

  The grassy field was littered with stones that made their progress slower than Thaddeus had hoped. A short time later, the field had given way to rockier ground, and they came upon a very nar
row footpath that appeared to follow the contours of the base of the mountain. They made better time on the path, and soon had reached the spacious parking lot of the Wraith Mountain Mining Corporation. A long, narrow two-story administration building sat on the opposite side of the parking lot from where they stood, the windows dark and a few of them broken. A tall chain-link fence enclosed the entire area, but Teofil pointed out a portion that looked like it had been pulled away from the post, and they were able to slip inside.

  The automatic lights on poles throughout the parking lot had come on and buzzed above them. Thaddeus paused to look up at one. “They’re solar powered. That’s a lucky break for us since I bet they turned off the power to this place long ago.”

  “Solar powered?” Teofil asked.

  “Powered by sunlight. Those panels on top of the posts gather sunlight and store the energy in batteries that power the lights.” He looked toward the mountain where a large wooden sign stood over the narrow rail lines for the mine cars. Written in bold red paint was the message: DANGER! STAY OUT. MINE UNSAFE. Beyond the sign, the entrance to the mine lay dark and sinister behind a heavy steel gate. A chill ran through Thaddeus. The whole place felt abandoned.

  “Too bad they didn’t have solar-powered lights for the inside of the mine,” Thaddeus said. “I kind of wish Dulindir was here with his starlight-reflecting hair.”

  “I don’t.” Teofil tipped his head toward the mine. “Come on, let’s get a closer look.”

  They headed toward the mine entrance. Thaddeus noticed nacht macabre growing in clumps between the rocks of the mountainside and near the mouth of the mine. He pointed it out to Teofil, and they paused to look around. When nothing seemed out of place or threatening, they approached the gate. Whatever lock or motor had once kept the mine secure was broken. The tracks that held the gate in place were caked with dirt and rust from disuse and squealed in protest. They put all of their strength into it and were able to lift it enough for Thaddeus to quickly duck beneath.

  “Stay right there,” Teofil said. “I want to make sure we can lift it again and get back out.”