Death Pans Out

by Ashna Graves

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Déjà vu all over again…The laughter was buried and would not come up but she felt it there in the depths, prowling around like a shy fish. What a kettle of fish. It stank of fish. No, not fish. Nasty old blankets. Some people never open the windows. Someday she would build her dream house, all windows, all of them open all the time. She would fly in and out like a swallow, a pigeon, Peter Pan…Ha, she said, and the deck tilted violently under her—the ship was going down!

  With a convulsive heave, she got up on her elbow and vomited. Damned fool. She knew better than to sail. It made her sick every time. She raised a shaky hand, wiped the spit off her chin, and snatched her hand away. It was flaming hot, it had scalded her skin. And now she smelled smoke. My God, the room was on fire with invisible flames and suffocating smoke. She had to get out. Struggling to lift her giant head, she fought against gravity, digging her fingers into the sand…But someone had cut her strings. She couldn’t move her legs. Not much of a puppet show. You had to have strings to move the arms and legs, two strings each, to the knees and ankles, elbows and wrists. Working the hand strings, she found a leg, pulled it up, found another, pulled it up, felt for the blanket that had slipped off her shoulders, got it over her knees, let her head fall forward and buried her nose in it, away from the musty, suffocating air.

  Her face was pressed into the blanket, the little smoky blanket. She breathed deeply. Wood smoke, sweeter than pine, most likely alder. If the fire were going she could make coffee…but there was no fire, only terrible cold and darkness. She lifted her head and looked for stars. There were no stars. She was in a vacuum, vacuum-packed like a sardine. Ha. She didn’t even like sardines.

  Time passed, time like a dripping faucet, time like a fripping daucet, time like a dipping raucet—what was wrong with her brain?

  Slowly her thoughts cleared and coalesced into an idea, a terrible idea but the only one that made sense. She was not outdoors, though she was sitting on sand in the cold dark. She was in the mining tunnel. Darrell Guptill had knocked her out with something nasty and left her in the old Calypso Mine. And somewhere close by were stacks of bodies that belonged in a cemetery. She had been left deep under the earth, a living corpse among the dead.

  Huddled into a ball, she buried her face in the blanket. More time passed, formless and cold, but after a bit she recognized that the small cover was not a blanket, it was Gran’s smoky sweater, though there was no Gran’s cabin to shelter her. There was blackness stretching endlessly, and there were bottomless holes, and bodies and pieces of bodies stacked all around. Her face was on fire, her head pounded, her stomach wanted to turn inside out. Better to have died of breast cancer out in the light and air. What if she had been offered a choice, to die two years ago or end up in a tunnel stuffed with the dead?

  Roy must be here, and her uncle.

  She raised her head, listening for her uncle’s bones to speak. She heard no bones, but she did hear something, a small movement, a whisper, a rasp. Breathing. Something was breathing nearby.

  Her own breath caught and her arms tightened around her knees. Rigid, she waited, and again heard the whisper of air, regular now, moving in and out. Some creature was sleeping not far away in the blackness. Claws, teeth, venom, what would it be that got her? Maybe it was a bat, or a whole colony of bats breathing in unison…ridiculous. A bear? Packrats to go along with the stench?

  Could one of the bodies have come back to life?

  A violent shudder shook her even as an internal voice commanded, Stop! Pull yourself together.

  If only she had matches. She did have matches. Her hand found the sweater pocket and closed on the small box, but still she continued to sit, unable to find the courage to look at what she faced, or to expose herself in the flare of light.

  And yet there was no choice. As long as she was alive and able, she would have to act. It was not possible to sit waiting for nothing while she could still breathe and think. She struck a match. It flared and died. The second burned long enough to reveal tunnel walls. With the third she lit a scrap of toilet paper and saw a sandy floor littered with sticks, that stretched about ten feet to the opposite wall. And for an instant before the weak flame died, she saw a figure curled up at the base of the wall.

  Blackness returned, but the dark was different now. She knew that form. Gene Holland was here—and he was breathing. She was not alone with the corpses.

  “Gene?” she said, and then, “Gene! Gene! Wake up, please, wake up, it’s Neva.”

  She listened but heard only the regular slip of breathing, which now struck her as very weak. Her mind began to issue orders. Cross the tunnel, help him, protect the matches. The nausea and headache were tolerable now, and though her arms and legs felt rubbery they responded to commands. She slipped her arms into the sweater sleeves and fastened the buttons over the torn dress front. Hitching the skirt up, she tucked it into her underwear so it wouldn’t catch under her knees, and began to crawl, her right hand curled around the matches.

  Stones on the floor jabbed into her knees. She crawled and crawled. Could she have veered up or down the tunnel in her confusion?

  Her hand struck something yielding. It was cloth, coarse like canvas. Crouched on her heels, she tried to open the matchbox, but her hands shook. She must not spill the matches. Willing her body to calm down, thinking of blue sky, flowering ridge tops, clear creek water, she waited in the dark. Her heartbeat slowed and the roaring in her ears ceased. A tiny snore, as though from a baby, came from just ahead.

  It was Gene she had touched, not a wrapped corpse, and the light of the first match showed that his upturned cheek was darkly bruised. His upper body moved as he breathed but he did not respond when she touched his arm and spoke his name. How long had he been lying here injured, without food or water? Two days? Three? It seemed a very long time since she first noticed the pickup truck parked in the wrong spot.

  Working in the dark, she took off the sweater, curled up against his back, and stretched the heavy old wool over them. The close touch of another living person, even unconscious, was such a comfort that she shuddered again, this time from relief. “Gene,” she tried again. She breathed on his neck, rubbed his limp hand, and talked, intensely at first and then with quiet determination. When she ran out of real talk, she began to count, saying his name in every ten’s place. Eight, nine, Gene, eleven, twelve…nineteen, Gene…At four hundred and sixty-three he stirred.

  “Gene! Wake up, for God’s sake, wake up,” she pleaded.

  He coughed, groaned, muttered wordlessly.

  “Gene, you have to wake up. Come on, just do it, you can do it, you’re a tough miner, we have to get out of here, come on, come on.”

  “Water,” he whispered.

  To get him upright and seated against the wall was a long, slow job but at last they huddled like lost children with the sweater over their shoulders. Through dry, swollen lips, he rasped, “Neva, there are old bodies in here.”

  “I know, Gene. I know. Don’t talk. Save your energy.”

  But he could not keep silent, and with pauses between words, he said he had begun to put bits and pieces together for himself after she told him about the mystery truck. Over the years, he, too, had heard vehicles in the night, though never so often as now. He had assumed they belonged to the Barlow Mine, but with all three young miners absent, who was driving up Billie Creek in the small hours? One night he had waited up, and followed the truck in his pickup with the lights off. He saw it turn onto the spur road, and had left his own truck to continue on foot, knowing the road ended below the Calypso Mine.

  “The light was on in the back and I could see that man that did Roy’s funeral. He pulled a carpet roll thing out of the truck and went away. I went to look in the truck. There was a body, an ancient woman, all shriveled up and dry.”

  “They dehydrate them,” Neva said matter-of-factly. “Not only bodies but pieces of bodies, for easier carrying. They’ve been doing it for years. T
hey can’t bury them in the cemetery because it’s solid rock. They’re in the body parts business.”

  “Body parts? What in hell?”

  “They can get a lot more per body if they break it up into useful bits, kind of like selling the working parts out of an old car. My newspaper ran a story last year about some funeral homes in the South that were getting thousands of dollars for every corpse.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There’s a market for almost everything, even hair I think. They’re called body brokers.”

  “Stop,” he rasped, and gagged.

  “Sorry. We shouldn’t talk about it now.”

  “Right,” Gene said, but after a brief silence, he mused in an almost normal voice apart from the hoarseness, “If this is true, they must’ve made a hell of a lot more money putting bodies into a mine than I ever made taking gold out.”

  “That’s very funny, Gene. I’d laugh if I didn’t feel so sick.”

  They didn’t speak for some time. Neva listened to his breathing and felt the heat in his arm and leg that were pressed against her own. They were both very much alive, but without food and water, Gene might not be capable of walking, and she wouldn’t last long either. Her mouth was drier than it had ever been in her life, even on the longest hikes when her water ran out early. They had no idea which direction to go, or how far away the mouth of the tunnel was, or whether it would be possible to get out through the supposed cave-in once they got there. That Darrell wouldn’t have left them alive if there was a possibility they could get out was a thought that she shoved sharply away as soon as it surfaced, but Gene was thinking along the same lines.

  “I don’t understand why he didn’t kill us,” he whispered. “He must have figured there’s no way out.”

  “I don’t think he’s up to actual murder. The people, bodies, he usually brings in here are already dead, and believe it or not, he’s squeamish.” She was recalling the look on his face when her dress ripped open. And hadn’t he said he quit collecting insects because he couldn’t stand pinning them?

  “Squeamish! You have to be kidding. That wasn’t any love tap he gave me. What about you?”

  “Chloroform, I think, some nasty rag over my face. My eyes sting, my face burns, my head hurts. But I almost think I could have talked him into letting me go if I hadn’t tried to run for it. I don’t think he cares for the business at all. But we are getting out of here, Gene. That’s a fact. And it’s time we got started. We just have to figure out which way to go.”

  “Go? I can’t even crawl.”

  “Well, I’m going and I’m not going alone. Do you have anything that might burn, a handkerchief or paper? All I have is a little toilet paper.”

  Gene twisted to reach into his back pocket, and groaned. “He must have run over me with the truck. Ah. I knew there was a reason to fool around with old engines.”

  He pressed an oily rag into her hand.

  “I’m going for a stick,” she said, and got onto her hands and knees. Working by touch, she wrapped the rag around one end of a sturdy bit of wood, just as she had done as a kid when making torches to go along with a game of make-believe. In those days the rags had been soaked in melted paraffin. Uncertain whether the oil would burn, she was triumphant when it caught on the first try, but rather than blaze it smoldered. This was enough to reveal mummy-like shapes piled up the tunnel to their right.

  “Decent of him to wrap them,” Gene said grimly.

  “We’re going that way.” Neva pointed in the other direction.

  Gene took several deep breaths and attempted to stand but his legs refused to hold.

  “It’s probably best to save your energy anyway,” Neva said, trying for a reassuring tone despite her horror at going alone. “I’ll explore and come back. I won’t be gone long, I promise.”

  “That’s what they all say,” he lamented.

  Her giggle brought a satisfied look to his swollen face, and when she said gently, “I’ll be back for tea,” he managed a one-sided smile.

  She walked with care, watching for the pits that Darla had described, but the tunnel floor remained level and not too rocky. Each time she rounded a bend she expected to see the wall of tumbled stone and each time she was disappointed. The light from the rag had been feeble from the start and now turned so dim that she stumbled on the shadowed floor. Panicking again, thinking of the long trip back to Gene alone through solid blackness, she was about to retreat when she saw something on the ground ahead and went toward it automatically. By the time she realized it was a skeleton, a human skeleton, she was also close enough to see the shreds of clothing that clung to the bones, and a dull glint of metal. A fine chain lay draped over the arched ribs and at its end, dangling inside the ribcage, was a watch.

  She dropped to her knees next to the bones, bowed her head and whispered, “Uncle Matthew. It’s Jeneva.”

  She knelt for a long time, still and silent. The rag faded out but she didn’t move. To leave her uncle now that she had found him at last was unthinkable—for fifteen years he had lain here alone in darkness—and yet to remain was impossible. She was miles under the heavy earth, miles from daylight and breezes, miles from the creeks of Billie Canyon. She must get back to Gene and go the other direction, for she now felt certain the cave-in was beyond the pile of bodies. There was no choice, she had to go, but she had lost the will.

  A cry reached her, and another, the sound echoing thinly as though from miles away. Gene was alone, without matches, and now he must think she had fallen down a hole.

  “I’ll be back, Uncle Matthew,” she whispered. “Next time I’ll take you with me.”

  The return trip was easier than expected. She felt the way, letting her fingers slide along the wall to keep from bumping into it or becoming disoriented, and now and then she called Gene’s name. When a faint response came, she shouted, “Stay there. I’m coming.”

  “Here, I’m here.”

  When she sank down next to him, he rasped, “I thought you were lost. I tried to follow.”

  “I’m so sorry, Gene. I found my uncle. And then the torch went out and I couldn’t leave him. He’s not wrapped. He’s lying on the floor of the tunnel, just bones and bits of cloth. And the watch chain draped on his ribs. I’m coming back for him.”

  “Of course.” Gene’s arm went around her shoulders.

  “And now we know which way to go.”

  “We’re going together this time, Neva. If I have to crawl.”

  She didn’t argue. Another dark foray alone was more than she could bear, and the sooner he made the trip to the entrance the better. Once on his feet with her help, he managed to walk with a hand on the wall, just as she had done, while she supported him with her left arm. In her right hand she held a stick for probing the ground ahead. Though they said nothing about it, both were braced to run into more stacks of bodies, and this made their progress all the more slow and uncertain. The pile of canvas shapes they’d seen before was now hidden by the dark, on the opposite side of the tunnel.

  They rounded a bend and were hit with an acrid current of packrat stench so foul that Neva could taste it, like breathing contaminated fog that seeps into every pore and cell in the body. The musty odor of canvas-wrapped corpses seemed sweet by comparison.

  “We might step in it, Gene. We’ll have to look.”

  The pinprick of flame blinded them for an instant, and then no more than twenty feet ahead they saw tumbled stone and timbers blocking the tunnel.

  “Eureka?”

  “Let’s hope.”

  They went closer. A second match revealed a rough door and trampled ground. The door was made of stone and old mine timbers cemented together, like something out of a troll’s palace. Without having to discuss it, they settled Gene against the wall to conserve his strength, and then Neva felt her way to the door. Again working by touch to save matches, she pushed, pulled and tried to slide any bit of wood, stone or metal that stuck out from the surface on or near the door. Not
hing moved. The whole jumbled wall might have been one solid piece forged in hell.

  Focused on the search, Neva paid no attention to the scrabbling sounds coming from Gene’s direction. When light suddenly flickered and then blazed, she turned to look dumbly at a fire that leaped through dry sticks.

  “I guess I’m good for something,” Gene said from his seat on a rock by the fire. “There’s plenty of fuel in here.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  Looking almost cheerful in the uneven light he managed to join her at the wall and they went over it together with minute care, concentrating on the door. It had to open, but they could find no chink, latch, device, or any indication of moving parts. More and more sticks went onto the fire, until they had cleared the tunnel floor for some distance. Gene’s brief resurgence of strength was soon spent and he sank down by the fire.

  “It must be locked on the other side,” Neva said.

  “No wonder he left us alive.”

  Neva soon joined him by the low flames, first sitting cross-legged and then sagging over onto her side with her head propped on her hand as she studied the tumbled stones, the heavy boards, the carelessly blobbed-on cement, every shape and shadow exaggerated by shifting shadows. The clean air of Billie Creek Canyon was no more than thirty feet distant but it had become unimaginable. The fire burned down and neither of them moved to collect more sticks. Neva’s eyes slid shut and she let her heavy head sink onto her outstretched arm.

  A long or short time later, she woke up but was not consciously aware of the fact, or of noticing a change. Then the word daylight struck her like a sound or smell. She sat up and looked at a bright streak on the tunnel wall. It was definitely daylight, a long, pale stripe of it, beaming in through a crack in the stone overhead. Her thoughts began to clear as she mentally traced the beam back up the crack to the sky that must be above, and the morning that must have dawned while they slept, casting light into their prison.