Childe walked with Darwin back up the street, sweating in torrents and trying to catch his breath let alone his mind. It had all happened; he was sure of it. He was sure of two other things as well: One, he had to get his mother and leave this place. Two, she would never believe him. After another minute or so passed, a third thought occurred to him: He was needed here. Are you a brave boy? Those suits of armor had been empty. Was he expected to put one on? His mind’s eye ran over the giant scales. Whose bones had heaped the heavy plate? There had been so many.
* * *
Eyes peered from the dusty glass of the ticket taker’s booth as Childe Howard trudged past the old movie theatre. T.R. kept perfectly still as the new kid and his mutt walked by. Well, there it was. He knew that if he came to his special place, his cathedral, the focus of his summer project would present itself.
* * *
In the holly, a pile of red and black death as high as a young boy’s knees lay still. A stuttering swarm, much diminished, smoked over the forest floor away from the battleground. In the other direction, a seven-legged spider limped back to the dark mouth of the mine. Underneath, the great dragon sighed with a weariness like gravity.
* * *
Three hundred miles from Shard a wasp that looked like a man twisted open the throat of its chopper and grinned down the distance.
Chapter 14
Erica walked through the woods and thought about George Rhodes and the merits of comfortable shoes. She had a couple of hours before dinner and he had shooed her out of the kitchen. (“No Rhodes ever accepted help in the kitchen from a house guest.”) He’d suggested she go for a stroll in the woods at the end of the street. There was a hiking trail that looped up the bluff to the old mine offices and back. He’d loaned her a pair of his mother’s old walking shoes. Not the height of fashion, but let’s face it: there was no such thing as a fashionable tennis shoe—not to a woman like Erica. The Keds were a little loose but nothing a double pair of socks couldn’t fix. And an extra layer of fabric between her toes and the inside of another person’s shoes didn’t bother her at all.
The four-o’clock sun was just beginning to take a serious slant, throwing strange, shifting disco lights through the canopy. There were bugs, but they were lazy, drunk on August heat and the deep green of the forest. An easy breeze dragged a hand through the trees and Erica was reminded of the sound newspaper makes as it tumbles down a quiet street. She took in a great breath of air. Something in her was unclenching.
Shard wasn’t what she had expected at all. Erica was sure it was going to be a mix of Deliverance and The Road Warrior. But where she thought she’d find industrial waste and devastation, she found a ghost town in repose, folding back into the mountain. Where she thought she’d encounter uneducated simpletons, she met brilliant, complicated George Rhodes.
George was a drunk. She got that. She also got that he hadn’t taken more than three drinks their whole day together. She wasn’t fooling herself, he needed to fix every now and again, or the pain came on him. But he wasn’t swimming in it either. When he had first answered the door, he’d just come up from a deep dive. Now, he seemed to be keeping to the shallows. She knew why. What she didn’t know was why she was encouraging it. She was here to murder this place the rest of the way.
What would a man like George think of Manhattan? Would he flourish there, follow his intellect into the pursuits available to someone with his kind of intelligence? He might not be sporting an MBA or a JD, but he was the kind of person who stood out. That was how you made it in New York. You had to be something special. George was something special. She could help him get his start, and then…
“Really, Erica? Seriously?” She sighed at the sound of her own voice and sat down on an old log. She flicked a ladybug off the knee of her jeans and noticed a chip in her nail polish. She was already coming apart, changing, slipping back into the mountain like everything else around here. A waft of sulfur tinted the air for a moment, riding a shift in the breeze as the day lost its heat an hour at a time.
She waved a droning fly away and the air sweetened, filtered through tannin and water-heavy leaves. That clutch in her solar plexus ratcheted down another notch and she closed her eyes. Orange and black, webbed with retinal blood vessels, shifted, shifted. A twig cracked and she opened her eyes to find a deer foraging a few yards away. It was a fawn, finely muscled and glossy. Erica froze, but it sensed her. The deer lifted its elegant neck and regarded her. For a long time they looked at each other—dark city eyes to dark forest eyes. “Hello,” Erica said, expecting the deer to run, hoping it would not. It dropped its head and cropped a fern.
Erica sat with her hands in her lap as the forest moved and lived around her. The fawn nosed through the undergrowth, never more than a few yards away, flicking an ear at the odd mosquito. A tear slipped from Erica’s eye and patted down, a small dark circle on her jeans.
* * *
Amy James checked her watch. She had another forty minutes or so before she had to meet the yummy Constable for dinner at his friend’s place. God, was she really going on a double date with the town’s lone lawman and his most reliable customer at the jail? Yup. Was she also snowing him a little while she went behind his back to treasure hunt based on a wild story about giant-spiders-and-dragons-oh-my? Yup. Multi-tasking was indeed one of her specialties. Having her cake and eating it too was how to win, and she could have it if she wanted it. Besides, all she was doing at this point was tramping around in the woods a little bit. If she happened to find the shaft opening Will had walked through chasing his dead father, and she just happened to locate the horde of diamonds and other precious gems he’d described, well, all the better.
There was the berm humping up the leaf-littered floor like Will described—a giant anaconda taking a giant siesta under a giant carpet. She crested it in motorcycle boots and a cornflower-blue babydoll dress. The dress was ridiculous and one of her favorites. She was being very careful not to get it dirty. Treasure hunting or not, she still wanted to look hot for Will. He made her, well, feel kinda goofy. She stopped on the little rise and there it was, complete with the thin stream of yellow smoke rising from the top of the opening: the shaft.
Amy walked in close and the smell burned her nose. Man, what was she thinking? She knew better than most people how dangerous it was to go screwing around inside a condemned mine, let alone one that was fucking on fire. Her ambition burned back. Hell with it.
She started in and stopped as the cornflower-blue caught in the corner of her eye. She’d ruin the dress if she went in there with it. Well, easy enough remedy to that problem. Amy slipped the dress over her head and hung it from a sapling growing just to the side of the entrance. She pulled a little mag-lite from her boot and paused, imagining what she must look like from behind—a young woman scrawled with tattoos, wearing men’s tighty-whities and a lacy blue Victoria’s Secret bra, complete with chunky black motorcycle boots. Amy spun, penlight held like a light sabre, but there was no one there. Her tattoos crawled with goose flesh.
“Am I really this dumb,” she said to herself. The tunnel before her hollowed her voice and ate it. She shined the flashlight in and around the walls. The supports were still in place and looked sound enough. She took a step, another. The heat wasn’t too bad and the smoke was sticking to the ceiling. She shone her light up on the zero-gravity stream of black that boiled along the roof. Amy checked over her shoulder. The breeze tugged at her dress and a flag of jaunty blue winked at her from the opening. All’s well out here, babe! How’s the mouth of hell treatin’ ya? The opening was close, she was okay.
Amy kept walking, panning the beam around the walls, looking for the… There it was the, the crack in the side that Will had gone through, that Will had chased the ghost of his father through. No, that wasn’t right. It hadn’t been a ghost. It had been a giant magical shape-shifting spider pretending to be his father. She splashed the powerful little Mag-Lite into the gap. The floor angled down at abou
t 30 degrees, the walls a good three feet apart. The overall shape was circular and fairly regular. She reached in and ran her callused hand along the skin of the wall. It was pebbly. The fumes were strong here, really acrid. She coughed and looked up. Sure enough the stream of upside-down black was thicker here and closer due to the smaller bore.
She stuck her head in and squinted at the wall. Something in the texture had her hackles up. Patterns were forming up in her head, she knew the feeling. A little more data, just a little more. She spat on the stone and wiped it with her hand. Her palm came back covered in soot from the coal smoke. Amy shined the light at the clean spot and sucked in a gasp. The stone was crystalline and yellow-brown. Her heart started to pound. She turned and spat on the opposite wall (hard to get enough saliva now), cleaning it with her hand as she had before. Holy shit, more of the same. It was a rhyolite pipe—what happened when molten rock from under the mantle, under terrific pressure, thrust up through the surface.
She couldn’t believe it. You didn’t find these in America in more than a couple of places. You sure as hell didn’t find them in coal mines. You found them in Africa. You found them in diamond mines. Amy forgot her fear and walked farther into the pipe. She wished she had a tank of water and hand pump. If she bet right, this whole structure was like the inside of that geode she’d given to Kiddo the other day, except it was full of yellow diamonds instead of amethyst. She was so excited she didn’t see the hole that Will had fallen through. One heavy, booted foot came down on nothing. Amy yelped, and jammed her hands out, the sharp walls biting into her palms. She arrested her fall, one foot hanging in space, the other on solid ground. The Mag-Lite was not so lucky. She watched it tumble down and down and down, illuminating the sides of another pipe, a throat of pure emeralds the size of her gaping mouth.
* * *
Erica and Amy were both distracted during dinner but got on well enough. The conversation around George Rhodes’s bright kitchen table was easy, and the wine flowed. The menu was simple—venison and steaming cornbread with fresh greens from the garden—but presented with flare and skill. The men laughed and talked, ribbed each other and the women joined them. Amy liked Erica—she was a bitch and sharp as the rocks in a rhyolite pipe. Erica liked Amy—she was funny, cared fuck-all for the niceties and was quiet at the right times. George and Will were pleased as punch with themselves and each other.
Chapter 15
Cyrus MacCoy lived outside of Shard proper but considered himself a citizen. His cabin, moss covered and silvered with age, slumped at the base of a natural granite wall. You could walk right by it and never realize it was a home, which suited Cyrus just fine. His still was over the ridge on the other side of the granite knob near a clear stream; the chuckling water echoing off that great rock lulled him to sleep each night. Cyrus had watched his Pa stumble around more and more as the whiskey blind came on him, and so never took a drop himself. But, the family business was the family business. To his knowledge he was the last of the family, so the still was all he had left. Sure there were other MacCoys, and McCoys maybe, but no one that he was close related to, nowhere around Shard anyway. He was alone in his woods.
The same fair summer evening that found Will and George, Erica and Amy strolling post-dinner through a town burnt orange with sunset found Cyrus MacCoy tinkering with his still. He fiddled a bit with the tubing between the burner tank and the furnace, coating the joints with a soapy mixture that would bubble if there were any leaks. There were always leaks, but nothing too bad. The high-pitched voice of his old Pa crackled at him, raw with drink. Ain’t no such thing as a safe still, boy. Bitch’ll turn and bite cha’, you give her half a chance. Then the old man (he was always old, even when Cyrus was barefoot in biballs) would lift a greasy flap of hair and show off the scar that wormed along the side of his head and over his ear. The ear itself looked like a twisted mushroom. Pa had died crazy and blind; his mind and his eyes fried out by white lightning.
Cyrus’s hands were filthy except at the fingertips where he rubbed the liquid soap into the creases of pipe and tubing. A cluster of soap bubbles bloomed at the join between the burner tank and the outflow hose. He squinted a brilliant blue eye at the leak and then looked up into the canopy, tossing easy in the evening breeze. Oh dammitalltahell. He’d have to bank down the fire and unhook half of everything to fix this. When he did that he was likely to find ten more things needed fixing and that meant going to town for parts. Did he have enough lightning jarred up for a run so as not to waste a trip? He looked up again. Wasn’t going to happen tonight, too late now. Get some dinner then. Tomorrow for the bitch still.
Back in his cabin after a meal of canned chili (oh, was his little house going to smell like the ass end of a bull come sun up), Cyrus sat at his little desk crammed between a wall layered with stacked mason jars on one side and canned goods on the other. He bent over his ledger, squinting in the hiss of a forty-year-old Coleman lantern. Never write your dealings down. Law can read, too, you know. Cyrus had heeded Pa’s advice to an extent, keeping his ledger in code. Each mason jar was a “brick”, moonshine whiskey was “mortar” and every dollar was a “pebble”.
Cyrus and his Pa and his Pa’s Pa on back had been running moonshine since before The War of Northern Aggression. Buried deep in the soft soil at the base of the granite knob was a copper-lined chest full of money, some of it printed with the likenesses of those generals on the losing side. Now in his fifties (he guessed), Cyrus could retire in style if he wanted. He could even afford to move into that fancy Rhodes rooming house for the rest of his days. Have someone else do his cooking and cleaning. (Well, to be honest, he’d never done much of either anyway.) Hell, he could even move away from Shard itself, nasty sulfur-smelling ashtray of a place. But the hoard never felt quite full enough. Just another few runs in his old International Harvester pick-up. Just another few dozen bricks of mortar and he’d have enough pebbles to put a bullet in the Harvester and the bitch still alike. He glanced over at the old, but gleaming, possum gun leaning by the bed.
Truth be told, there wasn’t any reason to code his dealings. The Constable trooped on up here every couple of months or so, just to see how Cyrus was getting on. Two-Bears knew well enough what he brewed on the other side of the ridge. Everyone knew; it was how he stayed in business. Most every house in Shard and the surrounding hills—even up to the county seat—had an empty mason jar or two that smelled more like lightning than put-away peaches. Cyrus was like a backwoods milkman. Constable Will just warned him to keep his shine away from young folks and drunks like George Rhodes. (No worries on either. Cyrus was afraid of kids and Rhodes never touched the white lightning, cottoning to his gin.) Other than that, the young lawman would check to see if Cyrus needed anything, if he was safe, healthy. Had he seen any coyotes? Were the other hill families doing all right? Cyrus always offered to pay his “taxes” to the Constable (as traditional as the rest of it) and Will always refused. Told Cyrus that information and responsibility were payment enough.
Cyrus always had plenty of information for Will. He was the only person making regular rounds through Shard’s suburbs: the clutches of shacks and cabins and even a few doublewides the hill families called home. There weren’t more than twenty souls living back in the woods, and, truth be told, that was fine with Cyrus. Maroons most of them. The women was too short and fat (cept’ maybe that Maggie Owens girl and she was only fourteen) and the men was all stupid and drunk. All right, that last part was mostly his doing, but if he didn’t sell it to them they’d just beat on their short, fat wives all the more. Wasn’t as if they had jobs. Most of them scraped by on garden plots and hunting. Lord knows how the fat ones got fat. Good old Cyrus always knew their doings though, and Will liked to know them too.
Cyrus blinked and sat back, his old chair creaking, threatening, holding. He rubbed his face, the gray stubble on his cheeks rasping in the stillness. He pulled a corncob pipe from his shirt pocket and filled it with homegrown tobacco from t
hose self-same Owenses, delivered by their too-young-for-him-to-be-thinking-about-her-that-way daughter. He got up and stood in the open door of his little cabin, the pipe a censer in a cathedral of old trees. The air had gone all purple-blue and a few fireflies lit their behinds at one another. One would go off and then a string would follow like bulbs on down a line into the dark. Blink, blink, blink—deeper into the woods they went. Cyrus counted them: one, two, three-four, five… six. His teeth clamped down on the pipe stem. There was a woman standing back in the shadows looking at him.
He narrowed his eyes and despite the growing darkness touched a sun-visor hand to his brow. The pipe suddenly smelled like roasted shit. “Hello?” he called out. “Who is that?” Cyrus looked over his shoulder into the cabin. His gun was loaded and one long stride away. He turned back and she was now a couple of yards from the cabin, standing just outside the trapezoid of light the lantern flung out the door. Cyrus dropped his pipe. “Lord a’ mighty, lady, you gave me start!” He laughed and shook his head. “A man can get a little jumpy out here by his onesome.” He peered at her in the gloom. Her face was pale and framed by black hair that looked like it hadn’t felt a brush in a few days. He couldn’t see her eyes. “You, uh, out here on your own, too?”
She nodded.
“You looking for a jar?”
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