by Dale Bailey
Faces hovered in the dark—Emily, Ben, his father—all talking, talking, but he couldn’t make out the words. It was like overhearing a conversation from a distant room. And then even that was gone. There was only silence, stillness, the endless winding ascent. Sometime after that—he couldn’t say how long—his flashlight died.
Henry sank to the floor in despair.
Stars.
As they emerged from the overhanging mouth of the mine, Ben stumbled away from Emily, sinking to his knees in the snow. Stars, he thought, staring up into the endless expanse of space, a black abyss sewn through with light. His lungs ached, and exhaustion rolled over him like a fog, blocking out everything beyond a radius of four or five feet, but somehow the stars got through, pouring down their radiance from a million years away. Pouring down their radiance like gods, he told himself, and the simile spurred another thought, an image really: that thing looming up and up, unfurling those mighty wings.
Like a fallen angel, like a god.
A big story, that was what he had told Henry that night in the kitchen. But that wasn’t precisely what Quincy Sleep had said. A story that changes everything, he had said, sounding like every crackpot conspiracy theorist Ben had ever met.
But maybe he was right.
“Come on,” Emily was saying. “We have to get help.”
She dragged him to his feet and they stumbled downhill toward the Blazer. He coughed and spat blood, bright arterial blood, black atop the snow, death planting a flag on the mountains of the moon. He knew he had to call for help, and he had a sudden sharp craving for a cigarette, and those gray banks of weariness kept rolling in, but Quincy Sleep’s words cut through it all like the beacon of a lighthouse: a story that changes everything.
Should he write it?
Should anyone?
He could see before he realized he could see. He had been sitting against the cold stone, staring blindly at his hands, gathering the strength to go on. Anxious to preserve the battery, he had avoided turning Perry’s cap light on while he rested. Now he leaned forward to do so, and he realized with a shock that he could see his hands, the dim outlines of his fingers. He’d been seeing them for some time now; he didn’t know how long.
A hallucination, he thought.
But it was there. In the pale gray radiance, shadowy outcroppings of rock assumed shape and substance.
He looked up.
His father stood at the crest of the tunnel, framed in a faint grayish glow the color of a starlit January sky.
Henry stared up at him. He felt nothing.
He closed his eyes and opened them again. Quincy Sleep stood unmoving at the crest of the mining shaft, not twenty feet away. Henry’s words to Asa Cade—
—do you believe in ghosts—
—came floating back to him. He lifted his fingers to his cheek, to the faded imprints of a dead man’s hand, a dead man in a dream.
He lurched to his feet and knelt for Perry, leaving the cap light off. He didn’t want to drown out the faint ghostly radiance from above. He staggered, cradling the unconscious man like a bride, and started up the tunnel. As Henry drew near, his father disappeared into a steeply ascending branch.
Henry stumbled on behind him.
Perry moaned, and Henry glanced down into his face.
By the time he looked up again, they had emerged into the central heading. The mouth of the mine lay not fifty yards ahead, a scrap of star-sown sky, filled with that gray January light.
His father had disappeared.
Henry staggered in a circle, looking down the tunnel from which he had emerged. Nothing was there. No one.
He took another step and stumbled to his knees. Then someone was kneeling beside him.
“Emily,” he whispered.
Together, they lugged Perry Holland into the night. Ten yards, twenty, the tipple looming up against the dark.
“Ben?” Henry said. “Where’s Ben?”
“I’m here.”
He appeared out of the dark, clutched Henry’s shoulder. “Help’s on the way.” He glanced at Perry, then turned to Emily. “There’ll be a first-aid kit in the Blazer,” he said.
“I’ll get it.”
Henry watched her for a moment, her figure diminishing as she sprinted down the hill. Then he slumped over, exhausted. The snow was cold, his jeans soaked. It felt wonderful.
“Henry, look at me.”
There was something imperative in the voice. He looked up. Ben’s face was serious. “You did well.”
“Thanks. Thank you.” He caught his breath. “And you, Ben, did you find your story?”
“Yes.” He held Henry’s gaze, his eyes intent. “But I keep thinking about your father—this changes everything, he said. I don’t know that I should write it.”
“Why?”
“Do you want everything to change?”
Then Emily was back with the first-aid kit and Henry never got the chance to answer. He found himself tearing open a bandage instead, pressing it to Perry’s face to stanch the trickle of blood at his temple.
“Smelling salts,” Emily was saying. “There must be smelling salts in here somewhere—”
In the flurry of activity, neither of them noticed Ben as he stood up and walked away.
Now that Ben had made his decision, breathing seemed to come easier. The fear had retreated, too, though he didn’t think the fear ever went away, not for anyone. It was fear of the unknown, after all, of borders you can only cross one way.
As quickly as he could manage, he strode up the hill to the mouth of the mine. At the summit, he turned back for a moment. Emily and Henry were hunched over the prone figure of Perry Holland, working easily together, a natural harmony they seemed wholly unaware of. They simply fit, as people sometimes do, and seeing them together dulled the edge of his own regret. He had never found that fit in his own life, but he had a good feeling about Henry and Emily.
He supposed it was the way a father might feel.
Turning on his flashlight, he stepped inside and began descending. He moved easily, with only the thick dust—
—with all this dust you could start a fire that might burn a decade—
—slowing him down, and as the mine enveloped him, his thoughts turned to the thing he had seen down there.
How long had it lain there, he wondered, shedding its beneficence on the valley below? How long had it been dying, each death throe releasing within the Run the natural passions and illnesses that were so much a part of life in other places?
He had no doubt at all that it was dying.
He had known that from the instant he stepped into the chamber and saw its wasted form curled upon that slab. He knew death too well. He had seen his own failing body in that gaunt frame. Yet even then some irrational fragment of his mind had continued to hope—the same hope that must have led Perry Holland to recruit Dr. Cade and Reverend Sleep, a desperate bid to cure the affliction, physical or spiritual, that ailed the thing. For Ben, the hope had been bound up in Sleep’s ruminations—
—giant, spirit, healer—
—about the nature of the creature.
For Ben, the hope had been personal.
His hope had died when Crawford plunged his knife into that monstrous chest, and he felt its loss, a physical ache, an added burden within his aching breast.
So what remained?
He coughed, a moist tearing in his lungs.
Decision, that was all.
He kept remembering the way the thing had lunged forward at the end, aware perhaps that its own fading powers rendered it vulnerable, welcoming the blade, choosing it, maybe, over a more protracted and painful death—a decision not unlike the one Ben himself had reached up there beneath that canopy of stars.
A story that changes everything, Quincy Sleep had said, and about that, as about so much else, he had been right. Ben wondered what Quincy Sleep had envisioned from such a story, what change he thought might come. Had he thought of it—really thought of i
t—at all?
In these last fleeting moments, Ben had thought of little else. It would be a comfort to believe, he thought, if only to lift the burden of that long fall into dark. But he had no love of organized faith, the way it twisted moral principle into a rationale for hate. The world had seen crusades enough. Let the evidence burn to ashes. Some stories should remain untold.
He paused, feeling the pressure of time. It wouldn’t do if the others decided to come looking for him.
Was this deep enough?
It would have to be.
He switched off the flashlight and tossed it away. The dark enfolded him as he fumbled loose a cigarette and wedged it between his lips. Then he lifted the lighter, tracing with his fingers the words engraved there.
Yes indeed, he thought.
And then he struck a light.
The first sirens were audible by the time they realized Ben was gone. Emily had found the smelling salts, and Perry was stirring groggily when it hit Henry, Ben’s words, that final question—
—do you want everything to change—
—suddenly leaping into his mind.
Henry scrambled to his feet. He barely had the strength to stand, but he staggered back toward the mouth of the coal mine.
He never made it.
The ground heaved under his feet. A vast roar shattered the stillness, and an enormous fireball pulsed at the mine’s dark mouth. For an instant Henry wavered there, torn between this chill January night and a dusk weeks lost—
—ages gone—
—when he had parked in the scenic overlook high above Sauls Run, rocked by that momentary hallucination, each molecule of air erupting as the conflagration leaped down the ridges to envelop the Run itself. Then he felt the heat against his face. Shielding his eyes, he fell to his knees in the snow and waited for the sirens to arrive.
Coda
Sauls Run
Three Years Later
Henry Sleep stepped out of the offices of the Observer, lifted his collar against the cold, and gazed up into a January sky bluing off toward dusk. It was the same every winter: It all came clamoring back as the mountains turned cold for the season. This year, though, the memories had a renewed urgency. He thought of Emily, her belly already starting to swell, and he laughed in a kind of bemused wonder. Fatherhood. If that wasn’t an act of faith, he didn’t suppose he was capable of one. He only wished his own father had survived to see it.
Yet there were still so many questions.
He remembered a conversation with Arnold Mears, the heavyset deputy who had shown up at his house that first night, the night it all began. Not long after Crawford’s death in the mines, Mears had been named sheriff—interim sheriff, anyway, until the election in the fall confirmed the appointment. He had been the one who investigated the case. He’d called Henry after answers about Crawford’s past began to trickle in, and they’d walked down toward the Stone Bridge in a flush of March warmth.
“Your story about the sheriff,” he had said. “The story about Delbert Grubb.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Mears gave him a sleepy glance. The laziness was an illusion. Henry had learned that in the weeks since the events in the mine. “Turns out Del Grubb was a beat cop in L.A. back in the early seventies.”
The City of Angels, Henry thought, and a momentary chill touched his heart. They were standing on the bridge itself by then, watching as a train laden with bituminous from the deep mines up Copperhead crawled by below. They stood silently until the clanks and rattles died away, and the Run filled up once again with the drowsy hum of a warm spring afternoon. Henry looked at Mears.
“How did he end up here?”
“He killed a kid out there. Turned out the kid wasn’t armed. The papers had a field day. Apparently Grubb didn’t like his odds at trial. He lifted a birth certificate and a Social Security number, and headed for points east.”
“So there’s a real Harold Crawford.”
“Hundreds of them, I reckon. It’s a common enough name. The Harold Crawford in question, he died of leukemia in 1953. He was five years old.”
“And that’s it?”
“Not quite. Apparently, Grubb nearly killed some kid in school, too. Juvenile courts sealed the records.”
“How’d you get them?”
“Right of privacy doesn’t apply to dead men.” Mears crossed his arms on the railing. “LAPD has pretty good reason to link Crawford to at least one rape-homicide out there—high school girl in 1971. There are a couple other possibles—FBI profile says there ought to be several—but that one’s real solid. With Ray Ostrowski, the Cades, the fellow we dug up out at Crawford’s farm, that brings the total to at least five. Six, if we add your dad.” Mears gave him another of those sleepy glances. “We checked some other things, as well.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, your father didn’t buy the gun that murdered him. Crawford falsified information in the file.”
“The ballistics report said Dad fired the weapon himself.”
“There was no ballistics report.” Mears stared at him, measuring the effect of these words. “I don’t suppose you’d reconsider your decision on the exhumation?”
“I think we know what we’d find.”
“I could get a court order.”
“Yeah.”
Mears lifted his face to the sun. “Probably not worth the effort,” he said. “I keep thinking, though. I knew Harold for years, worked with him, ate with him, rode with him. He was a gentle man. I thought he was a good man.”
“Maybe he wanted to be,” Henry said. “Maybe he wanted that more than anything in the world.”
“Maybe so. It’s a mystery—that’s for sure.”
Mears straightened, hitching his pants higher on his gut, and Henry thought the interview had come to an end. But Mears hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps toward the courthouse, high atop the long hill, before he turned back.
“Perry Holland’s story about exploratory work, reopening the mines, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Convenient how those old mines are burning. Had an EPA fellow in here last week—he said they might burn years yet.”
Henry said nothing.
“I have a lot of questions, Mr. Sleep. I’d really like some answers.”
Henry lifted his hands.
“So would I,” he said.
So much had changed since then. It hadn’t been more than a few weeks after that conversation—mid-April, it must have been—when Henry had barged into old Emerson MacCauley’s office at the Observer.
MacCauley was in his nineties by then, a baggy old reprobate with three or four long wisps of hair orbiting an otherwise bald head.
“I don’t suppose you came to give me an interview,” he growled.
“Actually, I came for a job,” Henry said.
“We like our people to report the news, not make it.” MacCauley pushed papers around on his desk. “Can you write?”
“I’ve got two English degrees.”
MacCauley made a face to show just what he thought of English degrees, but ultimately he relented. An English degree was bad, he opined, but at least it wasn’t a degree in journalism. Last thing on earth he wanted was some fresh-faced college kid with visions of Woodward and Bernstein dancing in his eyes. Being a reporter in a place like the Run, he said, you spent most of your time covering garden club meetings and the like. At least Henry was a local boy and had no illusions of glory.
Henry didn’t think he had any illusions left at all. But he found he liked the work, and now, three years later, he was still at it. He’d had more to cover than MacCauley would have imagined, too. In the last three years, death had come to the Run. Emerson MacCauley himself had died not more than six months after hiring Henry. And the years since had seen the occasional small-town sensation—a barroom murder in the lower end of town, a stabbing in the courthouse jail.
So many changes, Henry thought, getting in his car and turning it toward Widow’s Ridge. So many changes.
But the questions remained—private questions now, the kinds of questions you turn over in the small hours when sleep will not come, but questions all the same.
They had talked about it only once, he and Emily, behind locked doors in the Tipple, one evening a few months after he took the job at the Observer. It was one of Emily’s last shifts, a steaming August night with the air conditioner running full blast and the ceiling fans churning the air inside the bar. She would be heading back to school in the fall. They’d just finished closing the place up, and now, with the pleasant blur of alcohol in his veins and some of Emily’s music—Charles Mingus—on the house deck, Henry felt comfortable enough to turn some of those questions over in his mind.
Maybe Emily was thinking the same thing, for looking at him from behind the bar, she said, “You ever think about it?”
Pronoun reference he’d have said in his teaching days, but those days were over; he’d come to that by then, and besides, he knew well enough what she meant.
“All the time.”
She was dipping glasses—twice in the soap, then to the rinse, then onto the rack to dry—and she didn’t look at him as she spoke.
“Me, too,” she said. “I keep thinking about that conversation we had at Ben’s that night.”
“The Rephaim,” he said. “The healers.”
“The very one.” And now she did look at him, square in the face. “I think there was an element of truth to that, but I think it’s more complicated somehow. I can see that thing in my mind at night before I go to sleep, and it doesn’t make me feel safe or loved or anything like that. It didn’t feel …”