After another few minutes spent chucking rocks out of the new hole, Lang said, “Lawrence, prepare another stick. I think we’ll give it one more try. There’s a weak area here that should give way and open up a new pocket underneath.”
“Aye-aye,” said Perkins. Then he turned to me. “Clemens, get out a stick of dynamite and a blasting cap. You know where they are.” Indeed I did. They were back around the last dogleg, resting in the hod. I went to retrieve the goods requested, and returned with them to where Perkins stood beside the pit. I made as if to hand him the dynamite and the blasting cap, but he did not take them. Instead he said, “You prepare it, Clemens. It’s simple enough.”
I opened a hole in the wrapping surrounding the deadly cigar, then carefully inserted the business end of the cap, making sure it was fitted securely in place.
“Shall I attach the wires?” I asked. I had watched them do this enough times that I felt reasonably confident in my ability to carry out this procedure as well. Perkins agreed and I retrieved the spool of wire and the boning knife we used to strip the resinous cloth insulation from its ends. It is not an easy task to scrape wires clean of their coverings when your fingers are encased in ten thick sausages, but I eventually managed it. Then I twisted the wires I’d uncovered together with those from the blasting cap, making sure, as Perkins had shown me, not to tangle them together and, as they say in the electrical trade, “short them out.”
At last satisfied, I handed the assemblage over to Perkins. He took it carefully in his own collection of sausages, inspected it briefly, then passed it on to Mister Lang at the bottom of the hole. A minute later, Lang climbed out and we all retreated back around the dogleg, with Bemis and Perkins uncoiling the wire from its spool as they went. Soon we were all flat on the ground, Mister Lang spoke the ritual incantation “fire in the hole,” and once again the ground shook beneath us.
Then, even before the shaking had entirely subsided, a distorted eruption of oaths and wailing spilled out of my radio’s speaker. I raised my helmeted head and looked around to see which of us had been injured by the blast. Perhaps rock fragments had learned to travel around corners after all, I thought. But my three companions all appeared to be unhurt.
The cry came again, and although it was ripe with anguish, it was not a cry born of pain, or not physical pain in any case, but of rage.
“Good God,” I said, “we’ve unleashed the ghost!” This eventuality should have caused me to turn and run, and not stop running until I’d reached New Orleans, but instead a mad curiosity overcame me. Unthinking, I leapt to my feet and ran the wrong way—that is, into the dogleg. And as my reward for this madness, when I rounded the corner my headlamp’s beam indeed revealed a strange and monstrous apparition. A lumpy sphere, something like the helmet of a pressure suit, seemed to rise by itself out of the ground and float in the vacuum.
“Calvin,” I shouted, “come quickly! You’re not gonna believe this.” Meanwhile the sphere continued to ascend, and soon what looked to be a pressure suit emerged below it. It was not an ordinary suit, however, but one strangely appropriate to a ghost or a ghoul, for it was painted or tarred to a pitch black, and would have been completely invisible were it not for the gleam of its metal fittings reflecting in the beam from my lamp.
I felt a touch on my haggis and looked back to see that Bemis, and Perkins and Lang as well, had come around the dogleg and were standing beside me.
“Booger me,” said Perkins.
This was well spoken, considering the circumstances, but it was the ghost who had the floor, and it used it, shouting, “Now you’ll pay for what you done, ya rotten barstards. Just see if you don’t.” The voice was unmistakable. I recognized it immediately. Here was the source of the tortured cries I’d heard at the bottom of the crevasse. This was Chalk’s ghost, sure’s yer born, as Chalk himself would no doubt say.
Then I saw something that amazed me more than seeing Chalk’s ghost in the flesh, if that is possible. As I watched, and listened to the ravings of the primary apparition, another man, or ghoul, or animated pressure suit in any case, came up out of the ground, and behind that came another, and a moment later yet another emerged out of the deep pit that was the result of our recent blasts.
Then the ghost said, “Which a you sons-a-bitches is Merriwether?”
“What?” said Mister Lang.
“You heard me. Which a you barstards is the tyrant Merriwether?”
One of the others who had emerged from the hole said, “Don’t matter, Johnny. They’s all a them fuckin’ Deirdres.”
“Shut up!” barked the ghost named Johnny, who it seemed was not much of a ghost after all.
“Who are you men?” Mister Lang said. “Where did you come from?”
Perkins spoke then, saying, “Good Lord, Percy, I know that voice. It’s Jones. He’s—”
“Jones is dead,” said Lang, incorrectly, as it turns out.
“Which one?” screamed the ex-apparition Jones.
Lang said, “The captain’s up top supervising the loading of the next ore shipment.”
“Course he is,” said Jones, sounding oddly pleased. “No dirty work for him, no sir. No diggin’, no blastin’, no toting hod all the day long. No taking abuse from ign’r’nt whaler scum like Winters and that goddamn Gottschalk. No sea trash callin’ ya jonah just cuz they’d broke their own damned leg. No roof fallin’ in ta crush the life outta ya. Nooo. Not fer the likes a him, the great Captain Merriwether. Now ain’t that a laugh.” Jones tried to laugh here, but failed. “Captain is he? I say slaver’s more like it. An’ captain a what, I ask you? Captain of a hole in the ground, that’s what. Captain of a fuckin’ great hole in the ground. Him and his nasty little butt boy Lang. Now there’s a right barstard deserves to die a slow death, like he done for me.” He paused for breath, then snarled, “Which one a you’s Lang then?”
“That would be me,” Mister Lang said, and he raised an arm to indicate which of the anonymous haggises he was encased in. “What do you men want?” he added.
“Plenty,” said Jones.
One of the men who’d come up out of the ground said, “Don’ play at no dog in the manger. You maggots is jumpin’ our claim.”
The four of us stood frozen in place, stunned into immobility by a perfect bewilderment. Mister Lang’s question had been a good one: Aside from the jonah and ex-apparition Jones, who were these men? And how had they got here? Well, I knew how to answer the second question at least. Jones had come up out of the crevasse, but the others had climbed into D2 through the hole we had just now blasted open for them.
“We want plenty,” Jones repeated. “We’ll have it all before we’re through. But,” he continued, “Mister Lang, first I believe I’ll have you dead. Like you done for me.” Neither one of them appeared to be dead so far, I noticed. Then again, that could change in a hurry. John Jones had produced a pistol in one sausage-fingered hand. It ran through my mind that it would be a tricky business to pull the trigger with a sausage for a finger, when suddenly there was a brilliant flash, and Mister Lang gave a startled cry. I looked in his direction and saw an awful, great, fulminating geyser of air explode from the thigh of his pressure suit.
“That’ll do, I reckon. Oughta take a good long time. Now who’re you?” Jones barked again. And to my horror he turned his haggis, and the pistol, toward me. “That filthy little gnome Gottschalk I ‘spect. Least I hope so.”
“N-no,” I croaked. It was all I could manage under the circumstance, and indeed it was not enough.
“Well you’re a shit-crawlin’ worm of a Deirdre an’ that makes ya ripe for the killin’.” Seeing what had happened to Mister Lang, I wasted no time in diving for the ground, but as I went down I saw Bemis pick up a rock—there were plenty to hand after all—and throw it hard at the collection of sausages holding the pistol. It went true and struck Jones’s arm with enough force to send the weapon flying into the dark.
“Bravo, Calvin,” I cheered. This was neither
the first nor the last time that Calvin Bemis saved my life, but it is about my favorite of the lot, I think.
Meanwhile, Perkins had hauled Mister Lang to his feet and carried him back around the corner of the dogleg behind us. Jones was stunned by the impact of Bemis’s throw, but not much damaged by it, unfortunately. He raised his arms and began to come towards the remaining two of us, imitating the monstrous apparition he in his heart was.
“Let’s move,” Calvin said, and he picked up another rock and hurled it at the approaching black haggis. I finally got the message and began throwing stones myself. Most missed the mark, but one—it was another of Calvin’s I suspect—struck Jones on the side of his helmet and caused him to stagger back. We took this opportunity to duck around the dogleg to momentary safety.
Mister Lang’s badly deflated pressure suit was lying on the ground, and Perkins knelt beside it, pinching closed the hole in its thigh, but with only partial success, if the spurts of precious vapor that escaped around the sausages were any indication.
“Clemens, get a patch and the tin of sticking tar out of the hod. Mister Lang may or may not survive the wound, but he’ll not decompress on my watch.” I located the hod and soon found the patching kit. You can be sure that since I’d lost that toe to a leaking pressure suit, I was always conscious of the whereabouts of the patching kit, although it had done me no good at the time.
“Who are those men?” asked Bemis. “I gather that the lunatic in the tarred suit is John Jones, but who’re—”
“Whoever they are,” I interrupted, squatting beside Lang and opening the kit, “they’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain any second.”
Perkins said, “The two of you will have to hold them off while I tend to Mister Lang.”
“We’ll try,” I said, rising to my feet and then scanning the ground around me for a batch of throwable stones.
The doglegged passage was less than a dozen yards long, and narrow enough, as most such passages in the Deirdre were, so that only a single man in a pressure suit could negotiate it at any one time. Bemis was already standing athwart the passage with a rock in each hand. I looked into the blackness where I thought the tunnel might be and saw the flare of a helmet lamp as a man came around the bend. I saw Bemis’s arm shoot out and a rock passed through the beam of my headlamp. At the same instant I caught the glint of metal in the suited man’s glove. Jones, or someone, had retrieved the gun.
I shouted, “Calvin!” then shoved him to the ground just as a flash erupted out of the darkness. “He’s found the pistol.”
Bemis sat up and wasted no time in hurling another stone into the passage. That one must have connected with something, since it drew a spate of oaths from our assailant. Then he growled, “It’s the men of the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs come ta get theirs, ya thieving pirates. I warned ‘em long ago you’d be comin’ ta steal their rightful claim, and lo an’ behold here ya are, jus’ like I said.” There was another silent flash as Jones again fired the pistol. They are disconcertingly quiet, these gun fights on the Moon. Living on Earth, a man comes to expect a considerable noise to accompany each discharge, but out here a firing squad could be hard at work directly behind you, and you wouldn’t notice a thing until you were dead.
“Turn out your lamps,” shouted Perkins. “You’re making yourselves an easy target.” We did as he instructed, and as an enthusiastic coward, I felt foolish not to have thought of this myself. We returned then to throwing rocks at our assailant. After a moment there came a startled cry over the radio, and the light in the passage disappeared. From this I concluded that Bemis, or by some miracle I, had at last managed to acquaint Mister Jones with another rock.
“I think I got his headlamp,” Calvin said. Then added, “I don’t suppose we have a pistol of our own.”
“Cap’n has a brace,” came the ragged voice of Mister Lang. I realized I’d been hearing his heavy, labored breathing for the last few minutes. “In his cabin.”
“No good to us there,” said Bemis.
“Mister Lang is badly wounded,” announced Perkins then. “I’ve patched the hole in his suit but he’s bleeding out, sure’s yer—” He began again. “We have to get him to Mister Kent as soon as possible.” The unspoken words, or he’ll die, hung ominously in the vacuum.
Lang croaked, “We’re outnumbered, I expect, and completely outgunned. Take the men and get out, Lawrence. ‘s no use us all dying down here.”
“Booger that,” said Perkins. “You men put Mister Lang in the hod—leave everything out but the dynamite, can’t let them get their hands on that—then start carrying him up the D line fast as you can go. I’ll bring up the rear and keep them off as long as I can.”
Lang cried out through clenched teeth as we laid him in the hod, but otherwise did not protest, and we were soon lurching awkwardly over the fallen debris that had most assuredly, we knew now, not killed the jonah John Jones, and out of the (now fully confirmed as unlucky, even if not haunted) D2.
I glanced back from my now especially coveted place at the front of the hod and saw Perkins coming along behind us, hopping sideways like a pressure-suited crab, cradling an armload of rocks and hurling one occasionally into the tunnel behind him.
“Face forward, Sam,” whispered Bemis, although whispering was pointless to my way of thinking. “Don’t give them a target.” I, being in the van, was allowed the use of my headlamp, which was also starting to dim, just to make matters more interesting. I turned back to my work and saw, once we had come around another of the ubiquitous doglegs I now cherished and adored, that we were about to ascend a steep and particularly narrow section of the D line.
“Hoist him up, Cal,” I said. “It’s about to get steep ahead.” Then, to our passenger, I said, “Mister Lang, keep your arms and legs drawn in if you’re able.”
‘“Don’t bother,” said Calvin. “He’s unconscious.”
Without thinking, I turned my head to look at Lang. “Lord,” I began, “is he still—” There was a blinding flash that briefly silhouetted Perkins, and simultaneously fragments of rock exploded from the wall beside Bemis’s head.
“Sam!” my partner shouted.
“Sorry,” I said, resolutely facing forward again.
“Is he still breathing?” I asked, meaning Mister Lang of course. There was a part of me, one which I was not proud of, mind you, but still attentive to, that wished, in the kindest possible terms, that Lang had expired. There was no question we could escape a lot faster without the awkward burden of the hod.
“Yes, for the moment,” Calvin reported. “At least I think so.”
I was heartily glad to know this. I’d heard my conscience going over its notes, preparing to berate me in perpetuity for that one immoral thought.
I hoisted up my end of the hod and worked my haggis through the almost vertical stretch of tunnel. And then the hod, with its outsized and awkwardly shaped burden, ground to a stop behind me.
“It’s stuck,” said Bemis matter-of-factly.
“Can’t be stuck,” said Perkins. “They’ll be on us in seconds if we don’t keep moving.” It’s at times like these, I thought, that a conscience becomes particularly inconvenient.
“Leave the hod,” said Perkins.
“What?” said Bemis. “We can’t—”
“Pull Mister Lang out of the hod and leave it behind,” he explained, much to the relief of my conscience.
Calvin and I wrestled the unconscious Lang from the hod, fortunately thinking to get him in front of it as we did so. Then Bemis and I proceeded to work his haggis (which, thanks to Perkins’s efforts, was nearly as bloated as it should be once again) up through the narrow passage. My headlamp was necessarily pointed rearwards while I struggled to negotiate Mister Lang, and I saw, before Calvin blocked my view down the tunnel, that Perkins had somehow got himself in front of the hod, and was busy wedging its extremities as tightly as possible into the walls of the tunnel, leaving it thoroughly impassable, at least for the time being. Bemis
and I had performed this feat by accident numerous times, and now I knew what the stunt could be good for.
We were obliged to carry Mister Lang from there on, as the hod was lost to us, albeit in a good cause. We could hear cursing over the radios as our pursuers, apparently the men of the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs in league with the madman Jones, fought to remove the obstruction from their path. Perkins must have done a fine job of positioning the hod, as the cursing was prodigious and grew ever fainter behind us.
Thanks to the weak gravity, Lang was not heavy, but his suit, with the twin air cylinders on its back, was tremendously awkward in the tight space. If Lang had been a sack of ore, or a congressman, we would have dragged him, but this was certain to rupture his suit if kept up for any length of time, so we had no choice but to carry him between us. The fact that he did not cry out, awaken, or even much stir under the necessarily rough treatment was a blessing for all of us, assuming of course that Lang would ever regain consciousness again.
Chapter Nine
Mister Lang, his blood-drenched body relieved of both pressure suit and under-drawers, lay atop a makeshift pallet assembled from sacks of flour and potatoes (the same ones, less a peck, that I had occupied after my own misadventure). He was deathly pale and for the moment unconscious, thanks to a prodigious dose of laudanum. I had been offered the bed of potatoes, but alas not the laudanum, as Mister Kent had not thought my agony momentous enough to require its services, prescribing an ocean of expensive whiskey instead. After all, from his perspective, it didn’t hurt a bit.
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