Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  Tim laid his head down again after a brief access of interest.

  Peter, unanimously ignored, dropped his arms.

  “Okay, fuck you all. (Going for the door.) I’ll be in the actual men’s dorm.”

  Nate sighed, nodded, surrendered the point, and lay back, exhausted, Tim promptly coming to lick his face.

  Kerri went on: “And Dunia, by her own admission, was a scared child. We can’t trust her testimony. Shit, we don’t need to—there’s enough on our plate.”

  “The wheezers,” Andy interpreted.

  “Yes. Those,” Kerri said, not really fond of the new name. “But you don’t need a sorcerer to unearth those things; Copperseed and I discussed this. If they come from caverns under the hills, and they have been there for thousands of years…which is saying a lot, but I may accept it because I haven’t found evidence that they actually need any food or air…they weren’t set loose through magic. We’ve been mining these hills for a century; we just dug too deep.”

  “And whose idea was it to dig here in the first place?” Nate pointed out, jumping back in. “Come on, a guy comes west during the California Gold Rush, stumbles into Oregon, finds a lake, finds a one-acre isle on the lake, and starts digging for gold there? Isn’t it possible he was looking for something else?”

  “But he did find gold,” Andy intervened.

  “Did he? Or was he just carrying the gold from his swashbuckling days?” He paused, then switched to Kerri. “Consider this: How long have the sightings been going on?”

  “According to Copperseed, since the early fifties.”

  “Go one year further back: What happened in nineteen forty-nine?”

  The date came to their minds in the heavy slab print of the Pennaquick Telegraph.

  “The fire in Deboën Mansion,” Andy stated.

  “ ‘A freak accident,’ ” Nate quoted from Dunia. “I think the accident was old Deboën waking up the wrong guys.”

  The room, dark enough, went a little darker with the picture those words suggested: a vague sketch of eyeless creatures stumbling upstairs in the dark, and screams; a fight, and an explosion; a puff over the quiet lake.

  “Okay, let’s say it’s true,” Kerri said, shaking her hair awake. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Well, if we know the wheezers live underground, and that they came out through the mines…then we need to do exactly what we were doing,” he concluded, pointing at an off-guard Andy. “Retrace our steps. When we returned to the lake with Al, we found the footprints leading into the abandoned mines, and a few days later Al took us to the mines. That’s what we should do now.”

  “The mines?” Kerri said in high pitch. “We go right to the wheezers?”

  “Technically, we could’ve stumbled upon them last time, but we didn’t. We found more footprints, but those could’ve been Wickley as well. We’d be able to tell now. If the wheezers are using the mines to come to the surface, all we’d have to do is blow up the tunnels.”

  “It’s way too dangerous!” Kerri complained. “Guys, come on, can’t we just…call the police?”

  “We just did. By the time they get here all the evidence left will be some Polaroids and a pool of slime in Copperseed’s basement.” He appealed to Andy again. “Put it this way—as far as these creatures go, we’re the experts. Who else has faced one and lived to tell the tale? We go below Sentinel Hill again, but this time around we go armed. Al has guns. One thing we know about those creatures—they can die.”

  “Christ, that line came straight out of a B-movie,” Kerri moaned, sinking her head into her palms. “Might as well put on a shredded slutty dress and start practicing my screaming.”

  Nate ignored her, focused on the tiebreaker: “All we need to do is find evidence they’re down there. That’s it.”

  Andy felt the physical weight on her shoulders. She consulted Nate, then Kerri, still sunk in her hands, then Tim.

  She went through the plan in her head: climbing down a mineshaft, fighting, perhaps blowing up stuff. As strategies go, this one actually seemed tailored to her limited skills.

  Plus, Kerri had just said something about a slutty dress.

  “Okay, we’re going,” she said. “Tomorrow morning. We’re solving this case once and for all.”

  An actual canary perched in its cage, oblivious to the giant luck-dragon snout puffing against the bars. Tim couldn’t care less about any of the other stuff Captain Al was still unloading from his pickup.

  “Glowsticks…flares…phosphorus markers…”

  “Cap, where do you even keep all this stuff?” Andy wondered, already alarmed at the size of the impedimenta parked on the anecdotic sidewalk.

  “I live in a junkyard, Andy,” Al said, with as much pride as any mentally sound person could convey through those words. “The one advantage is that there’s seldom a tool or instrument you don’t have within a hand’s reach. Provided you don’t mind tetanus, that is.” He finished unwrapping a new piece of equipment. “Two-way radios. I doubt they’ll do any good underground; if they don’t, just chuck them into a shaft; there’s more in the pile these came from.”

  Nate stepped back to catch in midair one of the transceivers as the captain tossed it to him, inadvertently kicking the bird’s cage; the canary tweeted in protest like a fenderbent driver. Tim leaned even closer, English microbiologist eyes fixed on the compact featherball inside, tail producing enough aeolic power to feed a small city.

  The plastic penguin between his jaws squeaked.

  The bird, in turn, emitted a single new chirp.

  Tim stepped back in shock, searched for the approval of the audience who had just witnessed that milestone in animal communication.

  “Try not to get too attached, Tim,” Kerri advised. “He’s gonna be the first to go.”

  “Not really; it won’t just drop dead,” Al said. “If you encounter gas, it will start chirping and fluttering first. At that point, either turn back or, if you must, put on your masks and set the bird free. It will instinctively go for higher ground.”

  “Are these masks really gonna help?” Nate asked, banjoing the string of a simple respirator.

  “No, those you wear all the time to prevent inhaling silica dust. If the air goes bad, you switch to these.”

  Al opened one of the rucksacks and showed them the large, insect-eyed breathing mask inside, a long, flexible proboscis connecting it to a tank the size of a bike water bottle. Andy had had one chance to try one on in the academy; Kerri and Nate had seen them worn only by Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

  “Don’t worry, these ain’t from the junkyard,” Al comforted them. “I drove to Umatilla Airbase yesterday to borrow them. This one’s a different story—I had to call in some real favors for this baby.”

  He pulled out a cone-shaped, khaki-colored leather bag with stenciled letters: E12R8. He unlatched the cover and extracted a fourth respirator. Andy squinted at the distance between the air filter and the two visors, until she figured out the shape of the face that would fit in that mask.

  Everyone turned to Tim, way too engrossed with interspecies talks with the canary to care about their travel preparations.

  “They stopped making these after World War II, but,” Al italicized for attention, “it comes with no oxygen, so the dog will have to stay with the bird. And your bottles only last twenty minutes each, so if you end up needing these, do not linger.”

  Kerri flipped the dog mask in her hands, figuring out the straps, while Al went on to unbag the last but not least pieces of equipment.

  “Shells.” He threw a box of twelve-gauge ammunition at Nate, who was already carrying Uncle Emmet’s shotgun. Nate appreciated the package, adorned with a terrifyingly realistic drawing of a charging Kodiak bear.

  The captain turned to Andy: “I trust you know how to use this.”

  He flipped the M1911 pistol in the air, grabbed it by the barrel, and handed it properly to her.

  Andy could feel Kerri’s queasiness like a
bright orange siren glowing out of the corner of her eye. She looked up at the captain for a solacing smirk. There was none coming.

  She pocketed the gun and some mags in the back of her jeans, saying, “We used the M9 Beretta; it’s the new standard. But I prefer the single-action myself.”

  The captain produced a final piece of leatherware and handed it to Kerri.

  “I know you will refuse a firearm, so at least take this until Andy convinces you to trade it for the pistol.”

  He held a sheathed combat knife on his open hand, stretched out, not pushing or pressuring her in any way, but not retreating either.

  Kerri took it and pulled the sleeve off an inch. The steel blade gleamed boastfully at her for a second before she sheathed it back.

  Al kicked some empty bags and planted a foot on the side of his truck. It was the same vehicle that had driven them to the mines thirteen years ago.

  “So. What else can I do for you?”

  “One thing,” Andy said. “Put all this back on the truck and drive us to the mines; I don’t want to climb Sentinel Hill in a station wagon.”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” He smiled for the first time.

  —

  Nate rode shotgun and Andy and Kerri and Tim sat in the truck bed, jolting as the pickup climbed up the rutted lake road fork that led to the mine entrance on Sentinel Hill. Kerri was still carrying the knife in her right hand, grasping it lightly like she would hold a scorpion.

  Andy sat watching her, calculating whether she should put a hand on her shoulder. They had not touched the previous night, a remarkable feat given the size of the bed they shared. Kerri’s anxiety attack had not repeated; in her words, she was too anxious to afford one. They had spent all evening preparing the trip, frisking the town library for information on the gold mines and exhuming gear from seldom-queried chests in Aunt Margo’s house. Andy had failed to give the team a pep talk before they withdrew to their rooms at night. Kerri took a late shower and got into bed after Andy; Andy offered to pull out the guest bed but Kerri refused. Their only contact was a gentle whiplash of dryer-warmed hair as Kerri leaped over her to take the inside of the bed. From that moment, a 38th parallel had been drawn across the mattress. Andy had not dared cross it.

  She found her courage now and rested a hand on Kerri’s shoulder—right on the one square inch her parka and her shirt failed to cover. Her fingertips quivered with joy.

  “You can hang it on your pants. See, this goes through your belt loop. No, not like that; the other way around, so you can draw fast. (Guides her, white wrists burning in her hands, without unsheathing the weapon.) Like this, edge up. Never like the killer from Halloween; you thrust upward. Okay? You don’t want to stab them in the back; that’s hard. You want to hit them in the abdomen, hopefully puncture an organ. Also, you may want to twist it as you pull it back. But make sure to pull it back; otherwise, you just gave them a free knife.”

  “I don’t think the wheezers can handle tools.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the present situation only. It’s a life tip.”

  She bent down to fasten the weapon on Kerri’s belt and spied her lips through the orange curls.

  “Kerri,” she called softly, a hand conquering the other’s leg. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “So far I keep being right.”

  “And you keep pushing me a lot,” Kerri accused, looking up.

  “Because you can take it!” Andy argued, surrendering to a chuckle. “Kerri, two nights ago I told you I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve, and you didn’t even flinch. Do you know what that is? It’s you being in my thoughts, in my fantasies, all through puberty; it’s everything I’ve held in and been choking on for thirteen years, and you just took it with a smile. After that, you can handle anything.”

  A flimsy smile in the corner of Kerri’s mouth ruined her perfect misery while she sat reading Andy. She was wearing her most transparent, honest, unconcealing face. She had always been inept at masquerading.

  “You never mentioned the fantasies before,” Kerri said.

  “Yeah, well. It was implied.”

  She gazed away now at the balding hills, but Kerri didn’t take her eyes off her.

  “Andy, when you came back into my life and said that we had unfinished business to attend to…exactly what business were you talking about?”

  Andy gave that some thought, then concluded, “Everything.”

  Kerri’s face saddened up a tiny bit. “Andy, I may not be able to fix everything.”

  Andy nodded tranquilly. “It’s okay. Let’s deal with the subterranean monsters first and we’ll get to the rest later, all right?”

  —

  No one had bothered to replace the old chain and padlock that Captain Al had bolt-cut thirteen years before. Rust and dry mud were all that held the wire gate shut and probably up. After creeping forward for another two minutes, the road crested Sentinel Hill and expanded into a dissolute cul-de-sac, its edges littered with yellow black-bruised machinery and forgotten robots like very sad girls waiting for someone to offer a hand and lead them to the dance floor. Al stopped the truck and the detectives jumped into the arena. A Manhattan of battered signs sporting their warning colors dutifully greeted them, shouting their caveats about self-evident, prosaic dangers, like landslides or moving vehicles: the last of the kids’ concerns.

  A few things had changed since their last visit: the tunnel where the lake creature’s footprints led them and which they used last time to enter the mines had been walled up; the shaft had been sealed; and the timber headframe had crumbled on itself. Nothing they had not anticipated.

  “Okay, listen up,” Andy called, spreading the xeroxed blueprints over the truck’s hood. “This is us, on Sentinel Hill. (Fingerstabs a point on the map.) This is the level station, a hundred feet below. We’re getting through here. (Index follows a flimsy horizontal line.) This is an adit—it’s a gutter and waste disposal tunnel that opens above the Zoinx River; the opening should be that way.”

  She pointed off the map, at the panorama of mourning dark hills surrounding them, all spotted with treeless patches—the scars of human industry.

  “Now, once we’re underground,” she resumed, waving them back to the blueprints, “the whole mine complex is huge, but we’ve done our homework. Everything south of this line was dug by the RH Corporation after ’forty-nine. And much of what’s on this side was abandoned well before that. The only shaft in use at the time was this one: Allen shaft. That’s one-point-six miles in that direction. (Vaguely, over the hills in the east.) Once there, we go down the Allen shaft to this plateau and inspect these galleries. (Changing to another, larger-scaled map.) N-3 is the deepest; then N-4, N-5, and E-6.”

  “What are these?” Nate asked, pointing at dark geometrical shapes lurking dangerously close to those tunnels.

  “Water. Probably underground rivers connected to the lake.”

  Captain Al took the baton: “A word of caution. The mine was wired for electricity; I’ll stay up here and try to get the generator running. The deeper you go, though, the worse conditions you’ll find; no lights, no indicators, no steps, and cave-ins are a likely possibility. Also, we’ll probably lose communication once you’re in the drift. Provided I don’t hear otherwise from you, you have exactly six hours before I give you up for lost and call rescue. Roger?”

  Andy checked her Coca-Cola watch. “Roger.”

  “That path there will lead you to the adit. Good luck.”

  They geared up, carrying backpacks and a caged bird, and started the trek down over a rain-abated stretch of rotting wire fence through which dandelion heads poked and cheered at the sun.

  —

  The path was more properly a track of frequent landslides that faded away just a few yards from the hilltop. Tim led the party for most of the way, finding the more convenient route through low vegetation that thickened and grew up as they descended
, slowly drifting toward the east face of the hill into a steep, shadowy valley.

  After ten minutes, the harrumphing Zoinx River came into view. It looked like it usually did north of Sleepy Lake: cold and irate.

  Not far ahead, a conspicuous slope of gray pulverized rock poured down the hillside and into the roaring waters from the adit mouth. It was less ceremonious than mine entrances were in westerns: an open hole on the hillside, supported by three massive slabs of concrete. No theatrical soul had etched an agonizing KEEP OUT on an ineptly crafted wooden sign; no vultures or forgotten human skulls livened the place. But by the time the detectives stood on the landing before it, they were convinced that no such details could have made it any more ominous. A simple framed square of no-light that the sun could not penetrate and darkness could not escape. A service tunnel leading into the earth’s center.

  Andy faced the team, and even Tim sat down, tutting the caged canary to pay attention.

  “All right, listen: we’re not doing anything we didn’t do thirteen years ago. Remember that. We were twelve years old and we dared to go inside the mountain to follow clues. And all that time we were convinced there was a lake creature prowling around.”

  “Actually, that was Wickley, so we were being stupid,” Nate pointed out.

  “Exactly. And we were stupid. So we’re even better prepared this time. Let’s go.”

  They marched in, flashlights beaming the ground, spying wires along the walls and rails on the floor and Tim’s hindquarters as he scouted ahead.

  A full minute inside the tunnel, Kerri glanced behind at the surface world. She saw nothing but a tiny square of distant, howling light.

  —

  The electric lamps on the left wall magically blinked on a space break later, marking Al’s victory over the generator and pulling out of the canary a single chirp of ephemeral joy, between seeing the darkness repelled and assessing how little its situation had improved. The line of lights ended ahead, where the tunnel opened into a wider, brighter cavern.

  The radio cracked, cuing Al to speak. “You’re welcome, over.”