“That clean source of fuel wouldn’t have been cooling in a crate in the crick behind my house, would it?” I squinted a little and was pretty sure that blue flame looked familiar, like good liquor going to waste.
“It might have, but anyone who leaves perfectly good ethanol in a stream should know better than to expect it all to be there when they return. Now, which way to Tunnel Number Four?” She smiled at Billy Joe, who was still staring at the contraption on her head.
I elbowed him, and he jerked to life. “Oh! This way, Miss Tavvy. Bubba, keep your head down.”
“I heard you the first three — OW! Times.” I stooped lower and held a hand over my head to try and avoid bashing my gourd open on the support beams.
We walked through the mines for about twenty minutes before we came to the turnoff for Tunnel Four. Tavvy motioned us both to stop and come close.
We did, and she whispered “I will examine the entrance to the tunnel for any signs of tampering, then we can move forward.”
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered.
“I don’t want anyone to hear us, just in case there is a cause to the knocking.” Tavvy whispered back.
“Well that’s silly, Tavvy.” I stopped whispering and stood up as straight as I could. “If there’s a person down here, we’d already know about it from Billy Joe or Mr. Baker. And if it’s a haint, it already knows we’re here on account of being a haint. So fire up your Expectorator and get going.” I waved over at the mouth of the tunnel.
“It’s a Spectaculator, Beauregard.” Tavvy grumbled, but started shining her light around the mouth of the tunnel.
I pulled Billy Joe off to one side and said “Now tell me exactly what you heard down here.”
He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I never said I heard nothing, Bubba.”
“Bill, I know you ain’t liked being underground ever since David died. So if anybody’s gonna hear a tommyknocker, you’re on my list.”
“I didn’t make it up, Bubba.” His fists opened and closed like he was looking for someone to punch. I didn’t really want it to be me, on account of I liked Billy Joe and didn’t want to break him.
“I know you didn’t, Bill. Take me to where you heard the knocking, and let’s see what we can find.” He looked up at me for a second, like he as trying to decide if I was going to make fun of him or not, then I reckon he must have decided that either I wasn’t going to mess with him, or that it was worth it to find out what was down in that hole. He turned and stomped off down the tunnel. I followed him, stopping by where Tavvy was shining her light thingy all over the walls and generally looking like a kid in a candy store as she pulled levels on the side of her hat and switched the colored light from white to blue to gree to purple to red.
“You find anything, Tavvy?”
“Not yet, Beauregard. Has Bill decided to show us where he heard the knocking?” She didn’t look up at me, just flipped another lever and I couldn’t see any light coming out of her helmet at all. But when she turned her head, spots lit up on the timbers around the mouth of the tunnel.
“Yeah, we’re heading down there now. You coming?”
“Yes, I’ll be right behind you. I just want to get a scraping of this odd substance here.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a small knife and a glass vial. She walked over to the wall and scraped at the wood. A few flakes made It into her sample jar, and she placed it carefully into a fabric loop sewn into the inside of her bag. She fell in step behind me and Billy Joe, and we went further down into the ground.
We hadn’t gone ten feet into Tunnel Four before I heard the first knock. It was a single knock, just one loud thunk. We froze in place and scanned the walls with our lights. We were alone. We started forward, and had made it a few more feet when another knock came, then another. The further into the tunnel we went, the more insistent the knocking became, until finally Billy Joe stopped and turned back to me and Tavvy.
“Y’all believe me now?” He asked, sticking his jaw out.
“Bill, we believed you the first time you said you heard something,” Tavvy said. “We just didn’t know then, and still don’t know, what exactly it is that you’ve heard. Now, would you allow Beauregard and I to begin our investigation?”
“Yeah, investigate away. I’ll be up here, by the mouth of the tunnel.” He stomped back up the way we came. Tavvy walked along the sides of the mine, stopping every once in a while when the knocking got louder or softer. After a couple minutes of this, she took a round disk out of her bag andstuck her finger through the center of it. A shake of her wrist, and the flat disk extended to a collapsible ear trumpet, which she then pressed tight to the mine wall.
“What the hell is that, Tavvy?” I asked. She didn’t answer, just held up a finger at me to shush. So I shushed. She stepped off the wall a little bit, then shined her light on it and flicked through a couple of different lenses.
“Now what are you doing?” I asked. I got about the same response from Tavvy as I got from the tommyknocker — nothing. I sat down on the floor of the mine and leaned against the wall, pullng my cap down over my eyes and settling in to take a little nap until Tavvy uncovered something needed to be punched, lifted or shot. The knocking kept going, sounding deep and hollow, like it was an echo from something way far away.
“I think I may have discovered something here, Bubba.” Tavvy’s voice roused me from a drowse. The rhythm of the knocking had caused me to drift off, but now I got up and dusted the coal off my knees, doing nothing but transferring coal dust from my pants to my hands, then wiping it back off my hands onto my pants.
“What you got, Tavvy?” I asked as I came in close behind her. She had a narrow beam of purple light shining on the left-hand wall of the mine shaft, and I bent over her head to see what she was so interested in.
Just then I heard feet beating their way down the tunnel toward us, so I turned to face who or whatever it was. I drew my sword, a souvenir of our recent adventures in Atlanta, and stood ready to slice anything coming down that tunnel into bits. I sheathed my sword as I recognized Billy Joe’s voice hollering at us. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was definitely his voice. Instead I slung my shotgun off my shoulder and aimed it up the shaft. If somethng up there had Billy Joe that scared, I oughta be able to kill it with my sanctified double-ought buckshot.
“It’s gonna kill us all! Get down, it’s gonna bring the mine down! We done pissed off the tommyknockers and it’s gonna kill us!” I looked up the tunnel behind Billy Joe, and saw a silhouette of a man standing by the entrance to Tunnel Four. He was a big man, and he pointed down the tunnel at us, and bellowed something I couldn’t understand. Then he raised his hands, and the world collapsed.
I turned to the wall and slammed my hands against it, trying to provide some kind of protection for Tavvy. Billy Joe sprawled on the floor and crawled on his belly down the tunnel and dust, rocks and timber fell and bounced all around us. I went to one knee and dragged Tavvy to the ground with me. She curled up in a little ball around my legs and I let out a holler as one particularly heavy timber fell across my shoulders. I bent, but the rest of the ceiling didn’t come in with the timber, just the big eight by eight slab of lumber. I stayed there for a minute after it seemed like all the collapsing was done, then I started trying to figure out how to get out from under the mountain without all of us dying.
“Billy Joe?” I said.
“Yeah, Bubba?” I heard from a few feet off to my left.
“You dead?” I asked.
“Reckon not. My head hurts too damn much for me to be dead. Oh, pardon my language, Octavia.”
Tavvy spoke from her place on the floor. “Fear not, William, I live with Beauregard, I am long past the capacity for offense at salty language.”
“I don’t know what half that means, so I reckon that means you’re okay, Tavvy?” I asked.
“I appear to be mostly whole, although my foot is wedged under a timber, or perhaps a boulder.”
/>
I looked down, then moved my right leg. “Sorry, that was me.”
“Well, then. Now I am as well as can be expected.”
“Good, can you get out from under me without me moving?” I asked.
“I suppose so. But why don’t you simply stand up?” Tavvy asked from the ground.
“Because there’s a big damn timber laying across my shoulders, and I don’t know how much of the mountain I’m currently holding up.”
“Oh.” Tavvy didn’t say anything else, just slid out from under me and back up toward the mouth of the tunnel where Billy Joe was. Or at least to where the mouth of the tunnel used to be.
“Can you see what all is on top of me, Bill?” I asked.
“Yeah, Bubba. Ain’t nothing but the timber. If you can roll your shoulders right, it oughta just slide right off.”
“But if I thought it might be better to shore it up with something, how would I do that?”
“Well, Bubba, I’d grab a smaller timber and wedge it into place that way.”
I looked right and left, but my vision was pretty limited. “Is there a timber laying around that you could do that with?”
“Yeah, right here. Let me grab it. I still couldn’t really see what he was doing, but after a few seconds I heard scraping, then I heard somebody kicking on something solid, and the pressure on my back eased up a little.
“Bubba, can you just stand up a little bit? Just straighten your legs out a couple inches?” Billy Joe asked. I took a deep breath and stood up slowly, lifting the beam with my shoulders. Bill waited until the beam was high enough for all of us to walk over if we bent down, then he slid the brace under it and gave it a good kick to lock it into place. I slowly dropped down to both knees and scooted out from under the timber, reaching out in front of my feet to grab Tavvy’s helmet contraption. I didn’t know if she needed it anymore, but worst case I wasn’t gonna leave good liquor down there to evaporate.
We all stood up, me a little less straight than the other two, and brushed off as best we could. Billy Joe’s light was still burning, and after a minute Tavvy took her helmet from me and twisted the mirror around so it made a broad beam, so we had some light. My lamp was smashed when the timber knocked it off my head, but the two headlamps gave us enough light to see that we were trapped. Tunnel Four hadn’t been much of a tunnel, it was just a shallow cut off the main mine shaft about fifty feet deep, and we were at the end of it. The cave-in was up at the top of the shaft, blocking us off from our escape route with a couple tons of rock. I picked at a few of the bigger rocks, but when a new shower of dirt dropped onto my head, I went back to the end of the tunnel with Tavvy and Bill.
“What’s the plan, Billy Joe?” I asked, sitting down on the ground.
“Why you asking me, Bubba?”
“You’re the miner. We’re in a mine. It’s kinda your thing. I drink and hunt monsters. We ain’t got no monsters, and we ain’t got no liquor, so I’m one hundred per cent out of my elements here.”
“I don’t know that that’s completely true, Beauregard.” Tavvy said.
“Well, you’re right,” I allowed. “I do have my flask, but that’s barely enough to wet anybody’s whistle, much less get us drunk enough to not be worried about dying.”
Tavvy looked down at me, hands on her hips. She was a strong woman, but a little humorless sometimes. “I meant that I don’t know that we don’t have any supernatural beings in these tunnels. Remember the tommyknockers? I don’t think a cave-in killed off the ghosts, do you?”
She had a point. There was no damn way I was going to admit that, but she had a point. I looked to Tavvy, then to Billy Joe, and said “All right, then. Let’s work at it like this. I’ll go down a little ways further into the tunnel and see about communicating with the tommyknockers. Tavvy, you go on up to the mouth of the tunnel were the cave-in happened and see if you can figure out what brought the mountsin down on our heads. Billy Joe, you go with Tavvy. Sometimes when she gets all intellectualizin’ she forgets to do things like not cause another cave-in.”
“I’ll keep her safe, Bubba.” I didn’t mention that keeping her safe while we were trapped underground might be stretiching things a little. I headed to the back of the tunnel, tapping on the walls with the butt of my hunting knife. I heard nothing but echoes until I tapped on the left-hand wall just before the end of the cut. Suddenly the sound of my knocking changed, and it sounded like there was something knocking on the other side.
I stopped, and the noise stopped a second or two later. I banged on the wall hard one time, and my knock echoed back at me from the other side of the wall, but slower and deeper. I tapped, and it tapped back. I banged, and it boomed back. I tested my knock and return all around the wall, and found that it only happened when I banged on the left side of the tunnel, and only for a slice of tunnel about four feet wide.
“Hey y’all, come here and look at this!” I hollered up to the mouth of the tunnel.
“Just a moment, Beauregard, I believe we have found something of interest ourselves.” Tavvy’s voice came floating back to me a second later. I resumed my tapping and banging and finally decided that I was tired of waiting on them two. I looked around and saw a pickaxe leaning against a support beam, so I picked it up. I couldn’t get a good overhand swing going, but after a couple of tries, I got in a good sideways rhythm and laid into the hollow-sounding part of the wall. The harder I hit, the louder the “knocking” was in return, and the more convinced I was that I was right.
Just as I reared back for a gigantic swing, Billy Joe and Tavvy came running down the tunnel all hell-bent for leather. I swung my pickaxe like I was Paul Bunyan or John Henry or something like it, and the wall came tumbling down in a cloud of dust and rock.
“What the hell are you doing, Bubba, trying to kill us all?” Billy Joe hollered.
“No, I think I didn’t just figure out your tommyknockers, I mighta found a way out.” I point to the wall, or the four-foot wide hole where the wall used to be, and Billy Joe and Tavvy both gaped at me.
“There’s a cave on the other side of this piece of rock. When y’all were digging, it was echoing back across the cave at you. That’s the knocking you heard. And from the little breeze I feel coming out of this hole, there’s air moving in there. And air moving underground only means two things - either I farted, or there’s a way out through here. Wanna take a chance on number two?” I pointed at the hole in the wall, and Billy Joe stuck his head through.
“It’s huge, Bubba! It’s a giant underground cave, with a damn stream in it! And there’s something in the walls . . .” His voice trailed off as he stepped all the way through the wall. A second later his hand reached back and snatched the pickaxe from me, then he disappeared again. Tavvy and I looked at each other, shrugged, and waited.
“Y’all come in here!” Billy Joe’s voice came to us a couple minutes later. I grabbed a lantern I found hanging from a beam, lit it off Tavvy’s hat, and we stepped through. I left a little skin on the jagged outcropping of wall, but after some squeezing and more than a little cussing, I got through the hole.
The cavern we stepped into was like something out of a Jules Verne book. It was huge, with stalactites hanging some twenty feet over our heads, and huge stalagmite pillars sticking up out of the ground. There was a stream running through the cavern, more a narrow trickle of water, really, but it was water. The walls were shot through with coal and quartz deposits, and Billy Joe was over at one of these quartz deposits banging away with his pickaxe.
We walked closer, and my eyes picked out what looked like a little sparkle in amongst the quartz. I looked at Tavvy, and she nodded. She saw it, too. We got close, and sure enough, the quarts deposits were shot through with gold, branches of gold all through the walls as thick as fingers, sometimes as thick as Tavvy’s wrist. Bill stopped beating on the wall when we got there, and pulled his knife from his belt. He jammed his knife into the wall where he’d broken up the quartz, and wiggled a chunk loose.<
br />
“It’s gold, Bubba. Gold! This mine aint just a half-played out coal mine, it’s a gold mine, too!” He waved a big rock under my nose, and sure enough, there was a hunk of quartz with gold all shot through it.
“Damn, that’s good news, Bill. Now we just got to get out of here and tell the boys that not only are there no tommyknockers down in the mine, but the mine has gold in it, not just coal.” This would mean a whole new set of hours for the men working, and any talk about the mine closing down would be over for a good long while.
We spread out and started looking for an exit, but there was nothing to be found big enough to squeeze Tavvy through, much less Bill or me. I took to banging on the wall with the butt of my knife, hoping for another hollow spot, but found nothing. We had made it almost the whole way around the cave when I heard something from the far side. I pointed my lantern over in that direction and saw Billy Joe drop to his knees by the far wall. I hauled ass over there and drew up cold when I saw what Bill was looking at. The skeletons of six men were laid out against the wall, all dressed in the rotted remains of miner’s gear. Their boots were mostly intact, but all that was left of their pants and shirts were belt buckles and a couple of pocketwatches.
Billy Joe was sitting at the head of one of the skeletons with a hat in his lap, holding a pocketwatch. He looked up at me as I approached.
“It’s David, ain’t it?” I asked. Billy Joe nodded. His uncle and five men were trapped in a collapse off Tunnel Four more than thirty years ago, when we were just little kids. Bill had idolized his uncle, and cried for weeks when he never made it home.
Moonshine & Magic: A Beauregard the Monster Hunter Collection Page 7