American supernatural tales

by S. T. Joshi

  Scarecrow tall and thin, young Mr. Henry S. Matthews, lately of some place far enough north to do nothing to better the reputation of a man who is neither married nor church-going, who teaches geography and math at the new Powell School on Sixth Avenue North and spends the remainder of his time with an assortment of books and rocks and pickled bugs. The sudden rumble of thunder somewhere down in the valley, then, and he moves too fast, careless as he turns to see, almost losing his footing as the wet stones slip and tilt beneath his feet.

  “You best watch yourself up there, Professor,” one of the workmen shouts, and there’s laughter from the black hole in the mountain’s side. Henry offers a perfunctory nod in the general direction of the tunnel, squints through the haze of light October rain and dust and coal smoke at the rough grid of the little city laid out north of the mountain; barely seventeen years since John Morris and the Elyton Land Company put pen to ink, ink to paper, and incorporated Birmingham, drawing a city from a hasty scatter of ironworks and mining camps. Seventeen years, and he wonders for a moment what this place was like before white men and their machines, before axes and the dividing paths of railroad tracks.

  The thunder rolls and echoes no answer he can understand, and Henry looks back to the jumbled ground, the split and broken slabs of shale at his feet. The rain has washed away the thick dust of the excavations, making it easier for him to spot the shells and tracks of sea creatures preserved in the stone. Only a few weeks since he sent a large crate of fossils south to the State Geological Survey in Tuscaloosa, and already a small museum’s worth of new specimens line the walls of his cramped room, sit beneath his bed and compete with his clothing for closet space, with his books for the shelves. An antediluvian seashore in hardened bits and pieces, and just last week he found the perfectly preserved carapace of a trilobite almost the length of his hand.

  A whistle blows, shrill steam blat, and a few more men file out of the tunnel to eat their lunches in the listless rain. Henry reaches into a pocket of his waistcoat for the silver watch his mother gave him the year he left for college, wondering how a Saturday morning could slip by so fast; the clockblack hands at one and twelve, and he’s suddenly aware of the tugging weight of his knapsack, the emptiness in his belly, hours now since breakfast but there’s a boiled egg wrapped in waxed paper and a tin of sardines in his overcoat. The autumn sky growls again, and he snaps his watch closed and begins to pick his way cautiously down the spoil towards the other men.

  Henry Matthews taps the brown shell of his hard-boiled egg against a piece of limestone, crack, crack, crack, soft white insides exposed, and he glances up at the steelgray sky overhead; the rain has stopped, stopped again, stopped for now, and crystalwet drops cling to the browngoldred leaves of the few hickory and hackberry trees still standing near the entrance of the tunnel. He sits with the miners, the foreman, the hard men who spend dawn to dusk in the shaft, shadowy days breaking stone and hauling it back into the sunlight. Henry suspects that the men tolerate his presence as a sort of diversion, a curiosity to interrupt the monotony of their days. This thin Yankee dude, this odd bird who picks about the spoil like there might be gold or silver when everyone knows there isn’t anything worth beans going to come out of the mountain except the purplered ore, and that’s more like something you have to be careful not to trip over than try to find.

  Sometimes they joke, and sometimes they ask questions, their interest or suspicion piqued by his diligence, perhaps. “What you lookin’ for anyways, Mister?” and he’ll open his knapsack and show them a particularly clear imprint of a snail’s whorled shell or the mineralized honeycomb of a coral head. Raised eyebrows and heads nodding, and maybe then someone will ask, “So, them’s things what got buried in Noah’s flood?” and Henry doubts any of these men have even heard of Lyell or Darwin or Cuvier, have any grasp of the marvelous advancement that science has made the last hundred years concerning the meaning of fossils and the progression of geological epochs. So he’s always politic, aware that the wrong answer might get him exiled from the diggings. And, genuinely wishing that he had time to explain the wonders of his artefacts to these men, Henry only shrugs and smiles for them. “Well, actually, some of them are even a bit older than that,” or a simple and noncommittal “Mmmmm,” and usually that’s enough to satisfy.

  But today is different and the men are quiet, each one eating his cold potatoes or dried meat, staring silent at muddy boots and lunch pails, the mining-car track leading back inside the tunnel, and no one asks him anything. Henry looks up once from his sardines and catches one of the men watching him. He smiles, and the man frowns and looks quickly away. When the whistle blows again, the men rise slowly, moving with a reluctance that’s plain enough to see, back towards the waiting tunnel. Henry wipes his fingers on his handkerchief, fish oil stains on white linen, is shouldering his knapsack, retrieving his geologist’s hammer, when someone says his name, “Mr. Matthews?” voice low, almost whispered, and he looks up into the foreman’s hazelbrown eyes.

  “Yes, Mr. Wallace? Is there something I can do for you today?” and Warren Wallace looks away, nervous glance to his men for a moment that seems a lot longer to Henry who’s anxious to get back to his collecting.

  “You know all this geology business pretty good, don’t you, Mr. Matthews? All about these rocks and such?” and Henry shrugs, nods his head, “Yes sir, I suppose that I do. I had a course or two—”

  “Then maybe you could take a look at somethin’ for me sometime,” the foreman says, interrupting, looking back at Henry, and there are deep lines around his eyes, worry or lack of sleep, both maybe. The foreman spits a shitbrown streak of tobacco at the ground and shakes his head. “It probably ain’t nothing, but I might want you to take a look at it sometime.”

  “Yes. Certainly,” Henry says, “Anytime you’d like,” but Warren Wallace is already walking away from him, following his men towards the entrance of the tunnel, shouting orders, and “Be careful up there, Mr. Matthews,” he says, spoken without turning around, and Henry replies that he always is, but thanks for the concern anyway, and he goes back to the spoil piles.

  Fifteen minutes later it’s raining again, harder now, a cold and stinging rain from the north and wind that gusts and swirls dead leaves like drifting ash.

  May 1887 when the Birmingham Water Works Company entered into a contract with Judge A. O. Lane, Mayor and Alderman, and plans were drawn to bring water from the distant Cahaba River north across Shades Valley to the thirsty citizens of the city. But Red Mountain standing there in the way, standing guard or simply unable to move, and its slopes too steep for gravity to carry the water over the top, so the long tunnel dreamed up by engineers, the particular brainchild of one Mr. W. A. Merkel, first chief engineer of the Cahaba Station. A two thousand, two hundred foot bore straight through the sedimentary heart of the obstacle, tons of stone blasted free with gelignite and nitro, pickaxes and sledge hammers and the sweat of men and mules. The promise of not less than five million gallons of fresh water a day, and in this bright age of invention and innovation it’s a small job for determined men, moving mountains, coring them like ripe and crimson apples.

  A week later, and Henry Matthews is again picking over the spoil heaps, a cool and sunny October day crisp as cider, an autumnsoft breeze that smells of dry and burning leaves, and his spirits are high, three or four exceptional trilobites from the hard limestone already and a single, disc-shaped test of some specie of echinodermia he’s never encountered before, almost as big as a silver dollar. He stoops to get a better look at a promising slab when someone calls his name, and he looks up, mildly annoyed at the intrusion. Foreman Wallace is standing nearby, scratching at his thick black beard, and he points at Henry with one finger.

  “How’s the fishin’, Professor?” he asks, and it takes Henry a moment to get the joke; he doesn’t laugh, but a belated smile, finally, and then the foreman is crossing the uneven stones towards him.

  “No complaints,” Henry says and
produces the largest of the trilobites for the foreman’s inspection. Warren Wallace holds the oystergray chunk of limestone close and squints at the small dark Cryptolithus outstretched on the rock.

  “Well,” the foreman says and rubs at his beard again, wrinkles his thick eyebrows and stares back at Henry Matthews. “Ain’t that some pumpkins. And this little bug used to be alive? Crawlin’ around in the ocean?”

  “Yes,” Henry replies, and he points to the trilobite’s bulbous glabellum and the pair of large compound eyes to either side. “This end was its head,” he says. “And this was the tail,” as his fingertip moves to the fan-shaped lobe at the other end of the creature. Warren Wallace glances back at the fossil once more before he returns it to Henry.

  “Now, Professor, you tell me if you ever seen anything like this here,” and the foreman produces a small bottle from his shirt pocket, apothecary bottle Henry thinks at first, and then no, not medicine, nitroglycerine. Warren Wallace passes the stoppered bottle to the schoolteacher, and, for a moment, Henry Matthews stares silently at the black thing trapped inside.

  “Where did this come from?” he asks, trying not to show his surprise but wide eyes still on the bottle, unable to look away from the thing coiling and uncoiling in its eight-ounce glass prison.

  “From the tunnel,” the foreman replies, spits tobacco juice and glances over his shoulder at the gaping hole in the mountain. “About five hundred feet in, just a little ways past where the limerock goes to sandstone. That’s where we hit the fissure.”

  Henry Matthews turns the bottle in his hand, and the thing inside uncoils, stretches chitinous segments, an inch, two inches, almost three, before it snaps back into a legless ball that glimmers iridescent in the afternoon sun.

  “Ugly little bastard, ain’t it?” the foreman says and spits again. “But you ain’t never seen nothin’ like it before, have you?” And Henry shakes his head, no, never, and now he wants to look away, doesn’t like the way the thing in the bottle is making him feel. But it’s stretched itself out again, and he can see tiny fibers like hairs or minute spines protruding between the segments.

  “Can you show me?” he asks, realizes that he’s almost whispering now, library or classroom whisper like maybe he’s afraid someone will overhear, like this should be secret.

  “Where it came from, will you take me there?”

  “Yeah. I was hopin’ you’d ask,” the foreman says and rubs his beard. “But let me tell you, Professor, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” And after Warren Wallace has taken the bottle back, returned it to his shirt pocket so that Henry doesn’t have to look at the black thing anymore, the two men begin the climb down the spoil piles to the entrance of the tunnel.

  A few feet past the entrance, fifteen, twenty, and the foreman stops, stands talking to a fat man with a pry bar while Henry looks back at the bright day framed in raw limestone and bracing timbers, blinking as his eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. “Yeah,” the fat man says, “Yeah,” and Warren Wallace asks him another question. It’s cooler in the tunnel, in the dark, and the air smells like rock dust and burning carbide and another smell tucked somewhere underneath, unhealthy smell like a wet cellar or rotting vegetables that makes Henry wrinkle his nose. “Yeah, I seen him before,” the fat man with the pry bar says, wary reply to the foreman’s question and a distrustful glance towards Henry Matthews.

  “I want him to have a look at your arm, Jake, that’s all,” and Henry turns his back on the light, turns to face the foreman and the fat man. “He ain’t no doctor,” the fat man says. “And I already seen Doc Joe, anyways.”

  “He’s right,” Henry says, confused now, no idea what this man’s arm and the thing in the jar might have to do with one another, blinking at Wallace through the dancing whiteyellow afterimages of the sunlight outside. “I haven’t had any medical training to speak of, certainly nothing formal.”

  “Yeah?” the foreman says, and he sighs loudly, exasperation or disappointment, spits on the tunnel floor, tobacco juice on rusted steel rails. “C’mon then, Professor,” and he hands a miner’s helmet to Henry, lifts a lantern off an iron hook set into the rock wall. “Follow me, and don’t touch anything. Some of these beams ain’t as sturdy as they look.”

  The fat man watches them, massages his left forearm protectively when the schoolteacher steps past him, and now Henry can hear the sounds of digging somewhere in the darkness far ahead of them. Relentless clank and clatter of steel against stone, and the lantern throws long shadows across the rough limestone walls; fresh wound, these walls, this abscess hollowed into the world’s thin skin. And such morbid thoughts as alien to Henry Matthews as the perpetual night of this place, and so he tells himself it’s just the sight of the odd and squirming thing in the bottle, that and the natural uneasiness of someone who’s never been underground before.

  “You’re wonderin’ what Jake Isabell’s arm has to do with that damned worm, ain’t you?” the foreman asks, his voice too loud in the narrow tunnel even though he’s almost whispering. And “Yes,” Henry replies, “Yes, I was, as a matter of fact.”

  “It bit him a couple of days ago. Jesus, make him sick as a dyin’ dog, too. But that’s all. It bit him.”

  And “Oh,” Henry says, unsure what else he should say and beginning to wish he was back out in the sun looking for his trilobites and mollusks with the high Octoberblue sky hung far, far overhead. “How deep are we now?” he asks, and the foreman stops and looks up at the low ceiling of the tunnel, rubs his beard. “Not very, not yet . . . hundred and twenty, maybe hundred and thirty feet.” And then he reaches up and touches the ceiling a couple of inches above his head.

  “You know how old these rocks are, Professor?” and Henry nods, tries too hard to sound calm when he answers the foreman.

  “These layers of limestone here . . . well, they’re probably part of the Lower Silurian system, some of the oldest with traces of living creatures found in them,” and he pauses, realizes that he’s sweating despite the cool and damp of the tunnel, wishes again he’d declined the foreman’s invitation into the mountain. “But surely hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years old,” he says.

  “Damn,” the foreman says and spits again. “Now that’s somethin’ to think about, ain’t it, Professor? I mean, these rocks sittin’ here all that time, not seein’ the light of day all that time, and then we come along with our picks and dynamite—”

  “Yes sir,” Henry Matthews says and wipes the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. “It is, indeed,” but Warren Wallace is moving again, dragging the little pool of lantern light along with him, and Henry has to hurry to catch up, almost smacks his forehead on the low, uneven ceiling. Another three hundred feet or so and they’ve reached the point where the gray limestone is overlain by beds of punky reddish sandstone, the bottom of the Red Mountain formation; lifeblood of the city locked away in these strata, clotthick veins of hematite for the coke ovens and blast furnaces dotting the valley below. “Not much farther,” the foreman says. “We’re almost there.”

  The wet, rotten smell stronger now, and glistening rivulets meander down the walls, runoff seeping down through the rocks above them, rain filtered through dead leaves and soil, through a hundred or a thousand cracks in the stone. Henry imagines patches of pale and rubbery mushrooms, perhaps more exotic fungi, growing in the dark. He wipes his face again and this time keeps the handkerchief to his nose, but the thick and rotten smell seeps up his nostrils, anyway. If an odor alone could drown a man, he thinks, is about to say something about the stench to Warren Wallace when the foreman stops, holds his lantern close to the wall, and Henry can see the big sheets of corrugated tin propped against the west side of the tunnel.

  “At first I thought we’d hit an old mine shaft,” he says, motions towards the tin with the lantern, causing their shadows to sway and contort along the damp tunnel. “Folks been diggin’ holes in this mountain since the forties to get at the ore. So that’s what I thought, at first.”
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  “But you’ve changed your mind?” Henry asks, words muffled by the useless handkerchief pressed to his face.

  “Right now, Professor, I’m a whole lot more interested in what you think,” and then Wallace pulls back a big section of the tin, lets it fall loud to the floor, tin clamor against the steel rails at his feet. Henry gags, bilehot rush from his gut and the distant taste of breakfast in the back of his mouth. “Jesus,” he hisses, not wanting to be sick in front of the foreman, and the schoolteacher leans against the tunnel wall for support, presses his left palm against moss-slick stone, stone gone soft as the damprough hide of some vast amphibian.

  “Sorry. Guess I should’a warned you about the stink,” and Warren Wallace frowns, grim face like Greek tragedy, and takes a step back from the hole in the wall of the tunnel, hole within a hole, and now Henry’s eyes are watering so badly he can hardly see. “Merkel had us plowin’ through here full chisel until we hit that thing. Now it’s all I can do to keep my men workin’.”

  “Can’t exactly blame them,” Henry wheezes and gags again, spits at the tunnel floor, but the taste of the smell clings to his tongue, coats it like a mouthful of cold bacon grease. The foreman gestures for him to come closer, close enough he can peer down into the gap in the rock and Henry knows that’s the last thing he wants to do. But he loathes that irrational fear, fear of the unknown that keeps men ignorant, keeps men down, and all his life gone to the purging of that instinctual dread, first from himself and then his students. And so Henry Matthews holds his breath against the stench and steps over the mining car tracks, glances once at Warren Wallace, and to see a strong man so afraid and hardly any effort into hiding it is enough to get him to the crumbling edge of the hole.