The Regulators

Chapter Ten

It all happened fast, but Johnny’s half-wonderful, half-terrible ability to see and sequence kept up.

Entragian, dying but too badly hurt to know it, was crawling toward one of the primitive cacti at the left side of the path, his head hanging so low it left a swath of blood on the ground-growth. His skull gleamed between hanging flaps of hair like a bleary pearl. He looked scalped.

In the middle of the path, a bizarre waltz was going on. The creature from the ravine-a sinister Picasso mountain lion with jutting orange teeth-was up on its hind legs, paws on Steve Ames’s shoulders. If Steve had dropped his arms when the cat clawed the puny.22 away from him, he would have been dead already. He had crossed them over his chest instead, however, and now his elbows and forearms were against the cat’s chest.

“Shoot it!” he screamed. “For Christ’s sake, shoot it!”

Neither twin made a move for the dropped pistol. They were not identical twins, but their faces now wore identical expressions of anguish.

The mountain lion (it hurt Johnny’s eyes just to look at it) uttered a womanish shrieking cry and darted its triangular head forward. Steve snapped his own head back and tried to throw the creature off to one side. It held on with its claws and the two of them tangoed drunkenly, the cat’s claws digging deeper into Steve’s shoulders, and now Johnny could see blood-blossoms spreading on his shirt where the claws-as wildly exaggerated as its teeth, only black instead of orange-were dug in. Its tail lashed madly back and forth.

They did another half-turn, and Steve’s feet tangled in each other. For a moment he tottered on the edge of balance, still holding off the lunging mountain lion with his crossed arms. Beyond them, Entragian had reached the cactus. He butted the top of his bleeding and horribly distended head into its spines, then collapsed and rolled over on his side. To Johnny he looked like a machine that has finally run down. Coyotes wailed, still out of sight but closer now; the air was tangy with smoke from the burning house.

“Shoot this fucking thing!” Steve yelled. He had managed to catch his balance, but before long would be all out of backing-up room; he was at the edge of the path. One step into the thorny under-brush, two at most, and he would go over. Then the nightmare would rip his throat out. “Shoot it, please, it’s tearin me apart!”

Johnny had never been so terrified in his life, but he nonetheless discovered that only the first step was actually hard; once the lock on his body was broken, the terror didn’t seem to matter much. After all, the worst thing the creature could do to him was kill him, and dying would at least stop the feeling that an earthquake was going on inside his mind.

He scooped up Entragian’s rifle-considerably larger than the one the cat had ripped out of the longhair’s hands-saw the safety was on, and flicked it the other way with his thumb.

Then he socked the.30-.06’s muzzle aga inst the side of the mountain lion’s bulging head.

“Push!” he bellowed, and Steve pushed. The cat’s head rocked up and away from his throat. Its bristle of teeth shone like poison coral. The sunset light was in its green eyes, making them look as if they were on fire. Johnny had time to wonder if Entragian had chambered a round-he was probably never going to write another Pat the Kitty-Cat book if Entragian hadn’t-then turned his head slightly away and pulled the trigger. There was a satisfying whipcrack sound, a lick of fire from the barrel, and then Johnny could smell frying hair as well as burning house. The mountain lion fell sideways, its head mostly gone, the fur on the back of its neck smoldering. What was inside its lifted skull was not blood, bone, and tissue but fibrous pink stuff that reminded Johnny of the blown-in insulation he’d gotten for the second floor and attic of his new house the year after he’d moved in.

Steve tottered, waving his arms for balance. Marinville reached out a hand, but he was dazed and it was only a token effort. Steve went sprawling in the bushes at the side of the path, beside the mountain lion’s twitching rear paws. Johnny bent down, grabbed his wrist, and hauled. Black spots flocked in front of his eyes, and for one awful second he thought he was going to pass out. Then Steve was on his feet and Johnny’s vision was clearing again.

Wh-wh-whoooooo…

Johnny looked around nervously. He could still see nothing, but the sons of bitches sounded closer than ever.

Dave Reed kept thinking that pretty soon he would wake up. Never mind that he could smell the cop’s blood and sweat as he knelt beside him, never mind the tortured sound of the cop’s breathing (and his own), the cop’s one dying eye, or the sight of his brain-his gray and wrinkled brain-pushing through a shattered window in his skull. It had to be a dream. Surely his brother could not have shot the guy from across the street, a crooked cop, yes, but also the guy who had once told Gary Ripton to try throwing a baseball with his fingers across the seams instead of lying along them… and who had then demonstrated by throwing a brain-busting rainbow change.

Smells like he shit his pants, Dave thought, and suddenly felt like vomiting. He controlled it. He didn’t want to vomit again, even in a dream.

The cop reached up and hooked his fingers into Dave’s shirt.

“Hurt,” he whispered hoarsely. “Hurt.”

“Don’t-” Dave swallowed, cleared his throat “-try to talk.”

Behind him, incredibly, he could hear Johnny Marinville and the hippie guy talking about whether or not they should go on. They were insane, had to be. And Marinville… where had Marinville been? How could he have let this happen? He was a fucking adultl

With a shudder of effort, Collie Entragian got up on one elbow. His remaining eye stared at the boy with ferocious concentration. “Never,” he whispered. “Never-”

“Sir… Mr Entragian… you’d better just…”

Wh-wh-WHOOOOOOOO!

Close enough this time to make Dave Reed’s skin feel as if it were freezing. He felt like ripping Johnny Marinville’s face off for not stopping this before it had become irrevocable. Yet the cop’s eye held him like a bug on a pin, and one of the cop’s blood-streaked hands had knotted a handful of Dave’s shirt into a loose fist. He could tear away from him, maybe, but…

But that was a lie. He felt like a bug on a pin.

“Never took drugs… sold them… any of it,” Collie whispered. “Never took a dime.

Framed. IA shooflies on the take… I found out.”

“You-” Dave began.

“I found out! You understand… what I’m saying?” He held up the hand that wasn’t knotted in Dave’s shirt, opened it, appeared to examine it. “Hands… clean.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dave said. “But you better not try to talk. You got… well, a little crease, and-“'Jim, no!” Marinville screamed from behind him. “Don’t!” Dave suddenly discovered he could pull away from the dying man quite easily.

“What do we do?” Johnny asked the longhair as, on the other side of the path, the dark-haired twin knelt by the man his brother had shot. Johnny could hear the faint sound of Entragian murmuring, as if he wanted to make a good confession before he died. Johnny had relearned a gruesome fact this afternoon: people died hard, by and large, and when they went out, they left without much dignity… and probably without realizing they were leaving at all.

“Do?” Steve asked. He stared at Johnny, almost comically amazed, and ran a hand through his hair, smearing red in with the gray. More blood was spreading on the shoulders of his shirt where the cat’s claws had sunk in. “What do you mean, do?”

“Do we go on or do we go back?” Johnny asked. His voice was rough, urgent. “What’s up ahead? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. “No, I take that back. It’s worse than nothing. It-” His eyes shifted past Johnny and widened.

Johnny turned, thinking the hippie must have seen the coyotes, they had finally arrived, but it wasn’t coyotes. “Jim, no!” he screamed. “Don’t!” Knowing it was already too late, seeing it on young Jim Reed’s pale face, where everything had been cancelled.

The boy stood there with the pistol pressed against the side of his head just long enough for Steve Ames to hope that maybe he wasn’t going to do it, that he’d had a change of heart at the penultimate moment, that last little vestibule of maybe not before the endless hallway of too late, and then Jim pulled the trigger. His face contorted as if he had been struck with a gas-pain of moderate intensity. His skin seemed to pop sideways on his skull, the left cheek puffing out. Then his head blew apart, his ambitions to write great essays (not to mention those of getting into Susi Geller’s pants) so much vapor in the strange sunset air, red goo that splattered across one of the insane cacti like spit. He staggered forward a step on buckling knees, the gun tumbling from his hand, then went down. Steve turned his thunderstruck face to Johnny’s, thinking: I didn’t see what I just saw. Rewind the tape, play it again, and you’ll see, too. I didn’t see what I just saw. Neither of us did. No, man. No.

Except he had. The kid, overcome with remorse and horror at what he had done to the guy from down the street, had just committed impulse suicide in front of him.

“You should have stopped him!” Dave Reed screamed, hurling himself at Johnny. “You should have stopped him, why didn’t you? Why didn’t you stop him?”

Steve tried to grab the kid on his way by, but the pain in his shoulders was excruciating. He could only watch helplessly as Dave Reed grabbed Johnny and bore him to the ground. They rolled over twice, from one side of the path to the other. Johnny wound up on top, at least for a moment. “David, listen to me-”

“No! No! You should have stopped him! You should have stopped him!”

The kid slapped Johnny first with his right hand, then his left. He was sobbing, tears streaming down his pale cheeks. Steve tried again to help and succeeded only in distracting Johnny, who had been trying to pin the boy’s arms with his knees. Dave rocked up hard on one hip, throwing Johnny off the path to the left. Johnny put out a hand to break his fall and got a palmful of cactus spines instead. He roared in pain and surprise.

Steve got hold of Dave Reed’s shoulder with his right hand-that arm was at least responding a little-but the boy shook him off easily, not even looking around, and then sprang on to Johnny Marinville’s broad back, got his hands around his throat, and began to choke him. And, all around them in the swiftly darkening day, the coyotes howled-perfect round howls, the kind Steve had never heard when he was growing up, although he had been born and raised in Texas. Howls like these you only heard in the movies.

Both men had wanted to come with her, but Cynthia wouldn’t have it-one was old, the other drunk. The gate at the bottom of the lawn was still open. A moment after going through it, she was fighting her way through the underbrush toward the path. She saw several cacti before she got there (there were more of them now, and they were driving out the normal greenbelt vegetation), but didn’t register them. She could hear the sounds of a struggle up ahead: harsh, strained breathing, a cry of pain, the thud of a landed blow. And coyotes. She didn’t see them, but they sounded as if they were everywhere.

As she reached the path, a trim little blonde in jeans blew past her without so much as a glance. Cynthia knew who she was-Cammie Reed, the twins” mother. Following her and panting heavily was Brad Josephson. Rivulets of sweat were running down his cheeks; the late light made him look as if he were crying tears of blood.

Sun’s going down, Cynthia thought as she turne d on to the path and ran after the others. If we don’t get out of here soon, we’re apt to get lost. And wouldn’t that be fun.

Then there was a scream from just ahead of her. No, not a scream but a shriek. Horror and grief mingled. The Reed woman. Cynthia heard Brad say, “Oh no, oh fuck,” just as she reached him.

For a moment Josephson’s broad back obscured what was going on, and then he bent beside Cammie and Cynthia saw two bodies lying sprawled on either side of the path. In the thickening shadows she couldn’t tell who they were-only that they had been male, and looked as if they had died unpleasantly-but she could see Steve standing to one side of the melee at the left of the path, and the sight of him made her feel glad. Almost at his feet was the carcass of a horribly misshapen animal with half its head blown away.

Cammie Reed was on her knees beside one of the corpses, not touching it but holding her shaking hands out over it, palms up, wailing. On her face was an expression of murderous agony. Cynthia saw the Eddie Bauer shorts and understood it was one of her sons.

But they had such perfect teeth, Cynthia thought stupidly. Must have cost her and her husband a fortune.

Brad worked at getting the other twin (Dave, Cynthia thought his name was, or maybe it was Doug) off Johnny Marinville. The big black man had gotten his arms under the teenager’s arms, and had locked his large hands together behind Dave’s neck, giving him full-nelson leverage. Still, the Reed boy did not come easily.

“Let me go!” he bawled. “Let me go, you son of a bitch! He killed my brother! He killed Jimmy!”

Mrs Reed’s keening stopped. She looked up and the still, questioning expression on her white face frightened Cynthia. “What?” she said, so low that she might have been speaking to herself. “What did you say?”

“He killed Jimmy!” Dave Reed bawled. His head was bent strenuously forward under the pressure Brad was exerting on his neck, but he still pointed unerringly at Johnny, who was getting to his feet. Blood trickled from one of the writer’s nostrils.

“No,” Johnny said heavily. The woman wasn’t listening to him, Cynthia saw that clearly in her white and frozen face, but Marinville didn’t. “I understand how you feel, David, but-”

The woman looked down. Cynthia looked down with her. They saw the.45 on the path at the same moment, and both of them went for it. Cynthia dropped to her knees and actually got her hand on it first, but it did her no good. Fingers as cold as marble and as strong as the talons of an eagle closed over her hand and plucked the pistol away.

“-it was all a terrible accident,” Johnny was mumbling. He seemed to be speaking mostly to Dave. He looked ill, on the verge of fainting. “That’s how you have to think of it. As-”

“Look out!” Steve cried, then: “Jesus Christ, lady, no! Don’t!”

“You killed Jimmy?” the woman asked in a deadly-cold voice. “Why? Why would you do that?”

But she wasn’t interested in the answer, it seemed. She lifted the.45, centering it on Johnny Marinville’s forehead. There was no question in Cynthia’s mind that she meant to kill him. Would have killed him, if not for the new arrival, who came between Cammie and her intended target just before she could squeeze the trigger.

Brad recognized the zombie in spite of its hitching, shambling walk and distorted face. He didn’t know what kind of force had been responsible for changing the amiable college English teacher from down the block into the thing he was looking at now, and didn’t want to know. Looking was bad enough. It was as if someone whose prodigious strength was only overmatched by his sadistic cruelty had gripped Peter Jackson’s head between his hands and squeezed. The man’s eyes bulged from their sockets; the left had actually burst and lay on his cheek. His grin was even worse, a grotesque ear-to-ear rictus that made Brad think of The Joker in the Batman comic books.

They all stopped moving; Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner with his glittering, enchanted gaze might have entered their company. Brad felt his fingers, laced together at the nape of Dave’s neck, loosen, but Dave made no immediate effort to pull away. The longhair in the bloodstained tee-shirt was partially blocking Peter’s way, and for a moment Brad thought there was going to be a collision. At the last second the hippie managed a single shaky backward step, making room. Peter turned his strangely distended head toward him. The fading light shone on his bulging eyeballs and grinning teeth.

“Find… my… frie nd,” Peter said to the hippie. His voice was faint and queasy, as if he had been gassed enough to fuck him up but not quite enough to put him down. “Sit… down… with… my friend.”

“Do it, man, knock yourself out,” the hippie said in an unsteady voice, then hunched his shoulder in, away from the grinning man. The hippie had been wounded somehow and it obviously hurt him to do that, but he did it anyway. Brad didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t have wanted to be touched by that thing, either, even in passing.

It went on up the path, kicking the leg of the outstretched animal, and Brad saw a weird thing: the animal-it had been some sort of cat-was decaying with the speed of time-lapse photography, its pelt turning black and beginning to send up tendrils of nasty-smelling steam or smoke.

They remained frozen-the hippie with his bloody shoulders hunched; the counter-girl on one knee; Cammie standing in front of the girl and pointing the gun; Johnny with his hands up, as if he intended to try catching the bullet; Brad and Dave Reed caught in their wrestling pose-as Peter drifted south along the path, his back now to them. The evening was utterly still, poised on a diminishing shaft of daylight. Even the coyotes had gone still, at least for the moment.

Then Dave sensed the lack of strength in the hands holding his neck and tore out of Brad’s grip. The boy showed no interest in Johnny, however. He charged at his mother instead.

“You too!” he screamed. “You killed him, too!”

She turned toward him, her face shocked and flabbergasted.

“Why did you send us out here, Ma? Why?”

He snatched the gun from her unresisting hand, held it up in front of his eyes for a moment, and then heaved it into the woods… except they weren’t woods, not anymore. The changes had continued all around them even while they had been striving one with the other, and they were now standing in a bristling, alien forest of cacti. Even the smell of the burning house had changed; it now smelled like burning mesquite, or maybe sagebrush.

“Dave… Davey, I…”

She fell silent, only staring at him. He stared back, just as white, just as drawn. It occurred to Brad that not long ago the boy had been standing on his lawn, laughing and throwing a Frisbee. Dave’s face began to contort. His mouth drew down and shuddered open. Gleaming strands of spit stretched between his lips. He began to wail. His mother put her arms around him and began to rock him. “No, it’s all right,” she said. Her own eyes were like smooth dark stones in a dry riverbed. “No, it’s all right. No, honey, it’s all right, Mom’s here and it’s all right.”

Johnny stepped back on to the path. He looked briefly at the dead animal, which was now shimmering like something seen through a furnace-haze and oozing runnels of thick pink liquid. Then he looked at Cammie and her remaining son.

“Cammie,” he said. “Mrs Reed. I did not shoot Jim. I swear I didn’t. What happened was-”

“Be still,” she said, not looking at him. Dave was half a foot taller than his mother and had to outweigh her by seventy pounds, but she rocked him as easily now as she must have done when he was eight months old and colicky. “I don’t want to hear what happened. I don’t care what happened. Let’s just go back. Do you want to go back, David?”

Weeping, not looking, he nodded against her shoulder.

She turned her terrible dry eyes toward Brad. “Bring my other boy. We’re not leaving him out here with that thing.” She looked briefly at the fuming, stinking carcass of the mountain lion, then back at Brad. “Bring him, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brad said. “I absolutely do.”

Tom Billingsley was standing at the kitchen door, peering out into the growing gloom toward his open back gate and trying to make sense of the sounds and voices he heard coming from beyond it. When a set of fingers tapped him on the shoulder, he almost had a heart attack.

Once he would have spun gracefully and coldcocked the intruder with his fist or elbow before either of them knew what was happening, but the slim young man who had been capable of such speed and agility was long gone. He did strike out, but the redheaded woman in the blue shorts and sleeveless blouse had plenty of time to step back, and Tom’s arthritis-bunched knuckles coldcocked nothing but thin air.

“Christ, woman!” he cried.

“I’m sorry.” Audrey’s face, normally pretty, was haggard. There was a hand-shaped bruise on her left cheek and her nose was swollen, the nostrils caked with dried blood. “I was going to say something, but I thought that might scare you even worse.”

What happened to you, Aud?”

“It doesn’t matter. Where are the others?”

“Some in the woods, some next door. It-” A wavering howl rose. The red light had faded from the air now, and all that remained was ashes of orange. “It doesn’t sound too good for the ones that’re out. A lot of screaming.” He thought of something. Where’s Gary?”

She stood aside and pointed. Gary lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He had passed out while still holding his wife’s hand. Now that the screaming and yelling from the greenbelt had stopped-at least temporarily-Old Doc could hear him snoring.

“That’s Marielle under that coverlet?” Audrey asked.

Tom nodded.

“We have to get with the others, Tom. Before it starts again. Before they come back.”

“Do you know what’s happening here, Aud?”

“I don’t think anyone knows exactly what’s happening here, but I know some stuff, yes.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead and closed her eyes. To Tom she looked like a math student wrestling with some massive equation. Then she dropped her hands and looked at him again. “We better go next door. We should all be together.”

He lifted his chin toward the snoring Gary. “What about him?”

“We couldn’t carry him, couldn’t lift him over David Carver’s back fence even if we could. You’ll be doing well to get over it yourself.”

“I’ll manage,” he said, stung a little. “Don’t you worry about me, Aud, I’ll manage fine.”

From the greenbelt there came a cry, another gunshot, and then an animal howling in agony. What seemed like a thousand coyotes howled in response.

“They shouldn’t have gone out there,” Audrey said. “I know why they did, but it was a bad idea.”

Old Doc nodded. “I think they know that now,” he said.

Peter reached the fork in the path and looked into the desert, bone-white in the glare of a rising moon, beyond it. Then he looked down and saw the man in the patched khaki pants pinned to the cactus.

“Hello… friend,” he said. He moved the bum’s shopping cart so he could sit down beside him. As he settled against the cactus spines, feeling them slide into his back, he heard a cry and a gunshot and an agonized howl. All from far away. Not important. He put his hand on the dead bum’s shoulder. Their grins were identical. “Hello… friend,” the erstwhile James Dickey scholar said again.

He looked south. His remaining sight was almost gone, but there was enough left for him to see the perfectly round moon rising between the fangs of the black Crayola mountains. It was as silver as the back of an old-time pocket watch, and upon it was the smiling, one-eye-winked face of Mr Moon from a child’s book of Mother Goose rhymes.

Only this version of Mr Moon appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat.

“Hello… friend,” Peter said to it, and settled back further against the cactus. He did not feel the exaggerated spines that punctured his lungs, or the first trickles of blood that seeped out of his grinning mouth. He was with his friend. He was with his friend and now everything was all right, they were looking at Mr Cowpoke Moon and everything was all right.

The light dropped out of the day with a speed that reminded Johnny of the tropics, and soon the spiny landscape around them was only a black blur. The path was clear, at least for the time being-a gray streak about two feet wide winding through the shadows-but if the moon hadn’t come up, they would probably be in even deeper shit than they already were. He had watched the weather forecast that morning and knew the moon was new, not full, but that little contradiction didn’t seem very important under the current circumstances.

They went up the path two by two, like animals mounting the gangplank to Noah’s Ark: Cammie and her surviving son, then he and Brad (with the corpse of Jim Reed swinging between them), then Cynthia and the hippie, whose name was Steve. The girl had picked up the.30-.06, and when the coyote-a nightmare even more misbegotten than the mountain lion had been-came out of a cactus grove to the east of the path, it was the girl who settled its account.

The moon was bringing out fantastic tangles of shadow everywhere, and for a moment

Johnny thought the coyote was one of them. Then Brad yelled “Hey, look OUT!” and the girl fired almost at once. The recoil would have knocked her over like a bowling pin if the hippie hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her pants.

The coyote yowled and flipped over backward, its mismatched legs spasming. There was enough moonlight for Johnny to see that its paws ended in appendages that looked horribly like human fingers, and that it wore a cartridge belt for a collar. Its mates raised their voices in howls of what might have been mourning or laughter.

The thing began to decay at once, paw-fingers turning black, ribcage collapsing, eyes falling in like marbles. Steam began to rise from its fur, and the stench rose with it. A moment or two later, those thick pink streams began to ooze out of its liquefying corpse.

Johnny and Brad set Jim Reed’s body gently down. Johnny reached for the.30-.06 and poked the barrel at the coyote. He blinked with surprise (moderate surprise; his capacity for any large emotional reaction seemed pretty well drained) as it slid past the darkening hide with no feeling of resistance at all.

“It’s like prodding cigarette smoke,” he said, handing the gun back to Cynthia. “I don’t think it’s here at all. I don’t think any of it’s here, not really.”

Steve Ames stepped forward, took Johnny’s hand, and guided it to the shoulder of his shirt. Johnny felt a line of ragged punctures made by the mountain lion’s claws. Blood had soaked through the cotton enough for it to squelch under Johnny’s fingers. “The thing that did this to me wasn’t cigarette smoke,” Steve said.

Johnny started to reply, then was distracted by a strange rattling sound. It reminded him of cocktail shakers in the be-bop bars of his youth. Back in the fifties, that had been, when you couldn’t get smashed without a tie on if you were a member of the country club set. The sound was coming from Dave Reed, who was standing rigidly beside his mother. It was his teeth.

“Come on,” Brad said. “Let’s get the hell back under cover before something else comes. Vampire bats, maybe, or-”

“You want to stop right there,” Cynthia said. “I’m warning you, big boy.”

“Sorry,” Brad said. Then, gently: “Get moving, Cammie, okay?”

“Don’t you tell me to get moving!” she responded crossly. Her arm was around Dave’s waist. She might as well have been hugging an iron bar, so far as Johnny could see. Except for the shivering, that was. And that weird thing with the teeth. “Can’t you see he’s scared to death?”

More howls drifted through the darkness. The stench of the coyote Cynthia had shot was rapidly becoming unbearable.

“Yes, Cammie, I can,” Brad said. His voice was low and kind. Johnny thought the man could have made a fortune as a psychiatrist. “But you have to get moving. Else we’ll have to go on and leave you here. We have to get inside. We have to get to shelter. You know that, don’t you?”

“See that you bring my other boy,” she said sharply. “You’re not leaving him beside the path for the… you’re just not leaving him beside the path. Not!”

We’ll bring him,” Brad said in the same low, soothing voice. He bent and took hold of Jim Reed’s legs again. Won’t we, John?”

“Yes,” Johnny said, wondering what was going to be left of poor old Collie Entragian come morning… assuming there would be a morning. Collie didn’t have a mother present to stand up for him.

Cammie watched them lift her son’s corpse between them, then stood on tiptoe and whispered something into Dave’s ear. It must have been the right thing, because the kid got moving again.

They had made only a few steps when there was a subdued rattle up ahead, the gritty crunch of a footstep on the new surface of the ground, then a muffled cry of exasperated pain. Dave Reed shrieked as piercingly as a starlet in a horror movie. This sound more than that of strangers in the woods made Johnny’s balls pull up against his groin. From the corner of his eye he saw the hippie grab hold of the rifle barrel when Cynthia brought it up. Steve pushed it back down again, murmuring for her to hold on, just hold on.

“Don’t shoot!” a voice called from the tangle of shadows up ahead and to their left. It was a voice Johnny recognized. “We’re friends, so just take it easy. Okay?”

“Doc?” Johnny, who had come close to dropping his end of Jim Reed, now renewed his grip in spite of his aching arms and shoulders. Before the sounds from up ahead had begun, he’d been thinking of something from Intruder in the Dust. People got heavier just after they died, Faulkner had written. It was as if death was the only way stupid thief gravity knew how to celebrate its existence. “Doc, that you?”

“Yeah.” Two shapes appeared in the dark and moved cautiously toward them. “I stuck hell out of myself on a goddam cactus. What are cactuses doing in Ohio?”

“Excellent question,” Johnny said. “Who’s that with you?”

“Audrey Wyler from across the street,” a woman replied. “Can we get out of these woods, please?”

Johnny suddenly knew that he could not carry his end of Jim Reed’s body all the way back to the Carver house, let alone help Brad boost it over the fence. He looked around. “Steve? Can you spell me on this for a whi-” He broke off, remembering Steve’s dance with the Picasso mountain lion. “Shit, you can’t, can you?”

“Oh, Chri… ist.” Tom Billingsley’s voice made one syllable into two, then cracked on the second one like a teenager’s. “Which twin is that?”

“Jim,” Johnny said. Then, as Tom stepped next to him: can’t, Tom, you’ll have a stroke, or something.”

“I’ll help,” Audrey said, joining them. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Steve saw that the old veterinarian and the woman from across the street had come on to the path at the same place where he and Entragian had come on to it. There was a cow’s skull half-buried in the ground where the discarded batteries had been and an old rusty horseshoe where the potato-chip bag had been, but the wrapper from the baseball cards was still there. Steve bent, picked it up, and held it so the moonlight would strike it. Upper Deck cards. Albert Belle with the bat coiled behind his head and a predatory look in his eye. Steve realized an odd thing: this felt like the anachronism, not the cacti or the cow’s skull or even the freakish cat which had been hiding in the ravine. And us, he thought. We’re the abnormalities now, maybe.

“What are you thinking about?” Cynthia asked.

“Nothing.”

He let the wrapper drop from his fingers. Halfway to the ground it suddenly spread, filling out like a sail, turning from what might have been light green (it was hard to tell in the moonlight) to bright white. He gasped. Cynthia, who had turned to check the path behind them, wheeled back in a hurry. “What?”

“Did you see?”

“No. What?”

“This.” He bent and picked it up. The baseball card wrapper was now a sheet of rough paper. Staring out of it was a scruffy-bearded villain with hooded, half-bright eyes. WANTED, the poster blared. MURDER, BANK-ROBBERY, TRAIN-ROBBERY, THEFT OF RESERVATION FUNDS, MOLESTATION AND TERRORIZING, POISONING TOWN WELLS, CATTLE THEFT, HORSE THEFT, CLAIM-JUMPING. All that above the picture. Below it, in big black type, the villain’s name: JEBEDIAH MURDOCK.

“Give me a break,” Cynthia said softly.

“What do you mean?”

“That isn’t a crook, it’s some actor. I’ve seen him on TV.”

Steve looked up and saw the others were pulling away. He took Cynthia by the hand and they hurried after them.

Tak dangled in the archway between the den and the living room with Seth’s dirty toes barely touching the carpet. Its eyes were bright and feverish; it used the boy’s lungs in quick, hard gasps. Seth’s hair stood on end, not just on his head but all over his body. When any of this fine fuzz of body-hair brushed against the wall, it made a faint crackling noise. The muscles of the boy’s body seemed not just to quiver but to thrum.

The death of the cop had ripped Tak out of its TV-daze, and it had snatched for the cop’s essence quickly, instinctively, going all the way to the edge of its range… and then past, leaping for the prize like an outfielder stealing a home run that’s already over the centerfield fence. And getting it! Energy had boomed into it like napalm, another barrier had fallen, and it had found itself closer than ever to Seth Garin’s unique center. Not there yet-not quite-but now so close.

And its perceptions had also boomed. It saw the boy with the smoking pistol in his hand, understood what had happened, felt the boy’s horror and guilt, sensed the potential. Without thinking-Tak didn’t think, not really-it leaped into Jim Reed’s mind. It could not control him physically at this range, but all the fail-safe equipment guarding the boy’s emotional armory had temporarily shorted out, leaving that part of him wide open. Tak had only a second-two, at most-to get in and turn up all the dials, overloading the boy with feedback, but a second had been enough. The boy might even have done it, anyway. All Tak had done, after all, was to amplify emotions which had already been present.

The energy released by Jim Reed’s suicide had lit Tak up like a flare and shot its borrowed nerves all the way into the red zone. Fresh energy-young energy-flooded in, replacing the enormous amounts it had expended thus far. And now it hung in the doorway, humming, totally loaded, ready to finish what it had started.

Food first. It was ravenous. Tak floated halfway across the living room, then stopped.

“Aunt Audrey?” it called in Seth’s voice. A sweet voice, perhaps because it was so little used. “Aunt Audrey, are you here?”

No. It sensed she wasn’t. Aunt Audrey was able-with Seth’s help-to block off her mind sometimes, but never the steady pulse of that mind’s existence; its thereness. That was gone, now, but only from the house. She could be with the others, probably was, but she had gone no farther. Because Poplar Street was surrounded by Nevada desert, now… except it wasn’t exactly the real Nevada, more a Nevada of the mind, the one Tak had imagined into being. With Seth’s help, of course. It couldn’t have done any of this without Seth.

Tak moved toward the kitchen again. Aunt Audrey’s leaving was probably for the best. It would make Seth easier to control, make it less likely that he’d become a distraction at a crucial moment. Not that the little feller could present much of a problem under any circumstances; he was powerful but in many crucial ways helpless. At first it had been an arm-wrestle between equally matched opponents… except they weren’t equally matched, not really. In the long run, raw strength is never a match for craft, and Tak had had long millennia in which to hone its hooks and wiles. Now, little by little, it was gaining the upper hand, using Seth Garin’s own extraordinary powers against him like a clever karate master matched against a strong but stupid opponent.

Seth? it asked as it drifted toward the refrigerator. Seth, where are you, pard?

For a moment it actually thought Seth might be gone… except that couldn’t be. They were completely entwined now, partners in a relationship as saprophytic as that of Siamese twins fused at the spine. If Seth left this body, all the para-sympathetic systems-heart, lungs, elimination, tissue-building, cerebral wave-function-would cease. Tak could no more maintain them than an astronaut could maintain the thousands of complicated systems which first thrust him into space and then kept him there in a stable environment. Seth was the computer, and without him the computer operator would die. Yet suicide was not an option for Seth Garin. Tak could keep him from the act just as it had driven Jim Reed to it. And, it sensed, Seth did not want to commit suicide. Part of Seth, in fact, did not even want to be free of Tak, not really. Because Tak had changed everything. Tak had given him Power Wagons that weren’t just toys; Tak had given him movies that were real; Tak had come out of the China Pit with a pair of seven-league cowboy boots just the right size for a lonely little buckaroo. Who would want such a magical friend to leave? Especially if you would once again be locked in the gulag of your own skull when your trusty trailmate was gone?

Seth? Tak asked again. Where are you, y'old cayuse, you?

And, far back in the network of caves and tunnels and boltholes the boy had constructed (the part of him that did not want Tak, the part that was horrified of the stranger now living in his head), Tak caught a glimmer, a faint pulse, that it recognized.

Thereness!

It was Seth, all right. Hiding. Confident that Tak couldn’t see, hear, or smell him. Nor could it, exactly. But the pulse was present, a kind of sonar blip, and if it needed Seth, it could hunt him down and drag him out. Seth didn’t know that, and if he was a good little trailhand, he would never have to find out.

Yessir, it thought, opening the fridge, I’m a regular one-man posse. But even posses got to eat. They get powerful hongry, posses do, chasin down them bank-thieves and cattle rustlers.

There was fresh chocolate milk on the top shelf. Tak took the tall white Tupperware pitcher out with Seth’s grimy hands, set it on the counter, then inspected the contents of the meat drawer. There was hamburger, but it didn’t know how to cook and there was certainly no information on the subject stored in Seth’s memory-banks. Tak had no objection to raw meat-liked it, in fact-but on two or three occasions, eating hamburger that way had made Seth’s body ill. At least Aunt Audrey said it was the raw meat which had made him sick, and Tak didn’t think she was lying (although with Aunt Audrey, it could never be completely sure). The last go-round had been the worst-vomiting and shitting all night long. Tak had vacated the premises until it was over, just checking in every now and then to make sure there was no funny stuff going on. It hated Seth’s eliminatory functions even when they were normal, and on that night they had been anything but.

So, no hamburger.

There was bologna, though, and a few Kraft cheese slices-the yellow ones that it particularly liked. It used Seth’s hands to put the food on the counter and used the extraordinary mind it and Seth shared to float a plastic McDonald’s glass across from the cabinet where they were kept. While it made itself a sandwich, slapping meat and cheese on to white bread slathered with mustard, the plastic pitcher rose and filled the McDonald’s glass, upon which was a fading picture of Charles Barkley going one-on-one with the Tasmanian Devil.

Tak drank half the chocolate milk in four big gulps, belched, then emptied the glass. It poured a second glass with its mind while tearing into its sandwich, heedless of the mustard which dripped out and splattered on Seth’s dirty feet. It swallowed, bit, smacked, swallowed, drank, belched. The roar in its gut began to subside. The thing about TV-especially when The Regulators or MotoKops 2200 was on-was that Tak got interested, fell into its powerful dreams, and forgot to feed Seth’s body. Then, all at once, both of them would be so ravenous it could hardly think, let alone act or plan.

It finished its second glass of chocolate milk, holding it over its mouth to catch the last few drops, then tossed the glass in the sink with the rest of the dirty dishes. “Ain’t nothin beats chow around the campfire, Paw!” it cried in its best Little Joe Cartwright voice. Then it drifted back toward the kitchen door, a dirty boy-balloon with the remains of a sandwich in one hand.

Moonlight streamed through the living-room windows. Beyond them, Popla r Street was gone. It had been replaced by the Main Street of Desperation, Nevada, as it had been in 1858, two years after the few remaining gold miners had realized the troublesome blue clay they were scraping out of their claims was, in fact, raw silver… and the declining town had been revitalized by disappointed wildcat miners from the California goldfields. Different land, same old ambition: to grub a quick fortune out of the sleeping ground. Tak had known none of this and had certainly not picked it up in The Regulators (which was set in Colorado, not Nevada); it was information Seth had gotten from a man named Allen Symes shortly before he had met Tak. According to Symes, 1858 was the year the Rattlesnake Number One mine had caved in.

Across the street, where the Billingsley and Jackson homes had been, were Lushan’s Chinese Laundry and Worrell’s Dry Goods. Where the Hobart house had been the Owl County General Store now stood, and although Tak could still smell smoke, the store wasn’t showing so much as a single charred board.

Tak turned and saw one of the Power Wagons on the floor. It was poking out, almost shyly, from beside one end of the couch. Tak floated it into the air and brought it across the room. It stopped before Seth’s dark-brown eyes, hanging in mid-air with its wheels slowly turning while Tak ate the rest of its sandwich. It was the Justice Wagon. Tak sometimes wished it was Little Joe Cartwright’s Justice Wagon instead of Colonel Henry’s. Then Sheriff Streeter from The Regulators could move to Virginia City and drive the blue Freedom van instead of riding a horse. Streeter and Jeb Murdock-who’d turn out to have been only wounded, not really dead-would become friends… friends with the Cartwrights, too… and then Lucas McCain and his son would move in from his spread in New Mexico… and… well…

“And I’d be Pa,” it whispered. “Boss of the Ponderosa and the biggest man in the Nevada territory. Me.”

Smiling, it sent the Justice Wagon around Seth Garin in two slow, beautiful circles. Then it swept the fantasies out of its head. They were lovely fantasies, though. Perhaps even attainable fantasies, if it could gain enough essence from the remaining people across the street-the stuff that came out of them when they died.

“It’s getting to be time,” it said. “Roundup time.”

It closed its eyes, using the circuits of Seth’s memory to visualize the Power Wagons… especially the Meatwagon, which would lead this assault. No Face driving, Countess Lili co-piloting, and Jeb Murdock in the gunner’s turret. Because Murdock was the meanest.

Eyes closed, fresh power lighting up its mind like Fourth of July fireworks bursting in the summer sky, Tak began the job of powering up. It would take a little while, but now that things had gotten this far, it had time.

Soon enough, the regulators would come.

“Get ready, folks,” Tak whispered. Seth’s fists were clenched at the ends of its arms, clenched and shaking. “You just get ready, because we’re gonna wipe this town off the map.”

Allen Symes worked for the Deep Earth Mining Corporation in the capacity of Geological Mining Engineer for twenty-six years, from 1969 to late 1995. Shortly before Christmas of 1995, he retired and moved to Clearwater, Florida, where he died of a heart attack on September 19th,

1996. The document which follows was found in his desk by his daughter. It was in a sealed envelope marked CONCERNS STRANGE INCIDENT IN CHINA PIT and READ AFTER MY DEATH, PLS.

This document is presented here exactly as it was found.

October 27th, 1995 To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this for three reasons. First, I want to clarify something that happened fifteen months ago, in the summer of 1994. Second, I am hoping to ease my conscience, which had settled down some but has been considerably stirred up again ever since the Wyler woman wrote me from Ohio and I lied to her in my response. I don’t know if a man can ease his conscience by writing things down in hopes they will be read later, but it’s worth a try, I guess; and I may want to show this to someone-maybe even the Wyler woman-after I retire. Third, I can’t get the way that little boy grinned out of my mind.

The way he grinned.

I lied to Mrs Wyler to protect the company, and to protect my job, but most of all because I could lie. July 24th, 1994 was a Sunday, the place was deserted, and I was the only one who saw them. I wouldn’t have been there either, if I hadn’t had paperwork to catch up on. Anyone who thinks being a mining engineer is all excitement and travel should see the tons of reports and forms I’ve had to plow through over the years!

Anyway, I was just finishing for the day when a Volvo station wagon pulled up out front and this whole family got out. I want to say here that I have never seen such excited people who weren’t going to the circus in my whole life. They looked like the people on the TV ads who have just won the Publishers” Clearing House Sweepstakes!

There were five of them: Dad (the Ohio woman’s brother, he would have been), Mom, Big Brother, Big Sis, and Little Brother. LB looked to be four or so, although having read the Wyler woman’s letter (which was sent in July of this year), I know now he was a little older, just small for his age.

Anyway, I saw them arrive from the window by the desk where I had all my papers spread out. Clear as day, I saw them. They dithered around their car for a minute or two, pointing to the embankment south of town, just as excited as chickens in a rainstorm, and then the little guy dragged his Dad toward the office trailer.

All this occurred at Deep Earth’s Nevada HQ, a double-wide trailer which is located about two miles off the main drag (Highway 50), on the outskirts of Desperation, a town known for its silver mining around the time of the Civil War. Our main mining operation these days is the China Pit, where we are leaching copper. Strip mining is what the “green people” call it, of course, although it’s really not so bad as they like to make out.

Anyway, Little Brother pulled his Daddy right up the trailer steps, and I heard him say, “Knock, Daddy, there’s someone home, I know there is.” Dad looked surprised as heck at that, although I didn’t know why, since my car was parked right out front, “big as Billy be damned”. I soon found out it wasn’t what the little tyke was saying but that he was saying anything at all!

Father looked around at the rest of his clan, and all of them said the same thing, knock on the door, knock on the door, go on and knock on the door! Excited as hell. Sort of funny and cute, too. I was curious, I’ll freely admit it. I could see their license plate, and just couldn’t figure what a family from Ohio was doing way the hell and gone out in Desperation on a Sunday afternoon. If Dad hadn’t got up nerve enough to knock, I was going to go out myself and pass the time of day with him. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back,” you know!

But he knocked, all right, and as soon as I opened the door, the little tyke went running in right past me! Right over to the wall he went, to the same bulletin board where Sally put up Mrs Wyler’s letter when it came in, marking it CAN ANYONE HELP THIS LADY in big red-ink letters.

The tyke tapped the aerial photographs of the China Pit we kept tacked on the bulletin board, one after the other. Maybe you had to be there to understand how strange it was, but take my word for it. It was like he’d been in the office a dozen times before.

“Here it is, Daddy!” he said, tapping his way around those pictures. “Here it is! Here it is! Here’s the mine, the silver mine!”

“Well,” I said, kind of laughing, “it’s copper, sonny, but I guess that’s close enough.”

Mr Garin gave me a red-faced look and said, “I’m sorry, we don’t mean to barge in.” Then he barged in himself and grabbed his little boy up. I was some amused. Couldn’t help but be.

He carried the tyke back out to the steps, where he must have thought they belonged. Being from Ohio, I don’t guess he knew we take barging around pretty much for granted out in Nevada. The tyke didn’t kick or have a tantrum, but his eyes never left those photos on the bulletin board. He looked as cute as a papoose, peeking over his Daddy’s shoulder with his little bright eyes. The rest of the family clustered around down below, staring up. The bigger kids were near bursting with excitement, and Mom looked pretty much in the same emotions.

Father said they were from Toledo, then introduced himself, his wife, and the two big kids. “And this is Seth,” he finished up. “Seth is a special child.”

“Why, I thought they were all special,” I said, and stuck out my hand. “Put “er there, Seth; I’m Allen Symes.” He shook with me right smart. The rest of the family looked flabbergasted, his Dad in particular, although I couldn’t see why. My own Dad taught me to shake hands when I was just three; it’s not hard, like learning to juggle or floating aces up to the top of the deck. But things got clearer to me before long.

“Seth wants to know if he can see the mountain,” Mr Garin says, and pointed at the China Pit. The north face does look a little like a mountain. “I think he actually means the mine-”

“Yes!” the tyke says. “The mine! Seth want to see the mine! Seth want to see the silver mine! Hoss! Little Joe! Adam! Hop Sing!”

I busted out laughing at that, it’d been so long since I’d heard those names, but the rest of “em didn’t. They just went on looking at that little boy like he was Jesus teaching the elders in the temple.

“Well,” I says, “if you want to look at the Ponderosa Ranch, son, I believe you can, although it’s a good way west of here. And there’s mine-tours, too, some where they ride you right underground in a real ore gondola. The best is probably the Betty Carr, in Fallen. There’s no tours of the China Pit, though. It’s a working mine, and not as interesting as the old gold and silver shafts. Yonder wall that looks like a mountain to you is nothing but one side of a big hole in the ground.”

“He won’t follow much of what you’re saying, Mr Symes,” his big brother said. “He’s a good brother, but he’s not very swift.” And he tapped the side of his head.

The tyke did get it, though, as was easy to see because he started to cry. Not all loud and spoiled, but soft, like a kid does when he’s lost something he really likes. The rest of them looked all downcast when they heard it, like the family dog had died. The little girl even said something about how Seth never cried. Made me feel more curious than ever. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with them, and it was giving me a hell of an itch. Now I wish I’d just let it go, but I didn’t.

Mr Garin asked if he could talk to me private for a minute or two, and I said sure. He handed off the tyke to his wife-the boy still crying in that soft way, big tears just rolling down his cheeks, and I’ll be damned if Big Sister wasn’t starting to dribble a little bit right along with him. Then Garin came inside the trailer and shut the door.

He told me a lot about little Seth Garin in a short time, but the most important thing was how much they all loved him. Not that Garin ever came out and said so in words (that I might not have trusted, anyway). It just showed. He said that Seth was autistic, hardly ever said a single word you could understand or showed much interest in “ordinary life”, but that when he caught sight of the north wall of China Pit from the road, he started to gabble like crazy, pointing at it the whole time.

“At first we just humored him and kept on driving,” Garin said.

“Usually Seth’s quiet, but he does go off on one of these babbling fits every now and then. June calls them his sermons. But then, when he saw we weren’t turning around or even slowing down, he started to talk. Not just words but sentences. “Go back, please, Seth want to see mine, Seth want to see Hoss and Adam and Little Joe.'””

I know a little about autism; my best friend has a brother in Sierra Four, the state mental facility in Boulder City (outside of Vegas). I have been there with him on several occasions, have seen the autistic at first hand, and am not sure I would’ve believed what Garin was telling me if I hadn’t seen some of it for myself. A lot of the folks in Sierra not only don’t speak, they don’t even move. The worst ones look dead, their eyes glazed, their chests hardly going up and down so you can see.

“He loves Western movies and TV shows,” Mr Garin said, “and all I can figure is that the pit-wall reminds him of something he must have seen on an episode of Bonanza.”

I thought maybe he had even seen it in an episode of Bonanza, although I don’t recall telling Garin that. A lot of those old TV shows filmed scenic footage (what they call “second unit”) out this way, and the China Pit has been in existence since “57, so it’s possible.

“Anyway,” he said, “this is a major breakthrough for Seth-except the word that really fits is miracle. Him talking like he is isn’t all of it, either.”

“Yes,” I said, “he’s really in the world for a change, isn’t he?”

I was thinking of the people in Lacota Hall, where my friend’s brother is. Those folks were never in the world. Even when they were crying or laughing or making other noises, it was like they were phoning it in.

“Yes, he is,” Garin says. “It’s like a bank of lights went on inside him. I don’t know what did it and I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but… is there any way at all you could take us up to the mining operation, Mr Symes? I know you’re not supposed to, and I bet your insurance company would have a fit if they found out, but it would mean so much to Seth. It would mean so much to all of us. We’re on kind of a tight budget, but I could give you forty dollars for your time.”

“I wouldn’t do it for four hundred,” I said. “This kind of thing a man does for free or he doesn’t do at all. Come on. We’ll take one of the ATVs. Your older boy can drive it, if you don’t have any objections. That’s against company regs, too, but might as well be hung for a goat as a lamb, I guess.”

Anyone who’s reading this and maybe judging me for a fool (a reckless fool, at that), I only wish you could have seen the way Bill Garin’s face lit up. I’m sorry as hell for what happened to him and the others in California-which I only know about from his sister’s letter-but believe me when I say that he was happy on that day, and I’m glad I had a chance to make him so.

We had ourselves quite an afternoon even before our “little scare”. Garin did let his older boy, John, drive us out to the pit-wall, and was he excited? I almost think young Jack Garin would have voted me for God, if I’d been running for the job. They were a nice family, and devoted to the little boy. The whole tribe of them. I guess it was pretty amazing for him to just start up talking like he did, but how many people would change all their plans because of a thing like that, right on the spur of the moment, even so? These folks did, and without so much as a word of argument among them, so far as I could tell.

The tyke jabbered all the way out to the pit, a mile a minute. A lot was gibberish, but not all. He kept talking about the characters on Bonanza, and the Ponderosa, and outlaws, and the silver mines. Some cartoon show was on his mind, too. Motor Cops, I think it was. He showed me an act ion figure from the show, a lady with red hair and a blaster that he could take out of her holster and kind of stick in her hand. Also, he kept patting the ATV and calling it “the Justice Wagon”. Then Jack’d kind of puff up behind the wheel (he must have been driving all of ten miles an hour) and say, “Yeah, and I’m Colonel Henry. Warning, Force Corridor dead ahead!” And they’d all laugh. Me too, because by then I was as swept up in the excitement of it as the rest of them.

I was excited enough so that one of the things he was saying didn’t really hit home until later on. He kept talking about “the old mine”. If I thought anything about that, I guess I thought it was something out of some Bonanza show. It never crossed my mind to think he was talking about Rattlesnake Number One, because he couldn’t know about it! Even the people in Desperation didn’t know we’d uncovered it while blasting just the week before. Hell, that’s why I had so much paperwork to “rassle” with on a Sunday afternoon, writing a report to the home office about what we’d uncovered and listing different ideas on how to handle it.

When the idea that Seth Garin was talking about Rattlesnake Number One did occur to me, I remembered how he’d come running into the office trailer as if he’d been there a million times before. Right across to the photos on the bulletin board he went. That gave me a chill, but there was something else, something I saw after the Garin family had gone on its way to Carson, that gave me an even colder one. I’ll get to it in a bit.

When we got to the foot of the embankment, I swapped seats with Jack and drove us up the equipment road, which is all nicely graveled and wider than some interstates. We crossed the top and went down the far side. They all oohed and aahed, and I guess it is a little more than just a hole in the ground. The pit is almost a thousand feet at its deepest, and cuts through layers of rock that go back all the way to the Paleozoic Era, three hundred and twenty-five million years ago. Some layers of the porphyry are very beautiful, being crammed with sparkly purple and green crystals we call “skarn garnets”. From the top, the earth-moving equipment on the pit floor looks the size of toys. Mrs Garin made a joke about how she didn’t like heights and might have to throw up, but you know, it’s not such a joke at that. Some people do throw up when they come over the edge and see the drop inside!

Then the little girl (sorry, can’t remember her name, might have been Louise) pointed over across, down by the pit-floor, and said, “What’s that hole with all the yellow tapes around it? It looks like a big black eye.”

“That’s our find of the year,” I said. “Something so big it’s still a dead secret. I’ll tell you if you can keep it one a while longer. You will, won’t you? I might get in trouble with my company otherwise.”

They promised, and I thought telling them was safe enough, them being through-travellers and all. Also, I thought the little boy would like to hear about it, him being so crazy about Bonanza and all. And, as I said, it never crossed my mind until later to think he already knew about it. Why would it, for God’s sake?

“That’s the old Rattlesnake Number One,” I said. “At least, that’s what we think it is. We uncovered it while we were blasting. The front part of the Rattlesnake caved in back in 1858.”

Jack Garin wanted to know what was inside. I said we didn’t know, no one had been in there on account of the MSHA regulations. Mrs Garin (June) wanted to know if the company would be exploring it later, and I said maybe, if we could get the right permits. I didn’t tell them any lies, but I did skirt the truth a bit. We’d gotten up the keep-out tapes like MSHA says to do, all right, but that didn’t mean MSHA knew about our find. We uncovered it purely by accident-shot off a blast-pattern pretty much like any other and when the spill stopped rolling and the dust settled, there it was-but no one in the company was sure if it was the kind of accident we wanted to publicize.

There would have been some powerful interest if news of it got out, that’s for sure. According to the stories, forty or fifty Chinese were sealed up inside when the mine caved in, and if so, they’d still be there, preserved like mummies in an Egyptian pyramid. The history buffs would’ve had a field day with just their clothing and mining gear, let alone the bodies themselves. Most of us on-site were pretty interested, too, but we couldn’t do much exploring without wholehearted approval from the Deep Earth brass in Phoenix, and there wasn’t anyone I worked with who thought we’d get it. Deep Earth is not a non-profit organization, as I’m sure anyone reading this will understand, and mining, especially in this day and age, is a high-risk operation. China Pit had only been turning a profit since 1992 or so, and the people who work there never get up in the morning completely sure they’ll still have a job when they get to the work-site. Much is dependent on the per-pound price of copper (leachbed mining is not cheap), but even more has to do with the environmental issues. Things are a little better lately, the current crop of pols has at least some sense, but there are still something like a dozen “injunctive suits” pending in the county or Federal courts, filed by people (mostly the “greens”) who want to shut us down. There were a lot of people-including myself, I might as well say-who didn’t think the top execs would want to add to those problems by shouting to the world that we’d found an old mine site, probably of great historical interest. As Yvonne Bateman, an engineer pal of mine, said just after the round of blast-field shots uncovered the hole, “It would be just like the tree-huggers to try and get the whole pit designated a historical landmark, either by the Feds or by the Nevada Historical Commission. It might be the way to stop us for good that they are always looking for.” You can call that attitude paranoid if you want (plenty do), but when a fellow like me knows there are 90 or 100 men depending on the mine to keep their families fed, it changes your perspective and makes you cautious.

The daughter (Louise?) said it looked spooky to her, and I said it did to me, too. She asked if I’d go in it on a dare and I said no way. She asked if I was afraid of ghosts and I said no, of cave-ins. It’s amazing that any of the shaft was still up. They drove it straight into hornfels and crystal rhyolite-leftovers from the volcanic event that emptied the Great Basin-and that’s pretty shaky stuff even when you’re not shooting off ANFO charges all over the place. I told her I wouldn’t go in there even on a double dare unless and until it was shored up with concrete and steel every five feet. Never knowing I’d be in there so deep I couldn’t see the sun before the day was over!

I took them to the field office and got them hard-hats, then took them out and showed them all around-diggings, tailings, leachbeds, sorters, and heavy equipment. We had quit a field-trip for ourselves. Little Seth had pretty much quit talking then, but his eyes were as bright as the garnets we are always finding in the spoil-rock!.

All right, I’ve come to the “little scare” that has caused me so many doubts and bad dreams (not to mention a bad case of conscience, no joke for a Mormon who takes the religion stuff pretty seriously). And it didn’t seem so “little” to any of us at the time, and doesn’t to me now, if I’m to tell the truth. I have been over it and over it in my mind, and while I was in Peru (which is where I was, looking at bauxite deposits, when Audrey Wyler’s letter of enquiry came in to the Deep Earth post box in Desperation), I dreamed of it a dozen or more times. Because of the heat, maybe. It was hot inside the Rattlesnake Mine. I have been in a lot of shaft-mines in my time, and usually they are chilly or downright cold. I have read that some of the deep gold mines in

S. Africa are warm, but I have never been in any of those. Andthis wasn’t warm but hot. Humid, too, like in a greenhouse.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t want to do that. What I want is to tell it straight through, end to end, and thank God nothing like it will ever happen again. In early-August, not two weeks after all this happened, the whole works collapsed. Maybe there was a little temblor deep down in the Devonian, or maybe the open air had a corrosive effect on the exposed support timbers. I’ll never know for sure, but down it came, a million tons of shale and schist and limestone. When I think how close Mr Garin and his little boy came to being under all that when it went (not to mention Mr Allen Symes, Geologist Extraordinaire), I get the willies.

The older boy, Jack, wanted to see Mo, our biggest digger. She runs on treads and works the inner slopes, mostly digging out benches at fifty-foot intervals. There was a time in the early “70s when Mo was the biggest digger on Planet Earth, and most kids-the boys especially-are fascinated with her. Big boys too! Garin wanted to see her “close up” as much as young Jack did, and I assumed Seth would feel the same way. I was wrong about that, though.

I showed them the ladder that goes up Mo’s side to the operator’s cab, which is almost 100 feet above the ground. Jack asked if they could go up and I said no, that was too dangerous, but they could take a stroll on the treads if they wanted. Doing that is quite an experience, each tread being as wide as a city street and each of the separate steel plates that make them up a yard across. Mr Garin put Seth down, and they climbed up the ladder to Mo’s treads. I climbed up behind them, hoping like mad nobody would fall. If they did, I was the one who’d most likely be on the hook in case of a lawsuit. June Garin stood back aways so she could take pictures of us standing up there with our arms around each other, laughing. We were clowning and mugging for the camera and having the time of our lives until the little girl called, “You come back, Seth! Right now! You shouldn’t be way over there!”

I couldn’t see him because up where I was on Mo’s tread, all the rest of the digger was in the way, but I could see his mother just fine, and how scared she looked when she spotted him.

“Seth!” she yelled. “You come back now!” She yelled it two or three times, then dropped her camera on the ground and just ran. That was all I needed to see, her dropping her expensive Nikon like a used cigarette pack. I was back down the ladder in about three jumps. Wonder I didn’t fall off and break my neck. Even more of a wonder Garin or his older boy didn’t, I suppose, but I never even thought about that at the time. Never thought about them at all, tell the truth.

The little boy was already climbing the slope to the opening of the old mine, which was only about twenty feet up from the pit-floor. I saw that and knew his mother wasn’t ever going to catch him before he got inside. Wasn’t anyone going to catch him before he got inside, if that was what he meant to do. My heart wanted to sink into my boots, but I didn’t let it. I got running as fast as I could, instead.

I overtook Mrs Garin just as Seth reached the mine entrance. He stopped there for a second, and I hoped maybe he wasn’t going to go in. I thought there was a chance that if the dark didn’t put him off, the smell of the place would-kind of an old campflre smell, like ashes and burned coffee and scraps of old meat all mixed together. Then he did go in, and without so much as a look back at me yelling for him to quit it.

I told his Mom to stay clear, for God’s sake, that I’d go in and bring him out. I told her to tell her son and husband the same thing, but of course Garin didn’t listen. I don’t think I would have, in his situation, either.

I climbed the slope and broke through the yellow tapes. The tyke was short enough so he’d been able to go right underneath. I could hear the faint roaring you almost always hear coming out of old mine-shafts. It sounds like the wind, or a far-off waterfall. I don’t know what it really is, but I don’t like it, never have. I don’t know anyone who does. It’s a ghostly sound.

That day, though, I heard another one I liked even less-a low, whispery squealing. I hadn’t heard it any of the other times I’d been up to look into the shaft since it was uncovered, but I knew what it was right away-hornfels and rhyolite rubbing together. It’s like the ground is talking. That sound always made the miners clear out in the olden days, because it meant the works could come down at any time. I guess the Chinamen who worked the Rattlesnake back in 1858 either didn’t know what that sound meant or weren’t allowed to heed it.

The footing slipped on me just after I broke through the tapes, and I went down on one knee. I saw something lying there on the ground when I did. It was his little plastic action figure, the redhead with the blaster. It must have fallen out of the boy’s pocket just before he went into the shaft, and seeing it there laying in that broken-up rock-waste stuff we call gangue-seemed like the worst kind of sign, and gave me the creeps something fierce. I picked it up, stuck it in my pocket, and forgot all about it until later, when the excitement was over and I returned it to its proper owner. I described it to my young nephew and he said it’s a Cassie Stiles (sp.?) figure, from the Motor Cops show the little tyke kept talking about.

I heard sliding rock and panting behind me; looked back and saw Garin coming up the slope. The other three were standing down below, huddled together. The little girl was crying.

“You go on back, now!” I said. “This shaft could come down any time! It’s a hundred and thirty damn years old! More!”

“I don’t care if it’s a thousand years old,” he said back, still coming. “That’s my boy and I’m going in after him.”

I wasn’t about to stand there and argue with him; sometimes all you can do is get moving, keep moving, and hope that God will hold up the roof. And that’s what we did.

I’ve been in some scary places during my years as a mining engineer, but the ten minutes or so (it actually could have been more or less; I lost all sense of time) that we spent in the old Rattlesnake shaft was the scariest by far. The bore ran back and down at a pretty good angle, and we started to run out of daylight before we were more than twenty yards in. The smell of the place-cold ashes, old coffee, burned meat-got stronger in a hurry, and that was strange, too. Sometimes old mines have a “minerally” smell, but mostly that’s all. The ground underfoot was fallen rubble, and we had to step pretty smart just to keep from stubbing our toes and going face-first. The supports and crossbeams were covered with Chinese characters, some carved in the wood, most just painted on in candlesmoke. Looking at something like that makes you realize that all the things you read about in your history books actually happened. Wasn’t made up a bit.

Mr Garin was yelling for the boy, telling him to come back, that it wasn’t safe. I thought of telling him that just the sound of his voice might be enough to bring down the hangwall, the way people yelling can sometimes be enough to bring down avalanches up in the high country. I didn’t, though. He wouldn’t have been able to stop calling. All he could think of was the boy.

I keep a little fold-blade, a magnifying loop, and a Penlite on my key-ring. I got the Penlite unhooked and shone it out ahead of us. We went on down the shaft, with the loose hornfels muttering all around us, and that soft roaring sound in our ears, and that smell up our noses. I felt it getting warmer almost right away, and the warmer it got, the fresher that campfire smell got. Except by the end, it didn’t smell like a campfire anymore. It smelled like something gone rotten. A carcass of some kind.

Then we came on the start of the bones. We-us with Deep Earth, I mean-had shone spotlights into the shaft, but they didn’t show much. We’d gone back and forth a lot about whether or not there really was anything in there. Yvonne argued that there wasn’t, that no one would have kept going down into a shaft-mine dug in ground like that, not even a bunch of bond-Chinamen. They said it was all just so much talk-legend-making, Yvonne called it-but once Garin and I were a couple of hundred yards in, my little Penlite was enough to show us that Yvonne was wrong.

There were bones littered everywhere on the shaft floor, cracked skulls and legs and hip-bones and pelvises. The ribcages were the worst, every one seeming to grin like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. When we stepped on them they didn’t even crunch, like you’d think such things would, just puffed up like powder. The smell was stronger than ever, and I could feel the sweat rolling down my face. It was like being in a boiler room instead of a mine. And the walls! They didn’t just put on their names or initials down where we were; they wrote all over them with their candlesmoke. It was as if when the adit caved in and they found they were trapped in the shaft, they all decided to write their last wills and testaments on the support beams.

I grabbed Garin’s shoulder and said, “We’ve gone too far. He was standing off to one side and we missed him in the dark.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I still feel him up ahead,” he said, then raised his voice. “Seth! Please, honey! If you’re down there, turn around and come to us!”

What came back put the hackles up on my neck. Further on down that shaft, with its floor of crumbled skarn and skulls and bones, we could hear singing. Not words, just the little boy’s voice going “La-la-la” and “dum-deedle-dum”. Not much of a tune, but enough so I could recognize the Bonanza theme music.

Garin looked at me, his eyes all white and wide in the dark, and asked if I still thought we’d come past him. Wasn’t anything I could say to that, and so we got moving again.

We started to see gear in amongst the bones-cups, picks with rusty heads and funny short handles, and little tin boxes with straps running through them that I recognized from the Miners” Museum in Ely. Keroseners, the miners called them. They wore them on their foreheads like phylacteries, with bandannas tucked in underneath to keep their skin from burning. And I started to see there were candlesmoke drawings on the walls as well as Chinese words. They were awful things-coyotes with heads like spiders, mountain lions with scorpions riding on their backs, bats with heads like babies. I’ve wondered since then if I really saw those things, or if the air was so bad that far down in the shaft that I hallucinated them. I didn’t ask Garin later on if he saw any of those things. I don’t know for sure if I just forgot or if maybe I didn’t dare.

He stopped and bent down and picked something up. It was a little black cowboy boot that had been wedged between two rocks. The tyke must have got it jammed and run right out of it. Mr Garin held it up so I could see it in the light of my little flash, then stuck it in his shirt. We could still hear the la-las and dum-dee-dums, so we knew he was still up ahead. The sound seemed a little closer, but I wouldn’t let myself hope. Underground you can never tell. Sound carries funny.

We went on and on, I don’t know how far, but the ground kept sloping down, and the air kept getting hotter. There were less bones on the floor of the shaft but more fallen rock. I could have shone my light up to see what kind of shape the topshaft was in, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t even dare think about how deep we were by then. Had to have been at least a quarter of a mile from where the explosions cut into the shaft and opened it up. Probably more. And I’d started to feel pretty sure we’d never get out. The roof would just come down and that’d be it. It would be quick, at least, quicker than it had been for the Chinese miners who’d suffocated or died of thirst in the same shaft. I kept thinking of how I had five or six library books back at my house, and wondering who’d take them back, and if someone’d charge my little bit of an estate for the overdue fines. It’s funny what goes through a person’s head when he’s in a tight corner.

Just before my light picked out the little boy, he changed his tune. I didn’t recognize the new one, but his Dad told me after we got out that it was the Motor Cops theme song. I only mention it because for a moment or two there it sounded like someone else was singing the la-las and dum-dee-dums along with him, kind of harmonizing. I’m sure it was only that soft roaring sound I mentioned, but it gave me a hell of a bump, I can tell you. Garin heard it, too; I could see him a little bit in the light from my flash, and he looked almost as scared as I felt. The sweat was pouring down his face, and his shirt was stuck to his chest like with glue.

Then he points and says, “I think I see him! I do see him! There he is! Seth! Seth!” He went running for him, stumbling over the rubble and rocking like a drunk but somehow keeping his balance. All I could do was pray God he didn’t fall into one of those old support baulks. It’d probably crumble to powder just like the bones we’d stepped on to get where we were, and that would be all she wrote.

Then I saw the kid, too-you couldn’t very well mistake the jeans and the red shirt he was wearing. He was standing in front of the place where the shaft ended. You could tell it wasn’t just another cave-in because it was a smooth rock-face-what we call a “slide”-and not piled up rubble. There was a crack running down the middle of it, and for a minute I thought the kid was trying to work his way into it. That scared me plenty, because he looked small enough to do it if he wanted to, and a couple of big guys like us would never have been able to follow him. He wasn’t trying to do that, though. When I got a little closer, I saw that he was standing perfectly still. I must have been fooled by the shadows my little flashlight threw, that’s all I can figure.

His Dad got to him first and pulled him into his arms. He had his face against the boy’s chest, so he didn’t see what I did, and I only saw it for a second. It wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks on me that time. The boy was grinning, and it wasn’t a nice grin, either. The corners of his mouth looked like they were pulled most of the way up to his ears, and I could see all his teeth. His face was so stretched that his eyes looked like they were bulging right out of his head. Then his father held him back so he could give him a kiss, and that grin went away. I was glad. While it was on his face, he didn’t hardly look like the little boy I’d first met at all.

“What did you think you were doing?” his father asks him. He was shouting but it wasn’t really much of a scold even so, because he gave the boy a kiss practically between every word. “Your mother is scared to death! Why did you do it? Why in God’s name did you come in here?”

What he replied was the last real talking he did, and remember it well. “Colonel Henry and Major Pike told me to,” he said. “They told me I could see the Ponderosa. In there.” He pointed at the crack running down the middle of the slide. “But I couldn’t. Ponderosa all gone.” Then he laid his head down on his father’s shoulder and closed his eyes, like he was all tuckered out.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “I’ll walk behind you and to your right, so I can shine the light on your footing. Don’t linger, but don’t run, either. And for Christ’s sake try not to bump any of the jackstraws holding this place up.”

Once we actually had the boy, that groaning in the ground seemed louder than ever. I fancied I could even hear the timbers creaking. I’m not usually an imaginative sort, but it sounded to me like they were trying to talk. Telling us to get out while we still could.

I couldn’t resist shining my light into that crack once before we went, though. When I bent down I could feel air rushing out, so it wasn’t just a crack in the slide; there was some sort of rift on the other side of it. Maybe a cave. The air coming out was as hot as air coming out of a furnace grate, and it stank something fierce. One whiff and I held my breath so I wouldn’t vomit. It was the old-campfire smell, but a thousand times heavier. I’ve racked my brains trying to think of how something that deep underground could smell so bad, and keep coming up empty. Fresh air is the only thing that makes things stink like that, and that means some sort of vent, but Deep Earth has been burrowing in these parts ever since 1957, and if there had been a vent big enough to manufacture a stench like that, surely it would’ve been found and either plugged or followed to see where it went.

The crack looked like a zigzag S or a lightning-bolt, and there didn’t seem like there was anything much in it to see, just a thickness of rock-at least two feet, maybe three. But I did get the sense of space opening out on the other side, and there was that hot air whooshing out, too. I thought I maybe saw a bunch of red specks like embers dancing in there, but that must have been my imagination, because when I blinked, they were gone.

I turned back to Garin and told him to move.

“In a second, just give me a second,” he says. He’d taken the boy’s little black cowboy boot out of his shirt and was sliding it on his foot. It was the tenderest thing. All you’d ever need to know about a father’s love was in the way he did that. “Okay,” he says when he had it right. “Let’s go.”

“Right,” I says. “Just try to keep your footing.”

We went as quick as we could, but it still seemed to take forever. In the dreams I mentioned, I always see the little circle of my Penlite sliding over skulls. There weren’t that many that I saw when we were actually in there, and some of those had fallen apart, but in my dreams it seems like there are thousands, wall to wall skulls sticking up round like eggs in a carton, and they are all grinning just like the little one was grinning when his Dad picked him up, and in their eyesockets I see little red flecks dancing around, like embers rising from a wildfire.

It was a pretty awful walk, all in all. I kept looking ahead for daylight, and for the longest time I didn’t see it. Then, when I finally did (just a little tiny square I could have covered with the ball of my thumb at first), it seemed like the sound of the hornfels was louder than ever, and I made up my mind that the shaft was going to wait until we were almost out, then fall on us like a hand swatting flies. As if a hole in the ground could think! But when you’re actually in a spot like that, your imagination is apt to go haywire. Sound carries funny; ideas do, too.

And I might as well say that I still have a few funny ideas about Rattlesnake Number One. I’m not going to say it was haunted, not even in a “backstage report” no one may ever read, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t, either. After all, what place would be more likely to have ghosts than a mine full of dead men? But as to the other side of that slide of rock, if I actually did see something there-those dancing red lights-it wasn’t ghosts.

The last hundred feet were the hardest. It took everything I had in me not to just shove past Mr Garin and sprint for it, and I could see on his face that he felt the same way. But we didn’t, probably because we both knew we’d scare the rest of the family even worse if we came busting out in a panic. We walked out like men instead, Garin with his boy in his arms, fast asleep.

That was our “little scare”.

Mrs Garin and both the two older kids were crying, and they all made of Seth, petting him and kissing him like they could hardly believe he was there. He woke up and smiled at them, but he didn’t make any more words, just kind of “gobbled”. Mr Garin staggered off to the powder magazine, which is a little metal shed where we keep our blasting stuff, and sat down with his back against the side. He laced his hands together between his knees and then dropped his forehead into them. I knew just how he felt. His wife asked him if he was all right, and he said yes, he only needed to rest and catch his breath. I said I did, too. I asked Mrs Garin if she’d take her kids back over to the ATV. I said maybe Jack would like to show his brother our Miss Mo. She kind of laughed like you do when nothing is funny and said, “I think we’ve had enough adventures for one day, Mr Symes. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but all I want to do is get out of here.”

I said I understood, and I think she understood that I needed to have a little talk with her man before we picked up our marbles and called it a game. Not that I didn’t need to collect myself some, too! My legs felt like rubber. I went over to the powder magazine and sat down beside Mr Garin.

“If we report this, there’s going to be a lot of trouble,” I said. “For the company and also for me. I probably wouldn’t end up fired, but I could.”

“I’m not going to say a word,” he said, raising his head out of his hands and looking me in the eye. And I don’t think anyone will hold it against him if I add that he was crying. Any father would have cried, I think, after a scare like that. I was near tears myself, and I hadn’t ever set eyes on the lot of them until that day. Every time I thought of the tender way Garin looked, slipping that tiny boot on his boy’s foot, it raised a lump in my throat.

“I would appreciate that no end,” I said.

“Nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t even know how to start.”

I was starting to feel a little embarrassed by then. “Come on, now,” I said. “We did it together, and all’s well that ends well.”

I helped him to his feet, and we walked back toward the others. We were most of the way there when he put his hand on my arm and stopped me.

“You shouldn’t let anybody go in there,” he said. “Not even if the engineers say they can shore it up. There’s something wrong in there.”

“I know there is,” I said. “I felt it.” I thought of the grin on the boy’s face-even now, all these months later, it makes me shiver to think of it-and almost told him that his boy had felt it, too. Then I decided not to. What good would it have done?

“If it were up to me,” he said, “I’d toss a charge from your powder magazine in there and bring the whole thing down. It’s a grave. Let the dead rest in it.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said, and God must have thought so, too, because He did it on His own not two weeks later. There was an explosion in there. And, so far as I know, no cause ever assigned.

Garin kind of laughed and shook his head and said, “Two hours on the road and I won’t even be able to believe this happened.”

I told him maybe that was just as well.

“But one thing I won’t forget,” he said, “is that Seth talked today. Not just words or phrases only his family could understand, either. He actually talked. You don’t know how amazing that is, but we do.” He waved at his family, who had got back into the ATV by then. “And if he can do it once, he can do it again.” And maybe he has, I hope so. I’d like to know, too. I’m curious about that boy, and in more ways than one. When I gave him his little action figure woman, he smiled at me and kissed my cheek. A sweet kiss, too, though I seemed to catch a little whiff on the mine of his skin… like ashes and meat and cold coffee.

We “bid a fond adieu” to the China Pit and I drove them back to the office trailer where their car was. So far as I could see, no one took much notice of us, even though I drove right down Main Street. Desperation on a Sunday afternoon in the hot weather is like a ghost-town.

I remember standing there at the bottom of the trailer steps, waving as they drove off toward the awful thing Garin’s sister said was waiting for them at the end of their trip-a senseless driveby shooting. All of them waved back… except for Seth, that is. Whatever was in that mine, I think we were fortunate to get out… and for him to then be the only survivor of that shooting in San Jose! It’s almost as if he’s got what they call “a charmed life”, isn’t it?

As I said, I dreamed about it in Peru-mostly the skull-dream, and of shining my light into that crack-but I didn’t think of it much until I read Audrey Wyler’s letter, the one that was tacked on the bulletin board when I came back from Peru. Sally lost the envelope, but said it just came addressed to “The Mining Company of Desperation”. Reading it reinforced my belief that something happened out there when Seth was underbill (as we say in the business), something it might be wrong to lie about, but I did lie. How could I not, when I didn’t even know what that something was?

Still, that grin.

That grin.

He was a nice little boy, and I am so glad he wasn’t killed in the Rattlesnake (and he could have been; we all could have been) or with the rest of them in San Jose, but…

The grin didn’t seem to belong to the boy at all. I wish I could say better, but that’s as close as I can come.

I want to set down one more thing. You may remember me saying that Seth talked about “the old mine”, but that I didn’t connect that with the Rattlesnake shaft because hardly anyone in town knew about it, let alone through-travelers from Ohio. Well, I started thinking about what he’d said again while I was standing there, watching the dust from their car settle. That, and how he ran across the office trailer, right to the pictures of the China Pit on the bulletin board, like he’d been there a thousand times before. Like he knew. I had an idea then, and that cold feeling came with it. I went back inside to look at the pictures, knowing it was the only way I could lay that feeling to rest.

There were six in all, aerial photos the company had commissioned in the spring. I got the little magnifier off my key-chain and ran it over them, one after another. My gut was rolling, telling me what I was going to see even before I saw it. The aerials were taken long before the blast-pattern that uncovered the Rattlesnake shaft, so there was no sign of it in them. Except there was. Remember me writing that he tapped his way around the pictures, saying: “Here it is, here’s what I want to see, here’s the mine'? We thought he was talking about the pit-mine, because that’s what the pictures were of. But with my magnifying loupe I could see the prints his fingers had left on the shiny surface of the photos. Every one was on the south face, where we uncovered the shaft. That was what he was telling us he wanted to see, not the pit-mine but the shaft-mine the pictures didn’t even show. I know how crazy that must sound, but I have never doubted it. He knew it was there. To me, the marks of his finger on the photographs-not just one photo but all six-prove it. I know it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, but that doesn’t change what I know. It’s like something in that mine sensed him going past on the highway and called out to him. And of all my questions, there’s maybe only one that really matters: Is Seth Garin all right? I would write Garin’s sister and ask, have once or twice actually picked up a pen to do that, and then I remember that I lied, and a lie is hard for me to admit. Also, do I really want to prod a sleeping dog that might turn out to have big teeth? I don’t think so, but…

There should be more to say, maybe, but there isn’t. It all comes back to the grin.

I don’t like the way he grinned.

This is my true statement of what happened; God, if only I knew what it was I saw!