Erica stood in the door of her room and watched the owner’s daughter, a sallow teen with stringy hair, make the bed. He was so huge and she was like a greased pipe cleaner. She turned with a start when Erica cleared her throat.
“Oh, miss, you gave me such a scare!”
“Sorry,” Erica said. Here eyes were everywhere, every shadow seemed to jump and crawl.
“I got the room all cleaned up for you,” the girl said, “in case you changed your mind about leavin’ us?”
“You didn’t see anything? Find any of the hornets I saw?”
The girl tugged the bedspread up and fluffed a pillow. “I found a big old spider, but we’re in the woods here. You’re gonna have them. They don’t hurt nobody, though. He was all curled up dead, anyhow.”
She thinks I’m crazier than a shithouse rat. That was one of her mother’s. Pal, shit-house rat. When had they become hers? Erica crossed the threshold into the room. “No,” she said. “Thank you. I’m going.” Erica popped the handle on her slick black suitcase and wheeled it into the bathroom.
She was waiting for herself in the mirror, dark circles framing eyes that were a little too big. Had the wasps been a dream? Could it have been something so pedestrian, so weak? She planted her hands on the side of the sink and pain flared. No, she’d been stung by something. Maybe it was the sleeping pills and the stress mixed with an adrenalin dump from the sting. Maybe there had only been one hornet and her mind had produced the others. Maybe, maybe… maybe she was just going to wash her face and get the fuck out of here.
* * *
George stood in front of himself, hands on the sink, mouth open. His reflection had a coated tongue and the shirt he’d passed-out in last night hung off boney shoulders. His eyes felt like wooden ball bearings painted to resemble a person’s. He squinted. The paint was peeling. Metallic-blonde wisps hung down over his forehead. The guy in the glass looked about forty, maybe forty-five. Today was George’s thirty-fourth birthday. He pointed at the older fella in the mirror.
“You need a drink, boy.”
A triple fall of bells wafted into the bathroom. The old boy in the mirror lifted an eyebrow. It came again. Doorbell. Right. George tried to imagine who might hate him enough to ring his doorbell first thing in the morning. (Well, okay, it was around ten, but “first thing” was a relative term.) That ancient excuse for an elementary school teacher, Missus Najarian, gave him the hairy eyeball every time their paths crossed but other than that his enemies list was pretty short these days. There just weren’t enough people around Shard to hate him. Besides, George was the kind of drunk who really only hurt himself. He didn’t tend to take it out on others. The bell again and now it had an insistent tone somehow.
George ran the tap (got water instead of smoke—another good day in Shard) and rinsed out his mouth. Moisture infused his tissues and brightened his mind a bit. He splashed his face and toweled off. The bell. “Comin’!” he shouted, and winced at his own volume. Nothing was louder than your own voice. He moved through the cool scent of oil-soap and old clean linens that pervaded the Victorian his parents had left him.
The house was in good order. George lived a disposable life, eating from cans and prepared trays of microwaveable fuel. There were no empty bottles lying around, drawing miniature dust devils made of fruit flies. Open the oven, now, and you’d find your Beef Eater and Bombay. George, like dear old Mom, was a hider not a cooker, though if need be he could strut a fair bit in the kitchen. And he actually enjoyed doing laundry. Lots of time to sit n’ sip in between loads so his clothes were clean and folded.
The top half of the wide front door was a stained-glass depiction of the Arc Angel Michael menacing a naked couple as they fled the garden. Mother’s little reminder that sexual congress was sinful. In spite of those baleful glass eyes, there had been a fair amount of squeaking bedsprings in the Rhode’s Boarding House during the wee hours of George’s childhood. Blue and red painted the sharp planes of his face as he reached for the crystal doorknob.
He blinked three times, carefully, deliberately, to make sure he wasn’t seeing a gin fairy. When she spoke, George was convinced—The Most Beautiful Woman in the World was standing on his doorstep. A strange emotion heated his face. Up until the last few years it had been the undercurrent of his life, but this was first time in at least the last half-decade that George Rhodes felt shame.
Erica waited a moment, another, but when the zombie in the doorway didn’t say anything, she asked, “Is this the boarding house?”
George straightened up to his full six-three. A fiery belch ratcheted up his gullet. If he opened his mouth he would douse her with used gin fumes. George nodded and smiled. He bowed his head and stepped to the side, welcoming her in like any good Southern Gentleman should. Erica paused for a second, peering into the shadowy throat of the house. It was this or sleep in her car. She conjured a smile and walked in. George exhaled his belch into the morning air once her back was to him and closed the door on it.
Erica looked around the foyer. Moldings gleamed and wide floorboards stretched away to meet the tumble of a large staircase. The air was clean and something in her midsection relaxed with the first breath. She wished she’d known to come here first. “You have a lovely home,” she said, turning to find George with his back to the scattering stained glass. He seemed a little less freak show now. It looked like the sunlight had really been punishing him. And it smelled like he’d had a serious party the night before. Well, there probably wasn’t much else to do in this shithole town. “You do let rooms, right?”
“Yup,” George thought fast. He couldn’t talk to her like this. “Would you like to sit down in the parlor for a moment, Miss…?”
“I’m Erica Mendez.”
“George Rhodes, ma’am. Would you excuse me for a just a quick second? I’ll be right back, and we’ll get you settled.” George didn’t wait for her answer. He zipped into the parlor, motioning toward a chaise longue in a large bay window, and disappeared around the corner. He was up the kitchen stairs and into the bathroom before Erica even had a chance to take a seat. She heard him close the door.
George was waiting for himself in the mirror, but something was different. The eyes were real now, not some doll maker’s approximation. He yanked himself to the side as he opened the medicine cabinet. There it was: two birds with one swig. George grabbed the big bottle of green mouthwash and drank down half of it. Now his hands wouldn’t shake and his breath wouldn’t peel the paint off the walls. He grabbed the clean shirt hanging on the back of the door and buttoned up on his way back down stairs.
Erica had pulled aside the heavy drapes and sat in a bolt of sun. She turned toward him and smiled as he walked into the room. George blinked again and grinned.
“What brings you to Shard?”
Chapter 7
Will walked along the deer trail, daydreams flowing over his mind as coins of sunlight flowed over his shoulders. A whiff of sulfur mixed with the black-tea smell of rotting leaf-litter. The coal seam must be deep here, or the smolder would fill this part of the woods with smoke. Closer to the main shaft the sticky coal smoke had stripped the trees and turned the sky white, but this was still forest. Will took a long breath.
There was every chance these woods wouldn’t even be here if the mine hadn’t caught fire. Mountaintop removal was the name of the game these days. These lovely woods would be little more than heaps of slag. He shamed himself for thinking it, but sometimes Will Two-Bears wondered if The Fire hadn’t been a good thing.
His people, the Cherokee, had husbanded the forest with fire. Every so often they would set a blaze to clear the undergrowth and open up the woods for easier hunting. This forest, like most in the Appalachians, had already been logged a few times long after most of the Cherokee had been frog-marched west. The trees shading Will’s baseball cap were only about fifty years old. Maybe the fire would keep the logging companies at bay as well. Will stepped over a fallen log. How long had it been
since a lone Cherokee hunter had walked this forest?
He smiled to himself. His people. What a load of shit. His mother had hitched off the reservation in Southern Virginia when the casinos started sprouting like questionable mushrooms. She’d found work waitressing in a little mining town a few months later and met his Irish Catholic father. Jolene Two-Bears had been used to ignoring the soot-smeared miners with their grabby hands and racist bullshit about redskin this and Pocahontas that. But Jack McFarlan’s eyes—blue diamonds in the black dust—had been kind and quick. He’d always called her ma’am and meant it. If Will had ever had any people it had been his folks.
Dad was six years in the ground now, Mom four. The explosion at the mine hadn’t taken Jack’s life, just his job. It was the job itself that took his breath away, trading black dust for pink tissue. Again, maybe The Fire had been a good thing. If Jack had been allowed to keep working, Jolene and Will might have had even less time to enjoy his quiet presence and quick, kind eyes. Will might have had more time with Mom before the depression got her. The death certificate said complications from diabetes but Will knew better. When they put Jack under the soil, Jolene got buried too. She just kept walking around for a couple of years before she realized it.
Will squinted up into the sun. A person or ghost walking with him would have been forgiven for thinking he was about to cry for a second there. He decided to smile and spit over his left shoulder instead. Jack and Jolene were under the ground on the other side of town behind the clapboard Methodist Church. The seam had sent a tongue of smoke and heat under there a few months after Jolene went in. One day—if it hadn’t started already—the ground would subside and the dead would rain down into the forge. Either way, Mom and Dad were under the earth and Will was still walking it. Keep your thoughts in the sun, William. That’s what Jack had told him when Will asked how his father could stand working down in the dark all day.
A dry stick snapped underfoot. Will stopped and looked down. Not a stick, a bone. He picked it up and turned it over. Probably a femur. It was big but not too big. Too big would have been human big. This was only dog or… “Ah-ha,” he said to himself. “Here’s some of your coyotes, Kiddo.”
Will held the bone in close, catching the dusty mustard smell from the break-exposed marrow. It was stripped clean, gleaming almost, and there were no teeth marks. Another coyote hadn’t done this. The only other predator around here large enough to take out a coyote would be a bear and that would definitely leave teeth marks. The marrow was still viscous, so it couldn’t have been ants or beetles; a bone gets all dried out by the time the critters are done with it. Will supposed a person could have killed it, but why go to such trouble to clean a single bone and then just leave it?
A crow called and Will looked up. The forest floor rolled out in front of him like slow ocean, broken by icebergs of granite. The afternoon air began its daily struggle with the oncoming cooler evening, tossing the trees and shifting the light. Everything seemed to move. Will caught a slash of bright orange on the trunk of a venerable sycamore. His lips quirked in a smile. “Radioactive Rita,” he said.
His father stepped out from behind the tree. His crow-feather hair stuck up like it always did after he took off his hardhat at the end of the day. His face was war painted with coal dust and his eyes shone bright as sapphires.
Will’s breath solidified in his throat. He dropped the coyote bone and felt it bounce off the rubber toe of his left sneaker. That was his Dad, Jack McFarlan, not thirty feet away. It didn’t look like his father. It was his father. His father was dead. Jack McFarlan was six years in the smoking dirt. He couldn’t be standing there because his lungs had silted up with microscopic flecks of anthracite and he had died. Will had held Mom’s hand and they’d thrown dirt down onto the coffin. There had been pebbles in it and they’d rattled on the pine.
“You,” Will whispered and stopped.
Jack McFarlan closed his eyes and tipped his face into the white light, then looked back at Will.
“Keep your mind in the sun,” Will said.
Jack looked at him and smiled. He slipped back behind the tree and disappeared.
“Oh, hell no.” Will didn’t think—he ran. “Dad!” The tears were already blurring the forest in front of him. “Daddy!” Will focused on the slash of Radioactive Rita and pelted over the leaves. He stubbed the shit out of his toe on a sycamore root and roughed his palm on the bark as he ran past it. His .357, Smaug, bashed against his hip. There! Jack was just cresting the next rise. How the hell had he gotten so far so fast? Stupid to ask questions. Just run. Dad was dead. None of this made sense, so Will pumped his arms and bared his teeth. “Dad!” he called. “Jack! Jack McFarlan! Wait! Stop!” Jack rolled easy in his old denim over the hill between two black oaks and passed below Will’s sight line.
About a minute later, panting and slicked in sweat, Will looked down from the top of the rise. The forest flattened out below and fanned into a hollow before breaking at the base of a granite outcropping. When he was little, the kids had all called that the “Castle Wall”. The grown-ups had called it Out Shaft Six for the tunnel opening that stared out like a blind, cyclopean eye. A thread of yellow-gray smoke dribbled up from the top. Jack McFarlan stood in the entrance. He tipped Will a wink and walked into the dark.
Will straightened up. He needed to just stop and think for a second. He hadn’t taken drugs or fallen and injured his head. He was awake so not dreaming. That left two possibilities: One, he’d gone crazy somehow. Two, that really was his dead father who’d just walked into a vent shaft for a mine that had been closed down for over two decades. Will clenched his fist. He was being fucked with. He didn’t know how or who or what was doing it, but someone was playing some kind of sick game.
He pulled Smaug and opened the cylinder. Will reached into his jeans pocket and came out with a handful of very large shells. He loaded a few teeth into his pet cybernetic dragon and flicked its jaws shut. Jack McFarlan was dead, and his son William was going in after him.
As he made his way down the slope, Will muttered to himself in a mock-whine, “Oh, no! Don’t run up the stairs, big-chested starlet!” He stopped at the open maw of the shaft. The heat wasn’t too bad, but there was definitely some smolder down there. The tang of sulfur was much stronger. “The killer’s calling from inside the house.” Will pulled a penlight from a ring on his belt and the beam sliced into the dark. It picked out rocks and leaves… and bootprints. He thumbed the safety off Smaug. Thing was: big-chested starlets never carried huge handguns. Maybe he was more the skinny-babysitter-who-has-to-save-the-innocent-children type.
“This is Constable McFarlan of the Shard Police Department,” he warned. (That was kind of funny—Of the Shard Police Department. He was the department.) He thought a moment; a code 22 would work. “You are trespassing on private property. I’ll give you a three count to come on out.” Will waited two beats, “Didn’t think so. Okay, I’m coming in there. I’m armed and totally freaked out.”
Will walked into the cave straight-backed. The tunnel was high here, fully bored and supported with healthy steel girders. He had a good three or four feet of clearance off the top of his cap before the smoke condensed into an upside-down stream. He could smell it, but he wasn’t breathing it much. The lamp of the world faded behind him as he stepped farther in—ten feet, twenty feet, fifty feet. Will stopped.
“Fuck am I doing?” Real cops could call for back up before running into an abandoned mine after their dead fathers. Real cops had partners and clever little radios. Will had a cell phone in his back pocket with a dry battery because he’d forgotten to charge the damn thing again. Not that there was much signal to be had in Shard anyway, even when a body wasn’t halfway to hell inside a mineshaft. Smaug was getting heavy. Will took a deep breath. “Hello?” Nada. Shit. Okay, what was he going to do? He could go on into the deepening dark and probably get lost after the first turn, or he could back right the hell on up and get himself into some
light.
William.
“Daddy?” The gloom ate the echo. Will squinted his eyes shut—darker in his mind, but it was his dark—and shook his head. “You ain’t my Daddy,” he whispered. “Jack McFarlan’s in the ground.”
You’re in the ground, William.
Will opened his eyes. He was being huckstered. That voice (Was it a voice, had he actually heard anything?) wasn’t coming from his father. Down is down and up is up and the dead don’t come back. “Whoever you are,” he called, “I’m not buying this horseshit.” He calmed at the sound of his own voice, but his gun hand shook. The low light greased Smaug’s spine. This was the first time he had ever drawn his weapon on duty. Will eased the safety on and holstered the little dragon. Bad things happened around guns. Ultimately, every single one came off the assembly line looking to put someone down.
He took another step, his Chucks silent on the dusty rock. The shaft sloped down and the heat from the smolder fought the earth’s tendency to cool. The pen torch was a strong MagLite LED, but it only gave him about twenty feet of his immediate future. Will followed the waffle-prints of work boots for another couple of minutes. Whoever this crazy bastard was, he was going to get them both into some serious trouble if he didn’t stop soon. Even if the seam was mostly burned out here it meant the integrity of the tunnel had burned out with it. Will panned the white circle up the walls. They were scraped and gouged, chipped. This part of the seam had played out even before The Fire. The company should have closed this shaft a long time ago. Well, they’d never been known for their safety record.
Will slid up on an opening in the wall, an offshoot shaft. It was smaller, only about man height and three feet wide. He threw the MagLite beam into it. The floor angled away at a forty-five degree angle. Will tracked the light up. No smoke here, just the earth’s stony breath. The boot tracks continued on down the main tunnel without a pause for this tributary. That was fine with him.