. . . a new abyss yawned indefinitely below the seat of the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it. . . . so far as they could ascertain, the void below was infinite.
“The Transition of Juan Romero” . H. P. Lovecraft (1944)
It was a little past ten o’clock on a Friday night. Kimberly Haas, expert and easy, was riding the 580 rapids, steering a Titan northbound on that mighty freeway. Her half of the river was all ruby tail-lights, and the oncoming stream was all diamonds. What a rush! thought Kimberly, like riding a dinosaur—one that could do seventy.
She was hauling twenty-K gallons along the star-spangled rim of the San Francisco Bay, and the Bay was a galaxy in a space movie, this huge array of blazing lights. Black void at its center studded with islands and necklaced with bridges. Kim Haas, starship trooper . . .
“Hey, Alex,” she said to her partner, “Starship Troopers!”
They laughed. This was their sixth run driving for Kleenco. Though the pickup-points varied, the kind of load they hauled never did. Tonight: a pharmaceutical company in Hayward, a pesticide manufacturer in Emeryville, and a plastics plant in Oakland: solvents, sludges, and still-bottoms. A witches’ brew of industrial chemistry.
“Let’s get a brewski,” Kim said. “We’re almost there.”
“I dunno. We’re almost late now, and Chip seemed really pissed.”
“Yeah, but he’s always pissed. And we’re always gonna be late!” Kim, though in her early twenties, was already tired of men’s pre-wired predictable hissy-fits. “We’re always gonna be late, because he never gives us enough time, and because while we’re pickin’ up there’s always some holdup or other in loading this shit at three or four different places every night!”
Alex nodded, staring at the highway, and feeling his own doubts about this easy money they’d been amazed to fall into these last few weeks. Brooding on the river of lights he said, “True that. But he did make a really big point of it tonight, comin straight back.”
Kim looked at him with his new Zapata ’stache—still a bit thin as yet—and thought that she still liked him just as she had in high school. Basically a nice guy, a bit touchy sometimes. She was a white country kid whose dad had driven big rigs for the vineyards, Alex a brown country kid whose several uncles still drove trucks back in Mexico. Since high school neither one of them had done anything even close to as cool as driving this tanker. Kim had clerked at the Circle K and Alex had rented out scaffolding and weed-whackers for Action Rents.
And look at them right now: piloting this beautiful beast over the colossal crooked frame of the Richmond Bridge, cruising like a star-liner above the red-and-white river of traffic, the whole Bay encircling them with galactic scenery out of some sci-fi flick.
Kim didn’t want to have any reservations about this totally cool job. But there was a side to it that nagged at her.
“Toxics,” she said, as if trying the word out. Then a little more forcefully, “That’s why he’s always so uptight. All this is illegal.” She waited, uneasy, hanging that one out there. It had gone five nights unspoken but now she’d said it: their unseen passenger, the truth.
He tossed it back: “Well duuuhhh! But look. Hey. Let’s get a brewski. What’s a few minutes. If he wants us on time, he’s gotta give us more time.”
They were just south of Petaluma, and Kim eased the rig down an off ramp, steering the big tanker rocking and squeaking through dark streets to where a liquor store was the only thing alive for blocks around. They left the truck idling, and jumped down from the cab.
The store’s neon shed a sick greenish light on the pavement. The sidewalks were eerily empty.
No. There was someone sitting on the dark curb just beyond the store. Someone big struggling to his feet . . . her feet? Yes. A bulky bag-lady in multi-layered shabby clothes.
Odd, how slowly she rose up, like a gradually inflating balloon of dirty rags. The two of them found themselves turning towards her, watching her rise. Then, just as they caught themselves and began to turn away from her, she moved with sudden energy, shambling crabwise—surprisingly quick for her great size—and intercepted them before they reached the store’s entry.
Her face was swollen and crusted with dirt; her breath gusted cold and vile from her wide, loose mouth. They shifted to steer around her, but her bigness seemed somehow to slow down their movements, as if she exerted a kind of gravitational pull.
“Drink up, kids!” she hissed, and thrust a bottle at them. Kim received it, and felt its cold in her palm. The huge derelict winked at them. A dizzying chemical whiff, like a still-bottom, came off of her.
Then she pulled her own bottle from her rags, winked again, hoisted it, and drank. She drank obscenely. Her flabby throat working up and down, her dirty jowls quivering, her scabby eyes squeezed shut in the bliss of guzzling.
Kim, flustered, stammered some thanks for the beer as they retreated, and hustled away from the hulk. When she looked at the bottle in the light of the store’s entry, she was surprised to it was perfectly clean and new looking. Great Old Ones Ale, in gold gothic lettering, arched across its label.
“What was that all about?” muttered Alex as they hustled into the store. At the counter, a wino was puzzling out his pennies and dimes but when they got to the register with the sixer, the huge eerie lurker was gone.
They got back in the cab and back on the freeway, both silent until Alex said, “Man! She smelled like . . . ”
They both tried to think of the precise word, groping for it until Kim said, “She smelled like the kinda shit we truck.”
“That’s it,” said Alex. And they shared a moment of strange self-consciousness about this grand rig they were so jazzed about piloting. Here was their tanker, huge, towering above the traffic, rolling down the public highway, heavy with high-caliber toxins. High, wide, and handsome their tanker cruised up the 101.
Alex cracked a beer.
Kim looked doubtfully at the bottle of Great Old Ones Ale in the cupholder. “These micro-breweries and their weird-ass names. No way I’m drinkin’ it,” and took one of theirs instead.
Kim swung them off 101. They rolled down a narrower highway through darker countryside. Sleeping orchards, a few vineyards, some country houses slid past them under the silver moon.
She geared their rig up through the switchbacks of the hills, the oaks gestured in the sweep of their lights. The big truck’s headlights set all those crooked trees slow-dancing with their crooked shadows. Gaps here and there showed the young truckers fragments of the jeweled Santa Marta plain below and behind them.
“You gotta meet my Auntie some day,” Alex said, scanning that view. “She’s like half Miwok or something. Anyway she told me this mountain Chip’s mine is in was like a Spirit Place—like where you go to fast and have visions? Go to like, face your demons and stuff.”
“Spirits! Rad. I wish there was something cool like that about it. That would be something, but I think what these guys are doing up here is just plain old creepy and criminal.”
“Yeah, but we don’t really know that, not for sure. Anyway, we’re definitely good and late now. Maybe he’s just gonna fire us. When Chip said get back on time, he put a lot into it.”
“I think he sounded scared,” Kim said hauling on the wheel. “He just doesn’t wanna stay late.”
“Whaddya mean late? He sleeps up there at the mine! What does he care?”
“He just doesn’t like to wait up for us. He wants to go to bed.”
Alex turned his face away, irritated.
“Maybe, but I got the feeling he’s got company coming that he doesn’t want us to meet.”
“Where the hell do you get that idea?”
She mimicked Chip’s scoldings, “ ‘I wancha here, downloaded, an outta here by eleven-thirty! For once! Can’ya manage it?’ Why else would he be so pissed? He’s scared.”
Three quarters up the hill, the road mounted a broad shoulder of the mountain, and halfway out across that shoulder was the gated compound of the Quicksilver Mine. Through gaps in the treeline, fragments of Santa Marta’s jeweled plain glittered here and there below and behind them.
Chip was already rolling the cyclone gate back. Their headlights latticed his scrawny little body in the chain-links’ shadows as the gate slid aside. He had his rubber boots and rubber apron on, and his respirator was hanging by its straps from his skinny old neck. They pulled in and he stomped over, mounted the step-up and thrust his head in Kim’s window.
“You goddam kids think you signed on for a day at the beach?”
Very pissed. His back-sloped forehead suggested some browless animal, maybe a possum. “I can’t believe you come a half hour late after what I told you! You two swing your ass up there, you squirt, an’ you leave!”
At the hill’s crest was the mouth of the Quicksilver’s shaft, breathing out the white light of arc-lamps at the stars. Down near the gate was the office trailer, and beyond that was a sizeable pyramid of disposal drums five tiers high, with just enough moonlight on them to sketch their rims and bulges. It had been explained to both young drivers that these were filled inside the shaft from the holding tank, and then conveyed down the tracks in the ore carts left over from the mercury mining days. Much farther below, they were told, the drums were stacked securely in passages carved in the mine’s walls.
The only part of this process that Kim and Alex had ever seen was the offload hose snaking from their tanker up through the mouth of the shaft, as they sat idling and running their offload pump.
Initially they’d thought “Great, an environmentally correct operation!” But somewhere in the course of delivering a hundred thousand gallons, they’d noted that the great pyramid of drums had never altered its outline. It suggested to Kim one of those old jungle ruins the Maya or Inca left—moonlit and with an aura of ancient evil—erected for strange gods and human sacrifice.
Chip, radiating anger and impatience, clung to the door of the cab as Kim backed the tanker up to within thirty yards of the mine’s mouth. There, Chip jumped down and hurried into the shaft, pulling his mask on, to re-emerge a moment later dragging the fill-hose.
Was there any possibility this hose did fill a holding tank inside . . . ? Naw. They were just squirting all this black poison straight into the shaft, to soak into the naked earth. Chip’s gnomish fury, and his expression of disgust, proved that if nothing else did.
“ . . . just can’t believe you kids! Unship your out-take!”
Chip helped them couple the fill-hose to the tanker’s offload spout, and switch the pump on. “I got people comin’,” he told them. “You squirt your goddam load, you uncouple, an’ you drive the fuck outta here. Can’ya do that? Can’ya manage it?”
He stomped back down to the office trailer.
They sat in the cab, a couple of scolded kids. “Just tell me straight,” Kim said grimly. “Do you think Chip’s just a really grouchy old man, or do you think he’s afraid?”
“Okay. How I heard about this job was my cousin Nolo, who was drivin’ for these guys. He left real sudden down to L.A., but I got him to give me their number before he went, couldn’t believe he was dumping a gig like this. Now maybe I’m thinking Nolo got it right.”
Over the sound of their offload pump they heard a vehicle coming up the highway. Headlights swung in through the gate. A big dark van stood idling there.
Chip hustled out of the office and stood by the van’s driver’s side. He was talking to the driver, a slight cringe in his posture. He made a gesture toward the tanker, seeming to dismiss it, to be explaining something.
The tanker’s offload pump cut off. Kim and Alex got out quickly, eager to be gone before they met whoever had just driven that van in. They uncoupled their offload spout, coiled it onto its rack, and got back into the cab. They were hurrying to the max, while at the same time trying to seem casual.
Before Kim could slip the tanker into gear, the dark van rolled forward, driving right up into their headlights. It seemed to intend coming bumper-to-bumper with them, but just a few yards away from them it swung right, showing them its glossy black flank, and idled there, its driver’s head profiled in the tanker’s lights.
The driver turned his head and faced them directly, deliberately showing them his face, faintly smiling. A startling face, its features finely chiseled. For several slow beats he blocked them there, staring. Then he slipped his brake, and eased his van slowly up to the shaft-mouth.
Kim steered the tanker down the slope and into its slot beside the office. They jumped out and hustled down to Alex’s old Chevy pickup. Usually Kim felt the contrast, felt diminished switching the big rig for her or Alex’s four-wheeler. But tonight, the pickup felt light and frisky, a godsend—like an escape pod from a big spaceship that was blowing up.
Alex took the curves fast, and that was fine with Kim.
“What was that look?” he said. “Like he was showing us his face.”
“No,” Kim replied, her eyes fiercely fixed on the road. “He was looking through our headlights, trying to see our faces.”
“How could he see anything?” Alex asked.
“You see his eyes? I almost think he could see us through our headlights. That was one spooky guy. You know what? Money or no money, maybe I don’t wanna keep working here, much as I love driving this rig.”
“Me either.”
She glanced at him gratefully. “The thing is, I’m seriously broke.”
Alex gave her his hey-girl smile. “Check this out. I gotta friend I can move in with practically for free, an you could come too.”
“Wow, thanks, but just friends, okay?”
“C’mon, gimme some credit. But, hey, you wanna go out tonight? The Red Elvises are at the Phoenix.”
“No shit?” They cracked two beers, from their after-work sixer they kept in whichever ride had brought them up to work at the mine. The old pickup dove down toward the lamp-starred Santa Marta plain as they talked music.
Sol Lazarian parked his van well downslope of the shaft-mouth, so his soldiers would have to climb a bit with their burdens before carrying them down into the shaft. It was tricky footing down there, and he wanted them warmed up for the work.
Lazarian smilingly thought of tonight’s task as “compounding the assets” of his employer, Lou Bonifacio of New Jersey: they were putting two of Bonifacio’s dead enemies inside one of Bonifacio’s toxic dumps in California.
Rather than hide his face, Lazarian had given the drivers of that tanker a good look at it. A couple of kids—a girl and a young man. They’d brought, like him, their offering to this place. Had they felt its aura?
Sol thought it unlikely. He himself had frightened them, as he’d meant to do, but they, being young, had probably not sensed the terrible magic of this ground.
The driver before them, an older Latino, had perhaps sensed it and quit. The driver before him was still here—down in the shaft where Sol had put him. He hadn’t sensed anything. He had just been running his mouth off one evening in the tavern he favored.
Sol shouldered the heavier of the two bodybags and led briskly upslope with it. His two helpers were slower. Big, bearded Junior Lee carried the two satchels of weights. Sonny Beasely—almost as big as Junior Lee, but an edgier guy with acne-scarred cheeks—had the lighter bodybag.
“Look at ’im,” muttered Junior, impressed. “That sumbitch musta gone two-forty at least,” referring to the corpse Lazarian toted so lightly. Trudging up after, the pair watched the big man—so light of foot—leave them farther and farther behind.
Sonny grunted, low voiced, “Don’t it seem strange doin’ this? Fuckin ocean’s just five miles west.”
“Said we’re goin’ way down in.”
“So someone else could just walk way down in, and find these stiffs there!”
“Maybe we’re gonna bury ’em down there.”
“If we’re gonna bury ’em, we could bury ’em just as deep up in these hills, without goin’ down a fuckin’ mineshaft.”
They saved their breath for the rest of the climb. Waiting above them, Lazarian stood backlit by the shaft. His dreamy smile was invisible to them as he watched them come. Their faces were a quarter-turned to each other as they climbed, trading doubts perhaps, showing brief profiles of effort and unease.
Did these two simpletons feel the power here? Yes, rudimentary though their spirits were, Lazarian read in their eyes that they felt it as they came up and faced the shaft-mouth. Uneasily they registered the aura of that big, dark gullet.
Click. The image of them in this instant strobed in his mind’s eye, the way they looked right now in their moment of uneasy conference, repeating, repeating as if his visual cortex was a projector whose sprocket gear was slipping. When younger, these little epiphanies had unnerved him. Now he knew them to be a kind of signature radiation which his prey emitted as they neared death—like that given off by particles that were swallowed in a Black Hole.
“You need a breather?” Sol asked when they joined him up in the lip of the shaft-mouth.
“No! (gasp) Good to go!”
“No way, Sol!”
“Okay. So let’s pop on the masks, guys!” said genial Sol.
They all three set down their burdens and put on their masks, respirators with complex double filters that looked like the mouth-parts of insects. Even before entering, just standing here in the shaft’s mouth the air was awesome. Sonny and Junior gaped at each other as they struggled with their straps. The vapors were a waft of pure uncanniness, moving through their braincells like the creepy fore-tremors of a major acid high.
Sol Lazarian was no less awed than they were. It was a reek so potent it became deafening, a pandemonium of stenches impacting the mind like a chorus of shrieking angels, a mob of divine sopranos gone mad.
His soldiers, watching Lazarian put his mask on, felt an identical little chill.
The big man’s beauty was always a little unbelievable seen up close: the carven features, the rosebud mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes two pools of luminous candor. Shocking, though, when half that face was holstered in the mask, and you felt no mismatch between those lovely eyes, and what looked like the jaws of a huge bug.
“Man, this air is messin’ me up, Sol,” Sonny croaked through the crude amplifier. “You could sell it to junkies.”
“Relax.” Lazarian’s voice came out mellow, almost unmangled by the mask. “Breathe through your filters, you’ll be fine. And listen: count your steps going down. We think the guy running this place for us is ripping us off, taking other deliveries on the side. So count your steps down so we can check the fill-level.”
He doubted his laborers could show the concentration for a count. His real aim was to create a pretext for leaving them down there while he went back up for the weights and bags he was going to use on them in their turn. They took up their burdens and lanterns again, and he led them down into the shaft of the old Quicksilver Mine.
Here in the well-lit shaft-mouth they were in a stage set. There was a holding tank for delivered toxins, and a little stack of empty drums to be filled from that tank. There was a donkey engine mounted on the track, and some carts linked to it by cable—everything needed for lowering sealed drums of toxins carefully into the shaft for clean storage.
But sixty yards down, the rails gave out, recycled long ago for their steel. Below that point, as they pushed their bubble of light down the steepening pitch, there was only the black, six-inch fill-hose running along down the shaft floor beside a crude staircase of rail-less cross-ties. And as they descended, their lanterns’ light made the hose’s shadow twitch and shift, like a giant house snake, the resident genius of this place dancing down shaft beside them.
Ever deeper they sank down through a strange, ethereal inferno. Down here it wasn’t the men who sweated out into the air, but the air that sweated itself into the men, air like dragon’s breath, a micro-blizzard of molecular razors, and the brew that exhaled it was perhaps the perfect human solvent.
At this thought Lazarian’s smile bloomed within his mask, a secret flower.
Even sooner than Lazarian had expected, they reached the black pool. It was always a shock encountering it. Its stillness seemed to mask a secret aggression, as if this slug of earth-socketed poison—more than a mile in depth—had stealthily been hastening up to meet them, and had, just an instant ago, paused, pretending immobility, its flat black eye dazzling their lights back at them, its cold breath licking the skin of their faces like a demon’s caustic tongue.
Oh, there was great power here. He had not been wrong to cross a continent with these corpses expressly to offer them here. This pool was Death’s most absolute orifice, the threshold of a perfect annihilation.
He watched his soldiers awkwardly crouching, unlimbering wire, cutters, and weights from the satchels. Their dazed unease was understandable, entering this place for the first time. Even these morons sensed what was here.
“So what was your count, guys?” he asked them. Smiled again within his mask to see their eyes’ identical looks of guilty alarm.
It made him wonder: were such crude life-forms as these an insult if offered in sacrifice? To the Power that he had from the first felt to be hidden in this shaft, were two such primitive souls worse than no sacrifice at all? Come to that, were even the slightly more intelligent, slightly more dangerous men inside the body bags also too crude, too worthless an offering?
How could he know? On the threshold of such a Mystery as Lazarian sensed down here, who did know the rules? In the end, his own instinctive sense of a presence, his Awe—that was the real offering. His soul’s readiness was the incense he burnt on the altar. The sacrifices themselves must always be guesswork, mere gesture. They displayed his devotion, whether or not the god here valued them.
Granting all this, it was Lazarian’s intuition that told him he did right. Every life, however simple, in passing through Death’s membrane, forced open a seam between the space-time of this world and the unknowable Outside. Every death created a brief aperture through which something might be glimpsed.
“Never mind, guys,” Lazarian said. “I kept count. They’re overfilled.” He pulled two fat packets of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, and waggled them. “I know how neat and tight your wiring’s going to be, so I want you to take your bonuses now.” Their eyes crinkled above their masks—so pleased, pocketing the cash!
And Lazarian would send them into the pool with their money still in pocket. Like grave goods in the ancient world’s funerals, it was a ceremonial responsibility. Death would reveal nothing to those who tried to get revelation for a bargain price.
He told the men, “I’m going up to talk to the gate-man. Weight them heavy. I’ll be back down before you get both of them wired.”
Long minutes later, though they could no longer see Lazarian’s ascending light, Sonny’s voice was still cautiously low:
“You believe this stench?”
Junior—slightly dazed, his eyes goggled—shook his head. He was looping wire around the middle of the smaller of the two bodies, and threading the wire through a ten-pound weight-disc. “Fuckin smell feels like it’s leakin’ in through my skin!”
Their mask-muted voices rang strange to them, like buried men speaking from their graves. “Lift ’im a little higher,” Junior said, as he threaded the wire through another weight.
The gaseous air lay like a lubricant mist on everything. The weight slipped from his grip. It rolled, bounced off a lower tie, and jumped into the pool. The pair recoiled to either side from the tongue of black slop thrown back from the splash.
“You dipstick!”
“It slipped! Shoot me!”
“Don’t slip!”
The booming of their angry voices suddenly subdued them. The after-splash of the weight into the pool made the pond gently vibrate, and its rim kiss the walls of the shaft:
slap-suck, slap-suck . . .
The echoes took forever to die down. It seemed to Sonny a long time that they crouched there, listening. He wondered if the air was stoning him, messing with his time sense. He was crouched there, meaning to get back to work, but not doing it.
It was Junior who got them moving.
“Tilt ’im up again.”
They got back into it. Sonny manipulated the corpse while Junior paid off the wire.
“They were so stiff when we loaded ’em,” Junior said. “They’re a bitch to handle all floppy like this!”
They’d crossed the country in a little under forty-eight hours. The corpses were stiff to start with, but now that rigor would have been useful, it was long gone. The slack stiff slumped, resisting their work. Now that they had the third wire loop pinching into its bagged length, it had begun to look segmented, like a caterpillar.
Sonny remembered a book about Houdini he’d read in slam, and thought of something funny. He weighed his words. You had to be careful, if you wanted Junior to understand something.
“Hey Joon. You know that when you tie a guy in a buncha short lengths like this? Instead of tyin’ him in one long piece? You tie him in short lengths like this, and it’s harder for him to get out of. You know—free himself, escape.”
Bug-muzzled Junior sat goggle-eyed, staring at him. With just his eyes showing like this he looked . . . shocked at what Sonny had said. Wasn’t getting the joke at all.
Sonny pulled down his mask a little to show Junior he was smiling, making a joke. “You know—get himself untied?”
Junior’s brow corrugated. Really concentrating now, and still not getting it. With his forehead corrugated like that, he looked almost terrified, like these stiffs might suddenly try to untie themselves.
“You fuckin idiot,” Sonny said, and then couldn’t help laughing at that face of Junior’s. “It’s a joke! How’re they gonna escape? They’re fuckin dead!”
And then both of them looked for a moment at the bagged stiffs—as if they hadn’t quite fully grasped that fact before.
They worked on. They said nothing more, but their least movements wove fine webs of echo around them.
The last weight was wired. Stiff Number One was now a black caterpillar of seven unequal segments, with the discs attached to it like the eggs of some parasitic wasp.
Sonny thumbed out the razor tip of a utility knife, and cut the “window” Sol had prescribed—a big, square flap out of the bag over the stiff’s face, to let the solvents in to work on the nude corpse. As he cut, he felt the blade meet doughy resistance, and when he unmasked the face found a deep, unbleeding slice beside the nose.
“Sorry about that, wise guy.”
“Who do ya think he was?” asked Junior.
“An East-coast greaseball like the other one. Who cares?” He and Junior had staged a hold-up in an Italian restaurant; the distraction had covered Lazarian’s abduction of this guy from a back table.
Corpse Number Two had required the pair to enter the lobby of a plush high-rise, and kick up a drunken fuss about being admitted to the elevators up to “Lulu’s” condo. Four really big guys, armed, had poured from the elevator a moment later. Though the two tried to prolong the distraction, they were thrown out on their ass PDQ, but Lazarian still had the big stiff in the van by the time they returned to it. Guy was wearing sweat-stained exercise togs, apparently had been having a workout in his home gym.
“You come a long way, Bo-seephus,” Sonny told Stiff One. To Junior he said, “Why the hell did he take us all the way out there to get these guys, then bring them all the way back here to get rid of ’em?”
Junior shrugged mountainously. “Who knows? He’s a goon, got his goon reasons. I mean, this is a pretty good hidin’ place.”
“Yeah, but between here an’ Jersey there’s three thousand miles of—”
“What’s that?”
Slap-suck, slap-suck, slap-suck . . .
The pool was quaking again, still gently, but just a little stronger than before. Both men were lifelong Californians, but now they were discovering that a casual attitude about earthquakes decreased radically as the depth of your body under the earth increased.
“The stuff probably just keeps settling,” said Sonny. “Down into cracks an’ holes down there.”
“I don’t see no bubbles.” The cogency of this remark, coming from his slow-witted friend irritated Sonny.
“Okay, okay. So whaddya say we just quit fuckin’ the dog, Joon? You get that end, I’ll get this end.”
They stood up with the corpse hammocked between them.
“One . . . two . . . ”—they had a fair swing going—“three!”
The dead goon was launched. He lay face-up on the air for a moment. Framed in the “window” they’d cut, his eyes and mouth were pools of shadow in the oblique light from the lanterns. The shadows made the face live in that instant—it seemed to grimace as it fell.
It had to be this druggy air that made them both so late in jumping back—the splash was big and it wet their boots and spattered the lanterns.
Cursing, they wiped their boots on their jeans and set the lanterns higher up. Would the pond never settle? Jittering and splashing and slopping . . . They stood watching that turbulence, and imagining the wise guy’s journey down the steep shaft, a long slo-mo tumble down through the most perfect blackness there ever was.
“How far down you think he’ll go?” rumbled Junior.
Sonny understood exactly what Junior was picturing: the weighted mummy sinking, striking the shaft-floor a little farther down, jouncing up off the ties, tumbling slowly farther down, jouncing again.
They both looked up behind them at the tunnel’s steep pitch. Sonny rumbled, “If the slope don’t change he’ll just keep bouncin’ down.”
“So how far down’s this tunnel go?”
“It’s called a shaft, Joon. Tunnels you can come out the other end of.”
“So how far down’s this shaft go?”
“Well . . . ” Sonny’s mind kept jouncing down deeper and deeper with the corpse, and saw no end to it. “How should I know?”
It was funny how they kept freezing up and listening down here. And now they’d done it again, just crouching there, the silence deepening around them.
“Know what I think, Sonny?” Junior’s eyes had a look in them that Sonny had never seen before. It was like . . . amazement. “I think that this is some strange shit for us to be doin’ down here.”
This declaration flashed Sonny on some of the other strange things they had done as “soldiers.” He considered these, and then he nodded. “I think this is the strangest shit we’ve done yet.”
“And the hardest work too.”
They roused themselves, and started wiring Stiff Two. Heavier though it was, they were working more smoothly now—suddenly almost deft. Perhaps it was that they both felt a new tension in the shaft, felt the presence of something that seemed to applaud their work, to will it forward.
“Jesus!” Junior yelped, dropping a weight and his pliers. A roiling sound, a silken fizzing filled the shaft. The pool was foaming, bulging upwards at its center, mounting in a dome of turbulence, rising as if lifted by some powerful under-pressure.
Had the respirators melted from their faces? It felt like the poisoned air had suddenly soaked through their skulls, and was licking the brain-meat out of them. The pressure-dome mushroomed to the ceiling, and came surging at them.
They turned to launch themselves up-shaft, and tripped over the half-wired second body. Got up and scrambled past it, a voice in Sonny’s skull saying: One heartbeat too late. They were just getting their stride on the ties, the lighter Sonny taking the lead, as the gust of the black wave’s air pressure touched their napes.
The wave punched Sonny’s legs out from under him, gripped his waist like a cold, melting hand, and dragged him back down. He rammed desperate knees against the stone, felt bone crack and his fingernails torn off, but held on against the terrible back-drag of caustics draining off of him.
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that Junior Lee had been dragged all the way down, and now was up to his neck in the pool, his arms scrabbling for the shaft floor just out of reach. And there, just beyond Junior, Sonny saw what stood up from the pool, saw its hugeness and the wild night-black glare of its eyes. Awed, Sonny watched it seize Junior by the back of the neck and lift him up like a kitten, and with its free hand, hugely fisted, smite the pool, to send a second, mightier wave booming up the shaft straight at Sonny.
Again Sonny scrambled up-shaft, his knee broken but fighting himself up one tie higher, another tie, another . . . while a voice in his head was saying: just one heartbeat too late.
A tongue of waste shot past him along the shaft wall, and as he reached the lanterns, the wave curved around just beyond them, and came sweeping back down towards him like a gathering arm. For an instant, the lanterns made a black mirror of the oncoming liquid wall, and in it Sonny saw himself: a bug-mouthed being on its belly and reaching for a lantern, its eyes bulging at its oncoming end.
The descending wave’s satin mass wrapped him in blindness, flipped him on his back and snatched him down, the stepped earth under him beating him, braining him, blotting him out. A perfect blackness was the aftermath. The echoes of uproar and choked-off shouts collided again and again with the stone walls, subsiding at long last to a faint liquid chuckle.
Shortly after, there came down the sound of a heavy tread descending the shaft from the far, faint circle of moonlit sky high above.
Sol Lazarian stopped at the limit of the drenched zone, which now extended fifteen yards up-shaft of the pool itself. Not a sign of his soldiers remained, nor any sign of the two bagged dead they’d carried.
Fear, in Lazarian, was a darker shade of joy, it was the same radiation at a different frequency. When he broke a man’s life in his arms, his prey’s shock was his joy’s fuel. And, when any horror laid its hand on him, he felt not crushed, but light, combustible, packed like dynamite with a savage sympathy for that larger joy, that joy more monstrous than his own, that might be about to consume him.
Already at thirty-eight, young for a real master, he had consumed a dozen other first-rate killers. Real samurai like himself, not moronic buttons—of those he kept no count. And all these gifted men had learned that to endanger Lazarian was to inspire and ignite him. His startling face got eerily prettier, his manner even more serene. You had him distracted. You watched him fail to spot your trap. You sprang it on him, and suddenly, there was Sol Lazarian’s forearm across your throat and Sol Lazarian’s mellow baritone crooning unspeakablities in your ear . . . and there was your neck breaking.
He stood thoughtful for a moment, ears straining. Ta-da-dum
Ta-da
Ta-dum, da . . .
In the spectrum of things audible there is a doubtful zone shared by that which is imagined and that which is faintly heard.
If real, this voice was beautiful and sad. A velvet-and-molasses gospel voice. It gave him a delicate attack of the creeps, a horripilation of the fine black lanugo that covered the back and shoulders of the pale giant, and that no living man had ever seen.
Ta-da-dum
Ta-da
Ta-dum, da . . .
Sol thrust his light further forward seeking some purchase on what he’d heard, and the movement of his light revealed that the blackness under his feet was a shape, not a blot. Something distinctly outlined in the stone and timber. His hair stirred. Its outline was precisely that of a huge, outreached hand.
Lazarian stood squarely in the palm of that hand. You are mine, it said. Give me more, it said . . . Yes, it demanded more, as plain as printed speech. Demanded more.
Not many nights later Sol Lazarian had fetched another body from New Jersey, this one still living, though snugly bound: Lou Bonifacio.
Accomplishing this had been no slight feat.
Lazarian had had to kill no fewer than four buttons in swift succession—and quite good samurai they had been—two of them, anyway, so good Sol had for some moments considered bringing one—or even both of their bodies—back as additional offerings to the shaft.
But after all, the capture and sacrifice of his Capo must rightly claim his sole attention. To kill one whom he had served was an act of great spiritual weight.
Coming west, the securely bound Bonifacio had dozed for a long stretch of hours—an aging body, perhaps subconsciously fleeing its dire predicament. But he came awake again as their van climbed the switchbacks toward the Quicksilver Mine.
He was gagged. Lazarian had been driven to gag him not long after their journey’s outset. Lou’s abusive raging had quickly exhausted Lazarian’s intention to be courteous and sociable on the long drive. Now, even after so long at the wheel, Lazarian had never felt more awake. His heart rose in him while his van, turn by turn, ascended the switchbacks.
He drove rapt, so clearly recalling it—the black hand perfectly articulated, telling him whose Hand he stood in.
But whose?
Who but the one he’d lived and worked to meet? It was the hand of Annihilation itself, standing up and reaching out. The whole world had altered in answer to his sacrifice of those two goons! The spirit in the shaft had seized both his kills and his hirelings, obliterated the four of them, and left for Lazarian an urgent sign, the extended hand that said GIVE MORE.
Very soon now he was going to learn what he would purchase with this more powerful offering. A full-fledged Capo plucked right from his fortress.
In that moment of his first offering’s acceptance, his spirit had been enlarged, as if he had fed himself those lesser lives.
The odd thing was, that it was to Bonifacio himself that Lazarian wanted to talk about it, his Capo, a man who had himself offered human sacrifices. Who better able to provide a judgment of the eerie rightness of this shaft, the Dantean poetry of its deeps? It was to Lou he longed to confide that he found dread here too. For he did not know how much this black hand offered, and how much more it might demand.
If only they could toss it back and forth, as they had on other, no less homicidal excursions during their long shared past. He smiled wistfully. Honestly, whaddya think, Lou? I think you have to agree: apart from it being a really secure site, your life will unlock something big down here. Down here your life will buy me some kind of real power. Doncha think?
Lazarian steered through the last switchback, and out onto the mountain’s broad shoulder. A fragmentary moon showed them Chip sliding open the gate of the compound a moment before Lazarian’s headlights splashed across him. Chip had been informed that his assistance tonight was required. He brought out a sturdy dolly. Lazarian stood the shackled Bonifacio in the dolly and bound him to it, and then hauled him up to the shaft. The shaft-mouth was wreathed in the mist of artificial light that it breathed out at the stars.
His tone gentle, Lazarian told the dollied Capo: “In plain, unvarnished English, Lou, I’m giving you to a god down in there. I don’t exactly understand Her, and I don’t know what She’ll do with you. I sincerely hope it won’t involve doing you any harm. I only want to say that in spite of my handing you over, I have never wished you anything but the best, Lou. And for all I really know, maybe She won’t either.”
As he spoke he was clipping lights to the dolly, and to the bonds that bound Lou to it. Lazarian knew his little speech was disingenuous—was a false mercy of delayed revelation. Bonifacio was almost certainly going to end up in the pool.
He said, “Excuse me putting my mask on, Lou. The air down there’s really intense . . . Can you hear me okay? These speakers aren’t so great.”
Lazarian began to ease the dolly smoothly down the ties. This kind of descent was almost dance-like. Very soon they were below the lighted zone, and carrying their own bubble of light downshaft, utter darkness both behind and ahead of them. Softly they jolted deeper and deeper.
“I’m sorry about this dolly arrangement, Lou, but I think you’ll agree it’s the least painful way I can keep you both comfortable and secure.”
Bonifacio was an older brute, beginning to melt down at the corners and angles of his great frame, but as Lazarian jolted him softly, steadily down the shaft, he lay rigid in his bonds, and his gagged glare never ceased to blaze at his captor. Lazarian had to smile.
“Lou, you’re old-school in the best sense. If I hadn’t gotten the drop on you, I’m sure you’d be grinding my bones to powder right now with your teeth! It’s always a pleasure to be dealing with a professional.”
Lazarian’s great strength managed to ease down his massive cargo with a rolling smoothness, always iron-muscled in resistance to the earth’s black yawn of gravity he stepped down into.
The steadiness of his descent gave an hypnotic regularity to the shaft’s support beams, little timber stonehenges holding the earth apart, rising to swallow them at regular intervals as he stepped down, stepped down, stepped down . . .
Momma Durtt get you by de-greees
jus’ take hold
an’ squeeze an’ squeeze . . .
All doubt gone now, she was speaking to him.
Just to him, Lou didn’t seem to hear it. Ever so faint it sounded, far down in that darkness beyond his bubble of light. Echoey now . . . was he hearing it? Or was it the low commotion of his own masked breathing?
Momma Durtt get you, by degrees . . .
To Lazarian’s eyes, a faint aura was beginning to glow from Bonifacio’s body. There was a kind of Egyptian pomp in Lou’s big mummified mass as he floated half-recumbent down the shaft on his dolly, his eyes blazing above his bound mouth . . .
And justly so, Lazarian thought, for in Lou he was sacrificing a kind of deity, one of those furious Elementals like Hades or the Midgard Serpent, brought to heel by gods in tales . . . he was imbued with infernal majesty.
Then, far down below their light-bubble, from the perfect dark they descended to, something stirred . . .
A liquid sound? A soft, wet impact?
Lazarian stayed their descent, and leaned near Bonifacio’s ear to say, “We’ve conjured a god here, Lou, I’m sure of it. With my own eyes I’ve seen . . . unbelievable evidence. We’ve conjured a goddess, more precisely. I’ve heard her voice, heard her sing.”
The bound man’s eyes flared with a new shade of fear—the fear of lunacy in his captor—which Sol Lazarian saw, and had to laugh. “No! I’m not crazy, old friend. I know how that sounds, but I have heard her sing!
“And I’m afraid I have to be honest with you, Lou. I’ve procured you, you might say, for the goddess here.” He paused in their descent, resting briefly. “But the goddess, unfortunately, lives in the toxics, and that seems to be where her offerings must be placed.”
Silence then between them, stepping down through the last long steepness, the burdened dolly’s wheels groaning.
The ether-reek swelled thicker, swallowing them like a cold reptile mouth.
And here was the pool . . . Lazarian said, “I’m offering you, Lou—not giving you. Here, I will stand you up.”
He propped the dolly upright on the lowest crosstie above the black tarn that breathed its sharp, glacial breath in their faces. “I’m not putting you in—just putting you where she can take you. If she is as real as I think, I suppose she . . . consumes you—I don’t really know. But I hope that you know how truly I regret what’s going to happen here.”
Lazarian bent and locked the dolly’s wheels. He gave Bonifacio’s shoulder a pat, and retreated four ties upshaft of him. Crouched there, uncramping his leg muscles.
Lou was standing very carefully balanced. He was snugly bound and bandaged to the dolly, but his rage and horror made the little lights he was decorated with tremble on the black pool, which seemed to be almost as still as stone.
But no, not absolutely still. The subtlest of tremors now and then, here and there, skimmed its blackness.
Here in this grotto, this chapel of annihilation, Lazarian groped for the proper gesture. What did the black gulf want of him? What gesture of his must call forth the thing that hid here? Should he show his awe? His gratitude? All he could think to do was to declare his reverence. He addressed the pool.
“I give you the one who conjured you. The one who fed you the poisons that your Nullity grew from. He is your food now, a token of my reverence. In return, grant me vision! Grant me power in your service!”
Bonifacio was an earthy man, of strong simple appetites. Teetering on this narrow footing at the rim of nothingness, he had as firm a grip on himself as a man thus situated can have. Hearing Lazarian imploring the pool of poison like a god, the Capo knew himself to be in the hands of Lunacy incarnate, and with a wordless prayer he commended his soul to the abyss.
At which instant a huge black hand rose dripping from the pool and seized him. Its mighty grip was more than half his height, but enough of the Capo’s head and shoulders protruded to show that his features were as much convulsed with fury as with fear.
The great black knuckles liquesced as they gripped him, the huge fist melting as it lofted and seemed to heft him, as if assaying value.
And then, in sudden shock, it seemed to Lazarian that he himself melted, that he hung unbodied in the lethal air, because what was happening? The pool behind the huge hand began to bulge, and dome up as an immense face surfaced, her wet black eyeballs (big as human heads) glaring from a thorny thicket of hair, her jeering mouth a big whirlpool slowly spreading on her face.
The goddess thrust Bonifacio into the melting cavern of her mouth, wherein the Capo’s wordless roar was echoed and then drowned out as he plunged—dolly and all—from sight.
She faced Lazarian, this face of hers as big as his whole body, a melting face unendingly reborn, her eyes mockingly, merrily glaring in his.
And Lazarian’s soul spoke within him: I’ve done it! I’ve broken through! Into the world of miracles!
“You will not die,” her hissing lips of poison told him, each word a wet adhesion to his flesh. “You will serve me while this world lasts, and you will sow plague and poison upon it.
“I am the miracle you have lived and labored for. Of the Great Old Ones, I am the youngest, no older than this venomed globe itself, but until Dark claims us all again, you’ll till my earth and feed my monsters up to strength to work this world’s destruction.”
Gleeful now, her seething face, she lofted her great melting fist, and brandished it upshaft, and—far, far up the reverberating tube—an engine growled to life, avalanching echoes down upon them.
Lazarian found his voice hoarse with grateful joy. “I will serve you, Great One! I will serve you to the end of our time!”
The black giant grinned from her tarn. “Then let us make some room for your labor! Let us give scope to your service, and give you the power to serve!”
A mighty din of fractured stone filled the shaft, as a huge convulsion shook the earth they stood in. Raining dust and gravel, the mine’s walls and ceiling heaved, shuddering away from Lazarian.
And when it stilled, the shaft’s diameter had tripled, the crude-hewn stone ceiling was thrice his height above him, and the pool of poison was now a wide pond. The engine’s noise, still high and far, rang down more hollowly now.
“In power and style you will serve me,” the giantess leered at him. “Behold!” The distant engine’s roar descended, and its guttural howl came snarling down before it. Rapt, Lazarian gazed up at the lofty walls of stone that contained him—now high and shrine-like.
Here came the tanker’s headlights blazing down from on high, its echoes a ghostly landslide that broke against him. The shaft tremored like a waking dragon around him. He stood enraptured, unavoiding. The deep tarn was at his back, yet he stood serene as the headlights came down like comets.
Outside, far above him, under the silent sky, only a few deep dinosaur sounds welled up at the moon—some dim commotion far under the earth, but peace up here. Chip was gone—he’d taken off the moment the earth had shaken. A long and unmarred silence followed in the compound then, peace beneath the pale moon.
Until at length, a growling began to rise from the Quicksilver’s throat, rose quickly to crescendo, and out of the earth the tanker erupted.
It launched its hugeness arcing through the air, surged airborne twenty yards or so, until it colossally whumped down, ponderously tap-danced on its heavy tires, then leveled off, and hit the highway.
You could tell she was full by the sway of her, but even so she ate up the switchbacks, tires smoking down the mountain, zig and zag. And impossibly soon, she hit the cross-country straightaway toward the mighty 101—a linear glow past shadowy hills and groves.
As she rolled through the fields her looks improved. The moonlight seemed to wipe her bulky mass clean. Her tank turned a bright polished silver, and her cab grew glossy black with silver trim.
As she surged up onto the 101, she was gorgeous, all scoured steel and glossy black enamel. She rode high in the river of southbound headlights, a star-cruiser cargoed with Death for the Cities of Light that rimmed the great bay to the south. And high in her cab, commanding the wheel sat Lazarian, his eyes rapt on the cities of light as he hurtled towards them. He drank with gusto from the bottle of ale which he gripped in one hand.
A week later, Alex and Kim had a window seat in a roadside diner. An onramp onto 101 climbed right past their window, up through a Friday night blaze of neon colors. As they gazed out the glass, a gorgeous tanker truck slid to the ramp and surged up it.
“Whoa,” said Kim, “isn’t that . . . ?”
“Damn. It is.”
The pair watched with awe as the great machine roared onto the freeway and geared up for points south.