8

 

I allowed Randy access to my body at a fairly remote and unfrequented rest stop along I-86 on the drive back home. In spite of the fact that he had been worse than useless in the encounter with Mrs. Hotchkiss, I knew that I had to reward him for his mere presence—not just on this trip, but on a further expedition that I was already contemplating for that very evening. We parked as far away from the other cars as possible, although it was abundantly clear that the other drivers and their passengers were more intent on relieving themselves or stocking up on junk food from the numerous vending machines than on acting as peeping toms to a pair of oversexed twentysomethings.

Once Randy had satisfied himself, I was all business. Briskly putting my jeans back on and scarcely waiting for him to emerge from the back seat and dump himself into the front passenger seat, I gave him the same sharp look that Miriam had bestowed upon him, saying, “There’s a lab at the mine.”

Randy just gaped at me—both out of perplexity and out of apprehension that he was being led around like a recalcitrant ox by the women in his life. “I didn’t know,” he muttered into the hands in his lap.

“I’m not saying you did,” I said tartly. “But we have to find it. Now. Maybe tonight.”

“Tonight?” he all but squealed. “What if someone’s there?”

“Do you know if anyone works at the mine—or anywhere near it—on weekends?”

“Of course not,” he said dismissively. “I never go there then. Why the fuck should I?”

His profanity was a feeble attempt to gain control of the situation, but it didn’t work. “Well,” I said with quiet resolve, “we’re going there. So I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Randy sank into his usual sullen silence, saying virtually nothing to me on the remainder of the ride home. Only a few minutes ago he had slaked his appetite for my flesh—and now I was going to jeopardize his job, and perhaps even his life, just to satisfy some perverse curiosity of my own. What is it about women? I’m sure he was whining to himself.

I dropped him off at his house and returned to my own. I certainly wasn’t planning on having dinner with him; and anyway, any unauthorized invasion of the mine had to be done pretty late at night, on the assumption that this lab—which I now knew had to exist—might in fact be functioning during the evenings and/or weekends. The very fact that a miner of several years’ standing like Randy didn’t know of its existence suggested that there was, at a minimum, something covert about it. Whether there was anything actually criminal—and, more to the point, whether and why my father might have been involved in it, were questions I was not entirely certain I could answer in a single foray. But I had to start somewhere.

So at 1 A.M. that night I pulled up to Randy’s house and waited patiently. There was no particular need to keep this excursion secret from Andy, but there was likewise no compelling need for her to know of it. Whether Randy had told her was not of the slightest concern to me: what, indeed, could she do? Notify the authorities? What would that accomplish except get her own twin brother into needless trouble?

Randy sidled out of his front door several minutes after I had arrived—his delay constituting, in my judgment, another silly gesture of rebellion against the plan and against me personally. But I made no reaction when he entered my vehicle, and I simply drove off without a word in the direction of the mine.

Everyone knew that the main entrance to the mine proper was on the far eastern end—and I recalled that that newspaper article announcing my father’s death had mentioned a previously unknown (to me, at least) western entrance. That was obviously the place to begin.

But the mine covered an immense amount of territory, and it was girded by a barbed-wire fence around its entire circumference, precisely to prohibit intruders such as myself. I had to park at quite a distance from the putative western entrance, whose exact location I could only guess at. I had brought only a flashlight with me, for I couldn’t imagine what else would be of any use. The idea of having a gun struck me as preposterous. Even if someone were there, I wasn’t about to go blasting my way into the mine’s (or the lab’s) inner precincts. This current mission was exploratory only.

We had to make our way through a dense, tree-choked acclivity in approaching the western end of the mine, and when that barbed-wire fence loomed above us—at least ten feet in height—we found ourselves intimidated by it. At least it wasn’t electrified, as a quick probing of it with a dry stick established.

But there was more than the fence to send a chill through us. Only some fifty feet from us—and from what I took to be some kind of opening or entrance—was an armed guard.

This fellow had a shotgun draped casually over his shoulder, and in all honesty he looked rather bored by his seemingly useless task. I, of course, was dumbfounded by the man’s very existence: what could possibly be so vital that such a person was required in the very midst of a sleepy summer weekend? I suppose I should not have assumed anything overtly or potentially illegal: a shrewd businessman like Conrad Brashear might simply have been taking extra care in guarding company secrets. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to believe that.

The man was not stationary, but every so often got up and wandered about the general area, sometimes entirely out of our vision. After nearly an hour watching him carefully, I began to sense a pattern to his actions and felt that an opportunity to flit through that entrance might present itself if we timed our invasion carefully. And so I said to Randy:

“Okay, we’re going over.”

I’m not sure I was any more spry at climbing than Randy was, but my desire to avoid pain made me exceptionally careful as I ascended that fence. The most fruitful course, it seemed to me, was to climb as close as possible to one of the tall wooden poles that anchored the fence every twenty feet or so—and so it proved to be. I attained the top of the fence without incident, but when I looked down I saw Randy merely gazing up at me with a blank look of terror. I gestured firmly, even a bit frantically, with my head and arms for him to follow suit, but he refused to do so until I had gingerly crossed over the top of the fence—catching the sleeve of my blouse at one point on the barbed wire but quickly extricating it—and come all the way down to the ground on the other side. Only then—and only after I gave him an all but malign glare through the barbed wire—did he grudgingly follow. A hiss of breath led me to suspect that he hadn’t been quite as careful as I, and sure enough he was sucking the back of his hand as red drops emerged from a smallish wound there.

We had to wait a good many minutes, lying flat on our stomachs, before the guard went around a bend and out of view. At that point I leaped up and raced toward the entrance, Randy following with a muffled cry only, it seemed, out of fear of being left alone.

We slipped into the entrance undetected.

What confronted us was a long, concrete-lined corridor that seemed to be relatively level—that is, it wasn’t descending into the bowels of the earth and therefore into the mine proper. At the very end of the corridor was a heavy-looking steel door. I gingerly tried to knob—it was locked.

Randy, who I could see was sweating profusely in spite of the cool night air, seemed to collapse in defeat. He had followed my reckless infiltration into an obviously forbidden section of the mine, only to be stymied on the verge of revelation. He was already starting to skulk back in the direction of the entrance when I touched his arm, silently urging him to stay put.

I took out a nail file from my pocket.

There’s no need to explain how I had gained the knowledge to pick a lock—at least, certain relatively easy ones. And I had no idea whether this lock would be of such a type: why should it, given that the very existence of this entire area was so manifestly a secret? And yet, the lock in fact gave way to my careful and patient efforts. The process takes far longer than it does in the movies, and I was at it a full fifteen minutes. More sweat was pouring from Randy’s face; its sharp tang and the stains appearing all over his plain work shirt made it abundantly evident that he was just about jumping out of his skin in an agony of impatience and anticipatory guilt. His frenetic “Hurry up, Ali!” at one point didn’t help matters, and I gave him a withering glance and told him to hold his horses.

But I was successful in the end. Those fifteen minutes may have seemed like hours or days, but they were necessary for me to gain a feel for the kind of lock I was dealing with, so that I could take action accordingly. A satisfying, but disturbingly loud, click—which in fact made Randy leap back as if electrocuted—revealed that I had succeeded.

I turned the knob and entered, leaving Randy to shuffle in after me.

Closing the door, I felt it was safe enough to turn on the overhead light whose switch I found on the left-hand wall as I entered. What faced me when the light came on was something I could not quite grasp.

It was a lab—an immense one. The room must have been at least fifty feet square, perhaps seventy. The number of desks full of highly advanced chemical machinery was similarly vast. I could easily see twenty chemists working here without encumbrance. Quite literally every table had state-of-the-art gas masks lying carelessly around, and against one wall were dozens of hazmat suits that would cover one’s frame from head to toe. On another wall was a huge bank of what looked like industrial-sized freezers, humming with quiet insistence. Over in a corner I noted some ominous-looking large barrels or tubs clearly marked as radioactive waste.

A B.S. in chemistry doesn’t in any way guarantee that I know everything there is to know about the subject, but somehow this bewildering place caused me to experience some sort of mind-freeze. How could the mine possibly be radioactive? Could that somehow account for the anomalous number of deaths—not only of mine workers (and others, as in the case of the chemist Andrew Hotchkiss) but also, in a few tragic cases, their loved ones? If so, how could the mine keep operating at all? Surely the Bureau of Mines or the EPA or some other state or federal agency would have shut the mine down years or decades ago. Or was it that this phase of the mine activity was done in such absolute secrecy that none of the supervising agencies had any knowledge of the matter?

Then there was the quandary of what my father’s involvement in all this was. He was a miner, pure and simple; his knowledge of chemistry was probably poorer than the average high school student’s. Could he have been somehow assigned as one of the late-night guards, like the one whose patrol we had so easily evaded? But why would the mine operators have designated him for such a position, for which he also had little training? And even if that had happened, I was no closer to explaining how and why he had died. Did he poke his nose into something he shouldn’t have? As a result, was his death more along the lines of a murder—or even an execution? Who was responisble, in that case? And why would the culprits have felt the need to burn his body, to say nothing of bearing off his skull to parts unknown? Why not just slit his throat and be done with it?

As Randy was wandering around the lab in a daze of wide-eyed confusion, my own attention suddenly shifted to a curious contrivance at the very back of the lab. It seemed to me, at this distance, to be a kind of metal conveyor belt; but as I approached it more closely, I saw that there was actually no belt that would move material along. Instead, it was simply a long, low metal platform with a raised edge on either side where objects could be placed—for what reason, I could not begin to fathom. The platform covered the entire length of the back wall, and at one end of it there was what looked like a door, roughly three feet square, made of solid wrought-iron, with a heavy handle in its direct center.

Only now did I realize that there was a different kind of humming or throbbing—different from that of the freezers on the wall to the right of the door. The closest analogy I can make is to an immense sloshing, as of a tidal wave running up against an insurmountable barrier. But the substance that was making the sloshing noise seemed much thicker than water—more like some inconceivably titanic quantity of gelatin.

What instinct of folly or madness led me to try to open that door, I will never know. I was already faced with an abundance of evidence that radioactive material was present somewhere in the vicinity—and yet, here I was, proposing to unleash whatever lay beyond that wrought-iron door, without protection of any kind.

But my first attempts to open that door were frustrated: I pulled and tugged in every direction, but it refused to budge. I wondered if there was some lock on it, but I could not readily see anything of the kind. By accident I realized that the way to open the door was not to pull but to lift—that is, lift straight up.

As I did so, something immediately poured out of the aperture I had exposed.

It is hard for me, even now, to describe my initial impressions upon seeing this material. Even its color was indefinable: initially I thought it was white, but it would be more accurate to say that it was translucent, with a myriad of multicolored particles within its essence, all moving or flitting in some perplexing fashion and so rapidly that the eye quickly tired of watching any single particle or even the collocation of all the particles. My overall belief—for I at least retained the residual sense not to touch the thing—was that it was thick and viscous, for it expanded and contracted in a slow, glutinous fashion as it poured out of the aperture, running along the motionless “conveyor belt” in front of me. Every now and then a bubble would form somewhere on its surface and then pop nervously, emitting a curious odor—not unpleasant, but merely inscrutable.

I was startled into inaction when I first saw this blob or mass moving briskly along the platform; and it was some seconds before I recognized that I had the power to halt its seemingly unconscious or autonomic action. I could simply release the door, which I had continued to hold in the midst of my horror and amazement.

Only then did I grasp a vital point about that door: its lower edge was razor-sharp, in the manner of a guillotine.

As a result, the door neatly sliced off a large piece of the viscous entity that was continuing to poor onto the platform. The moment it did so, a hideous roar filled the place—exactly the sort of groan or moan that I had heard periodically throughout the years I had spent in this town.

At that sound—which, for all that I have used such loaded terms to describe it, was not to my mind unequivocally produced by a living creature—Randy turned to me and gasped loudly, crying, “Ali, what have you done?” I could immediately tell that he had recognized the sound also, although he knew as little as I did what to make of it.

We didn’t have much time to reflect on any of this, for along the long corridor that led to this lab I could hear thunderous footsteps and a harsh voice saying, “Hey! Who’s in there?”

Well, now we were in for it. Glancing frantically around the large room, I could not at once detect any means of egress except for the door we had entered—a door that was already being blocked by the lanky guard now bursting through it. When the guard caught sight of us, he seemed as astounded as we were—but he wasted no time in raising his rifle to his shoulder and firing at us.

Once again, this is not the way it is in the movies. For me, anyway, the spectacle of being fired upon with a high-caliber weapon by a person who has shown not the slightest inclination to determine our purpose in being here was so petrifying that time seemed to stand still. Mercifully, the bullet aimed at me went wide, for I was still almost fifty feet from my assailant, and his own agitation rendered his aim poor at best. The shot rang noisily off the concrete wall behind me, less than a foot from my head. Randy, who was in the middle of the room and had seen the guard rush in, merely ducked under a metal table for transient protection. I did the same, which compelled the guard to enter more boldly into the room and stalk us, one at a time, in what was obviously an unquestioned mission to obliterate us from the earth. He first turned his attention to Randy, who was marginally closer to him than I was; and as he bolted around the corner of the table where he suspected Randy to be, he raised his gun again to his shoulder and pointed it downward. A shot rang out, and I heard Randy emit a harsh grunt. I feared the worst, but then realized that his cry was only one of adrenaline-filled surprise; the shot had missed him, if only by inches, as he scuttled around another table.

I now wondered whether we might be able to outmaneuver the guard by continually shuffling around the tables and then exiting the room; but the prospect seemed remote at best, and there was a strong likelihood that at least one of us would be felled by the man’s repeated shooting. Then, in a corner of the room not far from the door, I saw what I felt, in my desperation, was our only chance of escape—an elevator.

As I scooted on hands and knees toward it, I actually passed Randy, who was struggling to get a grip on himself after being fired upon. His eyes were wide and rather crazed, and he seemed to be trembling throughout his entire frame. I hissed, “Over there!” pointing to the elevator. It took him a moment or two to figure out what I had in mind, but then realization dawned and he followed me, slinking along the floor like an injured animal. I pressed the button on the wall, and to my amazement the elevator opened at once. We plunged in, and I punched a random button on the inside wall just to get the door to close.

The guard now sensed that he had been bamboozled, and with an enraged cry, “Hey, you fuckers!” he once again aimed his shotgun at us. The bullet pinged off the closing door of the elevator, but that was all.

As I heard the guard pounding the now closed door in frustrated fury, I became aware that we were heading in a downward direction—the only direction, indeed, the elevator went from the floor we had been on. There were at least four levels where the elevator theoretically stopped, and we were heading for the lowest one.

I had no idea of the contours of the mine at this point, and I wondered if even Randy would be of any help in what seemed the insurmountable task of escaping from it without further detection. As we sat on the floor of the elevator, breathing stertorously and covered in sweat, we merely gazed at each other. I don’t doubt that he was cursing me inwardly for getting him into this unprecedented mess, but I sensed that beyond this emotion was a dim awareness of some highly anomalous goings-on here that had been kept from him and the other miners. To that extent he was coming to see that some inexplicable injury or injustice had been done to him also. I didn’t know how much of the viscous entity he had actually seen, but that groan or roar was still haunting his mind.

As for me, I was no closer to a resolution of my core concern—what, in fact, had happened to my father?—than I was before; but I too sensed that there was something very wrong with this whole situation. My father’s fate was now only a small part of an overriding concern with the fates of all the men who had toiled away at this place, a few of them dying in some spectacular and incomprehensible fashion but the great majority giving their entire lives to an operation that may have been merely a sham or cover for something far different, and far more sinister.

But those questions would have to wait. As the elevator door opened briskly at the fourth underground level, we exited on tenterhooks, not knowing what we would find facing us. I alertly took precautions against immediate pursuit by quickly locating a sturdy piece of wood and placing it in the path of the elevator door, preventing it from closing and therefore preventing the guard—or anyone else—on the main floor from using the elevator to come after us. No doubt there were other means of reaching this level, but presumably they would be more difficult and time-consuming.

It was obvious, from Randy’s baffled and harried looks as he canvassed the area where we found ourselves, that he hadn’t the faintest idea where we were or that this whole section of the mine existed. We were clearly well to the west of the central mine shaft; but for my part, I was not entirely certain I even wished to head in that direction, for who knew what guards might be positioned there? Indeed, the chances of our escaping from this place, in whatever direction, seemed risibly meager, to the point that I almost wished to collapse and give up right now, in spite of our momentary reprieve from capture.

We were in a long, barren corridor that snaked off in both directions from the elevator, and it was not immediately apparent which way we should go. Detecting what appeared to be a faint glow in the far distance along the path to our left, I urged Randy to proceed there. The glow could not possibly represent daylight, of course; but in the pitch blackness in which we found ourselves, any illumination, however dim and however problematical its source, seemed somehow reassuring.

So we began trotting to our left. At some point the walls ceased to be of finished concrete and became merely a conglomeration of hard-packed dirt and ragged veins of coal: this section of the corridor had clearly been hewed out of the solid ground, for what purpose we could scarcely fathom. I was not encouraged by the rhythmical sloshing sound that seemed to emanate behind the wall to our left—that is, the inner wall of the corridor—but tried for the nonce to put that out of my mind.

We saw crudely constructed staircases heading down at various points, but it would surely have been folly to descend even further into the bowels of the earth. Why there were no staircases leading up was more than a little perplexing: was that elevator the only means to ascend? If so, our fates were sealed.

But now, another sound suggested that they were sealed in any case.

A succession of clopping footsteps—almost as if from the shod shoes of a horse, but surely from a posse of jackbooted guards—could be heard emanating mechanically behind us. We redoubled our pace, although it was not at all certain that the way forward was any more likely to lead to our emergence from this underground nightmare than the way behind. That light had minimally increased in potency—but so had the sloshing. Both of us became almost paralyzed with indecision, dreading capture—or death—from the pursuing guards but petrified at whatever was causing that pale, sick-looking glow. Whatever Randy had or had not seen, I myself could not forget the loathsome entity back in that cryptic laboratory.

Without warning, the corridor—at times so narrow that we had difficulty running together side by side—suddenly veered to the right and opened wide, to an almost infinite extent; and what’s more, the wall of dirt and coal gave way to an incalculably vast barrier of clear glass. What faced us on the other side of that glass was such as to beggar our imaginations.

It was the originator of that sickly light. It was the entity—creature—thing—whose minuscule appendage I had unwittingly hacked off. Reaching dozens, hundreds of feet above our heads—and, in all likelihood, just as much below our feet—was the mass of white or translucent jelly, sprinkled with shimmering dark pellets within its depths, moving with incandescent life like an innumerable array of electrons circling the nucleus in the classic but misleading image of the atom. The creature—if indeed it was one single entity—was rolling and bubbling and folding and creasing in an exquisitely slow and curiously stately dance; parts of it would expand and contract at random, while other parts would shoot off temporary fragments of itself in what little space there was to do so—but these parts would quickly return to the main body of the thing, as if unwilling to part from its apparent source for even a moment.

It had no coherent shape; nothing that could be described as arms, legs, torso, head, or back. The mere attempt to liken it to anything terrestrial was doomed to futility. I am aware that the earth holds many strange things within itself, whether it be in the remote reaches of the untenanted wilderness or in the inky depths of the sea; but I instinctively sensed that this entity was in no way earthly, and that its purpose, motivations, and very existence were beyond the comprehension of our little minds.

But, somewhat mercifully, I did not have much time to ponder on this creature’s nature and properties; for in both directions we were suddenly beset by gun-toting guards, one of whom swiftly knocked Randy out with a derisive thrust of his pistol while another bestowed upon me the same gift of unconsciousness.