9

 

I awoke groggily in what I assumed was a hospital bed; but almost as soon as I partially shook the cobwebs from my mind I understood that this was no ordinary hospital, or perhaps not a hospital at all. In fact, I was lying on an almost excessively soft four-poster canopied bed, with thick and expensive blankets covering me almost to suffocation. Through the gauze of the canopy I saw a nondescript-looking woman of indeterminate age dressed in a white nurse’s uniform; but when I groaned in pain and felt the large lump on the back of my head, this woman made only the most token effort to take stock of my condition before she blandly turned on her heels and left the room.

In a matter of momnents she had returned, accompanied by a man much taller than herself. Even through the canopy I could see that this person was bald as a cue ball and dressed in a peculiar kind of suit or uniform that struck me as something from the future. As the nurse parted the gauze curtain, the man looked down at me as if scrutinizing a moderately interesting insect, then nodded to himself and walked away.

The nurse now did take the trouble to tend to my needs, checking that lump on my head, taking my temperature, and urging me to drink some orange juice she handed me. I managed to get it down, and it revived my spirits more than I could have imagined.

“Can you get up?” the nurse bluntly asked.

Without replying, I tried to do just that—but a wave of nausea and light-headedness overcame me, and I actually fell against her chest and clung to her like a child. She seemed inclined to put me back into bed, but I gritted my teeth, took more time to get up, and managed to get to my feet, although I still needed to hold on to the nurse’s shoulders.

She led me out through one of the several doors in the room, and I saw that I was in an office of sorts—but one so immense that I had difficulty taking in the contours and parameters of the place. I could see that one wall was lined with books, while other walls featured shelving that bore some choice objets d’art juxtaposed incongruously with high-tech electronic equipment of various kinds.

The nurse led me to a squarish desk that, although of moderate size, was nonetheless so dwarfed by the gargantuan room that it seemed like a toy. It had next to nothing on it aside from a gold pen in a holder, a telephone, and a small array of family photos.

The person seated at the desk was the bald man who had peeked into my room a few moments before. Aside from his perfect baldness, he was slender almost to gauntness, but with a suggestion of wiry toughness that made him a quietly formidable figure. The suit or costume he wore was such as to suggest a person from the future. He was probably in his early forties, but the intense blue of his piercing eyes and the lively alertness of his sharp features made him seem younger.

I did not need to be introduced to him to know his identity; his picture had appeared in the local paper often enough during my childhood and adolescence. Apparently out of formality, however, he did introduce himself, extending a hand.

“I am glad you are well, Miss Mannering,” he said in a rich baritone voice that exuded commanding authority. “I am Conrad Brashear.”

I felt it would be needlessly impolite not to take the hand, so I did so. But I did remark sourly: “I wouldn’t say I’m well. Your goon gave me quite a blow to the back of my head.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Brashear said, actually sounding sincere. “But you and your friend did enter an unauthorized area.”

I wasn’t going to argue the point. “I know that,” I said tartly. “I was trying to get to the bottom of—of what happened to my father. He was Guy Mannering, and he—”

“I know who he was,” Brashear interrupted briskly. “And I know of your interest in his—fate.”

“You do?” I said, although I was not surprised at his words. “Then maybe you can explain why—why his body …” I choked on the words. Dizziness overcame me for a time, and I came close to passing out.

Brashear looked at me with obvious concern and seemed on the verge of summoning the nurse; but I waved my hand in a curt gesture of dismissal and presently regained my composure.

When he was convinced that I was not going to faint on him like some Victorian neurasthenic, he stared keenly—but not, I will confess, without some latent sympathy—at me, got up from the chair, and began pacing back and forth behind the desk. I sat silent: the ball was in his court, and it was his obligation to respond. Maybe he wouldn’t tell me the truth—or at least the whole truth—but he had a moral obligation to say something.

“What happened to him,” he said slowly, “was unfortunate.”

A sudden insight flashed through my mind. “But it was no ‘accident’?” I said accusingly.

“No,” he said, his tone heavy with regret, “it was no accident.”

Once again I became dizzy—not from the effect of the blow to my head, but from the immensity of what I sensed to be the anomalies and mysteries confronting me. In a tone that sounded dismayingly close to a whine, I said:

“Please tell me what’s going on here.”

Again, his gaze seemed a mix of concern—both for himself and for me—and a sort of objective pity. He did not reply immediately: clearly he was choosing his words with monumental care.

“It is difficult to know where to begin,” he said.

“Why not try the beginning?” I shot back with cheap sarcasm.

He smiled out of the side of his mouth. “The fact is that no one knows what the beginning is. I understand you have been doing quite a bit of research into the history of the mine—”

It was my turn to interrupt him. “Not the mine—just the deaths at the mine, or the deaths of people who worked at or in the vicinity of the mine and the deaths of the family members of those who worked at the mine. Yeah,” I concluded viciously, “you could say I’ve been looking into that.”

My words didn’t have any appreciable effect on him. If he thought I was going to report these anomalies to some state or federal agency, or perhaps to go the press, he seemed singularly unconcerned. I got a faint sense that he had bigger fish to fry.

Several times he seemed on the verge of speaking, only to lapse into a frustrated silence. So I took the bull by the horns.

“And what of that—that thing—I saw? That horrible white thing that you’ve somehow trapped down there—that creature that may be miles and miles across—”

“Yes, that ‘creature,’ as you call it,” he replied almost whimsically. “That’s the core of the matter, isn’t it?”

“What is it?” I said in an agony of frustration. “Where did it come from? What’s it doing down there?”

He gazed at me as if I were a dense undergraduate who had suddenly grasped the theory of relativity in a single intuitive rush.

“What is it?” he said. “I have no idea. Where did it come from? I can only guess. What it’s doing down there? That’s the simplest question to answer:

“It is eating up all our coal.”

I could do nothing but sit silent and gaping.

“Perhaps ‘eating’ is not quite the right word: it may be a mistake to think that the entity in any way resembles anything human or even terrestrial.” This echo of a thought that had coursed through my own mind the moment I had seen the thing startled me into further silence. He went on: “I suppose ‘absorbing’ is the best way to put it. The creature absorbs the coal—and it grows. That much, and that much only, is clear to me after all these years.”

“You’re telling me,” I said, aghast, “that it’s been there for years?”

“Years?” he said mockingly. “Perhaps decades. Perhaps a century or more.” Turning on his heel so that he looked pensively out the large picture window behind his desk, he said, “I imagine your researches have alerted you to the fact that there was a meteor shower in this general vicinity around 1907.”

I confess I had only vaguely paid attention to the scanty news reports of that event in my canvassing of the newspaper, for it didn’t seem to have any relevance to what I was looking for.

“Maybe that was the source of the thing, maybe not. All I know is—and this is no doubt something your own researches have determined—that the various deaths and other unfortunate events at or near the mine began to occur a few years later.”

Again, I had failed to make the connection. So much for my ability to put two and two together! I remained mute.

“Let us assume that is the case. The issue that confronted my ancestors was: what to do about it.”

Now I began putting two and two together—and in the most appalling way. A burning flash of anger and outrage flitted through my entire frame, and when I spoke it was with a tremolo of towering indignation.

“You—your ‘ancestors’—sacrificed the men at the mine. Twice a year, in spring and in fall. They were scapegoats: you might as well have slit their throats at May Eve and Hallowmass. The thing—the creature—‘absorbed’ them, and then regurgitated what it couldn’t use or didn’t want. It ate my father, and then spit out his bones!”

By the end of my speech I was shouting, perhaps shrieking. But Brashear’s response was not what I expected.

With a face suddenly rubicund with outrage of his own—outrage and profound resentment at the injustice of the accusation I had hurled at him—he spat out his words with icy venom.

“Do you think those men were ‘sacrificed’ to make it grow?” he said, his own voice rising by decibels with each word. “They were sacrificed to prevent it from growing!”

I was stunned by his revelation. I was not entirely ready to believe him, but his own fury and conviction had the effect of deflating me.

“I know,” he continued with a bitter sneer, “you would dearly love to see me and my forbears as heartless capitalists—petty dictators who relish the thought of consigning their workers to a horrible death to put more money in our pockets. The reality is that we wanted to keep the mine operating as long as possible. We knew that the mine was vital to this town’s very existence, and we took very seriously our responsibility in maintaining it as long as it could viably be maintained. None of my ancestors, nor the specialists they quietly called in to examine the situation, could come up with any solution to the difficulty we faced: that creature, which clearly has an affinity for carbon in all its forms, was growing inexorably, even if slowly. Somehow, probably through trial and error, it was discovered that sending living human creatures into the maw of that entity would inhibit its growth, at least for a time. It was the best solution we could come up with.”

He sighed heavily and continued speaking in a low monotone.

“A lottery was established, open to those men who had worked for more than twenty years in the mine. The one who was chosen for that season—either spring or fall—was assured that his wife and family would be well provided for upon his death; and they were. It was an open secret among the old-timers, although naturally they didn’t let the younger chaps know: their work was hard enough without the prospect of certain death facing them in two decades’ time.”

At last I found words, after a fashion. “You—you just let these people die?” I said feebly.

Brashear placed both of his hands firmly on the table and stared at me.

“You’d be surprised, Ms. Mannering, how many of the chosen—scapegoats, as you call them—welcomed their fate. Oh, to be sure, some of them ran away and were never heard from again, but the great majority made peace with their selection. Twenty years working in a mine beats a man down—he is ready for a rest. And the rest that instantaneous death provides is often far more desirable than the long, quiet, lingering death of a monotonous retirement with nothing to do and nowhere to go.”

I suddenly felt the need to leap up from my seat and pace around the vast office, clenching and unclenching my hands. I spun on my heels just as Brashear had done and spat at him:

“This is horrible and insane and grotesque! You’re telling me that you and your cadre of ‘specialists’ couldn’t find a more humane way of—of retarding the growth of this vile creature than plunging your own men down its throat? What about animals? They’re living creatures, too, full of carbon. What about that secret laboratory you or your ancestors set up? Are you saying that your crack team of chemists couldn’t come up with some formula that would diminish or even kill that thing altogether? What the hell’s that lab for anyway?”

I was quite literally huffing and puffing with emotion, and I didn’t appreciate Brashear holding up a hand patronizingly as if to calm down a hysterical female.

“So many questions,” he said snidely, “and so many answers that will not please you. I doubt whether sending animals down into the belly of that creature would have been very much more humane than sending men, but for some reason that didn’t work—or at least not so well. There are records indicating that someone decades ago tried offering the thing a bear. It was no go. Yes, the bear died, but otherwise it was rejected by the entity in no uncertain terms.

“As for that laboratory—” Brashear sighed heavily again. “It is not nearly as nefarious as you seem to think. I know of your background in chemistry, so I’m surprised you haven’t deduced its function. The fact of the matter is that, through sheer accident, my father determined about thirty years ago that the creature could be made to yield certain valuable materials, albeit through a highly time-consuming and laborious process.

“In short,” he said with a certain smug satisfaction, “we began extracting rare earth metals out of the entity.”

I was stupefied. Maybe I should have been able to figure that out on my own—but I had other things on my mind when I was exploring that lab.

“I won’t bore you with the details of the procedure. But I will say that this discovery was a godsend not just to me and my family, but to the miners themselves. Surely you must know that mining is in fairly dire straits—as an industry it is dying, with no chance of resurrection. Cheap natural gas, and now cheap renewables, are consigning coal quite literally to the dustbin of history. But the fact that we can now sell rare earth metals to a worldwide market has allowed me to keep this mine open when, by every sane principle of economics, it should have been closed years ago.

“There is, however, a problem. As I say, the process of extracting the metals from the creature is so enormously difficult that it has certain unfortunate long-term effects on the chemists brought in—secretly, as you so correctly state—to manage the task. Yes, of course they use protective gear of the most comprehensive sort, but that does not seem to help; it only delays the inevitable.

“Their minds get affected somehow—we’ve never been able to learn how, as we have not had the wherewithal to conduct an autopsy, which would also have to be done in secret. So the result is that on a few occasions the chemists…run amok—”

“And try to kill themselves and their families,” I finished for him, thinking of Mrs. Hotchkiss.

“Yes,” Brashear said heavily.

“And you don’t care about that—you just want to get your hands on those metals.”

Again he bristled. “The chemists are fully notified as to the dangers of the job—and they are paid very, very well.”

“Mrs. Hotchkiss doesn’t seem to be in the lap of luxury.”

“Who?” he said, momentarily confused. “Oh, her. Well, her husband had contracted some fairly extensive debts—that was why he had come to us in the first place. We offered to pay him far more than he could feasibly have received from any other employer. But of course we couldn’t possibly maintain that level of reimbursement after his self-inflicted death.”

“No, of course not,” I said in weak sarcasm.

Once again he turned his back to me, gazing reflectively out the window.

“I confess, Ms. Mannering, that I am getting a bit fatigued by this discussion. You now know about as much as you are entitled to know—rather more, in my judgment. The question at the end of the day is: What are you now going to do?” He turned quietly to face me.

I was momentarily speechless. This long, bizarre, dreadful tale had drained me of emotion—I felt like a hollow shell. The whole situation seemed so utterly hopeless that for a time I simply wanted to run out of this office and head out, as he himself had said, for “parts unknown”—someplace so far away from Dunsmuir that I would eventually forget its very name, let alone the seething, bubbling entity trapped under the seemingly placid surface of its drab terrain. But of course I knew that that was the most frivolous form of wishful thinking.

“What can I do?” I said wearily. “What can we do? That thing is there, growing inch by inch, day by day, and nothing can stop or retard it except the periodic sacrifice of a few good men. What point would there be of reporting any of this to the police, or to state or federal authorities? I could force you to show them that creature—but then what? Drop a nuke on Dunsmuir? That might blast the creature to smithereens.”

“Yes, I suppose it might,” Brashear said wistfully, as if actually contemplating the prospect for a moment. Snapping out of his reverie, he said almost cheerfully, “I’m glad you’ve adopted such a sensible attitude. We may be sitting on a powder-keg, but we can at least do all we can to prevent it from blowing up in our faces for as long as we can. Trust me, my dear, the thought weighs upon me every moment of the day and night.”

He turned and looked out the window contemplatively. “I am not an evil man. I am simply a man caught in a horrendously untenable situation. If you can think of any alternative to our current course of action, I would welcome it.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said. Then, turning serious: “Just one more question, if you will. I suspect you know that I, um, exhumed my father’s remains.”

He nodded fractionally.

“Can you tell me why—why there was no skull? Where did it go? Did the—the creature keep or absorb it?”

Brashear closed his eyes, patently reluctant to answer. At last he said: “You may have to ask your mother.”

“My mother?” I cried. “What the hell does she have to do with all this?”

Once again that heavy sigh. “I have deceived you on one small point: the ‘scapegoat’ does not, strictly speaking, have to be alive when he is sent down to meet his fate. A recently deceased body, so long as it is quite fresh, would do just as well.” Looking at me straight in the face, he went on: “Some men prefer that alternative.”

A shiver began coursing through my entire frame, and even as I wrapped my arms around my body I couldn’t seem to stop.

“No,” I moaned, “no, please don’t say …”

“I’m sure,” Brashear said softly, “that what she did was merciful. But our undertaker, Mr. Knowles, felt it prudent to dispose of the head in the event that some snooper just like yourself might take the initiative to investigate the matter. His action was really rather irrational, for surely the state of the rest of your father’s remains would elicit more than a small measure of baffled inquiry. But that was his decision.”

I stood up stiffly, uncertain whether I was even capable of leaving that expansive office without collapsing in a heap. I was not about to ask Brashear’s permission to leave, and he made no attempt to stop me. Where Randy was, and whether his injuries were worse than mine, were matters I suddenly found utterly inconsequential. All I wanted to do was go home—but the inevitable conversation I would have to have with my mother made me doubt whether that was a destination that would have any meaning for me anymore.

 

She could tell, from my expression as I stumbled through the front door, that I knew.

She was, predictably, puttering in the kitchen, wrapped in a wifely apron. As she stalked into the living room to confront me—I had, after all, been gone an entire night, with no account of my whereabouts—she initially seemed on the verge of giving me a resentful tongue-lashing. But the look she saw on my face made her retreat, almost back to the perceived safety of that kitchen, the domain she had ruled for the better part of three decades.

“Alison,” she said, holding out her arms as if to ward off a blow, “you mustn’t—”

“How did you do it, Mom?” I said, unutterably weary. “Just tell me how you did it.”

She didn’t answer that question directly. Now standing firm at the threshold of the kitchen, she released a torrent of words in an angry whine. “He wanted to go, Alison! He wanted to! He was chosen, and he wasn’t going to evade his responsibility! He knew it would be for the good of the mine—for the good of the town! He was a good man, he knew what he had to do! It’s just that he—”

“Just tell me how, Mom,” I repeated. “That’s all I want to know. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame him. I’m not saying anything could have been different.”

Her glance softened, although it was still wary and apprehensive. Her mouth worked, and she licked lips that had suddenly gone dry. Then she peered at the floor and muttered, “The shotgun, of course. Nothing else would have been certain. I knew how to use that gun. It was all we had. I couldn’t possibly have used a knife, and I had no pills I could give him. So it had to be the gun. Just to the back of the head. He sat in a chair in the back yard. It was over in no time. And then Brashear’s men came and took him away.” Her voice trailed off indecisively.

“Okay,” I said, and made my way to my room. I suddenly felt like a child, retreating into the space that my parents had bestowed upon me for my personal use—a fleeting haven from the horrors of the world, and from their own importunities. I closed the door, locked it, and fell onto the bed.

Then I slept like the dead.