I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem. . . .
No, wait. Let me start over.
I know a place where a man can be happy, and all the more so, the boy who was father to that man. Oh, I know. I know. Still, that bit about the friendly, hospitable people, and the beautiful women who are amazingly anxious to please?
I guess they feed us that guff so we’ll get up and go to school every day, then, later on, toddle off to some pointless little over-and-over again job, until the time comes when we face the man with the shovel and don’t quite realize we never had a roly-poly little batface girl at all, much less a beautiful one who was amazingly anxious to please.
So: No Rufo. No Irish Sweepstakes. No mysterious ads read as I was whiling away my time on the French Riviera. And I’m not old enough to go be a military adviser somewhere on the other side of the world.
No, I just awoke, slow-eyed as usual, slanting yellow sunbeams pouring in through the smudgy glass of my bedroom window, warm, damp wind blowing in through the cranked open casement. They said it was an unusually cool month, August 1964, but you could’ve fooled me. Something to do with Hurricane Cleo building up in the Atlantic, I guess. Warm and damp, rather than the usual blazing inferno.
I sat on the edge of my bed, feet on the bit of oak floor exposed beside the ratty blue carpet my parents let me have, sat there in sweaty white jockey shorts, sat there smelling myself, wishing the floor was cold, the way it would be come winter. By which time I’ll be shivering, wishing it was summery warm.
It’s funny how around the time I started to grow hair in places besides the top of my head, I started to stink. I didn’t used to need more than a couple of showers a week. Sunday night, maybe Wednesday too. Now . . . Hell. It’s summer vacation. Anyone doesn’t like the way I smell can stick it up their butt.
I pulled off the jockey shorts and kicked them in a corner, found my hand-me-down yellow chenille bedspread, the one my parents had had on their bed before they bought all new, where I’d kicked it on the floor some time during the night, used it to dry myself off. Clean underpants. Ummm . . . blue gym shorts from school, already too tight for me to use again in the ninth grade—Christ, only a month away! Clean T-shirt, the white one where I’d drawn a copy of the Royal Seal of Aceta in red and black magic marker, something like a cross between a hawk and a dragon’s head in a circle. White crew socks with a red stripe around the top. Dark red US Keds.
I pulled my fingers through sweaty hair, making it stick to my scalp, a summer pretense of combing, then rummaged in my closet and got the hard hats Dad’d given me, the ones with the brass carbide miner’s lamps mounted on the front. There was one for me, and a spare for Micky. I stuck an old brass magnifying glass and Granpa’s old pocket watch in my pockets, and walked out through the quiet, empty house, my little sisters gone to spend a few days with Dad, Mom’s door still shut, nothing but silence inside, the whisper of the wind in the windows, distant birdsong, the very far away sound of cars on Route One.
It was sunny outside as I walked down the long hill of Staggs Court, toward Carter Lane and the creek, the sky a deeper, fuller shade of blue than you expect around here in August. More clouds, too. “An unusually cool month.” Down the hill, across the empty blacktop, not a car in sight, all the men long gone to work, quick through the Davidsons’ yard, though no one was home, down a grassy slope, plunging into the cool, woodsy shadows around Marumsco Creek.
I stopped at the bottom of the hill, and stood looking at the water, looking down into its dark shadows, at the pebbled, sandy bottom, wondering for the zillionth time why it was here. Good thing it is. This is where I played. Played as a kid, as a not-quite-kid now, summer and winter, spring and fall, played Barsoom with this as the river Iss, played Amtor for a while, imagining targos in the forest, voo klangan in the sky. Then that imaginary Jupiter Micky and I invented one winter with nothing better to do, Onol the mine inspector, Desta the artist-engineer, making me snicker at our lack of inventiveness, my father a geologist at the Bureau of Mines, his a draftsman for the Smithsonian.
Still, it was something, to imagine myself Onol of Aceta, to imagine myself a grown man with a job to do, not in a business suit in the rusty dusty America of 1964, but a man with a sword and diadem, inspecting the fabulous mines of Aceta, the City on the Mountain, on a vast, faraway world you could see most nights as a brilliant diamond gleam in the sky, Onol of Jupiter.
On Jupiter, I thought, suddenly silly, they wouldn’t like “Hard Day’s Night,” wouldn’t care that the silly-ass Beatles had come to America. Maybe they’d like the Animals instead, would like “House of the Rising Sun,” or maybe even Bob Dylan and . . .
I started walking up the creek to the rendezvous point, rolling my eyes in self-exasperation, picturing a movie drama, with Burt Lancaster instead of me as Onol, Bob Dylan twanging away at his version of movie theme music. Jesus.
Anyway, I know a place where there’s no Gulf of Tonkin, no “incidents,” no President Johnson looking more like a beagle than ever as he gave some idiotic speech, no damnfool “resolution” as Dad called it. No three civil rights workers turning up dead, no boozy parish priest trying to explain Ecclesiam Suam from the new damn pope. No damn civil war in Cyprus, much less any truce. No damn New York World’s Fair, no endless poont-poont-poont of Ringo’s damn drumming on every cool FM radio station I could pick up. . . .
Deep breath.
Damn. And I can’t even remember what happened last week!
By the time I got to where the creek was spanned by a fallen gray tree trunk, not far from the big old ant stump, Micky, Johnny, and Kenny were already there, Johnny’s deep-as-a-grownup voice booming, “Alan! You’re late!”
Johnny was a big Irish redhead, five-nine already, three inches taller than me, blue-eyed and freckle-faced, maybe a little dumber than the rest of us, though still smarter than most kids at Garfield Jr. High, which isn’t saying much, I guess. Micky, just as big as Johnny, but fat and Italian, dusty-looking black hair in a buzz cut that’d grown to an inch-long mess over the summer, had already made himself a sword from one of the hardwood reeds that grew along the creek, was waving it around in a big figure-eight, “just like Tars Tarkas,” thin wood making deep whoop-whoop sounds at the outside of each arc.
“Come on, let’s go, Onol!” he shouted, wobbling on his feet like one of those punching-bag clown toys. He was always like that, clumsy looking, but Micky had better coordination than I did, was the only one of us who had played Little League baseball, and was proud of his reputation as a “power hitter.”
Little Kenny, barely five feet tall, who’d been poking around at the base of the ant stump, straightened and picked up one of two reed swords resting against it, gave me a credible fencing salute. He was wearing one of those old leather football helmets like you see in old movies, some Knute Rockne thing he’d gotten from his dad, who looked way too little to play football himself.
“Adar Thu of Cillpa salutes you, Onol!” He tossed me the other reed sword, which I caught somewhere in the middle, almost missing.
I heard Micky mutter, “Cut yourself ?” Then he looked at Johnny. “Tengam?” Nothing. No reaction. “Hey, you! Tengam of Alaln! Ready to go?”
Johnny, bareheaded as always, gave him that baffled look he always got, and said, “I guess.” Johnny always had the most trouble assuming his Jovian identity, kept calling us by our real names, right in the middle of some scene we were playing out, which always made Micky mad, arguing, when it was just the two of us, that we should leave Johnny out, find someone else to play the part of Tengam, or even make up a new character, so his neighbor Wally could play.
Johnny’d been my friend longer than anyone else though, and I liked having him around, even if he couldn’t quite get into his role.
I said, “You bring the carbide?”
Micky picked up a green rucksack that’d been laying in the weeds by the creek, hefting it. “My dad had a couple of pounds left from the Fourth of July.” You could hear Carl’s carbide cannon all over Marumsco Village, so loud the police had come the first year they lived here, but it turned out there was no law against it.
“What else?” The rucksack was stuffed full.
“My Mom made some sandwiches. Ham and Swiss on Jewish rye!”
I glanced at Kenny, raising an eyebrow, then said, “All for you, I suppose?” Micky showed his teeth in something only halfway a grin.
I pulled the brass magnifying glass from my pocket and aimed it at him, thumb on the knurl I pretended was a trigger button. “You’ll share, or face the power of the ectolens!” That got a grimace. Micky never liked the ectolens idea, preferring we use toy plastic ray guns he called “thissars.” Then he’d stopped wanting to carry a toy gun on his belt, because sometimes we went in stores while out adventuring, and people would look at him funny.
Kenny picked up a small blue pack, something left over from Cub Scouts maybe, and said, “Never mind. My Mom made corned beef.”
Suddenly, Johnny said, “Let’s go, guys,” and started walking off down the creek. No lunch packed for him, or me. Sometimes, Johnny would bring his own peanut butter and jelly along, but not today. He never would say what was wrong at his house. Anyway, my Mom was still asleep, and I never minded skipping lunch, knowing I’d get fat like my Dad if I wasn’t careful.
I handed Micky the spare hard hat and lamp combo, and said, “One helmet, one sandwich; one lamp, one carbide load, right, Desta?”
More teeth, but he put the helmet on his head, and I knew he’d come through at lunch time. I turned and followed Johnny-turned-Tengam down the left bank of the creek.
It was a beautiful day for a Jovian adventure, cool and breezy, but sunny enough, patches of deep blue sky and puffy white clouds visible through the trees, sunlight dappled here and there on the ground, lighting up shiny bits of rippling stream.
Micky and I always played here more than the other kids, so much it made us feel we owned the place. I’d played with Kenny here long before Micky moved to Marumsco Village, but it was Micky who had an imagination like mine, full of wonder worlds from books and comics. He was the first one willing to call himself by another name, and his willingness to do that made Kenny join in, so he wouldn’t be left out.
I looked over my shoulder, “Hey, Mick. . . .”
Another show of teeth. “Desta.”
“You remember Herman and Melville?”
He got a sudden look of pleasure, and smiled. One summer, here by ourselves, we’d caught a couple of big black beetles, each one close to an inch long. We’d named them Herman and Melville, then floated them down the creek for miles on a piece of dead wood, two alien adventurers exploring The River of No Return. I was always glad we let them go, in the end.
He said, “Sure.”
“You suppose they ever found their way back home?”
He shrugged, bemused, and we walked on.
We came out of the woods not far from Dinky’s Cliffs, walking out into dazzling sunlight, into a hotter sort of day. The woods here were bounded by barbed wire, but it’d been cut in places a long time ago, and the field beyond was covered with tall, dry brown grass, almost like hay, cut across the middle by a footpath made by kids like us. Maybe just us? I hardly ever saw anyone else here.
Some Occoquan kids who’d lived here before Marumsco Village was built had told me there used to be a mean old bull in this field. They were full of tall tales about daring to jump the fence and be chased by the bull. Micky laughed when he heard that, said something about the bull being hamburgers by now, and didn’t seem interested in my explanation about the difference between a bull and steer.
Micky and I were walking side by side now, talking about Aceta, the Cenons, and stuff, making changes in how the story went to suit the new ideas we had, which were displacing old elementary school stuff. This had all started years ago, when some teacher thought the class should write short stories as assignments. “Not less than four pages!” she’d said, to alarmed groans and complaints.
Micky and I collaborated on our two stories, “The War in Aceta” and “Revenge of the Plant Men” set on an imaginary Jupiter, then had insisted we be allowed to read them aloud to the class, one after the other. We’d been worrying at it ever since.
Lately, we’d been talking about something called “The Guardians of Jove,” which started with Onol and Desta embarking on a long caravan trip, headed for the vast, unbroken mountain range of the title, which barricaded one hemisphere of Jupiter from the other. We thought there might be many such ranges ringing the planet, possibly what caused the famous banding visible in big telescopes, and maybe the Great Red Spot was a swirling storm where part of the Guardians had collapsed.
Other things had started to intrude as well, especially in the past year or so. A lot of the stories we’d read in the Ace and Ballantine paperbacks flooding all the bookracks lately had what you might call “romantic interest.” It was pretty sketchy stuff, especially in books that were reprints of things from the Thirties and Forties, but it was there.
There was also some boy-girl stuff happening around the seventh and eighth grades that was pretty hard not to notice, and Micky and I tried our hands at putting some of it in our little story fragments. Micky did a pretty good job writing an imitation of what we were reading, a scene with a man and woman bantering coyly with each other, just the way they did in stories.
I never liked admitting it, especially to him, but Micky can usually write better sentences than me, and combine them into better paragraphs. So I tried something a little different. My parents are pretty young, not even into their mid-thirties yet, and my mom’s got a little sister only a couple of years older than me, though I’m supposed to call her “Auntie” when there’re grownups around.
Anyway, I’m not totally clueless about this stuff.
So I wrote a little scene in which the boy/girl banter was a little more . . . oh, I guess torrid would be the word. And at the end of the scene, they wound up in what kids in school call “liplock.” Micky seemed uneasy when he read it, and suggested I hide it somewhere in my room.
Somehow, that scene led to Micky coming up with an idea very different from anything we’d ever talked about before, and now he was arguing, “That stuff between John Carter and Dejah Thoris is as silly as what’s in a Nancy Drew book!”
I’d never read a Nancy Drew book, and wasn’t sure he had either, but I had to agree John Carter’s problems with the Princess of Mars were pretty goofy. I mean, here’s a man who never ages, is so old he can’t remember ever being young, who’s killed people, and he can’t figure out what to do with a snotty little egg-laying princess?
“So what do you think we should do? Write about prostitutes?” People don’t talk about this stuff in front of kids much, but when you drive through the crappier parts of Washington, D.C., which is pretty much most of it, you see those women in the shadows, and if Mom’s not along, you might see your dad looking at them too. “So what’re we going to call our book, Micky? The Red-Hot Streetwalkers of Jupiter?” Actually, I kind of liked the title.
Micky tried to look pissed off, but tittered inanely instead. “Idiot. Look, what we need are Sector Maidens.”
“Huh?”
“The way we have it now, Jupiter is divided into Bands, right? By the Guardians, I mean.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So what if we divide the Bands into Sectors? And what if each Sector has a girl in it who’s supposed to . . .” He made a vague gesture with his hand.
I smirked. “Christ, Micky! Where’d you get an idea like that? And why Sector Maidens?”
Kenny, who’d been listening, said, “Moslem Paradise.”
That made Micky look mad, I think, because he’d been about to tell me he’d thought it up out of nothing. “Right. Virgins.” It seemed like a good idea, but . . . I said, “If we ever do any of this stuff for real, I don’t think we could get away with something like that. Not in a story.” Not in Amazing or Fantastic. Surely not in Analog!
Ahead of us, Johnny turned around, and said, “You guys are nuts, you know that?” Then he said, “Anyway, we’re here.”
I stepped past him and stood as close as I could bear to the edge of Dinky’s Cliffs, looking down at the muddy red lowland below, the yellowish expanse of the Occoquan River beyond, finally the bushily overgrown, rocky start of Fairfax County beyond that. Somewhere up there was Lorton and the big state prison, but we’d never walked that far.
Micky stepped a lot closer to the edge than me, looking straight down, something like eighty feet. “Conveyor’s over there,” he said, pointing.
My Dad had told me this used to be a clay pit, servicing a nearby brick factory, though that didn’t seem right, somehow. I remembered he’d brought me here when I was maybe eight or nine to see the old kiln chimney, by far the tallest structure in all of Woodbridge, demolished. What I remembered was, flash! Boom! There’d been a hard punch against the soles of my feet, then the chimney went telescoping down on itself, disappearing in a cloud of red dust, rather than tipping over the way I imagined it would.
We got to the top of the rickety old conveyor belt, which went slanting on down the face of the cliff to the ground below, ending near the ruins of some old buildings, Micky and Johnny setting right out, pounding on down at top speed, wobbling and slipping as they went.
Kenny and I stood and watched them for a while, and when I looked at him, I could see he was pale, though probably not as pale as me. He said, “I guess if Micky doesn’t fall through, we won’t, huh?”
I tried to smile, but couldn’t. “We better get down there before they see how yellow we are.”
On the way down, I tried not to hold on too tight, feeling faint, almost like I might suddenly turn and pitch over the guardrail, screaming my way down to the mud below, glad Kenny was behind me, so I couldn’t see if he was scareder than me or not. Down at the bottom, the other two were waiting, watching, Johnny’s face expressionless, Micky with a suppressed smirk.
When I got there, he said, “Onol make it with dry panties, did he? Oh, don’t shoot me with that there ectolens. . . !”
Beyond the wrecked buildings was a hole in the cliff face, a hole surrounded by a steel skeleton that’d once held some kind of winch mechanism, I think, though what was left now was a hook and dangling chain. What it dangled into was another hole, a vertical shaft, nothing but darkness down below.
Johnny grabbed the chain and leaned out, actually hanging over the shaft, peering downward into the dark. Micky picked up a round white rock of some kind and threw it in, then we all held our breaths, listening.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Kenny, standing well back, said, “How far. . . .”
John pulled back in, bending his knees to get his balance, teetering on the edge, scaring the hell out of me. “If you guys have that argument again about whether a rock would go all the way to China or hang suspended at the Earth’s core, I’ll throw you both in so you can . . .”
Micky gave him one of his looks, stepping closer. “I’m bigger than you.”
“Fatter, anyway.”
I said, “Cut it out guys. Let’s go in.”
That made them look at the horizontal tunnel opening in the cliff wall, and suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. A couple of other feet. Kenny danced around the edge of the vertical shaft and into the old mine, grinning back from the beginning of the darkness there, pulling a flashlight out of his pack and shaking it like a magic wand. “So. Onol? Brave Desta? Mighty Tengam?”
Micky said, “Silly Adar Thu . . .” but you could see he was nervous, see the little swallow as he thought about it.
I stepped in with him, and said, “Might as well get out that carbide. Anyone remember to bring a canteen?”
“Me,” said Kenny.
We got the carbide lamps going, gas jets making a little hissy whine, little flame in the middle of the brass reflectors casting a pretty good yellow white glow ahead of us. I told Kenny to put his flashlight away, save it for if we got into some kind of trouble, and we walked on in.
We’d been nerving ourselves up for this all summer, ever since I’d talked my Dad into giving me the helmets and lamps as toys, hadn’t done it earlier because we’d needed to argue about whether or not we should, Kenny and me for it, Micky and John against.
Now that we were in, Micky seemed to calm down looking around at wet, slimy old walls, at the big, rotten looking timbers, at the veins of color, red and green, in the gray rock walls. What were they mining down here? Clay? Doesn’t look like clay.
Behind us, I could hear Johnny whispering to Ken, “We’re just going to get hurt down here. What happens if there’s a cave-in? You ever think of that?”
Kenny said, “You were brave enough at the top of the cliff.”
“That’s different.”
When I looked at Micky, he was smirking again, and rolling his eyes.
I think he’s always happiest if someone’s more afraid than he is, and it doesn’t matter who.
The tunnel ended abruptly, widening out into a sort of a room, with wooden walls and a wooden floor, another tunnel entrance black and empty in the far wall. Johnny stepped around me into the light, walking to the center of the room, his concerns overcome by obvious curiosity, and said, “Wonder what this place was for?”
I said, “Bunk room maybe.”
Micky said, “There’s a bulletin board with paper still on it over there.” He took a couple of steps toward it, and stopped suddenly, looking down at his feet. Bounced a little. Stopped. “This floor’s got a little give to it.”
I laughed. “Maybe we better not stand too close together?”
Kenny said, “Don’t stand next to Desta, anyway!”
That got a show of teeth.
Something made a low creaking sound, almost like a painful groan.
Johnny opened his mouth and took a deep breath, said, “Um . . .”
There was a loud crack! and he went down like he was on an elevator, straight down through the floor, posed like a statue, mouth open, blue eyes popping, curly red hair flapping like a flag as it went down in the dark.
Thump.
Nothing.
I said, “Oh, man. . . .”
The floor made another creak, higher pitched this time.
Kenny said, “Alan?”
“Hang on.” I took a step toward the hole, felt the floor shift, got down on my hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way. There was nothing but black down the hole where Johnny had gone. No help from the carbide lamp, which sputtered and flickered when I tried to look down. I took my helmet off, laying it on the floor next to the hole, and said, “Ken? I need your flashlight.”
He crawled over and handed it to me, while Micky stood rooted to the floor, halfway between us and the tunnel entrance. When I took the flashlight, I could see Micky was looking at the tunnel, not me.
There was nothing down the hole but dust, all lit up in the flashlight beam, blocking passage of the light.
Kenny said, “Oh, shit. Alan . . .”
The room made a tortuous squeak, like someone pulling a hundred nails all at once, and I felt the floor start to tilt.
Micky yelled, “I’m getting out of here!”
The entire universe went snap-crackle-pop, and I suddenly went head down, the flashlight beam spinning crazily as I lost my grip. I think I said, “Fuck,” heard Kenny gabble something like “Shame a yizz . . .”
Maybe something hit me in the head then.
I sure don’t remember.
I opened my eyes on utter black, lying on what felt like rocks and old broken bricks, ears ringing, head spinning, smelling something like dust, something like gunpowder, something like the smell of a nosebleed. I sniffed, but there wasn’t any blood in my nose, as far as I could tell.
There was a scuffling sound somewhere, something like breathing, a vague little bit of something like a whisper, a rattling sound.
I whispered, “Shit,” to myself, quietly, putting a hand up to my head, my bare head, trying to sit up somehow.
I heard Kenny’s voice in the dark, kind of muffled, “Hang on. I think I . . .” More rattling noises. “Jesus . . .”
I felt something in me try to boil up in a giggle as I sat on the bricks and rocks, rubbing a lump on my temple, so I said, “Kenny, you’re a Jew. You’re not supposed to say that.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s much better.”
There was a squeaking sound, another rattle, and suddenly the flashlight clicked on, shining up through yellow-lit dust, lighting up Kenny’s face from below, making him look like a hollow-eyed ghoul. A ghoul in an old leather football helmet. “Damn. I thought it was broken.”
He shined it over in my direction. “You okay?”
“I think so.” I got to my feet, slipping on the bricks, tottering slightly. “Something hit me in the head.”
Kenny put his hand up, touching the helmet. “Me too. Sure am glad I had the chin strap buckled.”
I said, “What’d you yell when the floor broke? ‘Shame on something.’ ”
He looked at me, beady-eyed. “Nothing. Something Jews are supposed to say right before they die.”
“Huh. Weird.”
Kenny shined the light around wherever we were, just a mess of bricks, irregular rocky walls visible here and there, big pieces of wood scattered around the floor. When he shined it straight up, all you could see was darkness and dust.
Johnny was lying spreadeagled in the middle of the floor, my hard hat sitting next to him, a few feet away. When the light was in his face, he looked dead, eyes half open, big goose egg on his left cheekbone, ribbon of black blood coming out of one nostril.
I leaned down, reached out and put a hand on his chest. “Breathing, anyway.” I picked up my hardhat and fiddled with the lamp, smelled it. Apparently, the gas flow stopped when the flame blew out. Some kind of safety device. I didn’t know, and realized my dad probably wasn’t expecting I’d be able to get carbide and try to light the damned thing. Just a toy, nowadays.
I put it on my head, twisted the thumbscrew, heard the hiss, spun the igniter wheel. There was a little cascade of sparks and the flame sputtered to light, filling the room we were in with shadows. The first thing I saw was Micky standing with his back to one wall, dark eyes big, holding his hard hat in one hand, staring at us, silent. There was a big dark splotch on the front of his jeans, with a nice pseudopod down one leg.
I thought about repeating what he’d said to me at the foot of the conveyor belt ramp, but decided to keep my mouth shut.
When I tipped my head back, you could see the remains of the floor we’d fallen from, maybe forty feet up.
Kenny whistled softly. “I wonder why we’re not dead?”
I heard Micky crunching toward us across the bricks. He stopped maybe halfway and picked something up, then kept on. “Here’s your pack, Ken. Mine stayed on my shoulder all the way down.”
All the way down. I said, “Canteen?” Kenny opened the pack and handed it to me, one of those flat British desert canteens like you see in World War Two movies. “Maybe if we splash some in Johnny’s face, he’ll come around.”
Kenny said, “Worth a try.”
Micky said, “I tried to climb out of here first thing. I don’t think it’s possible.”
I thought about that for a minute, then decided to continue to keep my mouth shut. Maybe I’ll bring it up, once we’re safely out of this place.
When I splashed water in Johnny’s face, he woke up immediately, sputtering, eyes fluttering, rubbing his face, then looking around, big-eyed and scared. After a bit, he whispered, “See? I told you so. I fucking told you!”
No way to climb up. Not even a trace of a way. No sign there’d ever been stairs or anything. No clue what this room might have been for, once upon a time. There was a dark hole, the beginning of a tunnel in one wall, nothing but pitch black dark inside. I stood at the mouth of it for a long minute, staring at nothing, my lamp lighting up dwindling rock walls, a square tunnel, not even shored up like a real mine.
Finally, I said, “I guess we better find out where this goes, huh?”
A long time later, I stood in another big, empty stone room, the third one we’d found, empty but for rubble on the floor, silent, winding Grandpa’s old pocket watch, listening to the soft sizzle of the pawls. They made these things good. Grandpa’s been gone, what? Three years already? And the watch goes on.
I knew Grandpa had been born in 1902, and only lived to be fifty-nine. No idea when the watch was made. Dad said Grandpa had it when he himself was a boy in the 1930s, and it wasn’t new then.
Kenny was looking over my arm and shoulder, down at the watch. “How long’s it been?”
“Eleven-oh-two. Fourteen hours and some.”
“Jeez.”
I thought about reminding him of his religious heritage again, but the joke seemed to have gone stale in my head.
Micky held up his wrist, showing off the fine gold Helbros he’d gotten last Christmas, the first calendar watch I’d ever seen. “I’ve got 11:10,” he said. “pm”
I said, “That date right?”
He gave me a weird look. “You think we’re going to be down here long enough that’s going to matter?”
I gestured around the room. Irregular stone walls and ceiling. Broken rock on the floor. Scree. Dad would want me to use the right word. Back that way, the black square of the tunnel mouth, tunnel leading only back to the way we’d gotten in, forty feet straight up. On the opposite wall was a . . . oh, not another tunnel. Call it a crack.
Kenny said, “You think we should go down that?”
“I dunno. Micky might not fit.”
Still enough spirit for him to show me his teeth, a long look, then a wry smirk. “Fat’s pretty squishy, you know.”
Kenny giggled, then strangled. Maybe trying not to cry?
Micky stared at him for a second, eyes dark and empty. Then he said, “I’m hungry.”
“Yeah, me too.” I blew out a long breath, puffing up my cheeks, feeling so nervous for a second I wanted to dance around like an idiot. “Eat. Maybe get some rest? Move on in the, um.” Right. In the morning whose light we wouldn’t be able to see down here in the dark.
Johnny, facing away from us, looking at the tunnel back, suddenly said, “I’m scared.”
Kenny said, “No shit.”
Micky pulled open his rucksack, looked at me for a minute, sort of reached up and touched the helmet I’d lent him, then reached in the pack and dug out a square of waxed paper. “Here’s your other sandwich.”
Kenny said, “You want a corned beef ? I got three.”
“Sure. Micky, give mine to John.”
Johnny shook his head, back still to us. You could see Micky’s eyes light up.
I said, “God damn it, Johnny. Kenny’s a runt and Micky’s just a fat pig. You need to keep your strength up for me.”
Softly, Kenny said, “Hey . . .”
I blew out that breath again. “I’m sorry, Ken. Christ, I’m scared as he is.” But John turned and took the ham and Swiss from Micky, who had to content himself with just the one. Later, we each took a swig from the canteen, though we needed to save most of it for the carbide lamps.
Micky said, “Maybe we’ll find water? The walls are damp enough.”
“You want to count on that?”
You could see Micky think about trying to find our way in the dark, once the water was gone and Ken’s batteries were flat. Not a good thing to think about, is it? Then we turned out the lamps to sleep, and it was the darkest fucking dark you can possibly imagine.
Somebody started to sniffle after a while, but I didn’t try to figure out who.
I opened my eyes on pale blue light, groggy and confused, for just a second not knowing where the fuck I was, if anywhere. Lumps and painful spots, sharp edges under my back . . . scree. Like an eagle’s cry, I thought, squirming slightly, then, light. . . ?
Pale blue light.
Light so pale it was almost as black as the abyssal midnight on which I’d closed my eyes some forever long time ago. I sat up slowly, watching shadows move over deeper shadows nothing could penetrate.
The light was coming from the crack in the far wall of the mine chamber, the crack that’d looked to me like a natural rock formation, not the work of men at all, though I’d been afraid to say that to the others. Maybe Kenny guessed.
Like luminescence, I thought. Some crud growing on the walls, pumped up by the light from our lamps, invisible to eyes used to the light from the fire. Now . . .
I stood up, quiet as can be, walked almost on tiptoe over to the foot-wide crack in the wall, staring in at the light. Not on the walls of the crack, anyway. Coming from somewhere farther away. From somewhere beyond that first bend.
“Al?” Kenny’s voice.
I turned, wondering if he could see it too, opening my mouth to say something, I don’t know what.
“Alan!?” Panic in that voice, then a deep, sleepy mumble from Micky, who loved to sleep.
The flashlight went on with a flare, blinding me, making me squeeze my eyes tight. I heard Johnny say, “Ken? Alan? What’s going on?” When I opened my eyes again, the three of them were standing, facing me, all in a muddy sort of blur.
I said, “When I woke up in the dark, there was some kind of light.”
Micky said, “Light?” His Skeptic voice, the tone that said, You’re lying, Alan. I know you’re lying.
I gestured at the crack.
Kenny turned out the flashlight, and there was nothing but the old original dark black nothing, the adaptation of my eyes destroyed by electric fire. Rods, cones, whatever the hell they’d told us in science class last year. Sudden image in my head of Mrs. Kooyenga, fat, smiling, hair in a bun, freckles on her face, one of the few schoolteachers I’d ever really liked, maybe because I found out I she liked Andre Norton, too, and used the word “flitter” once in class.
Kenny put the light back on, and said, “Anyway, we can’t go look for it in the dark.”
Micky picked up his helmet and lamp, shook it and listened. “We better reload. Kenny?” It took the last of our water, but for the one sip we each swallowed, though there was enough carbide in Micky’s bag to last for a week.
I led the way down the crack, and it wasn’t as bad a trip as we feared. For one thing, it was wider inside than it looked. Micky had to squeeze his belly past the rock at the entrance, but after that all any of us had to do was walk a little crabwise, leaning to the left. Anyway, trying to. I kept cracking my helmet on the rock, though not quite as often as Micky, a good bit taller than me. I don’t know if Kenny ever hit his head or not. Even if he did, that leather helmet wouldn’t make any more noise than John’s head did the one time I heard him grunt, “Ow.”
It went on for maybe a hundred yards or so, and ended just the way it began, the four of us coming out of a crack in the wall, coming out and stopping, one by one, stopping and just standing there.
That’s all we did for a long damned time, until Micky said, “If you told me something like this was under Woodbridge, Virginia, I’d’ve said you were crazy.”
Hushed. Almost in a whisper.
I tipped my head back, aiming the lamp’s reflector at faraway shadows, trying to see just how far up it went. A hundred yards? Two? I said, “I don’t remember us walking downhill any.”
The mine entrance was maybe eighty feet below the precipice at the top of Dinky’s Cliffs, and we’d fallen maybe another forty feet when the floor gave way.
Micky said, “Be funny if there was a door up there and we came out in the basement of the Drug Fair in Fisher Shopping Center.”
I said, “You see a door?”
Johnny said, “I didn’t know Drug Fair had a basement.”
Kenny said, “What the hell is that?”
He wasn’t looking upward, and when I looked where he was pointing, there was a dull gleam like brassy metal. Brassy metal, and long, thin white things, like sticks.
No. Not sticks. Bones.
It took a minute to sink in, then we all walked forward in a clump, four terrified automatons puppeting across the floor. There was a brass cuirass lying on its back, some kind of skirt made from strips of metal and scraps of dark leather, arm and leg bones sticking out about where you’d expect.
Micky said, “This stuff’s kind of small, like the Spanish conquistador armor we saw in the Smithsonian.”
I remembered the field trip we’d gone on together. Seventh grade? I said, “This stuff’s not Spanish armor.” There was a helmet above the cuirass, crested, with a nosepiece, and a plume that looked like it was made from a horse’s tail. There was a skull inside, upper teeth grinning, and when I looked around, I saw a jaw lying not far away, upside down in the dirt.
Kenny leaned down slowly and picked up a thing like a scabbard, handle sticking out of one end. When he drew the short sword, its blade was slightly leaf shaped, rather than the longer, squarer sword you saw in movies. He said, “I think this is called a gladius.”
When he looked at me, I said, “The leather’s still soft, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. You’d think it’d be . . .” He gestured at the clean white bones.
“I don’t know how long cured leather would last.”
Kenny slid the sword back in its scabbard and started to throw it down, stopped, staring, then bent and put it softly down by the man’s side.
Micky suddenly grunted, looking off into the distance. Grunted and walked away from us, heading toward some colored glitter in the shadows. When we gathered round this next thing, it was maybe worse than the man in ancient armor. Another skeleton. Smaller. Skinnier. No armor. Swaddled in dusty, silky cloth. The colored glitter had come from a necklace of gold and gleaming jewels. Rubies. Diamonds. Emeralds. Maybe sapphires. I guess I should know which is which, though Dad does minerals, not gems. The word corundum popped into my head. Not carborundum. Something else entirely.
There was a slim gold diadem above the skull, laying back like a halo, though I guess it was on her when she died, and fell off as the flesh rotted away.
Felt myself try to gag at the too-sharp image in my head.
When Micky bent down and picked it up, some black strands fell away, fluttering to the ground. Hair? I tried not to gag again as he set it on his own head. There was a little wand sticking up from it, sticking up now from the middle of his forehead, tipped by the fiery gleam of a small ruby.
“Jesus! Desta, you look like you’re ready to go riding on a ther!”
He smiled when I said it, eyes brightening in the lamplit gloom.
Thers were beasts of burden we’d invented for Jupiter, kind of like trunkless, three-legged elephants, though in our drawings they looked more like well-upholstered footstools. They were telepathic, but humans weren’t, so you had to direct them by wearing a mind-control circlet.
Kenny said, “Who do you suppose she was?"…
