Ghouls (61 page)

“We’re not going to bring it down now. After we rig it up, we go back outside, set up defensive positions, and then we wait. In the morning, when the ghala go back into the mine, that’s when we blow the manway. There’s a good chance the whole
works’ll
come down, and even if just the manway caves in, the ghala will be trapped inside.”

Kurt’s skepticism was growing like a stain. “Willard implied that these things aren’t just dumb animals, that they got intelligence.”

“That’s true.”

“Then what if they spot us somehow? Or what if they know we’re there before they go back into the mine?”

“That’s why we set up the defensive positions. If the ghala smell us out beforehand, we can pick them off with the rifles before they can get to us. Piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” Kurt said. “I can hardly wait.”

««—»»

It was a bright night, crisply starred, sparsely clouded. The ridge lay frozen in moonlight. The moon crept behind a reef of clouds. Kurt felt tiny between the ridge and the opposing forest; he could feel the presence of the woods, and its pressing closeness. Thin brittle vines like wicker spread nets between the trees. The cricket sounds were louder now, exuding chaotically, pulsing out. A barn owl peered at them from a high tree, a white warning face in the dark. It all closed in on him now, the forest and the insect trills, the bleaching moon and the dark, and what they were about to do. Baked, cracked earth of what was once an outer trolley line crumbled beneath Kurt’s feet; his head felt empty.

I’m walking to my death,
he thought.

They passed the collapsed
manways
and finally stood before the only open entry. Kurt stared into the bore of blackness, the same depths in which Higgins had died just hours before. Vines, gnarled and thick as barbed wire, twisted about the portal’s outer support stulls. Fissures in the ridge itself sprouted tufts of grayish, unhealthy vegetation.

Sanders removed from his pocket a flat spool of thirty-pound test
trilene
fishing line. He knotted one end around a piton in the outer stull, then inserted a pencil through the spool’s center.

“Where’d you get that?” Kurt asked.

“Willard’s.”

“What’s it for?”

“You’ll see.
Here.
”

They carried several flashlights each. Sanders had brought an additional four from Willard’s, two of which he now gave to Kurt. Then they each securely masking-taped two flashlights to the
handguards
of their rifles.

“Ready?” Sanders asked.

“You’re sure the ghala aren’t here now?”

“One hundred percent sure. They only stay in their lair after dark when it’s their mating season, and that’s winter.”

Kurt loaded his five-round clip. “Okay. Let’s go.”

They slung their rifles, turned on handheld lights. Entering the manway was like stepping into a Freudian nightmare. A queer, warm draft siphoned overhead, bringing fetid odors of rotten wood, niter, and decay. The dripping sound could be heard even this far out. Sanders let the spool of line unravel as he followed the uprooted trolley rails deeper into the mine. Kurt struggled to keep up, thinking of Theseus and the Minotaur.

“What’s that stink?” Sanders asked.

Kurt shined his light on the crusted deposits. “
Sulphur
, zinc, saltpeter. It bleeds through the rock. And it gets worse, too.”

“Should’ve brought a fuckin’ gas mask.”

Sanders walked slowly, to inspect each stull. Some of them remained in good condition, but most were rotten or swollen by decades of seepage. Further on, he stopped, noticing the sign on the last overhead prop: MAIN SHAFT AHEAD.

“This is the end of the manway,” Kurt told him. “The
stope
pit’s about thirty yards in front of us, down that ramp.”

Sanders pried at the final manway stull with his fingers. The wood came apart in pulpy, termite-infested splinters. “What’s more likely to be weaker, the manway or the ceiling over the main shaft?”

“Hard to say. The greater weight’s over the pit, but then there’s a lot more reinforcement.” Kurt aimed his light ahead, revealing the inner cavern’s labyrinth of stulls. “How many grenades do you have?”

“Three, all
fuzed
M25’s, like the one I dropped at the house.”

“I say we set them off here, at the juncture. The concussion should bring down the ceiling and the manway as well.”

Kurt held the light as Sanders set to work and opened the string bag full of things he’d brought from Willard’s. He removed a box of one-inch flathead nails and the three grenades. Then he took the first grenade in his hand, gripped the safety spoon, and pulled out the retaining pin. He threw the pin aside.

Kurt gulped.

“It won’t go off unless I release the spoon,” Sanders said, and into the pinhole above the grenade’s pyrotechnic train, he inserted one of the nails. “Safe now.” He handed the grenade to Kurt, and repeated the procedure with the other two grenades.

Next, Sanders removed three eight-inch shepherd nails and a hammer.

“Don’t hammer too hard,” Kurt said. “Loud noises and old mines don’t mix.”

Sanders chuckled.

Each of these grenades had an additional hole in the striker housing, known as a “tack hole.” (The Army had implemented tack holes for a variety of
fuze
assemblies during the late Vietnam era, to make booby-trap techniques safer.) Using the tack-holes, Sanders began to nail each grenade to the overhead prop. Kurt glanced up furtively as Sanders drove the nails. The pounding shook loose dust and chips of stone from the
manway’s
ceiling. The inner cavern bounced back echoes of each blow.

Lastly, Sanders tied a yard-long piece of line to the smaller flathead nails in the safety-retainer pinholes, then tied the other end of each piece to the original piece of line which ran to the outside of the mine.

“Done,” Sanders said.

“Why bother removing the pins? Wouldn’t it have been less complicated just to tie the lines to the rings themselves?”

“Forget about what you see on TV; it takes about fifty pounds of elbow grease to jerk a pin out of a grenade. That’s why I replaced the pins with nails. The
nails’ll
come out easy, a quick tug is all we’ll need. This is how we used to booby trap spider holes in the war when we didn’t have any demo.”

“What do we do now?”

“We go back outside and dig in. When the ghala return in the morning and come back into the mine, we pull the other end of this fishing line, and that will be it.”

To Kurt, it almost sounded too easy.

While Sanders double-checked his rigging, Kurt wandered down the haulage ramp, toward the main shaft. He felt drawn to it somehow, challenged to take one last look into the pit. At the
causewalk
, he shined his light down into the black void. It looked bottomless now, a chasm without end. The dripping echoed up, a maddening almost metallic pap. He could feel heat rising. His light trailed the winze groove from the bottom of the shaft, then stopped at the row of stopes. The pit’s blackness made him reel.

He stared at the stopes for a long time.

“This the shaft?” Sanders had come up from behind. He took one look down and said, “My God.”

Kurt continued to stare.

“Come on,” Sanders said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I have to go down and see.”

“See
what?”

“The
stope
,” Kurt said. “I have to see what’s inside the
stope
.”

“You got some sure-fire shit for brains. This place is rigged to blow.”

Kurt began shaking the rusted ring ladders which descended to the
stope
ledges. He needed to find one that would hold his weight. “I’m going down,” he restated. “You said yourself that the ghala won’t be back for a couple more hours. This will only take a minute.”

“These ladders are rusted clean through. You’ll break your neck, you moron.”

Kurt didn’t know what suddenly impelled him to want to do this. The mystery of the stopes beckoned him, prodding his blackest curiosity. He needed the final proof to what a day ago he would’ve dismissed as pure insanity.

“There’s nothing in that
stope
but
bones,”
Sanders called after him. “It’s skeleton city down there.”

Kurt wasn’t listening. At last he found a ring ladder that had remained secure.

“You’re really gonna do this?” Sanders said. “You’re really gonna be this stupid?”

“That’s right.” Kurt climbed onto the ladder and began to go down.

Sanders said, “Shit,” and followed him.

The ladder wobbled slightly but held. Kurt descended with great care, testing each rung. He made a point not to look down.

“This is crazy,” Sanders complained above him. “This rickety piece of shit’s gonna break apart. Then we get to do free-falls without chutes.”

Kurt angled out of the safety ladder and stepped out onto the first-level catwalk. From there he took another ladder down to the next level. He moved slowly along the cat, grasping pitons for support when he could. Sanders cursed faintly behind him.

Kurt stopped at the side of the
orepass
, the entry to the
stope
where Higgins had died. He felt dead himself for a moment, his heart still, his brain inert. Did he doubt the safety of the
stope
? Sanders was certain the ghala weren’t here now. It seemed that what he feared was what drew him.
Death in there,
Kurt thought.
Skeletons. Emptied skulls. Waiting for me to see it all.

Sanders caught up to him.

Kurt took a deep breath and entered the
stope
.

A stench hit him like a blast from a cracked steam pipe. It was hot in here, the air viscid as syrup; he could barely breathe.

Sanders entered as if wading in muck. “This place stinks worse than a corpse pit. What the fuck are you trying to prove?”

Kurt didn’t answer. He roved his light back and forth over the
longwalls
. The stench rose; he tried breathing through a handkerchief, but that was a joke. As the
stope
began to veer, he found the first of what he was looking for.

Bones. Stripped ribs. Femurs split and sucked of marrow.

“See? I fuckin’ told you,” Sanders said, gagging.

Kurt’s light played at his feet. Sections of spine lay like big, malformed spools. Fillings glittered up from the teeth of a disconnected jaw.

He stepped forward, stupefied. Water dripped from a crack in the
topwall
; bones crunched underfoot. A gnawed hand lay to the left, a stripped foot to the right. At the base of the pass he saw what looked like the top of a grapefruit, but realized with numb revulsion that it was the top of a skull.

Sanders sounded like he was about to throw up. “We’ve seen enough.”

“I’m going to check the
stope
chamber. It can’t be far.”

Sanders stopped, leaning on his rifle. He spat, gagging, shaking his head. “You’re crazy to want to do this, man. This place is an open grave. You’re gonna dream about this for the rest of your life.”