Dieselpunk: An Anthology (6 page)

Alan’s shoulders slumped. If he continued lobbying for lenience, he’d only become the target of the old man’s wrath. It’d be better to shut up and benefit from the blood money he’d earn for his complicity.

“Give me one of the lights.” Alan sighed and reached out to the thug who’d driven Mudd’s car up the mountain. “I might as well be able to see what I’m writing about.”

They left the office, moving through the forest of timbers that supported the tipple and following the rusty rails that led to the mouth of the mine. Alan’s acetylene lamp hissed, beating back the darkness. The main shaft descended steadily, its walls broken by rough rock plugs and wooden barriers that attested to the destruction Mudd had mentioned. A few hundred yards into the mountain, the tunnel terminated in a wall of broken stone and Mudd directed the group into a smaller passageway. A film of coal dust blackened the walls of this new route, increasing the claustrophobia that had started working on Alan’s nerves. He wondered how many men had trod this path, bound for the coal seams and a ten-hour-shift of hewing rock for their bread. Thinking of toiling in the darkness, chopping out black lumps of bitumen while risking death by cave-in or asphyxiation made his heartbeat race and his breathing only eased when the passage opened into the cramped chamber that accommodated the elevator.

A metallic grinding reverberated off the close walls as the lift’s gates opened. The men moved forward, packing into the elevator and pushing Alan to the back of the car. He found himself pressed against the back grating, next to the driver. As they waited for the descent, the man reached into his jacket and retrieved a pistol, pressing the weapon into Alan’s hands.

“I know you’re just here to write things down, but it’s best to be ready.” He patted Alan’s shoulder heavily.

Alan stuck the gun in his jacket pocket, directing his attention and light at the wall of the shaft as the elevator lurched into motion. Strange shapes swam through the pool of illumination, unusual whorls and fish-like shadows in the uniform rock. He doubted his eyes, attributing what he saw to poor lighting and the movement of the elevator car. Steadily the sightings multiplied, finally becoming too numerous and evident to be dismissed.

Shoals of strange creatures lay entombed in the stony layers, fish of bygone epochs with vacant eye sockets that watched the descending car. Eventually the schools gave way to crab-like insects, unseeing things that must have scuttled across some ancient seafloor on their many legs. These strange crawling-things receded too, their dominion built on older layers of sterile, grey-green rock. Beneath this mantle, new oddities lurked, persisting to the very bottom of the shaft. Large clams lay in beds, crushed and mixed with stranger, more extravagant invertebrates whose trumpet and coiled shells formed tangled, intricate patterns.

The elevator slowed, its cables singing as the car jerked to a stop. The gates opened into a tool-littered chamber twice the size of the one at the top. Hammers and bits lying on the ground mixed indiscriminately with the timbers brought from the surface for shoring up tunnels and stabilizing ceilings.

Alan pivoted, panning his light around the space. Like the shaft, the library of the rock recorded a strange, submarine eon when a great ocean must have swallowed the world. The single passage that let out of the room declined rapidly, running unerringly straight beyond the acetylene lamp’s range.

“It looks like they just dropped everything.” Alan picked his way through the tangled implements, frowning at what he saw and musing on what might have transpired.

“Confirmation of my suspicions,” Mudd grunted, stowing his map and gesturing towards the exit. “Look sharp, they’ll be somewhere on this level.”

The shell-studded ossuary of a tunnel steadily sloped downwards, interrupted at regular intervals by timber supports. Water squeezed into the shaft through crevices, polishing the shells to a gem-like sheen and creating unnerving reflections. Alan trudged along behind the others, marveling at the diversity of form in the long-extinct creatures until a distant note pulled his attention away.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered, his voice amplified by the close quarters.

Silence filled the tunnel and Alan strained to hear over the slow hissing lamps. At first it seemed that a faint, high-pitched bell rang somewhere in the depths. It repeated rhythmically, steadily plinking away until other bells joined in, each keeping its own rhythm.

“Hammers?” Mudd’s tone had changed from that of the stern disciplinarian to a dumbfounded witness.

“Maybe they’re not organizing after all.” The brute with the shotgun suggested.

Mudd shook his head. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Keep going.”

They traveled on, drawn in by the intermittent pecking. As they went deeper into the mountain, the tunnel walls became less disciplined in their construction, eventually giving up their hall-like dimensions and becoming a sort of underground goat path that wallowed and wound. The floor dropped irregularly, creating pitfalls that left Alan stumbling as he attempted to keep up. Then, as suddenly as it had degenerated, the tunnel leveled and widened into an irregularly shaped terminal room.

More tools lay scattered about but fewer than in the higher chamber. The shells that decorated the walls were far bigger, the smallest specimens rivaling a truck tire in size. Alan counted three dead-end passages from this chamber, starts of tunnels the miners abandoned as if the muse they followed left them to grope blindly once they reached this depth. What struck Alan most, though, was the skeleton.

The creature had been some sort of half-fish and half-reptile and its calcified corpse made up the whole of the chamber floor. Fins that wanted to be feet splayed over ribs and crushed-vertebra lay contorted in a pose that suggested a painful demise.

“Mother of . . .” Alan breathed, slowly stepping into the room and taking in the sight.

“Yeah, some fish.” One of the enforcers confirmed. “I wonder what kind of bait you’d use to catch something like this.”

“You mean who you’d use for bait!” the driver countered, laughing nervously.

“Look!” Another of the men knelt on the gargantuan, horned gill plate of the beast, waving for a lantern.

Alan approached, directing his light where the man indicated. The grisly mouth of the thing sported rows of sharp teeth and above its giant maw, an empty eye socket yawned ghastly and black save for the protruding ladder that led down into the abyss. The hammer blows rang clear, emanating from below and filling the air with their song.

Stepping back to get a better view of the situation, Alan stumbled over something that rolled from under his foot and clattered into a corner of the chamber. He shined the light after the obstacle, casting a swath across the chamber that revealed dozens of irregularly shaped objects. Cautiously he retrieved one, holding it up to show his companions.

“It’s a miner’s lantern,” Mudd commented. “Just more evidence of the contempt they have for company property.”

Alan gently shook the lamp and then tested a few of its companions. “They’re all empty.”

“So?” Mudd surveyed the room.

“It just doesn’t sit right.” Alan stood, looking down at the lamp-littered floor. “It’s like everything just stopped; like the men just dropped what they were doing and headed down into that hole.”

“Isn’t it obvious to you by now?” Mudd shook his head, chuckling sourly. “And you call yourself a newsman? No wonder you’re going broke, you can’t even see what’s right in front of your face.”

“Alright.” Alan pitched the spent lamp. “Enlighten me.”

“Look around you, look at the bones. They obviously figured they’d struck it rich and wanted to steal whatever they could before I caught onto their scheme.” The old man looked around the chamber, bitterness filling his eyes. “There probably are hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fossils where we stand.”

Alan hooked a thumb in the direction of the piled lamps. “How are they digging fossils in the dark?”

“We’ll ask them when we see them.” Mudd paced the perimeter of the opening, his wrinkled jowls working as he chewed on how best to proceed. “You two, go down first, Mr. Roth and I will follow, then the rest of you. Have your guns ready, who knows what these perverted Communists might try.”

As instructed, two of Mudd’s henchmen clambered down the ladder. Alan listened to the sound of the men’s boots as they climbed, trying to estimate the depth of the hole. Twenty-four times he heard hard soles on wooden rungs before the climbers reached the bottom. Guessing a twenty-four foot climb, he secured his grip on the lantern and followed Mudd down.

The ladder rested on a flowstone plateau among the litter of more discarded equipment. Hammers and picks lay about, looking as if they’d been tossed through the aperture above. Several shattered crates attested to the workers’ carelessness; their sawdust packing tracked into the muddy floor. Combing through the wrecked boxes, Alan came up with a stick of dynamite, fused and ready for use. His heart started at the sight.

The shotgun-wielding enforcer swore, pushing his hat back and wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his jacket. “It’s amazing the fools didn’t blow themselves up, throwing that stuff around!”

Alan met the man’s eyes, sharing the sentiment as he gingerly returned the explosive to its resting place and backed away.

Alan stood, turning the lantern on his surroundings while waiting for the rest of the men. A vast gallery spread out from the plateau. He guessed its mist-shrouded ceiling rose at least a hundred feet above the cave floor. Great stalactites hung in masses from its vault, dripping water into unseen pools with melodic plops. A distant rushing told of an underground river and dark rapids somewhere far under the mountain. The acetylene lamp’s beam died in the fog that formed ghostly banks across the cavern. He could make out clusters of stalagmites, their redwood-sized trunks creating an underground forest that dominated the cavern floor. The hammering echoed around the stony chamber, but proximity overcame the tricks of the cavern.

“It’s coming from that way.” Alan aimed the lantern at the forest edge.

Without comment Mudd pushed past, beginning the descent with his makeshift army trailing behind. Alan watched the men go, biding his time among the discarded tools while they filed down via switchback folds of flowstone that draped over the edge of the rise. Alan surveyed the underground realm once more as the last of the troop of brutes began their descent. The sound that led them to this dank cellar had stopped and an oppressive silence hung in the misty air. Drawing a deep breath, he started down.

Shells littered the cave floor, washing up to the foot of the flowstone rise and stretching off into the cavern in such profusion they formed head-high dunes and snaking drifts. Crunching through the piles, they made for the vapor-shrouded stalagmite grove. Their progress churned the fossil drifts, turning up specimens that sparkled like fool’s gold or burned lurid red in the light. The sight of so much history, eons casually heaped on eons, made Alan wonder about Mudd’s assertion that the greed of the miners had driven them to abandon their posts. Maybe they had been struck by a kind of gold fever, descending into this buried hell to grub fossils by candlelight. Maybe the old man knew more than Alan wanted to admit.

He thought on the possibility as they descended a sandy hill into a shallow creek that snaked through the petrified groves. The opposite bank rose high and a faint glow silhouetted its undulating crest, suggesting the quest had drawn near its end. Mudd crouched in the cold, sluggish water, motioning for his men to gather around.

“I’m paying you to teach them a lesson. If that requires shooting a few miscreants, so be it.” He shot a glance at Alan. ”Remember, these Red bastards brought this on themselves. Your job is to write it that way.”

Alan nodded weakly.

“Alright,” Mudd turned his gaze on the clique of armed men. “Let’s get this done. I want it nice and orderly, no messy remnants to deal with.”

Alan squinted up the face of the bank, watching the gunmen emerge from the creek-bed like soldiers topping some subterranean entrenchment. Mudd rose to supervise his vengeance, his glasses set alight by the ghostly light. With a breathless curse, the old man slogged up the bank, leaving Alan waiting for the killing to commence.

The gunshots never came. Instead Alan’s piqued ears caught muffled gasps and obscenities muttered by the stalwart union busters. Slowly he got to his feet, succumbing to curiosity and climbing the crumbling slope to witness what had dumbfounded Mudd and his men.

The bank fell away like the face of a dune, declining to the foot of a steep cliff face that seemed to bisect the cavern. Imbedded in the rock, a vast spiral caught the acetylene light, breaking into fiery rainbows and distortions. The burning disk stood, set out from the rest of the cliff face by careful chiseling. If there had been a god of the ammonites, Mudd’s rogue miners surely had unearthed it.

“Jesus.” The shotgun-wielding ruffian breathed, craning his neck to stare up at the thing. “It’s got to be at least fifty feet across.”

“Well, I guess you know what they’ve been up to now.” Alan shined his light across the corkscrew shell, shaking his head. “I never imagined anything could be so . . .” He choked his comment off. “Did you see that?”

“I did.” Mudd straightened his glasses. “Something’s moving in there.”

A glimmer within the crystal matured into the fluctuating sheen of movement. Like wine through the neck of a great, jeweled decanter, some liquid thing poured itself from deep within the shell, working towards where the excavations had unearthed a portion of its curled lip. A glow presaged the coughing flow of viscous liquid bubbling out of the opening, flowing onto the cave floor. Then it appeared.