There was a fast, scared ripple of talk then, people trading experiences, showing wounds. They jumped out of the dark at me. . They was hiding in the Sawyers’ yard. . They took and tore my shotgun clean in half before I could get off a shot at ’em. . The terror in the air was volatile, like gasoline or alcohol, only needing a spark.
She was not the only one, Wilma realized, who was beginning to understand that this was not simply a matter of a power failure, of waiting till the lights came back on.
Someone was talking about monsters, another of invasion, and how the Communist Bloc had only pretended to break up and collapse. Someone said demons and God. Wilma thought, No. You’re wrong.
She didn’t know what was right, but none of them had encountered the thing in the house on Applby Street.
There was still blood and skin under her fingernails, and it occurred to her that that was the first time since childhood scuffles in the schoolground that she’d physically fought another living being. She’d always been mild-natured and aloof, shrinking from contact. Even Hank’s kisses-though she’d longed for the warmth of his closeness and the strength of his embrace-had been something she’d had to overcome her nature to achieve. And he’d felt it.
Hank. The thought of him filled her with a piercing regret.
And he was in the mine. With Ryan. With Lou. With men she’d taught when they were children, young men whose fathers she’d gone to school with, as she’d gone to school with Hank.
“Looky here!” yelled Katy Grimes. “Look! They come out already!”
And everyone ran to the rough blue-gray cliff of the old mine entrance to look.
Around World War II, Applby had put in a donkey engine to drag skips up the mine’s steeply sloping tunnel, replacing the mules. At that time the tunnel floor had been paved for forty or fifty feet down, and what had been a huge cave cut into the mountain’s flank had been finished with concrete, so that it resembled an enormous culvert, strung with electric lights. Time and weather and a million pairs of passing boots had had their way, however, and the pavement was invisible again under a layer of mud.
In the glare of the torchlight there was no mistaking the scuffle of fresh tracks, nor the print of men’s workboots.
“Some of ’em come out,” Katy repeated and brushed back her snaggly blond hair with the back of her arm. She was a hollow-eyed, too-thin girl who would have been stunningly pretty if she’d either washed or smiled; she’d never even made it as far as Wilma’s classes. Her sister, Annie Flue, joined her, holding her torch aloft.
“So why didn’t they come down to town?” she asked, puzzled. “Look at ’em, looks like they all sort of scatter every which way.”
“They got to knowed there was men left back in the mine.”
Torchlight gleamed on the puddles between the rusted rails as those who’d tried to follow the tracks regathered slowly around the tunnel entrance. Someone touched the cyclone gates that had guarded the tunnel, now thrown wide. The snapped chain lay in the mud.
“What you make of this?” asked Ulee Grant, kneeling to shine his light more clearly on the mud.
The prints of workboots, going back in.
And a mangled empty tuna can.
Voices sank to a whisper, baffled, then to silence.
“I guess we’ll find that out,” said Hazel, “when we find ’em.”
Candy started passing out maps and balls of string. “It’s a real labyrinth,” Hank had told Wilma when he’d first gone to work there in ’67. “They been digging under that mountain since just after the Civil War, and there’s miles of played-out galleries and rooms where the face collapsed back before anybody was born. They took up the tracks in most of ’em, but all they’ve done since is just put a couple of sawbucks in front of ’em, to keep us from taking the wrong way down. It dips real steep just about where Pidgeon Ridge goes up, and there’s whole sections that mostly caved in. God knows what’s in there now.”
God knows, thought Wilma, looking down at the tracks, then into the darkness.
“You won’t have to worry about anything till you get down to the last section, where it dips down here.” Candace Leary pointed to her map. Farther back from the pithead, the little gangs sorted themselves out, making sure each group included someone with string, someone with candles, someone carrying a canary or finch or budgie. Someone with water, with SCSRs. Someone with a gun.
“This is where they tried to put a vent shaft through to the new diggings. The fan engines got took out after the cave-in, so you don’t have to worry about the electricity going on all of a sudden and the fans starting up. After that you’ll have to spread out and search. If somebody did try getting through that way, they’ll have got lost in the dark.”
“What if those grunter things are down there?” Carl Souza shifted his rifle in his hands. “We can’t shoot ’em in the tunnels. The ricochets’ll kill somebody.”
“And what if they cut the string that leads us back to the vent?” That was Lynn Fellbarger, who ran the antiques store. “What if there’s another earthquake and a cave-in?”
“Then stay on top of the ground,” retorted Hazel, picking up a lamp. “This isn’t a Disneyworld ride.”
Movement in the tunnel-far, far away in the dark. Wilma stepped into the wet concrete circle of its maw, gazing, listening.
Voices.
Al Bartolo’s. Gordy Flue’s.
“They’re there,” she said. She turned. The opening behind her was a circle of golden light. “They’re there, I can hear them!” she called out, and the lights streamed in, glistening on the wet of the walls. “Al!” She raised her voice in a yell. The echoes of it bounded away into the blackness, piercing decades of silence there. “Gordy!”
“GORDY!” bellowed Annie Flue, who had a voice like the chimes of Big Ben. “GORDY!”
And blessed, blessed in the distance where the echoes died away, “Son of a bitch, you see it? Lights!”
“They’re there,” she said again. She was nearly lifted from her feet, carried along as if on a tide, men and women crowding around her, shoving to get to the men. The echoes of their voices drowned any further sounds from the tunnel, but she knew the men could see the lights, would come to them.
And they did. Pressed against the wall, Wilma sensed more than actually saw the first contact with the missing men, when the surging mass of bodies in the tunnel going down stopped, shoved and milled a little, holding up candles and lights to keep them from being overset. Struggling, hugging, touching: she saw Della desperately hugging Ryan, hugging Lou. “My God, my God.” Annie and Gordy, Shannon and Greg, Gina Bartolo sobbing in Al’s arms.
More mobbing, pushing, surging back toward the entrance with Candy yelling, “Let us through! We got ’em; now back out and let us through, for Chrissake!” and someone else from the back of the crowd saying, “We couldn’t have done it without Hank! Hank, fuck, he can see in the dark! You know he can fuckin’ see in the dark? Hank- Hank, come on.”
And Hank’s voice, “No, no, let me be.”
“Whoa-whoa, hang onto him!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Couple of the guys went like this, turned back into the tunnels. . ”
And someone else, “What the fuck happened? What the fuck’s going on? Looks like a fuckin’ Greek wedding with all these candles.”
Even before they reached the end of the tunnel, the wave of joy, of rescue and recovery, had turned to an undertow of fear.
“Whaddaya mean, the cars ain’t runnin’?”
“Batteries are all dead down under the ground too.”
“These things attacked us in the dark.”
“Smoke? Smoke in the sky? How do you know it’s not bombs? Lynchburg-there’s an airport in Lynchburg; first thing they’re gonna bomb is airports.”
Wilma smelled it, the rank smell of terror and rage, above the coal and the mud and the sweat. For hours these people had clung to the goal of rescuing the men from the mine; getting back their husbands, their fathers, their sons. Their hearts had told them-though their minds would certainly have conceded differently if consulted-that everything would be all right if only they could do that.