He didn’t like the way she phrased it. It offered up too many suggestions, too many implications. He wondered how much she really knew, so he asked outright. “Yes, ma’am. And you’ve worked the museum longer than anyone, besides being local to boot. I figure you’re the best person to ask.”
“How much do you know already?”
“Only what Bethany Huesman thinks she saw.”
Ammaw Pete made a derisive noise that flicked at the surface of her tea. “That girl. Thinks she knows so much. She didn’t tell me she saw anything. Didn’t tell the sheriff either.”
“She said you don’t like her any. Thinks it’s because she’s an out-of-towner.”
“It’s because she tried to order a skinny half-caff something-something at a gas station on the edge of town, and acted snotty when she couldn’t have anything but old-fashioned drip,” she snapped. But Kilgore figured they were saying the same thing. “So she didn’t say a damn thing to me … but she’ll talk to you. All right then, so she saw something, did she?”
“Something shaped like one of the old miners, rising up from the water. It dragged her friend down into the crater and drowned him.”
“Shaped like one of the miners?” she echoed pensively, and gave it a question mark. “Well, sometimes these things take the shape they’re called by. They show us what we expect to see.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply over her mug, taking the steam and smiling at it, but her smile verged on the grim. “Them things that were here before us … before the mine. Before the Indians. They’ll be here still, when the last of us are gone.”
“You think that’ll make them happy? The last of us being gone?”
“I don’t know. They belong to the land.”
Kilgore frowned. “But the ecology students from UTK are here for the land too—they’re putting it back in order. You’d think any resident haints or elements would be glad to see them.”
“Ducktown don’t want ’em here. Whatever’s at the bottom of the lake don’t want ’em here. The whole world ain’t made of hippies and sunshine, big man. It’s a balance, you know—and here in the basin, it’s always been about the metal. There’s the earth that holds the copper, the things that draw the copper, and things that work the copper. A balance.”
“Yeah, well, this place hasn’t been in balance for 150 years, and those kids shouldn’t have to risk their lives to put it back.”
“Why not?” she asked with a wink, but there was a gleam of something hard behind the flutter of her lid. He feigned astonishment, but she waved it away. “No, now. You know I’m only teasing. Whatever that little ol’ Nick might be, it shouldn’t be left to grow there. Shouldn’t let it fester. You’d better take it out and deal with it.”
“How?”
“Beats me. But if it’s nasty enough to kill people, a good talking-to won’t do it. Not from you, anyway.”
He considered this. “Thank you,” he finally said, his lips pausing on the rim at the top of Tweety’s head. “You’ve given me plenty to think about.”
He finished his tea, thanked the woman again, and retreated to his hotel to get ready for the night’s work. He’d booked a room in the same Holiday Inn Express the grad students used, not by any great design but because there was nothing else for miles.
Down the corridor on the way to his room, he ran into Bethany—who was barefoot and holding an ice bucket. “Hi there!” she chirped, and he said “hello” in return, adjusting the backpack he toted as luggage. Then she added, “I don’t know why I’m surprised to see you here. Can’t imagine where else you’d crash.”
“This is close and clean. It’ll be fine for the night.”
“Is that how long you’re staying? Just overnight?”
“Depends. We’ll see what happens.”
She shuddered and clutched her ice bucket. “You sure you’ll be okay?”
“I always am.”
She laughed nervously, and he wondered if she ever laughed any other way. “I guess nobody bothers you, not very often.”
“No, ma’am, they do not.”
They said their good-nights and he went alone to his room. He flipped on the light to reveal nothing at all outstanding but nothing offensive either: a bed with an ugly comforter, a tiny stack of sample-sized toiletries, and a sink with a chipped faucet head.
He wondered what Bethany would’ve thought if he’d blurted out the things he kept close to his chest—if he’d said that no, nobody bothered him too often but when they did, they did it for keeps. Anyone who’s ever watched a prison movie knows you take down the biggest man first; and the monsters knew it too. So far he’d escaped those greetings with only a few scars to show for it, but they were ugly scars, and they reminded him daily of those who hadn’t been so lucky.
The nothings out there … they were worse than the nobodies.
Sometimes the nothings bit and fought, screamed and spewed poison or fire. Nothings could change their shapes and shift their bones, and sometimes, only a Bible and brute force could put them down.
Kilgore’s Bible was a small red leather-bound thing, thumbed into softness with onionskin pages that flapped, fluttered, and stuck together. He didn’t read it much anymore. Didn’t need to. Knew it forward and backward, just like the devil. But he kept it on his person because once it’d deflected a swipe of claws that would’ve otherwise opened his chest instead of leaving him looking like he’d passed out facedown on a barbecue grill.
And that made it lucky.
In the absence of mortal assistance, he’d take what luck he could get. He’d rather have Pastor Martin by his side, but that ship had sailed, hadn’t it?
So when night came, he tucked the Good Book into his pocket, smashed up against his battered notebook—a worn thing filled with thoughts and research on the case, scribblings and small, carefully drawn images that might or might not mean anything to him later on. An hour or two of potting around on the Internet had given him a name, or at least a direction. It was only a starting point, but it was better than nothing.
Back into his car he climbed. He tossed his pack onto the passenger’s seat, and in doing so, he winged the silver cross that hung from the rearview mirror. It swung back and forth, smacking the glass with a loud crack. He grabbed the holy trinket and steadied it. He held it an extra moment or two, then said, “Fuck it,” pulled it off the mirror and slung it around his neck. He didn’t have a church, but he had his faith. And he had the trusty old Jolly Roger, which started on the first try.
Out past what few streetlights and corner stores Ducktown boasted, the car’s headlights cut a bold path through the pitch-black, middle-of-nowhere murk.
He wasn’t more than a couple of miles from the mine, but there were few signs to guide the way and little in the way of civilized lighting; the stars were so damn bright overhead, and the trees loomed so tall, so close together on every side of the service road that would take him down to the crater lake.
He watched those trees as he drove, hunting for something that might live there and hide behind them. Some hint of the old balance. Some kind of resurrection.
When he hit a low-slung bar across the road, the headlights shone bright on a big-ass NO TRESPASSING sign. The high beams glinted off the rest of the message, which stopped just short of promising that anyone who drove any farther would be shot on sight and fed to the bears for fun. Probably because there weren’t any bears.
He left the car to inspect the situation in person. The hip-high gate across the road wore the sign like a badge, but Kilgore couldn’t find a shit to give, and nothing but a rusted padlock on an old chain held the whole thing together. A pair of swift kicks with his steel-toed work boots made short work of the matter, and one more kick sent the gate swinging back into the trees, where it dragged itself to a halt and leaned off-kilter against a raggedy evergreen.