It almost wasn’t worth the effort to clear the way. The dirt road ran out another hundred yards down the line, petering into a wide patch that gave a vehicle enough room to turn around, but that was about it.
With some creative steering, he maneuvered the car into an about-face so he could hit the ground running if conditions called for it later. Then he parked, pulled the brake, and left the door open so the dome light would stay on while he checked his supplies.
A plastic ketchup squirt bottle full of holy water. A well-worn gris-gris he’d had made in New Orleans, the year before The Storm. Flashlight and extra batteries, and a head-mounted lamp he’d borrowed from a buddy who was a mechanic. An old silver cake knife because sometimes silver meant something, but it was expensive—so he took it where he found it.
A loaded nine-millimeter because you never know.
He patted his chest and felt the reassuring bulk of the notebook and the Bible. Tucked the gun into his waistband, up front where it’d be easier to reach even though the cold metal on his belly gave him a full-body shiver. He donned the headband with the LED light on it, and felt ridiculous but his hands were free, and that was more important than dignity in the dark.
Everything else he stashed in his trench-coat pockets.
He closed the car door and the light went out. He flipped the switch on his headlamp, and it came on, illuminating the woods without quite the vigorous panache of the Eldorado’s beams; but outside what passed for town, a little light went a long way.
For a moment he stood still and listened. He didn’t hear much. It almost bothered him, but then he remembered Ammaw Pete grousing about how all the critters were only just coming back, and then he supposed it wasn’t quite so unsettling. There weren’t any crickets to fiddle their legs in the grass. No mice to rustle in the leaves, or squirrels to build nests high above. Nothing and no one, except whatever waited in the crater.
Kilgore had a pretty good sense of direction—almost an uncanny one, or so his mother used to tell people. He could feel it in his head, the tug of the crater’s location. The smell of its water wafted up through the trees, an unpleasant stink of bottom-pocket pennies and stagnation.
The service road had gotten him close.
He sniffed, wiped his nose on his forearm’s sleeve, and started marching.
The grade grew steeper as he proceeded; with every step, the ground dropped away more sharply beneath him. He slipped and skidded, catching himself on the vegetation or—on one particularly unpleasant stumble—his own hands.
And then he reached the clearing that surrounded the water—a ring of red dirt that held back the trees, or maybe the trees just didn’t want to dip their roots into that questionable pond. It was a creepy little beach, angled and naked, with all the grimy allure of a bathtub ring.
Unmoving except for the pivot of his neck, the big man surveyed the scene and still, he heard nothing. But he felt something, and he didn’t like it: the prickling, unhappy sense that he was being watched.
He fished out his notebook. The brightness of his headlamp washed out the pages and made it tough to read, but he squinted and forced his own words to appear.
“You took two boys.” He said it quietly. Like the light, a little sound went a long way. “They were here to help the basin, and you killed them.”
A ripple scattered the calm surface of the night-blackened pool. He heard it, the soft rush of water in motion, the ripple of a solitary wind chime playing its only note.
“Ammaw Pete said something that got me thinking: She said a good talking-to wouldn’t stop you, not if it came from me. So I wondered if there was anyone you might obey. Everything’s afraid of something, but you’ve been living the high life up in here, haven’t you?”
The water moved again. From the edge of his vision, Kilgore saw it, the shifting lines of something traveling below the surface but not yet rising.
“She called you a little ol’ Nick, and that’s not just an expression. She meant you’re a little ol’ devil, but I doubt you qualify for the title. A devil could leave the water and wreak more … interesting havoc someplace else. And you can’t, can you?”
He lifted his gaze without lifting his head. The offset glare of the light showed him a shape that was round and bald, a head not unlike his own. Eyes rising just far enough to break the waterline and see what motherfucker was doing all this taunting.
Kilgore fought back a shudder and returned his eyes to the notebook, to the word he’d written down. “Not sure how to pronounce this,” he admitted. “And it might be the wrong name anyhow, but it’s a pretty coincidence all the same, so I’m going to call you Kupfernickel.”
The eyes in the water were blacker than the sky above or the water below. They were so black that the darkness spilled out in an ambient glow of evil.
Kilgore met the thing’s glare. “That word … does it mean anything to you?”
A low, burbling sneer blew bubbles in the lake. And then, so softly that it could scarcely be understood, the creature replied.
Silly sprites.
“Silly sprites,” Kilgore repeated, too surprised to say anything else until he’d checked the notebook again. Often these things couldn’t speak—or if they could, they found it hard to make themselves understood. This one’s voice was clear, though it sounded like it came from miles and miles underground. “But they’re dangerous, aren’t they? And tied to metal … like the metal here at the Burra Burra Mine, sort of.”
German miners of old complained about copper that was bedeviled and could not be smelted. They didn’t know that the metal wasn’t copper at all, but nickel arsenide; they couldn’t get copper out of it because there wasn’t any copper in it.
“You’re not so different from that, Kupfernickel. One thing pretending to be another. You’re no elemental—no creature of life, that’s for damn sure.”
Your word means nothing. You mean nothing. There is no life here.
“You ought to be a small thing, a cold spot. A patch where grass won’t grow. But the pollution from the mine let you outgrow your britches.”
I am stronger than you know, it hissed, and it lifted itself, crawling toward the bank, and toward Kilgore with a deliberate slowness that showed off its fearsome, knock-kneed, and razor-sharp shape.
“No,” he insisted, and he did not back away, calling its bluff. “If you had any strength of your own, you wouldn’t be wearing the skin of a dead man. You haven’t got enough substance. Not enough life.” He looked up quickly, scanning the woods with the white-bright beam that shot from his forehead. The tree line appeared impenetrable and unbroken, a row of trunks divided with stripes of darkness. It felt like a cage.
The creature fussed some moist complaint, but it stopped its progression from the water and remained thighs-deep in the glassy lake. It scanned the tree line too, seeking whatever Kilgore might be hunting; but seeing nothing, it sneered afresh.
You know little and understand less than that.
“Then come up out of that water. Get out here and teach me a lesson, eh, Nick?”
The creature hesitated, then lunged—and retreated, as if it’d changed its mind.
But Kilgore knew a fake-out when he saw one. “You can’t, can you?”
Can, it insisted.
“Show me.”
But the thing watched the trees again, seeking some response that Kilgore couldn’t see. It cowered in the water, stuck in a pose between menace and retreat. The thing wore loose-fitting clothes—the homespun and overalls of a miner a hundred years ago, in boots and gloves, and the smudge of candle soot around its empty eyes. Sopping and stark, its clothing clung wetly to its skin-and-bones form, showing off the crooks and bends of something made of little more than gristle and myth.