I didn’t get a chance to answer him and I don’t rightly know what I’d’ve said if I had, because right then, he noticed the flicker of the shadows against the wall. “Fire,” he breathed and my heart jumped up, ’cause fire’s the worst curse there is when you’re in the field.
Burke rushed out, already barking orders, and I followed him. If the doubtful and morbid thoughts of a few minutes before were still in him, as they must’ve been, then he kept ’em well hid. He shouted to the men and they jumped to, fighting to keep the fires away from the pipes and the nitroglycerine trucks.
I was a few paces behind Burke and when the ground shivered under my feet, I stopped and swung my eyes across the field. The fires seemed like they was burning everywhere, like they’d sprung up from every corner of the place at once. I could see the whole field, it seemed like, all licked with curling orange tongues, the derricks that wasn’t yet burning standing like the silhouettes of ships’ masts before the flames.
The ground gave another shake under me, like the flank of a horse shivering to throw off flies. Through the smoke, I saw my derrick sway. I ran toward it. The fire hadn’t reached it yet and I was prob’ly needed someplace else, but I somehow had a feeling that the derrick was where I had to be.
As I got right up to it, I heard that same sound, the one I remembered from earlier in the day, and I saw the derrick start to topple. At the same time, a crack opened up below me like a mouth in the dirt. I felt my feet going out from under me and saw that big skeleton of wood and metal coming down toward my head. The next thing I remember, I was hanging from the derrick where it laid across an empty black chasm, a pit that seemed like it went down all the way to the center of the earth. Down in that darkness, I saw something move.
In the years that’ve intervened since that night, the doctors have tried their best to convince me that I misremember some of what come next, but I know they’re wrong. I remember it clear as day. There was something down in the dark below me, something that heaved itself up toward the surface, toward the light, toward me. I remembered suddenly why that place was called “Black Hill.” I saw that great bulk heave and slop toward me in the dark. I saw what looked like golden eyes opening and closing, and hungry mouths smacking. I smelt a smell like what sometimes comes up from caves and holes that’ve been closed away fer too long. I heard a hiss and a groan, and I believe I closed my eyes. Then I heard Burke’s voice.
He was shouting, but there was something different about the sound. It was ragged and hoarse, but that wasn’t it. It was like he was talking straight at a feller, not like he was yelling all around as he had been before.
I opened my eyes up again and I saw him, standing by the edge of the crack in the ground, looking like some heathen god with the fires burning behind him. He was shouting down into the pit.
“What more kin you take from me?” he demanded. “What more could you want? You took ma hand, ma face, ma wife! I done give you ever’thin’ I got, damn you, ever’thin’ I am. I ain’t got nothin’ left you kin take, nothin’ but her, an’ her y’ll not have! I’ll see you in hell myself, first.”
And then he stepped into the hole. Other men in the field heard Burke shout and saw me hanging there on the tipped-over derrick. But if anyone else saw what happened to him, they pretended not to. They said they saw him standing there, and that they saw him fall, but that’s it. I know, though, that he didn’t fall. That he went down there to spite the Devil, or whatever it was he saw down there, and something came up to meet him, something black and old and putrid as a rotted log that’s set for months at the bottom of a pond. I saw him go down into that blackness like a mammoth being pulled down into a tar pit. That’s the last thing I saw ’fore I blacked out.
* * *
By the time I come to, the fires had been put out. The men told me that, even though I’d been unconscious, it’d taken three of them to pry my arms off the derrick’s supports.
Soon as I was able to walk again, I made a man take me out to survey the field. The damage was bad: nearly half the derricks lost, barrels of oil burned up, and one of the nitroglycerine trucks had exploded. My derrick still lay on its side, but there was little enough to show that the crack had ever been beneath it. I asked the man with me. He said that the ground had shaken again and the crack sealed up. There was just a scar to mark its passing, an uneven place where one lip of the ground was higher’n the other.
Burke had a business partner, a banker from Wichita, who took over his interest in the Black Hill Oil Company and sold it off to one of the other concerns. In his will, Burke had left a stipulation that his daughter never have a stake in it. By the time she was of an age to marry, she was provided fer nicely by the investment of Burke’s money into other ventures.
I never worked the fields again. When my wife died, I come here to the sanitarium, where I’ve stayed ever since. My two girls are grown and married now, but they take turns coming to visit me. They’ve taken such good care of me since the incident.
There’re days when I think I could leave this place, move in with one of them and have a life outside these walls, long as I stayed out of automobiles and away from oil fields. And maybe I would, were it not fer the dreams.
I dream, not of the world, but of the future. The future that Burke and I helped to bring about and that I’m powerless to prevent. I see a country criss-crossed with roads where thousands of automobiles drive every day. I see ships as big as whales, plying the sea with bellies full of black blood. I see a world of perpetual light and motion, powered by the unquiet dead.
•
The God of Dark Laughter
Michael Chabon
Thirteen days after the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus left Ashtown, beating a long retreat toward its winter headquarters in Peru, Indiana, two boys out hunting squirrels in the woods along Portwine Road stumbled on a body that was dressed in a mad suit of purple and orange velour. They found it at the end of a muddy strip of gravel that began, five miles to the west, as Yuggogheny County Road 22A. Another half mile farther to the east and it would have been left to my colleagues over in Fayette County to puzzle out the question of who had shot the man and skinned his head from chin to crown and clavicle to clavicle, taking ears, eyelids, lips, and scalp in a single grisly flap, like the cupped husk of a peeled orange. My name is Edward D. Satterlee, and for the last twelve years I have faithfully served Yuggogheny County as its district attorney, in cases that have all too often run to the outrageous and bizarre. I make the following report in no confidence that it, or I, will be believed, and beg the reader to consider this, at least in part, my letter of resignation.
The boys who found the body were themselves fresh from several hours’ worth of bloody amusement with long knives and dead squirrels, and at first the investigating officers took them for the perpetrators of the crime. There was blood on the boys’ cuffs, their shirttails, and the bills of their gray twill caps. But the country detectives and I quickly moved beyond Joey Matuszak and Frankie Corro. For all their familiarity with gristle and sinew and the bright-purple discovered interior of a body, the boys had come into the station looking pale and bewildered, and we found ample evidence at the crime scene of their having lost the contents of their stomachs when confronted with the corpse.