Jude looked up the road after them, leading up the mountain. And he suddenly knew that was the road he had to take. He could not have explained how he knew; the conviction just took hold of him. He walked downstairs, stepped outside and looked around. And he realized that he had been bothered by something since he had arrived, by the absence of something — that veiled sense of familiarity that he had first felt driving up Route 260. If he had grown up here, had spent his childhood here, then why did nothing that he'd seen here speak to him? Nothing did — until that moment when he knew that the road up the mountain was where he needed to go.
He walked to the car. Another one was parked farther down the road, a blue Camaro: was that the vehicle that he had spotted in the rearview mirror? He stared at it: Arizona plates, nothing distinctive. And no sign of the owner anywhere.
He got in his car, drove up the road, and after five minutes came to a turnoff on the right, a narrow dirt road rutted with holes and mounds. A beaten sign pointed the way to the Gold King Mine. Jude knew, even before he saw the dust still settling on the leaves from the motorcycles, that this was the turn to take; it was familiar and everything around it was familiar — the trees, the slope of the land, the look of the blue sky, as if he had suddenly stepped through a hidden door to his past. The sensation was frightening but energizing.
The road was short. It mounted a slope and then came to the crest of a hill, and he looked down, as if he were looking into the crater of a volcano, into an open pit mine and a cluster of wooden buildings. There were old warehouses and wooden dormitories, storage bins and a dozen outbuildings, piles of rock and railroad tracks. And in the center of it all, a large gray smelter with a giant red-brick smokestack. He knew the smokestack instantly; he had seen it before from all angles. He knew the entire scene, all of it — except that it now looked smaller, dollhouse size, compared to the tableau that had existed dormant and buried in his memory.
He drove slowly along the approach road around the rim of the pit. On the far ridge, higher up on the other side of the slope, was a narrow cabin where the motorcycles rested on their kick stands. A man in a black T-shirt sat side-saddle on one of them, smoking and watching him. Jude stopped the car before the road descended into the pit and parked on a narrow isthmus that separated the pit from the escarpment that fell off sharply into the Verde Valley below. He took a flashlight from the glove compartment.
Down the road he walked, at times so steep he had to turn sideways and dig his heels into the dirt. At the bottom, he knew to continue straight ahead, and entered a large building that had once been the mine office. The wooden steps were worn into concave bows by generations of boots. Had he not been there a thousand times? He turned to survey the layout from the doorstep — how strange to stand there, a giant returned to the homeland, looking at the buildings and at the tubular smokestack in the air, the only piece of the landscape that did not seem mysteriously diminished.
Abruptly, with the same certainty that had brought him there, he knew where to go next. He stepped outside and followed his feet, which took him through the encampment and up a rough road toward the hillside. He kept walking as the road curved, and finally came to an end before a gaping black hole in the side of the mountain, the entrance to the underground mine. He stepped inside and touched the rough rock walls with the palm of his right hand, then turned and took in the vista before him — the tops of the buildings, the smelter, the smokestack — it all fit so neatly into the mold of his memory. Unaccountably, he felt anxious.
He turned and walked twenty paces into the shaft until he was engulfed by darkness. He flicked on the flashlight and shined it around, up and down; the beam illuminated the roof of the tunnel, crisscrossing a mass of packed earth and rocks. From somewhere inside him came memories of warning of cave-ins and landslides, the childish terror of being smothered alive. Still, he walked on, and he managed to calm the fears as he made progress deep into the passageway. He came to a crossroads; to the left was a large tunnel in which he could see the rails for the iron cars, and in the hardened mud the sharp imprints of mule hooves. But he knew to take the smaller fork to the right.
Some ninety feet down, the tunnel sloped and passed under supporting timbers, which sagged. Then it narrowed until he could touch it on both sides, and as he did so, the fears returned with a vengeance. A wave of claustrophobia swept over him, so strong he decided to sit for a while. He waited a full ten minutes, then rose and walked on and came to another fork. This time he went left, and he realized he had followed a large white arrow that had been painted onto the rock face. He knew it from somewhere. After another hundred feet, he was stopped by an old cave-in. A support beam had split — half of it lay cracked in the middle of the tunnel — and above it the debris had tumbled down like sand, forming an impassable blockage. He felt a complicated rush of mixed emotions: he would be denied his destination, which attracted him with a force difficult to explain, but he was also almost secretly gratified that he would be forced to turn back and return to the surface.
But then he saw that the open darkness continued under the half beam. He shined the flashlight there. It was not just a beam but an entire wooden ceiling that had fallen, forming a kind of platform. Underneath was a stunted passageway about two feet in height. If he crawled, perhaps he could squeeze through. He inspected it thoroughly with the flashlight; it narrowed at the far end, which meant he could get stuck — or even worse, he might dislodge the precarious boards above, setting off another cave-in. He peered through it again, fighting down the panic that was pushing up from his chest. He got down on his hands and knees, then on his belly. He ducked his head and crawled forward, holding the flashlight ahead of him and pushing against the rocky floor with his feet. He closed his eyes as he moved slowly, feeling the dampness of the rock around him, the massiveness of the enclosing cocoon, breathing the stale air. Halfway through, he stopped to collect himself. He opened his eyes, which was a mistake: the wood above and the rock below seemed to converge into a thin envelope ahead; the wall on either side was less than a foot from his nose. He closed them again and squirmed forward — another six inches, another foot. Across the ridge of his back he felt a board; it scraped and he heard a sound, a slight shifting noise, and saw a trickle of dirt spilling down and forming a tiny anthill off to one side.
Then suddenly he was through. He pulled his legs out and stood up, breathing deeply. But he did not stay there for long, for he could tell, from a flick of the flashlight, that he had almost reached the place he was looking for. He walked another ten yards, and abruptly the tunnel opened up on all sides and he was standing at the opening of a large cavern. The floor was smooth rock, and the sides rose up like walls; there were electrical cables leading up to open light sockets on the ceiling, pipes to bring in water and, most surprising of all, furnishings. He knew the room from childhood.
He moved the beam of light slowly in all directions, and as he did so, it took in what little was left of the equipment that once had been there: long white enamel tables, double sinks, shelves for storage of flasks and test tubes and microscopes, even hooks for robes and masks. It was the ideal environment for a laboratory — sealed off underground from the outside world, no contaminants, constant temperature, almost hermetic conditions. It was also, he reflected, perfect for secrecy.