“Fucker’s long gone by now, so if you come here looking for it, you’re wasting your time. You might as well go home. What’s your name, anyhow?” Lester became jovial to hide his craftiness. His rifle was still in the truck cab.
“Jason.”
“And you want to know what it looked like.”
“There you go.”
“And that’s all you want.”
Jason held up both hands, palms facing Lester Cole. “Swear to God, Lester, my friend. After tonight you’ll never see me again.”
Jason had big hands, Lester noted. “I only saw him for a minute, Mr. Jason. He didn’t look like much. He was about six feet tall but real heavy. He had gray fur and a big belly and these long arms with hands turned in like this.” Lester dangled his arms, palms turned facing his body. “And that’s about it.”
“What about his head, Lester?”
“Just a head. Just a lot of hair on it.”
“Nothing unusual about its head?”
“I told you! It was just a head. Kind of like a monkey has, that’s all.”
By the way Jason’s rocky face seemed to turn inward Lester realized he had said something important. Finally Jason took out his billfold and stuffed a five into Lester’s shirt pocket.
“You’ve been a big help, Lester. Sorry to corner you like this.” With a pat on the shoulder, Jason walked away toward the kitchen.
“If I remember anything else I’ll let you know, Mr. Jason.”
The kitchen door closed behind Jason as though dismissing Lester Cole from existence.
There were two of them in the valley!
Jason’s feet seemed to float over Jack Helder’s lounge carpet. Robotlike, he walked to the desk and reserved a room for three days, his mind in turmoil.
The one Lester had seen was not the one he had fought in the river. Every eyewitness had noticed a misshapen head except Lester. The footprint cast in Drake’s office was of the hourglass type, not Moon’s beast. And one had stayed here ever since the lodge was erected and had killed a plumber.
Kimberly had warned him that it took more than one to keep up a population. He had said a cave or cave system would be the ideal home. Somewhere around Mount Colby there had to be a cave. He would go to the Ranger office tomorrow and get a chart.
Dangling the key in his hand, Jason was walking across the lounge when a terrain map showing in relief the features of Mount Colby and the valley caught his attention. A road crossed the north face of the mountain to a town called Oharaville. The town buildings were small black squares.
On the mountain’s base at the edge of town was a large black cross symbolizing an old mine.
A gold mine! In more ways than one.
The key fell from Jason’s fingers to the carpet.
8
Guests at Colby Lodge were discouraged from going to Oharaville. The mine area was thin earth pocked with sinkholes. People had fallen into the ground at Oharaville and vanished. Children had been trapped there with broken limbs. The Forest Service would run you out if they caught you there.
The road around the north face had been built when muscle and dynamite smoothed the earth and transportation was by horsedrawn buckboard. It followed a rusted railroad line used for transferring ore from the Limerick mine to the town of Garrison.
Oharaville lay at the terminal of a creaky railroad trestle spanning a gully full of old tin cans, newspapers, broken beams, and bald tires. The town was laid out on a slope running upward away from Mount Colby’s north face. Basically, it was a single rutted road called Bullion Avenue, which originated at a huge hole blasted out of Colby’s side, from which a collection of rotted, decrepit buildings seemed to spill out. All the windows in the ghost town had been boarded up. The most distinctive edifice was an old wooden church with a leaning steeple at the end of Bullion Avenue, almost in the trees.
When Jason pulled into the town, he was twenty-five hundred feet above sea level. He wondered if that were some kind of record for a mine. He parked the car on Bullion Avenue.
A faint wind blew down the street, creaking a hanging sign with the faded word SADDLERY on it. Of the two dozen or so structures, half were little houses around which long-dead housewives had tried to grow gardens which were now thickets of fungi and tight grass, enclosed by rotting fences.
Jason looked into the saloon. Shelves and counters with dusty glass jars lined the walls. The floor was full of jagged holes. Jason envisioned a winter in the Cascades when miners huddled blind drunk under a swaying lantern in here. The wind would sweep like a flash flood down Bullion Avenue as if draining into the mine shaft, rattling doors and shutters back and forth and tilting the church steeple. Up here skies were always gray and mountain peaks crowded your horizons.
Before the gaping hole of the mine was a string of twisted rail and some overturned ore cars. The mine supervisors’ hut was a long-gone jumble of wood. Metal barrels were strewn about, and piles of earth were stacked against the cliff. These were tailings, heaps of dirt through which scavenger prospectors picked for small hunks of silver ore.
Jason opened the glove compartment and took out a brand new .38-caliber revolver, a heavy flashlight, and a ball of twine on a rotating spool. With his pocket knife he carved a notch into each of the soft-nosed lead bullets, then loaded them into the pistol.
As he walked toward the mine he searched the ground for any depressions or other weakness. He flashed the light inside the entrance. Water dripped. A small avalanche of wet gravel hissed down the wall.
He tied the twine to a wooden beam and spun it out as he continued downward. The blackness was almost liquid in its density. His light beam was a white bar gliding fish-like over shaley walls which were soft and cheesy, apt to crumble under his touch. His major worry was the beams. Some were just stacked railroad ties. All were at least thirty years old, and each step caused them to vibrate.
The tunnel junctioned, one trail leading to the right, the other to the left. Jason paused, remembering the old Robert Frost poem about roads diverging in the woods. The old pioneer method of choice was spitting into one’s hand, slapping a fist into the spittle, and following wherever the largest gob went. Jason flipped a coin, thinking of Martha, and it came up tails. He went to the right.
The tunnel led straight down. Dust congealed into mud from overloaded ore cars parked on either side of the tracks. None of it had been disturbed, by either feet or rockfalls. There was no sign of recent activity.
Unless they walked on the ceiling, too.
The shaft curved again. This time Jason smelled something. An incongruous crowd of odors crushed together by the still, dank air tumbled over in a riot, as if to see which could reach his nose first. They were fresh and alive, more appropriate to spring sunlight and open ground.
The shaft ended in a wall of greenery, piled, spilled, crammed, and packed wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling, in a tight jungle barricade. It rested on a bed of seeds of every kind: acorns, pine nuts, oak and spruce, even peanuts. Every type of vegetation imaginable was represented. Huge strips of bark in layers on top of layers of berries, on top of apples, all resting on a bed of spruce tips. Jason stooped down and picked up a red berry. He bit off half of it, chewed, and spat it out.
Piled into a hollow in the wall by the vegetation was a stack of yellowing bones. Like the vegetation, they were a selection of all the wildlife that roamed the countryside. Bear. Woodchuck. Beaver. A horse skull nestled against that of a dog. The meat had been stripped from them, and Jason could see notches in the calcified surfaces where they had been gnawed.
Pulverize them into powder and add to the diet for calcium and minerals. Pack the meat in a higher tunnel, where cold was a natural deep freeze.
Now Jason knew why he saw no prints. The vegetation was a plug many feet thick which blocked intruders coming in from the Oharaville side and them from going out that way.