“Aye… I see your meanin’.”
“This stays with us. We pickaxe this… this ancient badger outta here, wrap it up, and toss it into the nearest river. Let it be somebody else’s bloody discovery. I want nothin’ to do with it. Agreed?”
O’Toole poked at the brittle creature in the wall with his pipe only to knock away an entire tooth the size of his finger. He lifted the tooth, pocketed it, and said, “Something to tell my grandchildren about!”
“I just said no one’s to know!”
“After I retire one day.” He laughed and turned to McAffey who shoved a pick into his hands.
“So long as you tell ’em that’s all you found—a tooth. Now let’s start diggin’.”
The two veteran miners intended to make short work of the unusual find. In fact, they soon had the creature extracted from the wall, and were chipping away at the remaining ore attached to the carcass. “I can just see this flesh-eater tearin’ away at his kill, can’t you, Francis?”
“Aye—he’s dried out like a mummy but from the girth at the shoulders, he’d’ave been a real monster, this one.”
“We’ll get a tarp, wrap it, take it down to the mill creek,” suggested McAffey, puffing now from the work. “Either bury it or tie a rock to it and dump it there.”
O’Toole pictured the spot his boss was talking about, a curve in the creek that accumulated debris floating in the current above the millworks north of the shipyards. His thoughts were interrupted when suddenly McAffey sucked in a deep breath of the mine dust and stumbled to a rock, squatting there. He tried to shake off a sudden fatigue, his face turning an odd shade of pale grey and a strange greenish hue in splotches here and there.
“Musta overdone it,” he muttered, out of breath.
“You OK, Tim?”
“Just get the tarp! I’m fine. Catch me breath in a minute. Go!”
O’Toole studied his boss for any additional signs of danger, wondering if the gases down here had turned him sour, and if so, they might both be dead in minutes.
“Just somethin’ I ate, Francis, so stop lookin’ at me like I’m a dead man.”
“Sorry, Tim. It’s right-cha-are!” After nodding, O’Toole set off for the surface to fetch the tarp; he couldn’t help grumbling and cursing under his breath that he was ordered about like a dog himself, while McAffey sat on a rock to wait for his return.
Fifteen minutes elapsed when O’Toole returned with the tarp only to find McAffey bent over in serious pain, asking the other man for help. “G-Get me to-to the surface; imperative. Need fresh air… now. Help me, p-please.”
He didn’t even sound like McAffey anymore, so distraught was he.
“Sure… sure… I can come back later for the carcass.” But McAffey had forgotten about every other consideration. He simply kept repeating, “Air… I gotta have air. Get me air!”
O’Toole thought of the amount of dust they’d both swallowed on first entering the shaft. O’Toole, a big man in his late fifties, held his wobbly boss who seemed about to faint dead away any moment. The man’s knees buckled; he could hardly take a step like some newborn pony on spindly legs. “Hold on to me; I’ve gotcha, Tim, me boy.”
“Feels like I picked up something, Francis. Got no time for this. No time for sickness.”
“You’re nose is bleedin’, Tim—gushin’ it is.”
“Get me to the surface, now!”
McAffey’s ears began to bleed now, but in the darkness, O’Toole didn’t notice. “Never been sick a day in your life, Tim, so what’s this?” he asked, but McAffey could not form words. Blood strangled any attempt to speak or to breathe. Halfway up the lit elevator shaft, Superintendent McAffey died in O’Toole’s arms, his eyes first imploring as if to ask why and then going absolutely blank. As if a shadow was crossing over his brow and eyes—a gray-greeness turning to sienna. Yes, in the eyes. Francis, distracted, paid little heed to this. He was too busy trying to forgive himself for his first thought—I’m sure to be promoted to McAffey’s job… make more money.
The lift platform creaked and bumped its way toward the surface.
By this time, under the elevator light, O’Toole watched McAffey’s body turn into a stiff, brown-skinned mummy. Francis knew that Tim had died a terrible death. A death which left his body looking like a brittle ancient unwrapped mummy, yet despite the bizarre desert-like dry condition of the body, a strange odor emanated from every orifice, an odor Francis could not place at first until he thought of Hades as it must surely be the odor of fire and brimstone and sulfur.
Francis knew also that he was himself feeling ill and far from normal.
And this terrified him.
He feared whatever had destroyed Tim McAffey before his eyes; feared it was no doubt now inside him, infecting him. He hadn’t time to feel guilty over his earlier thought of taking charge—finally—as mine superintendent. His hand went for his pocket, and he grasped the saber-tooth cradled there and cursed it. He knew, like McAffey, that he was on his own way to a horrible death, and it had to do with handling that beast he’d left below in the mine, all save the damnable fang.
He recalled having first tapped the damned thing with his pipe; recalled how they both had dug it from the wall, how they’d both tugged at it with their gloved hands, exerting themselves, breathing heavily as they worked. He thought of Tim’s fateful decision to remove it rather than call in the experts from a local university to give it a name—whatever the hell it might be.
Francis felt a stirring in his body like a foreign emotion. He tightened his fingers around the overlarge tooth resting in his palm now and squeezed until the tooth bit into his flesh. He did so just to feel something other than the numbing fear overtaking him. Something suggested that while he had no future, that he would live longer than McAffey had; that whatever this was, it had fed on Tim like a starved dog over a piece of meat, but that it would take its time with Francis O’Toole who had made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Mistake was goin’ back into the mine the second time… being human—of caring, of doing me best to help Tim to the surface air he craved in his last moments.”
Whatever had killed Tim, he feared now may well have spread to his body, but what in God’s name had killed Tim? It’d all happened so fast. One moment good old Tim’s feeling nauseous and begging for air—to get to the surface—and the next moment, he’s gone! Just like that!
But Tim McAffey calling for the surface and the air like he did, pleading like a frightened child—that was so unlike Tim; didn’t seem like Tim at all. Tim’s appearance, so changed, his skin resembling beef jerky, leather to the touch, like some ancient Egyptian. What did it all mean? What did it herald? Something Old Testament? A plague? Could there be any disease that could kill a man so fast and so surely as this? If so, O’Toole had never seen it nor heard of it. Not even the dreaded smallpox could take a man so fast and do such hideous things to the body.
It’d been a swift end for Tim.
“If I’ve picked it up, I should be dead as well,” he ciphered aloud, “or shortly now sure. Yet I’ve me legs—a bit stiff, to be sure, but I-I feel fine,” he tried reassuring himself.
However, deep within, he felt an overwhelming fear that this disease, whatever it was—some new strain of malaria, smallpox, the bubonic plague, whatever—it was beginning to sap his strength and resolve. Still, Francis fought it, suddenly as anxious for topside air as Tim had begged for—that and the company of men.
Air I m-must find… find air, said his mind. Survive I must, came a second voice in his head, yet so real.
And for no reason he could fathom, O’Toole suddenly began kicking out at the inert, now petrified body of his former boss and sometime drinking buddy, McAffey. Then again he landed another hard kick, and suddenly he was again kicking him repeatedly with a booted foot and leg that acted without reason.