The clock struck one as a night streetcar – the number 46 emblazoned on its front in art-deco style – labored up Admiralty Hill. Its sole passenger watched, chin in his palm, as the moonlit skyscrapers of Alki rolled by outside. Nothing disturbed the city’s slumber that quiet July night but a few bats fluttering overhead through the urban canyon.
The passenger, a PhD candidate in History at Alki University, bore the Christian name of Rhys Allen Jones. However, his acquaintances – from his fraternity brothers to a variety of Elizabeth Hill’s most eligible young ladies – generally referred to him by initials as “Raj.” That this caused occasional confusion with Alki’s growing South Asian community did not bother him; as far as he was concerned, he had had the name first.
Tonight, Raj wore shirtsleeves and a pair of light linen trousers so as to stave off the unusually powerful summer heat. In his right hip pocket he carried a folded piece of paper: a telegram, and the reason why a fashionable man-about-town like him would be wandering the city at such an hour.
BREAKTHROUGH STOP VISIT ASAP STOP TONIGHT BEST STOP FB
FB was Fergus Belmaine, Raj’s maternal uncle and the only living member of the young man’s family. A lifelong bachelor, Belmaine (as everyone, even Raj, called him) was prone to bursts of late-night enthusiasm; a summons of this sort was not unusual for him. Most likely the old man had not even had his supper yet.
The streetcar reached the crest of the hill, and Raj looked back at the great city glittering in the night. There was the Wellington Place Market, and the titanic Smith Tower, and the stately Butterworth Building, home to the funeral kings of Canada. The “London of the Pacific” did not lack for beauty, but for some reason it tended to attract eccentrics like Belmaine.
The young man pulled the cord. With a clang of the bell, the streetcar came to a stop, and Raj disembarked and turned down a side street of shabby brick townhouses. Though this area had once housed middle-class merchants and warehouse clerks, it had since fallen on hard times, and now two in three of the old buildings stood abandoned and crumbling. The rest had been subdivided into flophouses and dens of evil repute. On occasion, landlords would set one of the buildings ablaze to collect the fire insurance; some at City Hall joked about allowing the whole place to burn to the ground.
One hand on his switchblade, Raj made his way to number sixty-eight; the scarred door swung open at his touch. Entering, he climbed to the third floor and rapped sharply on the battered old door he found there. A wan light seeped out from the room within. As he waited, he wiped sweat from his brow.
Footsteps creaked over the weathered floorboards, and then door hinges squealed, revealing Fergus Belmaine in the flesh. Of flesh there was rather a lot, despite Raj’s uncle’s perpetual money troubles. The old man had a considerable income from investments in the Royal Trans-Pacific Line, but he spent it as quickly as it came in. “Raj,” he boomed, wiping his hands on his battered mustard-yellow waistcoat. “You came, you came. As trusty a nephew as I could wish for. Come in, come in! I’ve just put the tea on.”
Belmaine’s tea came in large, dented tins marked BRITISH SOUTH-AFRICAN COMPANY, though the war in the Cape had concluded some five years prior. It tasted like dust and, Raj imagined, springbok dung. Smiling weakly, the young man stepped inside his uncle’s room.
The old man had never been one for interior decoration. No pictures adorned the peeling walls. The only furnishings were a small stove, a basin, a pipe bed, and a battered old wardrobe. A dining table – but no chairs – stood in the center of the space.
Upon this table played out Belmaine’s true passion. Each time Raj visited, the scarred wooden surface lay covered with different knickknacks, artifacts, and other detritus of years gone by, all related to the man’s various historical ventures. Tonight’s subject was an unsteady mound of what looked like assorted dark stone.
A whistling filled the air. “Ah, that’s the kettle,” said Belmaine. “Just a moment.” As he lumbered over to fill the teapot, Raj picked up one of the stones. It was covered in scratched marks, almost like writing.
The young man cast his mind back to his studies of ancient Greece and the recent discoveries there. “Say, Uncle,” he called, “this looks a bit like the writing on the Phaistos Disc. Is it from Crete?”
“Ah, you’ve beaten me to the punch, lad, beaten me to the punch,” said Belmaine. He returned to Raj’s side bearing a couple of steaming cups of darkish liquid; the stuff smelled vaguely of gunpowder. “Would you believe these stones weren’t from Crete?”
“Well, I suppose,” said the young man. “I’m not an archaeologist.”
“Would you believe me,” said Belmaine, grinning, “if I said they came from the slopes of our very own Mount Albert?”
“What?” Raj asked. “But –”
“I know, I know,” said Belmaine, “hard to picture the Indians carving something like this. But carve it they did! This could well be the archaeological breakthrough of the decade!”
“Well –” Raj frowned. For all he knew, the local tribes could well have once been masons. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was that, in this very room, his uncle had shown him stones from “Lemuria” and “El Dorado” and even “Atlantis.” None of those flights of fancy had amounted to anything, and the young man saw no reason to believe that this time would be any different. “That certainly…that certainly would be a breakthrough,” he managed.
“Those rotters at the Burke wouldn’t so much as give me the time of day,” said Belmaine. “But have a look at this!” He slapped a slip of paper on the table. The cheaply-printed ticket bore the words ROYAL CANADIAN LOTTERY, a number, and a stamp: WINNER.
“Winner?” asked Raj. “How much?”
“One thousand dollars, lad, one thousand dollars,” said Belmaine. He laughed. “I would dearly love to see the old R.T.P.L. pay out a prize like that. Needless to say, I’ll be outfitting this expedition myself. I won’t have trouble hiring laborers, not with this financial muscle, but I need an expert eye to help me conduct the excavations. Without the Burke’s say-so, though, no one in academia will sign on. So that, my boy, is where you come in.”
“Me?”
“You’re qualified,” said Belmaine. “That doctoral research in the Ryukyus – you did a bit of digging there, didn’t you? And you know your way around a historical site. Healthy respect for old masonry. Handy with a tape measure. What else does an archaeologist need? Come with me, lad. Discover a lost civilization. Make history.”
“Well…” Raj thought about his summer plans, about boating on Confederation Lake, about that girl – Peggy Frostegard – who’d been making eyes at him at the picnic last Sunday.
“I’ll pay you a generous stipend, of course,” continued the old man. “Plus full board.”
Raj thought about his tuition bill. “I’ll do it.”
“Ah, Raj, Raj,” said Belmaine, smiling. “That’s what I love about you, lad. So inquisitive. So curious. So eager for the truth, no matter what those in power might have to say.”
“Right,” said Raj. “The…truth. So when do we leave? On Thursday I said I would meet –”
“Tomorrow, lad, tomorrow!” said Belmaine. “Tempus fugit and all that. Be at Union Station at noon sharp, eh?”
“N-noon sharp it is,” said Raj, grimacing.
That night, in his bed at the fraternity house, the young man struggled to get to sleep. His possessions – less his straw boater and his good shirts, which were unsuited to an archaeological expedition – sat packed in his trunk, and clothes for the next day’s journey had been laid out on his armchair. But something about this Mt. Albert venture made him uneasy. Perhaps those carvings had been fakes; why, then, had the sight of them left him so disquieted? Even now, the indecipherable little runes danced behind his eyelids, taunting him, beckoning him – looming, there at the foot of the wild mountain.
The bleary, half-blind morning brought clouds and a terrible, stifling humidity. That was rare in Alki, where summers tended to be clear and dry. Rarer still was the sight of Belmaine out and about by daylight, waiting for Raj on the marble steps of Union Station. A porter took the trunks, and the two boarded the twelve-fifteen express to Tacoma. They changed at Puyallup; a rattling caboose behind eleven coal cars brought them to the end of the line at Carbonado. There, Belmaine hired a motor to drive them out to Fairfax, the end of the road.
“Fairfax?” the driver squinted at the old man. “What, going coal mining?”
“Something like that,” said the old man, winking theatrically to Raj.
“...All right. Well, just a piece of advice,” said the driver, “considerin’ you seem like respectable folk. Don’t be spendin’ too much time in that place. Bad people.”
At that juncture, Raj leaned forward from the back seat. “You agreed to take us there, my man, so please do take us there. Our errand is our business.”
The driver scowled. “Bad business, no doubt. Well, suit yourselves, eh? City folk.”
They rattled slowly along a dirt road into the pine-swathed foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It was easy to forget the vastness of the North American wild. In Alki, one could pass entire weeks without seeing more than a few Douglas firs. But just off the shore, in the Raleigh Sound, orca whales hunted harbor seals and steelhead salmon. The vast inland forest, stretching from the frozen north down to the great bay of New Liverpool, housed grizzly bears and moose and, if the Indians were to be believed, the elusive “saskitch.” Thousands of leagues of wild housed those and who knew what other marvels.
In the midst of this natural grandeur squatted the town of Fairfax. That ill-starred hamlet of coal-stained shacks huddled among swamps next to the rushing Carbon River, housing a clutch of ragged workers who scraped their bread from the rich veins of coal to be found nearby. When the motorcar dropped Raj and Belmaine off in front of the tumbledown post-office-cum-general-store, a crowd of onlookers began gathering almost immediately. The driver tossed their luggage behind them and sped off without a second glance.
“Well, lad,” said Belmaine, turning to Raj, “our adventure begins here, eh?”
“Um…” Raj looked at the coal miners, their blackened faces and gnarled limbs. Had he really been at a picnic with the best of Alki just that past Sunday? “I suppose so.”
Just then, a man in a torn, coal-blackened flannel shirt came splashing towards them across the swampy earth. “Are ye that Belmaine that’s been writin’?”
“Indeed I am,” said Belmaine, with a smile. “And this is my nephew, Raj.”
The miner flashed them a gap-toothed grin. “Me name’s O’Connell. The one ye’ve been writin’ to. The lads’re all ready for ye. We’ll do ye proud in this treasure hunt o’yours.”
A sorry crew quickly assembled in a half-circle around Raj and Belmaine. Bony and sullen-looking to a man, they glared at the two Alkians as though uncle and nephew had done them some wrong. It seemed fitting that such unpleasant types should live here, tucked away on a gloomy, swampy riverbank between the dark, tree-lined spurs of Mount Albert.
Once all was ready, the group set off towards the mountain, whose graceful round peak now filled the sky ahead. The snowcap high above glimmered in the light; Raj imagined the icy beauty of Paradise Glacier, which he had always wanted to see.
As they walked, the workers chattered to each other in a language Raj could not identify – Gaelic, maybe? – and occasionally broke out into songs in hop-jig time in both that tongue and in English. They also told jokes, and their occasional significant glances over at Raj and his uncle left no doubt as to who the targets of their mockery were.
Gradually, the road narrowed into a rough track, and they came to an unhealthy-looking marshy country. Belmaine led the group down a faint side trail, really no more than a goatpath, that led along the side of a marshy lake. “This area,” he told Raj, “is called Longfellow, after the poet. He owned some land around here.”
“Not much of a judge of real estate,” said the young man.
“I beg to differ, lad, beg to differ,” said Belmaine. “Just think: the old bard owned one of the premier archaeological sites in the entire Canadian Southwest, and he never knew it!”
I suppose we’ll see about that, thought Raj. A midge nipped at his arm, and he cursed.
As they walked, the gloom gathered overhead. By the time they stopped for supper, it was dark as night, though the summer sunset would not come for an hour or two yet. Belmaine squinted up at the sky. “I wouldn’t call this auspicious weather. Hope it doesn’t rain.”
As Raj ate, a young miner – the least grizzled-looking of the bunch – approached him. “How’d’ye do? Me name’s Ward.”
Raj frowned at him. “Raj, but I suppose you knew that.”
Ward nodded. “Listen, mate – I wanted t’give ye a warnin’.”
“Oh?”
“Well,” said the young miner, “there’s dark stories about these mountains I grew up hearin’. The other men know ‘em too. They’ll do their work, but they aren’t too happy about it. Thought ye should know.”
Raj suppressed a snort. Of course these hicks would be superstitious. So far from Alki, they hadn’t a prayer of a proper education. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
The first fat drops of rain fell just as they were clearing away their dinner things. Then a tremendous clap of thunder rang out, and the heavens unloaded a curtain of water.
It was every man for himself. Raj and Belmaine ended up wedged together in a hastily-pitched tent, the curses of the workers pouring in from outside. As raindrops pounded the canvas overhead, the younger man sighed. “It’s like a typhoon in the Ryukyus.”
“Bah!” said Belmaine. “We’re very nearly there, too. It never rains this time of year. Why should this storm blow up at the very worst occasion?”
As they waited, a soggy night fell over the forest. The birds in the trees above, so vocal before, had fled to shelter. Small streams bubbled up around them, trickling off towards the lake. It was a thoroughly miserable time, and Raj thought about the money his uncle had promised him; was it really worth lowering himself to this?
When eventually the rain lessened, Belmaine decided to pitch a more permanent camp atop a low ridge not far away. “We’re not quite where I had planned to be,” he explained as they traipsed along the dark trail, “but this place should suit us well enough. We’re only a mile or so from the site, only a mile or so.”
That night, as he slept curled up in his wet, humid tent, Raj had a dream. He was floating in midair down a dark, cramped stone tunnel. Its roughly-carved walls were covered in thousands upon thousands of tiny shapes, and he knew somehow that these were letters, that someone had etched a story into the living rock. As he drifted along, he tried to read them, but no luck.
Still, the message, ancient as he knew it must have been, left him feeling terribly uneasy. The shapes seemed wrong somehow, as though they had been carven in ways no man should have ever seen. Within their shadowy crevices seemed to lurk a creeping fear.
He came to a halt in front of a crude picture. He seemed to stop moving, as though something had bade him pause and get a better view. The shape repelled him, but he drew closer and closer –
A light seemed to flash from behind him, casting the carven creature into hideous relief.
Raj woke to a terrible thundering rumble, so powerful it seemed to shake the foundations of the Earth itself. Before he had even fully awoken, he was tearing himself free of his tent, bolting like a deer over the forest floor.
The rumbling grew louder, as did the pounding of Raj’s heart between his ears. He was struggling up a slope now, not knowing where he was going, not caring –
And then a hand stuck out in front of him. “Raj!”
“Wh-wha?”
“Great Scott, lad, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Belmaine clapped him on the shoulder. He and a few smirking workers had gathered in a rough circle next to an enormous moss-covered boulder. “It’s a mudslide, yes, a mudslide,” he explained. “It began near the crest of the ridge, but it’s completely missed our camp. The noise may have startled a few of us,” he winked, “but we were never in any danger.”
“W-well, that’s a relief,” said Raj, reddening. “We might have been, though.”
“Indeed,” said his uncle. “Still, I’m eager to get to the site. On my last visit, I discovered little of real importance, but this slide might have revealed something. Come, lad, come, I think it’s calmed down – let’s rouse the rest of the men.”
As they struggled back down to the campsite, Raj remembered his dream. That shape carved into the rock, that creature – what had it been? He found he could not picture it, though he clearly recalled the unease it inspired in him. The cold fear in his veins had done as much to wake him as the sound of the landslide. Why couldn’t things be simple, he thought? Why couldn’t he be back in Alki with his fraternity brothers and Peggy Frostegard, tuition bill be damned?
After breakfast, they gathered their equipment and followed a narrow goatpath up a slope. Within a short while, they drew near the slide zone, where toppled trees lay like matchsticks over the bare ground. “Don’t you think,” panted Raj as they climbed, “that the land here might still be unstable?”
“Nonsense, lad!” cried Belmaine. “Even if the ground does shift a bit underfoot, we can’t afford to wait! Think of the grand discoveries the slide may have exposed.”
Thankfully, their passage did not trigger any second slide, and at last they came to a flattish place near a trickling stream. This had been where the collapse started; ten feet of topsoil had fallen away downhill, leaving a rough U-shaped half-crater carved into the crest of the ridge. What now lay exposed on the scoured ground left Raj agape with wonder.
As it turned out, the stone fragments in Belmaine’s apartment hadn’t represented more than a tiny fraction of what this site could yield up. A whole stone village had once stood here; foundations and the long-buried remnants of walls and floors peeked out of the churned earth. A mess of smaller pieces also lay scattered over the ground, tools and dishes and who knew what else. All was covered with the same indecipherable script.
Belmaine, glowing with excitement, leapt into action like a man possessed. He organized the workers into teams and the site into grid sectors. The grumbling miners began removing layers of earth, all while Raj and Belmaine hurried to take measurements and make notes.
The young man had to admit that his uncle had found something truly important. As they uncovered more of the site, it became clear that dozens or even hundreds of people had once called the place home. They had built all of this without metal tools, without the wheel, without even agriculture. The number of man-hours it would have taken beggared belief. What was more, every piece of stone they found – every last one – had been engraved with an array of tiny shapes. Raj wasn’t as sure as Belmaine that it was actually writing at all. Who had heard of a primitive people like this having so much to say? The idea that some message had been so critically important to them made Raj a bit uneasy.
By dinnertime, it had become clear that the site would take months to uncover. “Just think of the press, lad,” crowed Belmaine, between spoonfuls of salt beef stew. “‘Lost civilization uncovered on Mt. Albert! Canada’s very own Palmyra!’” He chortled.
Raj chewed at the stringy beef. “That’s just the trouble, though,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly a ‘civilization’ in our sense of the word, was it? These people didn’t farm. They couldn’t have, not around here. Why didn’t they do what was easiest and live in the state of nature like other Indians?”
Belmaine nodded. “You’ve a sharp mind, lad, a sharp mind. If only we could read that vexing writing of theirs! It’s clear they’d have a story to tell.”
As cast his mind back to the uncanny little characters, a thought flitted through Raj’s mind. Would we really want to know?
That night, a dream came to him. He was struggling through the waist-high snow, he and his three companions, their fur robes wrapped tight against the bitter cold. The rest of their people sat huddled in their houses, blazing fires warding away the chill, but the four boys were not so lucky. The deer slung between them lowed and grunted in panic, and it took their combined efforts to restrain its thrashing. There was no moon, and the black midwinter night threatened to swallow them whole.
They drew near the village, where snow lay in deep drifts, but did not pause. The old women said that tonight the heart of the world would open; it was the task of the boys to be present when that happened, and thus to become men.
Past the rear of the little settlement, they found the great stone mouth. Ordinarily this lay closed, sealed with sacred bearskins against intrusion from the outside. Tonight it had been opened, a carven ring of stone girding its border. The boy glanced around at the others; they seemed just as uneasy as he. None among them had ever come so close to the divine. But men did not shrink from such things, did they? Hefting the deer, the four companions carried on into the yawning tunnel. Inside, it was far too dark to see, but there was only one way for them to go. Shuffling along blindly through the dark, they bumped every now and then into the roughly-engraved stone walls. Not being a stonemason, the boy could not read the sacred script, but he knew that it recounted the tale of his people: how they had arrived in the Land of Rain, how they had been persecuted by the unbelievers, how they had retreated up the sacred mountain they now called home. The spirits of his ancestors whispered to him as he carried on.
The journey through the blackness began to feel like a kind of dream. Even the deer had fallen silent. Each step carried them away from the living present, off into the long-dead past.
Then, from the depths: a crunching step.
At first, the boy thought he was imagining it, but then another followed, and another. One of his companions began breathing rapidly, overcome with panic. Another hushed him, but broke off when the whisper echoed off the walls, reverberating and reverberating until it sounded utterly inhuman. The deer between them now felt like a source of solace, something firm and warm from the clean, bright outside.
It was coming.
The sound of footsteps grew louder. Some lumbering, many-legged thing was coming up from the depths to meet them, lured by the scent of fresh meat. An incredible stench hit them like a slap. One of the other boys was crying now, and the rest stood frozen in place. The creature’s tread drew nearer, nearer –
The young man dropped the deer and bolted.
Raj woke drenched in sweat. The scent of breakfast filtered in from outside his tent. His dream – it had been important, but it was already slipping from his mind like sand through a sieve. What had it meant?
Belmaine poked his head into the tent. “Ah, the sluggard’s awake! Come out – one of the men has found something!”
Groaning, Raj emerged into the stifling summer heat to find the workers murmuring to each other. Something important had obviously happened. He bolted his ham and potatoes, and then he and the men followed Belmaine up to the ancient settlement. There, below thick, dark, clouds, they found that a bit more of the land had slid away overnight. This second slide, smaller than the first, had sent yesterday’s stones tumbling down the slope, their original arrangement now existing only in the annals of history.
And something else now lay exposed on that hillside: bones. Black with soil and yellow with age, they stuck out from the ground like the teeth of some unhappy beast. The workers gathered around them, gawping, but Belmaine shooed them away before turning to Raj. “Just think, lad! We can study these to find out the inhabitants’ physiognomy.”
“Perhaps,” said the young man. At that moment, nothing attracted him less than the idea of poking through old bones.
Then someone pointed to the sheer earth wall at the very top of the slide and called out. More soil had come tumbling down overnight, and now…and now Raj could see it. They could all see it.
How was this possible?
The shape from his dreams, the carven mouth of the tunnel, stood before him. It was exactly as he’d seen it before in size and decoration, but now it had been blocked by a great stone seal. How had this thing from beyond waking thought come to menace him?
“My God, lad, my God,” Belmaine was shouting, “there could be anything in there! Anything!”
“Anything,” repeated Raj, dizzy.
“We’ll have to get past that stone seal,” said Belmaine. “And I don’t intend to spend months doing it, either. We’ll blast it open!”
Preparations began immediately. Half a dozen men sounded the rock, preparing boreholes and taking measurements just as though they were back in the Fairfax mines; others began surveying the newly-exposed skeletal remains. As for Raj, he took rubbings of the carven stone engravings around the tunnel mouth, preserving them for posterity in case of blast damage.
In this, Ward assisted him. As the Newfoundland miner handed Raj a fresh black crayon, he cleared his throat. “That uncle o’ yours – queer fellow, eh?”
Raj frowned. “...Maybe, but I won’t have him questioned by the likes of you. After all, he’s found something big here, hasn’t he?”
Ward shook his head. “I told ye before, we don’t like the idea of diggin’ too deep. It’s bad business.”
Raj opened his mouth to defend Belmaine, but another thought came to him. Could it be that Ward sensed the same ill omens he did? “Bad business how? Because of those tall tales of yours?”
“Not just ours,” said the miner. “The Indians’ too. I believe a few of the fellows still live ‘round here.”
“What do they say?”
“Nothing good, friend,” said Ward, laughing. “All kinds o’ghosts ’n’ goblins ’n’ banshees live in these hills, if you ask them. Most o’their yarns I never paid much mind. But this all makes me think of one they used to spin about the Mountain Men. See…long ago the Mountain Men were causin’ trouble, so Raven, sneaky lad, tells ‘em to meet him inside a cave for to fight. Only, when they went in, Raven wasn’t there. He was hidin’ outside. He pushes a big block o’stone to seal off the mouth of the cave, and they’re still stuck in there to this day, not harmin’ nobody.”
“Is that so,” said Raj.
“‘Tis,” said Ward. “Now I don’t believe in no Mountain Men – but it’s a bit strange that the tale would describe almost the exact place we’ve come to, eh?”
Raj would have liked to speak to one of those Indians himself. It wasn’t that he really believed superstitious stories like the one Ward had just told him, but something about it squared with his own feelings on the place. “That story,” he said. “Is that why the other men are so upset?”
“I can’t speak for the rest of ‘em,” said Ward, “but as for me, I’d rather let this dark hole well enough alone. I think that whatever this stone is sealin’ off should stay sealed off. And I’d dearly like to be able to read these letters. Might put me mind at ease.”
On that, thought Raj, they were in agreement.
Work carried on all day. As more boreholes were drilled, the laborers seemed to drag their feet – or how else did it take them until nightfall to prepare the seal, which was only around five by five feet, for blasting? Their grumbling, and the black looks they sometimes cast towards Raj and Belmaine, only added to the impression.
At dinner, Raj told his uncle about Ward’s story. Belmaine listened, then shook his head with a smile. “Ah, Raj, they’re lazy and that’s that. I’ve paid them and now they don’t want to do their jobs. Still…if there is any truth to that tale, if this is really the place it was referring to, we may well have struck gold. A site important enough to live on in legend for thousands of years…”
“But suppose there’s more to it,” pressed Raj. “Suppose…suppose there really is some danger here.”
“Pshaw!” Belmaine waved a hand. “What danger could there be after all this time?”
What indeed, thought Raj. Visions of Alki and Confederation Lake and Peggy Frostegard flitted through his mind. It all felt impossibly remote, though they weren’t fifty miles away.
That night, he dreamed of darkness. The most absolute black he had ever known covered all reality. And yet he could see, not with his eyes, for he had none, but with his mind. He could see the narrow tunnel leading out, see the traces left by generations of his kind over the eons. He could see, too, the bones of the small ones who had come down here to perish, both the four-legs and the two-legs.
It had been a long, a very long time. His kind moved slowly, lived slowly. But their patience was not eternal. A few cave-spiders and blind fish here and there would not do for sustenance, not like the real thing.
He was hungry.
Raj awoke to the sound of Belmaine shouting. “Rotters! Vagabonds! Curs!” Emerging from the tent, the young man found his uncle standing alone in the center of the campsite, shaking his fist. All else was silent and still.
Hearing his nephew, Belmaine turned. “Can you believe it, lad? They’ve gone, the bastards! They’ve taken my money and run off!”
So the workers had decided to go with their gut. Raj couldn’t blame them, though he wished they had brought him and Belmaine along. He would rather have been anywhere – even depressing Fairfax – than that bleak dig site on that gloomy ridge. “Well,” he said, “that’s a shame. We could…we could go back to Alki with what we’ve found so far, see if we can get some expert help?”
“Nonsense, lad, nonsense!” cried his uncle. His eyes gleamed with a dangerous light, and his nostrils flared. “This hillside is crumbling. In a few months, my find might be lost forever. I don’t have time for bureaucracy and busywork, not when truth awaits! My whole life has led up to this moment, do you understand?” Without another word, he turned and stormed away up the path, leaving Raj to follow or be left behind.
The old man had begun preparations to blow the seal by the time his nephew arrived at the site. Raj helped him pack dynamite into the boreholes, then ran a fuse back to a nearby boulder. When they were safely ensconced behind this makeshift barricade, Raj turned to his uncle. “Listen, Uncle Belmaine, are you sure…are you really sure this is such a good idea? I had a dream last night that –”
“Dreams?” asked Belmaine. “Why, lad, all the dreams we could ever want are right here! Behind that seal lies the secret to glory, fame, respect. Even those bastards at the Burke will have to sit up and take notice!”
“B-but,” said Raj, “who cares what they think of you? It doesn’t really matter –”
“Of course it matters!” roared Belmaine. Seizing the detonator, he shoved the plunger down. The world shook, and an earsplitting roar echoed through the air. Clods of earth and fragments of rock rained down upon the two men.
When they rose to their feet, they found their view obscured by a thick cloud of dust. Belmaine charged forwards, Raj hot on his heels. The blast had done its work, it seemed. A yawning hole now gaped in the side of the mountain.
The unstable earth underneath them trembled, but Belmaine paid it no mind. Turning to Raj, he grinned. “The way is open, lad. Ready to make history?”
Raj swallowed. “I…” he could not say the word, could not say yes. But Belmaine would never forgive him if he backed out now, and how could he forsake his only kin? “If…if you are.”
Belmaine lit a small battery lantern and stepped into the tunnel behind the seal. The space was fearfully cramped, perhaps five feet by five feet, so that neither man could stand upright. All Raj’s nerves jangled in warning.
A horrible feeling of deja vu crept over him. This place…it was the same as in his dream of the night before last. Every detail was there: the roughly-carved tunnels, the crabbed, inscrutable writing on the walls, the gentle slope, the interminable dark expanse around them.
Then Belmaine cried out, pointing ahead at something that lay just inside the entrance. “Look!”
“Wh –” Raj let out a gasp. “O-oh!” A skeleton, worn down by eons of dripping water, lay on the ground. It had begun to meld with the stone around it; tiny stalactites hung from the ribcage, and a lump of rock encased the skull. A few arrowheads, scattered around the deceased, left little doubt as to the end the unfortunate soul had met with. “Ch-Christ, it’s just like outside!”
“More violence,” said his uncle.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Raj. “Why do the modern Indians have that old story about the Mountain Men? Their ancestors must have been in contact with these masons. But none of the tribes around here build with stone, so…so they may not be the masons’ descendants. That means…”
“The Indians killed these people off?” Belmaine squinted down at the bones on the floor. “Perhaps. There could be answers ahead. Come.”
They shuffled along hunched over, the old man setting a ferocious pace. In the light of the swinging lantern, the carven shapes in the walls seemed to flutter and dance. The tunnel curved gently as they went, and when Raj looked back he could see no sign of light from outside. Inky blackness pressed in on them from all sides, beginning at the edge of the lantern’s light and rolling on into infinity.
The young man swallowed. Gooseflesh shivered down his arms and back; he began to feel as though he was being watched. But by who, or what? The tunnel had been abandoned for millennia. The tremendous weight of history pressed down on him, leaving so little room for his puny present-tense existence that he felt starved for air.
What, he thought, if the passageway came down around them? Even if they were not instantly killed, no one would know what had happened to them. Only the Fairfax miners had so much as seen the place, and Raj was willing to bet that none of them would return for a thousand dollars.
Still Belmaine increased the pace. How did the old man have such energy? The darkness around them seemed to sap Raj’s vitality. Gasping, he felt his heart pounding between his ears. His back and shoulders screamed in protest.
Though he knew it to be impossible, the place seemed to be growing still blacker as they went. Their shuffling steps should have echoed loud from the bare stone walls, but instead they sounded oddly muffled. There was no breeze, and leaden air pressed in from all directions.
Raj’s skin crawled. The letters swirled around him, forcing themselves into his vision, and for the first time he felt that he could understand them. GO, they said. GET OUT. GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
He realized that the darkness wasn’t getting darker at all – the lantern was simply dying away. “B-Belmaine,” he called, but too late. As he extended a hand towards his uncle, the last of the yellow light sputtered out.
Raj felt as though he’d been blind since birth. It made no difference whether his eyes were open or shut. With a whimper, he ran towards where his uncle had been, but then collided headfirst with cold stone. He staggered back, dazed, and realized that he’d lost his way.
Something warm and wet trickled down his face from his forehead. He heard a crunching from somewhere far away. Belmaine, stumbling through more bones? “B-Belmaine!” he called. “Uncle! Please…”
More of the steps rang out, a bit closer now. It wasn’t Belmaine, couldn’t be Belmaine – Belmaine didn’t scuttle. The heavy-sounding staccato thumps punctuated the movement of something much larger than Raj’s uncle. Then came the stench – a powerful, nauseating wave of rot and death and God only knew what else.
The old man had been right, thought Raj. They really had found the truth. They knew now why the stonemasons had worshipped in this place, why the Indians had killed them off. He knew why no human being had been mad enough to come here for millennia.
Sunny Alki lay so very far away. To think that Raj had been upset about missing Thursday’s regatta. The footfalls grew louder, thrumming through the air now, shaking his very core. He thought he could hear a kind of breathing.
Sitting down on the cold stone floor of the tunnel, he allowed himself a smile. Perhaps…perhaps this time the truth wouldn’t hurt. At least, not for long.
Image credit: McKay Savage from London, UK CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.
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