Auraria: A Novel (31 page)

“Which way?” asked Holtzclaw.

“It has to be the stairs,” she said. “Under the mountain.”

“Aren’t we rather too deep already?”

“I’m going this way. You can go where ever you like.”

Holtzclaw followed Abigail and the path of water.

A coolness came up the stairs from below, chasing away the withering steam. Abigail’s torch was the only point of light; it showed only more stairs leading down.

Holtzclaw counted one hundred steps, then two hundred, five hundred, a thousand. The river coursed through the channel, its sibilant rush revealing nothing about how far they had yet to go. And Abigail did not know either.

Another thousand steps passed beneath them. They stopped to rest; Abigail sat on the strongbox like a stool, and Holtzclaw sprawled on the steps. No matter how deeply they descended, they were not the first to pass here. How many thousands had made the tunnels, the village, the drainage tunnels, the stairs? How could he hope that there was any gold left for him? The first finders are the ones that are rewarded with fame and fortune. What prize goes to the very last?

But hunger, more than a fear of failure, gnawed at him, hunger that had grown out of size with his physical demands. Why hadn’t he brought with him his Effervescent Brain Salts or his container of Pharaoh’s Flour?

“You don’t have anything to eat, Abigail, do you? A sweet potato?”

“I brought a picnic basket, but I ate everything when you weren’t looking.”

She rose from the strongbox, her silhouette framed in firelight. Following her, Holtzclaw put one weary foot below another. He wished that he had dried some of the mushrooms that Emmy had shown him or that he’d filled a canteen with spiced groundhog stew or that he’d brought a container of hash browns, dripping with fat.

It was only a hundred more steps, and then the stairs ended, the tunnel turned, and they faced a wall of rich gold, yellow like the yolk of an egg. Gold covered every shore of a vast underground lake.

“And there it is,” said Abigail. Holtzclaw staggered forward past her. He shook off his bewilderment, surveying the underground lake and its shoreline, trying to understand. The gold was not layered like a natural formation of ore, which would be solid and intermingled with quartz and mica. These deposits looked like the loose tailings of a mine—slag and waste, and yet, pure gold. Pipes and springs and tunnels flowed into the lake from all directions.

In a circle of lantern light, Shadburn worked the deposit with a little hammer. He was chipping fragments of gold into an open strongbox at his feet. In the raw surface of the metal, a new light—the reflection of Abigail’s torch—flickered, and Shadburn turned to them.

“Holtzclaw? Abby? You shouldn’t be here.” He turned his back to the wall and held up his arms as though he were trying to hide the wall of gold, but he could hide it no better than he could hide a mountain.

Holtzclaw came toward him. “I convinced Ms. Thompson that you were bankrupt. But that wasn’t true, was it? You could never run out of money, could you? Not when you knew about this place.”

Shadburn shook his head. “Just the opposite, Holtzclaw. I never wanted to come here again. I never wanted anyone to come here. I didn’t know you would follow me. That is so much for the worse.”

“We didn’t follow you. We followed Abigail’s dreams.”

Shadburn peered around Holtzclaw to look at the tavernkeeper.

“Curiosity,” she said. “Useless curiosity. I don’t need a crumb of the gold. Seeing it is enough.” She sounded disappointed.

“And how many times have you made this trip, Shadburn?” said Holtzclaw. He wasn’t looking at his employer but at the shores of gold. “How many times have you brought up a fortune without me?”

“Five. The first was an accident. I stumbled a little deeper than others. We all played in the caverns, and I wandered past all those ancient leavings, through their sewers. For a time, I believed I had done something great, but it was chance. No merit in it. An illusion of wealth.”

Holtzclaw clawed some loose flakes from the deposits and shoved his gilded palm toward Shadburn’s nose. “What’s an illusion? This is just as good as any paper money. It’s your business that’s the illusion, your entire life. Mine too, I suppose. Why waste your time with unprofitable land deals? What use is there in turning some gold to less gold?”

Shadburn turned his head. “I wanted money, not gold. I meant to earn it, not just find it. Or at least, I meant for those poor miners up there to think that I had earned it. I can’t let them know I just dug it up. That would make their mania so much worse. What sort of respectable man just picks up his money, rather than earning it? You won’t tell them, will you?”

Holtzclaw did not respond. He clenched his fists; the gold dust between his palms and fingers was cold and slippery.

“These are not mineral veins,” said Shadburn, his finger tracing the pipes and springs that emptied into the lake. “It’s a sewer. The gold has washed up here. The moon maidens slough it off, and it flushes from their baths and builds up in drifts in the rocks. You came past their hotel and their cottages and their pipes and pumps—or what is left of them. You’ve seen the sheen on the waters after they bathe. Gold is their waste, Holtzclaw. It is the sickness that the water takes out of them, for us scavengers and night-soil men to contract in turn. Goodness knows how the moon maidens get it—it leaches into their skin from the sun or from meteors, or they catch it the same way we catch our own diseases, from bad airs or idleness or shame. Only, they’ve ruined their cure from overuse.”

“Who’s told you all this poppycock?”

“The princess,” said Shadburn. “She’s their Holtzclaw.”

“And does she get a salary from the moon maidens,” said Holtzclaw, “or do they pay her in dividends and shares?”

“I would guess that they don’t pay her in gold.”

“Shadburn, you are a fraud,” said Holtzclaw. “Your own one-person confidence scheme. I’ll make better of it. I’ll have ten thousand men bring up gold by the bucketful. I’ll have the railroad twins lay a narrow-gauge railroad.”

“You can’t,” said Shadburn. “Not before the flood. The dam is closed. Soon enough, this gold will be hidden away for as long as the lake lasts, and I mean for that to be a very long time indeed.”

“If we don’t hurry, we’ll be drowned ourselves,” said Abigail.

They were right. Holtzclaw cursed that Shadburn’s obsession should rob him of a fortune. Had Shadburn confessed his secret shame earlier, there might have been time to talk some sense into him. And Holtzclaw could have set up the wealthiest company ever seen on the continent. He would have made the great men of capitalism weep over their tiny fortunes. He could have sat atop a pyramid of gold, surveying the low and level world stretched out before him—his own possession, ready for the plow.

The rising lake made all this impossible. But he could still fill his strongbox. Holtzclaw began to dig at the gold with the ill-suited tools he had brought. It was slow work. Shadburn had already filled his own strongbox, but he did not offer his hammer to Holtzclaw. He watched his protégé, neither helping nor restraining him.

Abigail wandered the narrow lakeshore, fidgeting. Dark water quivered near her feet. Ripples washed up against her shoes. The underground lake was stirred into motion by the discharge of a thousand subterranean pipes, each flowing stronger because of the swelling river.

Every time he heard the water splashing against the rock, Holtzclaw anticipated the arrival of Princess Trahlyta. But she never appeared. With so much water pouring into her valley, perhaps she was overwhelmed.

Holtzclaw worked until his strongbox was full. Neither Abigail nor Shadburn’s discomfort could hurry him. He scraped a little more gold into his trouser pockets and the cuffs of his coat. He put flakes under his hat brim. Only when no more gold could be crammed into his person did he let himself be led from the underground lake.

Abigail lead the ascent up the long flight of stairs. She took the lantern from Shadburn, who followed without a backward glance, carrying his load atop his shoulder. Holtzclaw kept pace with them, but with effort; he’d packed his strongbox very full. Perhaps he had taken a little more than he needed—a few ounces less would have made little difference for his ultimate plans.

In the channel that split the stairs, water was running faster and higher. They reached the top more quickly than Holtzclaw expected. The return trip, with each step leading closer to home, is always faster than the outward journey.

The walls of the steamy tunnels were covered in curtains of water pouring in from cracks and fissures across the rock. Cascades tumbling from high above made the ladder slick and treacherous, especially with the added weight of the strongboxes. They raised the strongboxes one at a time, all three of them pulling, pushing, balancing, fighting.

Abigail needed no guide to take her back through the meandering streets of the cavern and its village of cabins. Overwhelmed pipes disgorged muddy soup. The brackish basins in each of the cabins ran over. Holtzclaw’s arms ached and his knees complained. He wished gold were not so heavy. Why could they not have found a cache of paper money instead? A ten-thousand-dollar bill weighs no more than a feather. But he supposed that no process, natural or supernatural, would allow federal notes to accrete below the earth.

Rivulets ran through all the upper passages. Flotsam of childish pastimes washed into the elbows of the tunnels and broke up against the smooth rocks. They passed by the names written in candle smoke. Had they not been in such a rush, Holtzclaw might have put his own mark there.

They broke out onto the surface, passing through the engorged waterfall, and stumbled through the entrance pool, which had merged with the rising river. The bright face of the moon was half hidden behind the rim of the Raven Cliffs.

“And we couldn’t go back for another load?” said Holtzclaw.

“There’s no time,” said Abigail.

Holtzclaw removed his hat and wiped yellow dust from his brow. A few flakes of gold fell on his shoulders, and half a hundred colors shone from inside the brim. He knew that he could not hold any more. Gold spilled out of him, from every pore.

#

When the lake covered Auraria’s graveyard, the pine boxes and mahogany caskets rose up through the softened ground. The headstones had been moved to the new graveyard, but the coffins had been left behind. The dead clung to their coffins like survivors of a shipwreck. Most pitiful was little Emmy, the mushroomer, sitting on her half-rotted pine boards, toes curled away from the water. She and her kind bobbed on the lake for two days until Holtzclaw was able to negotiate with a construction crew for their recovery. The coffins were tied to rowboats, pulled to shore, and reburied in the new cemetery overlooking Shadburn’s lake. Holtzclaw paid all in gold.

Book III

Chapter Twenty

When the first train crossed Lake Trahlyta, the arriving tourists pressed their noses to the glass, straining for a glimpse of the pure and ancient body of water promised by legend and advertisement. Instead, they saw a prosaic brown lake, and the Queen of the Mountains at the edge of this overgrown cow pond was a disappointment.

Holtzclaw wondered how much money it would cost to get the tea color out of the water, what kinds of filters and pipes he’d have to build. But before he could formulate a plan, the water solved his troubles for no additional charge. The tea color came from the agitated remains of life in the valley. Soil had been swirled into solution with leaf litter. Ashes from burned homes mixed with rotten traces of bracken and branches, soggy bits of paper, and charred sand. The water broke these remnants down into the smallest possible particles, which settled and sank. Day by day, the lake waters became clearer.

Then one fine evening, a group of arriving tourists smiled as their train flew over the face of the lake. The water had cleared enough to meet their expectations. Before them, the lake was pure and bright, casting a golden glow onto the Queen of the Mountains. The mirror-like surface reflected the hotel’s two chief towers and its domes, gables, porches, and walks. Nature doubled Holtzclaw’s work: one formal garden bloomed like two; the nine-hole golf course became eighteen; the manicured lawn stretched twice as far.

Holtzclaw’s usual perch in the Queen of the Mountains was a table in the grand lobby, near the reception desk. The lobby’s ceiling rose five stories, past interior balconies that opened onto loges and mezzanines. Doors opened and closed, discharging visitors and attendants from sleeping chambers, smoking lounges, dining rooms, conservatories, and baths. Overstuffed leather chairs enveloped men with newspapers and children with baubles. Here, Holtzclaw had succeeded best at capturing rhythm and order. Shined shoes, crisp creases, accurate hats, and clean gloves moved and settled and moved again. Quartets of studious-faced guests adhered to the strict rules of preference and faro.

An employee in the livery of the Queen of the Mountains—gold epaulettes; white coat; a tapering, diagonal blue sash running from right hip to left shoulder—brought him a glass of claret.

“Thank you,” said Holtzclaw.

“You’re welcome, James,” replied the employee. Holtzclaw whirled as he recognized the princess’s voice, but she had already vanished. There was no sense in chasing her; she appeared as she willed several times a day. Holtzclaw couldn’t fathom her reasons, but she was not doing any harm to his guests or his staff. And unlike a singing tree or a moon maiden, her presence would not stir up any excitement. Thus, he was inclined to leave her to her game and not incite her by confrontation.