Earth Cult (5 page)

Dr Leach regarded him with a fixed intensity that was not so much hostile as wary and suspicious. Then he said, ‘That is correct. In excess of 5 million electron volts. The Soviet findings will no doubt prove useful but they do not affect our research directly. In a sense they complement—'

Apparently he had heard something, for he cocked his head to one side, and then Frank heard it too: a subdued moaning in the far distance, sounding like the wailing of a prairie wind, or a beast in pain trapped in the bowels of the earth. It might have been his imagination – he wasn't sure – but Frank also thought he felt a tremor pass through the soles of his feet, a low-frequency vibration which seemed to jar the fillings in his teeth.

He looked questioningly at the others, who had frozen in attitudes of listening, and then his attention was caught and held by the expression on Dr Leach's face. He had seen people under hypnosis and the scientist reminded him of someone in a state of trance, lost to this world, inhabiting a region beyond the normal senses, where the private inner visions of the mind constitute the single ultimate reality.

Walt Stringer, manager of the Cascade Hotel, closed the roll-top desk and went to answer the ping of the bell. It had to be the stranger, no doubt about it, because the locals either called out his name or came directly into the office. It was him, all right, his vivid blue eyes and brown curly hair marking him out as quite a youngish man until you got closer and saw the delta of creases at the corners of his eyes and the slight heaviness in the line of the jaw. And he had thickened up around the waist – a sure sign of age, more
than moderate drinking, and soft city living. Stringer had hoped to have seen the last of him and here he was again, his leather grip in his hand and an assortment of gear slung across his shoulder.

As Stringer came out of the office, closing the door behind him, Frank Kersh said, ‘You don't face too much competition for accommodation in this town.'

‘What's wrong, don't you like our hospitality?'

‘Your food's okay and your liquor's fine; it's the twenty dollar cover charge that's a little steep. It isn't as though there was a private bathroom.'

‘Don't see as how that's necessary,' Stringer answered. ‘One bathroom on every floor. Should be enough for most folks' needs.'

‘You can put me down for another twenty dollars' worth.'

‘I thought you were moving on – don't they need you on your paper back in Chicago?'

Frank slowly smiled. ‘Did I mention I was a journalist?'

‘You got a PA sticker on your windshield, ain't you?' Stringer said, reaching behind him for the key.

It was true – though not many people recognized the Press Association symbol when they saw it. He hadn't intended to return to Gypsum, only it was late afternoon when he had finally left the Project and he didn't feel in the mood for a long drive. He reasoned that it was better to spend the night locally and make an early start in the morning: a day's hard driving should see him safely back in the Windy City.

He was given the same room, overlooking the main square. After a shower he sat down to write up his notes, listening to the interview he had taped with Professor Friedmann, though it was plainly unsatisfactory in the way of providing fresh information. It seemed that Perry had been right in his estimation of the Deep Hole Project; not expecting very much and having his judgment confirmed. Listening to it over again it sounded less like an interview than a first-term college lecture.

Frank had used the notebook technique before. He didn't regard it as outright deception, simply a trick of the trade to
get his subject talking more freely. His method was to start the recorder before the interview and then pretend to take notes so that the interviewee was relaxed, unaware that he was being taped. It had been his experience that some people froze at the sight of a microphone and became tongue-tied.

Shortly before eight he went down to the dining-room and sat at the same table, the young barman-waiter lifting his elbows off the bar and bringing him a Southern Comfort without being asked. His name, Frank learned, was Spencer Tutt. He seemed less guarded than he had the previous evening and when Frank invited him to have a drink he accepted, pouring himself a Schlitz and raising his glass. After the first swallow he said in his drawling voice, ‘Old man Stringer was askin' about you. Seems he cottoned on that you was a reporter. Only I didn't tell him,' he added quickly.

‘I'm not ashamed of the fact. Why do you suppose he's interested in me?'

Spencer Tutt shrugged his lean shoulders. ‘Guess he knew you had somethin' to do with what's goin' on over at the Telluride Mine.'

‘How could he know that?'

‘You weren't here on vacation, that was pretty obvious, so maybe he figured it out for hisself. And when you came back you had red mud on your tyres. That means you must have taken the mountain road over Eagle River.'

‘Mr Stringer is a regular Sherlock Holmes,' Frank said. He was about to ask if the earth tremor had been felt in Gypsum but something restrained him. The memory brought with it the association of Dr Leach, the strange dwarfish man whose dark fixed stare had almost seemed to contain an element of madness, and it was a recollection that Frank wasn't keen to dwell upon. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising that the townspeople regarded the scientific community with suspicion and distrust.

He ordered steak, spinach and salad, apple pie and cream, black coffee, and about half-way through the meal three or four people drifted in and sat down. By the look of them they were farmhands, wearing faded blue overalls, their
faces and arms burned a rich mahogany by spending most of the working day outdoors. Frank scrutinized them casually, wondering if any of them had been present at the Prayer Meeting the night before, but he couldn't recall their faces with any degree of certainty.

He finished his meal and had decided to have one more Southern Comfort before going up to his room when a short, broad, balding man in a wrinkled white cotton suit entered and made unsteadily for the bar. A couple of the farmhands greeted him, then glanced at one another with the secret amused air of people sharing a private joke.

Frank thought: Wherever you go you run across them – sometimes literally – the town drunk. This, by the look of it, was Gypsum's contribution to the national alcoholic problem. He watched as the man leaned heavily against the bar, his short stubby legs braced apart for stability, his creased cotton jacket riding up over the broad swell of his buttocks. Spencer Tutt served him with a bourbon and water and the man turned to survey the room, clutching the glass, his eyes shifting vaguely and near sightedly over the half-dozen people seated at the tables; no one paid any attention to him, and after gulping down most of his drink he set off in Frank Kersh's general direction.

Frank fervently hoped that this wasn't going to be another tedious encounter with a screwball. His largely wasted day at the Deep Hole Project hadn't left him sufficient reserves of the milk of human kindness to suffer the incoherent ramblings of a down-and-out lush. But in this he was mistaken, for as the man approached him, managing somehow to avoid stumbling into tables and chairs, there seemed to be a definite sense of purpose in his movements, and his eyes too had sharpened into focus, losing their hazy meandering blankness.

He halted and bowed rather clumsily, raising his glass in a gesture of friendly introduction. The breast-pocket of his jacket was stained with ink, Frank noticed, as if from a leaky pen, and there was a bundle of papers sticking out of his
pocket. In a voice that was surprisingly firm and under control he said:

‘I believe we're in the same line of business. Cal Renfield, editor of the
Roaring Fork Bulletin
, what you'd call the local rag. Mind if I sit?'

He had already pulled out a chair and manoeuvred his bulk into position, and without waiting for a response lowered himself carefully so that his belly came to rest on his upper thighs. He released a long deep sigh and closed his eyes, taking a swig and setting the glass down.

‘Frank Kersh,' Frank said sociably, somewhat relieved that the short fat man wasn't a free-loader. Or so he hoped. He said, ‘I'm not with a newspaper myself—'

‘I know,' Cal Renfield said at once, nodding briskly. He wiped his head, which had a bald strip down the centre and grey thinning hair either side, with a square plump hand, and then looked intently at the tips of his fingers. ‘Humidity's higher than hell tonight. Must be a thunderstorm on the way. Wind from the south and that's usually a bad sign.'

Frank studied him circumspectly, looking for signs of chronic drunkenness, the trembling hands, the uncontrollable nervous tics in the facial muscles, the patchwork of crazed skin on the nose and cheeks where hundreds of tiny blood-vessels had fractured and burst; yet Cal Renfield exhibited none of these symptoms. Perhaps he just went on the occasional blinder, making up for all the other times when he stayed hard-headed and stone cold sober.

As if reading his thoughts Cal Renfield swayed forward a little and said in a confidential whisper, ‘You caught me on a bad day, Mr Kersh. Bout once a month I take it into my head to—' he waved his well-padded hands about as if groping for words, ‘you, know, dip my head in the bucket and forget the paper, the town, the whole damn thing. Tomorrow I'm gonna be sorry but tonight is worth it.'

‘Can you stand another?' Frank asked, smiling.

‘Try me.'

Frank nodded towards Spencer Tutt and the young man winked and set up some fresh glasses.

‘You're with a science magazine, right?' Cal Renfield said, lacing his podgy fingers across his belly.

‘Based in Chicago.'

‘And you've been out to the Project at the old Telluride working.'

Frank shrugged. ‘So everybody seems to know. Is there bad feeling between the scientists and the townspeople? Don't they get on?'

‘What makes you ask that?'

‘The general feeling about the place. I get the impression that the townspeople don't understand what's going on at the Project and they're naturally suspicious when a bunch of scientists move in and start installing equipment underground. Most small communities would react the same way.'

Spencer Tutt brought the drinks to the table and Cal Renfield took a hefty swallow before considering his reply. He put the glass down and relaced his fingers across his paunch. ‘It amounts to more than mere suspicion, Mr Kersh.'

‘You're going to tell me that the Telluric Faith or whatever it calls itself has received some Divine intimation of disaster. They were performing outside the hotel last night: cheap theatricals to scare the locals.'

‘So you heard them?'

‘I had no option.'

‘And you weren't impressed.'

Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘With primitive mumbo-jumbo?' He shook his head.

‘I forgot – you're a scientist yourself.'

‘A science writer. But you're not going to tell me that you believe their nonsense? You don't look to me like a man who's taken in by a bunch of people chanting a few Biblical quotes.'

‘No I'm not. When I said there was more to it than mere suspicion I wasn't thinking of Cabel and his followers;
other things have been happening round here lately that I can't explain and I doubt if anyone can.' His eyes glazed over for a moment as if the alcohol had suddenly begun to affect him, then he seemed to shake himself out of it. ‘You ever been in this part of the world before, Mr Kersh? Know anything of its history?'

‘It was once gold-mining territory about a hundred years ago.'

‘That's right. Colorado was opened up by the prospectors back in the 1860s and a lot of men made their fortunes here. I wasn't thinking of that so much as how these mountains came to be formed – eighty, ninety million years ago. Ever heard of a woman called Helen Hunt Jackson? She lived round here at the end of the last century, studied these mountains and wrote about them. In one of her books she said: “The weirdest of places with rocks of every conceivable and inconceivable shape and size, all motionless and silent, with a strange look of having been just stopped and held back in the very climax of some supernatural catastrophe.” I think she described this part of the Rockies pretty well. Wouldn't you say so?'

Frank nodded and took a sip of Southern Comfort. ‘There are some weird rock formations round here, I'll grant you that. But what has that got to do with the scientists working at the Deep Hole Project? Or why the townspeople distrust them?'

‘I'll tell you why,' said Cal Renfield, easing himself forward and placing his elbows on the checkered tablecloth. His face was round and bland, the features moulded like soft wax, and it might have been a comical face but for his eyes which were grey, shrewd, intelligent – despite their occasional glazed wandering. ‘Some of the people round here – and not only those of the Telluric Faith – believe that when Helen Hunt Jackson used the phrase “supernatural catastrophe” she wasn't being fanciful or poetic but stating an historical fact. They really believe the rocks to be haunted, to have some inner dynamic power which is waiting to be released. There are too many tales the old miners used to tell
of strange things happening underground: rocks moving without cause, shafts opening and closing mysteriously, lights from nowhere moving about in the darkness. You're new to this area, Mr Kersh, so you don't know the historical background against which these people have been brought up. It's easy for an outsider to sneer and call their beliefs primitive and naive but you haven't had any first-hand experience of these mountains.' He jerked a broad flat thumb over his shoulder. ‘And especially that one.'

‘The Mount of the Holy Cross?'

Cal Renfield threw back the last of his drink. He put the glass down and wiped his mouth. ‘Whether they knew it or not those scientists picked the one spot which is the focal point for what the locals regard as the most sacred
and
the most mysterious part of the mountain … the Telluride Mine. You can call it superstition if you want to but there aren't many along Roaring Fork Valley who don't believe in it.'