The Six-Gun Tarot (31 page)

“Where is Mr. Phillips?” Deerfield asked, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

“Well, sir, that part is very queer. A few of the fellas on guard detail said that Phillips and Reverend Ambrose showed up here last night when second shift was getting off. They say that Phillips ordered all the remaining blasting materials loaded onto rail carts and taken into the mine. He said you had authorized some additional blasting.”

“We did no such thing!” Moore said, looking at Deerfield.

“No, we didn’t,” Deerfield said. “The reverend and Phillips went down with the third shift?”

“Yessir.”

Deerfield sighed. They had contacted Ambrose after the incident with Bick last night and had received a most cryptic response from Ambrose’s man, Phillips, by letter waiting for them this morning at their hotel.

The Reverend says that Mr. Bick will be dealt with—have faith and rejoice for the day of blessed rest is at hand,
the note announced in Phillips’s small, neat utterance.

Phillips was a mystery to Deerfield. The man was large, powerfully built, and obviously had a constitution of steel to deal with explosives as temperamental as dynamite. Ambrose had mentioned once that Phillips had fought in the war and lost his family to it. The huge, imposing figure was seldom far from the reverend’s side and Ambrose often called him his deacon. There was something about Phillips that had always sat very unwell with Deerfield—an impression, nothing more. Back home, Deerfield owned a cat, a black Persian. It was a magnificent creature and it often seemed to suddenly stare off into space, as if it were regarding something Deerfield could not see. Phillips had the same look.

“Very well. Damn it all to Hell! Mr. Kelly, round up the remaining men. Equip them and prepare to go below. We shall be accompanying you.”

“Yessir.”

Moore looked at Deerfield with a look normally reserved for deer on the wrong side of a gun.

“Oscar, are you sure that is the best policy?” Moore said. “I mean, these mines are terribly unstable, not to mention filthy. And I am terribly susceptible to the chill. Let’s let the men go down: It’s what they do; it’s what we pay them for.”

Deerfield was already inspecting a hooded lantern. He placed it on a crate and pulled a small pocket derringer from his waistcoat.

“I am tired of whatever game it is Ambrose and his man have gotten us into, Jacob. Bick is deadly serious about his threats and I am becoming more and more convinced we have been used by Ambrose.”

Deerfield snapped open the breech of the small gun. Satisfied that it was loaded and ready, he closed it with a metallic click, and put it away.

“I am tired of this. I’m tired of feeling manipulated by Ambrose, by Bick. I’m going to get some answers. Go or stay, Jacob, I’m tired of your cowardice and, honestly, to blazes with you.”

Deerfield picked up the lantern and moved to the front of the gathering crowd of miners. Many of the men were carrying rifles as well as picks. A few clutched Bibles and crucifixes. They all looked tense and frightened.

Moore rubbed his face and looked at the ground. His shadow was growing longer, bleeding into the darkening ground. He sighed and prepared a lantern of his own before he shuffled up to his appointed place a few steps behind and to the right of Deerfield.

“Men!” Deerfield shouted to the assembled miners. “Stay calm and keep your ears open and your eyes peeled down there. With that dynamite and any gas pockets down there, there’s no shooting unless I order it. Some damned fool starts popping off his gun and he could bring the whole place down on us … and if he doesn’t kill us, I’ll kill him myself.”

Kelly made his way to the mouth of the mine. He held a canary cage on a long pole. The bird chirped and fluttered about.

“Very good, Mr. Kelly,” Deerfield said. “Let’s go.”

The descent was made in silence. There was an occasional cough, sniff or whisper. But the men were focused on every shadow, every sound, not that there were many. This deep under were absolutes of darkness and stillness. Douse your lantern, stop walking, slow your breathing and you’d find yourself enveloped, absorbed by them.

No sound—especially the comforting murmur of nature most people ignore consciously but that constantly reminds them they are connected to life, to a living world. No light—not even the tiniest moon-sliver shimmer of illumination for the starving eye to grasp at. Void. This far below the earth, the only reminders a man carried that such a verdant place even existed were whatever he carried in the bone vault of his mind.

The party reached the slopes for the third level, near where Phillips had blasted earlier in the week. The wooden horses, cordoning off the new vein, lay in the dust. The support timbers for the entrance were jammed crookedly into the living rock, giving the maw the impression of a snag-toothed, leering grin.

“Stop,” Deerfield said. There was something on the floor along with the discarded barriers. He knelt down while Moore aimed his lantern’s beam at the ground.

It was a canary, the tiny form twisted and stiff, its dark eyes wide and vapid in death. One of the miners muttered an oath; another, a prayer.

“This way,” Deerfield said. “It didn’t die from gas, I’d wager. They came this way. So do we.”

The new tunnels were narrow and jagged. A man had to move through most of them sideways, with an arm thrust out in front of him holding his lantern. The heavy, silent air reeked of dust, lamp oil and blasting powder.

Deerfield heard Moore’s coughing and panting behind him; the noise bounced off the tight passages. Jacob really wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. Deerfield was about to call back to his partner and tell him to head back up when one of the men near the front shouted out. The message made its way along the human telegraph line quickly.

“A room! There’s a room in the mountain!”

The jagged incision of a passage gave way to smooth walls covered in tiny, crowded script that seemed to crawl like hungry maggots across the beams of the lanterns. The chamber was vast, stretching well past the feeble lights. The wind howled all around the huge open space and cold drafts of air raked the miners’ faces. The floor was covered with the thin, shaky symbols as well, layer after layer, circles in circles. Moore tried to not look at them too long, pulling his lantern’s beam away from the floor.

“Steady, lads,” Deerfield said as they spread out from the narrow tunnel. He fumbled for his pistol. This place was old, older than he could fully comprehend. He could feel the press of its age seeping into his bones with the cold. This place wasn’t some fluke, some naturally occurring cave—it was hacked from the living stone long before men walked upright. Smoothed with devoted hands, working until they were bloody, age after age, generation after generation.

One of the men near the rear of the party tried to sound out the things on the wall. He retched, suddenly and violently. Another recited the Lord’s Prayer. Someone chambered a round into a rifle

Something moved in the infinite darkness, something without shape, without borders. There was a sound—a snake’s scales scratching, crunching across dry, dirty stone.

“I think something is in here,” Moore whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of—”

“Shut up, Jacob,” Deerfield muttered. He turned to Kelly. “Have your men focus their light in this direction. Keep the hoods shrouded partly. This wind will kill the lamps.”

The sound came closer—shuffle, crunch.

Deerfield’s pistol was slippery in his palm; he clutched it tighter—he wished he could wipe his palm on his pants, but there was no way he was lowering his lantern. He could hear Moore wheezing behind him and he wanted so badly to strike him. Fear was to be controlled, to be mastered—not wallowed in, like a sow in mud. Only a weakling and a fool put his fear on display for the world to see.

“Steady!” Deerfield called out to the men, then to the darkness, “Who goes there! We are armed and will fire! Identify yourself!”

The scratching, shuffling stopped.

“I am a servant of God!” a voice in the darkness said. “I am the instrument of His will and His will shall be done. Glorious Hallelujah!”

The voice carried more than a little of the New England Puritan in it—booming, confident, almost arrogant. As it rose in volume, it became shriller in timbre, nearly feminine. It reverberated oddly in the blustery darkness.

“Ambrose?” Deerfield called out. “To damnation, man! Is that you?”

An old man stepped into the buttery light. He was nude, covered in something glistening that seemed to eat the lantern’s light, shimmering. His hair and beard were also dripping in the viscous muck.

“Is that oil?” a miner said.

“Blood?” another voice responded.

“Hello, Oscar, m’boy,” Ambrose said with a wet, black smile. He held a curved blade in his hand. It bore the same unknowable, slithering marks as the floor. “Jacob, it’s wonderful to see you here as well. All are welcome in the temple.”

“Temple? What the blazes is all this, damn you!” Deerfield barked. “I have had enough of your nonsense, ‘Reverend’! Where are my men?”

“They were never your men, Oscar,” Ambrose said as he slowly raked the blade across his wiry, muscular chest. Several of the men gasped; a few uttered prayers. The wind howled around them and the lanterns began to gutter. “We all belong to God—to the Greate Olde One Who predates time, predates matter, Who was usurped by the false god—the Demiurge. He built his sickening Heaven upon the bodies of the Lord’s fallen children, built this sick parody of a world with their bones.”

They all sensed something gathering around them in the darkness and the miners instinctively fell together, back-to-back. Guns were brandished, cocked, leveled, trembling. Moore and Deerfield found themselves next to one another, neither able to take his eyes off the old priest. Deerfield raised his pocket gun; his hand was steady, despite the humming desire inside of him to scream and flee.

“Stop it,” Deerfield whispered.

“Made this earth His cage, His prison, for that which existed before death cannot die—cannot die! Cannot be destroyed, even by the God of this hollow world! Can never die!
Hallelujah! Nephren-Ka, N’gai, Eibon Thasaidon, Yegg-ha, Yegg-ha, Yegg-ha
!
Nyogtha!
He is waking! He is rising! He is almost free, Oscar, and you belong to Him—we all belong to Him! Rejoice! You shall know the glory of oblivion—the ecstasy of negation!”

Ambrose stopped doodling in his flesh with the knife. Other figures, shuffling, appeared at the ragged edges of the lantern’s light. They walked shoulder to shoulder and their numbers were legion. The other shifts, all of them, their black eyes wept darkness, glistening, like a slug’s trail. The midnight fluid leaked from their noses, their ears, drooling from their mouths. They were full of it—a weeping mask that devoured the light.

And Oscar could suddenly hear singing—tuneless, an idiot falsetto parroting Genesis in a language not designed for human ears. Mocking, the whine of a flute made out of a human femur rattlesnake whirred an ice-knife tune up and down his spine.

The lost shifts shuffled forward, toward their former companions, toward the feeble illumination these men of daylight had carried into the temple.

“All glory to the Greate Olde Wurm!” Ambrose proclaimed as the horde surged past him.

Deerfield saw a man—he thought his name was Gill; he vaguely remembered talking to him over the camp coffeepot one morning, laughing at some inane joke—stagger toward him with his weeping face of oil, hands outstretched to his throat. Deerfield emptied the pocket gun into Gill’s face. The head exploded and the man fell. Deerfield’s hand was numb. His ears were ringing.

There was screaming beyond the hum in his ears and more guns firing. He grabbed Jacob’s sleeve and tried to pull him along as he spun and headed for the crevasse. But several of the damned had Moore now and the large man was struggling with more fury than Deerfield could ever remember to tear loose from the mob.

“Please for the love of God! Oscar! Help me!”

“Hang on!” Deerfield shouted, tugging on his partner’s sleeve. He suddenly remembered the gun and let go of Moore to grab shells from his pocket.

“No! No, damn you, Oscar! Don’t leave me!”

Moore was screaming. Deerfield ignored it. Only a second, two hot, empty cartridges out, two cool new ones in, close the breech with a snap and eyes up and—

Moore was gone, lost to the darkness. Even his scream was lost over the frenzied sounds of struggle.

Another one of the things lurched toward Deerfield. Oscar shot, emptying both barrels of the gun into the miner’s chest. It staggered backward from the blast, then righted itself, and began moving toward him again.

There was a screaming in Deerfield’s brain, like a kettle left on the stove. Over the sounds of gunfire, of miners crying, praying, begging and cursing, was the maniacal laughter of the old man. The alien falsetto, the bone flute.

Deerfield ran, ran like an animal. No thought, no plan, just run and live. He stumbled over the bodies of dead miners. He scrambled to his feet, hands clutching at his coat, at his hair, his arms. He screamed and ran into the darkness. He didn’t remember where he found the lantern, or how he thought to use it to make his way thorough the narrow, ripping, cutting tunnels. The dizzying darkness yawned all about him, and whenever he would pause to gulp a lungful of sweet, sweet air he would feel rough, awkward hands clawing at his back. So he ran, and fell and stumbled to his feet and ran some more.

Then he saw the dull gray daylight cutting a square out of the mine’s darkness. He staggered into the ashen pre-dawn gloom. Where were the guards? They had left guards. No matter. He dropped the lantern and ran, ran past the horses, ran past the wagons, ran through the gates of the mine compound and ran until he reached the squatter camp.

The camp was still quiet and still. The tent flaps drawn against the desert night’s cold, last night’s cook fire a mass of blackened rocks and soot. No one was up yet, but maybe at the Mother Lode they would still be up. There he could find help, find someone to help him off the mountain, away from this damned place.