Authors: Mark Nykanen
He lifted the skylight open and laid it on the roof. After hooking the grapple on the skylight’s metal frame, he lowered himself into the still shadows. But as his feet hit the floor, he was gripped with the fear that one of them would reach out and grab him.
To calm his breathing, he took a few moments to look around, to let his eyes adjust to the dim, uneven light. That’s when he spotted a man crouched in the corner.
Is that Stassler? What’s he doing? Then Jared realized—no, he
hoped
—it was a statue, sculpture. He peered as intently as he had ever looked at anything, and saw a glint of the day’s dying light on the form’s metallic arm. Jared bit the back of his hand in relief, a nervous habit from his boyhood, one that he hadn’t resorted to in at least ten years.
He ripped his hand away from his mouth. He wouldn’t want Kerry to see him like that. He was not without a hero’s fantasies, imagining her gratitude when she finally saw him, her open arms and thankful tears. She had trusted him with her secrets, and he, Jared Nielsen, would make that trust his cause.
Glancing to his side, he saw a movable crane, and chains hanging from its six-inch pulley. A few feet beyond the crane was the pour area with its metal grate and earthen floor. A faint chemical odor lingered in the air. Not unpleasant, but pungent, like the waft of wood after it’s been burned and left to smolder.
When he looked to his left, he faced the furnace, round and as tall as he, with dials and switches. The crucible stood several feet away. So much so close together. Why so large a room? He knew only what Kerry had told him about casting, the process of mold making, and then the heating and cooling of bronze, how nothing could be hurried. Nothing. You had to make every movement count. That’s why foundries were designed so carefully. See, there are the window fans, sinks, the mold-making table. All right, all this makes sense, but what’s over there, in that space behind the partition?
Jared took his first steps across the concrete floor slowly, careful not to bang into anything, one more shadow in the growing night, edging closer and closer to the partitioned area. He definitely didn’t want to knock over one of the tall metal tanks of oxygen, CO
2
, or argon gas. Knock the valve off one of those things and they could turn into a missile, blast right through a brick wall. That’s why they’re supposed to have those dome-shaped metal caps, but Kerry said sculptors sometimes got lazy and didn’t bother to screw them back on.
He stepped on a small, hard object, stooped, and picked up a shard from a shattered mold. A table stood to the side. This must be where Stassler pounded the molds off once the bronze had cooled.
Wait! He drew himself up at the sight of three bodies lying on the table itself, one of them a woman. Unmoving. As rigid as he found himself once again. But their skin was … greenish. He could see their pallor even in this lousy light. He touched the one closest to him, the largest of the three. It felt hard and brittle, and Jesus … they were headless. Except for their size, and the hump of their sex organs, they lacked any distinguishing features at all, more like mummies than anything he’d ever seen. To judge by its shape, he’d put his hand on the figure of a man. The one next to it belonged to a woman, and the last was of a boy. They were horrible.
Headless
. He felt a sickly presence and became acutely aware of his vulnerability, standing there alone, looking at these three decapitated creatures.
As much as they repulsed him, they intrigued him. He took a single finger and ran it along the arm of the male figure. His finger hooked under the edge of the hand, and he felt all the details of skin and bone and muscle. It was what Kerry called an impression.
He looked behind him. No window, just wall, so he dug into his pack and took out his headlamp. He set it for the narrowest beam, and switched on the batteries, holding it as he would a flashlight. As he eased himself down, he lifted the arm and trained the light on the inside of the hand. What he saw made him gasp, so real was the appearance of pain. The hand had clutched at air, he could almost see the desperate motion as it grasped the empty promise of nothingness, each finger extended, stretched, bones and tendons so distinct they protruded like thorns from a prickly bush. But it was the surface of the arm that shot an eerie current through Jared, that made him suddenly feel as if his hero’s quest were so compromised by fear that he would never save Kerry. The arm was rank with terror, pocked with dimples in each of the muscles where the strain of survival had lost its human roots, had assumed a primate’s jungle shriek, when an appendage is no longer a tool for travel, feeding, breeding, but a weapon to be used in any and all ways. But this weapon, Jared could see, had failed; and it was this sense of doom that he saw most clearly in the raised biceps, ropy forearms, and clutching hand that might as well have been a claw for all its brazen primitive hunger.
The brittle material shattered. He’d dropped the arm. He stepped back, alarmed by the sound, feeling the world inside himself as fault lines, great shifting plates of foreboding. He swore softly, reflexively, without real meaning, then slipped on the headlamp to free both hands, and looked at what he had done; but his eyes caught on the boy’s feet, snagged by their torturous, twisted shape, as if the child had been squirming in place, trying to escape whatever terror he had known by screwing himself right into the earth.
Jared had the sudden feeling that he was in a slaughterhouse, a butcher’s haven. His eyes finally moved back to the remains of the man’s arm, a crumble of shards and dust.
What have I done?
Even now, even after the suspicion of nature’s deepest violation had risen from beneath his skin, when he sensed that he’d entered the undying presence of murder, he felt a proper young man’s guilt over breaking another man’s work, of laying it so visibly to waste.
The arm had shattered along dozens of ragged lines, and his headlamp picked up motes already swirling upward, a rich green-gray cloud rising toward him till he smelled its dusty scent.
He’ll know something’s wrong. He’ll know it the minute he sees this. You’re going to have to do all of it tonight, because he’s going to see it tomorrow. Jared knew he wouldn’t face arrest for breaking and entering, he’d face murder. His skin bubbled with the feeling of death that surrounded him. Truly, he could feel it in his bones.
Across the room stood his destination, the partitioned area he’d started off to before the impressions of the bodies had stopped him, transfixed him, and finally horrified him. He made his way past a table saw and a pair of saw horses, tool racks, and two more fuel tanks for an oxy/acetylene torch.
When he moved behind the partition, he broadened the headlamp’s beam. Dust covered everything, a table, tools—mallets and chisels—and the floor, where his eyes settled last, spotting shoe prints that looked fresh, distinct. They led up to, and then away from a wooden box the approximate size of a four drawer file cabinet. But what was strange, very very strange, was that one forward shoe print had only the heel, as if the front of the foot had stepped directly into the box, as if the wood were no more than illusion, a wall that could be walked through.
Without thinking about his own trail, he inched up to the box. As he braced himself to try to move it, his fingertips found a seam that betrayed a door. It swung open with little resistance.
His headlamp revealed the floor, no longer of concrete with dusty prints, but of hard earth, and a few feet away, rising from a hole in the ground, the top of an aluminum ladder.
It looked … yes, it looked like the opening to a mine. But it was no more abandoned than the airport back in L.A. She’s here, he told himself. Down there.
He crawled inside the wooden box, drawing the door closed. He stared into the blackness of the hole, his headlamp revealing little more than the length of the ladder and the dark dirt at its base.
Down he climbed, clammy with fear, but excited too. The cops didn’t know about this place. Nobody knew about this. He’d go in, find her, and get her the hell out. Then later tonight he’d come back with the sheriff, take this son of a bitch away for good.
At the bottom of the ladder, he did indeed find himself in a mine shaft. The ceiling grazed his head lamp. At five-ten, he figured that meant it was about six feet high, and as wide, to judge by reaching out his arms in both directions.
Every few feet wood beams as broad as railroad ties braced the planked ceiling. When he rapped them, dust spilled from the seams, but they felt solid. He worried about a cave-in, then found short-lived consolation by reminding himself that a cave-in was the least of his concerns. His biggest worry lay down this dark tunnel, in whatever festered in the nether reaches of his headlamp’s throw.
Damp cool air moved past him, came alive on the sweaty exposed skin of his neck and arms. As he penetrated the darkness, as he forced its black borders aside, he glanced back and saw how illusory was his victory, how brief, for his wake had already been enveloped by air so empty it held nothing, no light, no sound, no life. It had rushed him from behind, and now pushed him forward. He could feel its iron hands, and see the shadows shifting before him, the fragile beam flickering nervously on the walls and ceiling and cold earthen floor. From all around him rose an unmistakable urge. It was as if these walls were trying to give birth to a complete and final darkness by forcing him deeper and deeper into the void of an ever more malevolent world.
His toes pressed against the tips of his running shoes as the downward slope steepened and drew him farther from the surface. In this thick, almost feral blackness, he wondered if what we called the night were no more than the insides of the earth rising relentlessly to the surface, an insatiable animal burrowing upward to spill out over the land, draping it in darkness, choking it with chills. It was a bizarre thought, and Jared knew this; but it held to him as a nightmare holds to sleep, unwilling to surrender to any thought of light.
Where would it end? How much farther? He thought of running back, of fleeing this tomb. That’s how he thought of it now, as a vast vessel of death. He’d failed to check his watch before he’d climbed down that ladder, so when he saw that it was nine-thirty, it meant nothing. Had he been descending into the earth for half an hour, an hour?
Kerry, he said to himself, Kerry. He tried to cling to her name, but his heroism had been thinned by his fear, and to its awful bounty he added a new one: that his headlamp would go out, the batteries would run down, and he would be left to navigate in absolute blackness. This fear stilled his feet, and as the beam steadied its stark gaze he remembered the night-light he’d kept in his bedroom until his junior year in high school. Every morning he’d stash it in the closet in case any of his buds dropped by. But his night fright had been that deep, that persistent, a predator with a constant hunger. He felt its teeth once more.
It’s not going to go out, he assured himself. The batteries are good. The beam is strong. See. As he ordered himself to look forward, he saw iron rails that came to an abrupt end about fifty feet from where he stood. He approached cautiously, but with the smallest spark of hope too. Maybe the rails would lead to the end of the tunnel, and he could return to the foundry, to the safety of earth and all those—even Stassler—who lived above it. So great was his fear that all the threats he had known now paled.
When he stepped close to their terminus, he saw large openings on both sides of the mine shaft. Warily, he looked to the right first, and startled at the sight of a ghoulish bronze face staring back. No body, just a man’s face hanging on the wall about ten feet away, glowing in the light of his headlamp, the empty eyes fiercely set, the mouth twisted in fury, or pain.
Jesus H … but he never said Christ, so fearful had he become of alienating the only ally he might find down here, the God of his childhood that he’d started to call upon.
With his heart raging, he turned to look across the rails, and in the recessed space behind him spied a woman’s bronze face with the same paralyzed appearance, the same deformed features. It also showed the same ghastly pain he’d seen in that man’s hand and arm in the foundry. His head swung back around, and he studied the male face again. Maybe that
is
his face. Jared’s fear had started asking the cruelest of questions.
She’s right, he said to himself. Kerry’s right. He’s a creep, a total creep. No more “El Creepo.” Stassler was no longer someone Jared could joke about. Stassler was a cold, cunning creep, and Jared almost bolted back to the ladder, actually saw himself climbing up into the foundry where he saw not the night, but the brilliance of the desert day.
But he held firm because he believed she was near, and that he had to move on. If there was a single moment of real courage in his entire effort to save her, this was it.
It did indeed mark the beginning of the end.
Each step forward sounded resonant and alone. And each step filled him with greater doses of the dread that had been building all along.
A line from a song came to him, one of his father’s CDs. The old man listened to some heinous stuff, but that line had stuck with him. It was about how you had to be willing to fight for what you wanted most in life.
Okay, he was ready to fight, though with what he didn’t know exactly. The Swiss Army knife? Your hands? Your feet? It had been a long time since he’d studied karate. A phase he’d gone through when he was ten. He could barely remember the kicks now.
These were his thoughts, some comforting, most not, as he moved along the rails. He walked about two hundred feet before the shaft abruptly broadened, and he triggered a motion detector light, which illuminated a room to his left that was filled with bronze faces like the ones he’d seen minutes ago. They sat on shelves that climbed to a ceiling at least ten feet high. Across from him, rising well above his eyes, was a bronze family, one of Stassler’s families, but with terrible tortured faces, so much worse than the ones he’d seen in the
Family Planning
series that Kerry had shown him pictures of. A mom, a dad, a little girl maybe three or four, and a boy a year or two older looked down at him with haunted faces that were all but screaming. They looked like they’d lost all of love and life and hope and prayer in a single terrifying instant.