Time Travel Omnibus, page 625
About three o clock the sheriff drove up, parked his car and came up on the porch to sit with me.
“I’m not getting anywhere,” he said. “I checked the records and the Lodge is owned by a legal firm down in Chicago. They hold the deed and pay the taxes and I suppose that’s owning it. So I phoned and got an answering service. At one thirty in the afternoon I got an answering service. And it took a while before they told me it was an answering service. Now, just why should a firm of lawyers be using an answering service at that hour of the day? They wouldn’t all of them be in court. They wouldn’t all of them be off on vacation, and even if they were, there’d be at least one secretary to take their calls.”
“Maybe,” I said, “it is a one-man operation.”
The sheriff grunted. “Doesn’t sound like it. Jackson, Smith, Dill, Hoen, and Ecklund. Took the answering service gal half a minute to get it out of her mouth. She sort of sang it. She had to sing it, I figured, or she’d never make it. Say, where is Piper?”
“He had to go back to the university.”
“He didn’t tell me he was going back.”
“He just failed to mention it,” I said. “He’d known for several days he had to go back today. Any reason he shouldn’t have?”
“No,” said the sheriff. “I guess not. No doubt at all what happened to Stefan. You wouldn’t remember, would you, what his last name was?”
“I never knew it,” I said.
“Well, so much for that,” the sheriff said. “A little embarrassing to have a corpse you don’t know the name of. Especially a man who had lived here as long as he had. Stopped at the Lodge on my way up and there’s still no one there.”
The sheriff stayed for an hour or more. He acted like a man who didn’t want to go back to town, who hated to get back to his office. We talked about the fishing, and he said that some day he’d come out and fish Killdeer Creek with me. We talked about grouse. I told him I’d seen a fair amount of them. We talked about the old days when people hunted ginseng in the hills and how you almost never found any ginseng now. Finally he got up and left.
I listened to the six o’clock radio news and again at ten and nothing was said about the Galloping Goose running into anything after it left Pine Bend. I went to bed after that, figuring that I wouldn’t sleep, for I was still too excited, but I did. It had been a trying day and I was all worn out.
After breakfast I decided to go fishing. When I got to the bridge over Killdeer Creek a woman was standing on the bridge. I had taken a good look at the Lodge when I drove past and it still seemed to be deserted.
But the woman was someone I had never seen before, and for no good reason I immediately figured she was someone from the Lodge. She was a blonde, a skinny sort of woman. She wore vivid yellow shorts and a skimpy yellow bra, but the bra seemed quite adequate, for she hadn’t much to cover. Her hair was skinned back from her face and hung in a short ponytail down her back. She was leaning on the bridge railing, looking down into the pool. When I pulled the car over on the shoulder of the road just short of the bridge and got out, she turned her face toward me. The face was as skinny as her body. The structure of the jaw and cheekbones stood out beneath the skin, and the face had a sharp, almost pointed look.
“Is this where you found him?” she asked.
“I was not the one who found him,” I said, “but, yes, this is where he was found. On the other side of the creek, just below the bridge.”
“Stefan was a fool,” she said.
“I didn’t know the man,” I said. I thought it strange that she should speak as she did of him. After all, the man was dead.
“We’re you a friend of his?” I asked.
“He had no friends,” she said. “He had this silly hobby.”
“No hobby,” I said, “is really silly if the hobbyist gets something out of it. I know a man who collects matchbook covers.” I didn’t know anyone who collected matchbook covers. I just thought it was a good example of a rather pointless hobby.
Did he have anything on him?” she asked. “Anything in his pockets?”
It seemed a rather strange question for her to ask, but I answered her. “Nothing,” I said. “No identification. They don’t know who he was.”
Why, of course they do,” she said. “They know he was Stefan. That’s all we ever knew of him. That’s all anyone needs to know.”
I heard footsteps behind me and swung around. A man was close behind me.
Angela, he said to the woman, “you know you shouldn’t be out here. What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk again? You’ve been warned to leave the stuff alone.”
He said to me, “Sorry if she’s been bothering you.”
Not at all, I said. “We’ve been talking. It’s been most interesting.”
He was a bit shorter than I was, perhaps a little heavier, for he ran to chunkiness. His face ran to fullness and his hair was clipped short. He wore a checkered sports shirt and blue jeans, with heavy work shoes on his feet.
“We were talking about Stefan,” said the woman, and her voice carried the impression that she was embarrassing him and was glad of the chance to do so. “About Stefan and his silly hobby.”
“But you are not interested in any hobbies he might have had,” said checkered shirt to me.
“Certainly I am,” I told him. “I find it fascinating.”
“Come along,” he said to Angela. “Back to the house with you.”
She came down off the bridge and stood beside him. She looked at me. “I’ll see you again,” she said.
“I hope so,” I told her. Before she had a chance to say any more he had taken her by the arm and turned her around and the two of them went marching down the road toward the Lodge. He didn’t even say good-bye. He was a surly bastard.
There had been a lot going on between the two of them, I knew, that I had not understood. Most of it, I sensed, had to do with Stefan’s hobby, and I wondered if the cubic photograph could have been the hobby. Thinking of it, I was fairly sure that my suspicion was correct. Angela had called his hobby silly, though, and it seemed to me that taking a photograph of Marathon was anything but silly.
There were a lot of things, I realized, I would have liked to talk with them about. When and how they’d gotten word of Stefan’s death and when they’d gotten to the Lodge and how. Ordinarily when people came to the Lodge they flew into Pine Bend and Stefan took the Cadillac down to get them. Probably, I told myself, they’d hired someone to drive them up; after all, it didn’t really matter. Come to think of it, no one really knew that Stefan had driven to Pine Bend to meet arrivals; we had just always assumed he had. I was a little disgusted with myself for wondering all those petty things; I was getting as nosy, I told myself, as Dora.
I lifted the rod out of the car and rigged it up, then got into my waders and went clumping down the embankment to the pool below the bridge.
I knew there were big trout in the pool, but I couldn’t really put my heart into the fishing. All the time that I was working at it, I was thinking of Stefan’s body, stretched out on the bank across the stream. Every now and then I caught myself looking over my shoulder at the spot where he had been found. I got no strikes and no wonder, for I was too preoccupied with Stefan to pay attention to the fishing.
So I left the pool and went down the stream, walking in the shallow stretches, climbing out when I reached pools too deep for my waders. I left the scene of Stefan’s death behind me and settled down to business. I hooked and landed one fair brookie in a stretch of rapid water at the head of a small pool, failed to set the hook when a big one, probably a rainbow, made a vicious lunge as the fly floated down the smooth water of a pool, edging in toward a cutbank where the big trout waited. I hauled in the line and made another cast to let the fly float in the selfsame pattern, but there was no second strike. The big fellow that had made the strike might have felt the hook and was having none of it. I fished the pool thoroughly, but without a further strike. Several hundred feet beyond the pool I netted another brookie, perhaps a little bigger than the first one.
I climbed out on the bank and sat down on a rotting log, debating whether I should go on or quit. My fishing had not been too successful, but I had two fish, enough for supper, and there was that book on the Precambrian waiting at the cabin. I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to keep on down the stream, not so much, perhaps, to keep on fishing as simply to stay out-of-doors, perhaps to stay away from the work that waited at the cabin. And, thinking that, I wondered rather seriously, for the first time, I am sure, if I’d ever get the book done, whether I actually wanted to get it done. I had published little else and the department had excused the failure in light of knowing that I had the book, that I was working on it I had been given the leave of absence to finish it, and I knew that I damn well better finish it And yet I sat there, miserable, wondering if I’d ever finish it, knowing that through all the summer I’d use every excuse I could find not to work on it.
I thought of Neville’s patch of lady’s slippers and wondered if I should take the time to go and look for them. There was no reason that I should, of course, but I told myself that if I didn’t see them now, in a few more days the blooms would be gone and I’d miss the seeing of them, for this year at least. But I made no move to go; I just stayed sitting there. I wasn’t absolutely sure where the lady’s slippers were, but from what Neville had said I didn’t think I’d have much trouble finding them. Still I kept on sitting.
I’ve often wondered since what it was that kept me sitting on that rotten log. I could have continued with my fishing, I could have gone back to the car, I could have gone in search of Neville’s lady’s slippers. But I did none of these. And because I didn’t, I now sit here writing this account when I should be working on my book.
Before I go any further, perhaps I should explain that Killdeer Creek lies deep in a wooded ravine between two steeply sloping hills. The bed of the creek lies in St. Peter sandstone, but a slight distance up either hillside there are outcroppings of the Platteville limestone, although in large part these outcroppings may go quite unnoticed because in most instances they are masked by trees.
On the slope across the stream from me something was rustling around in the underlay of last autumn’s leaves, and when I looked to see what was going on it took several seconds before I spotted the squirrel that was causing the commotion. He was nosing around, digging here and there, perhaps in hope of finding a nut left over from the autumn. He must somehow have sensed me watching, for suddenly he panicked and went scampering up the hillside. Veering to the right, he whipped into a small rock shelter. These tiny rock shelters are common in the hills, small areas of softer stone having eroded away and been capped by a layer of harder stone projecting out above them.
I sat quietly watching the shelter, and after a few minutes the squirrel came sneaking out. He sat upright and looked around, alert to any danger, then flashed up the hill again. A few yards above the rock shelter he crossed a small area of raw earth where the recent rains apparently had washed away loose ground cover and gouged into the underlying clay.
I followed his flight across the gouge and for a short distance up the hill, then my mind caught up with me and my eyes came back to focus on what they had seen, but which had been delayed in its registration on my brain. Protruding from that area of raw earth were not one but two logs, or rather the ends of two logs. Above the topmost log the ground appeared to have caved in, leaving a small depression, and just above the depression was another limestone outcropping.
I sat frozen, and my startled mind said no, that it was all imagination. But hammering through my skull were the words that Humphrey Highmore had spoken to me only the day before: “They cut logs to conceal the cave mouth and shoveled dirt over the logs to conceal the mine.”
You’re stark, staring mad, I told myself; you’re as bad as Humphrey. But the idea still persisted, although I tried to fight it down. A man simply did not sit down on a rotting forest log and find a legendary mine.
To give myself something to do, I unshipped my rod, dropped the reel into my pocket. Over the ages, I told myself, a couple of trees could have fallen and been covered by the slow accumulations of time. But the more I looked at those two logs, the less it seemed that way. Although I was too far away to see them, I found myself believing I could discern the bite of ax strokes upon the logs’ protruding ends.
I crossed the stream and began clambering up the slope. The going was slow, the hill so steep that I found myself grabbing hold of saplings to help pull myself forward. When I reached the small rock shelter into which the squirrel had popped, I paused to catch my breath. I saw that the shelter was somewhat larger than I had thought; a drift of dried autumn leaves had become lodged against the open face and made it seem smaller than it was. The floor of it was flat and a few feathers lay upon it; the floor was white with the chalkiness of old bird droppings. Perhaps, I thought, it had been used for centuries as a sanctuary for ruffed grouse, or possibly by quail, although there were no longer very many quail. Toward the farther end of the shelter a small rock fall from the roof above seemed rather recent; in a few years, I told myself, other rock falls would occur and there’d no longer be a shelter. I felt sorry for the grouse, it was such a snug retreat for them against the night or weather.
Having gotten back my breath, I went on up the slope to where I’d seen the logs. Kneeling beside them, I knew I had found the mine. The wood was punky and wet from recent rains, but there could be no mistaking the still-existent evidence that they had been cut to a proper length by ax work. I could not quite believe my eyes and ran a hand across their cut ends for confirmation. And as I squatted there, stupidly running my hand back and forth over the wood, something ticked at me.
I went cold inside my guts and crouched hunched over, as if expecting someone or something to clout me on the head. There was nothing in the sound that was sinister; it was, in fact, a very gentle ticking, almost companionable—but this was not the place for it. And now there was no doubt at all that I had found the mine, for it had been a ticking that had driven the miners in terror from the hills.
I came to my feet and for a moment felt an illogical but powerful urge to go plunging down the hill, to put as much distance as possible between myself and this thing that ticked. The feeling didn’t go away, but I stood against it and once I had managed to stand against it, it didn’t seem quite so bad. I drove myself, literally drove myself, my feet not wanting to move but my brain making them move, the few feet up the slope to where the depression fell away above the logs. I could see that the depression extended deep into the ground, and I went down on my knees beside it. There seemed no bottom to it. I thrust my face down close above it and smelled the darkness and the coldness of another world. The cave, I knew, lay beneath my feet, and out of the opening into it came a wild, excited chittering of ticks.
“O.K.,” I said. “O.K., just take it easy. I’ll be back to get you.”
I don’t know why I said it. The words had come out of me without any conscious thought, as if some part of me of which I was not aware had grasped a situation I was unaware of and had answered for me, speaking to the thing that ticked and chittered as if it were a person.
I straightened, and even though the day was warm, I shivered. I would need a shovel, perhaps something that would play the part of a crowbar—the opening was too small and would have to be enlarged. And I would need, as well, a flashlight.
As I started to turn away, the ticking came again, a somewhat frantic and excited sound. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be back. I promise.”
I was back in less than an hour. I had a shovel, a flashlight, my geologist’s hammer, and a length of rope. I had not been able to find anything that resembled a crowbar, so I had brought along a pick that Neville and I had used when we had dug a trench to put in the footings for the cabin.
The thing inside the cave began ticking at me as I toiled up the slope, but now it sounded like a contented ticking, as if it knew I was coming back to get it. During the time that I had been gone, I’d had it out with myself on that score. You acted like a damn excited fool, I’d told myself. You allowed yourself to be stampeded into the acceptance of a fantasy situation that could not possibly exist. You can be excused for what you did in the unthinking excitement of the moment; you acted under shock impact and were illogical. But you’re illogical no longer. You’ve had time to think it over and now you know it’s not a living thing down there in the cave, not a personality. Whatever is in there ticks, but it was ticking more than a century ago and it’s unlikely that any living thing that was there more than a hundred years ago, and God knows how much longer ago than that, would still be there, alive and ticking. What you’ll find will either be a mechanism of some sort or you’ll find a perfectly natural explanation. And once having found it, you’ll wonder why in hell you hadn’t thought of it before.
I admit that while I had been talking so harshly to myself I hadn’t examined that bit about finding a mechanism too closely. I had, I suspect, shied away from it because I didn’t want to ask the question that would follow—what kind of mechanism, made by whom and for what purpose and how did it come to be there?
The thing to do, I told myself, was to rip out the logs, enlarge the opening, get down into the cave and find out what was going on. I was scared, of course. I had a right to be scared. I had thought of seeking out Humphrey (because Humphrey was the one man who had the right to be there), the sheriff, even that bastard at the Lodge. But I decided against it. I was surprised to find that I had become somewhat secretive about this business—afraid, perhaps, that it would come to nothing in the end and that I would become the laughingstock of the neighborhood.
