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.
«OK,» I said. «OK, 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.
So I got down to business. I shoveled away some dirt from around the logs, drove the pick between the logs and heaved. The bottom log came loose with less effort than I had expected, and I grabbed it with my hands and hauled it out. With the bottom log gone, the one on top of it was easily removed. Underneath the second log I could see another, but there was no need to bother with it, for with the two logs out, the way into the cave was open.
I shined the flashlight down into the cavity and saw that the floor was only about three feet down.
All the time that I had been working, the ticking had been going on, but I had paid little attention to it. I suppose I was getting somewhat accustomed to it. Or maybe I was consciously trying not to pay attention to it. Coming out of the dark maw of the cave, it was a spooky sound.
I let the shovel and the pick down into the cave, then, holding the flashlight, slid in myself. Once I hit the floor, I flashed the light into the cave’s interior and was surprised to see it was rather small—ten feet wide or so and half again as deep, with the roof some three feet above my head. It was dry—there was very little overlay above it, and the slope was so steep that most of the water ran off without a chance to seep down into the cave.
I directed the light at the back of it and could see where the miners, more than a century ago, had done some digging. There were a couple of heaps of broken rock lying against the back wall of the cave, rocks that had been pried out of the rather thin-layered structure of the Platteville limestone.
The ticking came from the back of the cave. I stalked it step by cautious step. I could feel the short hairs at the back of my neck prickling but I kept on. I found it at the very back of the cave, protruding from one of the strata that had been broken by the miners. And, having found it, I sat flat upon my seat, keeping the light trained directly on it. Sitting there, with all the wind of courage drained out of me, I stared at it.