Rays from underground work lights seeped through the cracks in the elevator floor. Soon they were bumping to a stop in a cavernous space housing generators and worktables and machines that resembled sluggish giant wasps, so streaked with black grease were their yellow-painted casings.
The scene was indeed no place for high-rise heels. “It’s time to exchange my hardware for softwear,” Temple announced.
She tugged Aldo’s sleeve to stop him while she sat down on what passed for a tuffet down here, a newspaper-strewn bench. She slung her ever-present tote bag to the ground. No spiders for Miss Muffet. Unless you considered Aldo….
“I can’t imagine what you’re packing in that major knapsack,” Aldo said, more than somewhat in awe.
“For one thing, tennis shoes.” From the wide mouth of her tote bag she delivered a mushroom-pale pair of high-topped sneakers, the massive galoshes that passed for leisure footwear nowadays, and began fighting the laces open.
“These things make my shoe size look like ‘number nine,’ which is what the miner’s daughter Clementine wore in the old song,” she grunted as she bent over to lace them up.
“I would assist you,” Aldo said, “but I might crease the suit.”
Temple waved away his semioffer. “You’re the one at real risk down here. That suit couldn’t take one amok dust mote, and this place is a sawdust factory.” She sneezed in coincidental testimony to her comment.
Aldo whipped a silk square of exquisite design from his breast pocket.
“Save it. You may need it to sit on later, and my handy tote bag has plenty of tissues.”
Aldo gazed in admiration as Temple extracted an aloe-soaked rectangle of white and blew her nose. “You are like Indiana Jones; you always have the right tool with you.”
In a couple of minutes she was smaller in stature, but better outfitted for mine shaft exploration. Standing, Temple stamped her mushy flat feet on the rough terrain. “They certainly made it seem like an excavation for a mine, so far. But where are the workmen?”
Aldo shrugged as he lifted two yellow hard hats off a rack and handed her one.
“This is gonna fit like an open umbrella,” she predicted, and despite the smaller inner lining, it did indeed sink down on her head almost to her nose.
Aldo paused, smoothed back his patent leather hair and subjected it to the encompassing indignity of yellow plastic.
“These dome lights are neat.” Temple snapped on the headlamp and waggled her head to watch the beam slash through the dusty dimness like a light-sword blade.
Man-made constellations on the rocky walls flashed in phosphorescent spurts.
“This really feels authentic,” Temple marveled. “But where are the workmen?”
“That’s just it.” Aldo shook his head mournfully, the light atop his hard hat casting a beam that swayed like a rope bridge over the fake rocks. “They’re not working much since the … incident.”
A raised voice down the empty tunnel interrupted them.
Temple couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was clear: admonition.
She mushed along on her marshmallow-soled shoes, consoled that at least now they could pussyfoot onto the scene unheard.
The man who was speaking obviously felt no fear of being overheard.
“You gutless wonders,” he was railing. “You call yourselves a work crew? This here’s supposed to be an attraction, guys. It’s supposed to be scary, huh? That’s what we’re here for. So why’re you all shakin’ like a set a gag teeth? Light shows are what made Vegas famous.”
Temple and Aldo rounded a bend to find the tunnel had broadened into a cavern. Heavy-duty machinery, use-scuffed, sat idle.
So did the workmen in their yellow hard hats, beams from the built-in lights cast on the ground. Temple had never seen such a hang-dog crew, obviously in need of an “Avast, me hearties” speech.
Which they were now getting from the foreman. One by one, the hard hats lifted and their beams focused on the newcomers.
The foreman turned, for a moment looking worried. But his expression soon hardened into contempt. “And who are you two? Dorothy and the Straw Man?”
Aldo stepped forward as if posing for an Esquire ad in a soldier of fortune magazine. “That’s `scarecrow’ to you. We are representatives of the management. What’s the holdup down here? Still seeing things?”
The workmen stirred. Some spat. All of them grumbled uneasily.
Temple realized that she and Aldo looked like dudes on a mustang ranch. She eyed the foreman, one of those salt-of-the-earth, sweat-of-the-brow types who wore a tool belt like it sported six-guns. Someone who inspired confidence, and a wide berth.
He was tall, burly, big-bellied, hairy, and grizzled, like a teddy bear gone ballistic.
She decided not to beat around the bushiness. “We heard there was trouble down here.” It was hard not to add “in RiverCity.”
Everyone shifted his weight, but no one spoke. “Everything’s obviously been going great,” Templewent on. “The mine shafts are a work of art, I see the ride tracks are laid, the phosphorescent walls are as creepy as you could hope—”
All motion, even spitting, stopped on the word “phosphorescent.”
Maybe it had too many syllables.
“You know, the eerie, glowing … whatever … you painted on the walls.”
A silence. Then Teddy Foreman spoke with the grumble of a wakening volcano. “That’s just it, Miss. We got too much phosphorescence for our own good.” “It’s not like, a chemical reaction? An allergy?”
A workman laughed. “That’s it. An allergy. We need shots.”
“I know the kinda shots we need,” another man shouted.
But they were guffawing instead of growling under their breaths and spitting, and Temple counted that a victory. Of sorts.
“So what’s wrong?” she asked, straight up.
The foreman removed his hard hat to scratch his bald spot. “It’s like this. The set dressers come down after us to paint up the rocks. Like you said, real nice job. Except the phosphorescence detail comes behind us. And we suddenly got a little swamp gas ahead of us.”
Temple advanced into their midst, aware of Aldo like a reversed shadow on her heels. Such as those heels were. “What’s ahead of you?” She peered into the tunnel’s continuation on the cavern’s other side.
Teddy shrugged. “Doesn’t show up right now.” “Maybe the light’s bad,” she suggested.
Hard hats shook.
“Lights are what made us see it,” Teddy the Foreman said.
“It was weird,” another voice volunteered. “It moved.” “These beams of light are always moving.” Templelooked to Aldo for agreement. His nod demonstrated how wavery a hard hat beam could be. “Even breathing makes them tremble a little, you know how it is when you look through binoculars.”
A man stood up, his beam a tremor in the dimness, like his voice.
“We saw it. We shouldn’ta seen it. It was brighter than those paintings behind us. It was moving. Away.”
“Cold lightning.” Aldo’s voice sounded firm as a firearm.
“Naw. We’ve seen cold lighting. We’ve seen blue light arcing. Spark showers. Electricity on a bad trip.”
A third man’s voice joined the chorus. “This was .. . thin light, but shaped, like those tunnels people who are dying see. Only the light wasn’t the tunnel, the light was the man in it.”
“Man?” Temple asked sharply.
“Or a woman in pants, or an ape in chaps,” an anonymous voice snapped from the dark. “Jeez, lady, I guess we know what a man or a woman looks like in the dark, even when they’re gussied up in some strange-fangled halo—”
“Or an aura?” Temple wondered.
“Coulda been this guy here in the ice-cream suit, if it glowed. You know, pale with the pinched-in waist. Don’t care what you call it—halo, aura, Day-Glo gasoline, it was weird.”
“You think you saw a ghost,” Temple concluded. They were silent.