I climbed up the cold bank to the top again. This time there was no noise. Since I already knew there was no entrance to be had through the back door in the earthworks, I climbed to the top of the overgrown earthwork to the left of the gate. It was a short scramble; the berms that made up the outer defences of the fort were not high. On my way up I encountered more Hesperis. It was trying to tell me something, but I was too busy to read the message just then. From the top of the scarp or whatever military engineers call what I was catching my breath on, it could be a redoubt or a bastion or chopped liver for all I knew, I could see the rest of these defences as they zigzagged around the central keep of the fort, if that’s what it’s called. From here I could see the distant lights of the town which stopped just short of the edge of the golf course. It made me feel like a rather isolated private investigator. Lights meant life and warmth. Up here I could feel the cold settling in around my bones. Looking over my shoulder I could see that the lake was beginning to mist up for the night. Thanks a lot! Damn it, even an illegal operation such as what I suspected was going on here lets its workers off at a reasonable hour. Maybe the crookeder the scam, the better the help is treated. Private investigators have no union. I can’t grieve to anybody. There’s no joint standing-committee to see that I get as much time off as the men I saw working here an hour ago.
The front and sides of the fort had been surrounded by a low plastic mesh fence. I guess they hadn’t expected trouble from the rear. They might have learned a lesson in history from the French commander of Fort Niagara. He hadn’t anticipated trouble from this direction either. As I sat on the top of the earthworks, I kept my head and shoulders as low as possible. I didn’t want to present a silhouette against the night sky. There might be a watchman out there beyond the fence, maybe taking shelter in the golf course clubhouse. In the back of my mind I could see him unchaining his half-starved Doberman pinschers. I could imagine them drooling for a taste of Cooperman flesh.
The fort’s only roofed structure was the rough-cast flowerpot keep I’ve already described. It was circled by a flat grassy area, which was about the same height as or a bit lower than the golf fairways on the other side of the heaped earth defences. From where I was, it was hard to tell exactly. One thing, the area of the enclosure was a lot bigger than it appeared to be from the street. Most of it was the former second green before the excavations started. I could see some of these from my perch. There may have been others on the far side of the keep. The ones closest to me looked like small garden plots, with string running between wooden stakes in the ground and shallow depressions showing where limited digging had taken place. But over towards the berm next to mine, there were signs of serious digging. Here was a hole big enough to find three or four Troys in, a hole that a modern engineer could be proud of. I’d seen some of the digging equipment in action earlier. Now I could see it, a big yellow back-hoe at the bottom of the dark hole.
I scrambled down the inside slope of my earthwork and moved to the edge of the excavation. It was deep enough to support the underpinnings of a three-storey building. What were they up to, these archaeologists? Building a parking garage on the side? With the sod from the excavation neatly stacked against the base of the fort, the hole, which was roughly fifteen feet across and nearly seventy-five long, ran from beside the tower of the fort across the old green and through the distant earthwork on the other side of the back gate that looked out on the lake. I followed the curved base of the earthwork towards this point. Just where the hole reached the earthwork, I found a ladder set into the wood-reinforced side of the excavation. My feet found the rungs, although I was already thinking I’d been there too long.
Here it was nearly impossible to see anything. What I could make out was this: the excavation had sent branch tunnels under the earthworks. I know nothing at all about fortifications. Maybe these were the original defensive tunnels being restored. The butt ends of stout timbers that I could see disappearing into the dark supported this notion, but then I caught sight of some very un-nineteenth-century-looking corrugated galvanized iron arches. What was going on here? I struck a match and lit my way to the end of the tunnel. As far as I could tell, it followed the circular curve of the existing earthworks. At the distant wall of the cavelike space, I could see where recent work had been going on. There were shovels and wheelbarrows at the end, like the coalface in the illustration of a coal mine in The Book of Knowledge I’d grown up with. I guess the idea was to hollow out a tunnel deep down under the earthworks right around the fort. I struck another match and walked back towards the relative brightness of the main excavation. Cupping my hand over the light I crossed the open part and went into the other arm of the tunnel. I didn’t have far to walk. This end of the tunnel had either not been dug yet or it had already been filled in. I picked up a shovel and worked away at the sides. Here the clay hadn’t been moved since the last glacier passed through here, maybe twelve thousand years ago. But in the middle, the earth was less densely packed. Then I caught sight of end-beams disappearing into the clay. Somebody’s dug out a cavern here and then filled it up again. What was the point, I wondered. This wasn’t part of the restoration of the fort as far as I could see. It didn’t look like archaeology to me. But, what do I know about these things?
A sudden light nearly knocked me over. Two beams from flashlights crossed one another like searchlights looking for enemy bombers in a wartime newsreel. I moved as fast as I could into the deepest part of the shaft, near some oil drums and tools stacked to one side. Without making a noisy clatter, I turned a wheelbarrow over and climbed under it. By now the lights were getting brighter and I could hear voices.
“Crazy, I tell you.”
“I’m not drunk like you’re thinkin’. I seen a light!”
“St. Elmo’s fire is what you saw, Kirby.”
“In October? I’m tellin’ you it was a light!”
“Well, look for yourself.” Without sticking my head out, I was all too well aware that the two beams of light were making sweeps into the excavation.
“You goin’ down to look?” dared the one called Kirby.
“Christ, you’re the one who saw the damned light. I got good pants on.”
“Well, I’ll go alone then. I’ve done it before.”
“You see lights down here all the time, eh?”
“Ah, come on, Roy, get off my back!”
“You hear anything? Listen.” The three of us listened to the night air and the distant sound of the lake for about a minute. To help, I suspended my breathing. I couldn’t do much about my heart beating against the metal bottom of the wheelbarrow, though. The first minute was lengthened towards the end of my breath. Then:
“Shit, I’m not goin’ down there again today. They don’t pay enough, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah. You could break your neck on that ladder in the dark and you won’t even see compensation ’cause we’re casual. I say,” said Roy (I think it was Roy), “since we’re casual let’s act casual and get back outta the cold before we get pneumonia.”