“Stories have been my Achilles’ heel practically since I ditched the stroller. I have to tell you, though, this is one I’d like to hear end with ‘And they lived happily ever after.’”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Cynthia said.
“I think the guy I met told me everything,” David said, “but there are still some parts I don’t know. Parts that are blurry, or just plain black. Maybe because I couldn’t understand, or because I didn’t want to.”
“Do the best you can,” Ralph said. “That’ll be good enough.”
David looked up into the shadows, thinking—summoning, Cynthia thought-and then began.
“Billingsley told the legend, and like most leg-ends, I guess, most of it was wrong. It wasn’t a cave-in that closed the China Shaft, that’s the first thing. The mine was brought down on purpose. And it didn’t happen in 1858, although that was when the first Chinese miners were brought in, but in September of 1859. Not forty Chi-nese down there when it happened but fifty-seven, not two white men but four.
Sixty-one people in all. And the drift wasn’t a hundred and fifty feet deep, like Billingsley said, but nearly two hundred. Can you imagine. Two hun dred feet deep in hornfels that could have fallen in on them at any moment.”
The boy closed his eyes. He looked incredibly fragile like a child who has just begun to recover from some ter rible illness and may relapse at any moment. Some of that look might have been caused by the thin green sheen of soap still on his skin, but Cynthia didn’t think that was all of it. Nor did she doubt David’s power, or have a problem with the idea that he might have been touched by God She had been raised in a parsonage, and she had seen this look before… although never so strongly.
“At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave. Inside the opening was a pile of those stone things. Thousands of them. Statues of certain animals, low animals, the timoh sen cah. Wolves, coyotes, snakes, spiders, rats, bats. The miners were amazed by these, and did the most natural thing in the world: bent over and picked them up.”
“Bad idea,” Cynthia murmured.
David nodded. “Some went crazy at once, turning on their friends-heck, turning on their relatives-and trying to rip their throats out. Others, not just the ones farther back in the shaft who didn’t actually handle the can tahs, but some who were close and actually did handle them, seemed all right, at least for awhile. Two of these were brothers from Tsingtao-Ch’an Lushan and Shih Lushan Both saw through the break in the face and into the cave which was really a kind of underground chamber. It was round, like the bottom of a well. The walls were made of faces, these stone animal faces. The faces of can taks, I think, although I’m not sure about that. There was a small kind of building to one side, the pirin moh-I don’t know what that means, I’m sorry-and in the middle, a round hole twelve feet across. Like a giant eye, or another well.
A well in a well. Like the carvings, which are mostly ani-mals with other animals in their mouths for tongues. Can tak in can tah, can tah in can tak.”
“Or camera in camera,” Marinville said. He spoke with an eyebrow raised, his sign that he was making fun, but David took him seriously. He nodded and began to shiver.
“That’s Tak’s place,” he said. “The mi, well of the worlds.”
“I don’t understand you,” Steve said gently.
David ignored him; it was still Marinville he seemed to be mostly talking to. “The force of evil from the mi filled the can tahs the same way the minerals fill the ground itself—blown into every particle of it, like smoke. And it filled the chamber I’m talking about the same way. It’s not smoke, but smoke is the best way to think about it, maybe. It affected the miners at different rates, like a dis-ease germ. The ones who went nuts right away turned on the others. Some, their bodies started to change the way Audrey’s did at the end. Those were the ones who had touched the can tahs, sometimes picked up whole hand-fuls at once and then put them down so they could… you know… go at the others.
“Some of them were widening the hole between the shaft and the chamber. Others were wriggling through. Some acted drunk. Others acted as if they were having convulsions.
Some ran across to the pit and threw them-selves into it, laughing. The Lushan brothers saw a man and a woman fucking each other-I have to use that word, it was the furthest thing in the world from making love—with one of the statues held between them. In their teeth.”
Cynthia exchanged a startled look with Steve.
“In the shaft itself, the miners were bashing each other with rocks or pulling each other out of the way, trying to get in through the hole first.” He looked around at them somberly. “I saw that part. In a way it was funny, like a Three Stooges show. And that made it worse. That it was funny. Do you get it.”
“Yes,” Marinville said. “I get it very well, David. Go on.”
“The brothers felt it all around them, the stuff that was coming out of the chamber, but not as anything that was inside them, not then. One of the can tahs had fallen at Ch’an’s feet. He bent to pick it up, and Shih pulled him away. By then they were about the only ones left who seemed sane. Most of the others who weren’t affected right away had been killed, and there was a thing-like a z snake made of smoke-coming out of the hole. It made a squealing sound, and the brothers ran from it. One of the white men was coming down the crosscut about sixty feet up, and he had his gun out. ‘What’s all the commotion about, chinkies.’ he asked.”
Cynthia felt her skin chill. She reached out for Steve, and was relieved when his fingers folded over hers. The boy hadn’t just imitated a gruff bossman’s tone; he seemed actually to be speaking in the voice of someone else.
“‘Come on now, fellows, gettee-backee-workee, if you don’t want a bullet in the guts.’ “But he was the one who got shot. Ch’an grabbed him around the neck and Shih took away his gun. He put the barrel here”-David poked his forefinger up under the shelf of his jaw-”and blew the guy’s head off.”
“David, do you know what they were thinking when they did that.” Marinville asked.
“Was your dream-friend able to take you in that far.”
“Mostly I just saw.”
“Those can tah things must’ve gotten to them after all Ralph said. “They wouldn’t have shot a white man, other wise. No matter what was going on or how bad they wanted to get away.”
“Maybe so,” David said. “But God was in them too I think, the way he’s in us now. God could move them to his work, no matter if they were mi en tak or not because-mi him en tow-our God is strong. Do you understand.”
“I think I do,” Cynthia said. “What happened then, David.”
“The brothers ran up the shaft, pointing the foreman s pistol at anyone who tried to hold them back or slow them down. There weren’t many; even the other white guys hardly gave them a glance when they ran by. They all wanted to see what was going on, what the miners had found. It drew them, you see. You do see, don’t you.”
The others nodded.
“About sixty feet in from the adit, the Lushan brothers 7 stopped and went to work on the hanging wall. They didn’t talk about it; they saw picks and shovels and just went to work.”
“What’s a hanging wall.” Steve asked.
“The roof of a mineshaft and the earth above it,” Mar-inville said.
“They worked like madmen,” David went on. “The stuff was so loose that it started falling out of the ceiling right away, but the ceiling didn’t give way. The screams and howls and laughter coming up from below… I know the words for the sounds I heard, but I can’t describe how horrible they were. Some of them were changing from human to something else. There was a movie I saw one time, about this doctor on a tropical island who was changing animals into men-”