Marinville nodded. “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”
David said, “The sounds I heard from the bottom of the mine-the ones I heard with the Lushan brothers’ ears—were like that movie, only in reverse. As if the men were turning into animals. I guess they were. I guess that’s sort of what the can tahs do. What they’re for.
“The brothers… I see them, two Chinese men who look almost enough alike to be twins, with pigtails hanging down their sweaty bare backs, standing there and looking up and chopping away at the hanging wall that should have come down after about six licks but didn’t, looking back along the shaft every two or three strokes to see who was coming. To see what was coming. Pieces of the ceiling fell in front of them in big chunks. Sometimes pieces of it fell on them, too, and pretty soon their shoul-ders were bleeding, and their heads-blood was stream-ing down their faces and necks and chests, as well. By then there were other sounds from below. Things roaring. Things squelching.
And still the roof wouldn’t come down. Then they started seeing lights farther down—maybe candles, maybe the ’seners the crew-bosses wore.
“What-” Ralph began.
“Keroseners. They were like these little lighted boxes of oil you put on your forehead with a strip of rawhide. You’d fold a piece of cloth underneath to keep your skin from getting too hot. And then someone came running out of the darkness, someone they knew. It was Yuan Ti. He was a funny guy, I guess-he made animals out of pieces of cloth and then put on shows with them for the kids.
Yuan Ti had gone crazy, but that wasn’t all. He was big ger, so big he had to bend almost double in order to run up the shaft. He was throwing rocks at them, calling them names in Mandarin, condemning their ancestors, commanding them to stop what they were doing.
Shih shot him with the foreman’s gun. He had to shoot him a lot before Yuan Ti would lie down and be dead. But the others were coming, screaming for their blood. Tak knew what they were doing, you see.”
David looked at them, seemed to consider them. His eyes were dreamy, half in a trance, but Cynthia had no sense that the boy had ceased to see them. In a way, that was the most terrible part of what was happening here. David saw them very well… and so did the force inside him, the one she could sometimes hear stepping forward to clarify parts of the story David might not have fully understood.
“Shih and Ch’an went back to work on the hanging wall, digging into it with their picks like madmen-which they’d be before it was over for them. By then the part 7 of the ceiling they were working on was like a dome over their heads”-Davjd made curving gestures with his hands, and Cynthia saw that his fingers were trembling “and they couldn’t reach it very well with their picks any more. So Shih, the older, got on his younger brother s shoulders and dug into it that way. The stuff fell out in showers, there was a pile almost as high as Ch an Lushan’s knees in front of them, and still the ceiling wouldn’t come down.”
“Were they possessed of God, David.” Marinville asked. There was no sarcasm in his voice now. “Pos-sessed by God. What do you think.”
“I don’t think so,” David said. “I don’t think God has to possess, that’s what makes him God. I think they wanted what God wanted-to keep Tak in the earth. To bring the ceiling down between them and it, if they could.
“Anyway, they saw ’seners coming up from the mine. — Heard people yelling. A whole mob of them. Shih left off on the hangwall and went to work on one of the crossbar supports instead, hitting it with the butt of his pick. The miners coming up from below threw rocks at them, and ‘—quite a few hit Ch’an, but he stood firm with his brother on his shoulders. When the crossbar finally came down,
the ceiling came down with it. Ch’an was buried up to his knees, but Shih was thrown clear. He pulled his brother out. Ch’an was badly bruised, but nothing was broken. And they were on the right side of the rockfall-that must have seemed like the important thing.
They could hear the miners-their friends, cousins, and in the case of Ch’an Lushan, his intended wife-screaming to be let out. Ch’an actually started to pull some of the rocks away before Shih yanked him back and reasoned with him.
“They still could reason then, you see.
“Then, as if the people trapped on Tak’s side of the fall knew this had happened, the screams for help changed to yelling and howling. The sounds of… well, of people who weren’t really people at all anymore. Ch’an and Shih ran. They met folks-some white, some Chinese—coming in as they ran out. No questions were asked except for the most obvious one, what happened, and since the answer was just as obvious, they had no trouble. There’d been a cave-in, men were trapped, and the last thing anyone cared about just then were a couple of scared China-boys who happened to get out in the nick of time.”
David drank the last of his soda and set the empty bottle aside.
“Everything Mr. Billingsley told us is like that,” he said. “Truth and mistakes and outright lies all mixed up.”
“The technical term for it is ‘legend-making,’ “Mar-inville said with a thin, strained smile.
“The miners and the folks from town could hear the Chinese screaming behind the fallen hanging wall, but they didn’t just stand around; they did try to dig them out, and they did try to shore up the first sixty feet or so. But then there was another fall, a smaller one, and another couple of crossbars snapped. So they pulled back and waited for the experts to show up from Reno. There was no picnic outside the adit-that’s a flat lie. Right around the time the mining engineers were getting of f the stage in Desperation, there were two cave-ins-real cave-ins, big ones-at the mine. The first was on the adit side of the hanging wall the Lushan brothers had pulled down. It sealed of f the last sixty feet of the drift like a cork in a bottle. And the thump it made coming down-tons and tons of skarn and hornfels-set off another one, deeper in.
That ended the screams, at least the ones close enough to the surface for people to hear. It was all over before the mining engineers got up from town in an ore-wagon. They looked, they sank some core rods, they listened to the story, and when they heard about the second cave-in, which people said shook the ground like an earthquake and made the horses rear up, they shook their heads and said there was probably nobody left alive to rescue. And even if there was, they’d be risking more lives than they could hope to save if they tried to go back in.”
“And they were only Chinese,” Steve said.
“That’s right, little chink-chink China-boys. Mr. Bill-ingsley was right about that. And while all this was going on, the two China-boys who had escaped were out in the desert near Rose Rock, going mad. It got to them in the end, you see. It caught up with them. It was almost two weeks before they came back to Desperation, not three days. It was the Lady Day they walked into-you see how he got the truth all mixed up with the lies. — but they didn’t kill anyone there. Shih flashed the fore-man’s gun, which was empty, and that was all it took. They were brought down by a whole pack of miners and cowboys. They were naked except for loincloths. They were covered with blood. The men in the Lady Day felt like that blood must have been from all the folks they had murdered, but it wasn’t. They’d been out in the desert, calling animals to them… just like Tak called the cougar that you shot, Mr. Marinville. Only the Lushan brothers didn’t want them for anything like that. They only wanted to eat. They ate whatever came-bats, buzzards, spiders, rattlesnakes.”
David raised an unsteady hand to his face and wiped first his left eye and then his right.
“I feel very sorry for the Lushan brothers. And I feel like I know them a little. How they must have felt. How they must have been grateful, in a way, when the madness finally took them over completely and they didn’t have to think anymore.