One of the buzzards tried to lay its head in Ellen’s bloodstinking lap; it pushed the bird away. Tak had hoped looking into the mi would be calming, would help it decide what to do next (for the mi was where it really lived; Ellen Carver was just an outpost), but it only seemed to increase its disquiet.
— Things were on the verge of going badly wrong. Looking back, it. saw clearly that some other force had perhaps been working against it from the start.
It was afraid of the boy, especially in its current weak-ness. Most of all it was terrified of being completely shut up beyond the narrow throat of the mi again, like a genie in a bottle. But that didn’t have to be. Even if the boy brought them, it didn’t have to be. The others would be weakened by their doubts, the boy would be weakened by his human concerns-especially his concern for his mother-and if the boy died, it could close the door to the outside again, close it with a bang, and then take the others. The writer and the boy’s father would have to die, but the two younger ones it would try to sedate and save.
Later, it might very well want to use their bodies.
It rocked forward, oblivious to the blood squelching between Ellen’s thighs, as it had been oblivious of the teeth falling out of Ellen’s head or the three knuckles that had exploded like pine-knots in a fireplace when it had clipped Mary on the chin. It looked into the funnel of the well, and the constricted red eye at the bottom.
The eye of Tak.
The boy could die.
He was, after all, on—y a boy… not a demon, a god, or a savior.
Tak leaned farther over the funnel with its jagged crystal sides and murky reddish light.
Now it could hear a sound, very faint-a kind of low, atonal humming. It was an idiot sound… but it was also wonderful, compelling. It closed its stolen eyes and breathed deeply, sucking at the force it felt, trying to get as much inside as it could, wanting to slow-at least temporarily-this body’s de-generation. It would need Ellen awhile longer.
And besides, now it felt the mi’s peace. At last.
“Tak,” it whispered into the darkness. “Tak en tow mi, tak ah lah, tak ah wan.”
Then it was silent. From below, deep in the humming red silence of the mi, came the wet—tongue sound of something slithering.
David said, “The man who showed me these things—the man who guided me-told me to tell you that none of this is destiny.” His-arms were clasped around his knees and his head was bent; he seemed to be speaking to his sneakers. “In a way, that’s the scariest part. Pie’s dead, and Mr. Billingsley, and everyone else in Desperation, because one man hated the Mining Safety and Health Administration and another was too curious and hated being tied to his desk. That’s all.”
“And God told you all this.” Johnny asked.
The boy nodded, still without looking up.
“So we’re really talking miniseries here,” Johnny said. “Night One is the Lushan Brothers, Night Two is Josephson, the Footloose Receptionist. They’ll love it at ABC.”
“Why don’t you shut up.” Cynthia said softly.
“Another county heard from!” Johnny exclaimed. “This young woman, this roadbabe with attitude, this flashing female flame of commitment, will now explain, complete with pictures and taped accompaniment by the noted rock ensemble Pearl Jam-”
“Just shut the fuck up,” Steve said.
Johnny looked at him, shocked to silence.
Steve shrugged, embarrassed but not backing down. “The time for whistling past the graveyard’s over. You need to cut the crap.” He looked back at David.
“I know more about this part,” David said. “More than I want to, actually. I got inside this one. I got inside his head.” Hepaused. “Ripton. That was his name. He was the first.”
— And still looking down between his cocked knees at his sneakers, David began to talk.
The man who hates MSHA is Cary Ripton, pit—foreman of the new Rattlesnake operation. He is forty—eight, balding, sunken-eyed, cynical, in pain more often than not these days, a man who desperately wanted to be a mining engineer but wasn’t up to the math and wound up here instead, running an open-pit. Stuffing blast-holes full of ANFO and trying not to choke the prancing little faggot from MSHA when he comes out on Tuesday afternoons.
When Kirk Turner runs into the field office this after-noon, face blazing with excitement, to tell him that the last blast-pattern has uncovered an old drift-mine and that there are bones inside, they can see them, Ripton ’s first impulse is to tell him to organize a party of volun-teers, they’re going in. All sorts of possibilities dance in his head. He is too old a hand for childish fantasies about lost goldmines and troves of Indian artifacts, much too old, but as he and Turner rush out, part of him is thinking about those things just the same, oh yes.
The cluster of men standing at the foot of the newly turned blast-field, eyeing the hole their latest explosions have uncovered, is a small one: seven guys in all, counting Turner, the crew boss. There are right now fewer than ninety men working for the Desperation Mining Corporation. Next year, if they’re lucky-if the copper-yield and the prices both stay up-there may be four times that number.
Ripton and Turner walk up to the edge of the hole. There is a dank, strange smell coming out of it, one Cary Ripton associates with coalgas in the mines of Kentucky and West Virginia. And yes, there are bones. He can see them scattering back into the canted, downsloping dark-ness of an old-fashioned square-drift mine, and while it’s impossible to tell for sure about all of them, he sees a ribcage which is almost certainly human. Farther back, tantalizingly close but still just a little too far for even a powerful flashlight to show clearly, is something that could be a skull.
“What is this.” Turner asks him. “Any idea.”
Of course he does; it’s Rattlesnake Number One, the old China Shaft. He opens his mouth to say so, then closes it again. This is not a matter for a blast-monkey like Kirk Turner, and is certainly not one for his crew, nitro-boys who spend their weekends in Ely gambling, whoring, drinking… and talking, of course. Talking about any thing and everything. Nor can he take them inside. He thinks they would go, that their curiosity would drive them in spite of the obvious risks involved (a drift-mine this old, running through earth this uneasy, shit, a loud yell might be enough to bring the roof down), but the talk would get back to the prancing little MSHA faggot in no time flat, and when it did, losing his job would be the least of Ripton ’s worries. The MSHA fag (all hat and no cattle is how Frank Geller, the chief mining engineer, sums him up) likes Ripton no more than Ripton likes him, and the foreman who leads an expedition into the long-buried China Shaft today might find himself in federal court facing a fifty-thousand-dollar fine and a possible five years in jail, the week after next. There are at least nine red-letter regulations expressly forbidding entry into “unsafe and unimproved structures.” Which this of course is.
Yet those bones and old dreams call to him like troubled voices from his childhood, like the ghost of every unfulfilled ambition he has ever held, and he knows even z then that he isn’t going to turn the China Shaft meekly over to the company and the federal pricks without at least one look inside for himself He instructs Turner, who is bitterly disappointed but not really argumentative (he understands about MSHA as well as Ripton… maybe, as a blast-monkey, even better), to have yellow RESTRICTED AREA tapes placed across the opening. He then turns to the rest of the crew and reminds them that the newly uncovered drift, which might turn out to be a historical and archaeological treasure trove, is on DMC property. “I don’t expect you to keep this quiet for-ever,” he tells them, “but as a favor to me I’d like you to keep your mouths shut for the next Jew days. Even with your wives. Let me notify the brass. That part should be easy, at least-Symes, the comptroller, is coming in from Phoenix next week. Will you do that for me.”