It was to laugh at.
The Company was all for what Daniel Kiley proposed: a church to settle the community, to give the beginnings to the law and order that towns needed, to give the people a place to wed, a place to bring their babies for baptism, a place to prepare for the journey that every man and woman must make. The church kept workers satisfied. It would go up at the center of the fledgling business district of Silver Mine Number Three, and at Daniel Kiley’s urging the Company would build this church not of ordinary timber and tar, nor of bricks fired from the town’s new kiln, but from the stone of the mountain itself. It would be built to last a hundred years, and in mid-1891 a great hurrah rose into the red-dusted air as the shovels bit first earth, after which there was a pause while the photographer loaded his glass plates into the camera, repositioned the scene and memorialized the moment with a bright flare of magnesium powder.
When the church was finished, it was a thing of beauty. A thing of pride and of promise. The stones were tight and precise, the mortar as white as God’s beard. In front of the door, stone steps stood chiseled and firm underfoot, to guide the needy to their places. Who knew what the future of the town might be? The silver was still coming up, and much more to be found. This town of over four hundred people might be a city one day. A city on a mountaintop, to rival even Denver.
Oh yes, said the Reverend Daniel Kiley, from his new pinewood pulpit to his congregation in their pews. That’s a nice thought.
Within a month of the church going up, the mayor called a meeting. With the Company’s permission, he was suggesting a new name for their town. He was suggesting Stone Church, and may it stand for a hundred years as the beacon of this community.
“No one knows exactly how it started,” Ariel said, as the Scumbucket crept up the mountain road. “But it did start.”
“What started?” True asked.
“The end,” she said.
Maybe it started with the mine itself. But it wasn’t that the silver ran out. It didn’t stop gleaming in the walls when the lantern light touched it. But the streams of silver ran deeper down, and to get to them the miners went deeper too, and day after day—week after week and month after month—the miners went deeper. And deeper still.
Who was it who first had a nervous drink at a saloon and said he’d seen something, down in the passageways and gloomy rooms where heaving pumps brought in the gritty air? What had he seen? What did others see, that made them come up from that hole, pack into their wagons their picks, their shovels, their wives and their children, and leave their houses with bedspreads still on the bed and dishes in the cupboard?
Some talked, before they left. Not going back down in that hole, they said. No sir, not for any coin on this earth. Because there are things down there. There are things that watch me from the dark, and when I hold my lantern up I only see their shadows as they pull back into the rock. Did you hear me, sir? I said…into the rock.
The town’s doctor was an old man named Leon Lewis who had seen his own share of visions among the lotus eaters of San Francisco. He told the mayor and the council that he thought these hallucinations were a result of bad air down in the chambers. The bellows pumps were outdated and inefficient at the depth the mine had reached, he said, and it was time to present the Company with a plan for a steam boiler that would run a new air circulation system.
The Company’s response was to study the plan. In the meantime, more men were emerging from the rooms and vowing never to go back. Most would not talk, not for money or whiskey. When one of them spilled his story to a prostitute, it was likely the town would be less both one miner and one prostitute in the next day or two.
More than the shadows, more than the glimpses of figures standing where they should not be, more than the quick shine of eyes in the dark, it was the music that began to shred their nerves.
It was always faint. Always just at the edge of hearing. But all who did hear it were sure it was a brass band playing a march. Down in the deep dark of the mine, down in a place where picks and shovels had just begun to pierce the earth, a brass band was playing a John Philip Sousa march. There was some difference of opinion over whether it was ‘The Washington Post’ or ‘The Gladiator’ or some combination of the two, because there were only seconds of it to be heard, drifting amid the wheeze of the pumps and the scrape of the shovels.
Doc Lewis said working at that depth could affect a man’s inner ear, in such a way that phantom music might indeed be heard. He volunteered to go down himself, with Sheriff McKee and the head foreman.
“Ariel, you’re creeping me out,” Berke said. “You’re making half this shit up, anyway.”
“I wish. There are three books I know of on the subject, and last April there was a documentary on the History Channel.”
“What’ve you been doing? Studying this?” Nomad asked. Christ, he wished he had a cigarette! The higher they climbed up this freaking mountain, the more nervous he was getting, and he did not as a rule get nervous.
True followed the car ahead through an open orange metal gate. A small adobe-style building stood next to it and out front were a couple of guys in white shirts and sand-colored shorts. They wore caps that had GB Promotions on them. The security men looked like fleshy ex-football players, and one was making the devil horns hand to four girls in a Jeep while the other was hollering at somebody over a cell phone. True saw a sign ahead: Campgrounds. An arrow pointed to the left. He was supposed to keep going straight on, to the artists’ area.
“I think maybe you’ve been reading too much Stephen King,” he told Ariel. “But go ahead.”
She did.
When the doctor, the sheriff and the foreman came back up from the mine, they spoke to none of the other men waiting at the entrance. They walked straight to the stone church, and it was seen that Sheriff McKee had to help Doc Lewis because the doctor’s knees buckled at the foot of the steps. Then they went inside and didn’t come out for a while. Nobody followed them in, but one of the miners ran to get Daniel Kiley, and when the reverend arrived and went into his church he didn’t come out for a while, either. Finally everybody went home, and that was the first night the telegraph in the Company office started tapping out the message News! News! News! Stone Church has been destroyed over and over again from somewhere down the mountain, but nobody in Gila Ridge was sending it.
What got out, over the next few days, and what was whispered in the saloons over the half-guzzled bottles and the forgotten whores, was that the three men who’d gone down into the mine had followed the faint snippets of music, the ‘Washington Post’ or the ‘Gladiator’, whatever it was, the kind of music that ordinarily would have made a man doff his hat and salute his flag in a fine frenzy of patriotism. They had followed the music from chamber to chamber, armed with lanterns and in Sheriff McKee’s big ruddy paw of a hand a Colt Navy revolver. And, the whispers went, the music drew them deeper and deeper, until suddenly it stopped and the woman stepped out into the lantern light.
She was a striking-looking woman. A beautiful woman, in an elegant dress. She wore green gloves, and—so the whispers went—she told the three men she wanted to speak to the Reverend Daniel Kiley. She said it would go hard for the town, if he wouldn’t see her. She said it would go hard for the town even if he would see her, because that was how things were. But, she said, at least from such a righteous gentleman as him she expected a courtesy call.