Moore collapsed where he left him — slumped in shock, his soul tottering on the edge of madness. Even the most ordered mind can endure only so much stress before fragmenting into gibbering insanity, and Moore had never been considered a stable personality. Without recognition, his staring eyes watched Chance fumble through the clutter of empty bottles about the liquor cabinet.
“Oh.” Moore heard his voice speak in slow tones of understanding. “Oh. So you’re dead too, John. Is Kirsten here with us?”
Chance looked up at him in sharp concern, finally found a passed-over bottle of cheap scotch and sloshed its oily contents into a dirty tumbler. Tennessee had never repealed the Prohibition, but from the array of bottles he saw that Moore was an old and valued customer of the area’s still thriving bootleggers.
“Here! Drink it down!” Chance held the full tumbler to the other’s lips, and Moore automatically gulped it down.
It must have been half paint thinner, but Moore drank it like milk. “Wouldn’t he let you die either, John?” he asked calmly — his voice steadier.
Chance emptied the dregs of the scotch into the glass, handed it again to Moore, who swallowed it without flinching. He lay back in the chair, closed his eyes and gave a shuddering sigh. “Is Kirsten coming in, too?”
But Chance had caught the scent of anise on his breath, noted the shattered tumbler with its spatter of melting ice. He examined the empty absinthe bottle. Opalescent dreams and green venom in 170 proof. He watched the raw scotch cut through its grey mists, wondering what madness lurked behind.
“I’m as alive as you are, Compton,” he began. Badly.
Moore caught his breath in a sob, not opening his eyes. “Am I alive, then?” he laughed bitterly.
Chance sighed wearily and dropped into a chair to wait. He was a big man, though it took a second glance to realize that — for his two hundred pounds were compactly distributed over his big-boned six-foot frame, hard muscle and sinew without apparent bulk. Too, he moved with the quick stride and gestures of a smaller, more wiry man, rather than the ponderous self-assuredness usually associated with strength and bulk. The suns and winds of seven continents and at least as many oceans had weathered his skin to a worn, leathery brown, flawed with sudden streaks of pale scar. His hair was black and straight and thick, and always seemed in need of trimming. His forehead was wide and intelligent despite the rawboned quality of his features. A second glance would also notice that the straight nose and square jaw were somehow not right, and a third glance might note the fine scars of reconstructive surgery. Deep-set eyes of startling blue were watchful beneath thick brows.
Moore’s breath came less ragged.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could have given you some sort of warning,” Chance repeated, judging that the sedative effect of the alcohol had finally dulled the shock. “Of course I’m still alive. The radio carried a late bulletin — I thought you would have heard. I’d have phoned, but you don’t have a line.” Looking about the dingy room, he didn’t see a radio either.
“I thought we were all dead,” said Moore, eyes still closed.
Chance cut him off. “Kirsten’s alive, too — at least I think she’s still alive!”
Moore’s eyes snapped open. “Alive?” he whispered.
“She’s in danger, Compton. Deadly danger. But I know for certain she didn’t die in that crash last night! Compton, you’ve got to help me find her!”
“I’ve got to help you?” Compton muttered thickly.
“There’s something at work here that I can’t attempt to explain to the police!” Chance pressed him, reaching out to shake him to alertness. “Something sinister — an evil whose nature and extent their workaday minds could never begin to grasp. They’d call me a madman or hophead — at best make routine and useless inquiries. Damn you, Compton — you’re the only man here I can turn to if Kirsten can be saved!”
With sudden strength, Moore pushed the other man’s hands away from his shoulders. “John, this is all moving just a little too fast for my brain, and even for a nightmare this is making no sense. Who is dead, then?”
“John Wingfield and some girl I can’t identify — but I know it isn’t Kirsten. And probably a mining engineer named Cullin Shelton was killed too.”
“I think you’d better start at the beginning,” Moore said, getting to his feet uncertainly. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Who’s John Wingfield?”
“A friend from New York — or rather, a friend of Kirsten’s,” Chance amended, following him into the cramped kitchen-dinette. “I didn’t know him all that well. He was one of her former satellites — part of a mixed bag of old acquaintances we’d had down for the week for a homecoming-engagement party sort of affair.”
Moore boiled water. He remembered tearing the invitation into tiny fragments and burning them into fine white ash.
“Wingfield hung around awhile after the general festivities — still not giving up the chase, I suppose. But Kirsten knows so few friends here, and she enjoyed the attention. Yesterday I drove over to Cherokee to try to follow up some bits of Indian legend concerning the lost mines of the Ancients that are said to lie hidden in the mountains here. As luck had it, an afternoon shower left me mired to the door latches on some Godforsaken trail I had no business attempting by car. Eventually I hiked out to a phone, called Kirsten the news — then spent the evening and half this morning slogging the machine out to the road with a team of mules. I limped back to Knoxville by afternoon to learn I was supposed to be dead.”
Chance frowned and went on. “On my desk there was a quick note from Kirsten to the effect that a man named Cullin Shelton, a mining engineer, had phoned yesterday evening from Dillon. Sounded like he had his wind up, and he begged for me to drive over to meet him right away. Said he had the information I’d been asking around about. Kirsten thought it was important, and talked Wingfield into driving her up to Dillon in the middle of the night. Doubt it took much persuading him.”
Moore poured out black coffee into a pair of cracked cups. “And Wingfield drove off the road in the fog and killed them both,” he finished for him. “The car identified Kirsten, and with the connection what was left of Wingfield looked enough like you to fool some backwoods medical examiner.”
Not seeming to notice the scalding heat, Chance swallowed the sour java. “I drove up to Dillon as soon as I found out,” he stated. “That took some people by surprise.”
“I imagine.”
“The Packard was a total wreck, but it didn’t burn — not at the crash site. There was a lot of mashed-up rhododendron, but not a single scorched blossom on the slope. Oh, somebody had set fire to the wreck afterward — after it had been towed up the ridge — but the tank had punctured, and there was barely enough gas to peel the finish and scorch the upholstery.”
Moore refilled his cup. The coffee set his teeth on edge, but cleared his head. “I thought the bodies were burned beyond recognition.”
“They were.” Chance’s seamed brow furrowed at the memory. “The corpses looked like they’d been through an electric-arc furnace. Remember the poor burned devils we saw in the War? Remember how clothing cakes into the melting flesh and forms a sort of scab? Well, they’ve got some nice and clean charred clothing in the morgue there, but it still smells of the gasoline someone sloshed on the heap to ignite it. Hell — heat intense enough to burn bone to near ash — and there’s still sections of unmelted elastic left!”
Choking down a third cup of coffee, Moore felt his thoughts begin to steady. He forced himself to concentrate on Chance’s incredible account. “Electricity can play tricks like that,” he suggested. “I saw a man hit by lightning once — barely raised a blister on his skin, but he was charred meat inside. Did they hit a power line?” Chance swore. “That’s what the local constabulary said when I pointed out the discrepancy in the degree of incineration. And when I pointed out that there were no power lines where the car went over, they told me it must have been lightning. Lots of freak lightning in the hills this season, it seems.”