“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,’ “ Marinville 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 fromReno . 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. Billingsley 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.
“They could have stayed out there in the Desatoya foothills practically forever, I guess, but they were all Tak had, and Tak is always hungry. It sent them into town, because there was nothing else it could do.
One of them, Shih, was killed right there in the Lady Day. Ch’an was hung two days later, right about where those three bikes were turned upside down in the street… remember those? He raved in Tak’s language, the language of the unformed, right up until the end. He tore the hood right off his head, so they hung him barefaced.”
“Boy, that God of yours, what a guy!” Marinville said cheerfully. “Really knows how to repay a favor, doesn’t he, David?”
“God is cruel,” David said in a voice almost too low to hear.
“What?” Marinville asked. “What did you say?”
“You know. But life is more than just steering a course around pain. That’s something you used to know, Mr. Marinville. Didn’t you?”
Marinville looked off into the corner of the truck and said nothing.
The first thing Mary was aware of was a smell- sweetish, rank, nauseating. Oh Peter, dammit to hell, she thought groggily. It’s the freezer, everything’s spoiled!
Except that wasn’t right; the freezer had gone off during their trip toMajorca , and that had been a long time ago, before the miscarriage. A lot had happened since then. A lot had happened just recently, in fact. Most of it bad. But what?
Central Nevada’s full of intense people.
Who said that? Marinville? In her head it certainly sounded like Marinville.
Doesn’t matter, if it’s true. And it is, isn’t it?
She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. What she mostly wanted was to go back into the darkness part of her was trying to come out of. Because there were voices (they’re a dastardly bunch) and sounds (reek-reek-reek) that she didn’t want to consider. Better to just lie here and- Something scuttered across her face. It felt both light and hairy. She sat up, pawing her cheeks with both hands. An enormous bolt of pain went through her head, bright dots flashed across her vision in sync with her suddenly elevated heartrate, and she had a similarly bright flash of recall, one even Johnny Marinville would have admired.
Ibumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on.
Hold on, you’ll be inside in a jiffy.
And then she had been grabbed. By Ellen. No; by the thing
(Tak)
that had been wearing Ellen. That thing had slugged her and then boom, boom, out go the lights.
And in a very literal sense, they were still out. She had to flutter her lids several times simply to assure herself that her eyes were open.
Oh, they’re open, all right. Maybe it’s just dark in this place … but maybe you’re blind.
How about that for a lovely thought. Mare? Maybe she hit you hard enough to blind ySomething was on the back of her hand. It ran halfway across and then paused, seeming to throb on her skin. Mary made a sound of revulsion with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth and flapped her
hand madly in the air, like a woman waving off some annoying person. The throbbing disappeared; the thing on the back of her hand was gone.
Mary got to her feet, provoking another cymbal-crash of pain in her head which she barely noticed.
There were things in here, and she had no time for a mere headache.
She turned slowly around, breathing that sickish-sweet aroma that was so similar to the stench that had greeted her and Pete when they had returned home from their mini-vacation in theBalearic Islands .
Pete’s parents had given them the trip as a Christmas present the year after they had been married, and how great it had been.., until they’d walked back in, bags in hand, and the stench had hit them like a fist.
They had lost everything: two chickens, the chops and roasts she’d gotten at the good discount meatcutter’s she’d found in Brooklyn, the venison-steaks Peter’s friend Don had given them, the pints of strawberries they’d picked at the Mohonk Mountain House the previous summer.
This smell … so similar…
Something that felt the size of a walnut dropped into her hair.
She screamed, at first beating at it with the flat of her hand. That did no good, so she slid her fingers into her hair and got hold of whatever it was. It squirmed, then burst between her fingers. Thick fluid squirted into her palm. She raked the bristly, deflating body out of her hair and shook it of f her palm. She heard it hit something… splat. Her palm felt hot and itchy, as if she had reached into poison ivy. She rubbed it against her jeans.
Please God don‘t let me be next, she thought. Whatever happens don’t let me end up like the cop. Like Ellen.