Part IV

 

 

1.

Crouched low in the back of Dr. Thompson's Packard, Jacob and Ellie hid beneath a tattered blanket they'd found draped over the floorboard. She hadn't told him much, yet, just enough to convince him to follow Dr. Thompson when he left the potluck.

It had stung when his mom dismissed him in order to talk privately with Mr. Cooper. But maybe it would be for the best. Maybe he would finally learn something of Jimmy's whereabouts.

He'd left the other remaining boys down at the creek when their moods turned torturous. Archie Beaumont was the ring leader, shoving gravel into the mouth of a thrashing bullfrog. After weighting it down the boy tossed it back in the creek, waiting for it to resurface, if it would at all, laughing uproariously.

Disgusted with Archie's behavior and the other boys' willing complicity, he left, walking aimlessly from creek to barn, then back up to the house again. He'd kept a wide berth, hooking wide of the back porch to avoid his mom and Cooper's conversation. He entered the house through the front door. That's when Ellie found him.

Someone approached the parked Packard. They'd been waiting a solid five minutes, too worried about being spotted or heard to make a peep. The person opened the trunk and slid something heavy inside. Jacob assumed it was the doctor's leftover wine. He was surprised there was any remaining with how the neighbors were putting it away all day long.

They held their breath, but their worries were unfounded. Dr. Thompson walked by the rear door without so much as a glance, then opened the driver's side door, groaning as the seat took his weight. Ellie's head was against the door directly behind Thompson, but Jacob could see into the front seat from his hiding spot. A slice of dusky light washed across the doctor's face, and he looked tired, sober but tired.

Jacob would've bet the doctor had polished two bottles of mulberry wine by himself just this afternoon. But he seemed steady and aware, ready for home. The doctor started up the car, took a turn nearly too wide for the narrow turn-about, then thundered the engine down the double wheel ruts. They'd made it so far, stowed away, hidden and leery.

He still couldn't believe that a person as respected as Dr. Thompson would conceal knowledge concerning Jimmy. Ellie had been keeping her ears perked during the potluck, panning for any useful information. She was a sly one, moving from one crowd to the next, as noticed as a shadow on a cloudy day. Few held their tongues around the girl, and after hours of wine and rich food, their tongues only loosened.

As dusk settled over their farm, Ellie struck pay dirt. The doctor and Magee the barber were speaking in quiet tones, quiet enough not to draw a further crowd, but loud enough for Ellie to get the gist of it. After hearing the conversation, Ellie had pulled Jacob aside, whispering a transcript while cupping his ear.

Magee had spoken to Thompson about a man named Ethan. Ellie could hear the fear in Magee's voice. Ethan was consolidating his power, severing loose ends. When Jacob asked what that meant, she told him the names Magee mentioned. Jimmy, George, Greta, Cooper.

As the Packard jounced down the road toward town, Jacob analyzed the brief interplay.

How much did either man know?

Who else knew?

Quite abruptly, the doctor stomped the brake pedal, the tires ripping coarse grit from the ground.

"You can't stop this." Thompson slammed a fist against the steering column.

Ellie stirred, as did Jacob, but after checking on Thompson, Jacob caught Ellie before she could blurt out or startle the doctor.

Thompson continued to talk to himself. "You're too old. No, age doesn't matter in any of this, does it? Not with that damnable healing. Age doesn't matter, but courage does. And you don't have an ounce in you, old man."

Thompson rubbed his eyes roughly, as if trying to erase some horrible indelible image from his sight. The doctor laughed to himself. At first a chuckle, the laughter grew in intensity and timbre, flooding with a volatile mixture of madness and relief. He laughed and rubbed his eyes some more, then took a deep, quavering breath. He let it out and opened the door.

"Well, let's see what can be done. Sure wish Jasper was well enough to have a part in this foolishness. This should've happened decades ago. Me and Jasper, going in full-bore, guns blazing…" Thompson spoke, as if the words were no longer his own, or that perhaps he was not even aware that they were issuing from his mouth. Jacob made eye contact with Ellie, and as Dr. Thompson closed the door behind him, she placed a hand on his calf and squeezed. Even though they didn't know what the doctor had been rambling on about, she looked terrified. Her look mirrored how Jacob felt.

"Should I look?"

"Yes. Just be careful."

Jacob peered out the rear window. It took a few seconds to orient himself, but he quickly put two and two together. It was the scrubby patch of gravel that hooked behind Dr. Thompson's house. The driveway ended at a disused barn that had weeds grown tall before it, green tendrils extended to reclaim the land for the wild. A small shed leaned against the barn's listing southern side. If Thompson ever did any maintenance of his own property (with advancing age and his position in the community, he'd been hiring on boys to do those simple jobs for years), the hoes, rakes and saws would be found inside that shed. Some years before, Jacob and Jimmy had found a pair of coal shovels inside when the doctor hired them on to clear the three foot snow fall from his drive and front steps. It was a small shed, a shallow path between piled tools and equipment.

Of all the things Dr. Thompson could do on such a night, after drinking and sharing in his community's good spirits, he went inside the shed.

"It's his place."

"What's he doing?"

"He just went inside his old shed."

"What's he getting?"

"No idea. But he just lit a lantern."

Ellie joined him looking out the window.

"That sure is weird."

"Isn't it?"

"Maybe he's still drunk."

"I don't think so."

Jacob conceded to her experience; Ellie would know a drunk when she saw one.

"What was all that laughter and crazy talk about?"

"I don't know, Ellie. I don't know any more than you."

"What should we do now?"

"Wait for him to come out."

"We can sneak into his house, so we're there first, before he comes in."

He could think of no better option. "Fine. We better move, though."

"Wait. What just happened? The lantern went out."

"No. Not snuffed out."

"Maybe he ran out of kerosene."

"No. I don't think so. Looks to me like that light faded, like a light going down a hallway would."

"But there's no hallway in that tiny shed."

Jacob waited, thinking. Making a run for the house had been a good idea. But wouldn't the doctor have gone inside, if that's where he intended to go in the first place?

No, something strange was going on with how that light just faded like that. "I want you to wait here."

"No, Jacob, you can't leave me."

"It'll be okay. Just stay out of sight."

"But it's not safe without you here."

He waited for a reasonable argument to surface, but none did. "Fine, but you better be as quiet as a church mouse."

Ellie found a relieved smile, and though they were venturing into an even deeper unknown, they felt safer than they should have, knowing they had the other. It was a feeling of trust Jacob hadn't felt since Jimmy's disappearance.

 

 

 

2.

The night had turned quiet, mere murmurs of bullfrogs hunkered at the distant creek, a lone cricket's unanswered chirp. His welcoming neighbors had gone, by now settling their energy-sapped and surly kids into bed. They would have moved on to thoughts of tomorrow's chores and errands, the minutiae of the manual hardships of farming.

Alone, Charles Banyon fixated on his unrelenting failure as a father and husband.

What a row I've hoed. He sat slouched over on the outhouse bench. The stench held in by the closed door was an appropriate bombardment to his senses. He deserved nothing better.

But his neighbors had been so kind. So forgiving. Not to mention the furniture orders that would keep him busy through the winter. They'd accepted him once again.

And once again he'd slapped the hand of kindness away as if it were a buzzing mosquito. But he had his reasons.

Acceptance and kindness begot expectation, which in turn begot pressure and anxiety, which in the end, brought on a maddening panic that left him reeling, trying to hold together the broken fragments of control. The only way to gain control of the panic was by giving himself over to the harsh touch of the gentle hand of his beguiling mistress.

He tipped the bottle, hating the numbing burn as it surged down his throat and spread through his chest, reveling in the coming darkness. He sobbed silently, trying to hide from the world that he had failed once again.

With his head swimming and self hatred buzzing about his ears, he still noticed how silent the night had become. They were all gone and turned in for the night. His neighbors, the doctor, that kind lady, Jane Fowler, and…

And Elizabeth.

Hellfire.

His poor Elizabeth. All alone. No mother to calm her fears, no brother to turn to. A father pissing his life away.

"God damn it!" He lurched to his feet.

Gotta find my girl. He thought it again, then again, like a mantra. He dropped the empty liquor bottle down the outhouse seat and then opened the door. The air was cool, weightless, too pure. Too pure for him to breathe.

A single light shone from inside the Fowler's home. He walked what approximated a straight line toward the light. His Elizabeth would be up there with Jane. What would he have done without Jane Fowler's kindness?

The three makeshift banquet tables stood empty. Almost empty. Faint moonlight caught the curve of a wine bottle, as enticing as the swell of a woman's breast. His mouth watered as he approached. Flush with adrenaline and anguish and pain, his senses became more alert: his eyes peered through the shadowy yard for onlookers, watched the lighted window to make sure he was left alone. Alone to sin, alone to indulge, alone to quench the fire of craving, of loneliness.

He reached for the bottle, but stopped. Gave himself a mental slap.

Elizabeth. Gotta find my girl. My girl, my girl, my girl.

He righted his path, leaving the table and the wine bottle's magnetic pull.

Dusk had weakened, giving way to full-on night. Where did everybody go? He stopped dead still. How long was I in the shitter? It felt like he had lost time, as he often had while on a bender. Hell, he was on a bender, wasn't he? A new bender. The bender to end all benders.

"Elizabeth!" Instead of a shout, his daughter's name issued from his liquored lips like fingernails rasping on sandpaper.

He unsteadily climbed the porch steps. It felt wrong knocking on someone's door so late at night. But hadn't he been invited? This was a potluck and Jane Fowler had invited him and Elizabeth over. None of that changed, even after he went off to the shitter with that bottle.

Managing to quell his anxieties for the moment, he knocked on the door. A silhouetted figure walked through the kitchen to answer the door. He swatted the air in front of his face, trying to clear the alcohol vapors. He exhaled into his palm and smelled it, but couldn't tell how hard he would need to work to fool Jane. She could be a tough nut.

When the door opened, Charles was relieved to see Louise Bradshaw. Louise he could fool. Jane on the other hand…

"Yes?" Behind Louise, he saw the clutter left in the wake of the potluck. Piles of dirty dishes. Furniture pushed to the room's corners. But no sign of Elizabeth. No sign of anyone.

"My girl, Elizabeth, I've come for her."

Louise didn't say anything for quite awhile, simply stared into him with a shameful look. Nightsounds seeped into the silence. The whisper of branches bending to a gentle wind. Frogs croaking, a fox's baleful cry.

"Everyone's cleared out. The party's over."

"Please, you gotta tell me: where's Elizabeth?"

Louise continued to scrutinize him with her unflinching gaze. The lamplight glowed behind her. Inside it seemed so warm, inviting. But quiet. Empty.

"Where is she?"

Louise folded her arms across the top of her expanding belly. She winced, then rubbed it. She was so forthcoming he could strangle her. It'd feel good to get his hands around her judgmental neck and wring it like a chicken's. Oh, how it would feel, and then he'd find another bottle and disappear for awhile into oblivion.

"I don't know where she is."

"How so? She was at the potluck."

"Which has ended. Potlucks end. People go home."

"So that's where she went, back home?"

"I told you I don't know. If I did know, I don't think I'd tell you anyway." She reached for the doorknob behind her.

He shoved it open. Exasperated, Louise stepped back, allowing his entry inside. The odors of the feast and spilled wine and sweat permeated the house.

"Where is she?" He snatched a solid grip of her upper arm.

She cried out, tried to pull free, but her efforts only angered him. "Please. Don't. I don't know where she is."

Her simpering plea made his fingers constrict, made him grind his fingers into her flesh and deeper, into her bones.

She cried out again, this time troubled by her unborn child. Her free hand went to her belly while her eyes fluttered, unable to focus.

"Feisty one, is it?" He placed his hand on her belly, and sure enough, felt a resounding kick. It was a feeling he hadn't felt in so long. Since just before Elizabeth's birth.

Disgusted, she swatted at him to remove his hand.

He raised his hands, dirty as they were, palms out, to show his harmless intent. "How far along are you?"

Louise stepped away and breathed deeply.

"Not much for talkin', huh? Well, by the looks of you, I'd say you're five months tops."

He inched farther inside.

She said nothing, but her eyes spoke of her growing fear.

"You shouldn't shame a child, especially one not yet born. But you hid it. Shamed it. Hid a miracle as if it were a blight." Rage built at his temples, blurring his eyes. The last few days he'd fought so hard, the sweats and cravings, feeling like a marionette pulling against his strings. He fought the newfound clarity of his thoughts, the brightness of the day. But most of all, he fought the guilt for all of the troubles he'd caused, and everything he'd done that no matter how long he remained sober, he'd never be able to repair.

He could never have a fresh start. Not after tonight. Not after he so easily grabbed that bottle when no one was looking, grabbed it guiltily, but with lust also. He no longer had Mabel, not the Mabel he'd fallen in love with. With his own selfish actions he'd turned her into a monster. His boy, George, he was gone, too. As for Elizabeth, she would never see him as anything other than a vile, sticky thing clinging to the bottom of her shoe. Someday she would scrape him off, toss him away, and move on. Maybe today was that day.

Louise's unborn child kicked the hardest yet, making the girl catch her breath. Tears fell down her cheeks as she gritted against the stabbing pain.

He felt bad for her with no husband to calm her anxieties, no one to hold her hand through these baby pains. Jane Fowler was no where to be seen, either.

"Baby coming?"

"No, just doesn't like," she said, cut off by another kick. "Baby… doesn't like potato salad." She somehow smiled when she looked at him.

He closed his eyes and saw his beloved Mabel as young as Louise. So lovely, so humble and pure. The image blurred and distorted to the horrid thing she'd become. Undead, mindless, soulless. He heard the scraping of her nails against the door, wanting to get out, to ravage and tear him apart.

When he opened his eyes, Louise had drifted to the kitchen table, within reaching distance of a dirty carving knife.

"You know that Jimmy a' yours?"

Her hand stalled inches from the blade.

"He's dead."

"No. You don't know that."

"A' course I do. I brained him dead myownself."

Louise reached for the blade.

"And here you are, shaming a miracle."

He took two steps, grabbed her wrist with one hand, taking hold of the carving knife with the other. She screamed, but no one was near enough to hear.

 

 

3.

It was a rough go trying to find Greta Hildaberg's treehouse in the dark. Cooper had only been there once and was still unfamiliar with the wooded surroundings. Jane hadn't visited since she was a girl, on the eve of her marriage to Dwight Fowler. As they searched for signs they were in the right area, Jane told Cooper that she had gone (with a fair amount of skepticism, she emphasized) to ask Greta how her marriage would play out. Greta had told her during that long ago visit that her marriage would be loving and fruitful. If Jane would've only thought to ask if it would also be long-lived, she could've saved herself years of heartache. When you're fifteen, you never think you or a loved one is anywhere close to death. Death doesn't come near you. It is but a rumored condition afflicting others.

An amber glow warmed a wide tree canopy in the distance. They covered the remaining quarter mile quickly, kicking through a waist-high field that transitioned to a rough undergrowth of brush. The tree was the tallest around, with gnarled branches, roots grown grasping through the soil's surface below, a mantle of leaves blotting out the moon above. They mounted the spiral steps. Cooper found the nighttime effort considerably more amenable than his earlier attempt while accompanying the children in the bright sunshine. By the time Jane tapped on the door, he'd nearly forgotten his fear of heights and that they were now thirty or more feet in the air.

Greta answered the knock almost before it was finished.

"Good, good. Come on in. Cider's at the table. Have some if you will."

Jane looked at Cooper, but neither said anything. They entered, each taking a seat at the low table. Two cider filled wooden mugs were at the table. When Cooper touched the wood, steam poured over its rim. Neither drank.

"Time's almost gone. You know that, don't you?" Greta said directly to Jane. "You wouldn't be here otherwise."

There was no need to explain the reason for their late night visit. "I just need to know. I can't leave a stone unturned."

"I suppose, since I haven't seen you since you were a girl, I must be the last stone for you to consider." Greta turned away, peering through the wooden slates of the small kitchen window. She appeared to be gathering herself, while at the same time, checking the neighboring vale. "Your boy, he's in trouble."

Jane was going to say something, but held her tongue.

"There are dark forces at play--"

Jane cut in, "Greta, please. If you know anything, you have to tell me. He's my son. What if Arlen were in danger? You'd want to know, wouldn't you?"

Greta joined them at the table. Her eyes glistened with emotion. "Why of course I'd want to know. But we're all in trouble, not just your boy. There are reasons I live like this, in this damnable tree like some mad monkey. But I'm not crazy. No, no, I'm trapped here. Trapped by fate. I wanted to leave Coal Hollow and be done with it when Arlen was born. But I couldn't do that, even with my son's best interests at heart. I had to stay--we both did. Because we all play a part in this. If I had left, evil would have continued unabated."

"What evil, Greta?"

"First off, Janie-girl, you know what I'm telling you. You can't live in Coal Hollow a lifetime and not know. It's the Underground. The evil is underground. But it strays. Sometimes it strays to the surface; sometimes the evil of above drifts below, too. But when it does surfaces, it will at times take along innocence when it returns to its lair."

"They took my boy?"

"In Jimmy's case, he stumbled upon it. It was an accident; but sometimes accidents have unforgiving consequences."

Seeing pain etched in Jane's face, Cooper chimed in, "I know we've come unannounced, Greta, but if you know anything about Jimmy's whereabouts and how we can bring him home, you need to tell us, straightaway. In plain and simple langue. Drop the hyperbole; no more talk of 'evil and dark forces.' That doesn't help the situation."

Greta didn't look at him, didn't even acknowledge him. Instead, she gazed at Jane with mounting intensity.

At long last, Jane broke under her glare. "I know. Well, I've heard stories. The Underground is a place where men venture who soon become beasts. That's what my grandma once said." Her voice was soft, but thick in her throat. "Less human than animal."

"Depraved, yes. Indeed." Greta nodded, knowing she'd finally gotten through.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Jane looked miserable, as if she'd just gone through a physical trauma that began without certainty of her survival. Her face was gaunt, and she appeared a decade older than her thirty-two years.

"Oh, dear, I would've if it would've done any good. I had a right mind to follow those kids home after their recent visit and try to get through to you as well. I could've told you the day before Jimmy went missing. Or when you came asking about your marriage prospects all those years ago. I could have been done with it by whispering to your newborn ear. At no other time would you have listened. Not with open ears and understanding. Not until now."

A crash from outside halted their conversation, a slight pounding against the clapboards. Cooper thought a bird might have made an unwise flight path directly into the wall of Greta's home, perhaps a crow or barn owl, but an accompanying sound did away with that notion: the lively rush of rapidly expanding flame.

"We need to go now." Greta's voice trembled. "If it's not too late already."

Flames burned just outside the kitchen window. Greta stepped back. Heat pulsed from the window as the fire fed on the treehouse. Cooper went to the far side of the little home and looked out the small window by the kitchen table. A single row of torches marched through the tall brush toward the treehouse.

"What is it? Who's doing this?" Jane shouted, grabbing Greta's arm as the three of them rushed for the door.

Greta didn't answer right away, but Cooper knew.

Sometimes evil strays to the surface to steal away innocence.

Greta shrugged away from Jane's grip. "You can't leave this woman's side, Mr. Cooper," she said, then turned back to Jane. "You need to stay with Mr. Cooper. You will find your answers if you don't stray from his side. You'll be safe; that's as clear as day in my visions. You hurry down those steps, make your way North through my field. There's good covering ground in that direction, which will give you time. I need to take care of this, end it now. They want to scare me off. But I won't let them hurt you two. Now go. Off with you." Greta patted Jane's hand, squeezed Cooper's shoulder, then ushered them out the door.

"Greta, you're coming with us. The fire. It's spreading."

"Don't you worry. They won't let anything happen to me. They just want to scare me is all," Greta repeated. Her tired expression belied her words.

"Who are they?"

"The undead."

Greta closed the door on them, terminating the conversation. Fire spread across a third of the home, licking along the ancient tree branches, wilting the moisture from its leaves before they also caught fire. Smoke twirled along a gust of wind, enveloping Cooper and Jane as they nearly tumbled down the spiral steps.

"She's not going to make it out," Jane said.

Cooper didn't respond. The row of torches was closing on the house. They didn't even have a second to dawdle. He took Jane's hand and pulled hard as they made a break for the nearest gap in the surrounding brush. Together, they bound through the undergrowth as it tore at their clothes and skin.

They ran. Blood pulsed through their ears, but it seemed the sounds of the destruction they left behind only intensified--the flames overtaking the treehouse, timbers crumpling, upending, crashing to the forest floor. And voices, none-too-distant, closing in on the ruins, reveling in the destruction, basking in the warm glow of their hapless victim.

After a tense ten minutes, Cooper eased their pace. They caught their breath, tasting smoke on their tongues, smelling it in their hair. "They killed her. There's no way she got out in time. Why didn't she come with us. Why, Ted?"

"They--whoever 'they' is--didn't kill Greta. She let them kill her."

Behind them, the fire glowed over the treetops. Cooper saw how recklessly they'd trampled the grass during their escape. They might as well have painted a line of arrows in the bent blades to indicate their direction.

"Did they see us?" Jane asked the question before Cooper could.

"I don't know, but I'm guessing they were coming if we were there or not."

"Who are they? What did Greta mean, undead? The dead can't do that. The dead can't start fires and destroy, because, damn it, their dead!" Their slow progress screeched to a halt. "Ted, what aren't you telling me?"

"Greta knew what she was talking about. About Jimmy and the Underground. She knew we could escape safely if we headed north through her field."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Well, first of all, just over the next ridge is a meek runnel of a creek, and at the top of the next hill past the creek sits my house. She knew what she was talking about. We just need to figure out how that helps us find Jimmy."

They stepped across the meek runnel of a creek, the grass lining the shore lush and green, becoming sparse not more than twenty feet beyond. Cooper realized they were still holding hands long after it was practical for them to do so. It was a comfortable thing, a warm reassurance during such an disturbing night.

"You must be a wealthier man than you let on earlier tonight."

"What do you mean?"

"Your houselights are on."

The house was indeed alight, the two facing windows on the ground floor bright and wide-eyed, the upper floors awash in an umber of flame. It appeared as if the grand celebration of the day had assembled at Cooper's house instead of Jane's. But the house was empty. Essentially.

"Let me explain." He guided her by hand up the porch steps. He opened the front door, but when they stepped inside, the lights warming the house all went out. The entryway was dark and cold. No hint of a lantern's lingering warmth.

"That's odd," Jane said, looking around.

"Not from what I've seen." He closed the door behind them.

"You must have some draft," she said, chuckling nervously.

"No, I have guests. Or more precisely, I'm a guest in this house."

"Are you going to buy furnishings, or just sleep on the floor?" she said, pointing at his nest of blankets. He felt exposed having her see his bedding, as if she would instantly know the dreams he experienced while sleeping there.

"Eventually, I hope to restore the house to its original state. Period furniture, fresh paint, and the like."

He felt strangely at ease considering what they had just been through. The burning tree, the marching row of torch-bearers cutting across the open field. He felt like he should be hospitable, perhaps offer a cup of tea as he had to Jacob and Ellie. Relax a bit. Maybe continue on with the general flow of their earlier conversation.

But then Jane jerked her head aside as if a fat spider had plopped down on her shoulder. She jerked her head the other way, and Cooper could see the fear in her eyes.

He felt it too. A cold caress against his cheek. An invisible fingernail rasping through his five o'clock shadow.

Pressure, cold and bracing.

"Back to what I said earlier, I'm a guest in this house, regardless if the property title says otherwise."

With a jarring abruptness, Eunice Blankenship appeared between them. She appeared as the young, righteous and vibrant woman of her youth.

You need to hurry.

Cooper heard Eunice's voice in his head, and from her reaction, so had Jane. She was backing away from the apparition, reaching behind her for the doorknob.

NO, the reverend said, also inside their heads, a heady timbre that was nearly a shout. He appeared behind Jane, and he placed a hand on her shoulder. She jumped away as if the spirit had inappropriately goosed her.

"Ted… what's going on?"

"As I said, a guest."

As was his penchant, the reverend's ethereal body diminished to nothing. A cold wisp of air rushed by as he whipped through the entryway. A lacy curtain pulled aside, held there by an invisible hand.

There's not much time, the reverend said, looking out the window Cooper had just check for security.

"What do you mean?" Cooper asked the open air, then turned to Eunice. "What's happening?"

Eunice's body took on a more corporeal form, as if a dial had turned, sending additional energy surging through her body. She aged rapidly as the details of her face became more clear. Wrinkles creased her face, her skin sagged, her eyes dimmed, dirtying with cataracts. She extended her hand, touching Cooper's forearm. Her touch was as cold as the frigid reaches of Hank Calder's icehouse. Her lips moved, and a sound came from her throat, and it was a real voice. "NOW," she said. Quavering, and ancient, but real nonetheless. "Come with me!"

The lacy curtain fell and settled as Horace Blankenship abandoned his lookout position. Once again, an icy wind whipped by. Jane, while as frightened as ever, no longer seemed set on rushing out the front door and away from these unsettled spirits. The reverend threw the basement door open. Cooper assumed his spirit then went down the steps, but then a coercive hand pressed between his shoulder blades. His feet began to move, and standing next to him, so did Jane's.

"They're here," Eunice said.

A moment later something heavy slammed into the front door, while both front windows crumbled at once, leaving jagged shards clinging to weathered frames. Arms darted through the gaps, flailing, reaching, limbs slick with dark blood and something more vile. Another crash snapped Cooper's attention back to the door. The impact nearly forced it from its hinges. Time was fleeting; the door wouldn't hold much longer.

Something wriggled partway through one of the broken windows. It was a horrible sight, this creature with its pus-flesh seeping with decay, its maniacal eyes panning the entryway. Its eyes found Cooper's. It struggled through the opening, shredding its skin, losing a finger that was sheared off by a long, bladelike shard of glass. It didn't seem to notice.

The remains of the man wore overalls. His torso was tree trunk thick. A rancid odor swept over Cooper. One last push from the spirit of Reverend Blankenship ushered him down the steps. Side by side with Jane, they took the steps two at a time.

The tumult of crazed activity upstairs shook the basement's ceiling. Dust and flakes of mortar rained down from above.

"What are those things?" Jane held his hand.

Cooper had never seen such unfettered fear so close before. For some reason, he thought of Jane's husband, Dwight. The trenches changed him. He'd come home fragile, fractured inside.

Can fear stain a person's soul?

"Cooper, come on. Snap out of it."

Dazed, he heard voices, could feel the destruction reverberating from above, but somehow he couldn't move from the spot at the bottom of the stairs. He looked around, saw Jane's face welling with tears, overflowing, tracing jagged streaks down her cheeks. His eyes drifted past, to the mirror hanging on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The mirror angled so you could see upstairs as well as your own reflection.

He saw the white-illumined spirits of the Blankenships, just over his shoulder. The impatience in their faces was considerable. Then Eunice stepped away from her husband's side. In the reflection, Eunice gripped his cheeks with both hands. Her icy touch quaked through his facial muscles and down the nape of his neck. The ghost's body became entirely corporeal, appearing as it had in her final state--ancient and stooped, kindness still warming her eyes. Then a rift appeared at the crest of her forehead just below her hairline. It widened, spreading as wide as an axe's blade. Thick blood flowed from the opening, down her face, and as Eunice revisited the final moments before her last breath, she gained an immortal strength that rippled through her flesh. Her grip on his face tightened. She reeled back with her left hand, then let loose with a teeth-jangling slap across his cheek.

Cooper came close to falling to the dirt floor. But he didn't. Instead, he snapped out of it. Eunice began to fade, her energies sapped, the resilience he normally saw in her face flagging along with it. She looked defeated.

"Cooper, please? What do we do?"

For some reason, he smiled. "Come with me."

He took her hand and they went down the hallway, around a corner, and into a small room.

"Now where? That window's too small for us to get through." A wedge of wane moonlight cut across the floor. Its glow found their faces, casting them in somber blue.

"Here." He left her side, went to the far wall, rapped it with his knuckles. He ran his fingers along the surface until he found the right spot, pulled out and to the side, and the secret panel opened up.

"What's that?"

"A hiding place. Created for the Underground. The real Underground."

He crawled into the opening, reaching out in the near dark, searching. Just as he had figured, the bricked up wall five feet into the opening was a hastily constructed thing. He felt around until he found a gap at the top of the wall, a small rift where the ground had shifted and the stones had sunk over the years. He jammed his fingers through the opening, then pressed as hard as he could against the wall. Stones scraped one another, and then the topmost one fell into the tunnel.

The sounds from upstairs came in ever-increasing volume and intensity. The monsters (that's what they are, right? Cooper thought, monsters?) had gathered in the entryway. Stomping feet clomped in every direction as they searched the house.

One of their pursuers had seen their escape into the basement. It didn't take them long to find the stairway and trundle down in a wild clamor.

Cooper had succeeded in prying away a number of stones, pushing some ahead, pulling some toward himself.

"Quick," he called out to Jane. "Get in here and pull that panel closed behind you."

She did as he requested, and after a moment of panic as she fought to fit the panel square in its opening, they were alone in the lightless tunnel, the sound of the approaching undead momentarily quieted.

"I can't… I can't do this. I just can't go on. I need to get out of here, I need to see my family. They need me."

The undead filing into the basement quickly deduced that their quarry would not go quietly. Growls of rage came from the small room they had just exited.

"Jane, we need to move. There's no other choice. They'll tear us apart if we don't get moving now. It won't take them long to realize we're in this tunnel. They know about this tunnel. They've been through this tunnel, and I'm pretty sure they are the ones who tried to wall it up so no one would find the entry point to their lair."

"I can't. I can't do it anymore."

He reached out in the dark, found her hand, squeezed it. Speaking with his lips an inch from her ear, "This is a tunnel that served a purpose during the Underground Railroad, but it also leads to the Underground, the corrupt Underground. Greta gave her life to send us on the this path. She sent us to my house. She was trying to help us; for whatever reason she didn't or couldn't outright tell us what to do. But, Jane, Jimmy is in the Underground. They have him, and if we take this tunnel, we'll find him. We can set him free."

His words struck to her core. He couldn't see her, but could feel a change go through her. She took a deep breath and pushed him on the shoulder. "Let's go then. Let's get my boy."

 

 

4.

Arlen Polk's gopher hole resembled more a trash heap than a furry animal's living space. Trash was strewn alongside mounds of broken rock where Arlen sorted the precious coal from the worthless slag. He'd staked a canvas tent near the gopher hole where he could rest and eat meals packed by his mom. But now, forty feet below, Arlen toiled as he always had, sweating a mindless salty lather, humming to fill the empty space.

He'd been at work all day, and close to quitting time, the vein he was chasing opened in a wide berth of rich ore that alluded to an even deeper source. Every swing he took he hoped would lead to prosperity. He kept at it, long hours after simple fatigue ceded to exhaustion. He alternated swinging his pick axe and shoveling crumbled stone into a rickety cart.

His humming died off. Spittle flew from his lips.

Greta's death hit Arlen like a physical blow, fully a quarter mile from their tree house, burrowed at the deepest point of his gopher hole.

"Mom," he called out in a whimper, as if she could soothe him. Pain seared across his forehead, making him drop his pick axe in mid-swing. He fell to his knees, grinding his palms against his temples. In the yellow kerosene light, the rough tunnel walls quaked, the floor rumbled, sending him in a rumpled heap stomach-flat against the coal dirty floor.

The hot fist of pain bloomed throughout his brain, triggering synapses that had never been alighted with intelligence. Nerve endings jangled, snapped, sparked. The pain quelled, fell apart, became bits of words. Words crystallizing into a single, distinct voice.

"We'll always be together. You will always carry me in your heart." They were his mom's oft-repeated words. Words he never truly understood until now. He'd spoken them with his own voice--his flat, masculine voice merging with her lyrical speech patterns. Hearing her through him in the enclosed air of his gopher hole scared him. Scared him nearly senseless.

The worst part was finally understanding. After all these years, understanding the depth of her unflagging love for him, feeling its warmth filling him. Knowing fully how blind he had been to the world.

He also understood the generations of children's leers and laughter, the men folk's crude humor, the women's condescending tone and dismissive behavior. He had been an unwitting outcast; his whole life he had smiled agreeably, lent a helping hand and gladly labored at tasks others would have considered a menial tedium. But now he understood. Completely.

His mother's knowledge was flooding him. She was flooding him. Her stories and secrets, everything, hit him boldly, his vision swimming in the torrent of information. Others' knowledge--Grandma Nina was there, too--Nina, whom he'd never met but knew through his mom's stories, she was there with her photographic memory for numbers and their patterns. Also, a man named Rubell, another named Quint, they swept in too, deposited their lifetimes' knowledge into his brain.

Rubell… he knew now. His mom's lover. The shyster of patent medicines. Arlen's father. And Quint, his great uncle, a man from whom his mom had to fight off advances, an engineer who dabbled in steam locomotion in his youth. Ranging from disturbing to ingenious, his knowledge was now Arlen's.

Earlier voices, ancestral voices, guttural and thickening with accents (their words morphing into languages he didn't know, didn't know until now) they coursed through him as well, and he understood. Every word, he understood.

"Oh, Mom," he said, crying from the burden. "Mom, why?" It was his voice subsuming hers, for a brief moment.

"People I love are going to suffer," he once again spoke his mom's words as if they were his own. "No, Momma. Please." He was pleading, alone in the dark, hoping she would hear him, and in the back of his mind, hoping she was safe.

"Good people will suffer, oh God in heaven, will they suffer. If I walked the streets of Coal Hollow, I could point to certain people, say, 'You will be dead by the first frost.'" His voice was regaining strength, fortified by the generations that had preceded him. His words filled the tunnel, guttered the lamp's flame as he grabbed it from a hasp embedded in the soft rock wall.

With his understanding, he learned the role he was destined to fulfill. Such a responsibility placed in his care after a lifetime of being treated like a child--he felt such a warmth of pride. He could do this.

"But it has to be. Has to be, or nothing will change." His mother's voice filled him. He no longer fought it; he embraced it, found comfort in the familiarity. He gathered the supplies he would need. Well, nearly all of the supplies. The rest he would have to get from the locked trunk in his canvas tent.

"Sometimes death leads to life. Sometimes there's a greater good." Arlen's shadow ebbed and flowed as he trudged up the incline to the entrance of his gopher hole. "I know Momma, and I know now… you're gone. I know they took you from me. You'll always be in my heart. Always."

He made his way into the encompassing night. Unlocking the trunk he kept hidden in the back of his tent, Arlen Polk smiled.

"Found it, Momma." He could feel her pride, as soothing a balm as ice cream in July, though she no longer lived on this plain. "But you always knew it was here, didn't you, Momma?"

He would need to be sly. Slyer than he had ever been. Fulfilling his destiny, he would honor his mother's memories and the memories of past generations.

Now, he just needed to find one wall, find and breach one wall.

 

 

5.

Dr. Thompson's lantern sputtered and exhausted itself minutes after Jacob and Ellie decided to follow him into the tunnel under his tool shed. The old man sighed, exasperated, swore an oath, but continued on in the dark.

Their need for secrecy as well as the pitch black of the tunnel kept the children quiet. Otherwise, Jacob would have laughed a good stretch over the doctor's vulgarity, repeating it to himself to hear it issued in his own voice. But nothing seemed funny right now.

With the sudden darkness, Ellie held fast to Jacob's shirtsleeve. He could feel her quavering as she fought the urge to call out. But they remained silent, confounded by circumstance to follow the doctor through the low-ceilinged, downward-twisting tunnel.

In the absence of light, sound guided their way. Keeping a safe distance, they listened for Thompson's shuffled, unsure strides, his occasional grunts when he bumped into a wall or low passage, his labored, throaty breathing. They also listened when he picked up his mumbled train of thought concerning Jasper Cartwright. The crazed, one-sided conversation he'd begun in his car started again and halted, running in fits and starts as he made his way deeper into the earth. The doctor chastised himself (ostensibly spoken to his dear friend) for decades of cowardice made immeasurably worse by its accompanying guilt and shame; he rambled (is he still drunk? Jacob wondered more than once) about his need to rectify the situation, at least make an effort, no matter how feeble, after all these years of silence. Sometimes he would ask Jasper questions directly, as if the doctor's oldest friend walked at his side, and after a momentary lapse, Thompson would grunt, as if hearing just the right answer.

Jacob could guess what Ellie was thinking as they walked through this narrow vein of emptiness into an ever cooler unknown, for they would be the same thoughts as his: Who is this man they're following? How could you not know someone could be so… so strange? How could you not know about a seemingly endless tunnel burrowing in to the ground of your own hometown? Who else knows about the existence of such a tunnel?

And then suddenly, Jacob realized, there was no sound ahead. No aural beacon to hone in on.

He must have tensed at Ellie's side, because she broke their silence: "Where is he, Jacob? It's so dark down here."

"Shh."

"We should turn back. I think I can find our way. It's not too difficult. Only that one place where the tunnel split, otherwise, it's a straight shot to the tool shed." She would've said more if Jacob hadn't squeezed her arm.

In a voice no louder than an exhaled breath, he spoke with his lips brushing her ear, "Just because we can't hear him, doesn't mean he's not ten feet from us. Keep your voice down."

"I think we lost him," Ellie said, ignoring him. "Besides, it's Dr. Thompson. He's the nicest man I've ever met. So what if he hears us? He's our friend."

"Besides talking crazy, why's he ducking into hidden tunnels in the middle of the night? Remember, he mentioned Jimmy to Magee."

"I don't know, but we can't see a thing." Her voice rose in pitch, verging on panic. "It's cold and I'm scared. So are you, Jacob Fowler."

"An even better reason for keeping your voice low. Wait--feel that?" Jacob held her left hand with his right, while extending his other hand to feel their way down the tunnel. He lifted her hand, tracing it along the wall.

"What? What is it?" she said, this time barely audible. "Oh, another split. Which way? Which way did the doctor take?"

"I don't know, just give me a second--" he looked in each direction, but didn't find a clue to make their decision any easier. Turn left, turn right, go back the way they had come, no direction felt like the correct answer.

"Let's go right."

"Why right?"

He didn't say anything for a while.

Ellie nudged him, "Jacob, did you see something, hear something?"

"No. Just a gut feeling is all. Let's go right."

"Okay."

"Let's just be quiet about it."

She didn't say anything, merely took up her latch on his shirtsleeve. They started down the tunnel, ears and eyes alert, fighting phantom light and the sound of dripping water.

 

 

They stayed in that formation for a long, straight stretch of tunnel, softly shifting their feet along the damp cold floor, fingers flailing ahead, touching the walls as if searching for directional signs written in Braille.

A groan came from somewhere ahead; a raspy sigh swimming with pain, abruptly stifled. Or it could have been from another direction--the cavern walls distorted and so recklessly tossed about sounds that a person familiar with the tunnels would have been left confused. They couldn't turn around, not now. They had come too far. What if that sound was coming from Jimmy? Could they turn their back on him when they were on the verge of reaching him?

They heard the groan again, and this time they were ready for it. Without a doubt the sound was coming from in front of them. "Let's check it out," Jacob said.

"I don't want to."

"Have a better suggestion?"

Though reluctant, Ellie went along as they inched forward. The groan became louder. It was a man; he could hear it in the muscular quality of the voice. It was deep-sounding, wounded, irrevocably broken. Not Jimmy. No, Jimmy didn't sound like that. Jacob hoped he didn't sound like that. If he did he was in a world of pain, and he didn't know if he could see his brother in such a state.

Around a zigzag in the tunnel, they came across an area where a wan light washed over the walls, defining the craggy surfaces, revealing bottlenecks and small cubbyhole rooms.

Another bend in the tunnel revealed the light's source. A dying torch hanging in an iron ring. The flame had marred the wall with a black halo, and on the yellowish floor, an expansive depression nearly filled the small room, appearing like an embedded, unblinking eye.

Ellie screamed, her fingers clawing Jacob's arm. A second later, when he saw what had frightened her, he hoped his eyes were deceiving him.

A Negro man writhed on the floor, or rather, a mere torso straining to pull himself toward the dilated emptiness in the floor. His insides were no longer inside; guts trailed behind him, shredded flaps of flesh slimed with blood and mucus. His face and neck were a mass of scabs, some old some fresh, while his grimace was a testament to his effort to simply move.

He groaned, pulled his arm forward, slapped his palm down, found purchase and pulled again. He gained an inch, maybe two along the floor. But still, he started again, this effort just as vigilant as the last, his motions the final struggles of a dying swimmer.

Jacob felt like screaming too, but wouldn't. He couldn't let himself lose it, no matter how he felt. Ellie was counting on him, Jimmy was counting on him. His mother would never recover if he didn't keep a level head and get out of this predicament unscathed.

Ellie couldn't take the sight. She released her grip on his arm, and not taking her eyes from the man struggling on the floor, bolted down the tunnel. She would have made a good clip, putting distance behind her, but she slammed into the twisting tunnel wall, stunning herself. She slumped to the floor, blinked a few times, but didn't lose consciousness.

Jacob approached the man, careful to avoid the puddle of blood flowing down a slight dip in the floor.

As he got closer, he could see the man was naked, and that below his ruined entrails, there was nothing. No hips, no legs or feet. Yet, he was alive.

"Hello?" Jacob said, not sure what to say.

The man kept at it, fighting to move, his eyes blinking through sweat cooling into a pasty sheen on his skin.

Jacob stepped closer and touched the man on his meaty shoulder. The man jerked his head aside, crying out. He radiated fear like a cookstove's heat.

"I, uh, my name's Jacob." The man looked at him, as if not comprehending. But Jacob could see his mind at work, trying to understand something. The man wouldn't stop blinking, his lids fluttering like a butterfly's wings, shedding tears or sweat or both to stream down his cheeks to meet at the point of his chin.

"I know you." The man reached for Jacob. "I know you."

Jacob ignored the man's ravings. There was no way he could know this Negro. He didn't know a single one, was proud of the fact he didn't. His kind didn't belong in a Fowler's life. He inched away from the Negro's grasping fingers. "What is this place?"

"Hell, boy. You're in hell. Help me up now. We gotta get to digging."

Jacob glanced at Ellie. She was staring at the last bit of the torch's flame as it struggled to stay alight. She seemed unaware of their exchange. For the first time since they found her brother's body, he saw her sucking her thumb.

The Negro caught Jacob's pant cuff, and he instinctively smacked him away. He felt bad as soon as he did. "Hey, what is this place, this room? That pit?"

The man groaned again, whirled his arm in front of him, pulled himself another meager inch. Toward the pit. Biting cold wind blew from the void. Jacob was shivering. Ellie's lips were turning blue. The man reached the lip of the precipice. "It's the end, boy. It better be. Better be." Exhausted, he rested his head against his forearm, his gaze longing for the black emptiness of the abyss.

Such a pathetic sight, Jacob had never seen.

The man twitched, then quite silently, began to cry. He couldn't do it, couldn't reach the pit in order to end his life. Couldn't just die. Some unnatural force kept him breathing and alert with full understanding of his awful predicament.

Jacob couldn't stand it any longer. Something inside him snapped. If the man had been an injured dog, he would have stomp his skull, but instead, he reached into the muck remaining at the man's waist, grabbed two fistfuls of something slithering and rope-like, then manhandled the Negro the final six inches. Instantly, the man was gone. His descent didn't make a sound. He never cried out. He was simply no longer there.

Jacob peered over the edge, and though he couldn't see into the pit, his stomach swirled with vertigo. The harsh wind stung his cheeks. When he stepped away, his feet slipped in the cold sludge of spilled blood.

He took the dying torch from its mount, then helped Ellie to stand. She went willingly, letting him guide her as if she were a blind person negotiating a busy street. Before the light could wink out for good, he ripped a strip of cloth from his shirt, and wrapped it around the torch, careful not to snuff it out. Luckily, the flame caught hold of the fabric, fed off it, brightening the tunnel. His footprints looked like long brushstrokes in the trail of blood. He could feel it still on the soles of his shoes. It sickened him knowing where it had come from. And worst of all, knowing what he had done.

"You found a light." Ellie perked up at his side. "We can leave now." She sounded relieved, reminding him of when they saw Cooper's porch and knowing they would be able to ride out the storm there.

"Let's just keep quiet. Please?"

She was, and they made their way.

 

6.

"Did we lose them?"

Cooper didn't give Jane an answer. He wanted to say yes, but that would've only been a guess. At first, they'd seen flickering light trailing them and heard the unnerving growl of their pursuers. After moving at a breakneck pace for several minutes, the light dimmed, then was gone. The sound, Cooper had never heard anything more strident and hateful, soon seemed to scatter, at moments sounding behind them, while at other times seemed to echo from branching shafts ahead of them.

"Ted?"

"I… I don't know."

"Who are they?"

"I can't say who they are now."

"Damn it, Ted, talk to me!" Since they entered the dark tunnel he had kept track of her by listening to her steps, but now she'd stopped. He couldn't remember a time he felt more alone. "Did Greta tell you who they are?"

"No, not Greta. Horace and Eunice Blankenship."

"They're dead, Ted. This is crazy. This is so unbelievably crazy."

"I know what you're thinking, but you have to--" he was going to ask her to trust him. He seemed to ask that of her a lot. But why did she have to trust him? Why would she?

"Okay. This is going to sound crazy, and no matter how crazy this sounds, don't stop me, because if you cut me off, I don't know if I could start again."

"Okay. Fine."

He waited, listening for any signs of pursuit. All seemed clear. He fumbled for Jane's hand, and it gave him a feeling of calm when her hand found his first.

"Okay, here goes--" he said, then proceeded to tell Jane about the strange pull he felt toward the Blankenship home, and about how after he bought the place he started to hear noises, then to see things. "You saw for yourself. The spirits, they're real."

"I never thought… well, I guess…" Jane stammered, but let him continue.

He told her about his onslaught of dreams, the most telling dream revealing the details of the murder of Horace and Eunice Blankenship.

"The men chasing us were bounty hunters?"

"Yes. Ethan Cartwright, his toady Arthur Scully, and a set of triplet brothers."

"They're the men chasing us?"

"Yes. And no, I have no idea how this is possible."

"If I didn't see what I saw at your house, I would never believe--wait, did you say Cartwright?"

"I know. Jasper. It's his father, Jane."

"Why didn't you tell me any of this sooner?"

"Because it's just like you said, you wouldn't have believed unless you'd seen it. It's crazy--the whole damned story. I could have told you after I met with Greta--that's when things started making sense to me. But I didn't want you to learn a family secret of mine. I think it's my family secret that's caused me to feel such a connection with the Blankenships. Why they might have chosen me to help them."

"Don't tell me, you're a son of one of those sons'a bitches?"

"No, nothing like that. Do you remember when I said my grandmother came to stay with my family?"

"How could I forget?"

"Well." He paused, but before he could have second thoughts, he blurted it out, "It turns out she was colored."

Three feet away, there was a scratching noise and a small flash of sparks. The flame danced from the cigarette lighter, shedding light on a face beset with quickly healing lesions and gaping wounds. It was one of the overall-clad triplets. He was laughing to himself, apparently proud to have gotten so close without them knowing.

"This whole time we been chasing you, I never did know you was a nigger. But then again, only a nigger would run away like you did." The man's laughter sprayed tobacco juice from his grizzled maw.

Jane glanced at Cooper before returning her frightened gaze to the undead bounty hunter. In that brief glance he saw such unabated disappointment. As if he had just revealed that he'd spent the day of the potluck (was that really today? it seemed so long ago) pissing in her iced tea.

When he looked back at the bounty hunter, Cooper had just enough time to duck under a swiping blow from the hunter's machete. It whirred an inch from his scalp and crashed into the wall behind him.

Jane screamed, no longer caring to hide their location. He took Jane's hand once again (did he feel reluctance in touch?) and they took off down the tunnel as the bounty hunter worked to free the machete. Cooper glanced over his shoulder. Having placed the cigarette lighter in a nook in the wall, the bounty hunter's anger welled--his mouth sputtered oaths and spit as he worked the blade free--just as his brethren closed in bearing torches.

Several long minutes passed with their hearts racing madly. The other bounty hunters joined the machete-wielding triplet as they took up the pursuit. Their healing bodies moved more swiftly than aboveground and they quickly gained ground. A sense of hopelessness grew within Cooper, but after turning down a branch in the tunnel, light was shining ahead, bright light that could only signal a large gathering of people.

"Gonna get you, nigger!"

 

 

7.

Almost to his disappointment, the Bradshaw girl hadn't fought Charles. Oh sure, at first she cried a bit, tried prying her arm away from him, but he made sure she didn't get any disagreeable ideas. He raised the carving knife at her. At first she'd shied away, shielding her face with a flung hand, but then he lowered the blade to her belly. When that notion settled in, the starch fell off her convictions. She became timid as a lamb. From the time he shoved her into his wagon, and even as they entered the Underground from a hidden tunnel entrance near the town dump, she didn't try anything.

Torchlight reflected the hatred simmering in the girl's eyes. Five feet away and draped in shadow, she crossed her arms and shifted on the coarse limestone floor. She didn't look away, not for a moment, as if her scathing stare alone could scar him. He paid her no mind; in fact, he should accept whatever vengeance her mind toyed with. He deserved no less.

He mirrored her positioning on the floor, but with his back to the wooden door he so often visited when dark moods swept over him. "You look sweet as a peach."

She spit in his face, quick as a snake strike. He didn't bother to wipe it away as he chuckled to himself.

With the knife pressed against her belly, she'd barely made a peep the whole way. Probably trying to think of a way to outmaneuver a drunk man getting drunker by the minute.

But, oh that would never happen.

His thoughts were never so clear as when he could scarcely stand and his words were all a jumble. His inebriated actions might not mirror his thoughts, but drink allowed him time to think, to ponder, to self pity.

As if she could read his mind, Mabel scraped her claws on her side of the rough door. She whimpered, a gruff choke of corrupted flesh.

At hearing Mabel for the first time, the girl jumped as if she'd sat on a pushpin.

"Cha-chaaa."

"I'm here, love. Always here for you." He touched the door, longing to touch his wife's cheek and the delicate line of her neck, yearned to pull her to him. He swigged from a new bottle he'd taken from under the seat of his wagon. The cheap 'shine was still high in the bottle, just below the level of the narrow neck. He was never so happy or miserable as when he had a full bottle, and in the Underground he had time enough to ponder, time enough for eternity to come and go.

"Sorry for my rudeness. Wanna pull?" He offered the girl the bottle. For the first time since he knocked on the door of the Fowler home, she looked terrified. Her eyes were wide and she reflexively placed her hand over the swell of her belly. He waited for her response, and she eventually shook her head no.

She cried softly. Her hatred bled away and she didn't seem so confident now in her chances of escaping.

"Char-char-char!" Mabel cried out, and as always, he heard a meek remnant of her former voice. "Charrrr-les!"

He unsteadily closed with the girl until he loomed over her, looking down the angle of his nose. "You ready for this?" he asked the girl.

He hadn't told her his intentions, but she wasn't waiting to find out. She took a stumbling stride, but only one. It was easy. He reached for a long lock of blonde hair, grabbed it like a horse's reins, and heeled her to the floor.

She screamed so loud it popped his ears.

"Char-Char-Charles!" Mabel echoed the girl's scream. She began pummeling herself against the door, but when he had constructed it he had used the finest timbers. She would pulp herself before breaking through.

Charles shook his head, trying to clear the swimming numbness. He tightened his grip on the girl's hair, wrapping it around his fist a couple times. Using one arm, he pulled her over to the door.

Fearing he would rip out her hair at the roots, she half walked along with him.

He reluctantly set down his bottle and use his free had to reach inside his shirt for the key hanging on its twine necklace. He ripped it off, and never thinking he'd willingly remove it from his body, an odd despair settled over him. Neither the girl struggling at his feet, nor his shrieking undead wife behind the door, would let him dwell on any thought or emotion for more than a split second.

"Please, please, stop! Whatever you're doing, please, don't." Snot dribbled down the girl's lip, mixing with tears.

"Charles!" Oh, his poor Mabel. Sounding so normal, so alive. Hearing her voice reassured him that this was the right thing to do. It made everything all right.

As he worked the key into the lock, Mabel slammed into the door. He nearly dropped the key, but he squeezed it, stabbed it into the lock, turned.

How easily everything could have fallen apart if he would have dropped the key.

"Please! I'm begging you, I won't tell anyone."

The key engaged with a click he felt but couldn't hear over all the hysterics.

The door flew open, a shadow seemed to fall in its wake. Then he saw her sharp nails flailing, her ashen skin, eyes wild and seeking.

He shielded himself with the girl's body. She screamed and writhed in his arms, trying to get away. Mabel was shredding and tearing into the girl as if she were a plaything thrown into the pit. But he held fast, more out of a sense of preserving his own safety than anything. The girl screamed once more, more shrill and maddening than any of the others, but it was her last. Mabel swiped her claws across the girl's throat, and her voice was silenced.

Maybe it was instinct. Maternal instinct. Or perhaps some small part of her brain still functioned on a human level, but Mabel halted her assault, stepping away from the girl, apprising her as an artist would a canvas.

As the girl's body fell to the floor, Mabel looked at Charles.

He extended a trembling hand to touch his wife's cheek when she stepped closer. She flinched at his warmth, appeared ready to snap at him with her vicious teeth. But she didn't. Her eyes held his, and she did understand. In that moment, it felt like all those years ago, when she could look into his eyes, knowing exactly his intentions.

 

 

8.

None of the knowledge passed on to Arlen gave him any forewarning that he would see Ellie Banyon and Jacob Fowler lurking in the shadows of the Underground. They seemed raw with fear as they bumbled their way down the tunnel. When he heard their approach, he didn't know who it was. Not wanting his destiny so easily derailed, he pressed flat into a vertical crevasse. A handful of uncertain strides and they were upon him, walking side by side, inches from his hiding spot. At first he didn't know who they were, but his vision was well adjusted to limited light. To conserve fuel he would often work his gopher hole in little or no light once he found a ripe vein to tap, digging at it by feel. He thought about calling out to them--they had both been nice to him, and now more than ever he valued those who had acted so graciously--but decided against it the last second. He didn't want to have to explain his reason for being Underground or what he was carrying. His rucksack was heavy with dynamite. If they got hurt, which he thought was more likely than not, he would feel bad, but that couldn't be helped.

He listened, waited. When he figured they were gone, he waited five minutes more. Then he left his hiding place, listened again, then went on his way. He was close, he felt it in his bones. They ached from the damp. The air was laden with the smell of it, earthy, moldy. Cleansing. He needed to find a single wall, but it had to be the correct wall. Otherwise, it would just be a tremor rumbling through the tunnels. Maybe there would be smoke or a collapsed stretch of tunnel, but little more. Once he found the right place to stash his bundle, there would be a lot more than just a little trembler.

He'd found the six sticks of dynamite in a damp crate in an abandoned shaft of the Grendal mines the previous spring. He almost didn't bother opening the crate; it was oily and sodden, but when he unwrapped the oil-clothed bundle inside, the sticks were dry as bone. They must have been there a considerable amount of time since they had a timing wick instead of a plunger detonator. Those sort of things hadn't been used since…

…the mines opened in the 1840s, and even then, those wicks were quickly abandoned for more modern, safer detonators…

He knew this information as if he'd been there wearing his helmet with its candle flaring on its brim, crawling through the deplorable murk of the early mine.

Recalling whose knowledge he just accessed would be easy if he tried, but he didn't have time to waste. His fingers fluttered against the uneven rock walls, ten independent divining rods searching for a sweet spot. He closed his eyes despite the darkness, concentrating, calculating, understanding.

He never told his mom about his find. At the time, he didn't think she'd let him keep the explosives, but maybe she knew all along. She always seemed to know what was on his mind. So he'd locked the dynamite away for the most opportune time to use it. There wasn't a lot of it; he'd figured if he'd ever come across a large vein in his gopher hole, he'd use the sticks to blow it wide and get to its root. Strike enough coal to keep his mom comfortable in her waning years. Now that she was gone (I miss you already, Mom) would there be a more opportune time?

A spreading numbness in his fingertips quickly became a thrumming vibration. He could sense it in his fingers, his arms, the sound of it seemed to fill his ears. His memories. His family's memories. Rushing water, violent, kinetic. He pressed his hands flat to the wall, the tips of his index fingers meeting, his thumbs also, as if he were about to push the wall in and let loose the stored energy hidden behind it all these many millennia.

Behind this wall, the underground lake. Waiting.

 

 

9.

"Ellie, you won't tell anyone what I did, will you?" The guilt had gotten to him, enough so that he broke their silence. He didn't know how much time had elapsed since they saw the living remains of that colored man, but he couldn't stop thinking about the total lack of sound after he pushed him into the lightless abyss.

"I didn't see nothing, Jacob." For once Ellie sounded younger than her age. Normally, talking to her was like talking to someone from his own class at school, but now he was reminded of the fact that she was five years younger than him.

School. Class. He couldn't imagine rejoining his schoolmates when the school year started in a month. "Whatever happened, you wouldn't have done nothing wrong. You always do the right thing."

He felt better for a few seconds then realized that wasn't true. If he always did the right thing, he would've done something, anything, to prevent what happened to George (and possibly his brother), and he wouldn't worry his mother so often. She didn't deserve it; she'd been through too much trauma in her life and had withstood every wave of it. Just as soon as they got out of this, he would hug her, ask her to forgive him for all he'd done, and do his best not to bother her nerves another day of her life.

The torch's flame was once again dying, and there was little for him to do. The fabric trick worked for a few minutes, then the light would quickly peter out. They would soon again have to walk in complete darkness.

Fretting over the dying torch, he heard noises coming from branches in the tunnel. It didn't appear that Ellie noticed it. She was just a walking, blinking, scared little girl, not ready or willing to take on anymore of the unknown. He tried to steer their path to avoid the sound. They were voices, he could tell now. Rising and falling in volume and intensity. It sounded like an animal articulating with a human voice. Then came the sound of metal impacting stone, followed by a high pitched scream. A familiar scream. His mom.

"Miss Fowler!"

"Shh! Quiet. I have to hear… wait, there it is. It's this way. Let's go!"

"What's she doing down here?"

"How would I know? Be quiet."

"Maybe she followed us down here."

They followed a sharp-turning left bend, then a less severe right. There was light ahead. Rich, warm and golden. At the same time, his torch gave up its flame. He tossed it aside.

"There's people ahead. I bet Dr. Thompson's there. We're saved, Jacob!"

He didn't respond, but he did feel a rush of relief knowing they weren't just drifting farther into the earth with no end in sight.

There was a soft noise behind them as if someone had kicked a rock. Before Jacob could turn around to investigate, a hand reached around from behind him, slapping over his mouth. From the choked scream next to him, the same thing happened to Ellie. He felt instant rage. They had come so far, had done so well to stay hidden.

His mom was in trouble. Somewhere close. And someone was keeping him from helping her. He started to struggle, jerking from side to side, search for a weak point in his captor's hold.

Jacob's shoulder knocked into Ellie's as the person pulled them against his chest. Both filth and a trace of dread emanated from their attacker.

"Shh," a quavering voice spoke as the person leaned over their shoulders. "Don't say nothing, knucklehead."

The hand eased from Jacob's mouth and it was all he could do to stifle the volume of his voice. "Jimmy? Is that you?"

His brother answered by hugging them both.

"Jimmy? Hey, Jimmy?" Jacob said after several moments.

"What is it?"

"You stink worse than a pig sty."

"Sorry 'bout that. Been awhile since my last bath."

"Mom's in trouble. She's up ahead."

"I know, that's why we can't go that way."

"What do you mean? We can't just leave her."

"We're not. We can't just storm down the tunnel like that. Not this tunnel. There's a better way that's quieter and more roundabout."

"But, Jimmy--"

"Jacob, you listen to me. You don't understand what you've gotten yourself in to. They will kill you without batting an eye. They don't care you're a kid, or Ellie, either. They'd kill you like--"

"Like they did George," Ellie said, and it wasn't a question at all, but confirmation of what she'd been thinking for a while.

"Yeah, like George."

They all embraced, no hint of embarrassment ruined the moment for Jacob. He had longed to see his brother again, more than anything, and now here he was.

"I missed you, Jimmy."

"I missed you, too. We better get going. We'll find Mom, then get you out of here."

 

 

10.

Cooper held Jane as they cowered in the middle of the high-walled pit. Blood stains patched the rough ground and walls. The group of men who captured them (and killed Greta, and oh God, George and possibly Jimmy, too) gathered at the pit's mouth, animatedly discussing their fate. Their appearances were returning to normal; rot receded, wounds healed, but Cooper thought they sure were an ugly lot just the same. When they were at their most degraded, he couldn't distinguish one man from another, but now he could easily size them up. Two of the men were identical, he realized, the same as they appeared in his dreams. Two of three identical brothers who stormed the Blankenship home in search of runaway slaves. They looked like misplaced farmers. These two were the most vehement of the bunch. They raised their fists in anger as they vented their wrath. They spit into the pit, disgusted with intruders in what they termed their "Paradise."

Every time they mentioned his "nigger blood," Jane winced at his side. Trembling as she looked above, her eyes caught firelight. She had yet to react to his pronouncement. He feared he might have misjudged her. They wouldn't be in this whole mess if he hadn't opened his big mouth. Jane wouldn't be shying away from looking at him if he would have kept his secret to himself.

But her clammy hand fell into his, and he clutched it, and for the briefest moment, it was like none of this was happening.

"They're going to kill us," she said angrily.

"If we let them." He tried to sound more courageous than he felt. A rock blurred by his shoulder, cracked against the wall behind them. The man who threw the rock wore an unabashed grin. Cooper's courage was swiftly fleeting. There was no place to hide, no way to scurry up the walls without being attacked and thrown back down to break their necks.

Jane inhaled sharply. He followed her line of sight to the gathering people, now standing three deep all around them. Of all the people, one person focused Jane's attention.

The woman stood out as she had when Cooper saw her in the normal aboveground world. Luscious lips painted red, flowing hair catching and holding the dim surrounding light. An alluring figure, yet one glinting with barely controlled anger.

Thea Calder.

She saw that they had taken note of her, and it seemed as if the crowd did also. There was a temporary ebb in the volume of the throng, broken when Thea bunched up her fists and stormed off, the crowd parting before her like a split seam in fabric. The crowd roared as if making up for the momentary quiet, before finding a steady static hum.

Slurs and spit and more rocks hurled into the pit. Cooper and Jane huddled low, covering their heads with their hands and forearms. This caused another roar to ripple through the crowd, this one tinged with laughter.

Yes, yes you are getting to us, Cooper thought.

A voice cut through the rest. Confident, somehow mirthful, Cooper recognized the voice from his dreams, and just recently, as the leader of the bounty hunters. Ethan Cartwright. "You two make a wonderful couple, I've gotta give you that. Ted Cooper. That's a white man's name. You have your white skin, your greasy white man's hair. You have white man's money, yet, you're a nigger. How about that, friends? Vic Borland heard it from his own mouth. That'll show you what they'll do, what they'll try to get away with. But it never works out the way they want, taking and taking and taking some more, taking right from the white man for his own. It never works.

"And you, Jane Fowler, cowering in filth with your arms draped over a nigger, when all these years you wouldn't let a white man come within an arm's length. Toiling along at your pathetic farm since your husband's demise, all these years acting more a man than not, not even attempting to keep your place. Makes you question things, folks. It surely does. What really happened to Dwight Fowler? How convenient a death he had. You, taking up his plow, his sweat and toil, taking up the burden of your land as if you were a man. Makes you wonder if Jane Fowler would rather take up with someone of the fairer sex, doesn't it?"

A grumble flowed through the crowd, agreeing with their leader. She no longer looked at the crowd. She dipped her face to her palms, sobbing.

"These two are vermin. Deserving of each other, deserving the same fate--"

Ethan's speech became a garbled scream. Cooper looked up and saw someone attacking him. A long knife handle protruded from Ethan's neck, and a group of angered men were prying the attacker away from their leader.

"This must end!" the attacker shouted, his voice drowned by the shocked clamor of Ethan's followers. Cooper saw clearly the gray wispy hair cut in a blunt Magee haircut, and the angular frame of an old man unfamiliar with manual labor. But he'd never seen such rage in the man or the vigor in which he moved. Dr. Thompson lunged with a blood-soaked hand for the knife sticking from Cartwright's neck. His fingers closed on the slick handle and held. The doctor's eyes lit up in triumph as he twisted the blade and tugged the wound wider.

"I will end this, Ethan. Even if I have to cut your head from your shoulders!"

Ethan's eyes boggled as his blood poured down his front. Thompson yanked back on the knife and a crimson spray arched down into the pit. He struck again near the original wound, driving the blade to the hilt. The room was strangely quiet. Ethan's followers stood back, unsure what to do, or perhaps even glad for the attack. Many in the crowd stepped away, as if it were possible for them to be sickened by the sight of blood.

"This must end! You--"

Ethan mustered his strength and punched the doctor in the Adam's apple, silencing him. Thompson went over in a heap, grasping his crushed throat. Two of the Borland brothers rushed over and grabbed the doctor by either arm, securing him long after any practical need. The old man's face was creased with veins, his skin darkening to purple as his air flow ceased.

Ethan took hold of the knife handle and pried it from his neck. Blood dripped steadily from his drenched shirt, but his strength never appeared to ebb.

"Foolish old man." Ethan kicked the doctor under the jaw, sending him tumbling back.

The doctor struggled to his knees at the lip of the pit, grasping at Ethan's pant cuffs.

Ethan squatted to the doctor's level and took hold of his chin, staring into his eyes as he suffocated.

"Do me a favor," Ethan said between gritted teeth. "Say hello to my son." Cartwright slapped Thompson and he cartwheeled into the pit, crashing mere feet from Cooper and Jane, dead on impact. Jane flinched next to Cooper and backed away from the body.

A nervous hiss passed through the crowd, but Ethan barely missed a beat. Blood flooded through his fingers as he held a hand to his neck. He cleared his throat and spit into the pit. The crowd's energy began to rise again. Ethan's voice was weaker, but still vehement: "So be done with it. The world, our Paradise, will be a better place without them. All three of them, in fact. And anyone else who chooses to stand against me will follow suit."

The words were barely out of his mouth when a renewed barrage of stones flew.

They pounded Cooper's flesh and fell dully to the floor of the pit. A large rock smashed into Jane's forehead. Her eyes rolled and she fell backward as if flung down by a rubberband. Her head bounced on the pit floor. She shuddered, then lay still. Pelting rocks stung his skin, but he still managed to crawl to her. He tried shielding her from the worst of it, hoping she hadn't received a mortal wound.

 

 

11.

They skirted around the area where Jacob and Jimmy's mother had screamed, drifting farther from the light. Jacob would have simply sprinted blindly into the fray, but Jimmy seemed to know the tunnels and the importance of stealth in such a place. He was also acting strange. Jacob couldn't put a finger on it right away. But as they moved cautiously, walking with deliberate vigilance, pausing to listen, walking another ten feet before stopping yet again, it became obvious. His brother was uncharacteristically skittish with fear. He jumped at the slightest sound, waved for their little group to lean against the wall, melting into deeper shadows. It didn't matter how he was acting, Jacob would still follow Jimmy. This was Jimmy, after all. His brother. His hero.

A pungent odor wafted through the tunnel that assaulted his senses and made him more reluctant to move. It was decay, not old and desiccated, but new, fresh and wet with rot. Ellie scrunched her face and held her nose. Jimmy seemed unfazed.

"This tunnel follows directly around to what they call their Paradise. I'm pretty sure that's where they're keeping Mom. Once we free Mom and get you guys aboveground, I'll go back and free the others," Jimmy said.

That word piqued Jacob's ear. Paradise. Down here. In the gloom, in the damp, with screams echoing down mysterious corridors. "Paradise, what's that?"

"That's what they call it. It'll be their main gathering place. Kinda like a town square."

Ellie stopped dead in her tracks. "There's others down here? Other prisoners?"

"Harold and Edwina. They're imprisoned too. I can't leave without them. Harold helped me escape from my chains."

"Let's find Mom first," Jacob said, trying to keep focus on what was most important.

"Of course," Jimmy said, then held up a hand yet again to quiet them so he could listen. When he was satisfied, he waved them on. Periodically, lighted tunnels branched away from the one they were keeping to, dimly lighting their way.

"Who are they, the others?" Ellie asked. Still swooning from the cloying stench, she spoke with her hand covering her nose and mouth.

"A family. There's Harold and his daughter, Edwina. Benjamin, Edwina's husband, he was here too, until recently. I haven't seen him, not since they took him away when he tried to save me from being attacked. Harold thinks they did something to him. Something terrible," Jimmy paused, as if recalling the gruesome details. Jacob thought about the man/torso, the living person he had shoved into the pit, perhaps as much to rid his sight of him as to ease his suffering. He was going to ask his brother if the other prisoners were coloreds, but decided against it.

"But maybe he's free now," Jimmy continued. "Free or dead, either option is better than what happens down here. They've been enslaved for a long time. Too long."

"Any amount of time would be too long," Ellie said.

Jimmy looked down at her with unwavering affection. He put his hand on her head, softly, as if he didn't want to muss her hair. Jacob knew how easy it was to love Ellie's innocence and strength. She really was like the sister he never had.

"Who attacked you, Jimmy?" he asked. He wondered who could have done that to Benjamin, if the man/torso had been Benjamin.

The tunnel curved even more sharply back toward where their mother had screamed. He hoped it was the right direction. He already understood how easy it was to become lost down here.

His brother, still looking at Ellie, grimaced as he turned to face him. "Just two men. Two really bad men."

Thinking Jacob was satisfied with such a vague answer, he returned his attention to the girl. "What's wrong, Ellie? Do I need a bath that bad?"

Jacob saw a glimpse of Jimmy's old silliness.

"Don't you smell that?"

Before he could answer, a voice issued from the darkness ahead, little more than a whisper: "He took it. He took it, Jimmy. Took it from me."

Jimmy held up his arms to halt their progress.

Strides scrapped across the floor, a slow grating of bone on sandpaper. "Jimmyyyy…"

A wash of light was at their feet, a distant torch's farthest reach.

The girl stepped into the light, her face pasty white--not just pale, bloodless. Blood stained her lower half, from just below the swell of her breast to nearly touching her feet. A rent traveled the same distance through the fabric of her dress. Jacob didn't want to acknowledge this girl. That would make it all too real. Next to him, Ellie yelped as if slapped, then slumped to the floor, having fainted.

Jimmy. Poor Jimmy. He just stood and stared at Louise--Jacob could deny it no longer, it was Louise, and she was in sorry shape, and her belly was no longer taut and rounded--then his brother started trembling, finally stepping forward, catching the girl in his arms.

"Thank, God. I found you, Jimmy… He took the baby. It hurt so… s-so bad, but… but…" She shook free of his embrace, stared into his eyes. She placed her hands where they used to rest at the crest of her pregnancy, but they encountered empty air. "It was a boy, just like you wanted. A little boy, oh he's so small, and he's screaming and squalling and afraid. He needs me, Jimmy. He's going to starve, and it's so cold down here--it's freezing."

"Who, Louise, who did this to you?" His voice was quiet, yet firm, trying to console while still cutting through her shock. Jacob didn't know how Jimmy could be so rational when he himself had trouble staying upright and cognizant. "Who took our baby, Louise?"

"Banyon," she said finally. Her eyes fell to Ellie's slumped form. Jacob didn't think Louise was aware of where she was, or that she was looking at the daughter of a killer. Her eyes rolled back and it was like an invisible hand swiped her soul from her flesh. She was a thing now, an object--no longer living--merely blood and bones and wasted youth. Jimmy caught her under the arms, eased her to the floor. He kissed her closed eyelids, one after the other. When he stood, the rage in his eyes made Jacob take a step back. Rational thought was gone, caution thrown out along with it. Hands clenched into tight white fists, he headed in the direction from which Louise had emerged. Before Jacob could call out, his brother was lost in the darkness, consumed with still darker intent.

 

 

12.

Arlen snugged the dynamite bundle at the wall's base. He lit a wooden match, transferring the flame to the timing wick. Once certain it caught, he snuffed the match, then turned to walk away. The sour sulfur odor of the match trailed after him. The wick sparked and spit as it ran its length, the duration of its life a matter of a few short minutes.

 

 

13.

Jacob felt torn. Should he follow his brother? He didn't want to let him out of sight, not after fearing he would never see him again, but Ellie was groggily murmuring to herself as she recovered on the floor. He couldn't leave her, either.

"Wha… what happened?" She sat up, still woozy.

He went to her side and put a hand at her elbow to help her stand. "Are you okay? You didn't hit your head, did you?"

"No. No, I think I'm fine." Ellie saw Louise. Thankfully, when she died she fell forward at an angle that hid the worst of her wounds. Her awkward position was the only outward sign that she wasn't simply sleeping. No one would choose to sleep like that. "Oh, Louise. Who could do something like that?"

He recalled Louise's final words, but didn't repeat them. "I don't know. Jimmy went to find out."

"What do we do now, Jacob?" she asked as tears flowed down her dirt-smudged face. Jacob was tiring of seeing her cry. He didn't see it as a character flaw by any means; he simply wished she wouldn't be thrust into situations that compelled her to cry.

"I… I just don't know."

Sitting close for warmth, they were as lost and tentative as two kids could ever be. Water dripped nearby, methodically, maddeningly. Next to them, Louise began to stir.

 

 

14.

Jimmy charged down the tunnel, angry at himself for destroying his life, his future with Louise, their baby. Their baby boy. A fragment of him wanted to feel proud, but the feeling was buried by the rage compelling him through the twists burrowing into the earth.

When he came to the Banyon home in the middle of the night to share one last boyhood adventure with George, he knew that Louise was pregnant. But he couldn't face reality, not just yet. He just had to go searching for the mythical White Bane.

How could I be so stupid?

He wasn't sure how long he had been hearing the sound; rage thrummed through his ears, an all-encompassing claustrophobia that made him feel submerged inside a heart's chamber, with blood flowing over his skin instead of air.

But then he heard it. A cooing sound. Cutting through the morass.

Ahead, a feeble light outlined figures with foul luminescence. A torch wavered on the cave floor, cast off and dying. A wooden door was open wide leading to an unseen chamber. He'd found the source of the stench Ellie had complained about. Living rot and corrupted flesh, she huddled on the floor cupping something in her scabrous pale arms.

She was cooing.

The incongruous nature of an inhuman beast attempting such soothing sounds halted Jimmy.

An amorphous shape next to the undead woman shifted, stepping toward Jimmy and the sallow light. The light articulated his features. Scrubby salt and pepper beard, bleary eyes, paunchy stomach, skinny limbs. Charles Banyon raised a hand to stop Jimmy, and for some reason, Jimmy stopped in his tracks. Charles looked back at the cooing form, his lips flirting with a grim smile that quickly disappeared.

The woman rocked the bundle in her arms, too quickly, too ungently. She didn't know what she was doing. Even if she wanted to, she would be incapable of giving maternal care. That particular trait was reserved for the living.

The bundle twitched in her arms, squawked pathetically, then fell silent. Eventually, the cooing stopped, too. The cold air, laden with anticipation, became still weightier with the passing seconds.

"CHRRR!" the thing grunted and stood. The bundle fell to the floor, tumbled away, forgotten. Its contents unrolled partway from the blood sodden rag, but didn't move. A tiny arm fell out, hanging at an impossible angle. "CHRRR!" she grunted again, rising to her full height.

Jimmy saw her eyes (how could someone lacking a soul have such emotion, such fury?), and vaguely recalled a similar face. A face imbued with warmth and hope and tranquility. It was Charles Banyon's wife, Mabel. Long dead. No details from his recollection existed in the woman standing before him. But it was her, no doubt, and somehow she still moved. Somehow she had held his baby boy as he died. She had taken what little time his child had in this world, had looked on his face with those crazed eyes as he took his last breath.

Mabel grabbed her husband's shirt collar, pulling him close to her, as if to embrace him. She pinned him to the wall, forcing the breath from his lungs. She went at him with her long, razor-like nails, ripping fabric, flesh, burrowing rails of muscle and bone. Blood pulsed from his wounds, falling in a wash, forming a growing puddle at his feet.

He never put up a fight. His expression, while pained, never wavered as he gazed with ill-fitting affection at his wife. His life was draining as quickly as his blood.

Jimmy didn't have long. Crouched low, keeping to the shadows, he reached the rag-draped boy and rewrapped him, as if his actions could stave off the cold. He hefted the form to his body, and oh God was he a light thing! Not much more a burden than the rags themselves. Before he was seen, he turned away from the Banyons. The baby felt like bones in a sack against his chest. Hollow bird bones, undeveloped, fragile, and… dead.

He was crying. He couldn't help it. He never thought he would ever want this baby. He was too young, not sure yet what he would do with his life, but now he wanted his boy to be alive and sighing in his arms like a contented, thriving bundle of joy.

Eyes blurred with tears, he didn't want to look back. Seeing any more just might break something inside him.

But then a brief explosion flashed behind him. Loud enough to ring his ears even at a distance. It had been brief, and he did look back, and he was astonished that a shotgun blast could be so earth shaking.

One of those Borland brothers wore a wicked grin, the barrel of his weapon threading smoke through the air. The blast had catapulted Mabel Banyon into a wall. She slid to the floor, painting the wall with a crimson streak like a misplaced shadow.

Charles was still alive. Barely. Flayed bands of flesh trembled on the floor next to Mabel. It disgusted Jimmy to see him still trying to get at that Borland brother. His loyalty to his wife remained even though she had effectively killed him.

Borland laughed and launched a shit-brown gob of spit in Charles's face. He waited until that hopeless mess on the floor got real close, then placed the gun barrel against his forehead and pulled the trigger. The concussion of the blast and barrel flash assaulted Jimmy's senses.

Charles no longer moved. When the ringing in Jimmy's ears dissipated, he could hear Borland laughing even harder.

Mabel's knife-sharp fingernails stopped his laughter. At once, the sound seized inside him as if he were choking on a hambone. Mabel had circled around to his side so he couldn't see her movement in the shadows (how a beast can be so cunning but can't properly rock a baby, Jimmy thought), then jammed her nails into his chest, wriggled them with a twisting motion, impaling him to the third knuckle. She coiled her wrist as if searching for something, and Borland let out a bewildered shriek of pain. Mabel probed some more, each movement punctuated by a more perplexed yet fading cry from Borland.

Jimmy didn't wait for Mabel to notice him. He turned back, heading toward Jacob, Ellie and… Louise. He had almost forgotten about Louise. How could he forget about Louise? His love, his child's mother. She had died in his arms. Only minutes ago.

Now she could never leave.

What had he done to deserve this? He was damned to never leave this place as well, to never walk under the warm sun, never enjoy the fragrance of spring carried by the wind. And his family, stunted before it could find its roots.

Sprinting through the near-dark, he resolved to not spend his damnation alone. Louise was dead, but would she have yet risen? The thought gave him the briefest, dimmest spark of hope. But he clung to it as if it were a blazing nova. It was all he had.

 

 

15.

Within seconds Cooper would loose consciousness, and once that empty black wall descended on him, he would never wake.

Pinned beneath him, Jane moaned. Through the murk, he reached out to touch her face. The rock that had hit her above the right eye had left a nasty welt. His fingers came away bloody, but she was twitching below him. Remarkably, her eyes flickered open.

"Don't move," he said, the dark veil of unconsciousness thrown aside.

"I don't think I could if I tried."

"If we don't move, they'll think we're dead."

"My skin--"

"It's tingling?"
"Yes. What is it?"

"I think, somehow, it's healing. I feel it, too."

"What is this place?"

Cooper didn't have a chance to respond. A concussive blast trembled through the cave floor, through the walls, shook the ceiling until still more rocks and still larger boulders, collapsed in on them. The air itself vibrated with violent energy. A blanketing wind throttled down the tunnel, came crashing full-tilt into the people gathered at the lip of the pit, sending a handful over the edge. Screams rose from above; rocks fell; people flailed against each other to get away. The world was chaos. The ground trembled, then again with less force, and then a final time a faded echo of the first.

"What happened?" Jane huddle against Cooper's chest. While the ground no longer quaked, boulders still dislodged from above, thudding to the floor nearby.

Many of the torches had gone out. He could barely see. "Some kind of explosion. The walls are coming in." He grabbed her as he stood, pulling them both flat against the wall, trying to make themselves as small a target as possible for falling debris.

The crowd was recovering. Dust showered down now with only intermittent stones. Whatever caused the explosion, it seemed to be behind them.

Four others were in the pit. Two women stood together, crying. An old man cupped his hands around his mouth, shouting for help from above. The women held one another, scurrying away when they noticed Cooper and Jane on the far side of the pit. They looked like they expected to be attacked or bludgeoned.

The fourth person was one of the bounty hunters who chased them from Greta's house. Blood flowed over his face from his gashed scalp, coating him in a red mask. His wicked grin was made more wicked by debris that had shattered most of his front teeth. He spit out the remains of teeth, and oblivious to the surrounding chaos, he advanced on them, flicking a machete at his side as if testing its weight.

Cooper stepped in front of Jane. They circled the pit as the bounty hunter stalked them with deliberate slowness.

Having heard the old man's screams for assistance, a kind soul tossed a thick rope down into the pit. Immediately, the two women began shoving each other to gain an advantage in reaching the rope first. They were soon scratching and clawing each other over who would first receive a lift to freedom. It was a catty thing, more bluster than anger, until a fingernail of the shorter of the two dug a furrow in the cheek of the other. This ended any possibility for a civil ending. Fists were thrown and landed with meaty thuds, hair was pulled and came loose at the bloody roots. The two ignored the saving rope, scourging one another during the time it would take to hoist both to safety one after the other.

After staring at the fight for a moment, the old man looped the rope around his waist, and with the help of those above, he crabbed walked up the wall. As his spindly legs disappeared from view, a sound with the sudden ferocity of a dozen locomotives nearly deafened Cooper.

He covered his ears instinctively, but his eardrums popped as the tunnel's air pressure abruptly changed. Jane cried out, and though she stood just behind him, the sound came as a whisper through a paper cone.

The bounty hunter was ten feet away when the uproarious sound ripped through the tunnel. After briefly hesitating, he quickened his advance.

There was no place to go. No hiding place. This is the last second of my life, Cooper thought morbidly. The machete glinted through an upward arc, leaving Cooper with only enough time to meet the blade with an upraised forearm. He waited the inevitable bite.

It didn't come.

What did come was water. A raging flood as mighty as Neptune's thrown fist, it hurtled down from the tunnel above, pouring into the pit, catching the bounty hunter squarely in the chest. The force bent him in half backwards, and if not for the water's beast-like roar, Cooper would hear a dozen bones snapping. The man disappeared in a flume of white water that crashed into the far wall. The curve of the pit redirected the water's energy, swirling it around to scour the edges, flooding higher.

The water had lost some of its punch, but it still upended Cooper when it reached him. He lost contact with Jane, and as he struggled to keep his head above water, she went under, her face falling forward as if she had simply fallen asleep. The water lapped over her, still higher, rising to fill the pit. If Cooper didn't find her within seconds, she would never survive this.

 

 

16.

Jimmy carried his dead son wrapped in the soiled rag. He heard their voices--bewildered and frightened and escalating in volume--long before he came upon them.

So Louise had risen.

He had hoped to reach them before it happened, if for no other reason than to prepare his brother and Ellie. But he was too late. Too late to save his son (his son… his son, would the boy ever have a name?), too late to shield Jacob and Ellie from the awful sight of Louise rising from the dead. His mother, she was down here too, and she'd been screaming in pain. Would he be too late to save her as well?

"Jimmy?" Louise's voice was stronger now than during her life's final moments.

There was a hesitation, but then Jacob said, "He's… he's not here. He left."

"Where? Where's Jimmy? I need him. Our boy, he was taken… taken by Banyon." Louise spoke the words Jimmy was hoping to never hear again, words he hoped Ellie would never have to hear.

"No, not Daddy. He would never. No! NO!"

Jimmy sprinted into the tunnel, the trio awash in meager light. All at once their gazes fell on him. Pinning him in place. Those stares seeking knowledge, truth, coherency. And then, as one, their eyes fell to the bundle in his arms.

"Jimmy!" Louise shouted and ran to him. He held her against his chest, the dead thing held between them.

She felt the bundle between them, understanding what it was. "Jimmy! You found him!"

"No. No, babe, I was too late. He's gone."

Ellie stepped toward them. "It's a lie, Jimmy. Why would she say something like that? Daddy would never do something so…" her own choked sob cut her off. Because she knew. No matter how hard the man had tried to live the straight and narrow, the gravid pull of darkness had an even stronger magnetism. Simple enough: she alone was not enough to keep him good.

Louise was still trying to pull away, stunned by knowing what he held in his arms. But he didn't let go. If anything, he held her more vehemently. He didn't want Ellie to see any more. Didn't want to let go of his first and only love. He wanted to never leave her side, he realized. He would never let her go.

"Ellie, please, don't." Jacob took hold of her arm.

She regained her voice. She trembled and stepped closer to him, "Say it, Jimmy. Say he didn't do it!" she screamed through streaming tears. Her wounded voice quaked. She was daring him to lie to her. As if lying to protect her feelings would confirm that her father was an evil man more so than the outward truth. She was challenging him, waiting his answer.

Jimmy didn't have a chance to speak. The explosion hammered through the tunnel, sending everyone sprawling.

Jacob fell atop Ellie and covered both their heads. Jimmy held fast to the unmoving bundle, Louise also still in his grasp. He didn't know what was happening, but if this was a final judgment sent down by some higher power, he didn't want to lose contact with his family. Jimmy leaned over--rocks peppering down in a violent hail--and pressed his lips against Louise's. She kissed him back, and her lips were still death-cold, leaching the warmth from him. A trail of blood had dried across her mouth, and he tasted the coppery tang, but he didn't care.

The explosion grumbled and growled, losing its strength. A nearby wall had partially collapsed, but for the most part, the area was clear of debris. Dust billowed from one far end of the tunnel, sweeping across them in a cool wash. It passed by and continued on, as if compelled to escape some further calamity.

"Is everyone okay?" Jimmy called out.

Jacob answered, walking from the settling dust toward Jimmy's voice. He had his arm around Ellie. Their faces were powdery white, like actors painted as ghosts for a stage play.

A thundering noise shook the walls; it was the violent rush of water, undoubtedly, as loud as Jimmy imagined it would sound going over Niagara Falls. Jimmy had always considered it the most daring feat to attempt, and he'd often dreamed about surviving the foolhardy plunge, but now with the sound so close, the idea seemed absurd.

He handed the baby to Louise, who held it close to her bosom. The walls themselves were shaking. He touched the rough surface, and he could feel the water rushing just on the other side of a thin rock wall, pounding, gouging, seeking further avenues to drown and scourge.

"This wall is gonna come in. Get moving!" Everyone followed him down a tunnel he knew would take them to higher ground. The wall wouldn't last long assaulted by the force of that water.

He reached out, held Louise's hand. "I thought I lost you."

"Never. Everyone said you ran away. That's what everyone was trying to tell me. That you went off to the army. But I didn't believe it."

"I'd never leave. Just wanted one last adventure. I'm sorry I was so stupid. I've ruined everything."

Every ten seconds or so Jacob looked back to make sure their group was intact. The way his little brother was handling things, Jimmy knew he could lead their family once aboveground. He was growing up. Maturing into a man. Much faster and less reluctantly than he had managed. It was a small comfort.

Jimmy nodded to him, urging him on. Jacob kept his arm around Ellie. She was holding up as good as could be imagined. Her family was gone now, too. And she'd just learned her father was a killer. Whatever came of this, he'd never let her know he'd also killed him, despite Benjamin's best effort to thwart his attack. Some things were better left unsaid.

He was damned to stay in this hell forever. But Louise, he still had Louise--

With distance, the roaring water diminished, but now the sound was intensifying again, increasing rapidly. It was so loud Jimmy didn't realize Louise was trying to speak to him. She yanked on his arm to get his attention.

He leaned over so she could yell into his ear. Even at such close proximity, it was hard to make out her words.

"What!"

"The baby's moving!"

No, no, I can't let this happen. To me yes, if it has to be anyone, let it be me, and Louise, if that's the only way I can be with her, let it be so. But not the baby. Not my boy!

His mind was jumbled with conflicting thoughts. He had to sort through the clutter, figure out how to handle this. All of this. It was nearly too much to take in at once.

The tunnel was splitting ahead. Jimmy knew where they were. There was a way to the surface in either direction.

Frightened by the coming violent wave, the group pulled tighter. "What's happened?" Jacob asked.

"The wall is gone, the tunnels are flooding."

"Oh no," Ellie said in a deflated voice.

Jimmy shouted to be heard, "You have to go. I couldn't live with myself if you didn't make it out of here."

"What do you mean? You're coming with, right?"

"Not yet. I want you two safe, but I still need to get Mom, not to mention Harold and Edwina. You get Ellie to the surface, get help, whoever will listen. Let them know what's happened."

Jacob looked like a child who was just told Santa didn't exist. His lip trembled. "But…"

Jimmy shook his head. Louise cried out at his side, and Jacob looked at the writhing bundle in her arms.

He understood immediately, even if he didn't comprehend the nature of the Underground. "Okay, Jimmy, but you better be right behind us," he said nervously, trying to be brave.

"We'll catch up to you."

"We can't leave you," Ellie said.

"We'll be fine. I know these tunnels and what paths to take to be safe. All you two have to do is stay left, stay left and keep climbing through to higher tunnels. You'll reach the surface in no time. Now go. I'll see you topside."

Before Jacob could be dismissed, he hugged Jimmy. He said something into his ear, but the rushing water was too loud for him to understand.

Long after Jacob and Ellie had turned away and were swallowed by the shadows, Jimmy wondered what those final words had been.

 

 

17.

Jacob labored climbing the tunnel's steep incline, and while rosy-cheeked and panting for breath, Ellie seemed to be holding up fine. Looking at her, you'd never think someone so young and frail-looking would be so resilient.

But she was pushing him to keep up with her. Surging water roared behind them, still gaining ground with the passing seconds. The prospects for escaping seemed so remote; if Ellie weren't here with him, he might have given up by now.

Remembering Jimmy's advice, they stayed on a leftward path, even when the direction seemed misguided. They reached an alcove that contained a pond lapping at a steep stone shore. Jacob searched the room, but could find no other way out. The raging water was once again nearly deafening.

He expected to see fear or possibly resignation in Ellie's eyes. Instead, the girl left his side, making her way to the water's edge.

"Ellie, what are you doing?"

"This is the way," she said, stepping into the water. Her face bunched up at the cold, but she took another step. She was thigh deep, and not turning back.

"There has to be another way."

"This is the direction Jimmy told us. Besides, those waves in the pond have to be coming from somewhere. They come right from that wall. There's a hole there, and since the waves are coming from inside it, it must be a tunnel. A way out." She kicked into a fluid swimming motion, not waiting for his response. In a few quick strokes, she was halfway to the tunnel.

He was unsure what to do. He wasn't the best swimmer, and they weren't certain that this was the right way to the surface. The sound of the approaching water made it hard to think.

"Will you look at what I've found," a voice said from behind him as a hand gripped his shoulder. Jacob didn't recognize the beady-eyed pudgy man. While the man smiled innocently enough, an axe handle swayed in his hand, while his grip tightened on his arm. He was no friend. "I thought I was the only one making a run for it."

The stranger raised the weapon and smashed it across Jacob's chest before he could react. The wind left him, and he curled up on his side on the floor. Ellie disappeared into the tunnel, unaware of the attack. If he had the breath to shout a warning to her, she probably wouldn't hear him over the raging water.

The water.

It was coming, finally flooding the lower tunnels (Oh, Jimmy, Mom, please, be okay), rising higher, ready to sweep them into its roiling slurry. He had to act. Now.

Fear chased away the clenching pain in his chest. If he didn't get away from this maniacal stranger, the water would certainly kill him. He had to move.

He stumbled from his stomach to his hands and knees, scuttling along as fast as he could toward the water.

Behind him, the man laughed. A couple strides and he lunged for Jacob, easily grasping his foot.

Jacob fell flat on his face. The man wrenched his ankle as if they were wrestlers performing at a carnival. Pain twisted him until he flipped to his back. Blood flowed down Jacob's lips, and his nose throbbed, possibly broken. He didn't feel it.

He looked up, seeing the man reel back with his axe handle.

Who is this guy? Doesn't he know the water'll snap him in two?

He obviously didn't, because he flung the axe handle down with full force, connecting with the meat of Jacob's thigh.

He screamed, screamed so hard and forcefully that he was instantly hoarse, but he subdued his reaction as best he could. He had to. The man was wheeling back for another blow.

With his arms at their highpoint, he was also at his most defenseless. Jacob struck, ignoring the shooting pain in his thigh. He managed a side kick that landed against the man's kneecap, crumpling him to the ground.

It wasn't much of a kick. He couldn't gather much leverage from his position on the floor and the pain in his leg seemed to be getting worse. The kick only stoked the man's rage. He retrieved his dropped weapon, and then crawled toward Jacob, wincing at his damaged knee.

Jacob didn't think twice. Despite the pain in his thigh, he stood, then half-ran, half-stumbled his way to the water's edge. Losing his balance, in the process of falling once again on his face, he pushed off the best he could, transforming the fall into a dive for the water. He splashed awkwardly on the flat of his stomach. His chest hurt where the axe handle connected, but adrenaline was coating everything in a thrumming numbness. He barely felt the pain as he started swimming.

"God damn you, boy! I'm gonna hurt you for that. Gonna hurt you real bad." Jacob glanced back to see the man at the shore, gingerly stepping into the water.

Jacob reached the tunnel's mouth just as the stranger let out a startled, blood-curdling cry. A tremendous splash disrupted the water near the man's kicking legs, then he was pulled underwater.

What the hell?

Jacob had never seen anything like it. At first he didn't know what he was seeing, but then the man surfaced--just his flailing arm, one shoulder, half his face--before getting pulled under again. Something wide and translucent curled above the water, then a massive fishtail slapped the water's surface. The stranger surfaced just once more, but the fish's mouth, with its sharp, bladelike teeth, its snaking white whiskers flapping--had clamped onto his torso. The jaws closed off all remaining sound from the man. The fish went under, taking its prey with it.

White Bane? Jacob thought. The beast from Greta's stories? No one believed that story. Even the youngest children understood that the myth was intended to tingle the spine and caution against the perilous nature of the unknown.

But it was real. White Bane. Real.

It was gone. He never caught sight of the crazed man, nor the giant fish. Not a single white scale. The flooding waters reached the tiny alcove, a rioting wall of white water, and Jacob turned away for the tunnel, futilely trying to escape the inevitable. The water crashed into him less than a second later.

 

 

18.

"What are we gonna do, Jimmy?" Louise asked.

He had to look away; she would see the answer in his eyes.

They could stay down here with the baby, and God knows what would happen when the boy fully wakened. Or, they could reach the surface, leave this place behind, get their boy as far away from the Underground's cursed touch as possible.

"You know what would happen if we went to the surface?"

"I… I think so. It doesn't matter. We need to get him out of here."

She gave the answer he felt in his heart was the only path for them to take. They would take their son with them, escape the flooding water.

They would bury him. Give him a resting place that would never become unsettled.

The flood water was close, dangerously so. They would have to hurry.

"Let's go."

They held hands, winding their way through a narrow tunnel, heading to higher ground.

 

 

19.

Arlen thought he'd be dead by now. That would've been okay with him. He'd done his job by setting free the underground lake. The waves would purify the blighted depths. His mom would be proud of him. She was proud of him. He could feel it.

After lighting the timing wick, he'd aimlessly ambled away. Sometimes veering up inclines, sometimes descending, sometimes following curving spines in the tunnel that seemed to wrap around themselves. All the while he traveled in darkness, letting his mind wander, his only thoughts centering on his contentment.

Mom is so proud of me!

But as he walked--in the back of his mind awaiting the explosion--the air became cooler, downright cold. He soon entered a small chamber with a single candle burning low; though dim, the stark contrast to the previous impenetrable darkness stung his eyes. He blinked away the pain as his vision expanded to fill the room.

A hole covered most of the small room's floor, and from this hole, a bitter updraft gusted.

The panting, frigid breath of the devil, he thought, not sure where the notion originated, one of his ancestors obviously, but that wasn't important. He peered into the open maw, the wind frosting the sweat on his brow.

He first felt the blast through his feet.

Then a rock hit his shoulder, sending him to the ground. The earth quaked as if trying to purge itself of a violent sickness. Rocks tumbled all around him. The ones that fell into the open pit never made a sound.

He sat on his backside, resting his head on his arms propped on his knees. He waited for the explosion to weaken, and when it did, he waited in expectation of the coming flood.

Will it wash me away, down this endless frigid pit? he wondered. The thought didn't scare him. Nothing did anymore.

The water came sooner than he expected. He stood to face the curling waves, their constant collapse and rebirth.

The wave drained into the pit, inches from his feet.

Bodies bobbed in the water, mere debris taken into the plummeting maw. While he didn't care to save his own life, seeing his neighbors' bodies thrown about made him want to scream. He leaned into the flowing wave and timed a reckless swipe for one of the bodies, snagging it by the collar. Though a slim woman, her sodden clothes and momentum nearly sent him over. He yanked hard, and the body fell into his lap. The water continued to rush by, falling into the pit. Arlen was exhausted. He couldn't summon the strength to make another saving effort.

Warmth flowed through the woman's abraded cheek. Not only was she was alive, but she had a caring, pure soul. He could see his grandmother's visions of this woman's future. She would accomplish great things, would be the bedrock for her family's coming generations.

When the flow eased, and he had room to maneuver from the small room, he hefted Jane Fowler onto his shoulder and started for the surface.

 

 

20.

Jacob coughed. Flood water burned his lungs as his body tried to expel it. The sun was drying his clothes.

How am I alive? he wondered, yet again. Was it a miracle? He thought perhaps it was.

The water had hit him full-on in the back, and had carried him along, higher through twists and dips in the tunnel, then still higher, until the earth vomited him through a grass-veiled crevasse. The water spewed from the opening for a short while, then slowed to a trickle, before stopping completely. The flood had lost its punch.

He was alive.

And so was Ellie.

She sat on a mossy felled log, staring at him with a bemused expression. "I told you to follow me. I knew it'd lead to a way out."

Once the coughing fit subsided, he tested his bruised thigh. The leg took his weight. A gash bled across his nose, and each of his limbs felt blanketed with bruises. But nothing seemed broken. He gave her a half-hearted glare. "What now?"

"I don't know. Jimmy should be coming, right?"

"I don't think so. I think he's never coming out. I don't think anyone else is. Not even…" he couldn't say it, but it felt like a certainty that he would never see his mom again.

Ellie didn't respond right away, but he knew what she was thinking. Her dad was down there too. He was never coming out, either. She turned away to walk down a narrow game trail. He hurried to catch up.

"I'm sorry, Jacob."

"Stop saying that. I don't want you to ever say that again."

"We need dry clothes."

"True."

"We can come back later, maybe bring along some food. We'll see who comes out."

He didn't like the idea, but it was something for them to do, something to keep them busy. Jimmy had told him to tell anyone who would listen about what had happened Underground. But if someone would listen long enough to hear the story and not think him crazy, would they be the trusting sort, the kind of person would didn't know about the evil happenings below their hometown?

No. They wouldn't tell their story to anyone. Not right away. Not right now. His emotions were simply too raw.

"Jacob! Look! Come quick!" Ellie cried out from around the next bend.

He skirted an impenetrable stand of underbrush and saw Ellie cradling his mom in her lap. Ellie looked deceptively like his mom when they found the body of her brother George. Was that only weeks ago?

But one detail was different in this setting. His mother was moving. She appeared to be gulping for air, as if she had just surfaced after a long time underwater. But no, she was simply overcome with emotion. Her chest hitched, her tears fell.

"Mom!" He ran to her, calling her again and again.

He hadn't seen Arlen Polk right away, but he was standing close by. His arms were folded, and he looked apprehensive, but he also wore a smile. He looked different, as if he was the only person in on a joke that he hoped to share with all. Arlen gave Jacob a nod, and Jacob returned it, finding a smile of his own forming.

When his mom saw him, her crying stopped. She struggled to stand, slumping in his arms as they embraced. She finally stepped back and looked at him, "Look at you, in those wet clothes. You're shivering!"

He didn't want to admit that he wasn't shivering from the cold. When the wave crashed into him, he thought his life was over. But it wasn't. Somehow he'd survived the riotous waves and the jutting rocks and other debris without drowning. And so had his mom and Ellie and Arlen Polk. If so many people he cared about could survive the flooded mine, maybe he could still hold on to hope of seeing others. He promised himself he would never give up on the idea of seeing his brother again. No matter how much time went by.