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Chapter 32

G eorge Davenport’s grenades had either been too old or not the kind made to do much damage, but the hole they’d made in the hillside was roughly the size of a drainage pipe. Not to be deterred, I jumped up and wiggled into it, pulling the burlap bag behind me, like some kind of precious talisman. It wasn’t much, but if it came to it, I’d have no problem using the garden trowel to protect myself. But if they had knives, they surely had guns.

I was fucked .

I kept my head down and concentrated on breathing calmly and evenly as I inched farther into the side of the hill, deeper into the earth, clawing away more dirt. It wouldn’t help to hyperventilate in here. I said a silent prayer that Emmaline had been right and the tunnel I’d blown open would lead me to the mine and not some dead end. This was a bad dream. Because it couldn’t be real, could it? The hellish host of Juliana, standing together so calmly on my porch. Waiting there for me. It was something out of a nightmare. And my daughter was still out there.

Be okay, Mere, I thought. I’m coming back for you.

I’d gone maybe a dozen yards when I felt the dirt loosen, and I was able to dig with my hands and widen the narrow hole a bit more. I could crawl now, on my forearms first and then on all fours, and at last I tumbled out into the airy darkness, dropping to the floor with a thud. I caught my breath and righted myself. It was inky black in here, the dark, a thick, heavy, suffocating and solid thing. I closed my eyes to shut it out. To keep it from being more than it was. I could use my phone’s light, but that would only last so long, and I needed to ration it. There was no predicting how long I’d be stuck in here.

I shivered, soaking wet, mud encrusted. I could hear the echo of drips in the cavern beyond, their percussive rhythm settling my heartbeat. Cautiously, I stood, reaching around me, but felt nothing—no walls, no ceiling. I needed to orient myself. I swiped down on my phone, hit the flashlight, and held it up.

I was in a tunnel, about ten feet tall by twenty feet wide, that had been hewn into the side of the earth. The walls and ceiling were solid rock, slimed over with water and rust stains and some sort of mysterious, phosphorescent green stuff. Heavy wood timbers braced the walls and ceilings. There was a set of iron tracks running along the floor of the tunnel.

The air was cool and damp. The narrow hole I’d crawled through was the only entry point. A few chunks of dirt and rock had fallen in from the explosion or from my entry, and I scooped up as much as I could and packed it back into the narrow hole. It wasn’t exactly a deterrent, but it would have to do. I headed into the tunnel, deeper into the mine, breaking into a slow trot.

The ground was slippery, but I didn’t dare slow down. If those ghouls were able to find the opening in the side of the bank, if one of them could crawl through the hole—or if they somehow managed to blow open a larger opening—I needed to be as far away as possible. Even if I was running directly toward a dead end.

I picked my way down a long set of rickety wooden steps, half of them rotted through, to a lower level, where I dropped from the last available plank to the hard rock floor below. Deeper and deeper down the tunnel I ran, stopping momentarily to peer into smaller offshoot tunnels, only to discover they only went a few yards before ending in massive walls of rock.

I was puffing now, out of breath and sweating. My bobbing light, trained ahead of me, seemed to have hit a different sort of wall. A darker surface, different from the brownish gray of the other rock. What was it? I was deep under the surface of the earth, could feel the weight of it above me. Here, under the earth’s crust, I was a lost voice. A thin, wisp of nothing. Easily snuffed out and silenced forever.

Suddenly my foot hit something lying across the path, and I pitched forward, my phone flying into the dark. I grunted in pain but felt around, quickly recovering the phone and righting myself. The obstacle, a piece of equipment, like a long, thin, metal machine gun, appeared to be an old-fashioned drill. I crawled over it, peering ahead in the thin beam of light, and when I saw what I’d almost done, I let out a yelp of terror. Dozens of feet below me, in a huge cavern, shimmered a black pool of water. The light on my phone had been shining into empty space. Tripping over the drill had just prevented me from running straight off the edge of a cliff.

I scurried a safe distance away from the edge, my heart pounding, bile threatening to rise. I collapsed against the rock wall, gulping in deep breaths, then closed my eyes, straining to hear any indication that someone had followed me. Hearing nothing, I relaxed against the rock wall, trying to lower my heart rate. I needed to think. There had to be another way out. A tunnel I hadn’t noticed before that branched off in a better direction.

Think, Billie . . .

I ran through all my options, none of which were good. And I was so tired, it suddenly occurred to me. Exhausted from the day I’d had, traumatized by the discovery of Peter, from seeing Isaac Inman so brutally, savagely stabbed . . .

A wave of lightheadedness hit me. Followed by a wave of despair.

Mere . . . Mom . . .

Was I ever going to see them again?

I was feeling so groggy now, my head lolling on my neck as heavy as a bowling ball. It was like the worst kind of high, the kind where you felt simultaneously wired and like you were floating through space. It was like that day with Jamie in my house. How disconnected I had felt from my body. From my will . . .

God, I was actually falling asleep.

I blinked hard a few times and pulled out my phone. There was no way I was going to have a signal down here. And yet, impossibly, one bar showed. I tried Alice first, but the call rolled to voicemail. I tried Mom then and waited for the beep after her outgoing message.

“Mom,” I said, my voice breaking and echoing in the cavern. I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to say, and now . . . now, I had to say it.

“Mom,” I started again. “I’m . . . I’m in a bad spot, it turns out. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know . . .” I took a deep breath. “I know I love you. That’s it. I love you so much.”

I hung up, then pillowed my head on my crossed arms, and then lay flat on the rocky floor of the cave. I was so goddamn tired. I would just rest for a few minutes. Just until I could think more clearly to make a plan . . .

I closed my eyes and slept.

* * *

I dreamed I was in the mine, but it was bright as a moonlit night, lit up with candles wedged into the cracks and crevices of the hard rock. The slick-wet walls glimmered with iridescent streaks of quartz, like permanent, continually flashing bolts of lightning, a subterranean cathedral.

I was on the lower level, but back at the foot of the wooden stairs. Faint music drifted through the cold, damp air, the plaintive cry of a faraway fiddle. I strained to hear the tune, but I couldn’t make it out, so I walked down the tunnel, into the heart of the mine, following the same path I had before. I wasn’t afraid. I only wanted to follow the sound of the music, to find who could be playing so beautifully, with so much heart-aching melancholy.

Besides the music and candles, there were other signs of life: drooping bouquets of wildflowers tied with ribbon and draped over nails in the timber braces, or over chisels stuck in the rock. There were not only shimmering streaks of quartz in the rock walls, now I saw gold there, too. Thick, rich veins of it running this way and that, crisscrossing the rocks in a fretwork of gilding.

The music grew louder. I could hear voices now, too. Simple, untrained voices, singing a song I recognized.

We shall meet but we shall miss him. There will be one vacant chair. We shall linger to caress him, While we breathe our evening prayer. When one year ago we gathered Joy was in his mild blue eye, Now the golden cord is severed, And our hopes in ruin lie.

I came upon them in one of the safety tunnels—that’s what they were called, I suddenly knew, built to provide the miners a place to hide when they blasted the rock—singing in quavering unison. Women and children huddled together, led in their song by a woman dressed in a long white dress. She was older, in her sixties, I guessed, and wore a wreath of gray braids around her head. Her eyes were not glittering jet, but a blue fire, and a silver cross hung from a chain around her neck. The woman from my dreams.

My mother, it occurred to me, with a jolt of recognition. And somehow at the same time, not my mother.

I was overcome with relief. Relief and joy and a surging of love. Mom! She’d come back to me. I wanted to run to her, to wrap my arms around her, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to interrupt this solemn moment. I stood at the back of the tunnel watching the people, her people, sing the hymn. Another woman played the fiddle, a young boy the banjo. As the group sang, the old woman who was also my mother spoke to each of them, her lips close to their ears. Then they would step forward and put something in a crevice that ran like a seam down the length of the tunnel wall.

I pushed my way into the crowd, to get closer, to hear the words she was whispering to them. It was a hiss.

Never let them forget.

Never let them forget.

After she said those words, she turned her face toward me. Warmth filled me from head to toe. “How would you make them remember, Billie?” Her lined face, so familiar to me, and yet so unfamiliar, covered in a sheen of sweat, was so close to mine, I could feel her heat. Smell her rank breath. It was the smell of hunger, when a starved body had begun to eat away at itself.

“What have they taken from you?” she asked in her smoky cigarette voice. “Your heart? Your soul? The very hope that used to pulse within you and kept you going?”

I felt a tear slip down my cheek.

After the last item had been pushed into the crevice, the crowd of women and children shifted and turned, and now the old woman was leading them out of the safety tunnel and into the main one. I stood still, watching them file past, following her like sheep. They sang and she turned, bestowing a smile on them. She smiled sweetly over her shoulder at me, too, and beckoned me to follow. Soon we all arrived at the edge of the cliff, the one I’d nearly hurtled over.

“Join hands,” my mother, the old woman, said in a solemn voice, and I felt hands on either side of me take mine.

I looked down. There was water below us, a huge pool of phosphorescent green water, but so far away.

“They will not prevail,” my mother said. “We will martyr ourselves and bring the curse of our blood upon their heads.” Her words echoed through the rock tunnels. The people lined up at the edge of the cliff swayed in the echo. I saw they had brought the old drill, dragged it to the edge, and kicked it over. It fell into the pool below with a thunderous splash. A cheer went up and they all clapped.

Suddenly my mother’s face was next to mine. “Don’t you see? That song we sing is not a hymn. It’s a curse. A curse on all those who stand on the ground above our heads. They think they are above us. They think they are free, but they will not be. Because we pronounce a curse, here and now, in the bowels of the sacred earth, that they will never forget. Listen.”

The women and children beside me were calling out curses in thin, quavering voices. Curses that would fall on the men who did this to them. On the town who turned its back on this evil.

A winged horse of war! one shouted.

A great eagle with horns, called out a small girl, and talons for ripping flesh!

A demon in every dog, cat, and horse! cried a boy.

Shaking hands and faulty minds!

Blood in the river, in the creeks, and the streams!

The voices overlapped now, rose like thunder in my ears. My mother’s breath was warm on my neck. “You see? They curse their murderers. You can do it, too, Billie. You must do it. Make them pay for taking your family from you.”

But I couldn’t think of any curse to utter. I could see that she was disappointed in me. That I had failed her.

“Now jump,” she said.

The gold and quartz walls glimmered in the candlelight. No one moved.

“Jump!” my mother roared, and I saw them leap. Heard the splash of bodies.

I turned to look at her. “I can’t. I’m scared.”

Her eyes bore into me. God, I missed her. I missed her so much.

“You can.”

I shook my head.

“Of course you can, Billie. Don’t you understand what you are?” she asked me in a fierce whisper.

A failure . . . a cheat . . . a worthless piece of shit . . .

“No, Billie. No.” Her lips curled in a feline smile as she read my thoughts. “You’re a goddamn Catawampus.”

I felt one bone-rattling jerk, a push, and I was falling through the air. There was a rush of cold air and in the next instant, the shock of water closing over me. I let myself go, let the water take me, and the world burst open. It was a world of light and sound and vibration and possibility. I saw when the earth was formed, and the seams layered into the rock. I saw those seams—golds and whites and shimmering silvers—shooting off in all different directions, blasting through the rocks and dirt and mountains like they were nothing. Filling every crack, cooling, hardening into an impenetrable wall.

We were all seams of precious stone filling the cracks of the world. Hiding in the unforgiving rock. I saw the truth of myself, that my seam was nothing but a void of longing and desire and need. The longing for my mother, a mother who would never leave. A mother who would say, You are gold to me. A need to hear that I, Billie Hope—not so burnished, not so pure—belonged. Billie Hope was acceptable because she was she . I was me.

But I would have to be chiseled out first, I saw that. Even now I was being chiseled out by something horrible that had been conceived and born here in the center of the earth. Not a winged horse, but an old woman with gray braids and a silver cross who held an old-fashioned drill. The drill hammered the rock and me, because now I had become a part of the rock and the quartz and the gold. It was all dust, all raining into the rail cars waiting on the tracks below. I was the rubble. I would be smashed for the gold that lay inside me. And then people who were cannier than me would take that gold from me, profit from it, and I would be left alone on the floor of the stamping mill. The dust to be trampled underfoot for centuries to come.

I was dust. Only dust . . .

I woke, a scream trying to make its way out of my mouth but feeling a hand over my mouth, blocking it.

* * *

“ Don’t say a fucking word ,” hissed the voice that belonged to the hand. “Don’t you make one goddamn, fucking sound.”

I craned my neck, squinted hard, trying to see who it was, but I’d forgotten there was no light in this godforsaken tunnel. I couldn’t see a thing.

“You’re Billie Hope, right?” hissed the voice. A woman’s voice.

I nodded, afraid to say anything more.

“If I take my hand away, you cannot scream, you hear me?”

I nodded again. The hand went away. I pushed myself up against the hard rock wall. “Who are you?”

The woman was feeling around in her pockets, looking for something, and then she found it. A small battery-operated lantern, which she switched on. The glow of it illuminated her face in harsh, nightmarish shadows, the way kids would stick a flashlight under their chin to scare their friends.

“I’m Wren. Wren Street. I hear you’ve been asking questions about me.”