Where the Summer Ends Part 12

Brandon decided she had waited long enough for her kiss, and did something about it. Shadows crept together to form misty darkness, and the cool mountain breeze carried the breath of entwined clematis and freshly turned earth. The creak of the porch swing measured time like an arthritic grandfather's clock, softened by the rustle of the river. A few cows still lowed, and somewhere a chuck-will's-widow called to its mate. The quiet was dense enough so that they could hear Dan gnawing a bone in the yard below.

Ginger finally straightened, stretched cozily from her cramped position. "Mmm," she purred; then: "Lord, what is that dog chewing on so! We didn't have more than a plate of sc.r.a.ps for him after dinner."

"Maybe Dan caught himself a rabbit. He's always hunting."

"Oh! Go see! He killed a mother rabbit last week, and I know her babies all starved."

"Dan probably saw that they didn't." Brandon rose to go look. "What you got there, boy?"

Ginger saw him stiffen abruptly. "Oh, no! Not another mamma bunny!"

She darted past Brandon's arm before he could stop her.

Dan thumped his tail foolishly and returned her stare. Between his paws was a child's arm.

*V*

Olin Reynolds shifted his chaw reflectively. "I don't wonder Ginger came to carry on such a fit," he allowed. "What did you figure it was?"

"Certainly not a child's arm," Brandon said. "Soon as you got it into good light you could see it was nothing human. It had to have been some type of monkey, and the resemblance gave me a cold chill at first glance, too. Pink skin with just a frost of dirty white fur, and just like a little kid's arm except it was all muscle and sinew instead of baby fat. And it was a sure enough hand, not a paw, though the fingers were too long and sinewy for any child's hand, and the nails were coa.r.s.e and pointed like an animal's claws."

"Wonder where old Dan come to catch him a monkey," Olin put in.

"Somebody's pet. Tourists, maybe-they carry everything they own in those d.a.m.n campers. Thing got away; or more likely, died and they buried it, and Dan sniffed it out and dug it up. He'd been digging, from the look of him."

"What did you finally do with it?"

"Dell weighted it down in an old gunny sack and threw it into a deep hole in the river there. Didn't want Dan dragging it back again to give the ladies another bad start."

"Just as well," Olin judged. "It might have had somebody come looking for to see what come of it. I suspect that'll be Dr Kenlaw coming up the hill now."

Kenlaw's Plymouth struggled into view through the pines. Brandon glanced at his watch, noted it was past seven. He stretched himself out of Olin's ladderback chair and descended the porch steps to greet the archeologist.

"Had a devil of a time finding the turn-off," Kenlaw complained, squeezing out from behind the wheel. "Everything set?"

"Throw your stuff in my pickup, and we'll get going," Olin told him. "Where we're headed, ain't no kind of road any car can follow up."

"Will that old bucket make it up a hill?" Kenlaw laughed, opening his trunk to take out a coil of rope and two powerful flashlights.

"This here old Ford's got a Marmon-Herrington all-wheel-drive conversion." Olin said coldly "She can ride up the side of a bluff and pull out a cedar stump while your feet are hanging straight out the back window of the cab."

Kenlaw laughed easily, shoving spare batteries and a geologist's pick into the ample pockets of the old paratrooper's jacket he wore. Brandon helped him stow his gear into the back of the truck, then climbed into the cab beside Reynolds.

It was a tight squeeze in the cab after Dr Kenlaw clambered in, and once they reached the blacktop road the whine of the gears and fan made conversation like shouting above a gale. Olin drove along in moody silence, answering Kenlaw's occasional questions in few words. After a while they left the paved roads, and then it was a long kidney-bruising ride as the dual-sprung truck attacked rutted mountain paths that bored ever upward through the shouldering pines. Kenlaw cursed and braced himself with both arms. Brandon caught a grin in Olin's faded eyes.

The road they followed led on past a tumble-down frame house, lost within a yard that had gone over to first-growth pine and scrub. A few gnarled apple trees made a last stand, and farther beneath the encroaching forest, Brandon saw the hulking walls of a log barn-trees spearing upward past where the roof had once spread. He shivered. The desolation of the place seemed to stir buried memories.

Beyond the abandoned farmhouse the road deteriorated into little more than a cow path. It had never been more than a timber road, sc.r.a.ped out when the lumber barons dragged down the primeval forest from the heights half a century or more ago. Farm vehicles had kept it open once, and now an occasional hunter's truck broke down the young trees that would otherwise have choked it.

Olin's pickup strained resolutely upward, until at length they shuddered into an overgrown clearing. Reynolds cut the engine. "Watch for snakes," he warned, stepping down.

The clearing was littered beneath witch's broom and scrub with a scatter of rusted metal and indistinct trash. A framework of rotted lumber and a corroded padlock faced against the hillside. Several of the planks had fallen inward upon the blackness within.

Olin Reynolds nodded. "That's the place. Reckon the Brennans boarded it over before they moved on to keep stock from falling in. Opening used to just lie hidden beneath the brush."

Dr Kenlaw prodded the eroded timbers. The padlock hasp hung rusted nails over the s.p.a.ce where the board had rotted away. At a bolder shove, the entire framework tore loose and tumbled inward.

Sunlight spilled in past the dust. The opening was squeezed between ledges of rock above and below, wide enough for a man to stoop and drop through. Beyond was a level floor, littered now with the debris of boards.

"Goes back like that a ways, then it narrows down to just a crack," Olin told them.

Kenlaw grunted in a self-satisfied tone and headed back for the pickup to get his equipment.

"Coming with us?" Brandon asked.

Olin shook his head firmly. "I'll just wait here. These old bones are too eat up with arthuritis to go a-crawling through that snaky hole."

"Wait with him, Eric, if you like," Kenlaw suggested. "I probably won't be long about this. No point you getting yourself all dirty messing around on what's likely to be just another wild goose chase."

"I don't mind," Brandon countered. "If that morion came out of this cave, I'm curious to see what else lies hidden back there."

"Odds are, one of those Brennans found it someplace else and just chucked it back in there. Looks like this place has been used as a dump."

Kenlaw cautiously shined his light across the rubble beneath the ledge. Satisfied that no snakes were evident, the archeologist gingerly squeezed his corpulent bulk past the opening and lowered himself to the floor of the cavern. Brandon dropped nimbly beside him.

Stale gloom filled a good-sized antechamber. Daylight trickled in from the opening, and a patch of blackness at the far end marked where the cavern narrowed and plunged deeper into the side of the mountain. Brandon took off his mirror sungla.s.ses and glanced about the chamber-the albino's eyes were suited to the dank gloom.

The wreckage of what had once been a moonshine still cluttered the interior of the cavern. Copper coil and boiler had long ago been carried off, as had anything else of any value. Broken barrels, rotted mounds of sacks, jumbles of firewood, misshapen sculptures of galvanized metal. Broken bits of Mason jars and crockery shards crunched underfoot; dead ashes made a sodden raisin pudding. Kenlaw flung his light overhead and disclosed only sooty rock and somnolent bats.

"A G.o.dd.a.m.n dump," he muttered petulantly. "Maybe something farther back in."

The archeologist swung his light toward the rear of the chamber. A pa.s.sage led farther into the mountain. Loose stones and more piled debris half blocked the opening. Pushing his way past this barricade, Kenlaw entered the narrow tunnel.

The pa.s.sage was cramped. They ducked their heads, twisted about to avoid contact with the dank rock. Kenlaw carefully examined the walls of the cavern as they shuffled on. To Brandon's eye, there was nothing to indicate that man's tools had shaped the shaft. After a time, the sunlight from behind them disappeared, leaving them with their flashlights to guide them. The air grew stale with a sourness of animal decay, and as the pa.s.sage seemed to lead downward, Brandon wondered whether they might risk entering a layer of noxious gases.

"Hold on here!" Kenlaw warned, stopping abruptly.

Darkness met their probing flashlight beams several yards ahead of their feet, as the floor of the pa.s.sage disappeared. Kenlaw wiped his pudgy face and caught his breath, as they shined their lights down into the sudden pit that confronted them.

"Must be thirty-forty feet to the bottom," Kenlaw estimated. "Cavern's big enough for a high school gym. The ledge we're standing on creeps on down that fault line toward the bottom. We can make it if you'll just watch your step."

"Is the air okay?" Brandon wondered.

"Smells fresh enough to me," Kenlaw said. He dug a crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket, applied his lighter. The flame fanned outward along the direction they had come. Kenlaw dropped the burning wad of paper over the edge. It fell softly through the blackness, showering sparks as it hit the floor.

"Still burning," the archeologist observed. "I'm going on down."

"Nice if that was natural gas down there," Brandon muttered.

"This isn't a coal mine. Just another natural cavern, for my money."

Clinging to the side of the rock for support, they cautiously felt their way down the steep incline. Although an agile climber could negotiate the descent without ropes, the footing was treacherous, and a missed step could easily mean a headlong plunge into the darkness.

They were halfway down when Kenlaw paused to examine the rock wall. Switching hands with his flashlight, he drew his geologist's pick and tapped against the stone.

"Find something?" Brandon turned his light onto the object of the archeologist's scrutiny, saw a band of lighter stone running along the ledge.

"Just a sample of stratum," Kenlaw explained, hastily breaking free a specimen and shoving it into one of his voluminous pockets. "I'll have to examine it back at my lab-study it for evidence of tool marks and so on."

The floor of the pit appeared little different from the chamber through which they had entered the cavern, save that it lacked the acc.u.mulated litter of human usage. The air was cool and fresh enough to breathe, although each lungful carried the presence of a sunless place deep beneath the mountains.

"Wonder when the last time was anyone came down here?" Brandon said, casting his light along the uneven floor. The bottom was strewn with broken rock and detritus, with a spongy paste of bat guano and dust. Footprints would be hard to trace after any length of time.

"Hard to say," Kenlaw answered, scooping up a handful of gravel and examining it under his light. "Sometimes the Confederates worked back into places like this after saltpetre. Maybe Bard Warner came down here, but I'm betting that morion was just something some dumb hillbilly found someplace else and got tossed onto the dump."

"Are these bones human?" Brandon asked.

Kenlaw stuffed the gravel into a jacket pocket and scrambled over to where Brandon crouched. There was a fall of broken rock against the wall of the pit opposite their point of descent. Interspersed with the chunks of stone were fragments of moldering bone. The archeologist dug out a section of rib. It snapped easily in his hand, showing whiteness as it crumbled.

"Dead a long time," Kenlaw muttered, pulling more of the rocks aside. "Maybe Indian."

"Then it's a human skeleton?"

"Stone burial cairn, at a guess. But it's been dug up and the bones scattered about. These long bones are all smashed apart."

"Maybe he was killed in a rock slide."

Kenlaw shook his head. "Look how this femur is split apart. I'd say more likely something broke open the bones to eat the marrow.

"An animal?"

"What else would it have been?"

Kenlaw suddenly bent forward, clawed at the detritus. His thick fingers locked onto what looked to be the edge of a flat rock. Grunting, he hauled back and wrenched forth a battered sheet of rusted iron.

"Part of a breastplate! d.a.m.ned if this isn't the original skeleton in armor! Give me a hand with the rest of these rocks."

Together they dragged away the cairn of rubble-Kenlaw puffing energetically as he flung aside the stones and fragments of bone. Brandon, caught up in the excitement of discovery himself, reflected with a twinge that this was hardly a careful piece of excavation. Nonetheless, Kenlaw's anxious scrabbling continued until they had cleared a patch of bare rock.

The archeologist squatted on a stone and lit a cigarette. "Doesn't tell me much," he complained. "Just broken bones and chunks of rust. Why was he here? Were there others with him? Who were they? What were they seeking here?"

"Isn't it enough that you've found the burial of a conquistador?"

"Can't prove that until I've run some tests," Kenlaw grumbled. "Could have been a Colonial-breastplates were still in use in European armies until this century. Or an Indian buried with some tribal heirlooms."

"There's another pa.s.sage back of here," Brandon called out.

He had been shining his light along the fall of rock, searching for further relics from the cairn. Behind where they had cleared away some of the loose rocks, a pa.s.sageway pierced the wall of the pit. Brandon rolled aside more of the stone, and the mouth of the pa.s.sage took shape behind the crest of the rock pile.

Kenlaw knelt and peered within. "Not much more than a crawl s.p.a.ce," he announced, "but it runs straight on for maybe twenty or thirty feet, then appears to open onto another chamber."

Brandon played his flashlight around the sides of the pit, then back to where they stood. "I don't think this is just a rock slide. I think someone piled all these rocks here to wall up the tunnel mouth."

"If they didn't want it found, then they must have found something worth hiding," the archeologist concluded. "I'll take a look. You wait here in case I get stuck."

Brandon started to point out that his was the slimmer frame, but already Kenlaw had plunged headfirst into the tunnel-his thick b.u.t.tocks blocking Brandon's view as he squeezed his way through. Brandon thought of a fat old badger ducking down a burrow. He kept his light on the shaft. Wheezing and scuffling, the other man managed to force his bulk through the pa.s.sage. He paused at the far end and called back something, but his words were too m.u.f.fled for Brandon to catch.

A moment later Kenlaw's legs disappeared from view, and then his flushed face bobbed into Brandon's light. "I'm in another chamber about like the one you're standing in," he called back. "I'll take a look around."

Brandon sat down to wait impatiently. He glanced at his watch. To his surprise, they had been in the cavern some hours. The beam of his flashlight was yellowing; Brandon cut the switch to save the batteries, although he carried spares in his pockets. The blackness was as total as the inside of a grave, except for an occasional wan flash as Kenlaw shined his light past the tunnel mouth from the pit beyond. Brandon held his hand before his face, noted that he could dimly make out its outline. The albino had always known he could see better in the dark than others could, and it had seemed a sort of recompense for the fact that bright light tormented his pink eyes. He had read that hemeralopia did not necessarily coincide with increased night vision, and his use of infrared rifle scopes had caused him to wonder whether his eyes might not be unusually receptive to light from the infrared end of the spectrum.

Kenlaw seemed to be taking his time. At first Brandon had heard the sharp tapping of his geologist's pick from time to time. Now there was only silence. Brandon flipped his light back on, consul ted his watch. It had been half an hour.

"Dr Kenlaw?" he called. He thrust his shoulders into the pa.s.sage and called again, louder. There came no reply.

Less anxious than impatient, Brandon crawled into the tunnel and began to wriggle forward, pushing his light ahead of him. Brandon was stocky, and it was a tight enough squeeze. The crawl s.p.a.ce couldn't be much more than two feet square at its widest point. Brandon reflected that it was fortunate that he was not one of those bothered by claustrophobia.

Halfway through the tunnel, Brandon suddenly halted to study its walls. No natural pa.s.sage; those were tool marks upon the stone-not even Kenlaw could doubt now. The regularity of the pa.s.sage had already made Brandon suspicious. Cramped as it was, it reminded him of a mine shaft, and he thought again about the mention in Creecy's Grandfather's Tales of the interconnecting tunnels found at the Sink Hole pits.

The tunnel opened onto another chamber much like the one he had just quitted. It was a short drop to the floor, and Brandon lowered himself headfirst from the shaft. There was no sign of Kenlaw's light. He stood for a moment uneasily, swinging his flash about the cavern. Perhaps the archeologist had fallen into a hidden pit, smashed his light.

"Dr Kenlaw?" Brandon called again. Only echoes answered.

No. There was another sound. Carried through the rock in the subterranean stillness. A sharp tapping. Kenlaw's geologist's pick.

Brandon killed his flash. A moment pa.s.sed while his eyes adjusted to the blackness, then he discerned a faint haze of light-visible only because of the total darkness. Switching his own light back on, Brandon directed it toward the glimmer. It came from the mouth of yet another pa.s.sageway cut against the wall opposite.

He swung his light about the pit. Knowing what to look for now, Brandon thought he could see other such pa.s.sages, piercing the rock face at all levels. It came to him that they began to run a real risk of losing their way if they were able to progress much farther within these caverns. Best to get Kenlaw and keep together after this, he decided.

The new shaft was a close copy of the previous one-albeit somewhat more cramped. Brandon sc.r.a.ped skin against its confines as he crawled toward the sound of Kenlaw's pick.

The archeologist was so engrossed in what he was doing that he hadn't noticed Brandon's presence, until the other wriggled out onto the floor of the pit and hailed him. Spotlighted by Brandon's flash, Kenlaw glowered truculently. The rock face where he was hammering threw back a crystalline reflection.

"I was worried something had happened," Brandon said, approaching.

"Sorry. I called to you that I was going on, but you must not have heard." Kenlaw swept up handfuls of rock samples and stuffed them into the already bulging pockets of his paratrooper's jacket. "We'd best be getting back before we get lost. Reynolds will be wondering about us."

"What is this place? Don't tell me all of this is due to natural formation!" Brandon swept his light around. More diminutive tunnels pierced the sides of this pit also. He considered the broken rock that littered the floor.

"This is a mine of some sort, isn't it. Congratulations, Dr Kenlaw-you really have found one of the lost mines of the ancients! Christ, you'll need a team of spelunkers to explore these pits if they keep going on deeper into the mountain!"

Kenlaw laughed gruffly. "Lost mines to the romantic imagination, I suppose-but not to the trained mind. This is a common enough formation-underground streams have forced their way through faults in the rock, hollowed out big chambers wherever they've encountered softer stone. Come on, we've wasted enough time on this one."

"Soft rock? " Brandon pushed past him. "h.e.l.l, this is quartz!"

He stared at the quartz dike where Kenlaw had been working. Under the flashlight beam, golden highlights shimmered from the chipped matrix.

"Oh my G.o.d." Brandon managed to whisper.