The Croning Part 14

She studied him and her eyes were huge and dark as they became after s.e.x, or when she was furious, drunk, or working voodoo on him. "I've heard of Slango."

"Oh. Wayne says."

"I'm tired of Wayne bossing you around."

"Because it interferes with your bossing me around."

The room was lighted by a black candle she'd taken from the dresser drawer. Her face reminded him in its wildness of the expression she'd worn that one night at the Wolverton mansion, except less vulnerable. Her snarled hair and cruelly glistening lips, the marble tautness of her neck and bare shoulders, were those of a pagan G.o.ddess etched into one of the woodcuts she so diligently collected. A drinker of blood, killer of men, harvester of skulls, and fecund as the dark soil of the ancient forest. She was a savage druid contemplating whether to f.u.c.k him or slice his heart out with the wavy obsidian knife she stashed under her pillow. This spooked him, but it also made him hard again.

She said, "I wonder if he knew I was flying to Russia this week."

"He doesn't. And if he did, he wouldn't care. Wayne suffers from an increasingly common malady among management-rectal cranial inversion."

Mich.e.l.le stubbed her cigarette into a bone ashtray she'd balanced on a cus.h.i.+on. She slithered on hands and knees across the bed and mounted him so he was pressed against the pile of pillows. As his c.o.c.k went in, her eyes rolled back and she gripped with her knees and leaned down to kiss him softly. She said into his mouth, "Quit."

He grabbed her waist and she slapped his hands away, s.n.a.t.c.hed his wrists and pinned them to the mattress. "Quit? I can't." He spoke with some difficulty.

She bit his lip and moved her hips. "There's a village way out in the taiga, in the mountains. These aren't Inuit folk. Boris Kalamov made contact with them nine months ago, although I have a hunch he's lying on that score. He's a cagey b.a.s.t.a.r.d; might've found them years ago. He claims the people have seen outsiders three times in the last decade... trappers who didn't have a blessed clue they'd stumbled across a b.l.o.o.d.y miracle of modern anthropology. Kalamov is the only scientist on the planet who is aware of their existence. He told me, that's it. Lou was his confidante and now that Lou is gone... I'm going to partic.i.p.ate in a ritual with the natives. Maybe. Depends on whether Kalamov can pull the matriarchs over to his side."

"Kalamov...I thought he was ruined. The debacle..."

"The man is tough as a c.o.c.kroach. Can't kill him. Keeps coming back for more. He got tortured by natives once. Lived to tell."

"Baby, you're killing the mood." Don thrashed a bit; he couldn't break her bruising hold. Age was draining the life from him while she just got stronger.

"My mood is fine." She licked his ear and ground against him. The ceiling over her shoulder blurred into soft focus. "Don, your hair is going white. A whole shock right down the middle. When did that happen? It's sooo s.e.xy."

He was sure he didn't know. Not even a flash of Bronson Ford looming taller than a basketball player, his face that of a shark, could derail the moment.

When they were done, Don's manhood felt as if it had been used for football practice. Wheezing, he said, "What kind of ritual? Better not be a fertility ritual or I'm going to be jealous."

"I don't have their word for it," she said. "It's a croning. After a fas.h.i.+on."

"What's a croning?"

"Don't go to Slango."

He cleared his throat and hummed "Baby Please Don't Go."

After she'd drifted away into dreamland he arose and went to the toilet to urinate. A light flickered on the drive leading to their yard. He squinted, trying to discern a real shape in the black-on-black landscape. The light flared again-the eye of a penlight inside the cab of a car parked down the driveway. Don froze, not certain of what to do next. Moments later the car drifted away without engaging its headlights, reversing down the road and vanis.h.i.+ng into the night.

The next morning Mich.e.l.le headed for Siberia. Everything was different after that.

Don arrived at the Olympia Airfield as night receded into its cave. He experienced several seconds of disorientation when attempting to penetrate the snowy gap between slapping off the alarm on the dresser and climbing metal stairs into the cabin of a company jet.

Standing atop the platform, he glanced over his shoulder at the gravel parking lot which arced before the radio shack and the row of beige hangars gone blue-gray in the filtered light of dawn. He tried to pick his car from the silhouetted lumps of vehicles and failed-wait! Ronnie had driven him; Don abruptly recalled the morning talk show beamed live from Seattle, the dingy and desiccated air freshener bobbing from the rearview mirror, a thermos of coffee and Schnapps in the console between them; a mudslide and flas.h.i.+ng red lights and his confusion boiled over again. White-gloved hands floated from the darkness of the cabin and politely ushered him inside the plane, sent his disjointed and inchoate misgivings away in a cloud of smoking dust.

The jet was a four-engine model, manufactured in the '50s judging by its appearance, equipped with a bar and a young attendant named Lisa whose presumably lovely features were squashed under layers of makeup and mascara. Three fellow pa.s.sengers shared the accommodations.

Don recognized each of them from the list of names Wayne's secretary had printed for his reference, and in turn they'd been briefed regarding his role as the liaison dispatched by HQ to crack the whip and right the s.h.i.+p: A droll elderly lawyer named Geoffrey Pike; Dr. Justin Rush, an urbane gentleman with glistening hair and a Clark Kent smile; and the hotshot Oklahoma archeologist Robert Ring, a rangy, athletic man who claimed one of his ancestors was a famous Chinese n.o.ble exiled from the motherland. Perhaps five years younger than Don, Robert Ring dressed like a model in a Field & Stream catalogue-plaids and corduroy; his deep dark tan didn't appear to have come from a shake n' bake spa; undoubtedly the byproduct of skiing or bicycling or royal heritage, and his grip was intimidating.

Lisa dispersed coffees and Danishes and the quartet chatted as the crew ran down the last-minute flight check. Each was headed to Slango Camp with particular business on their agendas. Pike was to run interference against BLM officials. Rush had been sent to attend minor ailments afflicting various members of the team. Two surveyors had sickened from bacterial infections and another sprained an ankle navigating a sinkhole; all quite routine, perhaps better than routine-these remote operations were prime for frequent and grievous accidents. Ring was charged with examining several structures for hazards known and otherwise.

Structures? Don perked up. Historical monuments hadn't been mentioned in any of the previous briefings, although such wasn't his particular area. He asked Ring if these buildings were remnants of the logging camp that, though less infamous than the lost colony of Roanoke, was just as vanished in the mists of history.

Frick and Frack had made a cryptic reference to the camp's status as an official mystery and Don did a little digging of his own-two hundred men, women and a.s.sorted animals disappeared from the face of the earth in the late fall of 1923. Even the equipment, including boxcars from a train, and the shacks vanished. Unlike ma.s.s disappearances such as Roanoke or various wartime events, the Slango situation defied easy explanations such as attacks by angry natives or enemy forces, or high seas. It defied complicated explanations too. Don hadn't given the matter much attention prior to the previous weekend and the unsettling comments of the alleged NSA agents. There wasn't much a man could do with such lore except nod sagely and quote Hamlet. Right then, listening to the big engines rev for takeoff, a mere hour or two from visiting the legendary site, his already vivid imagination began to stir, eager to flex its muscles.

Ring wasn't forthcoming with details. He smiled enigmatically and changed the subject in a manner that achieved obliviousness and insolence in equal measure. He boasted about the red clay tennis court at his summer abode in the South of Italy, an ex-supermodel girlfriend and a brown belt in Jujitsu, his disdain of engineers' and geologists' underwhelming social competence, present company excluded, naturally. Don decided to hate him just a little bit.

Once they lifted off, it was a puddle jump flight to an airport outside of Portland to grab some equipment, then a forty-minute swing back into Was.h.i.+ngton and the Olympic Peninsula. Don had one bad moment after he buckled in and they gradually rose to cruising elevation. He'd closed his eyes for a few seconds as gravity pulled him into the plush recliner and when he opened them, the cabin windows were going dark. The stain advanced like fast-flowing syrup, a gush of blood spilling through a sluice. As his own window blackened, he detected the crinkle of dry ice, a knifepoint sc.r.a.ping bone, stones cracking under tremendous heat. Motion reflected in the onyx gla.s.s: the baggage compartment across the aisle silently swung open; inside, a membrane glistened, a colloidal plexus, the bulk of which nestled in deeper shadow.

The overhead lights flickered rapidly. Bands of utter darkness cycled through the cabin followed by flashes of red emergency light. All the lights shorted as one, snapping with the violence of a string of firecrackers, dry bones under tank treads. Wind shrieked against the fuselage and the plane shuddered, knocked slightly sideways by heavy turbulence. Someone cursed and metal clashed in the galley, pans clattered to the deck. Don dug his fingers into the armrests as the seat threatened to vibrate from its moorings.

Mr. Dart whispered from the adjoining seat, Nanking, Don. A train loaded with fifteen hundred souls-soldiers, tradesmen and peasants, mothers and kids, chickens and goats-lost. Not wrecked or ransomed. Just lost, like a soap bubble pops and it's gone. Do you suppose they fell into a crack in the earth? You think Martians took them?

As a boy, Don once asked Luther if he believed in aliens on account of all those secret government projects the doc.u.mentaries and non-fiction books talked about. The old man had regarded him with eyes brittle and cool as those of a snake. Luther seemed almost prepared to eat his grandchild, such was the manner he hunched forward and widened his mouth. Then he laughed that horrible, phlegmy laugh until tears squirted and his nose went purple. Idiot flesh of mine, O precocious whelp. Magic 8 Ball says try again later.

The plane yawed and Don's gorge filled his throat and he almost believed his hands were losing coherence, that he was dissolving in the suffocating blackness- -the train was so cold his breath steamed despite the stifling ma.s.s of humanity pressed from stem to stern. Such a tiny, tiny boy; his name was Xin or Hin and his mother crushed him against her as the windows disappeared, smothered in tar, and the lamps failed and the tube of the hurtling train became a blind canister full of groaning metal, of m.u.f.fled cries, the sour stink of unwashed bodies, milling animals, of terror. His mother's arm fell away and he floated above his seat as the carriage began to revolve- Don moaned and clamped a hand over his mouth and bit his palm and fell into himself- -the capsule revolved and the Earth slewed below the rim of infinite night and someone's water bottle floated toward the nose of the shuttle, someone's belt, an alabaster string of lower intestine, a wrist.w.a.tch, the crucifix and rosary end over end. The Lieutenant vomited inside his helmet; window plates turned black as empty sockets and b.l.o.o.d.y light seeped from somewhere deep within the ticking heart of melted circuitry. One of the others babbled through the headset and beneath that a discordant tone, an animal growling, wires sputtering, a train wreck, an avalanche and who was shrieking, who- Mr. Claxton said from directly behind his right ear, It didn't hurt much. We liked it. You should try it sometime. You will. You are. Don was afflicted with a crystalline image of Dart and Claxton, Frick and Frack, pinned in the front seat of a government-issue sedan. Blood poured from faucets in their skulls and covered their faces. They screamed and ejected bubbles of gore, soundless. Bronson Ford ducked his head into the frame. He smiled and waved and the agents flailed like drowning men.

The boy said, They eat children. The Children prefer children, haha! The brain, while alive, is their favorite. She's with them at last. Your wife finally knows everything. Maybe you will too, before the end.

Don groaned and covered his face and bit his tongue. This phantasmagoria had to be from exhaustion or heavy drinking or payback for prior indiscretions- a bad hit of purple haze or microdot, he hadn't lived the choirboy ideal in his youth. The imagery a.s.saulted him with the heft and force of a suppressed memory that once unleashed possesses the force and violence of a tidal wave or an avalanche. The icy, diamond-headed conceit that this might be a real memory filled him with despair.

Then the jet punched through the clouds and sunlight blazed into his eyes. The pilot came over the intercom, to apologize for the rough ride and promise smooth sailing the rest of the way. Don glanced around at the other men, noted their discomfort-Pike had dropped his gla.s.ses and Rush slumped sideways, green around the gills; meanwhile, Ring glared at the disheveled attendant when she uttered her conciliatory lines. Nonetheless, even as Don observed them, their momentary terror evaporated with awkward chuckles, snorts of relief.

Lisa unbuckled and briskly sealed the softly b.u.mping door of the baggage compartment. She graced Don with a strained professional smile before ducking into the galley. He swallowed and wiped his face with his sleeve. Thunder clouds raced below them; black-crowned and murderous and shot through with white-hot licks of fire.

They landed without incident. Unfortunately, the driver slated to acquire the pa.s.sengers and their luggage was nowhere in evidence and Ring vociferously questioned his companions and sundry about the logic of packing them into a car instead of a company chopper, but no one could answer that because no one really knew what was going on, least of all Don who felt much like a sacrificial lamb. After nearly two hours of loitering in the mechanic's lounge, they convinced an off-duty pilot to ferry them to a nearby diner for lunch. Don ordered a hamburger and a grape soda, chewed doggedly while the other men conversed in low tones, except for Ring's abrupt barks of sarcastic laughter.

The diner sat within spitting distance of the highway among a drab confederation of minor businesses including a locally operated grocery store and a car dealers.h.i.+p flagged by a balloon giant, a Cyclops jabbing its claws at pa.s.sersby. The whole comprised a strip town, one of the essentially anonymous blights that had eaten into the country and spread like cancer since the beginning of the previous decade. Low mountains rose in the east, bearded and misty. The sun shone small and hard and white through a film of iron overcast. Don noticed he'd been scribing a crimson doodle on the plastic table, tracing irregular lines between discolorations and blemishes with his wet fingertip. He shook his head, concentrated on bits of ice decomposing in his soda, tried to recall how he'd p.r.i.c.ked his finger.

The driver finally appeared; a surveyor sent from base camp who rolled up in a muddy Blazer. Elli Mills was a grubby woman with oily, shoulder length hair and a wide, tanned face. She was missing some teeth and Don noted that her knuckles were large and scarred. Ring started haranguing her when they gathered in the parking lot to load the vehicle. Elli shrugged and laconically suggested that pretty boys should watch their mouths and that put a damper on his theatrics. Don was mildly impressed.

The party got rolling as the light softened into violets and oranges. A few minutes north of town, Elli took a narrow spur road that wound through dense forest and rugged hills and meandered toward the mountains. She warned everyone that it was another hour to camp and the ride would become "rough as h.e.l.l." Long shadows swept over the potholed roadway and the country music radio station descended into static as they entered a gorge of jagged cliffs towering one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet above the surrounding firs and the angry river coiling through their roots. Don sat in the back of the Blazer, wedged between Rush and Pike. His head brushed the cab's roof with every savage jounce and he thought his kidneys might be jellified if Elli persisted in driving at Baja 500 speeds.

Night descended without stars. Don lost his sense of direction or the real shape of the land; he strained to follow the lane beyond the headlights until his eyes hurt. He'd actually nodded off when they left the spur and bashed along a severely rutted dirt track squeezed by boulders and trees. Dust caked the windows, filled his mouth with grit, sifted into his nose, his tear ducts.

Elli clanged gears and made the engine roar as they barreled up a slope, skirting a sheer drop into the invisible trees, the river and the rocks. She explained this had been a logging road and that one or two ridges over a railroad track snaked its way from the mountains toward the lowlands and civilization. The Pickett-Maynard Line historically serviced a string of mining and logging camps that died off shortly after WWII. The line was mostly forgotten; rails overgrown and blocked by slides; trestles rotting; and tunnels carved like arteries through limestone were now empty cylinders except for bat guano, moldering bones of small animals and the faux occult graffiti of bored teenage campers. The state nominally maintained the Pickett Road because of the weather station atop Mystery Mountain, although it too was practically abandoned eight months out of the year, tenanted by the infrequent hermits, meteorologists or astronomers who'd escaped into the wild. This was a lonely territory.

Camp Slango occupied a shallow basin ringed by shale and granite bluffs on the opposite of Mystery Mountain from the Mystery Mountain National Park. Half a dozen small tents nestled near a central pavilion, a powder-blue dome that glowed like a firefly. Plastic beads of electric light festooned the camp, wrapped the cl.u.s.tered tents in s.h.i.+mmering coral, mingled and counterbalanced the sharp lamplight that streamed from open flaps and through mosquito netting, refracted from the hoods of several parked vehicles.

Don extricated himself from the Blazer and inhaled deeply of the cold, dry air while his companions wrestled with luggage and exchanged greetings with several surveyors who were loitering about. Leroy Smelser, head man prior to that moment, emerged from the confluence of surreal lighting and shadowy confusion to shake his hand and escort him to the "office", which was a part.i.tioned niche inside the central pavilion.

Smelser proved genial; a ruddy, energetic man with a trim white beard and a wry smile, his skin was cracked and hard and there was dirt under his thick nails. Don knew in an instant he was in the presence of a workhorse. Men such as Smelser comprised the backbone of field operations and at the end of their tenure they received the aforementioned Taiwanese watch and a retirement condo in Florida where a fellow could suffer with his rheumatism in peace and quiet. Or they died in their traces. Such a fate might've befallen Don if not for Mich.e.l.le's pleasant, though relentless prodding that he branch out, explore management and design, indulge his latent artistry.

Who the h.e.l.l are you kidding, Miller? You're afraid of the dark. You've gone soft. By the way...what was that about two hundred loggers disappearing from this very spot? A fragment of the nightmare he'd suffered on the plane revisited him-Frick and Frack screaming while Bronson Ford laughed-and he set his jaw with grim determination.

Smelser waved Don to a folding chair and fetched a bottle of Dewar's and they had a drink while Don took in the cubby-a small metal desk and half-stack filing cabinet, a computer and numerous electronic components piled w.i.l.l.y-nilly, a folding shovel and oodles of rope and a frame pack hanging against the canvas wall. Smelser disappeared for a few minutes and returned with leftovers from mess hall; pork & beans and biscuits.

After Don had eaten, Smelser broke out several geophysical maps and stretched them across the wall with brightly colored pushpins. The two large ones were circa the latter 1970s during the most recent BLM flyovers. Three much smaller maps were the handiwork of Smelser and his able photogrammetrist, Carl Ordbecker, who was currently in the field. Ordbecker was at The Site, as Smelser emphasized in his convivial manner.

"What kind of site?" Don inwardly d.a.m.ned Wayne to h.e.l.l for making a fool of him.

"Eh?" Smelser's wrinkles deepened and he scratched his chin, obviously calculating the ramifications. "I thought..."

"I mean of course there's a site. They just didn't go into detail. If I'm called in, it's generally a personnel matter."

"A personnel matter. Right."

"I'm generally not greeted with pomp or enthusiasm, Mr. Smelser."

"Oh, I bet. On a Roman galley you'd be the gentleman with the whip. As it happens, we do have a bit of red tape mucking the works, and there are some minor staff difficulties. That's why we asked for the mouthpiece and the sawbones. But that isn't our problem."

"Aha," Don smiled with dread and crossed his arms. "Lay it on me."

"This area was always rich in timber and minerals. Big companies logged here in the 1920s. Then there were some...incidents, I suppose you'd say, and shop got closed for about a decade. Mining companies moved in, bored a few holes, and so on. The mines are dead; nothing suggests anybody would make a profit by reopening them, and so far the chance of dredging up any sizable measure of placer, leastwise what would turn a corporate bean counter's crank, is fairly remote. We've got to stick it out another eight to ten days to fulfill our contract and that's that. Except for Lot Y-22." The older man turned the computer monitor toward Don and conjured a matrix of topical maps and photographs. The photos captured trees, rocks of various shades, the skeletal remains of buildings (perhaps shacks or cabins), and a ragged discoloration akin to a lopsided seam. "Y-22. This was a small village about a jillion years ago, probably abandoned the same decade as Slango Camp, so far as we can determine. No name on record except a notation that B. Kalamov had surveyed the area in 1849, discovered a cave system. Can't vouch for the authenticity of that because I can't find corroboration that such a cave exists."

"B. Kalamov," Don said. "Huh. That's a coincidence."

"What is, sir?"

"Eh, nothing. Please, what else?"

"There really aren't any records except for a reference at the library archives in Port Angeles, and that doc.u.ment came from a decrepit historian who everybody considers a crackpot. A pa.s.sage in a local history book mentions several ghost towns and this was one. There was an old, old picture of a queer little village with guys in furs and ladies in Puritan bonnets standing around in front of a stone tower like you'd see on a castle in England. A very serious crowd, which was basically the norm in those days, I expect."

"A mining camp."

"Maybe. But it's sixteen miles as the crow flies from the nearest vein-and no roads, no trails, nothing to suggest the homesteaders traveled that way. Carl figures it was an isolated community of hunters and trappers, or something along those lines. Coulda been a religious commune eking out a living in the hills. It's all very interesting, but the site is the peculiar thing. A bunch of ruins, except for that sinkhole you see there." Smelser traced the quadrant of the map with his fingertip.

"d.a.m.n. Must be ninety meters horizontally-"

"And about twenty across at the widest point. Yup, it's formidable. You want another drink?"

"Thanks, no." Don's gla.s.s was yet untouched; he'd sniffed the whiskey and been transported into the recent unhappy past. "Very impressive. So, what's the problem, exactly?"

Smelser poured another three fingers of pitchy liquor and drank it with a grimace. "It opened six days ago. Carl and our pilot Burton were buzzing the area in the chopper and noticed it probably five or six minutes after the event."

Don stared at the monitor and its stark images. Cheek bones, left orbital, teeth, a black wedge where the throat began. He looked up at the older man and met his s.h.i.+ny eyes. "That's-there must be a mistake."

"Yeah. I thought so, too. The equipment checks out. Carl and Derek know what they're doing. The sink opened when it opened. Best part is, this isn't the first time. Look at the topo from '64 and compare it to the one in '76 and the ones we shot five days ago."

The 1964 photo showed a noticeably smaller version of the sinkhole. It was utterly absent from the 1976 record. Don had the unsettling impression of a vast, earthy maw opening and closing with geological implacability.

"Okay." It wasn't okay by any means. Sinkholes were unstable by definition, but they didn't behave this way. This was something beyond his experience.

"The thing is, we've had people looking into this from the get-go. The bra.s.s sent in a couple of specialists. Weird guys-one's a freelance geologist named Spencer Duvall, a hotshot Canuck. He's cooling his heels in the infirmary-sprained an ankle when he was mucking about the site. The other one is a physicist named Ed Noonan. They flew him in from the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, don't know why. All very hush-hush. Nice enough fella, seemed to know his business. He spent about seventeen hours walking around the sink, taking readings and whatnot. Then he went AWOL. Strangest d.a.m.ned thing I've seen."

"Noonan ran off? Where'd he go?"

"He's holed up at the weather station. It's about two kilometers north of the village. We tried to talk him out of the building, get him back on the job, or at least figure out why he hightailed it in the first place. He won't talk to me and he won't budge. I left some emergency supplies and reported the incident to HQ. They said carry on and that's what we've done. I mean, maybe we should call the forestry department or the troopers."

"No, the company would have our heads if we jumped the gun and created bad press. I'll drop in on him after I survey the site."

"Well, thank G.o.d. Mr. Rourke said you'd take care of this-"

"Mr. Rourke? You spoke to him?"

"Uh, yes. And you're one hundred percent right-he absolutely positively wanted this Noonan situation resolved without police involvement. He gave me explicit instructions."

Don nodded calmly while inside his thoughts ricocheted from one another. What was Barry Rourke up to anyway? Frick and Frack, the creepy photos, a sinkhole that apparently defied the laws of physics, and now this, a loony scientist who'd locked himself in a fire watch tower. He was sorely tempted to back away from the whole mess, radio HQ and inform them that this c.r.a.p was way above his pay grade. Something stayed his hand, compelled him to proceed, to follow the breadcrumbs and see where they led. This compulsion was more than duty, more than stubbornness. A slow burning fury had kindled in his heart. He said, "Is that everything?"

"There's some other details. Best they wait until you see for yourself, though. It sounds crazy and I've been onsite." Smelser wiped his mouth and capped the booze and stuffed it in the top drawer of the file cabinet.

"I'll take your word for it."

"Like I said, headquarters gave us our marching orders-hold the fort and wait for further instructions. This is your show from here."

"Appreciate the recap." Don's heart quickened as he contemplated the possibilities of landing in the center of a momentous geological find. "Where I do I bunk?"

Don snapped awake, trapped in the coils of a down mummy bag. Irrevocable darkness filled the tent. "Am I dead?" His chest throbbed. The wind rattled the canvas tent and it was bitter cold. "Am I dead?" Repeated and repeated in breathy whispers until, "No, you're alive." He wondered, as his skin p.r.i.c.kled, if that was his own voice returned from the void, if a double of his own face floated pale and unearthly.

Then he was asleep again and dreaming of Mich.e.l.le. She stood naked and smiling before the entrance of a cave. Strange, bony hands emerged from the shadows and caressed her, drew her into the cave. The moon flared.

The Man in the Moon turned his misshapen head, beamed green cheese eyes upon Don's coc.o.o.ned form. The Man in the Moon said, It feels good, my boy. A black swarm of insects poured from his chasm mouth, took wing and scattered into the icy void of limitless s.p.a.ce.

Derek Burton took Don and Ring up in the chopper right after breakfast.

Don tried not to stare. He recognized the pilot from another era of his life, or in the creeping smoke of a dream. I should know you. We have met. Ah, the question was where.

Burton moved with a hitching gait reminiscent of Bronson Ford's crow hop. Haggard in the glare of sunrise, his drinker's face sallow and dented and pocked, eyes twinkling, thin mouth pursed in the midst of a tuneless whistle, a culling song. His flesh hung loose as the sloughing wattles of an uncured pelt. His hair was white. He grinned at Don and winked. Yes, Don, we've met, that grin said.

Don shook the fellow's hand, suddenly averse to climbing into a c.o.c.kpit with this unwholesome character. Too late, too late.

Burton chatted with Ring regarding the locations of various structures, the mostly buried remnants of the ruined village. Don eyed the pair, mildly disturbed at Ring's deferential, almost obsequious behavior; a lapdog that had met his new master. When the chopper was aloft, Don awkwardly donned the headset to cut the engine roar and listened as Burton explained the various landmarks. The trees lay green and plastic in the folds and rumples of the land. Here and there small rivers and creeks slashed through valleys. Nothing but miles of crag and trees and low, misty clouds. The shadow of the chopper pa.s.sed over a trench in the earth. From a height of five hundred feet the gash of yawning rock and dirt and subterranean darkness gave Don a chill. He swore under his breath as the engine stuttered and a series of lights twinkled in the c.o.c.kpit.

"Hang tight," Burton said, his voice crackling through the headset. "She's old and cantankerous. U.S. Army surplus. b.l.o.o.d.y rotor could break off any second now." After a couple of beats the man laughed. Whether in jest or to reinforce his observation, Don couldn't decide.

They landed near a pup tent on a delta in a narrow river valley. An elderly man in a wool jacket and cap fiddled with pieces of video equipment recently unpacked from several large crates. Carl Ordbecker ceased adjusting a tripod-mounted laser camera and cheerfully greeted Don and Ring, clapping both hands to his wool hat until the blades ceased spinning.

"Ah, the blokes I've been waiting for, then. Good show!" He doffed his cap to swipe at a cloud of gnats. "You'll be wanting to see our find. Right around the corner, Mr. Miller, Mr. Ring." Without ceremony he led them through a copse of mixed fir and cedar.

The trio splashed across a shallow expanse of swift-flowing water and through a hundred yards of tall, brown gra.s.s, and then they were among the remnants of the nameless village. There was a hollow of weeds and bushes and from the mora.s.s jutted the lines of a low, shattered palisade like a piece of art from the set of a Revolutionary War movie, and beyond the palisade a handful of partially burned cottages. The central longhouse was roofless, but its walls stood. The ominous canted tower from the photographs rose at a crooked angle on a plot toward the far edge of the community. Don spotted a few more rotted cottages on a steep, forested hillside.

"Holy s.h.i.+t!" Ring said. "This is..." He closed his mouth and simply stared.

"Ayep, watch your step, boys." Ordbecker gestured to a section of ground where the sinkhole began as a crevice and rapidly widened to a chasm. "Mr. Miller, I don't have to tell you the footing is perilous yonder."

"Any changes since your last report?" Don said. He tapped his watch, a fancy digital model allegedly good for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro or deep-sea diving. The blocky numerals flickered, faded, came back to life.