Deep Sky

“We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”

She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”

“And what time was President Garner killed?”

She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.

“This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”

For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.

Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.

Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the way stories do when they’re made up.”

“Tell them about the ghost,” the little girl said.

Jeannie waved her off.

“You told us it was real,” the girl said. “You said you and Dad heard it talk.”

Jeannie looked annoyed at the girl’s insistence, maybe a little embarrassed. But there was something else in her expression, Travis saw. Some inability to refute what the kid had said, because no doubt Jeannie really had told her children those things.

“I don’t know what’s up there,” she said at last, keeping her focus on Travis and Paige and Bethany. “There’s . . . something.” She was silent a bit longer, then just shook her head. “The stories all go like this: the mine was nothing special until 1987—kids might go up there to drink or make out, but nothing strange ever happened. Then, that year, the government came in and fenced it all off. The nearest shaft entrance is actually on Forest Service land, outside the town limits.” She nodded out the front windows. “You probably saw the house up at the treeline with all the Humvees in front.”

“Raines’s house,” Travis said.

She nodded. “His property butts up against federal land. The mine access is two hundred yards straight uphill from that house, deep in the woods. They say the government took over the site and . . . did something up there. Built something, maybe. Down inside the shaft.”

Travis looked at Paige. He saw her processing the information and drawing the same conclusion as he was: Jeannie had it wrong. The stories had it wrong. The government—working with Tangent—had only found something in the mine shaft. The Scalar investigation’s long search for answers had led to this town in the end, and in turn had led to the mine. Whatever was in there, Ruben Ward had created it. Maybe with help.

“They say most of the government’s comings and goings were at a different entrance,” Jeannie said, “over the ridge to the north. That opening is a lot lower down, accessible by old logging roads. I guess some teenagers from here in town got pretty close to it a few times, when everything was going on. Close enough to overhear workers talking about what was in the mine.” A shiver seemed to pass through her. She shook it off. “The workers called it the Stargazer. They were scared of it. They hated being down inside with it, whatever it was—whatever it is. They said it had to be kept under control, but they were still working out how to do that. And then Mr. Raines bought that house up on the slope—he paid twice what it was worth to speed up the deal. He moved in, and around that time all the government activity just went away. It was pretty clear Raines was involved somehow. I don’t think anyone trusted him, at first. But after a while something became obvious: the man never left this town. And I mean never. I’ve seen that for myself, living here almost twenty years now. In all that time, Raines never took so much as a drive down to the ocean, three miles away. He’d come down to Main Street for groceries, or to have a sandwich in here. Then right back up to that house. The way people eventually saw it, he was the one keeping the Stargazer under control, whatever the hell that entailed. He got stuck with that job, and he did it. He kept us safe from it, all those years. And if we weren’t sure of it before, we are now. It was about six hours after he died that we got the first . . . hum.”

Travis had been staring down into the bar. Now he looked up. “Like the one five minutes ago. Feels like bugs in your head.”

Jeannie nodded. “Second one was about four hours after the first, then less than two hours, and they’ve been coming faster and faster ever since.”

No wonder the town was emptying out. Twenty-five years of these stories, and now physical evidence that they weren’t bullshit. That there really was something bad up in the mine.

Travis considered the word: Stargazer. A uniquely strange name for something that was deep underground.

Much of what they’d learned was strange—both here and before they’d arrived in Rum Lake. There were giant gaps in the puzzle, and Travis couldn’t picture what would fill them. The Stargazer itself was one: it had to have been in that mine since the summer of 1978, some nine years before the Scalar investigators found it, but in all that time it must’ve been effectively dormant. If it’d been generating these hums back then, this place would’ve become a ghost town. Yet when Allen Raines had taken watch over the thing, he’d had to stay on top of it day and night, right from the beginning. Those two facts were hard to reconcile. As was a third: even if he and Paige and Bethany could reach the Stargazer, it was unlikely they could do much more than Raines had. Which was to keep the thing in check, assuming they’d see how that was done. But what sort of Achilles’ heel was that? If all they could do was babysit the thing, how long could they stay on it before someone interfered with them? Like these guys in the Humvees. A few hours, at best?

He knew he was thinking in circles, and that doing so wouldn’t help until they’d seen the Stargazer for themselves. For better or worse, they’d have the whole picture then. He drew hope only from what Bethany had said back in Casper: If they consider us a threat, then we are.

The little girl stepped out of the doorway and tugged on Jeannie’s arm.

“The ghost,” the girl said. “Tell them.”

Jeannie’s forehead furrowed. She seemed stretched between frustration and sober gravity, as if she believed the story herself but would never expect others to.

“Try us,” Travis said.

Jeannie frowned and let out a long breath, giving in. “They say it always happens around the two entrances to the mine. They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t. My husband and I . . . we like to think now we might’ve imagined what we heard. The wind really was blowing that day. Maybe that’s all it was. I don’t know.”

Travis tried to picture the mine entrance relative to Raines’s place, on the satellite image they’d seen. The moment he did, something occurred to him. He turned to Bethany.

“That satellite was looking almost straight down, right?”

She nodded. “Perfectly straight down. Default angle unless you command it to do otherwise.”

“From that perspective,” Travis said, “even redwoods would have lots of gaps between them. Plenty of open ground visible in the image.”

Bethany shrugged. “I guess. Probably quite a bit.”

“We didn’t see any heat signature uphill from Raines’s house,” Travis said. “No bodies moving through those woods. Not even one.” He thought about it a second longer. “I don’t think these guys are going near the mine shaft.”

“I’m certain they’re not,” Jeannie said. “I’ve been watching all morning, waiting for them to head up into the trees and get in there—get working on the problem. I’ve assumed that’s what they were sent here to do. But all they’re focused on so far is that house. In and out, hours on end now.”

The more Travis considered it, the more that made sense, and not because of any strange phenomenon that could be mistaken for a ghost. Simple priorities were enough: these men had been sent to find and destroy the