It was the most desolate, the most hazardous, the most environmentally toxic place in the entire state.
Temperatures underground could reach a thousand degrees in the heart of the fire. That heat seeped up through the soil and melted snow before it could even collect on the ground.
Caxton saw the wintertime flowers, even in the dark. Wild-flowers, tiny blossoms on thin stalks that fluttered in the night breezes. In the moonlight, surrounded by the dead trees, they were eerily beautiful.
She parked her car near where the center of town had been once. There were roads crisscrossing a grassy field, but the houses were all gone. Here and there she could see an overgrown foundation, the crumbled remains of a brick chimney, but that was all. A couple of small houses remained on the edge of where the town had been, but only one had any lights on.
She had arrived. She was armed. She was ready.
The government had tried a few schemes for putting out the fire, but none had been successful. The coal continued to burn. Caxton had heard there was enough coal down there to keep burning for another two hundred and fifty years.
One thing the government had done was to close off every entrance to the underground mine. They hadn’t just strung up fencing or boarded over the entrances, either—they’d been blasted shut, in the hopes of cutting off the fire’s oxygen supply. The pit mines nearby had all been filled in with sterile fill, crushed rock, and nonflammable soil. That was good, from one perspective. The lair was down in the mine, and the fewer exits the mine had, the harder it would be for Jameson to escape when she came for him.
It did present one dilemma for her, however—knowing exactly where the lair was didn’t help if she couldn’t find her way in.
She had an idea about how to fix that. She started walking toward the house with the burning lights, intent on seeing who was still awake.
Chapter 54.
The house was filled with birds. The birds would drive Caxton crazy, she thought, if she had to live here.
“You say you’re not with the government,” the old woman said, and brushed her thinning white hair back over a bald spot. She was wearing a shapeless polyester housecoat. A chipped enamel tea mug sat by her elbow, untouched.
Caxton had its twin—the only other one the woman owned—on a coffee table in front of her. On the floor by her feet she had the Nomex flash-resistant suit and her other equipment folded neatly into a special backpack. Not that she intended to use it that night, but she wanted to be prepared in case she had a chance to do some impromptu spelunking. “Not anymore. I know they’ve approached you about buying your land—”
“And I told them, no.” A sharp fluttering of wings nearly drowned out the softly spoken words. The old woman frowned and peered through heavy eyelids at Caxton, sizing her up. “One day that fire’s goin’
out. Then they’ll have to come to me if they want the coal down there. I own mineral rights on half this town, and I’m not giving that up without a fight.”
A canary chirped next to Caxton’s shoulder. The bright yellow birds were everywhere, dozens or maybe as many as a hundred crowded into wire cages lined with ancient, brittle newspaper. The cages hung from the ceiling of every room, or sat on end tables. Some were even tucked away on the floor, behind the furniture.
It was quite possible the old woman loved the birds, but they weren’t pets.
“You keep these,” Caxton said, “to test for carbon monoxide, right?” The gas was constantly rising from the mine fire in tendrils of pale smoke. It gathered in basements and lingered outside windows like insubstantial tentacles tapping for entry. Even in very mild concentrations, as little as five parts per million, it was toxic, and a sudden puff of vapor could suffocate the old woman in her sleep at any time. Canaries were famous for their sensitivity to carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases. If they started keeling over, the old woman would have a few seconds’ warning to pull a gas mask over her face and avoid breathing in her own death. Gas masks were almost as common in the house as canaries—there was one in every room, at least.
“I treat ’em well, feed ’em twice a day and keep ’em clean,” the old woman insisted. “You from the ASPCA?”
“Maybe I used the wrong term. Perhaps,” Caxton said, “I should have said they were to test for white damp.”
Miners referred to poisonous gas outbreaks as varieties of damp, probably from
The old woman sat up and scratched at her wrist. It was as if Caxton had spoken a code word the old woman had been waiting to hear. Still her eyes were suspicious. “You’re no miner, lady,” she said.
Caxton smiled. “No. But I grew up around coal mines. I was born in Iselin, and I went to school near Whiskey Run. I don’t want to run you off your ground, ma’am. All I want to know is whether there are any bootleg mines around here.”
“If you’re who you say you are you’ll know that bootleg mining’s a thing of the past.” The old woman shook her head. “There’s no man alive who could dig enough coal in a day with his own hands to make a living.”
Caxton had heard that before—and knew it was like an Italian-American claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia. “He might dig enough to warm his house in winter, and cut down on his heating bills.”
Caxton picked up her tea mug and rolled it back and forth in her hands. She was getting frustrated and she wondered if there was a quicker way to find the information she needed. She supposed she could pull her gun on this old woman—but no, that was beyond even her level of desperation. “Anyway, the one I’m looking for isn’t currently in use. At least, not by the living.”
The old woman leaned forward in her armchair. “I’m not sure I heard that right.”
Caxton sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m after a vampire. I know he’s holed up in the mine, but I don’t know how he gets in or out. I thought—”
The old woman held up her hands. “That’s what I thought you said.” She tapped at a cage on top of her television set, which set the birds inside fluttering and chirping. Picking it up by one handle, she walked toward her front door. “You’d better follow me.”
Caxton got up and pulled on her backpack, not wanting to leave it behind. They went out into the dark and cold night, the old woman not even bothering to put on a jacket. They didn’t have far to go. Caxton followed her down a road cracked and overgrown with weeds, then into the weathered foundation of an old house that had long since been torn down. A pile of old rags and plastic bags had gathered where a bit of the foundation stuck up in the air higher than the ground around it. It looked just like a heap of trash. The old woman put down her cage, though, and brushed the refuse away, revealing a wooden trapdoor.
“He came here about two months gone, your fella. We all saw him out our windows—he didn’t make a pretense of hiding. Why should he?
“And you never called the police,” Caxton said.
“If we did, we knew what would happen to us. There’s just a handful of us left in Centralia, and we can’t afford people coming ’round asking lots of questions. Not if we’re going to preserve the claim on what’s ours. Nobody wants the police crawling over this ground, looking for evidence and getting in our business. Your kind aren’t welcome here.”
Caxton sighed. “I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”
Someone was standing behind her.
Caxton whirled around, her weapon out of its holster and pointing before she even saw what she was aiming at. The laser sight made a bright spot on the chest of a massive young man in a red plaid hunter’s coat. He raised his hands slowly and looked from Caxton to the old woman and back.
“What’s going on, Maisie?” he asked. “I saw you come out your house just now and I saw where you were going.”
“That’s just my cousin Wally. Don’t you shoot him,” the old woman insisted.
