Boyd was shaping up just fine and that bothered him to no end. Boyd was strong and he was a fast learner and he’d worked under guys like Maki plenty of times. In six months, Boyd would know more than he did and in a year Maki’d be asking him questions. And Maki knew it, too.
“Real tough guy, eh?” Maki said. “Well, that’s good, tough guy, because I made you a date down on Eight, the new level. You’ll be cutting drift down there, cleaning up after the charging crew. Dangerous work, cookie.”
Boyd snapped the lid of his lunch bucket closed. “So let’s get to it and quit with the jawing already.”
Maki liked that even less. He was half-way through his pasty and Boyd was stealing his break time from him. And not only that, Boyd was stealing his stage. He thought working drift would make Boyd piss yellow in his boots, but it wasn’t working. Boyd wanted it.
“Well?” Boyd said. “Let’s go.”
Maki threw his half-eaten pasty in his bucket and called Boyd a mouthy little sonofabitch and then they were on their way up the ladder road, making for the main shaft. The whole way, Maki was doing everything in his seriously strained repertoire to intimidate Boyd and put the scare into him.
But it wasn’t working.
Boyd was scared, all right. But not of Maki. Not of his stories.
It was something else and that something didn’t have a name.
5
“You never know what’s going to happen in a drift,” Maki was saying. “Sometimes the charges misfire and they blow your arms off. Sometimes you tap into a pocket of gas and it’s Goodnight, Irene. Sometimes there’s cave-ins. Guys get squashed flat, cookie. I seen it once. A guy, friend of mine, crushed between two slabs of rock. All that came running out was something like red jelly. Those cave-ins happen all the time. Probably happen to you. Then I’ll get stuck scraping your ass off the rocks.”
“No, don’t worry about it, Maki,” Boyd said. “We’ll be working together. If I go, you go. Won’t that be a fucking scream?”
Maki was getting exasperated. “You think it’s funny, cookie? You think cave-ins are funny?”
Boyd turned on him. Turned on him fast and made him back right up. “No, dumbass, I don’t think cave-ins are funny,” he said. “My old man died in one over at the Mary B. when I was fifteen. I don’t remember laughing much.”
Maki just stood there with a dazed and helpless look on his face. He closed up like a flower and didn’t have shit to say after that. His book of underground horror stories was just plain used up. When they got to the cage for the ride down, he had a cramped, uncomfortable look to him like he was constipated.
Finally, he said, “Listen, Boyd. I was just letting you know that this is dangerous. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.”
“Sure you were,” Boyd said.
Then the door was closed and the cage jerked and plummeted down into the depths of the earth, the air smelling of minerals and standing water.
When they stepped out, Boyd could taste the dust on his tongue. It was like the dust from a chalkboard, but grittier and thicker. He could feel it settle over his face right away and it made him want to breathe through his nose and sneeze a lot. There was a smell, too, one that he couldn’t quite put his finger on…something like moldy rocks and crumbling masonry, a distinct and unsettling smell of antiquity.
“How do you like it here?” Maki said, looking down the carved tunnels where nothing moved but a pall of shadows.
“I like it just fine,” Boyd told him.
But, good God, what a lie that was.
It was even worse down here than it had been on the other levels. It was like being in a tomb a mile underground and Boyd literally felt the walls closing in on him. This was Level #8 and the majority of it was still being excavated. He could hear the distant sound of hammers and machinery, but it sounded like it was coming from miles away. His heart thudded in his chest and the breath rasped in his lungs.
And he was getting that feeling again.
Just like before, that crawling, shivery sense that he was in grave danger. He’d written it off earlier as maybe simple paranoia couched with a healthy dose of claustrophobia given that his old man had been crushed to death years back at the old Mary B.
But this was something different. A separate species of dread.
As he stood there by Maki, next to the shaft house, feeling the great depths they had descended to, he had the weirdest sensation of deja-vu like he had been through something like this before. Maybe not in real life, but perhaps in a dream. One of those cloying, crowded awful nightmares of suffocation that you wake gasping and sweating from at three in the morning. It was like that. As if he was slowly being asphyxiated by this place. It was a numb sort of horror, making him feel utterly helpless like a swimmer going down for the last time.
“You okay, cookie?” Maki said.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
Thing was, the smartass edge was missing from Maki’s voice.
Boyd didn’t believe for a moment that that prick Maki was actually concerned about his well-being, but he could sense a certain veiled apprehension under his words. Like maybe Maki didn’t exactly care for it down here either. All Boyd knew for sure is that what he had been feeling was getting stronger. It was in his guts and crawling right up his spine.
C’mon already, he told himself. Get a fucking grip.
“You pussying out, cookie?” Maki said.
“Not me,” Boyd told him. “You’re looking a little green, though.”
“Shit.”
A few men in raincoats and miner’s helmets came walking out of a passage. Two of them were just diggers, but the other guy was Jurgens, the mining engineer who pretty much ran the place. He was the guy who located the ore, instructed the men where to dig and where to tunnel.
“Hey, Maki,” he said. “This Boyd?”
“Yeah. I got him under my wing, Mr. Jurgens. I’m showing him the ropes and all. I’m taking good care of him.”
“Good. We can use the help. We’re cutting a series of drifts down here,” he said to Boyd as they walked off down the tunnel and the sound of machinery began to get louder. “There’s no good quality ore where we’re at now, so we need to tunnel to it. You ever done any drift work?”
“No.”
“But he’s a fast learner, Mr. Jurgens. You got my word on that. I’ll teach him everything I know and make a first class miner out of him. Yes, sir.”
“Good, good.”
Christ, Boyd thought. Maki was kissing this guy’s ass big time. Wasn’t that just special? You had to love Maki.
They followed the tunnel for maybe fifteen minutes, turning off through a series of crosscuts, on and on. The whole way Maki kept trying to stroke Jurgens, doing everything but getting down on his knees for the guy. How’s your wife, Mr. Jurgens? Heard you went down to Mexico…was that nice, Mr. Jurgens? Is your daughter still in law school, Mr. Jurgens? It was fucking sickening. Finally they reached the stope, which was essentially a huge cavern cut by drilling and blasting. It was lit up by floodlights. It stank of sulfur and dankness. The ceiling was sloping and the walls set with jagged fault lines which Jurgens pointed out were from prehistoric volcanic eruptions.
“The rocks are different here,” Boyd said.
“Of course they’re different,” Maki said like he was some kind of idiot. “We’re deeper.”
