thick green tarp.
“We’ll have to get him topside with the other one, sort ’em out. Figure which is which.” Wyland then noticed something distinctly different about this corpse and wondered if the tarp cut the odor. “You notice that?” he asked.
“What? What is it?”
“This one doesn’t smell so awful as the other fellow.”
“What killed them?” Declan asked, ignoring Wyland’s confusion.
“That’s the real mystery, now isn’t it?” Wyland snatched the tarp away in his best magician form, fully expecting to have found Anton Fiore lying here dead if not O’Toole, but instead he and Declan were shocked to find a furry-faced, pained-looking, hoary wolf creature with a huge, ugly decayed snout, its eyes like dried prunes. The sight sent Alastair staggering back—and given his limp, he fell into Declan, almost losing his feet and taking the young man to him.
“What in God’s name!” gasped Declan, staggering back, now welcoming the dark corners.
“It’s some sort of beastie, I’d say.”
“Look at that snout; it’s no dog—yet it seems like a large dog, maybe a wolf?”
“I’ve not ever seen the like of it, but look at how dry the skin, and the eyes—like the fellow we sent up, two dry, hard orbs.”
“Mummified—both this animal and the miner.”
“Mummified? I saw no bandages!”
“I’ve seen mummies in the museum in Edinburgh and London, sir, unwrapped mummies. They appear like petrified wood.”
“We had Egyptian mummies represented at the great fair in Chicago, but they were well wrapped.”
“It’s as if…”
“As if what, Declan?”
Declan took the lantern from the detective and stepped closer, examining the dead creature. “It looks like some sort of
“That’d be my guess—and look here.” He positioned Declan’s lantern and hand up to illuminate the wall to his right. I’d say it was buried here for a long time, entombed in this wall. Notice the shape of the remaining, scooped out section?”
“The miners dug it from the wall and here it lies, yes.”
“And if it’s carrying some ancient disease or organism?” asked Alastair, his nerves shot. “We’ve been exposed.”
“Almighty’s will be done if it’s to be done.”
“You’re fine with it at your age, but I intend to live a long life.” Alastair’s dark joke got no laughs. “Declan, I appreciate the difference in our ages—and should’ve insisted you get topside with your friend.” Alastair fell silent, contemplating the results of a plague rampaging through the already filthy streets of Belfast’s ghetto areas long before reaching out to other parts of the city. The poverty stricken would die in droves at the outset, and when finished there, it might well devastate the entire countryside, biting at the gentry and heads of state, at which point they might attempt to do something about it. He imagined that Declan, being a medical man, was giving into the same fears.
“If the corpse we sent up with Thomas is diseased and virulent,” began the young intern, “then it could spread about the city.”
“Yes, afraid we’ve made some bad choices for being such intelligent men.”
“The jutting shoulders of this thing,” said Declan of the beast. “And you see the size of the fang there? Wonder where the other fang might be.”
Using his cane, Alastair tried to turn the monstrous snout here in the dark shaft, but he found it stiff as cord wood, unmoving. “Dry and stiff as bone,” he muttered.
“Like the miner we sent up—” gasped Declan—“yet this carcass is ancient, and he… his corpse only hours old.”
“I suspect that O’Toole and McAffey had some reason to dig this thing out of the wall, and things went bad from there.” Alastair poked at the monster with his cane. “Likely placed the tarp over the thing, then boarded the lift, readying to find the surface, but you saw where the one had fallen or been forced over the side of the lift, then caught on a ledge until we landed on the man’s body. If it’s McAffey we sent up, O’Toole got out and into the world.”
“You think they fought over a damn fang?”
“I don’t know that it was the fang they fought over, but do you see the second miner here?”
“Well… no.”
“I saw a chain with a hook hanging on a peg behind us,” continued Wyland, taking the lantern back to the spot where he’d seen the chain dangling on one wall. He returned with it, saying, “We hook this monster and send it up ahead of us, Declan, and then we get the devil outta here.”
“I’m with you. Place gives me the creeps.”
They soon had the crook-hook on the end of the chain attached to the strange discovery, and yanking on the chain which snaked up alongside the lift, they got a response, presumably from Walter, who began winding the crude winch which begged to be replaced. The animal carcass had been light in weight, dehydrated and ancient as it was, and it rained down a dust over the men below as the chain echoed a metallic screech down the shaft. The dry animal dust created a ghostly, curtain-like veil in the lantern light.
In the interim as they were discovering the beast in the mine shaft, topside Walter had had the presence of mind to return the lift back to them.
“Let’s get out of here, now!” Alastair shouted to Declan, and they leapt onto the lift platform. Declan and Ransom had both begun to cough in the confined shaft as they rode up below the animal carcass overhead. As they did so, Alastair’s cane tapped at an edge of the boards near Declan’s feet; so close came the tip of the wolf’s head cane that Declan jumped to avoid it.
“Look there!” said Alastair, tapping still. “More evidence the second man got out and away.”
“How can you be sure?”
He lifted the cane and pointed to where it had rested. “Do you see the swath of cloth caught on that nail, the concentration of hair? Someone—presumably O’Toole, who I learned from Walter was a heftier man than myself— kicked his superintendent off this platform as it lifted. Here, stop the lift.”
Declan immediately brought them to a halt. “What is it?”
“The rock face here… smeared with blackened flesh. It’s where the body had been resting before we hit it and sent it to the shaft floor.” Alastair placed his lantern close to the ledge he pointed at. “I’d noticed on the corpse, on the arm—a bad scrape but no redness, no blood. In fact, did you look at his eyes?”
“No, I did not, sir.”
“No, of course not; who looks a dead man in the eye? Only a fool, my mother would say.”
“I am proposing to be a doctor; I should do exactly that when confronted with a corpse.”
Alastair shrugged. “You’re not a doctor yet; you’re young. It’s natural to look away.”
“I’ll be a doctor in a few years; I’ve got to learn to be more observant. I should’ve looked into his eyes.”
“In this case, perhaps not.” With his cane, Alastair indicated up—signaling Declan to continue to send the lift upward again.
Declan swallowed hard and turned the switch for up. “What did you find in the eyes?”
“Dried pair of prunes, shriveled to nothing, yet intact—and yet with the level of decay to the body… makes no sense. There shouldn’t be anything whatsoever left of the soft tissue of the eyes.”
“But then in so short a period, the body shouldn’t be so far along in decay either, Mr. Wyland.”
“The eyes looked like shrunken little heads like those made by cannibals. Come to think of it, the entire body looked like those crazy shrunken heads I saw once at a huge fair that represented every race on the planet to us fairgoers.”
“The Chicago World’s Fair?” guessed Declan. “You saw the 1893 Columbian Exposition? Damn, I’d give anything to’ve seen that!”
“Yes… quite a show it was, too. Like all the world in one place.” This much was no lie, he thought, pleased with himself and the memory of being atop the Ferris Wheel with the love of his life, the woman he’d left behind,
