"Provided you got nothing stronger," she says, and only hesitates a moment before crossing the room to the chair.
"No," Jeremiah tells her. "Nothing stronger. If I recall, we had an agreement, you and I?"
"You want your key back?"
Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy pours hot water into the second teacup, then adds a second tea egg, and he very nearly asks if she imagines that his feelings have changed since the last time they spoke. Its been almost six months since the snowy January night when he asked her to marry him. Dora laughed, thinking it only a poor joke at first. But when pressed, she admitted she was not the least bit interested in marriage and, what"s more, confessed she was even less amenable to giving up her work at the mines to bear and raise children. When she suggested that he board up his museum, instead, and for a family take in one or two of the starving guttersnipes who haunt Colliers" Row, there was an argument. Before it was done, he said spiteful things, cruel jibes aimed at all the tender spots she"d revealed to him over the years of their courtship. And he knew, even as he spoke the words, that there would be no taking them back. The betrayal of Dora"s trust came too easily, the turning of her confidences against her, and she is not a particularly forgiving woman. So, tonight, he only almost asks, then thinks better of the question and holds his tongue.
"It"s your key," he says. "Keep it. You may have need of it again one day."
"Fine," Dora replies, letting the chair rock back on two legs. "It"s your funeral, Jeremiah."
"Can I ask why you"re here?"
"You may," she says, staring now at a fossil ammonite lying in a cradle of excelsior on his desk. "It"s bound to come out, sooner or later. But if you"re thinking maybe I come looking for old times or a quick poke "
"I wasn"t," he lies, interrupting her.
"Well, good. Because I ain"t."
"Which begs the question. And it"s been a rather tedious day, Miss Bolshaw, so, if we can dispense with any further niceties."
Dora coughs and leans forward, the front legs of her chair b.u.mping loudly against the floor. Jeremiah keeps his eyes on the two cups of tea, each one turned as dark now as a sluggish, tannin-stained bayou.
"I"m guessing that you still haven"t seen anyone about that cough," he says. "And that it hasn"t improved."
Dora coughs again before answering him, then wipes at her mouth with an oil-stained handkerchief. "Good to see time hasn"t dulled your mental faculties," she mutters hoa.r.s.ely, breathlessly, then clears her throat and wipes her mouth again.
"It doesn"t sound good, Dora, that"s all. You spend too much time in the tunnels. Plenty enough people die from anthracosis without ever having lifted a pickaxe or loaded a mine car, as I"m sure you"re well aware."
"I also didn"t come here to discuss my health," she tells him, stuffing the handkerchief back into a trouser pocket. "It"s the stink of this place, gets me wheezing, that"s all. I swear, Jeremiah, the air in this dump, it"s like trying to breathe inside a G.o.dd.a.m.n burr grinder that"s been used to mill capsic.u.m and black powder."
"No argument there," he says and takes the tea eggs from the cups and sets them aside on a dishtowel. "But, I still don"t know why you"re here."
"Been some odd goings on down in Shaft Number Seven, ever since they started back in working on the Molly Gray vein."
"I thought Shaft Seven flooded in October," Jeremiah says, and he adds two sugar cubes to Dora"s cup. The Professor has never taken his tea sweetened, nor with lemon, cream, or whiskey, for that matter. When he drinks tea, it"s the tea he wants to taste.
"They pumped it out a while back, got the operation up and running again. Anyway, one of the foremen knew we were acquainted and asked if I"d mind. Paying you a call, I mean."
"Do you?" he asks, carrying the cups to the desk.
"Do I what?"
"Do you mind, Miss Bolshaw?"
She glares at him a moment, then takes her cup and lets her eyes wander back to the ammonite on the desk.
"So, these odd goings on. Can you be more specific?"
"I can, if you"ll give me a chance. You ever heard of anyone finding living creatures sealed up inside solid rock, two thousand feet below ground?"
He watches her a moment, to be sure this isn"t a jest.
"You"re saying this has happened, in Shaft Seven?"
She sips at her tea, then sets the cup on the edge of the desk and picks up the ammonite. The fossilized mother of pearl glints iridescent shades of blue and green, scarlet and gold, in the dim gaslight of the office.
"That"s exactly what I"m saying. And I seen most of them for myself, so I know it"s not just miners" spinning tall tales."
"Most of them? So, it"s happened more than once?"
Dora ignores the questions, turning the ammonite over and over in her hands.
"I admit," she says, "I was more than a little skeptical at first. There"s a shale bed just below the Molly Gray, and it"s chockful of siderite nodules. Lots of them got fossils inside. Matter of fact, I think I brought a couple of boxes over to you last summer, before the shaft started taking water."
"You did. There were some especially nice seed ferns in them, as I recall."
"Right. Well, anyhow, a few days back I started hearing these wild stories, that someone had cracked open a nodule and found a live frog trapped inside. And then a spider. And then worms, and so on. When I asked around about it, I was directed to the geologist"s shack, and sure as h.e.l.l, there were all these things lined up in jars, things that come out of the nodules. Mostly, they were dead. Most of them died right after they came out of the rocks, or so I"m told."
Dora stops talking and returns the ammonite sh.e.l.l to its box. Then she glances at Jeremiah and takes another sip of her tea.
"And you know it"s not a hoax?" he asks her. "I mean, you know it"s not tomfoolery, just some of the miners taking these things down with them from the surface, then claiming to have found them in the rocks? Maybe having a few laughs at the expense of their supervisors?"
"Now, that was my first thought."
"But then you saw something that changed your mind," Jeremiah says. "And that"s why you"re here tonight."
Dora Bolshaw takes deep breath, and Jeremiah thinks she"s about to start coughing again. Instead, she nods and exhales slowly. He notices beads of sweat standing out on her upper lip, and wonders if she"s running a fever.
"I"m here tonight, Professor Ogilvy, because two men are dead. But, yeah, since you asked, I"ve seen sufficient evidence to convince me this ain"t just some jacka.s.s thinks he"s funny. When I voiced my doubts, Charlie McNamara split one of those nodules open right there in front of me. Concretion big around as my fist," and she holds up her left hand for emphasis. "He took up a hammer and gave it a smart tap on one side, so it cleaved in two, pretty as you please. And out crawled a fat red scorpion. You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?"
And Professor Ogilvy thinks a moment, sipping his tea come all the way from Taipei City, Taiwan. "I"ve seen plenty of reddish-brown scorpions," he says. "For example, Diplocentrus lindo, from the Chihuahuan Desert and parts of Texas. The carapace is, in fact, a dark reddish-brown."
"I didn"t say reddish brown. What I said was red. Red as berries on a holly bush, or a ripe apple. Red as blood, if you want to go get morbid about it."
"Charlie cracked open a rock, from Shaft Number Seven, and a bright red scorpion crawled out. That"s what you"re telling me?"
"I am," Dora nods. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d had a stinger on him big around as my thumb, and then some," and now she holds out her thumb.
"And two men at the mines have died because of these scorpions?" Jeremiah Ogilvy asks.
"No. Weren"t scorpions killed them," she says and laughs nervously. "But it was something come out those rocks." And then she frowns down at her teacup and asks the Professor if he"s absolutely sure that he doesn"t have anything stronger. And this time, he opens a bottom desk drawer and digs out the pint bottle of rye he keeps there, and he offers it to her. Dora Bolshaw pulls out the cork and pours a generous shot into her tea cup, but then she"s coughing again, worse than before, and he watches her and waits for it to pa.s.s.
What she"s told him is not without precedent. Over the years, Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy has encountered any number of seemingly inexplicable reports of living inclusions discovered in stones, and often inside lumps of coal. Living fossils, after a fashion. He has never once given them credence, but, rather, looked upon these anecdotes as fine examples of the general gullibility of men, not unlike the taxidermied "jackalopes" he"s seen in saloons, or tales of ghostly hauntings, or of angels, or the antics of spiritual mediums. They are all quite amusing, these phantasma, until someone insists that they"re true.
For starters, he could point to an 1818 lecture by Dr. Edward Daniel Clarke, the first professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University. Clarke claimed to have been collecting Cretaceous sea urchins when he happened across three newts entombed in the chalk. To his amazement, the amphibians showed signs of life, and though two quickly expired after being exposed to air, the third was so lively that it escaped when he placed it in a nearby pond to aid in its rejuvenation. Or, a case from the summer of 1851, when quarrymen in Blois, France were supposed to have discovered a live toad inside a piece of flint. Indeed, batrachians figure more prominently in these accounts than any other creature, and the Professor might also have brought to Dora Bolshaw"s attention yet another toad, said to have been freed from a lump of iron ore the very next year, this time somewhere in the East Midlands of England.
The list goes on and on, reaching back centuries. On May 8, 1733, the Swedish architect Johan Grberg supposedly witnessed the release of a frog from a block of sandstone. So horrified was Grberg at the sight that he is said to have beaten the beast to death with a shovel. An account of the incident was summarily published, by Grberg, in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, a report which was eventually translated into Dutch, Latin, German, and French.
Too, there is the account from 1575 by the surgeon Ambroise Pare, who claimed a live toad was found inside a stone in his vineyards in Meudon. In 1686, Professor Robert Plot, the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford claimed knowledge of three cases of the "toad-in-the-hole" phenomenon from Britain alone. Hoaxes, perhaps, or only the gullible yarns of a pre-scientific age, when even learned men were somewhat more disposed to believing the unbelievable.
But Jeremiah Ogilvy mentioned none of these tales. Instead, he sat and sipped his tea and listened while she talked, never once interrupting to give voice to his mounting incredulity. However, her cough forced Dora Bolshaw to stop several times, and, despite the rye whiskey, towards the end of her story she was hoa.r.s.e and had grown alarmingly pale; her hands were shaking so badly that she had trouble holding her cup steady. And then, when she was done, and he was trying to organize his thoughts, she glanced anxiously at the clock and said that she should be going. So he walked her downstairs, past the celebrated automatic mastodon and petrified t.i.tanothere skulls and his prized plesiosaur skeleton. Standing on the walkway outside the museum, the night air seemed sweet after the "pepper pot," despite the soot from the furnaces and the reek from the open ditches lining either side of Kipling Street. He offered to see her home, because the thoroughfares of Cherry Creek have an unsavory reputation after dark, but she laughed at him, and he didn"t offer a second time. He watched until she was out of sight, then went back to his office.
And now it"s almost midnight, and Jeremiah Ogilvy"s teacups sit empty and forgotten while he thinks about toads and stones and considers finishing off the pint of rye. After she told him of the most recent and bizarre and, indeed, entirely impossible discovery from Shaft Seven, the thing that was now being blamed for the deaths of two miners, he agreed to look at it.
"Not it. Her," Dora said, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. "She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah. Just like that d.a.m.ned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks."
"Then I am dreaming," he says, relieved, and she smiles, not unkindly. He"s holding her hand, this woman who is, by turns, Dora Bolshaw and a wispy, nervous girl named Katharine Herschel, whom he courted briefly before leaving New Haven and the comforts of Connecticut for the clamorous frontier metropolis of Cherry Creek. They stand together on some windswept aerie of steel and concrete, looking down upon the night-shrouded city. And Jeremiah holds up an index finger and traces the delicate network of avenues illumined by gas streetlamps. And there, at his fingertip, are the ma.s.sive hangers and the mooring masts of the Arapahoe Terminal. A dirigible is approaching from the south, parting the omnipresent pall of clouds, and the ship begins a slow, stately turn to starboard. To his eyes, it seems more like some majestic organism than any human fabrication. A heretofore uncla.s.sified order of volant Cnidaria, perhaps, t.i.tan jellyfish that have forsaken the brine and the vasty deep and adapted to a life in the clouds. Watching the dirigible, he imagines translucent, stinging tentacles half a mile long, hanging down from its gondola to snare unwary flocks of birds. The underside of the dirigible blushes yellow-orange as the lacquered cotton of its outer skin catches and reflects the molten light spilling up from all the various ironworks and the copper and silver foundries scattered throughout Cherry Creek. The bones of the world exhumed and smelted to drive the tireless progress of man. He"s filled with pride, gazing out across the city and knowing the small part he has played in birthing this civilization from a desolate wilderness fit for little more than prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and heathen savages.
"Maybe the world don"t exactly see it that way," Dora says. "I been thinking lately, maybe she don"t see it that way at all."
Jeremiah isn"t surprised when tendrils of blue lightning flick down from the coal-smoke sky, and crackling electric streams trickle across rooftops and down the rainspouts of the high buildings.
"Maybe," Dora continues, "the world has different plans. Maybe she"s had them all along. Maybe, Professor, we"ve finally gone and dug too deep in these old mountains."
But Jeremiah makes a derisive, scoffing noise and shakes his head. And then he recites scripture while the sky rains ultramarine and the shingles and cobblestones sizzle. ""And G.o.d said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.""
"I don"t recall it saying nothing about whatever creepeth under the earth," Dora mutters, though now she looks a little more like Katharine Herschel, her blue eyes turning brown, and her trousers traded for a petticoat. "Besides, you"re starting to sound like that idiotic Larimer woman. Didn"t you hear a single, solitary word I said to you?"
Jeremiah raises his hand still higher, as though, with only a little more effort, he might reach the lightning or the shiny belly of the approaching dirigible or even the face of the Creator, peering down at them through the smoldering haze.
"Is it not fair wondrous?" he asks Dora. But it"s Katharine who answers him, and she only trades him one question for another, repeating Dora"s words.
"Didn"t you hear a single, solitary word I said?"
And they are no longer standing high atop the aerie, but have been grounded again, grounded now. He"s seated with Dora and Charlie McNamara in the cluttered nook that pa.s.ses for Dora"s office, which is hardly more than a closet, situated at one end of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company"s primary machine shop. The room is littered with a rummage of dismembered engines every tabletop and much of the floor concealed beneath castoff gears, gauges, sprockets, and fly wheels, rusted-out boilers and condensers, warped piston rods and dials with bent needles and cracked faces. There"s a profusion of blueprints and schematics, some tacked to the wall and others rolled up tight and stacked one atop the other like Egyptian papyri or scrolls from the lost library of Alexandria. Everywhere are empty and half-empty oil cans, and there are any number of tools for which Jeremiah doesn"t know the names.
"Time being, operations have been suspended," Charlie McNamara says, and then he goes back to using the blade of his pocketknife to dig at the grime beneath his fingernails. "Well, at least that"s the company line. Between you me and Miss Bolshaw here, I think Chicago"s having a good long think about sealing off the shaft permanently."
"Permanently," Jeremiah whispers, sorry that he can no longer see the skyline or the docking dirigible. "I would imagine that"s going to mean quite a hefty loss, after all the money and work and time required to get the shaft dry, refitted, and producing again."
"Be that as it d.a.m.n may be," Dora says brusquely. "There"s more at stake here than coal and pit quotas and quarterly profits."
"Yes, well," Jeremiah says, staring at the scuffed toes of his boots now. "Then let"s get to it, yes? If I can manage to keep my blasted claustrophobia in check, I"m quite sure we"ll get to the bottom of this."
No one laughs at the pun, because it isn"t funny, and Jeremiah rubs his aching eyes and wishes again that he were still perched high on the aerie, the night wind roaring in his ears.
"Ain"t she told you?" the company geologist asks, glancing over at Dora. "What I need you to look at, it ain"t in the hole no more. What you need to see, well..." and here he trails off. "It"s locked up in a cell at St. Joseph"s."
"Locked up?" Jeremiah asks, and the geologist nods.
"Jail would have done her better," Dora mutters. "You put sick folks in the hospital. Killers, you put in jails, or you put a bullet in the skull and be done with it."
Charlie McNamara tells Dora to please shut the h.e.l.l up and try not to make things worse than they already are.
Jeremiah shifts uneasily in his chair. "How did the men die? I mean, how exactly?"
"Lungs plumb full up with coal dust," Charlie says. "Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed d.a.m.n near to busting. Doctor, he even found the s.h.i.t clogging up their stomachs and intestines."
"Some of the men," Dora adds, "they say they"ve heard singing down there. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they"ve ever heard."
"Jesus in a steam wagon, Dora. Ain"t you got an off switch or something? Singing ain"t never killed no one yet, and it sure as h.e.l.l wasn"t what got that poor pair of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."
And even as the geologist is speaking, the scene shifts again, another unprefaced revolution in this dreaming kaleidoscope reality, and now the halls and exhibits of the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities are spread out around him. On Jeremiah"s right, the celebrated automatic mastodon rolls gla.s.s eyes, and its gigantic tusks are garnished with a dripping, muculent snarl of vegetation. On his left, the serpentine neck of the Gove County plesiosaur rises gracefully as any swan"s, though he sees that all the fossil bones and the Plaster of Paris have been trans.m.u.tated through some alchemy into cast iron. The metal is marred by a very slight patina of rust, and it occurs to him that, considering the beast"s ferrous metamorphosis, he should remind his staff that they"d best keep the monstrous reptile from swimming or wandering about the rainy streets.
"I cried the day you went away," Katharine says, because, for the moment, it is Katharine with him again, not Dora. "I wrote a letter, but never sent it. I keep it in a dresser drawer."
"There was too much work to do," he tells her, still admiring the skeleton. "And much too little of it could be done from New Haven."
Behind the plesiosaur, the brick and mortar of the Gallery walls has dissolved utterly away, revealing the trunks of mighty scale trees and innumerable scouring rushes tall as California redwoods. Here is a dark Carboniferous forest, the likes of which has not taken root since the Mary Gray vein at the bottom of Shaft Seven was only slime and rotting detritus. And below these alien boughs, a menagerie of primaeval beings has gathered to peer out across the aeons. So, it is not merely a hole knocked in his wall, but a hole bored through the very fabric of time.
"She came out of the rocks, Jeremiah," Katharine says, even though the voice is plainly Dora Bolshaw"s. "Just like that d.a.m.ned red scorpion, she came out of the rocks."
"You"re beginning to put me in mind of a Greek chorus," he replies, keeping his eyes on the scene unfolding behind the plesiosaur. Great hulking forms have begun to shift impatiently in the shadows there, the armored hide of a dozen species of Dinosauria and the tangled manes of giant ground sloths and Irish elk, the leathery wings of a whole flock of pterodactyls spreading wide.
"Maybe they worshipped her, before there ever were men," Dora says, but then she"s coughing again, the dry, hacking cough of someone suffering from advanced anthracosis. Katharine has to finish the thought for her. "Maybe they built temples to her, and whispered prayers in the guttural tongues of animals, and maybe they made offerings, after a fashion."
Overhead, there"s a cacophonous, rolling sound that Jeremiah Ogilvy first mistakes for thunder. But then he realizes that it"s merely the hungry blue lightning at last locating the flammable guncotton epidermis of the airship.
"Some of the men," Katharine whispers, "they say they"ve heard singing down there. Singing like church hymns, they said. Said it was beautiful, the most beautiful music they"ve ever heard. We come so late to this procession, and yet we presume to know so much."
From behind the iron plesiosaur, that anachronistic menagerie gathers itself like a breathing wave of sinew and bone and fur, cresting, racing towards the shingle.
Jeremiah Ogilvy turns away, no longer wanting to see.
"Maybe, in their own way, they prayed," Dora whispers.
And the tall, thin man standing before him, the collier in his overalls and hard hat who wasn"t there just a moment before, hefts his pick and brings it down smartly against the floorboards, which, in the instant steel strikes wood, become the black stone floor of a mine. All light has been extinguished from the Gallery now, save that shining dimly from the collier"s carbide lantern. The head of the pick strikes rock, and there"s a spark, and then the ancient shale begins to bleed. And soon thereafter, the dream comes apart, and the Professor lies awake and sweating, waiting for sunrise and trying desperately to think about anything but what he"s been told has happened at the bottom of Shaft Seven.
After his usual modest breakfast of black coffee with blueberry preserves and biscuits, and after he"s given his staff their instructions for the day and cancelled a lecture that he was scheduled to deliver to a league of amateur mineralogists, Jeremiah Ogilvy leaves the museum. He walks north along Kipling to the intersection with West 20th Avenue, where he"s arranged to meet Dora Bolshaw. He says good morning, and that he hopes she"s feeling well. But Dora"s far more taciturn than usual, and few obligatory pleasantries are exchanged. Together, they take one of the clanking, kidney-jarring public omnibuses south and east to St. Joseph"s Hospital for the Bodily and Mentally Infirm, established only two decades earlier by a group of the Sisters of Charity sent to Cherry Creek from Leavenworth.
Charlie McNamara is waiting for them in the lobby, his long canvas duster so stained with mud and soot that it"s hard to imagine it was ever anything but this variegated riot of black and grey. He"s a small mountain of a man, all beard and muscle, just starting to go soft about the middle. Jeremiah has thought, on more than one occasion, this is what men would look like had they"d descended not from apes, but from grizzly bears.
"Thank you for coming," Charlie says. "I know that you"re a busy man." But Jeremiah tells him to think nothing of it, that"s he"s glad to be of whatever service he can if, indeed, he can be of service. Charlie and Dora nod to one another then, and swap nervous salutations. Jeremiah sees, or only thinks he sees, something wordless pa.s.s between them, as well, something anxious and wary, spoken with the eyes and not the lips.
"You told him?" Charlie asks, and Dora shrugs.
"I told him the most of it. I told him what murdered them two men."
"Mulawski and Backstrom," Charlie says.
Dora shrugs again. "I didn"t recollect their names. But I don"t suppose that much matters."
Charlie McNamara frowns and tugs at a corner of his mustache. "No," he nods. "I don"t suppose it does."
"I hope you"ll understand my skepticism," Jeremiah says, looking up, speaking to Charlie, but watching Dora. "What"s been related to me, regarding the deaths of these two men, and what you"ve brought me here to see, I"d be generous if I were to say it strikes me as a fairy tale. Or, perhaps, something from the dime novels. It was Hume David Hume who said, "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.""
Dora glares back at him. "You always did have such a G.o.dd.a.m.n pretty way of calling a girl a liar," she says.