Douglas Preston - White Fire

Doyle nodded vigorously, his face concentrated with the utmost interest.

“Naturally, the town fell into a state of perfect terror. But the killings went on, as there were many lone men upon the mountain. The bear was merciless, ambuscading the miners outside their cabins, killing and savagely dismembering them — and then feasting upon their flesh.” Wilde paused. “I should have liked to have known whether the, ah, consumption commenced while consciousness was still present. Can you imagine what it would be like to be devoured alive by a savage beast? To watch it tear your flesh off, then chew and swallow, with evident satisfaction? That is a contemplation never even considered by Huysmans in his À Rebours . How sadly lacking the aesthete was, in hindsight!”

Wilde glanced over to see what effect his words were having on the country doctor. Doyle had grasped his glass of claret and taken a deep draught. Listening, Pendergast took a sip of his own glass, then signaled a waiter to bring him a menu.

“Many a fellow tried to track the grizzled bear,” Wilde continued, “but none was successful — save for one miner, a man who had learned the fine art of tracking while living among Indians. He conceived a notion that the killings were not the work of a bear.”

“Not the work of a bear, sir?”

“Not the work of a bear, sir. And so, waiting until the next killing, this chap — his name was Cropsey — went a-tracking, and soon discovered that the perpetrators of this outrage were a group of men.”

At this, Doyle leaned back rather abruptly. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Wilde. Do you mean to say that these men were…cannibals?”

“Indeed I do. American cannibals.”

Doyle shook his head. “Monstrous. Monstrous.”

“Quite so,” Wilde said. “They have none of the good manners of your English cannibals.”

Doyle stared at his fellow guest in shock. “This is no matter for levity, Wilde.”

“Perhaps not. We shall see. In any case, our Cropsey tracked these cannibals to their lair, an abandoned mine shaft somewhere on the mountain, at a place called Smuggler’s Wall. There was no constabulary in the town, of course, and so this fellow organized a small group of local vigilantes. They cognominated themselves the Committee of Seven. They would scale the mountain in the dark of night, surprise the cannibals, and administer the rough justice of the American West.” Wilde toyed with his boutonnière . “The very next night, at midnight, this group gathered at the local saloon to discuss strategy and no doubt fortify themselves for the coming ordeal. They then departed by a back door, heavily armed, and equipped with lanterns, rope, and a torch. This, my dear Doyle, is where the story turns…well, not to put too fine a point on it, rather ghastly. Do steady yourself, there’s a good chap.”

The waiter brought over a menu, and Pendergast turned his attention to it. Three or four minutes later, he was jarred from his perusal by Doyle’s sudden violent rise from the table — knocking his chair over in his agitation — and subsequent flight from the dining room, his face a mixture of shock and disgust.

“Why, whatever’s the matter?” Stoddart said, frowning, as Doyle disappeared in the direction of the gentlemen’s lounge.

“I suspect it must be the prawns,” Wilde replied, and he dabbed primly at his mouth with a napkin…

…As slowly as it had come, the voice began to fade from Pendergast’s mind. The sumptuous interior of the Langham Hotel began to waver, as if dissolving into mist and darkness. Slowly, slowly, a new scene materialized — a very different scene. It was the smoke-filled, whisky-redolent back room of a busy saloon, the sounds of gambling, drinking, and argument penetrating the thin wooden walls. A back room, in fact, remarkably similar to the one in which Pendergast was — in the Roaring Fork of the present — currently situated. After a brief exchange of determined voices, a group of seven men rose from a large table: men carrying lanterns and guns. Following their leader, one Shadrach Cropsey, they made their way out the back door of the little room and into the night.

Pendergast followed them, his incorporeal presence hovering in the cool night air like a ghost.

The group of miners walked down the dirt main street of town, casually and without hurry, until they reached the far end, where settlement ceased and the forests mounted upward into the mountains. It was a moonless night. The scent of wood fires was in the air, and in the nearby corrals, horses were moving restlessly about. Silently, the group lit their lanterns and proceeded along a rough mining road, which made its way by switchbacks up, and then farther up, passing beneath the dark fir trees.

The night was cool and the sky was pricked with stars. A lone wolf howled somewhere in the great bowl of mountains, quickly answered by another. As the men gained altitude, the fir trees grew smaller, shorter, twisted into grotesque shapes by incessant winds and deep snows. Gradually the trees thinned out into matted thickets of krummholz, and then the cart path broached the tree line.

In his mind, Pendergast followed the group.

The line of yellow lanterns advanced up the barren, rock-strewn slopes approaching Smuggler’s Cirque. They were now entering a recently abandoned mining zone, and around the men appeared ghostly tailings, like pyramids, spilling down the sides of the ridge, the gaping holes of the mines above, punctuated by rickety ore chutes, trestles, sluice boxes, and flumes.

Looming in the darkness to the right was an immense wooden structure, set into the flat declivity at the base of Smuggler’s Cirque: the main entrance to the famed Sally Goodin Mine, still in operation now, in the early fall of 1876. The building housed the machines and pulley works used to raise and lower the cages and buckets; it also enclosed the two-hundred-ton Ireland Pump Engine, capable of pumping over a thousand gallons per minute, used to dewater the mine complex.

Now all the lanterns went out but one: a red-glass lamp that cast a bloody gleam in the murky night. The cart path divided into many winding tracks cut into the hillsides rising above the cirque. Their objective lay above, the highest of the abandoned tunnels high on the slope known as Smuggler’s Wall, situated at an altitude close to thirteen thousand feet. A single track led in that direction, carved by hand out of the scree, switchbacking sharply as it climbed. It came over a ridge and skirted a small glacial tarn, the water black and still, its shore dotted with rusted pumping machinery and old flume gates.

Still the group of seven men climbed upward. Now the dark, square hole of the Christmas Mine became visible in the faint starlight against the upper scree slope. A trestle ran from the hole, and below it stood a tailings pile of lighter color. A jumble of wrecked machinery was strewn about the slope below.

The group paused, and Pendergast heard a low murmur of voices. And then they silently divided. One man made his way up, hiding among boulders above the entrance. A second took up a covered position among the scree just below the entrance.

Lookouts in place, the rest — four men led by Cropsey, now holding the lantern himself — entered the abandoned tunnel. Pendergast followed. The shutter on the red lamp was adjusted to produce only the faintest glow. Arms at the ready, the men walked single-file along the iron rails leading into the tunnel, making no noise. One carried a torch of pitch, ready to be lit.

As they proceeded, a smell came toward them, a smell that became ever more awful in the hot, moist, stifling atmosphere.

The Christmas Mine tunnel opened into a crosscut: a horizontal tunnel driven at right angles to the main tunnel. The group paused before the crosscut and readied their weapons. The torch was lowered, a match was struck, and the pitch set afire. In that moment, the men rounded the corner, weapons aimed down the tunnel. The smell was now almost overwhelming.