Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"My father," Donny said drily, "was not the type to inspire much sentimentality among his survivors."

He said it with such deliberate understatement, such a hard light in his eyes, that Cree couldn't come up with a reply. Even Nick Stephanovic uneasily hitched a shoulder.

"You know," Joyce put in brightly, as if it had just occurred to her, "I was thinking that, given the limits on our time, maybe we should split up. Why don't I go look at the mutilation site, Cree, and you and Mr. McCarty go where… wherever you need to? If Mr. Stephanovic would be kind enough to take me." She turned a sweet smile on the big man.

Donny caught Nick's eyes, thought about it, and shrugged. "Why not," he said.

They took Donny's Lincoln Navigator through a maze of wide gravel roads that wound between heaps of soil and rock and past lumbering earthmovers, ending up at the office complex Cree had seen that first day with Julieta. At the main parking lot, Joyce and Nick bailed out and got into one of the rugged company Jeeps. Joyce brought her shoulder pack containing some basic equipment Ed had suggested would be typical for a mutilation site, given the supposed UFO connection: a Geiger counter, latex gloves, a soil scoop and a dozen plastic sample containers, a digital camera-enough for the charade they were putting on, anyway. Cree waved good-bye to her from the window of Donny's Lincoln, feeling a little trepidation at letting her go with the bearish hulk. Then, thinking about it, she decided that Nick Stephanovic might be one tough bastard, but if it came to any rough-and-tumble, she'd put her money on Joyce every time.

Donny drove east along the valley, passing deep trenches with striated cliffs, then up a winding ramp to the higher land on the north side. At one point he stopped and rolled down Cree's window.

"You can get some idea of the scope of operations from here. Quite a sight, isn't it?"

It was. From their position Cree could see a huge expanse of land, scattered with mountains of earth in pastel reds and grays, cut with meandering ramps and roads. A deep gash, half a mile long and several hundred yards wide, was obviously one of the working pits. Visible through the dust haze at its far end, a dragline swung a bucket the size of a house and let go an avalanche. The boom alone, Donny told her, was the length of a football field, the dirty-orange motor house at its base was six stories tall, its vertical mast another eight above that. Other machines came and went like ponderous prehistoric animals, filling the air with the rumble of engines and the stink of dust and diesel.

Cree startled as a broad ridge of ground about a mile away suddenly rose in a hump, as if the land were alive and flexing muscle. In another instant, a line of geysers blew soil and rock skyward in a rolling wave of explosions that swept across an area a quarter mile square. The sound of thunder hit the truck before the last of it had blown. In another moment, the area was hidden in a pall of downward-sifting dust and rubble.

"We call it 'shooting,'" Donny explained. "The shooters-the explosives guys-drill holes down to the first coal seam, fill 'em with TNT. Setting the charges off in sequence that way helps chase the shock wave. Cracks up the overburden so the big Cats can scrape it off, expose the coal." He watched with satisfaction as the dust cloud thinned and drifted away.

"It's very… impressive. Must be dangerous."

"That's coal mining," he agreed with some macho pride. But then he said coldly, as if she'd accused him, "McCarty Energy has one of the best safety records in the industry."

Donny rolled up her window and continued driving. In another moment, he steered the Jeep into a descending ramp that led into a long, flat-bottomed trench hacked into the rock.

"Not that I'm buying into any of this," he said, "but how the hell are you supposed to go to the site of an alleged haunting when the site isn't there anymore? I mean, the general area is just up ahead. But the ground he fell on has been stripped away, the pit floor is about thirty feet below that level now. The spoil's been taken away to fill in other mined-out pits. The coal has long since been sent to power plants in Colorado. The dragline he fell off of has moved to a new pit a mile and a half west. So where's the site? Where's your ghost?"

"I don't know," Cree admitted. If there was a ghost here, she was thinking, it would sure put Ed's geomagnetic theory to a stern test. But then it occurred to her that maybe the unusual circumstances here-the literal disappearance of the material place of Garrett's death-could have been the trigger that set his perseverating energies wandering.

"But," she went on, "there's plenty of historical precedent for haunted mines-shaft mines, anyway-that offer some of the same theoretical problems. And quite often when a house that's haunted is torn down, the empty lot or a new building that's put up will inherit the entity."

Donny blew out a skeptical breath and turned his attention to driving. Again she puzzled at her sense that he was indulging her, just playing along, waiting her out.

"Really, I only need a few minutes here, and then we can move on to the dragline. In the meantime, you can help me by telling me about your father. What kind of person he was. How he talked, how-"

"And how's all that supposed to help you?"

"There are many schools of parapsychological research. My approach is more psychological and intuitive than most. Knowing more about his personality will help me recognize him if I encounter him. The idea that ghosts always appear as visible phantoms is completely false. I usually don't really 'see' a ghost so much as 'become' a ghost, so that inner… feeling or quality of character is often the only way I can identify a revenant."

Donny grunted and abruptly pulled the Lincoln to a stop. "Well, good luck. Because this is it." He shut the engine down and glared at Cree, a challenge. He seemed to be struggling with a ticlike gulping movement, as if he had something stuck in his throat.

She got out. The ground here was a scraped plane of solid rock littered with mineral debris. The cliff rose in a broken, jagged wall a hundred feet high, striped with dark striations. She stood, walked a slow circle, and stood again with eyes shut. From here, the rumble of the rest of the mine was distant; she could just hear a crow calling from somewhere to the east.

She sensed nothing. It was as close to a complete psychic vacuum as she'd ever experienced.

Donny surprised her by speaking right at her shoulder. "He was being an idiot. He was vain about how fit he was for his age, how he knew his company from the ground up, and he was showing off to his new girlfriend. They'd had a bit to drink. So Dad climbs out on the boom to show her what a girder monkey he is, and he slips. Only fell about forty feet, but it was enough."

"Did he break his neck, or-"

"Hell, no. Landed upright, just like a cat. But the fall ruptured his spleen. Our on-site paramedics were afraid to move him. It took a while for the ambulance to get here. He was dead by the time it arrived. I was up at the Bloomfield mine when I got the call. What a goddamned mess."

"Were you and he close?"

Donny looked at her with his veiled eyes. Through the impatience and weariness, Cree saw a passing flicker of discomfort. "What's it matter?"

"I want to know what kind of person he was," she reminded him. "What kind of relationship he had."

"He had his life, I had mine. He'd divorced my mother by the time I was ten, and she mostly raised me. Dad and I didn't always see eye to eye. It wasn't easy working for him."

"How about Julieta? How did he feel about her?"

Donny walked away and stooped to pick up a rusted piece of iron, some small mechanical part from one of the behemoths that had worked the site. He inspected it momentarily, then tossed it from him. "You really want to know? When he first met her, he was wild about her. The man was over the moon. Told me she was young, not even my age, and then laughed and warned me to keep my hands off, this one he wanted all to himself. This one was a keeper. He brought her flowers, courted her on bended knee, the whole thing."