Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

He knew he should move after her, try to get her to say more. But he’d leave that to Ray Muldune; the private detective’s services didn’t come cheap. And Michael had had enough social contact for one day-first the girl in the woods, then her mother. He had the drained and exhausted feeling that plagued him when he’d been aboveground too long.

Michael was happier underneath the world. This sunlit place above, where normal life was lived… now, that was scary, that was the place of monsters and nightmares. The modern world and most of the people that populated it made him uncomfortable. The people he knew-friends and acquaintances, if he could even call them that-seemed motivated by things he didn’t understand. They said one thing but appeared to be thinking something else, wearing smiles that never reached their eyes. The people he didn’t know, those he observed, were what he liked to call busy-addicted, engaged in one task but paying attention to something else-grocery shopping while talking on their cell phones, driving their cars while sending texts. Multitasking, they called it. When did it become a badge of honor to be too busy, to have too much to do?

The world was in a fearful rush; he’d never been able to keep the pace. Michael often felt confused, had the vague sense that there was something terribly wrong with him. He wanted to stop and look at the sky and the trees; he wanted to talk to the people he knew and met. But everyone seemed to speed past him, move around him. He was an obstruction on the superhighway of life. And that was on a good day. On a bad day, he felt that at any time strangers might start pointing and shrieking, identifying him as something unwanted. Sometimes he was nervous to the point of sweating, even in the most mundane encounters-at tollbooths, grocery checkout lines.

But below the ground there was another world. In the dripping darkness of the mines, there was solitude and silence. There he started to relax and expand, to become more fully himself. In that peculiar living darkness, all his senses came alive.

He listened to Claudia shut her door, then turned his attention back to his father’s house. For another moment he wavered again about the hotel. But then he started up the cracked and overgrown path. He stood on the stoop a second, took in the rusting letter box, the flickering porch light, and then he walked inside.

He always stooped when he walked through doorways, though he wasn’t quite that tall, just over six feet. But he’d hit his head on so many things that others cleared with ease that it was just habit to fold in his shoulders, to bow his head.

He let the door close behind him. He could still hear her voice-her enthusiastically off-pitch singing, her trying-to-be-stern tone, her mellifluous laughter. Long after she’d gone, he’d hear her when he came home from school.

Is that you, sweetie? Are you hungry?

And the sound of her ghost voice caused him to ache inside. After she left, this house was haunted by her, though only in the way all houses were haunted-by echoes and memories, energy trapped in the drywall and floorboards. But that was bad enough. It was reason enough to go away and never come back again, to leave his father to grow old and lonely, to leave him to become sick and to rot like the rest of the debris in the dump he’d made of their home.

The hallway was lined on both sides with piles of newspapers that reached to the ceiling, narrowing the passage by more than a foot on either side. Michael had to flatten himself and turn to make his way sideways down the hall, to avoid touching the wall of newsprint, heading toward the only habitable room in the house.

The sitting room, with her television and shelves of books, the coffee table she’d inherited from her mother, the framed landscapes she’d painted hanging on the walls, remained as he remembered it. The surfaces and fabrics in here were kept clean. The sofa and love seat were free from stain; the dusky pink carpet was still fresh and bright. There was no dust even on the books. The visiting nurse had told Michael that his father had pulled out the bed from the couch and slept on it at night, replacing it in the mornings until he grew too weak to do that. Their wedding picture (did they look stiff and unhappy even then?) sat on the end table, beneath a lamp she’d cherished, with its blue-and-white flowers painted on porcelain. It had shocked him when he returned from his father’s hospital room to find this oasis in the center of chaos, this eye in the storm. Michael would have thought the old man had forgotten her or tried to, but instead he’d kept her room like this, just as she’d left it.

He sat on the chintz couch and tried not to smell the old man’s sickness. But it lingered, even with all the other competing aromas. It was there-that smell of medicine and washcloth baths, antiseptic and something else, something rotting from within. Or maybe that was just his imagination.

He found himself thinking about Bethany Graves. He thought she had a quiet energy, not unlike his own. She was careful; she listened, then waited a second before she spoke, absorbing, it seemed, everything that he’d said, and maybe what he hadn’t said.

“What does that mean?” she’d asked after he told her he’d been digging up a body. He’d seen a glint of curiosity, more than a hint of caution.

“That’s what I do,” he told her. “I dig up the past. I’m a caver. The Hollows was originally settled as a mining town. There are tunnels everywhere-some of them just exploratory.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that tunnels were blasted and then for whatever reason abandoned. When you find one, it’s like digging up a grave. Traveling back in time.”

“I’d heard that,” she said. “About the mines around here. Iron, right?”

She seemed interested. But he wasn’t a good judge of those kinds of things.

“Magnetite and some hematite,” he said. “This town has a fairly rich history. And there’s lore surrounding the vein I’m searching for. Two brothers, both looking to strike it rich. One of them did. One of them disappeared.”

And what Michael had told her was true. He was interested in finding the abandoned shaft where some believed a body might have been buried. It was a story Mack had told him, a tale the old man had supposedly unearthed in his exhaustive research. Michael had never been able to find anything about it in the few history books about the industry and the area. But according to his father’s deductions, the tunnel was probably somewhere around where Michael had been digging today. He knew that his father had written about the legend in one of his articles about the area mines, but Michael hadn’t been able to find it in the mountain of papers in Mack’s office.

His father, a geology professor, had a pet interest in the area mines and their history. He had wanted to document that part of the region’s history and wrote voluminously, compiling interviews with the old-timers still living in The Hollows, taking copious photographs, collecting any old documents he could find. He contributed articles to history journals and magazines, had hoped to one day write a book. But it wasn’t exactly a sexy topic. Mack was never able to find a publisher, and even interest in his articles dried up over time. But he kept writing.

Michael was sure that if he could dig past the piles of junk mail and circulars and catalogs and bills and bills and bills that formed a literal wall around his father’s desk, he’d find those articles, which Michael had always loved reading. They had to be under there. Clearly his father had never discarded anything.

Of course, Michael also had the business of settling his father’s estate. He had a meeting with the lawyer, Hank Barrow, an old friend of Mack’s. Their recent phone conversation had been grim.