Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

Travis had been staring down into the bar. Now he looked up. “Like the one five minutes ago. Feels like bugs in your head.”

Jeannie nodded. “Second one was about four hours after the first, then less than two hours, and they’ve been coming faster and faster ever since.”

No wonder the town was emptying out. Twenty-five years of these stories, and now physical evidence that they weren’t bullshit. That there really was something bad up in the mine.

Travis considered the word: Stargazer . A uniquely strange name for something that was deep underground.

Much of what they’d learned was strange—both here and before they’d arrived in Rum Lake. There were giant gaps in the puzzle, and Travis couldn’t picture what would fill them. The Stargazer itself was one: it had to have been in that mine since the summer of 1978, some nine years before the Scalar investigators found it, but in all that time it must’ve been effectively dormant. If it’d been generating these hums back then, this place would’ve become a ghost town. Yet when Allen Raines had taken watch over the thing, he’d had to stay on top of it day and night, right from the beginning. Those two facts were hard to reconcile. As was a third: even if he and Paige and Bethany could reach the Stargazer, it was unlikely they could do much more than Raines had. Which was to keep the thing in check, assuming they’d see how that was done. But what sort of Achilles’ heel was that? If all they could do was babysit the thing, how long could they stay on it before someone interfered with them? Like these guys in the Humvees. A few hours, at best?

He knew he was thinking in circles, and that doing so wouldn’t help until they’d seen the Stargazer for themselves. For better or worse, they’d have the whole picture then. He drew hope only from what Bethany had said back in Casper: If they consider us a threat, then we are .

The little girl stepped out of the doorway and tugged on Jeannie’s arm.

“The ghost,” the girl said. “Tell them.”

Jeannie’s forehead furrowed. She seemed stretched between frustration and sober gravity, as if she believed the story herself but would never expect others to.

“Try us,” Travis said.

Jeannie frowned and let out a long breath, giving in. “They say it always happens around the two entrances to the mine. They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t. My husband and I . . . we like to think now we might’ve imagined what we heard. The wind really was blowing that day. Maybe that’s all it was. I don’t know.”

Travis tried to picture the mine entrance relative to Raines’s place, on the satellite image they’d seen. The moment he did, something occurred to him. He turned to Bethany.

“That satellite was looking almost straight down, right?”

She nodded. “ Perfectly straight down. Default angle unless you command it to do otherwise.”

“From that perspective,” Travis said, “even redwoods would have lots of gaps between them. Plenty of open ground visible in the image.”

Bethany shrugged. “I guess. Probably quite a bit.”

“We didn’t see any heat signature uphill from Raines’s house,” Travis said. “No bodies moving through those woods. Not even one.” He thought about it a second longer. “I don’t think these guys are going near the mine shaft.”

“I’m certain they’re not,” Jeannie said. “I’ve been watching all morning, waiting for them to head up into the trees and get in there—get working on the problem. I’ve assumed that’s what they were sent here to do. But all they’re focused on so far is that house. In and out, hours on end now.”

The more Travis considered it, the more that made sense, and not because of any strange phenomenon that could be mistaken for a ghost. Simple priorities were enough: these men had been sent to find and destroy the cheat sheet, and failing that, they would at least prevent anyone else from getting into that house and obtaining it—if it still existed at all. And while those who’d sent them probably wanted some muscle close at hand to protect the mine if the need arose, Travis wasn’t surprised these guys were staying back. Being kept back , more likely, by strict orders. They were almost certainly nothing more than hired guns; why let them sniff around the mine at all? Whatever the Stargazer was doing in there, it was doing without anybody’s help. All it needed was for Allen Raines to stay dead, and none of his powerful friends to show up in his place.

“Two hundred yards isn’t much,” Travis said, “even with tree cover. But maybe it’s enough. Maybe we can get in there from the uphill side without them seeing us.”

The sound of a loud engine faded in. A second later an old pickup went by, heading out of town, its bed loaded with boxes and bags.

Travis put aside the mine for the moment, his thoughts going back to earlier questions. He turned to Jeannie. “What about the man I mentioned before? Ruben Ward.”

“I never heard that name until today,” Jeannie said, “when the others came in and asked about it.”

“And none of these old stories talk about the summer of 1978?” Paige said.

Jeannie shook her head.

“ Do you have paperwork for who lived here back then?” Travis said. “I know it’s a long shot—”

“It’s possible,” Jeannie said. “There are old file boxes in the office—”

She stopped and cocked her head.

Travis listened too, and heard another engine rumbling. Another loud one, though it sounded different from the truck. Jeannie appeared to recognize its tone.

“Shit,” she whispered. “I only meant to complain.”

“What are you talking about?” Travis said.

“When you went downstairs I called the number they gave me earlier. I yelled at them for sending in the good cops.”

The engine grew louder, drawing very near now. Its growl spoke more of power than age. A second later it cut out and brakes whined, somewhere just out of view past the edge of the glass front wall.

“That’s one of the Humvees,” Jeannie said. “They know you’re here.”

“Storage room, back right,” Jeannie said. Her hand shot out toward the corner of the building opposite where the Humvee had stopped. “No screen in the window.”

Paige and Bethany were already moving. Travis took a step after them, then pulled up short. He looked at Jeannie and the two kids.

Jeannie shook her head. “We’re fine if you’re gone. You left three minutes ago.”

Travis nodded, spun and ran after the others. He’d almost cleared the room when Jeannie called after him. He stopped again and faced her.

“Cell phone number,” she said. “I’ll find the old paperwork.”

From outside came footsteps and men’s voices.

Travis said the number aloud once. Didn’t wait to see if she’d caught it all. He sprinted for the back room, and in the same second that he slipped into it, he heard the front door open.

Paige already had the window up: an old single-pane affair with about ten layers of paint on its frame. It was on the side wall, leading out to the back stretch of the alley they’d walked down earlier. Bethany slipped through; the alley’s pavement was only a couple feet lower than the floor. Travis motioned for Paige to go ahead of him, and took hold of the raised sash as she let go of it. He went through after her, got his feet on the concrete and stood upright, his hand still holding the sash in place.

He considered just leaving it up—an open window in a back room shouldn’t stand out as unusual, if any of the men from the Humvee came to check this part of the building. Travis relaxed his hand on the bottom of the sash.