Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“What did you tell them?”

“Showed them that letter.” Reynolds looked at his watch again and stood. “Time for the meeting. You’re going to stay?”

I could tell Marla wanted to go, and I had no great desire to sit on a hard seat and listen to a bunch of eccentrics discuss how to find gold, so I made an excuse and said we had to leave. Reynolds looked a little disappointed, as though perhaps the Elephant Society was suffering a dwindling membership and he had hoped I might sign up.

As Marla and I were preparing to leave, Reynolds pulled open a draw in his desk and took out a diary with hard blue covers. He flipped pages for a moment and then made a sound as he came to what he was looking for.

“I don’t know if it’s of any use but the only other thing I remember Ray-and Gareth too-showing more interest in than usual was a particular lecture we had here around that time. We have it on again at next week’s meeting if you’re interested. ‘Geological Reengineering Through Topographical Catastrophe.’”

I must have looked a somewhat disbelieving because he smiled a little.

“Randolph Morris, the man who gives the lecture, is, ah, serious about his subject. He repeats it every six months.”

I couldn’t see how a lecture with such a title would reveal anything to me about Empty Mile, but it was an opportunity to leave with a little grace, so I said I’d attend. Reynolds looked happier and shook my hand.

It was just after eight p.m. when Marla and I stepped out onto the street. The sky was a milky phosphorescence, not yet fully dark, and the air smelled of the still-warm bricks the buildings on that block were built from.

“Did you know my father and Gareth were friends?”

“Being interested in the same thing doesn’t make them friends. I can’t see Ray wanting to spend much time with Gareth.”

“Gareth says they were. He told me they used to go panning together. Did my father ever say anything about that?”

“No.”

“How about at the meetings you went to? Did you see them together?”

“I went for a few months about a year ago. According to Chris, Gareth didn’t start going until six months later.”

“But you saw my father there?”

“Yeah. And no, he didn’t say anything about Empty Mile.”

Marla came back to stay the night at my place. I was hoping I’d be able to turn off, to put Stan to bed then climb into my own with Marla and for a few hours at least not worry about Empty Mile, or losing the house, or Plantasaurus going down the drain. But when we got home Stan was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor stripped to the waist, the front of his body dotted with moths. He was holding his arms straight out from his sides and staring intently at the black mirror of the kitchen window. When he heard us enter the room he dropped his arms with a groan of relief, as though he’d been holding them that way a long time.

He’d used adhesive tape to attach the moths to his chest and stomach and arms. I counted sixteen of them. One or two moved a leg or wing where their bodies stuck out beyond the tape, but most were still. There were smudges of moth-down around some of the larger ones. Under the hard light of the kitchen Stan’s body looked pale against the dark marks of the insects. He seemed dazed.

Marla sat down and just stared at him. I peeled a moth from his chest.

“These have to come off.”

“I imagined the window was the barrier, the edge of the world. I tried to make the power come across. I used to be a super-brain.”

“You’re still a smart guy.”

“Do you feel anything, Johnny? Do you think some power came across for Plantasaurus?”

“Come on, Stan, take them off.”

I reached for another moth but Stan took a quick step away. “No, Johnny! I want to leave them on. I might have to be asleep for the power to come.”

“Stan, we talked about this. A bunch of moths aren’t going to make a damned bit of difference to Plantasaurus.”

“That’s what you think but you’re not always right.”

He stood and glared at me, clenching his jaw to stop his lips trembling. The silence dragged between us as I tried to figure out what to say next. Eventually I gave up.

“You look tired, you should go to bed.”

After a moment he nodded and walked out of the room without saying anything else. As he passed Marla he kissed her goodnight on the cheek. I followed him upstairs and saw him into bed. He climbed in carefully and lay flat on his back under a light blanket with the moths still taped to him. He looked up at me and said, “Don’t be frightened, Johnny. I’m not crazy. Sometimes I don’t think like you, that’s all.”

Marla was already in bed when I got to my own room. I undressed and squeezed in beside her. The single bed made things tight but I didn’t care. I wanted to press my body against hers, to push my face into her hair and pretend there was nothing beyond the smell and the warmth of her and the soft protection of the blankets around us. But of course that was impossible, so I lay with my arm around her and stared into the darkness and told her about the new plant company in town, about Bill Prentice’s attempt to get us out of the warehouse, and how badly Stan had been affected by these things.

“Hence the moths?”

“He thinks they connect him to some other world that can send him power.”

“I could do with some of that.”

“You and me both.”

“Was Chris Reynolds any help with Empty Mile?”

“I don’t know. I still can’t figure it out. But there’s one thing my father seems to have known that no one else did. Chris said that Empty Mile got called that because someone came along, dug up all the gold, and then, when all the rest of the miners showed up, there was nothing left. And this is obviously what anyone else looking into Empty Mile would conclude as well. But my father got ahold of an old journal from the Gold Rush where the guy says he’s at the same part of the river that ended up getting called Empty Mile and that it looks like the river’s never been mined before. He’s the first guy to get a crack at it, right? Before anyone else even gets there. But he doesn’t find any gold. He pans right along the bend and gets nothing. And this journal was written two months before that letter Chris showed us.”

“So? Empty Mile’s still Empty Mile.”

“Yeah, but the difference is that while the general belief is that there was gold and it got panned out, my father knew that there was never any gold there in the first place. Empty Mile was just empty, end of story.”

“And that would make him want to buy the land, why?”

I wanted to hit her with a great explanation, a cast-iron reason to support me hanging onto the land, but the fact that there had never been any gold there was, if anything, more of an argument for selling it than keeping it. I sighed.

“I have no idea.”

The other thing I had no idea about, as we lay there chasing sleep, was the connection between my father and Gareth. They’d both been to Millicent’s house and read the journal, Chris Reynolds at the Elephant Society had said there seemed to have been some sort of relationship between them, and Gareth himself maintained that they’d been friends.

On the other hand my father, while he was drunk after hearing about Pat’s death, had warned me against him. Given that, and the fact that Gareth had stopped attending Elephant Society meetings three months ago while my father kept going, it was beginning to look to me as though they may well have had a falling out at some point. This seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I just couldn’t see a man like my father finding anything in Gareth he’d admire or respect. What I couldn’t understand, however, was why he would ever have spent time with him in the first place.