Charles Sheffield - The Amazing Dr. Darwin

“A little after midnight, if the moon is keeping to her usual schedule. Are you warm enough?”

“Not too bad. Thank God for these blankets. It’s colder than a witch’s tit up here. How much longer? Suppose they don’t put in an appearance at all? Or the weather changes! It’s already beginning to cloud up a little.”

“Then we’ll have struggled up here and been half frozen for nothing. We could never track them with no moon. We’d kill ourselves, walking the fell blind.”

The two men were squatted on the hillside, facing southwest toward Heartsease.

They were swaddled in heavy woollen blankets, and their exhaled breath rose white before them. In the moonlight they could clearly see the village of Milburn, far below, etched in black and silver. The Thaxton house stood apart from the rest, lamps showing in the lower rooms but completely dark above. Between Darwin and Pole sat two shielded oil lanterns. Unless the side shutters were unhooked and opened, the lanterns were visible only from directly above.

“It’s a good thing we can see the house without needing any sort of spyglass,” said Pole, slipping his brass brandy flask back into his coat after a substantial swig. “Holding it steady for a long time when it’s as cold as this would be no joke. If there are fiends living up here, they’ll need a fair stock of Hell-fire with them, just to keep from freezing. Damn those clouds.”

He looked up again at the moon, showing now through broken streaks of cover. As he did so, he felt Darwin’s touch on his arm.

“There it is, Jacob!” he breathed. “In the bedroom. Now, watch for the signal.”

They waited, tense and alert, as the light in the window dimmed, returned, and dimmed again. After a longer absence, it came back once more, then remained bright.

“In the usual place, where Anna hoped they might be,” said Darwin. “Show our lantern, to let Thaxton know we’ve understood their signal. Then let’s be off, while the moon lights the way.”

The path skirting the tor was narrow and rocky, picked out precariously between steep screes and jagged outcroppings. Moving cautiously and quietly, they tried to watch both their footing and the fell ahead of them. Jacob Pole, leading the way, suddenly stopped.

“There they are,” he said softly.

Three hundred yards ahead, where the rolling cloud bank of the Helm dipped lower to meet the broken slope of the scarp face, four yellow torches flickered and bobbed. Close to each one, bigger and more diffuse, moved a blue-green phosphorescent glow.

The two men edged closer. The blue-green glow gradually resolved itself to squat, misshapen forms, humanoid but strangely incomplete. “Erasmus,” whispered Jacob. “They are headless!”

“I think not,” came the soft answer. “Watch closely, when the torches are close to their bodies. You can see that the torch light reflects from their heads—but there is no blue light shining there. Their bodies alone are outlined by it.” As he spoke, a despairing animal scream echoed over the fell. Jacob Pole gripped Darwin’s arm fiercely.

“Sheep,” said Darwin tersely. “Throat cut. That bubbling cry is blood in the windpipe. Keep moving toward them, Jacob. I want to get a good look at them.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Pole again began to move slowly forward. But now the lights were retreating steadily uphill, back toward the shrouding cloud bank of the Helm.

“Faster, Jacob. We’ve got to keep them in sight and be close to them before they go into the cloud. The light from their torches won’t carry more than a few yards in that.”

Darwin’s weight was beginning to take its toll. He fell behind, puffing and grunting, as Pole’s lanky figure loped rapidly ahead, around the tor and up the steep slope. He paused once and looked about him, then was off uphill again, into the moving fog at the edge of the Helm. Darwin, arriving at last at the same spot, could see no sign of him. Chest heaving, he stopped to catch his breath.

“It’s no good.” Pole’s voice came like a disembodied spirit, over from the left of the hillside. A second later he suddenly emerged from the cloud bank. “They vanished into thin air, right about here. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I can’t understand how they could have gone so fast. The cloud isn’t so thick here. Maybe they can turn to air.”

Darwin sat down heavily on a flat-topped rock. “More likely they snuffed their torches.”

“But then I’d still have seen the body-glow.”

“So let’s risk the use of the lanterns, and have a good look around here. There should be some trace of them. It’s a long way back to Heartsease, and I don’t fancy this climb again tomorrow night.”

They opened the shutters of the lanterns and moved cautiously about the hillside. Darwin knew that the Thaxtons would be watching from Heartsease, and puzzling over what they had seen. He interrupted his search long enough to send a signal: four lantern flashes—all goes well.

“Here’s the answer.” Jacob Pole had halted fifty feet away, in the very fringe of the Helm. “I ought to have guessed it, after the talk that Thaxton and I had earlier. He told me yesterday that there are old workings all over this area. Lead, this one, or maybe tin.”

The mine shaft was set almost horizontally into the hillside, a rough-walled tunnel just tall enough for a crouching man. Darwin stooped to look at the rock fragments inside the entrance.

“It’s lead,” he said, holding the lantern low. “See, this is galena, and this is blue fluorspar—the same Blue John that we find back in Derbyshire. And here is a lump of what I take to be barytes —heavy spar. Feel the weight of it. There have been lead mines up here on the fells for two thousand years, since before the Romans came to Britain, but I thought they were all in disuse now. Most of them are miles north and east of this.”

“I doubt that this one is being used for lead mining,” replied Jacob Pole. “And I doubt if the creatures that we saw are lead miners. Maybe it’s my malaria, playing up again because it’s so cold here.” He shivered all over. “But I’ve got a feeling of evil when I look in that shaft. You know the old saying: iron bars are forged on Earth, gold bars are forged in Hell. That’s the way to the treasure, in there. I know it.”

“Jacob, you’re too romantic. You see four poachers killing a sheep, and you have visions of a treasure trove. What makes you think that the Treasure of Odirex is gold?”

“It’s the natural assumption. What else would it be?”

“I could speculate. But I will wager it is not gold. That wouldn’t have served to get rid of the Romans, or any invader. Remember the Danegeld—that didn’t work, did it?”

As he spoke, he was craning forward into the tunnel, the lantern held out ahead of him.

“No sign of them in here.” He sniffed. “But this is the way they went. Smell the resin? That’s from their torches. Well, I suppose that is all for tonight. Come on, we’d best begin the descent back to the house. It is a pity we cannot go farther now.”

“Descent to the house? Of course we can follow them, Erasmus. That’s what we came for, isn’t it?”

“Surely. But on the surface of the fell, not through pit tunnels. We lack ropes and markers. But now that we know exactly where to begin, our task is easy. We can return here tomorrow with men and equipment, by daylight—perhaps we can even bring a tracking hound. All we need to do now is to leave a marker here, that can be seen easily when we come here again.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Pole shrugged, and turned disconsolately for another look at the tunnel entrance. “Damn it, Erasmus, I’d like to go in there, evil or no evil. I hate to get this far and then turn tail.”